OPENING DISCLAIMER — 0:00
AVA: The following conversation is intended for informational purposes only. You should always do your own work to determine if an investment is suitable for you.
COLD OPEN — 0:15
AVA: You’re listening to the Telltales Weekend Update. I’m Ava Cabot.
MARCUS: And I’m Marcus Graham. Every Saturday we walk through what happened this week — and what’s coming next week — across the eighty-nine companies in the Cash Flow Memo. No filler.
AVA: Quick note before we start. This is a pilot episode, so we want your feedback — what works, what doesn’t, what you want more of. The show is produced entirely with AI tools, and both voices you’re hearing are AI-generated. We welcome your feedback.
AVA: On Wednesday, Mike, Jason, and Hunt spent most of episode twenty-six-sixteen on Hormuz, the deficit math, and the dominant-company debate — Lilly, Nvidia, Microsoft. Today we pick up downstream of that conversation, with the first big week of earnings season behind us. The AI build kept accelerating. A streaming founder stepped off his own board. And one of the cheapest stocks in the healthcare book heads into a print that could re-rate the whole managed-care complex.
THEME — AI CHIP CYCLE — 0:45
AVA: Let’s start with chips. Three names on page three of the memo set the tone this week — Taiwan Semi and ASML reported, and Intel reports Thursday. Same cycle, three very different places on the cashflow map.
AVA: Taiwan Semi first. The company reported Thursday morning. Revenue thirty-five-point-nine billion dollars, up forty-one percent year over year. Net profit up fifty-eight percent. Both records. High-performance compute — which is AI plus networking — was sixty-one percent of revenue. Three-nanometer was twenty-five percent of wafer revenue. The Q2 guide came in at thirty-nine to forty-point-two billion — ten percent sequential growth, unusual in that seat this time of year. And capex got pushed to the high end of the fifty-two to fifty-six billion range.
AVA: AI demand is not slowing, and the purest shovel in the build is telling you the order book is still accelerating. That matters most for Nvidia, which reports May twentieth.
AVA: On the same page — ASML. Revenue eight-point-eight billion euro, order book called “very strong,” and management raised the full-year guide to thirty-six to forty billion euro. Stock traded down three percent on the open anyway. Marcus — what does the memo say about where ASML trades?
MARCUS: ASML is expensive. The stock sits at seventy-four times free cash flow, and a free cash flow yield of just over one percent. Trailing twelve months, the company generated seven-point-five billion dollars of free cash flow — up seventeen percent. That’s clean growth, but it’s growing into a price that already prices in three more years of raised guides. The stock sold off on a raised guide because that multiple leaves no room for a stumble. If the memo number is your anchor, ASML is the chip stock you own for the monopoly, not for the cash yield.
AVA: Then Intel, same page. Stock is up seventy-six percent year-to-date. The rally is built on two narratives — the twenty-five-billion-dollar Terafab joint venture with Elon Musk and Intel’s plant, and a foundry deal with AWS. Thursday’s print has to validate both. Marcus, how does this one read on the memo?
MARCUS: Free cash flow for the trailing twelve months is negative sixteen-point-two billion dollars. This is not a cashflow stock; it is a restructuring narrative riding on whether the Terafab commitment converts into revenue inside of two quarters. The debt sits at forty-six billion. If Thursday’s guide doesn’t move that story forward, the seventy-six percent rally is doing the work of a beat that hasn’t happened yet. That said, I’d expect Intel to talk up booming CPU demand on the call. TSMC’s leading-edge capacity is sold out, and hyperscalers need a second source. At the leading nodes, Intel and Samsung are the only options.
AVA: Three stocks, same cycle. One with no cash flow. One expensive on cash flow. And Taiwan Semi sits in between — still cheap on the multiple, still growing into it. The memo is how you tell them apart.
DEEP DIVE — NETFLIX — 4:45
AVA: To the deep dive. Netflix, page four. Reported Thursday after the close. EPS beat handily. Revenue up sixteen percent. The ad business reiterated a three-billion-dollar revenue target for 2026, with over four thousand advertisers on the platform.
AVA: The stock dropped the most in six months anyway. Two reasons. The Q2 revenue guide came in below consensus. And the bigger one: Reed Hastings is not seeking reelection to the Netflix board. Twenty-eight years after he founded the company. Marcus — the memo has Netflix at a price most listeners wouldn’t call cheap. How does the print change that?
MARCUS: It doesn’t change it. Netflix trades at thirty-nine times free cash flow. That’s priced for a growth-and-moat story. But trailing twelve months, free cash flow came in at ten-and-a-half billion dollars — down fourteen percent year over year. Growth going negative at thirty-nine times is how multiples compress.
AVA: Management has been giving cash back hard. Gross buybacks ran almost seven billion dollars in the last four quarters — roughly four-point-eight billion net of stock issuance. Does that cadence hold from here?
MARCUS: Four-point-eight billion of net buybacks on ten-and-a-half billion of free cash flow — about forty-five percent going back to shareholders. It’s a real capital-return program, and it’s been the stabilizer for the share count and the multiple. The question is whether you keep running that cadence into a year where free cash flow is shrinking, there’s a content arms race pulling capital in, and the founder is stepping off the board. The easy answer is no. You’d expect a more conservative allocator — which Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos are — to slow buybacks, redirect to content, and let the multiple do what it’s going to do.
AVA: Hastings built the model where cash return was the discipline that kept Netflix from re-running the content-spend cycle. That discipline is now leaving the room during a content arms race. Also earlier this month, Netflix lost the bidding war for Warner Brothers content to a competing streamer. Streaming consolidation is real. A beat quarter with a founder exit and a soft guide, at thirty-nine times cash flow, is not what you want going into that fight.
RAPID-FIRE — 8:45
AVA: Forward week. Big slate. Four names to watch.
AVA: UnitedHealth — UNH, page nineteen — reports Tuesday morning. Consensus wants six-point-six-three in EPS on one-hundred-nine-point-four billion in revenue. The setup: on April seventh, CMS raised the 2027 Medicare Advantage rate by two-point-four-eight percent — the first favorable rate rule in three years. The memo has UNH at three-point-seven times free cash flow, with a twenty-six percent free cash flow yield. That’s not a normal number. The market is pricing in a permanent impairment, and the print is the first chance to push back on that. If UNH beats, managed care re-rates.
AVA: Tesla, page one — reports Wednesday. Q1 deliveries already missed — three-hundred-fifty-eight thousand against the company’s own three-hundred-sixty-five. JPMorgan flagged one-hundred-sixty-four thousand unsold units in inventory and laid out a sixty percent downside scenario. The memo shows Tesla with negative free cash flow of five-point-one billion over the trailing twelve months. The earnings number is not what this print is about. It’s the physical-AI language on the call — whether Musk gives a Robotaxi date, an Optimus milestone, or a new revenue line that the market can attach to. That’s the whole bar.
AVA: McDonald’s, page sixteen. Not reporting this week — the Q1 print is May seventh. But Tuesday is the launch of the new McValue menu: under-three-dollar items, four-dollar breakfast, five-dollar lunch. McDonald’s is a cash flow bellwether for the low-income consumer. Memo has McDonald’s at thirty-eight times free cash flow, with debt to free cash flow at seven-point-seven — rich on cash flow and highly levered. Watch the first two weeks of menu-launch traffic data as a read on whether the low-end consumer is responding. Real signal comes on the May print.
AVA: Uber, page twenty. Not an earnings name this week, but the big catalyst. Uber committed ten billion dollars this week to build a Robotaxi platform by 2028. Twenty-eight cities, Lucid and Nuro as hardware partners, employee test rides launching now. This is a break from the asset-light model that Uber’s valuation rests on. The memo has Uber at eleven-point-seven times free cash flow — cheap by tech standards. That multiple was earned by being capital-light. Ten billion of robotaxi capex puts part of it on the table. Watch the reaction on the May sixth print when management quantifies the spend.
CLOSE — 11:45
AVA: Hunt, Jason, and Mike will pick up Intel and Tesla on Wednesday’s main Telltales episode. If you want to follow along, the Cash Flow Memo is at telltales-dot-us.
CLOSING DISCLAIMER — 12:30
AVA: The views expressed on this podcast are the host alone and do not constitute an offer to sell or a recommendation to purchase, or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, nor a recommendation for any investment product or service. While certain information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, neither the host nor any of their employers or their affiliates have independently verified this information, and its accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed. Accordingly, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made as to, and no reliance should be placed on, the fairness, accuracy, timeliness, or completeness of this information. The host and all employers and their affiliated persons assume no liability for this information and no obligation to update the information or analysis contained herein in the future, and may or may not hold positions in the securities mentioned.
This podcast and the information herein are intended for informational purposes only. The views expressed herein are the author’s alone and do not constitute an offer to sell, or a recommendation to purchase, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any security, nor a recommendation for any investment product or service. While certain information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, neither the author nor any of his employers or their affiliates have independently verified this information, and its accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed. Accordingly, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made as to, and no reliance should be placed on, the fairness, accuracy, timeliness or completeness of this information. The author and all employers and their affiliated persons assume no liability for this information and no obligation to update the information or analysis contained herein in the future.
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