The Deep End: Stock and Earnings Analysis from Futurum Equities

Futurum Equities | Shay Boloor and Brad Freeman
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The Deep End is a weekly stock deep dive from Futurum Equities. Each Monday Shay Boloor and Brad Freeman take one company and work through what it actually does, what the latest quarter really said, and whether either of them would own it here. The verdicts often split, and the split is the show. Most episodes close with a rapid fire pass through the earnings calendar for the week ahead. Past deep dives include Nebius, IREN, NVIDIA, Zscaler, AppLovin and CrowdStrike. New episodes every Monday, so you know what to watch before the week trades. Nothing on this show is investment advice. Shay discusses his own portfolio and his positions in the names covered. Brad gives his general view on each company and publishes his own paid research letter. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FuturumEquities

Episodes

  1. 3d ago

    Meta: 'Agentic AI Is Having a ChatGPT Moment'

    Meta stock was up about 40% in September, on pace for its best month in 13 years, after Muse launched three weeks before this episode. Shay says agentic AI is having a ChatGPT moment with Muse. Meta already has 3.6 billion daily active people across its apps, and Brad calls that number alone a mic drop moment. Shay calls this Meta 2.0. The stock was always discounted under 20 times earnings because it was judged as an ad platform. Now Meta is using that cash flow to fund frontier AI models, personal agents, enterprise software and potentially the next major consumer hardware platform, all at the same time. The question is whether Muse moves Meta from getting paid for creating demand to sitting inside the transaction itself. They get into the health of the core ad business, whether Threads is a dud, why Meta can give Muse away while OpenAI and Anthropic have to charge for it, whether people will trust Meta with their data, how Meta pays for about $138 billion of capex this year, the lead in wearables, youth safety and regulation, and Meta's push into enterprise. Shay is bullish. He thinks Meta becomes one of the top five most valuable companies in the world, and he says anyone buying Meta is buying for the next five years. His wife studied art and is not in finance, and she now uses Muse every day. Brad's general view is bullish too. He does not expect Meta to take 100% of the consumer AI pie, only its fair share, and he says Meta can outsprint everybody but has to make sure it only wins by a little. Tell the guys which stock deserves the next deep dive. Shay is leaning toward a Latin America episode on Nubank and MercadoLibre. Watch the full episode with chapters on YouTube: https://youtu.be/tEd_IETk3xc New episodes every Monday on The Deep End. Nothing in this episode is investment advice. Shay discusses his own portfolio, and Meta is the largest position in his family portfolio. Brad's general view is bullish.

  2. Sep 28

    Micron: 'We Are Absolutely in a Bubble'

    Micron is growing revenue 350% year over year, and Brad points out that its gross margin has gone from 30% to 85% in a few years. In past downturns Apple was able to bargain that margin down below 0%. The stock still trades around five or six times earnings, because the market is still trying to figure out whether this is the greatest memory cycle ever or whether AI has changed the business for years to come. You asked for a Micron deep dive in the comments, and Micron reports on September 30. The question the episode keeps coming back to is whether Micron is still a cyclical company. Shay thinks this time it kind of is different. Brad thinks Micron is still very much cyclical and is benefiting from the best cycle anyone has ever seen. They get into what Micron used to be, why HBM is one of the most important pieces of the AI compute stack, the strategic customer agreements and their fixed pricing, why management sees supply staying tight beyond 2027, consumer AI and Meta's Muse, NVIDIA using less HBM per GPU, Apple asking to buy Chinese memory, when the bottleneck gets fixed, and the 14 week quarter that could make the next guide look light. Brad says we are absolutely in a bubble, and he does not think Micron bulls are done making money in this cycle. He sees way more reason to be optimistic right now than pessimistic, but says bulls should be paranoid and keep looking for signs that the most fun times are over. Shay remains bullish because AI has structurally increased the value of memory inside the compute stack, and he asks why the market pays 19 times earnings for Dell and six times for Micron. Tell the guys which stock deserves the next deep dive. Watch the full episode with chapters on YouTube: https://youtu.be/wdoKsSEFMu8  New episodes every Monday on The Deep End. Nothing in this episode is investment advice. Shay discusses his own portfolio, and he owns Micron as a trade. Brad's general view is bullish.

  3. Sep 23

    SoFi: valued like tech, trades like a lender. The bottom of the cycle.

    SoFi has 16 million members, more than $45 billion of deposits, and revenue growing around 30%. It is also the biggest dog in Shay's portfolio this year. His read is that the company is being valued like a tech company but still trades like a lender, so the stock moves day to day with rates, credit concerns and lending sentiment. This week the Fed raised rates for the first time in three years. This is the first guest episode. Tannor Manson of Future Investing has followed SoFi for years, recently talked to CEO Anthony Noto, and has argued about the stock with Brad in the same group chat for five years. The question the episode keeps coming back to is whether the market is right to treat SoFi like a bank when the business is way broader than that. They get into the everything app and the vertical integration behind it, why Brad says SoFi wins because it operates with less money than everyone else, the loan platform business, 90-day delinquencies at 0.40%, what a rate hike does to a bank that pays real interest on savings, what went wrong with Galileo, the capital raises, fair value accounting, and what each of them watches in the Q3 print. All three are bullish. Brad says buying SoFi right now is like buying AMD or NVIDIA at the depths of a cycle, with most of the bad news priced in. Tannor calls the company a compulsive sandbagger that still guides to 30% revenue growth and 40% EPS growth over the next three years. Shay is down 20% on his position and still holds it, because the market is not crediting SoFi for making the same customer more valuable over time. Tannor is @futurenvesting on YouTube and X. Tell the guys which stock deserves the next deep dive. Watch the full episode with chapters on YouTube: https://youtu.be/CaH-bTm1ep8 New episodes every Monday on The Deep End. Nothing in this episode is investment advice. Shay discusses his own portfolio, and he owns SoFi at a loss this year. Brad's general view is bullish. Tannor said on the show that SoFi is one of his larger positions.

  4. Sep 14

    Nebius (NBIS) is the software neocloud. Both hosts put it ahead of CoreWeave.

    Nebius was Yandex, the Google of Russia, for 30 years. After the Russia Ukraine sanctions it sold the Russian assets for almost $3 billion in cash, kept the AI cloud, and relisted in 2024. That AI cloud is now about 98% of revenue, and short term compute is fetching over $40 million per megawatt. Episode five was IREN, and the guys wanted the two neocloud cases side by side because a lot of people look at the space and see tomato, tomato. They are really different. The question the whole episode comes back to is whether the software, which Shay calls the moat in the neocloud space, can turn an insane capacity pipeline into real revenue. They get into what Nebius actually sells beyond the chip, the hypervisor layer that makes it more like a hyperscaler than bare metal, contracts that went from a little over $10 million per megawatt to over $20 million, how Nebius stacks up against CoreWeave and IREN, the Palantir partnership, and a share count that grew 13% with $8 billion of debt behind it. Shay is bullish. Nebius is a top 10 position in his family portfolio, and he expects the stock to stay at a commodity multiple until the first quarter of EBIT profitability, which he puts around early 2028. After that he thinks it becomes a mega cap in the new AI economy. Brad says if you had to own one neocloud it would be Nebius, and he would not have to think hard about it. He still wants to see a profit after depreciation, because to him an EBITDA margin at Nebius is what a gross margin is at another company. Next week is leaning SoFi. If you have a better idea, tell the guys which stock deserves the next deep dive. Watch the full episode with chapters on YouTube: https://youtu.be/BnS7oZxskoY New episodes every Monday on The Deep End. Nothing in this episode is investment advice. Shay discusses his own portfolio, and Nebius is a top 10 position in it. Brad's general view is neutral on the stock at this stage.

  5. Sep 8

    IREN has absurd upside and absurd downside. Both hosts stepped aside.

    IREN is one of the top five most polarizing companies on FinTwit, in Shay's words, and the numbers show why. Sell side consensus has revenue going from $3 billion this year to $12 billion two years out. Depreciation eats more than 80% of that revenue base, and there is no free cash flow in the estimates for at least five years. Neoclouds combine the fanship of Bitcoin with the fanship of AI, so any negativity makes you enemy number one. Brad and Shay wanted to be fair anyway. The question the whole episode hangs on is whether IREN can physically deliver what customers have already paid for, with about $4 billion of contracted AI cloud revenue sitting against roughly $1 billion actually operating. They get into what a neocloud actually is, how IREN stacks up against CoreWeave and Nebius, the cheaper money that comes with Microsoft backed deals, why management stays vague about its frontier model customer, the prepayments that fund half the hardware before a cluster turns on, and a share count that grew 50% in a year. Neither host is buying here. Brad thinks IREN needs to thread a needle, flawless execution plus a supply and demand imbalance that holds for a few more years, and if they pull it off shareholders get rewarded like kings. Until then he is watching from the sidelines with a big bowl of popcorn. Shay owned the stock for a year and a half and sold. Sponsoring Golden State Warriors jerseys and buying a marketing company while the business is raising money did not pass his vibe test, and he never once left an IREN earnings call satisfied. The guys also took listener questions for the first time this week. Tell them which stock deserves the next deep dive. They pick the company 24 hours before they record, so your comment can steer next week. Watch the full episode with chapters on YouTube: https://youtu.be/YPO6IgLtr5M New episodes every Monday on The Deep End. Nothing in this episode is investment advice. Shay and Brad discuss their own portfolios. Shay sold his IREN position before this episode; Brad does not own IREN.

  6. Aug 31

    Zscaler (ZS) at 40x earnings. The put up or shut up quarter.

    Cybersecurity is humming. CrowdStrike caught more than 20% in one day, Okta ran nearly 30%, and the hosts have officially graduated from SaaSpocalypse to SaaS Tapalooza. Zscaler is the name that has not reported yet, and it could have a catalytic move just like those two. Zscaler sits in the traffic path between enterprises and the internet, checking every connection instead of trusting someone because they work there. That is what zero trust means. The debate the whole episode hangs on is whether that position becomes more valuable as AI creates drastically more machine activity, or whether the original zero trust business matures before the newer products are big enough to move the needle. They get into the race to become the AI security operations center, platform-wide adoption and the Z Flex consumption engine, the 17% growth guidance that disappointed everybody, the Red Canary confusion around what is organic, and the multiple that surprised both hosts mid episode. Neither host is reaching for the stock here. Brad has bought the cheaper second best company in a field before and paid for it, and no multiple gets him back in until a quarter proves the expansion beyond network security. Show me something and then I will bother, in his words. Shay came in thinking Zscaler was cheap, pulled it up mid episode, and found 40 times earnings. He wants to see data security become a much larger business before the story earns back his trust. The show has a name: welcome to The Deep End. Watch the full episode with chapters on YouTube: https://youtu.be/JLtgbgVCZhA New episodes every Monday, so you know what to watch before the week trades. Nothing in this episode is investment advice. Shay and Brad discuss their own portfolios; neither owns Zscaler. Shay owns CrowdStrike and Cloudflare and sold his Rubrik position the day this episode was recorded.

  7. Aug 24

    NVIDIA (NVDA) at 18x earnings. The seventh wonder of the market.

    NVIDIA is a $5 trillion company and the stock trades at 18 times earnings. Revenue is supposed to grow 97% this quarter after six straight quarters of reacceleration. Even Jensen is out calling it the seventh wonder of the world while asking why the stock is not moving the way it should. Shay Boloor and Brad Freeman spend the whole episode on that dislocation. The easy story is over. For two years the pitch was that GPUs were sold out and NVIDIA could not make enough of them. Now the market is pricing this as the peak capex year while the physical supply chain says the boom runs at least three more years, and the real question is whether the customers sitting above NVIDIA can monetize AI fast enough to justify what is being built underneath them. They get into what NVIDIA has actually become, a networking leader with a $20 billion CPU business created overnight, the $500 billion financing pool with Apollo, BlackRock, and Blackstone, whether custom silicon from Google, Amazon, and Meta is really zero sum, the CPU renaissance that agents are driving, and what to watch when earnings land this week. The verdicts split. Shay put 80% of his son's brokerage into NVIDIA and treats it like a T bill, the foundation of a new AI economy at the start of the S curve. Brad owns the cycle through an ETF instead, giving up upside so a bad ending costs him 30% and not 80%. Both think it is hard to imagine much more multiple contraction while the profit growth keeps coming. Watch the full episode with chapters on YouTube: https://youtu.be/qa-gJCJbM_s New episodes every Monday, so you know what to watch before the week trades. Nothing in this episode is investment advice. Shay and Brad discuss their own portfolios; Shay's family accounts own NVIDIA, and Brad owns AI infrastructure through an ETF rather than the stock.

  8. Aug 17

    AppLovin (APP) fell to 15x earnings. First crack or false alarm?

    For the last few years, AppLovin was a beat and raise machine. Beat the top line by 4%, guide 3% ahead, see you next quarter. It was boring in the best way. This quarter the streak broke. Revenue still grew 53%, but the company came in 1% light against its own guidance, and the stock now trades at 15 times earnings, the same multiple as The Trade Desk. That comparison is why Shay Boloor and Brad Freeman spend the whole episode here. Trade Desk's slide started with very reasonable sounding excuses too, and they both watched it happen up close. So they want to know whether AppLovin is just a victim of the trust Trade Desk burned, or whether this really is the first crack. They dig into the late model update behind the miss, whether Unity's gaming data is real competition, what it costs to keep making Axon better every three months, and the push into e-commerce against Meta, Google, and Amazon. Shay comes out bullish. He thinks the new risks are already priced in at 15 times earnings, and further weakness would make him more aggressive, not less. Brad stays neutral. If he wants advertising exposure, he'd rather own the multi-trillion dollar companies that are growing like weeds. Both agree Q3 decides it. Watch the full episode with chapters on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Rv8LDYcBbRI New episodes every Monday, so you know what to watch before the week trades. Nothing in this episode is investment advice. Shay and Brad discuss their own portfolios; neither owns AppLovin, and they hold positions in some other names mentioned, including Meta and MercadoLibre.

  9. Aug 10

    CrowdStrike (CRWD) at 110x cash flow. Earnings week: NBIS, HIMS, ASTS, RKLB, CBRS

    CrowdStrike (CRWD) trades at 110 times free cash flow, and the two investors who know it best split on what to do about it. Shay Boloor and Brad Freeman of Stock Market Nerd open their new weekly show with a full CrowdStrike deep dive, then preview the seven names reporting in a loaded AI earnings week. The CrowdStrike conversation starts with the July 2024 outage: the company shut the world off for a few hours, handed its entire competitive landscape a free shot, and lost no meaningful market share. Two years later the SIEM, cloud, and identity businesses run at a $2 billion rate, Falcon Flex is changing how customers buy security by letting them commit to a pool of spend instead of signing product-by-product contracts, and the agentic SOC is the next act. The problem is the price. Brad sold every share on valuation at 35 times sales and has no complaint about the business. Shay trimmed 15% in July to fund AI power names and still cannot bring himself to exit a stock he says may neither reach $300 nor break below $100 for a long time. Both of them dismantle the idea that frontier AI models replace security vendors: a model that hallucinates 15 to 20% of the time does not get the keys to your digital estate. Then the week ahead. Nebius (NBIS) reports Wednesday pre-market with a capacity story: estimates already came down for Q2 while 2027 held, because data centers need power connections, transformers, and cooling before a GPU earns a dollar. Hims (HIMS) is mid-transition with gross margin down 8 points and GAAP net income margin swinging from 8% to negative 15%. Sea Limited (SE) is taking Brazil while the watch item is credit risk in Indonesia. CAVA at 35 times EBITDA works out to roughly 102 times earnings once store depreciation is counted. Rocket Lab (RKLB) rides entirely on Neutron staying on track. AST SpaceMobile (ASTS) is the most speculative name in the group and does not own its own launches. Cerebras (CBRS) is expected to grow from $865 million this year toward $8 billion by 2029 and already costs 45 times sales. The show closes with Shay's tin hat theory on a data center pullback into the midterms and Brad's case that mega-cap token pricing and open source models are squeezing OpenAI and Anthropic from both ends. Watch the full episode with chapters on YouTube: https://youtu.be/jpvWWyEOCNk New episodes every Monday, so you know what to watch before the week trades. Nothing in this episode is investment advice. Shay and Brad discuss their own portfolios and hold positions in some of the names covered, including CrowdStrike and Nebius.

  • 9 Episodes

About

The Deep End is a weekly stock deep dive from Futurum Equities. Each Monday Shay Boloor and Brad Freeman take one company and work through what it actually does, what the latest quarter really said, and whether either of them would own it here. The verdicts often split, and the split is the show. Most episodes close with a rapid fire pass through the earnings calendar for the week ahead. Past deep dives include Nebius, IREN, NVIDIA, Zscaler, AppLovin and CrowdStrike. New episodes every Monday, so you know what to watch before the week trades. Nothing on this show is investment advice. Shay discusses his own portfolio and his positions in the names covered. Brad gives his general view on each company and publishes his own paid research letter. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FuturumEquities

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