Bitcoin and $ETH are moving on the eve of Morgan Stanley spot Bitcoin ETF going live. But remember, the magic number that signals the commencement of Altseason is a 100% move on most Alts/ memes in 24hrs. Once you see that, then we have liftoff. Until then, don't get excited.
@jerr_rrej Bruh, you’re in your 60s. You’ll be lucky to have another 20 years. Live the remainder of your life with grace and compassion. Misdirected hatred will rot your soul
Thoughts on $DUOL
$DUOL just put up a year that, on the surface, looks incredible. 52m daily active users, up 30%. 12m paid subscribers. Revenue of $1.04b, up 39%. Over $300m in adjusted EBITDA with margins close to 30%. $360m in free cash flow. More than $1b in cash and a $400m buyback authorized. If you just stopped there and closed the book, you would call it a monster year without hesitation. But stocks do not trade on what just happened. They trade on what is about to happen. And what is about to happen is slower.
Management basically said they are going to ease up on squeezing every dollar out of the existing user base and instead focus on growing the base itself. They are removing some friction from the free product. They are giving up roughly $50m in bookings they could have captured. They are shifting teams away from optimizing ARPU and toward expanding users. They are investing more heavily in AI and pushing into new categories like chess, math, and music, with the stated goal of reaching 100m DAUs by 2028. That ambition is huge but it comes with a big unknown cost.
Bookings next year are guided to grow only 10 to 12%. Revenue 15 to 18%. EBITDA margins decreasing to about 25% from around 30%. Stock based compensation rising to 15% of revenue. Nothing is broken, but the trajectory flattens meaningfully compared to what investors had grown used to.
When a company is priced as if growth will stay near 40% with expanding margins and then guides to mid teens growth with contracting margins, the multiple compresses bigly. That is not emotion or fear, it is arithmetic. The market is simply repricing the unknown.
The more interesting part is what this means longer term. They are at 52m DAUs today and want to reach 100m in roughly three years. If they get close and even a modest percentage converts to paid over time, the revenue base five years out could be far larger than what current numbers imply. If they miss and DAUs stall, then they will have sacrificed margin without meaningfully changing the scale of the platform. That is the real bet investors are making now.
What I find most educational in moments like this is how quickly sentiment changes. A short while back this was a high growth compounding machine with expanding margins.
They are choosing to think in years instead of quarters, and that rarely feels comfortable in the short term. The quarter itself was strong by almost any objective measure. The stock is reacting to the forward deceleration and the intentional tradeoff between near term profitability and long term scale.
The future just became a larger opportunity and a larger question mark at the same time, and that dichotomy is exactly why the stock is moving the way it is.
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This is how it's done - hijack ATTENTION and you hijack the population's sense of reality. Gotcha. The unanswered question at the end here of 'who is doing it?' does have an answer. It is the other-dimensional force I have been exposing for decades working through the Global Cult of interlocking secret societies constantly generating the human rollercoaster 'drama' that captures ATTENTION.