Ed Castel

⚡️ Seeking innovation, sharing insights

[Ed Castel @EdCastel10]

@willo2_Poly @munchPRMR let me know if you want to sue Panama entity, currently located here

[Ed Castel @EdCastel10]

@munchPRMR Polymarket Scam

[Ed Castel @EdCastel10]

@willo2_Poly @punk9059 you should take legal action, this is complete bs

[Ed Castel @EdCastel10]

@benbybit Binance is doing direct ownership in stocks through a registered finra broker following a traditional brokerage model vs tokenized stocks

[The Rock Trading Group @The_RockTrading]

$MSFT They're trying to get everyone out before they move it.

[The Long Investor @TheLongInvest]

$MSFT Can we just be clear on one thing going forward

If a MAG 7 touches or drops below its 200 WMA, it is a BUY

As for the superinvestors who sold out of $MSFT in Q1, are you ok?

How did you get into your position!

$MSFT is looking like the strongest RvR Mag 7 right now.

[Ed Castel @EdCastel10]

@Polymarket the joke tells itself

[Ed Castel @EdCastel10]

@TrendSpider whats your thots on this?

[Evan @StockMKTNewz]

Microsoft $MSFT now has a $633 Billion backlog up from $321B last year

[Ed Castel @EdCastel10]

@tradfi Putting his money where his mouth is

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

As two of the largest forces in equity markets -- growing index ownership and increasing amounts of capital controlled by extremely short-term-oriented, leveraged, volatility-intolerant investors -- converge, we have found occasional opportunities to acquire some of the most dominant long-term compounding franchises at attractive valuations.

For example, we acquired Alphabet $GOOG when the stock declined substantially on the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, Amazon $AMZN in the weeks following Liberation Day, and $META more recently on the market's response to the company's unexpectedly large cap ex guidance and expenditures.

In our 13F which we will file later today, we will disclose a new position in Microsoft, a company we have followed for many years now offered at a highly compelling valuation. While $PSUS will not be filing a 13F tomorrow, it has also recently made $MFST a core holding.

Microsoft operates two of the most valuable franchises in enterprise technology, which account for approximately 70% of the company's overall profits: M365 and Azure.

M365, the company's productivity suite, is the dominant operating platform for knowledge work, with over 450 million workers using Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams on a daily basis.

Azure is the world's second-largest hyperscaler cloud platform and, like AWS in our Amazon investment, is a direct beneficiary of the multi-decade migration of enterprise IT workloads to the cloud, which is now further accelerated by surging demand for AI inference workloads.

Both M365 and Azure are underpinned by Microsoft's unparalleled enterprise distribution and the security, compliance, and identity infrastructure it has built and refined over decades.

Beyond these core franchises, Microsoft also owns a portfolio of other leading businesses, including LinkedIn (the world's largest professional network with 1.3 billion members), its gaming platform (Xbox and Activision Blizzard), and search and news advertising (Bing and the Edge browser).

We began building our position in MSFT in February following a meaningful share price decline after the company reported its fiscal Q2 2026 results. We were able to establish our position at a valuation of 21 times forward earnings, broadly in line with the market multiple and well below Microsoft's trading average over the last few years.

Notably, MSFT's headline multiple does not reflect the value of Microsoft's approximately 27% economic interest in OpenAI, which would represent approximately $200 billion, or 7% of Microsoft's market capitalization, at OpenAI's most recent funding round valuation.

We believe Microsoft's recent share price decline has been principally driven by investor concerns around two key issues: i) the competitive positioning of M365 against increasingly capable AI lab offerings (notably Anthropic's Claude Cowork), and ii) the durability of Azure's growth, especially in light of Microsoft's evolving relationship with OpenAI.

In our view, investors underestimate the resilience of the M365 franchise given its deeply embedded role across enterprises and highly attractive price-value proposition. Unlike point software solutions, which may be vulnerable to disintermediation by better-performing AI alternatives, M365 is tightly integrated into the daily workflow of nearly every large enterprise and is supported by Microsoft's identity, security, compliance, and data governance infrastructure, which would be nearly impossible to replicate.

Attractive bundle economics further reinforce Microsoft's advantage, with monthly average revenue per user on the M365 suite at approximately $20, less than half of what customers would pay to purchase the underlying applications individually from different vendors.

Moreover, we are encouraged to see Microsoft prioritizing its R&D efforts and investment in Copilot, its own AI agent embedded across M365, with direct involvement from CEO Satya Nadella. We believe these efforts will translate into improved product velocity and greater customer adoption over time.

Alongside Copilot's rollout, the company has also begun shifting its pricing model from pure per-seat licensing to a hybrid model of seats plus metered consumption, which helps expand the company’s revenue opportunity as AI agents drive incremental usage that a seat-only structure would not capture. These initiatives should help sustain M365’s strong underlying growth momentum, which was already evident in the business unit’s 15% revenue growth (in constant currency) last quarter.

We believe concerns regarding Azure's growth trajectory are similarly misplaced, particularly in light of the franchise's exceptional recent performance. Azure revenue grew 39% in constant currency last quarter, with company guiding to modest acceleration through the second half of the year.

We view Microsoft's recent decision to restructure its OpenAI partnership not as a concession but as part of a deliberate pivot toward a more open, multi-model architecture that better serves enterprise customers, who increasingly seek optionality across model providers.

Microsoft recently disclosed that over 10,000 enterprise customers have used more than one model on Azure Foundry, the company’s modular AI model marketplace. This model-agnostic approach also strengthens Copilot, which can auto-route queries across multiple models to deliver the optimal output for a given task.

To support Azure's rapid growth amid persistent supply constraints, Microsoft has raised its calendar year 2026 capex budget to approximately $190 billion. Consistent with what we have observed at hyperscaler peers Amazon and Google, we view this spend as growth capex that should drive future revenue generation. This is particularly true for Microsoft, given that roughly two-thirds of its capex budget is allocated to server and networking equipment that correlates directly with near-term revenue.

Like our purchases of $GOOG, $AMZN, and $META, we believe that $MSFT offers analogous and compelling long-term value at today's valuation.

[ImNotHarsh | 📈💸 @imnotharsh]

After $GOOGL and $AMZN being frustrating to hold and then going on a generational run to ATHs, next up is $MSFT.

Book it. Typical rotation of the Mag 7.

[The Long Investor @TheLongInvest]

$INTC I don't know who needs to hear this but $INTC is not a buy

Parabolic moves, regardless of who they are should be avoided.

[Ed Castel @EdCastel10]

@labubu_trader @mat78704 @diyas_1989 what about sk hynix?

[COATUE @coatuemgmt]

Chart of the Day:

Cash flow is transferring from hyperscalers to AI infrastructure.

[Ren @Ren_aramb]

Memory prices are going absolutely vertical.

Look at the Korea export price data. DRAM +18%. DRAM excluding modules +35%. Flash memory +47%. SSD +140%. In one month.

This is a supply-constrained market running into 56% CAGR AI inference demand through 2031.

Main beneficiaries.

$SNDK – +500% YTD. Pure-play NAND. Only name with clean exposure to the storage side of the AI buildout. Entire supply sold out through 2026.

$MU – +124% YTD. Market cap just crossed $700B. HBM fully booked. DRAM average selling price up 32% quarter over quarter. New York megafab breaking ground January 2026.

SK Hynix – the HBM pure-play. Operating margins approaching 70%. Every HBM, DRAM, and NAND unit for 2026 already committed. Planning US ADR listing because Korean market valuation doesn’t reflect what global capital is willing to pay.

The NAND bit demand chart makes it a lot clearer: 286 exabytes in 2025. 1,686 exabytes by 2031.

AI inference driving 56% CAGR – three times faster than training and traditional workloads combined.

Secondary beneficiaries

While the big three chase HBM, they walked away from legacy 2D NAND.

Two Taiwanese names own that vacuum.

Macronix (https://t.co/sy3Vhnt1qa) – NAND revenue +382% YoY. Gross margin from 17% to 40.8% in twelve months.

Winbond (https://t.co/CFIQG8taOT) – Number one globally in SPI NOR flash. Own fabs. Lead times past nine months.

What is clear is that memory is no longer a commodity business it’s a structural shift.

You are not early, but there is definitely a lot more juice to run.

[zerohedge @zerohedge]

Entire market is now one giant gamma squeeze: S&P traded $2.6 trillion notional of calls yesterday, all time high

[Ed Castel @EdCastel10]

@WazzCrypto dont be so salty

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

Just wrapped our quarterly earnings call.

We are focused on delivering AI infrastructure and solutions that empower every business to eval-max their outcomes in this agentic computing era.

Our AI business surpassed a $37 billion annual revenue run rate, up 123%.

We are at the beginning of one of the most consequential platform shifts that will change the entire tech stack as we move from end-user driven workloads to workloads driven by end-users and agents.

This will drive TAM expansion and change the value creation equation across the entire economy.

To capture this opportunity, we are executing against two major priorities:

[Ed Castel @EdCastel10]

@redactedrain actually, your employer fundraiser looks like a top