TTD is a 'too hard' investment due to complex ad-tech dynamics and slowing growth (28% to 12%), so I will not buy it even at current low valuations.

Do you already have an idea of what company I'm talking about? Oh, I do. I do. You got to be talking about Trade Desk. And uh I'm very glad we didn't buy that one. I still remember when it dropped 40% in literally the next trading day after we published the episode on a Sunday.

And while we decided against it for what we now know were seemingly the right reasons, it's definitely fair to say that no one expected such a sharp decline. I certainly didn't imagine that it would fall 80% from its highs.

I mean, we primarily didn't start a position because we just felt like the business was too difficult to understand. And to be precise, this is what you said in the episode back then.

I feel like we should just put it out there. TTD is just a bit difficult for me to to get comfortable with. I I'll be fully honest. I was expecting for it to be easier for me to wrap my head around the trade desk after already having gone deep on Alphabet and Roku, but ATTE is just so very messy and and complicated.

I I just feel like the ad tech industry probably goes in the two hard pile and the trade desk as a pure play on demand side programmatic advertising. You really need to understand the digital advertising ecosystem fully and and technically kind of know what's going on behind the scenes to appreciate what makes the trade desk valuable and and what can make it less competitive in the future.

In the model from back then, we still assumed a 30 times exit multiple because of the quality of the company. And the cash flow multiple today is just 10 times. So despite that, the model back then still showed that the stock was overvalued at the time.

But you know, the decision not to buy it didn't come down to what the model said. It was primarily us thinking that we don't understand the company. And again, if you will trust the valuation model despite having a way too high of an exit multiple and still saying it's too expensive.

Nowadays, just a couple of months later, the exit multiple is a third of what we assumed going out 5 years from now.

And so the only bigger difference to the downside than with Trading Desk, meaning where our fair value estimate was much higher than the stock price today, that was Vital Farms.

another interesting point in this trade desk story here was that there were actually massive insider buys a couple of months ago by the co-founder and CEO of the company, Jeff Green.

And so, in March, he bought stock on the open market at $25 for almost 150 million in total. And since then, the stock has fallen another 25%. And so it sort of complicates the signal we're pointing to with Adobe.

A lack of insider buying is not guaranteed to be bad and significant insider buying is not guaranteed to be good. But generally though, they're pretty effective predictors. Historical studies have definitely shown that insider buys have pretty strong predictive power and the trade desk may very well just be the exception to the rule.

So, it can happen, but I'm certainly not itching to start a position in the company today just because it still falls in that too hard pile. We definitely tried. I mean, since you covered it, we've been asked many, many times whether we do not want to revisit it and especially given the significantly lower prices today whether it's not more attractive than it has been in the past.

But in TTD's case, you have a business where topline growth is continuously coming down. I mean, in Q1 of 2024 was 28% in Q1 of 2026 was only 12%. Then answering the question of what that company is worth today is so much more difficult.

The trade desk is likely a bargain today. If we can assume that no 12% topline growth is what we're getting for the next 5 years assuming a similar margin but how should I underrite that assumption if growth more than half in just the last 2 years and if you're an ad tech expert that might be totally different for you maybe you understand the business significantly better I'm not saying that the trade desk is bad value right now but for us it's just in the two hard pile it was there last year and it's still there today and have pretty high confidence of saying it will most likely be there next year too even if it's at I don't $5 per share.

If anything, my surprise at how dramatic the sell-off and the trade desk has been made me feel like I understood the business even less than I thought because it has been such a quality compounder for such a long time that I wouldn't have thought that things could go this bad this quickly for the stock.

So anyways, that just shows probably how poorly I understand the business and that there are definitely easier hurdles for us to clear.