Invariantum

Intuitive's moat is an installed-base switching cost: once surgeons and whole OR teams train on da Vinci, replacing it means retraining everyone and accepting patient risk, so it deepens with every procedure. It deterred all entry for 20 years. Now Medtronic's Hugo (Dec 2025) and J&J's Ottava (Jul 2026) are FDA-cleared, but clearance isn't adoption. Verdict: Exceptional / Intact, under threat. The watch is real adoption, not the numbers.

Uber is two moats, not one. Mobility is a deep local network effect that holds market leadership but faces autonomy, where an AV owner like Waymo can bypass the app and go direct, a threat the numbers can't yet see. Delivery is a shallower network effect, second to DoorDash at home but largely safe from robots at the doorstep. A cross-platform bundle ties them. Verdict: Strong / Intact, under threat.

FICO's moat is a coordination lock: everyone uses the FICO score because everyone else does, not because it's the best model. That lock held for 19 years against a good rival. In July 2025 the one actor who could open it, the FHFA, admitted VantageScore into GSE mortgages. Record numbers since are lagging, not reassuring. Verdict: Strong but Impaired. Not broken, because the market hasn't actually moved, yet.

Hermès has fallen ~43% from its 2025 peak, but Layer 1 reads the moat clean, so this is almost pure multiple compression, from ~68x to ~39x, the floor it has held since 2018. At €1,678 the price only asks for the growth the disclosed model already produces. Recovery needs the moat to hold and earnings to compound; multiple reversion just speeds it up. Deploy two thirds now, reserve one third for a fall to ~27x. Sell only if Layer 1 breaks.

Layer 1 (rev. 8 Aug): moat re-tested on H1 2026 — seven conditions clean, no watch items, Tier A. Resale premium now measured directly: 173 observations, rationed formats at 2.47–3.12x retail.