u/ekonixlab

I’ve done a full 180 on Meta Muse. Been using it, and it’s pretty nuts.

It reminded me about bills I needed to pay and makes it clear what needs my attention and what it can handle. I don’t have to keep asking how it can help.

But the bigger point is Meta keeps finding ways to get people using its products, then turning that attention into money.

Automating online shopping feels like another opportunity. If Meta takes a small cut of purchases, it could make money by handling things people already need to do.

People question Meta’s spending, but figuring out adoption and monetization is something I’m increasingly reluctant to bet against.

Every AI release comes with another chart showing how it beats the competition. A little better here, slightly worse there. How much of that actually changes the user experience?

That said, I think Google is moving in the right direction. Based on its published results, the new model looks particularly strong at research and complex business tasks. The launch seems aimed heavily at enterprise customers willing to pay for that work.

Coding looks more mixed, and getting developers to switch from Claude or Codex could be a challenge. A better benchmark score alone probably won’t do it.

For a while, I thought Anthropic and OpenAI could become the Visa and Mastercard of AI. Now I’m less convinced this ends up being a two-company race.

My bet is that Google comes out ahead commercially. It may never have the best model in every category, but I think it’s positioned to turn AI into revenue and improve its existing business better than almost anyone. Meta is my other favorite on that front.

Google already has the chips, infrastructure, research teams, and products to put AI in front of enormous numbers of users. It also has an established business to fund that investment.

That doesn’t guarantee it wins. Distribution only helps if the products are useful, and being an established company doesn’t mean you’ll execute well.

I think Anthropic and OpenAI can build profitable businesses too. But Google doesn’t need everyone to switch to Gemini for its AI investment to pay off. Better Search, better advertising, and more valuable business software could be enough.

Are we putting too much weight on who wins the benchmarks and too little on who can turn the technology into profits?

I pulled data on ~200 large companies and used AI to test which 10-year business fundamentals had the strongest correlation with 10-year total stock returns.

I used Pearson correlation, which ranges from -1 to +1:

• +1 = strong positive relationship
• 0 = little to no linear relationship
• -1 = strong negative relationship

Results:

• Operating Profit Growth: 0.62
• Operating Earnings Growth: 0.61
• EBITDA Growth: 0.60
• Gross Profit Growth: 0.59
• Adjusted Net Income Growth: 0.58
• EPS Growth: 0.55
• Revenue Growth: 0.52
• Operating Cash Flow Growth: 0.52
• Unlevered Free Cash Flow Growth: 0.43
• Average ROIC: 0.16

The biggest takeaway for me was how consistently growth metrics had a stronger relationship with long-term returns than return-on-capital metrics

Operating profit growth had the strongest correlation, but gross profit, EPS, revenue and cash flow growth were all much stronger than ROIC.

That doesn’t mean ROIC doesn’t matter. High ROIC can be a sign of a very good business. But high returns on capital without growth don’t necessarily translate into great stock returns.

Correlation also doesn’t mean causation. Valuation, margins, dilution, dividends, acquisitions and starting point all matter

But this makes me think the long-term formula may be simpler than people make it:

Find companies that can sustainably grow earnings and cash flow, then figure out whether you’re paying a reasonable price for that growth

AppLovin is suing Unity because it claims Unity was collecting data from AppLovin-served ads through software sitting inside the same apps.

The interesting part isn’t really the lawsuit.

It’s why Unity would want that data in the first place.

AppLovin has access to ad performance data across a massive network of different apps.

• What ads work
• Who responds to them
• What advertisers are willing to pay
• Which users actually convert

That data feeds AXON and makes the system smarter.

And unlike a company that relies on one app or website, AppLovin’s data is spread across thousands of apps and advertisers.

So my takeaway is pretty simple:

Unity trying to get more visibility into AppLovin’s ad data may actually be evidence of how valuable that data is.

The moat isn’t just the AI model.

The moat is the massive amount of proprietary data feeding it.

And AppLovin clearly thinks that data is worth protecting.

FICO dropped ~26% today after one of the biggest threats to its moat became very real.

For decades, FICO was basically the toll booth of mortgage lending. If you wanted to sell a mortgage to Fannie or Freddie, you needed a FICO score.

That is changing.

Lenders can now use VantageScore 4.0 for eligible loans, Rocket Mortgage is making it its preferred score, and VantageScore is being offered for as little as $0.99.

So why wouldn’t everyone switch?

I think this is where FICO’s REAL moat gets tested.

It’s not the algorithm.

It’s trust.

Lenders have decades of FICO data. Their underwriting, risk models and historical loan performance are all built around it.

AI will make it much easier to integrate VantageScore, compare models and change underwriting systems.

But AI can’t magically create 30 years of real world mortgage performance.

If VantageScore proves over time that it’s just as reliable, I think it takes meaningful market share and FICO loses a lot of its pricing power.

If lenders decide decades of FICO data and familiarity are worth paying for, FICO’s moat may be stronger than people think.

One other thing bothers me about this whole situation:

The cost of a credit score is TINY compared with the cost of buying a house.

If regulators really want to make housing transactions cheaper, I’d much rather see continued pressure on real estate broker and agent fees.

Paying a percentage of the value of a $500k, $750k or $1M asset simply because that’s historically how the industry worked has always seemed ridiculous to me.

Competition for FICO is good.

But there are much bigger costs in a real estate transaction worth attacking.

**EDIT: NOW DOWN ALMOST 30%!!

FICO is getting crushed after FHFA announced plans to incorporate VantageScore into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s mortgage pricing framework.

Rocket Mortgage already says it will prefer VantageScore for eligible loans.

My bigger question: how quickly will other lenders follow? And how much pricing power does FICO lose along the way?

Starting to look like a buying opportunity to me… but only if that moat holds.

Overreaction or a real change in the business?

Jensen is buying back shares while Nvidia is trading around 29x trailing earnings and still growing revenue around 65%.

Period	Revenue Growth	Stock Move
2018	~40%	~$3
2020	Negative	~$13
2021	~50–60%	~$32
2022	Near 0%	~$12
2023–24	100%+	AI boom
Today	~65%	~$229

• In 2018, Nvidia was growing revenue around 40% and traded below 20x earnings.
• Revenue growth then decelerated for years and eventually went negative.
• Yet the stock still went from roughly $3 in 2018 to $13 by 2020.
• Revenue then reaccelerated to 50–60%, and the stock ran to around $32 before crashing back near $12 in 2022.
• Then AI hit. Revenue growth exploded above 100%, and the stock took off.
• Today, revenue growth has already slowed back to around 65%. It will keep slowing at some point.
• But Nvidia has always been cyclical. Growth accelerates, slows, sometimes turns negative, and then comes back.
• The stock also moves before the revenue does. It prices what investors think is coming next, not what just happened.

That’s why I like Nvidia buying back shares here.

Around 29x earnings while still growing revenue ~65% is not an absurd price historically for this company.

Growth will slow. The stock could fall. Neither automatically means Nvidia is expensive today.

Zoom out and Nvidia’s growth comes in waves, but the business and stock have continued moving higher over time.

I love the buyback here.

I had a post a few days ago about how long term revenue growth drives stock price.

This is the Mag 7 Revenue Growth vs Stock Performance.

Couple things stand out to me…

Forward 3-Year Revenue Growth vs. P/E of Companies In My Portfolio.

One of These Stands Out...

Apple isn’t the flashy growth story it once was, but that doesn’t mean the returns are over.

Strong cash flow + consistent buybacks can still be a powerful formula for shareholders.

I think Apple can keep compounding for a long time.

The goal of Ekonix is simple: help investors understand what they actually own.

• Hear about a stock from a friend? Check the numbers.
• See a company taking off? Verify it yourself.
• Building long-term wealth? Understand what you’re buying first.

Ekonix is meant to be a simple, low-cost way to research companies, focus on what actually matters, and make your own decisions.

Try it free for 7 days. Then $4.99/month. One better investment decision can pay for it many times over.

Ekonix 2.0 is a big step toward that.

Ekonix Investor Tracker — iOS
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ekonix-investor-tracker/id6755345408

I’ve been thinking about my portfolio more lately.

Right now about 65% is in 4 stocks:

Google - 19.6%
Mastercard - 16.2%
Amazon - 15.0%
Meta - 14.2%

I’m fine being concentrated. I’d rather own a smaller number of great businesses than diversify just to diversify.

But 65% in 4 names is probably a little too much, especially since I already have a lot of exposure to advertising through Google, Meta and Reddit.

I still want the same type of companies:

• High growth
• Durable
• Strong moat
• Long runway

A couple I’ve been looking at are FICO and Intuitive Surgical.

FICO obviously has a lot of pressure around it right now, but I still don’t really see it going anywhere. The bigger question is how much pricing power they keep.

Intuitive Surgical looks like an incredible business, but I don’t know the company that well yet and I’ve never loved investing in healthcare.

I also already own ASML, so I’m not really looking to add another semiconductor company just for diversification.

I think I’d like to eventually get the top 4 closer to 50–55%, mostly by adding to other positions rather than selling these down.

What companies would you look at that actually add diversification without sacrificing growth or quality?

Made the portfolio chart in Ekonix, an app I built:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ekonix-investor-tracker/id6755345408

Adobe reported another solid quarter:

Revenue: $6.76B vs. $6.70B expected
Beat by ~$60M

Adjusted EPS: $6.13 vs. $6.09 expected
Beat by $0.04

Revenue growth: +13% YoY
EPS growth: +15% YoY

They also raised full-year guidance, while AI-first ARR grew 150%+ YoY.

And yet the stock initially sold off after earnings.

The main concern seems to be slightly light Q4 revenue guidance, plus the same broader fear around AI disrupting Adobe.

But zoom out.

Since 2017:

Revenue: $6.9B → ~$25B
16.0% CAGR

Net income: $1.6B → ~$7.2B
18.9% CAGR

Net income has actually grown faster than revenue.

Adobe keeps growing, keeps beating expectations, and is still putting up double-digit growth.

Yet the stock is valued like the business is falling apart.

I understand the AI concerns, but I keep coming back to the same question:

Is Adobe actually deteriorating, or has the narrative gotten way worse than the business?

Looking at this chart, I’m having a hard time seeing a dying company.

Chart made in Ekonix:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ekonix-investor-tracker/id6755345408

Controversial take:

Maybe the sudden push to slow AI development isn't regulatory capture.

Maybe these guys are realizing they're in over their heads.

For years, some of the people at the center of AI have talked about what they're building in almost religious terms.

Former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever reportedly had employees chanting:

“Feel the AGI.”

Employees described him as behaving almost like a spiritual leader. At one OpenAI retreat, he reportedly burned a wooden effigy representing an unaligned AI.

Dario Amodei has described the future as essentially a “country of geniuses in a data center.”

There has always been this strange god-like undertone to the AI race:

We're going to create intelligence greater than ourselves.

It could cure disease.

Transform the economy.

Maybe even completely reshape humanity.

And we're going to be the ones who build it.

But now something has changed.

Amodei is openly saying AI development needs to slow because AI could begin advancing faster than humans can understand or control it.

Sam Altman is talking about pacing development.

Elon Musk agrees.

Thousands of employees across the frontier labs have now supported preparing for a slowdown.

Maybe they aren't seeing God.

Maybe they're staring at increasingly powerful systems they don't fully understand and realizing:

“Holy shit. We might actually not know what we're doing.”

And that's the part I find fascinating as an investor.

We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on GPUs, data centers and power based on the assumption that this race keeps accelerating.

What happens if the people leading the race are the ones who decide it's moving too fast?

I'm extremely bullish on AI long term.

But watching the people closest to the technology suddenly reach for the brakes definitely makes me pay attention.

Revenue growth matters a lot over the long term.

You can hide weak growth for a year or two with margin expansion, buybacks, or multiple expansion.

You can’t really hide it over 10 years.

This chart has slightly changed how I think about investing. I used to focus primarily on free cash flow + earnings growth. I’m increasingly putting revenue growth closer to the top of the list.

For the top-quartile S&P 500 performers in this study, revenue growth became a larger and larger driver of shareholder returns as the holding period increased:

1 year: 29% revenue growth
3 years: 50%
5 years: 58%
10 years: 74%

Meanwhile, multiple expansion accounted for just 5% over 10 years.

That doesn’t mean valuation doesn’t matter. Obviously it does. But it reinforces something I’ve increasingly come to believe:

I’d rather own a great company growing revenue at a high rate that’s slightly expensive than a cheap company that isn’t growing much.

Over a long enough period, the business itself has to do the heavy lifting.

I built Ekonix to help analyze companies around things like revenue growth, earnings, valuation, and fundamentals.
200+ downloads so far:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ekonix-investor-tracker/id6755345408

I was looking through David Abrams’ Q2 2026 portfolio and one position immediately jumped out.

Loar Holdings (LOAR) is 47.1% of his reported 13F.

For context:

LOAR — 47.1%
Lithia Motors — 13.2%
Google — 8.9%
Somnigroup — 8.3%
Asbury Automotive — 7.9%

The top 5 make up roughly 85% of the portfolio.

I had barely looked at LOAR before this, so naturally I went down the rabbit hole.

What is LOAR?

Loar is an aerospace & defense components company. Think somewhat like a smaller, acquisition-focused TransDigm.

They make things like:

Aircraft seat belts and airbags
Brake components
Sensors and switches
Ice protection systems
Lighting
Latches and other specialized aircraft parts

What really caught my attention is the business model:

~89% of sales are proprietary products
~55% of revenue comes from aftermarket
Q2 revenue grew 39%
Organic growth was ~12%
Adjusted EBITDA margins are ~40%
They have completed 18 acquisitions

Proprietary parts + recurring aftermarket revenue + acquisitions can be a pretty powerful combination.

And Abrams putting nearly half of his reported portfolio into LOAR is pretty wild considering Google and Meta combined are only around 12%.

Obviously a 13F doesn’t show his entire portfolio, and a huge position doesn’t automatically mean LOAR is cheap today.

But this is definitely one I’m going to dig into more.

Anyone here own LOAR or follow the company?

Join Ekonix, an iOS stock analysis platform I built and use myself, now with 200+ downloads:

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Tough quarter for $LULU.

This is starting to look less like a temporary slowdown and more like an actual market-share problem.

• Revenue: $2.42B, down 4% YoY and below estimates
• Americas revenue: down 8%
• Comparable sales: down 9%
• Americas comps: down 12%
• Operating income: down 13%
• Full-year revenue guidance cut to $10.35B–$10.50B
• Q3 guidance calls for another 10–11% revenue decline

The scary part is Lululemon isn’t just growing slower anymore. Revenue is actually declining, comps are falling double digits in the Americas, and it looks like competitors are taking share.

Look at the revenue chart. Years of basically uninterrupted growth, and now it has rolled over.
Yikes.

The stock is obviously way cheaper than it used to be, but the narrative has completely flipped. It’s going to take more than one decent quarter to change that. I’d want to see comps stabilize and real evidence they’re taking share again before getting interested.

Join Ekonix, an iOS stock analysis platform I built and use myself, now with 200+ downloads: Check out Ekonix on the App Store.

I’m still firmly in the camp that Nike isn’t a great investment here, even after the stock getting crushed.

The biggest issue for me isn’t just that growth has slowed — it genuinely feels like Nike is losing market share.

Look at running. Hoka, On, Brooks, ASICS, etc. are eating Nike’s lunch. Go to any running club or race and Nike doesn’t have anywhere near the dominance you’d expect from the biggest athletic brand in the world.

And the financial profile isn’t exactly amazing enough to ignore that:

Footwear revenue has basically gone nowhere for years

Apparel growth is minimal

Converse has been demolished

It’s a relatively low-margin physical-product business

Competition is only getting stronger

Nike is obviously an incredible brand, and I’m sure they can stabilize the business.

But great company ≠ great investment.

For me to get interested, I’d need to see actual evidence that Nike is taking share back and returning to durable growth. I don’t want to buy it just because the stock is cheaper than it used to be.

Right now, it looks more like a mature company losing ground to hungrier competitors.

Curious if people see Nike as a turnaround opportunity or a value trap.

Join Ekonix, the iOS stock analysis platform I built and use myself, now with 200+ downloads:
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RDDT ripped almost 10% today, and this is exactly why I thought that selloff was such a good buying opportunity.

Remember when the stock dropped because there were reports Reddit was renegotiating its data licensing deals with Google/OpenAI?

The market basically treated “negotiating” like Reddit was about to lose the revenue.

I saw it completely differently.

Reddit has one of the largest collections of real human conversations on the internet. Google/OpenAI obviously want that data. Reddit had the leverage and wasn’t just going to give it up for nothing.

Now the narrative is starting to flip back around and people are realizing these renewals could actually be a positive.
Meanwhile, the actual business just keeps growing.

TTM revenue has gone from roughly $800M → $2.8B, with a ~64% CAGR in the chart above.

RDDT is insanely volatile.

The business isn’t.

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ADSK is around 32x earnings today.

If EPS compounds at 15% annually over the next 5 years and the stock trades around 35x earnings at the end:

5-year return: ~120%
CAGR: ~17.1%

And 15% EPS growth doesn’t seem particularly aggressive given Autodesk’s recurring revenue, margins, and historical growth.

I’m starting to like the setup here. The biggest question is whether 35x earnings in year 5 is too generous.

Join Ekonix, an iOS stock analysis platform I built and use myself, now with 200+ downloads: Check out Ekonix on the App Store