July 2026 Random Ramblings

All right, hello and welcome to yet another value podcast. I'm your host Andrew Walker. Today is my monthly random ramblings for the month of July 2026. I say today, but it's actually yesterday and then of course because I am not a professional podcaster, I botched the intro so I'm re-recording it today. But I think I've got a fun one. It's just, you know, as I do in every random rambling, I'll remind you nothing on this podcast is investing advice. See the disclaimer at the end of the podcast. See the disclaimer in the show notes. But you know, this is just me rambling for 20 25 minutes. It's I think it's specifically 23 minutes and 36 seconds cuz I recorded yesterday. About things that have been on my mind for this month. So to start, we're going to go with the confidence of being an investor. You know, being an active investor and if you're listening to this podcast, you probably are an active investor in some way, shape, or form. You know, it is a game of arrogance. Every time you buy a stock, every time you do research, you are saying I think I am so smart. I think I understand something so much different than the market that I think I can beat the market and generate alpha, right? That's ultimately I mean investing is fun, it's interesting, but ultimately the reason you're doing it is generate alpha and beat the market in some way, shape, or form. So and that is a very arrogant act. So I'm going to talk about that and then specifically like, you know, when is the arrogance deserved and when do you need to kind of I talk about looking yourself in the mirror all the time and say, “Hey, I I am wrong.” And that could be I am wrong on this stock that I've done a lot of work on and thought I had a differentiated view. When do you need to say, “It's not the market, it's me.” And then, you know, you can start looking at it as or if you're underperforming the market, when do you look at the mirror and say, “Hey, it's not the market, it's me.” You know, is it after a day? No, probably not after a day. Is it after 50 years of underperformance? Yeah, it's probably before 50 years. So there's some place in between and you know, there's all these stories of value investors throwing in the towel at the end of 1999 after underperforming for a few years in dot-com bubble and if they had just held on a little bit longer. Is that a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? Is that delusion? So I'm going to talk about that. Very much related, talking about evolution as investor. how do you continue to evolve but while kind of sticking to your principles. Then we're going to go to just a little bit of, you know, as again as an active investor, if you sell a stock and then the stock does really well, how how do you measure that? How do you think about that? Did, you know, sometimes companies hit lottery tickets. Did you sell a company and they just kind of struck good lightning and hit a lottery ticket? Or do you need to look and say, “Hey, I might I might be getting bored and selling before my thesis fully played out?” And as I try to do always, I use myself as an example for that. Finally, wrap it up by talking about the London Stock Exchange, which I have made lots of jokes about. It is an emerging market, but things are getting taken out for huge premiums over there and just some quick thoughts on my favorite little emerging market and the frustration of investing in the market where kind of the only way to get out is getting taken out at a big premium. Nice if you're in the companies that get taken out at a big premium, kind of frustrating if you don't. So, we'll go there. We'll hop to all that in 1 second, but first, a word from our sponsors. Today's podcast is sponsored by fiscal.ai. Fiscal.ai is a modern financial data provider for global equities. In addition to their web-based terminal, Fiscal is one of the leading data connectors for Claude and ChatGPT. With their self-serve API, you can connect in real-time fundamental data directly to your LLM. And look, I said it in podcast before and I'll say it again. They're not just an advertiser. I've been doing lots of cool stuff with Claude and co-workers in particular, building all sorts of awesome tools and I needed API. So, guess what? I signed up with my own money, tossed my own credit card down and today, fiscal.ai, I need you guys to plug into my Claude co-worker for me so I can keep building these cool tools and have access to real-time fundamental data and stock prices to everything. And that includes more than 20 years of financial statements, ratios, filing segments, KPIs, and all sorts of other things. Unlike other providers, their data updates within minutes of earnings reports, not days. So, whether you want powerful out-of-the-box terminal or the real-time AI connector with API, you can use my link at fiscal.ai/yav, that's fiscal.ai/yav, to get 15% off. And they'll be in the show notes, too. All right, let's dive into the topics. Mhm. Okay, first off big I want to talk about something that's been on my mind a lot about it. I have some friends who I talked to who have probably heard me ranting or thinking on this a few times. So, if they're listening to the podcast, they're they're probably hearing duplicate or deja vu, but you know, being an investor is an interesting game of confidence, betting on yourself, and kind of arrogance. What do I mean by that? The base rate when anyone buys a stock is that it’s going to perform in line with the market, right? Investing is technically a zero-sum game: everyone who buys or sells—one side’s right, one side’s wrong. You can’t have everyone generate alpha. Any alpha that you take has to be taken from somewhere, right?

So, for you to generate alpha, someone else has to generate a little bit less. If you buy a stock, you’re saying, “I am smarter than the wisdom of the markets. I know something the market doesn’t.” What you know can be very different, right? You might know the fundamentals of the business cold and know that the market’s missing that. You might know there’s a forced seller on the other side, and the reason the stock is puking is because there’s a forced seller getting margin-called, or whatever it is.

It’s a game in arrogance. It’s a game in beating the base rates, right? Because the base rate when you buy a stock is that it kind of generates the market return. So, it is a game in arrogance, and there are 2 places where I think that is interesting.

One, most of the people who listen to this podcast—Random Ramblings is a unique episode where it’s just me rambling for 30 minutes, but most of the time you listen to this podcast, it’s an hour-long deep dive into a company or stock idea. It’s not investing advice, because nothing is, but it is an hour-long deep dive into a company, hopefully getting you up to speed on the fundamentals, up to speed on the opportunity, and up to speed on why the guest, who is generally a professional investor, thinks that this company, as I like to ask, presents a risk-adjusted alpha opportunity.

If you’re listening to that, it’s because you’re looking for what you’re trying to beat the market. You’re trying to find alpha. When do you, as an arrogant person who thinks they can beat the base rate, say, “Hey, enough is enough?” Is it—and I’ll talk about that in the individual stock point in a second.

It can be an individual stock, right? I’ve mentioned, and I’ll come back to this later, that I’ve increasingly come to the 3-year rule. If you invest in a company and it’s been 3 years and the stock has kind of gone nowhere, it’s time to really look in the mirror and say, “Hey, is it me or is it the market?” I hate to say it, but if it’s been 3 years, the answer’s probably you. We’ll talk about why that fails in a second.

A lot of the big losses I’ve had as an investor have been in a company where I buy it and say, “Hey, this is a really good company. I’m buying it at, like, 15 times earnings.” Then, a year later, I say, “Hey, it probably wasn’t as good as I thought, but now it’s at 10 times earnings, so the price is better.” Then, a year later: “Hey, I don’t even think this is a good company. It’s an okay company, but it’s 6 times earnings and they’re buying back stock, so boy, look at that free cash flow yield.”

Then, a year later, I say, “Hey, this is a restructuring play.” You started out with a great company, but it became a restructuring play. I’m going off topic, but whether you’re looking at the individual company and you’re saying, “The arrogance to buy the individual company,” when do you say, “Hey, I was wrong?”

It’s hard because, yes, we as investors and thinkers want to have open minds and all that sort of stuff, but you were arrogant. You had a belief. You saw something the market was missing. When is the market, if the stock was at 10 and it goes to 8, just giving you the dips of the market, versus saying, “Hey, the market is telling you something,” or, “What you saw wasn’t there?” Very difficult.

The other reason I mention this is that I get a lot of investor letters. I’ll see some investor letters, and the person will say, “Hey, the fund has been running for 15 or 20 years, and the S&P is up 10% annualized over those 20 years, and we’re up 8% annualized. We’re up 2% annualized. We’re down 10% annualized.” Whatever it is.

When do you, as an investor, look and say, “Hey, I’m doing something wrong? I was arrogant to launch this, and I shouldn’t be doing this, or I need to look in the mirror and reassess the process?”

It’s interesting. Again, 20 years is telling you something, but you launched arrogantly, and maybe you say, “I mean, I believe this about myself, right? I’m always learning. I’m a better—I’ve said it so many times on the podcast.

I'm a better investor today than I was not just yesterday, but particularly 2 years ago and 5 years ago. I'll go read some of the stuff I wrote 5 years ago and be like, "What was this guy thinking?" Hopefully, I'm continuing to get better. So even if you launched and said, "Hey, arrogantly, I think I can beat the market," maybe you didn't beat the market over the past 10 years, but you still got that arrogance treatment. You're a much better investor now. Maybe the next 10 years are different. I don't know the answer.

There are 2 places I would want to pull on that I think are related. Number 1, if you're investing—whether you're doing it professionally or even in your PA—you're doing it because hopefully you enjoy the process, but you want to beat the market, right? My question is, if you underperform, when is it time to look in the mirror and say, "This process needs to evolve"?

I was thinking about this because you'll see so many letters. I try not to call anyone out; I never call anyone out. I try to bring this back to me, so I'll use myself. I think about late last year, when I saw pretty clearly that AI was inflecting and accelerating. You can look at the blog—I was talking about it and saying, "Hey, this is really starting to change my workflows." I saw that and didn't pull the trigger on any AI trades.

I think part of that was me saying, "This is outside my wheelhouse," and part of that was me saying, "Hey, I'm a value guy. I'm an event guy, and I don't see the value. I don't see the events here." A lot of the AI stocks went on a generational run on the heels of that. I'm using myself, not someone else, but I do think we can broaden this out to someone else.

You'll see these letters where people will write, year after year, "The markets are up. The S&P was up 15% this year, and we're up 10%, but we're sticking to our value investing principles." When is it time to look and say, "Hey, are these principles that we've been investing on serving us? Do we need to change them? Do we need to throw them out the window entirely?"

By the way, how many times have you heard of the value investor who stuck to their principles and threw them out the window in late 1999 or early 2000, only to get their face ripped off on internet stocks? I try not to call people out, but I think a lot of people have been referencing the Fundsmith letter. I'm sorry, Chris. The letter said, "Hey, we've been underperforming for the past few years because we've been sticking to our hardcore value investing principles, and we're going to start being responsive to the market. The market cares about momentum, algorithms, whatever it is. We're going to start incorporating that."

They got dumped on in a lot of places, and if I'm giving my priors, I would probably say rightly so. But I think it's interesting. These are people trying to evolve, and they're saying, "Hey, this is how the game is played today, and we're going to start trying to play that game." When were the value investing principles holding them back, versus when were they just throwing their principles out the window to chase momentum? I think it's a really interesting question.

Some of the stuff they talked about was a little bit of chasing near-term performance, but I do think that if you're reading one of these letters and it's a fund that's been calling everything overvalued for the past 12 years, buying legacy businesses, and nothing's working, at what point is it time to look at yourself and say, "Hey, Meta in late 2022 was generationally cheap"?

I'll tell you that Netflix in 2015 and 2016 was crazy cheap. A lot of us remember that. That's around the time I think John Malone said Netflix had gone past escape velocity. They had gone off the charts, and nobody was catching them. You could have looked at that, and you would have done great if you had bought Netflix, particularly if you had shorted legacy media companies against it.

Everybody likes to say, "Hey, Micron or SanDisk—when SanDisk spun out in March or April of 2025, it spun out at 0.5 times next year's earnings because it's going to earn so much this year. That's really fucking cheap." No one knew they were going to earn that at the time, but the stock has been an absolute screamer.

It is worth asking, "Hey, bringing it back to myself and missing these AI trades, is it because I need to look at myself in the mirror and say, 'Yeah, they might not have fit into my wheelhouse, but these things were very cheap and the numbers were inflecting'?" Did you have a mental block, Andrew? Did you have a mental block that prevented you from looking at these things because they didn't fit your neat and tidy bow of, "Hey, this is a spin-off trading at 4 times cash flow—buy, buy, buy"?

If you had done the work, you could have seen the inflection. I tell people I don't like to build extensive models because I think people can get so caught up in the model and so caught up in focusing on the model that they kind of miss the forest for the trees, and it looks great on the model and the business is falling apart and you're like, “I'm buying it at 20 times cash, a 20% free cash flow.” It's like, “Yeah, but the cash was all gone because the business is falling apart every which way.” But, you know, if maybe if I had done a little bit of modeling work, I could have said, “Hey, I'm seeing an inflection.” Maybe I could have talked to some customers who were saying, "Unbelievable, man, we can't get filled." There was the story of Apple just going to Micron, and Micron was having a meeting where they were debating internally, "Hey, we say a 100% price increase for 3 years of supply, and then they'll negotiate it down to 50%." They went and said, "100% price increase for the next 3 years," and Apple just signed on the dotted line instantly. That's very un-Apple-like.

Maybe you could have seen that story, seen the inflection, and seen the model. Breaking through and evolving your process raises the question: when is my fixation on cash flow holding me back from seeing the opportunity? If I'm evolving from that fixation, is that me chasing momentum, chasing the thing that's worked in the recent past, or is that me evolving and improving?

I don't know, but it's my random rambling, so I get to throw out everything that I'm thinking about to you, and we can talk about it. You can reach out to me, and we can have a discussion.

Oh, and just briefly on this, I was having this discussion with a friend while we were grabbing coffee. Nvidia is 7.5% of the S&P 500. Whether you like it or not, as an active investor, you're probably getting benchmarked against the S&P 500.

Even if you say, "I can't tell you how many times I've said, 'I don't own anything in the S&P 500,'" you always kind of get benchmarked to the S&P 500. Nvidia is 7.5% of the S&P 500, so if you don't own Nvidia and you're getting benchmarked to the S&P 500, you're technically short Nvidia. That's kind of how it works. Nvidia goes up, and you're starting from behind the 8-ball. Nvidia goes down, and it's beneficial.

That's why a lot of value investors who invest in low-cash-flow businesses had their peak outperformance around 2000 to 2004. All the internet companies had grown so big and were such big parts of the indexes. As all of those companies fell apart, none of the value investors owned them. They owned great cash-flowing businesses that actually went up. The indexes were down 20%, and all these guys were up 20%. Boom, that's clear.

It's worth thinking about: if you're an active investor, by not having any AI exposure, you can say, "I don't invest in that stuff. I am the value guy. I don't invest in any of that stuff." Well, 2 things: that means you're short them, for 1, and, 2, coming back to it, should we have our minds open to that?

I used Nvidia, but if you start adding all the AI and everything, it's a big piece of the index. If you're saying, "I'm not going to invest in that," I wish I had it for the past 6 months, but you're actually short a huge piece of the index. How do you start thinking about that? You can say, "Hey, I might be benchmarking against an index, but I invest in different stuff." That's all true, but you are short that, and you kind of have to come to grips with it.

It's something I've been thinking about: do I mean to be, quote-unquote, actively short these by not having this exposure? I think it's a very interesting thought.

Let me turn to something related. I was doing some work and I saw—again, I like to bring everything back to myself, so you know that I'm talking about things that I'm thinking about. Honestly, with very rare exceptions, I try not to dunk on anyone on this podcast. Every now and then, somebody will be like, "Hey, you said that."

“Did you mean that about me?” I’ll be like, “Bro, in a Don Draper way, I don’t think about you at all.” I’m not trying to dunk on anyone, with very few exceptions. I was looking at a portfolio of mine and doing some work, and the portfolio had some—oh God, it’s hard to say—absolute bangers in it, right?

The portfolio was from around April 2025. As you’ve been following the blog, you know I got really invested in net-cash biotechs then. I had a pretty quick trigger as they traded up, and a lot of the bangers were net-cash biotechs that had a lot of success in Phase 3. For instance—and this was actually a little before April 2025—I used to have a huge position in uniQure, because for a while uniQure was one of the only biotechs trading well below cash value, and they also had some other assets in there.

uniQure, for those who don’t know, posted surprising results that suggested their drug might have a lot of success curing Huntington’s disease. When they announced that, the stock went from $5 or $6, whatever, to a peak of around $60. There was some drama, but right now it’s trading at $40. I was looking at that and I said, “Hey, I had this big position in uniQure, and I sold it for—no, I did okay. I bought it for under net cash and kind of sold it around cash. I did okay. I wish I had held it,” right?

Several stocks were like that, and then there were some other stocks that have done really well. To be blunt, they’ve done better than my portfolio. I’ll name one: Nebius. Nebius was the former Yandex. Yandex is like the Russian Google. They got sanctioned, they delisted from the Nasdaq, and the stock was frozen for 18 months. Then they did this huge reboot and all this sort of stuff, and I was like, “Oh, this is kind of neat for Andrew, right?”

I bought the stock. I think my cost basis was around $18 or $19, and I probably sold the last of the stock in the high $20s. Great trade, right? Nope. I sold it 15 months ago, and the stock is at 230 today, right? So, again, I’m not breaking new ground when I say, “Guess what? My portfolio has not kept up with a 30-to-230 move in 15 months,” right?

A few like that. I look at that and I say, “Okay, a lot of this stuff I sold—and I had pretty good positions in these—has done better than what my portfolio is.” I need to look at myself, and I’m struggling with it, right? Did I sell because I mentioned Nebius? The forced selling happened. I was buying because I was like, “Hey, I’m buying kind of at cash.”

I know a lot of very smart people who thought the sum of the parts was much higher. Nebius, for those who don’t know—I’m not going to go through it—the real reason they’ve gone up is that they’ve pivoted into a neocloud model. But they had some investments in kind of interesting, growthy plays, and some people smarter than me, obviously, were saying, “Hey, the way I was valuing them was much lower than the way they were valuing them, and I think they’ve been kind of proven right.”

They would have said, “Hey, Andrew, you’re selling at $30. You’re still way below the sum of the parts, and forget all the free upside optionality of the neocloud.” I’m kind of looking at it and saying, “The net-cash drugs—I bought a lot of these for 60% of cash and sold them at 100% to 110% of cash, or maybe 90% of cash—and a lot of them have worked because Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials came up heads instead of tails, right? They were successful instead of failing.”

So, I’m just struggling. I’m looking at it and saying, “Hey, Andrew, are you churning through the portfolio too fast? Are you getting impatient and not letting these theses play out? Or, conversely, are you kind of like—there is something to, ‘Hey, the money that is yours to be made, the situation you were here to invest in, has kind of played out,’ and maybe I’m not counterfactually hard enough, right?”

There are certainly stocks I’ve sold that are down, but maybe I’m not counterfactually hard enough. Either trial could have been a failure, all this sort of stuff, but it’s just something that I’ve been thinking about, right? You’d be a bad investor if you didn’t. If you looked and said, “Hey, a handful of your stocks from a year ago to 2 years ago have done really well over the past few years, better than the stocks you’ve owned,” what’s the break in the process? Was this good process? Was this some issue with you? It’s just something I have been thinking about.

There is probably also an element of bull markets, right? Since the early-April tariff delays, stocks are up a lot. Maybe these stocks I had held had excess risk. A lot of the stocks I’m comparing them with—I was and am still big in net-cash biotech, right? So, if I’m doing Nevro, which has a lot of cash but morphs into kind of an AI play, and we live in a world where the AI play works really well, there’s a world where the AI play didn’t work out well. Maybe the net-cash stuff, which has done pretty well, does pretty well in all worlds, or most worlds, and maybe the AI play only plays well in this one.

It’s just something I’ve been debating, and I’m not breaking new ground by saying this, right? I think all investors are evolving, but it’s something that’s been on my mind this month, and I thought I’d share it with you. I think that goes back well to the earlier things I was talking about: the arrogance of being an investor and being an active investor.

Let me go quickly to the London Stock Exchange. If you listen to the podcast regularly, anytime somebody comes on and pitches a London stock, I joke that it’s an emerging market. I just wanted to quickly mention it because literally this week, I believe, there was a company, Mitie—it’s MTO over in London—that got taken over for a big premium.

I saw a news article that said—the headline quote is—“We’re going to run out.” What they’re saying is, “We’re going to run out of London-listed firms.” Mitie, and I’m looking at the article as I speak, is the 11th £1 billion-plus takeover from the FTSE 250 so far this year.

It’s interesting, right? London is so devastated as a stock market and all this sort of stuff that you’re having private-equity firms come in and pay big premiums. EasyJet, which is a low-budget airline, got taken out by Apollo, I believe, for—gosh, I can’t even remember. If I were a professional podcaster, I would have looked up the premium, but they got taken out for a big premium. Mitie gets taken out for a big premium. All these things are getting taken out for big premiums, which suggests private-market value is much higher than public-market value, right?

There are 2 interesting things there. First, we’re going to run out of firms—we’re going to run out of public companies. It’s interesting because all of these are trading at such low valuations given such big premiums, and you would think, from a supply-and-demand point of view, that if you’re about to run out of companies, one of the reasons people talk about Australia trading at a structural premium is that they have a lot of pension funds that are forced to put money into the stock market.

There are only so many companies, and the pension funds are always having cash inflows, so they structurally boost the multiples because you’ve got this structural buyer. It’s kind of demand exceeds supply. Heck, the S&P 500—one of the reasons I know a lot of people think the S&P 500 multiple expands over time is because people save, wealth grows, people save, they put money into the S&P 500, and the index just buys. As you get bigger, the index is forced to buy more of you.

From a supply-and-demand perspective, it is kind of interesting. You’ve got this beaten-down stock market where companies are getting taken out for huge premiums, and the remaining companies don’t seem to be getting much of a boost. At some point, it seems like demand should be overwhelming supply because supply is shrinking so quickly.

The other side of it is just the huge premiums. Private value is much higher than public value. It’s really interesting, right? But I said the FTSE 250: 11 takeovers, 11 takeouts. That’s still only 4% to 5% of the 250, right? 11 divided by 250.

If you are an active manager and let’s say you’re running a concentrated portfolio—you’re running 10 stocks—it’s not only possible, it’s probable that you weren’t long any of these big-premium takeout stocks. The reason I mention that is because, again, bringing it back to me, my experience with London is that I’ve got 3 to 4 London stocks in my portfolio. I think it was 4, and I sold 1 of them out of frustration.

My stocks go nowhere. It’s just interesting: if you’re an active manager in London, your portfolio is doing terribly unless you were long one of these companies that got taken out. It’s tough because you can go and say, “Hey, private-market values are so much higher. Look at this. Look at the takeouts. Look at the work I’m doing. Look at the comps, whatever you want.”

But when you’ve got a market that’s broken like this, and the only way to get premiums is to get these takeouts, it sounds great in theory. In practice, it’s like, “Hey, I’m underperforming constantly despite knowing that private-market value is so much higher.” What’s the solution? I have no clue what the solution is, but I think it’s really interesting to think about.

You know, there was a line somebody said to me once: “Every investor wants to be invested in an inefficient market until they’re actually invested in an inefficient market.” Then they come and say, “Hey, look, I found this great value.” They buy it, and then a year later they’re like, “Hey, it’s even better value now, but it hasn’t gone up. The stock hasn’t done anything.” Then probably the old-timers say, “Welcome to the party, pal,” or something like that.

But it’s just interesting. I’m not saying every stock on the London Stock Exchange is listed, but go look—go run through them. You’ll be able to find some pretty interesting values pretty quickly, I would suspect. It’s interesting when you say, “Hey, the only thing that can make these things work is a takeout.” And guess what? In a lot of these firms, insider ownership is low. They’re loath to sell. If they do, they’re all going to lose their pensions, their salaries, and their board fees.

For me, what I’ve started saying is: You look at it every day and say, “This thing is so cheap.” But then you start wondering, “Hey, is management ever going to do the right thing?” Management will say, “We’re doing the right thing. We’re growing our intrinsic value every day.” But from a shareholder perspective, you’re saying, “Hey, the stock is going nowhere. The only way we’ll ever get value is a private equity sale.”

It starts to weigh on you. You say, “Hey, if they don’t sell, I’ll never go anywhere. So, do I need to—” It’s a great case for activism, obviously, but what can I do? Should I just go elsewhere? Do I want to take my chances on the coin flip that I have one of the 5% of companies that are going to get taken over? Do I want to risk my value investing principles? Do I want to evolve, as I talked about earlier? I don’t know.

Anyway, we’re at about 30 minutes. I’m probably going to wrap it up here. Look, these have been my random ramblings for the month of July. It is July 22nd as I randomly ramble. I've got some good podcasts coming up. I hope you guys are having a great summer. I’m looking forward to talking to you. I don’t know what I’m going to ramble on about, but I’ll ramble again for 30 minutes in August.

A quick disclaimer: Nothing on this podcast should be considered investment advice. Guests or the host may have positions in any of the stocks mentioned during this podcast. Please do your own work and consult a financial adviser.