Brandon Ladoff

Founder - Denmark Capital. Purposely flying under the radar from the beginning…just a little less now. Views my own.

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

Many are debating how to price AI's promise. Few are pricing in what happened to the machinery that sets prices, and how often and badly it can now misprice the best businesses on the planet.

THE TWO CLOCKS, an essay: Long-term ownership in a passive market

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

in a perfect world where SHs fully understood the situation and reasonable minds would agree Jensen's actions could be separated from his fiduciary duties as CEO, maintaining trust with employees, customers, govts, etc, of course SHs would want Jensen to stay.

But this proposal is literally backwards. SHs elect board members to be their reps in situations like this. If the board said he needs to go, they would be concluding the above is unfortunately not possible. If the NVIDIA board simply passed the decision back to SHs, the board should just all resign.

Importantly, what information would SHs even be working with here in a vote? If the board's conclusion were that going through a lengthy investigation would be pointless at this stage in light of new information received in the last 24+ hours, clearly they would be saying there's a lot more to it than we might know. If the board moves, they would have to be concluding that they’ve seen something very inconsistent with Jensen staying…otherwise ousting him quickly would clearly be a disastrous decision by the board.

[Gavin Baker @GavinSBaker]

I believe shareholders should be able to vote on Jensen *if* anything is going to happen before the investigation is finished.

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

lol, seriously? The Nvidia board should put out the bat signal to Rene Haas.

[@jason @Jason]

A much better solution for NVIDIA’s board, shareholders, customers and employees (and America) would to (a) finish their investigation and (b) make @JensenHuang the chairman if it comes to that.

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

To clarify: if you think giving China some H200s over the next 2 years could catapult them past the US in an insurmountable way, you should probably be anti export. This seems like a stretch to me. If you think exporting H200s will keep Huawei from achieving scale, this seems to have made more sense 12-24 months ago, but looks like Beijing has made its call and is rationing imports to protect Huawei. So being pro export for this reason also seems like a stretch.

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

Agreed, but if China has already decided that it will ultimately require its companies to figure out how to develop satisfactory hardware within the country, what are those for and against exporting less powerful Nvidia GPUs really arguing about? The pro export crowd should view older Nvidia chip sales as temporary / unsustainable and therefore not worth spending much time on, and the anti export crowd should also view these sales as not worth losing sleep over since it shouldn’t prove to the the reason China caught up and stayed there if that happens.

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

Agreed, but if China has already decided that it will ultimately require its companies to figure out how to develop satisfactory hardware within the country, what are those for and against exporting less powerful Nvidia GPUs really arguing about? The pro export crowd should view older Nvidia chip sales as temporary / unsustainable and therefore not worth spending much time on, and the anti export crowd should also view these sales as not worth losing sleep over since it shouldn’t prove to the the reason China caught up and stayed there if that happens.

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

Lots of thought provoking takes on $NVDA last 24 hrs from technologists and investors...but almost nobody in the investor camp is talking about how getting close to management can affect your judgment and process. Key man risk has sat near the top of every nvidia pre mortem for years. Most of us gave it a low probability on a 5-7 year view, while a report says the key man had a sex scandal PR firm on retainer for a year, per Wired. so if you’ve spent considerable time and effort building close relationships here, the 1x1s, conferences, dinners, podcasts, etc, and you enjoy the access (it makes your process feel heavier, and it's fun!), and you’d like the access to continue, can you be as curious and flexible right now as you might be if you'd engaged in none of it. For long horizon selective investors, the cost of management access is badly underweighted imo, especially now that most of what you’d want to know for what matters most for the LT is public.

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

Agree on crowding. but note I didn't say duration alone. every year the market disagrees with you, growing FCF/sh shrinks the years of FCF you paid for upfront. Compounding FCF/sh is the ultimate catalyst.

[Al Smallwood @SmallwoodAl_]

one of the very key things that are missed here is one very large assumption: AI, commoditisation of alt data, general crowding or simply increased capital formation on similar strategies drives shorter term alpha decay

within this is a huge assumption that more perfect information increases the efficiency of the price mechanism at T0

however, we're ignoring that this type of situtation is actually probably more likely to exacerbate bias (AI driven or human driven)

which in turn creates 2 things, higher likelihood of mispricing at T0 which results in potentially higher vol in the short term while presenting plenty of opportunities to capitalise on this for the contrarian investor

admittedly investment style and process is not as simple as fundamentals only, all the other factors have to be considered but I don't the answer is just 'more duration' albeit that does help

investors equipped with existing contrarian skills with a deep understanding of what type of catalyst drives a narrative switch for you to get paid on that position will be even more valuable going forward

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

But given these dynamics, what type of multiple should owners of the SpaceX equity put on the compute rental revenues, particularly when we’re in the short compute situation?

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@rohanpaul_ai It works both ways, of course. If compute becomes plentiful and cheap, SpaceX revenue will drop.

No crying in the casino for either party.

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

It doesn't require 10 years. It might take 10…or it might compound every year for the next 5. And the return comes from the business's growing FCF/sh. This is why it lasts, and why the capital that wants it (which I agree is a smaller but real % of institutional capital these days) is the only capital you should accept.

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

I'd encourage anyone interested in investing to mostly disregard this kind of smart-sounding rhetoric. If short-term prices trade less on fundamentals, the payoff for a long horizon gets bigger, as long as fundamentals still win over 10+ years. The only claim that kills "old school investing" is that they don't. The price could be bigger drawdowns along the way. Maybe it takes 10 years to show. But if you're right on the business, and your entry point is such that the years of free cash flow you’re paying for upfront is manageable and will quickly shrink as the business grows, and your capital can wait, the stock will eventually get too cheap to ignore. Sure, if you can skillfully protect against some of the path pain, you'll be better off. But the idea that winning over the next 20, 50 and 100 years comes from something other than investing makes no sense.

[0xFaust @0xFaust12]

I’m not sure how you can observe what just happened over the past week and takeaway that anybody should be leaning into “old school” stock picking but let’s unpack why a bit:

"buying cheap companies": lets start with the fact that in a world where a larger share of the market's x-sectional vol is factor vol vs. idio vol (https://t.co/SLYGTnNHek) that "cheap" is not a sufficient criteria for an investment to follow your thesis. Being blind to factor exposures of the position, counterparty dynamics like crowding, and short term fundamental trends are all forces that can/will move your position against you even if you have long "duration". In practice, buying a "cheap" company means holding a position(s) with negative to neutral momentum, positive residual volatility, negative perhaps negative profitability which are generally deleterious bets to be making and will present a drag on your total return during your holding period.

"accepting volatility and holding for 2-5 years": I don't have too much new to say here other than the fact that it is more likely your "long duration" horizon will result in you holding 50-60% drawdowns vs. 20-30% ones (you can confirm empirically), so in trying to be more clever than the pods you will in fact have constructed a much worse quality return stream for yourself (cough cough Lone Pine, Eminence, etc). Moreover, old school fundamental investing does not make use of risk models in the modern sense and, per the above, in a market increasingly trading less on fundamentals, your approximation of risk will be even less relevant leading to the deeper than expected drawdowns noted above.

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

@HochstatMichael Independent judgment…and the right accumulated judgment and heuristics.

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

Strongly agree overall but would say the increased turnover around LT positions should often come from views on emerging company specific, industry and macro controversies. Today’s market structure means FOGO / path recognition needs to factor into the process, which isn’t always about current valuation relative to LT views.

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

@ElliotTurn *if* (big if) it’s still early innings for models / products and efficiency gains don’t torpedo the demand wave that would follow, certain of those supplying the build wouldn’t stay down here if we ultimately need hundreds of GWs by 2040.

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

one potential difference here is that, outside of coding, the underlying models / products could still be early in their utility and usage.

[Elliot Turner @ElliotTurn]

I couldn't get the thought out of my head so I had to map it out.

This chart shows the COVID winners from April 2020-Dec 31 2021 plotted against the AI Bottleneck 40 from April 2025-today.

Look at the overlay and look at the correlations, it's jaw-dropping!

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

What matters now is further productizing the new trajectory. When looking at political, financing and public equity markets, the message is clear that it’s time for the labs and others to show a steady march to AI handling 10%+ of today’s knowledge worker equivalent work by 2031.

[Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_]

I said at the time - and repeatedly since - that things changed in November 2025, that the pace sped up, and that we were on a new trajectory. There's no denying now that was true. So, for the record: things changed again in September 2026. We are on a new trajectory.

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

Listening to this, seeing the insanely quick ARR ramp of Anthropic, OpenAI and other successful AI natives, and now seeing Anthropic basically miss its ideal IPO window begs the question of whether fast growing AI natives that are capital hungry should IPO sooner. When an AI native finds strong product-market fit, ARR is off to the races. But the consequence could be susceptibility to hitting the dreaded growth decel almost as fast. If this dynamic proves out and these companies will need a lot of capital to reach their next S curves, maybe we get more companies IPO’ing earlier going forward.

[Fireside Alpha @firesidealpha]

DoorDash’s inference spend has plateaued the last 1.5 months after rising 20x this year, according to co-founder Andy Fang.

He’s been discussing with Tony Xu: “if we’re seeing ROI from the spend, wouldn’t we want to spend more?"

FOODY: “Are you able to share how much you guys are spending on inference right now?”

FANG: “I’ll say a stat, that I think our inference spend has gone up 20x since the beginning of the year.”

FOODY: “How much do you expect it to go up over the next 24 months?”

FANG: “Well, I would say even the past month and a half, it’s plateaued. It hasn’t shrunk, but it’s definitely flatlined. I think there’s definitely efforts we’ve had internally to curb the spend. [...] And I was just talking to Tony, our CEO, about this earlier today. If we’re seeing ROI from the spend, wouldn’t we want to spend more, right? And so I think that’s the thing everybody’s trying to figure out, is where are those opportunities? Because let’s say if you’re generating revenue from token spend, you would spend that token spend all day, right? But I think a lot of what we’re focused on as an industry right now, quite frankly, is cost efficiency and all that stuff.”

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

Seeing additional wow AI products like the version of personal agents that just work is what should do it. People can better appreciate next 5-10 year opportunities as next undeniable products / improvements are released.

[Dean Marantis🇺🇸🇬🇷 @Deenobrown123]

Here is the problem I have with the memory trade right now. I personally believe we are still very early on the memory supply catching demand. I honestly think it might never happen. At least not in this decade. I also think memory prices will stay high forever. Just like new GPU or TPU prices will never drop in price. Every new GPU, TPU, and ASICS will get a new version of HBM. HBM will always be upgrading, and demand a higher price than the previous version. We are so early. Personal interference bots are about to explode. We are not even at the stadium with those, let alone starting the game. So much more memory will be needed for all of these bots. Then we get physical robots in a few years. Don’t even get me started on that. Space and other planets will follow, but that’s way out there. Literally no end to the build out. There are many people that completely disagree with me. Some think we are at the memory peak right now. Some think it’s less than a year away. And some think it’s a year or 2 away. Getting back to my problem with memory: how do we prove who is right? Is memory near peak and about to crash? Or are we in the early innings?

Every earnings that goes by, MU keeps crushing and guiding higher. But investors don’t believe it will continue. Next earnings, MU will make at least $44 billion dollars of profits in one quarter, and guide higher for the following quarter. But that doesn’t seem to matter. Micron stock no longer goes up because people don’t believe the earnings will continue. You see, when facts and data don’t matter, anything goes. Any story or thesis can be used against MU. So, if actual earnings and guidance don’t matter, because they are not believed to continue, how does that get proven to be true or false? If earnings after earnings continue to beat and raise, but the imaginary end of memory is thought to be right around the corner, then what? How cheap does MU have to be for investors to believe it can continue. With their thesis, the current valuation doesn’t matter because they believe memory prices will fall. so the actual earnings don’t matter! How long does this continue? What breaks this thinking? I honestly don’t know. I am 100% convinced Micron will make hundreds of billions of dollars of profits the rest of this decade. I absolutely believe earnings will go up every year for the rest of this decade. But if the market doesn’t believe that, when does the stock reflect the actual earnings? As every earnings report goes by, MU just gets cheaper and cheaper! I’ve never experienced this before. I’ve never seen actual earnings doubted to continue without any signs of a slowdown!

I honestly don’t know what it will take to convince investors that these earnings are durable and lasting.
Maybe the buyback is the only way! I would love to hear everyone’s answers as to what might eventually break this thinking. Obviously if earnings crash, we get that answer, but what if earnings continue to go up every quarter for the next few quarters?

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

Would be terrible. If it happens, non zero chance a certain “yikes” post and subsequent neocloud bashing helped bring it about

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

This would be the end of democracy in America

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

“We’ve also begun drug discovery efforts of our own”
Dario expanding the IPO buyer universe to biotech funds?

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

Over the past few months, Anthropic scientists have engaged in deep research partnerships with six organizations developing new medicines. We've also begun drug discovery efforts of our own.

In doing so, we’ve learned much more about how Claude can support the many stages of drug development.

In this blog post, we share some early results from these efforts, and describe how this work fits in with our wider ambitions in the life sciences.

https://t.co/EVbxkdDTgJ

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

Interesting discussion that brought to mind how human intelligence can be both the friend and foe of the intelligent investor. The friend when it allows you to more carefully and thoughtfully understand and reason through what matters. The foe when it causes you to add too much complexity to concepts that should be more straightforward when already playing out in a powerful way.

With AI, on the overly optimistic side, this can manifest in brilliant technologists reasoning their way into an incredibly accelerated path and very aggressive assumptions like adding 50+ GWs of AI-related compute capacity in 2027 and perpetually rising GPU pricing. On the pessimistic side, it can cause highly intelligent investors to reason their way into all the uncertainties in the path being too much to bear, like token pricing vs demand and model provider economics. This can cause you to put everything infra and hardware-related in the too hard pile when in reality getting comfortable with some of these uncertainties might be smaller leaps as compared to certain things you already own in light of what is already on the tracks and playing out.

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

Cliff Sosin (@CliffordSosin) is one of my favorite people to call, ask some big questions, and then shut up and listen.

This conversation is a version of one of those calls.

We discuss:
- The limits of intelligence
- Owning the complements to it
- Meta, the frontier labs, and the AI build-out
- Capital markets
- Why he's comfortable with 80% of his portfolio in Carvana.

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
10:41 The Limits of Intelligence
18:03 Investing Beyond Cheap Intelligence
24:03 Will AI Become Commoditized?
35:10 Who Profits From AI?
43:00 AI Agents Reshape Competition
52:06 America's Capital Markets
58:04 Transforming Companies With AI
68:19 AI and Portfolio Concentration
73:16 Education in the AI Era

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

asking this again post DoorDash-Instacart rumors….

[Brandon Ladoff @denmarkcap]

The latest selloff in $SE has me asking whether ecomm managements that are investing across multiple dimensions and facing AI disruption questions should try this type of reasoning exercise:

Assume Anthropic had full access to your business, data and people for 6 months. What would they prioritize for improving your value prop? How does that compare with where you’re investing today?

And would Anthropic’s people or yours be better at executing these priorities?