# Value Investors Circle Uber and AppLovin as AI Money Moves to Plumbing - Weekly Podcast Idea Digest - Week of September 7, 2026 > The Weekly Podcast Idea Digest for the week of September 7, 2026: high-quality growth names cut in half this year (Uber, AppLovin, ad-tech) drew value investors on the tape, while the AI money hunted power delivery, cooling and chip packaging, and contrarians leaned into insurance and beaten-down consumer names. ## Weekly Podcast Idea Digest ### Week of September 7, 2026: Value Investors Circle Uber and AppLovin as AI Money Moves to Plumbing --- This was a busy week for actual stock ideas on the podcasts (podcasts from Aug 31 to Sep 7), not just macro chatter. One theme kept coming back: *high-quality growth companies that got cut in half in 2026* (AppLovin, Uber, and the ad-tech names) are now the ones value investors are circling. A second theme is where the AI money flows next, away from the famous chips and toward the boring plumbing: *power delivery, cooling, and chip packaging*. And a few contrarians are leaning the other way entirely, into insurance and beaten-down consumer names. Every idea below is tied to the specific podcast and person who said it. --- ## The big deep-dives ### Uber (UBER), "Mr. Market is completely wrong" *Who:* Shawn O'Malley and Daniel Mahncke on *The Investor's Podcast / We Study Billionaires (Sep 6)*. Uber is one of the largest holdings in their "intrinsic value" portfolio, and they revisited it a year after first buying. Their argument, in plain terms: the business roughly doubled while the stock went nowhere, so it is simply a lot cheaper than it was. * When they first bought it in April 2025, Uber traded at about *55 times operating profit*. Today it is about *22 times*: "the business doubled, but the multiple got cut by more than half and then the stock went sideways." * Bookings are compounding at roughly *20% a year*, the user base is growing *16% a year*, and free cash flow is running at about *$10 billion annually*. The company bought back *$3 billion of stock last quarter alone*. * The margin story is the heart of it. Operating margins swung from *negative 43% in 2020 to positive 12%* today. O'Malley called it "a 55 percentage point swing in margin profitability in less than six years... that is astounding." * New profit levers: an *advertising business now over a $2 billion run rate, growing 50%+ a year* ("ad dollars are nearly pure profit"), plus Uber Eats pushing into grocery and retail (a new tie-up with Ulta Beauty was cited as an example). The whole debate is really about robotaxis. Their answer to the Waymo fear is that Uber's real moat is liquidity, millions of drivers who flex in and out in real time: > "In Austin, Uber's own data showed [that] Waymo vehicles on its network were busier than 99% of human drivers... there's almost a liquidity to the Uber network that is very, very hard to replace." They also noted that opening the Waymo app in California can mean roughly 18-minute waits versus a few minutes on Uber, and argued Waymo will ultimately keep working *with* Uber to fill its cars. Notably, *Dan Skelly of Morgan Stanley made the same call on The Compound and Friends (Sep 4)*, unprompted: asked which stock the market most misunderstands, he said, "I think the market is Uber wrong." ### AppLovin (APP), the 30-bagger that got cut in half (and a real disagreement) This was the most-discussed single name of the week, and the interesting part is that smart people landed on opposite conclusions. *The bull framing* came from Kyle Grieve and Shawn O'Malley on *The Investor's Podcast (Sep 3)*. AppLovin is one of the biggest losers in the market this year, down more than 50% in 2026, yet the fundamentals are extraordinary: * *EBITDA margins over 79%* over the last twelve months ("some of the best I've ever seen"). * *Average revenue per employee of $7.6 million*, a roughly *55% three-year revenue growth rate*, and a return on invested capital around *113%*. * Revenue still grew over 50% year over year, and the stock now trades at a mid-teens multiple, "definitely in value territory now." O'Malley's honest starting point: "are we wrong in not owning this business at its current price?" *The bear/pass framing* came days later on the sister show, *The Intrinsic Value Podcast (Sep 6)*. Running a deliberately conservative model (17% revenue growth against management's guided ~47% near-term, EBITDA margins fading to ~77%, and a 13x EBITDA multiple) they get a fair value of about *$480 with a 9% annual return*, and still recommend *passing*: > "My thoughts on this business are that it's a pass... I've been burned by businesses with high growth rates that I assumed would slowly fade only to see the growth rate halt to a complete standstill." Their two big worries: the disclosures are unusually opaque (no investor deck, and you cannot even see the take rate, the cut AppLovin keeps between advertisers and app publishers), and the whole thing depends on a constantly-updated ad algorithm ("Axon") that just had a weak quarter. *A third view* came from *The Canadian Investor (Aug 31)*, which called AppLovin the cheapest name in ad-tech while still growing faster than peers like Meta. Base case is a recovery to *$500+* if growth stays near 30%, with real downside if growth slows to the mid-teens and competition from Alphabet (and AI-generated games) bites. *Bottom line:* everyone agrees the numbers are stunning and the stock is cheap. The disagreement is entirely about whether you can *trust* the business model enough to own it. ### Limbach (LMB), a data-center winner that "missed" the data-center boom *Who:* a guest from *1 Main Capital* on the *Yet Another Value Podcast (Sep 1)*. This is a mechanical/electrical contractor (heating, cooling, plumbing for buildings), and it is a classic "the punishment doesn't fit the crime" setup. * Limbach spent the last two years pivoting from low-margin general-contractor work to higher-margin, direct-to-building-owner work (repairs, retrofits, hospital additions). That lifted EBITDA margins from low-single-digits into the low-double-digits. * Ironically, in doing so it *deliberately stayed out of the red-hot data-center construction wave* its competitors piled into. Then its core markets (healthcare especially) hit an air pocket this year: tariffs, Medicaid cuts, higher oil prices. * The result: revenue down ~5% in the first half, but *EBITDA down about 30%* because of fixed-cost deleverage. Management cut full-year EBITDA guidance from *$90M to $80M*, and the stock fell roughly *50%*. The guest's point is that the stock reaction is far bigger than the earnings miss, because investors don't trust the back-half guidance. He thinks the guidance is achievable, and that even in a disaster case the downside is protected: > "If you're looking at 65 [million] of EBITDA... you're looking at 45 of free cash flow. That's $4 a share. And you're trading at 10 times that number today with a very clean balance sheet." The upside "triple whammy": the core business recovers, capital allocation (acquisitions) creates value, *and* Limbach finally starts winning data-center work, where it has spare fabrication capacity while bigger rivals are capacity-constrained. ### Palantir (PLTR) and DLocal (DLO), quality vs. the crowd *Who:* an investor from *Babylon Capital* on *The Synopsis (Sep 3)*. On *Palantir* (owned since 2020): a "one-of-one" business with *over 70% incremental net margins*, meaning for every extra $100 of revenue, more than $70 drops to the bottom line. The moat is the "ontology" (a live digital map of everything inside an organization), which AI made far more valuable. His view is Palantir's moat is meaningfully wider than AppLovin's, even though both have huge margins. The more contrarian idea was *DLocal (DLO)*, a payments processor for global merchants operating in the hard markets of Latin America, Africa and Asia (60+ countries): * Trades at about *14 times forward earnings*, *no long-term debt*, over *$350 million of cash* even after buybacks, and revenue retention well over 100%. * CEO *Pedro Arndt* is the former CFO of MercadoLibre who helped build Mercado Pago: "you'd have to wonder why he left [after 25 years] if he didn't see something there." * Three independent ways to grow (existing merchants doing more volume, existing merchants entering new countries, and brand-new merchants). As he put it, borrowing Munger's "invert": for this to fail from here, "existing merchants have to use them less... refuse to enter new countries, and almost no new merchants come on, all at the same time." The bear case is take-rate compression (the cut DLocal keeps shrinks as volume grows), but he argues management is trading margin for volume on purpose and wants investors to watch gross-profit dollars, not the take rate. He also gave a memorable framing for *why* these opportunities exist at all: > "Clear skies do not give you 10, 12, 15, 20 times earnings for incredible business models. Pain does... The market pays you to take the other side of a short-term story when the long-term engine is still running." ## The "AI plumbing" theme, where the money flows next The recurring idea this week: the obvious AI winners (the big chips) are picked over, so look for the scarce technologies every builder needs, power, cooling, networking, and packaging. ### Vicor (VICR), getting power to the chip *Who:* Eric Bleecker, presented at the *Investacon* conference and unveiled on *Stock Club (Sep 3)*. (Note: the company is Vicor Corporation; its Nasdaq ticker is *VICR*.) The bottleneck he's betting on is *power delivery*. As AI chips get more power-hungry, the voltage conversion has to happen physically closer to the chip, or energy is wasted as heat. Vicor's "vertical power delivery modules" move that conversion right next to the processor. Bleecker compared it to two earlier "millimeters matter" breakthroughs, high-bandwidth memory and co-packaged optics, that each created huge new markets. The catalyst is an if-then: *if NVIDIA moves to delivering much higher voltage (an 800-volt DC system) to future chips*, Vicor's approach goes "from just being a nice, attractive engineering solution to being one of the essential enabling technologies." Revenue and earnings are already expected to grow strongly regardless. The honest caveat, raised on the show itself: these are cyclical manufacturers in the middle of an unprecedented boom, so it's a great "where the money is going now" idea, less obviously a 20-year hold. ### Adrad Holdings (ASX: AHL), radiators for the AI age *Who:* Andrew Page on the *Equity Mates Investing Podcast (Aug 31)*. A deliberately boring pick: a family radiator-maker founded in 1985, now making cooling equipment (heat-transfer solutions) for *data centers* and localized power plants. * Trades at a *P/E of about 12*, with *virtually no debt* and "a mountain of cash," near its net asset value. * The star of recent results was the *heat-transfer solutions (HTS) segment*, growing fast with strong operating leverage: revenue growing steadily but profit growing far faster off a fixed cost base. The company has moved manufacturing to a new Thailand plant, adding capacity for the data-center cooling wave. * Page's bigger-picture caution is worth quoting, because it applies to every AI pick here: "The story of technological revolution is always... legitimate hype, overhype, overhype in the wrong areas, a return to reality, and then the slow grind up." He thinks the durable money in AI gets made in "unexpected places," proprietary data, marketplaces, and picks-and-shovels, not the model builders. ### Japan's "picks and shovels", Hitachi, TDK, Ibiden and a bank *Who:* Masaki Nakanishi on *MoneyWeek Talks (Sep 2)*, whose Japan fund is up ~33% in the first half. His top holdings: * *Hitachi (~4.8% of the fund):* the poster child for Japan's governance reform. Return on equity went from *2-3% up to over 10%* as it shed its sprawling conglomerate structure to focus on rail, power grids, and now "physical AI." * *Sumitomo Mitsui Financial:* a straight play on the Bank of Japan finally normalizing interest rates. * *TDK* (yes, the old cassette-tape brand): now dominant in *iPhone batteries* and pivoting into capacitors used in AI data-center servers. * *Ibiden:* makes the *packaging for NVIDIA chips*, "without that package, the NVIDIA chip doesn't work," with dominant market share. He also flagged that Japanese mid- and small-caps have better earnings growth prospects than large-caps but trade at some of the widest valuation discounts, helped by the country's shift from deflation to inflation. ## Contrarian and value corners ### W.R. Berkley (WRB), an insurer as a smarter bond *Who:* Porter Stansberry on *Mining Stock Daily (Sep 4)*. His argument is unusual: he refuses to own long-term government bonds (he thinks they're uninvestable and is actually shorting Treasuries), so instead he puts that portion of a portfolio into high-quality property and casualty insurers. The logic: *W.R. Berkley has a ~$25 billion market cap and roughly $25 billion of fixed income on its balance sheet*, so you're buying a bond portfolio run by one of the best managers alive, who can actively shorten duration when it doesn't pay to take risk. > "Between 2019 and 2022, when the long end of the curve got so cheap... Bill Berkley moved his entire portfolio to an average duration of less than 1 year. He said, 'If you're not gonna pay me to take duration risk, then I'm not gonna take any.'... by far the best-performing insurance company [over that stretch]." He wants businesses that can sustain a 15%+ (ideally 20%+) return on equity, which is why he prefers insurers and gold *royalty/streaming* companies over miners. ### Lululemon (LULU), Michael Burry's new favorite (a "buyer beware" flag) Reported on *The Rundown (Sep 4)*, citing Burry's own Substack: the "Big Short" investor has been buying Lululemon and it is now *his largest position*, even though it's down 20% from where he last bought, and he plans to buy more. Fair warning, this is a knife worth watching, not catching blindly: the company guided to *full-year revenue declining 5-7%*, the stock is *below $100 for the first time since 2018*, and management admitted new products aren't landing while rivals Alo and Vuori take share. The host was openly skeptical of Burry ("might be a one-hit wonder"). File this as "a famous contrarian is betting on a turnaround here" rather than a clean thesis. ### Tesla (TSLA), a "controversial, undervalued" number one pick *Who:* Keith Fitz-Gerald on *Suze Orman's Women & Money (Sep 6)*, who named Tesla his single highest-conviction pick (up from Palantir/Microsoft/Apple last quarter). His case is that the market fixated on the underwhelming CyberCab reveal and "completely missed the point": the value is in the data, AI, and geolocation stack needed to make autonomous mobility work, none of which the market prices. He's dollar-cost-averaging into the recent ~8% drawdown, and holds SpaceX for the same reasons. ## Quick-hit calls and price targets *On Best Stocks Now (Bill Gunderson)*, a run of momentum-driven targets on AI-infrastructure names: * *Broadcom (AVGO):* ~$700 target, implying ~93% upside on 16% five-year growth (Sep 3). * *NVIDIA (NVDA):* an $8-9 trillion market-cap target, "a core holding for years" (Sep 3). * *Dell (DELL):* ~$840 target (~86% upside); the stock is already up ~245% over twelve months on AI-server demand, with a $90B+ backlog (Sep 2). * *Micron (MU):* his top pick for the year at roughly *6x forward earnings* (Sep 1). *Sandisk (SNDK):* Mark Rubin of *Bernstein*, on *Bloomberg Surveillance (Sep 4)*, values it at *11x forward earnings versus ~5x today* on through-the-cycle earnings, noting memory names broadly are trading at depressed 3-5x multiples despite doubling earnings. *Microcap conviction picks* from the *Planet MicroCap mid-year review (Sep 5)*: * *Maj Soueidan, SIFCO Industries (SIF):* a forging company riding hot defense demand with pricing power; a scary-looking inventory (LIFO) charge is "just noise," and it would have been a record quarter. * *Tim Heitman, Ascent Industries (ACNT):* a tiny chemicals company (~7-9M shares) that bought back 12% of its stock and is acquiring to fill underused plants and lift margins; management "exuded all the qualities you want to see." * *Mathieu Martin, Canadian cannabis:* his highest-conviction bucket for 18 months. Names like *Oxley (XLY.TO)* and *Canara (LOV.TO)* growing 15-20% a year with operating leverage but stuck at ~6-7x EBITDA, with no new competition entering the regulated space. *Snowflake (SNOW):* on *The Compound and Friends (Sep 1)*, one panelist is long (with a trailing stop), arguing it has become a core AI-infrastructure layer: 9,000 corporate customers already running "agentic" workflows on their Snowflake data, with net revenue retention of 126%. The open question is whether last quarter's 38% post-earnings pop was a real inflection or a one-off. ## What the pros are deliberately passing on Sometimes the most useful signal is a good analyst saying "not yet." Two clean examples this week, both from *Chip Stock Investor*: * *Nokia (NOK):* despite smart moves building itself into an optical-communications player (buying Infinera, an NXP fab), Nicholas Rossolillo passes. At ~$10/share (~$55B market cap) too much is priced in; the math needs a *71% profit growth rate over three years* to justify today's price. He'd look again nearer *$8-9* (Sep 1). * *Palo Alto Networks (PANW):* a great company, but at *~70x forward free cash flow* with dilution ahead (an expected ~11% rise in share count), per-share profit growth is constrained; patience advised after a 1,400% decade (Sep 2). And, as covered above, the *AppLovin "pass"* belongs on this list too: extraordinary numbers, but a business two very capable analysts decided they simply couldn't understand well enough to own. --- ## Get the full transcripts on Matterfact This briefing was produced with Matterfact, which indexes the complete, full-text transcripts of 120M+ podcast episodes alongside SEC filings, earnings calls, and financial datasets. 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