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Stock Analysis Compilation
Fairlight Capital on BQE Water $BQE CN

Thesis: BQE Water is well-positioned with innovative water treatment technologies and potential 'company-maker' projects in the mining industry, currently trading at an attractive valuation

(Extract from their Q2 letter) https://t.co/zQWo5cRULL
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Hidden Value Gems
RT @HiddenValueGems: A very interesting strategy - buying stocks that were excluded from the index.

🧵👇🏼

➡️ @RA_Insights have unveiled “a stock index named NIXT that would have earned investors about 74 times their money since 1991 by buying stocks kicked out of indexes.”

h/t @Spencerjakab

1/4 https://t.co/lhnIHYEitz
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Capital Employed
Enjoyed listening to this episode by @FoundersPodcast

How Fastenal $FAST grew by a relentless focus on excellent customer service.

You would think customer service would be an obvious thing for all companies to focus on but unfortunately it's not.

https://t.co/wwRhM8cD3i
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Hidden Value Gems
Almost finished reading Shoe Dog. Sharing a couple of Nike’s early ad slogans:

“There is no finish line.”

“Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never-ending commitment.”

What do you think? 😉 https://t.co/JI9X4yK1Xy

Fantastic reminder of the importance of focus in any endeavour.

A 30-yo Nike founder working 6 days as an auditor and weekends, nights and holidays on his startup 👇🏼 https://t.co/Uhz637r6RP
- Hidden Value Gems
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Librarian Capital
Nike $NKE: Reminder it is a family-controlled company

Class A shareholders select 75% of directors

Class A 97.2% held by named Phil Knight & related parties, incl. 77.5% at Swoosh LLC, which Phil formed and where his son Travis "has a significant role"

Travis on NKE board https://t.co/f80CcnVWlt
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AkhenOsiris
Databricks $SNOW

Bloomberg:

Once considered the little brother, Databricks has played the public antagonist with pugnacious marketing and sales tactics. “SnowMelt” is a not-so-subtly named initiative within the firm to take business from Snowflake, especially in its home court of data warehousing, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

Sellers can win bonuses for moving Snowflake clients to Databricks’ directly competing service. In other cases, Databricks salespeople offered to help pay off prospects’ Snowflake contracts in the form of credits if they switched vendors. Or they steeply discounted their offering to win business.

The typical pitch by Databricks is that its platform is less expensive and contains a wider suite of advanced features, such as those for building AI models for businesses from complicated unstructured data. Sellers are equipped with a program that estimates how much money potential clients would save by switching to Databricks from Snowflake.

Snowflake, too, says its offering is cheaper. “The claims on cost drive me nuts,” said longtime Snowflake product chief Christian Kleinerman in an interview. “I tell the customers — just try it and go run a representative benchmark.”

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi is known for giving fiery media interviews and posting migration stories or favorable benchmarks on LinkedIn. Employees recall being asked to like or share these posts on their own accounts.

Going after Snowflake helped spread awareness about Databricks, Ghodsi said in an interview. “Two or three years ago nobody got fired for buying Snowflake as their data warehouse — I don't think that's true anymore.” Now, Ghodsi said he’s no longer orienting employees against Snowflake, focusing them instead toward goals like promoting their AI and data governance products.

While hard to know how much is due to its combative style, something is working for Databricks. Unlike most other large software companies, its revenue growth is accelerating, according to an investor presentation in June. Recurring sales were expected to hit $2.4 billion in July, with the company’s relatively new warehousing product — which most-directly competes with Snowflake — contributing more than $400 million.
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AkhenOsiris
Databricks:

In recent weeks, Databricks has reached out to existing investors to get detailed ownership records, often seen as a precursor to an IPO filing, according to a person familiar with the matter. Ghodsi declined to comment on a timeline for an IPO.
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AkhenOsiris
Databricks $SNOW

Snowflake reported $3 billion in annual sales over the last 12 months, growing only about half as quickly as its startup rival. Mike Scarpelli, Snowflake’s chief financial officer, said in an interview that his company has higher profitability. “The reality is we’re generating cash and they're burning cash. How long can they do that for?”
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AkhenOsiris
Databricks $SNOW

“I have no idea why he is so obsessed with Snowflake, because I am not obsessed with Databricks,” said Scarpelli, the Snowflake CFO, in reference to Ghodsi.
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AkhenOsiris
Databricks

"It's a relatively new product," Adam Conway, senior vice president of product at Databricks, said about Microsoft’s Fabric. "On the record, I'll leave it at that." He added that he's "not worried about another company out-innovating us."

Partnership is still the official line. During an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Ghodsi warned against criticizing Fabric or other Microsoft products on social media, telling attendees that “our message to customers should always be that we are better together,” according to a presentation slide seen by Bloomberg.
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Hidden Value Gems
RT @HiddenValueGems: A couple of interesting data points:

1️⃣ Amazon’s AWS revenue over the last 12 months ($99 billion) was higher than the revenue of 468 companies in the S&P 500.

2️⃣ Apple has bought back $646 billion in stock over the past 10 years, which is greater than the market cap of 491 companies in the S&P 500.

h/t @charliebilello

$AMZN $AAPL
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