The Acquirers Podcast

The episode delivers a solid density of practitioner-level insights - the M2-vs-gold-supply-growth arbitrage logic, the hyperscaler capex-to-OCF transition math, the Dassault 'baby with bathwater' SaaSocalypse thesis, and the Walmart Mexico valuation gap - but these are diluted by extended value-investing boilerplate (margin of safety, Buffett spectrum, family alignment) and a long prepared Roman Empire monologue that, while interesting, is tangential to the investment discussion.

“the money supply in the developed world, as measured in M2 tends to drift upwards by 7 or 8% per year. Um, the gold supply only increases by about 1% per year”

“when you look at the time series historically the Hyperscalers spend about 20% of their operating cash flow in CapEx...if you look at the forecast for this year they're going to spend about all of the operating cash flow in CapEx”

The investment framework is classic Buffett-influenced value investing with a gold overlay - familiar to any serious investor - though there are a few genuinely fresh wrinkles: the explicit M2-vs-gold-supply-growth delta as a pricing model, the hyperscaler capex-saturation argument, and the time-arbitrage-as-competitive-moat framing. Nothing truly contrarian or first-principles, but the applications to specific situations are non-trivial.

“Trying to call the next quarter or the next couple of quarters ahead is a very competitive activity...patience is in very short supply in markets today. But um, having such a long track record, having a loyal capital base, uh, we are set up to exhibit some patience”

“we like businesses where we completely unable to tell you what earnings will look like three, six, 12 months from now. But where we feel three, four, five years out, that's a business that deserves to exist”

Albertini and Heck are senior portfolio managers at a $250B AUM firm with a fund track record running back to 1979, trained directly under Jean Marie Eveillard - a genuine investing legend. They are real practitioners with specific, hard-won views, not podcast-circuit thought leaders, and their answers demonstrate genuine depth rather than rehearsed talking points.

“we run about 250 billion uh doll in Aum. But we do very few things and one of the things we do is global value”

“Jean Marie ran the fund from 1979 up until like 2008. But he stayed with us as an advisor for over a decade and so we could spend uh, time with him asking any question”

The episode is consistently concrete: named tickers with exchange suffixes, ownership percentages, store counts, valuation multiples, capex-to-OCF ratios, customer retention statistics from a named competitor, and historical gold return data. The Walmart Mexico comparison and Dassault valuation section are particularly evidence-dense.

“out of the 500 largest customers 25 years ago, all but six are still customers today”

“Walmart has 3500 supercenters in the US it only has like 350 in Mexico. Walmart has 600 like Sam's Club in the US it only has less than 100 in Mexico”

Tobias generates a few genuinely probing questions - most notably the Walmart ownership structure challenge and the Google capital-raise strategic rationale - but the hosts largely accept the guests' framing without pressure, allow boilerplate value-investing language to pass unchallenged, and Jake's Roman Empire segment is an uninterrupted prepared monologue rather than a dialogue. The format skews toward promotional rather than adversarial.

“Why dozen Walmart US own it wholly? Why does it have, why does it have a partial listing in the, in Mexico? Particularly if there's a 40 times multiple in the US and a 15 times multiple in Mexico?”

“What does it say about Google that they need to go outside for capital?”