Speedwell Research's News Update and Weekly Recap
New Airbnb Company Podcast, AlphaSense Collaboration, The "Next Amazon" Trap, Distraction Risk
Welcome to Speedwell Research’s Newsletter. We write about business and investing. Our paid research product can be found at SpeedwellResearch.com. You can learn more about us here.
This is a weekly recap, where we summarize recent content you may have missed.
Table of Contents:
Speedwell Releases & Upcoming
Spotlight
Coverage Updates
Sharing Links
1. Speedwell Releases & Upcoming.
Research.
We’re Excited to Announce Our Collaboration with AlphaSense!
We’re excited to share that we are now working directly with AlphaSense for our research! This means our research will start including insights from their expert call library of over 200,000 transcripts.
As investors know, scuttlebutt is one of the most important—and time-consuming—parts of understanding a business. We often rely on our networks, cold outreach, or chance conversations to get behind-the-scenes info that doesn’t show up in a 10-K.
With expert calls, we can now access these insights faster and more reliably. These transcripts reveal what competitors’ management teams are focused on, how employees view the company internally, and other hard-to-find industry details.
We decided to work with AlphaSense (which now includes the full Tegus expert call library after their acquisition) because they have by far the most expert call interviews and their platform integrates AI technology, so it is easier to sift through all that data. As a bonus, they also have a lot of other financial documents and data (over 450 million documents I’ve been told).
Most importantly, what this means for you is better quality research and more insights. You’ll start seeing us include expert call takeaways in our research, updates, and podcast episodes soon.
If you’re interested in exploring AlphaSense’s expert interview transcripts for yourself though, check it out here: alpha-sense.com/speedwell
More to come soon!
The Synopsis Podcast.
We released our highly anticipated Airbnb company episode. This is our most in-depth episode yet. We cover Airbnb’s history, competition, capital allocation, valuation, and more. Listen or read below!
Upcoming.
Podcast
We are working on a Dialogue episode on Copart and Constellation Software.
Research
We are now working on LVMH as our next in-depth research report!
Coverage
We will release a business recap on RH’s latest earnings.
Become a Speedwell Member today to get access to all of our research updates and our in-depth research reports!
2. Spotlight.
Below are select quotes from our various writings and podcast.
Memo. Metaphor Malware
The “Next Amazon” Trap: “Whether we properly understand why Amazon was so successful or not isn’t the real issue. The issue is when we import fallacious reasoning to novel situations and try to contextualize them with old (and often irrelevant) understandings.”
Read the full memo here: Metaphor Malware: The Clumsy Thinking that is Crippling your Business Understanding
The Synopsis Podcast. ABNB: Becoming a Verb
The Distraction Risk: “They were very unprofitable for a long time because of their lack of focus. And now you could say with all these new businesses, they're kind of moving back to being more unfocused. And so their core is more under control, it's profitable, whereas it wasn’t before. And so maybe now is the appropriate time to experiment a little bit. But that is a risk that now they get too caught up in the services and all that.”
Evolution1Q25 Business Update.
The Regulatory Incompliance Weight: “Regulatory incompliance will of course never be a “vector of competition” that Evolution will try to win with, but it is still weighing on their market share.”
(Share this quote on Twitter/X)
Read the full memo here: Evolution 1Q25 Business Update
Company Report Snippet. Walker & Dunlop
Time, The Competition-Constraining Factor: “Every top broker tends to have more activity than time, so it is easier for them to hold out on fees. However, when the market turns and deal activity slows, this creates an environment where not only does deal volume slow, but incentivizes fierce competition on fees in order to win the little volume that there is. This may result in a double whammy of simultaneously lower volume and lower fees.”
*This is an excerpt from our company report on Walker & Dunlop.
If you are a Speedwell Research Member, read the full report here: Walker & Dunlop
If you are not already a Speedwell Research member, you can purchase it here: Walker & Dunlop Individual Report
3. Coverage Updates.
Evolution
CEO Martin Carlesund on Monday purchased 100,000 shares (~€6 mn) of Evolution stock.
Evolution’s stock jumped +8% on Monday following the news
Meta
Meta begins to advertise WhatsApp
“We’ve been talking for years about how to build a business on WhatsApp in a way that doesn’t interrupt personal chats, and we believe the Updates tab is the right place to introduce that. Subscriptions, promotions, and ads will appear only on the updates tab, away from your personal chats. This means if you only use WhatsApp to chat with friends and loved ones, there will be no change to your experience at all."
Here is what we had to say about the difficulty of monetizing WhatsApp in our Meta Company Report:
“The trouble with monetizing WhatsApp stems from the privacy centric ethos from which it was built. Since 2016, the app has been entirely end-to-end encrypted, which has made it hard to know what happens after a user clicks on an ad. While they are slowly solving the issue, the WhatsApp team has always had its own culture and has been reticent to embrace any sort of encroachment on what they see as their privacy-centric mission.”
- Meta Company Report pg 130
APi Group
APi Group is replacing U.S. Steel in the S&P MidCap 400
APG stock was up +6% on the news
4. Sharing Links.
Check out Speedwell Research’s Drew Cohen’s YouTube Channel. It is focused on general investing and business content.
Other Links.
A Letter a Day: Scale AI CEO Jason Droege’s 2020 UCLA Commencement Speech (link)
How Dev Kantesaria Invests in High-Quality Businesses (link)
Josh Tarasoff Essay on Direct and Indirect (link)
MOI Global: Thinking in First Principles: Focusing on Duration in Equity Investing (link)
And a special thank you to Matthew Harbaugh for helping put this weekly recap together!
The Synopsis Podcast.
Follow our Podcast below. We have four episode formats: “company” episodes that breakdown in-depth each business we write a report on, “dialogue” episodes that cover various business and investing topics, “article” episodes where we read our weekly memos, and “interviews”.
Speedwell Research Reports.
Become a Speedwell Research Member to receive all of our in-depth research reports, shorter exploratory reports, updates, and Members Plus also receive Excels.
(Many members have gotten their memberships expensed. If you need us to talk with your compliance department to become an approved vendor, please reach out at info@speedwellresearch.com).
