17 Fascinating Stock Pitches

This was an interesting collection of articles we came across. It features 17 written stock pitches from active fund managers, and we didn’t recognise any one of the 17 companies discussed.

The companies pitched range from a family-owned marina in Singapore to a Belgian imaging technology company, and from a bus parts supplier in Australia to one of North America’s largest distributors of wallboards, ceilings and steel framing.

This is what we love about investing. The whole world of opportunity that is at our fingertips. We are able to learn about companies all over the world and more and more there are brokerage platforms that allow us to invest in them.

The end of the Googleverse

Arguably, Google has been the most important company of the past 25 years. Other companies may claim that mantle - Apple for the technology we use, or Microsoft for the software we use on it - but the way that Google organised the world’s information and made it accessible has had an unparalleled impact. It brought order to the Wild West of the internet and made it useful in so many ways. Yet, there are signs emerging that Google’s influence is waning. This article from The Verge asks, have we passed peak Google?

Google has always faced competitors for web traffic and ad dollars. The search competitors of the early 2000’s, the social platforms of the 2010’s and the emerging AI platforms of the 2020’s. Over the past few years, a growing cohort of young users are starting their searches on TikTok or Instagram rather than Google. But perhaps the biggest threat to Google is an internal one. There is a growing chorus of criticism that suggests Google Search itself is not as accurate and as comprehensive as it once was.

Many people will look at AI chatbots like ChatGPT and suggest that they will just continually chip away at Google’s search dominance and ad-driven business model. And that may be true, but as this article suggests, many of Google’s challenges are of their own making and they’ve been bubbling up to the surface long before OpenAI launched ChatGPT.

Nvidia on the Mountaintop

This is the latest blog post from Ben Thompson’s Stratechery. Thompson is one of the best writers when it comes to technology businesses and in this article he writes about the biggest tech story of 2023: Nvidia.

For those new to the company, Nvidia is the chip designer that has created a lot of the hardware powering the artificial intelligence revolution. And this chart sums up their incredible growth over the past 10 years.

We’ve just come out of Q2 earnings season, and unsurprisingly Nvidia was one of the biggest stories. The chipmaker powering the artificial intelligence revolution announced that it had more than doubled revenue in the past year and expected to keep growing in the coming quarters.

While investors are euphoric, Thompson does point out that a comparison is being made between Nvidia and a high-flying tech stock of a previous generation: Cisco.

Thompson’s article takes a look at the Nvidia & Cisco comparison and asks: is this comparison fair? And what next for the hottest company of 2023?

The mystery of Long COVID is just beginning

This article takes a look at the Long COVID clinic that has been set up at Yale Medical School and shares what doctors there are starting to find. One estimate suggests that 65 million people will suffer from Long COVID and yet, very little is known about why the illness lingers and how it can be treated. Frankly, doctors don’t even have a definitive answer on what Long COVID is.

A key fact we learned from this article - Long COVID is not a new phenomenon. As this article explains, many common viral infections including Ebola, dengue, polio, and the flu see a small percentage of patients suffer for years afterwards with symptoms that are very similar to Long COVID: extreme fatigue, brain fog, joint pain, inflammation, dizziness, sleep disruption and mood disorders. Researchers believe that this might indicate that Long COVID has less to do with COVID and more to do with the body’s response to infections generally. So the Yale clinic is focused on better understanding why common infections become chronic illnesses in a small percentage of the population. And if they can answer that question, they may end up helping far more than just Long COVID sufferers.