Dumpster Cat Capital

Primarily TMT investing. Prefer dumpster fires

[Dumpster Cat Capital @DumpsterCatCap]

Concerning for $NFLX - Netflix TV streaming minutes have now basically been flat in the US for the last 3 years, while YouTube has leapfrogged everyone else

Netflix is now clearly in "take price" mode. Definitely a new leg to the story, question is how long it can last

[Dumpster Cat Capital @DumpsterCatCap]

Remember, the A100 is a 5-year-old chip at this point!

[Dumpster Cat Capital @DumpsterCatCap]

Interesting anecdote from Bernstein on the state of the Chinese AI accelerator market

IFlytek recently ported their training stack for their iSpark model from NVIDIA A100s to Huawei Ascend 910Bs - required 200 engineers working for 6 months to bring performance up to parity

[Dumpster Cat Capital @DumpsterCatCap]

Total time spent per day on music has actually fallen by 15%+ over the last decade, despite the fact that music revenues have roughly doubled

Wonder how long this divergence can continue

[Dumpster Cat Capital @DumpsterCatCap]

Very bullish chart on $TMUS from Craig Moffett - all of TMobile’s share gains over the last 3 years have come from suburban / rural markets

TMobile is still *significantly* underpenetrated in all of those markets

[Dumpster Cat Capital @DumpsterCatCap]

UberEats EBITDA margin has still improved massively since 2022, but that’s entirely due to opex leverage, with no net contribution from take rates

[Dumpster Cat Capital @DumpsterCatCap]

Good work from Mike Morton at MoffettNathanson on Uber margins

I like $UBER as a business but they’re trying their best to turn me off with all of these BS accounting changes - their “real” contribution margin basically moves independently of their GAAP and non-GAAP take rate!

[Dumpster Cat Capital @DumpsterCatCap]

UberEats reports a 15% “adjusted” non-GAAP take rate, but that obscures the mix shift from driver incentives (contra-revenue) to consumer incentives (S&M)

Accounting for both, Uber’s real take rate is just 11%, or 300 bps lower than $DASH - and it hasn’t improved in 3 years

[Dumpster Cat Capital @DumpsterCatCap]

The precedent above was ruling on section 301 tariffs for China, but presumably the same framework applies today

i.e. even if importing Taiwanese GPU servers into the US via Mexico doesn’t automatically make them Mexican, adding a few Mexican screws might be enough

[Dumpster Cat Capital @DumpsterCatCap]

Bernstein speculates that NVIDIA GPU servers will actually be *exempt* from new tariffs

Their argument: a majority of GPU servers imported to the US come through Mexico, which was excluded from the new tariffs. NVIDIA’s ODMs set up last mile assembly there a few years ago

[Dumpster Cat Capital @DumpsterCatCap]

But even if the loophole is wrong, the bar for “substantial transformation” on servers is not high - CBP precedent suggests if Foxconn buys a GPU from Taiwan and assembles it in Mexico with Mexican-made metal posts, the whole server would count as Mexican https://t.co/6HxqPrDrHc

[Dumpster Cat Capital @DumpsterCatCap]

From Bernstein: US alcohol consumption has gone off a cliff since 2021

After another -3% decline in 2024, per-capita consumption is now the lowest it’s been since 1962

[Dumpster Cat Capital @DumpsterCatCap]

The problem is most of these solar requests are basically spurious - developers speculatively apply for interconnect across multiple redundant projects, clogging up the system, and don’t build anything unless they get approved. Nearly 80% of requests are ultimately withdrawn!

[Dumpster Cat Capital @DumpsterCatCap]

The average time it takes to build a power plant in the US has gone from 2 years back in the 2000s to 5 years today - mostly due to bottlenecks in regulatory approval for power interconnection

[Dumpster Cat Capital @DumpsterCatCap]

The problem? Interconnect request queues across the US have gotten DDOSed by a flood of thousands of new solar projects over the last decade

[Dumpster Cat Capital @DumpsterCatCap]

Unfortunately the price cutting is from a position of weakness: Lyft’s cost structure is subscale vs Uber but they can’t reach scale without under-pricing Uber. Double whammy to the bottom line

[Dumpster Cat Capital @DumpsterCatCap]

Lyft’s strategy under their new CEO summed up in two words: “cut prices”

[Dumpster Cat Capital @DumpsterCatCap]

All good things must eventually come to an end

[Dumpster Cat Capital @DumpsterCatCap]

According to this Indian government study, Indian retail day traders lost $5B in 2024 betting on equity derivatives

80% of those profits ended up collected by unnamed “prop traders”

Wait is that just Jane Street lol