MBI and I recorded an episode of Never Sell recently (The Big Tech Capex Debate, Amazon Retail, Align’s Pricing Challenge) (Spotify, Apple, YouTube, RSS feed) What are scuttlebits? h/t @taobanker I’ll keep this brief as nothing material has changed since my March ‘25 update and a number of adherents of the growing Shift4 cult have recently tweeted/blogged quarterly commentary that I […]
What are scuttlebits? On the heels of my Global Payments post, another boomer payments stock has cratered. Source: FT You’ll recall that, through a series of mammoth-sized transactions, Global Payments morphed into an unwieldy issuer processor/merchant acquirer hybrid, only to reverse course and return to being just an unwieldy merchant acquirer. Fiserv, meanwhile, has committed […]
In last summer’s building materials series, I explained how branded manufacturers, like James Hardie in siding and Trex in composite decking, are protected by significant moats in the form of trusted relationships they’ve secured downstream with dealers and contractors, as well as the brand equity they’ve cultivated with homeowners: Homeowner mindshare is a relevant consideration. […]
What are scuttlebits? Nowhere is the insurance industry’s notorious resistance to change more evident than in how they fiercely it clings to antiquated IT architectures. Carriers adopted mainframes in the ‘80s, built policy and claims engines on top, then lagged years behind just about every other commercial enterprise in embracing client-server computing, then cloud computing. […]
What are scuttlebits? “we fundamentally believe whoever has the best infrastructure in this space will win in the longer run” (Harsh Sinha, Wise CTO; Wise Analyst Day, 4/3/25) it’s inevitable that the lowest price operator will win the scale needed to become the infrastructure to operate the trillions of cross-border money (Kristo Kaarmann, Wise Co-Founder […]
In simple terms what Gartner does is it furnishes research reports that executives use to inform consequential procurement and strategy decisions. Where Gartner wields the most influence is in IT (literally, the company’s ticker symbol!), where its insights might be used by CIOs to, say, design a cybersecurity framework, validate vendor choices, and benchmark deal […]
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What are scuttlebits? Nobody talks about Charles Schwab anymore, but just two and a half short years ago everyone had an opinion…and if you roamed the Twitter hellscape back then what you found was that the most amplified takes converged on one conclusion: Schwab was teetering on the brink of collapse. To recap: the most […]
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What are scuttlebits? I recently read Focus: The ASML Way by Marc Hijink, a book I’d recommend to anyone interested in getting up to speed on ASML. Among the many interesting anecdotes cited in this terrific book, the one that stood out most to me pertained not to its mind-boggling technology but its approach to […]
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