TIP838: Google, Reddit, Amazon – Are Our Biggest Winners Still a Buy? w/ Daniel Mahncke & Shawn O’Malley

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
You're listening to TIP.

**Daniel Mahncke** (0:03)
Welcome back to The Investor's Podcast. Today's episode is number 838, and after we just did an episode covering stocks that tanked since we covered all of them, today will be a much more pleasant episode for us because it's actually about our winners. So the plan is to analyze why they worked out so well and also what we can learn from them to find even more of them going forward.

**Shawn O'Malley** (0:23)
Yeah, that does sound a lot more enjoyable for us. And I did like looking at the stocks that didn't do well. I think you tend to learn more from those situations. But nevertheless, I would obviously love to identify some of the patterns among our winners so we can find more companies like them, hopefully. And it will also be interesting to see whether we still consider these companies to be good investments at today's prices.

**Daniel Mahncke** (0:48)
I also plan to cover some companies that we pitched and then didn't end up buying and that still skyrocket after, unfortunately. So to some extent, I won't even let us go through this episode without at least pointing out some of our omissions. And I gotta say, to be fair, I consider almost all of those companies to be quite expensive today. So I don't know if it was actually a mistake to not make them part of our portfolio.

**Shawn O'Malley** (1:11)
Okay, well, we'll get into all that today.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:17)
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. 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 hosts, Shawn O'Malley, and Daniel Mahncke.

**Daniel Mahncke** (2:03)
In case you're listening to this episode and you have no idea what portfolio we're talking about here on the show, my co-host Kyle and I alternate on pitching you, Shawn, our favorite new stock ideas each week with the obvious goal in mind of finding the great businesses for our intrinsic value portfolio. While it's a paper portfolio on the surface, every position of the portfolio is covered by at least one of us hosts through our personal portfolio. I would say it's always almost a significant position. We do not just buy one share so that we can say that we invested, we actually have sizable positions in our personal portfolios. We also regularly share them, at least in our mastermind group so that members probably can attest to the fact that we have skin in the game whenever it comes to the companies that we cover here.

**Shawn O'Malley** (2:47)
Yeah, for me, Uber, Google and Adobe are all very, very significant positions in my portfolio and I believe you're pretty heavily invested in Mercado Libre, Amazon, but also Reddit and some other names too.

**Daniel Mahncke** (3:00)
Yeah, especially the last one was one that you pitched to me. Otherwise, you can still already tell that there is a bias towards the company for which one has done the research. You know, it's always easier if I pitch Mellie and I've done 40 hours of research on that name plus probably a whole lot more hours along the time that I just have a bit more conviction in that name than you can ever have or that Kyle can have.
Obviously, in a perfect world, we could all study all the businesses to the same extent, but unfortunately, that's not realistic. So yeah, I would say with the formalities out of the way, where do you want to start today's episode?

**Shawn O'Malley** (3:33)
I got one more formality left for you, actually. I don't want to pass on any opportunity to shamelessly mention our New York City Intrinsic Value Conference on September 19th. Tickets should still be available at theintrinsicvalueconference.com. So just to say that again, that's theintrinsicvalueconference.com.
And so if you want to join us and a whole bunch of other value investors in New York, just go to that website. But how about we start with our largest portfolio holding and also one of the most successful investments we've made. I'm very proud of Alphabet. I think there's a lot to say about this one. Unfortunately, mostly positive things to say.

**Daniel Mahncke** (4:14)
It's somewhat funny that Google has been our largest holding from pretty much the beginning of this journey. And yet it's probably also the company we spent least amount of time talking about. And it might be because, you know, everybody talks about Google. There's so much to say about it, but there's also so many people talking about it that we don't really feel the need to say that much about it. And if we do, we oftentimes hear what people close to us or the two of us off the record. But then again, thoughts and perceptions can differ. So it might actually be worth talking a bit about this name, especially when we look at the current earnings and, you know, the entire cycle that AI is in and the hyperscalers. I want to listen back to the Google pitch that you made more than a year ago by now. It's remarkable how the narrative of that company have shifted. You know, it's one of the biggest in the world. And you would feel that probably for those companies, the market is the most efficient. Turns out there can be quite a lot of stuff happening over just a year time. Back when you pitched Google, the big question was whether search would be disrupted and whether the DOJ antitrust investigations could potentially even split up the company, which I feel is something that nobody talks about anymore, to some extent because it's done, but also because you just don't have the same fear again that any one of the big hyperscalers or ecosystem companies will be disrupted.