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Did Trump Talk to Iran? | $SPY $QQQ $USO $CL $TLT $BMNR $GRNY $BLK $OWL $GRAB $UBER
Recorded: March 23, 2026 Duration: 0:59:32Space Recording
Full Transcription
shout out to public.com for sponsoring the stream it's a platform built for serious investors with
stocks options crypto bonds plus ai tools and they're offering an uncapped 1% match when you transfer your
portfolio check them out at public.com forward slash wolf investing involves risk and this is
not investment advice so here we are again the start of a week and it has certainly been a very
interesting weekend and also a very interesting last week as well. And I'll be
it also an interesting year. This is really pairing up to be the craziest 2026 or the craziest
trading year since of course, 2022 last year. I don't, I don't really know what to make of this,
but all I know is that we are here and we are bouncing and the bounce is here. Yes,
We are here and we are bouncing and the bounce is here.
Yes, everyone, the bounce is here.
And it comes after Trump said that he did talk to Iran
and is coming up with a deal to end the war.
There's more commentary that I'm going to play for you
throughout the episode, but also on top of that,
we're going to discuss a little bit of
who are we going to believe here.
There's a little bit of back and forth
and that news continues to go on this morning or this afternoon,
if you guys are on the East Coast.
More things are still coming through the wire,
so I'll try to get that to you as soon as they come out within the next hour.
Also, we're going to listen to part of a clip with Tom Lee.
You guys might have already seen this one.
I personally have not seen it, so I'm going to play that for you guys
and also for myself to see where he sees the mark coming in. Mind you that this clip was actually
recorded last Friday after we had that drop. So we'll see what he has to say. Next, we're going
to talk about opening eye projecting guaranteed results for people who do invest in their AI
nation. And finally, we're going to talk about Grab expanding into Taiwan.
Some interesting news regarding that one in case you missed that one on the wire this morning.
So let's get started a little bit over here. We are basically up about 1.55% on the Qs.
on the S and sorry, on the cues, S and 500 is up about 1.61%.
IWM is up about 3%.
And this is definitely a bit of a small cap tech driven rally that we're having
here from the bounce.
The VIX is down about six and a half percent.
But I think the biggest question really comes here is who, who do we believe here?
Right?
We've obviously had some news this morning from Trump during an interview when he was about to board a plane that he did speak to Iran or actually his negotiator spoke to Iran.
And they did. They are coming up with a deal to end the conflict.
I actually have this clip over here that I do want to play for you guys.
That kind of gives a little bit of a summary from the horse's mouth.
Oh, it's actually from AP News. Let me go ahead and open this one up here.
Ministry says you're not telling the truth
when it comes to productive conversations to end the war.
Well, they're going to have to get themselves
better public relations people.
We have had very, very strong talks.
We'll see where they lead.
We have major points of agreement. I would say almost all
points of agreement. Perhaps that hasn't been conveyed. The communication, as you know, has
been blown to pieces. They're unable to talk to each other. But we've had very strong talks. Mr.
Whitcoff and Mr. Kushner had them. They went, I would say, perfectly. I would say that if they carry through with that, it'll end that problem, that conflict.
And I think it'll end it very, very substantially.
So the discussions took place yesterday.
They went into yesterday evening.
They want very much to make a deal.
We'd like to make a deal, too.
We're going to get together today.
We're doing a five-day period.
We'll see how that goes.
And if it goes well, we're going to end up with settling this.
Otherwise, we just keep bombing our little hearts out.
Who is Steve Wichopp speaking with, Mr. President?
A top person.
Don't forget, we've wiped out the leadership phase one, phase two, and largely phase three.
But we're dealing with a man who I believe is the most respected and the leader.
You know, it's a little tough.
They've wiped out, we've wiped out everybody.
Is that the supreme leader?
No, not the supreme leader.
Well, nobody's ever, nobody heard of the second Supreme Leader, the son.
But the people that seem to be running it — and they seem that based on, really, fact,
because things they've said have taken place.
Mr. President — I can't.
Mr. President, I know you've deployed —
Because I don't want them to be killed.
Okay?
I don't want him to be killed. Okay? I don't want him to be killed. Mr. President.
Sorry, I apologize. I was on mute so as he had mentioned there really is no guarantee that these deals are actually going to go through there actually was a post from kobe ac letter
uh discussing that they do believe that these discussions are happening which is very eerily
similar to what happened last year
when there were talks with China
and China was saying there weren't talks and so on.
And a few weeks later,
they ended up coming out saying there were talks
and they had their deal
as far as the tariff retaliation goes on China.
But I do want to show you this
because I think it's pretty important
to kind of understand the draft of events that we do have going on here.
So I'm actually going to share the Kobe SC letter post over here that I did quote on X.
All right.
So we firmly believe there are ongoing U.S.-Iran peace talks right now.
Why?
Because we have seen this exact sequence of events multiple times in previous
deals negotiated by President Trump. In fact, the May 2025 China trade deal followed the exact
timeline on April 24, 2025, just 15 days after the 90 day tariff pause. If you guys remember that
one, that was a crazy time as well. I'm sure that was a very fun and pleasant. It was actually a
lot more fun and pleasant months later after we all reaped those gains,
but certainly not fun and pleasant right now for some people.
The 90-day tariff pause, which also came as the 10-year note soared above 4.45%.
President Trump made similar claims about China and China responded just like Iran did.
Yeah, so they denied the talks.
Trump said China was interested in a trade deal with the US and China responded stating that there are absolutely no negotiations between
the US and China, end quote. Just three weeks later on May 12, 2025, the US and China announced
their first trade deal reducing tariffs to a 30% baseline. We believe a similar situation is happening right
now with Iran behind closed doors as Iran's war strategy has become to play the long game
and pressure the US slash Israel through capital and energy markets. Iran does not want to lose
leverage and allow markets to normalize until a definitive deal has been solidified. This is the same exact form of leverage that China had in April 2025 negotiations,
which they initially denied as the 10-year note yield broke above 4.5%
and U.S. equity markets collapsed.
We believe Trump is following the same playbook now.
That said, volatility will persist until there is a clear agreement in place
and broader market normalization
after this historic shock will take months.
Pattern-based trading has become incredibly profitable
over the last 12 months.
All right, and they provided some headlines
in the Wall Street Journal here,
kind of signifying the eerily similar pattern that we had.
So I basically said something
similar to give a little bit of my input over there. It's on my exit case. You guys want to
check that one out. But for the most part, this guy said it, he's buying time. Okay. I do think
that there is a little bit of nuance here, especially when it comes to Trump, as far as how the markets have been trading recently, especially the oil markets.
But I think namely the bond market, the bond market has been selling off very quickly.
Let me actually share the terminal or that is the trading view terminal over here.
And if we look at TLT, actually better yet, let me just bring up the yields over here.
If we look at the yields over here, we could see that this morning, the 10 year was actually up at 4.45%, which is around the same place that it was during the China tariffs.
In fact, if I go back here, oh wow, it was actually a lot higher than that.
Yeah, it was like 4.55% and so on.
We had that bit of a scare over there and if you really
think about it trump is definitely not does not want the bonds to be dropping as much or does not
want the yields to come up as much because this had actually infected the affected the entire
curve even the two-year short-term yields which is uh probably something that the fed tracks as
well but more importantly it's something that is going to signify the short-term effects of bonds. Those were coming all the way up above 4%, coming from
all the way down in early March from 3.69%. That's a very fast move for the bond market.
In fact, if I look at the bond market volatility index, which is the move index,
this is actually a delayed, we're probably going to get the update later on, but this is up about 28% today.
So this is the volatility index for the bond market.
And you don't want to see this coming too high because you're going to get these fast moves in the bond market, which generally the stock market doesn't like to see.
Also, on top of that, we do have, of course, what everyone was looking at last week, that the SP500 and the spy were uh below the tour today moving average
we're actually coming here um we're coming here retesting the tour today moving average which we
did test and try to break above this morning but if you ask me i don't you know i have to be honest
guys i like to stay like uber bullish all the time but i'm also going to remain very grounded
and sound here we need to close above the 200-day moving average,
and we need a lot more work to do on these other moving averages over here.
The market is never a good place to trade when it's below the 200-day moving average.
If I go all the way back here, the last time we hit the 200-day moving average
was when we had the tariff tantrum.
And you can see here that we closed below the 200-day moving average
over here on Thursday, March 6th.
We came back up to retest it, and then we closed the next day even further down.
And then we came back over here, kind of chopped around, and we came back to retest it and got Liberation Day and the massive –
actually, no, Liberation Day was well after that, but we had that massive rejection going lower.
So if I go back over here to spine stead um was this liberation day
liberation day was in april uh yeah i think this was liberation day yeah wednesday this
was liberation day this was like a really trying time here we came back up to retest it and then
we broke below so we could stay above the 20-day moving average, but we still need to go up a little bit higher today in order to have that reclamation of the 200-day moving average.
We were actually above there earlier this morning, and who knows?
We have about 45 minutes left in the market open, so maybe we might get there when Amit does the market close today.
But we still need a little bit more work to do beyond that.
However, I was on a podcast with, uh, with Steve last Friday, he was doing,
actually doing the market close.
And of course guys, the show must always go on.
Like, come on, if I'm inside here, the show still has to go on.
And Steve was carrying the torch.
And so was I, which is pretty funny because if I knew that he was recording
it, we both should have collab with each other, but it's all good.
We both didn't even realize each other were streaming, but we were both talking last Friday that, hey,
look, things are getting pretty serious right now. You can't put your hands to your ears and just
ignore all the noise that's happening there. They were actually during this time around versus the
previous small corrections of pullbacks that we've had lately, this is
actually a material effect on the market and could have further long-term effects on the market.
If you look at oil, it was trading above $100 a barrel recently. And today it pulled back about
10% trading below $90, which is great. But you have to remember that oil was heightened for a
period of time, almost three weeks. And that does have repercussions on the stock market as well as the economy.
And also the straighter Hormuz still is not open.
I think that as long as we open up the straight or come toward a deal that reopens the straight,
then we'll probably be skiing to new highs shortly after that.
But until that happens, we're probably going to chop
around this range, maybe float up a little bit, float down a little bit and so on until we get
some sort of resolution for this war. This war is just not good for everyone, right? Obviously,
it's weighing a lot on people's moods in society. It's weighing a lot in the economy and everything.
But I think more importantly, it's weighing on the sentiment in the stock market and kind of
putting people at a little bit of a hesitation to throw more money at the stock market. And we also
do have other things happening in the market other than oil going up or down or whatever it is that
today, we also have these private credit issues that are looming around. And we also have very
heightened valuations on certain companies as well. The S&P 500 is trading at afford earnings about
22 times,
which is historically pretty expensive for the stock market and above the median.
So at these intersections of all these events happening, it kind of puts certain people at
ease. Well, like maybe we shouldn't be investing or throwing too much money in the stock market.
Maybe we should kind of take a step back and see what's going to happen and see how things pan out
before we get back in. And that really is exactly how I'm going to do it. So what is this?
Five day ceasefire. Thank you for having that one. Let me try to see. This is how crazy it is
when the market is open. There's like so many things that are happening here. I don't see a five day ceasefire here i believe uh iran did have um an agreement to
pause the program for about five years so i don't know maybe you guys can tell me where you see that
one but um i did post this one earlier uh it was reported from israel channel 12 news uh how
credible is that outlet i I don't know.
I don't live in Israel.
So maybe someone might be able to enlighten me if they do a little bit more about that
new channel.
But I read, uh, did agree to pause this missile program for about five years.
Right.
So that's definitely a step in the right direction.
And it definitely is a step toward a possible ceasefire, but we still need to wait and see
what's going to happen here.
Okay.
Like this isn't really like a moment where it's like, guys, we are so back. In fact, it was actually pretty
funny because Evan, uh, stock market news did post about that one. Uh, he did post about that
image earlier. Let me actually bring it up over here. Um, yeah, this is, this is right here.
And I love this image. You if i i tried to look for this
image online to post it this weekend but i just could not find it but yeah you basically have
like people bought over here let's go you get a bounce and it drops let's go you get us let's go
get about i mean that's kind of how to feel like we are at this moment here so for me it's probably
better just like stand by and like wait and see what's going to happen versus trying to play
through this chop because we don't really know what's going to happen.
We don't know if Trump is lying, which I don't think is lying.
I think there's validity into what he's saying, but he's obviously going to make certain remarks that might get people a little too excited ahead of time.
But I do think it's definitely headed in the right direction.
But there is no there is no actual or there's no like straight up leadership in Iran
right now. So it's very difficult to know like who's negotiated with and so on. I do have this
clip from a, from a friend. Okay. So this one is actually, Oh, that's a Tom Lee one. That's not
the one I wanted to look at. Okay. So there, there's actually like some fun managers and stuff that did ended up buying
calls on the stock market last week.
And I don't know,
comment down below if you were buying calls last week.
actually,
hold on a second.
I think I know about that five day.
we have a five day,
five day pause on the strikes to power, let me strike the power facility. We'll see where they lead. We have major points of agreement. I would say almost all points of agreement.
Perhaps that hasn't been conveyed.
The communication, as you know, has been blown to pieces.
They're unable to talk to each other.
But we've had very strong talks.
Mr. Whitcoff and Mr. Kushner had them.
They went, I would say, perfectly.
I would say that if they carry through with that,
it'll end that problem, that conflict.
And I think it'll end it very, very substantially.
We have very much in mind our partners in the Middle East.
We've had great relationships with a lot of them, as you know.
A lot of them were surprisingly hit.
And I was surprised to see it, and so was everyone else, but we have very much in mind in the discussions.
So the discussions took place yesterday. They went into yesterday evening.
Yeah, so there is a five-day pause on us hitting the power plants, and that obviously led to a bit of the escalation that we've seen in the last week. And I mean, if I open up some charts over here,
there are things that were selling off pretty crazily last week.
So we have a little bit of a recovery today in the queues,
but the queues were all the way down over here.
Microsoft is still barely having a recovery over here. In fact,
if I do go to,
I'm pretty sure software stocks are not really rallying too much i mean
yeah two percent bounce in software stocks which is good oh that's interesting we actually came
back up to above the 200 day moving average um but the uh semiconductors were they actually were
leading this thing so this is interesting let me see what else is happening here oh congratulations
crossroads are about nine percent today on that one nav Navitas. Oh, wow. Memory is actually down today.
That was actually up earlier today.
What's EWY at?
EWY is up about 6%.
Got a little bit of a chop here.
We have Nebius is down.
Last time we looked, yeah, Nebius is down.
We have a bit of a fade on a lot of the data center plays,
data center plays and i think a lot of this has to do with the uh open ai stuff that we've been
and I think a lot of this has to do with the open AI stuff that we've been seeing.
seeing um asts down today rocket lab is up about two percent a lot of these other stocks are kind
of floating a little bit higher here who eliminated is almost at 70 bucks iomq is up seven percent i
i don't know i don't know anymore um cloud flare is up about four percent which is good to see digital ocean is up about
five percent and my play over here fastly is up 13 today making a new is that a 52 week high new
52 guy this stock this stock is just non-stop over here i learned of the subs in this one i got in
this one around like 19 bucks and stuff so this is a pretty crazy movie that we're seeing here
from a lot of the ai inference plays and that would mean that also oss is up a decent amount today up about five percent today
and akamai is probably also up today about three percent today is that an all-time high for akamai
no it's not an all-time high they made all-time highs back there in 124 so you have a lot of the
ai inference plays uh still making some headway over here i'm going to talk a little bit about
grab later on in the show as well they had some interesting news this morning that they are acquiring a food
panda for about 600 million dollars which is a bit of a discount from what uber was going to
acquire them for all right so markets are looking pretty good right now uh in my opinion i think
this is like probably a time where you kind of need to just let things play out right like i'm
not trying to trade this chop right now um learned that the hard way a little bit earlier this year,
gave back some gains. But I, you know, in my experience, it really is not a good time to
be trying to play this chop, trying to guess what's going to happen. Cause we've never really
seen any like particular follow through in the market. Someone asked how we feeling about the
overall semiconductor sector well they're
leading right so what you do want to look at the stock market are is relative performance okay but
if i look at where is my
is it the economy one i'm trying to pull up a watch list over here with ratios
okay so let me actually pull this one up.
So if I look at the, uh, socks spy ratio, this is basically showing how much socks
is a outperforming spy or how much semiconductors are outperforming spy.
And you can see that we're still in a long-term uptrend over here so it really does look like semiconductors are leading the way up and if i
look at saw igv over spy we could see that igv did make a comeback but it's still on the downtrend
so you're seeing some relative outperformance in terms of semiconductors if i look at nvidia over
qqq you could see that nvidia is kind of chopping side of the Qs, which actually makes
a little bit of sense. But if I look at like CRM, right? Like CRM is barely even bouncing today.
Microsoft is barely even bouncing. So you have like a lot of software stocks that are not really
bouncing today. Is VG a good energy play? It is a good energy play because it does have
that long-term tailwind as far as being the largest exporter of natural gas, liquefied natural gas
from the US. So if you think about the restriction or the constraint with oil
being sent around the US, obviously we are not directly impacted by the strain of Hormuz,
but a lot of other countries are, especially in Asia.
And if you have VG and a lot of these sentiment indicators showing that,
look, if we are going to be straight in oil,
then maybe we need to be looking at other resources for energy.
And that includes liquefied natural gas or LNG.
VG would definitely be a big beneficiary off of that one.
Also next decade was, is down about 3% today.
This one's quite different because they are not actually in full productivity right now. In fact,
they're still building a lot of their trains in Texas. I did quite a good amount of research in
this one with Matt and Chris, uh, about a year ago. I'm not in VG and I'm not in next. Um, one
thing that I'm looking to enter actually, and I don't even know if it's like a
really good idea or not, but, uh, if I go to the, uh, SP 500 sectors over here,
and we can look at all the sectors, we can look at what's leading, what's not leading.
If I look at XLE, this has actually been performing pretty well, even though, uh,
crude oil has not been performing well today. Crude oil is down about 10% today while XLE, which is basically like your Chevrons,
your Exxon mobiles and all those, all those oil companies, they've been performing quite well
lately. They've actually been performing quite well since the beginning of 2026. So I was actually
looking to get some exposure to, uh etf over here um xle uh
probably with call options and i'll probably post about that one to the subs uh on twitter but you
know i mean you guys are ready here so i i'll tell you you'll find out tomorrow if i'm going to be in
this one or not because i'll probably make that decision toward the end of the day but you can
see over here that across the board it it's not exactly an all around bounce
in the stock market.
XLY is obviously up a lot because Tesla's up a lot and so is Amazon.
But this has been a massive downtrend for a while.
XOK, kind of like a drifting lower downtrend, still not above the 200-day moving average.
XLF only bounce up about 1%.
So you have a little bit of work to do over here.
And leading sectors
like defensives is what's actually leading the market up today. You have XLB. They've been
dropping quite a bit lately, but they are leading the bounce today. Industrials are leading the
bounce today as well. Obviously XLK is up about 1.6% today and so is tech, but these other ones
have not dropped that dramatically over the last,
uh, since the beginning of the year. In fact, XLI is still green in the year, but XLK is about
red on the year. And so is XLI especially. So communication, same thing, Tesla and Facebook,
uh, or meta, these are also down as well. Um, real estate has pulled back quite a bit,
but energy still continues to make new all-time
highs.
So this is probably something that I'm going to be looking along with some of the cash
that I have.
Also, if you think about it, even though gas prices do, even though oil prices do come
down, these oil companies have been mining a lot of oil, refining a lot of oil while
oil prices were very much suppressed.
So they're going to reap the benefits if oil prices still do stay up here because they're basically going to be selling that oil at a heightened cost much higher
than they actually refined them at. And if you really think about it, they could do this for a
long time because oil has been suppressed for a long time. So this is the reason why your Chevrons,
this is the reason why Chevron's trading pretty much, uh, is that an all-time high at an all-time
high today? This is the reason why ExxonMobil is at an all-time high. At an all-time high today.
This is the reason why ExxonMobil's trading at an all-time high for the most part today.
Because of these factors.
Actually, I don't think that's an all-time high.
I think it was actually higher back in 2000.
No, I guess it wasn't.
But yeah, guys.
Matt's definitely enjoying that one because he's definitely invested a lot in oil and so is Steve.
All right.
Yeah, Micron is down as well today. Okay, so is Steve. All right. Yeah.
Micron is down as well today.
Okay.
So let's continue on with the show.
We did have Tom Lee talk last Friday,
give his commentary where he thinks the market is going toward the end of the year and toward the mid year.
Let's see what he has to say.
CIO, a fun strat, CNBC contributor. has to say. Why not? Well, one, I think 7700 was a conservative estimate to start because markets have been
steadily repricing on a P.E. basis, and we're only assuming modest P.E. expansion this year
to 7700.
And as much as the war is creating obviously a huge short-term setback and a lot of uncertainty including effects on monetary policy ultimately
wars are going to be good for the U.S. economy and the U.S. stock market so I think as we get
towards the end of the year the market stops thinking less about the crisis element of this
and more on the opportunity. I know and that's hard to say and you know it's not an endorsement
by the way of anything I get what your point is because you look at history and there's like the old maxim it's I'm going to chunk it but it's something like
you sell on the sound of trumpets and you buy on the sound of cannons meaning when things seem
the worst is often when the market does what you least expect it to do correct yeah that's right
I mean I think right now if we asked any investor,
they can list all the reasons why they're worried and what could go wrong, and that's what gets
priced in very quickly. But we have to know that that's counterbalanced with opportunities have
always emerged. I mean, whether when we look at the last eight major war events, the market was
always bottoming very early into the conflict.
I have said, nobody cares what I think, but I have said that just given what I've done for 30 years,
the markets appear, feel a little too complacent, a little too sanguine maybe about what you just
talked about. Go into that a little bit. Do you feel like people are a little bit too comfortable?
It doesn't sound like you are.
You sound like this is where we are and everything's fine.
Well, it's a good question.
I was thinking about this on the way here
that we've already had a rolling bear market
because last year, energy was already in a three-year bear market
and financials had been in a downturn.
The Mag 7 has been in a downturn. Tech and software. That in total is like 70% of
the S&P. And we know over the last few months before even the war started gold
was going parabolic. So in some ways I think the market was pricing in
uncertainty in a geopolitical event and I think the reason people are
maybe as you're saying somewhat complacent I think people have de-risked
already how do we say they de-risked when markets are down like four or five
percent this year and in a midterm election year which is this year by the
way historically going back a hundred or years, the S&P tends
to fall about 15 percent once on average in a midterm election year. We're only down five.
That seems complacent to me. Yeah, it's a good point. I think we have to look at global stocks.
Last year, more money was made owning emerging markets owning gold over stocks
emerging markets have corrected a lot more than the S&P has because the world is worried about
growth and as you worry about growth you want to own the growth index which is the S&P 500
yeah he makes a good point a lot of these emerging market stocks have been
pulling back a lot lately. In fact, if I pull up the Mercado Libre chart over here, which I am
very much long Mercado Libre, this has not been a great performer for me lately. This has just been
trending down. A lot of people are along Nub. I'm not long new bank anymore, but this one
has been trained up pretty decent bounce. Actually. I didn't realize it bounced like 5% today.
Um, grab has been, uh, pulling back quite a good amount, uh, only up about 2% today,
but this is like a nasty chart over here. Um, C limited, uh, only up about 1% today,
massive downtrend. I would have never expected C limited to be pulling back
so far down here. You are having a lot of the bounce really centralized in the US markets
as well, even though EWY is up about 6% today. But let's remember that about, what is it like 60%
of EWY or the South Korean index is actually samsung and sk hynix
but it is very interesting to see a dispersion here between uh micron which is down about four
percent today sandisk which is down about two percent today so those two are actually trading
lower than where they were last friday so it is pretty interesting to see like that divergence you have with the memory companies in South Korea versus the memory companies here.
So there definitely is a risk on the table. And like I mentioned earlier, IGV is definitely
looking a lot better than it did a few weeks ago, but it still has a lot of work to do.
Yeah. So what is going on at Tesla Groupie? Hello. How are you? D sharp, uh, telling me to
see you. Yeah. I mean, I don't know, man. I don't think it's going to 250 K anytime soon.
ESS. How are you? Good afternoon, Melanie. How are you? Greetings, Mel. All right. Cool. Mel,
what's going on? Yeah. So I'm still going to be cautious about this one. I don't, I don't know
what's going to happen. I like to not guess what's
going to happen. Actually, something to touch on a little bit over here. We did have some
news about Muddy Waters last Friday with SoFi. In fact, I did see that one over here.
You know what? Actually, I'm going to bring up the Muddy Waters interview on CNBC.
Let's watch that one together because I should have actually played that one earlier.
I should have seriously played that one earlier.
Does anybody have that?
I don't see it on CNBC TV.
Maybe somebody has it on Twitter. Maybe they have it on their page here.
Yes.
All right.
This is probably going to be an ad.
I'll let the ad run for a minute while I move on a little bit here.
So, oh, my bad.
Let me hide that.
All right. So while that's loading up a little over there, I keep an eye on that one. Muddy Waters did open up a short on SoFi. We
actually don't even know if they still have it open or not, even though he says if they do have
it open or not, who knows. But what they've read about with Muddy Waters is that they've taken
stabs at other companies with certain short reports. They have also tried to short Applovin.
They tried to short Reddit. They tried to, not Reddit. They tried to short at a few companies
over here. Hold on. They tried to short Lemonade and a few other companies. Actually,
the thing loaded. So let me go ahead and play that for you guys.
The thing loaded, so let me go ahead and play that for you guys.
Founder and CEO of Muddy Waters Research.
I guess you don't trade by the hour, obviously.
And do you view conflicts as something that you look beyond?
Because I want to talk to you about your, you know, I want to get to so far.
But first, I want to talk to you about your overall view of the S&P based on AI. But does anything going on
today with the Strait of Hormuz factor into your thinking about investment?
So I like to trade situations in which I feel like we have an edge. We have no edge in
understanding this. As somebody who used to live in China, though, and, you know, I guess a China expert,
I really hope that by the time this is over, we have significantly degraded Iran's capability to block the strait.
Because if there ever is a conflict between China and Taiwan,
if Iran can block the strait, China will have Iran do so to use that as a cudgel to keep us on the sidelines.
So I do hope that by the time this is over.
Do you tie anything that the Trump administration has done in Venezuela and in Iran to a long game against China?
Well, certainly Venezuela seems to be a reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine.
And it's also interesting because this is statecraft where rather than doing this traditionally
and saying, okay, we're going to have meetings of lower level people and then maybe a summit,
you're just saying, you know what, if you're not on board, you're gone.
And I suspect that works better in Venezuela than it does in a theocracy like Iran.
But, you know, that could actually really work well in Venezuela.
You were saying went on the averages, the S&P overall, until recently.
And I think you told someone you had a 180 based on, I guess, the long view of AI.
If no one's got a job, then no one's going to be contributing to a 401k,
no one's going to be buying stocks,
and no one's going to be buying anything unless they're on UBI or something.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think there is a realistic case
that AI can displace 15% of knowledge workers within a few years.
Now, I didn't just pull that out of thin air.
When you look at technology companies,
the best users of AI within these companies
have been able to replace seven of their colleagues
with just themselves and AI.
Now, the current generation is substantially more powerful
than the prior one. And it was coded
by its predecessor. The current generation is coding its successors. So this is not a linear
progression in capability. This is an exponential progression. So when you're going to have
businesses that adopt AI in this way, that are going to be able to significantly underprice their competitors,
it's going to force everybody to adopt. So if rather than going from eight to one, we say
in the general economy, we're going from seven to six, that's 15%. I mean, like lawyers,
I think the junior associate job is gone. They are high earners. And by the way,
like this is not why we started researching SoFi, but when I had this 180 in January after doing this
research into using Claude and doing this research, it also occurs to me that SoFi is probably ground
zero for this disruption because so many of its customers fit that high
earner, not rich yet demographic that I think is going to be nailed by AI displacement.
I mean, that's been one of their selling points is that they have a younger, more tech savvy
audience and consumer base.
Yeah. And look, we're not short SoFi right now because of that, although we did buy a bunch of long-dated, deep-out-of-the-money puts on it as part of our AI disruption thesis.
So one thing that we are doing eternally is we are positioning part of our book to take advantage of what could be a GFC-type situation because you overlay...
Global financial crisis situation.
Yeah, because you overlay the AI disruption
with what could be some real issues in private credit.
I mean, the short answer there is nobody knows.
But in the course of doing the work on SoFi,
some of the practices that we've seen in securitization
are really loose in terms of the documentation.
You need to go... Let me first say, and then I want to hear,
because I was fascinated at the five things that you say are happening there.
But this is what SoFi had to say, a statement.
SoFi is threatening to bring legal action in response.
And in a statement says,
In part, SoFi maintains strong confidence in the integrity of our financial reporting.
We are a highly regulated public company with financial statements and extensive disclosures prepared in conformity with U.S.
gap in rules and regulations of the SEC supported by robust internal controls and procedures.
Is that true?
I mean, it's a non-response.
It is, but some of the things that you pointed out, you would know if you were doing some of those things.
Can you point out some of the things that you pointed out, you would know if you were doing some of those things. Can you point out some of the things with the loans?
But you're saying these things that you're pointing out definitely raise eyebrows, but it's not necessarily illegal.
The way that you get to a default rate that's a third of what it actually is, so that you can issue more stock.
So SoFi's real superpower is borrowing money and booking those borrowing proceeds as loan
sales.
Now, we exposed one particular loan where they borrowed 312 million, booked it as a
sale.
And it turns out that much of SoFi's accounting edifice is built on that single transaction. So we've pulled documents from state filings that show it's a borrowing.
It's not a sale, even though the CFO said on the conference call it was a sale.
It's clearly a borrowing.
And so we think SoFi restates that loan into being a loan.
But when it does that, we think it also has to restate about a billion
dollars of EBITDA and restate its capital ratio significantly lower. So that's why we're short so
far. Investing. So it does appear, and I've done a little bit of research on it this morning, that they're more short the market through the lens of private credit because they do foresee a GFC type of crisis coming.
And that the way to express their view on this after doing their research is to buy out of the money puts in SoFi.
So they're not actually straight
up short sofi shares but they do own puts that are out of the money on sofi where if this does
turn out to materialize and to be a very big issue sofi is going to come crashing down so
the big part about this report, and I would recommend actually
people check out the Steve Eisman podcast he had this weekend where he was discussing more
private credit and securitization, how it pertains to SoFi. So for the most part, and don't quote me
on this, I'm not a complete expert on it, but this is just from what I gather from kind of
understanding both sides over here. And I personally have no position in SoFi long or short.
In this market, I'd rather not try to short things,
especially when the VIX is so high.
But also SoFi has a large amount of retail exposure.
So it's probably not the best thing to short.
But also it's like, I think there's going to be other targets
if we do have a private credit issue that's brewing the markets.
But I do think that there could be something brewing in the markets but probably not going to be an issue um in the
near term and we'll know very well if this does become an issue later on and again i i do think
that if there really is a private credit issue i think there's going to be much more opportunities
to short other companies other than shorting soFi where the premiums are just very high.
But yeah, Anthony Noto did explain this and they did explain it when they had their answers that they did post the other week.
But the point that Muddy Waters is trying to explain is that SoFi issues loans to a lot of its clients for consumers.
And let's say they get about 10%
interest rate on that loan. So whoever is borrowing money from SoFi, they pay them 10%
for every dollar as far as interest grows on an annual basis. So SoFi takes that same debt
and then sells the debt to creditors and private equity as far as securitization products for,
let's say 5%. So that Delta or that spread between the 10% they get paid and the 5%
they're paying out for people who own that debt gives 5% to SoFi. The issue that Money Waters
is trying to point out is that a lot of these payments for that five percent
are start are going to become overdue to the point where if sofi is overdoing that five percent
payment they're making on the debt that they sold then they're no longer going to make any money on
the spread so then they're going to have to put all the ten percent they get from their consumers
which so far has signify that these are
not as high risk consumers in fact these are low risk consumers so that'll be the liquid say won't
really be a big issue for the entire book but that's because of the fact that you're having
these private credit issues these companies that are owning the debt or buying the debt from sofi
they want more insurance on the debt that they did purchase, meaning that they want a higher
payout, more than 5%, which means that SoFi is not going to be able to make as much money on this
spread, which means that SoFi won't be as profitable on it because of how much money they
make right now on the spread. So again, I'm not a private credit expert, but this is basically
what Money Watchers is trying to say. So in that aspect, they have other reasons to short so fire by own out of the money puts
in so far.
But this was their main point that they do believe that private credit issue is coming
to fruition when it is.
Well, I mean, I think the options go as far as 2028 for so far.
So maybe they bought like 2028 put options that are out of the money on so far and they're
going to sit in those for a while.
So I don't know.
Again, like he's disclosing it on air. So maybe he's telling the truth. Maybe he's not. He's
probably telling the truth because I don't think why would he lie in CNBC, but he obviously wants
a price of SoFi to come down. Can SoFi come back up and recover from this? Well, let's take a look
at the charts real quick. And then we're going to move on to the last topic for grab so how the market's doing actually
yeah the market's just like floating around over here all right so sofi has been in a pretty big
downtrend ever since they hit 30 but so is a lot of high beta stocks i topped out around here closing
all-time high at 32.22 and it's trading at 17.20 so it basically had like a 20 50 haircut and it's trading at $17.20. So it basically had like a 50% haircut.
And it's sitting here below all the moving averages over here.
On the weekly chart, they did bounce off the 100-day moving average over here,
which is good to see.
So maybe we're going to get a little bit of a bounce.
On the monthly chart, they are below the 20-day moving average,
basically flat on the entire month.
One thing to note here is that SoFi is probably going to move with, is it going to move with the entire XLF? Yeah. So SoFi is actually underperforming XLF right now,
which is mostly the larger banks. So I think you need a decent recovery in XLF, which are the
financials, which is mostly your JP Morgans, your Bank of America's and so on. You need a decent recovery in XLF, which are the financials, like just mostly your JP Morgan's, your bank of America's and so on.
You need a decent recovery on this in order to see recovery in SoFi.
Because I think what the market is doing is that they're pricing SoFi like a bank.
And if there is a private credit issue,
then smaller players like SoFi are going to be impacted pretty dearly.
Right?
So I have no position in this.
I don't know if it's going to go one way or another.
I think it's more dependent on the macro, not just that RAM, but also how this private credit issues are coming
up. So there actually is a clip that I want to play from OpenAI or from CNBC regarding OpenAI.
They're coming to battle for private equity and private investment with Anthropix. So I think
this is the one right here this is it okay here we go
segue to anthropic and open ai which are in the middle of a high stakes bidding war
with like alongside in involvement with private equity the winner could end up deciding the
future of enterprise software mackenzie sigalos has more in today's Tech Check.
Interesting way to try to get their technology in a bunch of hands at the same time, Mac.
Yeah, something that we haven't seen before.
And the news today really builds on what we heard last week,
that OpenAI and Anthropic are both courting private equity firms as distribution partners,
trying to get their AI tools embedded across portfolio companies.
But according to a new Reuters report
out this morning, it's OpenAI that's offering the more favorable terms. They're dangling early
access to new models, along with a guaranteed 17.5% minimum return for PE firms that join its
proposed enterprise JV that is well above a typical preferred return. Reuters reporting the
company is in advanced talks
with TPG, Bain Capital, Brookfield and Advent on a $10 billion vehicle with the firms expected
to contribute about $4 billion. Now, OpenAI's Fiji SEMO last week called it a deployment
arm for their tech. Anthropics running its own parallel effort, talking to Blackstone
and others, but without the same financial sweeteners.
And the play here, you said it Kelly, it's distribution. PE firms sit on trillions of
dollars in portfolio company revenue and once your model is customized and embedded across
hundreds of those businesses, it becomes a lot harder to rip it out. That creates the kind of
sticky recurring revenue that public market investors like to see. And the JV structure
helps too. Deploying AI into enterprises is expensive upfront, requiring lots of engineering
and customization work. By housing that in a separate entity, those costs sit on the
JV's books instead of OpenAI, so the parent company's margins look better heading into
an IPO. That said, not everyone is sold. Toma Bravo,
for example, passed. Toma Bravo passed, but they're the ones who have all the software companies.
Exactly. And so the value proposition here for the PE firms, they're not just writing a check,
they're co-owning an entity that absorbs the messiest, most capital-intensive parts of
enterprise sales. And that's why they're getting that guaranteed return but you had orlando bravo weighing in saying that you know portfolio
companies are already deploying ai without needing to commit capital through jv right
broader pushback kelly unless you're the lead partner with the board seat economics hard to
justify okay so there's definitely some concern when it comes to private equity specifically
tomah bravo that's invested in a lot of software companies and we've seen these software companies There's definitely some concern when it comes to private equity, specifically Atoma Bravo,
that's invested in a lot of software companies.
And we've seen these software companies valuation compress quite a good amount.
I don't need to bring up the IGV chart.
You guys have seen this.
And this is the issue that because of private equity is that they have so much of this.
And if they need to sell out at some of their positions or if they need to insure some of
their positions, basically want to be able to make sure that they have some sort of insurance in case a lot of the software
companies go belly up due to open ai or anthropic or whatever these other agentic ai tools are
actually doing these private companies might be in trouble so we saw this post this morning uh
regarding open ai is offering private equity firms a guaranteed minimum return of 7.5%
as well as early access to models not yet in public release.
Kind of giving a little bit of a door here for these companies to invest in OpenAI,
which is going to build more on the bearish theme that software is dead, right?
So I think the pressure still is on in software
stocks and it's probably the reason why you're not seeing them bounce as strongly as a lot of
semiconductor stocks and for me personally still i'm still staying away from software stocks even
though some of them the multiples are pretty good only because well i do own software stocks but i'm
not going to be adding to those positions most because because like, I kind of want to see how the whole market plays out right now. Right.
It's it for me, I swing a decent size of my portfolio.
Of course, my long-term positions still do stay there.
So I look for opportunity when they do come and I'm looking at the market
right now. I'm seeing a lot of risk in the table.
It doesn't look like something where it's like, Hey, I'm going to buy the dip.
I'm going to buy the call options expiring in a couple of months because I don't know where
the market's going to go in a couple of months.
We'll see.
Uh, I don't think that opportunities there.
I think that VIX is at $25.
So we'll see.
And there's obviously concern about the market as well from these private equity
companies, which might make this more attractive to them to, um, to get this
guarantee of 17.5% from, uh, from opening eyes.
So we'll continue to take a look at that one.
The last thing I want to take a look at is grabs news that we did see this
morning is that they are acquiring food Panda for $600 million, which is going
to give them a gateway to enter the Taiwanese markets.
I do have a clip from a foreign news outlet here that kind of gives a little
bit description, cause I could not find this
being reported in the news outlets that we do have here in the U.S. probably because they just don't
really care about this stuff but certainly I care as a Grab shareholder so let's see what happens
here. Grab has bought Fu Panda Taiwan marking the company's first expansion outside of Southeast
Asia. Grab paid 600 million U.S. dollars in cash for Food Panda's operations in Taiwan.
Food Panda's Berlin-based parent company, Delivery Hero, is making a deal in order to repay debt.
Grab already operates in eight countries in Southeast Asia, where it provides deliveries,
ride-sharing and financial services. Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission blocked an earlier attempt
by Uber to buy Food Panda in 2024, ruling that the merger would give the combined business a market
share of more than 90%.
Right. So there is this post from Ahmed this morning that kind of gives a little bit more
clarity on it. Let me actually open this one up right here
okay so grabs expanded taiwan they're scooping a food pandas delivery business
uh in the region of 600 million dollars all right so he lays it all out over here the company has
600 6 billion dollars in cash we have been waiting for them to start using in a more strategic way
and this is one of the first expansions outside of southeast asia that makes sense why given the synergy synergistic the is given how synergistic
the acquisition is grabs overalls business so as they mentioned on the news outlets uh uber tried
to buy this business for 1.25 billion dollars and the regulators didn't allow it so now instead of
1.25 grab is getting for 600 billion dollars and here are the metrics around it food pan of taiwan
did around 1.8 billion dollars in gross merchandise value and also profited on an adjusted ebitda basis
uh from last year and grab did 14.2 billion dollars of gmv last year so for 600 billion
dollars they're adding about 12 gmv to the business uh and he basically goes on to uh discuss
more things and um gab growth uh did post, a little bit more about this earlier today. Um,
here it is. All right. So the deal is $600 million food Panda.
All right. And they will grab his grab tab.
One will be the sixth largest market after Indonesia.
I don't know what country that is. Thailand, I think. Malaysia and the Philippines and SG.
Why am I running? What? What country is SG? Geez, I'm going to be like such a moron if I
what company country is SG?
Singapore.
Oh my goodness.
How did I forget about that one?
I was just looking it up on a different screen.
So we all know about the go-to deal that was supposed to happen.
And that's still a rumor.
We don't know if it's actually going to happen or not.
This kind of does add a little bit more to Grab's profile as far as expansion into Southeast Asia.
My guess is that this is going to take a little bit more time to play out.
I don't think this is something that's going to happen overnight.
Yeah, man.
Thank you very much for the – all you guys commented on that.
I don't know why I didn't even realize that that was Singapore.
But yeah, so there was actually news earlier today,
just moving on a little bit,
that we did see that Apple is going to be putting Maps,
ads on their Maps app.
And Google already has ads on their Maps map as well.
And this is something pretty interesting for Zeta
because Zeta does offer proprietary data
to its clients. And maybe this could be a little bit of leverage that they do have if we do continue
to see ads being rolled up to new platforms, especially ones that are integrated with AI,
right? So that's obviously something that Zeta does as far as having generative engine optimization,
as far as having a generative engine optimization,
similar to a search engine optimization for searches.
Now through AI, they'll be able to transgress these ads
or all the data that these companies do need
to put the right ads for people based on their AI usage
or based on what the companies are seeing
as far as the queries that they're going through, right?
So maybe this is a leverage play through zeta we'll see i do think that um it is nice to see zeta
bounce a little bit over here on the day uh let's actually take a look at the markets before i end
the stream zeta is getting a little bit of bounce today uh above four percent on the day still need
some needs a little bit of work in this chart, but this is going through some decent consolidation here.
And again, we are seeing a little bit of a bounce
in some software companies,
not all software companies,
but some software companies.
CRM is actually flat in the day.
DigitalOcean is actually green in the day.
Adobe is flat in the day as well.
So not all these software companies
are getting a bounce.
Where's Fastly at?
It's probably up a decent amount in the day. Yeah, Fastly is these software companies are getting a balance. Where's Fastly at?
It's probably up a decent amount in the day.
Yeah, Fastly is up about 12%, so Fastly is doing pretty good.
I will see what happens.
It's been kind of floating around here for a while, so we're just going to have to wait
and see what's going to happen tomorrow, probably after the market closes.
That's usually when the news comes out.
And yeah, that's about it.
I don't think there's really much in earnings this week.
Let's see what's...
I just cut myself off there for a minute.
I think I'm still recording here, right?
Yep, I am still recording.
Lost you guys for a minute.
I accidentally closed the wrong tab.
Didn't mean to do that.
I was trying to open up earnings hub,
and I opened it on my stream window over here.
So let me open up the earnings hub.
Not really much this week.
I mean, if you guys are GameStop bull,
then you're going to want to see what's going to happen tomorrow after close.
Not really too much here.
KB Holmes tomorrow.
Braves is tomorrow.
Not a whole lot.
BYND is on Wednesday.
Jeffries is on Wednesday.
Chewy, PDD, Wednesday morning.
Probably going to be late at night tuesday for a lot of us or early early morning on wednesday uh lucid is on thursday yeah there's not really much being
reported this week so this is kind of this is going to kind of be earning season is basically
over for the most part and what's going on next week? Oh, T1 Energy is Tuesday before open next Tuesday.
So I know a lot of you people are long that one.
Not really much.
It looks like it's all pretty much done.
We did have on-disc report earnings this morning, which is pretty interesting to see.
They did have a pre-earnings release.
So let's actually see what some of the numbers were
uh shy did post about that one this morning let me try to open it up here we go yeah so on to support earnings this morning they did beat in the top line they slightly missed on the bottom line
on an adjusted basis gross margin 42 so that's good backlog 68 million
and cash position 1.75 billion dollar guidance was actually much higher for next year so good to see
that things are moving pretty well for on this i don't have an honest position so i can't really
tell you what i think about it never really looked too much into it as far as my drone play goes a
lot of you guys know that i am long ampx um but yeah so you guys take care i'm going to close out the stream now
you guys probably head on omit stream have a good one thanks for tuning in guys talk to you later
