The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 48 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Sundheim: Chinese tech firms avoided beating earnings to dodge scrutiny
“For a while we were seeing Chinese internet companies, like, they didn't want to beat earnings. Because if you beat earnings, your stock goes up too much. You know, you might be flagging that, like, you're over-earning”
Sundheim: Nvidia is not expensive and public AI stocks aren't in a bubble
“I would tell you, like, NVIDIA is, we can have a debate about what the earnings are going to be in a few years but it's not expensive.
Like, NVIDIA trades at twenty-something times multiple.
that's, you know, I think within reason, and I don't think there's…”
Sundheim: The biggest investing mistakes come from selling great compounders too early
“The biggest mistakes are selling the Costco's too early, because you know, the IRR is totally dependent upon what you assume the exit multiple is, like, and that is difficult to be precise about, you know, what the right exit multiple is for a business.”
Sundheim: Private market illiquidity is a huge benefit for holding great companies
“That's the nice thing about the private markets is that Once you invest, you can't sell, and usually for the best companies, that's a huge benefit ultimately.”
Sundheim: Hiring lateral portfolio managers from other funds almost never succeeds
“If I hire somebody laterally, who's a portfolio manager in another fund, that's rarely been successful, almost, almost never.”
Sundheim: Managing risk after a position moves destroys capital
“Risk management cannot happen after the fact. Like, anything you do after the fact is not risk management. It's actually just destroying capital. Risk management has to happen before the fact. Meaning, like, you size these positions so that, like, When it goes…”
Sundheim: D1 Capital does not use derivatives due to timeframe risk
“I don't use, I really don't use derivatives at all. The problem with derivatives is like, look, At the end of the day, when you break down, what is a derivative? It's just leverage and implied volatility. Like, if I want leverage, I can go, you know, get lever…”
Sundheim: US markets price turnaround stories far faster than Europe
“Like, the U.S. Is pretty quick at, like, seeing change happening, and then pricing in that change. In Europe, I find you know, once a company, like a company like Rolls had underperformed for so long, I guess that European mutual funds, they just kind of got i…”
Sundheim: Investors always make the most money from multiple expansion
“You're always gonna make the most money from multiple expansion. Just like it's hard to have that differentiated view on a company's growth rate.”
Sundheim: Gas turbines will face shortages for a very long time
“I think that gas turbines are going to be in shortage for a very long time.”
Sundheim: US electricity demand will grow 4% annually over 20 years
“Electricity demand in the United States grew at zero percent for the last 20 years. And so, if you think about the next 20 years, I think electricity demand will grow at four percent.”
Sundheim: GE Vernova trades at 2x Siemens Energy's enterprise value
“G Renova trades at two x the enterprise value of Siemens energy, just to give you a sense of like, and ultimately, there's no reason why the margin should be higher at G Renova. The revenue base is the same.”
Sundheim: AI market correction will hit when training returns asymptote
“At some point, they're going to say like, well, we're asymptoting out, like the returns on this new investment are actually not working. That's when I think you'll see a pretty big correction.”
Sundheim: SpaceX will capture more global telecom market than expected
“And I think that will continue in a way that probably surprises people, in that like, I think SpaceX will probably capture more of the global,
Telecommunications market than people expect.”
SpaceX can triple in value without relying on speculative new use cases
“Like, I look at it and say, like, I think the business can triple
Without having to make any big bets about people traveling 30 minutes across the world or, you know, data centers in space.”
Sundheim: Elon Musk is an even better businessperson than inventor
“I think he's a better business person than he is inventor.
He's amazing at both, but like, people don't understand, like, he just naturally understands, like, just get the cost down, and that's very hard to compete against.”
Sundheim: Premier private companies like Stripe should not go public
“I mean, if I ran a private company like Stripe, I wouldn't go public.”
Public stock markets have become less efficient despite universal access to information
“It should be correctly priced because everyone has access to the same information. It's actually gotten less efficient over time, for sure.”
Sundheim: D1 usually buys public stocks before finishing investment memos
“We're having to get to the memo stage, and usually we start buying it before, because in the public markets, you know, if you have a good idea, you could take a month and a half to, like, write a memo, but by that time, the price may have moved. So usually we …”
Sundheim: Private secondaries only offer easy liquidity for companies you shouldn't sell
“You can sell, like, the best companies you can sell easily, but those aren't the companies you want to sell. You know, it, it's, ah, we rarely transact in the secondary market because, you know, we don't want to sell the best companies, and it's hard, like peo…”
Sundheim: D1 Capital avoids hiring portfolio managers or public equity veterans
“One, we don't hire portfolio managers. I pretty much only hire people who've never done public equity before which has pros and cons.”
Sundheim: D1 analysts must submit weekly mock portfolios allocating capital
“We, yeah, we, everyone has like a, what we call a mock portfolio. So every week they have to take the positions they cover and they have to say, if I was managing capital, here's how I would allocate capital.”
Sundheim: Monthly and quarterly returns are arbitrary outputs of past decisions
“If you have a portfolio of things that you've built over time, our monthly returns and quarterly returns are purely an output. Like there's nothing, it's, it is arbitrary in some respects.”
D1 Capital never received margin calls during the January 2021 GameStop squeeze
“We never came close to going into business, never had margin calls, never.”
D1 Capital covered all short positions at peak prices during GameStop rally
“We covered everything at the worst time, and I knew it was the worst time. But, if it kept going on for two weeks, yeah, all of a sudden there's a real problem, and I wasn't going to put the firm at risk, and I told my investors that this is the worst time.”
Sundheim: D1's 2020 short portfolio ultimately underperformed massively
“Now, if I had held that short portfolio, forget like from the top, if I just held from the end of 2020, I mean, they underperformed massively.”
Sundheim: Short selling opportunity is the best in his career
“I would say that the opportunity for short selling is better than it's ever been in my career.”
Sundheim: Quality equities compound through mistakes, while macro bets are binary
“If you buy great businesses, you overpay for them a little bit, you get their earnings wrong a little bit in the short term. Over time, value, you know, compounds, and time is your friend. Macro, that's not the case. It's more of, like, a binary bet.”
Sundheim: Electricity is the AI bottleneck, making power enablers good investments
“Ultimately, the bottleneck is going to be electricity, and so companies that enable electricity production, assuming they have some moats, are going to be good investments.”
Sundheim: D1 Capital stopped investing in China around 2022
“Yeah, we stopped investing in China about three years ago.”
Sundheim: Warren Buffett intentionally curates a specific public persona
“He is a brilliant guy, but he actually does like to portray himself in a certain light.”
Sundheim: Few tech companies before LLMs combined huge fixed costs with high margins
“Up until the LLMs are very few tech companies where it's like a huge fixed investment. And then the incremental, ah, margins on the sales are extremely high.”
Sundheim: Private equity hires take three years to contribute at D1
“Now, like, if I hire somebody from private equity, it takes about three years for them to really be, like, contributing to the one.”
Sundheim: D1 paused short selling for a year after GameStop
“After GameStop, we took about a year off of short selling, and then I reengaged in short selling.”
Sundheim: D1's diversified short alpha matches its concentrated era
“Our short alpha since that time, and since we implemented the more diverse portfolio you referenced, our short alpha has been as good or better”
Sundheim: Cyclical over-earning shorts are the least attractive archetype
“And then I'd say the last, ah, and least attractive shorts are the ones where it's like, cyclically, they're just over earning a lot, and you believe that the real earnings, if you were to look like through a cycle, are much lower than people think.”
Sundheim: Companies facing secular decline almost never get acquired
“I find that, like generally, companies that have secularists almost never get bought. Like, I rarely has, do I ever see a CEO say, I want to go buy something that grows slower than I do, right? Like, this doesn't happen, right? Nobody wants, like, Take the tim…”
Sundheim: D1 analysts must be awake during coverage earnings calls
“If the company reports earnings, I expect the analyst to be awake. And I'm awake too.”
Sundheim: Clean Harbors can grow earnings in the teens for 10 years
“It's just very, very good business that's, and the starting multiple is pretty reasonable, and I think, you know, I can grow earnings well into the teens for 10 years.”
Sundheim: Siemens Energy and GE Vernova have near-identical revenue and businesses
“Siemens Energy and GE Vinova are basically the same company. Like, there's no two companies I've ever looked at that are more similar. They have almost the same revenue, dollar revenue, I think it's like, 45, 50.”
Sundheim: 70% of major breakthrough technologies trigger stock bubbles
“I think if you look back in history, 70% of the time that you have this kind of, like, major breakthrough technology, there is a stock market bubble.”
Sundheim: A $30B fund cannot practically short $5B companies
“If I'm thirty billion dollars, it's really, you can't really short five billion dollar companies”
Sundheim: Neobanks like Nubank and Revolut will increasingly take market share
“Iterate on product faster, have better engineers, and I think that those banks are going to increasingly take market share.”
Sundheim: Investing carries emotional asymmetry between mild gains and excruciating losses
“What I'd say about this job, is that there's like an asymmetry of emotion, right? Like, when you're making a lot of money, it's not like I'm, like, tap dancing around my house, like, euphoric, like, my lifestyle doesn't change. I feel like, yes, I'm happy that…”
Sundheim: D1 Capital will definitely not expand into macro trading
“Definitely not macro. First of all, like, it's tempting to think that because you're good at one thing, you're going to be good at all these different things, and, ah, I think that in and of itself was like a mistake.”