If you asked me to do the type of consumer research that Peter Lynch describes in One Up On Wall Street, Iβd just look down at the apps I use most (which Iβve done a few times before), and so thatβs why Iβm a bit embarassed to admit that we havenβt even looked at the business behind the app I use most: Spotify.
(Almost) Everyone agrees Spotify is a great product, but investors canβt decide if itβs a great business because Spotify isnβt a typical software company where gross margins can expand dramatically as revenue scales.
Instead, itβs 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 Spotifyβs existence, the company has faced capped margins, yielding rather modest profit margins for a βtech giantβ.
Lately, though, the story has started to change. Operating margins have finally inflected upward in a real way.
So, as always, letβs 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 weβre calling βThe Intrinsic Value Conferenceβ in Omaha during the Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Weekend. Weβll 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!
Whoβs the Bigger Winner: Spotify or the Music Labels?
Spotifyβs value proposition to users is obvious to anyone who has ever used it. The company took the worldβs 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.
Whatβs less obvious, and what drives the entire investment debate, is that the music industry is a market with a significant amount of βsupplier power.β 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 doesnβt 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 worldβs rights, as we learned when we studied Universal Music Group a few months ago, and those labels have had the leverage to dampen Spotifyβs earnings power ever since the companyβs inception.

Spotifyβs Gross Margins are closely tied to the cost of music royalties
This is why Spotifyβs bull case isnβt βSpotify wins music.β 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, itβs 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 itβs fighting companies with multi-trillion-dollar valuations.

And yet, despite those threats, Spotify has been resilient, which tells you specialization matters. Spotify isnβt 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 Danielβs and mine!).
How Spotify Made Stealing Feel Stupid
Spotifyβs 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 didnβt feel as βwrongβ as taking a $20 CD from a store. The industry tried lawsuits and enforcement, but you canβt litigate your way back to scarcity when the marginal cost of copying a song is effectively zero.
Appleβs 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 Spotifyβs mission from day one, as outlined by the companyβs 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 βELD-shaelβ), which translates roughly to βfiery soul.β Itβs a word about perseverance, and it fits Ek, because Spotify wasnβt 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 thatβs 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 didnβt want to be bothered with ads and wanted to listen to exact tunes on demand.
So while this was disruptive, Spotify couldnβt have emerged without the music industryβs 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 Swiftβs 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 wouldβve had to launch a platform without many of the worldβs most popular songs and artistsβ¦which would make Spotify a lot less competitive with piracy!

This is why the popular narrative that βSpotify exploits artistsβ is inherently incomplete. Thereβs a separate debate about how labels split royalties with artists and what βfairβ should mean, but Spotify isnβt operating against the industry; itβs intertwined with it and always has been.
Is Music a Commodity?
On the surface, thereβs 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 Spotifyβs 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 yearsβ 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, Spotifyβs 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 didnβt come from friends but rather from Spotifyβs 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 peopleβs eclectic music tastes, as reported in good humor by Spotify. Beneath the surface, wrapped is a viral moment that turns users into advertisers on Spotifyβs behalf in a way that feels like self-expression.

And then thereβs Spotifyβs hardware agnosticism. Translation: Spotify is everywhere, no matter what device youβre 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 theyβre doing β you need a music streaming app thatβs 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

Spotifyβs 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 Premiumβs Batman. Yet, of Spotifyβs 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 βperceived valueβ 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 Spotifyβs profitability is royalties to artists and labels. Spotify isnβt 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 donβt disappear with scale. In other words, thereβs a ceiling on the gross margins that Spotify can achieve, limiting how βtech-likeβ 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, Iβm going to guess 99 in 100 would say Spotify!

But also, thatβs why Spotifyβs recent margin inflection matters so much, because weβre finally starting to get an idea of how profitable this business can be after many years of losses as the business scaled.
Shown above, Spotifyβs 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 Spotifyβs 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 investorsβ 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 Spotifyβs 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 itβs 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, itβs 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 Spotifyβs future earnings power. In the short run, though, itβs very much a drag on Spotifyβs unit economics, because free users donβt 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. Thatβs partly because ads are worth less in emerging markets, but itβs also because Spotify isnβt 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, Spotifyβs 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. Thatβs why theyβve 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 theyβre still figuring out what βsuperfanβ 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. Iβm still trying to wrap my head around why they havenβt 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 Spotifyβs expansion beyond music, and they pursued them in a splashy way. The $100m Joe Rogan exclusive deal in 2020 wasβ¦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 isnβt constrained by the same royalty structure. There are no massive podcast labels demanding a cut.
Itβs a subtle point, but premium users listen to music ad-free, yet podcasts arenβt 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 βwatchβ The Intrinsic Value Podcast on Spotify each week!
Audiobooks are phase two, and theyβre still early. Spotifyβs 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 isnβt enough for serious readers (listeners?), either. My wife, who averages 1-2 audiobooks a week, doesnβt 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 youβre listening to, and they have a Page Match feature that lets you jump between a physical page and the matching point in the audiobook. Iβm skeptical this will be a meaningful revenue driver, especially when Amazon is much cheaper in the price comparisons I ran, but itβs still evidence that Spotify wants to use audio to bleed into broader consumption habits and even e-commerce.

Buying physical books on Spotify

Spotifyβs page match feature. Admittedly, itβs super cool!
Spotify As a Marketplace
One of the more important and less appreciated parts of Spotifyβs strategy is that itβs 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 donβt literally pay, but they accept reduced royalty rates on promoted streams in exchange for greater audience reach.

Itβs 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 itβs 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 isnβt just distributing music, but rather, itβs 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 Iβve 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, Iβd be remiss in the year 2026 to not mention anything about AI!
On the pod, Daniel read a passage from Spotifyβs Q4 call that still resonates with me about this. Spotifyβs 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, SΓΆderstrΓΆmβs 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 companyβs 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, thereβs no factual answer to what βworkout musicβ 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 Scandinaviansβ gym music of choice.
So, when someone asks for βGym Musicβ playlists, Spotify needs to take into account a whole lot of context about them to then determine the best playlist to recommend. Thatβs 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.
Spotifyβs Scariest Competitor
If Iβm honest, Apple Music and Amazon Music donβt scare me the way they used to. For years, the narrative was that these giants could crush Spotify if they wanted to, but theyβve tried, and Spotify has held up. Both are tough competitors, but I donβt foresee either being able to existentially damage the bull thesis for $SPOT ( β² 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, itβs hard to go back. At least, thatβs what Daniel keeps telling me (Iβve yet to pay to remove ads on YouTube, which is funny, because I canβt 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 donβt think itβs 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 Spotifyβs 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, Iβd rather pay a bit more to keep my Spotify subscription, and if I want ad-free YouTube, thereβs a tier called Premium Lite that removes most ads but doesnβt 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! Itβs a matter of personal preference and a luxury for me to be indifferent to the most affordable content bundles possible, yet that isnβt representative of music consumers globally and their propensity to spendβ¦
Itβs not an apples-to-apples comparison, since we donβt 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 βYouTube Music and Premiumβ subscribers last spring.
Iβm absolutely certain that the 125 million number significantly overstates YouTube Musicβs market share relative to Spotify, but that doesnβt 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 itβs truly better (this is where subjective opinions about Spotify come into play).
Perhaps Iβm naive, but while YouTube is the competitor Iβm 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?
Weβve already discussed why Spotifyβs 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 donβt think itβs tremendously difficult to extrapolate forward Spotifyβs growth and guesstimate how many users theyβll 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, youβd 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, itβs 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, itβs a question of calculating Spotifyβs 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. Itβs 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 Iβm sure our colleague and Spotify-bull Stig Brodersen will remind me, but it isnβt 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 βbuyβ 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 itβs probably fairly valued, but not unattractively priced either, after declining about 25% over the last six months.

So hereβs where I landed for the portfolio. Iβm 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.
Itβs a business Iβd like to own, and have wanted to own for years, so hereβs 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: Thereβs 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 yearβs 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. Marketβs 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 weβre 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, itβs a time where weβre glad to have some extra cash in the Portfolio, ready to be deployed as fears crescendo. Weβve 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
β Daniel Ek
What Else Weβre Into
πΊ WATCH: Adobeβs AI threat, Shawn & Danielβs conversation with Drew Cohen
π§ LISTEN: Value investing meets venture capital w/Kyle Grieve
π READ: Dan Rasmussen on deep value opportunities globally
You can also read our archive of past Intrinsic Value breakdowns, in case youβve missed any, here β weβve covered companies ranging from Alphabet to FICO, Transdigm, Lululemon, PayPal, DoorDash, Crocs, LVMH, Uber, and more!
Your Thoughts
See you next time!
Enjoy reading this newsletter? Forward it to a friend.
Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.
Join the waitlist for our Intrinsic Value Community of investors
Learn how to join us in Omaha for the 2026 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting!
Shawn & Daniel use Fiscal.ai for every company they research β use their referral link to get started with a 15% discount!
Use the promo code STOCKS15 at checkout for 15% off our popular course βHow To Get Started With Stocks.β
Read our full archive of Intrinsic Value Breakdowns here
Keep an eye on your inbox for our newsletters on Sundays. If you have any feedback for us, simply respond to this email or message [email protected].
What did you think of today's newsletter?
All the best,
Β© The Investor's Podcast Network content is for educational purposes only. The calculators, videos, recommendations, and general investment ideas are not to be actioned with real money. Contact a professional and certified financial advisor before making any financial decisions. No one at The Investor's Podcast Network are professional money managers or financial advisors. The Investorβs Podcast Network and parent companies that own The Investorβs Podcast Network are not responsible for financial decisions made from using the materials provided in this email or on the website.





