www.ft.comNicotine pouch sales jump in UK as companies step up marketingCampaigns come ahead of ban on advertising and sponsorship for all non-medicinal products from next June

The FT writes about tobacco companies spending large amounts on marketing this year, in anticipation of restrictions to advertising coming through from 2027. This only applies to the UK right now but it's likely other countries will follow their lead in years to come.

This is the type of development that leads me to believe tobacco companies can replicate the regulatory moat they currently have with cigarettes, with next generation products. One of the fears for now was: will NGP be as good of a business as cigarettes? I suspect that if restrictions on NGP advertising pop up around the world, the current dominant brands (IQOS, Velo, Vuse, Zyn...) will benefit the most.

What do you think about LVMH?

I thought this company was the best of CAC40 but she is still going down, could fall from the edge when politics made changes.

Can you all tell me your advices?

Thanks

Antoine

Came across this graphic, which represents the situation in Australia with regard to nicotine consumption.

A few years ago, the Austrlian government raised excise taxes by a huge amount on a pack of cigarettes. This was to stop people from smoking. Excise taxes already account for about 75-80% of the price of a pack, so when the government did this, the price of a pack climbed up drastically to $43-$55 AUD (or about $28-$36 USD). One of the most expensive packs in the world.

The effect has been pretty stark. Consumption of legal tobacco has gone down a lot, but people have simply turned to the black market. Not only is the consumption of cigarettes not much lower than before, but the government loses a lot of tax revenue every year. Australian authorities are considering reversing the taxes or at least freezing them.

This goes to show that trying to ban cigarettes is 1. very difficult if not impossible and 2. literally goes against the incentive of a rational government.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Investing in pharma is very hard.

Last week I was reading an article about Pfizer and how they have been struggling with a weak pipeline and tough comps since COVID. This is a company that has the second highest debt out of all pharma players (dividend to be cut soon?), spent $10 bil to outbid Novo Nordisk ($2.7 billion more than initial offer) and acquire a competitor to Ozempic/Mounjaro that will get to the market in 2028 earliest, and $43 bil to acquire Seagen in 2023 (drugs are struggling to pass clinical trials). Company is well diversified for now but this just shows how difficult it is to win in this sector.

Today, this:

Germany is deciding to double manufacturer rebates from 7 to 15%. That's another way to say tax, by the way. Germany has a big pharma industry but already it is becoming less competitive on the global stage: less clinical trials, less investment, foreign manufacturers not marketing new drugs there...

I’ve been looking into the space sector and I think there could be some good opportunities to back some companies that are creating momentum in the industry. Can you look into Planet Labs (PL) and let me know your thoughts? They’re already generating cash flow and look expensive. How do you make a call for a company such as this one?

TTD has officially completed its full circle moment, with the stock back to 2018 levels. Stock is down 90% in 18 months!!

One lesson here is to always pay attention to your gut feeling about valuation. I looked at TTD at various points in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024... Every time the stock was going higher but after a quick look at the number the valuation just didn't make sense to me. TTD is a much bigger company today than in 2018, but the valuation has compressed 85%, so that's where most of drop in stock price has come from: changing market sentiment.

Another, probably bigger lesson, is to always pay attention to quality and competitive landscape. Not too familiar with TTD's story, but pretty sure a big part of the decline in revenue growth comes from the rise in Amazon's advertising business, which is just much better since Amazon has so much data on its customers' spending habits.

Investing is not an easy game!

These are some companies that I find interesting (both from a quality as well as value perspective). This week, Verisk Analytics will go online (VRSK), and after that I'm thinking:

• Gaztransport et technigaz (GTT): French company creating tech to transport liquefied natural gas efficiently. Current P/E = 16, P/FCF = 19, dividend = 4.5%

• Intuit (INTU): Another casualty of the Saaspocalypse, down 60% from its highs and trading at about a P/FCF = 22

• Arista Networks (ANET): Connection layer of everything from data-centres to satellites, another tech toll-road for the next 10+ years. Trading at a high valuation but growing extremely rapidly and very profitable.
  
  Stay tuned! Any others you'd like to see?

www.ft.comCitadel buys Situational Awareness equity holdings after steep AI lossesDeal comes after Leopold Aschenbrenner’s investment firm held overnight crunch talks with investors

This story is super interesting because it teaches a very valuable lesson: being too concentrated and too levered can amplify returns in a bull market, and can also wipe you out in the matter of weeks.

For some context, Leopold Aschenbrenner is a wonder-kid out of OpenAI who started his own fund. He invests mostly in AI tech. His fund has grown to over $20b in AUM in just a few months, not surprising given he got a 439% return in the first 6 months of 2026.

But July has been incredibly difficult for many AI-capex related stocks. Story ends with Aschenbrenner force-selling his portfolio holdings to Ken Griffin at Citadel. He was leveraged 4-to-1 and owned companies like Nebius, Coreweave, IREN, Sandisk, Oracle, AMD…

I don’t really understand the market’s reaction to chip and memory stocks right now.

Alphabet just reported 82% cloud growth, while Meta, Amazon and Microsoft continue to signal that AI infrastructure spending will remain extremely high. That spending flows through the entire semiconductor supply chain, from GPUs and custom chips to networking and memory.

Yet parts of the sector are being priced like a major slowdown is right around the corner. Micron trades at roughly 6x estimated fiscal 2027 earnings, while SK hynix trades at around 4x estimated 2027 earnings.

Memory is obviously cyclical, and those estimates could reflect earnings near the top of the cycle. But it still seems strange to see the market price in such a sharp normalization while the hyperscalers are saying demand is so strong they can barely add capacity quickly enough.

Google reported earnings last night and brought down the entire market. What's surprising is that earnings were pretty good in general, cherry on top of the cake was cloud which was up a whopping 82%. Main reason why everyone is freaking out is this: Google announced they would increase capex for 2026, and spend significantly more in 2027 compared to this year.

The value question is really: is all this capex a good investment or not? Management's answer is pretty defensible: right now, demand is so high they are having to turn cloud customers away. It's difficult to call spending on a product with 82% growth and a waitlist "a waste of capex".

Right now a lot of big players are giving up on Google since it looks unprofitable on cash flow, and likely to do so for the forseeable future (4-6 quarters minimum). A PE of 16 isn't screaming cheap for that wait and level of uncertainty around ROI.

But that's kind of the deal. You get one of the best businesses ever assembled at a reasonable multiple BECAUSE the next 4-6 quarters are very difficult to model. Sure, if you need the stock to work this year, it's a hard pass. But if your horizon is 3-5 years you're being paid for patience, which is the one edge retail actually has over funds that get fired for a bad quarter. IMO Google looks interesting at these levels.

www.ft.comAMD to invest up to $5bn in Anthropic in chip dealAI group commits to buying tens of billions of dollars of AMD’s latest AI server chips

Leading edge models are back at it again with the circular funding. AMD is investing $5 bln into Anthropic so that Anthropic can use that money to buy AMD chips. I'm sure that'll make for some strong revenue growth at AMD...

www.ft.comPhilip Morris International cuts guidance as rivals squeeze ZynTobacco group lowers outlook for third time this year as currency swings and US pouch competition slow momentum

Zyn growth is slowing down in the US, Philip Morris is blaming this on increased competition and an "uneven" regulatory landscape...

It's probably true that, just like vapes, illegal pouches are being sold at stronger strengths and this is undermining Zyn's volume. It's probably also true that BAT's Velo pouches are gaining share. We'll see in the next report.