I added 15% to my PayPal stake. As I’ve said in recent articles, I’ve been a bit nervous about PayPal’s EU exposure and it being targeted by trade wars. At the same time, those nerves have calmed a bit as rising tensions have eased, and the likelihood of this risk coming to fruition continues to fall in my mind. None of the real proposals I’ve seen include specifically penalizing this firm (there were rumors). They also continue to take market share across all major EU markets, showing there’s no consumer pushback against the iconic U.S. brand. All of this makes me comfortable with more meaningfully over-indexing on financial services exposure, as I do view the deals within this sector as arguably more compelling than anywhere else right now. And I think the PayPal deal just got even better.

When pairing all of this with what I viewed as a strong quarter (review coming in a few hours to lay it all out in detail), I think there’s a lot to like here; my views of the company have incrementally brightened. The firm trades for 13x EPS , sports a nearly 10% buyback yield, boasts a 10% free cash flow yield, and is delivering far stronger execution on checkout rollouts and value creation overall. It’s innovating faster, driving a Venmo monetization inflection, fixing Braintree, driving more frequent engagement, and overcoming consumer headwinds. Two years ago, this business would have been far too fragile to overcome any form of macro challenges… but this is the new PayPal and they’re admirably hanging in there. Annual guidance was reiterated, with language pointing to that being overly prudent, if anything.

For now, I will leave it there so I can get this review article to you all ASAP. Here’s how things currently look (two charts below are identical):