Chit Chat Stocks - Airbnb and Remitly Earnings; Buffett's Last 13F; Opportunity at Adyen? $ABNB $RELY $SFM

Episode Date: February 20, 2026

The Investing Power Hour is live-streamed every Thursday on the Chit Chat Stocks Podcast YouTube channel at 5:00 PM EST. This week we discussed: (00:00) Introduction (04:29) Airbnb's Growth and Strategy (16:16) Remitly's Performance and CEO Transition (25:25) AI in Software: A Discussion (32:40) Quality Stocks Watchlist (37:02) Adyen's Activist Letter (43:55) Reddit's Business Model and Market Position (49:46) The Wall of Worry in Software Companies (51:45) Berkshire Hathaway's Strategic Moves (55:53) DoorDash and the Laziness Economy (01:00:49) Robinhood's New Venture Fund ***************************************************** Subscribe to Emerging Moats Research: emergingmoats.com  ********************************************************************* Chit Chat Stocks is presented by Interactive Brokers. Get professional pricing, global access, and premier technology with the best brokerage for investors today:  https://www.interactivebrokers.com/  Interactive Brokers is a member of SIPC.  ********************************************************************* Fiscal.ai is building the future of financial data. With custom charts, AI-generated research reports, and endless analytical tools, you can get up to speed on any stock around the globe. All for a reasonable price.  Use our LINK and get 15% off any premium plan: ⁠https://fiscal.ai/chitchat  ********************************************************************* Disclosure: Chit Chat Stocks hosts and guests are not financial advisors, and nothing they say on this show is formal advice or a recommendation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is presented by Interactive Brokers. You research your investments, but did you research your broker? In 2025, IBKR retail clients averaged a 19.2% return, beating the S&P 500's 17.9%. Over time, the broker you choose makes a difference. If you want to learn why, head on over to IBKR.com slash 2025. More on this later in the show. Welcome to Chit Chat Stocks, the podcast that helps you discover your next great investment. I'm one of your hosts, Ryan Henderson, and I am joined, as always, by the one and only

Brett Schaefer. Today, we've got our weekly Power Hour episode. We typically do these Thursdays at 5 p.m. Eastern time, and we do these live on YouTube. So if you ever want to ask us any questions live, you can head on over to YouTube, Chit Chat Stocks at 5 p.m. Eastern time on Thursdays, and we should be able to take any questions. But we've got a full slate. We talk all things financial markets on these episodes. We've got Airbnb earnings. We've got DoorDash, Remitly, one of our top holdings for both Brett and I. We've got an Addian activist. And I will say a little teaser here. We have a lot of what I would consider and have previously been considered very, very high quality businesses trading at reasonable prices.

It is a fun time to be an investor again, in my opinion, because it felt like the last two years was a little tough. You had to get a little more creative, but we've got some interesting stocks on sale. I'll stop there. Brett, where do we want to start this episode? Well, Ryan, it's Power Hour 199. Only people that know that are the ones that look at the photo on YouTube. Next week's 200, so we have to find a way to do a little bit of a celebration. I think that puts us at about four years of this format.

So it's been a nice little chugging along with the train here. And we know we have some people that listen every week. We know there's some people that are joining live at least every once in a while. So we thought we're not going to be doing a full actual power hour on the episode, drinking five beers in an hour, which is what that drinking game is. maybe we'll do one to celebrate a nice little as we had a sorry for the motorcycle in the background if anyone heard that welcome to latin america but we might want to do you know a single beer celebrate uh we just recorded an episode on constellation brands for ryan's maybe we can use

one of their portfolio holdings little pacifico medello or corona but we'll talk about them with any fun ideas to celebrate number 200 in the Substack chat. But excited to get to this episode. We had a good report, remitly. I thought pretty dang good report overall. Airbnb, I'd say average report to above average. Pretty solid in Sprouts.

Farmer's Market, we might talk about them. Eh, so-so. Not as much. You always have the good and the bad with earnings season. Yeah, what do you think? So I'm down to have our one beer to celebrate episode 200 or power hour 200 what do you think about a little uh emerging moats newsletter giveaway maybe one one year to the audience anyone

but we can maybe do like best question in the chat or something oh that is yeah i mean that's hey that's that's not a bad idea and we still have i know no one can join now uh but we still have i think 40 or 50 people competing for the best stock pitch for the year and the winner of that it's going to get a year for free too for the emerging modes newsletter yeah i like that well we'll see what the sub stack chat has to say of course they're going to maybe enjoy that idea as well but ryan where do we want to start maybe either some earnings or i have as we're past the 15th of february 13 f's of course everyone's looking at the final Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway, 13 Evans.

I may have a hot take of what's going on with that business. But how about we start with Airbnb? It's number one on our list here on this little document. Take us through what happened with this quarter. I know a lot of people, it's always one that many, many people are discussing. Yeah, all around good quarter for Airbnb. Nights and experiences booked grew 10%, which was an acceleration from the previous quarter. average daily rate was up 6%. So you got total gross bookings growing 16%, revenue up 12,

free cashflow up 13, all around good growth, pretty much just over double digit or double digit, I should say growth for all the line items that matter and a general acceleration in the business. But here was kind of the quote that stood out to me from the conference call. So So this was focused on the hotel expansion, which for a long time has kind of, I would say, maybe been slightly neglected, at least in terms of commentary from the management team. It's been a little more services and experiences oriented, but here's the quote. Our strategy for hotels used to be that we thought of them as filling in network gaps

when a home is booked and when homes are high occupancy, you can get a hotel. What we've now evolved to is a much bigger strategy, a much more expansive strategy. Some trips are better in Airbnb, but it also means some trips are better in hotels. That is true, anecdotally. So if you're booking last minute, if you're booking one night, if you're booking for business, if you're staying for a conference, this might be a really good reason to book a hotel. but also we're really focusing on boutiques and independents. And a large percent of the inventory, hotel inventory in the world are boutiques and independents. They provide incredible hospitality. I mean, these hotels really fit the ethos of the Airbnb brand and they are not niche. This is a huge percentage of the hotels in the world. This to me makes way, way more sense going after hotel inventory and basically booking holdings market, especially as they expand internationally and grow listings in markets beyond the u.s because boutique and

independent hotels are fairly i mean there are some in the u.s but it's much i imagine it makes up a higher percentage of the hotel uh inventory in other markets especially in europe so i like this effort. I am still very skeptical about the experiences and services effort. The core business is doing great. You've got, I think, active listings past nine million, which is sort of our barometer for is the moat expanding. Today, you're at an enterprise value of 66 billion dollars. Earnings before taxes over the last 12 months is 3.1 billion. So about 21 times on the multiple there what do you think of the quarter what do you think of the price today and growth expectations for the coming years okay i will say i am covering this company in depth

uh i should i should have the schedule memorized but i believe it's either next week or the week after on emerging modes research so nice little long read for people but they want that next friday but the quarter was i think all around solid look the hotels make sense they're not going to go after the hiltons and the big brands out there that's just kind of commoditized and you're not going to have any differentiation there but i like going after boutique boutique smaller and getting that differentiated supply uh in one way or another it's not as differentiated as what they have with their core business one thing i'll mention on the experiences i think the data that sometimes they've shared and other people have gotten from third parties is a little

bit better than you might be thinking, Ryan. Although, of course, it's not as big of a business and it's not nearly going to be as big of a business as this other stuff. In the future, the two things I'm looking for product-wise that are going to move the needle financially, and I would hope that this comes out at some point over the next five to 10 years, maybe within five years is one some sort of loyalty program as someone who's used airbnb a lot i would love a loyalty program and i think it would lock people in even more it's pretty easy to do it'd be nice for them to partner with maybe a credit card player especially a travel card chase american express stuff like that uh you know chase sapphire and then on the second one

is sponsored listings now that seems very very easy for them to do and then i i should also mentioned AI search, which I think if they get it right, which they've been slow on and they said that they want to get it right before they launch it, if they get it right, it could be very, very helpful given how unique each home is out there. You might have for a family vacation, 10 different criteria for your specific family or as an individual of what you want in an Airbnb, you can talk with a chat bot and hopefully I can spit something out within a local area like, oh i want walking distance from a beach oh we need something to help with someone who's in a wheelchair we need all this stuff that could be extremely extremely helpful if they can get

you know an llm right there but overall the quarter look valuation's not bad feels rock solid like nothing to complain about but nothing to go wow like they're they're outperforming my expectations yeah i get a little frustrated with the product velocity here it seems like it just feels like they are avoiding some of the most obvious next steps product wise and i don't understand why the law i understand why ryan i understand why they're hitting their numbers now double-digit revenue growth when they need it they'll pull out and pull it out of the bag you think yes 100 i just it feels like uh sponsored listings is such a i i don't think it's mortgaging your moat uh so to that analogy i think i can't remember who

came up with it but it i don't think it's compromising the product integrity to have sponsored stays if they were to roll out advertising yet for some reason they brian chesky seems reluctant to do it but you could be right it might just be the fact that they are waiting for when yeah it's like that trick playing it's a trick playing the superbowl kind of deal you know you're gonna put that in week four against a bad team you're gonna do that against a weak opponent. Once they have tough comps, once they hit some more maturity, they don't have that easy revenue growth, they're going to layer this on. Because I think the way they look at it is if sponsored listings will be or sponsored revenue, what was their GPV? It's about

$100 billion, right? Let's say it's $100 billion now and advertising as percentage of revenue could get to something like 3% or as a payment volume could get it 3%, say something like that. That's three billion dollars in really really high margin revenue but they could also turn that on at 250 billion dollars and then what does that get you seven and a half am i doing that math correctly yeah but it's not it's not like but you can't turn it on overnight i know that's that's the thing well also it's like first of all that's a product that you're gonna want to expand over time obviously we've seen what like amazon has done with their advertising that that's grown over time and it doesn't if it doesn't detract from the platform it's not like a one-time turn

it on you know it's not like if they started doing sponsored stays today it destroys their ability to do it when they do hit 20 million listings or whatever right and they can also slow roll it and not have it as many out there uh for example like you can look in amazon took them a while to build that muscle memory spotify it's taken them five years to kind of get really that product side from advertisement and the advertisers there. It takes a while. You're not going to have, I know they're not looking for third-party advertisers, so to speak, but it's going to take a while to build up that muscle memory for sure. They do buy back a lot of stock, but I will say we have a comment here. The SBC, this is in the live YouTube chat here, the SBC

is also a bit frustrating. Not terrible, but I wish they had the same philosophy as Booking's management. Airbnb is going to be one where you're investing in more of the vision. booking is going to be financial optimization would you agree yeah but knights and experiences booked are the same the growth is the same on a much higher base it's not apples to apples it's not apples to apples because they're not going after the same target markets they're not in the same places there's also maybe constant well is it is it's not dollar amount it's just no no so constant currency doesn't matter but look they're not airbnb is not as exposed to hotels or you kind of you know what i'm saying they're all in a niche

within the travel market so it's not going to be the exact same and they're not in every geography so i'm not too concerned i'm not too concerned the growth rate seems surprisingly correlated between the two like if you look at the nights booked year-over-year growth it's been very similar and it just i i constantly i i'm an airbnb shareholder i think it's my third largest position i love the platform but for the life of me i don't understand why i'm avoiding bookings like it's probably product experience just use it yes it matters yes it is uh but financially if i assume that both are going to grow and it's not a winner take all and they're going to grow at similar rates,

I would think booking is more of a fit. But I do think... Chesky is the vision. Come on. Believe. But I'm not sure I agree with some of the vision. Like the experiences and services doesn't... Why? What's wrong with services? Or what's services that's relevant, that's tiny.

But what's wrong with experiences? It seems like an easy way to get a billion in revenue at some point. It's not going to move the needle too badly. i mean yeah like let's say they do replicate a viator and they're able to compete on that front like it exactly it doesn't move the needle i feel like you can put dev resources towards other solutions well you're building a good product for people you're probably gonna get roi on this if you're more end-to-end on the vacation experience within the airbnb app i think that's helpful as well they've talked about and i wonder how high percentage this is i've seen

some good data it's kind of hard to tell you're looking at a lot of third-party stuff but people that go for okay you're searching online i want to do a tour in x city takes you to airbnb they now have experiences and then new people get introduced to the platform they become an active user and then they book a home and then become a very profitable customer i think that makes sense i mean who who's i guess maybe first time customers maybe but i don't think people are discovering airbnb for the first time because they find an experience like people oh i mean they've talked about this on the conference call this is happening i know but when you launch a new product you just handpick the most optimistic data you can it's what happens if they just i

could see a world where they stop talking about it in two or three years oh no way no way we'll see i mean they did obviously they launched you know experiences three or four years ago and maybe they'll relaunch it in three or four years and we'll be in the same same position but we've gone a little long on airbnb here do we want to talk uh another holding of ours remitly sure yeah a lot of people were asking about this i said i was going to talk about i got three thumbs ups in the chat so i think maybe that means you know what a company does well uh with a quarter people like that what's this what the stock finish up today uh not a bad day to be a Remitly shareholder.

It's been a bad few months. I finished up 26%, but in the last six months, we're still down 9%. So we're making a comeback. But all around, I think, great report. Active customers up 19%. Send volume 35%.

Revenue up 26%. You're going to kind of get that mix where they're adding more. And they're actually, I've talked about this on the call, they're focusing on more higher volume senders and small businesses. So you're going to get lower take rate revenues,

going to be a little slower than send volume and active customers are going to be a little slower than revenue, respecting 20% revenue growth in 2026, record operating margin of 9% in Q4. I thought that was probably the biggest highlight. Now, if they hammered the buyback, I would have said perfect quarter, but they didn't. And I talked about this quarter going, oh, don't worry. Now we're going to hit the buyback. I was thinking you're sitting there in November and December after your earnings call, you're seeing your numbers, you know, you're going to be your stocks at 12 bucks, two times gross profit. And you go, I'm sitting on $500 million in cash and I can't take out 10%. Like just take out 5% of your shares. You could have done it. It's a very

liquid stock. That was the thing that just frustrating, frustrating. I really would wish I could just tell, and we'll get to the CEO. I'll let Ryan give us us in the quarter. And then we'll talk about the CEO change. Really wish I could tell them, look, your stock's going to be a 10 bagger, but it could be a 20 bagger if we just optimize this buyback. Besides that, I still think it's going to work and it's been good. You research your investments, you analyze markets, you manage risk, but did you research your broker? In 2025, IBKR clients outperformed the S&P 500. retail clients averaged 19.2%, while hedge fund clients averaged 28.91%, compared to the index's 17.9%. IBKR's lower trading costs, competitive rates, efficient execution, and access to more

than 160 global markets helps investors keep more of what they earn and put more capital to work. Over time, the brokerage you choose makes a difference. If you care about performance, Find out why the best informed investors choose Interactive Brokers at IBKR.com slash 2025. Interactive Brokers is a member of SIPC. It is. Yeah, it's so frustrating. I mean, they were like I remember screening for software stocks in North America that were basically certain growth parameters below an EV to gross profit of like three. They stood pretty much alone as one of the cheapest software businesses in North America. And they are bragging about only diluting by 5%. It's like this is if you are a believer in the business, if you believe in your own business, this is a great time to be buying back.

So it just that part did irk me. Other than that, you really can't ask for a better report like this was. It's actually so shocking that they don't have a higher multiple because they have sustained 20 percent plus revenue growth and guided now for 20 percent annual revenue growth. I think basically for the next three years, if you use their investor day guide, that is like phenomenal. That's best in class. I mean, if they get to $3 billion in revenue and $600 million in adjusted EBITDA, which I think is their guide, and frankly, it could easily be higher. There's no reason that it should trade at, I think, what was it, an enterprise value of like, it was like 2.8 for a while. It doesn't really, it really makes no sense. I think enterprise value was below two and a half for a bit. We can check it out, but here's a chart I wanted to look at.

It might be a little small on people's screens here, but look at this send volume. It's just accelerating. They are executing. You talk about Airbnb with non-expansionary new products, right? That's something that Ryan and I have debated. I think both of us would agree it's been a little worse than you would desire it as compared to someone like Uber.

But look at Remitly here. They've added these new products. They're going after the higher volume centers and the business customers. And we've gone from kind of just steady send volume growth. And yeah, Q4 is higher. But I mean, just look at that step change. It's just fantastic. We were at, in March 2020, $2.5 billion quarterly send volume, and we're now at $25 billion, which is fantastic. And it's funny how the narrative, both in the investment community and maybe just all investors probably, is remittance taxes. There's going to be a remittance tax. They're screwed. And Remitly is literally advertising it. It's their ad campaigns. They're like, do you want to avoid the cash remittance tax?

Come to Remitly. it's like it's become fuel for send volume growth and new customers and they even talked about that they were able to see good new customer growth while reducing their their planned marketing spend because they were so effective on some of those avoid the remittance tax type campaigns so uh yeah exceptional quarter i think it's too early to have any strong opinions on the new ceo i i honestly had no idea who he was prior to this call and i think did you do any research do you know anything about him i did a little i did some brief stuff today no i didn't do much i listened to him on the call but that that's it well ran amazon payments was in charge of amazon marketplace

then that's good you know way much bigger business kind of understandable yet that two seattle companies there and then he was head of consumer finance for santander which is a giant consumer bank i believe it started in spain but it's big in latin america i think he probably wanted to move to a tech technology company seems that's where he's liked and did you know that after the adam newman debacle at wework he was brought in as some sort of leader i don't know if he was the ceo but part of the turnaround story we'll forgive him for that no one no one i think could have turned around turned around that but the fact we'll see what happens you never know like the fact that he was in charge of amazon payments though he has at least from that standpoint the

experience of leading a large organization did you also see the comp plan now i didn't read the details of this i just saw a screenshot but uh and people look up the exact details yourself but essentially he's getting a must like RSU or performance stock unit plan where if the share price hits, I believe it's something like $20 at some point this year on the first anniversary of his appointment, he gets 20% of his RSUs and $25 and then up to, I think, five tranches to $50. You'll get the full performance. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, good for him because when you can step in and get that kind of a package when the business could just you could just have multiple re-rating uh it's kind of good yeah good i mean yeah not to

be too aggressive here but i don't think 50 in a few years is outrageous really well do you know what they ipo'd at probably 45 40 yeah right around there yeah it's still very small still yeah i actually kind of whatever i mean if he gets there i'll be happy but i think they could have been more aggressive with that the anyone that is been that reported directly to bezos that's a green flag for oh yeah you know what they said he was on the s team oh if you're on the s team i mean that's bona fide right there you're getting invited to jazzy super bowl party in the basement at medina i mean come on he knows his stuff yeah in all sincerity i do think like you could not there's not a better person to have learned from uh yeah that's a hard driving guy

yeah yeah let's uh so all around very happy with remitly i think i finally got it back over my cost basis so i'm close i'm close to about that as well yeah this is it was a good day but it's been a tough few months that's for sure yeah when i zoom out i'm a little less happy i wanted to uh maybe we can shift gears from earnings for a bit i went semi-viral this week with a tweet actually twice this is uh kind of pat on the back for me yeah if you ever wonder why fiscal ai tweets about remitley and coupon it's because ryan runs the account i almost posted a sprouts farmer's market chart today i was like no that's gonna like this and no one else is gonna care yeah no it so i shout out to sean emory who actually drew my attention to this

anthropic parent company of claude had a job listing that said that was for a salesforce administrator basically someone to help integrate and manage their salesforce software i posted a picture that because i think it's ironic obviously the most the ai forward company is using legacy software so is ai really going to kill software uh anyways they also apparently subscribe to slack and asana funny enough i think uh anthropia actually took the job listening down after after this um because i couldn't find it yesterday or maybe they filled it but i have never seen it i don't want to spend all day talking about the ai versus software debate but this actually painted a good picture for me of kind of how crazy some of this is so here were

some of the comments keep in mind this is claude or anthropic they they have to use a bunch of software vendors like they obviously do salesforce asana slack i'm sure they use a ton right i got But before you keep going, did you, well, you probably didn't listen to what came out today. It's on an odd lots podcast today. Did you know that Anthropic and OpenAI combined have fewer employees than DocuSign? Now, it says something about the size of both companies, where, but in all reality, they don't have enough engineers to disrupt every software company tomorrow, is what I'm saying. There's only so many people, even however impressive the company is.

And if you look at those, that revenue chart is insane for Anthropic, 100 million, 1 billion, 14 billion. I mean, it's insane, but they're not going to replicate Salesforce tomorrow. No, and I can't think of – there would not be a more wasteful business than one who all they do is repurpose external software vendors for internal tools. If that's all their engineers did, the business would have no product. So, yes, I think it's dumb. But anyways, they are hiring for people to manage their software business, software relationships. And in the comments, I was I was honestly in disbelief by some of the comments. So I'm going to read some of them. Someone says that employee will be fired in 18 months. Someone says this is probably basically an undercover role just to get full enterprise access. Real deliverables rewrite the suite internally within a month. third one they need one the one human who will clone salesforce into cloud people think it's like a decoy i guess as they're hiring this guy just to clone it it's amazing how

much market cap has been lost to this idea that everything's going to be built internally for companies despite honestly such so much disconfirming evidence like i truly have not heard of one example other than people who are like talking their own book that are founders of ai companies or something like that where a big company actually ripped and replaced mission critical software suite other than that like fortune four or whatever where they kind of have to so it anyway thought it was funny and uh i think it lends some some confirmation for me as a large software shareholder. For the software back lines, yes.

Salesforce, 50% drawdown. Gap PE is 25. We can talk to Benioff about that, gap figures. That's not too bad. EV to EBITDA, 15. Another good point this investor made on odd lots, and I just am thinking about it because I listened to it a few hours ago

while I was making food. the software company is already compete with free versions of stuff and it's called open source software but the whole reason people go for professional solutions is because you have customer support regular updates i mean ryan i don't want to say the exact company but you told me about some vendor you're using for fiscal ai it was like an open source thing run by one person and then they just shut it down and you had to scramble. It was a tough week for you to go to a whole new system that was much more reliable.

I mean, I think that makes the entire point. For some stuff, yeah, it's going to be tougher, but there's so much, and maybe it's just because we're on Twitter too much. People are writing 10,000-word essays about whether software is going to be great or software is going to die. I don't think it's black and white.

It's a specific company. Does your company have a wide moat? Did it already have a wide met? Okay, it'll be more defensible. Are they innovative with the product? Are you going to keep up with the times? Okay, that's good. Then you need to add all these AI tools

for your customers to help them get better. And are you good at capital allocation? Do you understand capital returns properly? Yes, yes, yes. Then your stock's probably going to be fine if you buy at the right price. But it's not black and white. No.

Just says it never was. I could, I feel like we have talked about this a million times and we could continue. do you want do you want do you want to talk to adjian i yes i just want to say like that's the last note there are so i i keep hearing this like it someone's going to build it internally but like who no maybe at amazon or something but amazon signed with zoom like they're they're not going to build everything internally like some of the large enterprises do build stuff internally that's yes but they're not gonna build everything but that's only the large enterprises you have

teams that stay dedicated to that product you have engineers that are like obviously maintaining it so that it's helpful for the whole company i i don't really know any like people like well developers are just going to side quest this and it's like i don't know anyone that's doing that and if you are it's a waste of your time people could already side quest stuff yeah i've i mean i've had uh friends developers at our company that you know try to side quest certain tools or whatever and it's fine but it's like i don't want them doing that with their internal tools like go out and build something and get us more revenue you know like get attract more customers to the core business it doesn't it's not really a net benefit in my opinion another uh i guess we

can talk to quality stock so this week i i made a new list for uh basically what's that for a thread No, no, no. Sorry. A new watch list. A watch list on Fiscal.ai. You can make many. I have my longs and shorts and watch list. I have existing holdings, watch list, and shorts, but I could add many more. You don't have your psychological longs? I should have that one. I should have that one and see if it outperforms. Yeah, that's a good idea. It's a good idea for the show. I mean, in reality, with my personal investing, it doesn't matter, but maybe for show purposes, we could do that. What watch list did

you make uh this one was basically just a i really want to buy them but they're always too expensive list and two of the ones on that list uh are now i think within range into it is one because i think about it every tax season i when i pay turbo tax it's got all my information already at the end was another i can't remember who else was on this list it was not a long list but both of those reasonable prices and i think i know intuit's in its largest drawdown ever i think add-in might be around its largest drawdown as well yeah never got back to its 2021 high so it's been five years there yeah we have other uh let's see some of the comments here well someone said they vibe coded their own version of fiscal ai uh and that told me to invest in tesla but the uh that's a

complete joke for anyone that doesn't get that uh but someone related to this said i bought smb global and moody's during the sell-off maybe some other high quality stocks there i don't think banks will use some ai slop to determine credit ratings and whether they will loan billions of dollars to companies i think that's a good point that could be included into this list into it look i was on the side of hey why do we gotta pay for this stuff but you know every year i go what turbo tax is convenient it's not the worst price in the world yeah i'll use them it's fine yeah and it it is helpful i remember talking to leandro about it and he i was like well you know i feel like this is weird that we have to pay for in order to pay our taxes he's like no

trust me you don't want a government-built solution i think he had experience with like some sort of government-built tax solution in spain or something like that or maybe he was As a Spaniard? Yeah, yeah, probably, probably. He was like, it's way worse than a private company building this as their core business. And it's a good point. I mean, TurboTax does honestly make it easy. And it's a reasonable price for, obviously, it depends on how much you're making, I guess. But it's a reasonable price, typically, as a percentage of someone's earnings. so and it's so sticky once your information is all in there unless you like have some major job transition or something where you like totally reset your life's tax information it makes sense to stay with uh turbo tax in my opinion so i've always liked that business i think it's real sticky and ev to ebit 21 times so again not the cheapest in the world but it's getting there

yeah i think adian's even cheaper actually well it's it's had a bit of a comeback since the uh last uh i don't even look at this earnings yield it's very hard for that to look at their exact phone because you can't use EV. But Agin was at something like 20 times, I'd say. And yeah, it has bounced a little bit. I was up the European listing was down to like 900 or even below. Now it's almost back to 1000, which is a real shame because I'm writing a full research report on them now for three or four weeks from now. And you know, you got to stay disciplined. You don't want to buy before you do your full research. At least sometimes I feel that way. I bought some shares.

At least for the newsletter, I don't want to buy before writing a full research report, giving my thoughts, stuff like that. Now, in cases like Adjie and I, I feel like maybe I'm missing something, but who knows, maybe we can find new lows. The reason I want to talk about this week, though, is there was an investor,

and he has a Northern European last name, so I might get it wrong. Albert Jalerma? Jalema? He's an investor. I retweeted it. He is an investor in Adyen. He had a couple of good quotes. It was a letter written to management. I don't think he's a full activist. It's more of something, hey, look, I'm a shareholder. I'm not going to have influence here. Maybe he's large enough, but I'm not sure. And he just had a few questions for the company. I'm going to read a couple of quotes here. I'm a shareholder of Adyen and I have followed the company closely over the last couple of years.

The second half 2025 results confirmed the growth and margin possibilities for Adyen. Revenue growing at 21%, EBITDA margin expanding to 55%, which is precisely why I'm writing. This is one area where I believe the company is falling. There is one area where the company is falling meaningfully short, not in execution, but in communication. And it is in that area left unaddressed risk becoming a genuine drag on how the market values this business, regardless of how well everything else performs second quote companies adyen is most naturally compared to have a clear capital allocation framework for instance visa commits 80 percent of its free cash flow to shareholders through a combination of dividends and buybacks mastercard

operates with similar discipline even paypal he's really saying even paypal this total as we like to say crap co to use you know in case there's kids in the car even paypal a business going through a more complex strategic transition, has published a clear capital return program and articulated exactly what it intends to do with excess cash. Think about how bad you feel if you work at PayPal. Someone goes, even PayPal. You'd feel terrible. Here's a third quote. Third, if buybacks are on the table, what conditions would need to be met? At 15 times forward EBITDA, with the stock more than 40% below its 2021 peak, one could make a compelling argument that the conditions are already met. If management disagrees, it'd be helpful to understand why. And they have like $5 billion in

excess cash. I think it's 5 billion euros. So maybe it's like $6 billion in excess cash and USD is growing. They're generating a lot of free cash flow. They need stuff for regulatory compliance when operating as kind of a banking licenses and all that stuff that kind of goes over everyone's head. But they need more cash on the balance sheet than you might think. You can't run extremely lean but there's a lot of room to buy that stock thoughts here ryan and whether uh just thoughts on that that letter all right folks before we move on let's talk about our home for investment research fiscal ai fiscal ai is the complete stock research platform for fundamental investors we use it every single day here at chit chat stocks it has everything you need to research individual

companies from 20 years of financial data to company specific segments and kpis earnings call transcripts morningstar reports and insider ownership data and much much more and they just lowered the price of their highest tier by 60 if you want a complete enterprise grade financial data terminal check out fiscal ai if you use our link fiscal.ai slash chitchat you will automatically get two weeks of fiscal pro for free no card required and if you want to upgrade our link will get you 15 off any paid plan again that's fiscal.ai slash chitchat the link will be in the show notes yeah i did read that they do require like slightly more capital on the balance sheet but yeah first of all to the activists writing this letter i would have left paypal out of the

discussion i don't think highlighting them as someone with a great capital allocation framework given that well they do they do have a good capital allocation framework but is it for the best maybe yeah yeah yeah pay i mean either what is paypal going to do with an excess 10 billion dollars wasted on more development going over the the excess cash flow to buybacks is is fine i mean that's much better than what adi is doing yeah i honestly don't know maybe they could have improved venmo or something but uh and maybe this is the best of the worst case scenarios for paypal is just to be buying back stock but yeah i think it makes sense to be buying it back now and you you look at the visas and the master cards of the world for a business like that that's that consistent i

feel like you want the simplest capital allocation framework like don't overthink it buy it back on a regular basis and don't i actually i'm not fond of when companies try to be opportunistic with it i used to be i used to think that was the way to go but the companies that are just consistent that are like i'm gonna put in 80 of my free cash flow towards buybacks every quarter or whatever it's you kind of get the benefit of the volatility anyways as opposed to saying i'm gonna wait now i'm an issue here i'm going to buy back here just keep it consistent i will say add-in payments processing in general that is one of the that's one of the things as a big business you never want to replace you want to if you as long as you have a good payments processor it would be

such a pain in the butt to switch stripe which processes i believe the exact same roughly amount of payments volume so i last last update was 2024 they said they processed 1.4 trillion at the end this year processed 1.6 trillion so i would assume it's similar they have a 140 billion dollar private market valuation which of course doesn't actually mean anything at the end similar business better margins way more cash generative and similar processing volume is sitting i think around 35 billion dollar market cap like a fraction of stripes uh perceived value it seems like such a high quality business and usually when the payments businesses are built from the ground up and not a patchwork of like different acquisitions

it helps for diagnosing issues and growing you're forgetting one thing ryan they published munger's book come on that's that's got to be worth a couple billion dollars they're actually a media company now with the podcast yeah with the podcast which i guess does well it's probably not the end of the world but yeah i did it's focused on other things i think what's hilarious is that they're from what the letter sounded like they have a huge head not headquarters but a bunch of offices in chicago in the united states which i think is funny because we're going to San Fran, we're not going to New York. We're going to somewhere where we're going to save 30%

on salaries. That's what they're focused on, and that's why they have 55% EBITDA margins, which I appreciate. And I'm very interested in this company. I've never been a shareholder, but definitely over the next few weeks, going to be researching them much further. We have a question from the audience

asking if we own Reddit. This listener says they bought during the sell-up. I will say I've never owned it. Ryan, have you ever been a shareholder? Never been a shareholder, But I am – I like the business, and apparently there's a narrative they're like somehow an AI – they're the latest AI victim, I guess, because – They were a winner, but now they're a victim. It powers all secret – well, secret, it powers all of your returns.

It's Wikipedia and Reddit that power – and Molly Fool articles, I should say, they're actually one of the top 100 sources for training for ChatGPT, Gemini, all the others. yeah it's reddit so that's where you're getting this information yeah i saw some people like well i could replicate the reddit user interface with ai and it's like actually anybody could replicate the reddit user interface the pretty much the entire business model is the people on reddit like they've got i think it's like 400 million something weekly active users there's it's like a classic network effect it's very hard to replace personally as uh i don't contribute much to reddit but i can certainly see the value in it i see the ad uh uh add i guess potency maybe is the word the uh why it could be effective yeah but i guess

i don't know maybe just my poor user experiences with reddit has deterred me from being a shareholder i mean the business model makes sense i'm sure it could be really cash generative yeah well we're trading at 12 times sales and that's not my favorite not my favorite all right other question before we move on the topic what do you guys think happens to the overall market three months forward do you guys think being down companies trade back up to all-time hires or do the defensive stocks trade down and drag the index. Here's, I'll say first, this is just going to be some take on a podcast. We're not trading off of any of this. But what I saw, I believe it was in the Wall Street Journal today, the dispersion between sector performance while

the market has zero volatility. So volatility has been the lowest on record over the last three months, while sector dispersion, where some sectors are doing fantastic, other sectors are getting crushed is the highest on record which i thought was quite fascinating no one seems to know what's going on my joke was that it's it's like a crazy wife right now who's really mad at you you have no idea why the market's mad at you but they are mad and you got to figure it out it might not be uh uh it might be not be rational but they're mad and you gotta you gotta do something about it that's that's really what's going on i gotta figure it out yeah three months forward obviously kind of a crapshoot here but i can't see a world in which walmart sustains a pe near 50

and yeah that's a good point software companies assuming that they continue to grow the top line by double digits stays at teens multiples so why is someone owning walmart over amazon i our latin american correspondent in bzek had his take was basically people are selling software and they got to put it somewhere let's just put it in the most let's let's do a no look and just put it in the most stable business we can think of, which has grown operating income. Can you guess what the annual growth rate of operating income has been for Walmart over the last 20 years?

Average. Eight. Two and a half percent. Oh, wow. That is atrocious. Yeah. It's, they're getting into grocery. It's been a slim margin.

Yeah, it's, hey, well. Per share might be better. but I'm pretty sure it was 2.5%. I can double check, but it was low. I was shocked how low it was. That's fascinating. I think over the next three months, you could see some of these software companies,

they're going to report fine numbers. But the whole thing about this thesis that these companies are going to have to climb the wall of worry and it's not going to be an immediate thing is everyone just goes, well, what happens three months from now? Your business might be dead. And then you report good numbers.

oh, well, what happens three months from now? Your business might be dead. New AI tool. And these are kind of stocks I do like, stocks that have to climb the wall of worry that have a wider moat than people think. It's not something that can be a three to six month catalyst. It's a multi-year deal. You might be flat for a year. It can be frustrating, but you'll get situations like, for example, the first round we had with Sprouts Farmer's Market. It's kind of going nowhere, but then all right comp stores normalize the stock was trading at five times earnings margins start expanding your revenue growth is in double digits now and then it goes up 5x that's kind of how i see a lot of these softwares companies where some aren't going to work out but

the ones that do you're going to climb the wall of worry and eventually you're going to get a really interesting result yeah it's i don't know how long the wall of worry lasts but i mean you think about any anytime i share like revenue growth or whatever for let's say adobe people like yeah well that's backwards looking like they used to grow and it's like well chat gpt was launched four years ago like they've been growing for four years three and a half right three and a half three and a half but i think it was 2022 or something late 2022 yeah okay canva was launched 15 years ago figmo was launched 15 years ago it like these things have existed so i think it's just part of me wants to just buy buy some of these businesses and close my eyes for a few years

kind of wish like kind of like how i think some people had to do with meta in 2022 and and big tech i guess broadly we've got a comment from andrew marshall which hey andrew everyone go check out uh capital mindset recurring guests on the show yes uh not that i agree with it but the argument could be made that amazon is exposed to ai software ai slash software and that's seen as toxic if there is one thing seen as ai proof it's physical food slash stores i would bet if i was a casino i'd put much worse odds that amazon's uh revenue from retail is lower on a real basis 50 years from now than walmart i think given their skew towards younger audiences given the fact that they can push more into rural areas uh i just think that they're i understand

his point there and that's what people are thinking but i just wholeheartedly disagree like amazon's mode is more durable i think it's more durable yeah and he does he does start the statement with not that i agree with it but it is maybe that is what people are thinking is they just want i honestly think people just want to avoid as much tech exposure as possible like they want to get some people yeah unless you're certain companies um okay do you want to talk buffett or not buffett uh r.i.p he didn't die but he retired we're gonna talk berkshire hathaway's movements i get a little bit of a hot take on what greg abel might be cooking up last 13f for buffett came out um trimmed a little bit of bank of america turned a little

bit of apple sold a lot of amazon although it was a smaller position maybe it was a todcom's position they bought a lot more chevron and they have a new position in the new york times i kind of understand that thesis there's a lot of consolidation in newspaper they're kind of the global player in news especially american news at least not really a news business anymore Brett, by the way. That's true. It's games and well, it depends who you talk to, but there could be a lot of, yeah, it's games and stuff, right? It's all the other stuff along with it. But interesting that it's tiny as part of the business. What's more fascinating from the Berkshire standpoint as a potential, if you're a shareholder, is the fact that Greg Abel

as the leader of the business and also the leader of the energy business, they're selling $1 billion worth of wind farms, transmission, and a natural gas plant. I think Pacific Corp may be technically bankrupt. They could have been part of that wildfire issue in California. I could also be talking out of my rear end there. What people were speculating about this, though, is that you have all this cash on the balance sheet. Greg Abel's taken over. There are a lot of, over the last three decades, a lot of underperforming assets at Berkshire. Duracell is an example. Sleepwell Capital is one that mentioned that on Twitter. What if Greg Abel gets smaller to get better? This is my hot take.

You sell some of the underperforming assets. You make the business pure play insurance, energy business, railroad, stock portfolio. You get rid of some of the stuff that's not great. You trim some of the stuff that obviously is not performing well. Now that Buffett's gone, you free up a lot of cash, throw out a huge special dividend, get smaller to make it more manageable and easier to generate returns for shareholders. Okay, when I sell my business,

I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my head of office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth Advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IGPrivateWealth.com.

You've got to try breakfast at A&W. You've got to try breakfast at A&W. And what better way than with a delicious Pret Organic Coffee, starting with just $1 all day, every day, now until December 31st. You gotta try breakfast at A&W. At participating A&W locations in Ontario. Yeah, and he might want just like a smaller equity portfolio in general. Maybe that's not where he considers it like his core competence. Like if he's more of an operator, and to be honest, I don't know Abel that well, but I kind of got the sense that he was more operator as opposed to like the Ted and Todd running the portfolios.

It would make sense. I don't think having a bunch of money tied up in positions that he doesn't know as well makes sense at all. That's a good point. If Combs is leaving, is Weschler going to manage $300 billion? That's a lot to put on his shoulders. Maybe he has the chops. that roth ira you know that's legendary but i think it's probably some of that just him not being too well acquainted with some of the stocks

in the portfolio the new york times position is interesting it's too small of a business though it's not gonna matter for them yeah i would love clarification this meeting this annual meeting which i think is coming up in early may around basically who's doing what roles yeah like it's kind of like at the like as a part of a family like hey who's who's got the chore responsibility around here like yeah like who's who's making the equity investments and who's like is todd more operator it's it's such a funny problem to just have too much cash like it's return it just i think special dividend it would be font one great to talk about but i think it's the right move yeah at least some of it uh doordash earnings did you see these yes i'm beginning

to realize you don't bet against the slop and laziness i'm i've never bet against them but psychologically it's kind of i've kind of been one a doubter of the business and they keep proving people wrong yeah i guess uh this was sort of my second viral thing that happened this week uh but total orders jumped by their highest amount ever this quarter but it's most of it was in our well a big chunk of it was inorganic because they bought deliveroo which helps total orders grow so anyways people were outraged about this and i did not realize how many people hate doordash and they just hate the idea of food delivery generally i think you're talking to one of them philosophically even though i've used it philosophically i feel dirty

i don't get like it's not food delivery is not new i think no i existed for years Yeah, but this is a little different because one, it's so expensive, and two, the food is so bad when it gets there. Unless it's pizza or Chinese or some Asian food. It's usually terrible. I don't use it. And if my significant other tries to use it,

I say, just call, I'll pick it up because I get frustrated with the delivery. You run the little gasoline math in your head. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, let's save a little 20 bucks. I'll run down the road. Yeah. But the numbers actually look pretty good. DashPass members were up 59%, orders up 32%, 20% organically. Gross order value grew 25% organically. Here's my question for you. Maybe we do this for the next sector or thematic episode. What do you think of a bet on the laziness economy? That is Uber Eats, DoorDash, Instacart, Grubhub. could be others

we'll find others TV yeah I mean the streaming TV video games it gets included in that meta gets included in that what's crazy and you gotta think deeply about society about this one but the fact that meta with Instagram and is competing

I guess TikTok as well is competing with not just other social media but TV video games as well more like that usage is going down and the short form video is going up I think you include that in there. Well, I think our next one

was going to be stock exchanges, so maybe we can ask the listeners what they want first. We can do one first, then the next one second. We'll see. This one seems a little bit more fun. Stock exchanges is a bit more academic. I think maybe a bit more educational for the listeners, but come on. Those are some of the best

businesses in the world. I mean, nothing really much to say. The laziest economy keeps growing. Here's one thing I will mention. I'm not speaking about this i'm no opinion on it either way but investors should maybe think about if the immigration outflows in the united states continue how that'll impact supply on the deliverer delivery person side can i get my an uber as well i haven't seen actually like i've obviously heard a lot about the

like immigration policy stuff but i haven't seen stats on like how far above trend we are relative to other years we're and then now we're at net outflows interesting so it could start impact whatever your opinion is on that for the business of these gig economy workers if you use them if you use it but you know it's it's you know what like you know the driver you just anecdotally know what the stats are after if you've taken 100 rides like we have i think that could eventually impact the business on a supply side that's something i would look out for is maybe potential bear case which would ultimately result in higher delivery fees which will make people even more outraged about these delivery services or the whole or the whole country could

go like seattle which uh raised the minimum wage for gig economy workers to i think 26 or 27 an hour which is great but it cut demand off by 50 so because doordash added a 10 fee yeah yeah i i get that people are principled against it but honestly uh who cares good businesses yeah new etf ticker lazy lazy be taken by lazy boy i don't know right now roundhill is gonna scoop that one up yeah yeah with a thematic one let's see we have a comment here ah we don't have much time dang we could have gone a long time this other thought on blue owl blowing up um and we'll talk about that in a slower week private credit someone asked about uh said don't sell philip morris or british american tobacco well yeah philip morris i did sell although it was a pretty

good gain i really hope it dips a little bit but those are some great businesses any maybe a little bubble watch to finish things out we got two one or two minutes left did you see robin hood is launching a venture fund and it's going to be traded on robin hood like a closed-end fund right yeah like a like a venture fund available to public investors like it's a yeah like a like B-Reet. Quote, Robinhood is a... Do you remember that? B-Reet? Yeah. Blackstone?

Gating? Yeah, Blue Owl was doing the same thing. I think they gated Redemption indefinitely and someone had a quip, are they gating management fees? Of course not. Alright, here's the quote and then we'll get out of here. Robinhood is about to launch a fund focused on investing

in unlisted startups, which could open up a new path for Silicon Valley to raise more funds from individual investors. Robinhood is raising $1 billion for this fund, which will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol RVI. The company said the fund will invest in top-tier, quote, top-tier,

unlisted companies such as Stripe, Databricks, and Ramp. Well, it's a bit, you know, it's not the end of the world, but... I think this fund will be successful for Robinhood. I think it will attract capital. 2% is not insane in the VC world. but is that the fee yeah i think they have like a two percent management fee but i can't that's not your bread and butter it's not your bread and butter

no but they of companies that have done a very good job like diversifying away from their core product i would say they are like at the top talk about markets they have i think they they're helped by the Super Bowl here, but it became like a $400 million ARR business in like a few months. It was pretty impressive. Yeah, and this is another company, philosophically, along with the gambling companies

and prediction markets, you might have disagreements with if you're going to vote for whether these type of things should be legal or not. But I do agree, product has been great. They just launched a ton of new stuff. And the business is fine.

i'm an ibkr man our sponsor but likewise you know robin hood you gotta say that they've done well they've done well for sure yeah ibkr a little uh i would argue slightly higher integrity in my opinion but i think that's gonna do it i think we're running up on time here so thank you to everyone for tuning in uh thank you to everyone for listening we want to remind you that brett and I are not financial advisors. Anything we say or discuss here on this podcast is not formal advice or recommendation. We may buy, sell, or hold any of the securities discussed in this podcast. Thank you all again, and we will see you next time. could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life you know the same way you can skip an ad

i get it i'm siaya and i live in ice cove i've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way i planned and today i'm still figuring it out somehow things usually get worse before they get better apparently that's how i roll so bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride stream a new episode of north of north tuesdays on cbc gem