Chit Chat Stocks - Celsius Energy Drinks, Meta Platforms, and Spotify Uncertainty With Alex Morris (CELH, META, SPOT)

Episode Date: April 14, 2024

The Investing Power Hour is live-streamed every Thursday on the Chit Chat Stocks YouTube channel. This week, Alex Morris from the TSOH Investing Research Service joined the show to discuss: (08:07...) International Expansion and Distribution Partnerships for Celsius (27:09) The Future Growth of Netflix and the Potential of an Ad-Supported Tier (41:00) Spotify's Stock Performance and Future Prospects (55:23) Insights from the Piper Sandler Teen Survey (01:02:45) The Importance of Data and Financial Metrics in Analysis Find more from Alex here: https://thescienceofhitting.com/ ***************************************************** Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ChitChatStocks  Follow us on Twitter/X: ⁠https://twitter.com/chitchatstocks  Follow us on Substack: ⁠https://chitchatstocks.substack.com/  ********************************************************************* Options are not suitable for all investors and carry significant risk.  Option investors can rapidly lose the value of their investment in a short period of time and incur permanent loss by expiration date.  Certain complex options strategies carry additional risk.  There are additional costs associated with option strategies that call for multiple purchases and sales of options, such as spreads, straddles, among others, as compared with a single option trade. Prior to buying or selling an option, investors must read and understand the “Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options”, also known as the options disclosure document (ODD) which can be found at: www.theocc.com/company-information/documents-and-archives/options-disclosure-document Supporting documentation for any claims will be furnished upon request. If you are enrolled in our Options Order Flow Rebate Program, The exact rebate will depend on the specifics of each transaction and will be previewed for you prior to submitting each trade. This rebate will be deducted from your cost to place the trade and will be reflected on your trade confirmation. Order flow rebates are not available for non-options transactions. To learn more, see our Fee Schedule, Order Flow Rebate FAQ, and Order Flow Rebate Program Terms & Conditions. Options can be risky and are not suitable for all investors. See the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options to learn more. All investing involves the risk of loss, including loss of principal. Brokerage services for US-listed, registered securities, options and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA & SIPC. See public.com/#disclosures-main for more information. ********************************************************************* FinChat.io is The Complete Stock Research Platform for fundamental investors. With its beautiful design and institutional-quality data, FinChat is incredibly powerful and easy to use. Use our LINK and get 15% off any premium plan: ⁠https://finchat.io/chitchat/?lmref=J3bklw  ********************************************************************* Check out https://www.firmreturns.com/ for value-focused equity research  Use our link and get a 20% discount on a premium plan: firmreturns.com/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

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to Chit Chat Stocks. On this show, hosts Ryan Henderson and Brett Schaefer analyze businesses and riff on the world of investing. As a quick reminder, Chit Chat Stocks is a CCM Media Group podcast. Anything discussed on Chit Chat Stocks by Ryan, Brett, or any other podcast guest is not formal advice or recommendation. Now, please enjoy this episode. Okay, welcome in everyone. I believe we are live. This is the Investing Power Hour number 106. And today we have a special guest, Alex Morris from the TSOH Investing Research Service, subbing in for Ryan and he is gone on a company retreat with our good friends at FinChat.io. Alex, I think this is the first time doing this format, a little bit more fun,
Starting point is 00:00:57 a little bit less preparation, I guess I would say a little bit more off the cuff. So how are you doing? And excited to have you here. Good. Thanks for having me. I'm hoping we're gonna do a lightning round at some point. I'm ready to ready to make some bold claims. Let's do it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. This is where we test out ideas. And then listen back a week or two later and go, did I really say that? I because I actually disagree exactly with what I just said there. But yeah, I think we could start off, just kick things going with your Celsius energy drink and also kind of the comprehensive energy drink write up. And we're going to get into that. But first, let me talk about our sponsor, public.com. Have you ever actually thought about all the fees
Starting point is 00:01:42 you're paying to trade options? Aside from the regulatory fees, there are commissions and most platforms charge per contract fees too. That's what makes today's sponsor, public.com, so interesting. Public doesn't charge commissions or per contract fees. And in an industry first, they offer a rebate of up to 18 cents per option contract traded. Check it out. If you trade a thousand option contracts on public, you'll get up to $180 in rebates. If you trade 10,000, you can earn almost 2000 bucks. To recap, no commissions, no per contract fees, and up to 18 cents on every contract traded. CY NerdWallet recently awarded Public five stars for options trading and start earning up to 18 cents per contract traded only at Public.com. Paid for
Starting point is 00:02:29 by Public Investing. Options not suitable for all investors and carry significant risk. Full disclosures in podcast description. U.S. members only. All right, Alex, let's get into it. Celsius. I thought it was an interesting write-up. I read it in preparation for this. And I guess maybe first, what were your big takeaways from, I think, your first look at the company? Yeah, first look at the company, unfortunately, because it's actually not too far from where I'm at. So it's a company I should have known about previously. I'm not a big energy drink consumer, but I should have noticed what's been happening on store shelves for the last, I mean, five, 10 years, even maybe not Celsius specifically, but in terms of, in terms
Starting point is 00:03:13 of some of the clear customer preference changes, uh, particularly at, you know, C stores and things like that. Um, I should probably step back. My, my interest in the company really, really ties into my interest in another beverage company, Fevertree, which operates more in the, in the alcohol mixer space, you know, really tonics and club soda and things like that. Um, and just thinking about what that business is today and how it can evolve over time or in my opinion already is is starting to evolve albeit at earlier stages and as i as i was framing in my head where they are where they may be trying to go in some of these large well-established beverage categories i started thinking about a company like celsius that again before i had dug in my
Starting point is 00:03:59 perception was kind of that the energy drink category and i've confirmed this subsequently The energy drink category has really two major players, particularly in the United States, in the form of Monster and Red Bull. They account for about 70% of the category when you include the brands that Monster controls. But obviously, the core brand is the big boy for them. And I just thought about how Celsius came to market, to me, how different it feels from a traditional energy drink, who's likely to consume it versus who is likely to consume a monster energy drink by comparison. And as I started digging more and more on that, I started listening to, as I always do, I started listening to interviews with the CEOs and reading on the history of the companies. And I stumbled upon the Odd Lots podcast, which they've done episodes on Monster and Celsius, most notably with analysts from Stiefelman, Mark Astrakhan, who clearly he's been following it for, I think, 20 years or so now, basically back to the inception of kind of the US. opportunity and someone who's just clearly very well versed on how it's played out over time,
Starting point is 00:05:16 particularly in terms of the distribution part of the equation, which I think is fascinating and is really critical for even understanding how one of these brands can go from, in the case of Celsius, they've gone from 50 million in sales five years ago to 1.3 billion last year and presumably a lot of growth left ahead. And that's really all US at this point. They haven't even really scratched the surface internationally in a very small way. So anyways, just going down that way of thinking and just trying to understand how these things happen, and then obviously you can look at Monster as an earlier iteration of Celsius
Starting point is 00:05:56 that has similarly gone from, I think it was 100 million in sales in 2002. A decade later, it was 2 billion in sales, and last year I think was north of 7 billion. So, and the stock price performance for both of them, obviously monster over a longer period of time, has just been absolutely stellar. So anyway, just doing a lot of digging on that, just connecting some dots.
Starting point is 00:06:20 And yeah, I think it's a fascinating category. And, you know, you can always obviously ask the question, is any of this kind of predictable? And my response somewhat would be a good place to start for trying to predict these things would be to look at the ones that have done it subsequently to try to get your arms around what were the key factors that got them there. Yeah, that's what we thought when looking at Elf Beauty.
Starting point is 00:06:44 I'm hearing an echo in the background. Can you hear that, Alex? No. Maybe that's, I don't know. Maybe that's just my end. Okay, well, we've had, I guess, some shows on Elf Beauty. And that's another one that's just kind of similar to Celsius. It's gotten really popular with a different entrance into the marketplace from a different, you know, perspective.
Starting point is 00:07:11 As you mentioned, Celsius going for healthier, going for different demographics. And the conclusion we came to is, I don't know if we can predict, you know, proactively when this is going to occur. Because I could tell you that Celsius in maybe 2021, like, yeah, this brand has got a lot of momentum. It's pretty clear and you can see it happening. But could you could I have said that in 2017, 2018 before, you know, a ton of the games happened? I'm not so sure. We have some questions from the audience. I mean, you answered some of it real quick on that point. It's perfect because because Bang probably would have been the company that you would have put in that place three, four or five years ago. And another it's another energy company that actually is right around the corner from me.
Starting point is 00:07:57 You know, I think it's it's a great point. And you can look at things like these press releases on, hey, we've got distribution now in C stores. We have distribution at Walmart. I think on that one, and granted, this is benefit of hindsight to some extent, the brand positioning there, if you look at the product and you look at the flavors and think about what they're truly selling relative to someone like Monster, I think it's an interesting thought exercise in terms of how differentiated that was and how defendable their position would be as someone like a Monster adjusted to a new competitor coming out. to the space but to be sure it's still not obviously it's not a sure thing to predict these things yeah exactly um here's a couple questions we have from the comments here i guess they're all really related one does celsius have much international international presence no we mentioned that i mean this i think james uh is from the united kingdom he says we have monster
Starting point is 00:08:55 and red bull here but i don't think i've seen celsius does alex have any theories for why celsius hasn't expanded internationally like they have in the u.s um and then some guy says it's popular amongst residents and doctors as he is a surgical resident which makes sense kind of going for just that type of demographic that they're going after i think maybe an answer go ahead quick is the main thing that's happened here well one obviously as i said five years ago was a 50 million dollar business they're just getting right they're just getting their feet under them even in the u.s and that market opportunity is still uh you know it seems like there's a significant amount of white space ahead still the real game changer here for them
Starting point is 00:09:34 and there's there's history here in terms of the distribution i'd highly recommend people listen to the odd lots podcast the one that mark astrakhan was on the the change that happened here was in august of 22 pepsi invested in celsius and will now be riding their distribution and particularly in terms of international. It's a much more efficient way for them to try to figure out that part of the puzzle. So long story short, they really haven't even started yet. It's just getting underway now. And I can pull up some data for Monster real quick, just to give some context. You look at Monster in 2010, international business was still less than $200 million. Last year, it was $2.7 billion. Comparable numbers for the US are $1.1 billion and $4.4.
Starting point is 00:10:19 So, you know, even Monster in 2010, which the brand took off very quickly from launch in 2002, even eight years later, it wasn't even a $200 million business internationally. And, you know, their game-changing moment was the 2014 deal with Coca-Cola, where Coca-Cola essentially said, we're going all in on Monster as our energy bet. You guys can ride. And they got an equity stake as part of that. They contributed some cash. But you can take our brands. you're our energy play now, and you can ride our rails to try to expand internationally, which so far has been, I'd say in a lot of ways, a really smart deal for both parties.
Starting point is 00:10:58 Yeah. I mean, it makes perfect sense for Pepsi, especially because it seems like Celsius is encroaching on Gatorade's turf a bit. And I bet they saw some numbers where people are switching away from that. And then Celsius benefits, as you mentioned, because convenience store space is so important in getting that top shelf, getting a wide presence within those convenience stores. I mean, if you look at Amazon or Costco, where Celsius has done extremely well, that's not necessarily a place where I would think Pepsi has their advantage, but that's only a small part of the energy drink market. Let's see, one more question. Just add one more. Add one more as we're thinking about the bang and Celsius comparison. That's the
Starting point is 00:11:40 kind of data point for me that I'd pull out and go, okay, there's something about this that there's a different type of customer who's shopping in Costco and Ecom for that type of product, especially in my mind, relative to C-Store. And there's obviously overlap on a lot of these things, but it starts to open your mind in terms of, okay, who actually is the target demo here? And once you get to that point, the next question for me becomes, what is the actual price competition? For someone who's a core Celsius customer, what's the deal at retail for a monster energy drink that would convince them to switch. You might argue they're not even substitutes because they're not really overlapping customers at the extremes for both of those brands. I'm not
Starting point is 00:12:19 sure that was ever true for Bang to the same extent. So it just, it speaks to kind of positioning and what your brand is and what your opportunity is long-term. Right. All right. We have a question here that says, does Alex think there's anything unique between the domestic consumer, which I assume he means the United States and Canada, and then the international consumer's taste preferences for energy drinks that might slow celsius down well that's a tough one i think i don't know if you can speak for everyone from every country but what do you think it seems like one thing that's clear from looking at monster which i'm working on now and it's going to be the write-up for for monday following last monday celsius write-up what's clear for monster
Starting point is 00:12:57 nationally is that well one they've taken a portfolio of brands approach they call out frequently as an example affordability as one of the the key selling points for for two of their brands, Predator and Fury. But the other thing that's clear from the numbers I gave a minute ago on revenues, obviously they're at an earlier stage here, but if you do X U.S. and look at revenues and think about what consumption must be like, it's less than one-tenth of what it is in the U.S. That may be availability, it may be just building out those markets, but it's clear that energy drink consumption, generally speaking, outside the U.S. is not at the same place that it's at global so there there certainly is some component of this is actually
Starting point is 00:13:39 as highly demanded internationally as it as it appears to be in the u.s right and i do like that they're going slowly they're trying um to go into markets that i think are at least the most similar to the united states maybe like australia you know english-speaking market um new zealand as well and then the united kingdom but i do like that they're going slowly one other note and it's actually in something we had here uh from the piper sandler teen survey is they surveyed them on energy drink trends and let me zoom in so i can see the actual data so they said they looked at the three big brands in the united states monster red bull celsius and they said essentially you know what's your favorite brand among
Starting point is 00:14:27 teenagers and for monster was 26 red bull 25 and then celsius 17 but celsius over indexed to younger people while red bull and monster under index so i think that's also a good sign for celsius that as people are in their teen years and probably their 20s and anecdotally this lines up of what i'm seeing people are drinking these type of brands and hopefully they'll i think the bull case for celsius and obviously the stock trades at a very premium in multiple of the bulk cases that people are going to grow up with Celsius as they have with some of these other ones as well. Yeah. Yeah. Again, I think you, you, you see things like over indexing,
Starting point is 00:15:09 I mean, to other relatives, other energy brands, it over indexes to women probably skews potentially a bit younger in some cases. Um, but also, also introduces older consumers to the category who would not have joined previously. And then again, on a channel mix perspective, over-indexed to e-com and club and under-indexed to C-store. Some of that's just getting the infrastructure built out, in my opinion. And actually, they have little sayings like, if it's cold, it's sold, things like that.
Starting point is 00:15:38 You need to have the right placement in-store. And you would imagine in a C-store, you're competing for a relatively limited amount of real estate, and you have very tough competitors who you're trying to take that real estate from. And that's where something like the Pepsi deal becomes pretty darn important in terms of... It's one thing to have – the measure that they use is called ACV just in terms of is my product available in these stores. It's great to have an ACV, but you also need to have placement in the store that actually matters, whether it's coolers, et cetera.
Starting point is 00:16:07 So there's layers to all this. Yeah, exactly. All right. Anything else on energy drinks? I guess you just wrote – maybe talk about what you're covering at TSOH Research among the product. Yeah, I did Celsius this past week, which, again, is tied really into this ongoing fever tree interest that I have. And I'm going to write a monster here next week. And, yeah, I'm just really trying to develop a better understanding of what this category looks like.
Starting point is 00:16:38 And I really think it's, as I think back in terms of, I mean, outside evaluation, right, but just thinking about someone like Warren Buffett and Coca-Cola in the 90s, early 2000s, and thinking about where is Coke's mindshare maybe underperformed relative to those expectations, I think there has been an actual consumer desirability change in terms of energy's gone from, again, immaterial or non-existent category, basically, to a pretty reasonable-sized portion of the market,
Starting point is 00:17:08 which I think speaks to what's the evolution there and why does it matter in terms of functionality and then how do consumer brands effectively play into that? So it's really interesting to, to study and to think about. Yeah. Okay. Let's see questions here.
Starting point is 00:17:27 We got a lot today says, Oh, we got some on streaming companies. Maybe we can talk about that quickly. Let's see. What would it take for Alex to turn positive on Warner brothers, max subscribers to grow in the streaming profits to start replacing runoff network studios to become a major profit center.
Starting point is 00:17:44 And I guess thoughts on paramount was another person. So maybe any thoughts on subscale players right now and how they're doing? Yeah, I just think it continues to be very difficult. And I have a general aversion to names where I have fear about the combination of financing, financial leverage, and reflexivity in terms of stock price being a mechanism for M&A or something else where you're ultimately dependent upon what that currency is worth. So not to say that's too applicable for WBD in particular, but it is something I think about. On Paramount, you know, I don't want to layer on people when it's already not going particularly well. But I think it's an instructive example in terms of when you're investing, particularly being a long-term investor, you know, not letting price or valuation kind of drive the boat. And I think especially for the people who are listening to this who are younger, I think if you asked any of them two, three, five years ago, you know, are their core properties more or less relevant in 2024 than they are today? I think almost all of them would assuredly say that they're going to be less relevant to some extent unless they do things that would have proven quite impressive in hindsight.
Starting point is 00:19:06 for people who have been following it for a bit longer and understand some of the corporate history and the ownership issues, you know, what's happening now. I think you would have put a reasonable probability on it not going as well as minority shareholders would hope that it would. So these are just some, I think they're just some of the realities of,
Starting point is 00:19:24 and that's not to say you can't make investments in a situation like this or that it won't work out wonderfully, potentially. I just think it's, you see these things and you start to go, okay, as I'm thinking about what type of investor I want to be, Um, what are the things that are kind of in a no-go zone for me, regardless of valuation? And I think you can see in this case in particular, when they go poorly, I mean, again, this stock
Starting point is 00:19:46 was at what, $30 or something, a handful, excluding the crazy, the crazy pump and dump thing, whatever that was called. I think it was at probably 30 bucks. You know, now we're talking about a good deal might be at half of that price. So it's, it's a situation that no matter how you spend it, I mean, you can do well from where a takeout happens but it surely has not gone as well as planned um and you know i think again some of those lessons i think if you step back and look at it honestly it's not too surprising that a lot of the things played out the way that they did
Starting point is 00:20:18 so it's just something to think about as an investor in terms of what's driving your research process and where that's where that's leading you to in terms of portfolio holdings okay so we're getting some of the commenters are saying there's an echo still so maybe you can move the mic a little away from where the audio is coming out okay i'll turn off my uh i'll turn off my headphones that might work yeah maybe try that how about now let's see it's when i'm talking so i think that's when i'm talking so i think oh i think my mic is picking up or excuse me your mic is picking up my input my output so you need to move the mic away from your output speaker oh boy i got a mute button on this thing yeah uh yeah it should be
Starting point is 00:21:08 on the bottom where it says mic you can just press that button sort of like zoom i'll mute while you're talking maybe that'll fix the problem yeah okay that's beautiful all right let's see other questions on streaming does alex think there's going to be a pattern of consolidation and subsequent price raises in the subscale streamers? Hasn't this been a question for like three or four years now? Yes, 100%.
Starting point is 00:21:35 It's been a question for a long time and it's the thesis that myself viewed as quite likely at one point in time and I've soured more on that as time has gone by. Partly given the incentives of some of the players and again, I think Paramount's an instructive one.
Starting point is 00:21:52 It really took getting to a breaking point for For us to get here, you could clearly argue that in terms of the trajectory of EBITDA as an example, that something should have been done sooner and that the the likelihood of success with the current plan is at a minimum in question. So I think the incentives of the key players, as you think about Sherry and you think about Zaslav and you think about someone like Brian Roberts and Bob Iger, I just think there's a lot of interest that may or may not be aligned with minority shareholders and the outcomes they're looking for. And then the other big kicker has been, in my mind, Netflix being abundantly clear that
Starting point is 00:22:35 they have no interest in acquiring assets that are not perfectly aligned with where they're trying to go, i.e. they do not want to pick up a bunch of linear networks. I think it's a very difficult situation. I'm pretty sure I wrote this a handful of years ago now. I learned a lesson watching Walmart adjust after Doug McMillan became CEO in 2013 or 2014. He really put an emphasis on we have to figure out e-com, but really omnichannel in terms of keeping the stores relevant as they made that transition. And I'd say it's largely been a successful effort. The point is it's been about 10 years and for a long time, earnings were basically unchanged over that entire period. It's very expensive, time-consuming, et cetera,
Starting point is 00:23:29 to put yourself back in the right place after having missed a major change in how an industry has evolved. And in the case of the media companies, it's just clear that the earnings power is largely derived from a distribution channel that is going away. I mean, you can speak to the data that we saw in the team survey. It's not good, obviously. And it just continues used to be tough it has been tough and um yeah i'm not much of a my investment philosophy doesn't really go into the dumpster diving type of type of approach so it may work out well here but for me it's just something that i generally speaking i'm trying to stay away from especially from the players that are the most challenged yeah and i think for any anyone watching which i believe
Starting point is 00:24:18 the video will be out on youtube and spotify we have a chart here from our friends finchat.io of free cash flow at Paramount Global. And one thing I think should be noted here is that I believe they have a lot of debt on this company too. So this is not even including some of those liabilities as well. If we look at 2018, free cash flow peaked at about $3 billion, and then it's just declined ever since. In the last two years, I mean, 2022 was negative, 2023 was barely positive so they don't really seem to have the flexibility as opposed to a netflix let alone the giant technology companies they're competing with amazon you know youtube and uh apple tv which i guess apple's more subscale i think you look at this and you're like okay well maybe the studios
Starting point is 00:25:08 get bought out and maybe there's an acquisition here but is that the entire investment thesis it can work out but it's kind of it seems unpredictable especially as you mentioned netflix isn't going to buy anyone disney probably isn't because they already made their big acquisitions years ago um not too long ago i guess but they made their big legacy play with fox um and then i it doesn't seem likely that amazon already bought i guess mgm studios it doesn't seem likely that they would go anywhere there youtube is its own thing they're not going to acquire you on apple probably not it's like where will who is going to buy paramount and maybe it's a merger of warner brothers discovery and paramount but is that like going to solve any of the issues
Starting point is 00:25:53 i i don't think so i think the as it relates to the big tech players i think it was interesting to hear annie jassy today the cnbc interview with andrew ross sorkin talk about the i is it i robot is that what it's called yeah the the robotic vacuums yeah talking about that deal and and the regulatory environment in the u.s and you know it's just if i was any of those companies i'd be very very reticent to even try one of these deals well outside of the regulatory considerations i'd be a bit reticent to try and do it but especially after considering that that component i just i think that's very very difficult so you know this has long been batted around that you can flip the P&L pretty significantly at Paramount by shutting down
Starting point is 00:26:41 D2C and pursuing a licensing strategy. And that's just self-evident. That is true. They have to actually want to do it and they have to actually give up everything they spent the last couple of years working towards. And again, you're dealing with a situation where your incentives or your perspective on how to do things may be different from the people who have control of the entity. So it's just the reality of being an investor. Okay. One more thing on streaming. Does Alex see Netflix's future growth as mostly coming from the ad or ad-free subscribers? Does he see Netflix reaching enough scale for a functional advertising network? I would recommend going to listen to our overview of Netflix and the end of the streaming wars with the UN,
Starting point is 00:27:29 Francisco Oliveira from, I believe, right at the beginning of 2024, right at the beginning of this year. But I guess any updates on that? Any quick thoughts for the questioner? Yeah, I'd still plug our... I think it was April 20. I think we did it in April 2022. Maybe it was March. I'd also plug that Netflix conversation because it was a little messy back then. We had fun on that one, as I remember. On the advertising versus ad-free, I'm personally still a little bit up in the air. I continue to have this view that there's something really nice about being in the position where you are the mainstay service that people subscribe to and the one that they use the most. I mean, if you look at engagement data, it's pretty clear that's used multiples more in
Starting point is 00:28:15 terms of hours per account than a lot of the other services. I like the idea of being the ad-free provider there and letting other people fight for, I might watch XYZ show, but I got to watch ads while I'm doing so. And the consumer experience feels a little bit less clean and compelling than what I have through Netflix. I still think there is rationale for having the ad supported tier. And I think it'll be really interesting to see how they navigate something like the WWE deal. And if they put ad slots into that product, or if they try to turn it into something where it can basically be consumed without ads, given the unique aspects of that, I'm going to say sport for lack of a better term, but that property. So I think it'll be
Starting point is 00:29:01 interesting to see. I'm pretty confident that it will become a decent sized business over time, just because it'll reach a consumer that maybe doesn't have the ability or willingness to spend for the ad-free product, especially as it gets more and more expensive with time. But I don't know if it'll become a huge part of the business, but I could very well be proven wrong at that we have netflix uh united states and canada paid net membership additions from our friends at finchette and it looks like it's re-accelerated in recent quarters and i think it's probably because the password sharing cracked on as well as the advertising tier and i guess it's interesting to think
Starting point is 00:29:43 like i don't know how much more room they have to grow at least in the united states and canada from this, because if you go back to, again, our conversation from 2022, there was a lot of pessimism about they hit a ceiling, their ability to grow was considered maybe done in the United States. At least that was the big feeling. Now it seems to be flipped to the opposite again, where there's a lot of optimism about quarterly additions of a few million, at least every quarter, not just in the US, but globally. And here's a question that I've thought about.
Starting point is 00:30:24 Do you think they're ever going to introduce a free tier? I think I may have asked you this before, but would that be surprising? To compete with the biggest competitor now, YouTube. Well, even outside of YouTube, one thing that's, I mean, obviously YouTube is the elephant in the room. But one thing that's clear from the Nielsen data and the commentary from these companies is that the fast services, the Tubies, the Plutos, the Roku channels of the world are seeing a significant amount of growth and engagement. And they are finding a place in the marketplace that certainly seems to work for, again, potentially a subset of consumers, but maybe a meaningful subset of consumers. So, you know, it seems like a stretch for me that Netflix is going to get there. I think you'd have to, you know, they'd have to be able to backfill that in some way, whether it's, you know, a significantly higher ad load or a much better ability to price those ads, whatever it may be.
Starting point is 00:31:22 Seems like a stretch, but I never say never at this point. I just say one other thing on the comment about password sharing, which I think this really speaks to the problem that a lot of these other players have. Again, as I was talking about, like the Walmart, when you're late to something, it's not that you're just late and then you catch up. These things kind of snowball on you and get harder and harder with time. I think password sharing is a great example where, you know, the HBO Maxes of the world, the Disney Pluses of the world are a little bit behind on the rollout of this. They have to figure out the tech and how to actually do it effectively. They have less surface area to kind of test it over in the way that Netflix did when they, you know, embarked on that endeavor. um it's just it's messier when you're again you're a little bit late to the party and you
Starting point is 00:32:06 may or may not have sufficient scale to kind of figure out how to do this thing the right way another clear example of this is as you mentioned with disney and fox you know we're many years past the the deal being completed and they still haven't really figured out exactly what their product portfolio is in D2C and whether or not they want to do entertainment bundles or all-in bundles with sports as well, if they want a single offering, if they even want Hulu at all. HBO actually got really lucky in my mind that they merged Discovery Plus and HBO Max at the time because Discovery Plus was a completely irrelevant product with low single-digit million
Starting point is 00:32:50 users, most likely in the United States. It's the problem is a lot more difficult for Disney when you have 40 million Hulu customers and, you know, whatever number of Disney plus tens of millions of Disney plus customers. It's a lot harder to navigate that. OK, do we shut this down? Do we force it all into one thing and hit everybody with the price hike overnight? Again, these problems, I think the extent that you don't solve them today, they just become more and more difficult tomorrow. I agree. I agree. it seems like the more things the every year that goes on seems like the narrative or any of the
Starting point is 00:33:28 narrative the story the numbers they haven't really changed that much in streaming over the last five or ten years it's really you know netflix is winning youtube is also dominating and none of disney did okay for a while but maybe maybe they can catch up but a lot of players are still remaining subscale and it's going to be extremely difficult now let me talk about I have a question for you real quick in that same vein. And I know my assumption is you're a very big YouTube user, given some of the conversations we've had, as I am. And years ago, they made a push into kind of traditional entertainment programming. And eventually they kind of folded and didn't do that anymore.
Starting point is 00:34:07 Now they do things with channels and other stuff where you can kind of get that content, but it's not part of YouTube, really, per se. If you were them, would you reconsider having a more buffet offering of all the type of programming that exists out there? Or would you kind of live more with the kind of UGC backbone that they kind of have? I think I would focus on what they're good at and build, you know, the technology is getting better and better, easier and easier for people to do high quality stuff on their own without the need of a giant studio. I think just building the tools for that would be more beneficial for them. And then getting TV advertising dollars to flip over to them. Because if you can get that, and I don't even know what the exact number is, it might be much higher,
Starting point is 00:35:01 $30, $40, $50 billion a year that's spent on linear TV advertising in the United States, and you can flip that to places like YouTube and get a lot of share there, that's going to be a huge incentive for these subscale studios, maybe even larger studios to put stuff out on YouTube, make a good amount of money from that.
Starting point is 00:35:22 And yeah, sure, you can also sell it to someone like Netflix, but I think YouTube should stick with its core competency. I don't really see how... I mean, you know it as good as anyone. It took Netflix a long time to get that to build their own studio and start building up consistent, you know,
Starting point is 00:35:41 quality content without licensing it. Or, you know, I guess there's a difference between, you know, buying something from Steven Spielberg versus hiring your own thing and building it from scratch. I think YouTube would have a hard time doing that and they would already be really far behind. So I'd say stick with what you're doing. I mean, they continue to gain market share.
Starting point is 00:36:04 And I think, I mean, we look at, I have the thing from the Teenage Survey, too, is the same thing from what you post of the market share among streaming devices, except even more stark, where Netflix and YouTube dominate, you know, Disney Plus and Amazon Prime and Hulu do okay. but if if among the teens and the younger people especially you know in the united states i'm assuming globally it's similar if their dominant usage is youtube and netflix i i think that their market share just is only going to grow over the next five or ten years because and this is without seeing the data i would assume people 60 and over it's much less on youtube and netflix i'd say that with pretty high certainty yeah i always find it fascinating on youtube that the Nielsen data that shows them with the leadership, the leading position for TV viewership. It's a TV metric, and it doesn't even, you know, you think about what that probably looks
Starting point is 00:37:04 like on phones. I mean, I don't think it's probably crazy to say that their position in phones may be twice as strong as it is on the TV side, maybe three times as strong. Like, it's pretty insane to think that they have the leading position in terms of TV consumption where all of, or a vast majority, my guess would be of quality, you know, scripted entertainment programming probably happens. You know, when you pull out your phones and maybe some people do it. For me, I would never consider really the outside of being on a flight
Starting point is 00:37:32 or something, watching a movie on my phone versus constantly have YouTube open on my phone. They have put themselves in a very strong position. And to your point, I think I'd probably lean more into how do we start closing this gap between the two through tools and technology as opposed to as opposed to taking another jump at it yeah it's almost like netflix said back in the day and maybe it was the hbo guy that set up they said netflix has to become hbo before hbo can become netflix netflix definitely did that
Starting point is 00:38:02 but now maybe the next level is netflix has to i don't know if they have to become youtube but they have to defend themselves from youtube maybe maybe i'm sure both can win but youtube maybe has an opportunity to become a little bit more like netflix as netflix tries to go into this advertising stuff which is is encroaching more on youtube's turf it'll be an interesting battle to see for sure and i think it's hard to see how both those get dethroned at least outside of some niche markets like say smaller countries in east asia but yeah all right i'm going to hit some new topics. You basically wrote Spotify's stock price is causing you some pains. After selling it, maybe we can talk about that. But I want to talk about some of our
Starting point is 00:38:51 sponsors first. Any of the listeners saw some of the wonderful charts on FinChat.io, use their platform. They have standard financial data on over 100,000 stocks globally. And they have company-specific KPIs like you saw with Netflix there on 1,500 stocks. You can look at Netflix average revenue per user over the last 10 years. FinChat has it. You can look at YouTube's advertising revenue if they've got it too. You don't need to make that yourself. You can have FinChat, save you time, save you money, make your life way more efficient as an investor. We use FinChat over here at Chitchat Stocks. We love it. To get 15% off any paid plan, you can go to finchat.io slash chitchat. That is finchat.io slash chitchat and get 15% off any
Starting point is 00:39:38 paid plan today. The link will be in the show notes. I also want to talk about our friends at firmreturns.com. I believe it's hard for me to manage. I got a lot of stuff to do on the live stream here, but I believe the writer was in the show notes commenting today. So appreciate that. But at firmreturns.com, you get global coverage. It's a newsletter that leans towards the United Kingdom, which is their home market. But they're covering niche micro-cap, small-cap stuff. And they're talking to management. They're going deep into these e-liquid names, these maybe deep value names in the United Kingdom. The paid tier gives you four in-depth research reports on new companies each year and portfolio notifications when they buy or sell
Starting point is 00:40:26 Holdings. To give an example, they recently dug into a company's accounts for one of the companies they wrote up recently and managed to find a material misstatement that had been missed by the auditors. Management then confirmed the error to get a discount on a subscription to firmreturns.com, which also has some free stuff that you can check out as well. So check it out first, see if you like it. And if you decide to describe, you can go to firmreturns.com slash chit chat and get a 20 discount that is firm returns.com slash chit chat the link will be in the show notes as well all right alex do you want to talk spotify i'm in the same boat as you i uh i've not appreciated these games but sure we can i should talk to firm returns about fever
Starting point is 00:41:13 tree maybe they can uh they can help you on that one the uk name um yeah i mean spotify is uh And the stock, what does the stock do from, what'd it go from 250 or 300 down to how low to 75, maybe something like that? 75 is correct, yeah. 75, where are we at today? Back to 300? Yeah, 300. I owned it for a decent chunk of that ride.
Starting point is 00:41:37 I mean, as with everything at TSO, which is Investment Research Service, I have all the, any times I made any changes, I called it out and tagged it on the spot ticker. So you can find that there if you're a subscriber. I sold it. I can't remember how long ago it was now, but let's just say well below today's share price. And a big part of my thinking was, as I looked at another holding in Meta and thought about what year of efficiency meant for them and how they proved out, you know, the business and particularly on the FOA side. um i i struggled to see that spotify was taking uh the need for a similar year of efficiency as seriously and my argument at that time and still today would be that uh the impetus was on them
Starting point is 00:42:25 much more so than than meta probably to do that in terms of a you know consolidated p about pnl type of thinking um shortly after i wrote that they did that so uh the timing didn't look doesn't look too good in hindsight but good on them for doing what i think they needed to do effectively and you know some of the stuff around price increases i think it's a little bit still up in the air how those negotiations went um what the what the terms of the agreement look like at the end of the day but you know expanding into new verticals like audiobooks and and demonstrating material consumer interest and using that product and then potentially finding ways to parse out how how the pricing works or finding ways to you know make their argument to the labels a little bit
Starting point is 00:43:12 clearer i obviously the situation at at tiktok and the fight that they're having with i can't remember which label it was but one of the huge labels is you know it's an interesting development that that maybe makes those guys think huh spotify's you know truly a partner at the end of the day, how do we do things that are incrementally mutually beneficial to both parties? So the company's looking like it's in somewhat of a better position than it was six to 12 months ago. I think the cost side of it is really the bigger one. I think it's an open question how far that will go or how sustainable it will be. But that is certainly an important part in terms of the profitability of the business. What did you get wrong?
Starting point is 00:43:54 let's see i mean i think it was the big thing was similar to you where there was a narrative that they were going to trim on costs i guess they got caught up the same thing as many of the technology consumer internet players did in the pandemic where they projected growth to be higher going forward and then we had the covet overhang and they kept saying that, but it was multiple quarters before they actually had to turn their employee base. And we did the same thing where we sold out of the position right before they announced the 20% layoff. And I think going into it though, what we got wrong is that podcast advertising was going to be slower and a little bit more niche of a grower than we assumed at first. And I think
Starting point is 00:44:48 we underestimated how hard it is to build a self-serve advertising platform from scratch. So it's going to take them many years to do that. Now, I think they've made a lot of progress in that over the last three to four years, but there's still a lot of progress to make. And we kind of thought they could, you know, perhaps wrongly, we thought they could build that within a couple of years and match, you know, say YouTube's level of self-serve advertising, but on the audio side. So that was a mistake. We were a bit too over-optimistic there. But then I think everyone has underestimated how little the price hikes have impacted churn, because it seems like they're even, maybe this would come back to bite me, but they were almost in a better position than Netflix was five, six, seven years ago to raise prices without any worries about churn impact. Yeah, I think that's certainly fair.
Starting point is 00:45:46 I think what will be interesting to see, and this is true for Netflix, YouTube, someone like Roblox even in a certain capacity, it's interesting to see over time, you know, the company focuses on MAU growth and rightly so. I think it's a relevant metric. As with all metrics, it has to be kept in context and over time its relevance can differ. It can become more important or less important. And I think as you look at MAU growth and see the contribution from rest of world in particular, and then you look at the premium subscriber growth rates and look at the penetration rates in rest of world, I just think there's a big outstanding question in terms of ability and willingness to pay for a service like Spotify as you talk about the next person who's added as an MAU. And, you know, going full circle in this conversation, that is someone who may be very satisfied using YouTube, for example, as a competitive product. And I just I'm not sure that the propensity to pay is there as it stands today. But again, maybe as the product evolves over time and as new things are added, maybe you can convince people that to pull out their credit card to the extent that they have one.
Starting point is 00:46:57 But so far, and I've posted, you know, I've posted this on TSOH multiple times. Maybe I've done so publicly on Twitter as well. If you look at the penetration rates in terms of rest of the world, they have significantly declined over the past two or three years. And management used to talk about, I think it was a six to nine month lag, maybe it was nine to 12 on MAU to premium kind of conversion as people obviously start using it more and find a reason to pay. I just really struggle to believe that that's actually held up in terms of some of these newer markets. yeah that is interesting and just to be clear for the listeners that is essentially when they went to other countries for example their biggest i believe from mau perspective is india or perhaps indonesia from these new markets the percentage of maus that convert to premium subscribers that
Starting point is 00:47:49 pay which are honestly the maus don't really contribute much to revenue at all and may never given the model that they have with freemium and not a very strong advertising business it i want to broke is probably the wrong term but it's a lower percentage and i think there are still questions like compared to netflix netflix has i think a lot less uncertainty than a spotify going forward um yeah spotify was much cheaper i guess uh you know if the stock's at $75. But for one, in a lot of different markets, there has to be a way different go-to market strategy. And I don't know how much of their users are actually going to contribute revenue to them. Second, I get confused sometimes on what their value proposition is supposed to be
Starting point is 00:48:45 to a customer. When they add on these audio book things, they talk about this new super premium tier that they're working on they talk about adding audiobooks but then subtracting it from you know and having two separate tiers there i worry about the confusion for consumers on what exactly they're getting with spotify but then on a positive note and i'm not i don't know if this is this is probably not a competitive advantage and it's maybe not something to bet on but they have continuously i would say delighted their customers by creating just really innovative products i recently saw they're working on something that and this is in aligning with the labels as you mentioned where on tiktok type social media services um remixes of songs are popular but
Starting point is 00:49:31 the artists are a bit mad about that because they don't get licensing back from that and they're like using their their art spotify is creating a label an artist sanctioned uh remix thing for for users that'll probably be very popular among younger users that they can then take and use on you know social platforms or something like that but when you make it uh that remix you know they still obviously give the money back to the artist so it's an uncertain story and i still think the company's gonna like it's one where i think revenue like yeah i could see them growing revenue 10 15 20 a year for a long time but at this price you know it's more of a question okay can they expand margins that's the big bet
Starting point is 00:50:11 here i think it's to the to the way you said in the remix is i think it's been a very interesting switch on this investment in terms of the story and you know 12 18 24 months ago a rising topic of discussion was tiktok's music offering a standalone music offering and and you know what impact that might have on mau and obviously premium sub growth over time and some of these emerging markets. And again, I think it's fascinating that that's almost completely flipped from what's happening with TikTok right now is something that plays into the hand of Spotify and into the hand of the labels, ensuring that they're a partner that can continue to thrive to some extent because they're going to operate within certain rules that apparently TikTok is
Starting point is 00:51:02 less concerned about operating within. I'm not sure if there's been recent updates on that in the last week or two that i've missed but the story was pretty messy here as of late so um it's it's very interesting to think about i just looked at the numbers a second ago just for clarity on the thing that you explained on premium penetration penetration for people about five years ago the premium penetration and rest of world markets was in the mid-30s mid-30s percentage of maus um that's before the stream on market launches where they kind of went they started going after a longer tail of geographies that they had not operated in previously. But the rest of world premium penetration as of the end of 23 was down to
Starting point is 00:51:41 like a mid-teens percentage. So again, you're adding, it's great to add tens of millions of MAUs every year. But as Brett said, the ARPU on that customer for the ad-supported offering, especially in these markets, is very, very low. And it puts a lot of weight on your ability to convince them to go to the premium tier. And they have not shown a great ability to do that as of late. There might just be a lag. That could be the argument. But they clearly have work to do on that part of the equation. Yeah. It seems like the vast, the way more important question is whether they can consistently raise prices, say, by $1 a year, maybe $1 every two years in Western Europe, East Asia, North America, some of the wealthier markets
Starting point is 00:52:30 that they're in. That seems like from a revenue perspective, at least over the next five to 10 years, it's going to be much more important. Anything else on that, Alex, excuse me, before we hit another topic? No, I think you're definitely right on that. But again, I think part of the, again, a big turning point for me on this investment was the most recent round of negotiations. And my read on what actually happened was Spotify was the last one to get a deal done. And I think they, and I would recommend people go back and read what I wrote at the time because it'll one, be timely and two, it'll be a better version of what I'm trying to say here. But I think they ultimately gave in, in terms of what that negotiation looked like,
Starting point is 00:53:11 and they were not going to be able to get what they had set out to get. And they accepted the reality of the situation. Going forward, price increases, they do benefit from in some capacities, They don't benefit from it as much as they might have if they negotiated, you know, higher take rates on those incremental increases, which was an idea that was obviously discussed previously. You know, even things like partitioning out audiobooks or something, that's still a negotiation at the end of the day with the labels in terms of how they think about those economics being split. It's not, Spotify doesn't have a God-given right to get, you know, better economics on that portion of the listening. So it's all a negotiation. I think Spotify has a very strong hand in those negotiations, but the realities of that market are also pretty similar to how they were a handful of years ago. So it'll be interesting to see how it all plays out, that's for sure.
Starting point is 00:54:06 Yes, for one thing, I think it's clear there is a lot of uncertainty, also a lot of potential upside, but a lot of things can go wrong as well. I want to talk and close out with a final section on the Piper Sandler teen survey. But first, I want to remind our listeners again about our friends at public.com. Earlier in the show, you heard us talk about the investing platform public.com. That's where you can trade options with no commissions or per contract fees. And you can get a rebate of up to 18 cents per contract traded. NerdWallet recently gave public five out of five stars for options trading. and you can tell why because they save investors and traders the most money on options trading if
Starting point is 00:54:48 you want to see why go to public.com and start getting a rebate of up to 18 cents per contract traded link will be in the show notes paid for by public investing options not suitable for all investors and carry significant risk full disclosures and podcast description us members only all right i sent you this document beforehand um it's one that i'm really fascinated looking at every time but it also scares me away from investing in a lot of consumer stuff because i go well i have no idea that this is happening what crocs are dying i don't know um any big take i'll let you go first and then i can give some of my takeaways any big takeaways that stood out from this survey my first one as i told you right before we hopped on is somewhat jokingly
Starting point is 00:55:34 they had a list of like the top 10 music artists or something for teens and i felt pretty depressed to know i hadn't heard of like seven of them before so that shows that tells you how locked in i am to what the younger generation cares about something i'm also learning from uh the discussions around match group and online dating and and what the you know call it the young 20s data is looking for in the marketplace. It feels or sounds like it's quite a bit different from what people were looking for when I was in my 20s, but take that for what it's worth. In terms of the survey, yeah, I think one of the more interesting things as I think about some of those brands, I mean, Nike's a really prominent one. I think about them in a market
Starting point is 00:56:17 like basketball shoes in the US where they have an extremely dominant position and I don't really see that changing. But I think if you look on the margin, it's similar to what they saw on apparel against Lululemon and other brands that have come up over time. You see it now with On and tie-ins that these newer brands will have in running shoes or tennis shoes with major athletes. I think it's all very interesting and it's something I continue to think about. But I'm not that confident on how it plays out over time.
Starting point is 00:56:52 Did you look at, let's see, did you see the e-commerce favorites? Because I think that was really what stood out to me is that, and there's like 100 slides here. So maybe, I don't know if we looked at all of them, but what I thought was super interesting, and again, this is teenagers, so I'm not sure the exact age rate. So essentially just think younger people. And if we look at fall 2022, Amazon was 52% of upper income favorite websites, which is essentially like upper income teenagers and what's their favorite e-commerce website. But in spring 2024, that's jumped to 61%. So they're actually still gaining market share, which is quite fascinating given the fact that places like Timu are spending billions upon billions of advertising revenue to try to
Starting point is 00:57:39 compete with them. Yeah, Shein is doing quite well. They're actually the second player with 7% market share. But I think it's kind of amazing how popular Amazon is, given that it's seen as almost the old, boring, almost the Walmart or the Costco level. It's surprising to me that this is still popular among teenagers as a brand. And I think it's a testament to their moat and their strategy of focusing on the customer first. Yeah. Maybe a comment I'd tie to the stock market more broadly and the big tech companies and thinking about the regulatory pressure around like a deal like iRobot, which I think most reasonable people would say is kind of completely crazy that it's a deal that gets blocked. But I think it's a reflection of kind of that idea in
Starting point is 00:58:32 terms of there are five or 10 companies. I mean, there's more, but there's five or 10 that are very, very well known that are incredibly well positioned going forward. And they've built brand positions and modes that, again, like to the conversation on Netflix and some of the laggards, like the mode seems to, in many ways, widen over time and to cross the divide becomes more and more difficult. And, you know, I think regulators are struggling with the question of what do you actually do about that outside of blocking some immaterial, you know, VR fitness app acquisition in the case of Meta or some immaterial home robot vacuum cleaner acquisition in the case of Amazon. Outside of that, it's kind of unclear what do you do, especially when surveys like this
Starting point is 00:59:20 one show that consumers are actively choosing to engage with those companies. So it's a difficult problem to the extent that it actually is a problem. Maybe it isn't a problem. That's also worth discussing right right now you follow meta uh much closer than i do and one thing i thought was again another pilot for them in this survey is that instagram has started to regain a meaningful amount of market share versus tiktok have you i don't know is it was that surprising to you at all or is that something you've seen you know them talk about as you've covered this company each quarter i don't i mean i think it's i think the concerns about tiktok have certainly lessened over time and i think what they've done on reels and their ability to kind of follow quickly and
Starting point is 01:00:09 and iterate i think has kind of become more and more apparent they've given some data along the way that would make this particular data not be too surprising to me i mean i i think an asset like Instagram, they showed the strength that it's had. And I was joking with my good buddies that people know, Bill Brewster and Francisco Olvera, the other day talking about, you know, the way that at least I am with like Twitter and with stocks and investing. It's just interesting to think that there's an audience that's whatever, let's say 10 times larger than the Twitter audience and it's their entire lives as opposed to just stocks or investing, which I guess for me, that's pretty much close to my entire life. But it's just interesting to think about how dominant
Starting point is 01:00:50 that that that platform is and how you know i'm not too surprised that this company found a way to ultimately adjust to what they faced on the att idfa side and they've also done so in terms of the of the you know tiktok threat side one other thing which i thought was interesting from that leak um with the instagram revenues that you know what i'm referring to i i think i saw a tweet about it but maybe i don't think every listener had but maybe you can explain so long story short some government regulator i believe it was leaked uh you know they have access to that information revenues for instagram over the past i believe was five years and obviously you can use that to back into uh revenues for the non-instagram portion of the
Starting point is 01:01:35 business and i think people might be fascinated to know that from 18 to 23 from this one source that i saw the estimate for the revenue category for core facebook was 15 annualized which i think Like if you ask, I mean, some people might still not believe it when they hear the data, but if you ask anybody five years ago or three years ago what the growth rate was going to be for Core, for Facebook Blue, I don't think they would have come up with a number anywhere near there, which, you know, again, I think that requires actually studying the business and understanding things like ARPU and the realities of usage versus what people might say in surveys and things at times.
Starting point is 01:02:09 So all very interesting. yeah i mean the narrative is way was way off on the the big blue ad i mean i was i was a doubter as well and what's interesting is that it's grown but instagram is also it seems like it still has a long runway to grow we'll see we'll see what happens and what's fascinating about meta is they've gone over the last couple of years from a what you might call a defensive position to now they can play offense again and i don't think anyone even even someone like you that follows the company very closely would have predicted that that this could happen this quickly no no absolutely not i if i i was i was happy enough to hold through
Starting point is 01:02:58 all the pressures that we saw in in in 22 and i kicked myself a little i mean not just because of the stock price performance, obviously. I kicked myself a little bit for not playing offense when it really became clear that the year of efficiency stuff was showing up on the FOA side and that the concern that FRL was just going to continue to consume a growing portion of the FOA income. And FOA income was under a lot of pressure at that time. When that concern kind of faded, I do kick myself a little bit for not playing offense. But yeah, even just holding through that period was very rough and the stocks, you know, up 5x or whatever subsequently. So speaks to, you know, people like to say price drives narrative or something along those lines,
Starting point is 01:03:42 which is certainly true. But a lot of times there are things that are actually happening at the business that it's not as easy as, it's not as easy just going against the price, I think, in a lot of cases. Yeah, I think a good way to put it is price drives narrative, but also exaggerates the narrative is probably a good as good way to put it um i think we want to close out here we're a little over an hour but i think you know this piper sandler data gets thrown around every quarter or i don't know uh every half year and you look at there's so much data in the report and i think it can confirm or you know that you like or dislike a company whatever data you want to choose right how do you use or not you know in writing your research
Starting point is 01:04:30 building your portfolio for tsoh investing research how do you utilize this sort of data within your research because as you mentioned if you looked at probably this survey in 2018 they would have said facebook's dead so i'm just curious if you utilize this at all or it's not part of your process i data like this i use more as a as a starting point especially for something like let's say i didn't know about on as a as a brand or you know some of these lululemon competitors which i still don't know about because it's not i don't follow lululemon particularly closely and i don't know a lot of the close competitors but to the extent that something here suggested change was afoot i would use it as a starting point to dig in more i really and facebook's a
Starting point is 01:05:13 very good example right in terms of obviously you have to have belief in the data the company's providing you but i i always was much more focused on the data that facebook was giving in terms of maus and taus and revenues and and the things i could pull out from ad impressions and pricing and because that stuff's real versus a lot of these other things may have shades of truth in them and then at the other end of the spectrum when you get into a lot of you know press reports and things like that maybe just completely basically fabricated or very exaggerated um so i and and the other funny thing is too when you follow a meta or an airbnb with airbnbust and you you see recurring themes over and over again you have you have the framework going you know this is talked
Starting point is 01:06:02 about two years ago and you can you again you can come back to the actual data to kind of form a more informed, you know, understanding what's going on. So I think it's interesting to look at in terms of just asking new questions, but I don't really trust these things in terms of actually providing me the answers if, especially if I have, you know, publicly available financial data to then go kind of test it against. Right. It's, I think, I think Bezos said this recently where he's like, if the data and anecdotes, usually you want the data and anecdotes to match up. But if one's not, you got to really figure out which one is wrong. And sometimes the anecdotes can be right and the data can be wrong. Sometimes the data can be right and
Starting point is 01:06:45 the anecdotes can be wrong. If you have a comment here that I think you'll enjoy along with the Airbnb narrative is Netflix, which that provided another investing opportunity as well. But we're running a little bit long today. Thank you, Alex, for joining us. I guess for anyone still listening, where can people find your work? Where can they see all this good research? Yeah. First of all, thanks for having me. I thought this was really, really great conversation. Yeah. You can find me over at the TSOH Investment Research Service, scienceofhitting.com. And it's, as Brett knows, I put out research every Monday and every other Thursday. It's company specific research, it's investment philosophy discussions, and then prior disclosure of all portfolio changes and then quarterly returns. So it is complete transparency, basically, in terms of my whole research process and investment process. So I do stuff on Twitter every once in a while, but that's the best place to go.
Starting point is 01:07:43 All right. Let me hit the disclosure. We are not financial advisors. Anything we say on the show is not formal advice or recommendation. Ryan or any podcast guests may hold securities discussed in this podcast, may have held them in the past, and may buy, sell, or hold them in the future. thank you for all the listeners tuning in uh as a note these go live every thursday at around 12 30 p.m eastern time but you can still watch the replays on youtube or listen to the replays
Starting point is 01:08:09 on your podcast player of choice spotify apple podcast wherever thank you again everyone and we'll see you next time Bye.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.