Most investors look at Haypp and see a low-margin online nicotine retailer trading at 0,7x sales, growing top-line at ~25% CAGR, with a thin EBIT margin. The bull case is that it’s cheap on a sales basis and the US market is opening up. That framing is fine, but it’s incomplete in a way I hadn’t fully appreciated until I went through their open job postings and cross-referenced them against what management has been saying.

The short version: Haypp isn’t building a better ecommerce business. They’re building a retail media network. The hiring pattern, the technology choices, and the language in the job descriptions all point to a deliberate, multi-year transformation of M&I from a high-margin data subscription bolt-on into something structurally closer to Amazon Ads at small scale. If they pull it off, the unit economics of the entire group change, and the right way to value Haypp shifts from “ecommerce multiple on consolidated revenue” to a sum-of-parts where the M&I piece carries a software/ad-tech multiple.

This isn’t a thesis I can prove from current financials. M&I is still reported as roughly 10% of revenue inside the consolidated number, and management hasn’t broken out its margin profile separately. But the operational evidence is unusually clear, and the trajectory is the kind of thing that gets ignored until segment-level disclosure forces the market to acknowledge it.

Below, I’ll lay out what I found, what M&I actually is today, what they appear to be building, and why I think the right way to think about Haypp is no longer just as a nicotine retailer.

NFA. This is my own analysis for entertainment purposes; do your own research before making any investment decisions.

The backstory

Haypp Group runs 16 e-commerce sites across 7 countries, selling nicotine pouches and snus. Total revenue is around SEK 4 billion, growing at an 18-25% CAGR target through 2028, with about 1,1 million active consumers.

But Haypp doesn’t just sell pouches. They also run a business unit called Media & Insights (M&I), which currently accounts for around 10% of revenue and grows at roughly 2x the rate of the rest of the group. M&I is the part of Haypp that has driven most of the gross margin expansion over the past two years; the consolidated gross margin has gone from 14,3% in Q2 2024 to 19,2% in Q2 2025, and management has explicitly attributed a meaningful share of that uplift to M&I.

So what is M&I actually doing today? It splits into two pieces.

The Insights piece. Haypp sits on a dataset that effectively does not exist anywhere else: every transaction by ~1,1 million age-verified online nicotine consumers across 16 sites in 7 countries. They know exactly which products switch to which, how price elasticity varies by market, which flavors are gaining share in real time, what percentage of ZYN buyers also try VELO, repeat rates by SKU, basket composition, and conversion rates by brand. There is no Nielsen for online nicotine. The offline scanner data captured by IRI/Circana, the kind shown in the WhiteWillowResearch tweet I recently saw, only covers physical retail. Haypp packages this data into reports and dashboards and sells it on contract to the six big brand owners (PMI, BAT, Altria, JTI, Imperial, and Swedish Match before PMI absorbed it), to regulators, and to researchers. This is essentially a syndicated data product, structurally similar to what NielsenIQ sells to FMCG companies. The revenue model is recurring contracts; the cost structure is mostly the analytics team that produces the data plus a small commercial team. Once the pipeline is built, each new contract is almost pure margin.

The Media piece. Brand owners pay Haypp for premium placement on Haypp’s owned properties: featured product slots on category pages, sponsored placements on the homepage, dedicated landing pages for new flavor launches, email campaigns to existing customer cohorts, and supplier-funded promotional pricing on key SKUs. This is closer to traditional retailer co-op marketing or trade marketing dollars. It’s high-margin because Haypp owns the inventory and doesn’t pay anyone to acquire the audience (97% of traffic is organic, marketing costs run below 1% of revenue). But the deals are manually negotiated, not programmatic. They aren’t measured with ad-tech-grade attribution. They aren’t bought through a self-service interface. Each campaign is essentially a custom project.

So today’s M&I is a data subscription business plus a manually-sold on-site media business. Both pieces are attractive on their own, both are growing, and together they explain why the consolidated gross margin keeps expanding. Nothing about this is hidden; management talks about M&I on every earnings call, and the Capital Markets Day 2025 deck makes the 10% revenue / 2x growth disclosure explicit. This is the visible part.

The interesting part is what they appear to be building next, and that’s where the LinkedIn search comes in.

What the LinkedIn search revealed

Haypp’s public job board (which mirrors what they post on LinkedIn) currently shows around 11 open roles. What stood out is that several of them describe a retail media platform under active construction, using technical vocabulary that doesn’t show up in earnings reports. Three roles in particular tell the story.

Retail Media Lead (Stockholm). This is the central role. The JD asks for someone with 8+ years of experience in “Retail Media, AdTech, or E-commerce strategy” with a “strong understanding of ad servers, SSP/DSPs, and first-party data activation”. The mission, in their words, is to “scale our current offering into a world-class advertising network” across all 16 platforms. Responsibilities include partnering with Tech and Product teams to “implement new ad formats (on-site, off-site, and social) and improve self-service capabilities”, and working with the Data team to “refine audience segmentation and attribution modelling”. This is not a marketing role. It is a product and platform role that uses the technical vocabulary of programmatic advertising.

Global Paid Co-Marketing Lead (Stockholm). The mission here is to design “the global paid co-marketing roadmap” that balances Haypp’s brand identity with “supplier-specific visibility across paid marketing channels”. Translated: take supplier media budget and deploy it through paid channels off Haypp’s own properties, with Haypp orchestrating the spend. This is the operational equivalent of an off-site DSP function, the same capability Amazon DSP provides for brands advertising off Amazon.

Retail Media Ad Ops Specialist (Stockholm). This role is explicitly being hired to “build and own our ad operations function from the ground up”. An ad ops function is the operational backbone of an ad platform; the people who manage campaign trafficking, creative QA, performance reporting, and the day-to-day running of advertiser accounts. The phrase “from the ground up” is the most important one in the entire job board: it tells you the operational layer of the platform doesn’t fully exist yet.

Underneath these three, there’s a supporting cluster of data and engineering hires (Internal Analytics Manager, Senior Data Analyst, Data Engineer, Head of Engineering) that build the data infrastructure any ad platform depends on. Individually unremarkable; collectively they’re the technical foundation the retail media stack sits on top of.

A few things make this set of roles particularly revealing.

First, the technical vocabulary. SSP/DSP, ad server, first-party data activation, attribution modelling, audience segmentation, self-service capabilities; this is the language of Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, and Criteo. It is not the language of a retailer’s marketing department. Combined with the fact that Haypp has already deployed Kevel (the leading white-label ad server for retailers building their own ad networks), this is the technology stack of a retail media platform under active construction.

Second, the org shape. Hiring a global lead, an off-site orchestration role, and an ops specialist simultaneously is exactly the shape of an ad platform org chart in its first year of build-out. Hiring just one of these would suggest scaling existing capability. Hiring all three at once suggests building something new and treating it as a strategic priority.

Put together, the LinkedIn evidence describes a company in the late-foundation, early-productization stage of building a retail media network. The data infrastructure is in place. The ad server is deployed. The org around it is being hired. The self-service interface and the off-site DSP capability appear to be the next 12-24 months of work. None of this is mentioned explicitly in earnings reports beyond the high-level “Media & Insights is growing 2x” disclosure, but the operational footprint is unambiguous.

That gap between the operational footprint and what the financial reporting currently shows is the interesting investment angle, and it’s where I’ll go next.

The opportunity

To understand why this matters, you have to understand the unusual position the big nicotine brand owners are in. PMI generates around $37 billion in revenue annually, BAT around £27 billion, Altria around $20 billion. Companies of that size would normally spend somewhere between 6% and 10% of revenue on marketing. PMI alone is therefore working with a global marketing budget likely in the range of $2-4 billion. The combined nicotine industry’s marketing budget across these six brand owners runs into the tens of billions of dollars annually.

The problem is they have almost nowhere to spend it.

TV is heavily restricted or outright banned in most markets through the US Master Settlement Agreement and equivalent rules in Europe. Print is dying and most major publications won’t accept nicotine advertising even where it’s legal. Out-of-home is being progressively banned in city after city. Meta prohibits all nicotine product advertising, full stop. Google heavily restricts nicotine ads on Search and YouTube. TikTok prohibits it. Influencer marketing is blocked by both platform policies and PMI’s own internal rules, which prohibit using social media influencers in the US or anyone under 35 in marketing materials. The giant platforms where every other consumer goods company spends the bulk of their digital budget are categorically closed to nicotine.

So where does the money actually go today? A fragmented mess of channels: owned media on age-gated brand sites, a small handful of endemic publishers, retail co-op deals with c-store chains for shelf placement, sponsorships of motorsports and adult-oriented events, and a meaningful amount of underspent budget that sits idle because there’s nowhere efficient to put it. None of this offers the targeting, attribution, or scale that PMI’s media team would get on Meta if Meta took their money.

Haypp currently captures only a tiny slice of this budget. M&I is around SEK 400 million in revenue, split across the six brand owners, mostly through manually-negotiated insights contracts and on-site placements. Against a combined nicotine marketing budget that runs into the tens of billions, Haypp is capturing on the order of 1-2% of the industry’s available digital marketing dollars, despite running the only large-scale, age-verified, attributable digital nicotine consumer audience in the world. The constraint isn’t supplier willingness to spend; the constraint is that Haypp’s current model can only handle so many bespoke deals at once.

This is where self-service changes the shape of the business. The reference example most investors will know is Reddit. For years Reddit had a perfectly functional ad business that was bottlenecked by manually-negotiated direct deals with big brands. The economics were fine but the growth was slow because every dollar of revenue required a salesperson. When Reddit invested seriously in self-service infrastructure (specifically the auction-based Ads Manager that lets any advertiser set up a campaign without ever speaking to a Reddit employee), advertiser counts went from a few thousand managed accounts to hundreds of thousands of self-serve accounts, and ad revenue scaled in a way that wasn’t possible under the old model. The same dynamic played out at Meta in the early 2010s, at Pinterest after their 2018 self-serve launch, and at every retail media network that has matured. Self-service doesn’t just make existing advertisers more efficient; it brings in advertisers and campaign types that the manual sales motion couldn’t economically support. The long tail of smaller suppliers, regional variants, and challenger brands like Lucy, Rogue, On!, and Black Buffalo can buy their way in once the minimum spend drops from “negotiate a six-figure quarterly deal” to “log in and run a 5,000 SEK test campaign next week.”

The honest caveat is that it’s not entirely clear from the outside how much self-service Haypp has already built. The Retail Media Lead JD talks about “improving self-service capabilities”, which suggests some baseline exists, but the Ad Ops Specialist being hired “from the ground up” suggests the operational layer underneath is incomplete. The Kevel deployment provides the ad-serving infrastructure but Kevel is a toolkit, not a turnkey product; building a true self-service buyer interface on top of Kevel is itself a multi-quarter engineering project. My best read is that Haypp is somewhere in the middle of this transition, with parts of the stack functioning and parts still being built. The exact state isn’t visible from public disclosure.

What you can say with confidence is that the direction is unambiguous. They are building the architecture that converts a manually-sold, sales-capacity-constrained media business into an auction-based, software-scaled platform that big brand owners can deploy meaningful budget into without Haypp adding headcount proportionally. In a category where those brand owners have tens of billions of marketing dollars and almost nowhere compliant to spend them, the difference between capturing 1-2% of that budget and capturing 5-10% of it is the difference between Haypp being a small Nordic ecommerce retailer and Haypp being something materially different.

The valuation case

Here’s where the thinking gets interesting.

Read more

The problem with my own process is that time spent going deep is time away from discovery. On too many occasions, I’ve spent tens of hours researching a company only to find out that some key part of it doesn’t hold up. It can be management. Segmentation. Capital allocation. Any number of things.

The failure mode is always the same: I dig 90% of the way into a company before discovering the detail that kills the thesis.

Screeners don’t help. They filter on multiples, not on the things that actually matter, the semantic stuff. What the company does, how it does it, and whether the story holds together.

So I started building something that would remove this inefficiency from my process.

Introducing Stockread

The solution I came up with isn’t a screener. It’s a system that lets you understand all the key details of a company in about 10 minutes. I’ve been building and testing it for months, and it’s finally ready for wider adoption.

The app solves several problems, all grounded in my own struggles.

The main feature is reports built to be digested fast. Each one breaks down what the company actually does, what other people think of it, the bear thesis, the exact segmentation, and the rest of the things that normally take hours to piece together. The list goes on. Essentially, it’s a tool for killing blind spots before you commit time to a deeper dive.

I’ve made coverage for roughly 150,000 assets so far. Stocks, ETFs, funds, commodities, indexes.

Which brings me to the second feature: exploration. The app doesn’t just cut the time to understanding a business. It actively pushes you to look at sectors and companies outside your comfort zone.

A failure mode I see constantly is investors getting stuck on their favorite names and refusing to look elsewhere. Stockread has a few features built to fight this. The app gives you a daily sector tour, explaining different industries and surfacing stocks that fit the theme. There are also country-specific thematic reports that let you build an understanding of new markets. Say you’re interested in South Korea. You know very little about the market, but you have a wider thesis and want to find the right way to express the exposure. The thematic report walks you through the politics, the history, and suggests key names along the way.

All of this is aimed at cutting down the time investors spend clicking through websites, interrogating LLMs about details, Googling key executives, and finally landing on the bear thesis only to realize the stock isn’t for them.

My aim with Stockread is simple: let investors absorb 100x more information, and stop laziness from killing returns.

StockRead

The problem

I launched Stockread about a month ago and have been shipping updates almost daily since. Speed, UI, coverage, all of it. The app already has a small base of loyal users. The problem is the feedback loop. Current users either think the app is perfect, or more likely, they're biased and don't have much to push back on. This is where I've started hitting the limits of improving the app alone. Stockread captures what I want it to be, but it might be missing things that other investors value. To make it genuinely great, I need input from a more diverse set of readers. And I figured, what better group than the readers of this blog. So if any of this resonates, I'd really appreciate your feedback: - What parts of the experience work? - What parts feel off or frustrating? - What's missing from the reports? - What would make you actually open it daily? The app is on the App Store, link below. Free to start, paid after heavier usage. I hope some of you recognize the pain this is trying to solve, and that the app helps you absorb more information and find better opportunities.

StockRead

Screenshots below

Thank you for reading. It genuinely means a lot. I hope Stockread finds its way to some of you, and I'm grateful for any feedback, criticism, or ideas you send my way. Emil

Web traffic surged 15.5% QoQ to about 23.7 million visits, driven by strength in women’s health domains; that demand signal contrasts with a potential revenue dip from FDA restrictions on compounded weight loss drugs. The near-term print may disappoint given the recent run in the stock, but the setup here is materially different from where Hims was a few years ago.

The legal overhangs that weighed on the stock for years are largely resolved. The narrative has shifted cleanly to peptides, a category with what looks like durable demand ahead. That is a fundamentally better story to own, and the market is starting to price it that way without yet going completely off the rails on valuation. After years of trading at multiples that assumed perfection, Hims is now sitting at a valuation that looks grounded; not cheap in an absolute sense, but reasonable given the growth runway if the peptide category develops the way early signals suggest it will.

This is my first coverage post on HIMS, so errors are more likely than on names I have tracked for several quarters. The alt-data read will sharpen as I calibrate against reported results. That said, the stock has been on my radar for a long time and I have a view on the setup, which you can read in the editorial note above.

Outlook Snapshot

Q1 FY2026 covers Jan–Mar 2026. Last quarter, Q4 FY2025 (Oct–Dec 2025), revenue came in at USD 617.8M. Earnings are expected around 2026-05-11, per the EODHD calendar; Hims Hers Health Inc has not yet officially confirmed the day.

App Downloads Signal

App installs decelerated this quarter. iOS downloads, which make up 74% of the mix and often convert to higher-value subscribers, peaked in January before dropping in February and stabilizing in March; Android showed stability with a slight increase from January to February before holding steady. This softening in acquisition could pressure subscriber growth if conversion rates don’t hold up. The trend contrasts with web traffic strength, adding uncertainty to the revenue picture.

Web Traffic Signal

Aggregate web traffic rose 15.5% QoQ and 65.4% YoY, reaching about 23.7 million visits. Demand accelerated across the platform. The surge came largely from Hers-related domains. Forhers.com jumped sharply from 8.8 million to 11.6 million visits.

Apostrophe.com rebounded modestly to 20,675 visits after prior declines. Hims domains stayed mostly stable. Consistent traction held in men’s health.

Traffic drives user funnels into consultations and subscriptions. The uptick helps but may not fully offset disruptions elsewhere.

Intra-quarter patterns decelerated toward March. Momentum faded. Demand is positive overall, especially in women’s offerings.

Hers Brand Read

Signal sources: forhers.com, hers.com

Hers domains drove the quarter’s traffic growth. Forhers.com jumped sharply QoQ, while apostrophe.com rebounded slightly after declines. Traction strengthened in women’s health and skincare.

Engagement is the clearest signal in the Hers brand this quarter.

Subscribe now

Hims Brand

Signal sources: hims.com, forhims.com, forhims.co.uk

Traffic for Hims domains held largely stable QoQ. Hims.com ticked up slightly, but forhims.com dipped modestly; the UK site stayed steady. Demand stayed consistent in men’s health without big shifts.

Engagement in the Hims brand is flat rather than accelerating this quarter.

Revenue Estimate

My Q1 FY2026 revenue estimate is USD 614.9M. The slight dip starts from last quarter’s USD 617.8M. The dip comes from decelerating app installs and intra-quarter traffic softening, despite the overall web uptick. Hers brand contributes positively with its traffic surge.

That adds growth in women’s health. Hims brand is stable, holding its ground without acceleration. Positive drivers include underlying revenue momentum and daily app trends. Monthly app deceleration weighs in.

Sensitivities sit around the FDA restrictions from February 2026, which halted compounded semaglutide sales—a segment worth $180-200M quarterly—but my estimate sticks to what the alt-data signals, treating the event as background risk rather than a direct adjustment. My estimate lands 0.4% below consensus, a minor divergence at medium confidence.

What the Market Thinks

Consensus from EODHD has revenue at USD 617.2M for Q1 FY2026, based on 12 analysts, with a band from USD 608.4M to USD 632.5M. EPS sits at 0.0383. The stock fell 37.9% over the quarter, from 33.41 to 20.76.

Market chatter focuses on regulatory risks, with positive sentiment around a scheduled FDA review of peptide compounding eligibility. Discussions highlight subscriber growth and the lab testing launch. Regulatory concerns caused volatility. The narrative emphasizes evolving into a scalable consumer health platform.

Risk Factors

My biggest worry is prolonged FDA restrictions from February 2026 halting compounded semaglutide, eroding the $180-200M quarterly from weight loss; if no offsets emerge, revenue could drop by up to 32%, pushing below USD 420M. App install deceleration adds pressure on subscriber adds, particularly on iOS where the monthly trend is softest. Signals are noisy here, so confidence is medium; actuals could diverge if intra-quarter trends worsen.

Traffic-Revenue Decoupling

Web traffic surged 15.5% QoQ to 23.7M visits, driven by Hers domains, but this demand strength contrasts with a potential revenue dip from FDA restrictions halting $180-200M in quarterly weight loss sales.

Weight Loss Segment Headwind

If the FDA crackdown on compounded semaglutide fully erodes the $180-200M quarterly from weight loss without offset from other segments, my revenue estimate could fall by up to 32%, landing below USD 420M.

Editorial Note

I have followed Hims for a while and traded it several times over the years, both short and long, with good results. The stock had significant legal overhangs and was trading at extended valuations a few years back; that setup is largely behind us now. The focus has shifted to peptides, a category I expect to see sustained demand in going forward.

For this quarter specifically, the setup looks different from prior periods. Revenue will likely print in a fairly expected range, and given the recent stock surge, a slightly soft print could trigger a modest dip. That is the near-term read.

Longer term I am more constructive. The peptide narrative will drive retail interest hard, and the valuation is looking grounded relative to where this stock has traded historically. Hims tends to swing to extremes; I would not be surprised to see it hit new all-time highs as retail momentum builds again. I will be tracking it closely.

Disclaimer: This research is informational and not personalized investment advice. Outputs blend alternative data with a disciplined internal workflow; figures are directional and may change as new information arrives. Past accuracy does not guarantee future results.

If you want more of these before they hit earnings, subscribe at emilhartela.com.

I followed and traded HIMS for roughly a year and a half. It was a chaos trade. The stock has a beta of 2.47 and it earned every bit of that, moving 15-20% on FDA headlines with no warning. At its worst the regulatory noise around compounded semaglutide made the stock nearly untradeable on fundamentals; at its best the GLP-1 hype sent it vertical. I stepped away. Now I’m back, and I want to explain both why this stock belongs in my coverage universe and why right now is the right time to initiate.

Why HIMS is a natural fit for alt-data coverage

The business model is almost entirely digital. A customer discovers Hims or Hers, visits the website or app, consults with a licensed provider, and enrolls in a subscription. That funnel generates a clean, trackable signal in web traffic and app install data weeks before the company reports anything.

This is the core of what I do. When a DTC health platform is growing at 49% year-over-year and I can observe whether that growth rate is accelerating or decelerating through alternative data, I have a meaningful edge over the market, which is sitting on the sidelines waiting for the quarterly print. HIMS is one of the cleanest setups for this kind of work that I cover.

Share

What the business actually is

Hims & Hers runs a telehealth platform that connects consumers to licensed doctors and nurses for prescriptions across stigmatized wellness categories: erectile dysfunction, hair loss, skincare, and now weight management. Everything is delivered directly to your door. No office visit, no pharmacy line, no awkward conversation. That privacy angle is not a marketing gimmick; it is the structural reason the brand has pricing power in categories where competitors hesitate to go.

The model is subscription-based. Customers consult, get prescribed, and receive recurring shipments. That creates predictable revenue and high retention if the product works. Gross margins sit at 75%, which reflects the efficiency of a DTC operation without physical retail overhead. Operating margins are thin at 2%, but that is a deliberate choice; the company is spending aggressively to grow the subscriber base.

TTM revenue is $2.2 billion, up 49% in the most recent quarter. Founder-CEO Andrew Dudum has been at the helm since 2017, and insiders hold 6.3% of the company. The market cap is $3.7 billion.

Subscribe now

Where the money comes from

Revenue breaks into four segments. Weight management is now the largest at 39% of total revenue, fueled by compounded GLP-1 drugs including semaglutide analogs. Dermatology and skincare is 24%, sexual health is 20%, and wellness and hair care is 17%. Geographically, 95% of revenue comes from the US.

That segment mix matters for how I think about the stock. The top segment at 39% is the highest-growth part of the business but also where the regulatory risk concentrates. The other three segments are stable; they provide ballast but they are not driving the growth narrative. This is fundamentally a weight management growth story with a diversified base underneath it.

The competitive position

Hims competes against Ro in sexual health and weight loss, Teladoc in broader telehealth, and GoodRx at the discount end. The differentiation is brand trust in taboo categories. A consumer who already trusts Hims with their ED prescription is far more likely to start a GLP-1 subscription through Hims than through a platform they have never used. That trust is genuinely difficult to replicate and it extends naturally into each new vertical Hims enters.

The brand moat is the most durable part of the story. Network effects are moderate; the Labs personalization product, which tracks biomarkers over time to refine treatment plans, adds stickiness but it is not a flywheel in the way that social platforms have one. Scale advantages from spreading fixed costs over a large subscriber base are real. The weakness is FDA exposure on compounded drugs, which is concentrated in the highest-revenue segment.

On the supplier side, pharmaceutical ingredient providers have meaningful leverage, and FDA rules amplify that in weight management specifically. Buyer power is low by structure; millions of individual consumers making small recurring transactions have no negotiating position. New entrants face moderate barriers in stigmatized categories where brand rapport matters, and lower barriers elsewhere.

Management

Dudum has built this from a sexual health niche into a multi-category telehealth platform in seven years. The strategic bets have been sharp: the GLP-1 pivot was early and it paid off. CFO Yemi Okupe brings execution depth. The Zava acquisition adds European distribution; the Trybe Labs acquisition deepens the data personalization layer. Stock-based comp runs at 8% of revenue, which signals a growth-over-profits mentality and is worth watching as the business matures. Insider ownership at 6.3% is acceptable alignment but not exceptional.

The strategy and the optionality

The near-term priority is scaling the weight management subscriber base. Affordable compounded semaglutide, the Hers women’s line, and AI-driven Labs personalization are the three levers. The international opportunity via Zava is early but real. Longer-term, mental health and chronic care verticals are logical extensions of the platform. The optionality here is genuine; a company with this brand, this margin structure, and this distribution reach has multiple paths to compound.

R&D spend is 5.3% of revenue, modest but targeted. The focus is AI personalization and the Labs data flywheel, which tracks biomarkers over time to refine treatment protocols. That positions Hims to differentiate from basic telehealth as the category commoditizes.

Why I’m initiating now

Two things have shifted. First, the regulatory situation around compounded GLP-1s looks materially more settled than it did for most of the past 18 months. The compounded semaglutide question was the central bear thesis; if that risk is largely resolved, the valuation math changes. The 39% weight management segment can be underwritten more confidently.

Second, peptide and GLP-1 consumer demand is genuinely accelerating. This is not hype normalizing; it is structural. The consumer addressable market for weight management subscriptions is far larger than what Hims has captured, and the platform is well-positioned to take share. Accessible pricing, discreet delivery, and a trusted brand are the right combination for this category at this moment.

The stock was untradeable on FDA headlines. Now the fundamental picture is cleaner, the alt-data signal is trackable, and the demand backdrop is strong. That is the setup I look for.

What comes next

I will be running web traffic and app install data on HIMS going into the next earnings print. That data will form the core of the earnings preview, which goes to paid subscribers. Free readers get the coverage initiation and the setup framing. Paid readers get the data read, the model, and my view on positioning.

If you are not already subscribed, the link is below.

I have recently been expanding my coverage to more stocks that can be modeled using web traffic and app download data. StubHub is an interesting company to test the pipeline against and works as a useful experiment for understanding where the model has limits.

I am not yet sure whether StubHub will become an official coverage stock. It does not quite meet my ideal criteria. Web traffic and app downloads do carry some predictive power here, but the nature of the business creates a structural problem. Hot events can massively amplify ticket resale volumes in ways that web traffic alone simply cannot anticipate. The result is that the signal is noisier than I would like, and the average error in backtesting came out larger than my threshold.

For now StubHub sits in experimental territory. I will continue gathering data and may revisit it more seriously if I can add data sources that better capture ticket sales intensity and event sentiment.

One more thing worth flagging. The revenue estimate in this post lands well below street consensus, and that gap is likely a direct consequence of the weak explanatory power of traffic on this name. Misses in either direction of 10% or more are plausible. This report is best read as indicative of a potentially softer quarter than the street expects, not as a precise prediction.

StubHub’s Traffic Split: North America Tanks While International Spikes

StubHub’s aggregate web traffic fell 16.5% quarter-over-quarter in Q1 FY2026; the split is what surprises me—North America dropped sharply while international sites spiked. Stubhub.com visits declined about 18% from 67.2 million to 55.2 million – that marks seasonal weakness after the holiday peak. Viagogo.com jumped over 40% to 1.6 million visits; that divergence means uneven momentum. This is my first coverage post on the name, so errors are more likely than on tickers I’ve tracked for several quarters; my alt-data read should sharpen with each cycle as I calibrate against reported results.

App Install Trends

App installs held stable for StubHub in Q1 FY2026. The StubHub app added about 20,000 downloads each month, matching recent quarters. Viagogo’s app spiked in March to 200,000 downloads, doubling from February. The March surge means growing international engagement.

These figures cover Android only, via Google Play data; App Store installs are not available. Not every install converts to revenue—retention and transactions matter more. Stable installs sustain user acquisition. The international uptick provides modest offset to North American weakness.

Web Traffic Breakdown

Aggregate web traffic dropped 16.5% quarter-over-quarter to 58.0 million visits in Q1 FY2026. The year-over-year decline hit 62.9%. North America drove most of the pullback; stubhub.com visits fell about 18% from 67.2 million to 55.2 million. Q1 is historically soft for live events.

International sites bucked the trend. Viagogo.com spiked over 40% to 1.6 million visits; stubhub.co.uk dipped modestly to 0.7 million. Stubhub.ca rose to 0.5 million visits. The divergence stands out—domestic weakness amid international pockets of growth.

North America Read

Signal sources: stubhub.com, stubhub.ca

North America is the revenue heavyweight. Traffic here declined sharply in Q1 FY2026, with stubhub.com down about 18% quarter-over-quarter. The drop is seasonal. January through March is consistently soft for live events after Q4’s holiday surge.

Stubhub.ca added a small lift, up to 0.5 million visits. Event mix adds lumpiness; fewer major concerts or sports post-holidays weigh on gross merchandise sales.

International Read

Signal sources: viagogo.com, stubhub.co.uk

International traffic grew modestly quarter-over-quarter, led by viagogo.com’s 40% spike to 1.6 million visits. Stubhub.co.uk held at 0.7 million, a slight dip. This outpaces North America’s decline; the segment has a faster trajectory.

Revenue here adds upside, partially offsetting North American weakness through higher gross merchandise sales.

My Revenue Estimate

The Q1 FY2026 revenue estimate is USD 367.5M. That lands about 18.2% below last quarter’s USD 449.2M. Seasonal weakness historically drags Q1 results. North America contributes the bulk but pulls back on lower traffic and event volume.

International adds some lift from traffic gains, tempering the decline. Event mix sensitivities matter—a stronger concert lineup could add 5-10 points to gross merchandise sales. Where traffic is noisy, I lean on backtested patterns. The estimate includes these dynamics without assuming major distortions like last year’s Eras Tour.

What the Market Thinks

Consensus from 11 analysts puts Q1 FY2026 revenue at USD 425.2M, with EPS at 0.004. The street band runs from USD 387.6M to USD 460.2M. Stock price sank 56.3% over the quarter, from 14.29 to 6.24.

Independent views emphasize AI-driven direct issuance for efficiency and international expansion outpacing North America. Sentiment is cautious, with sparse discussion on stock declines. My EODHD calendar does not yet show a confirmed report date for this quarter.

Risks to the Estimate

Event mix swings are uncertain—a weaker concert slate could subtract 5-10 points from gross merchandise sales, pushing revenue below my USD 367.5M estimate.

The divergence from consensus comes from these factors, with my read 13.6% below the USD 425.2M average. International momentum helps, but it starts from a smaller base.

What Stood Out

Despite aggregate traffic plunging 62.9% YoY, international sites like viagogo.com posted over 40% QoQ gains, diverging sharply from North America’s 18% decline on stubhub.com amid seasonal weakness.

Risk to the Read

If event mix swings toward a weaker concert slate, gross merchandise sales could drop an additional 5-10%, pushing total revenue below my $367.5 million estimate.

Disclaimer: This research is informational and not personalized investment advice. Outputs blend alternative data with a disciplined internal workflow; figures are directional and may change as new information arrives. Past accuracy does not guarantee future results.

If you want more of these before they hit earnings, subscribe at emilhartela.com.

This is my first coverage post on MakeMyTrip, so errors are more likely than on names I’ve tracked for quarters; my alt-data read should sharpen as I calibrate against reported results.

The stock dropped 54.5% from January to March, with a critical report stirring controversy. Traffic fell 16.9% QoQ, but the mild 2.8% YoY decline means stability underneath. That mismatch is what caught my eye.

Outlook Snapshot

Q4 FY2026 covers Jan–Mar 2026, the exact window from 2026-01-01 through 2026-03-31.

Last quarter, Q3 FY2026 (Oct–Dec 2025), revenue came in at USD 295.7M.

Earnings are expected around 2026-05-20 per the EODHD calendar; MakeMyTrip has not yet officially announced the day.

How I Get to a Number

I use public web traffic and Android install deltas to read the quarter before MakeMyTrip prints. Every site and app is mapped to an IFRS revenue line — air, hotels, bus, others — then rolled up with seasonal and year-over-year patterns, plus an India events / hotels semantic layer for Hotels and Packages. Walk-forward backtests on prior quarters keep the model honest; the latest group-level MAPE is around 13%, with Hotels the noisiest segment. This is pre-print research, not a trade idea.

App installs held stable, with the main MakeMyTrip app around 900,000 monthly downloads in Jan–Mar 2026.

Goibibo saw 400,000–500,000 per month; RedBus jumped to 2 million in March after 1 million in February.

These deltas mean consistent user acquisition. Not every install converts to revenue, but steady onboarding supports engagement in air, hotels, and bus segments.

The signal matches traffic’s year-over-year stability; that offsets some seasonal web weakness.

Web Traffic Signal

Aggregate traffic fell 16.9% QoQ and 2.8% YoY in Q4 FY2026.

The QoQ decline is seasonal softness. Jan–Mar is consistently weak for Indian travel post-holidays.

Bookmyforex.com jumped from 149.2 million to 203.0 million visits, a sharp anomaly against the broader downtrend.

Revenue steps down from Q3’s USD 295.7M. YoY patterns temper the drop.

Hotels and Packages Read

Signal sources: makemytrip.com, goibibo.com (web) and com.makemytrip, com.goibibo (apps).

This is the revenue heavyweight, contributing about half the group.

Traffic pressure came from seasonality, down 4.9%, but year-over-year patterns add 6.8% and hotels semantic demand lifts another 1.7%, netting to +3.3%.

The segment lands at USD 132.6M, down QoQ yet stable against last year.

Remaining Segments

Air Ticketing

Signal sources: makemytrip.com, goibibo.com (web) and com.makemytrip, com.goibibo (apps).

Air ticketing traffic declined QoQ with seasonal weakness, but year-over-year patterns add a 9.9% lift.

Stable app downloads mean consistent user engagement.

Revenue comes in at USD 63.1M, down QoQ but bolstered by the YoY adjustment.

Bus Ticketing

Signal sources: redbus.in (web) and in.redbus.android (app).

Bus ticketing traffic dropped QoQ from seasonality, down 2.8%, offset by a 10.6% year-over-year lift, netting to +7.4%.

RedBus app installs spiked in March; that brings volatility but late-quarter strength.

The segment adds USD 36.9M.

Others

Signal sources: makemytrip.com, bookmyforex.com, quest2travel.com, goibibo.com, redbus.in (web).

Others held resilient with bookmyforex.com’s traffic spike, diverging positively.

Year-over-year patterns add a 12.0%.

Revenue sits at USD 37.6M, punching above weight this quarter.

Revenue Estimate

My point estimate for Q4 FY2026 is USD 270.3M. Starting from Q3’s USD 295.7M, the QoQ step-down comes from seasonal headwinds across segments. Hotels and Packages contributes USD 132.6M, about 49% of the total, with a net +3.3% from modifiers including seasonality subtracting 4.9%, YoY patterns adding 6.8%, and hotels semantic demand adding 1.7%. Air Ticketing adds USD 63.1M, or 23%, leaning on a 9.9% YoY lift; Bus Ticketing brings USD 36.9M (14%) with a net +7.4% after seasonality’s 2.8% drag and 10.6% YoY offset; Others rounds out at USD 37.6M (14%) via 12.0% YoY patterns.

Traffic drives most of my read, with event and semantic layers fine-tuning Hotels; sensitivities sit in monetization holding against the seasonal dip. The estimate diverges below the full-year street consensus of USD 1.12B from those headwinds.

Subscribe now

Methodology Note

These per-segment figures are IFRS operating-segment revenue from MakeMyTrip’s filings; they sum to the group IFRS revenue line.

MakeMyTrip also reports an Adjusted Margin per segment, a non-IFRS metric that subtracts service costs, which differs from revenue.

Both metrics have value, but I use IFRS revenue here to tie directly to consolidated totals.

What the Market Thinks

The EODHD full-year revenue consensus sits at USD 1.12B from 9 analysts, with EPS at 1.6224 from the same group.

The stock fell 54.5% over Jan–Mar 2026, amid controversy from a critical report accusing the company of defying regulators, scamming customers, and padding profits.

Chatter picked up on X, with sentiment split — some defending the financials, others echoing the short-seller allegations.

Notable points: - MakeMyTrip reported its Q3 FY2026 results on January 21, 2026, noting impacts from GST rate reductions on hotel bookings. - The company announced on February 15, 2026, a repurchase right notification for its 0% convertible notes due 2028.

Focus heading into earnings is on hotels growth and addressing the short-seller allegations.

Risk Factors

Deeper seasonal weakness could hit monetization harder than modeled.

If it slips an extra 5% in Hotels and Packages, the estimate drops to around USD 264M.

The short-seller report might erode user trust, leading to lower bookings; if that reduces volumes by 3%, revenue could fall to USD 262M.

Bookmyforex Jump

Despite aggregate traffic falling 16.9% QoQ, bookmyforex.com visits jumped from 149.2 million to 203.0 million, diverging sharply from the downtrend and lifting the Others segment against the seasonal backdrop.

Seasonal Drag Risk

If seasonal weakness in Jan-Mar deepens monetization by an extra 5% beyond modeled, particularly in Hotels and Packages, my Q4 estimate could drop to around USD 264M.

My Current Take on $MMYT

If you have been following my posts closely, you know I have been vocal about the Iran war and the broader oil shock. Urea, energy inputs, and other critical economic costs are in my view not properly priced into the wider market yet. MakeMyTrip has already come down sharply from its highs, but with no clear resolution in sight, it is hard to be genuinely bullish on a business this exposed to those compounding cost pressures.

The Iran situation has also likely landed some direct hits on the company towards the end of the quarter. I expect the impact to be minor in the Q4 print but more visible in the quarters that follow. That means my revenue estimate could fall further than modeled, and the current full year consensus looks high if critical input costs stay elevated.

On the short report, the next earnings release will be telling. If management fails to address the allegations convincingly, that overhang does not go away quietly.

The longer term picture is a different conversation. If the short report findings do not reveal anything structurally damaging and the company responds well, I still think this is one of the cleaner plays on Indian travel digitization over a multi year horizon. The tailwind is real. The platform is built. The question is timing.

And on timing, I am not a buyer here. The stock trades at close to 5x sales. If the Iran cost pressures start materializing more visibly in reported numbers, I think a compression to 3 to 4x sales is quite plausible. Pair that with soft revenues and you are looking at a meaningful further haircut to the price. That is not a reason to panic. That is actually when the stock starts to look genuinely interesting.

My playbook right now is simple. Watch, monitor, and wait. The next two earnings releases will be critical. I expect buying opportunities to emerge, potentially shortly after the coming prints, and I will be publishing updates as the situation develops.

If you want to follow the coverage as this plays out, subscribe below.

Disclaimer: This research is informational and not personalized investment advice. Outputs blend alternative data with a disciplined internal workflow; figures are directional and may change as new information arrives. Past accuracy does not guarantee future results.

If you want more of these before they hit earnings, subscribe at emilhartela.com.

Recently, I announced that I will be expanding my research coverage materially. My niche is tracking companies whose main customer surfaces are web traffic and app usage. That matters because these digital footprints can often be turned into revenue prediction models, creating the potential to uncover alpha before it is visible in reported numbers.

The coverage expansion is still in its early days. At the moment, I cover Haypp, and MakeMyTrip will become the second ticker added to the research desk. In the near future, I will also publish my first revenue prediction on MMYT.

MMYT was chosen because it is an especially interesting candidate for alternative data analysis. The company has the data, but the data is not easy to model. That makes it more challenging, but also more interesting. Beyond that, the stock has a compelling narrative and will likely be a fresh idea for many of my current readers.

This post marks the start of my coverage on the company. The purpose is to provide a deep dive into what MakeMyTrip actually does and help you determine whether the name is worth following more closely. If you enjoy this post, consider subscribing to the coverage section so you do not miss the upcoming revenue prediction on MMYT.

Finally, this is not financial advice. The purpose of this coverage is to surface interesting opportunities and, over time, identify divergences through alternative data for readers who want to follow the name more closely.

So, let’s get into it.

MakeMyTrip is the leading online travel platform in India. For most users, it is simply the place where travel gets booked: flights, hotels, buses, holiday packages, and increasingly a broader set of travel-related services. But as an investment case, the company is more interesting than that. It sits at the intersection of several powerful trends in India: rising incomes, increasing domestic mobility, growing digital adoption, and the gradual formalization of travel bookings through mobile platforms.

The more important point is that MakeMyTrip is no longer just a growth story. After years of investing through a highly competitive market and then surviving the collapse in travel during COVID, the company has emerged as a meaningfully profitable business. That changes the framing. Investors are no longer looking only at bookings growth or market share. They are now asking whether this can become a durable compounder in one of the most attractive consumer internet markets in the world.

Founded in 2000 and listed since 2010, MakeMyTrip operates through a portfolio of strong brands including MakeMyTrip, Goibibo, and redBus. The business is headquartered in Gurugram and employs more than 5,000 people. On a trailing twelve-month basis, revenue is around $1.0 billion, with gross margins close to 58% and operating margins nearing 14%. For a company that spent years prioritizing scale and market positioning, that level of profitability is notable.

What makes the story compelling is that the company has already been stress-tested. Travel is cyclical by nature. Demand is vulnerable to economic slowdowns, fuel price spikes, public health shocks, and discounting wars. MakeMyTrip has already gone through the most severe travel downturn in modern history and came out stronger. That resilience matters because India’s travel market still looks early in its development.

A Simple Business Model With Powerful Scale Economics

At its core, MakeMyTrip is a marketplace and distribution business. It connects travelers with airlines, hotel operators, bus companies, and other travel service providers, then monetizes that connection through commissions, service fees, advertising, and ancillary products.

The model is straightforward, but its attractiveness comes from scale. Customers book through the company’s apps, websites, call centers, and agent channels. The offering spans flights, hotels, packages, bus and rail tickets, car rentals, experiences, insurance, foreign exchange, and visa-related services. For the user, the appeal is convenience. For MakeMyTrip, the appeal is volume.

This is a classic high-frequency, low-ticket distribution business. Millions of small transactions pass through the platform. As that volume grows, fixed investments in technology, customer acquisition infrastructure, and supplier integration become more productive. In other words, once scale is established, incremental bookings can become very profitable.

That does not mean the business is immune to pressure. Travel remains a price-sensitive category, and online travel agencies often compete aggressively on discounts. But the broader point stands: in a mobile-first market like India, where more of the travel booking journey is moving online, scale is extremely valuable.

Where the Money Comes From

MakeMyTrip’s revenue mix is fairly balanced, though Hotels and Packages now represent the most important part of the business.

Hotels and Packages account for roughly 55% of revenue and are the strongest part of the model. This segment benefits from higher take rates, better margin structure, and greater opportunity for cross-selling. A consumer booking a hotel stay or holiday package typically creates more monetization opportunities than someone booking a standalone flight.

Air Ticketing contributes around 30% of revenue. It remains a large and strategically important category, but structurally it is less attractive than hotels. Airline tickets are easier to compare, consumers are highly price-sensitive, and suppliers have more bargaining power. It drives traffic and engagement, but the margin profile is usually lower.

Bus Ticketing contributes the remaining 15%, largely through redBus. This is an especially interesting segment because it gives MakeMyTrip exposure to a part of the Indian travel market that is both massive and still digitizing. Bus travel is essential across the country, and redBus has become a strong category leader. That makes it more than just a side business. It is a real source of differentiation.

Geographically, the company is still overwhelmingly tied to India, which makes up more than 90% of revenue. International operations exist, including exposure to markets such as the US, Singapore, and the UAE, but these are supporting pieces rather than the core driver. This is fundamentally a company built around the Indian travel consumer.

Why the Segment Mix Matters

The quality of MakeMyTrip’s segment mix is one of the stronger features of the business.

Hotels and Packages combine growth with attractive economics. The supplier base is fragmented, which improves the platform’s negotiating position, especially when it operates at scale. Consumers also tend to prioritize convenience and trust more than pure price when booking higher-value travel. That gives MakeMyTrip more room to monetize effectively.

Air Ticketing is the weakest segment in structural terms. Airlines are larger and more concentrated suppliers. Consumers compare prices aggressively. External factors such as fuel costs and fare volatility can affect booking behavior. Even so, this segment remains important because flights are often the starting point of the travel journey. A company that controls the booking relationship for air travel can often attach hotel, insurance, and other services to that transaction.

Bus Ticketing is a stronger business than many investors may initially assume. redBus has carved out a meaningful niche, and because the category remains relatively underpenetrated digitally, there is still room for continued growth. It also broadens MakeMyTrip’s customer reach beyond the more premium parts of the travel market.

The result is a business that does not rely on a single fragile growth engine. Hotels provide margin strength, flights provide scale and traffic, and buses provide category depth and long-tail growth. That is a healthy combination.

Competitive Positioning

MakeMyTrip competes against domestic players such as EaseMyTrip and Yatra, as well as international travel platforms like Booking Holdings and Expedia. Yet its position in India remains very strong.

The company’s advantage starts with breadth. MakeMyTrip is not just a flight booking app or a hotel marketplace. It offers a full ecosystem that spans several major travel categories and multiple consumer segments. Its brand architecture also helps. MakeMyTrip, Goibibo, and redBus each play a distinct role in the market, allowing the company to address different use cases without relying on a single brand identity.

That breadth matters in a market like India, where travel behavior is fragmented across price points, geographies, and transport modes. A company that can serve the budget bus traveler, the domestic leisure flyer, and the hotel customer within one ecosystem has a stronger competitive position than a narrower platform focused on one category.

The company’s market share appears to sit in the roughly 30 to 40% range, which is meaningful in a market of this size. While competition remains intense, MakeMyTrip seems to occupy the strongest position among the major OTAs operating in India.

The Moat

The moat here is not mysterious. It comes from brand, scale, and ecosystem strength.

Brand matters because travel is a trust-based category. Consumers are making time-sensitive purchases, often with relatively large amounts of money, and they want reliability. MakeMyTrip, Goibibo, and redBus have built strong recognition over time, and that matters when customers are deciding where to book.

Scale matters because it improves supplier relationships and operating leverage. A platform with more demand can negotiate more effectively, secure better availability, and spread its technology and customer acquisition costs across a larger base of transactions. Smaller competitors can discount aggressively, but they often lack the broader advantages that come from scale.

The ecosystem matters because it makes the platform more useful over time. A user may arrive to book a flight, but if the same platform also offers hotels, buses, insurance, and other travel-related services, that booking relationship becomes more valuable. Reviews, loyalty features, and repeat usage strengthen this effect. It may not be a pure network effect in the strongest sense, but it does create increasing returns to scale and raises switching costs.

All of this suggests that MakeMyTrip is not simply winning through temporary discounting. It has built real structural advantages.

Industry Structure

The Indian online travel market has characteristics of an oligopoly, even if competition remains active. A few scaled players dominate digital bookings, and the barriers to entry are higher than they may first appear.

The biggest barrier is not building a website or app. It is acquiring users at scale, building trust, integrating supply, handling customer service, and operating profitably through cycles. That is much harder. Travel is also a category where reliability matters enormously. Consumers remember bad experiences, especially around cancellations, refunds, or poor service during disruptions.

The industry is still cyclical. Demand can swing with macro conditions, oil prices, currency moves, or broader uncertainty. COVID showed just how brutal those downturns can be. For that reason, online travel businesses need cash discipline and operating flexibility even when demand looks strong.

Regulation is present but not overwhelming. Tax changes, data privacy requirements, or sector-specific rules can matter, but these do not appear to be the core threat to the business. The larger risk remains the normal travel cycle itself.

Management and Capital Allocation

One of the more reassuring parts of the story is that the company remains founder-influenced and insider ownership is meaningful. That tends to matter in businesses where the path to value creation requires patience.

CEO Rajesh Magow and Chairman Deep Kalra have been central figures in building the company through multiple phases, including rapid growth, intense competition, the pandemic shock, and the return to profitability. The market does not always reward long investment cycles, but management appears to have stayed focused on building durable scale rather than optimizing short-term optics.

Capital intensity is low, which is exactly what investors want in a platform business. Capex remains modest, and the company has generally deployed capital in sensible ways. The acquisition and development of redBus stands out as a particularly strong strategic move. It gave the company a leading position in a major adjacent travel category and added another durable brand to the portfolio.

There is also a difference between growth that consumes capital and growth that benefits from already-laid infrastructure. MakeMyTrip increasingly appears to be moving into the second category.

Strategic Priorities

The next phase of the story likely revolves around deepening its leadership in Indian travel while increasing monetization per customer.

There are several levers here. The first is continued penetration of domestic travel demand, which remains the core opportunity. The second is growth in higher-value categories and ancillary services. The third is improving personalization and conversion through technology, particularly in a mobile-first environment where user experience can materially affect booking behavior.

The company also has optionality. It can expand more aggressively into corporate travel, broaden its offering in experiences and value-added services, or pursue selective M&A where there is a good strategic fit. Because the underlying platform is already built, these extensions can be attractive if executed well.

The key question is not whether there are opportunities. There clearly are. The question is whether management can pursue them without undermining the improved profitability profile the company now has.

Technology and Product

MakeMyTrip is not a deep-tech company, nor does it need to be. This is a distribution platform, and the technology goal is practical: make planning and booking travel easier, faster, and more personalized.

That means investing in search, recommendation systems, supplier integrations, and increasingly AI-enabled personalization. None of this needs to be flashy. It just needs to improve conversion, reduce friction, and increase repeat usage.

This is actually a positive. Some internet companies talk endlessly about innovation while the economics remain weak. MakeMyTrip’s technology spending appears more grounded. It supports the business model rather than distracting from it.

The Bigger Tailwind

Ultimately, the MakeMyTrip thesis rests on a simple macro idea: India is likely to produce far more travel demand over time.

As incomes rise, more consumers travel domestically and internationally. As digital payments and mobile internet penetration increase, more bookings move online. As transport infrastructure improves and the middle class expands, travel becomes a more routine part of consumer life rather than an occasional luxury.

That does not mean growth will be linear. Travel never is. But the long-term backdrop remains attractive, and MakeMyTrip appears to be one of the clearest listed ways to participate in it.

Final View

MakeMyTrip looks like a company that has already done the hard part. It built scale, survived a major industry collapse, defended its position in a competitive market, and finally emerged with real profitability.

That does not make it risk-free. Travel is cyclical, competition remains real, and market enthusiasm can run ahead of fundamentals. But the business itself looks stronger and more durable than the average platform story. It has category leadership, a sensible segment mix, real brand strength, and exposure to one of the most attractive long-term consumer demand stories in the world.

For investors, the question is no longer whether MakeMyTrip is a real business. It clearly is. The more important question is whether this is still an early-stage winner in a market that has much more room to grow.

In that sense, MakeMyTrip is not just an online travel agency. It is one of the cleaner listed plays on the digitization of Indian consumption.

End Note

Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed the piece.

If you found it useful, please consider sharing it and subscribing so you do not miss the upcoming revenue prediction on MMYT. In that post, I will model the business through web traffic and app data in an effort to front-run earnings and potentially surface alpha if a meaningful divergence can be identified.

If there are other names you would like to see covered, feel free to leave them in the comments below. And if you have not already, be sure to check out my work on Haypp as well.

For those new here, Haypp Watch is a recurring series where I track Haypp Group’s web traffic; the number of users browsing Haypp Group’s websites. I then apply different methods to translate that traffic into revenue estimates ahead of reported results, with the aim of identifying potential alpha.

For those who have followed the series for a while, there has been a longer gap since the last update. That is not because the work has stopped. Quite the opposite. Behind the scenes, I have continued refining the prediction engine, testing new ways to improve regional accuracy, and strengthening the overall revenue estimation pipeline. A meaningful part of that work has gone into making the framework more robust in quarters where the underlying signals are noisier and less straightforward to interpret.

At the same time, I have also been exploring how this pipeline can eventually be scaled beyond Haypp Group and applied to other companies where web traffic has similar predictive value. That part of the work is still developing, but the ambition is clear: to build a broader framework that can identify useful signals across a wider set of businesses.

And on that note, I would love to hear from readers: if there are other stocks you would like to see covered in the future, comment them at the end of the blog.

Disclaimer
This is not financial advice. The methods used in this analysis are experimental and rely on a limited historical dataset. Web traffic–based modeling has clear limitations, particularly during periods affected by supply disruptions and regulatory changes. Forecasting results should therefore be interpreted as directional signals rather than precise predictions, and they may change as new information becomes available.

Backdrop

Q1 is shaping up to be another interesting quarter for Haypp Group, although for different reasons than in Q4. The broad picture is still constructive. Total tracked daily traffic across Haypp Group’s main sites remained strong in Q1 and came in modestly above the Q4 average. That may not sound dramatic on its own, but it matters in the context of what sits underneath the headline number: several of Haypp’s most important properties continued to perform well, and the US recovery story appears to be extending into the new quarter.

The most important development is once again the US. Nicokick remained at a high level throughout the quarter and averaged clearly above Q4, while Northerner also showed notable strength toward the end of the period, including some very strong weekly readings. That matters because the return of ZYN likely did not fully flow through in Q4. A continued normalization of product availability should still support customer inflows in Q1, especially as former users gradually return to the category rather than all reappearing immediately in one quarter. In other words, the US tailwind likely did not end with Q4. It may still be building.

Outside the US, the picture remains healthy across most of the core business. Sweden continues to look strong, with Snusbolaget still operating at a very high level and Snuslagret also showing solid improvement versus Q4. Haypp’s multi market site performed well too, adding to the impression that demand remains firm across the broader platform. Norway was somewhat more mixed, but still directionally positive overall, with both Snus and Snushjem holding up reasonably well.

The emerging segment is where the picture becomes more complicated. On the one hand, some of the smaller sites still show decent activity. On the other, Haypp Group has wound down its UK vape division, which will likely create a drag on reported revenue from that part of the segment regardless of what parts of the traffic data may suggest. That makes emerging market traffic less clean as a forecasting signal this quarter than usual.

Taken together, Q1 looks like a quarter where the core growth story remains intact. Traffic strength has been broad enough to support another good quarter, and the US segment still appears to have more room to benefit from the return of ZYN. At the same time, the quarter is not perfectly clean from a modeling perspective. The UK vape wind down distorts part of the emerging segment, and some site level moves are stronger than others. Still, the overall setup looks constructive, especially because the strongest signals are once again coming from the markets that matter most.

Below is an overview of how traffic developed across Haypp Group’s main sites during the quarter.

What is happening under the hood

Before diving into the actual findings and my revenue estimates for each segment and for the group as a whole, it is worth briefly explaining what is happening under the hood.

At this point, I am no longer relying on just one forecasting method. I currently run several parallel approaches when estimating Haypp Group’s revenue, and encouragingly, the range between them has become much tighter over time. That is usually a good sign. It suggests that the framework is becoming more coherent and that the underlying signal is being handled in a more disciplined way.

I still run manual Excel based forecasts. That means going site by site, modeling traffic, comparing value per visitor to historical levels, and adjusting the output based on past patterns and my own understanding of the company. This remains useful, especially because manual work forces me to stay close to the business rather than blindly trusting a black box.

At the same time, the framework has evolved quite a bit. Last quarter I introduced several machine learning based models, and for Q1 I have continued improving them further. These models do not just ingest web traffic. They also incorporate extensive backtesting, enough flexibility to detect regime changes, and, increasingly, a more semantic layer that can pick up on major business events that pure traffic data may miss. A good example this quarter is the UK vape exit, which clearly affects Haypp’s Emerging segment and needs to be accounted for separately rather than treated as normal traffic noise.

It is important to stress that this system is still relatively unproven. The early mapping and backtesting look promising, but the usual risks remain. A more advanced model can improve structure and consistency, but it can also overfit, especially when the historical sample is limited. So while the framework is improving, it should still be viewed as an aid to judgment rather than a replacement for it.

What the market thinks

Before presenting my own results, it is worth looking at outside expectations.

On March 31, I ran a public poll on X asking what readers thought Haypp Group’s Q1 2026 revenue would come in at. Based on the response distribution, the implied expected value was roughly 1 062,5 MSEK, with most votes clustered in the 1 025 to 1 075 MSEK range.

That said, the sample was very small at just eight votes, so this should not be read too aggressively. Chatter around Haypp on X has also been quieter than normal lately, likely reflecting how the nicotine pouch hype has cooled after very elevated valuations across the sector. In many cases, that kind of quieter setup is not a bad sign for future price action.

There also appears to be at least one analyst estimate out there at 1 174 MSEK, although I have not verified whose estimate that is.

As in previous quarters, I still put more weight on the web traffic data than on loose market expectations. In the next section, I compare that market backdrop with the outputs from my own models.

Core market prediction

Starting with the Core segment, the picture remains constructive.

My manual estimate comes in at 755 117 991 SEK, which implies another strong quarter for Haypp’s core business. The main driver here is straightforward: traffic across the key Nordic sites remained strong, with particularly solid performance from Snusbolaget and continued strength across the broader core market footprint. In other words, the traffic backdrop was strong enough to support another robust revenue print even without assuming anything overly heroic on monetisation.

The ML model is somewhat more conservative and points to revenue of around 719,7 MSEK. That is a fairly meaningful gap, but not an especially surprising one. The model tends to be more cautious when traffic strength is unusually pronounced, whereas my manual approach is somewhat more willing to acknowledge that the current operating momentum in the core markets may be stronger than the historical averages would suggest.

For reference, Haypp reported 732 471 557,5 SEK in Core revenue in Q4. That means the ML model is currently implying a slight sequential decline, while my own estimate points to renewed growth. Given the strength seen across the main sites, I lean more toward the latter interpretation, although it is worth noting that the model may still be undershooting rather than outright wrong. We are getting closer to the point where the systematic framework may start doing a better job than my own hand built forecasts, but I do not think this is quite that quarter yet.

Overall, my base case is that Core revenue comes in clearly above the Q4 level, with the manual estimate currently looking like the more realistic read.

Growth segment prediction

Read more

Readers of Haypp Watch have repeatedly been able to understand where revenue was likely coming in before earnings and, in doing so, get ahead of the market. Last summer, readers following my work on X would have had a clear chance to avoid the 30%+ drawdown. At the same time, while working on Haypp and other names, I have been building the infrastructure needed to scale this prediction logic across a broader set of companies. That is what this update is about.

What I am working on

When I first started modeling Haypp’s revenue in 2024, the process was still relatively simple. The traffic categorization was rough, the methods were more basic, and much of the work depended on manual judgment. Even so, it worked well enough to do what it was meant to do: get closer to the numbers before the market did.

Over time, that process has become far more sophisticated and granular. The models have improved, the inputs have improved, and much more of the workflow has become automated. I am now at the point where the system can generate predictions with very little manual involvement, and in many cases those predictions have proven better than other estimates available in the market.

That naturally leads to the next challenge. My plan is to scale the same underlying logic across a much broader universe of stocks. Going forward, I will gradually begin adding more companies to the coverage and publishing estimates on a wider range of names where this approach appears to hold predictive power.

At first, that expansion will likely be somewhat messy. Some estimates may not be as refined as the Haypp work has become over time. But I believe the system will continue to improve as it is exposed to more companies, more data, and more edge cases. The long-term goal is to shape it into something that can produce unusually accurate predictions across a much wider set of stocks.

If that works, this Substack will likely look very different a year from now. In the next section, I will outline how I see the future structure of the blog.

How the blog will evolve

Over time, I expect the blog to take on three distinct parts.

The first is legacy content. This will include my existing work on Haypp, along with other topics, ideas, and commentary that I find interesting enough to write about directly.

The second part will be a much broader stock coverage layer. This will live under a new section called Coverage, which is where I will begin publishing model-driven work on a wider set of companies. Depending on how many names I find that genuinely fit the framework, this section could eventually contain anything from a handful of stocks to hundreds. If you want those posts delivered directly to your inbox, you will need to subscribe to the Coverage section separately.

The third part will be the Pro tier. Its purpose will be to extract the most valuable signal from the broader research. As the coverage universe expands, I expect to come across more divergences, more mispricings, and more situations where expectations and reality do not line up. Over time, those more interesting opportunities will increasingly flow into the Pro tier.

If there are specific stocks you would like to see analyzed using web traffic, app download data, or similar forms of alternative data, feel free to leave them in the comments. That is useful input, and I will do my best to bring the most interesting names into the coverage.

The first batch of broader revenue predictions should begin appearing within the next few weeks.

To everyone who has been reading, subscribing, and following the work so far, thank you. The blog would not be where it is today without the interest, feedback, and support it has already received.

A lot more is coming from here. And if there are specific stocks you would like to see covered as the new rollout begins, please leave a comment and let me know which names you would most like to see analyzed.

Leave a comment

P.S. A new Haypp revenue prediction will be out in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Share Emil Hartela Investing

Sold almost everything

It is cheap to panic early.

Right now the setup feels wildly unbalanced. We have a war with real potential to tip the world into recession, while most investors seem fixated on what tech stocks are doing. The war in Iran that started less than a week ago shows no clear signs of resolution; most signals point to further escalation.

At the same time, markets are sitting at all time highs and almost no one seems to care.

So here is what I am doing.

First, I sold basically everything except Haypp; Haypp is defensive enough for me to keep. Then I added a small basket of chemical and fertilizer exposure, mostly via options. I bought Braskem shares, plus options in several US fertilizer and chemical companies that have protected feedstock and should benefit if the situation worsens.

These names are already trading at depressed levels. With options, they can offer explosive upside over the coming weeks. I view these positions as hedges: fairly cheap; if we get peace I should not lose much. But if we suddenly end up in a scenario where Gulf production shuts down and Brent and feedstock chaos starts sending shockwaves through the system, these positions can move violently in a very short time.

Summary

In summary, I am out of most of my positions for the coming weeks because the risk feels extremely asymmetrical. What is left is Haypp and a small set of chemical and fertilizer hedges, like LyondellBasell and Dow. On top of that, I have a tiny short in Citibank in case things get really ugly.

The setup feels a bit like early Covid. No one cared, until everyone did. The coming week is make or break for this call; it will quickly tell me whether this drastic shift was smart or unnecessary.

Not financial advice.

Subscribe now

Haypp is also one of the most interesting stocks to experiment with alternative data; especially web traffic and customer behavior signals. The business is digital at its core; which makes leading indicators unusually visible.

With that framework in mind; let’s get straight into Q4.

Q4 Recap; Acceleration With Intent

Haypp published its Q4 earnings today and they look very promising. Revenue reached a new all time high and the company continues to generate strong, profitable operations in its core Nordic markets.

The real story, however, is what is happening beneath the surface. Haypp is deliberately leaning into the US and UK. Customer growth is accelerating, nicotine pouch volumes are expanding rapidly, and management is clearly prioritising scale over short term margin expansion.

Core Markets remain the financial backbone of the business. They are stable, profitable and funding the next phase of growth. This is important because it allows Haypp to invest aggressively without stressing the balance sheet.

There have been minor headwinds. Austria decided to move nicotine pouch sales into a state controlled retail structure, which will result in Haypp exiting that market. The revenue impact is very small and not structurally meaningful, but it is still a regulatory reminder.

Emerging Markets are growing at a very high pace, although still from a small base and currently loss making. These investments weigh on consolidated margins today, but they expand Haypp’s long term optionality.

Overall, Q4 shows a company that is accelerating on the topline, protecting its profitable base, and consciously investing in what could become its largest future cash flow engine.

Webcast Takeaways; Tone Matters

Going into the call, the setup was fairly clear. Revenue looked like a beat, weak net margins were already expected due to investment, and the real question was whether growth was accelerating beneath the surface.

The tone from management was confident.

Gavin emphasised that Growth Markets now represent more than 40% of nicotine pouch sales. US volumes were up strongly and customer inflow is accelerating. The focus in the near term is on “sharpening the axe” in the US; improving retention, refining execution, and then leaning even harder into growth. The US remains priority number one, while the UK is positioned as the largest opportunity in Europe.

Importantly, management framed increasing US competition and higher state taxes as structural positives. More brands entering the market validates the category, and higher retail prices can push consumers online, strengthening Haypp’s value proposition.

Peter Deli reinforced that core markets remain solid and profitable, while the US and UK investments are intentionally weighing on group margins. Emerging categories are growing rapidly, but still dilute profitability at this stage. Inventory is elevated but expected to normalise in Q1. Net debt remains low and the balance sheet is described as stable with room for expansion.

In the Q&A, analysts pressed on like for like growth and margin expansion. There was debate around measurement, particularly related to ZYN switching effects. Management acknowledged some distortions but maintained that underlying growth is stronger than surface level metrics suggest. On margins, the message was clear; 2026 will still be an investment heavy year, with growth taking precedence over short term expansion.

Regulatory topics were addressed calmly. The Stockholm dispute is not expected to have material operational impact. Austria is a minor issue. The bigger picture remains US and UK scaling.

My overall takeaway from the webcast is that this was not just a strong reported quarter; it was strong in forward signals. Management is leaning into the largest opportunities with conviction. If US execution works, the future cash flow profile of the company changes materially.

Given the numbers and the tone, the recent weakness in the stock looks disconnected from the underlying trajectory.

How Reality Turned Out

When I published the Q4 preview, the key conclusion was that the setup looked constructive despite the noise. All models pointed toward revenue comfortably above one billion SEK, with most estimates clustering between roughly 1,030 and 1,070 MSEK.

The reported number came in at 1,052 MSEK.

The average of my estimates was around 1,046 MSEK, which means the deviation from reality was well below one percent. That is not perfection, but it is close enough to confirm that the overall framework captured the quarter correctly.

More importantly, the direction was right.

Compared to Expectations

Ahead of the release, I also ran a public poll asking what people expected for Q4 revenue. The implied average from that poll was approximately 1,003 MSEK, with most responses concentrated in the 1,000–1,050 range.

Against that backdrop, a reported figure of 1,052 MSEK represents a meaningful upside surprise relative to informal market expectations.

At the same time, the stock had pulled back significantly from its recent highs going into the print. That combination; softer price action and relatively modest expectations; created a situation where the risk-reward skew looked more attractive than the prevailing sentiment suggested.

The data was pointing toward acceleration. The mood in the stock did not fully reflect that.

Why Total Revenue Tends to Be More Accurate

One pattern that has now repeated across multiple quarters is that total revenue forecasts tend to be more reliable than segment-level predictions.

There is a structural reason for this. Several Haypp websites do not map cleanly into one reporting segment. Some domains effectively represent both Core and Growth geographies, and traffic composition can shift over time. When working with external web data, it becomes difficult to allocate every visitor perfectly.

This creates small distortions at the segment level. Core can be slightly overstated while Growth is slightly understated, or vice versa. But at the total level, these distortions often offset each other. The noise cancels out.

Q4 followed that exact pattern. Segment-level deviations existed, but the combined estimate was very close to the reported outcome.

Core Markets

Core Markets reported 732.5 MSEK.

In the preview, I flagged the unusually strong traffic growth and the possibility that monetisation might dilute somewhat. In the end, the segment delivered solid and controlled growth. The simpler, more conservative modeling logic was appropriate here. Core behaved like a mature ecommerce base; steady monetisation with incremental volume expansion.

Growth Markets

Growth Markets came in at 278.7 MSEK.

This was close to the upper end of the projected range. The central uncertainty revolved around the ZYN normalization in the US. Web traffic did not fully reflect the scale of the recovery management had previously hinted at, which made the modeling more difficult.

Revenue nevertheless rebounded strongly. This suggests that monetisation recovered faster than traffic signals implied. It also highlights a limitation of traffic-based models during supply disruptions; revenue and visitors can temporarily decouple.

Still, the broader directional call; that Growth would reaccelerate; proved correct.

Emerging Markets; The Main Miss

Emerging Markets reported 41.0 MSEK, which was above my central estimate in the low-to-mid 30s.

This remains the segment where the framework struggles most. Emerging includes regulatory shifts, category discontinuations, and structural mix changes. These events break historical traffic-to-revenue relationships, and the website data does not capture the underlying business dynamics cleanly.

While this led to a segment-level miss, it did not materially alter the total revenue conclusion.

Overall Assessment

The purpose of the exercise is not to forecast every segment with perfect precision. It is to form a probabilistic view of direction before the official numbers are released.

In Q4, the models pointed toward a strong quarter. Revenue reached a new all-time high at 1,052 MSEK. Growth in the US and UK clearly accelerated. Core remained profitable and stable.

The average estimate of roughly 1,046 MSEK versus an actual 1,052 MSEK indicates that the overall structure of the framework continues to work at the total level.

There will always be quarters where noise dominates. Q4 was noisy. But the broader signal; acceleration rather than weakness; was correctly identified in advance.

Final Thoughts

Thank you for reading this quick Q4 update.

Overall, the quarter reinforces the broader thesis. Haypp continues to scale revenue to new highs, Core Markets remain profitable and stable, and the US and UK opportunity is becoming increasingly tangible in the numbers.

The future looks bright. At current levels, the valuation still feels reasonable relative to the long term growth potential. If execution in the US continues to improve and growth sustains into 2026, I would not be surprised to see the stock revisit and potentially surpass previous highs over the coming quarters.

In the meantime, I will continue refining the forecasting framework, stress testing assumptions, and documenting both successes and mistakes openly. The goal is constant improvement; not perfection.

At the current price level, the stock almost feels like it did a year ago when negative headlines were dominating the narrative. The difference now is that the underlying business momentum looks considerably stronger.

If execution in the US continues to improve and scale benefits start to materialize, the earnings profile over the next few years could look very different from today’s numbers. In that context, a potential US listing, once the business can comfortably absorb the additional costs, could act as a catalyst for broader investor awareness and a meaningful re-rating.

Haypp still has tremendous opportunity ahead. The addressable market in the US and UK alone leaves ample room for multi-year growth if management delivers on its strategy.

Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. I own shares in Haypp Group, and my views are influenced by that ownership. Always do your own research and consider your individual risk tolerance before making investment decisions.

Since the previous memo, a few things have changed. Several option positions have expired, which has been a drag on the portfolio overall. That’s the cost of operating in high-volatility themes. At the same time, I’ve added one new position. It’s early, it’s asymmetric, and it fits how I want to be positioned heading into 2026.

This memo is about resetting the board; what worked, what didn’t, and why this new position deserves capital now.

Backward Look; What Worked in 2025

Returns in 2025 were driven by two trades.

The first was my Haypp position. From the start of the year, the stock nearly tripled. Given that it was also my largest position, it did the heavy lifting for the portfolio. Across my different accounts, the portfolio ended the year up roughly 56%. Haypp was the core contributor to that outcome.

Read more

For those new here, Haypp Watch is a recurring series where I track Haypp Group’s web traffic; the number of users browsing Haypp Group’s websites. I then apply different methods to translate that traffic into revenue estimates ahead of reported results, with the aim of identifying potential alpha.

For those who have been following the series, it has been a while since the last update. That is mainly because there has been little portfolio activity on my side and limited Haypp specific news worth covering. That said, the lack of published updates does not mean inactivity. Over this period, I have continued refining and stress testing my revenue prediction framework.

In this edition of Haypp Watch, I introduce a new approach to estimating Haypp Group’s revenue that should materially improve regional accuracy, particularly in a quarter where underlying growth signals appear unusually noisy.

Disclaimer
This is not financial advice. The methods used in this analysis are experimental and rely on a limited historical dataset. Web traffic–based modeling has clear limitations, particularly during periods affected by supply disruptions and regulatory changes. Forecasting results should therefore be interpreted as directional signals rather than precise predictions, and they may change as new information becomes available.

Backdrop

Q4 is a somewhat unique quarter for Haypp Group, with several forces moving in different directions at the same time.

First, ZYN is back in the US. Management has previously indicated that a return of ZYN availability could be associated with revenue increases of up to 60% in the US segment. At the same time, US web traffic does not reflect anything close to a 60% surge. Traffic to Nicokick and Northerner remains solid, but the rebound appears more muted than one might expect if volume growth alone were driving results. This suggests that part of the recovery may be occurring through changes in order behavior rather than pure user growth.

In the core markets, a different story is unfolding. Sweden is showing very strong momentum in web traffic. Snusbolaget continues to march ahead, and the other core sites are also performing well. Here, traffic growth appears broad based rather than concentrated in a single brand or channel.

The emerging segment also shows healthy momentum. While smaller in absolute terms, traffic trends across these markets are directionally positive and contribute to the overall growth picture.

Taken together, Q4 presents a mixed but interesting setup. Strong core and emerging market traffic contrasts with a US recovery that seems to be driven by factors other than headline traffic growth alone. Below is an overview of web traffic performance across the main sites and regions.

As you can see from the chart, which starts in Q1 2024, Nicokick’s traffic peaked just before Q4, roughly at the same time as ZYN came back online. That peak was followed by a noticeable decline in the subsequent months, and only recently has traffic recovered back toward late Q3 levels. This pattern is difficult to square with intuition. Management has pointed to a potential 60% uplift associated with ZYN in the US, while the traffic data instead suggests something closer to a roughly 25% decline versus peak levels.

At the same time, the chart highlights the clean and persistent growth of Snusbolaget, alongside strong performance across almost all other sites. The contrast between the US and the core markets is hard to ignore.

In summary, the overall setup looks constructive. Core market growth is unusually strong, roughly 15,6% QoQ, and emerging markets continue to show positive momentum. However, the US data contains a clear anomaly, and the strength of the core markets is also unusually pronounced. Together, these dynamics make Q4 revenue meaningfully harder to predict than usual.

Fortunately, the modeling framework has improved as well. In the next section, I will walk through two new models, explain how they work, and show what they are indicating for Q4.

From a simple Excel model to a more structured ML approach

Previously, I modeled Haypp Group using a very simple Excel setup. I calculated historical value per visitor for each reporting segment, applied a basic linear fit, and then adjusted the assumptions based on backtesting and my own understanding of the business. That approach worked reasonably well at the total level, but it consistently struggled when it came to segment-level accuracy. Small changes in assumptions could move large amounts of revenue between Core, Growth, and Emerging, even when the total stayed roughly right.

To improve this, I decided to add more structure and discipline to the forecasting process. The goal was not to replace judgment, but to build a model that could systematically spot and quantify trends, regime shifts, and asymmetries in the data; especially ones that are easy to miss when reasoning manually.

Below is a high-level overview of how the model works.

The core idea: revenue as traffic × monetization

Rather than predicting revenue directly, the model is built around a simple identity:

Revenue = Web traffic × Value per visitor (VPV)

Web traffic is observable and relatively stable at the quarterly level. What actually varies, and what drives forecasting error, is value per visitor; a compact way of capturing pricing, conversion, product mix, promotions, and supply conditions.

The model’s task is therefore to estimate how VPV evolves over time for each segment, given observed traffic dynamics.

What the model is trained to learn

The model uses historical quarterly data for Haypp Group’s Core, Growth, and Emerging segments. For each segment, it observes:

• Web traffic levels and changes

• Revenue levels and changes

• How VPV behaved following different traffic patterns

From this, it learns a small number of disciplined relationships.

First, VPV is assumed to be slow-moving.
In ecommerce, monetization rarely changes abruptly without a structural reason. The model therefore expects VPV to remain close to recent levels and to mean-revert after unusually strong or weak quarters.

Second, traffic growth and VPV interact asymmetrically.
The model distinguishes between normal growth, rapid acceleration, and traffic declines. It allows for the possibility that:

• Very strong traffic growth can dilute VPV if it comes from lower-quality demand or promotional activity

• Traffic declines do not necessarily hurt VPV, and in some cases can even improve it as marginal demand falls away

This is particularly relevant for Haypp, where Growth and Emerging markets often scale differently from mature Core markets.

Third, segments are treated as related, not independent.
Each segment has its own baseline level of VPV, but the model avoids treating small segments as completely standalone businesses. Differences are allowed, but they are constrained, reflecting the shared ecommerce mechanics across regions.

How the forecast is produced

The forecasting process works in three steps:

1. Estimate VPV for the forecast quarter based on historical behavior, recent trends, and current traffic dynamics

2. Use known web traffic for the quarter

3. Calculate revenue mechanically as VPV multiplied by traffic

This separation is important. It prevents the model from implicitly assuming future revenue growth by accident and forces all assumptions to flow through VPV.

Why this approach adds value

Compared to a manual Excel model, this approach adds value in two ways.

First, it enforces consistency. The same logic is applied across segments and quarters, reducing the risk of narrative-driven adjustments.

Second, it helps surface subtle patterns; such as asymmetric behavior during strong growth or contractions; that are easy to underestimate when reasoning manually.

The model does not replace judgment. It formalizes it. And in doing so, it improves segment-level forecasts while keeping total revenue anchored to observable reality.

V2 ML: adding granularity (and risking overfitting)

After completing the first ML model, I did the only logical thing and built a V2 version. The explicit risk was overfitting. The explicit goal was to see whether adding more structure and more granular data would genuinely improve segment-level understanding, or simply create the illusion of precision.

The key difference in V2 is that it moves one level deeper into the data.

The main change: from segments to individual websites

In the first model, web traffic was aggregated at the segment level. In V2, I instead used monthly traffic data for individual Haypp websites and then rebuilt each segment from the bottom up.

This allowed the model to observe not just how much traffic a segment received, but where that traffic came from.

For each segment and quarter, the model could now see:

• Which sites dominated traffic

• How concentrated traffic was

• Whether growth was broad-based or driven by a single website

• Whether traffic shifts were gradual or abrupt

This matters because changes in monetization often come from mix shifts, not from changes in customer behavior at a single site.

New signals introduced in V2

Using site-level data made it possible to add several new inputs that did not exist in V1.

Traffic concentration and mix
The model measures how concentrated traffic is within each segment. A quarter dominated by one large site behaves differently from a quarter where traffic is evenly distributed across many sites.

Dispersion and internal stress
By looking at how uneven growth is across sites, the model can detect whether a segment is healthy overall or whether weakness is being masked by a few strong performers.

Consistency checks
The model also compares traffic aggregated from individual sites to reported segment-level traffic. When these diverge, it acts as a warning that part of the signal may be measurement noise rather than real business change.

What V2 tries to learn that V1 cannot

V1 assumes that a segment is internally homogeneous. V2 explicitly challenges that assumption.

V2 asks questions like:

• Does VPV change when traffic becomes more concentrated?

• Do segments monetize differently when growth is driven by newer or weaker sites?

• Do sharp mix shifts explain quarters where VPV behaves unexpectedly?

In theory, this should allow the model to explain more subtle behavior, especially in Growth and Emerging segments.

Why V2 is more fragile

Despite being more sophisticated, V2 is also more dangerous.

The underlying revenue data is still quarterly and still aggregated at the segment level. Adding many site-level features increases the number of degrees of freedom without increasing the number of revenue observations.

That creates two risks:

• Real signals can be drowned out by measurement noise

• The model can learn patterns that exist only because of temporary traffic fluctuations or tracking inconsistencies

In other words, V2 can explain the past more easily, but that does not automatically mean it predicts the future better.

How V2 should be used

V2 is not a replacement for the simpler model.

Instead, it works best as a stress-testing tool:

• When V2 agrees with V1, confidence increases

• When V2 disagrees, the disagreement itself becomes the insight

Large differences often point to mix shifts, data quality issues, or segment-specific dynamics that deserve closer inspection.

Share Emil Hartela Investing

What the Market Thinks

Before presenting my own results, it is useful to look at expectations from elsewhere.

On December 29, I ran a public poll on X asking what Haypp Group is expected to report for Q4 revenue. The poll was open for three days. While it is not a formal forecast, it provides a rough indication of where expectations currently sit.

Based on the distribution of responses across the revenue ranges, the implied expected value from the poll is around 1,003 MSEK, with most votes clustered in the 1,000–1,050 MSEK range.

It is worth noting that these polls have produced mixed results in the past. In the previous quarter, the poll outcome was very close to the reported number. In Q2, however, the poll expectation was materially higher than my own estimate. That quarter ended up missing those expectations, and Haypp’s share price fell by roughly 20% in the months that followed.

This contrast is one of the reasons I continue to rely on web-traffic-based analysis. While far from perfect, it has occasionally highlighted downside risk that consensus-style expectations failed to capture. In the next section, I compare the poll-implied expectation with the outputs from my updated models.

Core Market Prediction

Starting with the core markets, the three approaches again converge within a relatively narrow range.

My hand-built estimate comes in at 754 872 300 SEK. This reflects a cautious but constructive view of core market monetisation, assuming that strong traffic growth translates into revenue without extrapolating any temporary uplift too aggressively. Given the volatility seen in web traffic during the quarter, this outcome appears reasonable and internally consistent.

ML Model 1 estimates core revenue at 756 726 642 SEK, almost exactly in line with my own number. This is not surprising. ML1 enforces mean reversion and relies heavily on historical segment-level behaviour, which makes it structurally conservative during periods of accelerating growth. The close alignment between ML1 and my estimate suggests that recent core performance does not yet justify assuming a step-change in value per visitor.

ML Model 2 produces a somewhat higher estimate of 767 194 142 SEK. Unlike ML1, this model is less restrictive and allows recent dynamics to persist for longer. As a result, it represents a more optimistic core scenario, implicitly assuming that monetisation quality held up better than historical averages despite traffic volatility.

Although all three approaches converge closely, there is still reason for caution. The sharp increase in core market traffic during the quarter almost certainly comes with some degree of customer value dilution, whether through promotions, mix effects, or lower marginal conversion. These second-order effects are difficult to capture in backtesting and may only become visible with a lag. As a result, while the core market outlook appears robust, the risk around value per visitor should not be underestimated.

Read more

Context

The entire TechBio sector has come down hard. It started with the FDA halting NTLA’s trials, which sent a shockwave through gene-editing names. Recursion Pharmaceuticals added fuel to the fire when its CEO unexpectedly stepped down; not exactly music to my ears. Combine that with weak performance across much of the sector, and sentiment has collapsed. Tempus, Prime Medicine, and the rest of my TechBio basket have all taken hits. What was once a market priced for perfection is now one running on fear.

The good thing here is that my best investments usually come after aggressive drawdowns; they force me to really dig into the true metrics of success. That’s exactly what I’ve been doing over the past week with Tempus, which just released what were, on paper, “great” results. Yet the stock is down almost 30% from the peak; not ideal for my options on the name.

Share

Tempus

Let’s jump right into Tempus. For those who haven’t read my Tempus AI Deep Dive, I believe the company has a real shot at becoming incredibly valuable in the long run. The problem is that the timeline to reach a dominant position in healthcare can be long; and the line between being a “tools company” and a true healthcare AI giant is thin. Either they remain just a tools company, which doesn’t make it a particularly interesting investment, or they evolve into a giant over time with a moat unlike anything we’ve seen before. Let me explain.

The CEO stated in Q3 earnings that he expects 25% growth ahead, not just for the next three years, but for the next ten. Funnily enough, that’s almost seen as bearish. The logic goes like this: it’s AI, so it should be growing faster; sell the stock.

But that misses the entire point. There’s what Tempus is today and what it could become in 20 years. Yes, they use AI today, but they’re not yet an “AI company” in the same way Palantir is. They can’t just expand instantly tomorrow. Why? Because they’re still laying the groundwork; and that takes time.

For Tempus to succeed, they need to dominate the entire health spectrum, not just oncology. Right now, oncology is their stronghold, and they’re executing well there. But if they remain confined to one branch, they won’t unlock the real power of multimodality.

Multimodal benefits are the key. You need scope and dominance across multiple medical verticals; radiology, pathology, cardiology, genomics, and beyond; because each domain feeds the others. You can’t achieve all that at once, so Tempus has to expand step by step, building critical mass in each field.

Once enough segments reach that tipping point, everything changes. The multimodal data flywheel kicks in; Tempus becomes the layer that sits between diagnostics and doctors. The system starts answering questions like “What’s the best course of action for this patient?” based on genomics, imaging, and clinical records combined. That’s how Tempus evolves from a diagnostics company into the intelligence layer of medicine itself.

Their full-stack product, Tempus One, is still in its infancy, currently piloted at Northwestern. But if it works; and early signs suggest it does; it could spread like wildfire. Once enough hospitals adopt it, switching costs will be massive. There will be little reason to use anything else.

To reach that point, however, Tempus must stay aggressive. They’ll need acquisitions; like Paige for pathology; and likely more, especially in proteomics and continuous data (wearables, metabolomics, behavioral signals). Those are still gaps in their multimodal ecosystem. Filling them turns the Tempus library from great to unbeatable.

If Tempus executes, the transformation will be gradual; then sudden. A slow grind as they integrate into hundreds of hospitals, followed by the moment the data moat becomes self-sustaining. That’s when they stop being “just a tools company” and start becoming the default operating system for healthcare.

Back to Reality

It’s easy to imagine a future where Tempus dominates; where their valuation could reach into the hundreds of billions. But that scenario is still far off. Before that, you have to look at risk and how to actually profit from the price action along the way.

The 25% “higher grind” growth path and already lofty valuation will come with volatility. The stock could easily drop 50% or more in the process. At the same time, competition is real. Tempus isn’t the only company in this race; just the best-positioned one for now. The future remains uncertain.

That’s why vigilance is key. You can’t just buy and forget. You have to monitor execution, adoption, and how fast the multimodal moat truly forms; because that’s what will separate a $20 billion company from a $500 billion one.

What I’m Doing

First, this is not financial advice. Second, TechBio carries massive risk.

Read more

First, I’ll go over the most interesting parts of the report and what management said during the call. Then I’ll discuss what this means for the future, and finally, I’ll share what I’m doing with my own position.

Q3 Earnings Recap

The most surprising part of Q3 was the steep decline in snus volumes. Swedish snus revenue fell 18%, with roughly a third of that due to a tax change. It’s a sharp drop, but ultimately irrelevant. Snus is near zero free cash flow and adds little to Haypp’s long-term story. The company itself describes it as “no longer strategically important,” and that’s accurate. The future is nicotine pouches, not snus.

What really matters is that gross margin came in super strong at 18.8%; an all-time high and up from 14.3% last year. This was driven mainly by Media & Insights and continued scale benefits. To me, that confirms Haypp’s model has structural leverage. When the company decides to optimize for cash flow instead of expansion, it will throw off a lot of free cash. But that time isn’t now. Margins don’t matter yet; market share does. Haypp should still prioritize growth and price for category domination, not short-term profit.

Another key takeaway is that it seems Haypp has re-established its Media & Insights relationship with Philip Morris. While not explicitly confirmed, the commentary strongly suggests that cooperation has resumed. PM is likely to become one of Haypp’s largest clients for that data platform, and the effect could already be showing in Q3’s margin uplift. If fully active, it could easily add one or two percentage points to both revenue and profitability, given the high-margin nature of that business. I wouldn’t be surprised to see gross margin cross 20% in the next few quarters as that scales.

Management also clarified that ZYN’s return won’t affect gross margins as some feared. The mix impact should be neutral. What’s more, inventory grew as ZYN came back, a clear signal that U.S. growth is accelerating again.

On the regulatory side, the picture is mixed but overall positive. The U.S. legal situation is described as “optimal.” The FDA’s new pilot program should speed up product approvals, expanding the available assortment of nicotine pouch products; which is exactly the environment Haypp thrives in. More competition among brands means more variety for Haypp to distribute. In contrast, the EU regulatory path remains “choppy.” The Tobacco Taxation Directive and related proposals could make headlines but are likely to be moderated over time. Volatility here might create buying opportunities rather than structural risk.

Finally, the UK emerging segment shutdown was disappointing, though not material. Haypp is discontinuing nicotine vaping and heat-not-burn sales in the UK, roughly 30% of the already small emerging segment. It’s a setback, but the company emphasized that it frees up resources to focus on the rapidly growing UK pouch category; where they can use their full competitive toolkit.

All in all, the underlying message from Q3 is that the U.S. business is regaining momentum and margin expansion continues ahead of schedule. With ZYN back and the media business contributing again, U.S. revenue is likely to grow sharply. More on this next.

Q4 Outlook and U.S. Dominance

With ZYN back, Haypp is set to post a big Q4. Gavin mentioned during the call that roughly 40% of previous ZYN customers have already returned; a large share, but there’s still a significant base left to re-activate in the coming months. U.S. revenue currently makes up around 20% of Haypp’s total. Once the full ZYN recovery plays out, that number could easily pass 30% within a quarter or two, and then continue to grow well above the 18–25% CAGR target.

If that happens, Haypp could add 100–200 MSEK in revenue between Q4 and Q2 next year just from ZYN returning. That would almost guarantee crossing 1 000 MSEK in Q4 and put the 5 000 MSEK mark within reach much sooner than expected. It’s clear that 2026 is shaping up to be the breakout year; the point where both revenue and profitability begin compounding at scale. If we don’t get any major negative surprises, a re-rating seems inevitable once the market realizes what’s happening under the surface.

The U.S. setup is particularly attractive because it’s not only growing faster but also structurally more profitable. Sweden is a tough, margin-compressed market with heavy competition; the U.S. still has oxygen. Gross margins there are already close to twice those in Sweden, and I think net margins above 10% are achievable long-term. Management even hinted that they don’t want too much margin right now; growth takes priority. As long as volume growth stays this strong, they’ll keep reinvesting to dominate the market.

In Europe, the picture is more mixed. The decision to cut 30% of the Emerging segment by shutting down the UK vape business isn’t material financially, but it’s still notable. Haypp simply can’t compete in a non-compliant market when others play by different rules. Nicotine pouches, however, remain the strongest-growing category in the UK, where Haypp is the clear leader. If UK regulation ever catches up, Haypp can re-enter vapes instantly; they’re the only one fully compliant.

The bigger story, though, is the U.S. pouch war that’s about to intensify. New brands are coming, the FDA is accelerating reviews, and competition among manufacturers will heat up. For Haypp, that’s perfect. The more brands fight for shelf space, the more valuable Haypp’s distribution network becomes. The company stands to benefit from every new entrant.

In short: the U.S. is entering a new era; and it’s extremely bullish for Haypp.

Prediction Getting More Accurate

Looking back at my Q3 preview, my manual estimate of 953 MSEK ended up almost exactly right. The actual figure came in at 952 MSEK, a deviation of just 0.1 %. That’s obviously very close; but more importantly, it shows that the overall framework is starting to capture the company’s dynamics quite well.

The qualitative setup also held up. I expected a gradual rebound driven by the U.S. and a stabilizing core market, while emerging segments would contribute less; and that’s broadly what happened. The ZYN restock effect appeared late in the quarter, just as anticipated, and management confirmed that it should continue into Q4.

On the segment side, the relative performance was directionally correct. Core and Growth markets aligned with the model’s expectations, while Emerging came in weaker due to the UK vape withdrawal. I mentioned earlier that overlap between domains could distort those numbers slightly, which proved to be the case.

All in all, this was one of the most accurate quarters yet for the forecasting process. Of course, that doesn’t mean it will always be this close; some luck is involved, and the data can shift quickly. But it’s encouraging to see that the approach is consistently producing results within a small margin of error.

Heading into Q4, I’ll keep refining the model rather than celebrating the precision. The goal is to make it robust enough that accuracy like this becomes the norm, not the exception.

What I’m Doing and Where I See the Stock Going

This is not investment advice. Anything is possible.

As you know, I’m very bullish on Haypp and hold a large position. When the stock traded in the 50–70 SEK range last year, I loaded up heavily, and since then I’ve added occasionally when the setup looked right.

Read more

Let’s begin.

Haypp – Business as Usual

Most of you are here because of Haypp. If you read my earnings preview, you already knew what was coming. My latest prediction turned out to be the most accurate yet; the web-based estimate was almost spot on.

Gross margin came in strong, while earnings themselves weren’t that impressive. I see the gross margin as bullish, and the weaker earnings as expected given Gavin’s earlier commentary. I haven’t had time to watch the webcast yet, so I’ll post a deeper piece on Haypp later.

A few things still stand out:
First, they’re withdrawing from the UK vape business. That was somewhat expected but largely overlooked. It’s not great news, as the emerging vape segment had shown strong growth and received solid investment. However, Germany remains, and it represents the majority of that segment.

Second, management continues to focus heavily on the U.S. They sound very optimistic about the expansion there; and it makes sense. If you make a rough DCF based on population and regulatory scenarios, you quickly see that the U.S. will likely contribute the vast majority of Haypp’s revenue in the not-so-distant future. In some of my models, as much as 97% of Haypp’s value comes from the U.S.

Anyway, I’ll cover Haypp in more depth soon once I’ve had time to go through the details properly.

Tempus AI

I’ve been following Tempus AI very closely and see it as a highly promising stock; though undeniably expensive. It’s one of those names that could just keep climbing like Palantir, which makes “waiting for a dip” a questionable strategy. If you haven’t already, check out my deep dive for more context on the company.

Tempus reported earnings yesterday after market close. They double beat and raised guidance. The story looks strong. Still, the stock traded slightly down as expectations were sky-high and comparable names; most notably Palantir; have been slipping.

Tempus is one of those companies that, despite executing well, tends to trade more on market sentiment than on its own developments. I’ll publish a deeper dive into the earnings soon, but until then, I’d recommend extreme caution; this is a volatile stock.

Turning Point Brands

This is where my earnings day got interesting. TPB was up 26% in pre-market after posting great results; nicotine pouches are clearly becoming the main story. I think TPB will continue to be a winner.

However, the stock only ended up around 6% instead of 26%. That gave me another chance to buy more. There was a brief moment when one of my 20k option positions, bought specifically for the earnings, was worth around 400k in pre-market. Unfortunately, the options weren’t liquid enough to unload at that price.

I’ll talk more about TPB in the last section, where I explain how I’m planning to profit from the stock’s price action.

Share

Other

Outside of that, Recursion announced a CEO change. I’ve had basically zero time to dig into it yet, so I’ll comment more later.

I also got interested in Nokia last week but decided against the trade. It’s more of a turnaround story than a true AI play, although the NVIDIA partnership does make it somewhat interesting.

Finally, my Prime Medicine position is currently negative after the stock dropped hard following NTLA’s trial halt, which pressured the entire gene-editing sector. That said, it might present an interesting buying opportunity.

What I’m Doing Right Now

Here’s a quick recap of what I’m doing based on the new information and market moves.

Read more

In my last post about Haypp, published about a month ago, I wrote that revenue would likely come in around 950 million SEK, as web traffic had risen significantly since Q2. Historically, Haypp’s traffic data has shown strong predictive power when it comes to quarterly results.

In this post, I’ll go over a few thoughts ahead of the upcoming earnings release; what I’m currently seeing in the data, how the market seems to be positioning, and what might surprise investors this quarter.

For Those Who Missed the Last Post

In my previous Haypp Watch from early October, I forecasted Q3 revenue to land around 953 MSEK, based on a sharp rebound in web traffic; particularly from Nicokick and the core Nordic markets.
Traffic data suggested the strongest quarterly growth in my dataset, driven by a renewed ZYN supply and stabilization across Sweden and Norway.

I also outlined three forecast models:

• Simple linear: 1,083 MSEK (likely too high due to U.S. mix)

• Mechanical regressions: 958 MSEK and 991 MSEK

• Adjusted manual: 953 MSEK (final baseline estimate)

The post highlighted that:

• Nicokick traffic was surging to all-time highs,

• Northerner remained muted but stable,

• Vapeglobe nearly doubled traffic (from a low base),

• And ZYN restocking would act as a gradual tailwind rather than a one-off event.

Finally, I argued that sentiment already reflected most positives; meaning the stock reaction would likely be neutral unless revenue materially beats expectations or we see a major surprise like an uplisting announcement.

What’s New Since My Last Update

Since my last update, there have been some clear shifts in Haypp’s web traffic. Snusbolaget is on an insane rally; by far the strongest mover across all domains. The core markets overall look very promising, with continued momentum and steady growth through the early part of Q4.

Interestingly, it almost looks like the ZYN supply returning boosted the Nordic markets more than the U.S.; even though that obviously makes little sense, since ZYN availability affects U.S. sales. Still, the timing overlaps in a way that makes the data look stronger than expected for Sweden and Norway.

Meanwhile, Northerner continues to grind higher, and Nicokick is also moving up, though with much more volatility. That volatility likely stems from differences in ad spend strategies or ongoing marketing experiments, which makes it worth digging into further.

Overall, Q4 is off to a strong start, with Snusbolaget clearly leading and the rest of the platform showing solid early momentum.

What to Watch This Wednesday

Haypp reports Q3 earnings next Wednesday, the 5th, and several key topics will be worth paying attention to. In my previous post, I already outlined some of the areas I’m watching, but here’s a more complete list of what would be particularly valuable to see discussed or clarified.

1. Uplisting Announcement
The biggest potential catalyst would be confirmation; or at least a timeline; for uplist plans from Nasdaq First North to the main market. Haypp already meets many of the requirements, and such a move would likely open the door for institutional funds and U.S. retail investors to buy the stock. It’s one of the few clear triggers that could materially re-rate valuation multiples.

Read more

Portfolio recap

Since the last memo, not much has changed on the portfolio side. The biotech names have been swinging wildly; up or down 10% every other day; but that’s nothing new.

My nicotine pouch holdings, Haypp Group and Turning Point Brands, have both traded fairly flat. Haypp will report Q3 earnings on November 5th, and I’ll post one more update before then. Activity around the stock on X has been unusually quiet, and the price has drifted slightly downward. Historically, these moments have turned out to be good entry points in my experience.

Looking ahead, I expect Haypp to pick up speed next year. Growth in this company tends to come in cycles, and the setup for 2026 looks increasingly favorable.

Turning Point Brands

I’ve written quite a bit about Turning Point Brands, but haven’t yet finished the full deep dive; most of my time has gone into startup work over the past few weeks. That said, it’s on the way.

Right now looks like an interesting moment to revisit the stock. It has taken a breather, and recent data suggests that the nicotine pouch segment is growing even faster than I expected a year ago.

I have a strong conviction that TPB could become one of the biggest nicotine pouch winners; and likely evolve into a near pure-play in the not-so-distant future as pouches continue to take market share.

Options on TPB also look interesting at the moment. They aren’t particularly expensive, but their short expiries make them a bit of a timing gamble. For that reason, I mainly hold the stock itself, while keeping a smaller position in options.

Looking back

Last time I mentioned that NBIS looked overstretched, which led me to sell my position. That call turned out to be fairly well-timed, as the stock has since pulled back sharply. It remains on my radar, but at the moment I’m not looking to take a position in either direction.

What I’m working on

Lately I’ve been eyeing startups. With public indices not looking particularly cheap, early-stage companies offer a useful layer of diversification against stretched valuations.

I mainly operate out of Finland, so Nordic startups are my focus. Over the past week I’ve met with several promising founders, and I’ll likely start including some of these startup investments in future posts. For those unfamiliar with the region, the Nordics offer some of the best startup opportunities outside the U.S. Investment in Finnish startups as a share of GDP is currently at an all-time high.

If you’re interested in the Nordic startup scene, feel free to reach out. I’ll also be attending Slush next month in Helsinki; if you’re there, let’s meet up. The ecosystem in Finland and Sweden has recently produced several notable billion-dollar companies like Oura and Klarna, and I believe there’s more to come. The Nordics have strong early-stage networks but often lack capital in later rounds (B, C, and beyond), which creates attractive openings for U.S. investors to step in with limited competition.

Looking forward

My thesis on TechBio remains intact. I still believe the sector offers some of the best upside in the current market. The extreme volatility also creates interesting opportunities to cycle around option expiries.

Pairing that with my exposure to nicotine pouches provides solid diversification, as the two tend to move in opposite directions.

Over the next two weeks, I’ll be in New York (Manhattan); if anyone wants to talk investments, feel free to DM me.

That’s all for today.

Disclaimer

Nothing in this memo constitutes financial advice. All opinions are my own and shared for informational purposes only. Always do your own research before making any investment decisions.

In this edition, I’ve gone deeper than before: breaking down segment-level estimates, revisiting the ZYN effect, and revealing how I expect the stock to react once Q3 numbers drop.
The question is; does the data point to another strong quarter, or has the rally already priced it all in?

Disclaimer:
This analysis is not financial advice. It’s based primarily on web traffic data, which can be influenced by factors outside the company’s control; such as marketing campaigns, SEO changes, or temporary shifts in consumer behavior.
While web traffic offers useful directional insight, it doesn’t capture everything that drives revenue. Variables like average basket size, currency effects, pricing, and product mix can all materially affect results.

September: On the Rise Again

Let’s start by looking at September and how each of Haypp’s sites performed. Below you can see a chart covering all Haypp domains. There’s nothing extreme in the data; more a picture of broad-based strength across markets.

Nicokick is hovering around all-time highs, while Snusbolaget remains stable and clearly above its summer slump. Both Norway and Sweden show continued strength, with smaller sites there performing well. Most interestingly, Vapeglobe saw a large increase in traffic during September.

The key takeaways from the data are:

• Nicokick appears to be trending aggressively higher, likely fueled by a renewed ZYN supply,

• Northerner remains somewhat muted, suggesting that the ZYN restock is helping but not triggering any sharp spikes, and

• The core markets look healthy and strong after a relatively sluggish Q2.

Finally, Vapeglobe’s traffic nearly doubled; albeit from a low base; signaling that this emerging segment is starting to gain real traction.

Looking at Q3 Web Traffic and Events

Looking at Q3 as a whole, this quarter shows the strongest web traffic growth of any period in my dataset ;for better or worse. It makes predicting Q3 results harder, but it also signals a fundamentally stronger quarter. I’ll return to the actual revenue prediction in the next section.

The first thing that stands out in Q3 traffic is the clear surge in the U.S., combined with steady recovery in the core markets, which offsets the slowdown seen in Q2.
Most of the U.S. growth came from Nicokick, while Snusbolaget led the gains in Sweden. The roughly 10% traffic growth across core markets likely reflects mean reversion after the Q2 slump, when Swedish site traffic declined unusually.

In the U.S., growth seems partly driven by the return of ZYN supply, which resumed around the second week of September. However, there’s an interesting twist; traffic began spiking well before the official announcement and availability. This could mean that Haypp’s like-for-like sales are already up strongly, and that the ZYN effect is only starting to show in the data toward the end of Q3.

My working theory is that the ZYN resupply will provide a gradual tailwind over the coming quarters, rather than a single one-time boost.

Next, let’s look at where I think revenue is likely to come in.

My Prediction for Q3

Now for the best part; my revenue prediction.

As mentioned earlier, the aggressive growth in web traffic clearly points toward higher revenue, but it also adds uncertainty. Rapid spikes in traffic often signal a wave of first-time customers, whose basket sizes and buying habits differ from repeat buyers. This can distort the link between traffic and sales.

I used three different methods to estimate Q3 revenue; all based on web traffic but with varying levels of detail:

1. Simple linear prediction:
   Web traffic increased 17,6% QoQ, which gives a revenue estimate of 1,083 MSEK. However, this is likely too high, as much of the growth comes from the U.S., where average basket sizes are smaller. I wouldn’t put too much weight on this figure.

2. Mechanical model estimates:
   Using a few more detailed models; OLS regression and time-series regression on derived metrics; I got 958 MSEK and 991 MSEK, respectively. Historically, these mechanical models have performed well, though the extreme swings in web traffic this quarter could reduce their reliability somewhat.

3. Adjusted manual estimate:
   Finally, I made my own adjusted prediction, incorporating past behavior during periods of extreme traffic growth and making a few conservative assumptions. This gives a revenue estimate of 953 MSEK. It might be a bit low, but it feels more balanced considering the volatility and mix effects this quarter.

From a YoY perspective, 953 MSEK could indeed be conservative, as last year’s web traffic was almost identical to this year’s, though the revenue per active customer is likely higher now.

In summary, I estimate Q3 revenue in the range of 953–1,083 MSEK, with the final figure likely landing closer to the lower end of that range; this estimate does not account for past prediction error. Taking into account past prediction error, the range would be something like 924 - 1020 MSEK (not a very useful range).

Bonus Prediction

As a small extra, I also ran the time-series regression to estimate revenue by segment. These figures should be taken very cautiously, as this level of granularity is new for me and the model hasn’t been validated yet.

Read more

Turning Point Brands: From Vision to Results

Last year I wrote that Turning Point Brands was an interesting stock. That was when nicotine pouches represented only a few percent of their total revenue.
Now, roughly a year later, things have changed dramatically. Nicotine pouches make up around one-fourth of total revenue. That means they’ve added over 100 million USD in revenue in just a year; an impressive shift by any standard.

The Thesis
The thesis is quite simple. You have a superior product in a massive market; nicotine pouches in the U.S. Then you have Turning Point Brands with two products, FRE and ALP. Both show clear differentiation and have built a practical following among users.

This gives TPB a strong foundation for long-term growth. They already have solid distribution channels and a management team that understands execution.
On top of that, the Tucker Carlson partnership adds a powerful marketing edge and broadens brand exposure beyond traditional channels.

Valuation and Market Perception
To put it in rough Fermi numbers, I see the U.S. nicotine pouch market heading toward 40 billion USD within the next 10 to 20 years. I also think there’s a strong chance that TPB captures a meaningful share of that market; possibly even above 20%.

Combine that with decent margins, and it becomes clear why TPB’s current valuation looks low. The company is severely under-discovered; it’s still largely owned by value investors, when in reality, it’s a growth story hiding in plain sight.

What I Did
I’ve been buying a combination of stock and options after the share price pulled back from its highs. I believe the upcoming earnings will bring the TPB story into the mainstream.

The options still look relatively cheap, although not very far-dated. This creates an opportunity to position with both stock and calls for maximum upside potential into earnings; where I think they’re likely to raise guidance again, following their previous increase.

Final Notes

That’s all I have time to cover about my latest addition to the portfolio. This is the second time I’ve entered the name. The last time, I exited because I needed liquidity.
Now, I plan to hold until the story gains traction and the market starts to recognize what’s unfolding here. I’ll be writing a deep dive on the stock in the coming weeks.
If you want to learn more about the company today, check out my previous pitch

article where I first outlined the case for TPB.

Share

Disclaimer
This memo is for informational purposes only and reflects my personal opinions and actions in the market. It is not financial advice. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.