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Equity & Macro Commentary, Technology Investing
Reddit carries Pinterest-like downside to a 10x P/E if investors decide North American user growth is toast, while the stock is priced on everyone playing for big numbers from new lab deals. x.comÂ
Social media stocks look worth buying because they trade at a discount while people stay hooked on social media. Usage is now a permanent part of life that cannot be taken away, contrary to @CryptoDan007's prediction that it will come to be seen as a low-class pastime. That makes Meta, Reddit, Pinterest and Snap all candidates to buy. x.com x.comÂ
Pinterest looks cheap until you account for its stock-based compensation. x.comÂ
Snap is in a bad position when Pinterest is now the better business of the two. x.comÂ
AI agents will reprice anything priced per human decision, so rails like identity and payments beat the persuasion, and the repricing has barely started. Click pricing compresses as agents take over sessions; transaction take rates hold. Search ads carry most risk, as Alphabet prices agent-shaped queries per human click; AppLovin and The Trade Desk are riskiest. Amazon and Walmart own the transaction, Meta, Snap and Pinterest feeds are safer than bears think, and Tencent's WeChat is best placed. … Show more
Pinterest's valuation looks capped near term as growth decelerates, until international monetization scales faster to offset ad budget sensitivity. Q2 beat on both lines, with revenue up 18% to $1.18 billion and monthly active users at a record 640 million, but Q3 guidance of $1.19-1.21 billion implies only 13-15% growth. Shares fell 10% after hours; buybacks offer long-term per-share support. x.comÂ
The social-media selloff looks way overblown, because AI makes these companies leaner and more profitable rather than disrupting them. Reddit is the clearest case at about 24x forward EV/FCF with 91% gross margins and 52% growth, despite being down 44.6% this year; Pinterest is down 32.2%. Meta's capex draws bear cases, but forward revenue growth of 30-33% at about 17x forward earnings shows that spending is delivering ROI. These are buys, held with some confusion. x.comÂ
Reddit should have a huge 2027. It is a better company than Pinterest both fundamentally and technically, as its financials show. x.com x.com x.comÂ
Agentic commerce is a bloodbath for online middlemen because AI agents that buy on a user's behalf skip the steps these companies monetize. No Google ad gets clicked, no Pinterest board gets scrolled and nobody opens Booking.com; the agent just buys the thing. Year to date, The Trade Desk is down 66%, Chewy 44%, Pinterest 31% and Booking 23%. x.comÂ
PayPal is a low-switching-cost, low-moat business headed for secular decline as payment fees race to the bottom. In 2021 it wanted to buy Pinterest for $45B; now Stripe reportedly wants to buy it for $53B. Stripe is probably the best suitor by far, as a good tuck-in acquisition. x.com x.comÂ