In last summer’s building materials series, I explained how branded manufacturers, like James Hardie in siding and Trex in composite decking, are protected by significant moats in the form of trusted relationships they’ve secured downstream with dealers and contractors, as well as the brand equity they’ve cultivated with homeowners: Homeowner mindshare is a relevant consideration. […]

What are scuttlebits? Nowhere is the insurance industry’s notorious resistance to change more evident than in how they fiercely it clings to antiquated IT architectures. Carriers adopted mainframes in the ‘80s, built policy and claims engines on top, then lagged years behind just about every other commercial enterprise in embracing client-server computing, then cloud computing. […]

What are scuttlebits? “we fundamentally believe whoever has the best infrastructure in this space will win in the longer run” (Harsh Sinha, Wise CTO; Wise Analyst Day, 4/3/25) it’s inevitable that the lowest price operator will win the scale needed to become the infrastructure to operate the trillions of cross-border money (Kristo Kaarmann, Wise Co-Founder […]

In simple terms what Gartner does is it furnishes research reports that executives use to inform consequential procurement and strategy decisions. Where Gartner wields the most influence is in IT (literally, the company’s ticker symbol!), where its insights might be used by CIOs to, say, design a cybersecurity framework, validate vendor choices, and benchmark deal […]

What are scuttlebits? Nobody talks about Charles Schwab anymore, but just two and a half short years ago everyone had an opinion…and if you roamed the Twitter hellscape back then what you found was that the most amplified takes converged on one conclusion: Schwab was teetering on the brink of collapse. To recap: the most […]

What are scuttlebits? I recently read Focus: The ASML Way by Marc Hijink, a book I’d recommend to anyone interested in getting up to speed on ASML. Among the many interesting anecdotes cited in this terrific book, the one that stood out most to me pertained not to its mind-boggling technology but its approach to […]

MBI and I recorded an episode of Never Sell recently (Global Payments, AI and Software, OpenAI and Anthropic Bubble?) (Spotify, Apple, YouTube, RSS feed) AI-generated podcast conversation: Spotify, Apple, direct link AI-generated summary: This report traces the rise, challenges, and current state of Align Technology in the clear aligner market. It shows how Invisalign transformed from a mocked niche product into the category leader […]

Hi Everyone,

After eight years of writing this blog, I’ve come to realize that habitual readership, essential to limiting churn, is difficult to foster with deep dives published every three weeks. The truth of the matter is that subscribers equate publishing frequency with value and, in their all too busy lives, also find it difficult to summon the energy to plow through long writeups on stocks they don’t own and that contain no immediately actionable insights or commentary on current events. Meanwhile, in the course of my day-to-day research, I often stumble upon developments pertaining to companies I’ve written about in the past that are interesting enough to merit brief commentary but not substantive enough to warrant a dedicated post.

Scuttlebits is my attempt to kill both birds. These posts, available to paid subscribers, will include digestible morsels of commentary and analysis, mostly related to notable developments on companies and industries I’ve already covered. They will also be a place for me to provide short updates and corrections to previous posts and sometimes sound off on interesting things I’m reading. I won’t be opining on the splashiest business headlines of the day. I won’t be offering thoughts on the latest AI drama or the newest LLM release. And I won’t be publishing notes on earnings calls if there is nothing unique or interesting to say.

You should expect scuttlebits to hit your inbox in the space between my deep dives, so maybe every 7 to 10 days. Thanks for being a subscriber. I hope this resonates with you!