SaaS companies create some of the world's biggest fortunes.

$CRM: $200B. $NOW: $150B. $NET: $30B. $CRWD: $75B. $DDOG: $45B.

But 90% of investors don't understand the metrics that matter.

Here are the 20 SaaS metrics that separate winners from losers: 🧵 Traditional investing metrics don't work for SaaS companies.

Forget P/E ratios and book value. These businesses are built on recurring revenue, not physical assets.

SaaS companies live by different rules. And smart investors learn those rules.

These two brothers are among the most successful stock pickers in history.

They found $AMZN at $0.80. $NFLX at $1.60. $TSLA in 2011.

Yet they had no MBA, no finance background, and no connections when they started.

Here's their step-by-step guide for complete beginners: 🧵 These two brothers are David and Tom Gardner.

In 1993, they started The Motley Fool with $4,000 and a simple mission: teach regular people to invest.

Both were English majors. Zero finance experience.

But they had something different...

They programmed you to hate learning.

Schools, textbooks, even your parents made you think education was boring.

But Luis von Ahn cracked the code and built a $14 billion empire teaching people for free.

Here are my top 7 lessons from the CEO of $DUOL: 🧵 In 2005, von Ahn was a Carnegie Mellon professor watching people solve crossword puzzles on flights.

Meanwhile, his computer science colleagues couldn't teach machines to do the same task.

That's when he realized something huge...

Aswath Damodaran has valued more companies than anyone alive.

After 30+ years, he's developed a 10-step framework that cuts straight to what matters.

While others get lost in complexity, he focuses on what drives value.

Here's his exact financial statement reading technique:🧵 Most people open a financial statement and immediately get overwhelmed.

300+ pages of numbers, footnotes, and accounting jargon.

Damodaran starts with something completely different...

It's the same thing Warren Buffett looks at first, he said on the last $BRK AGM:

$TTD crashed 60% from its highs but has recovered significantly since my last analysis.

In March and April, I called it severely undervalued. Now it's up 65%-75% since then... But that doesn't mean there can't be more upside.

Here's my updated thesis: 🧵 First, let me acknowledge what happened since my last analysis.

$TTD has bounced back hard from where I pounded the table multiple times here and on my Substack.

But the Q1 2025 results show why the recovery was justified - and why there's still upside ahead.

Why do smart people make terrible investment decisions?

Because intelligence doesn't protect you from psychological traps.

Napoleon Hill studied 500+ millionaires and found the mental patterns that destroy wealth.

His 7 principles to overcome these cognitive barriers: 🧵
The biggest obstacles to building wealth aren't market crashes or bad luck.

They're the mental chains in your own mind.

Hill identified these psychological traps in both "Think and Grow Rich" and "Outwitting the Devil."

Here's how they apply to investing...

One man turned $1,000 into $1,000,000, TWICE.

David Gardner bought $AMZN in 1997 and $NVDA at 16 cents in 2005.

While most sell for 10% gains, he holds for 1,000x returns.

His 6 "Rule Breaker" criteria that identify 100-baggers: 🧵 This is David Gardner.

Co-founder of The Motley Fool and architect of "Rule Breaker Investing."

He's picked 7 stocks that went up more than 100x and 30+ stocks that went up more than 10x.

But here's what makes him different...

This is the Father of Value Investing.

The man Warren Buffett learned everything from.

His ideas influenced Howard Marks, Ray Dalio, Bill Ackman, and
countless successful investors.

Here are 8 of Benjamin Graham's best investing rules:
(No. 6 is fascinating) Graham lost most of his money in the 1929 crash.

He spent the next few years analyzing what went wrong and developed a systematic approach to investing.

His method was so consistent that he later said he "never lost a night's sleep over an investment decision."

Here are the principles he discovered:

Vanguard studied 90 years of data and found something shocking:

Even with perfect timing, buying every dip perfectly... you still lose to dollar-cost averaging.

Yet 90% of investors try to time the market. And fail

The math behind why "buying the dip" is the worst strategy: 🧵
Here's what the data actually shows:

From 1920 to 1980, researchers gave investors a perfect crystal ball. They could buy at every single market bottom with perfect timing.

The result? They still underperformed simple dollar-cost averaging...

The greatest capital allocator no one talks about.

At 34% return/yr his track record destroys that of Warren Buffett, Ray Dalio, Carl Icahn, and nearly every investor alive.

Yet almost no one knows his name...

Here is Mark Leonard's updated investing philosophy: Mark Leonard founded Constellation Software $CSU in 1995 with a simple thesis:

Buy small software companies that serve niche markets and hold them forever.

Twenty-nine years later, he's generated 34% annual returns turning $25 million into $89 billion...

$DDOG is one of my highest conviction positions.

I loaded up between Feb and April when the stock looked mispriced.

The company crushed it in Q1 with:

• 25% revenue growth
• 120% net retention
• $4.4B in cash.

But I won't be adding to my position...

Here's why: 🧵 First, let me be clear, this isn't a bearish call on $DDOG.

I still rate it 8.5/10 on personal conviction and believe the fundamentals remain incredibly strong.

But valuation matters, and the stock is up 33% since I last updated my analysis...

I've been long $CRWD since $93, but I wouldn't buy it now.

The comeback from the devastating outage has been incredible - all-time highs in just 11 months.

But I won't be adding to my position...

Here's why: 🧵 The recovery has been nothing short of remarkable.

All-time highs just 11 months after July 19, 2024 outage.

$1.10B revenue (+20% YoY) with $4.44B ARR (+22% YoY).

If someone told you this on July 20, you'd have laughed.

$SE is up 115% over the last year, and I've been covering why.

The company is firing on all cylinders - $4.8B revenue (+29.6% YoY) with $410M net income.

Every single division is now profitable and growing.

Here's why $SE is still a massive opportunity:🧵 The revenue "miss" story is complete nonsense.

People called it a $50M miss on $4.8B revenue.
That's a 1% variance during massive FX swings.

Q1 GAAP EPS beat by $0.04 at $0.65.

Just watch this chart:

$NVDA just posted the most insane quarter in corporate history.

$44.1B revenue (+69% YoY) from the world's second largest company.

Data center up 73%, and Blackwell ramping faster than any product in history.

Here's why $NVDA is still a buy: 🧵 The numbers are crazy:

$44.1B revenue (+69% YoY)
$39.1B data center revenue (+73% YoY)
$26.1B free cash flow (59% of revenue)

This amount of growth for a company of this size has never happened before in history.

Here's what shocked me most...

The world's most stubborn investor.

Phil Fisher held one stock for 49 years until he died.

He bought Motorola in 1955 for $10 and watched it grow 2000x, turning every $1,000 invested in 1957 into $2 million...

Here are my 8 favorite principles from him:
(No. 6 is fascinating) 1/ Phil Fisher founded his investment firm in 1931 at age 24.

For 70 years, he beat the market using one simple rule:

Buy great companies and (almost) never sell.

He still influences investors today, including me.

Even Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger have praised him:

Everyone treats $NU like a risky bet in volatile Latin America.

But it just added 4.3M new users, grew FX-neutral profits 74%, and now serves 60% of Brazilian adults as their primary bank.

Its 2026 PEG ratio? Just 0.43.

Here’s why $NU is the (Amazon of emerging market banks): 🧵 1/ Most people still don't see what's coming...

Latin American digital banking adoption will be bigger than most people think.

60% of Latin Americans are still unbanked or underbanked.

Digital banking penetration is in early innings...

Visiting $ASML...
Attrition rate, just 3.8% For the pink industries, you need EUV

🤓 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.