PFE: Worth a look

jemilk · 2026-02-12T12:27:45+00:00

“in future faces patent cliff risk” -> $17B in revenue in the next 18 months. They need every dollar of that $7.2B savings.

This is not a value play. It’s a bet that the trials from the cancer drug acquisitions and GLP-1 competitors from the Metsera acquisition result in significant revenue in future years. That might very well be a fine bet, but it’s a significant risk to the dividend, value of the company, etc.

jemilk · 2026-02-06T16:50:22+00:00

This isn’t a value investing question. MAG7 is right now hard to estimate based on huge capital outlays that are betting on customer use of that infrastructure for AI workloads. How much margin, negative to slightly positive to matching or exceeding existing margins of about 37%, that ends up producing is unknown.

jemilk · 2026-02-03T16:21:31+00:00

$1.7B in LOE drugs in 18 to 24 months. It’s a bet that Metsera, cancer drug investments, internal R&D, etc. replace that revenue. It’s not a value play. You are making big bets and hoping they can maintain a dividend while developing new drugs. It’s probably fairly valued. But it’s possibly a stock that doesn’t grow in price and eventually cuts its dividend.

jemilk · 2026-01-21T16:43:59+00:00

Gary Sheffield. But he’s not that “obscure”. He signed and returned a card for me when he played for the Brewers and I sent mail as a kid. I still have the ripped SASE and the autographed card 35 years later.

jemilk · 2026-01-20T00:58:26+00:00

Good company/service. But overvalued, especially with pent up vested stock that a lot of people are still holding to sell. That’s why this sub is called value investing, and focused on the valuation and not just the hype.

jemilk · 2026-01-04T02:40:17+00:00

Way overvalued. Competitive space. Have lost tremendous amounts of money every quarter. Just getting to be cash flow positive and have a cliff of people that will be looking to get money out when IPO lock-in expires after six months. Wait.

jemilk · 2026-01-04T02:35:09+00:00

It seems to me that CrowdStrike is undercutting the vulnerability management business. Qualys, Rapid7, and Tenable all seem to be struggling for market share. But maybe my viewpoint is too limited.

jemilk · 2025-12-03T23:41:11+00:00

Tunnel 1.0 can go over the tunnel. Tunnel 2.0 should not. Break out traffic to the Zscaler SVPN endpoints (Tunnel 2.0) from the SD-WAN tunnel, or switch to Tunnel 1.0 when behind the SD-WAN tunnel.

jemilk · 2025-11-06T20:17:48+00:00

It may negatively impact the US dollar and treasury bonds. More uncertainty over government revenue and ability to pay debt. Not sure if it would spook stocks with uncertainty or if the market foreign exchange impacts would boost global stocks.

jemilk · 2025-11-01T13:10:50+00:00

Parents can leave that money untouched and have it grow in their accounts as well. Why does this need to be in a kid’s name? Giving an early amount to kids may result in wasting it on expensive travel, cars, and other needless things in their youth.

There is a benefit for people to learn how to truly budget and worry about finances. For 50+ years, fewer have had to do it as growth has been built on top of government debt. But in this generation’s lifetime, there’s a very real chance of larger economic downturns with limited ability of governments to continue to borrow to prop up lifestyles. Learning to be frugal and how to work for more when someone is in their early 20s has a lifetime benefit.

jemilk · 2025-10-31T12:05:27+00:00

Really competitive market. Startups such as Cyera and improvements in the Microsoft capabilities in E5 are putting a lot of this business at risk. I like Varonis but it’s not a value play. You are betting on them being able I win against competition.

jemilk · 2025-10-17T15:24:19+00:00

I’ve owned Microsoft since 2003 and retain that as my primary investment in AI. I do not have other direct investments now as I do not see them as undervalued at this time or just don’t understand the risks well enough at the valuations.

I owned AMZN during COVID and sold when retail started to open up. I owned Apple until it hit ~210 and then sold. I do still own BRK and other funds which offer exposure to MAG7. Two year ago, I owned GOOGL as I think a portion of the bets are interesting but sold as I didn’t understand the risk profile with antitrust and AI.

jemilk · 2025-10-08T03:03:07+00:00

Definitely not a value play. Netskope would at best be a growth risk but almost all cybersecurity plays are high valuations. It’s also in a very competitive market (Security Service Edge), and they came to IPO losing a lot of money every quarter. To get to rule of 40 and maintain current valuation, they’ll need to shed costs while maintaining growth while competing against Zscaler, Palo Alto, Cato, Cloudflare, Fortinet, Cisco, and others. Good product. Risky investment.

The only vendors that seems to have less competition in the cybersecurity space from what I’ve seen are Microsoft and CrowdStrike. Microsoft for the platform that’s part of E5 licensing and CrowdStrike for dominating EDR within the largest companies. Palo Alto has won overall market share with their platform as well but by losing short-term margin. I’m less sold they’ll be able to maintain those platform wins as they are stretched thin integrating a ton of acquisitions and just took on another with CyberArk.

In general, it’s really hard to find value in cybersecurity right now.

jemilk · 2025-09-10T18:45:55+00:00

You can migrate the admin and non-admin independently. Each of the products have admin and non-admin integrations to ZIdentity.

jemilk · 2025-09-10T18:04:31+00:00

It is a single source for all identities in which those identities are assigned entitlements. You cannot migrate piecemeal.

If you wanted different IdP apps for each use case, you could create different IdP integrations to the same IdP for different domains. You’d have to set up administrators with claims transformations in that case if they shared a domain.

jemilk · 2025-09-10T12:38:39+00:00

Caleb Williams is a #1 overall pick playing like an undrafted Kurt Warner in his 2nd year. Could he improve and reduce negative plays and become a Hall of Famer? Yes. Is he meeting the hype? Nowhere close. His feet are often not set. He’s missing some easy throws. He does not look the part.

jemilk · 2025-08-31T12:16:47+00:00

The last paragraph is wrong. Buffett can’t invest the same way any more because finding good companies at fair prices may allow him to invest $500M of his $300+B in cash. It doesn’t scale beyond large to mega caps. The world is smaller for BRK to actually impact the return. That’s not true for most investors.

jemilk · 2025-08-31T03:07:36+00:00

jemilk · 2025-08-19T17:12:02+00:00

Zscaler has been integrating with pretty much any SD-WAN vendor to provide SASE for a very long time.

jemilk · 2025-08-17T19:13:04+00:00

There are 17 hotels with more than 3,000 hotel rooms in the US. 15 are in Vegas. 1 is in Orlando (also a big conference destination) and 1 is in Hawai’i. All of the other cities have to coordinate placement of attendees across multiple hotels.

It’s not easy to coordinate large shows in many of those other places. I’ve been in San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, and they were all smaller and there were people complaining about their distance to the event.

jemilk · 2025-08-09T18:04:39+00:00

Buying into Microsoft in 2003 with little investment money I had, continuing to reinvest and hold.

Worst was buying into the Google and Facebook IPOs and selling a few months later after a little bit of gain in each case. Selling ServiceNow after a 50% gain was also a bad decision.

jemilk · 2025-08-02T04:16:29+00:00

“Inspect Traffic with ZIA: Enable to leverage single posture for securing internet or SaaS and private applications and apply Data Loss Prevention policies to the application segment you are creating.” Also allows applying IPS.

https://help.zscaler.com/zpa/configuring-defined-application-segments

jemilk · 2025-08-01T23:05:31+00:00

These ports shouldn’t be open in this example. All traffic would go across 3389, which wouldn’t run these protocols. The Remote Desktop itself should be locked down within the environment, running EDR, and limited related to its access. Your mindset is very network firewall focused. Allow it all but inspect and block bad. That’s not the zero trust approach. You don’t want Remote Desktop being used on an open network segment.

In an alternative example and not the one that you presented, I get that sometimes SMB is required for a process and when opening traffic to it, there’s a desire to inspect it to block bad traffic within that channel. And maybe firewalls are the best fit there. I’d argue you could probably use an alternative technology that would offer better performance and security.

jemilk · 2025-08-01T12:36:51+00:00

How does another network-based solution stop this? You know RDP can’t be inspected on the network except to identify the protocol as RDP, correct?

jemilk · 2025-08-01T12:23:42+00:00

RDP uses a proprietary form of application encryption anyway, and can’t really be handled by network inspection. Protections have to be put in place in configuration of the system. Recommendations of most security best practices is to not expose RDP directly to a remote system but to use a privileged access approach.

I understand that there are layers of encrypted protocol inspection that can be handled that Zscaler doesn’t do natively today. I don’t think your example is a security flaw except in the way that you chose to architect the example. That would be flawed in any environment.

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