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APPLE AND AMAZON LIVE EARNINGS
Recorded: May 1, 2025 Duration: 3:06:36Space Recording
Short Summary
Tech giants Microsoft, Meta, and NVIDIA report strong earnings, driving significant stock growth and reflecting a bullish trend in the market. Meanwhile, Amazon and Apple face scrutiny over tariff impacts, highlighting the importance of strategic partnerships and hiring in navigating the evolving landscape.
Full Transcription
Thank you. you
yeah what is up what is up how we doing today evan i'm doing fantastic and so is my portfolio cannot be upset with nothing today i haven't even
looked that much at my portfolio today maybe that's why it's green
yeah and you didn't ring the opening bell so so... Not ring the opening bell, no, that is confirmed.
The moment you started to move the New York Stock Exchange yesterday,
the market has literally moved up like 5% since then.
Okay, I don't know why they put the bring speaker up and like remove from space and mute person so close,
but I totally just hit mute stock talk.
So I don't know if you can't unmute now or something, but...
I can't unmute, I have the power.
Well, now you're muted again.
I'm excited for the spaces today, though.
Apple, Amazon earnings, big day, Airbnb, and a couple others.
It'd be a good one.
Yeah, a lot of earnings today.
A lot of things happened yesterday, of course.
A little quiet on the news today.
Trump was at that National Day of Prayer.
They had about 19 different prayers given up there on the stage,
and that was about all we really got out of that.
And he's somewhere flying to Tuscaloosa was last I saw.
So maybe we get some headlines later, but all quiet from Trump.
You never know.
Every once in a while he's at 40,000 feet and starts to rant about something.
But yeah, market's up today.
Obviously, Microsoft, after its earnings report yesterday,
up 9%, right at 9%.
I think it was up as much as 10% at the open this morning.
Meta as well, nice report from them.
They are still up 4.5%, faded a little bit of the move,
but still doing well across the board. NVIDIA, based on some of that CapEx spin we heard, up 4% today as well. Broader market QQQ is up 1.8 and SPY up 1.3. IWM small caps are up 1%. Dow Jones lagging a little bit, only up 0.69%.
tagging a little bit, only up 0.69%. And yeah, that's kind of where we're at in the market.
It's been kind of a quiet day. We had a little bit of a trend up in the morning, trend back down,
and we've kind of just held the same area and worked our way back up here in the back half of
the trading session. And yeah, that's about all I've got to report on so far. And then as Evan
was mentioning, big earnings today and a
lot of uh a lot of people will be watching these uh stock talk uh i know you'll be all over amazon
and my other co-host evan all over apple so it's big day for my two co-hosts up here
yep let's hope it's a it's a better day for me and not for him. Yeah, we will see. Do we want to turn this into a bet?
I'm on the losing side of this one, I feel like.
But we could do a little game of who's higher up at the Open tomorrow
or by Stocks on Spaces, Apple or Amazon.
It'd be a good way to...
I'm not providing calls for either of them for the ER.
Well, neither am I.
I think you're at a 50-50 shot,
like as a neutral here, because I think Amazon probably has bigger move downside risk,
but also they have a bigger upside move too.
So like, I feel like it's 50-50.
Yeah. I mean, they have a lot of tariff risk, definitely.
So I imagine we'll hear about that on the commentary.
On the call, I would not be surprised to see them
acknowledge tariff risk, though. I mean, obviously, Amazon has a lot of imports that are relevant to
the business. But yeah, that'll be it'll be an interesting one for sure, as always. I mean,
I've been through so many Amazon quarters as a shareholder at this point that, you know,
it's tough for me to get overly hyperbolic
about any single quarter. I think everyone kind of feels the same way when you've owned a stock
for a lot of years, but I do care obviously a lot and I will read it in detail and see if there's
anything. I think for Amazon, the biggest things I'll be looking for is just, you know, a game plan or some semblance of confidence around how they're going to navigate a tariff rich environment and, you know, what mechanisms they have in place to soften the blow.
That'll be, I think, where people will be most interested for Amazon when it comes to the retail business.
So, yeah, I'm sure we'll talk more about it later, though.
We'll get to the panel for now.
Yeah, sounds good.
Working on getting some of the speakers up here.
Wolfie, let's go over your direction first.
What's your day in the market looked like?
What thoughts do you have around today's action
and just what in general, what's on your mind?
Give me a top five. Give you a your mind top yeah uh give you a top
five i'll give you five things on your mind top five reasons the lakers lost no i'm just kidding
uh i luca lebron oh sorry well i was gonna say opting to go for a for a role instead of a pick and roll would be one for Luca. So I had a couple of calls left over, you know,
from when we had the secondary washout two Mondays ago.
Specifically, I had, like, some Microsoft calls
and some meta calls that were house money.
And I just kind of, like, closed them out on the back of this pop and then
you know I'm just I haven't really added anything in the last couple days outside of DoorDash which
I mentioned on the space and I added some calls to Rivian a few I think like a week and a half ago
which I also mentioned on your call but outside that of that, I haven't really done too much.
Again, for me, it's like nothing different at this point.
Just looking for some of these moves that have, you know, little to do with the indices themselves because of weighting.
Or I'm looking for, if it is a move for some of these bigger names,
I'm looking for stuff like Tesla, for example,
pressed right up against its 200-day and like a pretty violent downtrend.
But outside of that, you know, we got some econ data coming out tomorrow.
And we got Amazon and Apple, of course, tonight.
and Apple, of course, tonight.
I don't really want to get too cute.
I don't really want to get too cute.
Market's been, you know,
ripping on some of these
quote-unquote,
not quote-unquote, some of these bogus
trade headlines.
One I saw this morning
is that they had
Trump says that Besant is
negotiating with over 200
countries.
Someone retweeted it and said
there's only 195 countries in the world.
So I'm trying not to get too cute.
I think, you know,
if we get some sort of exogenous pop,
or not exogenous,
we get some sort of pop to the upside here
that pushes us into the 200-day
or into the downtrend of the 100-day.
I think there's going to be a situation
where everybody's pretty much looking for it,
and a lot of people were talking about on this space
and on shows and everything else,
looking for that 200-day on the S&P.
That's some sort of tell to whether or not things are going to get better, technically.
And I think if we get there without any sort of reset, I think the first move is probably
going to be a sell.
It's just my two cents on that.
So I'm trying not to get too cute.
I also don't want to step in front of things and short them. Right. So I'm seeing like some people are placing bets against some of these stronger names in the market.
Say Palantir, for example, which I haven't really participated in.
But I don't want to get too cute. I just kind of want to have the data come out the way that it's going to come out, have the market decide the direction. And then I'd rather catch the,
call it 70% in the middle of whatever move is to come,
than to catch it early and miss it.
I'd rather miss out on the first 15% of the total move
than trying to be early and get my head caved in um you know
outside of that uh i think the the the prudent thing to do is when you have some of these winners
is to like really hold yourself uh accountable for like the size of the moves that you had. So an example I'll give is I had,
I had Eli Lilly from, I think two Mondays ago, it rallied pretty aggressively on a headline I
didn't expect to see. And it had earnings and I was trimming it into earnings. And then whatever
I had left on the table, I typically deal in options for anybody who doesn't know. So whatever
I had left on the table is washed.
And that move reset today is pretty aggressive.
So I think for the most part, you know, if you participate in the last couple of weeks, you've been rewarded.
But I don't really want to get too cute.
I think today is a perfect example of that, too, because, you know, some of these moves that we had, you had Amazon meta and Microsoft,
aggressive gap ups. If you chase them, you got crushed. If you tried to short them outside the
first like few minutes, you got crushed probably. And if you if you're dealing in options, you know,
you have Microsoft, for example, trading in a, you know, what, like a four point range for most of the day or a five,
trading a five point range throughout the day.
So like, you know, your, your decay is going to crush you.
So I just don't want to get too cute.
I want to just kind of be a little bit light and nimble here.
If I had to guess the next five to 10%, I'd guess it to the downside, not upside.
But that's what makes markets.
So, yeah, that's pretty much it for now.
What about the Lakers part?
Are we just going to leave that alone?
So, I'm not a LeBron fan.
I'm not a LeBron fan.
So, by that proxy, I'm not a Lakers fan.
So by that proxy, I'm not a Lakers fan.
But I think if you want to talk a lot of shit about coaches on your podcast,
you don't get to play the role of sanctimonious jackass
when they ask you questions when you F up.
So I think J.J. Redick has to wear it.
And I think Luke is fat fat and that's about it.
Thought we might get stock talk out of the,
out of the hole on that one,
but we'll leave it alone.
We'll leave the Lakers alone for now or four guys.
Logical.
I'm going to come over to you next and see what you looked at in the
market today.
What your thoughts are.
Yeah. I mean, obviously great day in the market.
If you're a bull, this has been a fantastic run.
I'm going to say something and people are going to call me stupid.
I'm 135% long.
Yes, I'm on margin heavily.
That said, it's been an incredible run my portfolio is
probably up 20% in the last two three weeks so I'm about 15% or so year-to-date
which is fantastic it's crushing this and be that said I know we're at pretty
critical levels and we've run a lot in a short amount of time so I am being
somewhat prudent I know that's crazy to say after I said
I'm 135% long, but I don't want to sell my stocks. So instead I added about 3% in spy puts.
So I went even more long, but these are hedges. So yeah, I mean, I took some three, four week out
put spreads. I think that's probably the right way to play it with leverage especially
when you know vix is back down towards um you know that uh 24 level which is much lower now so
i mean options make a lot more sense and even then it's still pretty elevated given where vix has been
over the last uh year or so which is why i did put spreads, you know, I think it's going to take more to break
us below those 480 lows. I think those hold unless we get any sort of unless we get some sort of
escalation, unless we get some sort of like worse news, prolonged tariff resolutions, and that ends
up having, you know, more impacts to the economy, all that stuff.
Right. But, you know, I just think it's really funny because I'm sure I'll get tagged in the comments when I say this, but because, you know, the bears just want to, you know, once you get
into a bearish mindset, it's kind of like this virus. I don't care to be bearish or bullish.
I just care to be, you know, right, whatever side that is. And, you know, I saw the bearish
arguments, but I think the bearish arguments made a lot more sense when we were, you know, right, whatever side that is. And, you know, I saw the bearish arguments, but I think
the bearish arguments made a lot more sense when we were, you know, ripping to the upside a couple
months ago. And, you know, I'm not necessarily a fan of ripping straight back up to the upside,
but, you know, the market's kind of telling you that we, you know, potentially can avoid a
recession. And, you know, so I think that at 480, you basically priced in a mild recession. Now,
the question will be like, how severe a recession is, or if we end up avoiding one entirely,
then the upside is definitely coming. But yeah, I mean, we ran a lot in a short period
of time. So adding a hedge here makes a lot of sense, especially if you want to stay long.
But yeah, I mean, I'm sure people will tell me, I'll just wait until the shelves
are empty.
And that's, you know, that's the bearish mindset of like, just wait, our debt is going to
kill us.
Do they say that every time?
I mean, like, is this time going to be the time?
Maybe, you know, at that point, you know, I'll wait, I'll see the price action and I'll
react accordingly and I'll get more defensive.
But the price action has been pretty constructive.
And yeah, you had breadth expansion.
You know, typically individual names lead the way down and then they lead the way back
And that's what the breadth expansion is.
That's what those breadth thrusts are essentially like breadth deterioration leads quickly into
breadth expansion.
So, yeah.
And I mean, could you imagine if we, you know, avoid a recession and this ended up being a great dip to buy?
And, you know, names like Magnite are sitting at 12 bucks still.
They were at 21 in February and they were still undervalued then.
If we end up like the economy continues to hum along, you know, the fiscal policy just ends up blowing up the deficit and it's just business as usual.
You know, I thought magnite goes to 30 this
year and that's before we got the google ad tech antitrust ruling so that's a lot of upside and so
i don't want to miss something like that just because you know people are telling me they're
they're so smart and um you know you know just wait until the freights blah blah blah um i'm not
trying to down play that okay like yes that's the peak of pullback 10% here. Yes, I got it.
But those, that information is known by the market.
Like if somebody on Twitter knows that information,
then the market knows it and it's priced in. So I'm just thinking that, you know,
you're smarter than the market is just never a good thing to do.
That's why so many traders say, just pay attention to the price action. And yeah,
I mean, obviously a pullback is warranted here.
Hence why I just took 3% size. It puts right. Like I'm just trying to be reasonable and rational.
And again, if something more nefarious is afoot, then I will, you know, uh, get more defensive.
I'll trim my excess longs that I put on. I will, you know, add some shorts and, you know, if I feel
that things are rolling over, I will. I'll do that.
Yeah, it's been volatile waters.
But again, think back to 2018.
You had a 20% drawdown like this and it was during the Trump presidency.
And you had tariff awards then, trade awards then.
You had the taper tantrum.
we haven't necessarily had any sort of fed pivot this time around um
but we've definitely had a um we've had uh you know a fiscal pivot i think i think we've had
a policy shift in the in the sense of nobody's believing those 150 tariffs on china because if
they did and that was real then you then this economy would basically collapse overnight. I don't think anyone's buying that.
So again, we have NFP, I think, tomorrow morning.
That's going to be a big hit to the market.
At this point, I'm kind of hoping for a pullback.
And I've been saying that the 529 level on SPY would be, in my view, not a bad spot.
You'd end up making a higher low.
You'd end up filling that gap. I'd feel a lot more
confident and comfortable in the rally to the upside if we fill that gap. So that's why, you
know, I bought the 550, sold the 520s. And yeah, I mean, more downside than that, you know, can we
revisit the 480 lows for a double bottom? Yeah, yeah, it's all possible. But, you know, I just think that go look at the monthly charts for a lot of these names.
I mean, we have big volume.
And you go look at where SPY basically finished the month.
You know, there's a good horizontal support going back to that 2021, 2022 highs
before we went into 2022 bear market.
Everybody knows that. It's very obvious on the chart.
And then if you look at
the trend line from the coven lows and you just draw it across the board you know through 2022
uh and you know into where we bottomed at 480 you know it bounced perfectly right there so it's just
like a perfect symmetrical thing and like you know you look at the volume that we had in that one
week of like april 7th i mean the volume was massive and, you know, people can say, oh, well,
you know, you need more volume than that. It's like, well,
the dollar amounts that you're buying, uh, you know, on spy at 500 is,
you know,
much more dollars than when you were seeing the big volumes at the COVID
bottoms, right? Like, you know, spy was around 200 then or whatever. So,
you know, you gotta think about it as like that volume you just saw,
which was huge, is actually like 2.5 times or whatever the volume you saw then.
So, yeah, I mean, I don't know.
But could we look back in six months and say, yeah, that turned out to be the bottom?
And everyone would be like, wow, that totally made sense.
And of course it feels fearful when you're kind of, you know, at these lows.
And, you know, again, I'm not trying to discredit that there's still bear cases.
And I don't really like the fact that the S&P is about to rebubble back to, you know, 27 times earnings or something.
Like, I don't like that.
And that's why I don't necessarily own S&P 500 stocks.
I've been saying that I'd like to see the RSP, the equal weighted S&P outperform the market cap weighted.
But today's been all about obviously the market cap weighted since it was driven by two of the Mag7.
So I think it's good.
I think those reports are great.
CapEx reiterated they're still investing.
The AI story might not be over.
Can this be 1998?
Maybe.
I wasn't really around then i was like five six years old
so i i can't really comment too much on that but you know that's kind of what people have been
saying uh i'm not i'm not saying you know be ridiculous about your position like i'm still
i still expect that we'll have an economic slowdown i mean obviously you just got that gdp print
um you know i think the consumer has still been resilient.
That's what we've been seeing.
You know, people coming out, Capital One on their earnings call basically said,
we're not seeing anything that says the consumer is under too much pressure,
you know, Visa, et cetera.
So I don't know, like, you know, it's really easy to see the glass half empty.
But I think, you know, we have to easy to see the glass half empty. But I think, you know,
we have to see if like the things about these tariffs are like,
you know, really leading to, you know, because again, we had a lot of soft data
come in and that was really bad, but we really need to see the hard data.
And, you know, maybe NFP tomorrow is that,
in which case I'll be very happy that I took hedges today.
So, yeah, I don't know.
Can you see, you know, 5%, 10% pullback on S&P from here?
Will that hurt a lot of individual names?
Yeah, probably.
That's why you just want to be hedged for sure, especially after such a run.
And we're still, you know, in the midst of the volatility and still climbing that wall of worry.
And, you know, any, I think that that people are still gonna be very jittery.
If you get bad NFP tomorrow,
people will definitely be like, I knew it,
recession's here.
And they're just gonna dump indiscriminately, right?
So you do wanna be in the near term,
still prepared for volatility.
And so that's kind of what I'm doing.
And again, I've mentioned multiple times
over the last few months that a big, big, big chunk of my portfolio is in biotech.
And if you look from the bottom, when we bottomed in SPY on like 4749, whatever it was, I think it was 47.
XBI is actually outperforming SPY.
I think that, again, biotechs, I mean, there's some names I've been,
you know, tweeting about, they got to what trading at one third of the cash on their balance sheet.
And those names have tripled since. I mean, I don't know, there was max pessimism in that sector.
And you're going to be in an environment where, you know, maybe economic growth does slow,
it does stall. And in that case, I'd rather be
invested in places where I think that the growth is still going to be there. So, you know, I'm not
saying I don't own Mag7 stocks. I don't do that. I'm not saying that they won't end up leading.
You know, if they end up leading, then I think we're all good, right? But I'm not really like
ready to buy $3 trillion companies. Never have, never will.
So I'm a lot more selective about my longs.
You know, Stock Talk has a name that, you know, him and I share.
One Biotech ASND, we talked about it, actually reports today.
We'll see what that does.
HII reported today, whatever report, but we're kind of waiting on a catalyst around defense spending, a bill that's coming through.
So again, I think that there's catalyst trades you can take on.
I think there's certain sectors that you could look at
that are gonna, in my view, do well.
The businesses are gonna do well,
regardless of what's happening in the macro situation
and might do well because of what's happening
in the macro situation actually.
So that's kind of where I'm focused.
And I've talked about Latin America and stuff like that.
Sorry, I got some cleaners at my house.
So they just whipped up that vacuum.
I'll pass it.
I heard that.
I was wondering what that was.
I thought maybe you were in a mechanic shop
or woodworking or something.
I wasn't sure what that was,
but appreciate you sharing your thoughts there, logical.
Let's go ahead and go over to Stock Talk and see what's on your mind today. And then we'll hit Stock Sniper as we get closer to those earnings. All right. Yeah, I know we have a little
bit of a tighter panel today. So yeah, we've been active in the last couple of weeks on some
individual names. I haven't deployed all my cash yet but i deployed a good
amount on four or five names last couple weeks most of them have worked really well
um i'll go over a couple of them here so yesterday we opened a swing on
frankly it's one of my favorite stocks in the market i've traded it i don't know five times
now i've swing traded it five times. All five of those swings
have been successful trades. So it's quickly becoming one of my favorite names. I also
think it's frankly a really, really, really, really well at managed company, which is talent
energy, ticker TLN. I've, I've first got interested in this name last year when they were supposed to be Amazon's pick for their nuclear expansion for data centers.
And the deal ended up getting shot down.
And the stock showed tremendous resilience when that deal got shot down.
You know, people were expecting it to, like, 20 and it it didn't um and even in the the sell-off that we saw around data center names i mean it
came down every data center name came down but it bounced very hard off the off the 200 day you
know this thing came all the way down to the 150s and then within weeks it was back in the 200s
um you know that's a pretty impressive move not even really within weeks i, it was back in the 200s.
You know, that's a pretty impressive move.
Not even really within weeks.
I think it was like within nine or 10 days.
It recovered from the 150s to the 220s.
So that was the first sign of real strength I saw in this name where I was like, hey, I want to get back in this thing.
And for a couple months, I watched it chopped around a little bit.
It actually came back down to the 200 day again um it was like a month later a couple weeks later after that and so I kept
watching it waiting to see for it to prove the hold of that support area and then price started
getting a lot tighter um on this thing since April you. The range on it tightened up substantially. We went from
150s to 220s. Then we went from 160s to low 200s. Then the price stopped in this 190 to 200 range.
That's what I really like to see on stocks that are bouncing off support. I like to see price
ranges tighten as they continue to demonstrate that
support. And that's exactly what we saw with this name. But it's not just the technical picture that
I love about this name. I just love this name as an exposure to energy. And, you know, we saw the
reports earlier in this earnings season from a lot of these power producers, and they've ripped
face on these reports. You know, many of them were unjustifiably sold to the data center theme. So
anyway, we got along on this name yesterday. The reason why I felt like it was an ideal entry was
all the moving averages were stacked. Price was literally sitting on top of the hundred day.
It was a really beautiful technical picture, 9 and 21 EMAs pushing into the 100-day.
It was a really beautiful technical picture, nine and 21 EMAs pushing into the hundred day.
So we took a swing at it yesterday, and that thing ripped today.
At the highs of the day, I think it was up 7% or 8%.
It's going to close up about 5% on the day.
But for a $9, $10 billion power producer, that's a pretty big move.
And that's another thing I really like about this stock is it is high beta.
When you get the intraday moves about this stock is it is high beta. You know,
when you get the intraday moves on this thing, it moves nicely, you know, five to 10% intraday moves.
So if you time your trades well on a name like this, you can do really well and give yourself an early cushion. So, you know, the calls I'm sitting on with that thing that I picked up
literally just yesterday are already up 70 to 80% today off a one-day move so that gives me enormous cushion I can cut trim some of those
calls keep some of them keep some of the shares um so that provides a lot of flexibility right
off the bat for talent energy the the sector I've been talking about all year on these spaces has
been mid-cap aerospace and defense and you look at the
charts of any of those names i've talked about i've tweeted about many of them but you look at
the charts of kratos and brayer drs mercury systems which is ticker mrcy pull up any of
those charts and you'll almost feel like they don't even trade in the u.s stock market is what
it'll look like you know if you look at the correction in the indexes, most of these names barely budged.
Even the ones that did come down recovered so quickly.
Like I'm talking about when a matter of days, not weeks, they recovered all of their moving
averages.
And so the level of technical strength I saw in the sector throughout the year has been
very, very supportive of my idea to stay in these names.
Now, I haven't kept all of them.
One example, which is really the story of today, which is DRS, Leonardo DRS.
They're exposed to shipbuilding.
They're also exposed to the broader defense industry.
It's one of my favorite names.
It's one of my top five mid-cap defense names.
We were long this name earlier in the year, did really well on it,
got out of it at the start of April when it was trading around 31, 32.
But we did really, really well on it, and I wanted to revisit it.
They had earnings today, crushed it.
Stock jumped nine.
It's going to close up almost 10% on those earnings.
This is another, again, in that exact same range, mid-cap.
Well, as of today, it's a large cap because it popped over a $10 billion market cap today.
But in that sort of $2 billion to $10 billion market cap range for these mid-cap defense companies.
And you saw a little bit of enthusiasm jump after that report in some of these names as well.
You know, Kratos got a pop.
AMTM got a pop.
A lot of these other defense names got a pop off that today.
So I think this is an area where you have to be exposed.
If you look at the guidance for DRS today, they were just very, very bullish on the entire defense industry,
especially things like missile defense, shipbuilding, Navy contracts. And that's where the majority of my exposure is as well. So
I think the Leonardo DRS report from today provided me at least a lot of confidence in that mid-cap
defense theme being relevant for the rest of the year. And I said it, I literally posted this on
like January 15th of
this year, but I said mid-cap aerial space and defense is going to be a leading theme of this
year. I think if you go back at the end of the year and look at all these names, a lot of people
are going to be wowed at how much they moved. There's an extraordinary amount of room for
speculation is what I like to call it in these names. When you're in an industry where five or six billion dollar companies have 20 plus
billion dollar backlogs you're in an industry where there's a lot of room for flexibility
on valuation premiums because as those backlogs expand they don't expand incrementally you know
but like for these mid-cap defense names,
their backlogs aren't going up a couple of hundred million per contract.
When you hear about a Lockheed Martin contract,
it doesn't always move the stock.
In fact, it rarely does.
Why?
Because it's an enormous legacy prime defense contractor.
Any premium that's baked into Lockheed Martin is basically ongoing premium.
It's not based on some new contract they're receiving.
It's based on their leadership position in the industry.
That's a different type of premium.
When you look at these mid-cap names, the market premium they get is about either the
excitability of the sectors they're exposed to, but more importantly,
the optionality for valuation as a result of large contracts, right?
Like when Lockheed Martin signs a $3 billion contract, the stock doesn't move. When a $9 billion defense contractor signs a $3 billion contract, the stock moves, and
it moves a lot, and it moves quickly.
And so if you look at a lot of these mid-cap defense names, what you'll find is the price
action is sort of unique to the sector.
You know, and this is true with a lot of sectors.
You even look at biotech, for example.
Biotech price action is very unique to the sector, right?
You have huge moves on data announcements and readouts and trials.
moves on data announcements and readouts and trials. And then for the rest of the lifetime
of those stocks, most of them don't move a lot in the interim, right? They move them run-ups up to
data, run-ups up to approvals, commercialization bonuses, things like that. They're a very real
catalyst that move those types of stocks. The same thing is true for mid-cap defense stocks,
except in a different way. There's not as much unpredictability. Sometimes you go into a readout
where a lot of people are bullish in biotech and it fails and it's a super crowded trade and the
stock goes down 20%. That doesn't really happen in mid-cap defense because even without new
contracts, a lot of these companies, because of the specialization in their technology, retain market share anyway.
You know, for example, HII, which Logical brought up today, which is another name I got long recently, which has shipbuilding exposure.
They didn't have phenomenal earnings.
They had OK earnings, relatively in-line earnings.
Nothing surprising.
You know, the stock fell a little bit in the morning, recovered intraday.
I think it's going to close down around 1%.
That's the type of negative reaction you get in these names, right?
It's a low-risk negative reaction because, again, the majority of their businesses are pretty predictable.
But it's that unpredictability of these new contracts that can really drive share price.
So I think that's the dynamics that are
happening today. Like I said, I think the DRS earnings today are going to pump a little bit
more interest back into the sector, in my view. Not that these stocks haven't performed well
already. Most of them are up pretty significantly year to date already, but I think there's room.
And in that same vein, I had another name, MidCap defense name today, which is another one of my favorites that I have owned in the past, traded in the past frequently, which is BWXT Technologies.
They make reactors for nuclear submarines.
They're a hyper specialized subcontractor.
There are a variety of nuclear submarines that cannot be produced without BWXT's subcontraction.
So they end up being a beneficiary of a lot of what's going on right now with nuclear subs as well.
And also I saw that stock popping over the 200-day today for the first time in a while.
And I like the RR there.
You know, I can use my 200-day as to stop and control my risk really well on that trade.
So I took a stab at that one as well today to add to the basket. I actually got a nice little
move on that intraday and got a little 2% cushion early as well. So yeah, those are some of the
things I'm looking at and working with right now. Again, my focuses are kind of remaining in that
mid cap defense area.
And I've started to open up or not started to, but I opened up pretty recently some positions in the U.S. border security area as well.
So that's where my main focus is.
That's obviously outside of my core long term technology holdings, Amazon, Tesla, Robinhood, which aren't positions that I move in and out of.
So those are just kind of standard stalwarts, if you will, for the portfolio and have been for many years.
But outside of those, those are my areas of focus.
And, you know, one thing I will note about this market environment, and I've noticed this from a lot of people,
I will note about this market environment, and I've noticed this from a lot of people,
as markets stabilize or rebound, there's a propensity to chase, not only chase, in other
words, like buy stocks alongside, but there's a propensity to chase higher and higher beta stocks.
And I want to caution people against that. You know, in the midst of a rally
like this, and it's been a pretty tremendous rally off the lows, but in the midst of a rally like
this, your higher beta stocks obviously perform better off the lows. That's no mystery to anyone.
But they also perform worse when the
markets do chop or when the market's correct. And so it's important to stay grounded, I think,
about your risk expectations, even though the markets have recovered pretty significantly,
because we're still not above the 200 day. There could be an instance where we bump up into that.
And maybe even if we're destined to
retake it, maybe initially get rejected, you know, come down, make a little bit of a higher low and
then come back back for the breakout. That action is always possible. So you want to be careful about
just throwing on higher and higher beta exposure, more and more leverage as the markets go up,
because that's sort of the human nature
behavior, right? The human nature behavior is like, okay, markets are going back up.
I'm going to get longer and longer and longer and longer. I caution against that because a lot of
people did in 2022 and got killed on the first rebound. And I'm not saying this is going to be
another 2022. I'm just saying you have to entertain the possibility. Right. And so for me, I still think risk management is paramount.
I think still think having some level of hedge exposure, you know, a couple of percent in your portfolio, it's not going to hurt you.
But I think having that is still a good idea. You can be net long.
You know, even this entire time that we've been cautious and talking about this,
like we've still been net long, you know, hedges, the size of the hedges has gone up pretty significantly, not recently, but went up pretty significantly during our corrective phase. So
you can, you can find your way into these positions without putting much risk on the table.
You know, if you're risking a couple of percent exposure to a leveraged hedge,
then you're risking a couple of percent of your portfolio in case things do tumble down.
And if you're net long, I mean, and the market keeps going up,
you're going to blow right past that performance correction, right?
correction, right? I mean, depending on how high beta your portfolio is, but you should be able to
I mean, depending on how high beta your portfolio is,
out-earn that hedge correction if you're sized appropriately. So I think as crazy as these
markets are and as volatile as they are, if you just do some sensible, straightforward risk
management, I think you can do all right.
And that's true, I think, even if the markets do turn back around.
I think that'll still be true.
So keep looking for the individual stocks that make sense to you.
Do the work.
I've certainly done a lot more work this year to pick stocks than I did in the last few years.
And I think most good traders I know feel the same way.
They feel like they had to put in more work for their performance this year than they have in the past. last few years and I think most good traders I know feel the same way I feel
like they had to put in more work for their performance this year than they
have in the past and that's okay not every market's gonna be equally easy you
know and bull markets like the one of the last two years are easy you know
don't let anyone tell you otherwise they're easy you buy your favorite
stocks you close your eyes and you wake up six months later, and they're a lot higher.
That's generally what most people experience in those market environments.
So when the environment changes, just understand your risk management should change.
And when your risk management changes, the stocks you pick also to a degree should change.
You should be picking the stocks that you think can perform better in that environment.
And Logical's referenced this before about when he sort of shifted his portfolio away from speculative biotech to commercial biotech because he felt commercial biotech had a better shot in this environment.
Those are the type of adjustments that people should be making to their portfolios, in my view, is where you're
prioritizing stocks that can perform either way, right? Whether we get relief to this tariff
situation or not, right? You want to find stocks that have a chance to survive either way. You
know, you don't want to find stocks that are at the middle of this inflection where they either
die or rebound 100%.
I mean, some of you might want to take that level of risk.
But for me, I think in this kind of market environment, it's not a smart thing.
I think you should really measure the level of risk that you're willing to take based on the stability of the trend.
So if you are in a very stable, very aggressive uptrend,
like we were in the last two years,
you can be a little bit more liberal with your risk management.
You can be a little bit more liberal with your sizing.
But when you have CHOP, like we've had this year,
you want to take that as a signal to be a little bit stricter
with your risk management and to be a little bit stricter with your risk management and to be a little stricter with your position sizing. That's a very simple, logical, straightforward cue.
But a lot of people fail to do that when market environments change. They just
size the same amount, buy the same stocks, you know, and it just doesn't tend to work as well.
So yeah, that's kind of my rant for today. I think there's a lot of interesting opportunities out there.
We've been hitting on a few of them.
We also did a great pre-market call this morning.
We do a pre-market call every morning, but today's was really on fire.
We called it a bunch of names, called it five names this morning that all ripped.
Today, let me go pull up my transcript from the pre-market call this morning that all ripped uh today let me go pull up my transcript from the pre-market call
this morning we touched on uh trivago took a trvg and uh that stock was up about three percent in
pre-market it's going to close the day up 30 percent three zero massive move on that thing
on the b riley upgrade this morning that we covered in pre-market and there was actually
liquidity on that in pre-market.
You could have got a position this morning and enjoyed that move intraday.
Another one we touched on was Camping World this morning, ticker CWH, on an upgrade from JP Morgan.
That stock also did very, very nicely, up 8%.
We also touched on EverQuote, ticker EVER.
This wasn't an analyst report,
but it was a read-through from our head of research, Yanezu,
who many people on our server know, but he's a gem.
And we were talking this morning,
as we do before all our pre-market calls,
and he brought this one up to me and said,
hey, look, there was a great piece out from JP Morgan this morning.
What JP Morgan was saying was they were covering the max earnings.
And they noted that on the call,
the max CEO said,
we see significant weakness in our healthcare insurance business,
but we see significant strength in our automotive insurance business.
And they guided for an even stronger automotive insurance second half.
And so the read through there was, was, okay, sell the health insurance names, but buy the
automotive insurance names.
And if you look at most of the auto insurance pure plays today, they all ripped.
But EverQuote is the most pure play on the market.
90% of their business is in auto insurance.
So this morning we felt that I was a no brainer.
You're able to get that for free in pre-market. We got it for half a percent in pre-market stock ended up
running 11, 12% today. So these are exactly the type of, you know, opportunities we talk about
on a catalytic basis that we go over. We don't go over stocks every morning. Sometimes there aren't
any catalyst opportunities. Sometimes there's five in a day like there were today. Sometimes there's one, but we go through all the research every morning and
then share that with our members on the call. And to me, it's one of the most valuable parts of our
community, but yeah, did really well today. Another one we shared was OLO, Olo Inc. That was up 15%
today. Another one that was relatively flat this morning.
So a lot of stuff working, a lot of catalysts working,
a lot of individual names that have shown relative strength
are holding up and continuing to turn to the upside.
So there's a lot to like, you know,
even if the action in the indexes concerns you,
which, you know, to me,
I don't think we're out of the woods in the indexes yet.
I think we need a reclaim of the 200-day moving average with volume before we can say, okay, everything is behind us.
But in the interim, you can take these stops at stock.
Sorry, you can take these very well.
So if you put in the work,
I think you'll do fine.
If you manage your risk,
I think you'll do fine.
So I want to ask you a question.
You talk about some of the defensive names and such.
Is that kind of 200 day that you're mentioning in the indices or the broader market?
Is that maybe a changing point?
You know, if the MAG7 names just come roaring back
and lead us, you know, become the leaders,
if simis become the leaders again,
do you flip out of those and get back into tech type of names
or are you locked into where you're at?
I have enough tech exposure with Amazon, Tesla, Robinhood.
Like I have enough. And so for me, I don't feel like a need. And those are long-term positions for me,
right? Those aren't trading positions, but those three stocks give me enough exposure to like
tech and, and, you know, the idea of mag seven stocks performing that, you know, I'm fine to
roll with those. Am I going to start looking
at some other individual tech names as those individual charts start to build up? Yeah,
yeah, I will. But right now, there's still a lot of speculative tech names that don't have the
prettiest charts that still need to do a little bit more work before I'm gung ho about getting
along them. But yeah, my short answer to to your question is I feel like I have enough exposure.
If the Mag 7 want to go on another tear, I'll be more than exposed to that.
Yeah, I was just curious on, like, the defensive names.
If there's a – if it's the market conditions, why you're in those?
You mean defense names, right?
Like aerospace and defense.
Right, right, right. So you're in those more for mean defense names, right? Like aerospace and defense. Right, right, right.
So you're in those more for the thematic.
Yeah, exactly.
From what I've heard.
I don't view those as necessarily defensive play on the market.
Although, I do think a lot of them are tariff immune or close to tariff immune.
Like Kratos, for example, has like 3% tariff exposure.
So I do think that gives them a little bit of resilience
to the macro conditions, right? Like, who knows what's going to happen with this tariff stuff,
whether they go up or down or sideways or get reversed or not. But it's nice to have a few
companies in the portfolio where you're like, hey, you know, even if things do go haywire on
the tariff front, or do stay as they are, this company is not going to get hit that hard from them.
And so they fall into that basket as well.
But, yeah, to answer your question, no, I don't think mid-cap aerospace and defense is a defensive exposure.
I think it's just a good exposure.
I think it's a smart exposure.
think it's a smart exposure and i mean i have enough of a cushion on pretty much all of my
mid-cap aerospace and defense positions that i have the flexibility that you know even if we do
get three four five percent pullbacks in some of those names i'll be a dip buyer not a seller and
you know for me again i think this is about for the first time in decades real capital in the global budget flowing from legacy primes to smaller defense
contractors. And I think it's like the first time ever that that's going to happen in a meaningful
way. And I think that that's going to be reflected in the valuations of these smaller
mid-cap aerospace and defense companies.
And, you know, I could be wrong, but I don't think I'm going to be wrong.
I think in two years, people will be looking back and saying, you know, why don't we see that coming?
But I think all the cues are there.
I think the White House has given you the cues.
I think if you go and peer through the latest defense bill, you'll find plenty of cues.
If you go look through the Republican reconciliation package, you'll find plenty of cues. If you go look through the
Republican reconciliation package, $150 billion supplementary package, you read the details of it,
plenty of cues. A lot of the technology that's being cited for next generation defense, drones,
missile defense, autonomous craft, both submarines and aircraft. These categories are largely dominated by smaller
defense companies. And that's just something a lot of people overlook. Like Lockheed Martin
has great technology. They have industry best technology. Northrop Grumman, industry best
technology. General Dynamics, industry best technology. But if you go look when these guys win contracts, go look at the subcontracting sheets and you'll discover how many three, four,
five, six, seven, eight billion dollar companies are doing required subcontracting work to the
tune of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in value for these larger companies.
And, you know, a great
example of this is two days ago, General Dynamics was awarded a $12 billion shipbuilding award.
Okay. General Dynamics doesn't keep that whole $12 billion because they can't build the entire
ship on their own. There are component suppliers, there are subcontractors that they need. Okay.
So in that deal, $1.5 billion out of that $12 billion award was immediately subcontractors that they need. Okay. So in that deal, $1.5 billion out of that $12 billion award
was immediately subcontracted out to Huntington Ingalls, who's a $9 billion company. General
Dynamics is a $75 billion company. So these are the type of dynamics that, I mean, by virtue of
me paying attention to the detail in these bills that you can discover.
And, you know, Mercury Systems is another great example of this.
Like, I hadn't seen a single soul at all talk about Mercury Systems, ticker MRCY, not on Twitter, not in the analyst community.
When I found that stock and I found out its exposure to missile defense, I was like, OK, this is a great opportunity.
Look at how that stock is done recently. Thing doesn't go down, like never has
a red day. And if it does, it's down like half a percent, just goes up the next day. I think it's
in like the fifties now or close to it. So these things aren't sexy in the sense that they're not
like traditional tech companies, but they are tech companies. They're building defense tech.
And there's a new age of defense technology that is like on the horizon.
Like we're right here.
You know, in the next decade, the United States is going to spend untold amounts on autonomous systems, on drones.
And there are very few sources of capital that can compete with the U.S. annual defense budget.
It's going to be over a trillion dollars next year.
It's in one year.
It's not like, oh, we're allocating a trillion dollars over a 20-year period.
The U.S. government spends $800 billion to a trillion dollars a year on defense.
And so just an increment of that, 5% of that, 10% of that, I think the figure will be higher,
but 5%, 10% of that is valuation changing money for a two, three, four, five, $6 billion
mid-cap defense company.
So yeah, I can go on about this all day.
But yeah, I think it's one of the best opportunities in the market over the next decade.
And I think that's regardless of whether you want to be in a defensive position or a speculative position.
We do have 10 minutes here until the market closes. I know we are expecting
Amazon earnings right after the bell, I believe, 401 estimate based on their previous release times.
Who knows, maybe 405.
Apple, just in case you haven't followed along,
Apple always does take like half an hour before they release those numbers.
So we'll be live here for all of those.
We'll call out the other ones as well.
Reddit, XYZ, I guess, whatever that square is called now.
Duolingo, Twilio, some other names today.
I saw Brad jumped up here with us. Did I miss one? Duolingo's today? Yeah, Duolingo, Twilio, some other names today I saw Brad jumped up here with us
Did I miss one? Duolingo's today?
Yeah, Duolingo is today
Does that mean you're
going to be busy for the next five minutes?
I thought
I was wanting to call on you Brad
and see what thoughts you had
around these numbers that we're about to get
Yeah, I got nothing you had around these numbers that we're about to get?
Yeah, I got nothing because I need to cover that.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, hey, yeah, no problem.
Totally understand that.
We'll circle back to you here in just a little bit.
Thanks for being here.
Glad you're hanging out with us.
And Sam, I saw you jumped up on stage.
Hey, what's going on?
There he is.
What's up?
Just really been spectating.
Got to fly back to the U.S. tomorrow.
So I haven't really done much lately other than maybe just buy some dips here and there.
Overall, I mean, I've been seeing that. How long have you been gone?
God, too long. I feel like I've been gone when did you leave i left on the 16th so i left when we were when we just made the
lows and every time we need to uh can you just stay over there a little bit longer yeah i just
stay a little bit longer yeah i know seriously like it's just sometimes like you know you just
want to really check out while you're gone on vacation i have no problem doing that i used to
go on vacation maybe like once maybe twice a year but this time i don't know how you can really
clock out what the market's making like two or three percent movies every whole day like it's
very hard to do that especially during earnings season. I mean, you know, I love the game, so I'm going to always pay attention.
But it's pretty crazy because, like, the headlines change every time.
But what I've been seeing is that we saw something similar in 2020.
The highest inflation.
You're basically on the cusp of a double dip contraction GDP.
And even on the worst days where you're getting the worst news possible,
the market just rips up.
And it starts out deep in the red, kind of like yesterday.
And you have every single reason for the market to continue going down.
Headlines are bad.
The news is bad.
The numbers are bad, everything.
But the market ends up greener flat in the day after being down two sigma moves. I just feel like whenever you see that, you got to kind of skate where the puck is going. You have to adapt
to the market. So we were really stuck in a period for the last couple of months
before I left on vacation.
But before that,
the market was down like 2-3%
every single day.
Now we're seeing the opposite.
And yet, I just feel like
when we saw the AAIS estimate survey
had the worst bullish print since 2022,
also had the most bearish print since 2022. I mean, obviously you look at the, uh, CNN fear greed index.
That was more of a, that was more of a trailing base.
The AI is more of a sentiment base where it's just a group of surveys and so
on. But you see that happen and the market just continues to just go on.
Right. Not really the market just continues to just go on, right?
Not really the market I want to short, not really the market that I want to sell into as well.
Like it just got to be data dependent, see what's going to happen.
But I see oil pulling back, especially with OPEC saying that they can handle lower prices
in oil.
So oil is pulling back.
Inflation is going to curb.
I think the market might be sniffing that out,
but at the same time, still being cautious,
not like going too heavy or anything.
But it's tough to find the deals in the market
that we saw just a month ago.
And ironically, who would have had in their cards
that April was gonna end up on a flat or green month?
Definitely was not in my cards. I mean, when we were down like 20%, like there was no way April was getting up a
green month. I mean, we ended up a green month. Did it seem like we were a green month? But
you know, at the same time, I don't want to, I don't want to talk to everyone's ear. I forgot
the market closing here, but so far, you know, I think things are looking pretty good. Obviously,
it might not stay that way. But at the same time, this is not really a market that I want to short.
We saw pretty much the AI narrative come back pretty strongly. We saw CapEx raises across the
board for most companies. If not, guidance was maintained by Google. But that's what I'm looking for in Amazon earnings today.
I want to see what their guidance is as far as CapEx goes. I want to see what those cloud
numbers are, right? Google slightly missed or in line with cloud numbers. Microsoft was,
I believe they were in line or slightly beat cloud numbers, but at the same time,
they're still chugging along, right? So Amazon amazon the largest type of scale in the entire world
definitely want to see what's going on there probably going to see some hitting the tariffs
but at the same time i don't think this is going to be the earnings where oh there it is there's
all the issues there i think if it is it'll be known but you know don't take my word for that
uh we'll just see what happens in a couple minutes
stock sniper you've got two minutes.
Go ahead and hit me with those numbers. In only two minutes, I'm going to just say
I have a full schedule posted under the spaces right there. So you could see the order that
everything comes out. There's like a solid eight names that are highly anticipated releasing
earnings today. Some of the growth names and obviously two of the MAG7 names. But just to be very summaristic, because Amazon comes out at 401, Amazon has an
implied move of $10.31 or 5.44%, and Apple is at $8.05 or 3.79%. The only thing that's really
abnormal to me is when I take a look at Apple's open interest, it's down to $4,870,243, when it's typically around $7 million for the previous couple of quarters.
Amazon is actually higher than it was last quarter, pretty much right where it's supposed to be.
But a lot less people playing Apple earnings or a lot less contracts open on Apple specifically coming into this report.
contracts open on Apple specifically coming into this report. You didn't even need two minutes,
but I do appreciate that. Definitely check out StockSniper's posts there. You can go to his
replies and see it. You can see it under, if you hit that purple pill at the bottom of the screen,
You can see that all the times, estimated times for release of all those numbers, as well as some other great information we appreciate.
you can see that all the times, estimated times for release of all those numbers,
Stock Sniper.
And here we are in the last 30 seconds until the bell rings.
I've got several of these charts pulled up.
And I know Evan, Evan, are you got the gun in the holster?
Are you ready?
Somebody tell Evan the market's about to close
we are uh sorry boys i am here i am here i was just saying uh market's closing in three seconds
and yeah what's so let me check out earnings hub and see what time we're getting a lot of
these numbers i know apple is normally at 4 30 uh what time is it on amazon all right so actually
i need to get my post ready.
What was the implied move again?
Was it like 5%?
Spock Sniper?
Dude, did you listen to anything I just said?
Absolutely not.
I did not listen to a single word that you just said there.
I'm sorry.
You're good.
Amazon or implied move is $8, or no, $10.31.
What was the implied move? $10.31. What was the implied move?
$10.31. I'm kidding.
That time I listened.
That was gaslighting.
Sorry.
That's the third or at least the second time I heard you say gaslighting today.
Did you get a new word back home?
Well, actually, it was Mink saying it to me, and then I said it back.
So I'll blame her.
But yeah, these Amazon numbers should be coming out any second here expect around a dollar thirty-six expecting around 155 billion
dollars of revenue who was this talent here dump off at the end of the day the
whole market is dumped off actually semis if you if you look around a lot of the
semi names were selling off really hard here in the last 10 minutes 15 minutes
or a one I'm still not a number yep there it is Amazon revenue 155.7
billion being expectations and 155 EPS I'll dig in and find EPS dollar 59
dollar 59 the double beat for for Amazon at least on those top line numbers.
Let's see a little bit more here.
So for Amazon, GapBPS is always highly influenced by that old annoying mark-to-market equity gain valuation change.
So EBIT is probably a better metric for them.
You know what?
I'll take the number that's beating.
Who needs real stuff when I can uh put everything into my my numbers you
know make it uh good for me that's a buck out right there amazon is down uh 3d point 3 percent
right now seeing 182 all right uh i want to dig a little bit more into this amazon report but
obviously stock talks a fan so it's down and after you know Brad, do you know what the guide is? The guide's expected
to be? You guys always seem...
I must need a Bloomberg terminal because everyone
always seems to have these numbers two or three minutes before I
have them. 159 to
164 billion. They're writing
Q2 Rev 159. That works.
It won at 161. What did you say it was, Evan?
159 to 164? Yeah,
so that's going to be a little bit below, actually.
Like 500 million below or something.
The midpoint is what they take.
So, I mean, and then between 7%...
Yeah, no, that's ahead, man.
It was 161.5 versus 161 was a consensus that I have from Bloomberg.
Did AWS miss?
Amazon Web Services, 29.3 billion. They wanted wanted 29.4 so that's a tiny miss
airbnb looks like revenue on eps the revenue came in slightly above but i think we care more about
amazon right now by the way also for anyone who doesn't know you guys can like we got earnings
hub you guys should go in and we got Earnings Hub.
You guys should go in, and a lot of this information
is being published there.
And then also, you guys can use the
at Ask Perplexity bot on here to ask any of these questions.
So if you're, like, in a couple minutes,
like, what was, you know, Amazon's gross margins
for this quarter, go in and try it out.
So if you just tag at Ask Perplexity with a question,
it should go in and fulfill that.
But we shall see.
And then obviously, Apple reports earnings at
4.30 each day, so we definitely have a couple minutes
until that one.
Amazon is definitely a Biden stock.
Good callback.
Then it bounces back.
Trump's out.
It's kind of confusing these days
Well it did start out to be a Trump day
And then it totally turned into a Biden day
Oh BJ's restaurants just reported earnings
There you go
Amazon also reported Oh, BJ's restaurants just reported earnings. There you go.
Amazon also reported.
Initial move on Amazon is kind of hanging around this 4.2%, so it's not really...
We'll see.
And what time is the earnings call for Amazon?
I believe it's 5.
Airbnb.
Hang on, I'm sorry. I'm looking for EPS.
$2.27 billion versus $2.26 billion. Slight beat on revenue. EPS in lines at 24 cents. All right. Amgen
beat 4.9 versus
4.3. Sales also
slight beat, or revenue beat,
8.15 versus 8.06.
They raised
their... Square, just write square. A couple numbers
just number now, square, etc. Sorry. Yeah, I was just going to say Amgen raised their guidance Square, just write square. A couple numbers just number now. Square, et cetera.
Sorry.
Yeah, I was just going to say
Amgen raised their guidance
a little bit on EPS
and affirmed their revenue guidance.
A lot of stuff passing here.
There's also a Lockheed Martin headline
around...
Squares don't temper shut, by the way.
Oof.
I still haven't seen... Well, actually, it's block slash XYZ now.
Yeah, XYZ.
Down 10%, yeah,
at 52.50.
Logically, you know when those ASND numbers come out?
Let me check earnings up.
ASND, you said?
Yeah, great question.
It says 401.
It says it should be out already.
Wonderful.
Oh, it is out.
Yeah, I see them out.
Micro strategy earnings. Revenue $111.1 million versus $115.8 million expected.
Holding $553,555 Bitcoin.
Can't find EPS at the moment.
Let's see if I can ask the perplexity.
Oh, Duolingo looks pretty good.
Shout out Citron.
Yeah, Duolingo gapping up about 5.5%.
Thank you, sir, for telling me that I was about to miss an earnings report.
That happens like once a quarter, so I really appreciate you saving me.
Yeah, I was like, dang, did I just ruin our chance at Brad getting to talk to us here?
But no, I'm kind of glad it helped out.
Atlassian had a beat on revenue.'m not seeing eps right there uh reddit eps 13 cents beating expectations of two revenue of 392
expectations of 370 so double beat for reddit reporting earnings right there
well plus 12 that's great for ad tech names let's pick and go yeah reddit stock flying in after hours sam did you keep your reddit wow sam did you keep your reddit
i did add more to reddit yesterday morning congratulations brother yeah uh so yeah i Congratulations, brother. Yeah. So, yeah, I held on to that one.
I sold it, but right after those Google earnings on the ad stuff,
I was like, I'm going to get back to this.
That is definitely something to drink there.
And then watch it go by now.
I'm not seeing ASMD react really or am I wrong?
Maybe no reaction.
Which ticker was it?
ASMD.
I see it down 6%.
I do too.
Wonderful.
Sorry.
So far.
Square I'm seeing down 11 Amazon
I was just going to say ASND has a huge spread
in after hours so that's not a real number
that's probably what it is
there's like 200 shares traded
it's a $10 spread
it's nuts
Duolingo actually increased
its fiscal year 2025 sales guidance.
That's because despite OpenAI having a language translator for three years,
it's suddenly now going to kill their business.
Shout out to Citron.
Their forward guidance is also above expectations for next quarter, too.
Around what? the trunk their forward guidance also above expectations for next quarter to around what the simulator 240 million midpoint lost your one to 33 to 34 so
yeah decent numbers so far here at least on the forward guide for Duolingo I
don't look at the stock yet we also came on point look at that miss 2.5 billion revenue. Estimate was 3.5 billion.
That's got to be
something.
Is that stock getting killed?
The stock is flat.
Something's
up with that. There's no way. There's like revenue
recognition or something going on there.
Yeah, that's good.
Twilio is up
4%. Twilio reported 1.14.
Beat estimate of 0.94.
Revenue 1.17 versus 1.14.
They also basically maintained all their guidance, it looks like here.
I mean, I can't believe Twilio is still relevant, but I wonder if that's a good reason.
DocTalk, that was actually just concert revenue. here. I wonder, I mean, I can't believe Twilio is still relevant, but I wonder if that's a good read-through. Seriously, yeah.
DocTalk, that was actually just concert revenue.
Total revenue is $3.4 billion for Laptation. Oh, there you go. That's what it is. Thank you.
I was wondering if
Twilio is a good read-through for, like, DoorDash
or something like that, since they get a lot of the revenue
from the CPAS
revenue.
I just,
I don't see how a company like that can figure out for so long
Like people just gotta build their own stuff in house at some point. Um, we got roku
1.02 billion verse 1.01 estimate EPS minus 19 cents first minus 25 cent estimate
Dude that tech names are doing great
That's looking great unchanged Roku pricing right now, but estimate. Dude, the ad tech names are doing great. Oh, yeah. I was going to say.
That's looking great for ad tech names.
Unchanged Roku pricing right now, but good report. Oh, my God.
Please send my magnate and Pubmatic.
Please, for the love of God.
Well, you are the float.
Reddit is up 18%.
Let's go.
Investing with the ad tech boys.
Dude, we've actually spent a lot of time talking about ad tech,
Apple event, trade desk, magnite.
I mean, all of these.
In both directions too.
Dude, seriously, man.
You covered the down and the bounce.
I don't know why.
You know what it is?
There's so much money in corporations through ad dollars.
Google, Amazon, Meta, all the biggest companies are based on ad revenue.
If they need any extra spots to advertise, slide in the DMs.
That Amazon reaction, I think, is the operating income guide.
What was it?
Let me get it in front of me.
14% miss.
I'm assuming it's tariffs.
Damn, yeah, okay.
I feel like that was kind of nice.
Oh, they gave a really wide range for operating income, $13 billion to $17.5 billion.
You know, we didn't really mention that.
I was wondering if somebody would guide that way,
if somebody would just guide with a huge range
based on tariffs.
But the high end of the range is below
what was expected there on the operating income,
so I don't know.
Yeah, and revenue's ahead,
so that's all margin-related,
so I would bet money on that being tariffs
and Chinese seller weakness and stuff like that.
Did anybody calculate the cloud growth for AWS?
17%.
Okay.
It's a little bit deceleration.
All they have to say on the call was we have capacity constraints and that
slow down revenue and we'll be fine.
Yeah,
basically I like how during those calls,
Jesse's like just talking about aws the whole
time like come on man you know you love this stuff
by the way also apple does not report until uh 4 30 um i'm seeing forward guidance on reddit
which was actually pretty strong 4 10 to 4 30 million next quarter while she was expecting 3.95
and needham has been so good this year.
Needham called this Twilio report literally two days ago.
125 target.
I got to pay more attention to Needham this year.
They've been killing it.
You've been telling us like each year,
like different people have it,
you know,
have a sauce or not.
Yeah.
It's like a crown that gets passed around I mean I would say like
Bank of America this is a fundamentally different market than it was just like
two three four five months ago so it makes all someone's different absolutely
yeah the specialty shops stand out in in in a harder markets like this year
Needham and Evercore have been really good. Both of them have been really good.
Like Baird has also been really good this year.
I would say the top three this year have been Baird, Evercore, and Needham.
And last year, the top three were Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, and Raymond James.
So like, yeah, it shifts dramatically.
It's funny because like people in my Discord who like want to learn how to read analyst research and trade off of it, they'll ask me all the time, like, can you give me a list of, like, the top five best sell-sized shops?
And I'm like, I can't do that because it can change quarter by quarter, you know?
There are shops that are, like, always quality, you know?
quality. Bank of America is always quality.
Bank of America is always quality.
Raymond James generally is always quality, although they've lost
some of their small cap guys recently.
But they're still really good. J.P. Morgan is obviously really good.
I would say J.P. Morgan is really good mostly because of their influence
as opposed to their research. Their opinions move stocks because it's J.P.
Morgan, but I wouldn't say their research is as good as B of A's.
So, yeah, I mean, it just goes shot by shot,
but Needham definitely deserves a nod.
They've covered a lot of different categories,
like different sectors and industries this year,
and just been right in a really hard environment.
Like, they've called four or five plus ten percent
earnings reactions already and that's just this year uh in an environment where that's been tricky
to do so yeah props to need them if there's any need of analysts in the crowd shout out amazon's
getting quite a recovery here i mean dude like i've owned Amazon for so long now that it's like really hard for me to like feel hyperbolic about any portion of the report.
But I mean, you look at the trend, trend is still fantastic.
You know, I mean, we're upset about a hundred million dollar miss on an AWS estimate.
And then Chinese seller noise.
Well, all this tariff stuff gets sorted out. And I mean, you already know if Amazon's getting hit, everyone else in the world is getting hit harder than them in terms of in terms of proportions and ability to change supply chains and ability to leverage and ability to negotiate better deals and all those things.
So, yeah, I couldn't agree more for us for trees.
I just I as far as the tariff goes,, I feel like that sort of stuff was just expected.
I mean, they kind of made it expected, what was it, a few days ago when they were saving a disclosure,
and then they got a little bit of backlash from the White House, and they said they weren't going to,
but, like, it was already out there, right?
Like, the impact was already out there.
So, sitting under this report, it's like, oh, okay, yeah, we expected that.
But, I mean, we'll wait and see what the guidance is, especially the CapEx guidance.
That's going to be very important for this one. We had an inline CapEx for Google, Microsoft
raised, Meta raised. So it's going to be interesting to see if Amazon raises. They did raise last
quarter, I believe. I think they said $26 billion run rate or $26 billion quarterly rate. And they
said, we're going to maintain that for 2025. So I guess that's $104 billion is the number.
Okay.
GoDaddy announced a $3 billion purchase, repurchase.
That's a company I don't even know how they're killing it right now.
Shouldn't, like, chat TV just destroy that?
I don't even know how much.
They need to bring back Danica Patrick.
You're just always going to get people
who just don't want to build a website.
The internet, the domain
stocks have always done pretty well.
Cloudflare,
they're going
they're never cheap.
Yeah, that stock
there have been many times
where I wanted to own Cloudflare
and I just couldn't make the math work in my head.
I mean, yeah, but it's a great company.
It's an amazing company, man.
It deserves a hell of a premium.
I'll say that.
I just can't figure out how much.
But yes, it does deserve a hell of a premium.
Did you buy more Amazon than it did? Bro, I own so much Amazon, like I don't really buy more,
but like, I don't sell any either, you know? Um, so, you know, do it, do what you will with that.
But I mean, Amazon to me is just like, I think it's the best company in the world. You know,
I've said that many times. I just feel that way. I feel like they have the most optionality of any mega cap
You know, I feel like there's tremendous upside not only with AWS, but there's tremendous upside with their international business
I think there's tremendous upside in new verticals like healthcare. I just think they have a lot going for them. So
verticals like healthcare. I just think they have a lot going for them. So, um, yeah, it's not a
stock I really worry about. You know, pretty much all these names that I talk about all the time,
Amazon, Tesla, Robinhood, like I've owned these stocks for so long. That's really hard for me
to like get worked up about one quarter. You know, it's like, it's just, it's hard for me to panic
from one quarter or even get like
excited about one quarter but you know with popular stocks that happens people
you know especially retail who like might be newer to the market they just
like want to know you know why is Amazon down why is Tesla down why are they up
well actually they never ask why they're up but, people always want to know why they're down.
So, yeah, I just don't read too much, especially with my investments, into the quarter-by-quarter performance.
It's different with my trades.
I have a lot of trades also, right?
If I'm in a swing trade, I care a lot about the quarterly earnings because I'm not holding that stock for five years.
I'm probably holding that stock for six months.
And so the quarter matters a lot, right?
But just a different form, different style, different lens of analysis, I guess, for the
trades versus the investments.
At least that's the way I do it.
Yeah, Amazon looks pretty strong here.
They beat on the top and bottom line.
Guidance was a little bit weaker than people were expecting.
So I think that's where some of the initial sell-off came from. But overall, it looks like a pretty good quarter.
North American operating income was a slight miss, as well as operating margin.
They beat on subscriptions. They beat on everything else, basically, except for AWS
that we mentioned earlier
the guidance they uh slight miss on operating income guidance and margin guidance
and the amount of money being thrown around after us is pretty crazy just think about the uh man it's crazy
oh i don't i don't look at these numbers from amazon just like oh this is broken it would
there would have to be some dramatic impact fundamentally for amazon to just
oh i don't know if my thesis is going to play with Amazon,
that sort of thing, but I agree.
Best company in the world.
Going to consistently be one of the largest companies in the world for decades.
I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Evan, do you agree?
agree oh I meant Apple sorry I'm an Apple
Oh, I meant Apple, sorry.
I meant Apple.
Evans that we're not gonna get Evan to hate on one of the mag-7 even if it
means defending Apple Evans a big guy by he buys mag-7 every day Evans a
marketing advisor for the S&P 500 is by America as his license plate so yeah, yeah, you can't expect him to hate on the Mag 7.
But, yeah, I mean, look, when it comes to Amazon, it is pretty understandable that they have tariff impacts.
I think any Amazon investors are sitting there that are naive to that.
So it's good for the company to, at least on the operating margin side, guide a little conservative to say, hey, look, we may have to that. So it's good for the company to, at least on the operating margin side,
guide a little conservative to say, hey, look, we may have to eat more tariff impact than we expected.
But yesterday when we were talking about what to expect from companies and what's acceptable for
them to say in this market environment, I touched on three scenarios that I said, I think all of them are acceptable.
I think if you want to come out and say in scenario one, hey, here's our recession guide.
Here's our non-recession guide.
I think that's great.
United Airlines did that.
Other travel companies will do that.
If you want to come out and say, we're lowering guide as a caution as a result of tariffs, I think that's fine as well.
If you want to come out and say, we're reiterating our guide because we don't know what the tariff
policy is going to be at the end of the 90-day pause, I think that's also fine. You know,
I said this yesterday, but the issue here is a lack of predictability in the communications from the White House.
The issue is not the response of businesses to those communications.
The burden is not on American businesses to figure out what the tariffs are going to be at the end of 90 days.
The administration should be figuring that out sooner than later and give some clarity on that. but I just don't put that ball in the court of business managers
I know a lot of people do because a lot of people are like, oh my god
Like why why aren't you modeling this in that? That was another conversation we had on your yesterday. I don't know who it was
somebody on the panel asked me like I
Think was moderative and we were talking about this and wanted broughtative brought up like, oh, yeah, they did model tariffs in, you know, for an 800 million impact.
And I'm like, okay, but how do you arrive at that number?
You know, what are you doing?
Are we just assuming, are we modeling based on today's tariff rates?
Are we modeling based on what was shown on the whiteboard on April 2nd?
Are we modeling compounded tariffs between fentanyl and the additional tariffs that were placed or just one or the other or both?
What about steel tariffs?
Are we modeling steel impact in a vacuum or remodeling steel tariff impacts combined with auto tariffs in a vacuum?
Because if you listen to the latest White House remarks,
apparently that exemption is being made.
It hasn't been written in stone yet,
but I guess it's being communicated to the companies.
But it's like these gray areas of policy are impossible to model,
no matter how good of a modeler you are.
There's no hard numbers, right?
Everything is being floated.
Exemptions are being floated in the media, which is what I think is happening, being leaked to the media, tested in the markets, and then delivered or not delivered.
Right?
And so if that's the approach to exemption issuance, like who the fuck can model that?
I certainly can't.
I don't.
And there are much, much smarter analysts
than me on the street who can't do it either.
So yeah, I don't expect companies
to do anything in this scenario.
They can frankly do whatever they want.
They want to come out and reiterate, cool.
You want to come out and lower, get a caution, cool.
You want to come out and give recessionary versus non-recessionary cool i think all the all of the above are fine with me as an
investor because i as an investor am also puzzled by what the end case is going to be for the policy
and i think whether you talk to a supporter or a criticizer of the tariff policy whatever
i think both will tell you that i don't even think supporters of the policy can tell you where the end game is,
what the numbers on the sheet are going to be in 90 days.
If there is somebody that can tell us that, please do tell me because I'd love to know.
But there isn't.
And that's a huge, huge factor.
It's like that alone.
Forget about all the other nonsense we've talked about, about
like what the tariff impacts might or might not be. What I just said alone is enough of a reason
for people to stop investing or stop spending or cut capex. And so like, you know, you have to
operate under that assumption that there's going to be clarity on that issue at some point.
under that assumption that there's going to be clarity on that issue at some point.
And until then, you have flexibility as a business manager, in my view, to present it
however way you want to the public, as long as you're not being intentionally misleading,
of course.
You know, if you're somebody that's already seeing material tariff impacts and you try
to obfuscate that by, you you know softening the perception of the policy
that's misleading and that i'm not cool with but as long as you're not doing that
then you're fine in my view if you really are sitting there as a ceo like i don't know what
impact it's gonna have i think that's a totally acceptable answer yeah the lending oh sorry i'm sorry yeah so that you know the amazon
business obviously the retail side of the business i think is much more exposed to tariffs than say
a microsoft um and that's probably responsible for the weak guidance you're not going to see them
give really strong guidance in a situation like this as stock talk said it's just really
unpredictable but um you
know it's really interesting when you look at their business based on the most recent quarter
retail is about 81 of revenue aws is about 18.8 of revenue but aws is 62 of the operating income
AWS is 62% of the operating income,
retails about 37.5.
So I think the cloud business looks pretty strong.
They just mentioned they signed deals with Uber and Ericsson
and a bunch of other companies.
That's likely going to continue to grow
with AI training workloads and everything else,
regardless of the tariff situation.
So I like that aspect of the business.
Another thing about Apple, who's also reporting earnings today, is just this week there was a
landmark court case. I'm sure some of you have been following the Epic Games and Apple litigation
about Fortnite being removed from the App Store. And a judge delivered an injunction
that basically is going to allow third-party developers
to sort of circumvent Apple's App Store payment system
for the first time.
And they can actually go link out to another site
and have that transaction take place on the site.
Apple's not allowed to do anything to stop them anymore.
So I'm also going to be interested to hear management's commentary
on this injunction and whether they think there's a
long-term risk here to their services segment,
which has become really a major component of the business for Apple.
for Apple.
That Duolingo quarter is so pretty.
I was going to call out real fast.
LendingTree, they missed on their cells.
The EPS was fine.
Missed on cells and lowered guidance.
They're down 14%
here.
And we should get Apple
in one minute.
Evan, are you sweating?
Yeah. I am knees, weak, arms are heavy mom spaghetti i'm ready though did you vomit
uh yes i have actually three times but it's okay it's a good day yeah greg told me he my guess is
apple stock is going to be up three percent in after hours. Okay. Greg told me he bought two chargers this quarter,
so it should go up.
Two chargers?
They are expensive.
All right.
These numbers should be coming out any second, though.
It's the final countdown
give me 96.6 billion i find no way that apple's about to give us guidance they normally give it
on the call if they do uh apple out uh let's see 65 Apple. $1.65.
That is a small beat.
$1.63.
Revenue of $95.4 billion, which is also a beat.
$95.4 billion.
Double beat for Apple.
What's the initial move on the stock?
Nowhere.
Now it's down.
Uh-oh.
Now it's down.
They're going through
iPad China revenue right now.
Declared a $0.26 cash dividend.
Increase of 4%,
so just increases cash dividend.
I believe the last one was $0.25,
if I'm not wrong.
Red, green, red, green.
I've seen it hit 208 and 214.
It's all over the place.
Oh, double beat.
My prediction is Apple's going to end up being a nothing burger.
Right now you're beating Stockton.
That's all I know.
Stock it.
Well, I told you earlier, we're going into this Apple report with exceptionally low open interest.
You know, only $4.8 million.
They dodged the China risk.
I'm going to be annoyed.
China sells $16 billion, being an expectations of $15.9 billion.
I'm going to get in the zone, but great talking to everybody.
Have a great night. We'll talk soon.
Thanks for coming, Brad. Appreciate you.
Definitely check out Brad's page.
He puts out some amazing one-pagers around earnings.
Outside of that, it sucks.
Oh, he's not here anymore.
Never mind. Not funny. Great guy. Great account.
What's up, Hamid?
I saw you sneak in here.
Apple board, $100 billion share by that.
$100 billion. That makes sense.
Yeah, I think that's kind of what do they call that stock talk financial engineering correct
yes I'm learning I mean dude like we knew that though this blackout window is
gonna come that like that's the thing that that's why you can't really bet
against the market too hard you know they can just keep their stocks afloat
guy says is the financial engineering play like that's a bad thing I mean it's or they can just keep their stocks afloat.
Guy says it's a financial engineering play.
That's a bad thing.
I mean, it's not the best thing,
but at least they have experience. Actually, it is the best thing.
It's amazing.
Your dividend went up a penny, Evan.
There we go.
Apple product sales grew 2.8%.
Services revenue jumped 11.6%.
In total, 5% year-over-year growth.
Wow.
NVIDIA just put out how much Jensen Wong made last year.
Wong made last year. It looked like it was $50 million.
It looked like it was $50 million.
Those are rookie numbers.
I got to pump those up.
I know we were talking about the Elon Pay package.
It looks a little different than that one.
Let's see what it exactly was.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wong, $49.9 million.
I wonder how much he made last year.
Oh, wait, that's 2025.
Oh, they have a weird fiscal year, actually, so that's why.
2024.
In a year where the stock probably tripled to revenue more than doubled.
Actually, it normally says what it is.
I want to find what he made last year.
Wow, Delta Airlines authorizing a billion dollar share repurchase too.
Holy shit.
Companies are really...
How much?
One billion?
...on the plate this season for this.
Delta Airlines announcing a billion.
In news that nobody will be surprised by,
strategy is going to offer up to 21 billion in in Class A stock via at-the-money-sells.
Was the Delta report any good, or
is this just outside of the Delta report?
This is outside.
Yeah, I don't know
why they just did this, but yeah.
I think they reported a couple
weeks ago. Well, there's only one reason why people
do that, Evan.
It's not go up.
Jensen Wong only made $49.9 million.
What poor guy.
They're not giving him any options?
I just don't know if they hit this year.
He's got out of time.
I just don't know if they hit this game.
I'm opening it.
Did you say China revenue was a beat, Evan?
Yep, $16 billion
beating $15.9.
I see $16.83 billion is the estimate.
Interesting.
You probably had some pull forward there.
Low bar either way.
Yeah, I mean, you definitely had pull forward on iPhone Rev.
And that'd be...
And by the way, no one else laughed at that,
and you laughed at your own joke.
Wait, what did he say?
He said a joke, and then no one else responded to it,
and he made the laughing emoji.
I don't even know.
I said it was a low bar either way yeah exactly excited we stepped over that we and
emperor united in our apple hey he's my like little partner in crime on it jumps in throw
some comments on the low bar yeah you know apple yeah logical as well yeah yeah you know me logical
and emperor here to fight apple don't worry amazon down 3.5 percent in after here to fight Apple. Don't worry. Amazon down 3.5%
in after hours. Apple down 1.7%.
When you round it, it's down
Start the buyback now.
Start the buyback now. Or do they still
have money left over for their last trillion dollar buyback?
I mean, earlier
in the day...
What was it?
Evan, what was the last one?
Last one what?
The last buyback?
100, wasn't it?
I think it was 110.
Oh my God, dude.
They're just throwing this.
Lower the buyback?
They just throw the money around like,
buyback's not crazy, guys.
It's a good way to keep the stock afloat, though.
I mean, I was talking fairly negatively about apple
and then i looked down and i saw five apple devices within arm's reach and one in my son's
hand out in the living room one in my wife's hand i mean what can you say so i have it it's funny
i was talking to one of my buddies who's a fund manager and he also hates apple as well and i was
like talking over the phone like a couple weeks ago he also hates apple as well and i was like talking
on the phone like a couple weeks ago he asked me he's like dude for as much you talk about as for
as much as you talk about how much you hate apple he's like i'm surprised you've never shorted it
and the answer i gave him was i was like yeah because they keep buying back their stock and
here we are you know what's interesting i mean stock talk you should have seen this coming how
are you gonna fade a company that's like one of the biggest market caps in the world
that buys back $100 billion of stock at a time?
You can't short that.
So I'll just hate Apple from the background, I guess.
I will say, by the way, I'm looking at past of the past couple of years.
Every single time this quarter, they announced a big share buyback.
2024, it was $100 billion.
Then 2023, it was $90. 2024, it was $100 billion. Then 2023, it was $90.
2022, it was $90.
2021, it was $90.
So over the last four or five years, it's been $400 billion, $350 billion.
Something like that of share buybacks and adding to it again.
But the biggest one was last year, $110 billion.
In the last how many years has it been 450?
Say that again?
You said it's been 450 billion over
how many years?
350 over the last... since
2021. Oh my god,
dude.
Why is
their Q1 revenue always so high? Is it
Christmas season, Evan?
Yeah, that would be my guess, something like that.
Well, I guess Christmas season would be Q4, but...
Normal attrition.
I had some number that I think over the last...
I had some number that I think over the last...
Over the last decade,
Apple has bought back $716.3 billion worth of its own stock.
I'm tweeting that.
And you can announce that they just added another $100 billion on top of it.
So that was as of March 19th.
Wait, so it's $700 and...
Wait, okay, say that again.
$716 billion before today's?
Yeah, $716.3 billion over the last decade before this was announced.
That is as of March 19th that data was was published by the exchanges that's fully accurate 716.3 billion over the last decade
before this and they just added another hundred billion imagine buying a hundred
billion dollars of your own stock and you're still falling after hours
All right, so we had the Lakers lost, Apple did a buyback, and MSCR did an offering as the three most predictable things of the day. Get Hamid back up here
i mean you got any thoughts around what you're seeing out there in these numbers
uh not not really but one of the things i was going to say about the buybacks is that oftentimes
they announced that they have re-increased their buyback to
like a certain number. And I haven't looked at Apple's announcement in particular, but
it's quite possible that they already had like, I don't know, $30 billion remaining in their last
buyback and they're upping it back up to $100 billion. So I don't know if you've taken that
into consideration, Evan, or is this an additional $100 on top of whatever was already previously announced?
They said the board of directors has also authorized an additional program to repurchase up to $100 billion of the company's common stock.
It sounds like a new program.
But one of the things that would be good to know is like what's the um remaining on
their previous 100 billion dollar you know what i mean because they don't immediately purchase the
the stock right away so um if the previous one was like 30 billion remaining but then like that
one is getting sunsetted you know there's like sort of like these games that they play with respect to the buyback numbers.
On Robinhood in particular, who announced yesterday,
they had a billion dollar buyback.
They announced yesterday that they increased it
to one and a half billion.
It does say board authorized additional program
to repurchase up to 100 billion.
So that probably adds on.
I'm reading that as it's just on top of it,
but I could be wrong. So Apple apple i know what hamid is saying but apple doesn't traditionally do this
either i mean because last year and evan you can correct me if i'm wrong on this i think last year
they spent 105 or 106 out of that 110 billion right i saw a headline like that in december
i don't know the exact number,
but they spent the majority of their $110 billion buyback within the year. And so I would venture
to assume the five or six billion that was remaining out of that 110 was spent in this
first quarter and now they need a new buyback. But I think traditionally they hadn't authorized
new additional buybacks until they're either complete or nearly complete a new buyback. But I think traditionally they haven't authorized new additional buybacks
until they're either complete or nearly complete the previous buyback
is the point I'm trying to make.
Gotcha. That's good to know.
Hey, by the way, StockOgur, it looks like AS&D might be up 4% after hours,
but again, it's probably just a liquid but yeah
yeah I'm seeing that as well it is a liquid though there's one share filled at that price hilarious yeah I mean it's not really one that is gonna nobody
gives a crap about when everything else is reporting uh there was some news uh if people
are interested in some of these bios one that's pretty popular is uh cytk cytokinetics which had
like a potential blockbuster drug and their padufa date just got delayed three months uh so not fun
because i think that's happened in the past for them already stocks down 12 13 percent and after
hours uh matters to me because i uh i own
that stock and so that's not fun and i exited after hours that's why edit is still going crazy
up 16 now uh twilio up nine i'm not seeing too many other earnings reactions outside of the big
ones that we already talked about.
Not too many negatives. A lot of buybacks. Do you see a lending tree?
What's it down?
I would love to know it's down a lot.
now. It hit 45 a while ago.
Those are rookie numbers.
Those loan stocks are so high beta on earnings well it's crazy it's also like
insurance tech too like there's a lot of weird stuff and then they have like this existential
lawsuit that they keep downplaying i was long the stock so talked about it quite a bit on these
spaces and i saw a short report one of the two complaints got resolved in a positive way but
the other complaint is like
they have like this huge class action lawsuit that could literally extinct the company
and they just like downplay the crap out of it so until i see some
something around that i don't know otherwise the stock looks extremely cheap
dude i mean i saw what you posted about tim cook saying that there's no way he just said that
yeah cnbc interview that's such bullshit dude oh my god and it's funny because they were talking
about like moving planes over and stuff that whatever tell me i'm the only one in the world that went and stacked up on Apple products when the tariffs were announced.
I'm the only one that did that?
There's no pull forward in demand?
Come on.
But you did that in April, right?
You did it after the quarter.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Good.
Wow.
Amp.
All right, Amp.
All right.
Okay.
All right, Amp.
I see you switching jerseys, Amp?
Keep the Apple jersey on. There we go, big dog.
Just pull the look on you.
Keep the Apple jersey on. Send me that Amazon jersey
back in the mail.
Oh, Amazon does have a good return on policy.
Honestly, that's probably...
Okay, I did not even think of that, though.
That's probably exactly what that quote is.
That quote is probably not saying anything.
Yeah, exactly. That's what I think all these are right so i'm talking everything every number that we're getting is really before tariff day was april 2nd at the end of the quarter
was the 31st yeah i mean you have you have the luxury of whistling past the graveyard when you can't smell the blood.
I don't know.
I just made that up right now.
But what I mean by that is this happens every time we get an economic slowdown.
You start to get like there's a catalyst on the table, right?
there's a catalyst on the table, right?
Whether it's a bank failure or a big fund going under
or in the dot-com bubbles case,
the collapse of these tech valuations,
you have some sort of catalyst that happens
or COVID or whatever.
You can go through any of the crashes in history.
There's always some kind of catalyst.
And then you have an initial stage of panic.
And then generally you have a recovery from that panic where people are like,
oh, we over panicked, it's nothing to worry about. And a lot of those cases, especially where there
are multi year bear markets, you go all the way back down because things didn't change the way
people expected them to change. And it was too late for the economy. And you slip into a deep
recession that you can't immediately stimulate your way out of. Not a mechanical recession like the COVID one where we intentionally shut down the global
economy, but a recession that's not mechanical where, you know, business confidence gets
away from you.
And as a result of that investor confidence and consumer confidence and jobs are all
dominoes that follow.
So in today's market environment, it's, I don't
say it's easy, but you have the liberty to be not vague because that's not the right
word, but you have the ability to be like optional about your outlook, right? Because
you don't know what's going to happen, right? Like,
let's say, for example, when the 145% tariffs went in place, let's say hypothetically, and this is
probably isn't possible in this political environment, but let's say hypothetically,
we knew for certain that 145% tariffs on China were going to remain in place indefinitely.
Okay, we don't know that. And I don't think that's going to be the case. But let's say, hypothetically, we knew that. In that case,
a lot of these companies would have horrific guidance. So to a degree, what's happening
right now is that a lot of companies are saying, like, yeah, we're expressing caution about our
forward guidance. They're not coming out and swinging it out of the park.
But at the same time, they're also not acknowledging
that the status quo is going to be the forward outlook.
Because if they were, I mean, we all know how untenable 145% tariffs are in China.
We know that that's like a nonsensical number and that it will,
if it lasts, effectively be an embargo on trade in a lot of categories.
So like we're in that phase right now where you have the flexibility to be optimistic
because nothing is set in stone yet, you know, and you could have a huge 180 in policy in a matter of weeks for all you know.
Right.
And so that sweet spot of speculation kind of gives companies the ability to say, oh,
we don't know what's going to happen.
You know, we're not going to smash our guidance down yet because we don't know what's going
to happen.
You know, yeah, we're starting to see some preliminary impacts, but, you know, nothing
that we can hang our hat on. So we'll keep our guide
relatively the same, maybe pull it down by a few percent and just see what happens. But for a lot
of these companies, that's not going to be enough of a guide down if this stays intact. And everyone
knows that. And so to a degree, not only are executives not only calling bluff, but somewhat the market is as well, right? When the market
floats these stocks that they know will go much lower if 145% tariffs remain in place.
So we're in that gray area right now. And we probably we might be for another quarter,
might not even be might not end here. It's not like, oh, when we get through this earnings season,
we'll enter this period of clarity.
Maybe through the end of next quarter,
we'll still have this uncertainty.
Maybe even for longer than that.
I don't know.
I don't know how long it's going to take.
We have a 90-day tariff pause in place, right?
But people are still already paying China tariffs.
There was a guy that posted today,
I don't know what the company's called,
WizCam or something.
They make like these floodlight cameras.
But anyway, they're an American company,
and they source their stuff out of China.
And they imported, he posted the customs receipt on Twitter today.
I don't know if it was Photoshopped, but, I mean, off face value,
I have no way to verify.
It didn't look Photoshopped, and he told a pretty detailed story.
But he essentially said that they imported, they have a specialty manufacturer.
They designed these floodlight cameras.
I don't know if it's the same product or if they're different products, but whatever.
I don't know much about the company.
I don't know much about the company, but he said they imported $117,000 worth of these floodlights last week from China.
And they paid a $230,000 tariff customs fee for importing those.
Okay.
And he said, like, in the comments, he said, our executive, he said, we're a small company, we're a small business.
Our executives at our company don't even make
$230,000 a year.
And we just paid that as a tariff fee on the import
of one batch of floodlights.
So I'm not saying this is true for all companies,
but there are clearly going to be a lot of businesses
that are experiencing a similar thing.
So, yeah, those numbers are not tenable.
And we have to figure out how we get from the sweet spot of being having the liberty to be flexible in outlooks and not go the opposite direction where everyone's like, oh, shit, we actually are fucked.
And it could be a quarter to get to that point.
It could be two quarters to get to that point.
But hopefully between now and then, policy shifts meaningfully.
That's what the market is betting on, I think. If you believe this rally, that's what the market
is betting on. If you don't believe this rally, then it's just a fake out and it's all mood anyway.
But that's what we need to see. You need to see things change because like these numbers are not sustainable and trade
deals take a long time to negotiate.
You know, I saw somebody on Twitter saying like, oh, we'll get, you know, several major
trade deals this week.
The White House said it.
And I'm like, okay, yeah, the White House said it.
But you look at the history of how long it takes to negotiate trade deals.
You're talking about a year minimum for a
major trade deal um sometimes shorter than that maybe you can get away with six months if everyone
really sits down at the table and like ties their their their arms to the table maybe you can get
down to six months but i mean i think people are just misunderstanding how, like, nuanced these issues are.
Like, this isn't something that you can just, like, have a quick conversation about.
And you're like, cool, sign it.
There's, like, a lot of enormous amount of detail that goes into these agreements.
So, yeah, we just have to be careful about that and navigate that.
And I think right now Wall Street is sort of taking an optimistic tone.
And a lot of CEOs are taking an optimistic tone because they don't believe it's going to last.
And I wouldn't like to believe it's going to last either, but I don't fucking know at this point.
At the start of the year, I was trying to predict how this policy might evolve.
and I just figured out that that's a fool's errand,
And I just figured out that that's a fool's errand, like a month and a half into the year.
like a month and a half into the year.
So I'm not even attempting to predict what is or isn't going to happen
on a policy basis, but I do retain the confidence
that we are capable of a complete 180 on policy
as much as we're capable of the policy being worse than it is today.
So, you know, I do think the goalposts can move from here is what I'm saying.
Interesting commentary from Airbnb right here.
We find that we're seeing the higher income traveler
somewhat unimpacted by the current macro conditions.
You were certain consumers are waiting and seeing before they book their summer travel.
We haven't particularly seen consumers trade down in terms of room price or take shorter trips.
I mean, I don't think anybody's seen any effects yet.
That kind of makes sense.
I don't know.
So KG and Monit have joined up here.
What's up, gentlemen?
Hey, guys.
Sorry I was busy elsewhere.
But, you know, very ho-hum results at best, small misses, nothing really to write on.
I'm actually surprised the negative reaction is so small.
You think they're waiting for commentary on the call?
on the call probably but i i think it it it speaks to you know being able to spin it i suppose
you know so so like i said you know in the in the call they could probably you know say things i
mean apple is going to call out that this this quarter is shorter two days two working days
so you know that's substantial for uh somebody with the revenue as large as apple so that could
account for some of it uh clearly china is a problem and it's getting worse right so their
china revenues miss and and that is uh that that's going to be, I mean, even before when they were moving jobs out
of China, that started, but I think the damage because of trade war is going to just speed it up.
So that's that. We knew that services was going to beat and it did because we knew that that services was going to beat and it did and because we knew that from google's numbers
we knew from tsm and corvo and a bunch of other numbers that that uh that semis uh you know uptake
was solid so so their devices are fine so it really is is is services uh services that bail them out for most part.
There's still, I mean, the rest of it is just what, 5% revenue growth.
It is expensive as shit for a non-growing company.
I'm sorry, but that's what it is.
It's expensive stock.
Amazon, very different story.
Again, nobody ever talks about Amazon's multiples of valuation,
so I'll leave that out.
The good things off the top of my head,
retail margin is still growing.
That's a good thing,
which means their mix of third party to sell retail is helping
them, their cost control abilities are helping them.
So that's good.
AWS blah numbers, nothing great, nothing terrible.
17% growth is slow, but it's still on a very large base right so so i guess that that
gets a slight pass there um advertising i surprised for for uh the growth is 19 is is nothing right
it's a seventh or sixth the size of google. Google's growing at 10% for, you know, 77 billion.
And these guys for 12 billion are growing at 19%.
So I think that's...
I might add on that, right?
Like the thing with Amazon is that they're going to be way more impacted
by tariffs than Google is because Google can have advertisements
can have advertisements for services rather than goods whereas all of amazon is goods
for services rather than goods, whereas all of Amazon is goods.
i agree but but you have to also remember that google's a lot of google and for that matter
metas advertising comes from chinese companies which can turn off and turn on on time so they
could lose chunks of it at the same time too so so, so I, I think that understates the, the, the, the impact that
Google could have from, from, uh, from the tariff, uh, from the trade war, right? Not so much tariff
directly, but from the trade war itself. Right. So, so that that's happening, but, but I get your
point. It's, it's, it's, it's, uh, it, it's definitely an excuse for the number, but 19% is still small on a small base,
right? So that means they're starting to reach the end of their hyper growth and they're just
growing at the speed of their business, right? Nothing more. So the last five years of hyper
growth that they had to build that from nothing
to here we're not going to see that anymore that's the point i'm trying to make look it's not it's
not bad numbers i'm just saying very ho-hum numbers so i don't know what the expectation was
but clearly you know it is starting to it's starting to be tougher to keep those numbers up anymore.
That's all I'm trying to say.
Both these results weren't particularly badly negative in any sense,
but blah numbers in my opinion.
And given that, the sell-off is pretty tiny.
Manav, I mean, you were in here earlier,
but I always say this,
and I'm obviously a lot more
interested in Smith caps and most people shrug that off.
But once these companies get to $2 or $3 trillion, it takes a lot more to move them.
So generally, I agree with you, right?
I think it just becomes kind of like a safety thing or the illusion of safety and the passive
flows that are going to keep these companies up since so much you know whatever percent of every dollar that goes into a 401k gets allocated to
these businesses so i mean you're just not going to see big moves when there's that kind of stable
passive flow coming in every two weeks i'm not disagreeing with you i'm agreeing i'm just saying
that the valuation needs to come down i'm not disagreeing with you either no i'm not disagreeing i i'm just
saying that's probably why these things remain bid forever and never see too much downside
no one's going to sell these stocks really
yeah which which puts all of the you know the risk on these guys to you know execute correctly
which probably also means that we're gonna you know we're very close to starting to see you know cost side controls from
them of a significant size right they have to because they don't have livers left to pull
so they're gonna have to start cutting costs
well they have a great cost cutting tool that's on the verge of getting much better too
over the next few years and they have the most capital to develop deploy um it as well which is
artificial intelligence obviously but i don't know i think i think we will be surprised in the next few years
by the leaps that ai makes i still stand by that i know a lot of people i know the ai story has
kind of gotten shit on a little bit since the deep seek moment because the deep seek moment
was followed by this market correction and a bunch of these stocks got tossed so now everyone's kind of like oh like people like i guess the ai skeptics or whatever you want to
call them use that as like a moment to like dunk on ai as a bubble um i don't think it's a bubble
i don't think like i don't think it's going to be a fruitless expedition the way that people think it is going to be.
No, yeah, Stock Talk. I mean, just to that point, like, I do, like, trillions.
I probably process trillions of records a day at my job.
So, like, you know, and that's growing every single day we get new data,
and it's, like, billions and billions of records.
So, yeah.
Yeah, it's not even that.
I just think, like, automation in general at scale and AI really as a mechanism, like a software mechanism, is just smart automated.
Like, it makes automation smart, you know, in the real world.
And, like, I just think the value unlock of that is just, like, enormous.
I honestly think a lot of the technology resilience in the last few years, like, yeah, is it part of a bull run? Yeah, tech stocks go up in bull runs for like the last 25 years. Nothing new. I get that.
market valuations even, which isn't unique to the last few years. But I mean, I don't think anyone
can dispute that private market valuations, especially in technology, have been very robust
in the last five years. And yeah, it's due to a lot of new money in the system. Yes,
inflation has gone up. Yeah, we printed record amounts during COVID. All that's true. All that's
true. But that's not a contention to like the fact that SpaceX is a $350 billion company.
OpenAI is a $300 billion company.
There are, you know, more 50 plus billion dollar private companies than ever.
And a lot of them are in technology.
There are multi-billion dollar premiums that are being assigned to, you know, companies that are not making much money.
And some of that published stuff. Yeah, of course. Is a lot of that money going to go to zero? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. You know,
are there going to be huge, severe market corrections or the stocks go down 60, 70 percent?
All of those things are true. Because I know that's what's going to be a lot of the people
are going to jump to those retorts. All those things are true. But it doesn't take away from the fact that the technology is transformative.
Like today, the way we view AI is that it doesn't make money.
And it doesn't make money today.
You know, LLMs don't make money.
Right.
But the intangible benefits of deploying AI to basically every person with a cell phone in the world, the intangible productivity benefits from that,
you'd be crazy to not think there is one.
I mean, I use LLMs every day.
I know everyone doesn't use them every day,
but I know millions of people do use them frequently.
And I think most regular users of LLMs
would tell you that it has in some way
magnified their productivity.
Dude, stuck, stuck.
I don't even...
Hold on, let me finish my point real quick.
But in the status quo, that doesn't seem impressive.
Because in the status quo, we're like,
oh, it's a glorified search engine.
Like, yeah, it helps you like maybe sort
through information more quickly.
But like, that's where it is today.
After a couple of years of this being
even a public technology.
Like, yeah, LLMs were out before Google.
Google DeepMind was doing LLMs like eight years ago.
Well, the very early renditions of them.
NLPs been in your phones forever, right?
Natural language processors, Siri's been in your phone forever.
So people have been familiar with it.
It just wasn't characterized as its own industry.
And it wasn't presented to the public in the way that it
was with chat gpt but everyone thinks that's like where the buck stops like oh my llm is going to
get a lot better and you know that's great and i'll be able to do more productive things with
it but that's not where the buck stops buck stops with like fully automated factories
like fully automated,
where you have 10 guys working there,
you know, overseeing the software
and overseeing the automation.
Like that is a future reality that may not be a decade away.
It may be, okay, maybe 15 years away,
but in that reality, like what is that impact
on productivity?
What is that impact on the ability to produce goods for X cost or services?
It's enormous. It's unimaginable.
And like any other technology, none of us on this panel know how quickly it's going to develop.
None of us know. No one knew how quickly cell phones would proliferate when the first cell phone was introduced.
No one knew how quickly cars would proliferate when the first car was introduced.
megatrends, the majority of the quote unquote informed, well-researched, smart public was
against them.
You know, and that's an interesting thing to think about, because the loudest voices
often, you know, even in moments like this, especially during market corrections, that
people are like, oh, look, I told you AI was bullshit.
Look, your favorite stock's down 40%.
But I don't think that that's a testament to that at all.
You know, I think that's just a testament
to the dynamics of markets.
I think AI is going to be a transformative thing.
So I don't think people should lose sight of that
just because of what's happened to the stocks.
I just wanted to make two quick comments.
And I know, Kevin, you wanted to say something. I just wanted to fit this in. You know, I didn't use ChatGPT. I'm in the data field and I
didn't use it for like the first year. And then I started using it. And the more I use it, the more
I use it. Like now I've replaced all like Google searches with ChatGPT. I just, it's just so much
faster to get information. I was listening to an Animal Spirits podcast today and, you know, Ben Carlson,
he made a good point where he was like, you know, there was a time where, you know, DoorDash and
Uber were basically like VC subsidized. And he thinks that that's kind of where AI is right now
until we get like that user adoption up. And then at some point it's probably going to cost a lot
more money to be using these tools. But for right now, it's like the best time to enjoy using these tools while they're still free.
Yeah, I would.
I meant to take complete opposite side.
I don't think that you're going to see a monetization of large language models at all where we pay a subscription, right?
That's what I said.
Yeah, I think Logical said that we were going to see those get more expensive.
Well, I'm saying it'll come through in different services.
It won't necessarily be there.
Oh yeah, I think they're going to be free forever.
I agree.
Yeah, I think they're going to be free.
I mean, it's already coming out.
If it costs $0.06 for them to process each query, how could it be free?
For now, yeah, but if you're looking at the incremental cost for compute or to do any type of query, it's like come down like 10x almost every year.
So at some point it will be for the most part cost effective.
Now, it could be a part of a service offering like Apple.
Right. You have an Apple and you're in the Apple ecosystem.
Do you have access to whatever Apple, AI, Google, same thing, right?
Do you have access to whatever Apple?
Yeah. Google. Same thing. Right.
Sometimes companies, a lot of times, right?
Companies will have product offers that'll be losing, that they lose money all the time,
but it does enough to be able to bring in new customers for other services and businesses.
So I think that's how you're going to leverage it.
And then, you know, large language models is a very small subset of the overall AI phase, right?
Like Meta's making hand over fist on AI right now.
I mean, I think they're the largest company
that has really implemented artificial intelligence
on a customer facing platform at scale
with the reels offering.
And then obviously it sounds like
they're gonna expand that over to threads.
So I think once again, you know,
AI is definitely gonna be here to stay. One thing that I again, you know, AI is definitely going to be here to stay.
One thing that I do, you know, at some point, AI is probably not going to give most companies an
advantage anymore, right? It's going to be a standard. And I think it'll boost productivity,
but it'll be a standard. And so I think it's going to be a rise in tides kind of lifts all boats
scenario. If you're not getting into this field, if you're not leveraging these tools within your current suite of products or back end operations or what have you, you probably will lag behind your competitors.
And I think that's how I see the similar to the Internet when that really became robust in mid 90s, late 90s.
So I would say that I'm not, you know. The earnings that we actually had here today, Apple, I still say
we wait till the call because I think there's going to be some really interesting questions
for them, for their executive team and seeing how not only how tariffs are impacted, also their
doubling down in expansion in India.
I think that's also going to be very interesting. So let's see how the price action is going to be from there.
Stock talk, you were talking, I got the tail end of what you were talking about with tariffs.
I'm not going to go down that whole rabbit hole. But Trump's post today, President Trump's post today regarding Iranian petrochemicals exports and retaliating against
any country that does pretty much import any of Iranian oil production or petrochemical production
does actually throw, I mean, the market's not pricing this in, but that kind of throws a monkey
wrench in the whole China situation as well. China's the biggest purchaser of Iranian oil.
So that is- His whole that is just dedicated to China yeah well yeah that was a it was an intro I mean also I mean yeah it's an interesting one
so I'm not sure if he's uh if that was just a post out of just like let me post this now I
will say Pete Hanks have had a a post around the the Houthis and things of that nature yesterday.
And it seems like we're seeing a follow up today from President Trump.
So there might be a little bit in the background that's going on there.
But if he really sticks to that whole wrong name thing, it throws a complete monkey wrench into the China story.
And I don't believe that China is going to stop purchasing from Iran.
I would be surprised if they do, but I doubt it.
So I think that's also something, you know, markets not really seeing that impact.
Oil markets, it was very funny for you oil traders. You know, we have settlement at what,
2.30 Eastern time. And he posts this like 10 minutes before the settlement. And I feel really
bad for those options market makers there because, you know, you talk about the zero dte options that you had yesterday yeah
yeah today was crazy like you had two cent bids or you know two cent ask on on what the 58s i
believe the 58 58 calls 59 calls and things got completely blown out to like 40 cents 50 cents
and that's a lot of money you're talking about 20 bucks turning into 400 bucks per contract really quickly. So that was actually very interesting. I want to see how oil
markets actually react to that because we had an aggressive sell yesterday. We saw some buying
activity kind of taking place today. We had this announcement. But I think I just wanted to kind
of point out that the monkey wrench there is the post from Trump in Iran. Let's see if he actually is serious about that.
Wait, wait.
Yeah.
I mean, do you think he's kind of negotiating?
Did you say that they went from 2 to 40?
Sorry, Brendan, you were asking Kevin a question?
Oh, yeah.
I was saying, did you say the bid on that went from two to 40 in the last 10 minutes of trading?
Kevin, are you able to hear Brendan?
Yeah, I can hear him.
Can you guys hear me?
Yeah, sorry.
Okay.
No, it's all good.
Oh, yeah.
In the last 10 minutes, like right before, you're saying the bid went from 2 to 40 in the last 10 minutes right before settlement?
Yeah, 2 to 40 cents.
Yeah, so 20 bucks, 400 bucks.
Yeah, no, I know, but still.
That's crazy.
But yeah, but in 10 minutes before settlement, that's crazy to maneuver.
Yeah, and they were trying to press it down, too.
I mean, they were really trying to hold it at around 59.30.
They did not want to let it go any higher than that.
But it was actually very interesting, and I know that sucked from those market makers who were trading those options at that time.
That'll blow you out.
The crude options like that and a situation like that 10 minutes before it will blow you out easily.
So that's all the contributions that I kind of...
Oh, somebody actually did have an idea at the jet.
But somebody had a question in the comments regarding UNH.
Look, they're having a lot of issues when it comes to the landscape of their business.
Obviously, internally, they have some struggles, but the landscape of their business could
fundamentally change over the next six to eight months.
Kind of depends on legislation and the White House itself.
And it does appear that their own customers are obviously leveraging those services or
their services more.
So they're paying a lot more money for procedures and services and things of that nature
and just they're not getting enough premium. So what they're probably actually going to do is
probably raise premiums over the next year or so to be able to compensate for that. But the stock's
at a very interesting point here. I mean, if you kind of look at it, you're trading near what close
to COVID lows for UNH. There's a lot of structural problems.
I would just be very careful with it.
But this one can be a mover.
And unfortunately, UNH doesn't usually get like massive flows, a lot of interest until
we actually have more of a defensive trade in the market, right?
Consumer staples moving higher, utilities, and then usually healthcare and healthcare
exposed names like insurance companies.
So trade at your own risk here.
It does, you know, this is not a recommendation.
Does it kind of look attractive?
You could make that case.
But I can also say it's at, you know, your 380 is probably a better price to try to take a stab at it
because that's actually a significant area of support rather than maybe hitting the 400.
But it could go a lot lower than this. And it does appear from CVS's earnings here,
their competitors are not seeing the same headwinds as UNH. So they're going to have to
figure out a fundamental story to be able to turn that business around. And the best way for them to
do that is obviously raising premium. So I appreciate you guys having me on here and I'll
stick in the background and listen to
some of the other commentary.
I feel like to a degree, the
Iran comment was
him negotiating with China
in public. As you mentioned, Kevin,
China is the biggest purchaser of
Iranian oil. It seems to me like
that post was targeted.
On paper.
Yeah, on paper.
Let me put an asterisk.
On paper, China is the biggest importer.
I mean, Josh is up here.
He can probably talk more about that.
But yeah, like I said, that was like a little bit of a curveball for these negotiations.
I agree that definitely there was a curveball.
I think to a degree, Trump is... I don what, if it's egos at play or what, I don't know why they're not just getting on the phone and talking directly to each other, but it seems that China and the White House are just communicating through the press, really. Chinese state media to make statements. They keep hosting like the Chinese commerce ministry has
hosted like 12 interviews in the last two weeks and they do not do interviews at that pace normally.
Yeah, but let me just say this because I do have the jet after this. When you know negotiate with
China traditionally, traditionally, negotiations always start from the bottom up.
So Trump is the type that he wants to talk to the head guy directly.
Right. Like that's his jam. But she and his regime is really not like that.
Right. Like you get your minions. I was calling minions. Right.
You get your low level people to talk first and it kind of moves up the chain until it gets to the final powers.
This is usually how that structure works for China. It seems like Trump wants to go directly to the head. And it seems like China is saying,
hey, we want you to go through these steps that we are accustomed to. So it is a showdown,
for sure. And China can wait. China can outlast. Everybody's like, yeah, what's going to be the
impact to their economy? They know that. Everybody knows that, but they cannot last President Trump, at least for now.
And I think that the I think the administration recognizes that. And I think that's probably why you're seeing some of the other erratic commentary coming from them, because I think they're trying to do something to get them to the table to discuss.
And I think once we get to the table,
I think we, I'm not gonna say we fold,
but I think you're gonna see some pretty favorable terms
for China moving forward.
Compared to where the line has been set.
So for me to, you know, there will be an adjustment,
but compared to what Trump has stated what he wants,
I don't think he's gonna get all of that, right don't think he's going to get all of that.
Right. I think that's going to be walked back pretty significantly.
Yeah, I don't think either side is going to get what they want, obviously.
But I agree. I don't think Trump is going to get what he wants either when it comes to China.
I do think that he's trying to bring elements of the deal into the public to kind of negotiate in public, like the Iranian oil thing, the thing with fentanyl, obviously, which is where this whole thing started, and all the other specific industries that he's brought up where he feels like China is directly exploiting or taking advantage of the United States.
uh and he's done the same thing with india too he has these like very specific gripes you know like
he wants u.s car makers to be able to sell cars in india which has been like a huge
blocking point for the indian government for you know decades so i don't know i think i think he's
trying to negotiate in public but i can't be completely certain about it what's up joe
there's some other stuff going on uh that's worth noting so the um there's been some shuffling around
of key personnel like mike mike walls is out as a national security uh advisor and um there's an
opec meeting on the 5th and so what it looks like is there some sort of deal where the trump administration is trying to
um cut off iranian oil exports in exchange either formally or informally with uh saudi arabia and the rest of opec sort of increasing production and so the oil markets freaked out about this
it looks like because you have um saudi uh increasing production and OPEC sort of raising their quotas at a time of economic uncertainty
and, you know, because of the tariffs and various other and potential recession, various other concerns.
And so one reason to tweet about this would be to signal to OPEC that he's more serious.
Again, like it's not really a serious way to go about communicating,
to post on your own sort of owned social media and truth or whatever. But it's how Trump communicates. So I think it's worth noting that. Since this is an earnings space, I just thought
I'd highlight EOG announced. And frankly, their actual earnings were in line and sort of not that
interesting. They did a small acquisition, which is interesting
because some of these producers are running out of inventory. They would say they're not,
but if they had as much inventory as they say they do, then it would be grossly uneconomic and
frankly, massively value destructive for them to do the acquisition they just announced. So
clearly one of those things is true. But more importantly, they just
cut their capital program by a few percent, which is meaningful because if the whole industry cuts
by about that amount, you could end up with significant production declines for oil and then
insufficient production growth for natural gas. So we're starting to see it. Some companies cut more than that.
Some haven't cut.
But this general trend that the message was, oh, you know, there's going to be more drilling
because there's deregulation for oil and gas.
But the thing that was holding development back in my view, and I think in the consensus
industry view was price.
It wasn't regulation.
And so absent much higher
prices or some sort of other sort of way to make the company's whole like tax incentives or
whatever, I think the trajectory is going to be less investment. And then the last point is
this matters actually a lot for the US economy, because even though oil and gas is very small
from a market capitalization perspective. It's huge from a
gross domestic product perspective. And a large percentage of what's measured as industrial
activity in the US right now, after all the de-industrialization Trump and so on,
complain about, is related to the oil and gas industry and the energy industry sort of across the value chain.
And so when you have fewer drilling rigs running, it sort of, it doesn't just hurt that direct
capital and that direct labor. There's a like 10 X or whatever multiplier on those in terms of the
economic impact. So ironically, with these tariffs and sort of part of why I complain publicly about it so much. It's just there's this push towards moving manufacturing to America with the tariffs and stuff. But
one of the negative impacts is that less drilling is leading to less pressure pumping and less
pipeline builds and less processing and less potential stuff to export. But then also when
you go up the chain, it's less investment
in spare parts and equipment for the rigs and trucks and oil trucks and just sort of everything
sort of up that and all the widgets that are necessary for all of those things. And then the
housing for the labor and so on. And so you end up with this just enormous multiplier on what looks
like something that's pretty small. So that's why this matters. And it could end up being a bigger drag than people think. The flip side is this was
what actually helped the U.S. get out of the global financial crisis. The upturn in oil and
gas and the shale revolution in 2009, 2010 sent a ton of rigs to work and sort of built up this whole like US industrial economy
even though there was a lot of regulation in that Obama era.
So anyway, it's worth tracking this and sort of a little different from what you'll see
in the news.
Pretty positive comments from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on the call.
He said, and he's actually kind of reflecting what we were talking about earlier when I was
giving these guys slack for not knowing.
He said, none of us know where tariffs will settle or when, but we haven't seen any attenuation
of demand yet.
We've seen some heightened buying in certain categories that may indicate stocking up in advance of tariff impact.
We also have not seen the average selling price of retail items go up yet.
So that's interesting commentary there.
Tim Cook's also talking about the tariff impact.
They did kind of still give guidance.
He says he's expecting a $900 million impact from the tariffs in the upcoming quarter.
Yeah, that's interesting that there are a number out there.
I guess some people are willing to throw numbers out there and other people aren't.
I guess it's really a matter of who has the confidence to model the impact and who doesn't.
I guess that's the difference.
But interesting.
What's up, Monitiv?
I had a bunch of questions
that ran through my mind
as the last few comments were coming up.
So is Apple modeling loss of revenue
from China because of the trade war?
Or is this purely...
They just said 900 million impact.
They didn't specify where the impact is.
But I imagine mostly COGS related.
I don't know.
I imagine.
All right.
So going back to, by the way, Josh, I did have a question for you on, you know, the last time when the supply chain unraveled, you know, we ended up with a shortage in spares and pipes and specialized equipment for a long time that took us time to, you know, be able to scale up the rigs again.
Are we going to face that situation again?
I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand you asking if it's
going to be what do you mean by last time?
So so when when when we had a when we had the supply chain
unravel last time, right? And during COVID, we ended up with
shortage of of specialized pipes and spare parts that were
needed to scale the rigs quickly, right?
So, or to put the rigs back to work and to provide for, you know, replacement or maintenance
and all that spares.
Are we going to have that situation again if we have this period of time where, you
know, trade is unraveling, which also means supply chain is unraveling
oh yeah i mean i think that's a great question i think that's a real possibility i think there's
just so much of a black box around tariffs that it's really hard to know for sure if things
continue on the current trajectory without the trump administration deviating substantially
from what they've actually
implemented. And again, the market's betting that they will deviate. But if they just follow
their current plan, there's going to be a problem with just keeping current industrial activity
going. So forget getting back up from 500 oil rigs to 600 or 700 or whatever. Forget even building new LNG facilities,
just existing construction and existing drilling activity.
There's thousands of parts and widgets
and technologies and so on,
most of which is made in Southeast Asia
and various other places.
And even if you have this goal
of bringing industrial activity back to the US,
by trying to do it all at once,
they've sort of shocked the system
and no one knows really what the tariffs
are gonna be on these different parts.
And so some of the companies are just gonna pay for it
sort of no matter the price
and figure they can pass it on to their customers or eat it.
But that willingness,
from what I can tell, has fallen a lot with this latest $10 down move in oil price. And so,
yes, there's a real possibility that you have a problem on the back end of this as you try to
ramp activity, but there's also a real problem right now just sustaining existing activity.
problem right now just sustaining existing activity. And I don't think anyone really knows.
It's, I think, just terrible policy. I mean, people have complained about this a lot publicly
and whatever, but companies I'm talking to every day, they don't know where they're going to get
the stuff they need to keep their businesses running. But you have the president out there
and the secretary of energy out there, whatever, talking about it. These things are so important
and so great.
And they're claiming they're fixing it, but they're actively breaking it more.
Every day, the problem's compounding.
So it's not just that it could be bad on the back end.
It's already causing problems and potentially leading to much lower activity, let's say, a month from now, two months from now,
and so on. And so it's not people, you know, there are a few like shipping experts and logistic
experts that are talking about potential empty store shelves at some point. And that may or may
not happen. And maybe, you know, Trump will capitulate just to make sure there's stuff at
Walmart or whatever. But it's a real issue on the industrial side where frankly, no one cares.
The policymakers are supposed to care, but it's almost like they're, it's like the,
this is fine sort of meme where they're sitting there at a table as if they're going to get
like served something or get to drink their coffee, but like everything's on fire and
blowing up.
And so, um, and I think that sort of, um of divergence in between their sort of approach, but also their expectation, I think is actually hurting things more and may end up suppressing investment for longer.
I wasn't sure what would happen with Trump. And I've lost a lot of money in the last few months
as I didn't think that they would sort of destroy this industry that they thought would be so great.
But I actually, I think there's a really good shot that we end up with all time high oil prices
before the end of this administration, just because if we don't end up with giant GDP losses
globally, and even if we do, and then just get a bunch of stimulus in the next couple of years, you're
going to end up with potential extreme shortages.
And so that's sort of my concern here anyway, sort of taking a short answer and simple answer,
sorry, short and simple question and making it bigger.
But there are real problems, again, not just on the recovery, but even going into this,
problems again not just on the recovery but even going into this there just isn't there there's not
enough like just in time or there's too much just in time not enough sort of stocked up parts and
inputs and so on and there's no certainty on what these things will cost or how long they will cost
because if you think about it just one one more point if you're a distributor of XYZ input, whether it's a critical mineral
that needs to go into drilling fluid, or whether it's a production chemical, or whether it's steel
pipes, or whether it's a certain kind of screw that's made in a certain factory in, let's say,
Vietnam or China or wherever, you don't really want to stock up on those right now because if
you try to buy them, you have to bring them in
and you'll have to pay a tariff which you don't know what it'll have to be but then let's say
they waive these tariffs a month from now they're probably not going to give you a rebate and so you
can end up with a whole bunch of stuff in inventory that you paid way too much for and that you can't
really pass that cost on to your customers and so there's just so much uncertainty in terms of how
it'll be enforced and what it'll look like and so on, that ironically, they're actually destroying some of the productive
capacity of the existing manufacturing economy. And again, I can see that explicitly in oil and
gas as I talk to operators and they're like, what the hell are they going to do? And then the
services companies, even more so the drilling rig companies, some of the providers. And I mean,
it's really interesting and tough. And I mean, it's really interesting
and tough. And I think the market's sort of very much sleeping on this because I think they're
interpreting too much of the US economy, which it is a big part of it is like stuff you buy through
Amazon. But this whole other part of it that the Trump administration is trying to grow
is ironically actually getting hurt through these policies.
So long answer to short question. No, that was an excellent answer. Thank you. I wasn't sure. I
knew what I wanted to ask, but yeah, you got it. You got it exactly. That's exactly what I wanted
to know. There is a lot of parallels, right, for different reasons with the supply chain unraveling
and now we are unraveling it, you know, wantonly, right? So, so there is a lot of parallels. So, so thank you, Josh. That was,
that was an excellent answer. Hey, uh, stock talk going back, I had some comments on, on, on,
so on the AI thing, right? So look, I, I'm front and center here, like a ringside seat to everything that's happening here.
But just going to what even the top execs of these hyperscalers are talking about, all
the big companies, right, Amazon, Google, so the world, they're already saying that
over 30%, let's just call it a third of the code, is being written by automation rather than by people.
Yet, we've not seen any significant change in headcount in any of those orgs that are using this automation.
So one, the level of trust on that automation is not yet there.
The level of quality is not yet there.
Whatever, the level of quality is not yet there, whatever, the level of performance is not yet
there. To continue to get to that point is going to require additional capital spend.
And that's where I think the next problem lies, which is when you start taking out some of the revenues, right? Like going by, you know, what Kevin was saying, the cost, the revenue per unit of compute per unit of time
has been crashing dramatically in the last three years.
It's fallen by 70, 80, 90% from the beginning of the cycle.
So you're, from running that as a business, the cash generation
is dramatically smaller, which is only offset by volume and additional customers and additional
workloads. So what is going to happen? Now I'm just going to ponder here, right?
So the only companies that can afford to keep doing this are the ones that are where the cost of capital is very low, meaning they're not dependent on getting that revenue back, which rules out all the new scalars because that's their only business of of getting revenue
back immediately but willing to look at it as a long-term proposition where you know there's going
to be a certain point in time where the damn breaks and yeah everything falls in place and
and they can start getting what they need to get to make their internal rate of return. But until then, you're going to still burn cash.
And the first set of spend to date is a write-off.
We know that, right?
There's no sugarcoating that.
This $300, $400 billion that has been spent
is never going to be recovered before its end of life, right?
We are already going to have three years or a little bit more in some cases of this current
hardware.
And at best, we could have another two, three years, maybe.
And then, you know, you have to start refreshing it.
So the point I'm trying to make is, I think you're going to see either a slowdown in the spend at some point in
time soon enough or you're going to start seeing a forced adoption of a product whether it's ready
or not to the point where something happens on the cost side, meaning they're able to lay off
staff to be able to say that their investment in technology is paying off in terms of efficiencies,
which lets them have fewer people, or there's going to be just fewer people doing this. And
the ones that do it think that there is a world out there that they need to dominate irrespective of the cost, irrespective of consequence for the foreseeable future.
So we're going to see one of those three scenarios or some parts of all three play out.
Yep, I agree with that.
look i think it's been an endless pit of spend so far because
strategy of ai development is still unclear you know we we had a initial strategy that everyone
sort of followed um and is still following for the most part of just like buy as many gpus as possible shove them in a
warehouse and get it up and running and you know train models and then use spare capacity for
inference or you you know whatever you want to do in some cases renting out spare capacity but that's been the model so far. And the product has varied,
right?
I mean,
if you look at the internal products that have been deployed,
like Kevin brought up Meta has used it really effectively on the customer
facing advertising side.
There've been other companies that have driven meaningful internal
efficiencies using AI. But when we think of the
mainstream product, LLMs, I mean, they're being commoditized so rapidly that the ROI on that end
is pretty unclear. And, you know, I think it'll be next to nothing. So if that's true, then yeah,
you're right. There is an urgency to sort of shove products in the marketplace.
But I don't know if I'd characterize it that way, because I think we're close.
You know, I think we are close to real world AI.
I don't know how close.
That's tough to say.
I mean, I don't have a crystal ball.
But I think we're within a decade of meaningful real world AI applications.
But I think we're within a decade of meaningful real-world AI applications.
And that's not just self-driving cars and, you know, automated factories.
Although those two things in and of themselves are, like, enormous productivity boosts.
I mean, could you imagine if self-driving vehicles became mainstream?
I'm not just talking about Tesla robo taxis here.
I'm talking about like, you know, automated trucks, automated ships.
You know, the benefit on transportation costs there is enormous.
And then you extrapolate that to manufacturing.
The benefit is probably untold exponentially higher in manufacturing.
So that's just two categories right but that automation is going to permeate to everything um and i think deployable
intelligence without a cost the cost of human labor is something that's like it it's really
hard to model or perceive and it's really hard to model or perceive.
And it's really hard to predict how that's going to unfold.
Because we've never like, all of the technologies prior to AI have been purely tools, purely in a vacuum.
Right?
Like the steam engine was a tool.
You know, the computer was a tool. All these things have been tools by which you still have to employ human labor and you still have to.
The limiting factor is still human labor. Like a human with a computer, you know what? I don't know what the ratio is, but let's say a human or the computer is as productive as 10 humans without a computer or 20 humans without a computer, whatever that number is, you know, a human with an
LLM is probably a little bit incrementally more productive than that.
But the LLM getting better isn't the end of that spectrum, right?
Like somebody with today's LLM is slightly more productive than somebody with yesterday's computer or yesterday's search engine.
And somebody with tomorrow's LLM will be incrementally more productive than the person with today's LLM.
But the spectrum doesn't stop there.
It's not like, oh, when you're at peak LLM, you're at peak productivity.
No, there's other expressions of this technology, right? Like the other things that I just brought up before, like autonomous driving and automated factories and robots and, you know, automated paralegal
platforms where a law firm can run on six people instead of 60, you know, automated accounting
platforms where these multi-billion dollar accounting firms can, you know, employ 20,
30,000 less people. Like Those are the types of efficiency changes that
are real step changes in productivity that drive huge untold margin expansion. And
I don't want to say we are right there. This is all going to happen next year. Of course not.
But the effects of it can compound quickly. Like we were talking about this earlier.
Kevin brought this point up. I don't know if he's still up here.
I don't see him up here, but he brought this point up earlier with like,
he sees it more of as like as a rising tide lifts all boats effect where AI
becomes standardized, right? That's insanely bullish.
Could you imagine if AI would became just a standard for all industry
to have it internally deployed to maximize your labor costs,
sorry, to minimize your labor costs by maximizing AI deployment,
to minimize all of your operational costs?
Like right now, the penetration is pretty surface level. Like, yeah, businesses
are using LLMs or they're using like white labeled specialized software.
Not today, but, you know, what about when all businesses are doing that at scale, right? And
at that point, the technology will inherently be much better than it is today, too.
Right. If you standardized just today's AI technology, which is super infantile, right, in the grand scheme of things, you standardize today's you have a huge productivity boost.
But that standardization process is going to take a long time. It's going to take a long time for people to realize, oh, we need to employ AI internally to be competitive at all. So that factor, the standardization factor is one factor. That takes X amount of time. But then there's also an exponential increase in the usefulness of the technology that's happening in the background simultaneously, right?
that's happening in the background simultaneously, right?
So higher levels of standardization
paired with improved technology
and eventually real old applications,
like it's a steam train.
You know, it's a, like,
I don't know how you stop that trend.
It's gonna be like the biggest mega trend.
You know, regardless of if the ROI and LLMs is there,
even if spend slows down, spend could slow down dramatically from how accelerated it's been in the last two years.
In fact, I was one of the people in January, as you remember, and we all talked about this on these spaces, that called out the data center theme and the cuts to these leases.
I called that out very early before Microsoft canceled leases.
And people were like, oh, you're an idiot.
They're not going to cancel leases.
They reiterated it on their earnings call.
Like, how could they cancel leases?
And like three weeks ago, they're canceling leases.
So I'm not as bullish as I am.
I'm a realist about the periods of digestion.
And I'm a realist about the idea that spend isn't going to accelerate on a year by year basis in perpetuity.
Of course not. There's going to be periods of digestion. There's going to be periods where the
technology stalls for a bit, maybe for a couple of years at a time. And during those periods,
investment will stall, valuations will depress, multiples will compress, enthusiasm as a whole
will compress. That's normal. That happens with every technology, you know.
But I think a lot of people are missing, you know, they're missing the forest for the trees
by viewing this incrementally. Because at the end of the day, this is going to transform
every single industry enormously. Everything from building a car to, you know,
the most complex software operations and everything in between.
So, yeah, it's, I know at times I'm like bearish about the market
or cautious about the market or cautious about valuations on certain companies.
And, you know, I can go through those things on a micro basis.
But broadly speaking, I don't want people to mistake any of the commentary I've made
this year about a lot of these stocks.
Like, I am still a mega AI bull when it comes to the theme.
You know, I just sometimes I think the stocks are mispriced at certain moments.
And earlier this year was one of those moments where I thought they were getting a little ahead of themselves.
And that'll happen in the future, too, you know, where they'll hit these but last couple of months has been a great example of like the development process slowing, the improvement process slowing.
Like I use LMs every single day.
I don't think they've gotten tremendously better in the last couple of months.
I think some of them have in the cases where they didn't have developed AIs like Grok's gotten better, but it's a relatively new model. Like ChatGPT hasn't gotten exponentially better for me in the last couple months, or hasn't
even really gotten any better than incrementally better for me in the last couple months. And so,
you know, am I being impatient by saying that? No, I'm just noting that like, yeah, there's going to
be months or sometimes years at a time where the technology is just not impressive anymore.
We're super complacent when it comes to technology as like a consumer culture in the United States.
We're very complacent. We're like, you know, sorry, not complacent. We're very,
what's the word I'm looking for? You know, like we're demanding sort of, you know,
we don't take things for granted. We expect the technology to get better. We're, we're not like, you know,
we sit around and have these amazing technologies and we're like, Oh,
why isn't my video buffering faster? Right? Like it's a,
it's a very level of spoil. Like you start to get spoiled by it.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so, and I'm not knocking American culture.
I'm part of that too. I feel the same way, you know? And, um,
so there's going to be periods where people lose enthusiasm about this
because they're going to be like,
man,
chat GPT hasn't gotten any better.
It's been six months.
Like AI sucks.
Like AI was all hype.
Like,
this is all it can do.
Like those,
that's what people say during moments like this.
It's so funny to me because then like two years later,
the technology is way better.
And that's like almost unequivocally true
about every major technology in the world today.
Like rewind the clock on any major technology
you can think of 10, 15 years
and think about what people were saying.
You know, look at what people saying about the internet,
like the smart people, you know,
I'll put that in air quotes.
Look what they were saying about the internet,
you know, especially after the dot-com crash what they were saying about the internet you know especially
after the dot-com crash i mean after the dot-com crash i mean then you look at the commentary i
mean you can look at before or after and there's there's skeptics on both sides but especially
after when when people had price influencing and exacerbating their opinion they're like oh the
internet's just fucking fab like it's definitely over now right it's like no yeah the dot-com crash happened but
the internet sure as hell didn't go anywhere still like the biggest economic powerhouse of
of the last you know 30 years so uh yeah technology inherently involves skepticism in the early stages but it almost always wins like it's just a tale that has been
told by history over and over and over again like for every technology that you can think of
so yeah i always bet on the side of technology winning in the end even though there's periods of
of volatility in between oh stuck tuck you're winning the battle right now apple drilling down
four percent down now yep i mean i think they said some pretty cautious stuff right on the
commentary about that 900 million hit yeah they said so like what stuff, right, on the commentary about that $900 million hit.
Yeah, they said. So, like, what I read was that that was the estimated cost increase.
And they said in Q3, which for them is next quarter, I believe,
because they're off.
There's been a ton of times.
I saw the headline that said they're expecting to face 145%
tariffs
in Q3
even the ones
that got moved to India
India has a 26% tariff across the board.
So there is going to be some tariff unless this is reversed in some form, right?
Well, they did say almost all their iPhones are going to be made in India now,
and their wearables are going to be made in Vietnam.
I'm assuming
maybe they're worried about the counter-tariffs
as well.
How much
did China tariff back against
us? Isn't it over 100% now?
Yeah.
25 or whatever.
Maybe that's the angle
I didn't think about that until this month.
Yeah. I mean, I don't know if all this Apple talk about India is signal.
It might be.
It might be signal that the first deal is going to be with India
because Tim Cook has clearly been talking to Trump.
He even said on this call that he's very involved with the tariff discussion.
So, like, did Trump tell him something?
Because, like,
Apple,
all these stories have come out now
about Apple,
like,
shifting,
wanting to shift 100%
of their U.S. production.
In fact,
before this earnings call,
there was a story about that,
like,
four days ago,
that Apple wants to shift 100%
of their U.S.
sold iPhones to India,
and then now they're saying it again
on the earnings call
and shifting all their whereabouts.
You know? I said this to you long ago.
India deal could have happened, at least the framework finally finalized and signed off if that terrorist incident had not happened.
And now that's sucked out all the oxygen, right?
So there's nobody to negotiate with on the other side.
So I think that was, of course, completely out of the left field there.
So there's nothing anybody could have predicted about that.
So I think in time, it's still a deal that is more possible in reasonable time because the two leaders can make a lot of decisions and enforce it through their
legislatures without without a problem so so i still think that happens but again right i mean
india is also involved though though they're not direct buyers of iranian oil they have uh
work that they do in india they they're developing a port together in India. There's a lot of business there. So, you know, there's a lot of mess that has to be unraveled, right?
It's not like, I think one of the points that Josh made can be extrapolated to say that, you know,
what Trump administration is trying to do in one place has a lot of knock-on effects
that are not being considered or not being thought through or
not being planned for not being addressed and those are all coming to a head soon at some
point in time we're going to have to deal with the mess we've created and and it's not that far away
so you know if you say don't do any business with with iran okay uh then what does that do to a deal with india does india say you
know what hey we're not going to write off whatever 10 20 hundred billion i don't have any
idea but they've spent significant amount of money on on on that you know infrastructure there and
and and time and resources and uh you know political and financial capital are they going to just write it off what
are they going to ask for in return so there's all these things that that that are sort of messy that
needs to be unraveled but you know i mean uh they'll just they'll just buy from russia or
anywhere else where the price is you know international price of oil is international
price of oil whoever gives them discounts off that they were buying from iran before they then started buying a lot
more from from russia because the price was cheap and i think you know every every consumer is going
to just rush to you know the cheapest supplier because it's just a commodity um the other problem also you know i want to talk to josh is if there's an all i i see
no possibility of a full-on war with pakistan um but if if it does get messy india's largest
petrochemical plants are very close to the bottom in the state of Gujarat. So that could be a pretty dirty problem to handle.
And those are major exporters of refined goods worldwide.
So you take off a lot of capacity,
might impact the market there directly
because that's one of the largest petrochemical plants
in the world.
The other thing I was gonna say, yeah, so going back again,
I'm not disagreeing with your entire commentary, Stock Talk,
but we're talking about tech companies because we're in the middle or the tail end of the MAG7 season here.
Where they are, valuation is the problem right now because you're not seeing that revenue come in today and clearly their their their
guidance is not so enthusiastic that that revenue is around the corner right it's going to take its
time maybe two three quarters away maybe maybe longer, I don't know.
But it certainly doesn't seem like
it is something that's a quarter away,
which means, at least to my eyes,
valuation is stretched in some of them
to a point where they are obscenely expensive.
Yep. obscenely expensive yep I mean the premium that the
mag 7 sit on is
always fragile when the markets
are fragile so that I don't disagree
with I wasn't
making any commentary about valuation
I don't disagree with that at all
what I will say is that
these companies are still in the best position when it comes to the AI trend in the long term. And so, you know, all it takes is one or two of these guys
turning their head away from this thematic.
I just don't see that happening because, again,
I think the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is too attractive here.
So I think, I could be wrong once again,
but I think the Mag-7 will stay committed to this thematic
for the foreseeable
future because within the next few years, you will start seeing meaningful ROI in my view,
not from LLMs, but from other applications and other products. And if that doesn't happen,
then you're right. Then those stocks deserve a beating and they may get one long before then too the market may not be that patient um
but yeah a lot of the premium right now in technology broadly is hinging on the idea that
um that that pot of gold is there and if it's not there then then yeah, it's a fucking problem. Of course, if AI ends up being some kind of like fad, which again, I don't think it is
going to be, but if it ends up being just some kind of glorified search engine, then
yeah, those companies will get destroyed and will deserve to get destroyed.
But again, I'm betting on that not being the case.
I don't think that it's going to just be this forever where we get
no roi from tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of spend um i think eventually you'll
punch through and have very very useful real world applications in fact i think a lot of the reason
right now that we don't is because there's a two-sided hesitancy. There's some businesses
that feel that they either can't or don't want to or don't have an immediate benefit from adopting
AI broadly. And in another instance, there's too much focus on the core models from all of these
big guys where they're just racing to get to AGI as opposed to trying to make specialized software with today's
technology. There's not a tremendous amount of focus on that. You know, most of these guys are
just chasing, chasing better and better models. And so we'll see eventually maybe the light will
plateau and they'll say, okay, now we need to start differentiating the types of software we're providing and, you know, start offering hyper specialized solutions to different industries.
stage where we sit for a few years before you see these sort of broadly applicable products
like full self-driving and, you know, autonomous factories and things like that.
You know, those may be a decade away.
Those may be 15 years away.
And we may have to go through another, you know, a secondary phase before then.
I don't know the answer to all these things.
Of course, you know, I don't have a crystal ball, but you know, if somebody told me to
shut my eyes and wake up in 20 years, I would bet that the technology will have been transformative
in that period of time. And that a lot of industries will have adopted it and not only
transformed their profitability but transformed
their productivity broadly uh from that technology it's just hard for me to imagine it any other way
like if you're somebody that believes technology gets better just just just that you don't have to
believe anything more than that if you believe technology gets better then like where do you
see the end point of this you know do you think we're going to hit so much of a plateau in ai development that it'll just be
rendered to a glorified search engine i feel like that's a pretty bad bet to make
you know i feel like the historic history of technology tells us that's a bad bet to make
but i don't know at the end of the day i don't know
all right well all the calls have ended and here we sit apple Apple down 4%, Amazon down 2.3%.
Amazon winning for now.
And futures just opened pretty much where they closed at an hour ago.
So not a whole lot to report here.
We'll see kind of how this thing plays out overnight.
And obviously we gapped up and pushed up.
I said yesterday my thought going into yesterday's earnings reports,
Microsoft and Meta would do good.
Apple and Amazon would probably not do well.
Which one does the market reward more or pay more attention to?
That will be the question of the day going in tomorrow.
Manitav, we're going to wrap up here.
Do you have any final comments to leave with the crowd today?
No, no, no no no no i have nothing
much to add i think uh i need to spend a lot more time digging through the numbers to see if anything
more interesting but uh but yeah i mean things are to to me to me at least short term i think
we have a significant valuation issue uh unless there is something that changes it that is not captured in any of the the the
commentary that the companies have given us or anything that's leaked so far.
I still think that that at least, you know, this this sub sub 20, we need to get as cheap as at least where the S&P is, if not cheaper than that.
And Microsoft and Apple are significantly more richer multiple there.
So those 30 plus multiples, I don't think are supported by the numbers we see here.
It just makes no sense.
That's it.
That's my last comment.
Wow, wild comments here from Japan Finance Minister.
Our U.S. Treasury holdings are a card we can use in trade negotiations.
Whether we choose to use that card is a different decision.
Wow, he's just straight up playing hardball.
It's not a great thing to hear from Japan.
If Japan's saying that, I wonder what China's saying on the phone.
We've had no official talks, but we have
had talks, but
they didn't say.
But not talks.
We're not talking, but we are talking.
But we're not talking, but we this morning but we're not talking but we
are talking but there's somebody that's talking on our behalf somebody's here may not be talking
you know that the india thing is really interesting because i mean
half of what i'm hearing is that we want to bring stuff to the u.s and then now half of what i'm
hearing is we just want to avoid China.
Is the narrative changing a little bit there?
Or is this leverage to get a deal done with them first?
Just kind of try to start that cascade, that domino effect.
I don't know.
I think it's going to be interesting.
We'll see how it plays out.
Sock Talk, what's your last word of wisdom for the day?
No last words of wisdom.
I did plenty of talking on this space. We owe a little overtime today too.
But I'll be out of town on monday so i'll be back with the crew on tuesday but
i'm sure you guys will have fun on monday without me
well it won't be as fun as normal but we'll we'll manage without you stock talk we will be
off tomorrow of course uh being friday i hope everyone enjoys their friday and their weekend
we will be back on Monday for
same time, same place, Power Hour.
Real quick.
Sorry, I didn't see you stop here.
I was going to say, we have the Investing with the Boys
tomorrow during Power Hour.
Yes, over on
if you are looking for Power Hour entertainment
tomorrow, Wolf Financial.
You'll see them hosting
Investing with the Boys tomorrow.
And had some travel conflicts the last week or two,
so I'm excited to get that conversation back rolling again.
Some great episodes out there too.
Logically, I saw that Seth Guild over from Robinhood.
Fantastic interview.
Does the other one, has the new episode dropped?
No, as you said, this is our first week where there is no recorded episode because both of our co-hosts are traveling back.
So we didn't get to do an episode this week, but we'll be back with the recorded episodes next week and the space tomorrow.
Beautiful.
Well, I am definitely looking forward to that space.
Stocks on Spaces will be off tomorrow, but Wolf will be live.
Wolf Trading will be live first thing in the morning all day long.
We also have on Wolf Financial that investing with the boys tomorrow afternoon starting at Power Hour.
Don't miss out on that.
If you go to the pinned post on the Wolf page, you'll see that full schedule there.
And you can drop down, set your reminders so you don't miss it.
I'll be there. Logical will be there set your reminders so you don't miss it. I'll be
there. Logical will be there. Shy and I guess Sam will be there. Hopefully Sam will be there.
Either way, we'll have that tomorrow. Hope everyone has a great rest of their evening and
take care all. Thank you.
