The Compound and Friends Sep 25, 2026 1h 8m · 50m saved
With Jonathan Boyar, Principal at Boyar Value Group, which includes Boyar Asset Management and Boyar's Intrinsic Value Research
Pool Corp, the largest wholesale distributor of swimming-pool supplies, now trades at 15 times earnings, the multiple it carried in the financial crisis and after 9/11. At the height of Covid it sold for 55 times.
The market has been selling Pool Corp, Broadridge, Booking and Uber on fears of an AI disruption or a housing slump. Jonathan Boyar said the businesses are fine or improving, and what has changed is the price.
"Muse isn't going to do all this stuff. They're going to use booking."
Jonathan Boyar, a principal at Boyar Value Group, on The Compound and Friends. The group's research arm, Boyar's Intrinsic Value Research, is an independent equity research boutique founded in 1975 whose subscribers include sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds, mutual funds and family offices. On his last visit to the show, earlier this year, he was bullish on Salesforce while the stock was being sold on AI fears; it has since recovered after a partnership with Anthropic.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 68 minutes of audio, 18 minutes of reading.
Here are the 14 calls that matter.
Key Takeaways
Buy and hold works only with constant re-checking of the business and the valuation
Buffett called not selling Coca-Cola at 60 times earnings in 1998 one of his biggest mistakes
Deep value investing no longer works, Boyar said, because the information edge that once supported it is gone
Uber keeps growing while its stock goes nowhere, and Boyar said that cannot last if growth runs at 20–30% a year
Booking and Airbnb were sold in an AI "basket" trade that Boyar called "absolutely ridiculous"
He said an AI agent without hotel inventory will end up using Booking rather than replacing it
Broadridge handles most US proxy votes and is in its second-worst drawdown since the financial crisis
Pool Corp's multiple has fallen from 55x at the Covid peak to 15x, as new pool construction runs at a decade-plus low
Burger King is halfway through the recovery McDonald's is only starting, under former Domino's CEO Patrick Doyle
MGM will have the only casino in Japan in 2031, and Boyar said analysts are not putting it in their forecasts
Boyar's lesson from StubHub: avoid businesses consumers hate
1. Hold, but Keep Re-Checking
The hosts opened with research from Adam Parker of Trivariate Research, titled Buy And Hold Doesn't Work, and asked Boyar how stock picking had changed over his career. He said he holds great companies bought at reasonable prices, but that a holder has to "hold on to it, but continuously re-evaluate it," checking both how the business is executing and whether the valuation is still reasonable.
Most of Boyar Asset Management's accounts are taxable, so the firm tolerates a stock getting "a little bit overvalued" rather than selling, because a replacement would need to be about 25% better to justify the tax bill.
Owning the few long-term winners means looking different from everyone else
"But you have to be prepared to look really different than most people and most people don't like to be different. You have to be prepared to have lots of concentration." — Jonathan Boyar
He said those stocks become disproportionate parts of a portfolio, and that there will be years when things go against the holder.
Microsoft hurt his accounts early this year, and selling would have been worse
"You know, the beginning of this year was horrible for a lot of our accounts because we own Microsoft and I felt like a when it went from 579 or whatever it was to whatever wherever it went. But, you know, now it's back." — Jonathan Boyar
Boyar said he would never have known when to buy it back, and his clients would have been worse off had he tried to trade around it.
