Thomas Chua Profile picture
Oct 21, 2021 8 tweets 3 min read Read on X
🧠 5 mental models that helped me recognize the patterns of great investments early:
Theory of Reflexivity by George Soros

I watched this play out in real-time with Tesla

We often think earnings drive share prices

But high share prices allowed $TSLA to raise a 'limitless' amount of capital

Which in turn allowed them to survive & eventually deliver earnings
Ecosystem Control by @DennisHong17

Every stakeholder in the ecosystem is voluntarily locked into the business

That lock-in is so compelling & powerful that it is economically irrational for anyone to unlock from the ecosystem
Companies that are Verbs

"Let's Zoom to discuss"

"Let me Google it"

Companies that become verbs gain high ROI on marketing

Word of mouth network effects create high-quality touchpoints and increase the frequency of usage

h/t @investing_city podcast ep #60
Razor & blade model

The razor is sold at a low price to increase sales of a high margin complementary good—the blade.

Predictable, recurring revenue that stacks up overtime drives huge investment returns

E.g. Peloton $PTON drop prices to boost monthly membership
Operating leverage

Companies that grow their revenue while the bulk of the costs are fixed

Once it passes a tipping point, it'll explode with profits

How much does it cost for Facebook to earn an additional dollar of ad revenue?

Nothing!

It all flows to the bottom line
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More from @SteadyCompound

Dec 14, 2025
1/ Howard Marks just dropped 5 decades of investing wisdom in one conversation.

5 market calls in 50 years. $218 billion under management. Zero blowups.

Here's what separates him from everyone else: 🧵 Image
2/ The dinner that changed everything:

In 1990, a pension fund manager told Marks his portfolio stayed in the 27th-47th percentile for 14 straight years.

Sounds mediocre.

But over 14 years total? 4th percentile.

How? He never blew up while everyone else occasionally did.
3/ This became Oaktree's motto:

"If you can avoid the losers, the winners will take care of themselves."

Most investors shoot for the stars and occasionally shoot themselves in the foot.

Once you have a big loss, it takes years to recover. The math is brutal.
Read 25 tweets
Dec 10, 2025
Just finished Gavin Baker's latest interview with Patrick O'Shaughnessy.

It's one of the most insight-dense conversations on AI infrastructure economics I've encountered.

Key insights that matter for investors 🧵 Image
First, the big one: Gemini 3 confirmed pre-training scaling laws are still intact.

This matters because no one actually knows why scaling laws work. It's an empirical observation, not a theoretical guarantee.

Every confirmation that it still holds changes forward projections. Image
Here's what most people missed:

Between mid-2024 and now, there was no way to push pre-training forward. You can't get more than ~200,000 Hoppers coherent, and Blackwell was delayed.

Reasoning models bridged an 18-month gap where progress would have otherwise stalled. Image
Read 16 tweets
Dec 9, 2025
Everyone's blaming Chipotle's 44% decline on Slop Bowls.

The real threat? Casual dining.

A former Regional VP who ran 415 restaurants shared what management won't tell you: Image
Chipotle's average check: $18

Chili's: $21

The old advantage was no tipping. But Chipotle has embedded tipping into card readers, making it almost impossible not to tip.

That $3 gap with casual dining has nearly disappeared. Image
On Cava: Management points to Cava's slowdown as proof it's an industry problem.

"See, it's not us, it's the industry."

But internally? They'd never accept that excuse from their own people. Image
Read 13 tweets
Nov 26, 2025
Fundsmith is on track for its 5th year of underperformance.

In a recent interview, Terry Smith explains the reasons why—and what he thinks is wrong with the market today.

Key insights: 🧵 Image
Smith breaks down the underperformance into distinct phases:

2022-23: Interest rates rose from 0% to 5%
2023: Magnificent Seven concentration
2024: AI boom/hype
Throughout: Passive fund flows

He claims each one is a headwind for quality investors. Image
On interest rates:

Quality companies trade at higher valuations because more cash flows are in the future. When rates rise, they behave like long-dated bonds—they get hit harder.

"When rates go up, our type of companies suffer in share price terms and companies which we wouldn't own which are very cyclical or not very good actually relatively benefit."Image
Read 15 tweets
Nov 23, 2025
Eric Seufert and Ben Thompson just released an interview that reframes AI monetization strategy.

Why affiliate links fail, why "agentic commerce" won't happen, the Netflix lesson OpenAI is ignoring, and Meta's first real bear case in years.

What stood out: 🧵
Context: Everyone assumes ChatGPT will monetize through affiliate links (Walmart, Etsy partnerships).

Seufert's argument: this is the wrong model. And the urgency is real—"OpenAI needs to launch its ads product today, they cannot wait."
Why affiliate advertising is wrong for ChatGPT:

1. It only monetizes queries with commercial intent

Seufert: "If you're using ads, you get to monetize everything because it's every single engagement. If you're just using affiliate links, you can only monetize the ones that are like, 'What's the DSLR camera?'."Image
Read 18 tweets
Nov 21, 2025
This is what happens when you answer the "tell me about your weakness" question too honestly.

PayPal CEO Alex Chriss at Citi's FinTech Conference laid out the challenges so clearly it spooked the market.

Here's what he said: 🧵 Image
1/ Consumer spending deteriorated suddenly mid-September and it's persisting into Q4.

Chriss: "We started to see a slowdown on consumers, particularly around discretionary spending, retail and really in middle to low income brackets, which play a significant role in PayPal."

The weakness is concentrated: "If we look at some of our cohorts of higher income spenders, they're still spending. But we are seeing pressure for middle to lower income."

Q4 branded checkout expected to grow slower than Q3 as a result.
2/ The branded checkout rollout is taking much longer than expected.

Only 20% complete after significant time. Chriss admitted: "That's probably the piece I underestimated the most in terms of just how long it would take to get that experience out to customers."

The timeline? "We're just going to have to go through the hard work over the next few quarters and maybe even a couple of years to get through our backlog of merchants."

Years, not quarters. That's a meaningful delay.

Why so slow? Technical debt worse than realized.

Chriss: "We have 15-plus years of really bespoke integrations across our merchant base. This was something I personally didn't appreciate when I got here of just how many different integration patterns there have been."
Read 8 tweets

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