In short
Value-investor “unloved stock” pitches on AI-driven fears and whether moats endure for Meta, Booking Holdings, and Adobe.
Guests (backgrounds)
Stig Brodersen hosts. Hari Ramachandra (value investor, focuses on AI constraints like chips/power/data and “walled garden” advantages). Tobias Carlisle (value investor; long-term, intrinsic-value framing). (Mentioned as “Tobias Carlisle and Hiram Atandra” in intro; later referred to as Hari and Toby.)
Key claims
- Meta: Market discount is mainly about massive AI capex ($135B data centers/infrastructure). Moat is distribution/network effects plus ad targeting using Meta’s data; AI models may commoditize, so execution/monetization matters more than model quality.
- Booking: AI assistants may not disintermediate aggregators because of required relationships/network effects and travel ecosystem data; Booking could become an API/plugin channel for LLMs.
- Adobe: AI threat is real but switching costs and workflow inertia (creative/document precision) likely protect the suite; CEO messaging (“tailwind”) is viewed skeptically.
Notable examples
- Meta: Reality Labs/Metaverse prior “money pit” concerns; Llama vs newer “super intelligence” model; workforce efficiency.
- Booking: Concern about losing mindshare/real estate if users book via LLMs; Booking.com as Google ad spender.
- Adobe: Photoshop as “verb”; Creative Cloud + Document Cloud + Digital Experience; internal anecdote about team difficulty replacing Adobe.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOMeta Stock Pitch Introduction
0:45 to 1:21
Discussion starts with Hari's pitch of Meta and its current market status.
“And finally, I pits the most unloved stock of them all, Adobe.”
Deep Dive into Meta's Business
1:21 to 6:50
Analysis of Meta's strengths, challenges, and potential for recovery.
“Since 2014, with more than 200 million downloads, we have interviewed the world's best investors, studied deeply the principles of value investing, and uncovered many compelling investment opportunities.”
Tobias' Insights on Meta
6:50 to 8:00
Tobias shares his perspective on Meta's business quality and AI challenges.
“And I look forward to your feedback, Toby Elstig.”
AI's Impact on Companies
8:00 to 12:20
Discussion around the implications of AI on computing costs and business strategies.
“Of course, these guys were all going to figure out how to monetize this thing and that was going to be...”
Hari's Perspective on AI Constraints
12:20 to 14:00
Hari addresses the constraints of AI and advantages Facebook may hold.
“So let me throw it back over to you, Hari.”
Exploring Booking.com and the Travel Industry
14:00 to 21:00
The discussion covers the strengths and risks of Booking.com in the evolving travel market influenced by AI.
“So that can prove to be an advantage for Facebook because their cost of delivering AI goes down as chips gets commoditized our model becomes more efficient.”
Exploring Booking.com and the Travel Industry
21:54 to 23:08
The discussion covers the strengths and risks of Booking.com in the evolving travel market influenced by AI.
“Spending my days digging through the financials of the world's best businesses, and one thing becomes obvious fast.”
Discussion on LLMs and Travel Booking
24:28 to 28:00
The hosts debate the future of Booking.com in a world increasingly dominated by Large Language Models.
“I always like your picks and this one is no different.”
Analyzing Booking.com's Market Position
28:00 to 42:00
Learn how Booking.com retains its strong market position and the implications of AI.
“But I think that there is, if you assume that things sort of go back to normal, it doesn't continue to earn what it has in the past, but maybe it sort of muddles along a little bit below that.”
Analyzing Adobe's Stock Potential
42:00 to 42:16
Exploration of Adobe's stock performance and buyback strategy.
“Stiglick, it's again, there is a big discount in the stock.”
Show all 16 chapters
Analyzing Booking.com's Market Position
44:30 to 45:49
Learn how Booking.com retains its strong market position and the implications of AI.
“Built for every industry, ready for every boardroom.”
The Future of Adobe in the AI Era
45:58 to 51:04
Discussion on Adobe's challenges and competition in the AI landscape.
“Yeah, Toby, thank you so much for your feedback.”
Creative Control and AI's Impact
51:05 to 56:00
Examining the balance between creativity and AI in content production.
“Well, it matters for the terminal value.”
The Value of Human Connection in AI Products
56:00 to 57:14
Discusses the balance between human-created products and AI-generated alternatives.
“But they're also saying people want that human connection.”
Analysis of Bellring Brands' Stock Performance
57:14 to 1:00:48
Toby discusses the significant decline in Bellring Brands' stock and its implications.
“But Toby, I know that you also wanted to chat a bit about Bellring Brands from last time that you pitched?”
Market Trends and Future Predictions
1:00:48 to 1:02:59
Explores the current state of small and mid-cap stocks amidst market challenges.
“The bear thesis is real, but the discount here is so material that I think it's worth holding to see what the next few quarterly reports look like.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00You're listening to TIP.
0:02Tobias Carlisle:In today's episode, I'm joined by my friends and fellow value investors Tobias Carlisle and Hiram Atandra for another round of, dare I say, unloved stock pitches. We kick things off with Hari's pitch of Meta. The business is firing on all cylinders, yet the market has been selling off the stock. And we discuss whether investors should be worried about rising capital expenditures and whether Meta's competitive advantage lies in its AI models or in its unmatched distribution and data. Now, Tobias walks us through Booking Holdings, one of the world's leading travel platforms. We debate whether AI assistants could eventually replace travel aggregators altogether, or if Booking's relationships, networking effects, and position in the travel ecosystem makes its mode more durable than investors currently believe.
0:48Tobias Carlisle:And finally, I pits the most unloved stock of them all, Adobe. The stock is trading near multi-year lows as the mark worries about, yes, you guessed it, the threat of AI. And the recent departure of the CEO and CFO has not made the narrative more compelling. So we discuss switching costs and whether Adobe's biggest challenge is technological disruption or something completely different in a rapid changing environment. As always, there's plenty to disagree with, plenty to think about, and a few investing lessons along the way. So without further ado, let's jump right in.
1:26Since 2014, with more than 200 million downloads, we have interviewed the world's best investors, studied deeply the principles of value investing, and uncovered many compelling investment opportunities. We focus on understanding businesses and intrinsic value, investing accordingly, and sharing everything we learn with you. This show is not investment advice. It's intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. All opinions expressed by hosts and guests are solely their own, and they may have investments in the securities discussed. Now for your host, Stig Brodersen.
2:10Tobias Carlisle:Welcome to the Investor's Podcast. I'm your host, Stig Brodersen. And today, as always, throughout these mastermind discussions, I'm here with Hari and Tobi. Jens, how are you today? I'm Will Stig. Good to see you. Good to see you, Harry. Hey, Stig and Toby. Hello from India. Good to see you both. Take it away. Awesome. My pick for this time is Meta. When I was looking at the recent shuffle in the market, I see many names falling down and Meta was one of them. Its share price from its peak has fallen down by 20%. And when I looked at the company, the business is pretty strong. They're one of the two best advertising machines ever built.
2:56In fact, they are on track to beat Google in terms of ad revenues. Their forecasted ad revenue for 2026 is$243 billion, which will be$3 billion more than Google's. And they're growing, their operating margin is very healthy at 41 % with a 46 billion free cash flow in 2025, a 30 % net margin. Their revenue has been growing pretty healthily for last five years with a 18.5 % CAGR revenue growth. So what's the problem? And the problem is something that is not new to Meta, they are very bold and very swift in making serious bets. And they put serious dollars behind those bets. Metaverse was one of them, which market got spooked when they didn't see much returns and they saw it as a money pit.
4:03VR Labs was another one, the Reality Labs. And this time, What has spooked market is their investments of their projected capex, especially of$135 billion into building their data centers and infrastructure for their AI. Their big bet that they're making, their first LLM Lama was not a big success. But recently, their super intelligence group came up with their latest model, which has performed really well compared to other foundational models out in the market. Which gives me confidence that, one, they have the ability to come up with a good model. Two, as we are seeing that models are pretty much getting commoditized, that means the incremental difference between models is kind of getting saturated.
5:02Distribution becomes more advantageous. It's the distribution that matters, whether it is Grok with XAI, Gemini of Google. Meta has a solid distribution. The second thing with Google and Meta is they have a lot of use for AI to make their products better, their ad targeting better. So they don't have to look for subscription model immediately. They can actually improve their profitability, their revenue streams for their existing products with AI. But they're also trying to diversify into subscription. They are also looking into cloud business, but I'm not going to be accounting for those because those are still kind of, you know, things in on the drawing board.
5:52So my base case is that their network effects, their mode that comes out of it, the ability to use AI as an engine for their ad business, their pricing power, and then the discipline they have exhibited wherein Zuck said in 2023, it's a year of efficiency. even in 2026, they have reduced their workforce. So they're kind of not going off hinge in terms of spending. So I'm hoping that that will continue. So my base case is based on these, they're able to recover their FCF margin and also the growth stabilizes without any re-rating of the price to earnings, I see a 46 % upside from here. If they really hit the ball out of the park with their AI monetization, then it can be much more.
6:50So that's kind of my case for Meta. And I look forward to your feedback, Toby Elstig. Thank you. Good one, Harry. I like Meta. I think it's a good pick. I agree with everything that you've said. I think it's an absolutely world-class business. One of the very unusual ones that still found the lead where Zuck is really fully engaged and he's young and he's done a really good job. So might be one of the best managers in the business at the moment. Absolutely gushes free cash flow and just grows ridiculously fast. You've got that optionality that they figure out, AI. It doesn't seem like they're a loser in that race.
7:32they're competitive at least even if they're not at the forefront because as you say the models seem to be commoditized over time and so you don't necessarily need to have the best model you just need to have a model that's competitive with the other ones. I think for Meta the big issue is I think it's the same one for all of them that they've all got this massive capex to chase this opportunity. It's hard to say whether looking back on this in five years time will be like, oh, it was silly. Of course, these guys were all going to figure out how to monetize this thing and that was going to be...
8:04Or they all sort of tried to spend all the money at the same time and they all caused each other to overspend and the underlying kind of trajectory of the growth of these businesses was going to be sustained anyway. And so, they've just had this period where they've really overspent on CapEx and it's not clear how they're going to generate the revenue you out of that capex over and above what they're already doing. And I think that's what the market sees. I think that's why it's probably reasonable value on what it's already done, but there's some discount for the uncertainty of their ability to execute on AI.
8:46It's a hard question to answer. I think that it's such a high quality business that really your risk is not that you're down 50 % on a position like this. I think the risk is just that for a period of time, and I don't know how long this is but could be five years they just under earn on what they've invested and the multiples come down as a result and they just have like a i don't know how long but a period of time while they work through the sort of capex spending and start earning enough on that investment and at the same time the problem with the spend on this stuff is that the chips age faster than infrastructure has in the past that's not like a railway or fiber optic cable which sits in the ground for a really long period of time and you just wait for demand to catch up.
9:30I think the chips age a little bit faster than that. Yeah, you're right, actually. It needs some faith.
9:38Tobias Carlisle:Inzhak. So Hari, again, I really appreciate it. It's such an interesting time that we're in. And I have to talk a bit about AI. I can't help myself. Let me ask you a question. And the reason, I probably want to preface this by saying that we created a model here on TAP of Meta, and we came up with a valuation of 775. At the time, recording is trading at 600 and change. But of course, whenever you do that, you have different scenarios and you assign different probabilities. And then you look back and you're like, oh, to Toby's point, this happened. It wasn't that obvious that it would happen. And I don't know.
10:18Tobias Carlisle:Right now I'm talking about the future. I don't think anything is obvious in terms of what's going to happen with AI. And so it's only really, whenever we see the result, we think it's obvious, but then again, you sign the probabilities to what you think is going to happen. But one of the things that I can't help but think about for many of the stocks in my own portfolio is what happens if computing becomes free or essentially free? And I know it sounds a bit odd to have the framework. It's a bit like for a lot of companies, you had this thesis for the longest time. What happens if we figured out how to make abundant energy, for example, and then all energy is free.
10:58Tobias Carlisle:Then we have clean drinking water for the entire world because we need so much energy, but now it's free. So it might sound very theoretical. At the same time, you also see what's going on right now, and you see how much cheaper everything becomes in terms of, for example, inference. But then at the same time, you also need that much more. And so you have these two things that are trying to counterfeit each other. But anyways, I wanted to ask, this is going to be a very long question, you can tell. What happens if computing, I'm definitely going to use the wrong word here, but I hope you see where I go with this, computing, AI, whatever you call it, whatever you need to do, if that becomes free or cheap.
11:37Tobias Carlisle:And so let me talk a bit more about the framework here, because Meta has so much data that what happens if they can utilize all that data and collect all of that data, and it's essentially free for them to compute. And then Then you can basically go to Meta and say, here's$100 ,000 for my campaign. This is my objective. Figure it out. And then Meta is going to figure it out because computing is free. Or is that not the way to think about it at all? Because Meta doesn't have that type of advantage if computing becomes free, because then everyone can collect the same amount of data because everything is possible.
12:14Tobias Carlisle:And that's going to be a framework. I know it sounds like a bit of an odd question, but I think you can sort of break it down from there. So let me throw it back over to you, Hari. Yeah, actually, great question on stick. And that's kind of the million dollar question now all of these guys are facing. If you look at AI in general, I think it is constrained by power. It is constrained by real estate or space because you got to build a data center somewhere. And it is constrained by chips or the GPUs currently. Of course, now there are competition from Google and Amazon and others with TPUs, and there are specialized chips for inference versus training coming in, and then the models are also being optimized.
12:59So the arc is towards that. So right now, we are heavily constrained by chips today. But as you mentioned, the arc is towards a place where we might no longer be constrained by that. by a factor of one, competition catching up, so supply coming into the market, to the model themselves becoming more efficient. And there is a lot of papers now being published on that area. And I'm following that where so far it was all about features in the model, if you will. Now it's all about how to optimize the model for energy, for cost. In fact, Google Flash, Gemini Flash, recently in their Google I.O., They talked about how if you use Flash, you will save billions of dollars because it's much more efficient.
13:49So that conversations have already started. So I think with that arc continuing, Facebook has the advantage that it has the walled garden. Not everybody has access to what the data Facebook has. and it can leverage that data, whether it is for better ad targeting or for suggesting products to its customers or even coming up with new features and product and subscription model for its customers based on the treasure trove of data they have. So that can prove to be an advantage for Facebook because their cost of delivering AI goes down as chips gets commoditized our model becomes more efficient.
14:32Now they have the advantage of data.
14:35Tobias Carlisle:Thank you so much, Hari. Toby, you are up with your pick. Mine is also an AI impacted name. I like booking. Booking.com. If you're in the States, you will see any ads, right ads. Booking.com really sticks in the mind. It's a big company. It's much bigger than I usually pitch and it's more expensive than I usually pitch. But I think it's interesting because it is so dominant and I think it's one of the unusual chances that you get to buy one of these companies cheaply. Just so for folks who don't know, Booking is a business that allows you to book travel. They have Booking.com Priceline, which has been a great business forever.
15:23Agoda, I don't know it particularly well, but Kayak is also a name that folks will recognize, an open table. Over time, there's secular growth in travel as people become more wealthy, they tend to travel more and they're able to control the experience. They're able to upsell and control various parts of the experience. They have a business model that doesn't. So through 2020, some of the other sites in an effort to compete with booking, they buy rooms up front. They got caught when the rooms weren't taken. Booking.com doesn't do that. They don't buy their rooms up front. So, they're very capitalized.
16:00They don't own the underlying assets. They just hook people up. The big risk to booking is that folks think that they can somehow they will figure out how to get AI to control. You'll just type into your AI that you want to book a trip somewhere and the AI will do all of that for you without you having to interact with any of these sites and it will either do it directly and therefore cut out booking.com. So, booking.com, their thesis though is that that doesn't happen. So, they're not disintermediated because there is a large database of all these sites and there are relationships that need to be maintained.
16:41It's not a simple matter of just calling them and paying them. They have this specialized relationships. And so, in order for Chad GPT or Claude or one of the other LLMs to access these travel agents, they'll need to go through booking.com in order to do it. I don't know what the likelihood of that actually happening is, but that's their thesis. They think that they won't be disintermediated, that they will continue to be part of that acquisition, that purchase journey. The rest of the business is, it's very well managed. Capital allocation is excellent. As a result, it tends to be very high return on invested capital.
17:19It's grown very steadily for years and years and has all of the things that make it a great business, very asset light, great sort of network. Once people get used to the site, there's high switching costs, lots of free cash flow. So, the competitive advantages I think are durable. The risks to to booking. Travel is still sort of somewhat cyclical. If the economy goes through a weaker period, then folks just tend to travel less. And because of the way that booking is priced, really is priced, assuming some future growth or assuming that it continues to grow into the future, somewhat like it has in the past, if that sort of revenue growth slows down, that's the sort of return we would likely expect.
18:07I think the most likely outcome is that travel just sort of generally grows as it has historically. You know, I like companies that buy back stock at opportune times and I think that they're doing a good job buying back here. The bull case is that AI helps them and they become this sort of channel for all of these other LLMs and they just continue to grow. They interconnect with them seamlessly. You don't even know that it happens. And so they do a lot better than they have historically. You can handicap the bull and the bear and maybe they cancel out. And so the base case is the most likely, which is just that they keep on sort of muddling along.
18:50I think that booking is a reasonable risk adjusted bet at these levels because it's a little bit depressed with the fear around LLMs, but there's a reasonable chance that they are beneficiaries of that. Very interesting pick, Toby. And I think there are so many, suddenly the market has become interesting now with the AI scare. One question I have is, I agree with you, the relationships booking has, the channels they have maintained is definitely a mode for them. Even if I'm going through say a chat gpt or anthropic cloud client and booking becomes like a headless and provides an api it might go in background but i'm still querying booking through chat gpt or llm as so booking can be a plugin to chat gpt so that's kind of the case where it's still there it's not disrupted.
19:48However, in the longer term, so in the short term, it's not a problem, but in the longer term, they're gradually losing the mindshare. And they're also losing the real estate in the sense that right now folks land on booking website and they can cross sell to them. You can promote, you can show advertisements and then you know people discover things as they are on the site so those are some of the opportunities they might lose in the long term if they just become a plugin for cloud or openag it's certainly sold off over the last sort of six months after being a pretty consistent compounder for a very long period of time I do think that the value actually got a little bit ahead of itself.
20:40But I think the valuation has, it is at a reasonable discount now, or if it loses that mindshare, then that's the bare case, that's the risk. So I think it's a great question. I don't have a great answer, but I think that that is really the reason why it trades where it does.
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24:28Tobias Carlisle:All right, back to the show. I really like your pick, Toby. I always like your picks and this one is no different. Booking has been on my radar for years now. And I can't really figure out now that it's been selling off if not the time, because I do feel like there is a reason why it's selling off. And I know this is very anecdotal, but please take it for what it is. But I just came back from a wonderful trip to Paris with my wife, and I've seen how we increasingly have started to use LLMs. And this one, probably because it was as recent as last week, was the one where we used it the most. And it's so incredibly helpful in so many ways.
25:10Tobias Carlisle:You talked before about all the things that were working behind the scenes that's super, super important, and that just needs to be done. And so I'm sort of using that as a microcosm for, it's probably just me who are an ignorant traveler. And I don't know why it's so difficult that you can't make it through an LLM. Why can't I tell an LLM, book me a hotel in Paris throughout this criteria, and then I probably need to give a final sign-off, and then I don't need Booking.com at all. I think Hari is absolutely right that there are some wonderful things that something like Booking.com can do. For example, you can explore, you can do that different ways.
25:47Tobias Carlisle:But I guess I'm not sure if you need an intermediary like Booking.com if you're already doing it through an LLM that knows you better and would give you... One of the challenges I have with Booking.com, and I've used it multiple times, is that I feel that there are too many options. It's almost like going on Netflix sometimes. And so I'm like, if my LLM of choice really knows me better than anyone, I would probably like to put in different criteria, or perhaps I don't even want to put in different criteria because it already knows me. And then these are the three, five choices, and then I'm going to click that one.
Read the full transcript
26:23Tobias Carlisle:And so I also think it goes to Hari's point about like, are they going to lose Mindshare? Perhaps. I can probably see a case where LLMs, because they're so expensive to run, they would need like the Booking.coms, their advertising dollar. I think it's well known by now that Booking.com is one of the biggest spenders on Google. And I can see why you want to build your business model around that because travel is such an obvious thing to use elements for. And so that's a way to monetize it. Right now, they can just raise money without making any money. So perhaps they're saying, no, we're basically cutting out the middleman.
26:57Tobias Carlisle:We don't care about advertising. we're just providing the best possible service. And again, this might be my own travel habits. I would love if I could go to ChatDBT or Gemini or whatnot, and not go through Booking.com. That brings me absolutely no pleasure, but perhaps I'm just a very anxious traveler. So anyways, those were a few thoughts. Let me sit back with you, Toby. Toby Lowe I think those are good thoughts. And I think that that is the real risk. We're in this transitional period where we don't really know how everybody's going to interact with all of these businesses. And because booking.com is an aggregator, it's entirely possible it is disintermediated by the LLMs.
27:39The only thing I would say is that that has always been the risk, but the boogeyman for most of booking.com's history was Google, that Google was going to do exactly that, that you could just search. And Google has tried to do that. You can search flights and so on on Google and book all the way through with the the carrier and that's disintimated booking.com but booking.com has continued to be has continued to grow and the lines show that despite the fact that google has been out there but again as harry mentioned does that impact their mind share and their ability to charge i think that's a good question but i still think that you get this is not priced for perfection i think that you're getting a little bit of a discount and i guess the uh the question is whether the discount is enough that risk.
28:25But I think that there is, if you assume that things sort of go back to normal, it doesn't continue to earn what it has in the past, but maybe it sort of muddles along a little bit below that.
28:36Tobias Carlisle:I don't think you're going to too many problems here at the current valuation. So a way of thinking of this is if Booking.com disappeared tomorrow, who would notice it first? Would it be travelers or the hotels? And there's probably a bit of a rhetorical question. But I see why Booking.com has such a strong foothold, especially here in Europe. We don't have as many brand new chains as you do in the States, for example. So there are a lot of independent hotels. They don't have a lot of rooms, and they're very much dependent on the Booking.coms of the world. One of the things that we talked about here before we hit record, because I'm also going to talk about a company where the management is saying AI is going to be a tailwind, not a headwind.
29:18Tobias Carlisle:But I dare everyone to see if they can find a CEO of a public company who is not saying that AI is definitely not going to disrupt them, but it's going to be a tailwind. Anyways, one of the ways that I like to think about this is, can it replace the entire value chain? And that was also what I was getting at here with Hara before, where I was saying, okay, when, if, when, and how would it look like if I went to Meta and said, here's$100 ,000, run my campaign, this is what I want to achieve. And then they will figure out the rest and create the ad and whatever. I probably would like some kind of control, but even so, I want to see more money coming in and get a report on that than the money I'm putting out.
29:59Tobias Carlisle:And the more automated it can be, the better. Of course, it's going to take a long time before AI can change the sync in my house, but how long is it going to take before I can do something that's completely digital. And so one of the things that I was quite impressed by and have been, because I've been using LLMs here for, well, I'm going to say for the longest time, but haven't existed for the longest time. But just something like, you see what kind of tasks you can do whenever you're traveling and how helpful it is in terms of planning, whatever. I don't know. Whenever I look at what Booking.com is doing, I wonder if it can do the entire value chain and how long it's going to take.
30:38Tobias Carlisle:And I'm not, again, I kind of sound overly embarrassed. I've been looking at this wonderful company for the longest time. I think it's a very, very strong company. So please don't get me wrong. I think it might be a helpful framework in terms of seeing when is this going to be disrupted and how is it going to be disrupted? Because if it can only take a small part of the value chain and then do it much, much better, then it could be a tailwind. So anyways, just a few thoughts that came off way too much barriers than I wanted it to sound like. I think they're off about 30 % from their high on a sort of DCF basis.
31:13I think you can get to about$220. I think it's worth about, it's trading at about 167 today. So the question is, is that enough of a discount for those risks? And that 220 is based on sort of historical growth rates. They've bought back a significant amount of stock over the last 12 months as they've traded down. And I think it might be one of the bellwether sort of stocks that we watch and tells us how the LLMs are impacting other businesses. It's an interesting time in the markets for us. It definitely is.
31:47Tobias Carlisle:All right. So thank you so much, Toby. Now it's time for you to bash my pick. My pick is Adobe. And if anyone is unfamiliar with Adobe, it's a software company. They're known for Photoshop in particular, but now they have a ton of different apps you would typically use if you're a designer, a creative person. They also have something called digital experience that's more about analytics, but my pick is Adobe. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. Market cap, roughly$100 billion, and it has been growing double digits for the longest time. And it's not only trading at a 52-week low or near that, but near a seven-year low.
32:30Tobias Carlisle:And of course, I should have said that it traded at 224 not too long ago. At the time of recording, it's 270. So it had a small bump. But the market, like all software or SaaS companies these days, is just unloved. Because at first glance, there is a lot to love. 96 % of the$23 billion in revenue comes from subscription revenue. That is exactly what you want to see. Diversified base of more than 41 million paying users. And I mean, if I had pitched this just a few years ago before the era of the LLMs, we'd be all over it. But of course, you could also see that in evaluation because everyone was at some point in time trying to make their software business into software as a service with a subscription.
33:21Tobias Carlisle:And Adobe has really been one of the companies that managed to do that successfully. Back in the day, you would not use it in the cloud. You would get a CD, and then you would install it. And then some of the younger listeners are probably saying, hey, dude, grandpa, what's a CD? To which I'm going to say, it's a more modern version of a flubby disk. And so, of course, that's my way of saying that I'm super old, but it's also my way of saying that Adobe IPO'd in 1986. And it's really been the industry standard more or less ever since. Many people don't think about a PDF whenever they use that today.
34:01Tobias Carlisle:That's a standard you're owned by Adobe. And there is something to be said about whenever you, for example, whenever I'm calling a car, or I would visit Toby, I would be Ubering. You know, that's a verb. And if I'm going to edit a photo, I am not editing a photo, I am Photoshopping. And, you know, Adobe saw that a long time ago. Actually, they didn't come up with Photoshop themselves. They acquired the rights to market it from the Noel brothers. But it's a long time ago. And today, everyone associates very much Photoshop with Adobe. Launched in 1990. Let's just continue to take a trip down memory lane.
34:43Tobias Carlisle:It was four years before Netscape for your listeners who remember that company. All right. So let's talk a bit about the competitive advantage. The most important mode, I would say, is switching costs. And like I was hitting at before, you can think of Adobe as having two segments. They have digital media into 76 % of their business. And that's where you have the creative cloud, you have the document cloud where that resides. And then you have digital experiences, that's the enterprise software business that help companies manage marketing, customer data, e-commerce, digital content, and so on.
35:20Tobias Carlisle:And we're all creature of habits. And as uninspiring as it sounds, inertia is just very good whenever you think about it in terms of a business model. And you also have to consider that people follow incentives. And of course, in this day and age with AI, it seems like it should be a tailwind. Shareholders, management, they want the employees of whatever kind of company to embrace AI, for example, to become more productive or to save on costs. Guess what? Most employees do not have the same incentive. They think, and perhaps rightly so, that any efficiency gains doesn't really benefit their paycheck.
36:02Tobias Carlisle:And worst case, they can lose their own or the co-workers' jobs. And so management and shareholders are just way more excited about embracing AI to cut costs, which very often mean salaries. And I would also say that it sounds good on paper, right? But let's look at it from the other side, even if we are looking away from the financial incentives and job risk and so on and so forth, there is a professional pride in knowing how to use Adobe. If you're a designer and you're taught in those tools, you've used it for decades, it's really difficult to embrace a new technology where there is a level playing field for, I wouldn't say everyone, but more or less everyone, and certainly someone who's entry-level who might be making a third of what you're making.
36:51Tobias Carlisle:You don't really have that incentive to start playing that game. And I'm going to talk a bit more about incentives here, but I think anyone who's been running a business would tell you that whenever you roll out a new initiative, everyone would consciously or subconsciously be thinking, what's in it for me? And one of the things I often think about whenever I would make an investment is, how does this align with human nature? In this day and age, we see disruption from everywhere, but it's very difficult to disrupt human nature. And so one of the things that I wanted to highlight is for 99 % of people, they have an easier time spending other people's money than their own.
37:35Tobias Carlisle:It sounds so passive aggressive whenever I'm saying this, but I think a lot of the AI fears are probably overblown in the sense of how rapid things are going to change. And I'm not questioning at all that AI is going to change a a bunch of different things. But I think we sometimes underestimate how much of these changes that need to be almost brute force and how difficult it is to brute force something in an organization. And it is very difficult to get people to understand something whenever your livelihood is depending on not understanding it. And of course, even that there's a limit to. If you don't understand the car and you swore by faster horses, you would eventually have to wake up to the reality.
38:19Tobias Carlisle:And so I'm not saying that if AI isn't 10 times better, and despite the switching costs, then we would eventually have to use something else than say Adobe's products. And of course, whenever you ask the CEO about that, he's saying, oh, no, no, no, no. AI is not going to disrupt us. It's going to be a tailwind. We're going to be so much better because of AI. So I think that's a pretty weak signal. Any CEO that's worth his salt would probably say that today. But I would also be the first to say that a company like the Investors Podcast Network, we are so dependent on Adobe. And we're 20 people on the team, 15 of them are using Adobe.
39:03Tobias Carlisle:Some of them are just using one app, but most are using the entire suite. And the overall cost is significantly less than 1 % of our total cost. So as much as it sounds great, let's use something that's cheaper. And it's sort of like a different discussion if it's better. But let's say that this is going to be a lot cheaper. Even me as one of the owners of the company, as much as I would like to save on cost, it's just not really a cost saver. And whenever you run a company, and of course, it depends on the company, but it's not always the greatest people that are paid the most. They are typically one team inside a larger organization.
39:43Tobias Carlisle:It's the same with CIP. Then you have the salaries to the people that's the biggest cost. And then the second biggest cost is typically the equipment. And then a very small part of the cost is the software. So you're looking at something that's very small. So whenever you're doing that, I would say that Adobe is an incredible cheap product for the value that it provides. And I think it's very important that you also, whenever you hear people talking about the cost of Adobe, you would have a lot of people who are saying, it's ridiculously expensive. The freelancer who has a side hustle that makes$800 a month.
40:22Tobias Carlisle:No, for them to buy the Adobe Suite that's like 70 bucks a month, it's a significant cost. But for a multimillion dollar company, and I'm not necessarily talking about the Coca-Colas of the world, but if your turnover is like$5 million and you're spending, I don't know, $3 ,000 on Adobe Suite, that's not where you want to skimp on your cost, especially not if your entire team are trained on using the software. And so I would say that the switching cost is a lot higher than probably what it seems. And I also couldn't help myself but to do a bit of scuttlebutt research and speak to our team members about it.
41:02Tobias Carlisle:And you could, of course, also say they were having all the incentives in the world to tell me that they would never go off Adobe. But I was speaking with our VP from our YouTube team, and she completely paused whenever I asked her, what kind of tool would you use if you didn't use Adobe? She had a really, really hard time coming up with using something that she could use. And of course, you can then use... There are a lot of alternatives. I'm not saying that there aren't alternatives, but right now they just don't have the same functionality. So anyways, I've been rambling here for quite a bit.
41:33Tobias Carlisle:I wanted to talk a bit more about some of the risks. I wanted to talk about the valuation, but I want to throw it back over here first. Adobe is interesting because it's similar to booking in the sense that, again, it's AI that is the risk to it. Maybe it never gets easy to edit them. Maybe that's where Adobe really shines that you can do all of the idea creation and really simple stuff in ChatGPT or whatever LLM you use. But I think the valuation is very compelling. Stiglick, it's again, there is a big discount in the stock. They're doing a lot of buybacks. If it is sort of temporary or they can adapt or be beneficiaries, then you're getting a good price.
42:13You're getting a good handicap price to take it on here. I think Adobe is very interesting.
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46:00Tobias Carlisle:Yeah, Toby, thank you so much for your feedback. Of course, I'm biased as I'm saying this, but I'll probably make the argument that to your point about CanLab, which is the most obvious competitor. I think the lower end of the market is the one that's most ripe for disruption. And I was speaking with a team member about this. I was the first to say, well, disruption from AI. She said that it's really the creative control that's where Adobe shines. And she was saying the same thing as you, like it can generate things, but as a creative person, you need to tweak things all the time. And that's very difficult to do, at least right now with AI.
46:42Tobias Carlisle:And so I asked her, and she was saying, oh, she's using AI within the Adobe suite all the time. And it can do a part of the process. It can't do all of it. Or perhaps it can, they just don't want you to know. So she was saying, one of the great things is that AI is very good at figuring out how to clean up this background. You can press a button, and then it works. You're prompting it. but it works really well with that. But there are so many of the other components where it doesn't do that. So anyways, I found that to be quite compelling. I think, especially whenever you look at a stock chart and sort of like to your point, you see how much it's been selling off and it just, it looks really appealing.
47:22Tobias Carlisle:They're buying back a lot of shares. I also think they're issuing too many shares. But I always say that whenever I pitch a stock, that is to some extent the new standard. I think that it's very tricky to think about the valuation. I feel pretty confident that I can underwrite something like 350, 400. And so whenever I was looking into Adobe here, and I was thinking, well, perhaps the right time to buy it would be around 200. And again, trading at 224, just a blink of an eye ago, and here are the past few days, it just took a big bump. But anyways, I think one of the challenges that I now see is, well, there are quite a few, I should probably say.
48:07Tobias Carlisle:One of them is the top of the funnel. It goes to what you were saying before, Toby, about Canva. I know Canva has been there for quite some time, so take for what it is. But a lot of people get into the Adobe ecosystem very early, whether you are a creative person or not, but especially if you're a creative person and then you continue on that path, you can get it very, very cheaply. And of course, you can say that a subscription for a student is all incremental value. It's part of the power of the SaaS business model, but it's also a way for you to get into the ecosystem. So whenever you do work at a corporation, whether you're paying for yourself or the company is like, what do you want to use?
48:47Tobias Carlisle:Well, you're going to use Adobe. But I can see why there might be an issue with the top of the funnel where a lot of people are going to say, no, no, no, I'm not going to go into Adobe in the first place. They have their own top of the funnel product, Adobe Express. But with the LMs, some people might never make it to the bottom of a funnel where they really make their money. And so I can't help but make the comparison to the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting. And you might say, wow, that's a big of a jump here from Adobe. But one of the things I've been thinking about now has been what's going to happen with the value investing community without Buffett.
49:26Tobias Carlisle:I was speaking with a mutual friend of ours, Chris Brunson, here the other day about it. And the first thing he said, probably because I articulated myself extremely important, was, hey, I'll continue to go. Of course, I'm going to continue. I have all my friends are there. It's Omaha. You have to go. And that makes a lot of sense. And so in a similar way, if you are a creative person, you work at a Hollywood studio, it has to look really, really good. Yes, you are on the enterprise license through Adobe. You're not going to change that. and you've done that the past 30 years, and you're going to do that the next 20 years.
49:57Tobias Carlisle:Of course, you're going to do that. But what about the top of the funnel? What about the 26-year-old MBA who doesn't know anyone, but he just wants to go to Omaha and check out the free events? And the reason they really draw is that you just want to see Buffett. That's a big part of the value prop. And now Buffett is no longer there. They just order these private clubs there where people know each other and they've been going for 30 years and why would he go? And I'm not saying it's the most perfect comparison, but whenever I speak to people who have been using Adobe for a number of years, it's the gold standard.
50:35Tobias Carlisle:That's what they've been taught. That's what everyone used. And if you know your craft, you know the Adobe suite. And so the tools makes a lot of sense. And also they're bundled, right? So you might be using this app, but then you need something else. You didn't know that you need it, but oh, Adobe has that. And of course, everything works together seamlessly, just like Microsoft Office. But what if you don't go there in the first place? I guess that's my biggest concern. And you might say, well, that doesn't show up in the numbers. Does it really matter? Well, it matters for the terminal value.
51:07Tobias Carlisle:What kind of multiple are you actually at? And I think before the time of the LMS, you could underwrite a much, much higher multiple. Like I was mentioning before with Adobe, 96 % is a subscription revenue, and it's such a sticky product. And so why wouldn't you assign a really, really high multiple? But that's also assuming you still have top of the funnel. What if you don't have that anymore? So whenever I say, oh, it's probably worth 400 bucks, perhaps more, but perhaps not. So I have a bit of a hard time with the evaluation. So anyways, I want to throw it back over here to the group and open up for any thoughts.
51:48It's really, it's an unknowable problem. It's the same problem that we all really have. It's funny that the AI question has become so urgent all of a sudden that it really has impacted so many of these very historically very dominant businesses. As you say, Photoshop is the verb and it's been around for forever. But the content generation, and this is not the editing, the content generation is getting so good on the LLMs that it really is starting. You can see how it could impact these guys down the road. But I still think they're always going to have that, I mean, I don't know, always, I guess, is a long, but that precision editing of those documents is, in order to get that precision editing of the LLMs, you're probably going to need a suite of tools that look something like Adobe anyway.
52:44It's a very difficult question to answer. But again, I think you're getting a pretty good discount for the cash flows that it does generate and it does take longer than everybody thinks for these things to really impact. We may be early adopters and it may take a lot longer for the bulk of the industry to catch on. And so, they've got that, you know, it's not uncommon in deep value type scenarios to have a very long tail where the market thinks that the revenue growth of the earnings fall off sort of almost immediately. But in actuality, they're very sticky and it takes years and years and that's that slow decline.
53:22It's still a valuable company in slow decline. And if it's in that cash cow decline stage of its life cycle, then they're doing the right things. They're buying back stock. It's a great pick and it's one that I've been sort of watching for a long time, but it is a very interesting time to be investing in the markets. Trey Lockerbie, that's so true, Tobi.
53:42Tobias Carlisle:And we talked here before about resulting and coming up with explanations for why things happened. And it's a lot more difficult to predict what is actually going to happen. And so whenever I look at a company like Adobe, I think to some extent, it also depends on a bit of the state of mind you're in. Sometimes I'm thinking content is abundant. There's just so much content out there, so much slop. Adobe is needed in a world that's still shifting from physical to digital. And whenever that shift is happening, you need one of Adobe's products to make that happen. And also in the world of content, you need the highest quality to separate yourself.
54:26Tobias Carlisle:It's not a question of making more content. We can all make more content, but it has to be really, really good. And so then you can sort of like talk yourself into saying, the canvas of the world are going to be disrupted, but the high end, really where the money is, they're not going to be disrupted anytime soon because it has to be just right. So it's kind of interesting if you look at the customer groups that Adobe has, and they're not breaking out the market-free customer group, but you can probably fill in the blanks. They have the 22 ,000 large enterprise customers. And then you can think Think about them as government bodies, Hollywood studios, universities, whatnot.
55:06Tobias Carlisle:And then they have 41 million paid Creative Cloud subscribers, such as individuals, freelancers, students, small businesses. And then they have 850 million monthly active free users. And that also includes free Acrobat Reader users. So it's a very wide funnel, and they don't pay any money out of that. So you can see where they make the money. I wouldn't be surprised if we would be talking about this five, 10 years from now and say, oh, there was so much pushback against AI because people want the human element. And of course, XYZ happened, or it might be the other way around. It's like, oh, people just want efficiency.
55:46Tobias Carlisle:And one of the biases that I experienced is that the experts, the creative people are the best people and the worst people to talk to about Adobe. They're the best people because they have the most knowledge for obvious reasons. That's why they're experts. But they're also saying people want that human connection. They don't want something that's created by AI. The people who think like that by a lot might also be more artistic minded, whereas some people might be saying, I don't really care if this has been created by AI as part of the process. If I can get it 30 % cheaper, then that's fine. Imagine that you're standing there at the pump and you're like, I know AI doesn't generate gasoline, so take it for what it is.
56:31Tobias Carlisle:But if you're like, hey, I can get this for four bucks, I can get this for five bucks, and you're like, I just need to drive. And so depending on where you are and what the product is, I think that is true when it comes to say art. Yes, it has to be created by a human in terms of sports. Yes, you need to see the athletes. But then there are a ton of other products where that Adobe is probably also touching where you're like, I don't know if people care if AI has been a big part of the process of creating this digital product or not. So anyways, I'll make sure to link to a model of the evaluation here of Adobe.
57:07Tobias Carlisle:I'm going to do the same thing with Booking.com and Meta, and then people can play around with their own assumptions. But Toby, I know that you also wanted to chat a bit about Bellring Brands from last time that you pitched? Yeah. So Bellring Brands has collapsed. The stock price has collapsed since I pitched it. I can't remember exactly. I think it was at about$27 and it's currently trading a little bit north of$8, which is a very significant breakdown in the stock price. So I thought I should address it. It's basically continued in this drawdown that began 12 months ago and it's had this very significant drawdown from the peak and I think that it is undervalued.
57:51It's worth noting that Bellring Brands does carry a reasonable chunk of debt which when there were much bigger market capitalization, it's funny because it really doesn't impact the size of the business hasn't changed. The business has grown slightly over the last 12 months. It's grown less than the market had hoped which is one of the reasons why the stock is down so much but they make these protein, ready to drink protein drinks. They are attractive to people who are on the go but the criticism of them has been that they have some seed oils in them, they have some soy and folks don't like that.
58:26So that has created a problem for them. The market still seems to be consuming them. They have grown a little bit but their growth has slowed materially which is one of the reasons that the stock's down. You guys know I'm a deep value guys so I like big discounts and I don't mind when a business is struggling a little bit if you can get enough of a discount in the price to sort of handicap that slowdown. So just to give you some numbers, it still grew year over year, something like 6 % year over year but it has historically grown quite a lot faster than that so that's the markets now where previously it might have been sort of something that had a reasonable chance of growing quite materially and it was being valued on that basis.
59:08The question is now whether it can keep ahead of its inputs. On a forward earnings basis, it's a little bit over five times. What has been a pretty good business, although the business does seem to be deteriorating a little bit on the basis of their last print, I think the great risk for it is that it is close to being commoditized product in a very competitive category and there's more competition coming in all the time. You have to weigh that against the fact that there is this general move towards health consciousness as part of that people are consuming more protein. I thought that perhaps it was the GLP ones.
59:46So the AI of the health industry is the GLP one that's making everybody leaner. I still think as part of that process, people need to eat more protein. the GLP one sort of stopped you from eating but once you've reached your goal weight to maintain a healthy body composition you still need to consume protein so they do make protein the question is for folks who are particularly health conscious who don't like the seed oils then these sort of seem to contain them and that seems to be a turn off for many people they do continue to make aggressive buybacks so that says to me that they think that they're undervalued and I I tend to think they're undervalued too.
1:00:26I've run a valuation using various different scenarios and it gets you anywhere from$20 at the low end to$70 at the high end. And I realize that that's a very wide margin, but I think there is some reasonable uncertainty in that. Just for context with the stock at$8, it's like half of the low end. And so I still think it's pretty good value here and I'm going to continue to hold it. The bear thesis is real, but the discount here is so material that I think it's worth holding to see what the next few quarterly reports look like.
1:01:00Tobias Carlisle:Very, very appealing. I have to say, with all the red flags and yes, there's always some hair on it. That's why that's deep value. Even last time, I was like, wow, that looks interesting. And now, I don't know, I probably got angered to the old price, but it's a very interesting thesis. So please continue to provide us with updates, Toby? There has been this sort of general swoon in small and mid-cap stocks. Everything that's impacted by AI or GLP-1 is really can't find a friend in this market. And so I do think that I've seen that generally across a lot of the names that I track, that the businesses, if anything, the businesses are inflicting up and starting to do a lot better.
1:01:44But it's coincided with this recent rally with the AI stocks. and I think the valuations are now looking, they're really at a decision point where either the market completely runs away from small and micro or small and micro catches up soon because I think the forward returns to me look very compelling. They look about as good as they have looked since I've been running the funds. And I think that when a lot of the market moves towards one narrative, which is the AI narrative and to some lesser extent, specifically for this stock, the GLP-1 narrative, that it does seem to pull money away from the part of the market that hasn't done anything and it creates this little air pocket which seems to have happened for these stocks.
1:02:27But as I say, that does seem to me to have created pretty prospects for reasonable forward returns, pretty good forward returns at the same time as these stocks seem to be inflicting up because they have all suffered from an extended period of a pretty weak consumer. The consumer has really been struggling from what I can see. And with this Iran conflict and higher energy prices, high gas prices, that seems to be really putting the bite on people. I think that the time to put these positions on is at the point of maximum pessimism. And we're certainly pessimistic. I hope that it's maximum pessimism.
1:03:04Tobias Carlisle:I love it. Famous last words. I love it, Toby. All right, Hari and Toby, thank you so much. It's always great to chat with you. Let me throw it over to you guys. What can people learn more about you? Hey, Toby and Stig, always a pleasure to join the Mastermind. You can find me on X or Twitter. My handle is HariRama. I hang out there and I look forward to all your comments, feedback, and conversations. And I'm at Greenbacked on Twitter, G-R-E and B-A-C-K-D. I manage acquirers funds which has these ZIG ETF which is mid and large cap deep value and the deep ETF which is small and micro deep value.
1:03:48The spreads between deep value and the market are extreme at the moment and largely driven I think by the LLM risks but a lot of the stocks that are in those are going to be beneficiaries like until the LLMs figure out how to mine and pull energy out of the ground that we're going to be. We're going to need real businesses.
1:04:11Tobias Carlisle:Wonderful. Thank you so much for your time, Jens. It's a privilege as always. Thanks, Stig. Thanks, Harry. Always great. Thank you. Thank you, Toby. Stig, good seeing you both. Thanks for listening to TIP. Follow The Investor's Podcast on your favorite podcast app and visit theinvestorspodcast.com for show notes and educational resources. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not provide financial, investment, tax, or legal advice. The content is impersonal and does not consider your objectives, financial situation, or needs. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principle, and past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
1:04:48Listeners should do their own research and consult a qualified professional before making any financial decisions. Nothing on this show is a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any security or other financial product. Hosts, guests, and the Investors Podcast Network may hold positions in securities discussed and may change those positions at any time without notice. References to any third-party products, services, or advertisers do not constitute endorsements, and the Investors Podcast Network is not responsible for any claims made by them. Copyright by the Investors Podcast Network.
1:05:15All rights reserved.
From the publisher
In today’s episode, Stig Brodersen is joined by Tobias Carlisle and Hari Ramachandra for a new round of stock pitches. Hari makes the case for Meta as a leading AI-powered advertising platform. Tobias breaks down Booking Holdings and whether its travel moat can withstand the rise of AI assistants. Stig analyzes Adobe, exploring the durability of its creative software ecosystem amid rapid technological change.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
(00:00:00) Intro(00:02:31) Why Hari is bullish on Meta (Ticker: META), highlighting its advertising dominance, network effects, and long-term monetization potential.(00:03:38) The bear case for Meta, including massive AI infrastructure spending, uncertain returns on capital, and execution risk around AI monetization.(00:14:27) Why Tobias is bullish on Booking Holdings (Ticker: BKNG), emphasizing its capital-light business model and robust travel ecosystem.(00:18:46) The bear case for Booking Holdings, including AI-driven loss of customer mindshare, and potential pressure on its role in the travel booking value chain.(00:27:43) Why Stig is bullish on Adobe, focusing on its switching costs and subscription-based revenue model (Ticker: NASDAQ: ADBE).(00:37:21) The bear case for Adobe, including AI-generated content and the increasing competition from tools like Canva and LLMs.
Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences.
BOOKS AND RESOURCES
Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community.
Stig Brodersen’s Portfolio and Track Record.
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Check out the Mastermind Discussion Q1, 2026 | Video.
Check out the Mastermind Discussion Q4, 2025 | Video.
Check out the Mastermind Discussion Q3, 2025 | Video.
Check out the Mastermind Discussion Q2, 2025 | Video.
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Tobias Carlisle's podcast, The Acquirers Podcast.
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Hari's Blog.
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