If you asked me to do the type of consumer research that Peter Lynch describes in One Up On Wall Street, I’d just look down at the apps I use most (which I’ve done a few times before), and so that’s why I’m a bit embarassed to admit that we haven’t even looked at the business behind the app I use most: Spotify.

(Almost) Everyone agrees Spotify is a great product, but investors can’t decide if it’s a great business because Spotify isn’t a typical software company where gross margins can expand dramatically as revenue scales.

Instead, it’s an audio platform built on licensed content, and the suppliers who own that content are about as powerful as suppliers get. Meaning that, for the entirety of Spotify’s existence, the company has faced capped margins, yielding rather modest profit margins for a β€œtech giant”.

Lately, though, the story has started to change. Operating margins have finally inflected upward in a real way.

So, as always, let’s build a mental model of what Spotify is, why it exists, where value accrues, and what needs to be true for the stock to be attractive from here.

β€” Shawn

The Intrinsic Value Conference in Omaha

Hotel Indigo

We are very excited to announce that on Friday, May 1st, Daniel and I will host an event we’re calling β€œThe Intrinsic Value Conference” in Omaha during the Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Weekend. We’ll give a special stock pitch presentation followed by a Q&A session and a private dinner for members of The Intrinsic Value Community on Saturday.

In addition to the VIP Spots for members, a limited number of free spots for the conference will be available on a first-come, first-served basis (make sure to arrive early to claim a spot!)

Being in Omaha last year was a fantastic experience, but the best part has been connecting with some of you. With this event and social hour, we hope to meet many more and get to know you better in person!

The conference is at Hotel Indigo in downtown Omaha from 1-4 pm local time on Friday, May 1st.

Hope to see ya there!

Who’s the Bigger Winner: Spotify or the Music Labels?

Spotify’s value proposition to users is obvious to anyone who has ever used it. The company took the world’s catalog of music and put it at your fingertips, available to stream as much as you want, whenever you want, either for free with ads or for a modest subscription fee that is still, in my opinion, one of the best-value subscriptions for entertainment on the internet.

What’s less obvious, and what drives the entire investment debate, is that the music industry is a market with a significant amount of β€œsupplier power.” While Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb run marketplaces where they tower over the individuals and small-to-medium-sized businesses that supply their platforms (e-commerce brands, drivers, and hosts, respectively), Spotify doesn’t tower over its supply partners.

In fact, the music industry is a market dominated by a small group of music labels that control most of the world’s rights, as we learned when we studied Universal Music Group a few months ago, and those labels have had the leverage to dampen Spotify’s earnings power ever since the company’s inception.

Spotify’s Gross Margins are closely tied to the cost of music royalties

This is why Spotify’s bull case isn’t β€œSpotify wins music.” Music is broadly licensed, meaning a ceiling on margins. The bull case is that Spotify uses music as the foundation of its business, then layers higher-margin monetization on top, through advertising, marketplace-style promotion tools for artists and labels, and expansion into podcasts and audiobooks, where the economics can be structurally better than music streaming.

The bear case is the opposite. Spotify stays trapped as a low-margin licensing intermediary while competitors like Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet bundle music at cost to sell something of greater priority for them (Apple products, Amazon Prime memberships, YouTube Premium subscriptions, etc.).

When a core product becomes a loss leader inside a bundle, it’s difficult to compete if your whole business is that product, as music is for Spotify, whereas music is a secondary focus for the companies mentioned above. In other words, Spotify is a roughly $100 billion company, but it’s fighting companies with multi-trillion-dollar valuations.

And yet, despite those threats, Spotify has been resilient, which tells you specialization matters. Spotify isn’t distracted by iPhones, e-commerce logistics, or user-generated video feeds. Instead, it can obsess over purely audio, though the lines start to blur as Spotify increasingly bakes video into its platform, from music-video excerpts on songs to watchable podcasts (like Daniel’s and mine!).

How Spotify Made Stealing Feel Stupid

Spotify’s story only makes sense when you remember what the music industry looked like before streaming.

In the late 90s, recorded music was a high-margin physical distribution business. Then the internet blew the doors off scarcity, as platforms like Napster and Limewire made it easy to get music for free.

As the industry clung to its old business models, many consumers embraced digital piracy because downloading an MP3 online didn’t feel as β€œwrong” as taking a $20 CD from a store. The industry tried lawsuits and enforcement, but you can’t litigate your way back to scarcity when the marginal cost of copying a song is effectively zero.

Apple’s iTunes, then, was a temporary bridge. It made digital music purchases legal and simple, and it helped unbundle albums into tracks, but it still assumed ownership of music would remain the status quo.

iTunes Store

Streaming, however, was a truly internet-native model that flipped the industry upside down. It replaced ownership with unlimited access and made sampling free, helping music discovery become as frictionless as ever, which expanded per-capita music consumption. Streaming drove the rebound in music-industry revenues in the 2010s, but only after years of decline due to piracy in the 2000s:

Streaming was so good, in fact, that it made piracy taboo again, not through fear, but by making the legal product better than stealing.

That was Spotify’s mission from day one, as outlined by the company’s founder, Daniel Ek, who we should talk about next.

Daniel Ek, EldsjΓ€l, And The Chicken-And-Egg Problem

On our podcast, Daniel asked me about a Swedish word Daniel Ek uses as his Twitter handle: eldsjΓ€l (pronounced β€œELD-shael”), which translates roughly to β€œfiery soul.” It’s a word about perseverance, and it fits Ek, because Spotify wasn’t built by politely asking the industry for permission. It was built by outcompeting piracy while convincing the rights holders that the best way to survive was to participate in his vision.

Spotify was founded in Stockholm by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon with the formidable challenge of creating a service that’s better than piracy while still compensating the industry fairly.

They helped pioneer the freemium model we all know so well now, creating a massive top-of-funnel with almost no friction. As in, suddenly, millions of people (top of the funnel) could access music on the go, for free, while creating an opportunity to better monetize the most passionate/wealthiest fans with premium, ad-free subscriptions (bottom of the funnel) who didn’t want to be bothered with ads and wanted to listen to exact tunes on demand.

So while this was disruptive, Spotify couldn’t have emerged without the music industry’s blessing. As is still true today, the three major music labels control the majority of recorded music rights, and thus, can pull their music off any new (or existing) platforms as they see fit. We saw this come to fruition a few years ago when Universal pulled Taylor Swift’s music off of TikTok over copyright & monetization concerns.

Spotify had to convince labels of the opportunity, and one of the more effective ways to do that was by allowing labels to invest directly in Spotify early on, giving them skin in the game and aligning incentives. If one of the music label giants (Universal, Sony, and Warner) had objected, then Spotify would’ve had to launch a platform without many of the world’s most popular songs and artists…which would make Spotify a lot less competitive with piracy!

This is why the popular narrative that β€œSpotify exploits artists” is inherently incomplete. There’s a separate debate about how labels split royalties with artists and what β€œfair” should mean, but Spotify isn’t operating against the industry; it’s intertwined with it and always has been.

Is Music a Commodity?

On the surface, there’s a good argument for music streaming being a commodity. Press play, and you hear a song, with streaming platforms effectively all having the same catalog of music available.

But Spotify’s stickiness comes from everything around the song. For me, the cost of switching from Spotify is emotional as much as it is functional, since I have years’ worth of playlists hosted on Spotify corresponding with different phases of my life.

Beyond that nostalgia, which may not be as impactful an argument for others, Spotify’s recommendation system is what makes the product so sticky. It blends your habits with broader listener behavior and has become extremely good at discovery, and as alluded to, it has LOTS of data on what you have enjoyed listening to at various times in your life. Honestly, much of the music I listen to today didn’t come from friends but rather from Spotify’s suggestions, AI DJ, and its autoplay feature that recommends similar music after your selected playlist or album has finished playing through.

Spotify has also been great at turning data into marketing via Spotify Wrapped. Every December, my Instagram becomes awash with Stories showing off people’s eclectic music tastes, as reported in good humor by Spotify. Beneath the surface, wrapped is a viral moment that turns users into advertisers on Spotify’s behalf in a way that feels like self-expression.

And then there’s Spotify’s hardware agnosticism. Translation: Spotify is everywhere, no matter what device you’re using, from iPhone to laptop, your car, smart TV, or smart watch, Spotify (mostly!) works very well.

As obvious as that sounds, streaming competitors that sell hardware have incentives to optimize performance inside their product ecosystem (Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon), while Spotify optimizes for ubiquity.

This is why I think specialization has benefited Spotify, because for people who treat music as a form of companion media β€” something that follows along with them almost no matter what they’re doing β€” you need a music streaming app that’s available across as many devices as you may use on a daily basis. As you switch between playing music through Apple Play in your car, your Alexa at home, and on your Samsung phone at the gym, knowing that the Spotify app will work as expected and is synced up across devices is a subtle but important point.

Two Business Engines, One Constraint

Spotify’s business model is simple to understand, geared around two engines, with one of the two doing significantly more of the heavy lifting.

Premium subscriptions drive about 90% of revenue. Advertising drives the other 10%, as the Robin to Premium’s Batman. Yet, of Spotify’s 750 million monthly active users, around 290 million are premium subscribers, and 460 million are free users (supported by ads).

The free tier is the top of the funnel, as mentioned. It expands reach, reduces customer acquisition friction, and converts some portion of users over time as Spotify increases perceived value. People tend to become reliant on Spotify over time, hence why β€œperceived value” fluctuates.

And the free product is good enough that most users are happy to stay free, but the model still works because enough people are willing to pay to bypass ads, and evidently, this is where Spotify makes all its money.

The structural problem for Spotify’s profitability is royalties to artists and labels. Spotify isn’t a classic fixed-cost software business, because roughly 2/3 of every dollar in incremental revenue, whether from ads on music or premium subscriptions, has had to be paid out to music-rights holders.

So from a margin perspective, the business looks more like Uber, where growth carries high variable costs that don’t disappear with scale. In other words, there’s a ceiling on the gross margins that Spotify can achieve, limiting how β€œtech-like” the profit profile can become, as I touched on in the intro.

For most of the last decade, until recently (and just barely!), Spotify has had lower operating profit margins than Amazon, a business that requires enormous capex and labor costs to support its logistics empire. If you asked the average person which business should be more profitable, I’m going to guess 99 in 100 would say Spotify!

But also, that’s why Spotify’s recent margin inflection matters so much, because we’re finally starting to get an idea of how profitable this business can be after many years of losses as the business scaled.

Shown above, Spotify’s operating margin improved from roughly -5% in 2022 to nearly 13% in 2025. 13% is incredibly modest compared to the Mag 7, besides Amazon, but it does signal that scale is finally showing up in earnings, and that Spotify’s investments outside of pure music, like podcasts and audiobooks, are starting to contribute.

ARPU and the Pros & Cons of International Growth

Spotify has always had more pricing power than it has used, underlining investors’ debate over its earnings power. In most markets, Spotify went from 2011 to 2023 without any price hikes. Even today, U.S. pricing is only about 30% higher than it was 15 years ago, which means Spotify’s inflation-adjusted prices fell while the product improved.

Recently, Spotify has started taking price more aggressively in North America and Europe, but international expansion complicates the ARPU (average revenue per user) story. To gain traction in lower-income markets, Spotify prices lower. When you also consider the introduction of family and student plans, you can see why premium monthly ARPU fell from a peak of $6.84 to about $4.29 in 2021. Since then, after price increases globally, premium ARPU has grown again, compounding around 2% per year.

Monthly premium ARPU*

The geographic mix has shifted, too. The U.S. accounted for more than 60% of revenue in 2015, but now it’s less than 40%, even though the U.S. business grew roughly ninefold. International growth has simply been faster.

That growth also changed the premium mix. In 2019, more than 46% of users paid for Spotify, but today, it’s closer to 38%. Free user growth has therefore outpaced premium subscriber growth as more price-sensitive ex-U.S./Europe users embrace Spotify. On the bright side, assuming a larger percentage of these (mostly) emerging-market free users become paid subs over time, then you could argue that this is a leading indicator of Spotify’s future earnings power. In the short run, though, it’s very much a drag on Spotify’s unit economics, because free users don’t monetize well, and it still costs money to provide them music and a functional app.

Premium Subs as a % of Total Users Has Declined Largely Because of International Growth

For context, an ad-supported user generates less in an entire year than a paid subscriber generates in a month, on average. Across the freemium base, Spotify makes less than $4 per user per year. That’s partly because ads are worth less in emerging markets, but it’s also because Spotify isn’t one of the best places to advertise compared to Meta or Google. The targeting data is less rich, and audio ads can be interruptive.

Average ad-supported revenue per user annually*

So the business is subscription-driven, and the long-term earnings power depends on three things: Pricing, conversion, and higher-margin layers on top of music.

The Superfan Opportunity

Everyone values music, and correspondingly, Spotify’s service, differently. Some people would pay twice as much if they had to, and Spotify wants to capture that willingness-to-pay without blowing up churn across the broader base. That’s why they’ve experimented with the idea of a super-premium tier, offering perks like exclusive playlist tools and early access to tickets or album releases. For a while, people thought lossless audio would anchor that tier, but Spotify rolled it into standard premium, which suggests they’re still figuring out what β€œsuperfan” actually means in product terms.

Nevertheless, especially in North America and Europe, an opportunity remains to add a higher-priced premium tier, with the potential to significantly raise premium ARPUs. I’m still trying to wrap my head around why they haven’t done this yet, honestly, after talking about it for years. One thought is that Spotify is/was hoping to earn better margins on super-fan subscriptions, but the labels have protested (this is speculation).

Music β€”> Podcasts β€”> Audiobooks

Podcasts were phase one of Spotify’s expansion beyond music, and they pursued them in a splashy way. The $100m Joe Rogan exclusive deal in 2020 was…eye-popping, to say the least. The deeper strategy stems from podcasts expanding time spent on-platform and expanding ad inventory, while the unit economics can be better than music because podcast revenue isn’t constrained by the same royalty structure. There are no massive podcast labels demanding a cut.

It’s a subtle point, but premium users listen to music ad-free, yet podcasts aren’t ad-free for anyone. Spotify can monetize podcast listening through its ad network when shows opt in, and the revenue split on marketplace advertising can look closer to 50/50 with podcast hosts, rather than the two-thirds pass-through dynamic of music.

Spotify has also evolved its podcast strategy. It moved from trying to win through exclusives to trying to win by owning the creator toolchain, hosting, analytics, ad-tech, and marketplace products, so creators can grow and monetize efficiently on Spotify even if their show is available elsewhere. And bringing video podcast functionality onto Spotify is part of that shift, partly because YouTube has become a massive podcast platform (actually, the biggest!), and Spotify needed to meet creators where attention is going. P.S., you can β€˜watch’ The Intrinsic Value Podcast on Spotify each week!

Audiobooks are phase two, and they’re still early. Spotify’s catalog of English audiobooks grew from roughly 150,000 to roughly 400,000 titles since the premium audiobooks launch, and they introduced Audiobooks+, an $11.99 add-on that unlocks an additional 15 hours of audiobook listening each month on top of the 15 hours included in premium. Daniel and I both felt the packaging is off, though.

Having the hours that you paid for expire each month is frustrating and disappointing, and 15 hours isn’t enough for serious readers (listeners?), either. My wife, who averages 1-2 audiobooks a week, doesn’t even bother with listening on Spotify due to how limiting and expensive the hours are.

Interestingly, Spotify also partnered with Bookshop.org, so you can buy physical versions of books you’re listening to, and they have a Page Match feature that lets you jump between a physical page and the matching point in the audiobook. I’m skeptical this will be a meaningful revenue driver, especially when Amazon is much cheaper in the price comparisons I ran, but it’s still evidence that Spotify wants to use audio to bleed into broader consumption habits and even e-commerce.

Buying physical books on Spotify

Spotify’s page match feature. Admittedly, it’s super cool!

Spotify As a Marketplace

One of the more important and less appreciated parts of Spotify’s strategy is that it’s becoming more of a marketplace.

Spotify has a product called Campaign Kit inside Spotify for Artists that lets labels and artists pay* Spotify to promote music, new releases, targeted discovery, and sponsored recommendations.

*They don’t literally pay, but they accept reduced royalty rates on promoted streams in exchange for greater audience reach.

It’s similar to how sellers can pay Amazon to show up at the top of search results.

Spotify has to balance this carefully because too much paid promotion could dilute recommendation quality, but the opportunity is massive. Marketing budgets are large and recurring, and it’s one of the most direct ways Spotify can raise its gross-margins ceiling.

This also shifts leverage. If Spotify owns discovery, it influences what becomes popular, which gives it more negotiating power with labels over time. So, Spotify isn’t just distributing music, but rather, it’s increasingly a marketing channel.

Spotify has also been improving its free tier and its viability as a standalone product, which matters because the free tier is, as I’ve mentioned, the funnel through which Spotify earns 90% of its revenues. For example, they loosened the shuffle-only constraint on mobile with Pick & Play and Search & Play, allowing free listeners to search and start specific tracks. The concern is that if the free tier gets too good, that could cannibalize the premium tier, but for better or worse, Spotify is making the bet that strengthening the top of the funnel is worth it.

And with all that said, I’d be remiss in the year 2026 to not mention anything about AI!

On the pod, Daniel read a passage from Spotify’s Q4 call that still resonates with me about this. Spotify’s new co-CEO, Gustav SΓΆderstrΓΆm, argued that technology is rarely disruptive on its own. Disruption happens when technology enables new asymmetric business models, which is what Spotify did to recorded music using the internet, and what Uber did to taxis using the internet, GPS, and mobile phones.

So the key question with AI is whether it creates new business models, or if it mostly makes existing products better? Put differently, will we get new Spotifys and Ubers in the next 5 years that redefine society, or will AI help further entrench current tech giants?

If you think you know the answer, please let us know ;)

More seriously, SΓΆderstrΓΆm’s view is that in consumer-facing businesses, the dominant model will remain ads plus subscriptions, which is exactly where Spotify already operates. Therefore, the opportunity is to use AI to deepen engagement and build unique datasets.

But this is the part I found most interesting from the company’s latest earnings call: Spotify is building, in their view, a dataset that has never existed at this scale that bridges natural language requests to specific music, podcast, and audiobook recommendations. As in, there’s no factual answer to what β€œworkout music” is.

The answer to that largely depends on where you live. Hip hop is the common go-to workout music in North America, while heavy metal and EDM are stereotypically Scandinavians’ gym music of choice.

So, when someone asks for β€œGym Music” playlists, Spotify needs to take into account a whole lot of context about them to then determine the best playlist to recommend. That’s the unique dataset Spotify has and is building, where they benefit from having hundreds of millions of users constantly teaching the model what that phrase means for them.

Spotify’s Scariest Competitor

If I’m honest, Apple Music and Amazon Music don’t scare me the way they used to. For years, the narrative was that these giants could crush Spotify if they wanted to, but they’ve tried, and Spotify has held up. Both are tough competitors, but I don’t foresee either being able to existentially damage the bull thesis for $SPOT ( β–² 0.53% ).

YouTube, on the other hand, scares me because YouTube Music exists inside one of the most compelling bundles in consumer tech.

YouTube Premium includes YouTube Music, and the ad-free YouTube experience is so good that once you have it, it’s hard to go back. At least, that’s what Daniel keeps telling me (I’ve yet to pay to remove ads on YouTube, which is funny, because I can’t stand them on Netflix. Perhaps having used YouTube for free for nearly my entire life makes it hard for me to subconsciously justify paying for it.)

For how globally dominant YouTube is, I don’t think it’s an excessive exaggeration to say that YouTube might be one of the best products in the history of capitalism, rivaled by the iPhone.

This matters because Spotify’s future growth is expected to be increasingly international, and YouTube is incredibly popular in emerging markets. Nearly 500 million people use YouTube in India alone! And for price-sensitive consumers, the YouTube bundle can be compelling, especially when YouTube is already where their entertainment lives.

Personally, I’d rather pay a bit more to keep my Spotify subscription, and if I want ad-free YouTube, there’s a tier called Premium Lite that removes most ads but doesn’t bundle in YouTube Music.

But that difference of a couple of extra dollars a month in favor of Premium Lite + Spotify is almost certainly of more consequence to others worldwide! It’s a matter of personal preference and a luxury for me to be indifferent to the most affordable content bundles possible, yet that isn’t representative of music consumers globally and their propensity to spend…

It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, since we don’t know how many people who pay for YouTube Premium actually use it or also pay for Spotify on the side, but still, Spotify has about 290 million premium subscribers, while YouTube disclosed about 125 million β€œYouTube Music and Premium” subscribers last spring.

I’m absolutely certain that the 125 million number significantly overstates YouTube Music’s market share relative to Spotify, but that doesn’t change the reality that, in my opinion, YouTube is very well positioned to grow its YouTube Music and Premium offering in emerging markets as fast, or faster, than Spotify.

The important question from there is to ask: how can Spotify defend itself?

I see the answer largely boiling down to one word: Personalization. If Spotify keeps compounding its discovery engine, it can remain the highest-satisfaction music app, maintaining higher perceived value than competitors, even if YouTube wins some bundle shoppers. My takeaway from watching Apple and Amazon try to win with bundling is that music matters enough to people that many will keep a dedicated paid app/subscription to music if it’s truly better (this is where subjective opinions about Spotify come into play).

Perhaps I’m naive, but while YouTube is the competitor I’m watching closest, I still think that the pure-play company with the most unadulterated focus on music/audio will perform the best at generating the highest perceived value among users, and correspondingly, maintain its market share as the music-consumption pie grows dramatically overall.

Valuation & Portfolio Decision

As we bring it altogether to try and ponder a fair value to pay for Spotify shares, I see the biggest question as being what level of normalized profitability Spotify can achieve?

We’ve already discussed why Spotify’s margins will never look like a pure software company, but it reminds me of Uber in that you have an incredibly valuable ecosystem restrained by a variable cost structure, and then suddenly, as scale and pricing power and maybe even some operational discipline kick in, margins begin to expand faster than the market expected.

In other words, I don’t think it’s tremendously difficult to extrapolate forward Spotify’s growth and guesstimate how many users they’ll have in 5-10 years from now. The harder question, to me, is determining how profitable the business would be at that scale. 18% operating margins? 25%? Perhaps even 30% (in line with Alphabet)?

In a pessimistic case, you’d argue that most of the margin expansion is behind us, and five years from now, margins would be similar or only modestly higher. That would be hugely disappointing to the bulls, but not entirely implausible.

In a base case, I imagine that Spotify keeps scaling, keeps taking price, keeps building higher-margin layers outside the pure music royalty split, and reaches something like 18 to 20% operating margins by 2030 (up from almost 13% today).

In an optimistic case, premium conversion improves over time as emerging markets mature, ad targeting improves (increasing ad-supported ARPUs), AI helps reduce overhead costs internally, and then, it’s not hard to imagine Spotify pushing margins toward 25%, though I concede this will likely take more than five years to hit that level.

The point, as we always say, is that this is an exercise in actively imagining an unpredictable future, which is true of all intrinsic valuation work. Quite literally, everything is possible, but these are the three approximate versions of reality that I see being most plausible that serve as catch-alls for everything in between, and so then, it’s a question of calculating Spotify’s valuation in each situation, and then getting a blended valuation when those rough possibilities are merged together.

Before I reveal my target price to purchase shares in Spotify, I want to just mention a word on dilution. It’s actually not as egregious as I expected for a flashy tech company. Stock-based comp was under 2% of revenue around the IPO, peaked in 2022, and has been declining since.

Spotify also bought back nearly $700 million of stock last year, limiting total share count growth to 1.7% per year since 2021. That dilution is not trivial, as I’m sure our colleague and Spotify-bull Stig Brodersen will remind me, but it isn’t enough to be a dealbreaker if earnings power keeps rising.

After accounting for expected dilution, and weighing those scenarios described above + selecting reasonable exit multiples five years out (based on peer comps and assuming some moderation in valuation as Spotify matures), I landed on a blended intrinsic value β€œbuy” target around $390 per share, where the expected returns from that level are 12%+ a year looking ahead, with a fair value around $500.

Spotify has traded roughly in the middle of that range recently, meaning it’s probably fairly valued, but not unattractively priced either, after declining about 25% over the last six months.

So here’s where I landed for the portfolio. I’m not recommending to Daniel that we add Spotify to The Intrinsic Value Portfolio today, but I do love the product, and I think the platform strategy is working with margins inflecting.

It’s a business I’d like to own, and have wanted to own for years, so here’s to hoping Mr. Market will give us an attractive opportunity to do so.

I came across a fitting Swedish proverb that goes something like this: There’s no bad weather, just bad clothes.

I feel the same way about investing. My own spin is that there are few bad businesses, just bad prices paid for businesses.

Weekly Update: The Intrinsic Value Portfolio

Notes

  • The S&P 500 closed down 3% for the week, bringing this year’s decline in the market index to 7%. The more tech-concentrated Nasdaq 100 fell nearly 5% last week. To what exactly one can attribute Mr. Market’s bipolar mood swings nobody knows precisely, but the popular guesses are a mix of concerns about the effect of AI on SaaS business models and the uncertainty and inflationary impacts triggered by the conflict in Iran. We see the former as more of a potential risk to a handful of our portfolio holdings that we’re continuing to monitor and trying to better understand, whereas the latter has spiked short-term uncertainty but seems unlikely to impair long-term business values. Nevertheless, it’s a time where we’re glad to have some extra cash in the Portfolio, ready to be deployed as fears crescendo. We’ve averaged down on a few positions over the last year, but as our cash pile becomes more sparse, we must be mindful of opportunity costs.

    • Adobe, for example, has continued to decline, yet we feel our overall exposure, at 7.5% (and more at cost), reflects an appropriately-sized bet on the company at current prices. As always, of course, if the gap between market prices and our estimate of intrinsic value widens further, we may choose to be more aggressive.

Quote of the Day

"The value of a company is the sum of the problems you solve.”

β€” Daniel Ek

What Else We’re Into

πŸ“Ί WATCH: Adobe’s AI threat, Shawn & Daniel’s conversation with Drew Cohen

πŸ“– READ: Dan Rasmussen on deep value opportunities globally

You can also read our archive of past Intrinsic Value breakdowns, in case you’ve missed any, here β€” we’ve covered companies ranging from Alphabet to FICO, Transdigm, Lululemon, PayPal, DoorDash, Crocs, LVMH, Uber, and more!

Your Thoughts

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