A 13F review episode — the managers (Dev Kantesaria / Valley Forge, Chris Hohn / TCI, Bill Ackman / Pershing Square, Pat Dorsey / Dorsey Asset Management) are people and funds, and are intentionally excluded from the table. "View" is Carlson's stance in this video, not the manager's: Positive = a name he owns and/or endorses here, Neutral = relayed from a 13F or referenced without his own conviction. Research: QT Qualtrim · SA Seeking Alpha · STK Stock Analysis.
| Ticker | Name | Research | View | What he said | At |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| META | Meta Platforms | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | The episode's conviction test. Ackman added 20% (to 9%) and Dorsey 24%; Carlson: "I agree with him here. I think a great buy" and names Meta one of Ackman's two loudest buys. Against the 29-state Oakland trial he works it from first principles — under-18s are "between 2 to 4% of the total daily active user base" and a smaller share of ad revenue ("it's the parents that buy things"), teen accounts have been tightened every year since 2021, so the likely landing is "a big fine, multiple tens of billions" plus further teen restrictions, with the product-overhaul branch "around 10%, maybe less." Verdict: "I'm not as worried as the market is today, and that's why I continue to hold this position and continue to buy in." | 29:14 |
| UBER | Uber Technologies | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | The cross-manager consensus name — Ackman "added even more to his Uber position, making it currently his top holding in the portfolio. Currently at 12.72%," and Dorsey bought it too. Carlson reads the weighting as a statement: "in terms of business quality, growth, and valuation, Bill Ackman would say that Uber is the top buy today"; pairing it with Meta, "I agree with both. I've been buying both of these companies." Also named in his own book alongside DoorDash as the earlier-in-the-arc aggregators he rotated into from Booking. | 17:39 |
| NFLX | Netflix | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Ackman's largest new position at "almost a 5% share." Carlson confirms he's on the same side and still adding: "Netflix right now is 50% off of its highs. There is a lot of fears baked in that I don't believe are accurate, and I still hold this one as a huge position. I haven't sold any Netflix, and in fact, I've added $5,000 to it this year." | 16:24 |
| MSFT | Microsoft | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | The episode's biggest disagreement. Hohn took a 17% position to zero on a moat call — Claude "could overtake many of the responsibilities and suppress the pricing power of Microsoft Office," with Azure falling behind it as a domino. Carlson concedes the pressure is real ("certainly transitioning some of the value to Claude's interface") but keeps the stock: "I'm not so concerned about Microsoft that I'm going to be selling my position… I believe Microsoft still remains very wide moat… In fact, I become more bullish on Microsoft over time." Ackman added another 10%, and Microsoft has since recovered into the green YTD — Hohn sold at the lower valuation. | 14:02 |
| GOOGL | Alphabet | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | The other side of Hohn's rotation — Google added 12% to roughly an 8% combined position, and the exact reverse of Hohn's 2018 trade (he sold Google then on ChatGPT-disruption fear and bought Microsoft). Carlson's read: "Google's moat wasn't disrupted… many investors have come to the same conclusion that Google is still wide moat." He owns both sides of the trade: "Whether or not you're flipping the coin between Microsoft and Google, they're both great. I own both of the companies. I'm bullish on both of them." | 13:42 |
| MA | Mastercard | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Held, and deliberately held without Visa: "in my portfolio, I have MasterCard, which is a credit card company, but I don't have Visa" — the worked example of concentrating holdings while spreading risk factors. Kantesaria's 28% cut into a rising price is the episode's stinger — "these ones really sting… the quarter ended right before these companies went up" — and Ackman bought MA and V as a combined ~11% position. | 7:49 |
| SPGI | S&P Global | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Bought by Ackman at 5.4% — "huge holding into this one. I think another excellent buy for the Ackman portfolio" — and added to by Hohn ("He continues to build conviction in Visa and S&P Global"). Carlson holds it and takes the opposite side of Kantesaria's trim: "he chose to reduce S&P Global and not Moody's. I would have done just the opposite… I would have kept S&P Global," because Moody's is the one holding up better and carries the higher valuation. Also on Dorsey's list — "I also like S&P Global, of course." | 16:44 |
| ASML | ASML Holding | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive — but trimming | Positive on the business, actively trimming the position: "As much as I love the qualities behind ASML, I believe the valuation is very stretched today, and so I've actually been trimming a little bit of my position, despite the fact it's been one of my best performers over the past 2 years." Dorsey did the same and Carlson calls it smart. The counterweight lesson: Dorsey's first trim came "just a tad too early" at $1,300 before the run to ~$2,000 — "when a stock has this much good sentiment behind it… you can be very slow to take gains." Kantesaria refuses to trim it at all, up ~62% YTD, which Carlson reads as keeping his one uncorrelated risk factor. | 18:34 |
| APP | AppLovin | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Dorsey's second-largest position, added to meaningfully over the past three months, and described approvingly: "this is one that has outstanding growth. It's one that helps different companies monetize and advertise, especially on mobile. They've carved out a very good market position for themselves there." Growing "47% year over year on a trailing 12-month basis"; he flags it as a higher-volatility name. | 20:11 |
| DASH | DoorDash | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Held, and the destination of his Booking Holdings profits: "I made a decision to go from Booking Holdings, which is a vacation aggregator, to move into DoorDash and Uber, which are travel and ride-sharing and delivery aggregators… I believe Uber and DoorDash are more early in their respective journeys… Booking's already won the game." Also named in his risk-factor spread alongside Costco, Microsoft, Texas Roadhouse and Uber. | 21:05 |
| V | Visa | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Owned by all three managers, deliberately not by Carlson — his risk-factor argument is that Visa and Mastercard "are very much similar to each other and they're also sensitive to all these same factors," so he holds only MA. Hohn "continues to build conviction in Visa," Ackman bought it with MA as one ~11% payments position, and Kantesaria cut it 22% right before the run. Relayed, not endorsed. | 14:58 |
| FICO | Fair Isaac | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Not owned. The one Valley Forge reduction he endorses — "when we look at FICO, I'm okay with him reducing FICO. It's a huge holding. I think that that was likely an intelligent decision." Also the lead exhibit in his risk-factor critique: "a credit company in that financial arena… highly sensitive to interest rates because as interest rates go up, homes become more expensive, fewer people need their FICO score." | 4:56 |
| MCO | Moody's | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | The name he'd sell first in a forced trim, on relative strength and multiple rather than quality: "Moody's stock is holding up better than S&P Global. It's at a higher valuation… I probably would have kept a little bit more S&P Global and reduced Moody's." He grants Kantesaria's likely reasoning — Moody's is "a higher quality company… because it has more of a concentration into the credit rating business" — and notes Hohn "maintains his large Moody's position." Relayed and debated, not a call. | 5:33 |
| GE | GE Aerospace | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Hohn's flagship impenetrable-moat holding, described admiringly but not owned by Carlson. "There's no one even close these type of plane engines… too much capex, too much testing, too much red tape, too many regulatory bodies… It takes decades of time to get them approved. Another startup company can't chat GPT their way into creating aerospace engines." The only brake he names is airline growth, and "airlines continue to expand." Hohn held it through the quarter with very minor changes. | 10:22 |
| MLM | Martin Marietta Materials | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | One of Hohn's two new ~1.4% "watcher positions" — a starter stake, relayed by Carlson without a stance of his own. "MLM is not technically a monopoly, but it is very much like a controlling stake or a monopoly in many chemicals and materials in certain geographical areas. It is very difficult to disrupt." Fits Hohn's taste for physical businesses whose local market share and barriers to entry make them hard to replace. | 15:20 |
| BKNG | Booking Holdings | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Built up by Dorsey; sold by Carlson, with the admiration intact. "I'm very familiar with Booking Holdings. I believe it's one of the highest quality companies in the world… very capital efficient, super profitable… they do a ton of buybacks." He exited to concentrate the portfolio and rotate into DoorDash and Uber because "Booking's already won the game, and it's already towards the end." The Google disintermediation risk he calls minor: "it just has such a big back-end… I don't believe that's going to happen." | 20:44 |
| QSR | Restaurant Brands International | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | A one-line 13F relay from the Pershing Square holdings walk — "He added more to Restaurant Brands International." No thesis or stance of Carlson's own. | 17:04 |
| AMZN | Amazon | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Relayed as an Ackman trim, read as profit-taking rather than a view change: "He slightly reduced Amazon. This one has done really well, so I believe he's taking some gains out of this one and simply reallocating it." Carlson passes no judgement on it here. | 17:04 |
| BN | Brookfield Corporation | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | An unchanged Pershing Square holding, described in passing: "He still has Brookfield Corporation, which is in the AI business, funding it, doing a lot of the big infrastructure projects. And I think that he really likes this one as well. I don't see it going anywhere." Relayed, not owned. | 17:20 |
| RPRX | Royalty Pharma | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | A Dorsey holding flagged for its chart rather than its fundamentals: "Look at the price chart of this company. It almost looks made up. It's just going at a 45° angle up and to the right… you'd think, 'Man, this looks like it's a scam. It almost looks too good.' So, he's likely riding a lot of momentum with that company." No business analysis and no stance of his own. | 20:26 |
| COST | Costco Wholesale | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Named in the roll-call of his own portfolio, used to show risk factors spread across categories rather than stacked: "S&P Global, Costco, Microsoft, Texas Roadhouse, DoorDash and Uber… the risk factors are spread out through all different categories." A disclosure of a continuing holding, not re-argued here. | 8:08 |
| TXRH | Texas Roadhouse | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | The other portfolio name in the same risk-factor roll-call — a restaurant operator sitting deliberately alongside payments, semis, advertising and cloud so that no single macro variable ("the same Achilles' heel") can take the whole book down. Disclosed as held; no fresh thesis in this episode. | 8:08 |
"View" is Joseph Carlson's stance in this video, not a price rating. Positive = a name he owns and/or endorses here (ASML flagged Positive-but-trimming on valuation); Neutral = relayed from a manager's 13F, disclosed as a holding without a fresh argument, or debated without a call. The managers and their funds (Valley Forge Capital, TCI, Pershing Square, Dorsey Asset Management) are people/vehicles, not securities, and are excluded from the table. Research: QT Qualtrim · SA Seeking Alpha · STK Stock Analysis.
A jargon-free summary of the thesis behind each substantive name — what it is and why he holds that view. (Plain-language companion to the table above; renders on each ticker's consolidated page.)
Meta is on trial in Oakland. Twenty-nine state attorneys general say the company knowingly built products that harmed children, and the press is calling it social media's "big tobacco moment" — the phrase matters, because tobacco ended up paying billions and losing its influence for good. Meta already lost a similar case in New Mexico that costs it roughly $1 billion plus product changes. The nightmare version is that California, Meta's home state, forces a rebuild of the recommendation algorithm itself.
Carlson's response is to do the arithmetic instead of reacting to the headline. Under-18s are only about 2–4% of Meta's daily users, and they generate an even smaller slice of advertising revenue, because children don't buy much — the money comes from advertising to their parents. So even a harsh outcome aimed at teenagers touches a small corner of the business. He also lays out five years of teen-safety changes Meta has already shipped (private-by-default under-16 accounts, blocked DMs from strangers, parental permissions, AI age detection), which is what a court weighs when deciding whether a company ignored the problem.
That leads to a two-branch forecast rather than a verdict. Most likely: a fine in the tens of billions plus tighter teen accounts — painful, survivable, and largely already underway. The branch that would actually change the business — rules extended to adult accounts and a forced algorithm overhaul across states — he puts at around 10% or less, because no judge is likely to order Meta to make its feed worse than TikTok's.
His historical anchor is Cambridge Analytica in 2018: identical wall-to-wall coverage, advertisers publicly quitting, congressional hearings, the stock at $130. It trades around $560 now. The point isn't that every scandal is a buy — it's that the disciplined move during maximum noise is to price the likely outcome, not the loudest one. He's holding and still buying.
Uber is the name where the professionals converged this quarter. Bill Ackman didn't just own it — he made it his single largest position at 12.72% of the fund, and Pat Dorsey bought it too. Carlson treats position size as the honest signal in a 13F: when a concentrated manager puts his biggest weight somewhere, that is the name he'd tell you to buy today on "business quality, growth, and valuation."
Carlson already owns it and reads the filings as confirmation rather than instruction. His own reasoning, argued at length elsewhere, is that Uber's advantage is per-city driver density rather than technology, so the self-driving fear that keeps the stock cheap is overpriced. Here he adds the portfolio logic: he sold Booking Holdings — an excellent but mature aggregator that has "already won the game" — to fund Uber and DoorDash, which sit earlier in the same arc.
His summary of the whole 13F season is one line: if Ackman were to name two buys, they'd be Uber and Meta, "which I agree with both. I've been buying both of these companies."
This is the episode's real argument. Chris Hohn — a manager Carlson rates as among the best in the world — deleted a 17% Microsoft position entirely. His reasoning is a moat judgement, not a valuation one: AI assistants like Claude increasingly do the work people used to do inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint, which could gradually "disintermediate" Office — sit between Microsoft and its customer and take the pricing power. And because Office is what gets Microsoft into every Fortune 500 company, Hohn thinks Azure would fall as a domino behind it.
Carlson accepts half of it. He agrees value is genuinely shifting toward the AI interface. He just doesn't think the moat is narrow enough to sell: "I believe Microsoft still remains very wide moat, at least wide enough to have as a big position in my portfolio. In fact, I become more bullish on Microsoft over time." Bill Ackman took the opposite side of the same trade, adding another 10%.
The scoreboard so far favors the holders: Microsoft has recovered into the green for the year, meaning Hohn sold at the lower valuation. Carlson's own resolution is deliberately non-committal on the pair trade — he owns both Microsoft and Google and is bullish on both, so he never has to be right about which one wins.
Google is where Hohn's Microsoft money went — a 12% add taking the combined stake to roughly 8% of a $52.7B book. What makes it instructive is that it exactly reverses his 2018 decision, when he sold Google because he feared ChatGPT would break search, and bought Microsoft instead.
He was wrong then, and he changed his mind on evidence rather than narrative: the disruption "did not manifest in the numbers." Carlson notes the market has now reached the same conclusion, which is why Google has already re-rated to a much higher valuation than when Hohn was buying.
For Carlson himself there's no new call here — he owns Google and Microsoft both, and says flipping a coin between them is fine because both are great businesses. The takeaway he draws is about process: a manager willing to publicly reverse a headline thesis when the data contradicts it is doing the job correctly.
S&P Global rates debt and sells financial data — a business two firms effectively share with Moody's, which is why he calls them a duopoly. It shows up on three of the four managers' books this quarter: Ackman bought 5.4%, Hohn added to an already-large position, and Dorsey holds it. Carlson owns it too.
The interesting wrinkle is the one manager who sold it. Kantesaria trimmed S&P Global and left Moody's alone; Carlson would have done the reverse, and his reason is a trading rule rather than a quality judgement. When you're forced to raise cash, sell the one the market is still paying up for — here Moody's, which is holding its price better and carries the higher multiple — and keep the one that's already been marked down.
He's fair about the other view: Moody's is arguably the purer business because more of its revenue is credit ratings. But if the whole point of a forced sale is to keep the most upside, selling the cheaper of two near-identical assets is backwards.
Netflix is Ackman's biggest new buy at nearly 5% of the fund. It's trading about 50% below its highs on worries about engagement and competition that Carlson has argued at length are misread.
His own behaviour is the disclosure that matters here: it remains one of his largest positions, he hasn't sold a share through the entire drawdown, and he has put another $5,000 in this year. "There is a lot of fears baked in that I don't believe are accurate."
ASML makes the machines that print the world's most advanced computer chips, and nobody else can build them. Carlson still loves the business — but he's selling some of it, and says so plainly: the valuation is "very stretched today," so he's been trimming even though it's been one of his two best performers. Pat Dorsey trimmed too, which Carlson calls smart.
The more useful part is the tension he leaves unresolved. Dorsey's first trim came at about $1,300 a share — and the stock then ran to roughly $2,000. Carlson faced the same doubling and chose to let it ride, and generalises the lesson: "when a stock has this much good sentiment behind it, they travel up a lot further than you'd think. So, you can be very slow to take gains in stocks like this." So the discipline isn't "sell when expensive," it's "sell slowly into strength, and don't confuse an expensive price with a finished move."
Dev Kantesaria's refusal to trim it at all gets a different explanation. In a portfolio otherwise built entirely on interest-rate-sensitive financial-data businesses, ASML is the only holding whose fortunes move for unrelated reasons — the single piece of genuine diversification, and this year the only thing keeping the fund's returns off the floor. Keeping it is a risk decision, not a valuation one.
Mastercard is the clearest illustration of Carlson's portfolio-construction rule. He owns it and deliberately does not own Visa, because the two businesses rise and fall with the same things — consumer spending, interest rates, regulation of card fees. Holding both would double the exposure without adding a genuinely different bet, which is exactly the flaw he diagnoses in Valley Forge's book.
The 13F detail is a cautionary one about timing. Kantesaria cut Mastercard 28% and Visa 22% — and because a 13F reports a quarter that ended weeks ago, we now know the sale landed immediately before both stocks rallied. Carlson's reaction ("these ones really sting") is a reminder that even forced, sensible-looking selling can be badly timed, and that copying a filing means copying a decision made months earlier.
Ackman, meanwhile, went the other way, buying Mastercard and Visa together as a single roughly 11% payments position.
AppLovin sells the software that helps app makers — mostly mobile games and consumer apps — find users and turn them into paying customers. It sits between advertisers and app audiences and takes a cut of the spending it makes more effective.
It's Pat Dorsey's second-largest position and he added meaningfully over the past three months. Carlson's description is approving on both the growth and the position: "outstanding growth… they've carved out a very good market position for themselves," compounding at 47% year over year on a trailing-twelve-month basis.
The caveat he attaches is about the ride, not the business: this is a name "you're going to see trade around with a lot more volatility" — high growth priced aggressively means the price swings hard in both directions.
DoorDash appears here as the other half of a swap. Carlson sold Booking Holdings — a business he still calls one of the highest quality in the world — and moved the money into DoorDash and Uber. All three are aggregators: platforms that sit between many suppliers and many customers and make the matching work.
The reasoning is about where each sits in its life cycle rather than quality. Booking "has already won the game, and it's already towards the end," while DoorDash and Uber are "more early in their respective journeys" — still building the network, still growing into their economics. Trading a finished compounder for two unfinished ones is a deliberate bet on the remaining runway.
Visa is owned by every manager reviewed here and, deliberately, not by Carlson. His objection isn't to the business — it's that Visa and Mastercard "are very much similar to each other and they're also sensitive to all these same factors," so owning both concentrates one risk under two names.
That's the general principle he's arguing all episode: a portfolio can be concentrated in the number of holdings while still spreading exposure across unrelated risk factors. Hohn added to Visa, Ackman bought it alongside Mastercard as one payments trade, and Kantesaria cut it 22% just before it rallied. Carlson relays all of that without taking a side on the stock.
FICO sells the credit score lenders use to decide who gets a loan and on what terms. Carlson doesn't own it, and it's the one Valley Forge reduction he agrees with — it was an oversized holding, so it's the sensible place to raise cash.
It's also his lead example of a hidden risk factor. FICO's revenue depends on how many loans are being written, which depends on interest rates: "as interest rates go up, homes become more expensive, fewer people need their FICO score." Pair that with S&P Global and Moody's — which get paid to rate debt, so they also slow when borrowing slows — and a portfolio that looks diversified by company name turns out to be one bet on the rate cycle.
Moody's is the other half of the credit-ratings duopoly with S&P Global. Carlson doesn't own it and doesn't argue against the business — his point is about which one you sell when you must sell something.
Moody's has held up better this year and trades at a higher multiple, so in his view it's the one to trim: you keep the asset the market has already marked down and realise value where the market is still paying up. Kantesaria did the reverse, and Carlson steel-mans why — Moody's is more purely a ratings business, and therefore arguably the higher-quality franchise.
Hohn, separately, maintains a large Moody's position. Nothing here is a call on the stock; it's a worked example of trim-selection logic.
GE Aerospace builds the engines on commercial airliners, and Carlson uses it as the textbook definition of an unbreachable moat — the anchor holding in Hohn's portfolio, though not one Carlson owns.
The barrier isn't a patent, it's the accumulation of everything an entrant would have to redo: enormous capital investment, decades of testing, certification through multiple regulators, and a safety record airlines will not gamble on. His AI-era phrasing: "Another startup company can't chat GPT their way into creating aerospace engines."
The one thing that could slow it is slower air travel — and air travel keeps growing, with airlines ordering more planes and therefore more engines. Carlson describes it admiringly and holds no position.
Martin Marietta supplies construction materials — aggregates, cement, chemicals. It's one of two new starter stakes in Hohn's fund at roughly 1.4%, which Carlson labels a "watcher position": too small to be a conviction bet, big enough to signal interest.
Why it fits the moat screen: these materials are heavy and expensive to move, so whoever owns the quarry nearest a market effectively controls that market. "Not technically a monopoly, but… very much like a controlling stake or a monopoly in many chemicals and materials in certain geographical areas."
Carlson relays it as an example of the non-tech, hard-to-disrupt businesses worth studying in that portfolio, without taking a position himself.
Booking runs the hotel- and travel-reservation platforms that sit between travellers and accommodation. Carlson owned it, made good money, and sold — and he's careful that the sale wasn't a downgrade: "one of the highest quality companies in the world… very capital efficient, super profitable," with heavy buybacks.
He sold to concentrate the portfolio and because he judged the growth largely captured. Booking "has already won the game," whereas DoorDash and Uber are earlier in building the same kind of aggregation network. That's a bet on remaining runway, not a criticism.
Pat Dorsey went the other way and built it into a large position — and Carlson says he understands the buy. The one risk he names, Google inserting itself between Booking and travellers, he waves off on the strength of Booking's back-end and infrastructure.
Summary & timestamps derived from the public YouTube video (transcript in transcript.txt) for personal study. Not investment advice. © Joseph Carlson for source material.