0/ In a podcast with Druckenmiller @DavidNovakOGO coined a few "Drucks Nuggets" advice that he has given over the years & had him extrapolate on it:

1. Do not invest in the present. Always imagine where the world will be in 18-24 months and invest for that. 1/ 2. Put all of your eggs in one basket and watch that basket carefully
3. Invest & then investigate
4. Look at leading & lagging industries (e.g., market internals such as housing, retail, trucking)
5. Be imaginative of what can go wrong (and what can go right...pick up change)

0/ Last month JPM published a piece on payments entitled "Payments are eating the world" introducing their "POWER+" framework.

These 5 themes (& 20 micro themes) are responsible for ~$54T of the ~$240T in global payment flows:

Platforms
Online
Wallets
Embedded
Real Time 1/ When looking at the opportunity for FinTech / Crypto to disrupt banks there's the view that payments are a "solved" problem despite a ~$2T+ rev opportunity

Jamie Dimon notes JPM moves $8T/day across 52M payments of which ~98% is same day & 78% is real-time.

0/ @nubank filed their F1.
-They have 48.1M users as of 3Q21 w/ a NPS of 90+, adding 2.1M new customers / month on in 3Q21 & 80--35.3M MAU (73%)
-They are the 1st credit card or bank account for 5.1M+ users & have 1M+ SMEs. 1/ They position themselves as a better solution for consumers & SME's across "Five Financial Seasons":
-Spending (CC, Mobile Payments, Rewards)
-Savings (Personal / Business Acct)
-Investing
-Borrowing (Personal Loans)
-Protecting (Insurance)

0/ Yesterday was $AFRM's 3rd earnings call as a public co but @mlevchin treated it like Day 1 articulating the vision for AFRM to "unbundle the credit card," discussing TAM, product roadmap, the 10-year+ vision, & recent trends / consolidation

Worth a listen given BNPL debates. 1/ For FY21 $AFRM facilitated 16M+ transactions & $8B+ in GMV for 7M users with merchants +5x YoY

Initial FY22 guidance of $12.75B of GMV vs. high-end Street at ~$12B (doesn't include $AMZN, or Debit+, modelling $PTON (-30-35%) YoY vs. Street +, $SHOP is implied at ~$600M-$1.0B.

0/ @patrick_oshag had former Notre Dame CIO Scott Malpass on the pod, Malpass took ND's endowment from a 3 person team (a priest, a receptionist & himself) & $425M in 1989 to ~$14.0B when he stepped aside last year w/ endowment spending going from $19.5M to $425.7M over that time 1/ He became CIO at 26 w/ 2 years of work experience & is one of the more underappreciated capital allocators of the last 3 decades.

Malpass was one of the first CIO's to embrace the Endowment Model having a greater equity allocation, diversification, & investing into alts.

0/ We had Druckenmiller give another warning this AM about more gov't spending.

"In Spring of '20 economy was in a black hole & it was the most uncertain period [Druck] has seen in his lifetime. Congress did the best they could do & spent $2.3T. Fast forward 5-6 months & we 1/ didn't have a great depression, it turns out we had the sharpest V recovery in history.

By early Fall the 30 year trend in retail sales was above trend, this took 5-6 months, in the Great Depression it took 10 years, post GFC it took 5 years, this was a very different animal

0/ Leading FinTech co's are seeing CAC decrease as they scale.

$SQ finished '20 w/ a CAC <$5 & 36M MAUS (up from 24M in '19) while $HOOD saw CAC hit $15 in 1Q21 down from $20 for '20, $32 in 1Q20 & $53 in '19 w/ 18M accounts in 1Q21 up from 12.5M, 7.2M & 5.1M respectively 1/ These customer bases are starting to surpass incumbents: E.g., $BAC has 39.3M "digital users" (12.9M Zelle) while $JPM has 63.4M households, 55.3M digital / 40.9M mobile customers

$SCHW has 32M active broker accounts with $7.4T in clients assets & $IBKR at 1.4M /$363B

0/ Druckenmiller has now had a similar interviews for CNBC, USC, & The Hustle w/ their own twist.

Tech Bubble vs. Today- "Today, you have something similar & something different. Monetary policy is absolutely insane. We had no QE back then. And our rates weren’t 0%. They were 1/ 4% or 5% when they probably should have been 6% or 7%. No comparison.

So we have an asset bubble. Now that’s not just in tech stocks, it’s in everything. I know some of the backers of $DOGE might disagree. If you’re an asset, you’ve been moving. From '95 to '00, you had an

0/ On the $FISV earnings call mgmt highlighted the strength of Clover (their SMB platform) & Carat (their enterprise omni-channel commerce solution).

Most impressively they achieved their 35th consecutive year of double-digit EPS growth. How many public co's have done that? 1/ Clover GPV grew 25% to $35B in 4Q & $135B annualized.

This is larger than $SQ's Seller GPV ecosystem and it continues to be under-appreciated within $FISV from the Street.

0/ In a recent Talk w/ GS Druckenmiller discussed the current environment & said "this is the wildest cocktail I've ever seen in trying to figure out a roadmap. The recession we had was 5.0x the avg recession since WWII but it did it in 25% of the time. 1/ More bizzairely during the year while 11M+ people were unemployed we had the largest increase in personal income in 20 years; due to the massive policy response.

0/ Thoma Bravo just filed a $900M S1 for a SPAC entitled Thoma Bravo Advantage.

They've executed 270 software transactions & in '17, '18, and '19 were named the top performing buyout firm based on all funds raised from '05-'14; so this is a notable new entrant. 1/ They talk about extending their expertise in the public market, "We believe there is a robust pipeline of high quality software companies that are both ready to take advantage of the opportunities that the public market has to offer & would benefit from partnering with us."

0/ We've highlighted FinTech infrastructure co's like BR, FIS, JKHY, MA, V, ICE, NDAQ, etc. as companies w/ a variety of moats that have led to dominant mkt share & outperformance despite being 50+ years old on avg.

$FISV had their investor day yesterday and laid out the why. 1/ $FISV highlights the fact that they have #1 market share in core accounting processing for $1-$50B FI’s; they are doing $1.0B in global e-Commerce revenue, and have more than $30B available for capital allocation over the next 5 years (read more M&A for FinTech co's)