Fynn

23 | Investing and Studying Technology | $ZETA $AMD $APP $HNST $NKE $CELH $DUOL $NOW

[Fynn @FynnCox]

@ariaradnia Says the guy addicted to stocks

[Fynn @FynnCox]

$NOW making a run today 👀

I posted this yesterday and the market is starting to see the same angle.

If AI becomes a massive new cybersecurity problem, ServiceNow may be one of the companies businesses need to solve it.

[Fynn @FynnCox]

AI horror movies have a 10% chance of coming true? $NOW.

This drama strengthens my thesis.

ServiceNow has AI Control Tower, Armis and Veza. If AI agents become a massive new attack surface, somebody is going to have to keep them under control inside businesses.

[Fynn @FynnCox]

AI horror movies have a 10% chance of coming true? $NOW.

This drama strengthens my thesis.

ServiceNow has AI Control Tower, Armis and Veza. If AI agents become a massive new attack surface, somebody is going to have to keep them under control inside businesses.

[Fynn @FynnCox]

@QC_Capitals Flat tomorrow

[Fynn @FynnCox]

@CKCapitalxx So now we flat. Gotta make those 9B in options expire worthless this Friday😂

[Fynn @FynnCox]

Markets flat this week?

[Bull Theory @BullTheoryio]

BREAKING: $9.6 trillion in US options is set to expire by September 18, the largest triple witching ever, per Citadel Securities.

That beats June's previous record of $7.7 trillion by nearly $2 trillion.

[Fynn @FynnCox]

Housing market has felt dead since 2021, and it’s looking pretty bad right now.

Is this finally a good time to buy $RKT, $OPEN, or $RH?

[Kalshi @Kalshi]

BREAKING: US mortgage rates hit 7% for the first time in 15 months

[Fynn @FynnCox]

If you’ve ever actually tried to use PayPal, especially their customer service, you’ll understand why it’s so hated. You can get passed around for hours, talk to 10 different people, and still not reach anyone with the authority to actually solve your problem.

The stock may perform well in the future through share buybacks and modest growth. But in my opinion, that doesn’t make it a good business.

I think PayPal is poorly run and extremely bureaucratic, and that creates an opportunity for smaller, faster-moving companies to take their margins.

Personally, I won’t touch this business unless they cut a lot of the fat and get back to a much leaner, more efficient model.

[Fynn @FynnCox]

If you’ve ever actually tried to use PayPal, especially their customer service, you’ll understand why it’s so hated. You can get passed around for hours, talk to 10 different people, and still not reach anyone with the authority to actually solve your problem.

The stock may perform well in the future through share buybacks and modest growth. But in my opinion, that doesn’t make it a good business.

I think PayPal is poorly run and extremely bureaucratic, and that creates an opportunity for smaller, faster-moving companies to take their margins.

Personally, I won’t touch this business unless they cut a lot of the fat and get back to a much leaner, more efficient model.

[Fynn @FynnCox]

What are you doing to hedge your portfolio going into next week? 👀

I bought a small amount of $TSLZ calls last week - a 2x inverse $TSLA ETF.

[Fynn @FynnCox]

Last week I bought $TSLZ calls to hedge my portfolio because of people like this.

If anything goes wrong in the markets, I think $TSLA gets hit far harder than the broader market.

[Fynn @FynnCox]

@DonnHogan We know AppLovin is focused on DTC, but they don’t give us much quarterly data on the actual scale of non-gaming spend. So it’s difficult to tell how quickly that ~40% market-wide figure is changing or how much of it AppLovin is capturing.

[Fynn @FynnCox]

$APP Investors,

If you haven’t seen Sensor Tower’s Gaming Ad Monetization report, you should take a look.

Honestly it’s left me with more questions than answers.

Sensor Tower estimates AppLovin has ~36% share of the mobile gaming ad market, and roughly 40% of in-game ad impressions come from NON-GAMING advertisers.

AppLovin disclosed ~$10B annualized gaming spend in 2025 and ~$1B annualized e-commerce spend by Dec. 2025, yet Sensor Tower’s 2026 report says ~40% of gaming ad impressions come from non-gaming advertisers. That suggests a massive amount of non-gaming demand is being captured outside AppLovin, most obviously Google/AdMob and Meta who has the Advertisers and the creatives to deploy in this scenario.

You can think about this in two ways: either AppLovin now has to take on $GOOG and $META for non-gaming demand, or there’s a massive ~40% of in-game impressions that AppLovin can optimize to capture.

[Fynn @FynnCox]

^to clarify “40% in game impressions come from non gaming” figure is the market as a whole. I haven’t found any public data breaking this down by ad network.

[Fynn @FynnCox]

I agree DTC is the closest to what they know with the biggest ROI.

But eventually when they move into the other verticals they will optimize like they always have IMO.

They also have experience with some “lag” IAP games aren’t a simple feedback loop so it’s not a completely new thing for them.

[Fynn @FynnCox]

📍95% of people don’t understand the $APP Thesis:

AppLovin is the strangest advertising business in the market.

Think about this for a second.

AppLovin has an advertising platform reaching 1B+ daily active users.

Yet the business was built around advertising one vertical: GAMING.

Gaming advertising is only expected to represent ~0.9% of global advertising revenue in 2026.

AppLovin has already become a winner in a TINY corner of advertising. I’m not sure this exists anywhere else (please tell me if it does)

They’ve somehow built a massive advertising business and won in their category while barely touching the enormous universe of non-gaming advertisers.

DTC is the obvious first step, but it doesn’t end there.

Prediction markets. Insurance. Subscriptions. Food delivery. Lead generation. Eventually, potentially much more.

I like how they’re approaching this.

They’re not trying to attack every vertical simultaneously.

They can enter a category, collect conversion data, improve Axon, prove the economics, and then move to the next one.

[Fynn @FynnCox]

@ariaradnia EYEBALL EFFICIENCY.

Only show eyeballs gaming ads = BAD.

DTC ads + Gaming ads + smart AppLovin people = EYEBALL EFFICIENCY

I’m way too bullish someone help me. $APP

[Fynn @FynnCox]

They may become a more general engine but if they sacrifice margins we will likely see larger revenue growth numbers. I will trust whatever the management chooses to do. As they have proven to be very capable.

I think the biggest thing I want to see is DTC advertiser spend.

We know APP already has an enormous supply side through MAX, with 1B+ DAU, but that number is not expected to grow. That means a lot of the value has to come from the demand side getting advertisers to spend more.

We haven’t gotten a new dollar figure for DTC spend in the last two quarters. The last number was the ~$1B annualized e-commerce spend run rate reached in December 2025. Q1 gave us a qualitative update that April was the largest month ever for consumer-vertical advertiser spend, but no new dollar figure.

So that’s the biggest thing Im watching along with margins. If DTC advertisers are steadily increasing their spend on APP, I think that’s strong evidence that Axon is doing what it’s supposed to: becoming more effective at finding valuable customers and generating returns for advertisers. And in turn strengthening there moat on the Demand side by using eyeballs more efficiently.

[Fynn @FynnCox]

🚨 $APP Thesis: Is Gaming Just the Beginning?🚨

AppLovin already is the king of mobile gaming ads. Axon + MAX + enormous gaming data + a huge amount of creative gives it one of the strongest flywheels in gaming advertising we’ve seen:

More advertisers → more creatives → more conversion data → better targeting → better ROAS → advertisers can bid more → more value for publishers → more supply/data → stronger Axon.

What interests me most is DTC.

Gaming ad TAM is roughly $14B+ today, while the broader DTC-performance advertising opportunity for AppLovin could potentially be $100B+.

AppLovin says advertisers are spending $11B+ annually on its platform. In February 2026, the company disclosed that its e-commerce business had reached roughly a $1B annualized gross advertiser spend run rate in December 2025, just months after launching.

APP is already seeing DTC/web advertising ramp extremely quickly, and management has talked about ~30% long-term revenue growth being a reasonable assumption.

There may also be subtle differences between monetizing an IAP game vs. a DTC advertiser, but I’m not convinced the economics are meaningfully different enough to make this a major part of the thesis.

An IAP game may pay a lot to acquire a user, but that user could spend less time in ad-supported games afterward, potentially hurting Applovin's flywheel.

The same could arguably happen when a gaming ad is shown on YouTube or another platform. However, I’d argue gaming-to-gaming advertising is potentially more harmful to AppLovin’s ecosystem because the user is being moved from one ad-supported gaming environment to another.

With DTC, APP can monetize a purchase or lead without needing to move that user’s attention to another app.

I don’t have proof that this materially improves APP’s economics, and I still believe IAP games will remain a huge part of APP’s future. This is one of the areas I’d especially love AD-tech or gaming experts to challenge.

The bigger DTC opportunity, in my opinion, is that it gives the same system a much larger pool of advertisers, creatives, and conversion data to optimize.

More advertiser types means more potential buyers for the same impression. An impression that may not be very valuable to one gaming advertiser could be extremely valuable to a DTC advertiser.

For example, going from 5 to 6 purchases per 1,000 impressions is a 20% improvement in acquisition efficiency. To get the same 5 purchases, you’d need ~833 impressions instead of 1,000, about 17% fewer impressions. Scale that across billions of impressions and even small improvements can create enormous value.

More DTC data + more creative also gives Axon more opportunities to learn what works and match the right person with the right ad.

APP is also increasingly automating creative production, which could make generating and testing large volumes of creative much more scalable.

The more ways APP can monetize a user’s attention, the more valuable each impression potentially becomes.

Long term, I think gaming advertising could become relatively small compared to DTC without necessarily hurting gaming advertisers. Gaming advertisers could actually benefit from APP having more ways to monetize users and more data to determine the most effective creative for each individual, while wasting as few impressions as possible.

That’s the part of the thesis I find most interesting:

DTC may not just add a huge new TAM. It makes the existing impression pool more valuable.

I’m not convinced margins have to compress dramatically as APP scales. They’ve built a very lean business, the same infrastructure can support a much larger advertiser base, and revenue is currently growing far faster than the cost base. That operating leverage could allow APP to maintain much higher margins than many expect.

My 2031 Projection:

• 30% annual revenue growth
• ~$7.5B 2026 revenue starting point
• 60% GAAP operating margin
• ~3% annual share-count reduction through buybacks
• 30× P/E
That gets roughly:
2031 revenue: ~$27.8B
2031 shares: ~287M
2031 EPS: ~$47.7
2031 value: ~$1,430/share
From ~$321 today, that’s roughly 4.5×, or about 35% annualized over 5 years.
Obviously, this is a model, not a prediction. The assumptions are the entire debate.