Chit Chat Stocks - What 10 Top Investors Bought And Sold Last Quarter (UBER, MSFT, SPOT + More)

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

On this episode of Chit Chat Stocks, we dive into 10 different 13Fs from various fund managers in Q1. We discuss: (00:00) Introduction (02:58) Bill Ackman (10:15) Berkshire Hathaway (18:59) Akre Capital (27:13) Druckenmiller (41:05) Pat Dorsey (54:40) Value Act (01:03:27) Research Ideas and Final Takeaways ***************************************************** Subscribe to our newsletter, Emerging Moats: 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.  ********************************************************************* Check out Value Spotlight: Stockwriteup.com  ********************************************************************* 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

Will the Fed raise rates 25 basis points in June 2026? IBKR prediction markets let you trade the outcome alongside your stocks and options. Earn interest, get it right, and earn $1 per contract at ibkr.com slash predictions. Last trading day, June 17th. 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, Chitchat Stocks is a CCM Media Group podcast. Anything discussed on Chitchat Stocks by Ryan, Brett, or any other podcast guest is not formal advice

or recommendation. Now, please enjoy this episode. Welcome into another edition of the Chitchat Stocks podcast, a podcast to help you find your next great investment. My name is Brett Schaefer, and as always, joined by my co-host, Ryan Henderson. This week, we are taking a look at 10 different 13F filings from super investors. 13Fs, for anyone that doesn't know, are holdings, buys, and sells published for U.S. equities from professional investors with over $100 million in assets under management. They do this every quarter, and we're looking, Ryan, you have something. Quick, if I may butt in here, on Fiscal.ai, it includes non-U.S. listings as well. So it's all holdings, which 13Fs are specifically usually for U.S. holdings, as Brett mentioned. But this is a comprehensive review of all these investors' portfolios at the end of Q1.

Now, is it possible to get that for every investor? Do you have to look at different data sources? Does Europe have filings or is that a bug? Yeah. No, it is. It is possible to get, I mean, maybe there's certain specific investors in like tiny regions that you can't get, but for the most part you can, you can pull them in. All right. Well, before we get started again, this is maybe their portfolio as large as we can get it. They might not have like shorts in there. There's some things that aren't included. So when we look at their portfolio, this is not the a hundred percent definitive what they own at the moment and it is always 45 days late so they posted these at least the deadline was on may 15th a couple 10 days ago ish as we're recording this and that was the holdings

as of the end of q1 2026 on march either i forget what month it is 30th or 31st so it's going to be a little stale but that's the context we have when looking at this we generally want to look at investors that at least aren't kind of the day trading type. I know we have Drunken Miller in here who trades a little bit more actively, but we're not going for someone that's going to be recycling something every month where the entire portfolio is going to be stale. We'll look at Berkshire Hathaway, Bill Ackman, and others. We're going to look at all these. We're going to try to look at how, well, just basically their buys and sells, their large buys and sells, their biggest holdings, and whether we have any interest in looking at the same stocks. But before we do,

again housekeeping items as always make sure to follow the show wherever you are listening right now if you haven't before leave us a review on spotify or apple podcast it is by far the best way to help us grow the podcast and if you want further discussion and to read more of our analysis sign up for our newsletter and join our substack chat community the link there is in the show notes emerging moats is the brand name all right ryan that's enough of an introduction let's begin with who i colloquially colloquially like to call the general otherwise known as bill ackman yeah ackman's always a fun one to look at because he largely runs his portfolio pretty concentrated so when he does make a change it's usually meaningful and you can get a pretty clear

glimpse of what he thinks by just looking at his position sizing so the i guess i'll just roll through some of the top positions for him so excluding pershing square which recently went public and i'm not sure on the whole logistics there because it's his own company as well the top positions are brookfield which is the large alternative asset manager based in canada amazon uber microsoft and then i believe fannie mae and freddie mac there's a couple others in there as well but there's a couple notable purchases that happened this quarter from bill ackman so first off he sold basically his entire stake in google and as we go through some of these 13 f's you'll see that a lot of the super investors do not agree on google's future

apparently because some people are selling the stake entirely and some people are making entirely new purchases for google so sold all of google started a new position in microsoft and made it nine percent of his portfolio so he basically swapped out google for microsoft we can talk about that in a second here he added big to amazon and he i guess the only other meaningful transaction was he sold entirely out of hilton uh which is the the big hotel chain here in the states probably an international chain as well so the i guess most meaningful transaction here is the swap microsoft for google what do you think of that choice do you think he's right it's an interesting choice it's almost it's very similar businesses at the moment they're

riding the ai uh how do you even call it just infrastructure build out i mean they have different businesses overall but right now i mean what's driving the stock is those two things maybe he just saw a valuation difference uh i i doubt it was that big of a difference it's really hard for me to come around on that because I kind of look at maybe that's just my personal bias coming in but I think Google is much

or Alphabet is much more better position than Microsoft in the years ahead I mean one Microsoft product AI related outside of the ones that they basically stuffed down Microsoft 365 users throats have actually gotten adoption

I don't see much And then it seems like, as well, their relationship with OpenAI kind of held them back from going to other players. And now OpenAI is exploring many, many other options for their compute needs. Maybe Microsoft's being smarter by being a little bit more cautious in their AI build. But I still think they impacted on it either way. I mean, we can maybe look at their PEs or EV to EBITs and see if there's a material difference there. But, yeah, I'm a little bit perplexed. I'm sure he usually has updates on his thinking every quarter,

or at least the funds thinking every quarter. I'm curious what he thought there. Did he, is he out of meta? I thought, again, this could be old news, but I thought he was all over meta like a year ago. Oh, yeah, there he is. No, he still got 7% stake. All right.

Yeah. Interesting portfolio. Heavy big tech. I think the Uber one is fascinating. as well as brookfield yeah he's not afraid to go for some of the more battleground stocks i guess you could call uber sort of a battleground stock uh and he's been very vocal about like well i guess he does this for a lot of his holdings he's been very vocal that he thinks uber's undervalued he's been tweeting about it sort of endlessly which i don't know i sometimes

don't love when influential investment managers are tweeting about it whenever like the quarter end is coming up um so yeah that's exactly right yeah we've talked about that before with him we even worry not like we're trying to post something for quarter end because we don't have professional we're not managing anything professionally but we always worry about accidentally saying something positive about a stock right we don't want to move anything even though we're a medium-sized show and i feel like with someone with his stature you kind of got to go with the buffett route and be extremely tepid and say well look at our 13f we'll publish it once a year with our annual holdings yeah and he also literally always does it right before the end of

the quarter which feels like sort of padding your stats a bit uh anyways the on the microsoft google debate could you guess the current ev to ebit multiples for microsoft and google google slash alphabet i will say 32 microsoft 35 so you would be pretty wrong on microsoft let me share my screen real quick i just pulled this up on fiscal ai they've basically flip-flopped so microsoft and you know maybe there's some certain accounting things going on here but eevee to ebit trailing ebit is 20.5 uh google is at 33 if you go look about a year ago microsoft was trading at a significant premium to google and they have for years it looks like this whole chart until pretty much

late 2025 2026 microsoft has had that premium ever since the pandemic yeah it's um it's kind of interesting timing i feel like he has done this a couple times where he's found the big tech company that's trading at sort of the cheapest multiple and gone after it although and in this he owns now three big tech companies in amazon meta and microsoft which maybe i see where he's coming from now it was trading at and probably even in q1 you know it was still trading at low 20s earnings multiple the alphabet soaring i i guess he didn't really touch alphabet or no he sold alphabet so flipping that around yeah it makes sense i mean you look at i pulled up the numbers here microsoft's constant currency intelligent cloud revenue up 28 percent their

Azure, 38% in constant currency. So they're still growing pretty impressively. Alphabet had that blowout quarter with Google Cloud, but selling Microsoft hasn't been a beneficiary. So okay, yeah. I thought Microsoft's earnings multiple was significantly higher. So maybe I understand where he's coming from now. Okay. Let's shift gears. Who's your first super investor, if we want to use that term that you're looking at? Well, we are going to stick with Berkshire hathaway everyone wants to talk about them this is the first quarter without buffett at the helm uh we can i guess use our link at fiscal ai here it's a pretty boring portfolio for the most part if you look at the largest holdings apple nothing touched american express not touched

coca-cola not touching those are all you know 20 17 11 positions bank of america really barely touched. I don't really know what they changed it by less than 1% of their position. Chevron was down a bit. Maybe they sold in the oil price spike. I'm not exactly sure, but Occidental Petroleum, which is their other big oil position, was flat, unchanged. The biggest change, at least from the size of the portfolio, was a 224% increase in their stake in Alphabet. Now, this is the opposite when Ackman was selling Berkshire Hathaway, Greg Abel, and Ted Weschler. I think it's mainly Abel, but Weschler obviously has a portfolio as well. They were buying. It's now 6% of Berkshire Hathaway's portfolio, worth $17 billion as of this recording.

What do you think here? Does Abel just say, well, across our entire businesses, we spend a lot on Google properties and we're not going away anytime soon. I'm not sure exactly what the thesis here is now you kind of get what i'm saying yeah and that's why it's kind of interesting because we're seeing the same thing with we're going to go through some of these other investors too people initiating new positions in google after uh you know 200 run up over the last couple of years the i thought the alphabet stake or the jump in the stake was interesting the other one that stood out to me here was a new purchase of delta airlines they're getting back into the airlines the it's not that meaningful because it was a one percent position now of the portfolio

but there was sort of the famous buffett selling the airlines during covid where people thought he panics old or whatever uh so for that him to be getting back into it i think it's not him it's able i guess sorry for able to be getting back into it it is airlines for a long time were seen as like one of the most competitive industries and ones where companies just consistently go bankrupt airlines are kind of in a different era i would say now with with customer lock-in would you agree yeah i mean i think the thesis is probably the same as it was pre-pandemic you have to lock in with the hubs at the gates You have the credit card loyalty program, specifically with Delta Airlines.

You have that relationship with American Express that has been rock solid for 20, 30 years. With that credit card program, there's always the fun stat that 1% of United States GDP flows through Delta cards. Yeah, I mean, if you look at it today, I mean, the stock's up quite a bit since when they bought. i mean if we look at where it was trading in q1 it was maybe at one point uh i don't know when they bought but it was down to kind of 60 and now we're back up to 80 and at even at 80 today the pe is 11 ev to sales 1 ev to ebit 8.4 price to free cash flow 13.2 next 12 month pe is 12 Well, you have, I think, one of the best in the industry, maybe the best of the industry, and they kind of see, I can understand the thesis here, but one, it's not going to move

the needle for Berkshire Hathaway, and two, is it better than holding long-term treasuries at 5% at the moment? I'm not sure, or even short-term treasuries are pretty close to that. It feels like an interesting choice. the capital intensity of course is the same you have the huge cyclicality of the industry and the impact with commodity input prices if the consumer falls off a cliff you might see travel decline but on the other hand you have the travel rewards programs now that locks these customers in and you have travel as a whole growing typically at gdp plus so long term you know you look out

10 20 years is delta doing twice as many flights and they have a nice loyalty program still intermixed generating a lot of profits over the next 20 years i think possible um that that feels very plausible they're probably the least indebted airline out of many of these big players yeah it makes sense not a stock for me but it's interesting okay two other transactions that stood out to me first they tripled their stake in the new york times which is it kind of interesting it's at an interesting point in the business right now where it's become more of like a cooking and mobile games business than like pure news but the other one that really stood out is they basically sold their entire stake in constellation brands the maker of modelo or

or the seller of modelo in the united states we recently did an episode on them so i guess it's able uh he's on ozetic oh he's he's on ozetic well no comments on that one but i think they'd probably just see the numbers and know that beer may not be recovering at the rate like it wasn't potentially a one-time blip and you look at the business again it's not a fantastic business so they i'm guessing they made a bet and said these are good brands but we're betting on a beer rebound the beer rebound didn't happen all right let's cut our losses yeah it's hard to it's almost hard to believe that such a durable category beer for the last thousands of years yeah yeah it could be at sort of uh like a true changing of the tide

now a lot of i don't buy the whole sobriety is the new trend because it's cool and people are switching and that's what's creating the volume to clients but i do think if weight loss i mean weight loss drugs are the best-selling drug in pharmaceutical history glp1s i should say that There's no question that that is going to hurt demand. And especially because it helps with people that have alcoholism, which are the largest customer base here. So if you have someone that has five drinks a week versus someone that has 50 and that five drinks person is still sticking around, maybe there's obviously waves in customer demand and stuff like that. But if you have that 50 person one that gets cured by GLP-1s, I mean, look, that's a huge change in the business model. Okay. Any other notes on Berkshire? Or can we jump to...

What are your thoughts on Abel and Weschler after this first 13F? A little more aggressive than Buffett? Yeah, I kind of like that. And I wonder if maybe Buffett was like tempering transactions towards the end, like trying to keep it sort of clear other than him selling down his Apple position to kind of give maybe a cleaner start to Abel. but i like that he's not just following buffett's footsteps necessarily and that there's actually some changing going on here whether it turns out better or worse we'll see but it it gives us something to actually analyze every quarter which is kind of nice yeah that's fair all right what is your second one ryan it looks like we have acree acree i actually never known we met the guy in person but i've never known how to pronounce his last name correctly will the fed raise rates 25 basis points in june 2026 at ibkr prediction markets the yes recently traded at five cents

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Yeah, I think it's Acre Capital Management. It's no longer Chuck Acre, who ran the portfolio for a long time, and his name is attached to the franchise. It is, I believe the name is John Neff, is sort of his protege or successor. and this was probably the most interesting portfolio update of all the ones i looked at because there's some serious change going on uh acri capital management for a long time was sort of seen as a never sell where they were trying to buy long-term compounders and not trying to buy they identified long-term compounders that produced really strong results over multiple decades american tower is a notable one that he was uh mastercard and visa he owned for a long time which both were phenomenal returns i think he's owned moody's for a while as well but this quarter the top four positions mastercard moody's kkr and visa the they sold

significantly, all of them. So reduced the MasterCard position by 24%, Moody's by 28%, KKR by 17, Visa by 39. They sold almost half their stake in O'Reilly Automotive, which has been a great performer for them. And they've rotated almost entirely into SaaS, software as a service. So initiated new positions in Salesforce, ServiceNow, Perimeter Solutions. they added to roper technologies fico and costar this is like a full rotation out of their bread and butter into sass at the moment the other one that kind of stands out here almost sold half their stake in airbnb yeah uh airbnb maybe we can table that that's kind of a different beast but maybe you can see okay visa mastercard they trade at more expensive multiples i believe and i haven't

looked at the accurate stuff in a long time they kind of have that thought where all right we look at 100 high quality businesses around the world at any one time there might be five or ten that are trading at attractive prices depending on where the bull and where the where we are in the market cycle and they probably had some high quality software names that at least the they've deemed high quality. Salesforce, ServiceNow, others, Roper, of course. CoStar Group, I can never get around that valuation, but maybe they like it now. And they said, all right, well, these are trading at cheaper prices. We think they're as high quality as Visa and MasterCard, and let's rotate into them. I think it might be as simple as that, or they're looking at Visa

and MasterCard as potentially having moat erosion. Now, I don't agree with the Visa and MasterCard mode erosion, but there's been a lot of talk about that in the last few years. Yeah, I mean, this is fascinating to see because generally, I mean, they'd maybe have a couple of nibbles around the edges, maybe from investor inflows and outflows, but they could have frozen 13Fs for a whole quarter. And now we have what looks like not 100% portfolio turnover in a quarter, but significant portfolio turnover in a single quarter. Yeah, and a clear theme about what they're buying and i guess you know if you are i i just kind of doubt the visa and mastercard sales are from concerns around erosion i mean john neff's been there for a long time he's seen how

good of businesses these are that's right they're still their largest positions yeah yeah that's the other part but i i like some of these purchases and i think if you're a quality i i really do think there's a chance we look back in five years and say, wow, you had a chance to buy Salesforce and ServiceNow, which are very deeply integrated into a lot of businesses around the world at reasonable multiples for the first time in a decade. I could see these turning out to be really good returns for ACRI. Same with the FICO purchase. That's kind of a controversial one, but that multiple's come down significantly. Roper, I think, has had a bit of a drawdown as well.

I kind of, at least it gives us a lot to talk about and something to analyze over the next year or two. Okay, I'm going to give you the stats on Salesforce. PE 23, price to free cash flow 11.6. There's that gap in SBC. The three-year revenue CAGR is only 7%. that that is good surprises me high or low i would have thought it'd be higher five years 11 so maybe there were some comps in 2022 something like that maybe maybe we have some tough comps but

yeah not not as great as i i think it feels like a good valuation especially with them plowing into the new buyback but nothing too crazy my suspicion is that i don't even know if it's suspicion they might have already announced this but we're seeing the same thing we saw i think in 2023 where it's the like contagious layoffs where another company does it so now you have the right to do it without seeming and you can say well it's just ai we're such an ai beneficiary that we are laying off our worst performers yeah that's fair yeah it's almost an excuse their their their margin is only still only 20 percent with what you would think with an adobe microsoft level comp you could get to 30 at least maybe even higher so maybe that's part of the thesis i think probably around three

years ago value act and elliot elliot management stepped in uh there was a number of i think a big round of layoffs and you saw operating margins go from gap operating margins go from three percent to 18 percent in like a year i think this is uh there's maybe a chance i'm looking at the chart right now out of friends of fiscal ai and yeah it went it did exactly what you said three percent to eighteen percent but hasn't been much progress since maybe maybe there's room for further improvement all right should we go to my second one let's do my favorite investor at least from an entertainment perspective i don't really invest like him but he's always got given his thoughts Stan Druckenmiller, Duquesne Family Office.

This is his family office, so I believe not running any outside capital anymore, but it's still fairly large in the billions of dollars, so they have to report publicly. Two stocks make up 40% of the equity portfolio that's on Fiscal Day. Again, there are any shorts, there may be derivatives, all that stuff. That is not his entire portfolio, but from what we're seeing, 40%. TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, and Natera. Now, TSMC was slightly trimmed last quarter. it's still a large percent. We probably don't need to discuss them. We talk about them all the

time as the AI kind of fulcrum. But Natera was increased by 22%. Natera, which I've never heard of, Ryan, I'm guessing hasn't heard of either. I think many listeners haven't, is a diagnostics company that offers DNA testing related to oncology, women's health, and other things. Can't say I'm an expert on what they do, but their revenue is inflecting higher. It's compounded at 35% for the last decade, which just stood out like right away. That's, that's fantastic revenue growth. And the stock is up 330% in the last three years. They first purchased it in Q3, 2022. It looks like a good case study on a typical Druckenmiller investment, the way he likes to run his family office. You know, it's not just him. He has, I'm guessing a large ish team of

investors and analysts. But I think it's also a lesson in that when you look at a 13 F perhaps the largest position isn't the one where you think maybe it's a buy now because i'm guessing the way they operate this one might be leaving the portfolio sometime soon after the last little run up here right because nvidia he is someone who called nvidia in the 2022 2023 time frame and it ended up being his largest position i think in 2024 and then he sold all of it so if you look at what their largest position is by a percentage basis it doesn't actually mean their highest conviction. But before I get to this Argentinian state-run oil company, any thoughts on the rest of the portfolio? Yeah. Well, I guess first off, I like looking at Druck's portfolio because

with a lot of investors, I'm kind of just looking for confirmation bias sometimes when I read these reports. But with Druck, most of the time, I don't know the companies that he's investing in, really so it's like you can get up here yeah new new idea generation yeah the opposite of uh confirmation bias for me i saw he sold most of his coupon he's getting too frustrated uh red red flag for us ryan potentially the other part that i always think with druck and miller is he kind of has famously said the only thing that matters for your investment is what happens over the next 18 months like to the business what what are the numbers look like over the next 18 months So ever since he said that quote, I think he knows something.

Every time he starts buying, I think he must know something's coming in the next 18 months. Yeah, with the coupon, well, he's not perfect, but with coupon, it probably is. He's owned that for a long time, and maybe he's finally frustrated with the analyst that got him into it and said, it's not working. It's been three years. We got to get out. Something like that. Could be. Do we want to look at some of these Latin American companies?

i think he's got three in the top six holdings he might yeah well what were the other ones i i really only have this ypf uh energy company but what did he have mercado libre too no well he's got the brazil i shares etf but okay maybe he's betting on the brazilian economy ahead of that election not sure on that one but i want to talk about ypf which is just think about it as like the biggest oil company argentina sort of state run i think they're spinning it out but it's an energy company engages in the oil and gas upstream and downstream activities in argentina they include exploration development and production of crude oil natural natural gas and ngls its downstream operations include refining marketing transportation and distribution of oil petroleum products and

petroleum derivatives as well as gas separation natural gas distribution and power generation so all things oil and natural gas both upstream and downstream across the supply chain in argentina In USD, now don't look at the one in the Argentinian pesos because that's up like 10,000%, but in the USD, the stock is up 960% in the last five years. I'm guessing this is associated with the opening up of the economy, the opening up of the shale fields in central Argentina. There's deregulation for what is called, I think it's called Vaca Muerta, which apparently has the capacity for over 1 million barrels of oil per day.

Now, it's not developed yet, but there's preparations for this. At the current market cap of $20 billion, I'm guessing Druckenmiller and I think also Howard Marx is in this as well. They are betting that the infrastructure gets built and we get to tens of billions of dollars in oil and gas output for the country. It's also in North and South America sphere of influence. So it's part of potentially the US strategic positioning to get out of dependence on Middle East oil. I think the problem is, and the biggest risk is probably pretty obvious you know you're hoping that over the next decade a malay or american ally stays in power but argentina has a long history of flipping to extreme socialism military dictatorships

fascism they flip-flop a lot um are you willing to bet on that maybe but it's an interesting five-year thesis because it feels like you can do well especially at current oil prices and if uh yeah if it works yeah i tend to just avoid oil generally speaking the one i find kind of interesting i think this is fifth largest holding is bbb foods it's the mexican grocer i don't know if you've largest holding i don't know if you've uh read them read about them at all but leandro our friend at uh best anchor stocks has done some good work on them as well let's shift gears unless you have any other thoughts on druck and miller i think that's more inspiration to cover bbb foods what are they trading at today i always found them

maybe too expensive let's just quickly look at that maybe i'll just look at a sales multiple one-time sales six times gross profit all right yeah maybe the valuations can the earnings multiples catching up with the stock price yeah yeah it's uh that's probably next on the research list let's talk chris hone seen as one of the i guess quality investors i know he's definitely having a nice uh reputation uplift in the last year or two right probably because of our podcast seems to get 50 views a week it's one of our kind of evergreen episodes but yeah the financial media loves him now yeah i think he's maybe been a little more public as well i think it helps that he was uh really positive on ge and involved in some of the spinoffs that happened there and there

was sort of that i guess resurgence in the various spun entities but yeah for those that don't know chris hone he's really focused on durable businesses and oftentimes it has like an infrastructure element to it as well so he owns a couple companies that are toll road operators he owns the jet engine oligopoly he owns the card networks well the only visa at the moment and there were a couple notable transactions that came out of this report so first of all he basically took the opposite trade of bill ackman he sold almost his entire stake in microsoft and increased his google position by about 50 percent now who are you taking akman or hone in this bit hone has had here's the interesting part hone in 2022 and 2023 wrote multiple letters

to sundar pichai the ceo of google and asked them basically said you guys need to reduce headcount And, you know, maybe he was right, whatever. After that, about mid 2023, keep in mind at this time, this is like the peak chat GPT fears, search is dead. Hone panic sold his Google stake after writing two letters to Sundar Pichai. That was, I assume, probably around $100 a share. now he's basically rebuilding his position again at around four hundred dollars a share which i will i will give him credit well okay he's missed a lot of the gains but it takes a lot of i kind of commend the willingness to say i was wrong to sell it's three times higher and I'm still willing to buy, like you kind of have to change a lot of your assumptions significantly if you're going to make that choice. So I kind of, it's really hard to do that, I imagine, as an investor. But I would, it's hard not to be optimistic about Google's business

at the moment. So I would say I would probably back Chris Hone on this one. But again, the valuation discrepancy is quite large at this moment between that and microsoft remember this is q1 so we're almost we're over 45 days late that they could have bought a three we're at 380 ish right now for google stock at least g o o g l and q1 it was trading at 300 i mean during the panic around the iran conflict it was down below 300 so maybe they bought then yeah it's the only other i guess notable transactions here he increased his stake in airbus increased his stake in visa the airbus is significant i mean that's 17 16 position 16 and a half and they changed it up 60 of their shares so big jump yeah the they sold ferrovial which

is like the i think they own a number of toll roads uh they have one in canada and they've i guess canadians have been very upset about the toll road price increases but yeah basically they're sort of exiting that position i do think the adding to s&p global is kind of interesting here financial data providers are sort of in the hot seat right now you see it with fact sets down a lot thompson reuters is down a ton same with uh i mean shares are basically flat for a lot of these companies over the last five years so the the jump at s&p global i think is notable yeah and they could be bad tossed into the basket that considers them an ai loser when in reality they're going to be a little bit different than a data provider all right my third one semper augustus

a.k.a. Chris Blumstrand, the Berkshire Hathaway expert and old combatant, fun and wild, I guess, with Cathie Wood on Twitter, old ARK Invest. People used to, well, at least from what my algo would show me, there would be a lot of dunking on him because of ARK's returns. But turns out, you know, value investing, buying some good businesses at cheap prices can work out. His fund was up 41% in 2025.

Just for some context for people that don't know, again, it's a value-focused fund. They have an anchor holding in Berkshire Hathaway that's done well. They seem to have bought at some pretty good times. It says, quote, for a full 27-year history, Semper's equities with no cash and before fees returned 12.4%, 10.8% including cash, and 9.8% net of cash and fees paid, compared to 8.5% for the S&P 500 and 7.5% for the MSCI. There's your MSCI, Ryan. All country world index.

I call that pretty solid performance for an investor who wants to skew value, especially giving up the gains the last few years for the AI boom. I mean, they're not seeing any AI exposure whatsoever. So you factor that in and you say, all right, they're slightly beating them. I would guess that in any downturn, that's where they're going to get the potential outperformance. But let's look at the portfolio. They trimmed Dollar General. It's still 9.5% of the portfolio.

There's a huge increase in Alaska Air Group, up to 7% of the portfolio. Maybe a similar bet to Delta from Berkshire Hathaway. And they're getting out of their gold mining positions. I think the gold one's pretty straightforward. Gold went on a massive run in early 2026. And they're trimming back that position as probably a nice hedge to inflation. thoughts on the alaska air group because it feels a bit like delta they're building that loyalty program or they build that loyalty program and they have the hubs across the west coast and

they're expanding uh internationally with the recent purchases of the 787s from hawaiian air group yeah i can get behind some of the leading airline theses you already laid it out earlier in this episode i think they're fundamentally different businesses than they were a decade or two ago the and they all seem to trade at pretty reasonable multiples this is probably by far the biggest or the most notable transaction that bloom strand made in q1 i mean it almost quadrupling their stake in alaska airlines the rest is you know i guess they sold a lot of dollar general but that's really it was at the edges yeah yeah yeah the i just don't something about asset managers that have more than a 20 stake in berkshire it just feels weird to me like

well hey they they've claimed that they've timed per time to their buys well you know what i mean now which i get but i also understand what you're saying i don't know it just feels like asset manager inception like just let your shareholders buy that themselves or your investment at least Berkshire isn't like Pershing Square charging that whatever fee, right? At least they're not charging a fee. But I get where you're coming from. Yeah. There's a lot of recognizable names on this list.

I mean, he's got the dollar stores. He's got a couple retail concepts here, Five Below as well. Starbucks is in here. He purchased Builder's First Source, which is kind of tied to the housing market a bit and has been sort of a dog in recent years. But if you look at the returns on capital, they've been rock solid over the last two decades. Yeah, that could be a great way to play the freezing housing market. Now, this spring was supposed to be the final unlock with mortgage rates steadily falling, and that has not happened yet. So maybe next year, but yeah, I agree with you.

This could be a good way to bet on a solid company when the housing market eventually normalizes, maybe by 2030. but we'll stay patient all right let's shift to pat dorsey of dorsey asset management he's someone that i like i like his work i like some of the like stuff he's done around moats and and how to assess moats he hasn't always had the best timing on some of his buys and sells from what i've seen but i like the way he thinks there were a couple big changes for him first of all asml's largest holding i guess maybe i'll just run through some of the largest holdings here asml air cap holdings sunbelt rentals which is kind of a competitor to like united rentals app loving royalty pharma and s&p global he's a very concentrated investor i'll say as well

i don't think there's he doesn't have any position below five percent of his portfolio this i guess he is on the uh it must be the bill ackman camp here he sold his entire stake in alphabet this quarter it seems like every investor had to choose one side of the fence battle lines are getting drawn yeah well you have the general on one side so it fits yep he also sold his entire stake in auto zone we can maybe touch on that in a sec which uh if you remember acri capital management sold their a big chunk of their stake in o'reilly automotive the notable buys he initiated a new purchase in app loving which the name is always gets me uh no new purchase in smp global nine percent position and a new purchase in uber so the big

buys are app loving smp global and uber i do think smp global stands out here i mean i guess they all stand out because they're big positions. But Dorsey was an early employee, I believe at Morningstar, which is a player in the financial data sector. And I wouldn't be surprised if he's got sort of some good understanding of that industry. I also think S&P Global is maybe getting tied in with the financial data disruption discussion, even though a good chunk of their earnings comes from ratings and sort of different end users but app loving for me i get it it's it screens really well like the growth rate is astounding but and the margins have become insane i think it's like 77 operating margins but if you've ever clicked on their ads

if you've ever seen the ads they serve which maybe people don't know exactly the ads they serve they suck they are terrible like it's it's the mobile ads where you can't or the the x button is like off the screen it's not sized properly so you can't actually exit out of the ad that kind of thing i think it's hard not to be skeptical on one their accounting and two their business models sustainability as the moat man i i don't understand where he's coming with with that app loving but the rest of it well one uh uber smb global i can see why there's hedge fund hotels and why that's a thing because it feels like a lot of i don't want to say people are just following each other maybe everyone's coming to independent conclusions here but there is always a lot of

overlap which is interesting to look at and how sentiment can change because of it because look We're not the only ones looking at the 13Fs. Famous investors buy something, momentum starts to build, retailers pile in, blah, blah, blah. The other one I like, though, AirCap Holdings. Our old friend, Jim Gillies, well, still current friend, Jim Gillies at The Motley Fool is one of his favorites. I believe it's a leaser of airplanes.

It's been a really strong performance, 15% of Dorsey's portfolio here. They lease, finance, sale, and manage commercial flight equipment across the world. the PE right now, six, price to book 1.2. And I believe they are a fantastic repurchaser of shares. Let's look at our shares outstanding charts. We'll go back to December 2021. Okay. Versus the last 12 months. Again, this is a good time to mention our friends at Fiscal AI, which have all the super investor info you would want and has all the data that we can look at across this episode shares outstanding kpis buys and sells everything you can use our link fiscal.ai

slash chit chat and get 15 off any paid plan the link will be in the show notes check them out it'll help your own research it helps us we get commissions if you uh use our link and yeah i think no one will regret all right back to air cap holdings down 9.4 percent ryan's looking at the chart here he may be using a different date but either way very very impressive capital turns from this company combined with the cheap pe you know maybe a little bit of a cynical industry but it seems to be well managed uh reminds me of some of the best players in the home building and kind of construction space yeah interesting you know i've always uh i've always been been slightly interested in this one yeah i mean i'm pretty blown away by this shares outstanding chart

the over the last four years so since the end of 2022 shares outstanding have been cut by a little over a third so they're reducing shares by 12 a year not afraid to get aggressive either yeah pretty impressive yeah i like that uh the only other comment i make on his portfolio is the auto zone and i i'm not i don't disagree with it in any way but auto zone has long been seen as one of those sort of long-term very durable compounders where cannibal the quintessential share cannibal yeah one of the that's like the share cannibal really where it's very predictable business that has grown consistently that the end markets have grown cars on the road have increased one to two percent a year the average age of cars on the road has increased which means

more servicing more and they're standing into mexico right a little bit i yeah i believe so the i i think this is maybe just a case of opportunity cost here when looking at acri selling o'reilly and autozone being sold off the the valuation is trading at it's about 19 times EBIT. This is close to the most expensive valuation they've had in more than a decade. And for a share cannibal, that's when it starts to really hurt you because you're not able to reduce share count as much as you used to be able to. And there's probably some, I guess, maturity here where the growth rates are going to come down a little bit as well. You know, they reported this morning,

and it looks like it's been, so far, a good sell because it's down 10%. Comp sales of 4%, 4%. What did Pat Dorsey know? No, I don't think he invests like that. But, hey, you know, the stock's been down a lot. Maybe now is the time to take another look at it. Okay, let's talk to your fourth investor here.

Who do you have? All right, we're going to younger investors now. I don't know how, actually, old these people are, but they're not kind of on the senior tour as the Druckenmiller and the Ackmans and the Berkshires of the world. We have Shaw Spring Partners, I can't talk today, helmed by Dennis Hong. I don't really know much about Dennis except that he was on Twitter.

He writes good stuff. He has great analysis. I have no idea what their returns have been, but I really like what he has to say, and I think he does good stuff. So I like looking at his portfolio every quarter, especially because he does have that longer-term mindset as well. I had three things I noticed. One, new buy of Zscaler, 13.3% position. Again, it may not be including Chinese stocks here.

He has historically been in some Chinese companies, so that might not be a full 13%. But of the portfolio we're looking at, 13%. 13%, and a new buy of Coupang at an 8% position, which, of course, I love for the confirmation buys. And then looking at the opposite here of some of the software buys from Ackery, he is selling CoStar, selling Procore Technologies, which is that construction management software,

selling Shift4, and selling Monday.com. Ryan, any thoughts here? Yeah, there's a lot of companies here that I follow, actually, and kind of like. The Coupang edition, obviously, nice confirmation bias for us there. Actually, side note, I met Dennis Hong last week or two weeks ago at the Constellation shareholder meeting. Very nice guy. And I do like reading his letters.

The Zscaler purchase, I don't know the business well, but that is quite the vote of confidence to go completely new position, 13% of your portfolio. All I know is that the Motley Fool loves him, and I have to use them to log in every day. so i think it's a it's oh gosh it's like an identification tracker for more mobile devices around the world you know make sure you have your enterprise network secure for example the molly fool they don't want to hack into their system to get their recommendations you know stolen early or front ran or whatever they also just want to be a secure network zscaler i believe again without knowing any of the technical details helps a lot with that and they love yeah and i can imagine that being a business you don't want to or a software or a solution you

don't want to switch out of consistently uh the costar group and pro core sales are interesting costar group one of the worst performing stocks in the s&p 500 this year they are kind of got out of a leaky boat right yeah yeah i don't know the timing here but costar for those that haven't followed it they are like the premier commercial real estate data provider so and they they aggregate a lot of their data through their own like through heavy investment like cameras on helicopters to get mapping and like sizing that kind of thing they spend to get proprietary data but they've been investing heavily in homes.com to basically compete with Zillow. And for the first time, I think in a decade or longer, they were burning

money, free cash burn and gap unprofitable as well. So it's completely flipped the business kind of on its face. And I think a lot of investors are cycling out of CoStar Group right now because it's totally changed the thesis where this used to be such a durable B2B go sell to commercial real estate investors and now it's focusing on individual customers well homes.com probably sells to realtors as well but it it's unclear i mean zillow has been at this game for a decade and they're yet to find the efficient monetization model or the best monetization model and they seem to make enough revenue that maybe that's more of an expense thing for zillow yeah how many if you go through zillow's acquisition history it's hilarious but it's atrocious anyways

it is i mean it's just completely flipping the business which i guess it's not surprising to see or at least flipping the economics by investing so heavily in this now i've seen activist investors have come in and said hey cut this out we're going back to profitable yeah homes.com and apartments.com or they're not going to win versus zillow it's just not look i'm going on that yeah i'm going gut check it's i think you're right zillow is just it's the it is the verb like now maybe they're going after different customers i don't know maybe there's a different sort of draw within like real estate agents for certain data on homes.com but yeah like as far as consumer mindshare goes i don't know how you can beat zillow the monday.com sale has it worked out or

not you're a monday.com man right i am a monday.com man small position uh it has not worked out that was my first that was the quickest stock i ever lost 50 on the but it is interesting to sell after seeing the valuation compress so much so i was harvesting yeah that's probably part of it all right i have one more on shaw spring and z scaler for to get anyone excited to research the company i was very surprised at this number from july 2019 so let's say six ish years ago i think that was right around maybe when they went public but do you want to guess what the revenue per share let's get that spc sass stuff you know uh included as compounded at for the last uh Anyway, since July 2019.

I'm going to guess high 20%. 37. Wow. Fast grower. So maybe, you know, we're trading at a better price now. They could be a huge beneficiary from cybersecurity stuff with AI. Very interesting. Okay, my last investor for the day is not really a single investor,

but it's an activist. value act capital they you've maybe heard the name because they recently got involved with salesforce at the same time as elliot management they actually have a pretty dang good track record one of the their most famous investments ever was e they got a board seat uh from microsoft in 2013 and replaced balmer with nadella and what a not trying to throw shade at balmer but what a Great choice, Nadella has ended up being. It's hard to get public data on them on returns, but I saw one investor apparently leaked that from 2000 to 2019, they averaged 14% a year. Not sure whether that's gross or net, but looking at the S1 or not the S1, the 13F, the holdings here, Salesforce still the largest position. So they took that activist stake in 2023 and they've held it since. I wouldn't be surprised if they're pushing for more headcount reductions. But again, we'll see. The other ones, and these are small, they're pretty inconsequential to value act, but I guess interesting for us. they took a new position in wix 99 million dollar position in wix and i don't know if you saw the

news yesterday brett wix just announced a 1000 person layoff i wonder what ever celebrate layoffs ryan never celebrate layoffs that's all i know i know i agree but i wonder how much how much influence value act had in that process um god i read the wix conference call they say they're getting a lot of efficiencies on the customer support which is huge for a website builder for people that don't have tech expertise so they're talking a lot about ai transformation they train their own llm for their website building yeah they're moving fast um it's it's a very dynamic situation which the market hates at the moment and that could be creating value and what is this nitera nitera is you want me to look at what they are while you keep talking i believe they are a

japanese company that sells spark plugs so i know nothing about that market or company the only other interesting sale uh or not sale purchase new position in spotify as well they i mean these guys are they've kind of built a reputation as tech activists i mean salesforce microsoft i guess wix you could say here and they were actually uh activists i believe for the new york times as well in 2022 which that's worked out well i mean what a phenomenal transformation they've gone through you know the only company that never listened to them nintendo well yeah they don't listen to anyone yeah it uh yeah uh nothing too crazy here i thought the wix involvement was interesting as a Wix shareholder, see what impact they have.

But yeah, any thoughts on this one? Spotify is interesting. Maybe they think there's a lot of pricing power here. I mean, we're seeing that nice margin inflection from them keeping their employee base stable. But if I look at it, Spotify is trading at EV to sales of five, EV to gross profit of 15. And it's not like this is a hyper growth company. you know it's a durable grower but i don't know if i think spotify is dirt dirt cheap today i'm with you yeah and maybe maybe that's us comping to what it looked like in late 2022 2023 but i think gross profit yeah yeah that's not that's not the best no and even if you the labels move slow like the even if you think margins are going to expand from here

it's not going to be we're not going to be looking at 60 gross margins anytime soon oh well no of course of course not of course not all right anything else on value act no let's let's move to your last one here who do you have i have alta fox capital uh helmed by connor haley excuse me and others which is a lot for any listeners they do a lot of work with um i don't want to call them startup investors but enterprising young investors doing lots of pitch competitions things like that if you want to get your name out i would i would talk to them or participate in some of their i think it's competitions other things they do at universities any younger listeners go into that all right what i noticed here and ryan you can tell me what you

notice too they have a 21 position in expel xpel is the ticker and they increased their position last quarter so increased position or conviction in expel for people that don't know expel is a they basically sell aftermarket automotive surface and paint protection films so if you have a nice car this can cost i think and i've listened to a few podcasts on them but i'm no expert on the business but i think it can cost a few thousand bucks but it really protects your vehicle if you have a nicer vehicle and it's something that dealers essentially they sell into the dealerships the dealers upsell the product to the customer it's been a nice growth story is actually one of the famous investments from microcap club stocks been down uh from a peak in

2021 and pe is 24 eb to sales 2.5 i mean it's not not crazy cheap but it looks like it's rebounded a little bit so far in q2 so maybe they got another cheaper multiple but the five-year revenue cavers kager is 14 feels feels interesting um people really like this stock i mean it got ahead of itself in 2021 of course but yeah yeah not bad i i kind of lukewarm interest in a business like this yeah it's always tough with a business that has had such strong historical performance not that that shouldn't deter people but it's it's hard you almost feel like you're late to the party the yeah that is a tough psychologically to to get around to to put this in context this is one of the best performing micro caps probably of all time the from january 1st 2010 to 2022 if if you

invested ten thousand dollars in 2010 you would have had 25 million dollars by 2022 the returns were staggering it was a more than a 50 compounded annual growth rate so yeah it's just kind of hard to feel like you're getting uh i don't know sometimes i look at that and think i'm too late but yeah i mean connor haley's probably he's known this business for a long time if i'm not mistaken he's been an investor in it for a while so yep and altifox has pretty good returns they have a great track record i mean short short is only done i think five ish years but strong track record yeah i it's it's a business i can get behind and it's one of those where it's operates in an industry where I can't imagine

they have a ton of competition or at least they can carve out some sort of a position there. Any other notable transactions? Well, we have a new buy of Toast and then we have completely exiting. Now, they're on no side of Ackman and Hone. Out of Meta, out of Microsoft, out of Amazon

and out of the hedge fund hotel, FICO. interesting yeah interesting moves um toast value act is involved in toast as well 350 million dollar position i wouldn't be surprised if maybe maybe they're vying for a board seat at that size yeah it's a decent size position uh again we're just throwing out a lot of numbers here but yeah it's trading at below two times sales there you go pretty good pretty good track record i'm so lost when i look at the point of sales like the restaurant software space it feels like every company i look at i think oh that's you know they're doing something really cool unique but it's it there's a ton of competition shift four square uh i assume pfizer operates in that

industry as well clover i believe is owned by pfizer there's just a ton of competition Yeah, the only payments processor I like, again, disclosure, I own them as of this recording, Adyen. Also MercadoLibre as that subdivision where I think both of them can have a solid advantage over the long term. But yeah, Toast may have a nice niche

and they're executing well. That could be the thesis, but hard to get around a wide mode business at this price. Okay, I think that's going to do it. That's all 10. Any closing thoughts or you want to take us out? Well, it's always hard to give any sort of concrete analysis from 13S,

but I think it's good idea generation. Maybe the final question is, what stocks do you have inspiration to research further? I'll go first and say maybe Zscaler, but that's something that I don't know if I can get around. I can't put it into my circle of competence or it would take a long time to study. second maybe the argentinian oil company and then third and i'm kind of going off the cuff here

but air cap holdings now i know dorsey didn't even buy much this court he trimmed it a little bit this quarter but i like it a lot and of course smb global high quality business that a lot of people are buying yeah i would say probably at the top of my list is that bbb foods the mexican good point good point yep yeah big new position for druk and uh leandro has been doing good work on it so you know maybe we can borrow some convection from him and then i i'm still kind of on the fence of uber there i guess a lot of investors have been buying it but uh i don't know The only thing is, to answer your question, that's not really a research issue. That's a I-can't-make-my-mind-up issue.

What's a stock you haven't heard of really that you like? I might go Perimeter Solutions. It's one of the software names that Accra Capital Management recently added to. And I think it's one of the cheapest screening software stocks as well. All right. Well, hopefully listeners, we got, or you got by listening to this episode, a lot of insights on different companies, how the super investors invest, just plenty of different ideas.

Again, we're not buying or selling any of these today, but we're just talking through a lot of ideas about what we potentially might research further in episodes and, you know, getting inspiration from some of these super investors. All right. As a disclosure, we are not financial advisors. Anything we say on the show is not formal advice or recommendation. Ryan and I are 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, everyone, for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.