Behind The Idea

There are three sorts of stories we've gravitated towards in the past 95 episodes of Behind the Idea: Value traps and/or value plays, the sorts of junk we might invest in. Examples: Cars.com (CARS), AT&T (T), Dell (DELL), Kelloggs (K) from the short side. Growth stories that break our value-oriented brains. Examples: Amazon (AMZN), Shopify (SHOP), Crowdstrike (CRWD), Lyft (LYFT), PagerDuty (PD) from the short side. Battleground stories or news stories. Examples: Boeing (BA), PG&E (PCG), Chipotle (CMG), Trupanion (TRUP). This week we cover Teladoc (TDOC), which falls squarely in categories 2 and 3. The company is a fast grower on the top line, but it's yet to crack break even profitability metrics. We've published many short ideas on the company on Seeking Alpha, but we recently published a PRO+ top idea by Value Alpha that takes the long side. As with many of these stories, there are both exciting things going on and questions raised that deserve a closer look. We break down the long case, and then we ra