Update from the PM – September 2025

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– Andrew Macken

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August is typically subdued due to the northern hemisphere summer holidays.

But not this year.

During the month, investors were faced with:

1. Trump’s ongoing attempt to gain effective control of the Federal Reserve Board – not to mention the Bureau of Labor Statistics – which pushed up interest rate expectations. 

2. Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s guidance that monetary policy may soon start to ease (pushing down interest expectations). 

3. Trump’s new brand of state-sponsored capitalism, typified by the US Government’s investment in US chip designer Intel; and Nvidia and AMD’s agreement to pay the US Government 15% of their revenues from the sale of chips in China. 

4. Multiple summits that could reshape global alliances (US/Russia, US/Europe, China/Russia/India); and 

5. Many more company earnings reports – not to mention the ongoing release of increasingly advanced AI models (GPT5, Genie 3).

Given the above, Montaka’s portfolio experienced some volatility during the month, with stocks like Microsoft, KKR and Meta Platforms declining a little bit.

These declines, however, were partially offset by strong stock price appreciations in Alphabet, MongoDB and Tencent.

Tencent reported another very strong set of quarterly results in August.

We believe Tencent has the most advantaged digital platform in the massive Chinese market. It has multiple flywheel dynamics within its numerous businesses and large new adjacent market opportunities. After several years of investment, the company is now benefiting from rapid growth in several new, high-profit-margin revenue streams – including digital advertising, ecommerce, AI and cloud computing. We’ll dig into Tencent in more detail next month.

MongoDB also reported a stand-out performance in Q2. Revenue growth in its all-important cloud-database segment (called ‘Atlas’) accelerated to 29% per annum, well above the market’s expectations. The stock rallied +38% on the day. We continue to see reasonable and increasing probabilities that MongoDB’s offering will meaningfully participate in the enterprise adoption of AI. 

This month, in The Adaptable Investor: Only adaptive investment teams will win in this new AI world, Andy explores an unusual topic: the half-life of facts.

While facts already become outdated much faster than most expect, this dynamic is set to accelerate with AI increasingly making novel discoveries.

As investors, we will need to adapt even faster to uncover the many mispricings (i.e. opportunities) that will surely result from this reality.

Following on from last month’s podcast discussion on the extraordinary growth in the cloud computing businesses of the three largest hyperscalers (Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet), Amit dives even deeper in How Cloud and AI Fuel the Next Wave of Hyperscale Growth.

He explains why we remain in the early innings of cloud computing and why long-term growth will be highly profitable for the hyperscalers.

In this month’s Spotlight Series podcast, we share a presentation Andy made to the Wide-Moat Investing Summit 2025 back in June. He presented Montaka’s investment hypothesis on US hard-surface flooring specialty retailer: Floor & Decor.

(A video version of the presentation can be found here, and the presentation slides here).

 

Sincerely,

Andrew Macken 

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Podcast: Join the Montaka Global Investments team on Spotify as we share real-time examples and investing tips that govern our stockpicks. Click below to listen. Alternatively, click on this link: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/montaka

 

 

 

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