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DEADLINE DAY … TRADING USING ETFS with TradrETFs $MQQQ
Recorded: April 7, 2026 Duration: 2:34:41Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. what is up what is up everybody how are we doing give me some uh emojis down below in the chat if
you can hear me i hope you are all ready and excited for another day of Stocks on Spaces.
What's up, Mr. Options Mike?
We got you up here today.
I'm not getting kicked.
Oh, God.
Yesterday, I think every time I tried to log back in, it just kicked me right back out.
I was like, okay.
Are you on an iPhone or an Android?
An Android.
I hear that's part of the problem, sir.
Oh, I don't have an iPhone.
I'll see if I can find some other way to get around it.
But it worked well this morning.
Step one.
Step two.
Turn it on and off again.
Step three.
Basic technology hack is you just give it a little love tap.
The market is down today.
My ETF portfolio is down by one percent ish 1.02
qqq is down by one percent s&p 500 etfs are down by 0.7 really interesting actually going on in
the world right now what's up gw appreciate the thumbs up and everyone else um the NASDAQ 100 ETF, Invesco ETF, there is going to, there has really not been many NASDAQ 100 ETFs.
But for some reason, NASDAQ has given out the license to BlackRock and iShares and State Streets and their SPDR spider ETFs.
So there will be more NASDAQ 100 ETFs, which tells me the QQQ expense ratio is about to go from 0.18.
My read is it's going to be 0.03 within the next year or two,
which I think is a good sign for most people.
But there is going to be more NASDAQ 100-based ETFs incoming.
Interesting little tidbit.
Market is down.
My single stock portfolio, let's see if it's underperforming.
I saw Apple down pretty aggressively earlier. Down 1.9% the single stock portfolio. Apple, who was doing pretty well
yesterday or the day before that or whatever it was, down 3% today. Tesla down 3% as well. Google holding in a little green. BMNR down 4%.
Pain.
Rivian at 1450.
Interesting. UnitedHealth holding on to
its gains up 9.7%.
I was wearing my
UNHG hat, which is a 2X UNH
ETF. I was like, I haven't gotten many chances
to wear this. And transparently, I don't know if I want to wear
a UnitedHealthcare hat out in
the public. But, you know know at the desk when on a nice
green 9% UNH day it's it's not a bad day for it
let's see Powell is also up 6% today
it's actually kind of funny we'll see day. I appreciate everyone for joining us.
Today is deadline day.
Let's change the title to that.
Deadline day.
Day.
All right.
Give the second Mr. Brian London options, Mike.
The title's about to update in a second, but what do you think?
Rate my title.
Is it good to get people in, you think?
Sure.
I could have called it Taco Day.
That might have worked, too.
People are hungry.
It is Taco Tuesday.
It is Taco Tuesday.
Probably going to have some chicken for
dinner, though. But yeah, we can
jump into it. I appreciate everyone
for joining us. As always,
we've got 182 of you guys listening to
the little pre-show or whatever we want to call it here.
The little intro.
But yeah, as we're talking,
feel free to drop us any
questions that you guys have down below
in the chat. I would love to guide the conversation in whatever direction that you guys are interested for it to go.
It wasn't the busiest of news days, a couple partnership, whatever.
But obviously, it's a macro market.
It's a he said, she said.
It's a headline-driven market.
So we're waiting for some other stuff.
8 p.m. Eastern, there is a deadline.
The Truth Social post this morning was quite aggressive.
We're at an interesting point right now.
We'll give this Truth Social post a read from the morning.
It was, and this is not me.
This is a quote from the president.
A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.
I don't want that to happen, but it probably will.
So I don't know.
We'll see what ends up happening.
It's going on talking about energy infrastructure.
We've heard throughout the day of what their retaliation
might end up looking like.
We'll see.
But we are possibly on the precipice of escalation.
Maybe that's when it's darkest before the dawn.
Maybe that's when the pullback happens.
I think you have to ignore his messages like this.
I don't like them.
But it's not going to happen.
People out there are talking, he's going to
nuke them. He's not going to nuke them.
They're not going to take
out civilians
and civilian targets because
the generals aren't going to go for it.
That's war crimes type stuff.
He said what they're going to do.
They're going to destroy the energy and the civilian infrastructure.
But that's easy to do that.
I mean, great.
You're going to create another generation that's going to hate us for generations for the next couple generations.
He's trying to force them to come talk, and they're pulling his bluff, and that's what's going on here.
He's trying to force them to come talk, and they're pulling his bluff, and that's what's going on here.
He's getting more and more, the last couple of days, just more agitated.
Iran is just sitting there saying no.
Honestly, at the end of the day, I don't know what's going to happen here,
but I suspect it's not as bad as everybody wants to make it seem.
Because at the same time, if...
Go ahead.
I was just saying, the market's been strong relatively
in this time, which...
And again, we listen, war is one thing,
but we're here to talk about markets.
And that's why we're all here.
Well, the market is tied
to the war right now, unfortunately.
This is what I'm saying.
Markets don't necessarily care that much about war.
What they care about is energy and oil and the global economy. And I guess, you know, American markets do require stability at home, but I don't think that's in question here. It's the energy aspect of this. So we've talked about this, but this is a global energy conversation here, which is a global. For people who don't also know, this kind of shows the lifeline of
global economy as well.
I kind of suspect, Evan, we're going to get some kind of late-night
announcement from him that everything's fine.
They gave me what we wanted, we won, and we're done. And it's going to come out of nowhere.
I just kind of feel like that's where we're heading towards with this this and the market will rally like mad in the middle of the night on that
you know my read is my read is is he's definitely nothing's gonna happen tonight for sure what is
what i would say and it feels like uh if anything's gonna happen it would be over this weekend
and you get like a good two-week guy and then saturday or friday night we'll see but i don't
know we don't need to prognosticate in this direction We'll see. But I don't know.
We don't need to prognosticate in this direction.
We'll see what ends up happening.
We'll play the markets in front of us.
Yeah, it should be. Fix as high as of the day.
The market has been,
there was some relative overperformance
for a little bit of time,
and this week so far has been a little bit less so,
two days in a row of not so great.
We're kind of overlooking escalation i know yesterday was the lowest volume spy day in more than a year what is it so far for
today is there a little more volume or is it similar no it's pretty bad we're at 41 million
shares we're below average the market's waiting yesterday close to like 34 though or something
right right but yesterday i forgot it's kind of a holiday
Easter Monday for a lot of people is another holiday
They take it off, so I kind of forgot that
It is interesting that it was less than
That it was less than even half days
The volume on those
So, I don't know, but fair
Fair enough, combination of people waiting
Plus it being a holiday.
We shall see.
That is the overhang
that we are sitting on
in this market.
Monitiv, I see you down below.
You know I enjoy talking
some single stocks.
You should always feel free
to join us up here.
I sent you an invite.
But yeah. What are you guys thinking invite yeah if you what are you guys
thinking in the smart what are you guys watching today so are the options Mike
you've been even I did one trade today I traded Intel pretty quickly grabbed some
calls it didn't make much bit a couple hundred bucks and that's the only trade
I made today you know I I like to day trade and swing trade but this is when you're in
a headline-driven market like this it's just too tough there's constant headlines coming out and
you're moving against you and stuff or the market just suddenly moves hard one way or the other
because the algos but you know fire first ask questions later so i'm hoping we get some clarity
here tonight and the market decides where it wants to go. And hopefully we don't, you know, I really hope we don't kick the can down the curb again and say, well, I'm going to extend another five or 10 days because I just, you know, that's just going to drag it out.
So I honestly, not much today.
I will say I think the semi is held in much better today.
Av goes up bigly with that deal with Google.
Google up nicely with it.
The semi is held in well today.
Energy obviously has been strong with oil hitting $117 a barrel here today.
Palantir had a decent day.
But overall, the market just left a lot to be desired.
It was really just pretty much a choppy mess.
A lot of red.
There is that moment, AVGO being one of the green ones.
Intel was a little green
they had a deal with
Tesla this morning
in that little pocket
SpaceX right?
or Tesla and SpaceX
Tesla, SpaceX
all of them
yeah yeah
Elon Musk
Liputon is a great deal maker
got everyone on board
Intel
I mean I guess they're in
they're in a hot area
where people need them, but...
A lot of deals.
Is that something you watch, Monitif?
You an Intel watcher?
You an Intel stock owner?
How long do you spend that Intel?
No, I unfortunately sold it a while ago, so I don't have any Intel.
I sold it, actually before uh trump announced
his stake so i have not got back in i have traded it is that me or him
him rough and i got booted too
so I don't know
interesting time
apparently there's some
Adobe news right now
what's happening to this stock
X is announcing
a photo editor
and that's making
Adobe move down
apparently
what do you guys
think of Adobe stock
is that one of the
software names
that's kind of cooked
to where we survived and what's the market cap here 96 billion interest i you know that's not
on my list of names to buy i think that one's just under way too much pressure and it's too
much competition too much easily replaced and they don't do anything they're great for photo editing but everybody's doing video now and it's just like okay the great thing about uh using technicals is
you don't have to make that decision right you don't have to decide if adobe's cooked you can
just say well it's 43 off it's 52 week high it's 65 off the all-time highs the market now as we sit
here at this exact moment, thinks it's cooked.
That could change tomorrow. It could change
next week. But fortunately,
we don't have to or I don't have to make a decision
on whether that's right or wrong.
Just wait until technicals
change.
So it makes things a lot
easier.
What would you want to see Adobe retake?
I mean, this is like
five year lows.
Yeah, I mean,
Adobe would have to do...
How about reclaim the 50 days,
something it's really been struggling to do
for the last year plus?
Yeah, I mean, Adobe would need
weeks, if not quarters
of good technical action
to even get my interest. I mean,
I mean, look, this sounds kind of flip. But when I always talk about whenever we're in a pullback
or a correction, whatever, and people are freaking out, I say, look, there's a series of things that
have to happen to give us, you know, each one gives us incremental confidence that the pullback
or the correction's over. The very first thing, the very first thing
is it has to stop going down in price. Okay. So when Adobe stops going down in price, when it
stops making, you know, lower lows and lower highs, that will be the first part of the process. And
then there will be a whole series of other things that we'll have to do, but it would have to show
that over an extended amount of time. because right now what the market is saying is
structurally adobe is broken right it's saying like this is like to use your words it's cooked
so in order for me to get a sense that it's not cooked it would need some extended positive
price action so um and by the way if it's not cooked and it's going to go back to the all-time highs, which all-time highs are like 700 and it's trading at 236, you're going to have plenty of time to ride that train and ride that trend.
So right now, it's not even worth paying attention to in my book.
Thanks for using my lingo, sir.
Yeah, yeah. I think Monitiv agrees as well. Thanks for using my lingo sir. Yeah.
I think Monitiv agrees as well.
Yeah.
Sorry.
The app has been creating hell for me.
It's just blowing up every few minutes.
Do you have an iPhone?
I don't know.
No, I have an Android.
All right.
I'm a Google guy.
Come on.
There's a common theme here though.
That's okay.
I would rather take that pain than switch out of Google's OS.
But anyway, I agree with Brian.
Look, they're looking for a new CEO.
They're structurally so badly broken.
They're not the leader in software SaaS anymore.
So you probably need the industry to recover first. Then you
need some excitement around new management and then
probably Adobe recovers. But like Brian said, you're
going to have a lot of opportunities to get back in. So it's
probably one of the last SaaS ones of
decent quality
that I'd rush into.
It's there's plenty of time, 100% agree.
You know, Stock, we'll go a little rapid fire around here.
With Stock, I just got a notification for it
being up 5% is CrowdStrike.
Cybersecurity, there's this anthropic headline
or something there.
I don't know if this is just them trying to market their new model and be like
guys the step changes here fantastic marketing they got a lot of people
scared but there's a lot of talks around cybersecurity right now today and
dropping to a partnership with everyone trying to let them train on the new
models to make sure they can protect against certain stuff is what they were
saying maybe you can explain it better but crowd strike stock now about five percent but still expensive but it is special they are growing like
a weed still but uh i think i think they have the support of the entire cyber security sectors
industry is probably going to do you know just fine against anything from ai in any recent uh
you know in any short term right so it's not it's not an industry that's likely to be impacted
uh crowd strike being one of the leaders i think uh is less impacted than smaller players which
have you know issues with slower growth and uh you know and small market share so so i think
they'll be the ones buying and building up their business um i like crowd strike i it's a little
expensive for my taste i'm not buying it but it's probably uh you know has a good place in the
portfolio here if you want to add you know positions in in software right in in sas but but i like the sector in
general i prefer palo alto um i've been adding a little bit of zs just just just for you know
starters but but i have a good size position in palo alto now and i expect to you know keep adding
to that i still have my cisco position uh anytime it dips below 80 i buy a little bit
i it's all there's already a significant long-term position now and i trade around that i i like cisco
i still think it's very cheap and i think they are not getting the credit they should for reigniting the growth there and running a really tight ship.
So I like Cisco.
So I like Cisco Palo Alto.
Did you buy some Cisco this morning?
I did not today.
I was looking.
I did add a swing trade yesterday.
What did I do?
Or the day before.
One of these very recently, last few
trading sessions I bought a, wait, what was that? So I bought a-
Is this all-time high for Cisco?
No, 86 was the all-time high.
Interesting.
And we've got some breaking news here pakistan prime minister requests trump extend
the deadline by two weeks it's guys i mean i i heard uh option mike speaking as i came in
i 100 agree with him but but it's the third wheel problem it's not that US is actually not trying. It's just that Israel has a mind of their own.
Even today, they were bombing. While we were in that waiting period for Trump to make that final
call on whether Iran had given enough to make a deal, Israel was still bombing. So I don't think the US is driving this at all. So to
look at Trump to make that call, we should be looking
to see if Israel is serious about pulling back. If not,
this is not going towards peace. It's going towards
whatever they called it, destruction of the
Iranian civilization or whatever the heck it, destruction of the Iranian civilization,
or whatever the heck it was called last night.
That's how I see it.
This is really not U.S. driving anything here.
Or at least the agenda vastly varies between Israel and the U.S.,
and we're going to be left cleaning up the mess afterwards.
But before I forget, I want to let you know, I bought some KEMQ.
I actually bought KWeb also and I'm taking a deeper look at all of the Chinese stocks
and probably will add in some size soon here.
Interesting.
I think my take is China's far better prepared if you're going to get messier than almost any other large economy in the world.
Interesting. Why do you think that?
I mean, they have a lot of oil and energy and gas exposure from that direction,
but I guess they have friendly relations where they would be able to get stuck through.
The market is ripping off this headline.
Well, friendly relations or not i i think they have one
well for one you know they have the ability to push through policy decisions even if they're
tough and they don't feel the pain from the electorate or anything like that so so decisions
can be made for long term for you know for their strategic goals to uh you know we're we're coming out of
this damage internationally and china's going to try and fill those holes at least marginally even
if not you know even if not holy right so so they are trying to make deals everywhere
um and they're not looking for you know all-encompassing trade deals they're trying to
make you know industry by
industry deals or just a deal at a time it doesn't matter what but they're out there marketing you
know what they need to do for their businesses and for their you know strategic interests so
i i think well anyway it's just a theory right so? So my thesis is they're going to do well.
But I was pretty impressed.
I went and spent a lot of time learning about the KEMQ digger,
and it is pretty diversified, though a lot of it is Chinese.
I think it is a lot of interesting plays, so I took a stake in it.
Not much, but starter, right?
So we'll see.
Thank you for that.
Honestly, well, let me know.
We'll talk on it.
I'm curious on some more questions or comments
or anything you may have.
I'm looking through this.
He actually posted a tweet.
C.M. Shabazz is the...
I apologize.
I probably... You know, name's never my strong point.
But I'm trying to go through it.
Diplomatic efforts for peaceful settlement of the ongoing war in the Middle East are progressing steadily.
This is, by the way, from the prime minister of Pakistan, where a lot of these negotiations have been ongoing.
negotiations have been ongoing.
So he's saying diplomatic efforts
are going on strongly
and powerfully with the potential to lead
to substantive
results in the near future.
To allow diplomacy to run its
course, I earnestly request
President Trump to extend the deadline
by two weeks.
And there's just a couple more
there. But
request them to open the straight of her moves
for the corresponding period of two weeks
is a goodwill gesture.
Markets are giving back a little bit
of the initial gain there,
but they're still moving higher.
Options Mike, good call on this one.
You take a trade off of that.
Do you ever trade in the second half of the day?
Yeah, I just caught TQQQ.
I grabbed a bunch of shares on that pop.
Do you think news is important for trading?
Do you enjoy trading some news?
Well, news provides momentum, right?
So whether it's earnings or an upgrade or a downgrade or something going on with the stock or they guide up or guide down news provides
momentum into an aim you know one of the things i know we're looking at here is we're talking about
going from quarterly reporting to uh biannually twice a year and i you know and i get it because
i don't think the i do think the companies do not need to worry about you know hitting their number
every three months it's tough but it also takes momentum permanent because you know hitting their number every three months it's tough but it also takes momentum from an
end because you know earnings provides a tremendous amount of momentum in names and you know not just
upon its release but you know for a period after that so you know i i do love news yes
i agree news is a good time yeah but you know so this is this is interesting you know so yeah it's likely
we're going to get some extension i would i would say at this point it's likely that we're going to
get some extension here tonight um only if they reopen the straits and by the way i thought that
was a great request by the pakistani pm there they have to reopen the straits during that period
you know so everybody gets something
they want and we have time for things to work and honestly i think a country like china just
needs to step in at this point and until iran this needs to stop you know we've been supporting
you but we're not going to support you anymore if this doesn't stop and i think everybody just
wants out and be done with this and then we we start earnings season next week, Evan,
with Goldman Sachs on Monday
morning and Netflix next Thursday.
I'm excited for
earnings season. It gives us a good time
on the spaces. I need to make sure I'm prepared for it as well.
I can get us some cool people.
Does that mean you're going to be drinking heavily this weekend?
Always.
Always.
What's your go-to drink?
You seem like... You and Brian Lund seem like whiskey type of guys
or scotch or whatever it is.
I do enjoy a good scotch
wine.
I don't drink all that much anymore.
I really, really
reduce my drinking, but I do enjoy
a good scotch or a nice glass of wine.
And a martini. Definitely love a good martini.
Mr. Brian Lunds, what's the go-to drinker?
Do you have any thoughts on how you play tonight or tomorrow?
Well, I think that's another thing that needs to happen, too.
They need to reign in Israel at this point.
You need to say enough.
Stop.
All right. So I like Uncle – or sorry, I almost said Uncle Mike.
Sorry about that.
It's like I'm in a little bit of a fallow period for drinking right now. But when I do drink,
drink uh it's always a craft beer and it's preferably uh a saison or a farmhouse ale
which is like a belgian type of beer so there you go i'm curious everyone down below what's
your go-to drink we won't we won't stick on this too much maybe we'll uh read it again a little
later on but i'm curious in the comment comments section, bottom right, Purple Eight,
what's your go-to drink?
Mr. Bronlund, markets, are you watching anything on this headline here?
Are you watching anything for tonight?
Do you trade overnight futures at all,
or are we just waiting for tomorrow, really, at this point for you?
So, you know, my attitude is, so like a couple of weeks ago, I launched a new thing called the Saturday cut.
I put it out every Saturday. It's free.
You can get it by just going to the loan loop.com.
And I talk about every, every week.
I talked about three concepts that are kind of evergreen that you can make part of your
process, whether you're a trader or investor. And a couple of weeks ago, I talked about one.
And the theme is that the market doesn't owe you activity. Not every market environment is built
for constant action. And that's unfortunately the part that people struggle with. They come in
with an idea how they want to trade, right? Active, engaged, constantly doing something. And then they try to force that approach onto
whatever market shows up. But the thing is the market sets the terms, not us. So when the
conditions aren't aligned with that sort of style, you have two choices. You can fight it and you can
scrape for small gains. You can stay glued to every tick and you can turn trading into a full-time stress event.
Or you can set back and wait for the kind of setups that actually fit your approach.
Most people, they want activity because it feels productive.
But it isn't.
It's just noise dressed up as effort.
Now, I'm not talking about someone like Mike or other pros that this is what they do.
But I think for the average person, there's nothing wrong with doing less.
In fact, I would argue that doing less is often the right move because if the environment
doesn't support your edge, the best decision is just to adapt and do something else.
And so that's what I've been doing is being very slow and deliberate
in building some longer term positions and things that I think are going to be long term winners
that are maybe having some short term pressure names like poet names like bros, you know, some
of the the anduril adjacent names, I've been selling puts very slowly.
And if the stocks go down to those levels by expiration, I'm picking up a tranche at a lower cost basis.
If they don't, I collect the premium and rewrite the puts.
But I'm in no hurry because I just don't think the market we're in at this moment is conducive to the type of trading I like, which is swing trading.
So to answer your question, yeah, I'm watching.
I'll watch what happens tonight,
but I'm really not trying to trade off of news flow
and I'm not trying to trade off every tick.
I'm just being patient and taking a little bit more
of a holistic view of the markets.
That's fair.
For the degenerate prop firm traders out there use code wolf at your
favorite prop firm get a good discount have you ever said that's not fair when someone's done
have you ever said that's not fair yeah sometimes i'm one or two days i'm argumentative you are
you know it's funny you you get in these little modes every now and then where you're kind of uh
a little sassy it happens you know so like i'd say 10 to 15 percent of the time i'll say that's not fair
i'll come in that's a fair that's a fair mix yeah i'd say that's fair sassy like that
sassy boy does happen every once in a while it's not i don't know if that's the word I'd go for, but it was good to use.
Okay, we're just going to move on.
Dark Talk, do we have you here?
Yep.
How are you doing?
What's up, what's up?
How's Leo?
He's good.
He was just being a baby, and I was worried about it yesterday.
So I took him to the vet, but, yeah, he's fine. He was just fake limping. and I was worried about it yesterday. So I took him to the vet, but yeah, he's fine.
He's just fake limping.
What type of dog is Leo?
He's a Lab.
Oh, like a chocolate Lab?
He's a yellow Lab.
Well, he's kind of yellow and white.
His mom was like a, I don't know what you call them,
but she was like a pure white Lab.
Like her coat was all white.
His dad's coat was all yellow.
So he's like half and half a little bit.
That's a great breed.
I love Labs.
Yeah, I love Labs.
Yeah, they're great dogs for the most part.
Besides when he's being a little crazy, but that's part of the game.
It is part of the game.
Well, I'm glad he is doing okay.
I did see you talking about the market here. I don't know.
Obviously, it's been...
We don't normally do stocks on spaces on a Friday,
but it still does feel like we missed an extra day here.
Maybe yesterday is playing a little bit apart to that.
But I don't know.
Any comments when I get in?
But there was just that headline that came out here
in the last 10 minutes or so.
Possible off-ramp to what he was saying tonight.
I did see you tweet it as well.
I don't know if you have any thoughts.
Just in general, Theron.
Yeah, I mean, like I said the last couple of weeks,
I'm not doing anything until the markets I think have stabilized,
which I don't think has stabilized yet.
I have a pretty simple barometer for that,
which I've mentioned many
times. It's just, I want the indexes to be trading above the 50 and 200 day moving averages.
And when the indexes are doing that, and by the indexes, I mean SPY and the QQQ. That's all I
really care about because I trade stocks that fit into the purview of those indexes. I don't care if there's like a random derivative index,
like in this case, XLE or XLI or XLP. If they're trading above their moving averages,
that's irrelevant to me. I want the major indexes where most of the liquidity and most of the market
cap is, I want them to be trading above their moving averages and they're not and so until that happens i
maintain a defensive tone um not necessarily defensive positioning i wouldn't describe my
positioning really as defensive but that's largely because a lot of the stocks that i own have done
fine this year in spite of the chop right like? Like my three biggest positions are VIAV, AMCOR, and Inertia Systems. They've all held up very well this year. I mean,
VIAV has doubled. AMCOR is, I think, flat year-to-date. Inertia is up like 17% or 18%
year-to-date. So my top three positions, which are about 45% of my portfolio, have done fine.
And so I haven't felt the need to sort of run out of my stocks during the chop,
but I also haven't felt the need to go chase new opportunities during the chop either, because
I don't think it's been a great environment for sustaining swings, right? You get these gap ups
and then you get retraces back, whether they're low or high volume retraces, you get retraces back to the bases.
And so I think there's setups that you can trade in the short term.
I don't think there's amazing setups to swing here outside of a handful of industries like photonics has done well, memory has done well.
I have indirect exposure to photonics with the avi
so i don't really feel like i'm locked out of that trade or anything um but yeah outside of that i
just haven't there are stocks i want to buy i just haven't been inclined to buy them yet and you know
that'll that could change for me very rapidly. If this situation in the Middle East
resolves over the next week or two weeks, I'll probably change my tune and buy some stocks.
But until then, I'm keeping a pretty neutral stance, neutral to defensive stance on new
positions in the market. And that'll be kind of the same thing you hear from me. I'll sound
like a broken record, really, until the major indexes have recovered. And I care much more
about that, by the way, than I do about all the headlines. Like, I know a lot of people are
sitting around wondering, like, what does this headline mean? What does this headline mean?
What could happen because of what this guy said? I don't
think as much about that. Like, I'm down to talk about that stuff. And obviously, we talk about
that on the show and in other places, for the sake of, you know, intellectual discourse or
entertainment or whatever. But for the sake of like, actionable insights, I don't think that any of that is really actionable. Headlines are
usually not contextualized. They're usually only part of the story. All of us on the outside,
I mean, none of us are in the high levels of the US government or the Pakistani government or the
Iranian government. If you're not in the high levels of those governments, you don't actually
know what's happening. You only know what you're being told through leaks generally, and that to intentional leaks.
Let's say we did send our Wolf Analyst, Sam Solid, Sam Badawi, to the region to get more information.
There you go.
But, I mean, even if you have people in the region which you know i guess there's people out
there that are sending people to the region so trini sent um you know somebody that's straight
or four moves and that's cool and fun but it's more entertainment than anything uh even if you
have somebody on the ground in those areas you do you you don't have somebody in um the government
offices of the people that are in charge of these negotiations and i'll put negotiations in air
quotes and so if you don't have access to that sort of privileged information,
your hope of deciphering what's actually happening in this conflict, I think, is pretty low. So
as a consequence of that, I defer to the charts here, right? I defer to the collective intelligence
of the market here to tell me when it's all clear, to tell me when there's a green light. And the market
has not yet given that green light, right? I mean, you can see the action is very telling,
right? We come up, we rally into these overhead moving averages. And then the next day you get
bad news or disappointing news and you get the indexes down 0.3, 0.4, 0.5%. But that's all it
takes to constitute a rejection. And same thing happened
this morning. Like, yeah, we've had a lot of intraday volatility today with wicks up and down,
but for the most part, yesterday, we almost recaptured that 200-day, and then today you get
a little bit more pressure to set you back into the chop. So I don't know.
It's not an environment where I think it's overtly actionable.
And it's not an environment where I think you can really capitalize on trend,
which is where most of the money is made in markets.
I think trend-following systems are the most lucrative.
I think trend-following systems are the most consistent in terms of paying you.
And if you're a trend follower, and it's only one type of strategy, you can be a trend follower as
a short-term trader, you can be a trend follower as an investor, you can be a trend follower as a
swing trader. It doesn't only fit one type of strategy. But if you are a trend follower,
you know that this isn't a trending environment, right? This is a choppy environment.
you know that this isn't a trending environment, right?
This is a choppy environment.
And until that resolves itself,
I just prefer to sit on my hands.
And, you know, I've got stocks loaded up that I want to buy.
I have a watch list of five or six names.
Right now I'm kind of narrowed in on two names.
And I want to buy them, but I'm exercising discipline until I feel like the opportunity is consistent across the market.
And I can actually approach them with confidence and size and not have to worry about being chopped out on a headline.
So that's the way I'm thinking about markets at this time.
And until the situation
resolves itself, I don't think the indexes will resolve themselves. So maybe they are connected
in that way. But either way, I'm going to defer to the price action to tell me when we're in the
clear and not some headline. And so I guess that's the difference in the way I'm acting from how a
lot of people are acting here. But yes, I'm paying attention to the news.
Yes, I'm attempting to sort of keep a floating opinion about what's going on.
But I'm not acting on it because when I look at the market and I look at the price action,
the market is telling me that it is indecisive about what's going on.
And I certainly defer to the intelligence of the market.
I think the market's much smarter than I am or than anyone is.
And so until the market is satisfied with the conditions that are presented, whether that's a ceasefire or withdrawal of U.S. troops or an escalation or a de-escalation, whatever the case is, until that happens and the market tells me, hey, this is good enough.
Let's rally. The index is back above the 200 day. Then I'll be like, OK, I'll buy stocks. But we're not there yet. So I'd like to get out of this environment. It is kind of boring for me to sort of sit around. But I do have a nice cushion on this year. So I don't mind waiting if I have to rather than just being undisciplined. But yeah, I mean, I wish I had
more insight to give than that. That's really what I'm thinking at this time. I mean, it's
pretty straightforward. The indexes have not yet given me the all clear signal. And until they do,
I'll sort of be sitting on my hands. And I understand there's people out there that are
thinking, well, enough's enough. The markets have acted decently for the past four or five sessions. We strung together four days of green prior to today.
Like, isn't that enough for you to see? And the answer to that is no, because, you know,
all of that action has failed to reclaim any significant levels. And so until that happens,
I can't just pretend like I know what's going to
happen. I can't sit around like a prophet saying, yeah, I mean, we're going to take out the 200 day
tomorrow. I have no idea. I have no idea what happens tonight or what happens a week from now.
And I think a lot of people, especially new traders who enter environments like this,
who enter geopolitical conditions like this, they expect
more experienced traders and more experienced investors to be able to know what's going to
happen. You know, I get questions from people in our community like, well, what's going to happen?
Do you think that the Strader Vormuz will reopen? And if you do, then like, why aren't you buying
stocks? Like, no, I don't know. I don't know if it's going to reopen. I don't know when it's
going to reopen. And I don't know what the conditions will be under which it will reopen. And even if it does,
I don't know how long it'll take oil to get back below 100 bucks. And that may be the condition
that markets need to rebalance and to restabilize. Markets may want to see oil come down back to
below 100 bucks. I don't know. I don't know. And so what I can do at this juncture is just say, I am not in the Bureau of Privileged Information here. I'm not an executive
in any of these governments. And because of that, I have to wait until the market gives me the all
clear signal. And so that's what I'm doing.
Do you want to test Sam Solid?
Do we have you?
I was surprised to see him here.
He's actually on vacation right now. I'm here.
I'm here.
Ironically, I am actually pretty close to the crazy acting going on over here on the coast of Egypt right now. So just like across Saudi Arabia,
I'm like right there. But other than that, I mean, it's a peaceful country. So I don't really,
no one really talks about it. I don't really hear about it over here. So, you know, maybe just
because I don't speak, I don't speak Arabic, but might lose reception here because I'm in the
elevator. Not a stock talk loss of reception. I think I might want to hunt through the floor or anything, but my thoughts are pretty much very similar. I'm not trying.
I'm really not trying to focus too much on it. Mostly because I'm just trying to enjoy the trip
right now. But you know, this is pretty much the type of work that I'm into. I enjoy reading the
marks all the time, but it's been pretty fulfilling. The fact that I don't really have to do much
right now because there's really nothing to do
other than get caught in the chop and lose money.
So for me, just trying to observe what's happening and got a little bit excited the other day.
But I said the stop loss is pretty tight there just to make sure I take profits in case things
do pull back and they did.
So I was able to profit a little bit, but nothing too substantial at all.
Other than that, I mean,
some of the stocks that I'm in are leading pretty nicely lately. One of my larger positions,
Marvell Technology. I've been in that one, got in around 90 bucks. That one's performing well.
They actually had really good earnings and they're part of the photonics play from
an indirective stance. And also I've been in Fastly, which is more of an inference play as well.
So if you look at a lot of the inference, the inference stocks out there, Cloudflare,
DigitalOcean and so on, they've actually been performing quite well, been quite resilient.
Any brutal downfall that is before the software pullback we had when they bought them and IGV
bought them, but they haven't really been staying back like most of the market. And then of course, Nebius is just unstoppable in this environment.
Like I don't even know why people are bidding this thing up so hard. We're trading back
to where we're around last October. It is understandable why there will be excitement
and hype around it, but given in this current market environment, I can't tell you that
I would be buying over here at all. The time to buy was probably in the higher to mid double digits.
I can't really speak for that in terms of buying there, but my average in this one is
in the 20s.
So doing pretty well in this one.
And like other positions, I like to just build my position and then just hold on to it.
Same thing goes with Zeta.
So the other side is that,
oh, we're seeing some things in the newswire come in over here. Other side of Zeta is that I'm right
of the position, but I am okay with that because I size the position correctly. And this is more
of a higher conviction play. And look, it's about 5% of my portfolio now, given that it's a little
bit of a drawdown, but I'm okay with that happening because other positions that I'm in are still green year to date. So still performing quite well. I'm not up
50%, 40% year to date like StockSock, but at least I'm somewhat green over here year to date,
given the bounce we've seen in the last few days. And some of the higher concentrated stocks are
continuing to push higher in the midst of this uncertain,
crazy environment I've been.
Like this is just, it's very nauseating because I focused so much on the price action last
year and trying to bring that over to this year after the first six weeks of the year
where everything was forming sober, we thought we were so bad.
We certainly were not back at all.
And I approached this one quite different.
It definitely is a lot less stressful than a year ago.
A year ago, trying to call the bottoms,
trying to do some hard DCAs on the way down,
kept thinking this is the bottom, this is the bottom.
This year, not really.
Not trying to guess where the bottom is in size.
Of course, I do like to kind of look at the charts
and try to think in terms of macro,
like, hey, maybe Trump might do X, or maybe he might do Y. But of look at the charts and try to think in terms of macro, like, hey, maybe this is, maybe Trump might do X or maybe he might do Y.
But I think at the end of the day, it really doesn't matter what he does.
It's how the markets can react.
Because let's say tonight he invades them and we end up green tomorrow.
And nothing's really changed since then, other than the fact that he did end up sending the
troops in, right?
So people are going to take that story.
They're going to spin it around in some narrative saying like, well, now that means that the war is over because he
already had his heart attack. So everything's gonna be good now. It's like, well, okay, so what if it
was the other way around? It'd be a completely different narrative. Probably better just to wait
and see how the market's going to react to certain situations. I think I've heard time and time again
from StockTalk and a few other people, a few other pro traders that I've talked to, is that, look,
don't try to anticipate what's going to happen in the market. Just react, right?
And if there's anything to react, it is until we get a meaningful recovery on the markets. If you
look at stocks that are outperforming on a relative basis, these stocks are continuing to push higher,
staying above their nine EMAs. And a lot of them are out there. It's just unfortunate that the ones
have been riding pretty high, like a lot of retail names, are just not.
And unfortunately, that is what a lot of people
try to focus on,
saying things are a generational buying opportunity,
or I hope this pulls back more
so I can buy more and so on,
which there is nothing wrong with.
But just for me personally, I'm not,
I don't like to do that anymore
because guess what happens when you go all in,
you run out of cash,
and the stock continues to fall down.
You have to buy more.
You have to put new money in your account.
You have to buy more.
And that is frustrating.
I don't think there's really anyone in this world saying like, oh, I don't care if this
stock keeps dropping because I know this is the best opportunity in the world.
No one has that absolute certainty as to what's going to happen with their stock or what's
going to happen to their company.
And that's the reason why you have a diverse basket of positions in the portfolio to reduce
that risk.
And anyone who's gotten full port on a position and went in their favor, maybe it's not luck,
but maybe there's a possibility that could have went the other way around and you won't
hear from those people.
So I would just say that in this type of environment, be careful what you buy. Make sure you're at least writing certain themes that
are out there. I personally don't think the AI trade is over, but macro is the front and center
here. You can come up with any earnings like Axon came out with, Axon Enterprise came out with an
amazing earnings last quarter and they gapped up like 20%. And today, they got rejected off the
100-day moving average, and they dropped all the way back to before their earnings, below where
they were for the earnings. Take TTD, for example, the trade desk. You had Jeff Green, the CEO,
buy $150 million worth of shares. The stock gapped up almost 20%, it was about $30.
We are back below from where he bought
right
there's so many other
examples out there
don't chase
the stuff
that happens
wait till it comes to your level
and buy it if you want to
go ahead
I'm thinking
it's
I'm trying to say
how I'm going to word this
for me
AI is very clearly
one of the most
important
shift changes one of the most important shift changes,
one of the most important technologies that we'll see.
I feel like humanoid robots, and not even just humanoid robots,
robotics, autonomy, all that stuff are derivatives of AI,
derivatives of the same thing.
I don't know who's going to win this race,
but it's a race that I probably want to have all my money invested towards
for the next couple decades.
It feels like at least a decade type of thing.
It feels like something that's here now.
Space travel is something I really want,
and this whole theme is something I really want.
It feels like there's more time in that one.
AI feels like...
I believe Jensen, when he says we're in year three of a
seven to ten year build out.
I firmly do believe
the time for AI is this
decade.
I agree, and that's the reason
why tech continues to lead.
Tech is continuing to outperform
on a longer term basis.
We've had a very weak time period for the first few months.
And what we have today is that tech is underperforming in the year.
But just because you're underperforming,
even if it's double digits versus leading sectors,
look back on the last three years.
It's just consolidating.
It's a massive outperformance.
It's just consolidating.
Now, is it going to continue?
Well, that's the best question. I mean, if someone can tell you that they know for certainty
when something's going to happen, you got to be careful who you're following because
you don't, no one knows with certainty. It's all a probabilities game. So anyways, as you're
talking about tech, I'm actually, I actually want to kind of switch the conversation discussing
some other macro plays that I've been more involved in versus just versus just tacking isolated micro trades that gold is
a pretty good has been something that I have a small position in, but I've traded that
a few times in the last few weeks with success.
It's been in a fairly large range, about a 200 point range, and it's moving positively correlated to the markets, but more negatively correlated to oil, which has been pretty interesting.
But gold historically does rise on a correlation as the dollar drops.
And the dollar is finding its resistance here around $100 can't seem to break above it, which is good news.
It's good news because gold is a currency that currency that is paired with the US dollar. And it isn't
a direct one to one relationship when it comes to the DXY. But overall, as a dollar does get
cheaper or as a dollar does get weaker against the other five paired currencies, you start to
see the dollar depreciation and people head toward things that are more inflationary
focused or inflationary hedge, and that would be gold. And it's been on a massive run. I believe
that it's still on a second of the run. Am I going to be able to ride this wave? I don't know.
We'll see. But when you're playing with futures, it can be pretty dangerous because there's a lot
of leverage involved. However, a small risk parameter can go a long way when it comes to the secular move.
So I remain bullish in gold.
I haven't tried to short oil because I did not think we would be all the way up here
and oil and the market would not find its way much lower.
But here we are today.
I would imagine, though, that if we do come to some sort of deadline pushback or resolution,
that we're likely going to see sort of deadline pushback or resolution,
that we're likely going to see oil pull back a little bit.
But continued escalation is very likely oil is going to stay up here.
And again, I don't, I honestly, if you, even if you ask the best macro traders, I don't
think all of them can really give you a solid answer that like, oh, hey, oil is actually,
it's actually going to drop below a hundred bucks.
It's going to drop below $100. It's going to drop below $90 or something like that.
I mean, look, oil's at $112.
It's been above $100 for the last,
what's my chart saying over here?
How long has it been above $100?
It's been above $100 for two, three weeks now, right?
I don't believe this is sustainable,
but the market disagrees with me,
so I'm not going to fight that trade right if oil wants to stay
above 112 bucks then so be it like it it seems pretty risky to fight a medium term trend in the
opposite direction if you're trying to follow it's better to follow those trends however I'm looking
at gold did this that this has been on a very positive trend for the last couple of years now. And I don't think it's done yet.
At the same time, do your own due diligence. I think gold is more of a technical trade than
anything. Very difficult to find sustenance on a fundamental perspective of this. It more follows
technicals than anything, but it's definitely part of a positive trend right now. So
that's just something I'm looking at.
I was looking at some oil companies lately.
Larry, did you – I did see Larry come up here.
I don't know if you were muting to talk about gold there at all.
No, no, Sam can keep going.
I can hop in after he's done.
Nah, dude, go for it.
I know you've got some modeling.
I'm actually pretty interested to hear
about something you came up with.
Yeah, so I guess...
Go ahead.
I'm curious, is gold something you watch at all?
Yeah, I watch all commodities.
So I think right from a...
From a, if you look at like a technical view, you can even just call it like market regime analysis.
If you look at a technical view,
you can even just call it market regime analysis.
With gold, copper, silver, metals in general, there's just an inflationary trade that's working overall.
And I think for me, I don't try to just overcomplicate getting into just like one name and then beat it with a dead horse.
I try to look to be a little
bit more diversified in an inflationary environment, which is what we've seen benefit.
And so one of the ways you can do that is just something like ETS related. One that I look at
and recommend to just take a peek at is INFL. So it's just a Horizon Kinetics Inflationary
Beneficiaries ETF. I've talked about it on here
before, but they just have larger exposure to energy, materials, and financials. And you can
see, similar to what Sam is saying about gold, you just have a strong uptrend. During this pullback,
it didn't get oversold, and you're seeing resumption of that underlying uptrend. So I think in general,
if we have this inflationary backdrop from the market,
I don't care respectfully.
I don't trade economic news per se.
I know there's people who make good money doing that,
but a chart that's saying inflation's going up is going up.
So I'm okay with that.
So I think something like INFL is an interesting way
to kind of play that inflationary dynamic. I think as a whole, it's continuing to do well.
So yeah, that was the only comment I had kind of related to that. And so gold, yeah, I do own gold
as a result of that. I do own some metals as a result of that. I think XME is the other one, which actually ended up closing that position
because this downtrend, the recent downtrend is a little bit more well-defined and something like
XME. XME hasn't gotten back above those 2025 highs yet. So that might actually be, if you do pairs,
I do a decent amount of this, but if you look at something like shorting XME, if you do pairs, I do a decent amount of this.
But if you look at something like shorting XME, if you're just even trying to hedge even more of your position,
you could short XME against this, what is that, late October high, because it might turn into resistance here,
because it's kind of running against this 50-day downward sloping moving average.
kind of running against this 50-day downward sloping moving average.
So all that being said, from the metals and inflationary perspective,
I think that is a spot where you could have bought the dip the past couple of weeks.
But more broadly speaking, just in terms of the market,
I think last time I was on, I kind of talked about my model that I utilize with breadth and then the S&P 500. So when the S&P 500, 50 days above the 200 day. So that's a way to
kind of extrapolate trend because 50 days intermediate and then 200 days, right, maybe
a longer term just for simple. And what a lot of people do is they look at just price.
So it's price above a 50-day or a 200-day. Well, one thing you can do is if you're a little bit
slower in your process, so you're trying not to get out of a trend just because of choppiness
around the 200-day, you can use the 50-day moving average to confirm the downtrend.
And typically, if that crossover occurs, it either symbolizes a V bottom is about to occur
or it symbolizes you're going to preserve a lot of capital if you continue to see a
drawdown.
So using that, last week we had kind of washout sentiment and breath using the 20 day moving average.
And I think that's the most recent chart I posted. So you guys could just reference it.
So we got the follow through that I wanted to see. The signal tends to work on a 20 day,
10 to 20 day timeframe. So it's a mean reversion, right? And so today we're actually starting to
see breath roll back in. And this is right when it's hitting its 200-day from the underside.
So you're starting to see a little bit of the market got punched in the mouth.
It counterpunched, but it's counterpunching into resistance.
And that resistance is turning into overhead supply, which if you think about that from a market perspective, not necessarily a
technical perspective, it can symbolize the fact that we didn't have extreme capitulation signals,
which means there's a decent amount of overhead supply, right? Because why would there be overhead
supply? Overhead supply is just a fancy word for people still wanting to sell because we didn't have all the sellers get out of the market.
And that is essentially, Sam brought up a great point. If you know the future, let me know. Just
send me a personal DM right now, and then we can talk offline. But for those who don't know the
future, the bet is this. Do you think we V bottom or not? Okay, it's not more complicated than that. And the problem is, we've had a lot of recent V bottoms that unless you look at data since like 1950s or the 70s, you don't realize like V bottoms are a more unique phenomenon to recent history.
more unique phenomenon to recent history. And so a lot of these signals, people are like, man,
what about the last two times? It's like, yes, the last two times, but the last two times the
market did what it did, the bottom, a lot of it was related to fake, right? Like tariffs are fake,
right? It's just, it's words on paper. Energy dynamic like COVID, energy dynamic like the straighter Hormuz is just a little bit
different than a fake tariff made up numbers on a piece of paper. Okay, business as usual when
the president pivots. So that's where trend following is going to have you out of the market
when we V bottom and you're going to miss a V bottom, but it's going to protect a lot of the downside if we don't V bottom. So I think it's just cognizant to be aware of,
yes, if we V bottom, trend following isn't made for V bottom, but be protecting your capital when
we start to get below these certain levels. And if you're going to use mean reversion strategies to try to catch a V bottom, set trailing stops.
Because mean reversion is picking up pennies in front of a steamroller, right?
Trend following is picking up the meat of a move.
So we just picked up pennies in front of a steamroller, which was great to see.
But if we roll over here, don't allow a signal that has done really well in recent history leave you caught up in the underlying trend, which right now is down.
Like the markets below the 200-day, the 50-day is downward sloping, the 20-day cross below the 200-day a couple days ago.
And so it's really that preserved capital.
If you're going to allocate – I think Sam brought up a great point when it comes to kind of the metals. I also think, look at, we talked about this last week,
and it kind of, it didn't necessarily bite me in the butt because it's fine, but look at things
that are recapturing key levels and then use those to your advantage because it's just,
it's still messy out there. So something like XLK, right? XLK is reclaiming its April OAVWOP around 135.
It's still below its 200-day.
But now you have a level maybe you manage risk against if you think this is going to go higher.
I personally like something a little bit more.
It's down today, but that's okay.
Something like XLI to me, industrials looked a little bit better.
But you'll notice none of these daily RSIs are getting back above 50.
So we had the down move.
We got oversold.
And now on this up leg, we're starting to run out of steam when RSI is around 50.
Seeing trends kind of roll over when RSI is around 50 is indicative of downtrends resuming. So I just, be cautious with this,
the three to four day excitement,
unless you really understand how mean reversion plays
in the underlying trend,
because underlying trends are still down across the board.
We've seen a lot of breath improvement,
but it hasn't dissipated to the 50 days and 200 days.
So yeah, it's just, it's a messy market.
I think you still have to have that exposure to those inflationary trades, XLE, XLB. XLF is sprinkled in there,
but it's specific to capital markets. It's not specific to necessarily banks. And so that's
still what I'm kind of doing. I think it's interesting. Kind of I heard the note about the AI.
I think it's interesting to see what semis are doing here
because they've kind of reclaimed key levels.
I'm still not too interested in software
as much as other people might be,
but that's kind of some of the stuff
I'm looking at right now.
I appreciate the thoughts there. We did get a market close while you were talking. Yeah. We did basically close about even on the day there. And there's a really
interesting take. It honestly sounds like you and Stock Talk have some similar thoughts there
on how you guys are approaching this market. Yeah, we tend to align. I don't know. I think it's because we're not bullshitters.
I think that's like 80% of it. It's like, when you actually do this, you realize there's,
it's hard. And there's times where you have a ton of conviction and there's times when you don't.
And so this is just not a time. I mean, we closed about flat. I would just say if you look at S&P 500, right,
breadth was down today.
So we have more decliners and advancers.
I think there's some names covering up some stuff,
but something like CrowdStrike, I think, looks great.
That's quite the day today.
Yeah, a lot of sub-securities up today. Yeah, a lot of cybersecurity is up today.
Yeah, CrowdStrike is one of those.
So if you look at the
daily chart of CrowdStrike,
one, I just think it's a secular,
I just think it's a leader in
this space.
Ooh, Supermicro stock might be moving.
Supermicro provides update on investigation
by independent board directors.
Confirmed
underway in March
Toysman's indictment. Three individuals who were associated.
No, sorry. It's not
important. It's just more information
about it. Yeah.
I will tell you though, shout out
to that dude. I want to marry a woman
like his wife who's just like, yeah, let's
just break all the laws
and risk it all for this business. That's the type of lady you want to marry. One who's just like, yeah, let's just break all the laws and risk it all for this business.
Like, that's the type of lady you want to marry.
One who's just out there with a blow dryer changing labels for you.
That's a keeper.
So he might go to jail, but he found the right woman at least.
A bigger battle.
Pound to go visits.
Pound to go visits there for a reason.
Yeah, I see CrowdStrike is up 6% today.
Fortnite is up almost 2%.
Palo Alto is 5%.
Rubrik is up 4%.
Seemed to be moving off this Anthropic headline that came out here.
Their model is too good.
They don't want to release it because it's going to break the internet.
It's basically what they said.
Yeah, I mean, it was pretty interesting just looking at the performance of this one today
because they all, well, at least some of them opened up red today and continue to move higher.
But I'm actually surprised that, well, not really surprised, but not all cybersecurity
is up.
It's mostly focused on the ones that are either profitable or are outpacing the growth with
a rule of 40 above 40.
If you look at certain ones like Sentinel-1, that one's still down in a day.
Okta is still down in a day.
Actually, I think Okta is close to a rule of 40, but obviously, if you have the leaders
in each environment, pretty much the leaders are the ones that are up.
So yeah, quality outweighs even the sector of performance,
which is really good to see.
Cybersecurity is an interesting sector.
I think to think we're going to need it less
would be an interesting take
as we go into more of an AI world.
Stock talk.
Can I ask you, like, back to one of the earlier conversations when we were talking about AI and this stuff. It feels, this AI wave feels more akin to the internet than, like like internet of things or crypto or whatever it was.
This does feel like, to me, an actual step change that is happening right now over this next decade.
And who knows what's going to happen over the next little bit.
But this wave does feel like something sustainable and does feel like it will create a lot of value and will change a lot of stuff.
And yeah,
it feels like something that I would want to be all in.
I mean,
the million dollar question is who is the big winner of this,
who we're going to be the big winners coming out of this,
but it feels like you'd have to, you'd have to pry my stocks out of my dead hands,
to be honest.
I won't sell them,
not even a market volatility.
Yeah. So I agree with you.
The AI trade is not hype,
and it's not...
No matter what happens,
whether this war or what happens
with the other catalysts that may or may not
transpire this year or next year or the year after,
it's going to be a secular thing.
it's going to be a secular thing.
I think it's really, really hard to argue otherwise.
I think it's really, really hard to argue otherwise.
I think there are valuations in the AI ecosystem
that have gotten ridiculous.
But I think there's a lot of others
that have a good probability
of growing into their current valuations
if they continue to win.
It's going to be a competitive space like anything else.
I mean, you go back to the dot-com bubble,
and everyone talks about the dot-com bubble like it was all bad.
And yeah, I mean, during the moment, I'm sure it felt that way.
But the winners that came out of the dot-com bubble
ended up being the biggest companies in the world, right? I mean, especially the winners that came out of the dot-com bubble ended up being the biggest companies in the world, right?
I mean, especially the winners that came out of the decade after the dot-com bubble.
You know, they ended up being the biggest companies in the world.
And even the ones that didn't become magnificent seven names, you know, many of them became hundred-plus billion-dollar market caps, much, much bigger market capitalizations than they were back then.
So, yeah, there is a huge opportunity in front of us.
I think if you remain somewhat grounded in terms of your expectations and in terms of
the types of stocks that you own, and it's easy to get distracted from that.
I think when there are events in the market like war and tariffs and so on and so forth,
it's easy to get distracted from what's happening in the market like war and tariffs and so on and so forth. It's easy to get distracted from
what's happening in the backdrop. But yeah, I'm a big believer in the AI trade. Most of my
portfolio is in some way, shape, or form built around that trade. Not all of it. I mean, I have
a good portion of my portfolio in areas like defense and other areas.
I have some fintech exposure and stuff like that.
But for the most part,
my portfolio is built around the AI trade.
Even my power grid thematic basket in my portfolio
is also centered around the idea
that the power grid will need to be revolutionized
in order to provide for AI.
So even that's a peripheral trade on AI.
So yeah, I mean, you're preaching to the choir by saying that.
I completely agree that AI is not something that's going to go anywhere
and it's probably going to get better every single year like it has.
And I think the people who have used AI since,
I really call it the start of 23.
I know technically chat GPT was released end of 22, but I think start of 23 is really where it the start of 23. I know technically ChatGPT was released end of 22,
but I think start of 23 is really where it started to become mainstream.
If you map back to the beginning of 23,
it's gotten better, way better.
A lot of the stuff, one of the simple examples that I like to use is
you go back and look at the AI video generation from the beginning of 23.
It was retarded.
You look at the videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti.
I don't know if anyone remembers that.
It was from January of 23.
And like it looked stupid.
And it looked stupid.
And now you have, you know, models like Seed Dance and Sora and others that are creating like high definition, very realistic videos where you can barely distinguish the person from what they actually look like in real life.
That's a massive step change.
And that's just video generation if you think about like the
research that these models are capable of i mean i've been using chat gbt every day since january
23 every day i use it for stock research and other things but mainly for stock research
and like to say it's improved would be an understatement. Like I used to be able to rely on it for very, very simple queries
when I first started using it, like things that were very limitedly useful.
And, you know, I would do most of the research on my own still.
You know, if I rewind the clock back to 2023, that's what it was.
It was like I would still do two or three hours of research on my own going through articles and SEC filings. And now 30, 40, maybe 50% of that work that I would do manually on my own can be done very effectively by the AI. Now, is it completely like AGI level? No, not yet. I mean, there's still, you know,
there's funny videos that are made all the time.
There's this guy on, I guess he's on all platforms,
but he posts like short videos.
I forgot his username,
but I'm sure people have seen his videos before.
And he does like tests with the AI voice models.
And he points out hallucinations and flaws
that they still have to this day.
So they're not perfect, but they're getting way better.
And the usage of compute is the input for that, right?
Like data centers today are much bigger
than they were two years ago.
And most of the spend on data center that we've seen
this year and last year has yet to even materialize, right?
Like the Stargate project is not built yet.
Like Elon's Colossus project is not built yet.
You know, Oracle's two big data center projects they're doing,
I think in Idaho, and I forgot where the other one is,
they aren't built yet.
Like the groundwork has been laid, the servers have been bought, the GPUs have been bought, but nothing has been installed yet.
None of these data centers are online.
You're talking about the four or five biggest sites in the world that aren't online yet.
So what is the step change we see in these models when that happens? When you have 5 to 10x the amount
of compute that you have today working under the umbrella of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic,
I think the models get even better. And the biggest thing here that I think is not inhibiting
the productivity contribution of AI, but is a headwind for it, is just the adoption curve, right? Like,
and this is true across all technologies. I mean, a couple of weeks ago, we were talking
about electric vehicles. Electric vehicle penetration globally is at what? I don't know
the number is 13, 14, 15%. You know, back in 2020, 2019, 2020, when the real inflection
started to happen, people can sort of think back to
2019, you'll remember, I'm sure, that Mercedes and GM and Ford and Volkswagen were saying,
oh, we're done with internal combustion engine cars. We're setting a 2030 deadline to seize
all production of internal combustion vehicle. Well, that's sure as hell not going to happen now.
I mean, penetration's not high enough.
Internal combustion engine sales still dominate the vast majority of the automobile market.
And the question is, well, why? Well, the answer is the adoption curve, right? And there's always an infrastructure component to it too. And in the case of EVs, it's the power grid and electric
vehicle charging infrastructure. In the case of AI, it's compute infrastructure. So there's an
infrastructure component to the adoption curve, but then there's also just the public awareness component.
And I think with AI, because of how pervasively available it is,
I think the public awareness component is a much bigger factor, right?
Like when you talk about 40, 50, 60-year-old business owners,
70-year-old business owners of small businesses
and heads of corporate
management at these big companies, the extent to which they are not only willing to incorporate AI,
but aware of what it can do is pretty limited at this time. More limited than people would assume.
Like, yeah, if you're on the internet all the time and you're like, you know, in your 20s or 30s and you're on X all day and you're looking at every model update and you're a pro subscriber on Claude and, yeah, you're a power user of AI in that case.
But how many people are power users of AI to that extent?
Most of the millions of users of AI are asking AI very rudimentary questions,
asking it to plan travel arrangements for them,
asking it to tell them if they need a jacket outside for their trip in San Francisco or whatever.
Huh?
I want to ask you, does Apple become a winner of AI?
So my thought process here, the thinking here is the real layer here, and we talked about this.
You love Apple, man. I don't even necessarily need it to be apple here but
the value is not in the models it's in making the models useful for the masses honestly the
white label layers on top of it i think is where a lot of the money is going to be made
and i'm sure uh anthropic and open ai are going to be racing to acquire companies and do other things like that and be the ones implementing this.
But ecosystems like Apple and Microsoft and whatever it is
are probably going to be the way that just in Google with their phones
is probably going to be the way that people really start to get really used to it
out of AI for the first time.
Yeah, I think putting it on device is,
I mean, I'm a big believer in edge compute
and on-device inference.
I think that's going to be a big chapter
that's going to come around the corner pretty soon.
I think it'll help with adoption,
especially if Apple does something meaningful
to integrate into the AI.
I think Apple intelligence was a huge failure.
And I think the reason that Apple hasn't discussed usage rates of Apple intelligence is because of
that. But yeah, if their next rendition of Apple intelligence is better, and they actually
meaningfully integrate a frontier model, a cutting-edge frontier model into every iPhone on Earth,
yeah, that's going to increase usage rates for AI, absolutely.
But the real effector here is enterprise-level adoption.
That's the real effector.
If you're looking at productivity rates
and you're looking at economic efficiency, contribution to GDP,
if you're looking at those metrics, which matters more than a consumer using AI, then
awareness still matters because putting AI on a phone isn't going to magically increase
a corporate or enterprise adoption rates.
That needs to be done via convincing the enterprises of the value proposition.
And I don't think they're convinced yet. I mean, it's not And I don't think they're convinced yet.
I mean, it's not that I don't think.
They're not convinced yet
because otherwise enterprise adoption rates
would be way higher than they are today
and they're very low.
So yeah, we need enterprise level systems.
Aren't these companies just going to get outcompeted?
What companies?
Companies that don't adopt AI
if it gets good enough at some point.
I mean, it sounds like that would happen.
In theory, yeah, but you need base level adoption for that to be noticeable, right?
Like if in today's environment, let's say 10%, I don't know what the number is,
but let's say 10% of enterprises are meaningfully adopting AI.
By meaningfully adopting AI, I mean adopting it at scale across the enterprise
and firing people as a consequence. That's what my benchmark for meaningful adoption is.
If that was happening at scale, then everyone would be using it. But it's not because right
now your average accounting firm is not competing against other accounting firms who have fired 80% of their
staff and replaced for AI. When that begins happening, then the other accounting firms
will look at themselves and say, why are we hiring high school level accountants when our competitors
are using enterprise level clawed systems to do accounting instead? They're just not doing it yet.
That's why you haven't had the incentive yet,
the competitive incentive yet to drive adoption. So there's a fine line there, but I don't know what it's going to take to hurdle it. Maybe more capability, maybe just we have to just
follow the adoption curve naturally. I don't know. I mean, this happened with the internet too. This
happened with the cell phone. This happened with the electric vehicle. This happened with, I mean, everything. You can go
down the list, the car, the plane, everything. There is a base level of adoption. And usually
the big step changes come from enterprise level adoption, right? Like when you talk about usage
of airplanes, usage of airplanes became pervasive
when airlines went and bought a bunch of airplanes
and then offered the service of flight
on a ticket-by-ticket basis.
That's what drove the adoption of airplanes.
And when you look at the adoption of the motor vehicle,
the motor vehicle adoption was entirely driven
by infrastructure spend,
which was driven at the enterprise level.
The building of highways, the building of gas stations.
Consumers didn't do this, right?
It's not like we went out and started building highways with picks and shovels to facilitate our cars.
This happened on a government and enterprise level, right?
The construction of the interstate highway system, the building of gas stations on
every corner in America, this was done on a government and enterprise level. The same way
that the building of flight infrastructure and the building of airports and the purchasing of
fleets of planes was done on the government and enterprise level. The same way that for the cell
phone, the building of cell towers, the proliferation of a
cell phone being given to every worker of these large enterprises, a Blackberry being given to
the worker of everybody who worked at a company. These are enterprise and government level decisions
that drop adoption. It's rarely the consumer in a vacuum that can drive adoption. That is rare.
Getting the consumer to be aware of the product and use it
is important, right? That's step one. It's not what accelerates the adoption curve. Like
2023, the chat GPT moment was great for the consumer. The consumer became aware of AI.
If you talk to the guys in the frontier labs or talk to the AI ML experts. They were like, yeah, I mean, we had known about LLMs for the last two years.
They just weren't public facing yet, right?
And so now we're in this sort of limbo where the average consumer is aware of AI.
Most of them are not fully aware of the capabilities because they haven't used it extensively.
They're not knowledgeable enough with how to prompt AI effectively, you know, and they're not knowledgeable
enough with how to integrate it into their workflows. But when enterprises and governments
force the adoption, that's when you see the acceleration of the curve. And so we're not
there yet. So you need to convince enterprises of the value proposition. And I don't know, again, I don't know specifically what that will take,
but I imagine more capability
and following along the basic adoption curve
to where people just pick up these systems over time,
you know, that's probably what it'll take.
But yeah, I am a big believer in AI.
I don't think it's a fad.
I don't think it's hype.
I don't think it's like goingad. I don't think it's hype. I don't think it's going to be gone in a few years.
I don't think you're going to start seeing revenue slow down for these companies.
I mean, Anthropic, what, like 4x their revenue from last year already?
Open AI, something similar.
So eventually there will be another sort of chat GPT moment,
but it'll happen on an enterprise level. And that's where I really think you'll see not only more adoption globally, but you will see the actual productivity benefits begin to show up.
and their day-to-day problems with AI,
that's cool and it's helpful,
but it's not going to be really a big,
meaningful contributor to productivity.
And so that's the step change you need to see, I think.
And I don't know, maybe it'll take a couple of years
for that to happen,
maybe two or three years for that to happen.
But yeah, I mean, bottom line,
I agree with your sentiment
and I'm a big believer in AI.
And I want to continue to get exposure, more exposure
to it than I already have. Robotics will also help too because it's a physical rendition.
Autonomy as well?
Yeah, all that stuff. It helps when you can see the benefits in like a in a physical form you know
yeah yeah it's available but again it's not available everywhere right like
i even talked to one of my friends um who was in scottsdale recently and i was like
oh did you use waymos when you were there and he's like oh i didn't even know they had them
in scottsdale i'm like okay well you know it, you know, it's, you know, they're about to launch, they're
in Las Vegas now. They're in like, they're in a bunch of cities, but I think a lot of people who,
again, are on the internet all the time, who are on their computers all the time, who think that
this stuff is like, everyone is just privy to this and they're not, you know, that's the factor
here is that you need to not only make people aware of the technology, but you need to convince them that it's useful.
And that's a taller task than people give it credit for.
So, yeah, that stuff is available today.
But, you know, humanoid robots that people are talking about, like, have you seen one of those in somebody's house yet?
Right?
seeing stuff like that, like robots on the street
and more autonomous
vehicles in every city, then
people will begin to believe that
there is more capability than they have
assumed. And then
maybe they'll jump on their LLMs or
whatever. But
yeah, bringing it to a physical rendition
is important.
And that'll happen too. I think that's around
the corner actually.
Doc Talk, I think that's around the corner, actually. Stock talk, I think you bring up a good point too.
I think there's a, especially if you're in the, say,
top 20% of people who utilize as a technology,
there can be this thought process that the consumer is what's going to drive
the future of it to some degree.
Like, oh, I know a bunch of people that are utilizing it for cool things.
And the reality is it's going to be the companies that implement and then enforce employees to comply.
Like that's why do most people understand Excel?
Because it's on their work computer and their work said get good at Excel if you want to make a little bit more money.
Not because people were in their background trying to build really good
budgeting tools for themselves. So it's not going to be, I think the individual use cases
is exciting. And like, it's exciting for people who are going to utilize it, but then we're
going to realize the average intelligence and motivation of the average person who's living
paycheck to paycheck isn't, let me take this whole
weekend to figure out how to build an AI model, right? They're just going to be drinking beers
and watching the final four or whatever. So it's really going to be that corporate enterprise spend
that then leads to consumables for the consumer and whether or not that downstream effect adds to,
And whether or not that downstream effect adds to, right, GDP effectively, adds to, okay, how much of my spend is going from these other services to now it's AI-related spend that's in my daily life.
If that's a $5 AI Apple feature that gets added onto your phone, like we have AppleCare, and then, okay, you pay $5 a month for Apple AI, which allows the small brain person to utilize it a little bit better, like you said, for maybe booking flights.
But I don't, I think the individual use case is like a fat tail thing where it's like, yeah, there's gonna be individuals that build billion dollar companies because of AI.
Like Amazon, right? Amazon changed the world because of Jeff Bezos, not because of individuals
wanting, individuals figuring out that I could just have a package delivered to my house in two
minutes. So it's really going to be those CEOs and those people that like give us those use cases
for the, you know, average fat, out of shape, dumb American. So I think we put a little too much emphasis on the individual,
like, oh, look what I'm doing on my home computer.
That's not really going to move the needle for a stock
or for the markets.
Yeah, because it doesn't produce anything.
And even all these guys who are on OpenClaw or bragging.
I mean, OpenClaw is awesome. It's very cool i'm i'm actually gonna set up two systems in the next
couple of weeks at my house um for open claw as well but it's it's cool and if you you know want
to be on the cutting edge of like exploring these products and you're somebody that has time to do
that and they can be useful to your own personal workflows, great. But yeah, to that point,
there's no real productivity that comes out of that.
There's no meaningful economic contribution
that comes out of that.
And that's the difference.
For the needle to move meaningfully,
the market needs to see that you're going to make things from this
and that you're going to be able to leapfrog
certain inefficiencies that existed prior to AI.
And until you can prove that you can do that at scale,
and I think at scale is the operative phrase here,
then the market's going to sort of be neutral towards it.
And I'm not saying the market's been neutral
towards the AI trade.
Obviously, valuations have expanded, multiples have expanded with everything touching that trade.
But if you want to see real winners emerge and you want to see the economy transform and you
want to see GDP numbers go up and you want to see companies' earnings go up and their margins go up,
you need enterprise adoption. And so there will be a
tipping point for that. I'm 150,000% confident that there will eventually be a tipping point
for that. I just don't know when it's going to be. It might be this year, it might be next year,
might be the year after. I think companies like Claude, Anthropic, are doing a great job of
building products for the enterprise specifically. All the tools they've introduced
over the last year are really targeted at the enterprise. So I think they're doing a good job
of sort of filling that niche. The problem is, is adoption has to be low because if you look at
their revenue figures, the vast majority of their revenue is coming from just basic LLM usage.
majority of their revenue is coming from just basic LLM usage. And so we need the frontier
model companies to prove that they can rebuild software in a way. And this is part of the reason
why I am not buying the dip on software and why I've not been interested in bottom fishing any of
the software names. I think I have like very, very little,
if any, pure play software exposure in my portfolio.
Actually, I don't think I have any pure play software.
But my portfolio is very centered around hardware currently,
I think, because, you know,
that's where I think the opportunity is.
I think software is in real jeopardy over the next decade.
But once these frontier model companies can prove
that they can build enterprise-level software,
sell it at enterprise-level subscription costs,
and then, to boot,
improve the productivity of those enterprises,
then you have a real inflection point.
And then the economy changes.
And, you know, maybe you get a Citrini doom scenario out of that
where unemployment goes to 25%.
I don't know.
I haven't game theoried that all out.
But that's when you'll get the inflection.
And I think it'll be sooner than later.
I think within the next five years,
you'll have real meaningful enterprise level software
built by frontier model companies
sold at huge ticket prices. And you'll open the window for these guys to fire
hundreds of thousands of people and replace them with AI systems. And that's where the economy
transforms, I think. So we're not there yet. We're a couple of years away from that, I think. But
there yet. We're a couple of years away from that, I think, but that's what we should wait for.
I think if you're somebody who's a doubter of AI or somebody who doesn't think this is a real thing,
wait till that happens. Because there's a lot of people out there who are like, oh yeah, AI still
hallucinates. The voice models don't have a timer. They can't time how long somebody's gone for a run.
That's really a myopic point of view. If you look at what
these models are actually capable of, it's pretty insane. I had a model this weekend go through a
thousand SEC filings in like an hour. And it gave me such a comprehensive insight on everything I wanted to know from those filings, that would have taken me weeks, if not months, to do on my own prior to AI.
And so there are tons of use cases like that.
Like, forget about stock research.
I mean, there's tons of use cases like that across any thinking career on earth.
And not to mention all these,
you know, we were talking about Excel earlier,
the people who are sitting in cubicles
filling out Excel spreadsheets.
Like, I'm not calling anyone out here.
I don't root for anyone's job to be lost.
But if you're somebody who that is your core competency
to sit in a cubicle and fill out a spreadsheet,
like, you are in imminent danger
of just being absolutely
and utterly replaced by AI already today
based on the currently capable models.
Or if you're somebody whose core competency
is like doing basic level accounting for a firm like KPMG
or Deloitte or EY, you are in imminent danger
of your career being absolutely replaced by an AI.
So you either learn how to use these things
to make yourself a more effective contributor to these companies
or you develop other core competencies.
And I think people will be stunned by the replacement effect
within the next few years.
I think people will be astonished by it,
especially those who are doubting this technology
because technology skeptics always lose.
They always lose.
You know, you go back to like the internet era.
People were like, the internet is just a fad.
I actually shared that headline a couple of minutes.
Do you think you're missing about what becomes possible
and what productivity increases come?
That's one person can do the, you know,
maybe you work one day less,
but you get 10x more done.
Yeah, that's step one.
That's step one.
That the individual worker just becomes more efficient.
That's step one.
And then step two is that the individual worker
is no longer required.
I genuinely believe that.
Yeah.
But yeah.
The only... It's interesting cause I love this stuff, but I'm
normally just talking charts, but the, I work for an industrial company that's in the S&P
500, but from a, I work on the compliance side.
One of the things that will happen that will kind of oversee, say, for example, accounting
position or something, is you will still have, you'll have an operator that oversees that,
right?
But the workforce will be able to be decreased for sure, right?
So a team of 10, you know, so we'll say 10 compliance, entry-level compliance people will probably go down to three.
But then there'll be a person who oversights that management.
So there will be like a step-down effect.
I don't think just working in the bureaucracy, one of being a public company and then being, especially if you're consumer-facing products,
it can be hard politically to just cut that much of your workforce. So I think a lot of it will be what they're doing, what they did with like return to work is it'll be, hey, your position, this is what's happening with your position. You have six months to figure it out. And we're going to stagger layoffs individually.
So people will try to smooth it just like they try to smooth good news into earnings.
They'll try to smooth bad news in earnings.
And because if not, it'll become political, right?
It'll just become a the government has to regulate this.
The government can't let all these people get fired at once because there wasn't just
a bunch of people fired during Internet, right?
Like there was slow and steady change. Like the internet didn't cause the dot com, like internet didn't cause the
unemployment, right? Like that's not what happened, right? It was massive valuations and things like
that and then bubble popping. So that's the piece that will slow it down, damper it a little bit
more than people think. The other thing that will damper it more than people think is just the makeup of our workforce.
Like the 60-year-olds, I love Tim Dillon.
If you guys don't listen to Tim Dillon, I recommend it.
But the boomer generation has such a strong hold on their jobs that they're not retiring.
They just want to keep making more and more money, like, and then
travel to see their kids and make fun of their kids for their homes being more expensive,
right? Like, that's the boomer mentality. I'm making a joke here. But so they're not going to
be quick to try to adopt these systems unless they're at the tippity-tippity top. But these
middle managements are not going to be quick to do it. So I think it'll just be slower than we think because of the bureaucracy. And then people still want people
they can fire underneath them if it goes wrong. And so it's harder as a CCO, for example, like a
chief compliance officer to sign off on, hey, yeah, we can implement this AI at this broad scale
for our company. Well, what if that fails? Now the CCO is the one that's going to be fired. He's
going to be like, nah, let's actually keep 50 of these employees just to oversee the machine that
I recommended. So then I have 50 people I could fire if this machine breaks. So I think it'll
just, it'll be slower and more bureaucratic at the top level old consumption and not at the risk of,
oh, you're going to be outpaced by these
other companies, but at the risk of people don't want to lose their jobs. So it'll still be slower
adoption than we think. I mean, there's companies running around still that, yes, they utilize Excel,
but I work with people on a daily basis that are mid-career that should understand Excel that are
still very simply don't know how to create a new
tab and create a new Excel every single time they utilize it, right? And they're getting paid 200K
a year. So I think the adoption will happen. I just think it'll be a slower curve because of
the human. And I know the AI will be able to replace it and it'll do more, but still like
Excel could transform hundreds of companies currently,
and it still doesn't. So I just, I think it'll be slower, not as a skeptic, just as a realist,
as a skeptic of humans, not wanting to be replaced and humans still making the decisions,
not as a skeptic of what the technology is capable of. And I think that gap that exists is where if you are an accountant,
like, dude, spend your weekends learning this stuff frontwards, backwards,
because you could actually be the guy that stays on
and then actually gets that salary bump.
So just, yeah, it's great to see what will happen,
but I think it'll just be slower because of humans being slow
to want the change to occur and wanting to have people they can still fire and lay off slowly as
they change their business model like they're not going to do what jack did you know
yeah no i agree i think there'll be some pushback from society yeah yeah
as a step one what we did was we actually
ended up finding someone
who was really good at this AI stuff
before, who also is powered by
AI, and we're having
them build us a whole app and do
the work of 10, 20 people in one.
This guy, listen,
seeing what people who are on the
edge of this, what it's actually possible,
what one or two people can get done is pretty wild.
Yeah.
So we pinned up in the nest above.
If anyone wants to try the app, you don't have to,
but it is pretty cool.
What's the app called?
It's called Rallies.
We're basically trying to do like a,
you can connect your portfolio.
Oh, Rallies, I see it pinned up here.
I see it pinned up here.
Yeah, I was one step ahead.
You can connect your portfolio
and then get AI insights
back directly against your portfolio.
Ask questions against it.
Yeah.
We also started a little arena
where we got the AIs to trade
against each other, trying to get them the right prompts
and more swing trade
and more longer-ish term investing.
So far, Claude
has been destroying everyone. Claude has been
in first place, doing it since
late November. Claude
is up 10%, basically.
S&P 500 is down like 2.5%,
3%. Gemini is also
doing pretty well.
GBT has been underperforming
for the most part.
Good to know I still have a job.
Yeah. We'll see. We started know I still have a job. Yeah.
We'll see.
We started a little AI hedge fund here
up 1.5% over the last week or so.
Watch out.
We're coming.
That's funny.
Yeah, no, I think there'll be pushback
from everyday people
and from society on people getting fired.
I agree with that.
But I think the difference this time,
maybe more so than any other technology ever,
I think there's two big differences.
The first one is,
and I think this is what makes it different than the dot-com bubble too.
The first point being that this is the first technology that's not just a tool. It's the first technology
that at least purports to be manufactured intelligence. The computer was a tool. So
was the car. So was the steam engine. So was everything. Plane, combustion engine, they're all tools.
And they made the human operator more efficient, right?
You take the car, you take the horse and replace it with the combustion engine,
and the human operator becomes more efficient.
He can go for longer distances, carry more people at a lower net cost.
And the computer, you know, the guy sitting in the cubicle doing math on a pencil and
paper could do it more effectively on a computer.
And I just think AI is the first technology where it says we just don't need the person.
You know, you just need the system.
And you still need a person somewhere, you know, a systems operator or oversight manager
or, you know, whatever.
But you don't need as many people.
And I think that's the difference, right?
You take the guy off the horse, you put him in the car, you take the guy, you know, out
of the cubicle, you put him on the computer.
That's a displacement effect more than it is a replacement effect.
So I think this is, in my view, the first technology ever
that purports to be a replacement for human intelligence
as opposed to a tool to accelerate human intelligence.
So I think that's point one in terms of differentiation.
But the other point is that I think this is the first technology,
at least in a long time, that is also a weapon.
at least in a long time, that is also a weapon.
And I don't think, even if there is pushback from a civil standpoint,
in terms of truck drivers not wanting to be fired in favor of autonomous systems
or cubicle workers not wanting to be fired in favor of enterprise-level software systems.
I think China and the United States are going to be the biggest accelerators of this technology
because they understand that there are very disruptive weapons on the other end of it.
And that is what I think is maybe the most terrifying part of all of this.
Because a lot of people very early in this AI race, I'm talking about back to 23,
Elon, Dario, the head of Anthropic, I won't say really Sam because Sam hasn't mentioned it much.
But a lot of the people in the AI ecosystem,
Jan Lacoon, even from Meta's former guy,
Mira Mirati, who used to be at OpenAI,
Greg Brockman, go down the list.
AI safety was one of the big things brought up
very early in this conversation.
And many of the countries around the world that were not leaders in AI also brought this up.
And we're calling for a convention or we're calling for some sort of international rules-based system to be put in place to ensure the safety of AI and at the same time slow the progress of it so
that governments could have control over the systems that were being developed and the
risks they might pose.
And that got nowhere.
We talked about it for like a year and nothing ever happened.
Nothing meaningful ever happened.
There were no laws put in place, regulations put in place by either China or the United States outside of the US putting export controls on China,
which again is just reinforces this idea that there's an arms race going on.
But that element of this, I think, is the biggest accelerator. I think China and the United States both feel that they have to be the first to get to AGI, and they may be willing to sacrifice the civil consequences for that.
And so I think those are the two big differentiators from other technologies. But I do agree with most of your points, Larry,
that there will be some level of resistance from the people
in terms of the job losses that are going to be associated with this.
And so that could slow the pain, I guess.
But I do think those first two points are massive accelerators.
So we'll see.
I do wonder if it's also, I wonder if the cutting edge has to slow down to accompany this kind of,
or to in this in-between time. time if it's like if for this or then
that I don't know if the cutting edge necessarily
does need to slow down
I mean I mean
I don't know if it does if it needs to
slow down it's tough to say that
use the word needs because it depends
on the perspective you have there right like
let's say you're the United States government and
let's say I don't know I'm going to bring up an example.
Let's say that autonomous semi-trucking technology
becomes fully developed within the next year,
which I don't think that there's, it's too far-fetched to say that.
But let's say the next year or two years,
fully autonomous trucking technology becomes very good,
like almost error-free.
Then let's say the truckers union,
I don't know what they're called,
whatever they're called in the United States,
the trucking union,
comes to the United States government and says,
you know what?
You have to slow down development of these systems
because truck drivers are being fired by the tens of
thousands and it's not sustainable and they're being put out of work and it's hurting the economy
and then let's say the united states government says yeah sure you know we'll do it because of
political pressure do you think china would do that i don't and do you and And apply that to any industry.
Apply that to accountants or paralegals or whatever. Like any of these jobs that are from imminent threat of AI.
Does the civil pressure, which translates to political pressure,
which translates to regulatory action,
does that step-by-step process happen in China? I do not think so.
And so, you know,
is it foolish for the United States to
succumb to that sort of political pressure? That's a good question to ask.
And I don't know. I don't know the answer to it.
I would say it's less,
because I think just using that,
trying to keep the same premise
instead of pivoting premises,
because that's easy to do in conversation.
If I use that premise,
we're just taking the Chucks, for example,
because I think your point's super fair.
If you use that premise,
I would just say that's, we've already shown that we would do that, right?
Because I think about like child labor and I think about, we'll just call it, I don't know a better term for it, slave labor, right?
Or whatever they call it, sweatshop workers.
So we don't allow that in the United States, but people in China do it.
So China is able to export at a cheaper price, but people in China do it. So China is
able to export at a cheaper price, right? So they have that competitive advantage. So I think
competitive advantage from like a trucking, sure. Accounting, sure. These other areas, maybe,
right, defense, right, defense spend and things like that. I don't think we're ever going to slow
down because, right, at the end of the day, all of this is an illusion.
We recycle to go then drop bombs on oil fields.
This is all just illusionary stuff.
We pretend to be good people to then go bomb schools.
It's all illusionary.
So I think we'll keep the illusion when it comes to civil obedience because this is just where I don't know the
answer to this. So if someone else does, let me know, or if I sound stupid, that's fair too. But
like, what happens if we have autonomous truck, what prevents some two rednecks in West Virginia
from putting out spike strips to stop the robotic truck and flip it over? Right. I just, what
prevents them from doing that? Whereas like, they're not going to do that today because they're going to murder somebody. And like, there's going to be a guy in the truck
that defends himself. Like these defenseless trucks, why aren't people just going to slash
their tires at truck stops? Like, I'm just, I'm more thinking, like, this is just me thinking
out loud. Like, how do you prevent that? I think software integration is way easier because,
right, Larry, the accountant or whatever, right,
can't hack into the software and then stop the software from doing the accounting. But like,
trucking? Sure they can. I just, we're just thinking a lot about that.
Trucking was, maybe that was a bad example, you know, just because there's not national
security implications to that. But, you know.
No, it totally get you from the national, like,
I don't think aerospace and defense
were going to slow down at all.
Yeah, but is the development of AI for aerospace and defense
exclusive from the development of AI in general?
You get what I'm saying?
Like, is the development of...
Is the improvement of AI models
to be more useful in aerospace and defense?
Is that, like... Can we specialize models improvement of AI models to be more useful in aerospace and defense, is that like,
can we specialize models to only be useful for aerospace and defense? Like, I don't know if
that's a thing either. Yeah. Right. So it's like, if, if, if we say, okay, AI usage in aerospace
and defense, no, we're not going to curb that at all. We're going to chase the ball because China's going to chase the ball, and we're going
to keep spending and developing AI for aerospace and defense applications.
I mean, why doesn't that spill over to the corporate environment?
I think it does.
I mean, all the other developments we've made in the aerospace and defense industry are
widely used in corporate and enterprise applications, right?
I mean, yeah, Kevlar, chemical, especially like bonding, adhesion, things like that.
Many energy technologies too.
Many nuclear energy technologies, many oil and gas combustion technologies.
All of these things have been cross-applied.
I mean, if you look at many of the advances in automobiles, they came when?
From World War II.
If you look at many of the advances in modern commercial airplane engines, where do they come? From World War II. You know, if you look at many of the advances in modern commercial airplane engines,
where do they come from?
World War II.
And so it's like, yeah, I mean,
I would love to say that we can just separate the stacks
and say, you know what?
No more AI usage with trucking and with, you know,
accounting and this,
but oh, we are going to use it for aerospace and defense.
Like, I just don't know if we can separate it like that.
That's my concern.
And, you know, even if, and to your earlier point about, okay, we haven't, you know, China
doesn't really have the same clamps on like child labor and, you know, exploitative labor
that we do.
I mean, we're also not a manufacturing economy anymore, right?
And so
I don't know if that's as much of a competitive concession as it was maybe 30 or 40 years ago,
right? Today, I don't think it's as much of a competitive concession. So
I just have trouble wrapping my mind around the idea that the United States is going to
allow China to win the race. And I also have trouble wrapping my mind
around the idea that there's no spillover from the development of AI for aerospace and defense.
I think there's a ton of spillover and a ton of cross application. So yeah, I don't know. I mean,
it's a good conversation. I mean, of course, neither of us are purporting to know what's
going to happen. I have no clue what's going to happen, but-
Yeah, or even disagreeing. Yeah, we're not even disagreeing. Yeah, we're just chatting. But
I mean, yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's all food for thought. I just, I'm more so worried
about, I'm bullish on AI. I think that great things can come from it. I think great productivity
increases can come from it, so on and so forth.
I'm not implying that it's all bad, but I am worried about the labor implications.
And I am worried about what the pivot will look like from there.
Do we have universal basic income?
I don't know what changes from there.
So that part I am a little worried about. But I feel like we're maybe at least a couple of years away from that, hopefully,
to give us some time to figure it out from a policy standpoint.
But I think politicians need to start talking about it and need to start having conversations
on like, what do we do if three years from now, we've effectively replicated human intelligence
five years from now, let's's say even if it takes 10
years like if we come to the stage of replicating human intelligence and all it costs is tokens
i mean i just don't know what the implications of that are for society in general if it feels
like a slippery slope but yeah i mean i hope there'll be some level of like moral
collectivism when it comes to society where we can kind of sit down and say you know this is
what's right and this is what's wrong the issue with that has always been that there are
counterparties you know and that's been the issue not just with ai but with technologies in the past
too i mean we had this problem with nuclear weapons for many years, right?
We had this problem with nuclear weapons where we had to basically create a coalition,
not only between the United States and Russia for strategic arms limitation,
but we had to create a coalition of nations globally to limit the spread of nuclear weapons.
And it took a while before there was any progress on that.
I mean, we got to however many nations there are today with nukes,
what, seven, eight nations with nukes now.
But prior to that, we didn't want it to spread anywhere.
You know, when the United States first developed a nuclear weapon,
we were like, we only want it to be with ourselves
and a handful of other nations.
And then we extended it to the United Kingdom.
And then before you know it, many nations in Europe had them. And then, you know, the ball keeps moving. And, you know, today we're talking about nations like, you know, Iran and North Korea developing nuclear weapons. And it's very difficult to contain, I think. imminent destruction that sort of serves as a built-in headwind for adoption.
But with AI, I'm not sure that that exists.
And, you know, I'm not sure that people, even if it does exist,
even if there is a sort of apocalyptic endgame with AI,
I just don't think it'll be as easily identifiable by the public.
And that's a problem too. So i don't know it's all just
food for thought really we got a guy joining us up here as well what's up sir yeah doing good
doing good just uh we're gonna get the trader et ETF guys in here. Nice. Very nice.
We're
talking about AI taking all of our jobs again.
I'd like to see
ship post on X as good as we do.
I don't know. Stock talk.
I'm interested to see
this future. I'm interested to see how far
out this future is as well. You're going to see it. You're a pretty young guy. You'll this future. I'm interested to see how far out this future is as well.
You're going to see it.
You're a pretty young guy.
You'll see it.
I definitely feel like I will, but we'll see when,
if it's like a decade thing or if it's a little bit further out.
And I know you've talked and we've talked about the markets.
You think the markets are going to be one of the areas where you still are
going to be able to make money long-term.
I think so.
I think markets will, you'll still be able to make money.
I mean, hopefully.
I mean, I don't think all the opportunity will be arbed away by algos.
I mean, algos have been around for a while.
They'll get better.
They'll get probably a little bit more efficient in terms of market pricing,
but I don't think all the opportunity will be arbed away by AI.
Opportunity will be arbed away by AI.
Maybe I'm just being biased because it's my job.
Maybe I'm just being biased because it's my job.
But look, I wish I had a crystal ball
and I could figure out where this whole thing was going to go
just through game theory.
But it's really hard to do that
because you don't know how quickly the technology is going to advance.
If you had asked me in 23, like, where is AI going to be in 26?
is AI going to be in 26?
I did not think it would be this capable.
I did not think it would be this capable.
The pro level, the $200 a month subscriptions
for all these models are very good.
I don't know how many people use them
or how many people use the free models
or the $20 subscriptions or whatever,
but if you use the pro level subscriptions
for all the latest models,
whether it's GPT 5.4 or the new Claude or the new Gemini.
They are very capable of doing a lot of work in a very short amount of time.
And that's sort of terrifying.
It's nice, it's cool, it's useful, but it's also sort of terrifying.
And I think the people who don't think of it as capable are just not using them
or haven't been using them.
I was talking to a friend the other weekend.
I was out with a couple of friends, and he doesn't use AI,
and he was, like, asking me, like, what do you use it for?
And I was, like, talking to him about how I use it for stock research,
and he was, like, dumbfounded.
I was, like, showing him on my phone, like, some of the responses
that it's given me to really, really in-depth and he was like shocked by it he was like you don't edit this
you don't like go in and i was like no this is like what it tells me on its own after i give this
query and he was just like dumbfounded by it and so and he's not a dumb person you know he's a
pretty wealthy guy he is a high level corporate job He's an intelligent guy. He just hasn't used it
for whatever reason. I mean, just hasn't been exposed to it, hasn't had the awareness developed
for these technologies. And that means that that alone, that anecdote alone tells me that there's
millions of people that haven't either. And so I don't know where the puck goes when those millions of people start using it.
And that's the part that I don't know.
And adoption curve will really dictate not only the usefulness of the technology, but how much more we're willing to spend.
If the user bases for these companies keep skyrocketing the way that they have for these frontier model companies, you will see
more adoption, you will see more spending, you will see more enterprise use cases.
That all just comes with the ball getting bigger, right?
The pie getting bigger.
And it's the same thing that happened with the internet, the same thing that happened
with the car, it's the same thing that happened with the semiconductor.
Like all of these things, the industry's got bigger, badder, more investment,
more scale, more capability as adoption went up.
And adoption is going up in a straight line right now for AI.
And that too at a relatively slow pace.
Once you hit a step change,
both in the capabilities of the models
and therefore also in the adoption of the models,
those two things go hand in hand,
you'll see changes that you never expected.
Wild times are happening now.
Wild times are coming.
I appreciate your stock talk.
I do want to shift us into the next conversation
that we have here.
Like we always like to say,
we are live every single Monday through Thursday,
3 to 5 p.m. Eastern at least.
We love to bring on really, really smart people in these overtime shows to have some different conversations.
Obviously, we are putting out a lot of free content, and people like the Trader ETFs team come and support the stuff that we're doing.
I am excited for this conversation that we have coming up here.
Gov, I'm going to maybe bring the conversation over to you, and then we can jump into the conversation here. But shout out to that Trader ETFs account coming up here. Gov, I'm going to maybe bring the conversation over to you and then we can jump into the conversation here.
But shout out to that Traders ETFs account being up here.
Who do we have behind the account today?
Hey, this is Matt Markiewicz from Trader.
Hey, Matt. Fantastic to meet you.
I appreciate you for joining us.
Gov, do we have you here for this one?
Yeah.
Oh, yes.
I am here and excited for this one and super excited for this one because this is actually
a combo, uh, collaboration here between us and trader ETFs, but also with NASDAQ.
So special shout out to NASDAQ for helping to set up this show.
We're definitely going to get into things, a couple of conversations.
Obviously we're going to talk about like the volatility that's happening right now. If anyone hasn't seen trader ETFs,
all focused on leveraged ETFs, single stock, as well as some more broad items. And so we'll talk
about volatility since that's such a huge piece right now. And we'll also go over, I think, a
couple more of the individual single stocks and just diving some where we've seen flows and interest
and pieces like that. Before we do so, I'm going to have a disclosure that I'm going to read. And
before I do that, Matt, do you mind just giving like a brief 20, 30 second intro for those that
aren't familiar with trader ETFs? Sure. First of all, thanks for having me on. Appreciate it. First
time doing stocks on spaces here. So again, very appreciative to NASDAQ and to you guys.
So Trader ETFs is a brand of leveraged ETFs.
And for those that don't know what leveraged ETFs are, we magnify the exposure that you
have for returns, whether it be long or short on particular ETFs or single stocks. And the products are
designed primarily for, I don't want to call them professional traders, but people who have time to
pay attention to their portfolios because these products are quite volatile with a lot of nuances,
which we can dive into, of course. Currently, we manage just over $3 billion at Trader and have close to 60
ETFs, again, all in the leverage space, long and short. Beautiful. Appreciate that initial intro
here. For those that are listening, investors should carefully consider a fund's investment
objectives, risk charges, and expenses prior to investing. Funds Perspectives and Summary Perspectives contain this and other information about Trader
ETFs.
To obtain the Funds Perspectives and Summary Perspectives, just go right to their website.
It is tradretfs.com.
There's no E in Trader, just tradretfs.com.
And you can find both of them there and can read them carefully prior to investing.
Excited to be working together with Trader ETFs. And shout out to NASDAQ for helping to put together this show.
So let's talk about it. Lots and lots of volatility going on right now in this market.
Hard to find clear direction, it seems like, at the moment. I think we're all waiting to see
what's going to happen tonight. Right at 8 p.m., it's kind of deadline day. And there's been a lot happening specifically with some of the different ETFs, I would say, that you actively
focus on as well. So why don't I just turn it over to you from the top just to talk to me about
what you think about this market that we're seeing, the volatility, and how you see people
approaching using leveraged structured products? Sure. Yeah. I mean, you know, just coincidence, of course, that I'm able to join today, which is just
a crazy day when you kind of step back and think about it, what's going on in the world.
So these products, these leveraged ETFs have been around for close to 20 years.
And we were the first ETF issuer to launch what's called single stock ETFs back in July of 2022.
And most people are used to ETFs delivering a performance of a basket of securities, bond stocks, commodities, whatever it is.
But a lot of the first products that we launched, as I said, the single stock ETFs, we found
we launched these because we have a lot of traders who trade on margin, right?
Or in a brokerage account or use options, which is a derivative.
So this is just another way to get amplified exposure or be able to amplify your returns
using the structure of an exchange-traded
product. And again, there's some advantages to doing so. Most notably, you know, you kind of
options have, you know, their own intricacies that we've found a lot of people still don't
understand. Unless you're an options professional,
probably shouldn't be messing with options,
in particular for longer term,
unless you know what you're doing.
And when you're using margin account,
really it's not clear what you're paying
to borrow stocks or ETFs on margin.
So that's one of the reasons why we launched these products
on the single stocks is to,
I don't want to say supplant those two other methods
of getting exposure,
but it's just, it's a real efficient way to do so
in a wrapper that a lot of traders understand, right?
Which is in an ETF.
So yeah, I mean, really, the volatility can work against you, you know, both ways,
of course. I think one of the things we wanted to discuss a little bit this, you know, this
session here is a format or a wrapper that we were of for what we call the calendar reset products.
And to take a step back, up until that time, all leveraged products, about $100 billion
of assets represented in that product set up until that time we launched these new products,
they reset their performance daily. So in other words, let's just take a well-known
daily reset ETF, QLD, which gives you two times the daily performance of the NASDAQ 100.
Every leveraged ETF up until we launched our calendar reset products, only that was their sole objective, to give you daily performance, right?
Every leveraged ETF up until we launched our calendar reset products,
Which is great if you're day trading.
But these products with the daily reset can work against you depending on how stocks are trending, depending on the volatility over your holding period.
are trending depending on the volatility over your holding period. And what we found was that
on average, that people were holding these leveraged ETFs for days and weeks in many cases,
which is not how they were intended to be used originally. The SEC is very clear,
to be used originally. The SEC is very clear, like these are day products and FINRA. These are
products that should be held for not a long period of time, but that's not how they're being used.
So what we did was come up with this kind of new idea, which is again, a calendar reset. So it resets the leverage on either a monthly or quarterly basis.
So what we were finding when we had several single stock ETFs on the market,
most notably we have a 2x short Tesla ETF. We would get emails or calls from investors and they would say, I bought your ETF TSLQ on April 10th and
I held it for a month and Tesla was down 10% over that time. I should be up 20% over that period of
time. But again, failing to recognize that the fund's objective is to deliver just twice the performance in a day,
not over any other specified period of time.
So the more feedback we were getting and questions and folks using these products over the longer
term, we realized that there's a need out there to create a product that resets leverage on a longer basis.
And that's when we introduced in, I guess, September 2024,
the fund I guess we'll touch on a little bit today, MQQQ or MQQQ is the ticker on that one.
And it seeks to deliver 200% the monthly return of the Qs before fees and expenses.
So again, you can feel a little bit more comfortable holding this product over the longer term
and maybe point to point avoiding some of the volatility that you would experience
in the daily reset products such as QLDA.
Great breakdown.
I think it gives some good context for how people should understand these, you know,
in terms of how long people should be holding them and how they work as trading products.
I know that they've been getting more and more popular as well, people digging in.
So we did put that ticker up at the top if people want to check it out, MQQQ.
Yeah.
Which I, you know, Evan, everybody's going down the NASDAQ 100 lane these days.
So, you know, maybe you'll just see more and more people gravitating towards this area too,
everybody filing for these ETFs.
Yeah, it's interesting. We'll see.
Yeah, interesting stuff going in the NASDAQ arena. But I see. Interesting stuff going on now, Zacharina.
But I did pin a couple tweets up in the nest above. It basically has all the ETFs that you
guys have out there for anyone who wants to dig in. Obviously, we're going to talk more about the
MQQQ one. But single stock ETFs do good in a trending environment, do good when there's kind
of in the toolbox for these traders. And I definitely want to make sure when it's the right point, these people know that a lot of these exist. A lot of
the ETFs that we even just become naturally talked about on the spaces, I'm even seeing some products
here like a Joby Aviation, a Nebius Group one, there's a 2x single stock one on there's a couple
other up here. So I'm just curious that you guys you see I'm sure trading volume and
like assets under management and that type of thing. I'm just curious on the 2x single stock
ETFs if you've seen any trends across particular names which ones are the more popular ones from
a AUM and trading perspective and maybe if there's any like surprising ones there that have
been surprisingly performing pretty well but i'm just curious out of the uh out of the single stock
ETFs that you guys do have which ones are more popular and there's any trends standing out
yeah sure so just kind of you know more the 35,000 foot view what's really interesting is we see a spike of inflows when things are down.
So 100% appetite for buying the dip.
So it's interesting, our Tesla short ETF, TSLQ, I think we topped out around 500 million of assets in the fund.
topped out around 500 million of assets in the fund. But Tesla's had a rough go of late.
And the appetite for TSRQ has gone down tremendously. I think we have just over 200
million in assets right now. So it's very much used as, uh, buying the dip a lot of times. So, uh, we had, um,
yeah, I guess, I think we hit kind of our, our peak in assets, um, second kind of second,
middle of the second week of March, uh, recently. And, uh, then, you know, when the market took a nosedive, we lost, I don't know, what
we call it, 800 million of assets in, you know, a matter of eight days or so. Normally,
it would freak most fund managers out a ton. But what's interesting is we saw just an exorbitant
amount of inflows over that time. So lo and behold, you know, April 7th, here we are,
we're back to 3.1 billion of assets, right?
In a matter of like two weeks,
we kind of round tripped it with this type of volatility.
So, you know, that's again,
that's how what we're really seeing.
And that's been the case
since we've been managing these products
almost going on four years now,
just in preponderance of dip buyers. And we're always kind of shocked. It's like, how many more dip buyers can there be? But we're seeing again, like just, you
know, whether it's from the US, we have a lot of overseas interest as well. In these
products, because a lot of overseas brokerage platforms, you can't either short
stocks or you don't have margin or you have no access to options. So the leveraged ETFs really
are quite popular overseas, especially in Asia. So overnight, we have a lot of trading volume
coming in to our names and see a bunch of flows there. But yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, getting to your question on the,
on the single stock side, we launched January 26th of this year, the first 2X long SanDisk
ETF. And, you know, SanDisk is top performer in the S&P 500 last year. This year, the stock's up
last year, this year, the stock's up close to 200% last time I looked.
And you would think kind of with that type of price action, you know, this thing's peaked
out, you know, the interest in SanDisk is kind of, can it get any stronger?
Well, you know, even with, you know, the stock up almost 200% year to date and up 35% in the past month, we've taken in $900 million of assets in our 2X SanDisk ETF.
The ticker on that one is SNXX.
And I think we're really surprised about that appetite.
Memory names have been hot across the board.
So that one really stands out.
It's been our most successful launch ever.
And interest, huge dip buyers there.
Interest is unabated in that one.
And the other group where we've seen a ton of interest
is in these optical names.
I'm not sure if you guys have talked about these before, but names like Coherent, Lumentum, Applied Opto Electronics. And we've launched
three ETFs on those three names this year. And I think we're quite surprised by the level of interest in these names. Of course,
it helped a lot that both Coherent and Lumentum got added to the S&P 500 recently. So that's a
really nice tailwind for those two names. And it has have to get those names on investors' radars.
And as recently as two weeks ago, we launched our two times AAOI. AAOI is a ticker on the stock.
AAOX is our ticker that's applied to Opto Electronics. And already in, you know, 14 days time,
you know, on that one,
we have almost 20 million in assets.
So really strong, sorry, not 20,
almost 50 million in assets as of today.
So that's a really strong launch,
again, for a fairly small company in terms of the market
gap.
So these are names that they're all part of the AI infrastructure stack, shall we call
it, right?
They just kind of need these optics as part of the plumbing in all of these huge data
center build-outs.
And there's been a ton of interest there.
So between the Lumentum and Coherent and Applied Opto,
the space is pretty well covered.
And I think we're the only one to have any ETFs out on those stocks.
So that's also helped too, that we're kind of the only game in town.
But yeah, between those three ETFs, we're talking, I think we've gotten about $600 million
in assets year to date, which is really strong.
So that kind of caught us by surprise as well.
Yes.
I could see people definitely wanting to trade those,
the AAOX ETF.
I'm just going to say it out there.
I won't spend a lot of time
on this one,
but give me a 2X AMKR ETF.
I think the spaces
would end up loving it.
And I think it would be
a nice little trader on that one.
But it's been filed.
It's been filed.
I don't know whether,
I believe we filed, we filed so many ETFs and have some that are
effective and some that are, you know, kind of, kind of, you know, being still reviewed
with the registry statements.
But yeah, they're, they're, they're, you know, it's kind of getting to the point where a
lot of names are just really, you know, you're going down the the cap spectrum and um you know a lot
of the vol the high vol names you know smaller market cap names are getting filed for whether
they'll be launched or not but duly noted um you know and and listen it's i'm a little surprised
that aaux has done as well as it's done in such a short amount of time. And the stock's up 240% or so year to date, right?
It's just been an absolute monster, up 23% in a month.
And usually with that type of price action and that type of momentum,
you would expect traders to kind of sit on the sidelines
until things cooled off a little bit.
But we just haven't seen it.
The interest has been, much to our joy, of course, has been phenomenal.
So, yeah, I mean, it's, that's definitely been a big surprise for us.
Those, those optical names this year.
If I could just ask one more question and gov, I can, I apologize for taking us off of MQQQ,
MQQQ, which is probably a very interesting one, exciting one.
I have a comment or two there, But I'm looking through the website,
which everyone else should as well. I'm looking at the, we have Sark
and Tark. We have 1X short ARKK
and then we have the 2X long ARKK. I'm just curious, is this one
people are turning around? Is there decent volume and interest
in these vehicles? I know
it's one that Stock Talk has spent time in the past playing the Sark point when that
one has its time, but I'm curious if these are of interest at this point in this market.
Yeah, so Sark, I'd say was kind of the original leveraged ETF of ETFs on an active name. To the best of my knowledge,
it was the first, you know, again, leverage ETF on with an active ETF as the underlier, right?
There are plenty other leverage ETFs that kind of, you know, either, you know, look to get leverage
on an index, or they may use the actual
ETF itself to get the leverage like we do with MQQQ. We're not levering the index, we're actually
leveraging the Qs. So yeah, Sark's been around, you know, let's call it kind of, you know,
one of the OGs and the, you know, the, the, the, the new, um, regime of lever products.
Uh, and, and, and then I say that like, you know, outside of the pro shares direction era,
um, of, of products that we have a bunch of competitors now in the, in the space and
it's really blossomed over the past few years, especially as single stock ETFs have, uh,
single stock ETFs have kind of exploded.
you know, kind of exploded.
But yes, Sark was launched in November 21.
And the timing was really good on that one.
It's kind of when we market hit the skids and growth stocks,
the Fed started raising rates,
growth stocks really started getting pounded.
And Sark was quick to gain assets.
I think it topped out around 500 million in assets.
And it's still an active trader. you know, Sark was quick to gain assets. I think it topped out around 500 million in assets.
And, um, you know, it's still an active trader. Uh, it's, uh, you know, it's, I've had a lot of feedback. It's been, you know, a pretty, uh, low vol portfolio hedge that people have been quite
happy to own over the longer term. Again, I'm not advocating that given that these products are,
you know, for intended for day trading, but, um, you for day trading. But it's been,
it's called a quote unquote cheap hedge for growth year names. And then TARC was launched
several months later, two times the long side. Interest in that one has kind of waned, I'd say, over the past year or so.
You know, you got ARKK is a bit of a mini proxy for, you know, Tesla.
It's the largest holding.
It's always, you know, it has been for ever since I've been kind of following it.
So, you know, kind of as interested Tesla, you know, goes, especially on the long side, So does the, you know, the trading volume and
assets in TARC. Again, but that's two times long, right? So you have a kind of that magnification
effect. But yeah, I mean, they're still active. SARC's got a 70 plus million in assets. I think
TARC's around 20 some million. But again, I feel Sark is increasingly being used
as a hedge, right?
Kind of a hedge to high beta growth
or momentum portfolios,
and helps that the fund is in the news a lot, right?
And Kathy's on TV or whatever,
her research team's posting a lot of content out there.
So yeah, that kind of helps keep Zark, you know, in the,
in the, you know, somewhat of the limelight on the short side anyway.
But we just had a great launch from when we, you know,
we just kind of timed it well, got lucky around that.
And of course it, I don't know if anyone remembers,
but it's Jim Cramer talked
about it one time and he had this like ARC, this paper ARC, and he poured a bottle of Cuddy Sark
on it. It's a bit of a publicity stunt, but it really worked because it got the fund out there
and the Sark ticker out there and really helped to cement it as kind of a go-to short ETF.
One that has for sure been talked about on the spaces here for a little bit, but Gov,
I can yield back and throw it over to you.
Yeah, I can jump in.
I'm also curious just because I know we're going to run another five to 10 here.
I see that Ryan's on stage.
I see Stock Talk's on stage.
Stock Talk, curious to hear from you here with all this volatility,
just how you think about it within the market.
And I think that these single-day focus trading products that have the double leverage,
right, and other pieces, especially if they could be on an index,
they could be on single stocks.
Perhaps if someone thinks, hey, if something happens with Iran specifically tonight,
hey, this is a stock that could benefit. I don't necessarily want to take
a big options trade, but I could maybe lighten my, you know, risk there and play around with
some of these. I'm just curious if you have any general thoughts in terms of volatility and
leverage products. I think it'd be very useful tools for hedging, especially like an overnight
event like tonight. You know, people might be thinking they don't know what's going to happen.
They might be net long on whatever, something high beta,
and they want to have an overnight hedge for an event like this.
Yeah, I think it can absolutely be useful.
It could also be useful in times where IV is inflated, put premiums are inflated,
and so it can be expensive to hedge
with something like the QQQ puts or SPY puts.
It can get expensive at times
depending on how negative market sentiment is.
It's been pretty negative lately.
Put skew has picked up a lot.
So in those times, it can be especially useful.
And if you, in terms of the single stock ETFs
that are out there,
if you have a single stock exposure that you're extremely overweight on and you want to hedge it
for an event, they can be useful for that too. So yeah, I think they can be very useful tools for
hedging purposes or for event trading purposes too. If you're looking for some kind of catalyst
to drive action, it can be useful in those cases as well. So yeah, I'm totally in agreement that I think it can be a useful tool for people's portfolios,
tactically speaking. Yeah, maybe Matt, you could add on to that as well, just in kind of short,
just like a minute or two, you know, bounce off a stock talk, how you see people utilizing it with
all this volatility right now?
Earnings days are times when we see the heaviest usage, just flat out, like going into earnings
after earnings, you know, from an event-driven swing trading perspective, you really have a view on a particular stock.
Maybe the stock has really responded well to the company beating earnings over the past four or five quarters, right?
And you think that trend is going to continue.
So you just – you're uber bullish on a name.
you're uber bullish on a name and um you know you kind of can leg into a single stock etf position
you know day of uh day before right so we see a lot of that um i don't have numbers i probably
should look at it but like you know i'd say earnings days our single stock etfs are trading
in the neighborhood anywhere from three to 10 times volume on those days.
And days where a company may, you know, may miss earnings and the stock is down big.
And obviously, you know, single stock ETF, you know, the return is magnified on that day.
We see, as you know, as I mentioned in the onset, like a lot of dip buyers.
So, you know, we may see a fund has 10 million in it,
the stock's down 10%, the ETF's down 20%, we would lose 20% of assets. But, you know, we,
you know, just on the price move, but we see $15 million come in, just folks buying the dip.
Very, very common for these names. And I'd say that's probably the most useful because
I think the more that traders uncover your ways to use these, especially, you know, kind of some
charts, not a chartist, nor do I pretend to be one on TV, but I do kind of watch some of our names, and there's some really interesting moves that you can kind of look at,
just looking at the underlying charts and using the ETF to express a view
where you have clear convection either way.
That's been pretty useful too.
Perfect. Thank you.
Ryan, did you have any thoughts here?
Hey, yeah. No, I just, I think it's super interesting. All the different,
I was going through the list up there, pinned up top.
And I really like what Sogtog said there.
And that's kind of the way that I approach these is, you know,
you see a VIX up here in the upper twenties.
If we get some kind of big bounce in the market, that VIX can
get sucked out and the options can be complicated. I heard that point made earlier as well. Options
to get a lot, you know, pretty complicated for a lot of people and all the different strategies
and stuff. But you can get this volatility crush where even though you picked a decent option,
you picked the move that you wanted, that VIX can just get drained out of it.
Also, with all the headlines going on,
pre-market, after hours,
another thing I really like about these
is the fact that you can trade these in pre-market.
You can trade these in after hours.
Earnings season starting in a week as well.
So you get earnings reports.
You can actually react.
You can get out in real time.
You can get in in real time
and not have to wait for that options market to open either.
So I just, I really appreciate him coming on and going through some of the different,
you know, pieces of all of this.
And I just think these are great tools for people to stack in, maybe work into their
portfolio.
If I can just say one thing just on that, you know, we do get some input or feedback
sometimes, you know, folks will be looking at it, the underlying stock and the stock will be down. this is a bit of a PSA, but like, you know, let's say the stock is down,
or, you know, up 2%, and, you know, so therefore you think our ETF may be, you know, should be up
4%, right? If the ETF doesn't actively trade, you know, there might, there's a two-way market
being quoted all time, right, from, you know, opening might, there's a two-way market being quoted all time, right?
From, from, you know, opening bell to the closing bell.
But just because you don't, you may see an ETF, you know, in your mind, not tracking,
you have to look at the quote.
Don't look at, at, you know, the last sale, right? Because in some of these ETFs that are new, and this, this goes for everyone's ETFs, not
even just a single stock ETFs necessarily, but you really this goes for everyone's ETFs, not even just single stock ETFs
necessarily, but you really need to look at the bid offer. Don't look at last sale because the
market makers are the ones who are, you know, I'll call it controlling the spreads, right,
throughout the day. We as ETF issuers aren't the ones who are dictating that. What we control is
the leverage at the end of the day when we do our
trading to make sure we get to that 2x long or 2x short leverage, let's say. So just a bit of a PSA
out there that sometimes what you see on the screen, last sale of a single stock ETF may not
be reflective of what's going on in the stock itself at that current time.
going on in the stock itself at that current time.
Great points there.
I know we are running up on the end of our time, but hopefully this gave a lot of good
insights to people that are curious about these 2x leveraged ETFs, thinking about when
to use them, where to use them, what type of names are popular right now.
You can dig a lot further into this.
Again, I mentioned in the beginning of the call, but there's a website, traderetfs.com,
tradretfs.com. You can see all the different ETFs on there. You can see the news, the media around
them, all those different pieces. These should be available on pretty much every brokerage as well.
Matt, you got any final comments for us today? No, appreciate you guys having me on.
And, you know, hopefully I can do this again.
And best of luck tonight to everybody.
Yeah, it should be a crazy one.
Some people might be using your products to play it.
So I think it'll be an interesting one to watch.
We'll have Matt back on. Actually, one week from today, we will be on a twitter space on wolf trading so keep an
eye out for that 11 30 a.m eastern next tuesday evan i'll turn this one back over you yep i
appreciate you for joining in make sure you are following the amazing speakers that have been a
part of this conversation yeah follow that creator yes yeah make sure that you're following it click
that follow button click in there let's
see those followers go up sorry continue having yeah go check it out and then there's a tweet
pinned up in the nest above with a couple stuff obviously the website is the best place to go in
and check that out and if you go into uh the x page on here then you will see the website so go
check that out tweets pinned up in the nest above with all the etfs they have obviously um our goal
with anything and everything is to have obviously um our goal with anything
and everything is to have informed investors and just bring interesting products and tools really
great companies doing cool stuff and letting you guys have their research put extra stuff into your
tool bag and at the time that they're right to be used you know you have the tools there so
trader etfs for any of you guys trading 2x single stock ETFs out there, go check that
out.
They obviously are also doing a lot of other stuff around that MQQQ and other different
stuff around leverage and interesting stuff.
So go check out that website.
I'm going to quit Blabber in here.
I appreciate everyone.
Have a great one, team.
Follow the speakers.
See ya. Thank you.
