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Ideas from our Weekly Inspiration newsletter
We highlight a few stock write-ups from the latest Weekly Inspiration:
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) has been one of the worst-performing large US chip stocks in 2026, behind Micron, Marvell, Intel and AMD, while management guides to ~70% revenue growth in FY28 on a supply-constrained basis and has visibility into more than $1 trillion of cumulative Blackwell and Rubin revenue through 2027. Aurelion Research, writing after a post-earnings conversation with the company’s investor relations team, argues the laggard status is unjustified: inference is now a larger workload than training after the two were roughly balanced 18 months ago, AI clouds, industrial and enterprise customers already account for about half of data center revenue, and the physical AI business is running at $10 billion a year. The risks the market is pricing are real, among them memory costs pulling Q4 gross margin to 71-72% from an expected ~74%, custom silicon from Broadcom and OpenAI, and the question of whether hyperscaler capex earns a return, but at ~18x forward earnings the authors think they are more than priced in.
Deckers Outdoor (NYSE: DECK), owner of HOKA, UGG and Teva, trades at ~11x guided earnings after a ~60% fall from its late-2024 peak, with a net cash balance sheet. Revenue and EPS compounded at 13% and 30% a year from FY17 to FY26 in close to a straight line, and the share count fell nearly 30% over the same stretch as management put about two-thirds of free cash flow into buybacks. The de-rating came from HOKA slowing from 20%-plus growth to ~10%, a pre-tax earnings dip on higher SG&A, tariffs, and a starting multiple above 30x. Value Don’t Lie frames it as a “busted GARP” name: over 20 years the stock has traded at 14-18x earnings, the better footwear peers sit at 10-15x, and 3G paid ~15x for Skechers in 2025, a business with the same net cash, a similar wholesale mix and the same international growth story. On FY27 guidance of $7.35-7.50 in EPS, 16x gives ~$120 a share; a punitive 7x on a $7 miss gives ~$49. The author has no position and is keeping the name on a watchlist.
Shurgard Self Storage (Brussels: SHUR), Europe’s largest self-storage owner with 335 stores across seven countries, trades at about 43% of its €54 per-share net tangible assets, having listed in 2018 at €25 against NTA of €24. Guy Davis argues that the 17 analysts covering the stock are focused on the wrong thing, a revenue-growth guidance cut to 3.5-4.5% and the removal of 2027 targets, rather than on hard-to-replicate assets at a 57% discount with a 23.7% loan-to-value ratio, €795 million of liquidity and the only investment-grade rating in European storage. Blackstone’s late-2025 talks over Big Yellow took place around NTA, Europe has 0.3 square feet of storage per capita against 7 in the US, and a comfortably covered 5% dividend pays the holder to wait. Public Storage owns ~35% and the New York Common Retirement Fund a third, which makes a third-party takeover harder. His base case, the price moving from 43% to 80% of a flat NTA over seven years plus the dividend, compounds at ~12% a year, and he went from first look to buying within 48 hours.
Flitto (KOSDAQ: 300080) sells non-Western-language translation data, built over 14 years by 14 million users, to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, Baidu and Alibaba, and grew revenue 77% in 2025 to ₩36 billion while turning its first operating profit. In late June two supply contracts with its largest customer were upsized from a combined ~₩14 billion to ₩31.6 billion, a figure approaching all of last year’s revenue, and the disclosed backlog at June 30 stood at ~₩28 billion; booked first-half revenue plus backlog already covers about 80% of Smoak Capital’s ₩51.5 billion revenue estimate for 2026. Smoak expects earnings to more than double to ~₩17 billion, which puts the shares at 8.7x estimated 2026 earnings and 2.6x EV/revenue, against 7-10x revenue for listed AI training-data peers in more crowded niches. The Q1 operating loss that sank the stock reflected deliveries idling ahead of the new orders, and Q2 alone came in at ₩8.1 billion of revenue with a 17% operating margin. One customer accounts for more than 45% of revenue.
Applied Co. (Tokyo: 3020) is a regional Japanese PC retailer and systems integrator whose net cash and securities cover roughly half of its ¥12 billion market capitalization, which leaves the operating business at ~1.5x EV/EBIT and ~5.5x forecast earnings. The company earned a 17.6% return on equity in FY26 while carrying all that cash, against 10% at BIC Camera and 4% at Yamada, because it sells PCs bundled with setup, data migration, security and support and runs a far leaner SG&A line than the big chains. The more interesting half of the business sells workstations, HPC and AI systems to universities, government agencies and corporates; Applied is one of 53 NVIDIA partners in Japan and lists more than 700 HPC deployment case studies. Altay Capital, which has owned the shares since early 2023 and recently added, points to Bain’s take-private of the larger peer MCJ at ~7x EBITDA earlier this year; at that multiple Applied would be worth ~¥12,000 a share, about 2.6x the current price. The founder’s family controls 52%, which rules out activism but keeps a buyout in play, and average daily volume is under $50,000.
As always, the above theses reflect the linked authors’ views (available here), not Latticework recommendations.
Articles worth your time
‘Death of the Brand’ or dearth of thought?, by Django Davidson of Hosking Partners, revisits a 2017 speech that called the quality-compounder consensus a cognitive bubble and reports the result. Anheuser-Busch and Kraft Heinz both peaked above 7x trailing EV/sales in July 2017, a multiple that implied software margins for beer and cheese, while Alphabet traded at 5.5x. Hosking bought Costco, Kroger, Walmart and Tesco at 0.5-0.8x sales instead; that basket has returned 245% since, against 0% for Nestlé, Unilever, Diageo, Kraft Heinz, Anheuser-Busch and Clorox. His explanation is the capital cycle rather than any special insight: seventy years of TV-advertising dominance ended with social media, over-priced brands handed retailers a private-label umbrella where margins run 1-2.5x higher, and investors outsourced their thinking to a Buffett halo and a story that was easy to sell.
Small Caps in 2026: The Lottery & the Leftovers, by Daniel Rasmussen and Chris Satterthwaite of Verdad, shows that the past year’s small-cap rally was a lottery drawing rather than the revaluation value investors have waited two decades for. The Russell 2000 returned 37% against 23% for the S&P 500, but 32 points of the small-cap return came from multiple expansion, the gains were concentrated in loss-making biotech and story stocks, and high-yield spreads barely moved. Since 2013, 61% of the small-cap universe is new, and the loss-making share has risen from 13% to roughly 40%. With spreads in their tightest quintile since 1989, small caps have historically gone on to trail large caps by nine points over the following year. The part of the market they find intact is the profitable half: a median 9.5x EV/EBITDA against 15.1x for profitable large caps, a 37% discount versus an 11% norm, with the cheapest quintile still at 4.7x after a 41% year.
Why Cheap Is Often Better, by Reimar Scholz, explains why an investor who came to listed equities from private-company turnarounds keeps returning to small, neglected, statistically cheap companies with survivable problems, usually below €300 million in market capitalization. The empirical case is the familiar one from Tweedy, Browne, Greenblatt, Gray and Carlisle, and his own approach has beaten the DAX by a wide margin without finding the next Nvidia. The practical points are sharper: a machinery maker serving pharma trades at twice the multiple of an identical one serving an unfashionable sector, foreign markets such as Japan strip away the home-market prejudices that pass for knowledge and force you to start with the numbers, and a low entry price reduces the number of things that must go right. He is explicit that cheap is not a thesis by itself: balance sheet, cash conversion and a survivable downside come first.
The Surface Area for Luck, by Todd Wenning of KNA Capital Management, uses Sham, the racehorse born the same year as Secretariat, to argue that good companies widen their exposure to good luck. FedEx survived on a $27,000 blackjack win, Amazon sold $672 million of convertibles three weeks before the dot-com crash, and Novo Nordisk found GLP-1’s appetite effect while studying blood sugar. His examples from the portfolio are Games Workshop’s Amazon series and Halma’s $20 million purchase of Photonics, which fifteen years later serves a single customer worth ~19% of group revenue as AI demand surged. Companies that build consumer surplus, allocate capital well and treat stakeholders decently accumulate option value the market has not priced; companies that squeeze customers for short-term profit build an off-balance-sheet liability. The counterexamples cut both ways (GameStop, Arthur Andersen), which is why he accepts that a portfolio hunting for Secretariats will hold some Shams.
Druckenmiller Unbound, by Harvey Sawikin of Firebird Management, takes Stanley Druckenmiller’s admittedly AI-written Wall Street Journal op-ed on Treasury buybacks as a case study in what machine prose leaves out. The piece is logically organized and clearer than its author would have managed, and it is also bloodless: no stories, no humor, no use of five decades of trading experience, and no mention that Druckenmiller was publicly short Treasuries in January. Sawikin, who has written a monthly investor letter since August 1998 and refuses to hand one to a model, rewrites a paragraph in the Druck voice to show the difference, then reprints his guide to fund-manager prose: the passive voice for excuses, “staggering” for the Russell’s underperformance, and “huge” as a signal you will lose half your money and “massive” that you will lose it all.
The deck
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