A Farewell

I started writing this newsletter the summer after my senior year of highschool, my first article was on Cita Reservations - which I thought was the coolest concept for a marketplace at the time.

Writing for 100+ people has been a great experience and it’s been cool to see the newsletter spread to different audiences over time. It first began with startup founders and venture capitalists being the main audience, then shifted to students, public markets analysts, and even a few PM’s from name brand hedge funds.

VC was a huge interest of mine at the time, that interest has now taken the form of public markets. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest winners and losers that the team and I have pitched over the two years this newsletter was running:

Match Group $MTCH - Loser

We gave Match a price target of $50 - $52 in July 2024, our Tinder thesis didn’t play out due to incompetent management and the price stayed stagnant over the past year. We do have a bit of conviction in the stock now with Spencer Rascoff leading the ship. Although Match’s price didn’t appreciate, this taught us that you can’t rely too much on activist intervention within a public company (Elliot and Starboard).

On $ONON - Winner

We gave On a price target of $45 - $51 when the stock was trading around $40. It reached highs of $64 before trading down to the price now of $41.86. Conviction was built seeing every college student have these on in 2024. On is still one of our favorite company’s as they possess a “cool” factor that legacy shoe brands are losing.

Lifeway Foods $LWAY - Winner (Multibagger)

We pitched Lifeway when it was trading at $12.31 and gave a price target of $27 - $30. The pitch played out perfectly as we hit all the points the company was focused on and called the Danone acquisition a couple months after our pitch (page 15 in the deck). Lifeway was a company that came on our radar because on of our parents was drinking their kefir everyday. After some research we knew the security was undervalued, a key metric we built our thesis on was ROIC.

Red Cat Holdings $RCAT - Winner (Multibagger)

Red Cat was a stock that we got into around $2 as we believed it was going to play out perfectly as an event driven trade. They had a chance to win a huge government contract and we didn’t see anybody that was worth losing to. They are now trading at $13.10. Our exit price was around $8 once the contract win was announced and we had a re-entry around $8 in December (lost some money on lol). The stock was first mentioned here:

With the sole newsletter post being this one;

Lululemon $LULU - Winner (Short Pitch)

Lululemon was a short that when we pitched it was trading at $382.41, we had a price target of $304.58 - obviously too optimistic haha. The thesis was simple, Lululemon was fading out of consumers minds as the competition from Alo and Vuori was too much for them. This was also our first time using alternative data, which we used to track activewear sales. The first link contains the pitch PDF.

Akero Therapeutics $AKRO - Winner (Acquired by Novo Nordisk)

Akero was a name that we saw being acquired by a big name player looking to beef up their liver disease pipeline. Although it wasn’t Gilead who acquired them, Novo still confirmed our suspicions that there was an acquirer. This was our first time looking at biotech and maybe some beginners luck. Efruxifermin is still a long time from FDA approval but Novo has made a bet that we think will pay off for them.

Farewell for now!