Equity Mates Investing Podcast
Which Aussie software stocks are ready to rebound with Jared Pohl
23 Apr 2026
Chapter 1: What are the implications of the software sell-off for investors?
Everything you're about to hear is for education and entertainment purposes only. Whilst we are licensed, we're not aware of your personal financial circumstances.
Chapter 2: How has the AI boom affected growth investors' perspectives?
Any advice is general advice.
Chapter 3: What factors are driving the depth of the software sell-off?
Equitymates operates under Australian financial services license 540697.
The software sell-off continues and there are plenty of questions to ask.
Chapter 4: Why is software not considered the primary moat for companies?
Have the quality of these companies changed or is it just a market overreaction? Welcome to Equity Mates, a podcast where we explore what's possible in the world of investing. If you've just joined us for the very first time, a huge welcome to our community.
Chapter 5: Which software companies are most vulnerable in today's market?
My name is Bryce, and as always, I'm joined by my equity buddy, Ren. How are you going?
I'm very good, Bryce. Very excited for this episode. One of the biggest questions in markets in 2026 is what is happening...
Chapter 6: Is the reset in valuations a warning sign or a buying opportunity?
With this continued AI boom and the software sell-off that has come on the back of it, as you said, have these high-quality names changed, or is the market overreacting? Today, we're joined by an expert. He and his team have just written a big three-part report on software companies, so we're going to dig into it and get his answer. You may have just heard him there.
Jared Pohl, co-founder and portfolio manager of ECP Asset Management.
Chapter 7: How can AI-driven productivity lead to future growth for software companies?
Welcome back to EquityMates. Thanks for having me again. It seems like every time I come, performance gets worse. So I don't know if it's the... Definitely not. That's the EquityMates effect, yeah. But no, no, jokes aside. Yeah, it's definitely been a tough, tough market. So, you know...
Hopefully we can sort of explain what we're thinking and people can, you know, start buying software stocks again. We need the retail community to give us a hand, I think.
Yeah, I appreciate that. I appreciate, you know, you being forward with sort of where the performance is at and talking about it. Like often people come in and they're just cheerleaders. So this would be a good conversation, I think, to sort of get your view on.
Yeah, no, I mean. Honestly, you've just got to own it. You've got to own the wins and the losses, right? It's not fair either way. And I think that's the irony of markets is they're very much, your truths get tested a lot, you know, and you need to be willing to sort of change your view. I mean, we haven't yet changed the view.
I don't think we panic sold anything, particularly in the sell-off, but we've spent a lot of time thinking about what's actually changed and where things go, but it hasn't made it any easier, you know. That's for sure.
Well, that's where we wanted to start. Since you came on the show last, and not just necessarily related to software, but just generally, what is one thing that you've changed your view on?
Has our fundamental philosophy changed? I think we were sort of talking before this started on... this core idea, but we fundamentally believe in growth as a way to invest. And that leads you to certain kind of areas of the market, companies that are growing their economic footprint, software tends to be pretty scalable. So that's why we've ended up there a lot of the time. Is that changing?
And it's like a real existential crisis for, as a fund manager or an investor, you have these sort of core ideas about what makes a good investment. And we fundamentally believe that earnings will drive that. And then it comes down to, well, you know, in the software space as AI change that whole thing or not. So you've got to go and test that consistently. And, you know, we've done that.
We haven't had any sort of major changes to answer your question directly. Nothing yet. Like there hasn't been enough evidence to suggest that that kind of core premise of investment is broken. has volatility increased? Yes. Is momentum increased? Yes. What does that mean for us?
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Chapter 8: Which Australian software stocks are poised for a rebound?
And, you know, if you run the thought experiment on something like that, they're just going to keep enriching the data sets. But can an agent do that? I'm sure an agent can go and crawl every real estate agent's website and say, well, here's all the houses for sale. But all you end up doing is you just get a lot more noise.
Like in a world that you have all these agents talking to agents and, you know, jobs kind of illustrates this probably better than the real estate example. But like if you just have agents looking for all the jobs out there and agents looking for all the candidates out there, you've got this many to many problem, but you don't have any intent signals. Like, are they a good candidate?
How do we filter this down? Like, you know, that's what the marketplaces do. And that's that search problem. So, you know, first order thinking, yes, agents can build all this stuff, but it's not great. And you won't really know that it's not great until you start getting into the weeds. So, you know, there are differences like systems of record are definitely not, there's no issue with those.
Companies like Samsara, for example, or WiseTech. Samsara is the global, I've spoken about them before. They're a listed US company that does, it's like the service now for infrastructure. What about Xero?
Yeah, I was about to ask that follow-up question.
I'm going to get A-Tech up and let's go through the top 10 and you say if they're at risk or not.
So for context, Bryce and I have disagreed about Xero. I have kind of had a view that switching costs are high, company's data is on there. Bryce has a view that you could just have all your invoices saved on your computer and the agent could do the rest. Yeah, it could do it.
I think you both can be right. Yeah. And I think that's the thing with this stuff is that it's not mutually exclusive. Like agents just don't kill software. You know, Xero's not dead. It isn't. The general ledger is a very complicated thing to build. And there's a lot of competitors to Xero that are AI native general ledger type situations.
But there's a lot of work that goes into building that, the local tax law, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, the connections with government to file your taxes. The bookkeeping part's probably the easy part. The question will be is can Xero implement something like that? And they've already got an AI tool. Can they make your life easier?
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