BullishBKNGBookingBookingNFLXNetflixNetflix

1w ago

Musings on Muse: the inertia sell-off looks too broad

Muse churn risk for Netflix is overstated by the market; engagement makes it robust. Views weakly held.

EXPEExpediaBearishExpedia

2w ago

The rise (and downsides) of AI agents in investing

Consumer AI agents may disintermediate online travel agencies such as Expedia.

COSTCostcoNeutralCostco

4w ago

$TBBB: Tiendas 3B is Mexico's Aldi. Is it too late to buy? | Fruit Tree Capital

Tiendas 3B has more than 3,700 stores in central Mexico, opens roughly 150 more every quarter, and earns its money back on a new store in about two years. It is the Aldi model, built by a founder who saw BIM work in Turkey, moved to a country where he did not speak the language, and has spent 21 years compounding it. Alberto Vadia of Fruit Tree Capital thinks it is a hundred bagger from here. My problem is the price. The stock is approaching $50, it has run a ton, and the bulls I was reading a few months ago were underwriting it in the mid 30s. So I push Alberto on the thing that actually decides this: do the unit economics survive the move from 3,500 stores to 15,000, or does a two year payback quietly become a four year payback once they leave central Mexico? We also get into the two equity offerings from a business that self funds every store it opens, why every other hard discounter on earth stayed private, what Costco at 40 times earnings implies for a Mexican retailer, and whether adding fruits and vegetables is an expansion or a risk. This podcast is sponsored by Trata I already know you’re going to like trata. Why? Because you’re reading this blog post, meaning you’re interested in this podcast. And trata is just like this podcast (though without the handsome host!). Trata is anonymized transcripts of buysiders discussing stocks they are following and what they really think will drive the stock. I’ve been mentioning it on the podcast for months, and the most frequent complaint I hear from people who check it out is they wish trata had more content on more of their stocks. Even better: they recently released an MCP that lets you connect their transcripts to the AI model of your choic e. If you’re interested, click here to check out their TBBB transcript. Please follow the podcast on Spotify , iTunes , or YouTube ! And please be sure to rate / review the podcast if you enjoy it, or share it with someone else who would enjoy it (more listeners is a critical part of the flywheel that keeps this Substack and podcast going!). Share Yet Another Value Blog Transcript for paid subs begins below ( The initial transcript is AI-generated and is replaced with a professionally edited version when available) Disclaimer : Nothing on this podcast or on this blog is investing or financial advice; please see our full disclaimer here. The transcript below is from a third party transcription service; it’s entirely possible there are some errors in the transcript. Read more

DUOLDuolingoNeutralDuolingo

5/21/2026

Corporate dark arts: mulligans, midstream cuts, and one fast double $AGL $TPB $DUOL $COTY $RIVN

Corporate dark arts, part 12 Today’s post is the 12th post in my “corporate dark arts” series 1 . Today, I want to highlight a few more interesting case studies; while I don’t think any of these are imminently actionable, I think all of them are instructive in some way, shape, or form, and sharing them will help you better understand the dark arts going forward. The cases are: AGL: another proof point that these can work FAST RIVN gets a mulligan COTY’s midstream adjustment DUOL: what happens when you halfway vest? TPB’s CEO chooses stock Let’s dive in. AGL: another proof point that these can work FAST On April 27, AGL hired a new CEO. His contract had 200k PSUs that started to vest at $50 and vested in full at $150 . Given the stock was trading <$30 at the time, it was a pretty bullish signal. On May 6, the company reported blow out earnings . The stock more than doubled, and it’s almost doubled again. Not only are the first set of PSUs set to vest imminently, but it seems like the second set might vest before the summer is over! Source: fiscal.ai. You can get a 15% discount on fiscal.ai membership by signing up here RIVN gets a mulligan One of the issues with the “dark arts” is management can turn it into “heads, I win; tails, I try again and then win” pretty easily: give yourself an aggressive stock grant…. and then if you miss it give yourself another one! Thus, there is no signal in a dark arts grant because management is greedy and will just keep giving themselves packages until they get fabulously wealthy, fairness (and shareholders!) be damned. Rivian serves as a nice example. They gave their CEO a massive package in the boom days when they deSPAC’d …. but with the stock getting hammered and the CEO going through a divorce, they just reloaded him with a $400m package that would be worth >$4B if it vests in full. The option targets are definitely aggressive …. But if you’re a shareholder, you have to ask yourself: is this package a one time thing meant to incentivize a CEO to pursue a massively value accretive path that insiders are seeing? Or will the board just keep handing these big packages out until one of them pays out? COTY’s midstream adjustment COTY pairs well with the RIVN example; instead of a mulligan, COTY appears to have slow walked setting the actual terms of their new CEO’s pay package to adjust for the business melting down as he took the reins. Let’s back up; here’s a little secret: sometimes a company will make an executive hire and they won’t give all of the details in the 8-K. When that happens, it’s worth tracking closely to see what’s going on. That’s exactly what happened with COTY; they brought in a new exec chair and interim CEO in late December . His contract called for 6m performance options to be granted, but it didn’t detail what the performance criteria for those options were. COTY buried the performance criteria in their next 10-Q, and they are aggressive. COTY’s stock was trading for ~$3/share when the options were granted (and that’s where they are struck); the stock needs to hit $7.81/share for anything to vest, and full vesting isn’t until $10.50. If the options do vest in full, they’d be worth just shy of $50m pretax. Again, aggressive. Also interesting that the bottom end of the vest is $7.81/share; that is a strange number. How was that specific number chosen ? Does management and the board have some view or inside information that informed that number? Even more interesting, the exec chair / interim CEO didn’t file a Form 4 until March 18 ( the same day COTY revamped their whole board ). Curiously, if you read footnote 2, both the strike price and the option vesting prices appear to have been nudged down (the strike from the ~$3/share COTY was trading for in December to its current price around $2/share; the vesting from $7.81 on the low end to $5.56/share). Makes you wonder what the company was seeing to adjust all of these down midstream…. though perhaps worth noting that this package (and the adjustments) keeps the CEO in line for a ~$50m payout if he vests the full high end. DUOL: what happens when you halfway vest? I was reading my friend Adam Wilk’s DUOL write up , and he had this table on the PSU DUOL’s CEO got at the time of the IPO. As I write this, DUOL’s stock is trading for ~$108/share. Which creates a kind of interesting hypothetical: if a CEO vests ~half of their PSUs and then the stock falls off a cliff, do they have a perverse incentive structure now? Are they incentivized to lever up to try to increase volatility and hit the out of the money options? Or are they incentivized to tamp down volatility and hold on to what they’ve already vested? I’m not saying either is the case at DUOL; the CEO owns enough stock outside of the PSU grants that he’s probably pretty aligned / not suffering from perverse incentives. But it’s fascinating to think about, and the DUOL structure provides a nice little hypothetical even if it doesn’t fit perfectly! TPB’s CEO chooses stock Sometimes, the signal is not in the action… it’s in how an action changes. Consider TPB: earlier this year, their CEO took his 2025 bonus in RSU s 2 with the stock in the mid-$80s/share. Plenty of executives do that…. what’s noteworthy is that he took the bonus in cash in 2024 . Sure enough, Q1 earnings crushed, and the CEO managed to increase his bonus by >10% by taking stock instead of cash. Side note: the CEO engaged in an interesting forward swap on >$12m of stock that settles in cash or shares ; I could definitely see how a swap like this incentivizes him to keep the stock price elevated this year, but I haven’t fully thought it through… /Fin Ok, that’s it for post 12. I’ll be back next week with post 13 to wrap the series up with high level takeaways. Don’t forget to sign up to make sure you don’t miss the conclusion of the series (or any future posts)! Yet Another Value Blog is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. 1 Previous posts include RELY + OPEN’s pay package , META’s YOLO options , incentives gone awry , an analysis of LION + STRZ new packages, five more dark arts ideas , dark arts clues $SOX was about to go parabolic, the ACHC case study + premium dark arts basket , the incentives driving moves at VAC/GME/EKSO/RPD , five grants that aren’t as bullish as they appear , and this premium writeup on my favorite current dark arts setup . 2 “Mr. Purdy received a 2025 bonus valued at $750,000, which was paid through the issuance of 8,638 restricted stock units (RSUs) under the Company’s 2021 Equity Incentive Plan in lieu of cash.”

NFLXNetflixNeutralNetflix

3/6/2026

The future of media free webinar $NFLX

Tl;dr: I’m doing a free, live webinar with AlphaSense’s director of TMT research on March 10th at 1 PM ET. We’ll be taking live questions from audience members, so it would be great if you can come join / discuss the future of media; if you’re interested, you can sign up here (a replay will also be available if you can’t make it live!). Long time readers will know that I’m not a full out media expert, but I’m a passionate follower of the industry. Media blends so many different things I love (storytelling, business, power, politics) in a way I find completely fascinating. And I’m obviously not alone: media’s cultural power far outstrips its economic size. Paramount’s (PSKY) enterprise value is ~$26B (per Bloomberg). To put that in perspective, the “real-time billionaires” list suggests that there are ~90 individuals in the world who are worth more than Paramount and makes Paramount far, far smaller than even boring businesses like grocery giant Kroger (KR, ~$65b EV) or toilet paper king Kimberly-Clark (KMB, ~$45B EV)…. but Paramount’s public presence and ability to shape news and culture (through movies, CBS news, talk shows, etc.) gives them cultural relevancy and political power in a way that KMB and KR could never dream. Yet Another Value Blog is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The media landscape has been dramatically shifting over the past ten years. The cable bundle was perhaps the greatest business ever invented, and it created a bunch of scaled winners in the media landscape with some of the strongest moats we’ve ever seen. The rise of streaming (and Netflix in particular) started to chip away at that bundle in the early 2010s; the market had its head in the sand about the model’s death for awhile until the infamous August 2015 earnings call when Disney noted they were seeing “some subscriber losses” at ESPN . Since then, basically every non-Netflix media stock has been a massive loser. That history is what makes the current moment so interesting (and serves as the inspiration for the webinar !). The story of the past ten years has been Netflix’s inexorable rise as they ate the lunch of literally every legacy media player. It didn’t matter what legacy media did: basically every legacy media player eventually launched their own streaming service, and we saw a wave of consolidation (after s plitting years earlier , Viacom and CBS recombined to eventually form Paramount, Disney bought Fox , Discovery bought Scripps and then Warner Brothers ) and nothing could slow Netflix or reverse the decline for the legacy media players. The stock chart tells the story nicely; over the past 10 years, Netflix stock zooms higher and smashes the indices, while the legacy players not only dramatically underperform the index but basically underperform cash over the same time period. That background sets the stage for why now is such a fascinating time for the media sector in general and this webinar in particular. We’re coming off the heels of one of the great bidding wars we’ve ever seen, with PSKY ultimately topping Netflix (and Comcast) to buy WBD for $31/share , a ~150% premium to WBD’s unaffected price 1 . The whole saga was fascinating, but it leaves more questions than answers. On the heels of this, I’d say Netflix has the most questions to answer. After stomping all over the legacy media sector for the past ten years, why did they suddenly decide to buy into the sector? Yes, I’m sure their scale meant a WBD deal may have been attractive, but Netflix is a company that has historically been averse to acquisitions. They had done only a handful of minor acquisitions in their entire history, and NFLX’s current co-CEO admitted that Netflix’s founder wa s “more in the build vs. buy mode” and “not an enthusiast about these kinds of deals.” It seems like a wild stretch to go from “we build things” to “let’s complete one of the largest acquisitions in history.” When Netflix looked at the playing field for the next ten years, why did they think they needed to buy now? Was it really just this deal made sense economically on its own? Or were they seeing signs of weakness in the core Netflix business that they thought they needed to address? Perhaps they thought the continued rise of AI might shift even more power to the most elite IP, something Netflix is woefully short on but WBD has in spades? Netflix also faced enormous political pushback in the wake of their announcement to buy WBD 2 . Did the amount of pushback Netflix faced reveal anything? Will it have any impact on Netflix’s strategy going forward? Then we turn to the “winner” of the WBD bidding war, Paramount. I use winner in quotes because Paramount faces the issue of the “ winner’s curse ” on steroids. First, history is not kind to companies that have purchased Time Warner. AOL, AT&T, and Discovery all bought Warner Brothers over the last twenty years. All ended up regretting the deal; AOL and Discovery took huge write downs on their deals, and T was eager to get out of the business . History is also not kind to companies that win media bidding wars; the best case outcome for a bidding war is undoubtedly Comcast buying Dreamworks (there were rumors Softbank or Hasbro were interested). Outside of that one example, it’s hard to find a single successful example of a media bidding war that ended well. Disney would probably do the Fox deal again despite some large write offs in the Indian operations, but, for every single other bidding war example that I can find or think of in media, the bidders would want happily take a mulligan if given the chance. Comcast wrote down >20% of the purchase price of Sky , Amazon paid $8.5B for MGM and still hasn’t gotten a Bond movie of their own, and the 90s were rife with media overpays that ended up destroying companies (ironically, Viacom nearly destroyed themselves buying Paramount in the mid 90s). The newly combined Paramount / Warner Brothers will face lots of questions. Chief among them: how do they avoid the fate of Warner Brothers Discovery before them? Warner Brothers’ finances were a mess when Discovery merged with them , and the WBD team had to focus on generating cash to the exclusion of basically everything else in order to service their debt post-merger . Paramount is suggesting they can find $6B of synergies in the merger; that’s an enormous number that’s almost equal to WBD’s standalone EBITDA. I don’t doubt Paramount can find that much cost to cut; the question is whether they can do it without impacting the core business.. There, I’m not so sure! There are interesting questions for the other standalone players on the heels of this bid as well. Comcast made a bid for WBD, though I don’t think it stood a chance given its structure, but the standalone NBCU looks awful small when you put it up against Netflix, PSKY / WBD, or Disney. What’s plan B for them when it comes to the media business? What about Apple or Amazon? They’re both burning a lot of money on their video businesses to varying degrees of success; are they happy to have their services be nice supplements to the main players, or do they want to think about buying someone else and turning these into real businesses? How about poor Versant? No one caught more strays than Versant during the WBD / NFLX / PSKY bidding, as PSKY would basically mock the VSNT’s assets and valuation at every turn. With the playing field generally set, what does that poor company do as it looks to stand on its own two feet? The other really interesting angle on the heels of this bidding war is what is going to happen to sports rights for a bunch of the leagues. The headliner here has to be the NFL (of course). I’m not sure people are ready for how crazy the numbers might get for the next set of NFL rights. Right now, the majority of NFL rights are carried on CBS (Sunday AFC games), Fox (Sunday NFC games), NBC (Sunday night), and ESPN (Monday night)… though ESPN shares with ABC quite a bit. I’m not sure if ESPN and Fox have a reason to exist without the NFL at this point; yes, I know ESPN has some baseball and the basketball package, but just look at their programming. Football is the draw and they know it. If ESPN doesn’t have football games, does that channel even work anymore? And Fox’s lineup is basically the Masked Singer, some Gordon Ramsey shows, and football; if they lose football, what do they have to go to affiliates or distributors and say “this is why you need us.” So that’s two bidders who will face an existential crisis without the NFL…. and honestly I think CBS and NBC are not far behind! How wild are the bids going to be if two of the four bidders have their literal business on the line when it comes to keeping a package? And then consider new bidders: Amazon s eems to be getting the stride of running NFL games and pretty pleased with how the NFL is performing for them ; would they want to come in for a package? Netflix continues to say they don’t want to do full league schedules , but they also said they’d never do ads , and their Christmas day NFL games were a hit . Honestly, I could go on and on. I find the absolute implosion of RSNs fascinating, the non-NFL / NBA sports leagues face very interesting futures, short form videos impact on media is still being felt, and I would not be surprised if AI content kills off some genres of media in much the same way Farmville may have killed soap operas . Lots to talk about. I’ll see you for the webinar on Tuesday 1 And honestly the premium is bigger once you add in the break fee PSKY covered WBD paying to NFLX. 2 Netflix continues to say it was “completely normal” pushback, but I would suggest that’s poppycock