Shareholder letters: Amazon, Tradeweb, Pulte Group
Amazon.com (AMZN)
In his last shareholder letter as a CEO Jeff Bezos included a passage from Richard Dawkins’ book The Blind Watchmaker:
“Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself – and that is what it is when it dies – the body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with its environment. If you measure some quantity such as the temperature, the acidity, the water content or the electrical potential in a living body, you will typically find that it is markedly different from the corresponding measure in the surroundings. Our bodies, for instance, are usually hotter than our surroundings, and in cold climates they have to work hard to maintain the differential. When we die the work stops, the temperature differential starts to disappear, and we end up the same temperature as our surroundings. Not all animals work so hard to avoid coming into equilibrium with their surrounding temperature, but all animals do some comparable work. For instance, in a dry country, animals and plants work to maintain the fluid content of their cells, work against a natural tendency for water to flow from them into the dry outside world. If they fail they die. More generally, if living things didn’t work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge into their surroundings, and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.”
Bezos notes that this metaphor applies to people as well as businesses:
We all know that distinctiveness – originality – is valuable. We are all taught to “be yourself.” What I’m really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness. The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen.
You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it. The fairy tale version of “be yourself” is that all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine. That version is misleading. Being yourself is worth it, but don’t expect it to be easy or free. You’ll have to put energy into it continuously.
Tradeweb (TW)
Tradeweb’s Lee Olesky lays out bull thesis for his company:
I’d like to note that Lee Olesky has a rare ability to explain a complex theme (which is the investment case for Tradeweb) in a plain language.
https://investors.tradeweb.com/static-files/01968b18-799a-48c9-bf3f-56f7047cd6a6
Pulte Group (PHM)
Pulte Group on the record deficit of homes which accrued over the past decade (e.g. a bull case for the construction industry):
Beyond any lasting changes in buyer preferences brought about by the pandemic, we are optimistic about the sustainability of housing demand. We believe housing starts of approximately 1.5 million are needed annually to meet basic housing demand created by a combination of factors including demographics, household formations and obsolescence. The industry has been underbuilding relative to this level for more than a decade, and while it finally got close to this number in 2020, a deficit approaching seven million homes has accrued over the past decade.
https://s22.q4cdn.com/957797852/files/P52213_PulteGroup_2020-AR_PROOF_JL_REV1.pdf