Investing is a game of arrogance. The base rate when you buy any stock is that it just does the market return, so every position you hold is a bet that you know something the market doesn't. My July ramble is really one question asked five ways: when do you look in the mirror and admit you were wrong? I walk through my three-year rule on a single name (if it has gone nowhere for three years, the problem is probably you, not the market), and the harder version, a value fund that has underperformed for a decade.

I use myself as the example. I saw AI inflecting in late 2024 and didn't pull the trigger, because I'm a value and event guy and I didn't see the bet, and a lot of those names then went on a generational run. Was that discipline or a mental block? From there I get into why you're effectively short Nvidia if you don't own it and you're benchmarked to the S&P, the Fundsmith letter walking back its principles as the cautionary tale on both sides, my own April 2025 book (the net-cash biotech and the Nebius trade I sold way too early), and why London increasingly trades like an emerging market: a takeover wave, private value miles above public value, and the frustration of owning cheap names that only move if someone buys the whole company.

This episode is sponsored by Fiscal.ai: https://fiscal.ai/yav. Fiscal.ai is a modern financial data provider for global equities, with 20+ years of statements, ratios, filings, segments and KPIs, a web-based terminal, and a self-serve API that plugs real-time fundamental data straight into Claude and ChatGPT. Use fiscal.ai/yav for 15% off.

Chapters:

(0:00) Intro and episode preview

(2:50) Sponsor: fiscal.ai

(4:16) Investing is a game of arrogance: beating the base rate

(6:18) The three-year rule, and when a whole strategy has underperformed

(9:19) Missing the AI trade: discipline, mental block, and the Fundsmith letter

(14:42) If you don't own Nvidia, you're short it

(16:46) My April 2025 book: Nebius, net-cash biotech, and selling winners too early

(21:47) Why London trades like an emerging market: takeouts and dead stocks

(27:08) Wrap

Links:

Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com

See our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimer

Production and editing by The Podcast Consultant - https://thepodcastconsultant.com/

Light & Wonder ($LNW) is one of three companies in the slot machine oligopoly, with 70%+ recurring revenue, and it trades at 7-8x EBITDA while Aristocrat, its closest peer and arguably its slower-growing twin, trades at roughly double that. Zach Buckley thinks the market is wrong on almost every count: the stock has traded like a SaaS chart on AI fears even though slot content has almost no AI exposure, the Street doesn't believe 2028 targets from a management team that already hit the last three-year guide it set, and the soft first half is a game-launch timing story (Aristocrat launched in H1, Light & Wonder's slate lands in H2), not share loss. Zach has sized this the largest he's ever sized anything, and you can hear it.

I push back where I can: whether Caesars could ever build its own boxes (Zach: Marriott doesn't build elevators), why management is paying down debt to appease Australian shareholders instead of murdering the share count at these prices, what the Dragon Train settlement really cost them, and SciPlay's genuine AI risk. We also cover the move to a sole Australian listing, the Grover charitable-gaming acquisition at ~7.5x EBITDA, and what would actually break the thesis.

This episode is sponsored by AlphaSense: https://alpha-sense.com/yavp. Most AI tools are very good at sounding right, but can you trace the answer back to the filing, the transcript, the exact passage that drove it? AlphaSense's AI platform is built for exactly that: over 500 million curated documents, from broker research and expert transcripts to filings and earnings calls, with every answer linked back to an exact, verifiable source. See it for yourself with a free trial at https://alpha-sense.com/yavp.

Chapters:

(00:00:05) Introducing Light & Wonder

(00:03:09) Light & Wonder's transformation

(00:05:57) Australian listing creates opportunity

(00:08:36) Recurring revenue business model

(00:09:39) Why game quality matters

(00:11:45) Business quality meets valuation

(00:13:31) Explaining Aristocrat's valuation premium

(00:17:15) AI offers productivity upside

(00:19:08) SciPlay faces greater AI risk

(00:21:20) Barriers protect game development

(00:23:56) Casinos avoid vertical integration

(00:29:05) Why Australia made sense

(00:30:25) Dragon Train litigation explained

(00:32:14) Assessing lingering litigation impact

(00:34:11) Why investors doubt targets

(00:36:04) Short-termism drives investor skepticism

(00:39:41) Balancing buybacks and deleveraging

(00:42:39) Grover acquisition adds growth

(00:43:55) Electronic pull tabs explained

(00:47:14) What could break thesis

(00:50:41) AI fears create opportunities

(00:52:32) Zach summarizes investment thesis

Zach Buckley / Buckley Capital Partners: https://www.buckleycapitalpartners.com/

Links:

Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com

See our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimer

Production and editing by The Podcast Consultant - https://thepodcastconsultant.com/

United Parks ($PRKS) owns SeaWorld and Busch Gardens, trades around 8x EBITDA with an 8%+ unlevered cash yield, and is plowing basically 100% of free cash flow into buybacks while Hill Path sits on roughly 60% of the stock. Adjust for passive holders and effective short interest lands somewhere near 80% of float; Bloomberg's short squeeze score is 93 out of 100. Hawkins Entrekin (Valyte, and the guy who pitched Vornado on this podcast right at the bottom of New York real estate) thinks you're buying irreplaceable hard assets below replacement cost, with a squeeze as the cherry on top. His fair value: low $80s against a stock in the high $40s.

It's catnip to me, which is exactly why I push back. EBITDA fell from roughly $700 million to $600 million in an inflationary environment; is that Epic Universe's one-time supply hit, or a sign SeaWorld is the industry's swing capacity? Management has blamed weather in 15 of the last 16 quarters (I counted). And when a 60% owner is pushing every dollar into buybacks while attendance sits 20% below the 2008 peak, you have to ask whether this is being run for long-term operations or just for the spreadsheet.

Hawkins' United Parks write-up: https://valyteresearch.substack.com/p/united-parks-and-resorts

The Trata call I used to prep: https://www.trata.com/prks

This episode is sponsored by AlphaSense: https://alpha-sense.com/yavp. Most AI tools are very good at sounding right, but can you trace the answer back to the filing, the transcript, the exact passage that drove it? AlphaSense is the AI platform built for that: over 500 million curated documents, from broker research and expert transcripts to filings and earnings calls, with every answer linked back to an exact, verifiable source. Try a free trial at https://alpha-sense.com/yavp.

Chapters:

(00:00) Intro: everything I love in a stock, and why that scares me

(01:34) AlphaSense (sponsor)

(02:49) Welcome back Hawkins Entrekin

(03:41) What is United Parks?

(04:44) The short squeeze setup: ~80% of effective float

(05:50) A real estate lens on theme parks

(08:36) What are the shorts seeing?

(10:32) EBITDA went from $700M to $600M; why?

(12:01) Epic Universe and the new-supply explanation

(17:27) Weather excuses: 15 of the last 16 quarters

(19:44) Capex and the asset-stripping check

(24:08) The real estate angles (and OpCo/PropCo cold water)

(28:19) What's the excess land worth?

(30:34) Can you comp a theme park on NOI?

(32:13) Valuation: low-$80s fair value vs a high-$40s stock

(34:33) Why 8x when Blackstone paid 12-14x? Plus replacement cost

(40:45) Hill Path at 60%: squeeze, take-private, or sale?

(46:05) Attendance is down 20% from the 2008 peak

(48:47) The bulls have been early for three years

(56:58) What is Valyte?

(58:28) Seritage, Elme, and a hard stop

Hawkins Entrekin / Valyte: https://www.valytedata.com/

Links:

Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com

See our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimer

Production and editing by The Podcast Consultant - https://thepodcastconsultant.com/

Ryan Bunn (Reference Equity) has a public proposal for CBIZ ($CBZ): stop buying back stock at 9x earnings and restart the M&A flywheel that compounded revenue at 13%/year and took EBIT margins from 9% to 14% over the last decade. For someone like me who has always been a sucker for share buybacks, "stop the buybacks and issue equity" lands like a knife right in the gut, so I make him defend every piece of it.

We get into whether the $2.3B Marcum deal (the largest accounting acquisition ever, with the stock down ~70% since) deserves a mulligan, whether the multiple got crushed by 3.4x leverage or by AI headline fear, whether AI lets the Big Four come downmarket and eat CBIZ's middle-market lunch (or lets superstar producers hang their own flag), and whether long-term investors would really put primary equity onto the balance sheet at no discount. Ryan's math: the market prices credit risk, small 6-9x EBITDA bolt-ons restart the compounding machine, and a delevered, re-rated CBIZ has 100%+ upside.

Ryan's Restarting the Flywheel site (proposal + deck): https://cbizflywheel.com/

This episode is sponsored by AlphaSense. Most AI tools are very good at sounding right; the summary is clean, but can you trace it back to the filing, the transcript, the exact passage that drove the answer? AlphaSense owns the content (over 500 million curated documents, from broker research and expert transcripts to filings and earnings calls) and the retrieval layer on top of it, so every answer links back to an exact, verifiable source. Try a free trial at https://alpha-sense.com/yavp

Chapters:

(0:00) Intro: an activist pitch to STOP the buybacks

(1:15) AlphaSense

(2:31) What is CBIZ ($CBZ)?

(5:01) Ryan's proposal: restart the M&A flywheel

(7:44) Buybacks at 9x earnings vs. getting back to M&A

(10:38) Post-Marcum, are there even deals left to do?

(12:52) The AI risk: offshoring and the Big Four coming downmarket

(19:24) Does AI let superstar accountants hang their own flag?

(23:41) The Marcum deal: mulligan or strategic masterstroke?

(28:59) Private equity competition and winner's curse

(31:38) Valuation: 9x free cash flow at 3.4x leverage

(40:00) Does delevering actually re-rate the stock?

(45:47) Management, the board, and alignment

(49:58) Why issue equity now? The FMC example

(56:57) Ryan's real ask: end the muddled capital allocation

(57:38) Wrap

Ryan Bunn / Reference Equity: https://cbizflywheel.com/

Links:

Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com

See our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimer

Production and editing by The Podcast Consultant - https://thepodcastconsultant.com/

Adam Wyden runs one of the most concentrated books I know, and he came on to make the case for two stocks the market has basically left for dead: Stagwell ($STGW) and Driven Brands ($DRVN). On Stagwell, his pitch is that this is not a dying ad agency but a marketing-services and data business compounding toward $700M of EBITDA by 2028, sitting at a 20%+ free cash flow yield because it came public through a no-fanfare reverse merger and carried a dual-class and TRA overhang that kept institutions out. On Driven, he thinks the sum of the parts (Collision, Autoglass, and a 50-year-old franchise stub around Take Five) is worth far more than a low-teens stock, and he has been loud enough about it that the company started disclosing numbers within 48 hours of one of his letters.

I push back on both. On Stagwell I keep coming back to the agency model itself: WPP, IPG and the rest have trailed the S&P for 20 years because the human capital walks out the door every night and takes the economics with it, and AI arguably makes that worse. On Driven I press him on why a business this cheap has stayed cheap for four years running, and whether the corporate cost and the leverage ever get fixed without a private-equity owner. Adam's answer, more or less: the market doesn't care until it cares, and the best money he has ever made is buying someone else's five-year pain right before the aha moment.

This episode is sponsored by fiscal.ai: https://fiscal.ai/yav. Fiscal.ai is a modern financial data provider for global equities and one of the leading data connectors for Claude and ChatGPT, so you can pipe real-time fundamental data straight into your LLM. I signed up with my own money to plug it into my Claude cowork setup: more than 20 years of statements, ratios, segments and KPIs, updated within minutes of earnings, not days. Use my link fiscal.ai/yav for 15% off.

Chapters:

(00:00) Intro: Adam Wyden and two names, Stagwell and Driven

(02:44) Stagwell $STGW: the bull case on a marketing-services roll-up

(05:00) Mark Penn and how modern Stagwell came together

(08:40) Does AI break the ad agency model?

(12:50) The data moat and Stagwell's agentic operating system

(19:00) Is Stagwell a jockey bet on Mark Penn?

(24:20) Free cash flow, buybacks, and a stock priced to die

(28:20) Undervalued for four years: what is the market missing?

(32:15) Adam's activist stake and the August 14th tease

(37:00) Driven Brands $DRVN: the auto aftermarket bull case

(41:30) EVs vs ICE and why the aftermarket keeps compounding

(45:20) Sum-of-the-parts: Collision, Autoglass, and the franchise stub

(51:30) Activism at Driven, Roark, and where this business belongs

(58:30) Closing: the AI losers that become AI winners

Links:

Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com

See our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimer

Production and editing by The Podcast Consultant - https://thepodcastconsultant.com/

$VEON trades like a busted emerging-markets telecom, but it owns 84% of Ukraine's Kyivstar and a Pakistani fintech, JazzCash, that already moves 15% of the country's GDP. Samit Umatiya of UIG Funds lays out the sum-of-the-parts case for why the holdco could be worth roughly 4x today's price, and Andrew pushes back hard the whole way: a not-so-storied history of value destruction, a sanctioned 45% shareholder, capital controls, and a long graveyard of telecoms that bungled every growth opportunity they ever had. The result is one long push and pull on whether the upside is real this time.

This episode is sponsored by Fiscal.ai. Fiscal.ai is a modern financial data provider for global equities, with a web terminal plus a self-serve API that plugs real-time fundamentals straight into Claude and ChatGPT. Andrew uses it himself. Get 15% off at https://fiscal.ai/yav

Chapters:

00:00 The setup: a sum-of-the-parts EM telecom nobody talks about

01:31 Sponsor: Fiscal.ai

02:35 Who is Samit Umatiya and what is VEON

04:19 Vimpelcom to VEON: the history and the Russia exit

08:14 Why is the market asleep on this name?

11:31 The sum of the parts: Kyivstar plus four frontier markets

13:59 Bridging the EV gap: Andrew's $8B vs the bull's $3B holdco

16:36 Valuing a telecom on revenue: the "it's a tech company" case

17:54 JazzCash: 15% of Pakistan's GDP, never independently valued

21:00 The bridge to ~$1B of free cash flow and a 4x

23:40 Organic vs. bolt-on digital growth

24:34 Capital controls and getting cash out of the op-cos

27:11 What the market is missing: demographics and under-penetration

31:09 Starlink: competitor or partner in Ukraine's rebuild?

35:31 Digital stickiness and retention

37:42 The Kaspi problem: a dominant super app that never re-rated

39:25 The AI 1440 strategy and a sovereign-AI moat

42:31 Is telecom just structurally bad at capturing growth?

45:11 Capital allocation and the next catalyst: a JazzCash spin

49:38 The elephant in the room: LetterOne's sanctioned 45% stake

54:05 Geopolitical turmoil as a feature, not a flaw

55:24 Is that 45% block actually an opportunity?

57:09 Founder DNA, CEO Kaan Terzioglu, and the spin-off playbook

1:01:56 Wrap

UIG Funds (Samit Umatiya) - https://uigfunds.com

Links:

Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com

See our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimer

Production and editing by The Podcast Consultant - https://thepodcastconsultant.com/

MSA Safety ($MSA) is the "OG pick and shovel" of worker safety: a century-old, pure-play maker of gas detection and firefighter equipment that the Pershing Square Challenge 2026 finalist team argues is a quality compounder the market is underrating. The bull case has three legs. Portable gas detection is shifting to a recurring, higher-margin subscription model, the "canary" that now sings to the whole worksite instead of just the worker wearing it. A legally mandated SCBA replacement cycle is coming that consensus barely credits. And a 2023 divestiture of product liabilities freed up the roughly 17% of EBIT that used to leave the building every year at a zero return. Base case: a double to about $350 by 2030 from roughly $160 today.

EJ Karobath, Craig Larkin and Bob McGrane walk through why MSA's owned-sensor hardware is hard to copy (Blackline got taken private, and its devices break if you drop them), how winning a tier-one fire department like LA or Memphis pulls the surrounding towns along on interoperability, and why 50-plus years of dividend growth and a record $500 million buyback point to real capital-allocation discipline. I push back on the obvious tension: this is a roughly 20x compounder that does not scream alpha, the CFO is guiding mid-single-digit growth, and most of the thesis only pays off in 2028 to 2030. Is the market that inefficient, or is this just a very good business priced about right?

Team MSA's pitch deck is linked here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/gv1oj18pawqrmeq7lai4j/MSA-Pershing-Square-Challenge-vYAVP.pdf?rlkey=8l5vkpkr7r26oi0k7wx5fcf0h&st=g4ow2fxo&dl=0

This episode is sponsored by Trata: trata.com. Trata is recorded, anonymized conversations between two buysiders who actually follow the same company, about an hour each, with a full transcript. When you are getting up to speed on a name, there is nothing like hearing two people who research it talk it through. Check them out at trata.com.

Chapters:

00:00 A quality compounder hiding at a market multiple

01:24 Sponsor: Trata

02:47 Meet Team MSA: EJ, Craig and Bob

05:50 Why they picked MSA: an underfollowed, simple business

07:50 What MSA is: the "OG pick and shovel" of worker safety

10:24 The three segments, and why detection leads

11:51 Fixed vs portable gas detection

13:15 The subscription shift: the canary that sings to the whole worksite

16:40 The moat: durability, owned sensors and a long replacement runway

17:21 Market share, and why Blackline got taken private

21:32 Fire safety: the G1 and the mandated SCBA replacement cycle

23:38 Valuation: a double to ~$350 by 2030, and the reverse DCF

25:43 My pushback: a 20x compounder that doesn't scream alpha

27:00 Why management sandbags the connected and SCBA upside

28:46 A stock for the patient: the J-curve and the long horizon

31:47 Primary research: site visits, IR access and r/firefighting

36:18 Becoming a tech company: 40% of engineers now in software

38:10 The tier-one halo: win LA or Memphis, win the region

42:08 Capital allocation: the liability divestiture, dividends and a $500M buyback

44:13 Wrap: where to find the team and the deck

Team MSA (Columbia Business School): pitch deck linked above

Links:

Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com

See our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimer

Production and editing by The Podcast Consultant - https://thepodcastconsultant.com/

Fox's stock is down about 25% since it agreed to buy Roku for $22 billion, and the market has decided the deal is a blunder. Simeon McMillan of Accrued Interest thinks the market is wrong. His case: Roku controls roughly 44% of how Americans reach streaming on the big screen, about 3x the next platform, so Fox just bought the "front door" to streaming and around 100 million connected TVs in North America. Look under the surface and the deal is closer to 16-17x free cash flow once you account for Roku's barely-tapped ad levers and synergies.

We get into the homepage that became the new "Netflix homepage," why Fox keeps making the smartest M&A bets in media, the Tubi sleeper Simeon is most bullish on, why he loves Roku but is bearish on Spotify, and why Google and Meta look like "true value stocks" to him. I push back hard on whether Fox plus Roku is really better than Roku staying neutral Switzerland for every bidder.

See Simeon's post on Fox / Roku here: https://www.accruedint.com/p/the-strait-of-roku-how-fox-seized

This episode is sponsored by my upcoming AI webinar with AlphaSense.

The AI landscape has never been more crowded or more confusing. Everyone's telling you to adopt AI, but almost nobody's telling you which tools actually give you an edge. I'm sitting down with Dave Wang of Wall Street Prompt and Ben Collins of AlphaSense to break down the modern AI stack for investors, from horizontal platforms like OpenAI and Claude to agentic workflows and finance-specific intelligence tools, and where each one actually fits in a real research process.

Register here: https://www.alpha-sense.com/resources/webinars/choosing-your-ai-stack-a-framework-for-institutional-investors/?utm_source=pt_YAVP&utm_medium=sponsored&utm_campaign=SWB_DG_06-25-26_IMP-GENAI_CORPFS_YAVP-AI-Solutions

Chapters:

00:00 What's coming: Fox-Roku, plus Spotify, Google and Meta

01:08 Sponsor: my AI webinar with AlphaSense

02:24 Guest intro: Simeon McMillan, Accrued Interest

03:05 The Fox-Roku deal and why Simeon thinks it makes sense

05:30 Roku as the "Strait of Hormuz" of streaming (44% of viewing)

06:25 Why Fox has the smartest M&A team in media

07:55 Buying the "front door": ~100M connected TVs

10:03 The Roku homepage as the new "Netflix homepage"

13:44 The ad-sales levers hiding under the multiple

16:31 Valuation: 22x EBITDA, ~16-17x free cash flow with synergies

18:01 My pushback: Fox down 25%, winner's curse, thin synergies

19:35 The real risk of staying pure-play (Viacom, Paramount)

24:51 Rebundling and why everyone's partnered up by 2028

26:08 Is Fox+Roku actually better, or could anyone have bought this?

28:01 Cord-cutting, YouTube TV, and the Disney bloody nose

32:07 The Fox bet Simeon likes most: Tubi

38:30 Why now? The 50% streaming inflection and a shrinking buyer pool

42:21 Does AI slop break or boost the distribution thesis?

48:06 The gotcha: bullish Roku, bearish Spotify (the Pokemon theory of media)

52:22 Google and Meta as "true value stocks"

56:55 The complexity discount, Meta's enterprise tools, and founder control

59:13 Wrap and where to find Accrued Interest

Simeon McMillan / Accrued Interest: https://accruedinterest.substack.com

Links:

Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com

See our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimer

Production and editing by The Podcast Consultant - https://thepodcastconsultant.com/

SpaceX is buying Cursor for ~$60B, and one of the early backers was SBF. So was a convicted fraudster also the greatest VC of all time? That's where June's random ramblings start. From there: why I've flipped from AI doom toward AI as a force multiplier, whether deep subject-matter expertise gets MORE valuable as the world fills with AI slop, why legacy brands (KPMG, CBS, People) might actually gain power in an AI world, why "my edge is a long time horizon" is usually a tell for underperformance, and the cracks showing up in Polymarket and prediction markets.

This episode is sponsored by my upcoming AI webinar with AlphaSense. The AI landscape has never been more crowded or more confusing. Everyone's telling you to adopt AI, but almost nobody's asking the harder question: which tools actually give you an edge?

I'm sitting down with Dave Wang of Wall Street Prompt and Ben Collins of AlphaSense to break down the modern AI stack for investors, from horizontal platforms like OpenAI and Claude to agentic workflows and finance-specific intelligence tools, and where each one actually fits in a real research process. If you're trying to build an AI-enabled workflow that sharpens your judgment rather than replacing it, you won't want to miss this.

Join us on June 25th - register now: https://www.alpha-sense.com/resources/webinars/choosing-your-ai-stack-a-framework-for-institutional-investors/?utm_source=pt_YAVP&utm_medium=sponsored&utm_campaign=SWB_DG_06-25-26_IMP-GENAI_CORPFS_YAVP-AI-Solutions

Chapters:

00:00 What's on the menu this month

02:05 Sponsor: my AI webinar with AlphaSense

03:22 Was SBF the greatest VC of all time? (Cursor, SpaceX, Anthropic)

09:48 Do any frauds or blowups hide assets this valuable? (GGP, Enron, EOG)

11:42 Why I flipped from AI doom toward AI as a force multiplier

13:41 Why AI rewards the creative, and the top 0.1% problem

16:18 AI slop and the rising return on deep expertise (Knicks, ABVX)

20:12 KPMG's hallucinated AI report and secondhand hallucinations

21:57 Does brand get MORE valuable in an AI world? (CBS, People, TMZ, ChatGPT licensing)

25:14 Why "my edge is a long time horizon" is usually a lie

28:50 Forced selling, diamond hands, and the seven-years-of-underperformance letter

32:02 My three-year rule

32:53 Polymarket, MicroStrategy, and the limits of the rulebook

35:00 Prediction markets are reflexive: why nobody's waging "Polymarket wars" yet

37:36 Wrap

Links:

Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com

See our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimer

Production and editing by The Podcast Consultant - https://thepodcastconsultant.com/

The market has decided YouGov ($YOU.L) is an AI loser and cut it ~50% in a year. Jonathan Cohen of Zipperline Capital thinks it's an AI winner trading at 6-7x EBITDA, with a 20-year proprietary dataset AI makes more valuable, not less. We spend the first half on the UK as an "emerging market" (corporate governance discounts, why buybacks are finally happening, and why you can never compare UK and US multiples), then go deep on YouGov: the panel, the moat, synthetic data, and why the company is cancelling its dividend to buy back stock.

This episode is sponsored by my upcoming AI webinar with AlphaSense.

The AI landscape has never been more crowded — or more confusing. Everyone's telling you to adopt AI, but almost nobody's asking the harder question: which tools actually give you an edge?

I'm sitting down with Dave Wang of Wall Street Prompt and Ben Collins of AlphaSense to break down the modern AI stack for investors — from horizontal platforms like OpenAI and Claude to agentic workflows and finance-specific intelligence tools — and where each one actually fits in a real research process. If you're trying to build an AI-enabled workflow that sharpens your judgment rather than replacing it, you won't want to miss this.

Join us on June 25th - register now: https://www.alpha-sense.com/resources/webinars/choosing-your-ai-stack-a-framework-for-institutional-investors/?utm_source=pt_YAVP&utm_medium=sponsored&utm_campaign=SWB_DG_06-25-26_IMP-GENAI_CORPFS_YAVP-AI-Solutions

Chapters:

00:00 Why YouGov could be the AI winner the market is misreading

02:56 Why Jonathan Cohen runs a UK and Europe small/mid-cap book

08:01 Why you can never compare UK and US multiples

13:08 What UK analyst coverage actually tells you

17:37 The shift toward UK buybacks and capital allocation

22:00 The "buybacks kill liquidity" myth

25:11 What YouGov really is: a proprietary data business

31:19 Inside the panel: why people answer, and why retention is the moat

36:52 Why the market thinks YouGov is an AI loser

38:19 The bull case: why AI makes YouGov more valuable

40:55 Synthetic data, and why it breaks

46:28 Trust as a moat in a world of AI slop

52:27 Pushback: Chegg, Wix, and the real AI losers

56:51 Content businesses vs distribution businesses

01:00:14 Music, media, and what compounds through disruption

01:05:38 Closing

Links:

Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com

See our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimer

Production and editing by The Podcast Consultant - https://thepodcastconsultant.com/

Alex Roepers of Atlantic Investment Management lays out two deeply cheap special situations: Dauch (DCH) and Nomad Foods (NOMD). In both, management is sending "dark arts" signals (an aggressive CEO payout struck well above the current price, heavy insider buying) that point to an inflection the market hasn't paid for yet. We dig into the $300M merger synergies at Dauch, the auto-cycle and leverage risk, the governance red flags, the private-label threat to Nomad's frozen-food brands, and whether the European discount on both is real or just doldrums.

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Disclosure: long DCH and NOMD

Chapters:

0:00 Two cheap special situations and the "dark arts" setup

1:10 Sponsor: AlphaSense and the AI-stack-for-investors webinar

2:29 Alex Roepers, Atlantic Investment Management

3:04 Dauch ($DCH): the GKN, Melrose and Dowlais backstory

7:05 Why Atlantic made $DCH a core position at ~$6

9:03 The governance knock: a company named after a sub-1% CEO

13:42 Dark arts: the PSU grant that only pays above $12

15:11 Underwriting the $300M merger synergies

18:13 Leverage, capital allocation and the path to buybacks

24:42 The auto cycle and why 5x free cash flow caps the downside

29:12 Nomad Foods ($NOMD): the frozen-food bull case

33:14 Nomad by the numbers: 5.5x earnings, 7% yield

35:39 The bear case: private label, Aldi and a new CEO

39:21 Would Martin Franklin ever sell?

41:22 Dividend or buyback at these levels?

43:00 Is Franklin distracted by APi Group?

45:27 The kitchen-sink reset and a fall investor day

47:37 "Addback city": cleaning up the earnings number

50:02 The European discount: real or imagined?

Links:

Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com

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Production and editing by The Podcast Consultant - https://thepodcastconsultant.com/