Yet Another Value Podcast - August 2026 Random Ramblings

Episode Date: August 4, 2026

Strategy filed an 8K this morning: they sold $300 million of stock, sold $100 million of bitcoin, and put the proceeds into buying back roughly $80 million of their own preferred at a discount. So you have a company trading over NAV, diluting shareholders, and selling the one asset it exists to hold, and it is still trading at a premium. Management is presenting the move from "one-way capital issuer" to "multi-way capital issuer" like it is a financial engineering breakthrough. It is just normal capital allocation, and it took them five years to get there.That is the through line for this whole ramble: selling. Strategy made a genuinely good call in 2020 and then never sold a thing. Situational Awareness made a generational call, long AI winners and short AI losers, went up something like 10x on it, never rebalanced, kept pressing a trade that naturally degrosses, and blew up when software went from 20 back to 30 and semis went from 400 back to 370. I do a miniature version of the same thing every time I decide in advance that I will start trimming at 15 a stock I bought at 10, and I am not sure that plan is as smart as it feels. I also get into why thematic trades are so hard to sell when there is no price to anchor to, whether the crossover funds actually had an AI information edge or just conviction, why I cannot make the memory valuations work under any assumption I am willing to make, and where I think the real opportunity is: the beaten-up AI power names Situational owned in size, several of which are not trading far above the DCF of the contracts they already have.Situational Awareness, crossover funds, and the AI edge: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/crossover-funds-ai-edge-situational-awarenessThis episode is sponsored by Trata: https://www.trata.com/glxy. Trata is two buysiders hopping on a call and talking through a stock they are actually working on, which is the fastest way I know to get up to speed on a name. They also have an MCP now that connects to Claude and ChatGPT, so the first thing I do on a new name is run the Trata search and see what buysiders are really saying. That link is a preview of the Galaxy call I mention on the episode.Chapters:(00:00) Cold open: three things on my mind(02:11) Sponsor: Trata(03:55) Why I am recording a bonus ramble(04:49) Strategy's new 8K: sell stock, sell bitcoin, buy back the preferred(06:05) "Multi-way capital issuer" is just normal capital allocation(06:58) A great call in 2020, and then they never sold(08:21) Investors are good at buying and bad at selling(09:37) Is my own sell plan its own trap?(11:37) The Situational Awareness blowup(13:19) The trouble with thematics: there is no price(14:44) Micro versus macro, and the software buy signal I missed(16:22) Do the crossover funds have an AI information edge?(18:41) Why I cannot get to the memory valuations(19:04) The opportunity in the beaten-up AI power names(22:05) Wrapping upLinks:Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.comSee our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimerProduction and editing by The Podcast Consultant - https://thepodcastconsultant.com/Disclosures: I am short $MSTR and long $GLXY. Nothing on this podcast is investment advice. Please do your own work.

All right. Hello, welcome to the end of the value podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Walker. Today, we've got kind of a bonus random ramblings. I'll explain why in the full episode, which I just recorded why I'm doing the bonus random ramblings a second, but just really talking about three things that have been on my mind. Number one, my favorite company, long, a little bit of strategy. My favorite company, they published a new 8K, and I just had to talk about how crazy it is that this company continues to share a premium in the capital allocation there. And how silly is that I think it took them this, this longs involved. And then I'm going to kind of tie that into, you know, strategy, which had one great call on Bitcoin. I'm going to tie it into the other thing I've been thinking a lot about, situational awarenesses blow up. You know, the, just the thought, the risk frost behind that. And again, they had one great call. And then it kind of blew up. And another thing, I don't even mention the podcast. You know, something I've thought about a lot. If you have one great call and you make generational wealth on it, how do you judge someone as an investor on that? Like, are they gods because they had one great call? Is it just,

the coin flipping monkey. You know, I don't know. I think obviously very smart of hairy, very questionable risk manager practices, but I don't even mention that on the podcast. Maybe that's a call for another time. But talk about the situational awareness blow up and just things. I've written two articles on the blog. You can go find them in the show notes, but talk about a little bit of that. And then, and just wrapping up, you know, speaking of situational awareness, they had a great call that was a thematic trade, long AI, short AI losers. The tough things about thematic trades is, yes, you can call it, but historically, those have and priced in. You know, people know what's going to be a good theme for the most part. And

the stock market is very good. If there's a rosy future, it's very good at pricing it with a rosy outlook. Historically, that's been a tough way to invest. But the past 10 years, if you just said, hey, I think AI is going to be a winner. Let's buy AI themes. Boom, you're rich. You said, hey, I think GLP-1s are going to be a huge thing. Boom, you're rich. So, them thoracic trends have been very easy, but I find them difficult and, you know, related situational. If you've got a great thematic winner, when do you know what to sell? Like, you know, if the price is one or five thousand doesn't matter, you still think AI is going to be a winner. So how do you know what to sell thematic winner? Just rambling on a little bit about

all of that. So we'll get there in one second. But first, word from our sponsors. Today's podcast is sponsored by trotta.com. Look, if you've been listening to this podcast for the past year, you know what I'm going to say. If you like this podcast, you are going to love Trada. Trotta is two bysiders who hop onto a call and discuss stocks that they're interested in. And I'll give you one. I have been really interested in the power shells recently because on the heels of the situational awareness blowup. Situational awareness was really long power shells like Nebius and Corweave and several others. And the stocks were all slaughtered on the situational blowup.

So I was trying to get up to speed. And these names, you know, it seems easy. Oh, they just lease data center. But there's the devils in all sorts of details. how much more megawatts do they have to lease? What are the terms of leases? Can you trust the management teams? All sorts of stuff.

And Trotta, you know, whether it's for this, and there are recent calls, I'll link to one. There was a galaxy call with a very handsome, anonymous by-setter on one of them. I'll link to them. It's just such a great way to get up to speed on any name you're working on. And here's the great thing. Now they've got an MCP that connects to Claude and to chat GPTV and all these things. So whenever your research name, the first thing I do, if I'm looking at the name,

I say slash Trada, have it run the Trotta skill and pull what people are actually talking about, what by-siders are really talking about will drive and move the needle for the stock. So look, if you like this podcast, you're going to love Trada. And if you're trying to build all your AI skills and get up to speak quicker and aims, guess what? Trotta's got you covered with a unique database that no one else has. So go to trotta.com. And if you want to see the Galaxy call that covers some of the stuff that I talked about,

and by the way, disclosure, I'm along a little bit of Galaxy. go to trotta.com slash g lxy and you can see a preview of that call so thanks trotta for sponsoring this episode and now let's get to the podcast all right hello and welcome to the yet another value podcast i'm your host andrew walker let's dive right into it so today is august third and i just did a random ramblings like two weeks ago but i i'm doing i don't know if i'm going to call it or my august random ramblings or a bonus random ramblings i'm not sure but i'm doing it for three reasons number one i have got some two things on my mind that have just been going over and over and over again. And if I pour them out of my mind into a microphone, I will be able to move on.

So that's the main reason, but also two other pretty good reasons. One, it's raining outside and I'm just going stir crazy. This is when I'd normally go on my afternoon walk and clear my head and I can't go on a walk because the weather is awful. And number three, I had a podcast gas cancel on me. So I kind of had like an extra hour, I don't have more than that because I prep for all my podcast. But I had like an hour, a bunch of extra time that I had kind of budgeted and know what to do

with it. So between the rain, driving me crazy and all this or stuff, but you don't care about that. Let's dive into the podcast. So I'm going to start off talking about the company I'm obsessed with, strategy, formally known as micro strategy. Disclosure, I'm short a little bit of strategy and long a little bit of the press. But I just cannot get over this company. And I swear I'm going to land. I'm going to stick the landing.

I'm going to pull this strategy thing as a whole through for this whole random ribbons. But, you know, they published an 8K this morning. Oh, let me see if I can pull up the AK while there. Well, I'm talking, but they published an AK, and the AK says, hey, we sold 300 million of strategy stock. I mean, this is a massive company, so it's not like this is a giant thing, but, you know, it's 300 million of stock. And we also sold 100 million of Bitcoin.

And we took the proceeds and we purchased like 80 million of stretch preferred. So what you have in strategy now is you have a company that's trading over NAF that is diluting shareholders and selling their Bitcoin in order to buy back prefs at a stock. slight discount on the open market and to park a lot of cash on their paling sheet. And I just, you just look at me, like, how is this company trading at a premium? Like, it's just, it's so crazy to me. I can't get over it. But the reason this is going to be a through line is, you know, I read their earnings call as someone with a position in them should read their earnings call. And it's crazy how they can talk like it's magic, right? They say, hey, look, strategies evolved

a year ago, six months ago, two years ago, when we first started. buying Bitcoin. We were a one-way capital issue. And what that means is they were just, they only issued stock to buy back Bitcoin, to buy Bitcoin. And now they say we're a multi-way capital issue, right? We'll issue stock to buy that preferred send a discount or we'll sell our Bitcoin to buy stock at a discount. And they're saying it like there's some genius. And I mean, all they're talking about is good capital allocation. I mean, not even good, like normal capital allocation, right? Now, the reason this is the through line for this podcast is, you know, say what you about crypto.

You can be a crypto bull, a crypto skeptic, whatever it is. I've generally been pretty skeptical of crypto. But my strategy's underlying observation back in 2020 when they made the Bitcoin pivot was a good one, right? And you can say that on a whole host of different levels. I think Bitcoin was trading at like 20,000 when they made the pivot. And it's at 65,000 today. It peaked at like 120,000.

Right. But a triple inside of, I suppose, that's six year, more than a. and triple inside of six years is a very good result, right? Now, we're going to ignore that they kind of piled in at the top, so they're actually underwater on their overall purchases. But if you just take the first thing, a triple in six years is a very good result. And by the way, they were also right on their theme.

Their theme was, hey, they're equity people who want exposure to crypto in some way, shape, or form, and they cannot get it. Back in 2020, it's very easy to forget. Bitcoin was hard to get, right? You get hacked. There were no Bitcoin ETFs, all this sort of stuff. a public company going and doing this and being able to trade them in your brokerage account, like, you know, I was skeptical.

I said, hey, these are financial markets. Like people get, but they were, they were betting that people wanted a one-click button to buy, cap, to buy Bitcoin and they were right, right? So they hit it out of the park with them. But they never sold. They never traded. And they never even considered it until recently, right, where they've evolved. And I think they evolve because their capital structure, I personally think they

completely mungle their capital structure. I think they would have been better off with the kind of Hold on the story they're telling. They kind of fall, but now they're selling. And the reason I mentioned this is, you know, it's got me thinking a lot about this is, as I've mentioned all podcasts, I try not to call out investors. I try to think myself, but there's a lot of research that suggests investors as a whole are very good at the buying. They're very bad at the selling, right? And if I'm using myself, you know, if I am researching a company, I will research it a lot and I'll say, hey, the stock's at 10. And I think this is a really attractive risk-adjusted opportunity and I think it's worth 20, right?

And then I'll kind of start putting into my head, hey, here's where I think I'll start selling, right? If it's at 10 and I think the stock's worth 20, well, then I probably start taking a little bit off at 15 and get heavier and heavier at taking off at 17 or 18 and I sell it all at 20. and obviously there's a thousand things that go in between that, right? Maybe in between now and then I find something that's tree net five that I think is worth 20 or, you know, if it's nothing on this podcast is tax advice, but you know, if it's two weeks from, if the stock's at 14 and my cost basis is 10 and in two weeks I go long term, I'll probably consider the tax consequences. So there's a lot of things, but in general, I've kind of got the game plan when I'm coming out. And I don't think I'm alone in that, but I have been thinking, hey, when I've got this game plan, I'm coming into it. I'm saying, hey, I'm buying this at 10 and I, it's a, I want to start selling it kind of

15. Am I mentally, like, am I falling into that sell trap that I mentioned where investors aren't as good as selling? I'm not putting as much thought into the sale, right? That's kind of mechanical. And in the same way that strategy before it was mechanical, we sell our stock and buy Bitcoin and we never do anything else. If I'm saying, hey, I'm going to wait till the stock hits 15 to start selling, am I getting

too mechanical? And more importantly. Am I failing to incorporate new news, right? Because I talk about it, it's very difficult to execute, at least in my opinion, probably as somebody who's not a great trader or I don't know, still needs to evolve, still needs to improve. But a lot of the big money is made where you buy a stock at 10 and it goes to 20 and you say this is better today than it was yesterday.

I need to buy a lot more in particular events, but it can happen with fundamental investment thesis too, right? A lot of the big money's fair. Well, if you are saying, hey, I bought the stock and I think that. it's worth 20 and I'll start selling 15, that big clearing event might happen. And it can be very difficult for you to flip your mind because you've said, hey, I'm anchored. I'm selling at this price. Or, you know, the stock goes from 10 to 15 and you start selling. And then the good news happens. And it goes of 20. It's very difficult not to sell when sell more to stop selling or to buy more because

you started selling a 15. So, you know, I have no great answers to that. But it's something. and I've been thinking about. And, you know, again, this strategy thing is crazy and it cracks me up every time this company's valuation. It seems so clear to me that this is a completely bust the capital structure that needs to be reset. It needs to be financed. But just the fact that they said, hey, we're going to start thinking about selling. We're going to start thinking about evolving. It was hilarious to me. I can't believe they managed to pull it over, but it also, you know, got me thinking about selling. And the other thing that got me thinking about selling and the other thing that's been on my mind a lot recently and has been on the mind of everyone in finance,

is the situational awareness blowup, right? I sure everyone knows about the situational awareness blowup at this point. I've written two posts on the blowup on the blog. You can go check them out if you want. But, you know, the other thing I've been thinking is situational along the lines of selling, they had a generational callout, right? Which was basically long AI winners, short AI losers. They did that.

They had that call out in, I don't know, two years ago, whatever it is. And they go up like 10x on this claw, right? And they've got privates and all the sort of stuff that, you know, kind of save them. Because I think the fact they had this massive anthropic stake that's up a ton and that they couldn't really lever is actually why they didn't zero the fund out. But neither heard of that. You know, they have this generational rum. Unbelievable call, right? And the issue is along the lines of not selling, they didn't know or they didn't know.

They didn't. I don't know what the reason. They didn't rebalance it. after this generational run, right? They win, let's just make it very simple. They went long semi and power and short software, and they did it, you know, levered up, but they did it when both were trading in 100,

and the semis went to 400, and the software went to 20. And it said, A, that's a naturally degrossing transaction unless you keep putting on, but they kept pressing and pressing and pressing it. And then eventually the software went from, you know, 20 to 30 and the semis went from 400 to 370, and the whole fun blew up because they kept pressing it.

So I was thinking, like, look, you've got this generational trade and you didn't have this, you didn't press sell. You didn't risk management. And obviously, this is a failure of risk managers, it's failure of everything. But I was thinking about that sell, right? They had this great thematic call. And one of the issues with thematics is when you have a thematic call, whether it's long AI, long GLP1, a long, choose your great theme, right?

There's no price, right? And historically, the way markets have worked has. been, if you had this great theme that I renew, if it's in the news, it's in the price. You know, there would be people would say, hey, we want to go long health care in 2006 because the population is aging and it's got all these great demographic tailwinds and it's a protected sector. Well, that was kind of in the price, right? And I think health care did pretty well, but these things are generally priced in.

The interesting thing about the past 10 years is the themes, it generally, you could buy the themes at almost any price, right? If in 2016 you said, hey, software is eating the world, it basically didn't matter what price you paid for the next eight years until kind of the 2022 growth reset and then chat GPT came along. And I understand that's very much saying, hey, eight years and then the ax did fall. But if you said in 2024, you were going to go along AI, basically didn't matter the price. Same with GLP1s. And I've just been thinking with themes, the tough thing about themes is how do you know, if you call thematic winner right, how do you know when the price has caught up to you?

I don't really invest thematically. I invest micro, I for the most part. You know, I look at individual securities, weird setups. I try to look at setups. I will do some macro when, you know, and I'm trying to get a lot better at this because I've seen it happen a ton, particularly recently. I mean, great one. Software, right?

I kept saying I want to be long. I see panic in software. I want to be long software, but it's too hard for me because these are not terminal zero. There's the chance of all of these being terminal zeros. In March and April, you saw across the board companies giving their executives. It just really, I like the dark, the dark art term, but just really juicy comp grants at software, at software companies across the board. That was kind of your buy signal. And the software index is up like 50% since those bottoms. And, you know, you had this buy signal of insiders getting greedy. And that's one way, like, I've been trying

to expand my micro to macro. But you know, with the Maddox, again, with if you were long AI winners, like where is the top? Where it doesn't matter? You know, just something I haven't thinking about. Obviously, there's a failure versus management, but you had this great AI trade that turned out right. How do you know? Just a few more things. Man, I can't believe his wedding was the same weekend he blew up.

That's just a disaster. You know, it's easy to say, oh, go have fun at your wedding. You kind of solve the blow up and you can get back to work on Monday. if you've ever had a lot of stress at work, I mean, it is very, you cannot turn your, and you cannot turn your brain off. And I am sure, like, he just had his whole fund implode from out of nowhere inside of a week. Man, I can't imagine going to that wedding and thinking about that and having that hangover you.

Other side of that I want to talk about is the opportunity in these names. And, you know, I mentioned this, again, I wrote a blog post, but it's just really interesting. A lot of these names have come down a lot. And you've heard a lot of investors over the past few years say, and this is generally investors who missed the AI trade. And you can throw me in myself, right? Though I don't believe this line of conspiracy theory. But a lot of the people who have been the biggest beneficiaries of the AI trade are either public to private crossover investors. So they were investing in the privates or they had really interesting ties to the AI trade.

And, you know, the situational is a great example where the guy is a former open AI researcher. and he is, I suppose, now married to the chief of staff for Anthropic. So what you hear people say is, hey, all these guys over the past 18 months had these generational runs, long AI stocks. And it wasn't particular genius on their end. What it was is they had MNPI from the, not MNPI and the you will go to jailway, but just MNPI and they saw Anthropics numbers and they said, oh, it's pretty easy to see if Anthropics going crazy like this, we should go buy semis or Anthropic, you know,

the one thing they keep caught out is they have to pay through the nose for memory. We should go buy the memory stocks. You'll hear that a lot. And you know, you can go back to deep seek, the deep seek scare in January of 2025. You would hear a lot of people who said, hey, these guys bought the deep seek scare. And a lot of them say, oh, they saw opening eyes, numbers and everything and knew there was nothing to fear. Or, you know, in March, there's this big slowdown in the semi prices. And you'd hear all these guys piling into the March sell off right before every.

everything really rips in April to June of this year. And you'd hear people say, hey, they had asked them, you know, I'm sure there's a little bit of truth there. But to me, these guys had, they had conviction, right? Like, they were invested in all of the stuff because they had conviction in the AI trade. And they had conviction. So, yes, the numbers probably help them build the conviction a little bit. I mean, it's easy to stay long, something that's up a lot when you're seeing demand

exploding in front of you and maybe you've got those numbers. but I think they had real conviction here. But again, that's where things get interesting, right? Like, it's very easy to say, hey, I'm long and I see memory. I see memory demand through the roof. I see pricing through the roof. But that's a nice theme. But again, I would just say, if you look at these memory companies, there's just simply

no way you can justify the current valuations. You know, take whatever supernormal profits you want for the next two years, three years. There's going to be a cycle at some point. These are commodity plays. and the back end is going to look really ugly once these get overbuilt. So unless you think, hey, we can just no longer ever catch up to memory demand. Anyway, that's not where I was going to, you know, I was going with opportunity. And I think one of the interesting ones, you know, situational, the thing they were pretty much longest was the power bill out.

And the names that have been hit the hardest on this, not hit the hardest, but names that have been hit pretty hard are things that are associated with the power build out. You know, the, the former Bitcoin miners that have transitioned to AI Data Center plays because Bitcoin mining takes a lot of power. They had these shells. Bitcoin mining sucks as a business. It's probably the work. It might be the worst business ever invented. It's hard to think of a worse one, to be honest with you. But we can talk about that another time of written it.

But, you know, you have all these Bitcoin miners. They've got terms of power. They say, hey, Bitcoin mining sucks. All of a sudden, all the AI plays need power. And they transition to AI plays. A lot of these things have been really hit. And in part that's because, situation. was long, a ton of these things in big size of some of their biggest positions. And because

these things were a little smaller, they owned the most of them. So these things have been hit. They bounced a little bit since the, since the situational blow up, but, but they haven't bounced as much as they, I don't know, should have the right word. They're down a lot, let's said. And I think that's interesting because, A, a lot of these, you can DCF, the contracts they have. And a lot of these are not trading for much more than the DCF of the contracts they have. And B, you know, if you were one of the people who believed, hey, all these crossover funds are trading on insider information, well, all these crossover funds are telling you the fundamentals continue to explode. Understand that's asking a barber for a haircut. You know, they're kind of

talking their own book there, but they're saying the fundamentals continues to reflect higher. And the thing that a lot of them were the heaviest into is also down right now. So if you kind of believe that, there's an really interesting opportunity there. Do I believe that, you know, it brings me, I don't know, but I do know contract securities. And a lot of these things, I mean, if you get, if you can buy them for the DCF of their contracts, whether it's with a core weave or with a meta, if you can buy them for the DCFs of their contracts and get everything else for free, I mean, that's a very interesting call option to me. And I understand core weave, you might worry.

If you're a real skeptic, you might worry about the credit risk there. But I think it's really interesting. So I've spent a lot of time doing work on them. Oh, you know, I'll mention it. Trada is a sponsor, great product that I love. I, maybe not me. There was an interesting call on a couple of the AI PowerShell trades that I will link in the show notes or maybe I'll link in the advertisement for this company. But if you're looking to get up feed, that would be interesting.

And look, if you want to talk any of them, just reach out to me. I'd love to talk them because I'm still doing due diligence. And it sounds easy. Like, oh, yeah, you've got these contracts. Do you see of them? But how much of the CAPX is there? what are you putting on the terminal value? Like how good they're responsible for?

What are they not? Like some of these contracts, the customer's responsible for the power and some of the contracts, the data center's responsible for the power. Like, it varies a lot. And there's all sorts of different one. Like, are they just doing the triple net lease to the customer or are they also going to buy the GPUs, which some of these have gone, which is a much higher risk, high return business.

So anyway, I guess those are the things that have been on my mind. You know, I've written about some of them. They're posts on the bog. But I had some extra time. It's raining. I had no way else to get it out. And one of the nice things about running your own podcast is if there's no way to walk around and kind of sort of your thoughts, hop on the mic and just start in rambling.

So this is kind of the bonus random ramblings. Again, if you've got thoughts on any of it, feel free to reach out anytime. But I will talk to you guys later this month. A quick disclaimer. Nothing on this podcast should be considered an investment advice. Guests or the hosts may have positions in any of the stocks mentioned during. in this podcast. Please do your own work and consult a financial advisor. Thanks.