Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
BITCOIN & GOLD vs THE US DOLLAR | $BTGD
Recorded: Sept. 16, 2025 Duration: 2:37:09Space Recording
Short Summary
In a lively discussion, participants highlighted the significant growth potential of emerging crypto assets like BMNR, alongside strategic partnerships in the EV sector, particularly with Rivian and Rocket Lab. The conversation also touched on the ongoing trends in fundraising and the increasing interest in innovative technologies, setting the stage for a bullish outlook in the crypto and tech markets.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. All right, wake up, everyone. nap time's over um market is uh flat completely flat uh a little
sell-off to start the day and then just kind of a slight recovery here going into power hour we are break even on nasdaq we're few i mean 30 cents i guess on spy red right now iwm uh
basically the same the dow basically the same it's all kind of flat dow's down a little bit more
fix is up fix hanging around that 16 dollar mark um not a whole lot to talk about. Tesla is up 2.4%. Meta and Amazon
having pretty solid days. Apple had a strong push in the morning, but most of these charts have gone
sideways most of the day. Broadcom, notably red. NVIDIA, notably red of the Mag 7. I count Broadcom
in my Mag 7 so either way that's
kind of where that is uh there were some other little things going on and some news stories i'm
sure that we'll hit on here a little bit and uh but even even crypto is a little bit flat i'm
waiting on evan to join let me get evan up here because bmnr uh up seven percent uh wolfie also
had mentioned that some of these treasury
companies look pretty interesting the other day um let me get evan connected here and then we'll
start uh diving into it a little bit evan is just spinning i will say this i updated to ios 26 last
night and i absolutely hate it it looks just terrible yeah just just whatever that glass whatever this thing is it
looks so bad um and then i had to go through and update my app so uh x has been acting up for me
i don't know if any of you have that same issue but either way here we are and i see evan just
spinning uh trying to get him up here so So we'll... There he is.
BMNR.
That has been flying over the last little bit.
So I was this guy saying here, the market's like even, and I'm sitting like, what?
I had to go and check my other ETF portfolio.
I get it.
But BMNR, what a move.
I don't know if you guys have been seeing that one, if I need to take over the spaces, but it just feels good.
I was waiting on you to come in and take that. I just bought 10 more shares of BMNR in both my regular and my retirement.
So I think I bought, nah, let's say I bought 15 more shares.
Listen, all-time highs are not, well, 52, whatever this is,
highs are not going to be bearish. We'll see
if this breaks out, but...
Options, Mike, tell me why
this is bad.
And then we'll get Wolfie to come in and
actually think it's bad, but try and give me the bright
side, and we'll get a good time going on.
No, you missed the top
and you're bearing the lead.
Hold on, you missed the top and you're bearing the lead.
Let him know.
Hey, Trader Market News over here is doing his own thing these days.
He's been right.
I'll say that.
And I did give you credit.
I don't know if I haven't heard that, but I did give Wolfie credit.
I know you did.
I want him to hear it again.
So what is bad? What's supposed to be bad?
BMNR moving?
All right, let's run us through the intro again.
Give me 20 seconds, high energy.
Tell me what I missed, and then we'll get caught up.
Three, two, one, bam.
Nap time. It's the only thing you really missed today.
As I said at the top of the space, we are.
All right, what are we doing?
Wolfie gives me this whole thing I'm missing.
Let's get into it, Mike.
What's up?
I'm just saying how you're feeling on BM&R.
The market's flat, but BM&R up 6.5%.
I flagged that when I did charts on Sunday.
It looked good.
I thought it was heading for 60.
So, you know, looks like it wants to go there.
It looks pretty good.
I didn't trade it today, but real nice move on it here alright so can I say something actually let's do the
topic here selling covered calls is this something you guys do yeah this is
something I need to get better at on the the premium on the BM&R calls if you
want to sell cover calls is fat I have no idea what I'm doing I'm kind of scared
in my IRA I ended up selling a $70 call for this week and just took in $60 I was Alice and if I'm
gonna sell for 70 I'm good if we get to 80 I'm fine to say I sold it at 70 but
like for this week at 70 like $15 ahead I was able to get in $60 I don't know
because it's just one of those names it has a lot of IVs
because the IV so high that's why there's so much premium I wanted to get
if anyone has any thoughts you guys you would look if anyone will go and look
into it and here's some of their thoughts on selling cover calls and this
one that was definitely something that I'm saying I sell cover calls when I
have a position I don't want to sell and I'm not sure.
Going into earnings or going into a market event.
Other than that, I don't sell a lot of calls.
So if I like a name and I'm strong with it, I'm not going to be selling calls against it.
These are basically leveraged liquidity, right? So if the result of tomorrow is everybody needs to FOMO pump, then you kind of might be capping your returns.
So, you know, for me, like covered calls or stuff like that, you want to do on stuff that already the implied volatility, which is already expensive, like doubles or more. So if you look at like Tesla yesterday, for example, on the open implied volatility on the short end was,
the skew was like two to one call to put type, right?
So like strikes, strikes evenly out of the money
you paid a two times premium for calls that you would put.
So that's like where I would,
that's where I would want to sell um you know
premium on the upside uh for something like bm and r it's totally gonna you know it's totally
gonna be dependent on whether or not people press the gas pedal on the back of the fed
because this thing could be at 67 in a day
yeah you know i mean yeah you a name like this
you either have faith
and you don't
I do have faith
but like
I sold it for this week
I'm like
I'm sold it for this week
you would want to sell
you would want to sell
puts I think
if you had faith
if yeah
if you're
if you're bullish
and you have
because you sell puts
I'd want to sell puts
lower though
you're saying
yeah you'd sell puts like under 40 or to sell puts lower though. You're saying. Yeah, you'd
sell puts like under 40 or something
down there and you just collect that premium and
if it turns around against you
then you have the premium
but you get your shares called away down there
but if you really believe in it, it seems like selling
puts would be the correct answer.
I mean, unless you're okay with being
called away if you sell $60
or $80 or whatever calls.
I think I got to $70 this week.
I'm not totally against it.
I went in and took that premium and then bought a share.
I don't know.
I think it's the $70.
If it got to $70 and I had to sell out some of it,
I didn't do it for all of it.
I don't know.
I don't know if sell puts is quite exact.
I would want to go.
I'm already pretty balls deep.
I don't know if I need to go even further deep
and be on that hook for that.
We'll see, though.
All right.
Hamid, you are on here for the first time this week.
Hamid, how are you doing, sir?
Good. How are you guys doing?
We are doing well.
Emp came in with this whole thing
about the market being flat today,
and I'm sitting here in my BM&R, and my portfolio is not looking so bad.
So how are you doing today?
Rivian?
Rivian had a fantastic day today.
That was one of the ones.
There was a story about them picking up or starting to build stuff
at their factory in Atlanta, Georgia.
That was interesting.
They broke ground. Bro they broke ground not building any
uh cars that that factory is not going to be ready for 2028 i think is what it said
yeah 2020 so more more than uh two years i'm also pretty freaking excited for this meta event we
have coming up tomorrow i'll let you go into it but how are we feeling me i'm feeling good man
it's it's funny because uh they accidentally released a video promotion of the Metaglasses, which are going to have display.
So we now know that for sure.
And that's going to be the first of its kind for a sub, most likely sub $1,000 product.
The estimates are that they're going to start at $800.
For the first time,
it's going to have AI. It's not going to look ridiculous like the Google Glasses did.
This is going to be groundbreaking territory for Meta, and I think it's going to be pretty
well-received. Now, they did look, the ones that have heads-up display do look a little bit
different. The glass, you can kind of tell it's a little bit different like the glass you can kind of tell
it's like a little bit thicker the glasses are not exactly like not noticeable the way the smart
glasses are right now like when I wear the meta smart glasses hardly anyone ever notices that I'm
wearing them so the heads up display ones I think they're a little bit more noticeable. But we'll see how the reception is to those.
I mean, it's the first version of it.
It should be pretty exciting.
But yeah, and then Rivian today regaining its –
it had a little dip, I think, was it yesterday or the day before,
that there was a recall.
And every time they do an over-the-air update for these recalls, it's still considered a recall.
So the news was negative about it.
But Rivian continues to be in an extremely strong position.
I think that this is a very, very undervalued company at just $17 billion and it's like going to be a leader in ai
and autonomy um and evs right like so uh this space that everyone is so excited about and thinks that
tesla is dominating which you know for a while there it was dominating but it's sales growth
for vehicles are not happening anymore um they're basically discounting Rivian as if it's non-existent.
I don't think the market believes Rivian will be a successful AI company.
It seems like that premium going on right now is maybe it's Waymo.
It's hard to see what it is within Google, but Waymo is very unclear with it.
Tesla is a trillion dollar company, so 1.4 trillion.
So clearly there's a lot of AI in there.
And clearly there's not much
in Rivian.
100%.
That's exactly right.
Navidian tweeted about Rivian today
from their workstation account.
Yeah, so basically
the market is saying they don't believe
anything, Rivian.
And Rivian will most likely fail.
That's sort of like the market's position on Rivian, which is why it's a $17 billion company as opposed to a $100 billion or $200 billion or $300 billion company if they believe the future of it.
But they continue to execute.
They continue to execute.
They're about to release their R2 line.
They've created a manufacturing line for the R2 that is already pumping out test vehicles, which are being driven by Rivian employees for testing purposes.
So their R2 vehicle is looking really, really good to be a formidable competitor to the Model Y.
formidable competitor to the Model Y. And with the starting price point of $45,000,
they're fully expecting it to be gross margin positive from early on. So there's a lot Rivian
has gone for it. So if the market is getting it wrong, the question is, what will this thing adjust to?
And that'll be super exciting to see.
So obviously, I'm betting on Rivian.
That's one of my larger positions.
And I'm excited.
Today, Rocket Lab took a pretty big hit because they're about to raise $750 million through open market stock sale,
which is roughly a 3% dilution.
And the stock tanked by almost 12%, if I'm not mistaken, today.
And this is where I laugh, because so often the market gets things wrong.
so often the market gets things wrong.
Are we saying that Rocket Lab with an extra $750 million
is a weaker company by 12% than it was yesterday
when it didn't have access to the $750 million?
I mean, how ridiculous of a position is that?
And so I'm actually quite excited for Rocket Lab's future as well.
actually quite excited for rocket labs future as well that should be pretty interesting to see
That should be pretty interesting to see.
i mean did the uh i saw that same video the leaked uh metaglasses did did the visual of
that surprise you or was it what you were expecting i just i'm curious because i it
it wasn't what i was expecting i don't know what i was expecting it wasn't exactly what i was
expecting but it didn't look bad i I actually thought it was pretty interesting.
The heads up is pretty much exactly what I was expecting.
I actually saw a demo of very, very similar glasses by Google, and I got to test them out on my face, and it looks pretty amazing at the TED conference.
So the part that kind of surprised me is that the Google version that I
tested at TED basically looked exactly like the Ray-Ban meta smart glasses, whereas the ones from
the video look like the glass is thicker or the framing is a little bit thicker. Now, we have very
limited view in that 30-second or 15-second clip that was released but uh if it's that thick it'll probably be less
you know like sometimes um the reception of the market has to do with sort of like the minutiae
details of of some of these things and uh the less detectable it is that it's not normal glasses or
you know the higher the probability of success in my opinion.
So these first versions with the heads-up display
might not be as successful
as maybe Mark Zuckerberg hopes that they will be,
but I'm certainly gonna get one,
but I'm an enthusiast, right?
So you can't really count on people like me.
The question is when will the average Joe want to get one
and can't live without?
And I think it probably has to be less detectable.
Well, I have a couple really good topics
I want to dig into that one,
but let's bring Godfather into it.
Also your first time being on the Spaces this week.
Godfather, how you doing?
Any topics standing out to you any
things you're uh watching excited about we appreciate you being here yeah uh hey everybody
uh i just wanted to pipe in on uh on rivian it's not a position with me but i think commuted's
worth uh reminding folks that there there are believers in the industry uh on rivian most
notably volkswagen right they committed to invest almost $6 billion through to 27, and that's because they wanted access to the electrical infrastructure,
the battery management systems, all of the software for vehicle experience, all of that.
And they're utilizing it for their EV platform. So anyway, that's worth reminding folks that Volkswagen, at least,
doesn't think that Rivian is going to die in the vine.
So look, yeah, of course, everyone focused on the FOMC.
It's interesting to me, and regulars on the show will, you know,
have heard me go on and on about the interest rate sensitive sectors, most notably housing
and those related to housing. My view that the second half of 2025 was going to be strong for
that group and that group, the home builders in particular, have done an incredible job with
respect to their capital allocation and their efficiency. And, you know, the Trump administration
is likely to do whatever it can to stimulate housing affordability. And, you know, it'll be
interesting. In the bond market, the steepening trade is, in my opinion, fairly crowded trade.
I'll be looking to see if we see further steepening of the yield curve post the Fed tomorrow. I'm in this camp that we're
going to see a decided break of the 4% on the 10-year, and you will see mortgage rates continue
to decline. For those that are closely following the mortgage market, MBS spreads to the 10-year have continued to fall. People are attributing it to
a number of things, speculation that Ginnie Mae may lower their mortgage guarantee fees for
first-time homebuyers, which would boost affordability. There's some spec that Trump
would lift the caps on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's ability to buy MBS,
and that could unleash like a trillion dollars worth of MBS demand.
And other things that may come out of this quote-unquote housing emergency that
has been alluded to by Besson and others in the administration. There seems to be some
goal there to drive down at least 30-year you know, closer to the 5% mark by,
by midterms next year. So I think there are a lot of forces at work. You know, I don't,
I don't know who it was on this call, but, you know, reminding folks that, you know, the president
was, you know, it did indeed make his money in real estate. And I do think that now that the tariff side of things, the trade has been all but dealt with, the administration's focus will turn to housing affordability as a big headline to where they want to be campaigning on for midterms. So that's my key focus. I added four new core positions
in the last week, or I guess since we last talked. LDI would be the mortgage play on exactly this
theme. It's just shy of a billion dollar company. The founder that essentially led all of the growth and owns 45% of the company returned
to lead the company just recently. And these guys, the biggest thing for mortgage companies is what
they call their recapture rate, which is essentially refinancing customer retention,
and their levels are double the industry. So that leads to incredible operating leverage if indeed we do see
a kickstart to the refinancing schedule, which would come obviously with lower rates. So there's
that name. On the Semi's name, I added BABA, which of course is a $380 billion market cap company.
China seems to be doubling down on their protection efforts to their domestic semi-industry.
We saw the dumping charge on analog chips just a few days ago.
And we've got these new chips that are being released and the pressure on domestic tech to not use NVIDIA chips and other, you know, USB lines.
And of course, this stock is just cheap on every metric.
I also added Carmen, which is a high-tech defense play analogous to, you know,
along the lines of KTOS, which is also a core position for me.
This is a relatively new IPO that, uh, uh, hit the market in February of this year. And, um,
you know, these efforts by, by Trump to sort of redefine, uh, large drones as aircraft so that
they can get around this, uh, um, I forget what it's called. Yeah, the missile technology control regime, this MTCR thing.
Looks like it's really going to kickstart foreign sales of U.S. drone technology around the world.
And these guys would be a primary beneficiary of that.
Obviously, Andrel and KTOS are also in that group.
But Andrel is hard to get your hands on as a private company.
It's hard to get your hands on as a private company.
So I like that name.
So I like that name.
It compares very favorably to KTOS and trading a market cap of around $8.5 billion.
The fourth name that I added is a tiny name, talking market cap of $27 million.
And this is a name in the physical AI space.
I gave a full brief on this on small cap spaces yesterday, but this whole physical AI
space, you know, anything that has to do with inference at the edge through, you know, remote
surveillance platforms, et cetera, be they on UAVs or just security cameras, et cetera,
is an extremely hot space. And that's a leading name, their subcontractor to some large
prime defense contractors. They're providing both hardware and software solutions when it
comes to video compression algorithms, as well as AI accelerators. So that's what I've done in
terms of market moves. Of course, this week, we've got very little on the earnings front, but we do have a few looks at the consumer on Thursday.
Lenar on the housing side, FedEx, of course, in the afternoon, all things consumer.
And then Darden, which is all a garden with Chris, etc., a look at the consumer there.
So I'll be watching those just from that perspective.
We do have a StubHub IPO tomorrow, I understand, as well. So I'll be watching that.
I think that could be an interesting market mover. And yeah, I thought it was interesting
that we really didn't see any movement out of Oracle on this announcement that they're involved with Anderson and Silver Lake, I guess.
You don't think we had a huge move? I mean, look at the overnight move on Oracle.
It gave it all back.
Yeah, it gave it all back. Maybe I was late, but when I saw the headlines actually hit, I was watching for the stock to move and it hadn't really moved um maybe this was all it's been telegraphed also because i thought the
deadline was also delayed off i think there's still something in the future oracle uh also i
don't know i think uh i think oracle had uh i'm not fully surprised by this overnight move a lot
of this has been kind of telegraphed we also don't necessarily know what their ownership piece in this is. We
did hear 85% of it will be owned by that consortium, but there's still some stuff to be kind of found
out there. I do appreciate the thoughts in that direction. I think Oracle is an interesting topic.
A lot of these housing ones are as well. Mike, is there something you want to say there? And then
we can keep going. I want to double tap back to the Rivian, the Meta,
the Rocket Lab conversation
as well with some of the people.
We'll keep it moving. Yeah, Mike?
Go ahead, man.
First of all,
we had a stock snap a hand up during there.
Oh, I just wanted to touch
on the Kratos. We were talking about that
for a second. Yeah, what a day for, if anyone doesn't know,
Rexhares, T-Rex, who we work with,
they launched a 2X Kratos ETF.
So they ended up choosing a good day to do that, KTUP.
Now, listen, these ETFs,
you need to make sure they have the volume,
and it's the first day.
I haven't even gotten the chance to dig that deep into it.
Maybe you want to answer your watch list.
They chose a smart first. They got a lucky first day on that haven't even gotten the chance to dig that deep into it. Maybe when I answer your watch list, they chose a smart phone.
They got a lucky first day on that one.
Yeah, for sure.
Shout out to that.
Kratos has been quite the day.
Yeah, I think that the U.S. kind of changing the export rules when it comes towards military technology and the drones
is going to be huge for that name,
especially with that QX-58 Valkyrie,
the drone that Kratos has been developing for a while. They're trying to get the cost down towards
$2 million. It's around $4 million right now, but that's the price of a single-family home
in California. I think that they're going to do very well with this drone, and it's also
comparable to many fighter jets. It's at that transonic speed area um and it's capable of
flying with all the fifth generation fighters that are out right now and pretty much every
sixth generation concept and you know the main upgrade from fifth to sixth generation fighter
jets that we're expecting is supposed to be drone swarms so like these jets are supposed to have an
autonomous uh group of drones around them and um i think that QX-58 Valkyrie is a great contender for many fighter jets that are out right now and some in the future.
Quickly, before we keep going, Godfather, what was the drone ticker you talked about?
Ephraim wants to know.
We saw Viva Godfather. Ephraim wants to know, we still have you a godfather?
Yeah, it's K-R-M-N, Carmen Holdings.
Gotcha.
Gotcha, gotcha.
I hope we get Hamid back up here.
But Stock Talk, can I bring you into the conversation?
I want to ask your thoughts on these meta smart glasses.
We have spent many a rant on here at the end of these spaces
talking through smart glasses
and how you kind of view that as
the future. Apple doing it in the wrong way.
I want to get your quick take on
the meta...
I forgot Monitiv had his hand up
and I'm just going to take his full different way. I really want to go to Monitiv
after, but I'm committed to the stock talk.
What's your thoughts on the meta event tomorrow?
Is it something you're watching?
Do you think you're going to buy the glasses right away?
I'll probably buy them.
Did you see the leak yesterday?
I did see the leak.
Yeah, I mean, I like buying these new technology things just because I'm like a tech geek like that.
But yeah, I'll probably buy them.
Do I think they look cool?
Yeah, based on the preview of the leak that we came out.
I don't know if that's entirely true, but sometimes these leaks get edited, and now you have so much AI video generation, it's really hard to tell.
But assuming it's true, yeah, it looked pretty dope.
Zuckerberg did an interview when he started this partnership with Essilor Luxottica, and he talked about, like, how they're starting with Ray-Ban, they were going to expand to Oakley.
They've obviously already done that.
They're expanding to the other Essilor-owned brands as well.
But the development here, the development focus here was really about the glass and the ability to take what was a pretty simple mainframe on the original rendition, like the first version they released.
The mainframe was extremely rudimentary.
Taking that to add better audio, better screen, more interactive and augmented reality as opposed to just complete VR.
That's Apple sort of set the tone for that with the vision Pro I think they just failed
to execute on the actual product but I think that's what people want and I mean
I'm not I can't say for sure but I think that's what people I think people want
more of a augmented reality approach where you know they could still see the real world through their glasses but then you know have sort of an Iron
Man Tony Stark heads-up display that you can engage with the world through I
think that's what most people want and if you're being prudent in an effort to
replace the cell phone that's really the only way it works, right?
Because otherwise it doesn't offer you anything
more than the phone does.
And I think that's the big challenge here
for the people who are working on, you know,
this next generation of compute, personal compute,
is like, how do you make the offering so compelling,
so seamless and so convenient
that people would rather not pull their phone out of their pocket.
And that's a hell of an ask.
Like, just think about what kind of device you'd have to have to never pull your phone out of your pocket.
It would have to be incredible.
You know, the voice recognition would have to be perfect.
The visual recognition would have to be perfect.
There'd have to be extremely good battery life
they'd have to be you know they'd have to look cool that was a huge problem with the vision pro
like nobody wanted to wear those around i mean there was a there was a cohort of influencers
i guess that were wearing them around to like flex that they owned them but no one wanted to
wear those heavy clunky two-hour battery life things around normally, right? In their
casual life, you'd look like an idiot. And so Meta's effort to normalize this and say,
hey, these are a pair of Ray-Bans that millions and millions of people wear already. We're just
putting smart glass into them. I think that's a smarter approach, frankly, than what Apple is
doing. And that's why I've been tooting Zuckerberg's horn on this thing, because I think he's really executing very well. What they've done with their hardware division,
taking it from Oculus to what it is today, I think is very impressive and deserves praise.
Because in the next five years, if they keep doing what they're doing, they will have a
significant amount of penetration in personal compute, in my opinion, on the hardware side,
not on the software side.
I think Meta's
killing it, and we'll see how that event goes
tomorrow, but they're firing
on all cylinders, in my opinion.
To me, that's the
existential crisis to Apple.
I think it might be further away
than people...
I don't know how far away it is,
but to me, that's the existential crisis i said that we were the first time for for apple that i that you
know i think they should be watching which is a huge opportunity for for zuckerberg if you told
me the long meta short apple pear trade right now that's what i don't know if I would take the Apple side of.
Just saying.
I think Meta is the biggest threat
to Apple today.
More than any other
cell phone company or anything.
I don't think it's Huawei.
I don't think it's Samsung.
I think it's...
Would you phrase that as the threat of wearables?
Yeah, the next generation of wearables.
Yeah.
I mean, that's where Apple, like,
if you're Apple and you're sitting there today
and you're like, what,
if we are ever going to return to growth,
how are we going to do it?
It is going to have to be that.
iPhone upgrades are not going to get you there.
We're past that point, you know?
So... as we get
deeper into this world like there are some advantages that apple does have with the airpods
with the watch they are leaders in this space but meta is coming for a piece of it and honestly
they're going for they're going for the part that's important the part that you're going to be
like seeing stuff through like i don't know
um apple has apple has ecosystem advantages but here's the thing there's a chance that this next
generation of compute just replaces the ecosystem right like you're like okay well apple has air
pods which is great right right right now i love my apple devices because I have a MacBook that's open I have my phone in my hand I have my air pods in my ears like it's
it's all synced naturally I can just pull them out everyone loves the Apple
ecosystem if you own Apple devices it's like one of the most compelling parts of
their products but if this new hardware offers the features of multiple devices
which is the intention in one,
then there's an argument to be made
that the ecosystem incentive is less incentivizing, right?
Because the more things a product does,
the less attractive an ecosystem for that product is.
It's like common sense, right?
So that's a risk for Apple too,
is that this becomes a very capable product
with great battery life
and with the ability to do basically everything
the phone can do.
If that's what they're purporting to do,
which is I think what they want to do,
then that is a threat.
Not just Apple to the cell phone in general,
in my opinion,
but that's a long way out But that's a long way out.
That's a long way out.
Cell phones are on grade.
I'll just add one thing because Meta has a history of bad hardware launches.
They just have never really gotten hardware right yet.
And I'm hoping this one's different and it looks different.
But they have not done particularly well with most of their hardware other than their VR products, which came out really well.
So, you know, fingers crossed, this is just a natural transition from that for them.
And this one comes off well.
Well, the Ray-Ban.
So even the Oculus is honestly, like, they just didn't sell enough of it.
Like, we've talked, we ran through the numbers here.
I enjoy it.
It's gimmicky.
I don't go in and use it every single day.
They're just not selling the numbers in that Oculus thing.
The Ray-Ban glasses are, but like we're literally called, it's Ray-Bans.
So like when they're, you know, working with other companies and stuff like that,
I just wonder what lessons they've learned.
But Meta has yet to make a hardware product, I think themselves.
I mean, Apple doesn't actually like make their phones, put them together, but they're definitely a better hardware company than Meta has yet to make a hardware product, think themselves. I mean, Apple doesn't actually make their phones, put them together,
but they're definitely a better hardware company than Meta is.
Who hasn't done that hardware yet?
Is that the angle you want to take?
Watch out.
I would stick to my bet again, and we always come back to this.
I wanted this to be a Meta conversation.
Apple will one day again be the largest company in the world.
I'm still okay to take this bet.
We already took this bet once when it was overtaken, and it was over.
I won.
In like three months.
No, no, no.
That does not count.
Yes, it does.
A moment of reclaiming.
There was like a week or two.
There was some time.
We have to set a benchmark.
We have to set a benchmark for how long Apple has to retain.
You're saying it's like Elon's executive compensation.
Like we have to turn 90 days above the
market cap level? No, we're saying like a minimum move.
Apple has to retain the spot for like a minimum of two
quarters or something. It can't be like
Apple gets the top spot
for five seconds and then it counts.
That's not...
Apple will not be sustainably the biggest company in the world
ever again, in my opinion.
Sustainably. Maybe for a moment.
But not sustainably. You don't have to be more worried
about Google. We're moving the goalposts.
Moving the goalposts.
Goalposts have been moved.
That's what losers do. That's what people who are
afraid of losing do. They start to
move some goalposts. I'll accept whatever
you guys want in here, what makes you sleep at night.
When was the last time Apple wasn't
in the top three?
I don't know. When was the last time before the last two you know long time ago the last time it wasn't top three was uh or the last time it wasn't was um pre exxon mobil being
the biggest company in the world wow i'd take the bet with evan that apple is gonna fall out of the top three before it reclaims
number one yeah what do you mean take the bet with evan take the bet with me i think you're
saying like i'm a long board tesla by the way just passed taiwan semi you know the ninth largest
company um we'll see we'll see i'm not saying right now or right now, right? Whatever, but don't count Apple out of this wearables game.
Do we go to Monitive?
Let's go to Monitive. Monitive, you had a hand up there.
Are we talking defense?
It's been a lot. I feel like I wasn't here last week,
and maybe you missed a little bit,
so it feels a while since i've i've heard the great
powerful monotiv i've been out of the country on vacation i just got back yesterday anywhere fun
uh new zealand oh okay and and actually i stopped all right top three things you did there now give
me just one one thing that if i go to new zealand i should do well there's a lot of things you can
do there give me one there's just
about turning so i mean i look i i love sailing i wanted to go sailing even though it was cold i did
i did uh sailing three days two days sorry uh it was freezing cold but uh but but the weather is
getting better so this is this is the very end of their winter so spring will be there soon
end of their winter so spring will be there soon uh but this there's a lot of
exceptional hiking and and and you know this i mean if you go in winter you can even ski there
so it has a bit of everything so but but anything outdoors uh it's just incompatible it's just a
beautiful beautiful country so um anyway I'm not talking about my
vacation here. At least that's not the plan. But yeah, I put my hand up to talk about Oracle.
Look, actually, before I go there, let me talk about Apple for a second. So I think something is
And so I think something is not yet caught on with the decision that was handed out for, you know, Google's, you know, the deal was not broken, right?
The locked in search deal.
I think that's very positive for Apple.
It just gives them the ability to make another deal like that with
an AI tool set.
And that's probably where they're going to see a significant inflection in margins,
certainly on their services side.
And that could shrink their multiple down to more acceptable levels.
And that would weigh in well on the valuation of the company.
So I think they are free to make that deal now,
and I'm sure they're talking to everybody.
So an additional $10, $15 billion, which is all margin,
hey, there's nothing wrong with that.
That's enough to change the economics of the stock. So, so I think that's coming this year. And who knows, at the end of it all, they might be the smartest one having not spent any money on this and the ones cashing it out.
So yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't take that off.
I don't think that's in the stock price yet, but but it it should start showing up at some
point in time.
They should make that deal.
So going back to Oracle, I raised my hand to talk about Oracle.
Look, assuming they're part of this this triangle rate that's going to end up buying TikTok, you know, it is positive for Oracle
in the sense that they're not going to lose that cloud contract, which is really the center
cornerstone of their entire cloud business so far, until until open ai actually starts paying you know uh paying
something or anything for that matter uh tick tock is their biggest customer by by some margin by
actually a very large margin so so so that uh that's a positive right that they've locked that
in assuming this this deal goes through and it's not like a Meta or a, you know, or a Microsoft or somebody
else who would just take that away.
So that is a, that's a positive.
But if we really look at the numbers, it's starting to get, I don't know, borderline
crazy on their financials.
Look, they have about 20 billion in cash.
They generate about 20, 25 billion.
Let's say that goes up substantially next year to $35 billion.
If they're going to buy half of that 85%, you know, based on the numbers that are being thrown around, that's something like, you know, I don't know, $200 billion valuation.
85% of that is $1 170 billion, 50% of that.
So 70, 80 billion, you know, dollars, you know, plus some change.
Plus they are going to spend $85 billion in CapEx next year by their own, you know, in in their quarterly conference call they
already have about 20 billion dollars in debt they're gonna have to raise a
shit ton of money here that the numbers don't add up at all for me look most of
that money is gonna come from open AI which doesn't have anything close to you know a fraction of that money let alone you come from open AI, which doesn't have anything close to, you know,
a fraction of that money, let alone, you know,
enough of it to actually make this deal.
Can I ask you a question?
Sure.
Am I the only one that has concerns that Oracle is not really positioned
even to run a company like TikTok?
It's very much out of their wheelhouse.
It's not.
Look, I have a lot of experience with Oracle's acquisitions and how they manage that company.
Oracle is really an enterprise sales shop.
That's what they do.
They do that very well.
They do that exceptionally well.
They have an entire massive org built around built around selling to the enterprise this is a
different business they just do exactly any capabilities whatsoever in this so so even
setting that aside for a second let's just even say that they are desperate to hold on to hold on to the few hundred million a year in cloud revenue
that comes from TikTok.
There's so much already in Oracle's price and then some.
It's to me at this point in time, an obscenely expensive stock.
And they are, I mean, outside of the RPO number, which is really a lot of hot air based on,
you know, OpenAI actually executing to perfection.
They missed on everything else, maybe just by a little bit, but still a miss is a miss, right? So at this point in time, I have significant negative thoughts on Oracle now. I took a small shot, got out of it, you know, did very well last week based on this exact thesis but once we get the tick tock numbers through and we understand what
article is going to be on the hook for i'm going to short it again there is there is very little
upside and significantly large downside at least from a fundamental perspective here
the numbers just do not add up in any way whatsoever for me
just do not add up in any way whatsoever for me.
I would be curious down below if anyone in the comments section has any questions or
more thoughts around that Oracle topic there. I know a lot of people have been talking about it.
Someone says Apple is garbage now, fair enough. But I am very curious on this Oracle one, because obviously that remaining performance obligations
is what everyone's going towards.
What, $300 billion deal with OpenAI ended up being in sign?
Yeah, I'm curious what people's thoughts and questions
they have off of that.
But Oracle is one of the names that it's, what is it, $850 billion now?
I think what Monitiv is alluding to, and I will agree and also allude to this in a different way.
Now, keep in mind, I am an AI bull, and I know Monitiv is an AI bull too.
So I will caveat my comments with that.
And I'll speak for Monitiv on that side because I know he's a tech bull in general.
So I know he's not trying to be bearish on tech when he's saying that. But has anyone ever seen Beavis and Butthead when they're kids who watch it?
I have, but I'm excited for this transition.
Let's see where this goes.
So there's a Beavis and Butthead episode.
I don't remember what it's called um but yanezu
posted a clip of this the other day and i saw it i thought it was hilarious but they are um
they're selling chocolates they get like an assignment like it's like for this class and
this guy's like oh you're gonna go sell chocolates so they both get a box of chocolates
and they try to go sell them and they're not
selling so they like go home they're sitting on the couch with chocolates and they're like
dude like we can either of us and sell chocolates and so he's like dude you want to buy a chocolate
for me and beavis is like yeah and then he buys a chocolate from him and he's like he eats it
he's like hey do you want to buy chocolate for me he's like yeah and they both start buying
chocolates from each other until both their chocolates are gone.
And then they go to the teacher the next day.
And they're like, look, they have all this money.
And they both win the top salesman or whatever for the chocolates.
And the teacher's like, oh, how'd you do it?
And he's like, oh, it's like they just sold themselves.
That was the joke in that episode.
But I don't know.
I'm trying to phrase this in a way that doesn't make AI seem like a stand.
I don't hate the reference, though, so far.
We came around.
So that's kind of what's happening right now with high-performance computing.
And, you know, you have this incestuous relationship.
Like, let's take the CoreWeave deal, for example, with NVIDIA, right?
So that deal, a lot of people thought that the thing that was announced this week was a new deal.
It was not.
It was a new order under the original master services agreement, okay?
So NVIDIA and CoreWeave already had an MSA, a master services agreement.
And the deal that they made that sent CoreWeave stock, whatever, 13% higher on that day, if you actually read what was said, the way people interpreted it was, well, NVIDIA is providing a backstop for their demand, and NVIDIA is going to buy the rest of the demand. But the way a smarter person would have read it is they can't fill their
data center demand, right? Because they're exercising a part of the MSA that requires
NVIDIA to buy spare data center demand. They would not need to exercise that portion of the MSA were there enough opportunities to sell
that demand elsewhere. So while it was interpreted bullishly, the stock moved up that day the PR
came out. If you really took a deeper glance into what was said, I don't think it was bullish
for Corby. Now, extrapolate that and extend that to the rest of the industry and ask yourself, well, what else is happening?
You also have NVIDIA invested in several purchasers of compute, providing MSA and backstop agreements to them, which I just talked about the example with CoreWeave.
There are others as well.
And on top of that, you have these hyperscalers who are both building AI, buying the assets to build it, buying the assets for inference and training.
And then on top of all of that, you have these specialized AI companies like OpenAI, XAI and Anthropic that are also buying those GPUs or renting those GPUs.
And in some cases, leasing those GPUs from people who already own them for other purposes, like Bitcoin mining.
This entire ecosystem is full of people who are invested in each other, partners with each other, also customers of each other, essentially selling chocolates to each other.
Just like Beavis and Butthead did.
And it's not problematic if there's a prize at the end of it. It's not problematic if all of this money exchange it doesn't really matter. But if there is no product, and I don't know what the timeframe is for that.
I don't know how long the market's going to be willing to wait or how long the market's
going to be willing to patient, but there is no product within the market allowed timeframe.
Then it is a problem because then you've created a ton of value.
I'll put value in air quotes, that has no value at all.
And it's just an exchange of HPC assets between multiple counterparties who are invested in each other and who are backstopping each other's demand.
It's incestuous is the best way to put it.
Like the entire industry as it stands today.
And, you know, that could change,
but that's what sort of a monitor is alluding to
and why he thinks the Oracle numbers don't make sense.
And he's right.
And the only way the Oracle numbers make sense
is if open AI is hundreds of billions of dollars
and where are they going to get it?
You know, that begs the question.
So I don't know.
It is a, it's kind of a fucked up scenario right now.
It's complicated to sort of read through, but the best you can do, I think, as a trader
is follow the numbers.
But if you really want to be thoughtful about it, then yes, Monitiv is right.
And there are some problems here that need to be figured out before we can just keep moving hundreds of billions of dollars around circularly, essentially, and then boosting the valuations of companies that are seeing revenue pass through but aren't actually making anything or doing anything.
Right. They're just getting data centers leased by a company that has an investment in the company already that they're leasing the data centers from.
And the same company that makes the GPUs that goes in the data centers is the one investing.
Like, it's just, yeah, it's super, super spider webby once you start to look into it.
What's up, Martav?
Yeah, I mean, 100 percent. what's up marif yeah i mean 100 right and i think it's more than that the the balance sheets are
getting extremely complicated in these uh in these large tech companies now to a point where
you know you're starting to see more and more off balance sheet items you know of significant size
weighing in on potential future you know problems or opportunities call it what you will
right uh you saw google you know doing the same backstop for uh you know with wolf for uh
where's that food stack you know uh you see microsoft uh you know doing deals for for uh for
doing deals for, you know, capacity from neoscalers. You see a whole bunch of neoscalers
actually getting deals from hyperscalers. To me, these are all signs of, you know,
balance sheet being stretched and they cannot just continue to do what they're doing. They have to do things more creative
and certainly potentially more questionable.
You know, I'm trying to, you know,
put this in as non-controversial words as possible, right?
It certainly, to me, it's the first sign that, you know,
the balance sheets are not as far away from being significantly
stretched as we would think.
Because if you see, I mean, Meta is a good example, right?
Cash flow has fallen down the drain to almost nothing.
And they have to, you know, figure out how to bring that up again.
Doesn't mean these are not profitable companies.
They're making shit ton of
money but they're also deploying money at a much faster rate than the rate of increase in cash flow
and that is potentially a problem if like you said all of this wouldn't matter if everything
goes perfectly well but the first sign of trouble it could unravel terribly. And that is the risk that
that's not priced in. So I don't know how else to put it carefully without being an alarmist.
Here's the way I look at it, because I have no idea what the immediate future looks like. But
when you kind of extend out the timeframes, and you look at, okay, in that type of scenario, what ends up happening there? It's probably these really
large companies that when shit is hitting the fan for them, it's really hitting the fan for
everyone else. And those big, large companies probably come out of this, take a hit. And then
in a couple of years, they're bigger, badder than ever, and extremely more profitable, and the base is being built.
So, it's also a lot of questions about, that is a weird email.
There's a lot of questions about timeframe as well.
No, no, I mean, certainly, look, it doesn't mean that these companies are going to be weakened in any sense that they're in trouble, right?
That's not the point. But the fact that they are extending depreciation
and lifecycle of their hardware, the fact that they're making deals instead of just blindly
increasing capex to whatever they need without going to somebody else for that capacity,
all these things tell me that there is a limit on their balance sheet and they're quickly getting there. The question is how far away are we from them
actually pulling back on CapEx?
And that is going to be where we see starts of the,
in the start of the beginning of the real problems
for the companies that are around, right?
I mean, you don't even have to actually pull back
capex you can just start spending less than you expected to spend and that itself is is is uh you know is problematic right because that's the first step they don't have to really say they're changing
their capex they just spend less than they plan to spend and they could explain it away saying hey
you know we have difficulty in getting approvals or getting hardware or whatever else right construction delays
whatever it is but to me you know that's where I'm trying to look through all the numbers that
come out Oracle right again it gets more interesting as you dig into the numbers
their capex spend actually went down quarter over quarter so actual capex
spend went down but capex guide went up 10 billion for the you know annualized 12 months
from what they guided to last quarter to what they got it to this quarter so so the these numbers are
changing rapidly and and and and we could see them change negatively also rapidly,
equally rapidly if things unravel.
Not saying they are.
I am very much an AI bull.
I just want to understand at least for my own larger positions, you know, where is it that I stop just letting it run and
start hedging the heck out of it or where I start taking chips off the table and full disclosure,
I am slowly selling Google and my cost is negligible. So not, you know, it's not a problem for me if it goes up another $10, $15.
But, yeah, it's really made up a lot of that discount, if not all of that discount that was there, you know, two months ago.
So that's, for me, the primary point of this exercise of looking deeply at all these numbers to see whether there's any sign of stress
and we are starting to see minimally you know the beginnings of that's that that stress not sure
that they cannot handle it as long as as long as you know their revenues keep going up at
these 50 60 70 margin that these companies have it's not a problem. But when one thing
falls apart in this picture, everything will come crashing down really fast. And that's what I'm
trying to make sure that I get ahead of. That's why I keep reading all these numbers at a great
depth to see what is not being said
and what those numbers reflect or don't reflect.
So it's not happy days, let me put it that way.
It's not, the article was a simpler one, right?
It was just, it had run up already so much
and against the backdrop of an okay quarter,
they throw this 15 X know, 15x in, you know, six years growth in, you know, revenue for their IAS.
That to me is, I don't know, too good to be true.
Let's just put it that way.
put it that way. The big reason why Marta feels this way and also why I feel this way and why a
lot of people feel this way is that it's pretty obvious what's happening here. It is an arms race,
right? Like you look at the amount of money being spent without any ROI, like any immediate ROI,
right? And I mean, even if you look at the revenue for companies like OpenAI,
like there's no earnings.
So yeah, I'm not saying earnings won't come.
Earnings will come from AI.
I have no doubt about that.
So let's get that squared away initially.
Earnings, major earnings improvements
will come from AI at some juncture.
But for now, it is just a arms race.
That's what it is.
It's like all of these big four, big five,
whatever you want to characterize it, hyperscalers all want the same thing.
They want to be the first to a model that is world changing, literally. Like a model that
will upend efficiency and productivity. I think it's possible. I don't know how long it'll take. I
think it's possible. I think most AI researchers think it's possible, but we don't know how much,
how long and how much money it'll take. And neither do the CEOs of Google, Microsoft,
and they don't know. They don't, they don't have a crystal ball and they're like, yeah,
we'll achieve AGI in 18 months. They don't know. And so the best they can do is,
A, assume they have competition,
which they know they do
from other multi-trillion dollar counterparts
with unlimited money.
So you have competition with unlimited money.
You know that for sure.
You also know for sure
that there is some sort of level up
on the horizon for AI software
that will make it extremely more capable.
But you don't know how long it's going to take to get there and you don't know how much money
it's going to take to get there. But going back to point A, you know, your competitors also have
unlimited money. The only conclusion in that scenario is to burn cash. The only smart conclusion.
And the funny thing is, is it's not, it's not necessarily smart either. Right? Because
if this golden goose is two decades away, if the golden goose of AGI is two decades away,
then you fuck yourself in the interim period, because you spend billions and billions of
dollars on capex on a product that isn't coming around the corner. So that is a possibility.
And that scenario, people will be like, well, these decision makers were stupid. But in the moment, with the information on the table that you have about your competitive
environment and about what could be, you have to do what they're doing, in my opinion.
So yes, it is an unsustainable arms race. Yes, it probably will end in a surprising halt or down guide of CapEx from one of the big players at some point.
And it'll probably shock the markets whenever that does happen.
But in the interim, these guys are going to throw as much money at this as possible because they think there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
And there most likely is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
The question is, how much money do you have to spend to get there? And who's going to get there
first? And once somebody gets there, is it a defendable moat? You know, that's another question
that we don't know. Like, let's say Microsoft solves, and AGI is like a pretty, like, I mean,
how are you going to define AGI? Different people have different definitions. But let's assume that
there was some kind of consensus definition. Let's say Microsoft solves AGI in the next five years or OpenAI does or whoever. Then what? Do they have just this world controlling software that has hierarchy over every type of software and they can charge whatever they want for it to whoever they want for it? Or do they have that moment for a flash in the pan,
maybe for a quarter or two quarters, and then everyone has AGI?
I don't know.
I don't know, because we're not there yet.
And not only do I not know,
neither does Sundar Pichai, neither does Satya Nadella,
neither does Sam Altman, neither does Elon Musk.
None of these guys know either.
But guess what they're all doing in unison?
They're getting as much cash as they can possibly get, and they're dumping it into
trying to get there. So you either believe that it's going to happen at some point or that it's
not, and that we're going to be stuck with an era of LLMs with trillions of dollars of investment
and useless data centers and, you know,
just too much compute. That is a possible scenario too. Obviously, I'm an AI bull,
so I defer to the former picture, or I would, I don't want to say defer to it, but I would prefer
the former picture, but who knows what's going to happen you know we're playing with fire
here you're playing with a lot of fire because there's trillions of dollars being spent on
something and we don't know when it's coming you know and we don't know how much money it'll take
to get there the stock talk right just just just to drill to drill into part of what you mentioned there, it's that staying power, right? It's that staying power that's going to take some or a few of them overiencies skyrocketing generation to generation, there's only a certain amount of time where it's economical to run your older generation chip, your H100s, H200s, before the customer demand is just not there or the cost of running it versus the revenue that it's
able to generate you know makes economic sense so so whether they solve it or not whether they
solve it even if they solve it in a short amount of time there is still this question of how much of this current spend to date is going to have to be written off
because it's not economical to run it anymore
at a certain point in time.
And they've not, and they've taken the risk
of dragging out the depreciation or useful life
of these assets a little too longer than they should have
with the result, you know, you're the first of the H100, H200 clusters,
really not making any economic return.
And that valuable rack space and cooling capacity
and your electrical connectivity can be better used for, you know, the Blackwell or what comes after that.
That's another concern I have. Again, right, these companies can afford it. It's not a problem.
The question is, you know, do we have a clean handoff where this revenue comes in quickly
enough to make up for all this? Or do we have fits and starts where we are going to have these large write-offs,
write-downs, and then, you know,
it starts picking up again,
and then you have, you know, another set of write-downs,
and finally you have that hockey stick right now.
Yeah, it's going to be interesting.
I mean, you know, I think we will, I think the market, the price action, everything you know i think we will i think the market the price action
everything is telling us that we will get transformative products from this but
who you know there will be a lot of companies left holding the bag either way whether whether
or not it happens there'll be a lot of companies left holding the bag because everyone's spending
money on this and not everyone's going to win.
That's just simple math.
So, yeah, there will be big losers for sure.
I wonder where Apple's strategy ends up playing in this as well.
I always go back to it.
We won't stay on this conversation for too long, I promise you,
but they're one of the few ones that aren't spending as aggressively
like the rest and letting it play out.
Yeah, they are.
I mean, you know, if I was Apple, though, I'm surprised that they are
or aren't because they're the one company out of that group that needs growth.
You know, they're the company out of that group that if anyone should be
chasing the puck here, in my opinion, it should be chasing the puck here in my opinion it should be them
but whatever
I just spelled partnership wrong
alright, oh well
I'm not seeing too many headlines in After Hours
as well, there was a Robin Hood one
but I think it was something about Vlad
it was announced yesterday that he was selling 3 million dollars
or 3 million shares or something like that.
Was it a re-announcement or was it another
Form 4? Because what I heard was another Form 4.
It was not another Form 4. That would be crazy.
That's what they said originally, but
you know, never trust them.
I'll go to, never trust they.
Never mind.
I was trying to make something and then I was
like, alright, that actually can be construed in the wrong way.
I'm glad I stopped myself it is not another form 4
wait is it the same one
no so what happened was
yesterday was the registration
statement this was the actual sale
the event happening so this is the same
event
yesterday was the registration
statement today is the, Oh,
that's a tough scene. I'm seeing what you, uh,
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if you want to hit the, the top. Oh, wow. Okay.
No, I don't know. I don't know if I need to dig so far. That's crazy.
We'll let that one end up coming out and we'll, we'll dig in. Wow. Um,
yeah, there, I, I saw this Uber Tesla story, but it was from a couple hours ago. I saw Lux posted it out there. Yeah, I saw this Uber-Tesla story, but it was from a couple hours ago.
I saw Lux posted it out there.
A lot of these CEOs are in the United Kingdom today.
I wonder if there is any moves there.
But this United Kingdom-U.S. crypto partnership or whatever,
I think is what ended up sending my BM&R higher today.
That was a nice story.
Was there any earnings in After Hours?
Nothing going on today.
Alright, Stock Talk.
Rivian was also
brought up by Hamid.
I've had Rivian to be a little bit
of an interesting one. We've had a conversation
or two, and maybe we'll bring
Logical into this one on the next
part of it. Also, we've got a Rockalab
too. Actually, let's bring in Rivian and Rockalab
stock talk. Which one would you rather
talk about?
We can talk about both if you want.
Give me which one first.
Rivian. Let's talk about Rivian.
The reason Rivian
stock is up today
was then breaking ground on their factory in Georgia,
second factory.
But Hamid was talking there earlier a lot about the AI aspects of the company, that
side of it, which is clearly not getting much value, if any, for the $16 billion market
cap where you see Tesla at like $1.4 trillion.
Initial takes on Rivian rivian i mean post this move
today where was it was it was an easier conversation in a 10 12 range rivian at 1462
it's all crazy off of it um it's not in your portfolio but is the name you've had on watch
before no i'm not interested in owning rivian at all i mean i i just don't get the tesla peer comparisons so i mean to me i don't
understand the thesis because i don't think they're a peer of tesla at all um they make
electric vehicles car makers are you know commodity purveyors they should not trade
at rich multiples i don't see a reason for rivian to either um it's really that straightforward for
me tesla is a technology company first a car company second in my view if you look at the
deep-seated technologies that they have in batteries you look at the technologies that they
have pretty much across not only the whole vehicle platform but outside of the vehicle platform and software and energy storage,
like car makers don't have those types of businesses.
None of them do GM doesn't Volkswagen doesn't Ford doesn't Rivian doesn't.
So they're not peers.
Like I just don't get it.
And people always laugh when they're like, Oh,
the Tesla people always say Tesla's not a car company,
but 90% of their sales comes from cars.
Like that again,
that misses the
point like they have other businesses those businesses have optionality they are cape
those other businesses are capable of growing rivian is is just a car company like so yeah i
i don't get the pure comps the chart looks good i mean i'm not saying the stock can't go higher
i'm not short the stock i don't think rivian wants to be just that that pure car company i think they are trying to lean
more into the autonomous aspects of it yeah and so what their 15th place
okay well there is that question there is that value about um
well the question you have with agi is what what does this moment of being
first to full self-driving look like is it is it a flash in the pan or is it a sustained thing
and does rivian building this purpose-built thing like do all these start i mean i guess they
probably do a lot of them have like the cameras and the stuff equipped for it but i don't know
who's at the door self-driving will be pretty pervasive either way,
whether it's done through LIDAR.
We already know it can be done through LIDAR, right?
This is another thing about the self-driving theme.
There's still skeptics.
What are you skeptical about?
It works.
The self-driving debate is not a debate anymore.
There will be self-driving.
It's game over.
Autonomous vehicle operation is a thing.
It happens today at scale and hundreds of millions of cars, sorry, hundreds of millions of rides have happened autonomously. And the danger, error, accident rate is no more significant. There's
been no shutdown of any of these programs
so autonomy is here it's not about like when is it coming it is here now and it is rapidly
scaling in the united states especially but also in china it's right it's scaling rapidly oh okay
where how much how valuable do you think that sector is and i bet you it's not going to be
just a google and tesla
race i mean winner take it won't be winner take all it won't be winner take all it won't be
for multiple reasons because you all there's also a hardware side of this versus a software like
um the companies that waymo has the tech that you could say is there right now the most pervasive
everywhere we don't know if they have the scaling method, but they don't make their cars.
I don't know.
Like as we're changing stuff here,
the old incumbent players,
like,
I don't know.
There does feel an opportunity for Rivian.
I'm not saying it's as certain as some of the other ones, but that's where you're not getting in an evaluation.
I will be astonished if Rivian becomes an autonomy leader.
Astonished.
Where's their software competency like
rivian's a software company surprise to me they're not they're not a software company and they're
purporting to be one and that's dangerous and they're not a software company they're they're
a maker of of automobiles that's what rivian is they just happen to have a battery in them
like just because the vehicle is electric it doesn't magically make the vehicle not a commodity
look at look at what's happened to tesla's vehicles in the last three years they have been
commoditized okay whether it's by virtue of chinese vehicle ev pricing or whatever you
want to assign that to a slow down in the overall growth of the industry doesn't matter like cars
are commodities selling cars is not a sexy business never has been never will be
they're commodities period end of story there's literally no debate about that
okay so if you're selling commodities you should be valued as a purveyor of commodities period
the upside and speculation premium and uh you know when these when stocks trade richly they trade
richly on optionality generally speaking they trade richly on the possibility of growth that one of their other verticals may have
uncalculated or unseen growth that the market doesn't know is going to happen yet. And people
try to get ahead of that and inflate these stocks. I just don't see what you'd be betting on with Rivian in that case,
that they magically leapfrog to number three or four in the autonomy race. No chance, no chance.
Like Tesla and Waymo are so far ahead of the pack. It's not even particularly close. And then you
look at the Chinese counterparts. And I mean, yeah, if you want to deploy using a $350,000
LiDAR driven vehicle, pretty much anyone can do it today if you have enough infrastructure.
Now, regulatory approvals are a separate question.
But I could go on and on about this.
Autonomies here, the winner is going to be decided by a very simple metric, and that's cost per mile.
That's it.
That's all that matters at the end of the day.
The rest, top down, is all noise.
It's just cost per mile.
And whoever can provide rides more efficiently wins. That's it. And that's why the distinction
between LiDAR-based autonomous systems and vision-based autonomous systems, that's why
that distinction is significant. And in my opinion, that's why Tesla stock has caught such a bit over
these past few months, because they're testing in Arizona now, they're expanding their Austin service area rapidly, they'll be in more cities, and they're doing this without LiDAR.
That is the focal distinction to make, that these vehicles are not equipped with massive LiDAR scanning systems top to bottom now will that be necessary to scale them globally we don't know
maybe at some juncture elon will sit down and say you know what to scale this program globally to
get it in every city i need to use lidar maybe he'll make that decision but for now they have
not felt the need to do that not significant because that does enforce the idea of a much
lower cost per mile now waymo at the scale that they
are currently, you aren't going to be able to make that direct comparison, right? You can't look at a
fleet of 15 vehicles and look at the cost per mile of the program versus a fleet of thousands of
vehicles. That's just the economics and math does not make sense. You cannot do a one-to-one
comparison of two businesses like that.
So what you have to do is really break it down on a per vehicle cost. And on that basis, Tesla blows Waymo's cost per mile out of the water by a magnitude, right?
Because you're talking about a $40,000 to $50,000 vehicle that can do what a $250,000 to $300,000 vehicle can do, right?
At roughly an eighth of
the cost for the vehicle. And then the operation cost is also lower. So yeah, cost per mile
dictates the winner. Tesla, the caveat is that Tesla does not know yet if a pure vision-based
system will be capable of scaling globally. If they can,
then it's game over and Tesla wins. If it can't, then the LiDAR industry comes back into beaming
relevance and probably grows 5X. One of those two things happens. Either Tesla wins or they
realize they need LiDAR and they fall back on it and everyone falls back to LIDAR.
But it's worth noting that Waymo is considering a pivot too.
If you read Waymo's last two white papers, I don't know, maybe people don't read stuff like that, but I'm a nerd.
I read stuff like that.
So you read Waymo's last two white papers, they talk about this very explicitly,
that they are exploring the idea of a pure vision-based system that it may be a more efficient solution.
So they're not there yet, but Elon tends to be
right a lot when it comes to new technologies. And he's proving himself right here. I know there
hasn't been a lot of commentary about Tesla's robotaxi program, but no one has died.
Right. And that's significant. I know that's maybe a low bar for some people,
but that's significant. No one has died in a robotbo-taxi program that's operating with no LIDAR. That's the, I mean, if you ask the Elon skeptics prior
to the Tesla robo-taxi launch, they would have been like, yeah, wait, wait for all the dead
bodies to pile up. Like I dare Elon to launch it. Like it's not ready, right? These were all
the skeptics were saying, where are the dead bodies? Right.
Where, where, where's the, where are the pileups on the, on, on the roads from, um, from these autonomous cars stalling in the streets?
Like, where are they?
Right.
I mean, let's not pretend like the media wouldn't be all over that if it was happening.
Right.
Let's not pretend the media wouldn't be all over it if somebody got hit by a Tesla robot
taxi or if, or if there was a six-car pileup
outside of UT with a Tesla.
The media would have been snapping pictures right away.
The publications that have proven that they aren't fans of Elon would be writing about
that all day and all night, but they aren't, right?
So the fact that the news around Tesla's robotaxi program is quiet is actually a good thing.
You know, it's I think it's suggestive that it's been going pretty smoothly and seamlessly.
And so, yeah, autonomy autonomy is here. It's not like something like we have to wonder if it's coming.
That's not a part of AI that we have to wonder about. Autonomy is here.
All vehicles will be autonomous at some point. It's an inevitability. Everything, planes, boats, trains, cars, everything will be autonomous. It's an
inevitability. And it's not about whether you think that's cool or not, or you like that or
not. It doesn't matter. It's more efficient and efficiency always wins. Opinions don't matter.
Efficiency wins every single time, period. Can't name one
example where a more efficient technology didn't permeate rapidly and capture basically all of the
market share. It always does. You know, my favorite example is cell phones and landlines, but you can
use cars and horses. You can use any example you want. You can go back decades. You can go back five years.
Go back 100 years.
Every technology story is the exact same.
More efficiency.
People are skeptical.
Doesn't matter.
Skeptics get rolled over.
Efficiency wins.
That's how it works.
Businesses want more money, higher margins.
Businesses spend all the capital to make technology happen.
And they seek efficiency constantly. And that money that they deploy seeks efficiency constantly and it never loses never
never so yeah technology always wins bet on technology win with it so software over hardware?
I think so.
But there's distinctions to that.
Sometimes there's new categories of technology where the hardware investment is the leader, right?
I mean, you look at NVIDIA with AI.
That's been the case.
You look at Tesla in the early days of the electric vehicle industry.
That's been the case.
You look at, you know, I mean, I'm sure if I thought hard about it, you'd come up with some other examples.
But it's not always software.
I think net-net, if you look at, like, durable investments in technology, yeah, software tends to be better because they tend to be able to float higher margins and higher growth for longer on a more asset-light model.
But that's not to say the big hardware companies
aren't big winners, right?
NVIDIA, Apple, so on,
these guys are hardware companies and they do it well.
I mean, NVIDIA is also a software company,
but their focus is on hardware and there are winners.
So I think it depends.
If you're in a new technology
and there is an are winners so i think it depends if you're in a new technology
and there is an enabling piece of hardware like in nvidia's case with the gpus or in the case of
tesla with you know the first mass market ev or in the case of apple with the first like truly sexy
portable phone like in all three of those, they had a hardware product that enabled the
adoption of this new generation of technology. Like it was the enabling piece. When you're that
type of hardware player, yeah, you're going to make a lot of money. But most hardware players
don't fit that description. Most hardware players are, you know, relatively low margin
businesses, relatively
commoditized, not a ton of
growth, stuck in the supply chain,
multi-year contracts,
shit tons of visibility,
not a lot of room for speculation.
That's most hardware players.
You know, but
like I said, you know, there are the NVIDIAs
and Apples and, you know, there are the nvidia's and apples and you know there are the
juggernauts that emerge in these in these eras too that guy my mind went over to uh stable coins
and ethereum but i'll let it go i will let that conversation your mind's been your mind's been
stuck there for a while uh today how did it do for me today sir how did it do it's been stuck there for a while. Today, how did it do for me today, sir?
How did it do for me today?
It's been good.
Hey, look, the daily chart's nice, so I can't hate on you being long.
You want to give me an update now?
I mean, we're moving higher, so I don't think it's going to get worse.
Yeah, I mean, the only thing it's going to get is extended from here,
but I don't think it's broken down or anything.
Let's see.
It looked damn good when we first talked about it,
and you were talking to me about it.
Let's see now.
Yeah, it looks fantastic still.
Yeah.
Maybe some resistance back from the 18th or something.
You want to bust above it
and then I don't even know what you'd be looking at.
That weekly chart is wild.
Some high beta Ethereum.
We shall see.
It had a decent headline.
I'm curious in the trading volumes today.
If it had more than MSDR.
That's a hell of a chart.
I can't even be mad at you because of the chart.
I can't even really talk you out of that one.
It's way more than MSTR.
I mean, the price has to factor in there some,
but if you're just doing straight up total trades,
it's like $8.5 million for MSTR versus $50 plus million for B&M.
MSTR also had a pretty brutal downgrade note this morning.
I didn't post it, but I can pull it up right here.
Yeah, it's Maness, Crespi, and Hart,
and they're pretty good financial analysts,
but they reiterated their sal rating in 175 target on MSTR.
Pretty brutal note they're saying that um they believe mstr's premium um to nav is likely to continue unwinding owing to one implied volatility breaking down which has limited convertible debt
portion of their 4242 plan, which we think is
largely baked into the expectations now. Number two, limited uptake for their strategic issuances,
STRC and STRK, which had initially high interest, but have since faded significantly.
Three, absent debt capital markets and a lack of appetite for risk around treasury companies.
And then five, they said, we believe the pool of copycat strategies is growing and leads to a lower justified MNAV for treasury companies.
for treasury companies um and they say the m nav today at 1.47x likely sees an unwind back closer
to 1x m nav so that's from moness crespian art this morning on msdr with a 175 target so that
um definitely was not a great note but that stock ended up what closing green today or no they close yeah 2.23 percent so
i guess the mstr here holders didn't really care about that um but one thing i did want to touch
on was amcorp today which had a nice move um i shared the video of tim cook last night talking
about it i think we were talking about this yesterday into the close but not mistaken i
think evan brought up that this was my newest position.
And then we got a nice 5% pop today on that thing.
It was actually up a lot more in pre-market after hours.
But it's funny because when I posted the original tweet,
which I pinned at the top on September 5th,
I mentioned the Apple relationship.
But I guess people didn't believe me,
so they wanted to hear it from Tim Cook's mouth. So, um, I posted the clip of Tim Cook from last night, I pinned it at the top,
uh, directly mentioning Amcor. And, you know, so people, I guess, uh, wanted to jump in or
chase it on that. Uh, but really nice move for that stock today, because we're pushing over
the 20 months. You can get a close here above 2620, it's going to look really, really, really, really,
really nice coming out of this lower structure on the chart on all time frames.
So I remain long on that name.
It was nice to see the 5% move today.
But that's, you know, to me, just the beginning.
That's not what I'm looking for.
I think the stock can re-rate 40, 50, maybe even 60% or 70% higher very, very easily.
You look at the rest of the semiconductor ecosystem.
You scroll down any of the names, not even the growth names.
You scroll down the names that have flat TTM growth, have flat EPS growth.
They're trading at 4X sales, 5X sales, 40XP, 50XP.
And they're just random parts of the supply chain, right?
They don't have any strategic significance or any visibility.
They're just related to the semiconductor supply chain, and so they're trading at premium valuations.
Amcor isn't, right?
Amcor is trading at a 19p one-times sales, one-times.
And you ask yourself, okay, the company is not really growing right now, which is fair.
Ask yourself, OK, the company is not really growing right now, which is fair.
But you look at this new facility.
You'd have to imagine that this unlocks a huge phase of growth for them.
Right. And you'd have to also imagine the market looks forward to that new phase of growth.
Right. Apple is going to be the largest customer for this facility.
for this facility. Amcor is doing, what, a buck six, so 1.6 billion in quarterly revenue,
trading at a 6 billion market cap with an Apple and TSM partnership facility coming online.
And they happen to also be the leading OSAP play in the United States. I alluded to this when I
first shared the thesis on here, for those of you that were listening. But there is a concerted effort right now from the White House
to domesticate the semiconductor supply chain.
Right?
There is a very, very directed effort to do that.
They're incentivizing TSM to bring more facilities online.
They're incentivizing other players in the supply chain to come to the United States.
And in that fervor,
you have to ask yourself,
like, what is a really easy way
for a company like TSM
or any other foreign chip maker
to say, we're going to invest in the US?
Like, what's the easiest way for them to say that?
Well, it certainly isn't to
build a fab, right? Building fabs is extremely complicated, takes a long time, years, you know,
and let alone staffing those fabs is an extraordinarily complicated process, right?
So what's the really the easiest way if you're T, to say, hey, we're investing in the United States?
Or if you're Apple, to say, hey, we're investing in the United States?
To me, the answer is OSAP, right?
Outsource Semiconductor Assembly and Testing is what that stands for.
But to me, if you want to make a symbolic investment in the United States, or you want to make a gesture to President Trump,
or you want to make the appearance that you are building part of your product in the United States,
OSAT is a great way to do it. Because you can keep your core competencies at home.
And you can say, look, we're packaging the chips in the United States, in Arizona,
right here in Arizona, we're packaging the chips. And that's exactly what Amcor's new facility at Peoria is intended to do. And that's exactly why
Apple is investing in that facility. Now, we don't know the size of Apple's investment yet, but
should that be disclosed at any juncture? I think it'll be probably to the tune of multiple billion
dollars. Now, Apple investing, Apple going to pen on paper, by the way, committed to be the largest customer.
Taiwan Semi helping build the OSAP facility.
And Broadcom, who has an expanding AI chip business, they're their closest and top awarded supplier.
And they got best supplier award last year.
So you have Broadcom's AI chip business growing as a tailwind. You have Apple's direct
support as a tailwind. You have Taiwan Semi's direct support as a tailwind. And the entire time,
the stock's trading at a $6 billion market cap and 1x sales. It does not make sense.
The stock's worth 2x what it's worth today, in my opinion. And I don't usually say that about
stocks I buy, but it's worth twice what it's worth. I think it's a $50 stock wearing a $25 stock's costume. Well, $27 stock now as of today is 5% move. But
I think the stock is significantly mispriced based on the opportunity in 2028.
And maybe the market wants to lag on that and not start awarding them for that opportunity
till next year. Okay. That's fine. If there's going to be a little
bit of a delay on it, I'll be patient. But I think the stock is mispressed. What I said the
first time, and even after today's 5% move, I still think that. I think the stock should trade
closer to two times sales, considering the opportunity at Peoria. That should be a driver of value here because it will unlock like that capacity
expansion will unlock a material upgrade in revenue for this company. You know, they're
likely to go by the time that facility goes online, they're likely to go from about 1.5,
1.6 billion in revenue per quarter to closer to 3 billion in revenue per quarter. So you're saying
in light of that, the stock should trade at half,
0.5X forward sales? Like what? No. So even if you want to say, even if you want to normalize it and say, the stock should trade at 1X sales, right? Even if you want to make some crazy
fundamental justification and say that, make an argument to say that, at least give them the benefit of
assigning it to forward sales, right? If you really want to give them a 1x multiple, then put
that 1x multiple on what it's going to look like post-capacity expansion, because then you're
already looking at the stock doubling. So whether you want the multiple to go to 2x based on the
current thesis, the stock doubles, or if you want the stock to trade at 1x forward
based on the obvious and visible capacity expansion that's coming in 2028, you have pen on paper from
Apple computer, like it's not going to not happen. You know, that's coming, you have visibility to
say it's within a sign of 1x multiple on that revenue. Same thing, stock doubles. So yeah,
I mean, anyway, I'll, I'll, I'll leave the table pounding at that.
But, you know, I was sharing this thesis with you guys a couple weeks ago.
Stock's about 7% to 8% higher now.
I'm still very long.
You know, it's about an 8% position in the portfolio for me after today, which is quite large.
So, yeah, that's my thoughts on Amcor.
I just wanted to talk about that today.
Kratos also, by the way, had a fantastic day-to-day.
Big breakout.
It was setting up for that, but had a ripper of a day-to-day.
So that was nice to see.
Kratos is one of my top five positions.
So, always good to see Kratos.
I don't want to give away too much of what you're doing,
but you have positions labeled as core positions for you, And I noticed that Amcor is not one of those.
Not right now. It would have to be to become one of them.
It could become one. Yeah. I never give a position a core label until it proves itself to me.
You know? So Amcor is, out of all the positions, and Evan's looking at the portfolio update in my Discord right now for those that are curious what Evan's referring to, but I post all my positions and all my weightings in our community every week.
Out of all the positions I own currently that are not core positions, Amcor is the most likely to become a core position. That's the way
I'll put it. And if you look at my core positions, I've owned them all for a long time. Like I have
deep, deep cost basis on all of them. So like, if you're somebody who's like, oh, you know,
I don't want to chase Kratos, you know, StockDoc bought a 20, it's 75. I don't want to trace
Nebius, he bought a 25, it's 100. If you don't want to trace nebius you bought a 25 it's 100 if you don't want to chase those
stocks that are four or five x from where i bought them amcor is one that i bought literally two
weeks ago and i'm up like you know eight percent on it so it's not like far away from where i bought
it you know but i i do have a lot of confidence in the story and i do think the stock is significantly
mispriced in fact on a pull, I probably would upsize that position again.
You know, I opened it at 4.5%.
I raised it to 7.5% literally the day after.
If the markets pull back here, that's the first thing I would add to for what that's worth.
And, you know, I'd probably add another 3% or 4% if it pulled back and bring it to an 11% weighting.
I'm very, very comfortable owning that stock here
based on what I know about it now.
Again, it's not a growth story.
The company has not grown revenue much.
They've not grown EPS much.
Margins have even seen some impact recently.
If that's what you're looking for, it's not your stock.
What it is is it's a
capacity expansion story. And it's also a strategic interest story because it's a domestic OSAT play
that is likely to get sympathy money from TSM and Apple as a way to nod towards US production.
They are not going to build the entire supply chain in the United States. We all know that. And OSET is a really easy way to go to Trump and say, look, we're
packaging the chips here. Be happy, you know, and he probably will be just like he was when Apple
said they were going to make the glass and they did the huge presentation about it. If you listen
to that Tim Cook interview I posted yesterday,
that's exactly what he says about Amcor.
He says, you know, we're trying to bring the whole supply chain here.
TSM is going to fab the chips.
And then he goes, he literally says, and Amcor will package the chips.
Tim Cook himself is telling you who's going to package Apple's chips,
and the company's trading at 1x sales.
Do what you will with that information and that apple business by the way last thing
i'll say the apple business is not on the balance sheet currently okay so imagine right this is what
a lot of legacy investors never get the best never catch great moves in stocks because they are incapable of imagining.
Imagine what will happen to the balance sheet and then ask yourself what it's worth.
Don't say, well, the company's flat TTM growth, so clearly they need to do some work.
No, no, no, no.
Think about what's happening.
Your visibility into a massive project. That's rare. It's very rare to get like pen on paper visibility into something that you
know will increase revenue. Companies do stuff, do a lot of stuff, right? Some stuff generates
incremental revenue. Some stuff fails epically. It's rare to have something where a company 500 times the size of you is saying, hey, buddy, we really like you.
We want you to build a facility.
We want you to package the chips.
In fact, we're going to help you build a facility.
We're going to finance it.
And we're going to be your customer.
That's really, really, really, really rare.
Really rare.
Okay.
So, yeah.
Anyway, we can talk about other stuff.
That's enough of an Amcor rant.
AMKR.
There we go.
That's what we were talking about there.
An interesting one to watch.
And by the way, those leaps were cheap.
I mean, I was sitting on some March leaps, and this 5% move today.
The March leaps were trading at 40% IV.
I own some of the 25s.
They're not really leaps, because they're not – I don't I don't call them leaps because they're not over a year out but far out March calls I guess you can say we're up
50% today on a 5% we need to have that argument yeah what is a leap because I
feel like yeah I feel like that's one of those arguments in the market with no
winner no it's not. It is a fact.
It's more than a year out is the technical definition of a leap.
Yeah, that's the technical definition.
I generally am just like, you know, I'd like to buy something else.
If it's not this calendar year, it's a leap.
That's how sometimes I feel.
Yeah, sometimes I feel that way, but whatever.
My point is the calls are cheap.
The stock is cheap.
Big name partners.
I don't know. I try not to overthink things you know i just like i see things lining up and i'm like okay this makes too much sense and i just
buy them and some stuff works and some stuff doesn't like you know there was a stock about
a couple weeks ago airo this new drone ipo didn't work you know i got stopped out of it like four
days later that's part of the game too guys guys. We talk a lot about winners here, but like not everything works. Keep in mind,
we've had extraordinary success this year. Like I don't want to say most stuff hasn't worked
because most stuff has worked, but some stuff doesn't work. And you just have to know like
your risk parameters, right? And like for me, I'm very conscious of my risk parameters. Like if I'm high conviction in something, I'm going to be a little more loose with it. You know, like your risk parameters, right? And like, for me, I'm very conscious of my risk parameters,
like if I'm high conviction in something, I'm going to be a little more loose with it.
You know, I'm going to let the stock play around, I'm going to let it bounce around and be volatile,
I'm going to allow that because I have conviction. And then when I don't have as much conviction,
or I don't understand the company as well. Like, for example, with AIRO, then I get out when they
break down, you know, and sometimes I get out right at the bottom.
But that's okay. It's part of it. You know, it's just part of risk management to say like,
hey, this isn't a position that I'm committed to. And the technical structure is breaking down.
So I'll revisit it maybe, or maybe I won't. But I'm going to cut it for now. And so I do that,
you know, there's, there's even a couple positions this week that I was looking at,
like, I was talking about this yesterday, but like Penn was in a precarious position this week.
Actually had a nice, some nice action today to hold strong near the 50 day.
But I was like, Hey, if it breaks the 50 day, I may have to get out of that one.
Looks like it's going to defend it. We'll see how it goes into the end of the week.
But sometimes you have to make just procedural decisions, just like sort of robotic decisions occasionally to be an effective manager of
positions, in my opinion. And I do that sometimes. But when I have a position that I really like,
I don't let market volatility just scare me out of it. You know, like, I mean, a great example is
energy fuels a couple weeks ago, had this really high volume cell, where it fell from like 10 to 850. And I was long from 850.
It fell right back to my cost basis. In a lower conviction position, I would have been shaken out
there. I would have been like, you know what? Stock came back down to my cost basis. I don't
want to let this trade go red on me because I had its size pretty large. And I probably would have gotten out. In that scenario, I didn't. Right. Because it was a very high conviction position for me. And,
you know, yesterday I traded 14. Right. So like it moved 50 percent higher off those lows. So
you have to know you have to make the distinction and say, I want to allow myself to be risk
tolerant here because I have the bigger, a bigger picture in
mind. And there's other cases where you want to say, I don't want to allow myself to be risk
tolerant here because I'm going to open myself up to unnecessary downside on a position that I'm not
really convicted in and that I haven't really done the work on a position that I don't really
understand. Like if you trap yourself in positions that you don't really understand like that, that's not a winning, you know, that's not
a recipe for success, right? The stuff you keep should be the stuff, you know, the stuff you trade
should be the stuff that, you know, you're just sort of flippant about that, you know, comes and
goes that you might've noticed on your timeline and said, oh, cool chart. Like when somebody brings up a stock and I go, oh, nice chart.
I'm not swinging that.
I might trade it.
I might be like, oh, cool.
I'll take a little day trade or a week trade on it.
But I'm not like just because somebody mentioned something, the chart's cool.
I'm not going to go buy it in size and swing it.
Like that's not how I operate.
I have to know what's going on.
I have to know the story.
Right.
I mentioned this
last week, but like you, I own 17 positions right now. You could ask me about any of them and I
could sit here for an hour and talk to you about the company for an hour. Okay. And I think it's
important to be able to do that. And I also think the same way it's important to be able to do that.
I think it's also important to be able to be simple about your thesis. It's also important to be able to say,
like, if somebody were to ask me the same thing, to go through my portfolio and point to a stock
and go stock talk, explain this in two sentences, why you own this, I could also do that.
So not only is it important to know what you own in detail, it's also important to be able to simplify your thesis to say, I own this because of this and this.
And if this and this change, then my thesis will change.
Right. And this sounds rudimentary.
It sounds like obvious stuff that I'm talking about, but it's not obvious when you put it into practice.
Because most of you don't think this way about your positions.
Most of you aren't constantly asking yourself, what's the thesis?
Is the thesis still intact?
Most of you just buy a stock, see it go up, let it keep going up and be like, I'm a winner.
I'm a genius.
I'm going to stay in this.
It's going to keep going up.
You have to constantly keep reanalyzing and saying, like, is the reason I bought still
valid?
Can I, you know, add additional parts to the thesis as there's new things happening in the business that have developed that have made me either more cautious or more confident?
Like you have to add all of that into your analysis, you know?
So, yeah, Amcor, not a core position, technically, in terms of being listed as one.
Obviously, those are just subjective designations
but if if i was going to designate anything that's not a current core position my portfolio as one it
would be mcore so yep doc talk yeah you you said something that triggered a thought how long would
you say you typically research like maybe not like the actual research but like let's say something
goes on your radar how long until on average until you're entering a position? I mean, cause I feel like some people
are like, Hey, that looks good. That chart looks good. Like, let me just get in today,
you know, or I'll wait for maybe a pullback and I'm getting it. What, what does that look like
in for you and your process? Something that pops up on your radar, obviously you said you're,
you're deep diving into the company. You're looking at some fundamental stuff as long you know with the chart and stuff but how
long from hey this idea is like on my radar to I'm actually taking a position yeah so that that's a
good question I think that's where technical literacy comes into play so the short answer is it depends and here's a long answer.
What I tend to do is I tend to look at a couple of things.
So there's a few highlights I go through on every stock I'm considering before I start
doing deep research.
First thing is I look at TTM revenue growth.
So I look at trailing 12 month revenue growth.
Look at trailing 12 month E EPS growth as well I also then
go through and look at the past three quarters sometimes I'll do I'll go
deeper than that maybe look at the past eight but I do at least the past three
quarters and this is keep in mind this is like the first 20 minutes of research
on every stock this is not like the whole process. I'll get more into the details of the distinctions in a second, but this is just like the, I guess you call it the survey.
TTM rev growth, TTM EPS growth. I look at the past three quarters. I look at it just on the
headline, right? So just what was the rev? What was the EPS? What was the beat? what was the rev what was the eps what was the beat what was the miss past three
quarters um then after i do that then i go look at the chart first thing i look at is the daily
chart i ask myself is the chart because when i'm looking for entries i'm looking at the daily
generally you know i don't look i don't look before i blow i don't look at time frames below
the daily generally because i'm not a day trader. I day trade occasionally, but I'm not a day trader.
That's not where my money is made.
So I generally look for entries on the daily chart.
And so what I ask myself is, first thing I'll do is look at the daily chart and ask myself,
is it extended?
And a lot of times, because I like strong charts, it is.
And in those scenarios, I don't buy right away.
So in those scenarios, I'll market and say, OK, daily chart extended, look for pullback.
And I have like a list on my watch list on my Weeble watch list compiler.
I have a thing called the short list.
And it's generally five to seven stocks.
Right now, I think it's like eight or nine,
but it's generally five to seven stocks
that I want to take a position in,
but have extended daily charts.
Okay, that's the purpose of that short list.
So I'll have five to seven names on there.
And when the market pulls back,
or let's say there's a bad day for momentum or something,
the cool thing about these momentum and high beta names that I like is it's, you know,
you get minus seven or 8% days all the time.
And so finding that pullback on the daily, I don't usually have to wait that long.
You know, I usually could within a couple of weeks can find a meaningful pullback on
the daily.
And there are exceptions to that.
There's stocks that
run away from you, right? And that's okay. Like, you know, there's a lot of stocks this year that
I've gotten out of wanting to get back into and they ran away from me and that's okay.
But if they don't and they come back, then that's where I'll enter a starter on those positions
when the daily is as flat as possible against
the short-term moving averages. So generally I am looking at the nine and 21 EMA. Some people use
the eight and 20, whatever floats your boat, but you know, some people look at the seven and 18,
I've seen some weird shit out there, but whatever. I look at the nine and 21, uh, EMAs and I look at
them at all on all timeframes, by the way. I'm actually a big fan of the weekly
nine EMAs as well. That to me is a very big pivot point in markets. You can find a lot of great
stocks bottoming at the weekly nine EMAs. So I look at the nine and 21 EMAs on all timeframes,
daily, weekly, and monthly. Once the daily setup is as flat as possible against those
short-term moving averages, that's where my entries are generally.
That's where I like to enter.
And that's sort of what guides me on entries is the daily charts.
Now, in terms of how quickly I buy versus how long my research process is, that also
I buy versus how long my research process is that also depends sometimes I'll be looking at a stock
depends.
and like I don't use scanners so my ideas never come from the chart up they always come from like
the theme down like the chart is like usually the last thing I look at or one of the last things I look at. Oh, actually,
no, that's not true. Not the last thing. But it's it's downstream is my point. It's not like it's
not where the ideas originate. It's not I'm not going through a scanner and saying, OK, these are
my top five favorite charts. Let me go research the companies. I am looking and studying thematics
and industries and analyst reports and Wall Street research and finding names that are interesting to me and then looking at the charts and the financials and the valuations after I already find them interesting.
Because otherwise, I feel like I'm seeking confirmation bias constantly.
and confirmation bias constantly. Like if I'm going just based off the chart and I see a really
nice chart and I'm like, dude, I want to find a reason to buy this chart. Then I start justifying
things that I shouldn't justify. I start saying like, oh, you know, yeah, the stock's trading at
nine times sales, but they're growing double digits. So like maybe it makes sense. And I
start justifying things in my head that I wouldn't otherwise justify. So that's the reason I do it this way, top down.
And so there'll be some times where the story's interesting to me,
the theme is interesting to me, there's good TTM rev growth,
there's good TTM EPS growth, the valuation's reasonable,
the chart is nice.
When all my boxes are checked, then I don't hesitate and I just buy it right away.
And that's rare.
But there are scenarios like that where I'm 45 minutes into my research and I'm like, I've seen enough.
Like I have to buy this.
So that happens sometimes.
You know, I would say an example of that is Nebius.
I did probably four hours of research on Nebius before I bought it in May at 24.
And once I started realizing like their deep expertise in so many industries, I was like,
this is a must buy AI stock. And I just bought it in size right away.
I didn't scale into it or anything.
I just aped into it because of how bullish what I thought I read was.
Centris Energy, that's another example.
I've bought and owned that stock twice.
First in the 40s back in 2021, sold it last year in the 80s, bought it back in 96 in May. I did not even think when the executive order came out about nuclear, like within two minutes of the executive order dropping,
I dropped an alert in the Discord and said, I'm buying Centris. Didn't even think about it.
Bought it at 96. The next morning, it was 120. Like that quickly, right? But that's,
so in that scenario, that's not a product of research. That's a product of experience,
because I've owned the stock before. I know how it reacts to nuclear news. I know their
positioning in the nuclear industry. And so that didn't require research for me to make that snap
second entry on Centris in May. So, I mean, I go on and on here but it i'm trying to give
examples along the way of how different positions varied in terms of my entries but
again there are some scenarios where i'm in i read something it's so unbelievably bullish and
i'm in right away there are other scenarios where i like it but the daily charts extended so i wait
for the daily chart to set up and there are other scenarios where I look at a stock and go, you know what?
I like the story. I like the fundamentals. I like the theme, but the daily is broken. The weekly is
broken. And in those scenarios, I actually wait for recovery and I actually buy the stock higher
in those scenarios. And that's something that new traders constantly are like scratching
their heads about they're like i don't get it stock talk you like the stock and you want to pay
five percent more for it like why and my my answer to them is is that it's easier to manage there
my answer to them is, is that it's easier to manage there because after the stock, like,
I don't know, let's make up an example here. Let's say there's a stock that I like,
you know, I like the fundamentals. I like the catalyst, I like the theme.
And that stock is trading at, you know, below the 200 day moving average, below the 921 EMAs.
And I want to get in, but I'm like, you know what? I want to wait for a recapture of the 921 emas and i want to get in but i'm like you know what i want
to wait for a recapture of the 921 emas i want to wait for some structure to rebuild maybe in that
scenario the stock goes from 25 to 29. okay is that a bad decision that i chose to buy it then
to some people they'd be like yeah you're an idiot you could have got the stock for 25 and
in my my retort to that would be like, yeah, but the stock could have also gone
to 20. Right. And in which case you wouldn't have seemed like such a bottom calling genius.
And this is like, you know, this is what happens a lot of markets. Like when people who buy the
bottom, they're like, oh, this is a product of me not looking at the charts. And this is why,
like, I'm never going to look at charts because, look, I bought the bottom anyway, even though I don't look at charts.
That's a stupid way to think about markets.
Just because you got lucky and bottom ticked something, it doesn't mean you don't know how to read a chart.
You shouldn't know how to read a chart.
You know, reading charts is if I do assign one reason to the fact that I continue to super perform the markets consistently, it's because I know how to read a chart.
The stock picking is great.
Like, I mean, yeah, I'm not going to discount my stock picking.
The stock picking has been a huge driver of that.
But the reason my entries are so good, right?
I'm not tooting my own here.
You can look at my entries yourself.
Go look up all these winning stocks from this year.
Nebius, Kratos, Centris. Go look at at when i tweeted about them and go look how perfect those entries were
why were they so good because i know how to read a chart and it's it doesn't take a rocket scientist
to learn technical analysis but if you do your entries will be much better timed and you'll be
just less stressed you won't get buried on your stuff.
You won't have to build into positions
while you're red on them
like so many dot-com era investors do
thinking that they're being smart.
That's not a smart way to manage your book.
It's not capitally efficient.
There's a huge loss of opportunity cost.
I can go on and on and on.
It's just not smart way to manage your money.
Learn how to read a chart
and expose yourself to the wonders of good entries.
That's my view on it.
Great rundown, SogTalk.
I appreciate that.
It's always great to hear the different perspectives and processes those people are diving into.
And just the way you went through that and set that up.
I mean, not everyone has to And just the way you went through that and set that up. I mean,
not everyone has to do it that way, right? But that's a great guide for how you should approach
a position and investing. So I love that. And we are right at the top of the hour. Great timing on
that stock talk, deep dive there. And I saw that we have David joining us and Gab is up here as
well. We're going to talk some, basically some anti-inflation.
We're going to talk some gold and Bitcoin
versus the US dollar.
Gab, I didn't know if you had any
opening thoughts here.
And obviously we're excited to have David on.
Yeah, I love talking with David.
I love working together with Quantify Funds.
It's the TTF that, you know,
I fully disclose I own personally upfront.
I tell my friends to buy this.
I disclose them as well that I work together with David.
But I'm just so bullish on this area, both Bitcoin and gold.
What better time to have this conversation?
Gold looks destined to just continue to the upside here.
I believe, David, did we hit all-time highs on BTG today?
We did.
We crossed $42 today.
We're $83 million in AUM.
Woo!
$83?
What was that like a week ago when I saw you?
It's like $70.
We are plus $16 since last Monday.
So it's been a nice little stretch.
And honestly, I think we're a new structure.
For those that are hearing this for the first time,
we have a leveraged Bitcoin and gold ETF ticker BTGD.
Simple it can be.
Just adding one asset to the other, you get 100% exposure to both.
And actually, the last time we spoke, we were debating gold.
And Evan, I'd love to hear your thoughts on gold because I feel like we were talking about it in a sideways market.
And it does feel like it's breaking out a little bit here we're you know doing rate cuts when
assets pretty much across the globe are at an all-time we got to protect
in the face of ai that's you know some pressure on the employment market And I don't know if that's going to slow down anytime soon.
I'd love to just kick off talking about what people's thoughts in the gold market.
They see continuously very bullish.
I think gold, Bitcoin mines at a really tight rate of about 1.75%.
You saw articles last week of Russia's buying more gold you know russia's buying more gold than ever
like everyone's buying more gold than ever individuals starting to uh central banks are
just only increasing their purchases and again i am completely biased as the pm here on bcgd but
just don't see this slowing down
yeah me either um just adds up your service was cutting a little in and out for me. I made
out everything that you said, but just giving you a heads up in case it might be easier for you to
switch onto one thing or another. So just saying that. Let's get into it, though. Let's talk gold
here first. Stock Talk, you a full-on gold bug? Sorry, you cut out there,v all right maybe it's my end of service then um i was saying stock talk
wanted to kick in with you talking about gold here and uh basically see are you uh are you a
full-on gold bug yet at this point how are we feeling because i think this is just moving
it is moving it's moving like it's moving like it's a meme stock lately, but yeah, I mean, it's been a hell of a
run for gold. You know, I've never been a much of a market exposed guy to gold because, um, I mean,
my parents were big advocates of owning physical gold. So I own quite a bit of physical gold. Um,
and, uh, that's my way of sort of getting gold exposure. But I mean, I don't blame investors
these last couple of years for wanting gold exposure. I mean, it's been a historic run for
the asset. I think, you know, there was a point somewhere in the last five years where there was
a debate between Bitcoin and gold of what was the real store of value. I think that debate has been
settled. I mean, Bitcoin has certainly been a higher return asset, if that's your goal, a much higher return asset than basically anything.
But is it a store of value? I don't know. I think it depends on your definition of that and depends
on the type of volatility you're okay with if you're seeking that sort of exposure. But
no, it's not something I have allocated to in my portfolio, but I do own, like I said, a decent portion of my net worth of physical. And I think, you know, investors are
thinking the right way in the markets, thinking the right way about this, which is that it seems
we're going to run it hot forever. You know, this is an administration that came in to the White House purporting to be, you know, cutters of spending and reiners of the budget.
And that obviously didn't happen.
You know, we're at new record highs for defense spending.
We're at new record highs for the overall U.S. government budget.
Costs of everything are going higher.
More and more subsidies are being introduced in spite of the ones that are being taken away we're
talking about you know new deals for domesticating supply chains you know five billion dollar fund
getting talked about this morning from rare metals on and on and on i mean you know we're getting to
the point now where it's just looking like fun money from the u.s government standpoint
and it's been that way for a while and it's obviously dilutive it's good for And it's been that way for a while. And it's obviously dilutive. It's good for assets.
It's good for gold. It's good for Bitcoin. And so, you know, I'm not surprised the party's
been continuing on, but people are looking for some stability in the value of their capital.
And the rate at which we're inflating and spending it away is pretty alarming. So I'm not surprised at how well gold's performed.
Feels a little bit extended here, but, you know, it felt extended six months ago and kept ripping.
So it looks like a strong market.
Just some context.
Obviously, I've mentioned this before, but all assets are at all-time high.
And if you think about scarcity assets over, like, the last 50 to 70 years um you know we went off the gold standard in the 70s and then scarcity assets didn't really have value why because they
didn't have cash flow and we monetize everything we could with cash flow and we leveraged everything
on this planet that we could that we could even imagine even fake made up ebitda cash flow and we leveraged everything on this planet that we could,
that we could even imagine even fake made up EBITDA cash flow.
And we got greedy and drunk on that debt.
And now it's time to pay the piper.
Even when we're trying to lower the deficits in our spending,
we're just, we kind of came to the realization that we can't.
So every day there's more currency papers paper currency printed
doesn't have to be the us could be japan it could be china it could be europe um it but somewhere
around the world there's printing and the scarcity profile these assets just go up and the only curb
to this drunken spending and printing and debt is skips the assets um and that's why i think
if you zoom out like we could still be very early in both these trades because gosh what happens if
there's a recession you think we're printing a lot now wait wait till there's a recession yes
obviously bitcoin will go down a little bit in the first leg and gold will hold up uh that's
historically what's happened during the two crypto winters bitcoin is gold has held up really well and that's the beauty of this it's
a leveraged etf designed to be held for the long run you get both assets and historically on the
downside you really only get exposure to bitcoin and then on the upside you get exposure to both
and the beauty is yes gold is up 40 this year gold doesn't need to do 40 for it to be added
to this vehicle this vehicle doesn't make you choose between the two you get both so gold just
really has to outperform the cost of financing on the ctf which is under five percent um and if you
just think about how much we're printing and how little new gold we find on this earth each year
the math just makes sense for like a long-term hold on both assets, unless it's too low risk of a profile for your portfolio,
talking about gold,
which is why again, stacking it,
that makes you not have to make that choice.
Yeah, it's great points there
on what's happening with both these assets
and kind of the bull case for them to keep on going.
I just continue to kind of hold here. I like the upside. I kind of like the bullishness of
the breakout here. This is perfect, though, I think, for what people, why I'm so infatuated
with this asset, right? Because Bitcoin at this point has not hit new all-time highs, right? It's
doing great, obviously, here today. It's up about 97%
in the past year and about 10.5% in the last three months. But it entered the year right
around 93. It's trading around 116. Good, solid gains, but not all-time highs at the moment.
GLD, on the gold side, obviously, has pushed pushed all time highs and really looks quite awesome,
especially like Stock Talk said, kind of traded like a meme stock here over the last month. That
one's up about 42% in the past year, 39% year to date, and roughly 8% in the past three months.
And then I think kind of having that combination to the two in BTG, you can look at it on the past
year, outperforming both of them.
Even Bitcoin being up 90%, this is outperforming at 107%.
So obviously significantly outperforming gold.
Year to date up 54%.
And last three months, beating both of them as well, up 14.5%.
So you've kind of hit the sweet spot here with BTG.
Plus people can get exposure to that leverage, right,
of $1 into $1 of each.
So to me, outperformance on all timeframes is nice.
And obviously, if you're bullish on these assets,
I personally, and I wanted to get your thoughts on this, David,
I really see this as a complementary piece
to like an SPY or a QQQ.
It's like you go in, you use SPY, you use Q,
they're a large part of your portfolio.
You get exposure across the board to the United States stock market.
And then your complimentary piece to that is, well, what happens if the dollar keeps
firing up?
Well, perhaps all the assets just continue to increase in value as well, right?
SPY, QQQ just continue rising.
But at the same time, kind of like my hedge, that's not really a hedge, but also just more
of an upside play, is BTGD with Bitcoin and gold to accentuate those assets. Yeah. If you're an aggressive investor,
all of a sudden, if you're trying to find some diversification in your portfolio, you run into
a problem of just not enough allocation space. And that's where the even like not high risk
institutions use a little bit of leverage. So if you're at 80, 85, 90% stocks
and you're trying to round out your portfolio with anything else,
whether it's hedge funds, treasuries, Bitcoin or gold,
you need to think about strategic leverage vehicles in your portfolio.
And there's, you know, leverage ETFs have a place in this world.
They just need to be traded three or four days a week.
We got around that disclosure,
that normal leverage disclosure of intended just
for daily use.
And we market this as leverage for the long run because we have at least two assets that
are uncorrelated that we can rebalance between.
And that means that, you know, when Bitcoin's rocketing, we're trimming it and adding to
gold.
And when Bitcoin drops to 80 during a tariff tantrum, like embedded in the ETF, you know
we're trimming our gold allocation buying to Bitcoin just to get it back to that 100% and 100% level. But I think these two asset classes can
very much be thought of as, you know, SPX and treasuries over the last 10 years. If you owned
stocks and bonds and rebalanced it, you had a much higher rate of return in Sharpe than just
buying the two and letting them float because they were very uncorrelated. And we're just doing that in a 200% basket with 100% to each.
Temp, you want to jump in?
I'll throw in a couple thoughts.
You talk about bullish charts, and Gav, you've actually mentioned this.
The M2 money supply chart is probably the most bullish chart I've ever seen.
It just seems like there's going to be no slowdown.
I'm sure a lot of people are watching the Fed tomorrow and the dot plot and all that great stuff.
And it just seems like, and I like Stock Talk's point as well, it just seems like anyone that has tried to come in and reduce spending, it's just a hard pivot goes away from that.
It just doesn't seem like we're getting any type of solution anytime soon.
So, you know, like I keep, you know, gold, I keep Bitcoin anti-inflation.
I would almost rather keep that in my portfolio than cash.
You know, most people, you know, they keep some type of dry powder for a dip, especially up here at all time highs.
You know, they keep some type of dry powder for a dip, especially up here at all-time highs.
But, you know, personally, I would rather keep, you know, my cash portion, at least a bulk of it,
in something that's not inflationary, like just cash, like the U.S. dollar.
So that's where I'm at on that.
You guys also were mentioning, like, the breakout, the chart.
If you look at the, like, I'm on the future side of things more often.
So I look at gold futures, which, you know, obviously made an all-time high today.
But this thing consolidated from basically the mid-April until the breakout just at the beginning of this month.
And that is a multi-month base that it's breaking out from.
Now, yeah, does it look overextended?
Sure.
But at the same time, when you break out of a five month
base you usually get an explosive move which we're seeing so i remain very bullish there bitcoin on
the other hand bitcoin it does have some of the risk asset kind of vibe to it but at the same time
it is still there's multiple things behind it that i think are still very bullish with bitcoin
and that chart actually looks pretty good as well, kind of reclaiming some major moving averages.
So when I look at this and I think, OK, I definitely want access to this.
And then, but do I want to deal with a crypto wallet?
Do I want to just buy the GLD ETF or something like that?
Why not have exposure to both?
I just absolutely love this product that David and his team have come up with over at Quantify Funds. The one question that I really
had ready was about the rebalancing, and you already kind of hit on that, David. So I'm just
a fan of the product. I think it's fantastic. And I don't know if there's anything that you're
looking for as far as does the inflation side of things slow down? Does the Fed do anything?
Or do you think that we'll hear continued, you know, continued words from the Fed that, hey,
we're going to keep doing what we're doing and the administration? Is there anything around maybe
tomorrow that you're looking at as a piece of this bigger puzzle of inflation?
Oof, that's an interesting question.
I mean, really, the holy grail that people are waiting for is for the Fed to admit that the inflation target should probably be at 3%, not 2%.
And a lot of the investment world has already come to the conclusion that the Fed has come
to that conclusion and all but kind of stated that.
But they've already backed off of this,gged 2% inflation target. And pretty much our entire
system was built on this 2% inflation target. So the amount of growth
we need coming out of this. How the market will
candidly in the short term react tomorrow, I'm not sure. I do think we are
still on this bull market rally. I think everyone's looking at this and looking at this
in historical context and saying, oh, this is the third year of a bull market in Q's. Oh, Bitcoin's near all-time
high. Gold is near all-time high. But I don't think people really understand how it feels when
the system's truly broken and what it feels like to be in an emerging market economy. And that's
what the U.S. is heading towards, not necessarily from a demographics perspective, from a fiscal
perspective. Our balance sheet is starting to look like that of an emerging market economy. towards not necessarily from a demographics perspective from a fiscal perspective our
balance sheet is starting to look like that of an emerging market economy this you know the fed can't
fight debt bubbles in the government they're built to fight debt bubbles in the corporate and
financial sector not not on the government level so that top-off blast and all assets can be
a whole lot higher than people actually realize um And I think we're still seeing that.
So I try to look a little bit more like past the trees through the forest.
And so irregardless of what tomorrow is,
we are cutting when everything is at all time highs and there's no other way
around it. Like where, I mean,
I think there's a very little chance we're not cutting.
But you know,
how many cuts over the next year is more
important than I think what he actually says tomorrow and with the caveat saying, unless he
gives more guidance on like a new target for how we approach inflation targeting from the Fed's
perspective. It's a really great point. I hear, obviously, getting to host all these spaces,
a lot of smart people talk about, you know, different sides. And when I hear that, I hear cases made that, OK, we move the inflation target to 3%.
They finally maybe admit that one of these days, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not this year.
But I hear that case, and that sounds bullish for gold.
And then I hear other cases in different directions that also sound bullish for, I mean, I just, or Bitcoin as
well, not just gold, but for, for any anti-inflationary side of things, what's the main
thing that maybe you watch for? Because it seems like the different circles that I'm a part of,
it seems like everyone has a different reason to stay bullish, the, the anti-inflationary trade
and just continue to expect more and more money printing to go on.
Yeah, I mean, again, unemotionally it's scarcity, right?
You could look at land, you could look at certain commodities
that can't be replaced by other types of energy,
such as like uranium, but anything with true scarcity
profiles going up, we all know we feel inflation
at a much greater rate than what they print at.
So I think it's really all systems go.
I think the reason why Bitcoin is not at an all-time high is because of the bill that
was just passed.
And I think that actually further separates Bitcoin into the gold camp than the rest of
the crypto space.
I could argue that if you took the flows out of the ETFs, et cetera, that have been put into the market since the bill.
And you add those to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin would also back to be an all-time high,
but it was just a little bit of institutional capital saying,
okay, we finally as a government and JP Morgan put the stamp on,
you know, crypto as a technology platform for building on with Ethereum and Solana.
And that's very, very different than the store value from bitcoin and yeah you know we talked
so i think stocks to you talked about this earlier like yeah bitcoin doesn't feel like a store value
it moves every single day it's like don't you feel like you're losing money in your checking
account every single day at this point because i do like i fully feel like every dollar i have
my checking savings account i'm just losing value on
every single day um so it's just like what perspective you're looking at it um and I think
if you think about it like that like the swings that you see in bitcoin which we're already seeing
come in on volatility much much less the volatility is just dropping as it's getting
institutional adoption and why is that because like guess what you're not going to fire sale an
asset that's one percent of your portfolio if you're an endowment, right? Like that's not
going to be the force if there's like the 10% drawdown on an asset, right? We kept seeing
crypto shakeouts and Bitcoin shakeouts and we're like, oh, yep, people got greedy on all these
platforms and over leverage. And we just shook out a bunch of leverage on these platforms.
That's much harder than Harvard buying IBITs, You're not going to shake out Harvard's IBIT position. So you're seeing
just lower and lower volatility in the asset class. Yes, there will be a Bitcoin volatile
moment and it may be tied to crypto treasury companies at some point in the future.
And that will happen. But again, then we will just keep printing and scarcity will prevail and the actual derived asset itself bitcoin will will run up
because we have no other way but to print our way out of this you know to quote lynn alden like
nothing stops this train um we've been saying that for a year and nothing's changed you know people
ask me for a bear case a bull a bear case for bitcoin and gold uh in that for a year and nothing's changed. People ask me for a bear case for Bitcoin and gold in the fall last year and it was Doge.
I was saying, inflation's good, deflation's good, stagflation's good.
They all lead to printing except for Doge.
And as you alluded to earlier in this call, that has come and gone.
Elon has admitted he's spending very little time on that.
It is interesting.
It kind of goes to my point.
I just don't hear many bear cases on gold or Bitcoin, either one.
A little bit more maybe on Bitcoin.
But you mentioned the volatility stuff there, the institutional adoption and, you know, things kind of settling down a little bit.
down a little bit. We even have stock market news up here, Evan, who was, I would say,
We even have stock market news up here.
we like to joke that he was anti-crypto, but now it seems like he's even diving in a little bit
deeper. Sometimes you get a prompt from Evan when that happens right there. Gab, that was kind of
my last question that I have. The M2 money supply still interests me a lot. I didn know if either you or david had any thoughts around there gavin or you shared some before where the
the m2 money supply just keeps going up keeps going up and and the bitcoin probably or has
tracked it well and may actually play catch up that seems to be another bull case over there
yeah i posted this morning on the wolf page for anybody anybody that wants to see it, I'll pin it to the top of the space.
And basically, it was just showing that we really haven't seen this type of decoupling of Bitcoin to global liquidity in years.
If you go look at the chart, I just put it up top.
You can see Bitcoin is right around the 116, 120 level. But if you plot this on a chart of global M2 money supply,
you would almost expect Bitcoin to be at 200K at this point.
Sometimes there's a lag, right, that happens,
but often it really does follow with it.
So I think that I'm expecting a violent move upwards here
for it to catch up.
But I'm just curious, David,
what you think when you see that chart. You know, i've been doing the shows with you guys for a year and
i don't think i've once said i think bitcoin is trying to just rip because it's gone up but it
has like kind of steadily gone up but i i actually completely agree with you i think 165 185 mainly
because it's been repressed from allocators allocating a little bit to Ethereum and Solana and just rounding out their crypto portfolio.
As I always say, sometimes in crypto, it's like better to worry about getting beta than alpha sometimes in an asset class like this.
Just kind of get your beta.
So I think, again, this is coming from all the stablecoin stuff.
People just rounding out their portfolio,
and I think you can totally see this rubber band effect on Bitcoin,
and it could rip from here.
If it hits 125, who knows how high it goes in even the short run,
but it could definitely go north from there.
Again, there's just not a lot of people who want Bitcoin
who are going to be selling it.
Yeah, Taz, I saw your hand up there.
Hey, how's it going?
This is a really cool conversation.
A couple of things that I kind of wanted to throw out there and ask you a question on
is something that I like to track that's, I don't know, it's an interesting metric,
I don't know. It's an interesting metric, in my opinion. As someone who's a little bit more Bitcoin and crypto native than the average person, I like to track how 2021, you can get 33 and a half ounces, 34 ounces in November and so forth.
in my opinion.
And then right now, you can only get about 31 in change.
So, you know, when you look at the actual that ratio, Bitcoin is actually not performing as well.
However, you know, we're talking about how performance has gone and so forth. From that high in 2021, it went all the way down to nine, nine and a half or going, how gold is performing against and so forth.
Does that play any factor into it where it actually performs against each other?
Well, I mean, when they move in opposite directions is when you win in a leveraged ETF like this because you're not leveraging the same asset and it leads towards a rebalance.
Those peaks and troughs in the chart you're looking at are going to be rebalancing moments for us.
We're probably going to rebalance in between them as well.
But as they alluded to earlier in the show, we try to rebalance on a 5% drift.
So you let the assets drift a little bit.
We tend to rebalance like two to three times a week and more if there's creates.
So we'll always rebalance on a create day.
But we'll let it float a very little bit and harvest some of that volatility and then rebalance between the two.
So you're taking advantage of those swings when one outperforms the other, vice versa, relative to each other.
And again, that's why the beauty of this, the risk return of this is so interesting.
We have a paper on our website, QuantifyFunds.com, on the BTGD tab called The Case for Bitcoin and Gold.
We show a risk-reward chart of our product versus gold, Bitcoin, 2x gold, 2x Bitcoin.
We show sharp ratios, standard deviation, and returns.
You'll see we have right about 104% of the volatility of iBit.
Literally just 104% of the volatility of iBit alone just 104% of the volatility of IBIT alone.
And GLG's volatility alone is 18,
or same deviation is 18.
So we kind of like that gold position
without even adding that gold volatility
because of that chart you showed right there
and what we're balancing between that does.
You can look at that at like, you know,
in the 2010s, again, comparing, you know,
SPX to treasuries, and it would
probably look like a very similar chart to what you're looking at right now. The rebalancing
moments add huge value over time. But those peaks and troughs are opportunities to rebalance and
increase your return and minimize your volatility in the overall portfolio.
Yeah, it's really interesting how it swings
because like you said, if I go back even further,
if I look at 2017, it was 14 ounces ago to one Bitcoin
and it went all the way down to two and change.
So that had, I mean, if this was around then,
that had to be like a crazy
rebalancing moment. But as far as, you know, how it goes, I totally understand the profile
of someone who would say, all right, you know, these moves and so forth with Bitcoin, it's,
you know, not necessarily something I want to go into 100% a hold and be totally Bitcoin.
And then at the other side, someone who has a very low risk threshold or tolerance that
would say, all right, yeah, I definitely want gold, but I don't want to hold it physically.
I think it was stock market talk or whoever it was said that earlier that they have physical gold.
I see the benefit in this. But as far as the last thing I'll ask before I pass the mic again,
know pass the mic again the the i guess you'd say the the the person that is looking into this do you
see like a a certain demographic like like say uh a boomer an older person or you know obviously
gob is not but you know like where does it fall with the mix of people that you're seeing that
are showing the most interest in this or is it like a growing area anything of that nature i'd
like to kind of uh dig into that a little bit yeah i think anyone with a growth profile or an aggressive
growth profile this fits into whether you're old or young i think one of the policies we've seen
in the investment world is that a 65 year old retired boomer who has a good amount of wealth
wants all fixed income that's not the case If they have enough assets to have a minimal distribution rate, they still want growth.
They're seeing a lot more growth profile investors, especially in a world where we can't really trust
bonds. I mean, peak to trough, 30-year treasury has lost like over 50% over a three-year period.
So it's really that growth profile. And this's, you know, this vehicle can very well
be traded. It's a great tool, for example, to hedge a bet one way or the other on Fed day,
but also just as much can be allocated to. So this is, I see it as like anyone who's extending
the VU and chill or SPY and chill and kind of wants to add as Gab alluded to intelligently
structured leverage to your portfolio
where you don't have to hawk it every single day.
The vehicle you can just own and know that like,
hey, tariff tantrum, gold's probably rallying
and Bitcoin's probably dropping.
They're going to be rebalancing between the two.
I don't need to make those difficult trades
in those difficult moments.
Let's say for retailers,
like either do the full research on your individual stocks,
just like
you heard in a half hour leading up to this show, have a concentrated basket of probably
no more than 20 stocks, because it's hard for any research analyst to cover more than
20 stocks.
But find ways for the rest of your portfolio to work for you and focus on certain parts
of your portfolio that you think you can generate off of.
This is a good tool for that.
Great points there. Appreciate that. I know we're coming into the 30-minute mark. These times,
you know, these things always go by rapidly, but I'm pretty excited to see here just kind of the plot developing and people, I think, starting to really realize what is going on here
and what the power is. And this has got to be one of the best performing ETFs of the year,
would be my guess, especially for one. I understand that there's a type of leverage
being used here, but it's a little bit different than the double leverage, you know what I'm saying?
Yeah, we're definitely in the top few percentiles. And if you look at it from a Sharpe ratio
perspective, we're probably in the top 2% of all ETFs on Sharpe ratio.
And so when we hit our one-year anniversary in mid-October,
we can start doing total return comparisons.
We're not allowed to hit that one-year period.
I do think we'll be in the top 1% of our ETF assets
at our inception, which feels really good.
But also, if you've seen a lot of these emerging market economies and if you've seen the currencies
collapse, assets just kind of go to infinity.
So I do think it's almost been a straight lineup.
And I think we actually would have gotten more allocators if we had any big dips.
But I don't see any big dips in the collective of these two assets coming anytime soon.
Where are these budget deficits going to get cut?
And the only way we really get out of our deficit situation without having a recession and printing ungodly amounts of money is insane amount of productivity growth from AI.
And then the Fed at that point will probably be like,
let's just do a 3% inflation target
and erode the value of the dollar even quicker.
And these are two scarcity assets printing
at way less than 3%.
All right, guys, I always appreciate these shows.
I love this.
Thank you guys so much for all the support.
Please give us a follow at Quantify Funds
and check out some of our research at Quantify Funds.
We have
two new filings coming.
I'm hoping one of them
is the end of this week and then another one
midweek next week.
We have some really amazing things we've been
working on behind the scenes.
You guys have been with us from day one and and I can't thank you enough and been very
appreciative.
And please give us a follow and take a look at some more of our followings in the next
two weeks.
They're going to be coming out.
So we talked BTGD on this one, but I have a feeling our next space, we're going to be
talking some new products, but congrats on the success here. So excited to see this picking up
millions of dollars flowing in every single week. AUM has basically doubled since July area. So
it's really been a rousing success. Next time we talk to you, I assume this will be at a hundred
million AUM. And so again, to the audience, please do due diligence.
Full disclosure, again, I already have exposure.
I worked together with David,
but I really think this is one of those great assets
that everyone deserves to know about.
So David, thank you so much for coming on.
We're looking forward to the next one.
Thank you guys as always.
Love the show.
Going on today, anything else that you wanted to hit on?
Not sure who you threw that to the first
piece of that cut out just a little bit.
You've been cutting out.
Yeah, whenever you unmute, it's like
20 seconds. No, not even, like 30 seconds.
No, it's AirPods. It's so annoying. My sound's probably a lot better now, isn't it?
Oh, yeah. Yeah yeah way better now yeah yeah it's it's airpods can't deal with them um you should uh you should connect the meta glasses and talk through those honestly the sound probably is pretty
good when i do maybe i should try that more often it's not a bad idea but i was just i was throwing
it back to you and see if you had anything else to go over today i got actually a little um i got a paperweight for my desk and it's just a bar of gold not real
gold sadly but you know made me fond of this conversation get a real bar of gold you can
afford it go on go get a real bar of gold and use it a real bar just use it as my paperweight
don't don't put it in my safe or anything. Yeah, put it on your desk. Go on.
Put a gun in the drawer, too.
There you go.
Put a gun in the drawer, yeah.
Get a couple cigs in there.
You know what's up.
Yeah, a nice little cigar tray on the desk.
Gun in the drawer.
Gold bar on the desk as a paperweight.
Half a ribeye on the side.
We're cooking.
Yeah, dude, half. No, the plate. Half a ribeye on the side. We're cooking. Yeah, dude. Half.
The plate's got to be cleaned.
Just the bone.
The ribeye bone.
Just the tamag bone. No gristle on it.
You cleaned it.
And a bloody knife on the plate.
Just finished steak.
Cigars kind of like
half smoked.
We're painting the whole picture here
i i hope this is it this is the power spaces we paid vividly yo i saw you bought i saw you
bought that cable machine yo i did buy that cable machine dude i love cable machines i'm a big i
installed a full gym basically into my bedroom yesterday so it looked like a pretty good one i haven't
seen that brand but it looked like a pretty good one you got it did you get it like used or did
you get it for like a supplier brand new baby right from the store nice uh is that costco or
where'd you get it no i got it from uh there's a place called fitness for life san juan down here
in uh in puerto rico and i went to the store and they caught my eye look at
the pictures i just sent you stock talk how many machines you have in there so that thing all right
sorry to get into this for the audience i'll try to make it quick uh it's a fourth usa g12 if anyone
looks that up it's really quality so in it it has two 220 pound stacks that are hooked up to pulleys on
either side. And then you have all the attachments. So you have like basically a full on rowing
machine. You could do curls, you could do tricep extensions, you could do anything you want on
that side. You have one on each side, so you could put a handle on, you could do chest flies,
all that different stuff. It also has a full Smith machine built into it. And I have weights
for the full Smith machine.
Plus I got a separate Olympic bar also.
So I could use a free weight bar.
It's going to have a bench coming.
The bench has a preacher curl attachment,
a leg curl attachment.
It's got a full leg press attachment
that you can put onto it.
So it turns into a leg press as well.
It's got a pull-up bar built into it.
It's load bearing up to like a thousand pounds
um so yeah it's uh it's sick i think it's the full package to be honest yeah i didn't google
this thing it's incredible yeah so i got it all put together and well they delivered it and
installed it into my room so shout out here in your room bro literally wait listen i'll send you one more picture uh this is a wake
up go gym kind of picture this is a spare bedroom right just to clarify no no no your bed is beside
this dude what bro i will literally no this is sitting in gav's bedroom this is wake up this is
wake up i'm surprised you uh you didn't call anyone to help you set it up though they i gotta go to puerto rico now oh no i was gonna say i was gonna say i'm gonna go to puerto rico
and work on your gym but i don't want to work on your bedroom so i'm sorry i was gonna say it's
got a nice ocean view too so just saying um but yeah there you go i just pinned it to the top of
the space if anyone wants to see that is literally in my bedroom full gym and the ocean's outside so that bed looks
comfy it hasn't hasn't broken yet that is a comfy bed but i like that machine a lot yeah yeah jordan
helped me build the bed i feel baby that was a brutal night that took till like 3 a.m the bed
the bed after having to build those beds and go with me the mistake of not hiring someone i was like there's no way i'm trying to build this gym zero percent chance anyway that's my uh that's my latest investment
into my health that's sick yeah yeah dude i mean like i thought about it but like my building the
building i'm at right now in dallas has like a sick apartment gym that has everything
I need so it's like it's literally the floor below me so like I don't know I just haven't felt the
need to like do anything like that but yeah yeah I'm gonna go down to Puerto Rico check it out
I do gotta jump here but yeah come check it out in Puerto Rico.
It's going to be a good time.
All right, sounds good.
All right, we'll see you guys tomorrow.
Same time, same place.
Take it easy, everybody.
Bye-bye. Thank you.
