The annual tradition continues!

David Kim (💚💚💚💚💚 🥃) and I look back at the past year, both for Scuttleblurb and for the world of finance & markets. We use David’s excellent ‘2025 business update’ as a foundation for our chat, and I encourage you to read it.

We cover a lot of ground. David’s unusually candid look at the business of running a paid newsletter (subscriber churn, the tension between writing what interests you and writing what gets clicks, and why he almost renamed his blog “Fallen Angels”), the tactical changes he made to turn things around (frequency, the Scuttlebits format, a price increase that went better than expected), and his partnership with our common friend MBI (🇧🇩🇺🇸) on the Never Sell podcast (🎧).

On the markets and investing side, we dig into:

* The weird vibe of 2025: indices hiding a lot of pain underneath, with good companies down 40-50% while the index barely fell.

* Why investors seem blind to cyclicality in ways they weren’t 20 years ago (Trex at 65x peak earnings vs. home builders at single-digit multiples in ‘05-’06).

* The beaten-down compounder opportunity, and how fast some of those names recovered.

* The AI pain trade rotating into SaaS and data providers (Gartner, FactSet, S&P, Thomson Reuters), and why the bear case on Gartner may be missing something important.

* David’s forensic breakdown of how Shift Four calculates organic growth, including cross-selling synergies from acquisitions in ways most acquirers don’t, and why the sell-side comparisons to payment peers aren’t apples-to-apples.

* Booz Allen and the frenemy dynamics with Palantir/Anduril. The write-up almost nobody read but David is most proud of.

* How competitive boundaries between industries are getting blurrier, including for Big Tech, and what that means for moat analysis

* David’s nuanced take on using AI tools for research, where it levels you up vs. where the “knowledge illusion” kicks in and de-skilling becomes a real risk.

We also talk about what’s next in his research pipeline (Veeve, U-Haul, Lamb Weston, S&P, Moody’s, Thomson Reuters, etc), and whether Pluribus can stick the landing in season two.

I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed talking to David! 💚 🥃

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