Thoughts on $ADBE $ADBE is one of the most fascinating stocks in the market today because it highlights one of the most important lessons in investing. It continues to execute at a high level. Revenue continues to grow, margins remain exceptional, free cash flow is enormous, and millions of customers still rely on $ADBE products every day. Yet despite all of that, the stock has struggled for years hitting all time lows. This confuses many investors, especially newer investors. They look at the financial statements and see a business that appears healthy. Then they look at the stock price and assume the market must be making a mistake. After all, if the business is improving and the stock is falling, shouldn’t that create an even better opportunity? Sometimes the answer is yes. Some of the greatest investments in history occurred because the market became too pessimistic about a business whose future remained bright. But it is important to remember that the market is not trying to value what a company earned previously or even currently. The market is trying to value what that company might earn in the future. This is where the story becomes interesting. $ADBE looked cheaper at $500 than it did at $600. It looked cheaper at $400 than it did at $500. It looked cheaper at $300 than it did at $400. Many investors looked at the declining valuation and concluded that the opportunity was becoming more attractive. Yet the stock continued to fall because investors were not debating the current business. They were debating what the business might look like in the future. For decades, $ADBE built one of the strongest moats in software. Photoshop, Illustrator, etc became the standard tools used by creative professionals around the world. Entire careers were built around learning Adobe’s products. Millions of designers, marketers, photographers, and video editors integrated $ADBE into their daily workflow, creating an ecosystem that appeared almost impossible to disrupt. Then artificial intelligence arrived and changed the conversation. For the first time, images could be generated with a prompt. Videos could be created automatically. Design work that once required years of expertise could suddenly be performed by almost anyone. The question investors began asking was not whether $ADBE remained a great company today. The question was whether $ADBE moat would be as strong five or ten years from now as it was five or ten years ago. That distinction is incredibly important because stocks are ultimately claims on future cash flows, not current cash flows. Imagine owning a toll bridge that earns $100 million per year. If someone announces that a second bridge will be built beside yours five years from now, the value of your bridge immediately changes even though today’s profits remain exactly the same. Nothing changed in the present, but something changed in the future. This is why investing can be so difficult. The numbers investors see today often tell a very different story than the future investors are attempting to price. A business can appear healthy while its long term competitive position weakens. At the same time, a business can appear expensive while its future becomes far more valuable than most people realize (ie $PLTR). The market spends surprisingly little time pricing the present and an enormous amount of time attempting to price a future that has not yet happened. This is also why one of the most dangerous phrases in investing is, “The stock is down but the fundamentals are improving.” Investors have said that about newspapers as the internet emerged, department stores as ecommerce gained share, and cable television as streaming began taking over. In many cases the current business remained healthy long after the future business had already started to deteriorate. 1/2 👇