November 2025 Random Ramblings
A winning streak can be a hot craps table masquerading as investment skill. Walker’s friend made roughly 5x on night one before losing every dollar of winnings on night three; similarly, Walker had very few losing legal situations for seven years, followed by three years when seemingly every one lost. He is now asking whether he ever had an edge, or whether early success weakened his diligence.
John Malone’s “levered buyback model” may have owed more to its operating environment than value investors admit. Growing EBITDA while maintaining roughly 4x leverage creates extra borrowing capacity and cash for repurchases, but the model’s 1980-2010 peak also enjoyed falling interest rates and extraordinary media economics. With Formula 1 the notable exception, SiriusXM, Charter, Warner Bros. Discovery, and QVC suggest the tailwinds may have mattered enormously.
Walker’s perhaps worst-performing bucket is stocks he initially rejected, then bought after they fell—often from $50 to $30—when his identified risk materialized. Correctly spotting the risk can create a dangerous belief that he knows the company “stone cold,” lowering the underwriting bar just when new diligence is most necessary. His unresolved question is: “What step am I skipping?”
Shorting Palantir, CoreWeave, or another perceived AI-bubble stock on valuation and disputed economics carries especially high risk. Their “nosebleed valuations” and debatable economics, TAMs, and moats resemble the late-1999 Cisco setup, but Walker says one would have to be “crazy” to short them naked and stresses that shorting is especially risky.
The neglected AI analogy is not dot-com collapse but the failed 2010-2015 shorts of Tesla, Netflix, Amazon, and Salesforce. Those companies drew persuasive accounting and valuation critiques—Netflix’s content depreciation, Amazon’s lack of economic profit, Salesforce’s multiple—yet shorts “got their faces ripped off” as several became exceptional businesses. Walker is not predicting the same outcome for today’s names; he wants investors to acknowledge it as a real alternative path.
Management-provided targets and NAVs are not, by themselves, an investment thesis. Three-year projections routinely disappoint, corporate overhead erodes headline NAV, and a discount already advertised by management is known to the market. Liberty SiriusXM is Walker’s warning specimen: the gap closed largely through SiriusXM falling toward the tracker, not the tracker rising toward management’s implied value.
1. A hot streak can manufacture confidence without creating edge
Walker’s opening specimen is craps: a novice friend hit a hot table, called it “the infinite money hack” and “a free ATM,” made roughly 5x on night one, did well again on night two, then lost all the winnings on night three. The casino’s edge had never disappeared; variance had merely delayed its arrival.
His investor test: after five consecutive winners, “is it evidence of skill,” or did a hot strategy manufacture confidence before its odds caught up? The same question applies to themes, repeatable-looking playbooks, and corporate strategies.
Walker’s legal special situations sharpen the point. For roughly his first seven years of professional investing—“to the extent that I am a professional”—antitrust, MAE, and other legal bets produced very few losers; over the last three, he felt that seemingly every legal situation he looked at was a loser, leaving him unsure whether skill, selectivity, luck, or weaker diligence explains either regime.
He never hid the limitation—during the Twitter situation he repeatedly said, “I am not a lawyer”—yet winning may have made parachuting into specialists’ territory feel justified. Believing a generalist can rapidly learn a sector and outinvest trained specialists may be “the height of ego.”
2. Malone’s levered-buyback machine may have been regime-dependent
The classic John Malone engine combined a growing subscription business with roughly constant leverage. If EBITDA rose 10%, debt could also rise 10% without increasing the leverage ratio; that incremental borrowing capacity, plus free cash flow, funded progressively larger repurchases.
Walker wonders whether the model’s 1980-2010 triumph reflected two exceptional tailwinds: declining interest rates and “the best period for media in history.” The spreadsheet logic still makes intuitive sense to him, but mathematically elegant leverage does not establish that the strategy works across regimes.
The last decade supplies uncomfortable evidence. Formula 1 worked, but SiriusXM, Charter, Warner Bros. Discovery, and QVC performed poorly; several businesses stopped repurchases, raised equity, or approached bankruptcy. Walker retains enormous respect for Malone’s intelligence and discloses a small Charter position, while conceding, “I was very wrong.”
3. Correctly spotting a risk can lower the bar at the wrong moment
The recurring setup begins when smart friends pitch a company at $50 and Walker passes because of a specific risk—say, Facebook entering a dating app’s market. The risk then materializes, the stock falls to $30, and he buys; instead of rebounding, it gets “crushed” again.
This has been “perhaps my worst-performing bucket.” His suspected mental error is that identifying the initial problem makes him feel he understands the company “stone cold,” even though new diligence may still be necessary after the adverse event.
Permanently refusing every company once rejected cannot be the general answer. Walker leaves the problem unresolved, asking how to reframe the setup and, “What diligence am I skipping?”
4. The AI short has both a dot-com precedent and a successful-tech counterexample
Walker sees a heavy recent drumbeat around an “AI bubble,” intensified when Sam Altman “basically” hung up after someone asked how a $10 billion company promising $1 trillion of capex over ten years would fund it.
Palantir and CoreWeave are the shorts he hears most often. Both carry “nosebleed valuations” alongside questions about economics, TAM, and competitive moats, although Walker explicitly allows that they might still be great companies and says naked shorting would be “crazy.”
The bearish pattern match is late-1999 or early-2000 Cisco: a real company at an unsustainable valuation. But from 2010-2015, hedge-fund managers with strong track records made similarly compelling valuation and accounting cases against Tesla, Netflix, Amazon, and Salesforce—only to get “their faces ripped off.”
Netflix’s content depreciation drew scrutiny, Amazon seemed never to produce economic profit, and Salesforce looked extraordinarily expensive. Walker’s underheard third path is that today’s AI leaders might be future-defining businesses; he is not asserting that outcome, and their current market values might already constrain the upside.
5. Management’s NAV is public arithmetic, not hidden value
Walker first separates numbers from personal trust. Friendly executives may promise never to issue undervalued equity, then discover “the deal of the century” six months later and issue equity amounting to 50% of the company—while also giving management a larger empire and greater compensation.
Long-term targets deserve similar skepticism. Without claiming a formal study, Walker is “pretty sure” most three-year investor-day goals are missed; he rhetorically asks how many 2021 SPACs projected $5 billion of revenue by late 2025, even though many still had not generated any revenue, while IBM famously missed its early-2010s EPS objective.
A typical NAV slide turns $1 billion of assets and 100 million shares into $10 per share, versus a $6 stock and a 40% discount. Even after checking every component, Walker’s results have been poor: management NAVs do not account for corporate overhead, and the supposed bargain is already visible to the market and potentially to quantitative systems.
Liberty SiriusXM is the clean specimen. SiriusXM at $4 implied roughly $40 of tracker NAV, if Walker remembers correctly, while Liberty SiriusXM traded near $25; Greg Maffei highlighted the discount and promised repurchases, but stress halted buybacks and brought a rights offering to support the rest of Malone’s empire during COVID. Ultimately SiriusXM fell toward the tracker as the float normalized—the “cheap” security did not rise to management’s NAV.
Full transcript
You're about to listen to the Yet Another Value podcast with your host, me, Andrew Walker. Look, if you like this podcast, it would mean so so much to me if you could rate, subscribe, review it, wherever you're watching or listening to it. Ratings, subscriptions, reviews help me get more viewers, which helps me get better guests, which helps the podcast fly just keep spinning. But anyway,
Today, I don’t have to worry about guests because my guest is me. It is time for my November monthly random rambling. I’m going to ramble quite a bit today.
I have 4 topics that I want to talk about. The 4 topics are wins that lure you into a false sense of security; things that you pass on, that drop, and that you then go on to buy, and my history of that not working out well for me; shorting the AI bubble—and I’ve got quotes around “AI bubble,” and I’ll say shorting is risky. See the full disclaimer at the end of the episode.
I’ve got thoughts on shorting the AI bubble and the risks. People draw parallels to the dot-com bubble, but I think there might be another parallel to keep in mind. No firm thoughts, but it’s an interesting, thought-provoking experiment to think about. I’ll obviously explain that during the ramble.
And finally, some thoughts on trusting management, NAV, and numbers, and how you can make that work for you, why it doesn’t work—all sorts of stuff there.
Let me go to our sponsors and then we'll dive into the monthly random. A word from our sponsors coming up. Today's podcast is sponsored by AlphaSense. Look, you know, AlphaSense as a longtime sponsor of this pro podcast. I love all their tools, their virgin AI tools. I love their expert networks and I increasingly love their webinars. Uh they are sponsored this podcast. The next webinar they have coming up is P distributions. Is the drought finally over? They're going to be talking about go on Twitter, go look. Everyone's talking about hey uh you know the IRS, are they real? Where's the cash? Where's all this sort of stuff? So they've got a great set of speakers who are coming on and talking about all those things. Hey, if they open up P and alternatives to investors, what does that to retail investors? What does that look like? They've got a great set of speakers. It's Ted Cades from Capital Allocators and Xavier Smith, the director of ENI Research, Alphasense. It's launching November 18th. There'll be a link to the sign up in the show notes and on the blog. You can sign up there. And thank you to Alpha Sense for sponsoring this episode. All right. Hello and welcome to the Yet Another Value Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Walker, here today for my monthly random ramblings.
It is Sunday, November 9, and I am going to ramble about 4 things. I’ll tell you what those 4 things are in a second, but first, a quick disclaimer. Nothing on this podcast is investing advice. I don’t think I’m talking about any specific stocks here, but if I do, I’m just rambling for 30 minutes or so. Please see the full disclaimer at the end of the podcast. Remember, not investing advice.
Today, I want to talk about 4 different things. Normally, it’s 5, but it’s 4 today. Maybe I’m less thoughtful this month, but the 4 things are wins that lure you into a false sense of security; a related thought on things that you pass on, that drop, and then maybe your bar is a little bit lowered. I’m going to explain all of these. I realize I’m just rambling and saying random words.
Then I want to talk about people shorting the AI bubble. And then I want to wrap this up with something on trusting management and trusting management’s numbers. So let’s hop into all that.
The first thing I want to talk about is wins that lure you into security. I love to explain things with metaphors and stories. I’m a bit of a storyteller—probably not a very good one, but let me give you a story.
I don’t gamble much. That’s the honest truth. If I’m watching a basketball game, I’ll slap $20 on a team or the over-under just because it’s more fun. A basketball game lasts 2.5 hours. $20 is what you’d pay for a movie these days, and watching a game with $20 on it has better EV than going to the movies, right? So I’ll do that.
I don’t really gamble a lot, but every year—or at least for the past 3 years—I’ve gone to Planet MicroCap in Vegas. When I go to Planet MicroCap, it’s a ton of fun, and I give myself a gambling budget of $300. It’s not crazy. That is money, but 3 days and $300 isn’t much. If I lose it all in 1 go, okay, I’m done gambling. If I can make a little bit and make it last, great. Awesome.
I like to think I’m an investor, but I like craps. That’s my game of choice. I’ll play some blackjack, but it’s generally craps or blackjack. Craps is a really funny game. For those of you who don’t know, craps is the game where you roll the dice.
If you’ve never played craps and you hop onto a table when it’s hot—where you’re throwing point after point and the whole table is winning at the same time—the table’s hot, the shooter’s on a heater, whatever you want to call it. If you bring somebody new to the craps table when the table’s hot, they’ll think that you’ve given them access to a free ATM machine, right?
They’ll know that’s not how it works because casinos aren’t built on giving. But you’ll do it and you’ll be like, “I can’t believe the house has an edge in this. This is insanity.” The house does have a very small edge in craps. But the thing with craps is that it’s extremely high variance. If the table’s hot, you can make 10 times your money in a second. If the table is cold, you can lose all your money in a second.
Why do I mention that? I brought a friend this year. He’d never played craps before. He came to Planet MicroCap with me, and we went to a craps table. The table was hot. We were laughing about it. He was like, “This is a free-money hack. This is the infinite-money hack. This is a free ATM, right?”
We were laughing. He made 5 times his money on night 1. I think on night 2, he had a great night, too. He was talking about how this was free money. But the casinos, again, there’s no free money at the casinos. The odds caught up to him on night 3. I mean, he didn’t literally lose his shirt, but all of the winnings were gone, right?
That’s kind of the fun of it, right? As long as you don’t have a gambling problem, that’s kind of the fun. You go, you have a great time with your friends, and you have stories of the big highs and the big lows.
Why do I mention all this? First, I mention it because he’s my friend. I had 2 friends who were doing this. We’ll see if they listen to the podcast and reach out. They’ll be like, “Hey, you tell my stories.”
But the main reason I mention it is that I think about it when it comes to themes and strategies. If you invest in a theme or strategy and there are 5 winners in a row, is it evidence of skill? Or did you go to the craps table, the craps table was hot, and you rolled 5 times, and now you’re overconfident in yourself and you don’t know if you have an edge?
I’ll give you an example from my own experience. I still look at a lot of legal special situations, and I used to do a lot more of them. I would say that the first 7 years of me professionally investing, to the extent that I am a professional, I had very few legal losers. It just felt like one after another: winning on antitrust bets, winning on MAE bets—every legal situation was a winner.
Over the past 3 years, I feel like every legal situation I’ve looked at has been a loser. And that has me wondering: The first 7 years, was that a hot streak? Was I more selective in my diligence? Was it just a hot streak? Did I just get lucky? What was it?
If I was just lucky, did I ever have skill or an edge there, or was it all luck? Is this an area I should be looking at after the last 3 years, when they’ve all been losers? Is it because my diligence got worse? Was it luck? Was I investing in an area where I had no skill? Was I riding a wave, and maybe my diligence dropped because I said, “I know legal situations. I can do this. I’m good at these. I can assign odds better”?
I don’t know, but it’s something I’m really thinking about a lot.
And look, I say legal situations, and then you would say, “Hey, Andrew, I remember every Twitter podcast you did.” Twitter was obviously a big winner and one of the winners I refer to. I started every Twitter podcast by saying, “Hey, guys, I am not a lawyer. So who am I to say I have an edge competing against lawyers, competing against people who are trained in this area, just kind of jumping in as a generalist? I don’t know.”
A lot of times, I’ll talk to journalists about ideas, and they’ll jump into ideas in sectors that they’re not specialized in. I’m the exact same way, right? I’ll jump into ideas in sectors that I’m not specialized in and think I can make money investing in those sectors.
Is that the height of ego? Generally, I think all these people are smart. Is it the height of ego to say, “Hey, I’m not specialized in this sector, but I can parachute in, learn everything, and make money investing in this sector”?
It’s the height of ego. Are they on a winning streak? Is that crazy? I don’t know. But it’s something I’ve really been thinking about a lot.
I guess this evolved from wins luring you into security to where is your edge, where can you get an edge, and where can you express an edge. But let me bring it back to wins that lure you into security.
Let me zoom out and go a little further. I mentioned legal situations as my personal example. Another one I’ve really been thinking about—and if you’ve listened to this podcast or read any of my writings, you’ll know this—is John Malone, someone I think about an unfortunate amount, I would say.
The past 10 years, in my opinion, have not been kind to John Malone. I’m sure, again, he’s a multibillionaire, so they’ve been kind enough to him. But his empire has really crumbled over the past 10 years. Go pull up the stock of any of the Liberty tracking stocks, for the most part. Formula 1 has been great, but aside from that, none of them have really worked.
Sirius XM hasn’t worked. Charter was a big investment for him that hasn’t worked. I think I do have a small investment in Charter that we can talk about, but it’s not a big position anymore. I was very wrong, and it’ll come into play here. Charter hasn’t been great. Warner Bros. Discovery has been a disaster. QVC is on the verge of bankruptcy. Sirius XM was great 20 years ago, but the past 10 years have been a disaster. Everything has been a disaster.
It has me wondering about the famous John Malone model, which was a levered buyback story. You have a growing business—basically a cable business, a subscription-based business. It grows: you add a couple more subscribers, you get a little bit of pricing power, so it grows every year. You keep leverage constant on it, at 4 times or whatever, and EBITDA goes up every year.
Because you’re keeping that leverage constant, you generate cash flow and get an added boost. Every year, if EBITDA grows by 10%, you can increase your debt by 10%. Because you keep your leverage constant, you can return increasing amounts of free cash flow to your shareholders. That was the John Malone levered buyback model, and that’s what made him rich.
I do wonder, though: John Malone practiced the levered buyback model from 1980 to 2010, when it was at its absolute best. That was a period of declining interest rates, and it was the best period for media in history. So he had that double tailwind.
I wonder if all of us value investors get obsessed with the levered buyback stories. I wonder if it’s actually not as good a story. Point me to one that’s worked over the past 10 years; they’re few and far between. I wonder if it wasn’t that this was a great model, even though mathematically and intuitively it does make sense to me. I wonder if it wasn’t as great a model for a world that, admittedly, has different risks.
I wonder if it was really benefiting from dual tailwinds: declining interest rates, which was the main one, plus media companies from 1980 to 2010 operating in the best of all worlds for them. They’ve just been devastated over the past 10 years as their multiples have come down. I wonder if he was more a product of the tailwinds he was riding than his strategy actually being great.
This is hard to say because I still have a lot of respect for John Malone. One thing I didn’t say is that John Malone is a genius, because the man is off-the-charts bright. He’s an electrical engineer with a PhD and all of that; he is absolutely brilliant. I think the levered buyback model makes a lot of sense in the electrical-engineering, mathematical, Excel-spreadsheet model.
But it was a big winner from 1980 to 2010, and I wonder if that was just the tailwinds. It has not worked over the past 10 years. Malone’s empire has not crumbled because it’s still together, but almost all the pieces have performed disastrously. They’re all practicing this levered buyback model, and many of them practiced it for the past 10 years. Over the past year or two, they’ve had to really hit the brakes and, in many cases, reverse it and raise equity capital. They’re on the verge of bankruptcy.
I don’t know, but that’s one thing I’ve really been thinking about: wins lulling you into security. That applies both to individual investors and to the different themes and strategies they like to invest in. Honestly, it applies to management teams and companies overall pursuing different strategies.
A related thought I have—let’s move to the second thought—is things that you pass on that drop. Every now and then, a few friends will pitch me an idea. An idea will get hot among the value-event investors I like to talk to, and they’ll pitch me an idea. They’ll say, “Hey, this is a great growth company. This is awesome. This is the next big winner.”
I respect my friends a lot. They’re all smart. Three of them will come to me and say, “Hey, I’m long this company. Look at this diligence. Look at this. This is great. It’s growing. It’s cheap.” All this sort of stuff. I’ll research it and, for one reason or another, I’ll pass.
In one case, I’ll give an anonymized example. A bunch of my friends are long a company because they say, “Hey, the company is really cheap on an EV/EBITDA basis, it’s growing, and all this sort of stuff.” I look at it, and the accounting was impenetrable to me. I thought the add-backs were crazy. The cash flow and the EBITDA did not really match.
I saw that, and I’m not accusing anyone of anything. I just didn’t think the economics of the business were as good as what they were pitching. So I passed on it. Fast-forward 6 months: my friends are pitching it at 50. I passed because of the accounting, and maybe there was another risk or 2 that I identified. The stock announces a terrible quarter, and the stock goes from 50 to 30. Maybe they say, “Hey, our accounting—we had problems with it.” Whatever.
There was a risk that I identified that played out. Accounting might not have been a great example, because I’m specifically talking about times where you identify a risk and it plays out. You say, “Hey, that soda company you’re talking about is great, but I’m really worried that Coca-Cola is going to enter that market.” Or, “That dating-app company you’re talking about is great, but I’m really worried that Facebook is going to enter that market.”
You identify that risk, you hold off, then that risk comes to pass and the stock gets hammered. The stock goes from 50 to 30. I have found that to be a very difficult setup for me. Multiple times, I’ve seen a stock go from 50 to 30, then I’ve bought the stock, and then it’s gotten crushed. It has perhaps been my worst-performing investment.
I like to go back through what were my worst investments and what were my best investments. Perhaps my worst-performing bucket is stocks that I initially passed on. I had a bunch of notes, the stock dropped, the risks came into play, I bought it, and it was a disaster. Again, to the point about wins lulling you into security, I’ve been wondering if there’s something mental going on with me.
Obviously, people can pass on things, buy them after they drop, and have them be successful investments. I’ve been wondering if there’s something mentally wrong with me where I think, “I correctly identified the risk that took it from 50 to 30. I know this company stone-cold because I identified that 1 risk.” What is wrong with me? What is it about that scenario or that setup that’s causing me to perform so poorly?
The answer cannot be that every company I pass on that has risks is something I should just pass on for the rest of time once the risks have come into play. That can’t be the right answer, but maybe it should be, because I’m telling you, these are the worst investments I’ve ever had.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what is happening there mentally for me, how to readjust, and how to reframe it. I bring myself into it, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who can have this problem. The wins-lulling-you-into-security point seems pretty applicable to most investors.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot. How do you reframe it? If I’m constantly getting into these situations where I pass at 50, the risk hits, the stock drops to 30, I buy it, and then it drops again, how do I reframe it? What am I doing wrong? What diligence am I skipping, or what step am I skipping? What is happening there where I think that because it’s gone from 50 to 30 and I identified that risk, I’m not doing enough diligence or I’m thinking I understand what’s going on?
That’s the second thing I want to talk about. Let’s go to the last 2. These can be shorter. I always forget to keep track of time when I’m doing these, so I don’t know if I’ve been rambling for 20 minutes or 20 hours.
Shorting the AI bubble—and I’m putting “AI bubble” in quotes there. Over the past 3 months, there’s been a heavy drumbeat of people claiming it’s an AI bubble. About a week ago, there was the now-infamous incident of Sam Altman basically hanging up on a podcast because someone asked, “Hey, you’re a $10 billion company that’s promising a trillion dollars of capex over the next 10 years. How are you going to fund that?”
For the past 3 months, 6 months, whatever it is, people have really been talking about shorting the AI bubble. I think the most popular ones I hear—and I think you’d have to be crazy to short either of these naked or anything—are Palantir and CoreWeave. Shorting is extra risky, disclaimer, all that sort of stuff, but I’m just talking about the most popular ones I generally hear.
But there are plenty of others. The reason I chose Palantir and CoreWeave here is because they trade at nosebleed valuations, and both of them have, I would say, questionable economics, questionable TAM, and questionable competitive moats. That doesn’t mean they’re not great companies. I’m just saying those questions could be raised, right?
Especially value investors look at these and say, “Oh my God, the valuation is insane, competition is looming, all this questionable economics stuff.” They short them, and I get it. When these people short them, they say, “Hey, I’m basically drawing the parallel. I’m drawing the pattern recognition to: I’m shorting these companies at the top of the dot-com bubble.”
Was Cisco a great company? Yes. But if you shorted it in late 1999 or early 2000 and you could hold on—for a while, I think it did run up a little bit—the stock got crushed. The valuation was insane. Palantir, CoreWeave, all these guys trade at even crazier valuations, I think, by either argument. So I totally get that.
But I do wonder: People also forget that from kind of 2010 to 2015, there was a steady drumbeat of hedge fund managers with really good track records who would make noises about shorting a lot of the tech companies. The ones I’m particularly thinking about are Tesla, Netflix, Amazon, Salesforce, and a bunch of other ones, too. They were shorting these companies.
There were lots of theses, right? But the main thesis was accounting and valuation. I specifically remember Netflix’s depreciation of its movies and its owned IP getting lots of questions from short sellers. Amazon never turned an economic profit, right? Salesforce had a crazy valuation. Those were the shorts, and the shorts would say, “Hey, these are great”—maybe they’d say they were great companies, maybe they wouldn’t—but they would say the valuation was a bubble.
All of them got their faces ripped off, right? All of them got their faces ripped off. Go pull up the Netflix chart. Go pull up the Tesla chart. Go pull up the Amazon chart. Their faces got ripped off.
So I do wonder: With Palantir and CoreWeave, yes, I get the questions on the long-term economics and everything. I get that. But people draw the parallel to, “Hey, I am shorting the dot-com bubble,” and I hear it. You could have made the exact same arguments for these great companies that became the Magnificent 7, all this sort of stuff, 10 to 15 years ago, and you would have been dramatically wrong. You got your face ripped off, and many of them turned out to be the best businesses of all time.
I’m not saying Palantir or CoreWeave get there, but I think people talk a lot about the AI-bubble side. They talk about valuation. They talk about the AI-bubble side. People say, “Oh, I’m going to short this. Oh, you know, crazy, inflated.” I get that.
Then I hear people on the short side, or I hear people who kind of fall into the camp that I actually, admittedly, am in, where I’m just like, “Too hard. Don’t know where it’s going. Short meme stocks, all this sort of stuff—I don’t want to touch it,” right? I hear those 2 camps, but I very rarely hear the third camp.
Maybe it’s because I’m not talking to enough retail bulls, I don’t know. But I very rarely hear the third camp of, “Hey, you would have said the same thing about Amazon, Netflix, Tesla, and all these guys 10 to 15 years ago. You would have been decidedly wrong.” What if we’re not on the dot-com-bubble 2.0 path with these guys? What if we are on the, “Hey, these are actually the companies of the future” path?
Because if that’s the case, there’s still probably a lot more room to run. They trade at such big valuations and such big market caps, so maybe not. But I think it’s an interesting other side of the coin and just something to consider and think about.
The last thing I wanted to talk about is trusting management. I’ve talked about trusting management on this podcast and on the blog a few times, and I’ve generally meant that I’ve gotten friendly with a management team and they’ve, to be honest, pulled my pants down, right? I thought, “Hey, these guys are good guys. They know what I want. They know what I expect. I respect them. I think they’re thinking about the world,” right?
They say, “Hey, Andrew, we understand we’re undervalued. We would never issue equity in a deal. We get it. We’re working toward shareholder returns. We see the same value in our shares that you do. We’re working toward shareholder returns. We get it.” Then 6 months later, they say, “Hey, look, we had the opportunity to do the deal of the century. How could you have us turn down the deal of the century that had us issue 50% of our equity at these cheap prices?”
And by the way, management didn’t do it because we’d be running a bigger empire and we’d get paid a lot. But that type of stuff. So it’s the trusting of management: “Hey, I believe they’re going to do the right thing for shareholders,” despite maybe their incentives not being aligned or everything. I think they get it because I’m friends with them and I’ve talked to them. I’ve shaken their hand. They’ve got a solid handshake. I always think about that.
What I’m talking about here is management numbers and NAV. The 2 in particular I would talk about are that a lot of companies will do investor days and publish 3-year targets. Famously—I don’t have statistics or studies on this—but I’m pretty sure most companies miss their 3-year targets when they put them out, and pretty dramatically, too.
The SPAC bubble would be the fantastic one, right? The SPACs in 2021. How many SPACs put out revenue projections that said they’d be earning $5 billion by this year? This is late 2025, and many of them still haven’t generated any revenue.
Even more than that, there are big companies that put out big long-term targets. A famous one might be IBM with Buffett in the early 2010s. They had their famous, “Hey, here’s our long-term EPS target,” and they missed it dramatically, right?
Management teams love to put out numbers at investor days. The other thing I find a lot of management teams like to do is put out NAV slides—net asset value slides, right? They put them out and say, “Hey, here are the different pieces of our company. Here’s how much they’re worth. Here’s what we think our stock is worth.”
I will call myself out on this, and I think plenty of investors will agree with me: It’s very easy for me, especially with the NAV slide. Management lays out the NAV and says, “Hey, look, we own 5% of this company that’s valued at $1 billion. That’s $50 million of value there. Ten percent of this company—that’s $100 million.” They lay that all out, and then it comes out to a nice number that says, “Hey, we’re worth $1 billion. We have 100 million shares outstanding. Our shares are worth $10 per share on an NAV basis. We trade for $6. We trade at a 40% discount.”
I will obviously go and check the assumptions under every piece of that NAV, but I will tell you, my history investing in management NAV stories has not been great, right? It’s not great. Even when the assumptions are fine and I think there are a lot of reasons for that, management NAVs never give discounts for corporate overhead, which I always do. The corporate overhead a lot of times is running pretty big, and once you capitalize that, it takes a big chunk of that NAV discount away.
But even adjusting for that, I just don’t think I’ve had a lot of success when management publishes an NAV number that says—obviously, it says—the NAV is higher than the stock price, I buy the stock, and I don’t think I’ve ever had much success in that scenario. I wonder why that is.
It could be possible that the reason is—I talk all the time about how you need an edge that is not in the numbers—that 100 years ago, if you were buying stock in the 50s and the 60s and calculating, “Hey, book value is $10, the stock trades at $5, this is a buy,” that could work today. That’s done by quantitative computers, and if you’re trying to compete on that, you’re going to get outcompeted 100 times out of 100, in my opinion.
Maybe it’s the same thing with management NAV, right? If management is presenting the NAV, the market knows it, and it’s trading at a discount for a reason. That doesn’t mean it can’t work, right? Because if you say, “Hey, I think management is much more incentivized to unlock this NAV than the market believes,” that’s a thesis, maybe. But just saying, “Hey, management’s got NAV at $10, the stock’s at $5”—that’s probably not a thesis.
I will tell you, it has not worked for me. It’s something I’ve been thinking about: How do I make myself more skeptical of some of these management teams and NAV? But why hasn’t that worked, and how can you tweak that?
I am a value investor at heart. I do want to buy stuff for less than it’s worth. How do you tweak that so I can buy stuff for less than it’s worth, find these NAV discounts, and have management kind of guide me, but not constantly buy things at a discount to what management says they are and then never realize value?
I’ll give 1 very fast example: Liberty SiriusXM. I like this example because anyone could do the math. Greg Maffei, who was the Liberty CEO at the time, would do the math all the time, right? SiriusXM traded for $4 per share. That implied that Liberty SiriusXM’s NAV, which was basically all SiriusXM stock, was, if I remember correctly, $40 per share.
And Liberty SiriusXM traded for $25 per share, right? Greg Maffei would say all the time, “Hey, this is the discount. We know it’s there. We’re going to attack it. We’re going to buy back stock.” All this type of stuff. The reason I like using this is because it’s a great example, and it also plays into the Malone stuff I talked about earlier. He’d say that all the time.
But I think the interesting thing that happened there was that he would always say, “We’re going to buy back shares,” but at multiple points, when things got stressful, they would stop buying back stock. Or they famously—infamously, I don’t know—issued a rights offering to save the rest of Malone’s empire during the COVID times.
But you could do that math, and I think a lot of people would say, “Hey, SiriusXM, for a business that is challenged by Apple Music, Google Play, and all this sort of stuff, trades at a pretty high multiple.” Maybe the issue isn’t that Liberty SiriusXM trades at a discount. Maybe the issue is that SiriusXM stock is inflated because Liberty SiriusXM controls so much and it’s a low-float stock. And that actually is kind of what happened when the 2 collapsed.
It wasn’t Liberty SiriusXM stock going up to meet the SiriusXM stock price. It was the SiriusXM stock price that came down to meet the Liberty SiriusXM price as the float normalized. Now, that is a silly example, but I’ve got plenty, plenty more companies where they publish NAV numbers.
Liberty SiriusXM was a simple NAV, but I’ve got plenty more where companies publish an NAV number and say, “Hey, we’ve got a chemical company that’s worth 10x. We’ve got a paper company that’s worth 5x.” If you’re just using pure multiples, you put those together and our stock price is worth $20. We’re trading at $8. Huge buy. And it just never works.
So, did it work for them? No. But maybe it’ll work for us. I don’t know. But anyway, I’m going to wrap it up there. Again, I don’t know how long I’ve been rambling.
One of the reasons I do these ramblings is that people like them. Maybe I’m inflating myself, but I think some people like them. I love having discussions on these points. So, if you listen to this ramble and I don't expect every point I made to hit with you, but you know, if you've got thoughts on things that you pass on that drop and you say, "Hey, Andrew, maybe this mental model would work for you or I've been thinking something similar." Reach out. I'd love to chat. I'd love to chat anytime. You can always reach out. Uh, please feel free.
The only caveat is that, if you listened to the October ramblings, you know I’m expecting my 2nd child. I thought that was going to be my last one. My wife has decided—her body’s decided—to keep the baby in for the full term. So, that 2nd child is coming real fast.
You will not be hearing from me for a couple of weeks after the child comes. Maybe I’ll be doing a December rambling, but around Thanksgiving time there’ll be a 2-day-old baby, so I won’t be responding then. My wife is also doing great. She’s a trooper. She’s got more energy than me. She looks incredible, so I’m really excited for that.
But I’m rambling. That’s the point of rambling: I’m rambling. Uh, thank you for listening. Again, reach out. Would love to swap thoughts if you ever want to see the disclaimer at the end. All that sort of stuff. But uh I'm looking forward to talking to you on the other side of the baby. A quick disclaimer, nothing on this podcast should be considered investment advice. Guests or the hosts may have positions in any of the stocks mentioned during this podcast. Please do your own work and consult a financial adviser. Thanks.