Incremental Insights #8

How Starbucks Devalued Its Own Brand

Starbucks is losing its soul!

Declining sales, vanishing comfy chairs, and shifting towards efficiency over experience erode its brand. Can a return to its roots and a focus on authentic, in-person experiences save it?

Buyback Barometer

The winners and losers of S&P 500 buybacks.

From Apple's $110B repurchase to GM's new $6B buyback, which companies are adding value and which are falling short. Considering dividends as another option and a company’s cost of capital.

Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit

Different viewpoints on how much economic impact all the AI capex spend will actually have? Picks and shovels of AI are still the favorite themes for AI Capex and how power generation growth will be the next major theme of AI build-out.

CoreWeave’s CSO on the Business of Building AI Datacenters (Podcast)

How does their business actually work? How do they get energy? Where do they locate operations? How are they financed? What's the difference between a cloud AI and a legacy cloud?

Coatue’s Laffont on AI Darlings and Opportunities in Today’s Markets

Philippe Lafont talks with David Rubenstein about AI and investment opportunities, his career, how he came to America, and how working for free at a small mutual fund got him his entry to Julian Robertson’s Tiger Fund.

And a tweet summary of the key points from the interview

Incremental Insights #22

Cash! Is Warren Buffett bracing for a market downturn? Berkshire Hathaway's cash reserves have swelled to over $300 billion, sparking widespread speculation. However, this massive cash pile might not be purely bearish positioning. Instead, it's likely a consequence of Buffett's extraordinarily successful Apple investment.

Why Chris Hohn & TCI Own GE Aerospace

Chris Hohn runs the multi-billion dollar hedge fund The Children's Investment Fund (TCI). As of 2022, the fund generated annualized returns of over 18%. In 2023, TCI's return soared to 32.7%. TCI achieves these impressive returns by focusing on a select few great businesses with

Incremental Insights #21

The Ten Best Companies in the World From Visa's global dominance to Hermès' luxury legacy, the 10 powerhouse companies reshaping the business landscape and what makes them the 10 best global companies. Pricing Power Everywhere Companies with pricing power have significantly outperformed the broad market over long

From MTV to Mammograms: Unexpected Lessons in Risk Management

In 2020, former MTV VJ Ananda Lewis announced that she had stage 3 breast cancer. She discovered the tumor during a self-examination not through a regularly scheduled mammogram. She revealed after her diagnosis that she had actively avoided mammograms, despite having a family history of breast cancer. Her reason? She