Sharing my stream of consciousness as I learn to be a better investor, person and father with each passing day. Paying it forward.
Joined January 2021
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Chicken Little retweeted
Love this! This is how I wish someone had explained physics to me.
I've been exploring the same idea with Claude! A skill for making everyday machines you can play with.
Here's my little pencil sharpener. Two cutters orbit the pencil like planets and 12 turns of the crank make the point :)
visual-learning.app
Chicken Little retweeted
Anyone can make an explainer video with Claude Opus 5.5 now. These 8 prompts cover 8 different styles.
They range from kinetic text to Manim math animations.
Each one runs in Claude Code, so you don't need any editing software.
🔖 Bookmark for later
Chicken Little retweeted
Grok Bot is the best AI agent right now
It gives you an army of agents that can do work for you around the clock 24/7
If you set it up correctly, you gain super powers
In this video I cover setting up Grok Bot, use cases, plugins, and what makes Grok Bot so good:
Chicken Little retweeted
Temasek news breaks. Samsung and SK Hynix rip 8% in a day. Twitter fills up with theses that sound like they were written by the fund itself.
Here's the part nobody mentions. A Temasek spokesperson denied timing anything with the Korean government. They also said the position isn't new — they've held both stocks for over two years. The headline calling it a "first investment" is the market discovering a trade that was already running.
That's the pattern. By the time institutional buying becomes news, the buying already happened. What you're reacting to is old information wearing a new headline.
The retail move isn't to chase the ticker. It's to ask why a $400B fund with a decade-long horizon found conviction in memory semiconductors two years ago — and whether that reasoning still holds today, at today's price, on your timeframe. Their entry point isn't yours. Their exit won't be reported until a quarter after it happens, if at all.
Following the herd works until the herd doesn't. And you never get the exit alert.
Chicken Little retweeted
Potential news of market crash.
Everyone freaks out.
Wait. ⛔
Remember two world wars, multiple smaller wars, pandemic, Asian and global financial crisis, trade war, Dotcom bust, occuring in past 10 decades.
The market is much higher since 100 years ago. An understatement.
Why am I confident yet skeptical of the market in the long term?
1) I stop timing the the market because I know I cannot. Reflect on each thought and action to align with "time in market beat timing the market".
2) Economy moves in cycles and there is always bad news in the world. Economy can influence but unlikely dictate fundamentals of a company in the long run.
3) Future Earning / cashflow drive valuation. Stock price will match valuation in due time.
4) Waiting in all-cash, only to invest in a market crash is extremely difficult psychologically. Most either cannot do it or underperform the market returns. Seriously, it makes no sense to spend more time and energy yet losing to the (lower) alpha and beta of the market.
Thus when devising a investment philosophy,
🔸Look at past data as a hint/ guide and not based on emotions or believe I (retail investor) have some secret information edge.
Chicken Little retweeted
This Messi compilation against England is too good to miss he literally owned the game and England
Chicken Little retweeted
Not choosing maxxing.
The pattern never changes. Maxxing begins with a lack. It overshoots into abundance. Then the excess becomes a new lack.
Maxxing is maximizing without constraints. Unlimited freedom, unlimited resources, no limits to respect. Optimizing is different. Optimizing works within given limitations.
Investing has its own version of token-maxxing. It is return-maxxing. Business has one too. It is profit-maxxing. We avoid both. We do not practice them. We do not invest in companies that do.
Chicken Little retweeted
Haaland walking and pretending like he does not know what is happening 😂
He learned well from the master at that.
Chicken Little retweeted
The great lie is that society is divided between rich and poor.
The great truth, as David Friedberg puts it, is makers vs takers.
Makers build, create, and deliver real value: houses, software, art, businesses, and everything that moves civilization forward.
Takers watch, criticize, analyze, and politic. They push the lie that the rich hoard unfairly so the poor must seize it… all while positioning themselves to rule the chaos.
As @friedberg tells his kids: “At the end of the day, if you made something and someone else valued it, you were a maker. That was an amazing achievement. That is a great day.”
Takers thrive on division. Makers drive progress.
Time to choose your side.
Chicken Little retweeted
Andrew Ross Sorkin on Elon Musk:
“He is a demonstrable force for good. He’s a genius. I admire so much about what he’s created; If I look at the totality of this man, 100-200 years from now, he’s the person we’ll be writing the history books about."
Chicken Little retweeted
Everyone says Singapore property is a great investment.
But did it actually beat the stock market over 30 years?
I ran the numbers across condo, landed, HDB 4-room and 5-room — vs the S&P 500.
The answer will surprise you. [1/8]
Chicken Little retweeted
The smartest person in any room is usually the one everyone thinks is dull.
They’ve mastered “strategic invisibility.”
Watch them in meetings. While others compete to showcase their knowledge, they ask questions that expose gaps in logic or reveal assumptions nobody else caught.
They frame these inquiries as genuine curiosity instaed of intellectual challenges. The room thinks they’re just trying to understand. They’re actually teaching.
True intelligence recognizes that being perceived as the smartest person creates a target on your back. Colleagues start viewing you as a threat. Bosses worry you’ll make them look incompetent. Friends become defensive in conversations. The social cost of displaying your full cognitive capacity often outweighs the benefits.
So they develop camouflage.
They’ll let someone explain a concept they understood years ago, nodding thoughtfully, asking follow up questions that guide the explainer toward better conclusions. They’re not learning. They’re leading without anyone realizing they’re being led. The explainer walks away feeling brilliant. The hidden genius walks away with social capital and new information about how that person thinks.
Pay attention to their word choice.
Genuinely intelligent people who are hiding it will use simpler language than their vocabulary actually contains…
They’ll say “that’s interesting” instead of “that’s a fascinating manifestation of bounded rationality in decision making under uncertainty.” Same insight, zero intimidation.
They remember everything but pretend to remember selectively. They’ll “forget” minor details that would make them look like they were paying too much attention, but somehow always recall the exact piece of information needed to solve a problem three weeks later. Convenient memory gaps coupled with perfectly timed recall.
The tell is in how they handle being wrong.
Average people get defensive when corrected. Actually smart people get curious about their error. People pretending to be less intelligent will get visibly excited when someone teaches them something, even if they already knew it. They treat every correction as a gift because they understand that people love feeling helpful and knowledgeable.
But the real giveaway is what they do with information asymmetry.
Most people hoard knowledge to maintain advantage. Hidden intellectuals do the opposite. They’ll casually share insights that solve other people’s problems without taking credit. They’ll send articles, make introductions, offer perspectives that save someone hours of work. They position themselves as connectors and facilitators, never as the source of wisdom.
Everyone remembers who helped them. Nobody feels threatened by someone who makes them look good.
Smart people pretending to be average understand that influence flows to those who make others feel intelligent, not to those who prove their own intelligence. They’ve realized that being underestimated is a superpower. People speak more freely around them. Share sensitive information. Include them in discussions where the “obvious genius” would be excluded.
They’re collecting data while everyone else is performing.
The deepest irony is that this strategy actually makes them more intelligent over time.
Long story short, the person who appears to know everything usually knows less than the person who appears to know just enough.
Chicken Little retweeted
The older I get, the more I realize intelligence is overrated. Intelligent people are more likely to overthink, overplan, and overanalyze. They hide behind motion that doesn't create progress. They fear the judgment of others if they're proven wrong.
The truth is that intelligence is abundant. Courage is not. The people you admire are the ones who had the courage to act. They aren’t more talented than you. They aren’t smarter than you. They just took action when you didn’t.
I often wonder how many extraordinary people wasted their entire lives waiting for permission that never came. Permission isn't granted. It's taken. You get to tap yourself in whenever you want. You can just do things.
Courage beats intelligence.
Chicken Little retweeted
50 years ago, the US and Saudis came to an agreement that forced every country to buy dollars before they could buy Saudi's oil. China had to convert yuan into dollars every time they needed the one commodity that keeps their factories running. Japan bought US bonds just to get dollars that kept their bullet trains running. France traded euros for dollars just to buy fuel that runs their wine and agriculture.
This deal is a key reason the US dollar has maintained its position as the world's reserve currency for so long. And why the value of your 401(k), your IRA, and every dollar you've saved since you started your full-time career has been propped up.
In the article below, I'll explain how this deal created the "petrodollar system", why it's breaking down now and how this affects retail investors.
Chicken Little retweeted
When i analyse $smci in Nov 2023, it was before stock price did a astronomical climb in Jan 2024.
I was against the investment because of the quoted post.
The price shot up 4x between Jan to Mar 2024. Many were raving it to be the beneficiary of nvda and AI, and going to be a multibagger.
Was I right not to buy?
Yes, I was.
In Aug 2024, stock price came down after a short seller report and delayed filing.
Was I right not to buy?
Yes, I was.
I am not trying to brag as I have 1) zero vested interest, 2) not trying to sell investment courses or 3) funds, 4) not prove i am better.
I am just trying to bring one point across -
I am neither right or wrong because of how media/market thinks or how stock price moves. I am right because my analysis/ facts were correct.
For all I know, the stock price can move up and company can turn around but it is what it is, and this is how I invest.
It is good to have an investment strategy and framework. Stick to it, finetune it necessary but don't flip it 180 degc because of pure emotions.
Stick to the f-ing plan.
From FY2022 AR $SMCI
🔸Key Points🔸
1)No other customers represented more than 10% of revenue
2)Working with leading processor vendor eg Intel ,Nvdia and AMD.
3)Believe to be only major server, storage and compute platform that design, develop and manufacture significant portion of the system in US.
4)58% of revenue from US, 21.9% from Asia
🔸Risk🔸
1)Competition from original design manufacturer (ODM) eg Foxconn which can scale and low cost production. These companies have longer operating histories and branding. ODM has previously supplied parts too.
2)Computer server industry has short lead time and quick delivery schedule. Coupled with global shortage in 2021/2, there is a need to shore up inventory. When the economy falters, the big inventory demands more storage cost.
3)Had a history of delay FS filing in 2017. Recorded liability of $17.5M with SEC.
4) The R&D as percentage of Sales is higher than most of competitors.
5)There are plans to target larger customers and sales, this implies
➡️Customer base will be more concentrated
➡️Cost of sales might increased
➡️Borrowing will increase
➡️Higher inventory risk
6)Vendor concentration risk
Two companies for their work in contract design and management support and warehousing – Ablecom and Compuware.
The management of these two companies are direct family members. In 2018, CEO Charles borrowed $12.9M from his sister-in-law. It was to pay off margin loans to financial institutional which the lenders called for in Oct 2018, with stock price suspension then. As of June 2022, CEO still owe $15.7M.
The supply chain and company operation can be affected or held at hostage if the two vendors were to be acquired or change of management.
7)Supplier concentration risk - Two suppliers form 29% of total purchase in June 2022.
🔸Financials🔸
1) Income Statement
Inventories at sky high at $1.5B with finished goods at $1B. Will have a big problem if unsold.
Although current ratio is 1.9x but the bulk is from inventory at $1.5B.
Remain interesting to see if the inventory will be sold off.
2)Balance Sheet
Cash of $267M, short term debt $449M and long term debt at $147M.
3)Cashflow
Borrowed $1.1B to pay debt of $650M.
Negative cashflow form operating, largely contributed by high inventory ($519M) and receivables ($371M). To monitor whether the AR decreased in near future.
🔸Loan Repayment🔸
2023 $449M
2024 $36M
2025 $39M
2026 $39M
2027 $14M
2028 and beyond $16M
🔸Summary🔸
I don’t see any moat as is dependable of key vendors, competition can easily penetrate.
Huge loan and debt to clear off.
Not my cup of tea.
Chicken Little retweeted
Andrej Karpathy on what makes Elon Musk unique.
Elon keeps teams small, highly technical, and removes low performers very quickly.
He pushes for intensity, avoids useless meetings, and stays deeply connected with engineers.
Chicken Little retweeted
My thoughts on $DUOL as a shareholder:
$DUOL posted a very strong Q4 2025. There’s no doubt about that:
• DAU 52.7M (+30%)
• Paid subs 12.2M (+25%)
• $400M share repurchase to offset dilution
Full year 2025:
• Revenue: $1.037B (+39%)
• Bookings: $1.158B (+33%)
Business fundamentals
On many objective metrics, $DUOL is a business in very good shape. They have $1B in net cash, and 2025 was an amazing year. But we all know the stock tells a very different story. It’s a great example of how the market is forward looking. And it’s exactly in that forward looking dynamic where things look different from what investors are used to seeing from $DUOL.
On the earnings call, management made it very clear they do not want to squeeze every dollar out of their existing user base given the opportunity ahead. Instead, they want to “expand the pie” with the ambitious goal of reaching 100M users by 2028. But that comes at a cost, which is reflected in the bookings guidance. They guided for 12% bookings growth, which is a significant deceleration.
Guidance
Management on the outlook: “We designed the guidance to do the right thing for our customers and experiment with what works best.”
They emphasize expanding the pie using AI capabilities to unlock a larger opportunity. How they plan to reach 100M users:
• Teach languages better
• Improve the free user experience, based on 15 years of experimentation
• Invest in growth engines like Chess, now at 7M DAU after launching last year
• Increase marketing spend and R&D investments
“If we can get to that DAU and reasonable monetization assumptions, we could be looking at a $2.5B annual revenue business.” That is 2.5x $DUOLs 2025 revenue.
“”We are really motivated to go for the bigger prize. In terms of when you are going to see it, we modeled it later in the year, so it will take a little while.
Monetization
Management also mentioned additional monetization opportunities. Only about 10% of users are currently monetized, and they believe they can do much better. Potential levers include:
• Better ads
• Character customization
• New features
• Monetizing additional subjects
Market saturation and competition
CEO and founder Luis von Ahn: “We are not worried about either. We have about 85% of the DAU of learning apps in the world, which has been basically flat for a while now.”
“If we can get to 2% penetration in every country, using the US as a reference, we would double our DAU.”
Is AI eating into user growth?
On whether AI is driving DAU deceleration, Luis noted that AI translation has been nearly perfect for years. Users come to DUOL for two main reasons:
• As a hobby, they genuinely want to learn
• To learn English
From user exit surveys, AI does not show up as a reason for churn. The main reason users leave is that they are busy. In other words, they spend more time on social media.
The bet you must be willing to make
Management is deliberately sacrificing short term revenue growth and margins to chase longer term opportunities tied to a much larger monetizable user base. But user growth must reaccelerate at some point to reach the 100M target. If it does not, the deceleration and margin compression are not justifiable.
On the flip side, if they pull this off, $DUOL could be a significantly larger business a few years from now than it is today.
You must be willing to take the long view and trust management to execute. The trajectory is less predictable than it used to be, and the market is repricing that uncertainty.
My take as a shareholder (4% position)
First, credits to management for being transparent about their plan and its impact on the earnings call. I think many companies could learn from how this team communicates with analysts.
It is clear that $DUOL is prioritizing long term growth and user value over short term profits. As a long term investor, I love to see that. If they execute, $DUOL could become a much larger business with
A: a larger monetizable user base
B: a more efficient monetization engine
But it introduces uncertainty around how and when this plays out. And if there is one thing the market hates, it is uncertainty. I think that short-term question mark is reflected in the sell off.
As an investor, you have to bet on management execution and think in years, not quarters for this to work.
Even though I am holding the $DUOL bag I have decided to keep my shares and see how this plays out.
I trust management, given their track record so far, and believe in the long term opportunity. The stock is already repriced for the material bookings slowdown, which in my view limits downside from here.
If management cannot pull this off, I will take the loss. If they can, we might see new highs. But it will take time and patience. Which I have. I would not be a long term investor if I chased quarters.
I hope you found this helpful.
~ Jan
$DUOL Q4 2025:
• Revenue: $282.9M vs $276.0M est
• Daily Active Users (DAU): 52.7M
• Monthly Active Users (MAU): 133.1M
Q1 2026 Outlook
• Q1 Bookings: $301.5M vs $329.7M est
FY 2026 outlook
• FY Bookings: $1.27B - $1.30B vs $1.39B est
Chicken Little retweeted
$PLTR I just read @michaeljburry's new short report.
This is BURRYSH1T.
+10,000 words. Here are the 10 worst takes:
1. "Palantir’s margins are not even SaaS-level, but when Palantir’s functionality succumbs to the commoditization of AI coding tools, they will fall further."
2. "The result is a Net Dollar Retention surge from 107% to 139%. 139 is extraordinary. It is also suspect. Such heights are rarely sustained and almost always associated with base effects.
3. "Not enough bandwidth? That sounds exactly like a consultancy. Not enough integration engineers, not enough Palantir people to customize the
installations."
4. "So, after the company lost $4bn in almost 20 years as a private company, it has continued to give tons of stock to employees while losing money on
bubble SPACs and growing to a remarkably petite $4.5bn revenue for 2025 – petite for being the U.S. government’s pet data enforcer AND an AI FOMO/Lucky Strike poster child."
5. "[Selling Gotham] was not too hard. Government software was terrible, and hence, low-hanging fruit. It took 3y, but after that, low hanging fruit."
6. "Foundry was produced in 8 weeks, AIP in a few weeks. Foundry is an integration layer for thin apps that require extensive customization. AIP is simply a wrapper. Putting the cost of its fleet of FDEs in R&D pumps up R&D artificially."
7. "Palantir moved to 'bootcamps' – short demos in lieu of full FDE deployments – as a way to onboard Foundry AIP customers faster and improve margins.
As these boot camps are rehearsed scenarios built on curated data, for ease of use, they can fail in real life scenarios that vary from the curated ones."
8. "Palantir creates architectural overhead in a system, and now that LLMs are integrated into this overhead, the coming commoditization of LLMs should render Palantir a user interface provider of little value.
9. "Let’s spend some time on those money-losing years onas it was a very long time for a company full of supposed geniuses to not make any money."
10. "Calling his engineering consultants 'forward deployed' fit right into his desired noble, militaristic vibe. A righteous and right company."
------------------------------
I lost 10 QI points while reading the entire report, so you don't have to.
Here are a few personal thoughts:
1. The report seems entirely written by GPT.
2. ~20% of the report is focused on how the company was at DPO in 2020. We are in 2026 😉
3. Doubts on the validity of the software are dismantled by customers themselves:
• Airbus, client since 2015, just got a ~$1bn 10y expansion
• Hyundai HD, client since 2021, just got a "hundreds of millions" expansion
• $200mn Lumen expansion
• $440mn deal with the US Navy to provide Ship OS;
Are these clients nuts? 😆
4. Burry wildly misunderstand the Palantir's AI thesis.
Burry just sees AI = LLM , but there is much more than that.
Palantir doesn't build an AI model.
Palantir bets that as LLMs converge toward commoditization, value will increasingly shift to the model-orchestration layer to deliver outcomes: call it AIP.
The 20 years of building software in the most critical use cases put Palantir in a prime position to capitalize on this.
5. Burry wildly misunderstands Palantir's financials, as he believes growth and margins will decrease.
Operating leverage + network effects
= sustained growth with expanding margins
6. Trying to prove US Commercial is a scam by showing International Commerce does't grow is dumb.
Palantir voluntarily pivoted the entire company on the success of US Commercial, the most important market, while it saw the Int market was not ready to capture the AI wave.
US Commercial:
+137% YoY Revenue Growth
+145% YoY Remaining Deal Value
+49 % clients
7. Seeing the low number of clients as a minus is dumb.
The fact that Palantir has been able to generate ~$4bn with ~1,000 clients shows an abnormal earnings potential vs its similar size "competitors":
• Databricks (17,000 clients),
• Snowflake (12,000 clients),
8. Many concerns have dismantled infinite times:
• "consultancy"
• "SPACs"
• "SBC"
They are not concerns now.
9. Dilution is simply not an issue any longer.
The truth is in the Earnings Per Share:
• 8x YoY
• 43% GAAP Margin.
PLTR is diluting by 2% while growing revenue by ~70% at 57% EBIT adj margin. As an investor, I am only happy if we get only 2% dilution to get these results.
10. His $46 valuation uses dumb inputs:
• 16% WACC is crazy. PLTR is no longer a money-burning startup.
• 4% dilution vs 2% actual dilution
• 50% growth for 5 years and 25% after: this is not that negative, but inferior to what the strength of the company can achieve.
11. Burrito is proving himself to be a bad influencer more than an investor.
If he had properly analysed the situation (he could subscribe to @PalantirBullets for free), he could have focused on discussing valid points.
Essentially, he wanted to short and asked GPT to help him draft the thesis, leveraging his "influencer status."
If he wanted to provide a reasonable short report, he would have provided evidence like:
• big customers churning;
• product failing to deliver;
• serious evidence of corporate misconduct.
Why hasn't he done this? There is simply no ground.
There was once an investor.
Now there is only a substack grifter.
Yours,
@arny_trezzi
