🤓 Master Financial Models in 5️⃣ Steps 💡

(Learning on Sunday!🙌)

Ever wonder how pros predict a company’s future? 🤔

Spoiler: it’s not a crystal ball 🔮, it’s financial modeling.💡

Most people think it's way more complex than it really is.

You just need a simple, repeatable process.

And guess what? I’ve got one for you!🙂👇 🧵

🔑 5 Steps to Master Financial Models: 🪜Step 1: 🪜

The future potential of a business usually starts with its financial history.

Here’s a simple approach to analyzing financial models effectively:

➡️Review Past Financial Reports: The numbers tell the real story. Study revenues, costs, and profits to find patterns.

➡️Identify Key Drivers: Which factors drive growth? Which hold it back?

I usually put the key drivers on a list that I check each quarter. I call them the Selling Criteria.

⚠️If these weaken, you should be very cautious!⛔️

First let's look at the chart you could see on the right-hand side.

You can see that you have a drop-down menu. I clicked drawdowns and selected maximum.

You can see that $NVDA is now down 8.99% from its recent high, but that it dropped more than 50% multiple times. Let's go to the left-hand side.

There you have several tabs that you can open. You see an overview here. I'll click on estimates for the next post, but all others are very interesting as well. You can do your own modeling, for example.

But estimates 👇

📚Buffett Only Needed 3 Chapters🎯

Warren Buffett said that most of his investing wisdom came from just 3 chapters.

I have summarized them for you.
👇 What are the chapters?

📖 From Benjamin Graham’s classic, "The Intelligent Investor":

Chapter 8: Understanding market psychology and riding out the noise.

Chapter 20: The unbreakable rule of the Margin of Safety.

The other one: 👇

10 Things I wish I knew about investing 20 years ago.

Lesson 1⃣
Companies should be valued according to the phase they are in. Lesson 2⃣

Only 5% of the fair value of a stock is in the next 2 years.

Zoom out and then even more.

Jeff Green changed advertising technology (or in short ad tech)as the founder and CEO of The Trade Desk $TTD

But Green is also known for overcoming the challenges of his background and his public departure from the Mormon Church.

Let's dive into his life's journey. Jeff Green grew up in a Mormon town, Holladay, Utah, on the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains. But little Jeff had big dreams. First he had to overcome his difficulties, though.

There's a lot of talk about the Mag7 being overvalued. Let's examine the valuations from a few different angles.

$NVDA $AAPL $MSFT $AMZN $GOOGL $TSLA $META Here are the returns of the Mag7 over the last 5 years.

$NVDA 2,363.9%, CAGR 82.62%
$TSLA 1,042.45%, CAGR 58.06%
$AAPL 354.90%, CAGR 32.94%
$MSFT 251.54%, CAGR 26.65%
$GOOGL 179.04%, CAGR 21.27%
$META 168.77% CAGR 20.42%
$AMZN 98.27%, CAGR 13.73%

S&P 500 79.75%
Nasdaq 108.6%

Introducing: $TTD

From $1B (at the IPO) to $49B+ in 8 years.🚀🚀🚀
Disclosure: long $TTD since 2019 ($19.5).

How can $TTD compete with giants like $GOOGL & $META? We look at the 3-part moat.
Is $TTD a buy now?💰
🧵👇 $TTD was founded in 2009 by Jeff Green, a visionary who created the first digital ad exchange AdECN, which was bought by $MSFT in 2007. Green staid there for 2 yrs before founding $TTD.
But what does it actually do?🤔👇

$PAYC is down almost 75% from its high and now trades at a PE of 17.9, the lowest ever.

Is it interesting to buy now? 🔍🕵️‍♂️

A short🧵👇 Investors have punished it for its slower growth, which, according to the company, was caused by Beti, its self-service HR solution, which cannibalizes other revenue streams.
That's the reason why $PAYC trades at a PE of 17.9, the low valuation since its IPO in April 2014. 👀

This is me.

My general state of mind is happy. 😀😀😀
I wake up happy every day, but that was not always the case.

When I was in my early 20s, I was depressed. Just TWO questions that I have been using ever since completely changed my life.

You can use them too!👇 The 1st question is about decision-making:

Suppose you are 90 and have one week to live. When you look back at this moment, will it be important?

In 99% of cases, it won't, so don't put too much pressure on yourself to make the right decision. Don't overthink it. But...👇

While $NU has a market cap of $55B, many don't really know it yet, as I could see again yesterday after another fantastic quarter!

That's why I put together a thread with crucial insights to understand the investment case.

Ready? Go! 👇 $NU was founded 11 years ago in Brazil and recently, it already celebrated its 100 millionth customer (99.3 at the end of Q1).

The customer growth has been explosive, as you can see on this chart.

But customers need to be monetized! 👇

Price/Gross Profit 🙌

One of the most underrated ratios is price/gross profit. It can foreshadow what the business might be worth in a mature state.

Let's do this for widely-followed🔟growth stocks🚀

$TTD $MELI $CRWD $NET $SNOW $DUOL $ZS $SHOP $DDOG $CELH We start with The Trade Desk $TTD.

At a P/GP of 26 times, I think it's quite fully valued without being crazily overvalued.

Next: $MELI

$DUOL' stock price is up 64% over the last year and 140% since I picked it as a Potential Multibagger in September 2022. 🥳🥳🥳

I'm a user (Italian🇮🇹) with an 888-day streak.

Here are some key statistics that help you explain $DUOL's price movement. In the last three years, $DUOL has tripled its revenue. As you can see in this great 🤩@finchat graph, most of that comes from subscriptions.

Those come from users willing to pay to have Duolingo Premium without ads.

Let's dive a bit more into the revenue streams.👇

10 GREAT quotes about volatility.

1. "I think that the business about volatility being risk is a con job which was perpetrated primarily because volatility is machinable."

Howard Marks
🧵👇 2. Day-to-day fluctuations in the profits of existing investments, which are obviously of an ephemeral and non-significant character, tend to have an altogether excessive, and even an absurd, influence on the market.
John Maynard Keynes

GROWTH INVESTING in 5 quotes and 7 tweets.

1. LOSERS
If you are a growth investor, you will have many losers. I've had my share.

But the wonderful thing is that one or a few multibaggers can wipe out all the losers and still allow you to outperform the market.
🧵👇 2. The reason? The ASYMETRIC RISK in investing. You can only lose 100% (unless you are leveraged) but you can gain 10,000% or more.

“It's not whether you're right or wrong, but how much money you make when you're right and how much you lose when you're wrong.”
George Soros
🧵👇

I'm long $NVDA since $25 and today, it crossed $700. 🚀🚀🚀

When it was at $400, I recommended it a few times to the Multis as a Best Buy Now and called it fairly valued for its growth.

But does $700 make sense or is it in clear bubble territory? 🫧

Let's have a look. 👇
1/6 Let's look based on free cash flow.

Over the last year, $NVDA had a free cash flow margin of 40%. I think it will be slightly above that in Q4 and that it can beat on revenue. That could mean $25 billion in FCF for 2023.

So, is that expensive?👇
2/6

Are valuations too high?👇

This 1st chart shows that large caps are historically expensive. Midcaps and smallcaps are not.

Your conclusion is now probably that the Mag7 stocks are overvalued?

$MSFT, $AAPL, $NVDA, $AMZN, $GOOGL, $META, $TSLA

But is that really the case?👇1/3 There is an outstanding reason for the Mag7's higher valuation. Their earnings are just incredibly much better than those of the rest of the S&P 500.

Just look at this image and you'll understand.

But there's more.👇
2/3

Have you read Robert Cialdini's FANTASTIC book📕 "Influence"?

If not, I highly recommend it. If it's good enough for Charlie Munger, it's good enough for anybody.😃

Here are some facts from the book and some trivia about the book.

The first is about Charlie Munger.👇

1/5 Charlie Munger liked the book so much, he sent Robert Cialdini a big envelope with a Class A share of $BRK.A stock.

At the time, this was worth about $60K. Today, that share is worth more than half a million dollars!

More trivia. 👇
2/5

One of my subscribers (Jason, thank you so much!) reached out with this great question on the Potential Multibaggers platform:
"Could $PAYC be like one of those companies we have read about in the great book The Outsiders?"

I think it could, yes. Read the threat to know why👇 This is what Jason wrote about the characters of Outsider CEOs:
"Humble, unassuming, and often frugal, these "outsiders" shunned Wall Street and the press, and shied away from the hottest new management trends. 👇

Since its IPO, $TTD is a 20-bagger and since I picked it 4 years ago, it's a 3-bagger, despite being down ~45% from its highs right now. I think it still has multibagger potential for patient long-term investors.

But what does The Trade Desk do exactly? A 🧵👇1/10 This slide from the company's earnings call slide deck can already help you. You have to cross a certain ad spending budget. If you want access to ads in Canada, you have to spend $100K/month on ads, and in the US $1M. 2/10

This is my representation of $SE's Q4 2022 income statement. I have marked a few important things and will highlight them and give my point of view in this thread. 🧵👇 As you can see, Garena's revenue continues to go down. It was cut by 1/3 YoY. But Shopee and DFS (=SeaMoney) did really well. Overall, revenue was up 7.1%. That's not so much, but if you look at gross profit, you see it's up 29.5% YoY.

A lesser-known piece of tech history from the late 80s and early 90s and what that can learn us about the implications for today's long-term tech investing.
(h/t WSJ)
1/10
⏬ In the late 80s, the tech sector had lost its mojo. Since the 1960s, the Cold War had spurred big defense investments in tech, but the Cold War was over now.

2 important things revived tech in the early 1990s.
2/10
⏬