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LIVE APPLE $AAPL EARNINGS | JEROME POWELL | STOCK MARKET TALK
Recorded: Jan. 29, 2026 Duration: 2:13:01Space Recording
Full Transcription
What is up what is up everybody i hope you guys are all doing well it is quite the interesting
day in the stock market we are here post earnings and still some earnings coming up after the close
apple earnings microsoft stock on pace for its worst day in five years.
Maybe even more than that, down 12%.
Meta stock was ripping earlier, but maybe that one has pulled back a little bit.
Let's see, where's Meta?
Meta stock is still up more than 10%.
So those two names kind of canceling each other out a little bit.
But overall, the market kind of retreated.
Was a little hot air in the morning.
Had a random drawdown around 10, 11 a.m.
And has maybe recovered a little bit since.
We obviously also had Tesla earnings, which is down by 3%.
Not as big of a mover as some of the other ones.
After the close today, we do have apple reporting earnings i am very much
excited for that one apple earnings incoming hopefully it's good we shall see but um but
yeah i hope you guys are all ready and excited for another day of stocks on spaces i'll read
through the news stories after a little bit we have jennifer schoenberger coming on from yahoo
finance she's actually in the room she's one of the people that asked jerome powell a question
she uh actually interviewed uh beset what is beset's actual term let's get in front of me
but uh we are lucky to be having her on in spaces i'm to to hear her talk treasury secretary bestings so she has some some interesting insights there but um but yeah it should be an interesting day exciting day
wonderful day tell me a little bit your thoughts on some of the earnings some of the stuff like
that that we got going on here mr mike evan how are you man i'm doing? I'm doing well. I'm doing well. A lot going on.
Crazy times, busy times, but I've been good.
I've been good.
We're kind of just, this pattern kind of maintains the same.
We talked about it yesterday.
Every time we put a new high in the market the last couple months, three months,
we immediately sell right back off.
We did the same thing the day before, and then the last few days we sold off and we're coming off to lows but we also are
putting in a series of higher lows so the market generally is trending up very slowly it's just
not going anywhere um you know i uh i didn't do a lot today i think i've only done one trade today
i shorted tesla with puts out of the gate and made some nice money and i haven't done anything since then other than
i started a new position in uh in meta i bought some stock there uh for a long term
uh the action caught me a little bit off guard but how wicked we were down we dropped today
meta obviously looks great i think that one's going to go back to the all-time highs as long as the market holds up.
I think Microsoft report was an absolute disaster.
Just not a lot to like there at all, unfortunately.
One of the biggest things I took from that call was the admission from them that of their forward-booked revenue for their Azure, for their cloud, 45% of it is from OpenAI.
That's just bad.
One company accounts for 45%
of your forward-looking revenue there,
books revenue.
That's not good.
I thought Tesla was a typical Tesla call.
I don't think it changes anything here.
If you're a Tesla bull,
you're still looking towards the fiber slash robo-taxi,
depending upon which version. You're looking at the Optimus there. I think their revenue
can take a hit over the next year and their profits. The reason on the revenue is they're
going to discontinue the model X and S. And those are well-liked cars and drive a lot of revenue
and profits. So I think you can look at some problems there short term.
As they go to scale up, they're going to turn those factories into optimist factories. But that's going to take a year plus, you know, before you see any kind of return,
those actually get up and running.
So, you know, it just kind of is.
IBM had a decent report.
Lamb Research had a great report.
I mean, there's nothing really wrong here with the markets other than it just doesn't
want to break out and it doesn't want to break down.
Names will be the tell.
I mean, everybody getting hit off of this, the software names are getting absolutely punished today.
Well, for now earnings, I mean, Salesforce is getting destroyed.
Now is down.
I mean, they're all getting just punished on this.
It's a tough market.
It's a market of names.
You have to kind of look around and ask yourself, what do you really want to be in?
And, you know, where do you want to put your money to work on any given trading day?
You know, in your long-term accounts, I'm not worried.
You know, anything I have in there, nothing's really bothering me right now.
It's the, you know, day trading is just being more careful here.
Honestly, I didn't think we were going to, I didn't think we were going to dump as hard as we did for the first 90 minutes of the day.
And then we came off the low.
It was right at 11 o'clock.
That was it.
The low came in.
So, you know, no damage done.
We're still right back now above the 8 and the 21 day on the SPY right at it.
And, yeah, everything looks fine.
Do you have any thoughts on Jerome Powell from yesterday?
We're going to have Jennifer Schoenberger on in a little bit.
Like I was saying a second ago, she is in the room asking powell some questions also had a best of interview
tell me more you got any thoughts on uh on the powell interview from yesterday let me let me say
oh it doesn't matter he doesn't he is you know he doesn't control anything no i mean he was he was
her own pal i mean i thought the overall tone of the Fed announcement and him was slightly hawkish, which I think everybody kind of expected.
He he stood his ground. He wouldn't take questions on things that would get him in trouble on on the grand jury inquisitive, you know, a grand jury indictment on him.
He wouldn't answer questions on what he's going to do afterwards. I mean, he was smart.
He avoided topics that can get him in trouble.
He answered things in his typical math.
I didn't have a problem with anything he said.
I think he was fine.
He has two more meetings left.
So, you know, I thought it was fine.
Wonderful meeting.
You know, Trump's mad.
We knew that was going to happen.
I mean, that was a given knew that was going to happen.
That was a given that he was going to throw a fit.
So no big deal.
Yeah, earnings was a lot of the news from today.
There was a really big news story that came out in the last hour, hour and a half, whatever it was, hour two,
that reportedly SpaceX is looking to merge with XAI ahead of the plant's IPO coming up later this year.
So we might be getting SpaceX and XAI.
It kind of makes me even think like,
oh, what am I doing here on Tesla?
I'm left out on the side a little bit with all the fun going on.
But SpaceX and XAI,
this is a report out of Reuters and Bloomberg.
We'll see if we get the patented Elon saying this is not true,
but that was a big news story from the day SpaceX and XAI, reportedly a merger coming in that
direction. There was another story that American Airlines is looking to restart service to
Venezuela for the first time since 2019. I saw a little headline around NVIDIA and Mercedes.
I saw a headline around Waymo robo taxi reportedly hit a
kid not the best thing uh they tried to defend it by kind of saying how their robo taxi performed
better than a normal person would have kind of saying that they were able to break a little bit
but they still had the kid some just some minor injuries um on him but it still did happen. Apple, who will be reporting
earnings after the close,
4.30 p.m. Eastern is when Apple reports
earnings. They like to do it at the same time.
Apple did announce
an acquisition, so they don't really do
too many acquisitions. Their
largest acquisition is $3 billion.
The second largest one was $1 billion.
Well, not anymore. They just announced
or it has been reported that they agreed to acquire a company called QAI.
Apple making an acquisition, QAI, that will reportedly worth $2 billion.
So Apple kind of breaking its rule a little bit, making slightly larger acquisitions than they have in the past.
I don't know too much about this QAI company. I
don't know if any of you guys down below do as well. And by the way, if you do have any comments,
questions, any stories that were standing out to you in the bottom right of your screen,
there's a little purple something or note thing down there. That is the Spaces chat. You can leave
some comments and I will read through that. President Trump came out and said that he's
going to pick the new fed chair next
week for a long time we've had um you know it could be in the next week or so or anything like
that but finally the president has come out and said next week we will be getting that
a lot the rest of it was earnings crypto moving lower bitcoin got below 85k i saw was even below 84 right now it's at 838 bitcoin having a
little bit of a rough time ethereum at 2800 initial jobless claims came in slightly above
expectations were pretty much in line with expectations there's been a lot of companies
talking about job cuts over the last couple of days weeks or so obviously we had
amazon doing corporate layoffs 16 000 corporate layoffs chemical maker dow dow chemicals they
reported earnings this morning but they also said that they plan to let go of 4 500 employees reduce
their workforce by 4 500 jobs a lot of these conversations are around streamlining the
workforce around ai all those type of languages but yeah that is one thing that we do have going on.
DAO announcing some layoffs.
There was a lot of, like I said, earnings was really the big theme.
I see Monitiv down below.
I bet you he comes up here and gives us a little bit of a thesis
on how earnings are going in general.
MasterCard came out this morning, had earnings.
Caterpillar, Lockheed martin etc actually we do have mr sniper from wolf defense did you get the chance to look
into lockheed martin earnings stocks up four percent yes um actually we saw a new all-time
high out of the lockheed uh martin earnings um funny that you're saying that i was literally
about to post a transcript of their call literally right now.
But basically, we saw a backlog record, $194 billion. This is 2.5 times their annual sales,
which is huge. Sales are up 6% year over year. They're making $75 billion or so. And their free
cash flow is up at $6.9 billion, which also exceeded expectations. We're also seeing a 25%
increase in their operating profit from a 5%
sales growth that they're estimating. EPS was down just a little bit, but it seems like nobody
really cared that much about it. Missed by like 8 cents or 4 cents. Don't quote me on that exactly,
but very close. Not a major EPS miss at all, but slight miss on the EPS side. Revenue came in
above expectations. And yes, stock is up to a new all-time
high today and pretty exciting to see what happens next on Lockheed so far the street loves it and
this earnings reaction was pretty good you will see a transcript of this call and see what actually
caused this five percent plus move on Lockheed Martin keep in mind this stock doesn't really
ever move this crazy but you will see a transcript of this call coming on Wolf Defense momentarily. Just about to put
that one out there. But a great report from Lockheed, similar towards Boeing's report also.
It seems like defense spending in general is going to continue to be ramped up. And I'm really
interested to see the rest of the defense names. Most of them, or the big two have came out. We've
got some more coming out, but I'm interested to see where the rest of the defense names. Most of them, or the big two have came out. We've got some more coming out,
but I'm interested to see where the rest of them
set their guidance going forward.
Seems like the defense sector looks like
it's going to be receiving some nice bids
in the next six months.
We'll see if that continues,
and we'll see if the defense spending
continues to maintain and meet the guidance
that all of these guys are setting that are pretty high.
Yeah, we shall see what happens in the defense area. But just the point is a lot of companies
reporting earnings this morning in a couple different parts of the market, getting to see
a little bit of insights. I know Lockheed Martin, name that reported earnings, that stock was up.
Obviously, I was saying earlier, Meta, they reported earnings up 10 microsoft they reported
earnings down 12 so kind of canceling each other out service now also reported earnings that one
is down 12 service now getting slacked a little bit ibm was another one that also reported earnings
last night doing a little bit better on the upside up 4%. So there are definitely a couple winnings, losers, and winners here.
Seems like the losers are kind of going down to a little bit of a larger magnitude
than some of the winners there.
Should be having Jennifer joining us here in a second.
I'm looking at my watch list that we have going on,
and it's kind of sorted by the best and worst names for the day
meta is the best one carnival is second honeywell which you guys think was a stock talk stock market
news name that i have owned for a little bit i am playing for that spin-off this year but honeywell
stock is actually higher off of their earnings they're up about five percent they reported
earnings this morning
thurman lockheed martin ibm applovin are some of the names that are outperforming on here
caterpillar also had earnings this morning some of the names that are underperforming
worst performers microsoft microstrategy bmr crypto actually getting hit again
rough times rough days leu figma core weave axon clean spark salesforce are the names that
are on the downside of the list these salesforce probably had earnings as well a lot of the crypto
names are on the lower side salesforce is down often now off of what service now all these software names are down up now
yeah that makes sense that makes sense i do see jennifer down below i'm excited for this
conversation we're gonna have here what's up jennifer how you doing hey guys how's it going
uh no i am doing fantastic.
We're excited to have you up here.
It's obviously been a crazy day, a crazy week in the stock market.
We're having some big moves, big intraday swings today.
We have a lot of earnings in Powell.
Today there's a couple of earnings up after the close.
So I think craziness is the way that I would describe it there.
Never a dull moment, right?
Yeah.
So for anyone who doesn't know, Jennifer Schoenberger,
she is in the room when Jerome Powell is giving his press conference.
She is one of the people who gets to ask a question,
senior reporter over at Yahoo Finance.
She also interviewed Treasury Secretary Besant over the last couple of days,
so a very connected person, having some of those conversations uh i'm excited to have you on the spaces and just talk through uh some of the
latest that was going on direction but obviously we had jerome powell's press conference yesterday
uh why don't we just start with some of your your general thoughts on that general thoughts on kind
of what's going on in your world and what's interesting for you we appreciate you yeah sure
so i i guess starting with the first question you have on takeaways from
Fed Chair Powell's press conference yesterday, I sort of look at it as two buckets, right? There
was what's the path for monetary policy as the first bucket. And then the second one is what's
going on with the state of the independence of the central bank and the legal issues
surrounding Chair Powell and other members of the central bank like Lisa Cook.
So on the first bucket on monetary policy, I would just say it's very clear that the Fed is in no
rush to cut again. He said that policy is in a good place, which is a phrase that I heard from many other
of his colleagues on the committee in the weeks leading up to this meeting, which sort of signals
we're happy where we are right now to take stock of the economy and see what affects the three
rate cuts that we did at the tail end of last year have on the economy and
the job market. And they did say in their statement, and Chair Powell acknowledged that
they think that the job market appears to be stabilizing at this point. That doesn't mean that
downside risks have been eliminated altogether. At the same time, he seems to be optimistic that
tariffs are going to be topping
out here, perhaps in the first half of this year, assuming that the president doesn't layer on more
aggressive action. And that's certainly a possibility. But if all goes as it looks right now,
you know, things look good and they expect the economy to pick up. I mean, I tried to ask Chair Powell, if you have an economy that's picking up, you have fiscal tailwinds in the form of
big tax refunds that are going to be given out, a spring back from the effect of the government
shutdown. You know, how could you cut into that? And then we also talked about sort of the divide
between the softness in the job market
and the GDP numbers.
And he sort of seemed to indicate that he gives more stock to the jobs numbers.
They're more reliable than the GDP numbers because GDP, there's so many different components
to them.
If that's the case, I mean, he also seemed to indicate that it's not just cyclical issues,
right, with the job market and the weaker payroll numbers we've been seeing, it's structural issues.
And if it's structural, there's only so much the Fed's going to be able to do with their blunt
interest rate toll. On the second bucket, I would just say it was very clear that he deflected on
all legal issues surrounding the criminal investigation into his testimony before the Senate last year.
And I thought it was interesting, the remark that he gave over why he attended the oral arguments at
the Supreme Court last week for Lisa Cook. I did see him personally there. I was at the oral arguments. And he said, look, I think it would have been a bigger question if I hadn't attended. People would have said, well, why aren't you here? And it was clearly a show of solidarity with Lisa Cook and upholding central bank independence, which he seems to think is still safe at this point.
still safe at this point.
That was definitely one of the themes as well.
I imagine it's a very interesting point
of going in and trying to ask him a question
because we were talking about this.
President Trump just came out and said
that he is going to pick the next Fed chair next week.
Obviously, for a while, it's been next week or so.
I feel like it's been like that for two months now,
but next week, it seems like we're actually going to get that.
So Powell has two meetings left.
There's also some sort of thing when you tick over into the new year, when it's kind of the last one that kind of like he's almost done point to talk about the long term monetary policy with him.
Someone who he also didn't answer if he's going to stay on the Fed committee after.
answer if he's going to stay on the Fed committee after.
So it's just a very interesting time to come in and ask Powell questions.
So I was just kind of thinking how you kind of went through this press conference,
kind of, and maybe some things you noticed, maybe some things that were different as we
are towards the end with just two or three of these press conferences left versus a little
bit earlier on.
Sure. Well, I think we should clarify press conferences with under the chairmanship of Jerome Powell, right?
Because those will continue under whoever the next Fed chair is.
And, you know, I noticed yesterday he seemed to be more relaxed than I've seen him in a while.
be more relaxed than I've seen him in a while. He seemed to be going with the flow when he was
getting questions that were not on the economy and monetary policy, which historically I think
he's been a bit uncomfortable with, at least when you look at his mannerisms. He doesn't like those
questions. He gets upset with them. I once asked him a question earlier, it was last May, why he hadn't met with the president and it pissed him off. So that was one thing I noticed. I think he also perhaps sees himself as one of the pillars to uphold independence at the Fed.
And I think one of the reasons why he's deflected and been silent on his plans to stay on as a governor once his chairmanship is over mid-May is that he wants to retain that option, right? There's
this legal investigation that's playing out, and maybe he wants to stay on the board. He thinks
that, and I'm speculating here, right? I don't have inside information on this, but maybe he
wants to stay on the board because he thinks that he can help maintain central bank
independence. If the president has more seats and has more opportunity to put who he wants on the
board, maybe that concerns him. I don't know. But that is certainly sort of the narrative that's
been circulating here in Washington. Are people expecting for him to uh to stay there is that kind of your base case when you're
when you're going through this and obviously um there was two dissenters yesterday this isn't
just one person going in and saying what they want race to be there is a little bit of a committee
so even if that other person wanted them to cut rates and they didn't that doesn't necessarily
mean it's going to happen it might be a very interesting press conference when there's one
or two dissenters
and that person is the Fed chair.
Absolutely.
I think that the divisions that we've seen,
the very deep divisions in the central bank,
we could see those reignited again
under whoever the next Fed chair is
because Chair Powell said there was broad support
on the committee to hold
rate steady yesterday.
And yes, we did have two dissenters.
But I noticed that Stephen Myron, who has been arguing for a half percentage point cut,
was looking at for a quarter percentage point cut yesterday, which I thought was interesting.
And we know that Governor Chris Waller is still on the shortlist for Fed chair.
He has voice concern about the job market, but he's still on that shortlist.
So I sort of took that to mean he still wants the job.
He's still in the running because Michelle Bowman is not on the shortlist anymore.
And she gave a speech a couple of weeks ago in which she laid out a case that I think could have been one for her to dissent upon based on the groundwork she laid out.
But she didn't.
She didn't dissent.
So that to me was telling.
And to your point, yes, this is a committee.
This is not one person who's going to make a decision.
There are 19 members here, 12 voting members.
There are 19 members here, 12 voting members.
And they are going to, there's probably going to be some very healthy debate on the committee.
And that Fed chair is going to have to create consensus.
So it'll be interesting to see how that all plays out.
And as to whether I think Chair Powell is going to stay on or not,
I think it's going to hinge on what happens with this criminal investigation.
Yeah, that is fair. That is fair.
I want to ask about Basant.
Obviously, you've gotten the chance to interview him over the last little bit.
I'm curious if, you know, a little bit more of a cheeky question,
then we'll get into some other ones.
I'm curious if sometimes they just say things to say things.
I don't know if they necessarily believe
everything they're saying.
Do you think you're generally getting
the real thoughts of these people
or is it kind of just like a little bit of a political game?
Or I don't know if political game is the correct way to part it.
Yeah, you're saying, are they just talking points?
Yeah.
Well, so I chatted, had a nice interview yesterday
with Secretary Besson
and we talked about the Trump accounts.
So speaking of the stock market and how to get Americans invested early on to help grow their wealth.
And I think he actually believes and is very fervent in what he is putting forth and proposing. And he gave a lot of credit to the president. But
I think is it I mean, ultimately, look, right, he is a money manager. And I think he truly believes
in and what they're putting forth. And he called it a game changer. And I don't think he's wrong,
honestly, because I do think that real wealth is built through
investing, not through just having a job in most cases.
And if you didn't do that early on or you don't have the skill sets to do that or the
know-how, there is a gap.
And one thing I asked him about is, look, you're going to give these accounts to newborns for the duration of this administration, $1,000 to start automatically invested in index spend.
But what about mandating investing classes in schools so kids learn how to invest and have the tools to invest?
And he said, look, Jennifer, you know,
it's really up to the states. I personally would like to see the federal government mandate that because not all states mandate that. And I think that we are required to learn American history.
We really need the investment tools and skill sets. It is a valid, important part of life that shouldn't be outsourced to
somebody else. Or if it is, we should have some know-how. So that's a very long way of saying
that I do believe that he believes in that, you know, whether it's there are other parts that
he may or may not, and he's just doing the president's bidding. I can't speak to that.
And we also talked about the search for the next Fed chair. And he told me yesterday that in the
next week or so, he expects an announcement from the president. And the president said today during
his cabinet meeting that he does expect to make an announcement over the next week. We know there's
four people on that list. I still wouldn't rule out. Besant, personally, I know the president really wants him
to do the job. And at this point, I don't know if that may be a better, more exciting job than
being Treasury Secretary with so much already accomplished and done within the first year of
this administration. Interesting. So did you get any sense that he would want to do that
no i mean he's he's not going to show his hand and then he said publicly like no he doesn't want
the job he's happy where he is and you know you got it you got to take him at face value but
i do think that if the president really pushed him and said look i really want you to do this
i think he would do it.
So the question is whether Trump really wants Besson or he is fine to deal or to do with Rick Reeder, Chris Waller.
I don't think it's going to be Kevin Hassett or Kevin Warsh.
And independence has definitely become a big theme,
a big talking point out of all this stuff.
I'd love to hear your take on it and the conversations you're hearing from the inside.
Obviously, it's something that is kind of super important.
And the Fed being able to make the decision it needs to is definitely something that for markets,
the markets definitely do want it to see.
You can see just based on the way it moves that when that comes into question,
that is not super exciting.
But also there's opportunities
for it to be blown out of proportion
and things not to happen
and the art of the deal, whatever it was.
But I just want to hear your take
on kind of the conversations
that are being had around Fed independence right now.
Yeah, I mean, certainly those inside the Fed who I've talked to and interviewed members
of the Fed, I mean, they certainly saw the Justice Department's criminal probe into Chair
Powell as an attack on central bank independence as a policy difference.
And so that was, it sort of took all of the actions and comments that we've seen up to this point to a high boil.
And I think that that causes officials to sort of dig their heels in more to make sure that they are focused on the data and doing what's best for the economy.
And again, I think it goes back to what we were just talking about, which is this is a 19 member committee.
This is not one person who makes a decision.
And there are seven members who are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate on the Board of Governors here in Washington.
But the rest of the members are the 12 regional fellow reserve banks.
And those are appointed by the individual boards.
And we have a rotation of four voting members each year
amongst those regional feds.
And yes, I guess the Board of Governors has to confirm
those presidents, those regional fed presidents, a year, uh, I believe in like
February or something or March. Um, but I think it would take a lot to chip away at this in terms
of central bank independence. I think the Supreme court case with Lisa cook, um, also will help
re-cement that precedent because in listening to
the justices, they seem pretty skeptical of the administration's arguments
on grounds to remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook. So I know there's concerns here,
and I know that the president wants to do what he thinks is best.
But right now, there's a lot of ripples.
There's a lot of drama.
But I think central bank independence is intact.
And you heard Chair Powell's speech of that yesterday.
Yeah, I think those are some good points there.
What about the search for the next Fed chair? That's kind where this is all this is going into um there's
four or five candidates left i think the calci i was looking at the betting markets are saying
prediction markets are saying uh rick reader is the most common outcome now so it'll be interesting
to see uh who that ends up being it's gonna be so interesting to see just because it's like
the minute the president makes a comment about one of these candidates, all of a sudden they rise in the horse race.
Right. And so the fact that the president said he was impressed with Rick Reeder, all of a sudden now he's at the top of the list.
I wouldn't say that it's a slam dunk that it's going to be him, though, because the president goes back and forth and it's very, very difficult to handicap and forecast what his decision is going to be him though because the president goes back and forth and it's very very difficult to handicap and forecast what his decision is going to be we i i can tell you
the last time we were thinking about myron's seat we were all taken by surprise when steven
myron was the nominee and he is still uh one of the two people who are not going with uh with what the other fed
members wanted to do with no cut i yes crystal crystal uh crystal ball tinfoil hat i got two
questions on i don't know how much time you have i'm enjoying to keep uh talking about this we also
have apple earnings coming up after the close today a couple others so it is an interesting day
but uh and microsoft's tanking
the market today too yeah no microsoft's a little rough meta doing the opposite tesla kind of in
between it's uh it's an interesting mega cap moves yeah service now also getting destroyed
it's it's lockheed martin which i'm sure his office is right uh in dc i would i would be my
guess uh it is doing pretty good here.
But tinfoil hat, speculation,
who do you think the next Fed chair is going to be
if I had to get you out of the four people?
And how many rate cuts do you think we end up having in 2026?
Could be a trick question, if any at all.
Yeah, it's so hard to tell you who the next Fed chair is.
I honestly, I don't think it's going to be Kevin Hassett
just because he has shown loyalty to the president
and the markets, the bond market in particular,
has shown through price action,
higher yields and issues with that.
And so I think the president recognizes that.
So I think he's off the list.
So I really think it's down to three.
I think it's between Warsh and
Reader personally I don't think that Waller's gonna get it I could be wrong but I think it's
between those two um if you want me to pick between them I don't know it's it's tough for me
uh as far as the number of rate cuts look they they penciled in one rate cut this year
we could see one or two.
It's not going to be until the second half of this year.
I don't see any cuts before Powell's term is up.
And look, if some of the Republicans in the Senate, like Tom Tellis, have threatened to stall and block any nomination for the next Fed chair until the criminal
investigation into Chair Powell is resolved. That could draw things out, in which case,
I wonder if Powell then stays longer. And then that has implications for rate cuts.
But again, I go back to, and I'm sorry to beat the dead horse here, but this is a 19-member committee.
And I think for the Fed to cut rates, either you're going to have to see a deterioration in the job market.
And yes, most of the jobs have been coming in one sector, right?
It's been like healthcare and social services.
So it does look not so great. But I think you also need to see a drop, a decisive
drop in inflation that is sustainably coming down. And if tariffs aren't going to peak until
the middle of the year, then there's no way they're going to cut before the middle of the year.
Again, unless there's something drastic that happens. And the
fact that we have this fiscal stimulus coming in the spring and with the tax refunds, and you have
the one big beautiful bill in place with all the tax incentives for corporations, you've got a good
economic year ahead. I think it's difficult to cut into that unless you really see inflation drop.
But if you've got a good economy, you're stimulating demand. So again, I think it's difficult to cut into that unless you really see inflation drop. But if
you've got a good economy, you're stimulating demand. So again, I think we're lucky we see one
or two cuts. Okay. There we go. Thank you. I kind of forced you on it, but I think you gave a good
answer. Thank you. Yeah. It was good because no one's really like put me in, you know, forced me into the corners. It was good.
It kind of forced me to think.
We did get a little story while you were talking there.
Amazon is reportedly in talks to invest up to $50 billion into OpenAI.
OpenAI seeking $100 billion in around $830 billion valuation. There's been stories around them.
A lot of people seeking to invest
in open AI, even at these valuations. So I'd imagine in your kind of day-to-day around the Fed,
around DC, there are a lot of conversations around AI. I'm curious.
Yes. And I think it's more...
Powell was even asked about it yesterday.
Yeah, it's more about productivity. Sorry.
It's sorry. It's more about productivity, I think, if you're talking about Washington circles.
And I did ask Chair Powell yesterday.
I said, look, is it productivity that's the gap between, that explains the gap between GDP and softer job growth?
And is that being driven by AI?
He spoke to that, but he didn't, productivity, I should say, but not to AI specifically all that much.
He did talk a little bit about it
in terms of the impact on the job market.
He thinks there is a loose connection
to entry-level positions, college grads,
so on the fringes,
but it's not the driving force right now for the job market.
But also they're looking at all these data center build outs, right? Because that is where you're
seeing a chunk of this business investment. So that is where we're really seeing a lot of the discussions here in Washington, less about, you know, the potential for bubbles.
And, you know, look, we see all the spend from Microsoft, all those, and then the market gets upset, like you're not turning in the percentage growth that we want in your cloud business.
But all that spending, you got to wonder,
it translates to bigger investment in the economy, boosts the economy ultimately.
Until that one time when we all get scared about it, but I genuinely do think that this is the
direction it's going. And obviously some of these valuations are getting crazy.
And when you can kind of...
Actually,
we won't go down that way.
The thought was taking me towards gold and silver and all these precious metals.
And I'm curious what type of conversations
you've had around the Fed
and D.C. around gold
and silver. Powell was asked about that
and he said he doesn't look at it necessarily
as a signal. It doesn't mean they aren't
talking about it and looking about it.
So, I'm curious what type of conversations have been there.
They never let the dollar either.
We always try to ask them about the dollar, and if they
think that's inflationary, and they just
don't go there.
So, yeah, I don't have too much to add.
I mean, obviously, gold
is a safe haven, right? And the dollar, right, the world's global reserve currency, it's a function of right now of what we're seeing, what's happening in other currency markets with the yen, of course, but also geopolitics and a lot of the shifts that we're seeing.
overseeing. So I think you've seen since the president took office, a weakening in the dollar
and the president has said he favors a weaker dollar. But I think you could also argue it
diminishes our purchasing power. It could be inflationary. I don't know. Maybe it does boost
overseas earnings. But these are all factors that the Fed does look at and take into account as they look at the overall picture.
That's, I think, how they look at this.
Yeah, that is fair.
What other topics are you talking about the most there in just the conversations? I mean, is it the ones I'm asking you about here? I'd imagine people have different perspectives.
a lot of drama surrounding it. And the president was not happy with the Fed holding rate study
yesterday. He posted on True Social. The other thing that we're looking at is this crypto bill,
the Clarity Act, which did pass the Senate Agriculture Committee on a party line vote.
But I think there's a lot of hurdles to getting this thing passed. It's something that the administration wants passed. And we're hearing about a crypto summit at the White House next week that I'm trying to look into.
crypto companies together to try to figure out or come to a middle ground on this yield issue,
right? If crypto companies can pay out yield. But I think it's more than that, right? There's
other hurdles because you have to have bipartisan support for this legislation to pass and you're
going to need democratic support. So there's other issues that they're going to have to get through,
and they're facing the midterms.
So I think they recognize this,
and this is why they're going to convene a summit next week.
And we'll see how they sort through these issues.
I'm going to be really interested to see how this plays out
and if they get this done.
SEC chair, obviously, Paul Atkins,
he has some rule- writing ability when it comes to
crypto, but it's better to have it codified by Congress. And it's been a long road for crypto,
you know, with Gary Gensler's SEC chair, now they've got Paul Atkins. So they have a cheerleader
on their side. But, you know, those rules, if written by the SEC, could easily be undone by a new administration.
If it's codified by Congress, then it's more difficult to overturn.
So keeping an eye on that.
Crypto needs some good catalyst.
Yeah.
I don't know if you've been looking at the price, but it's down again today.
When the market goes up, crypto stays the same today when the market goes up crypto stays the same
when the market goes down crypto goes down
it's about what the last couple months have been for that
it's an interesting dynamic right
because everyone said oh it's like
digital gold
and it doesn't seem to operate that way
at least in my experience
not to mention stocks recovered today off the lows and crypto didn't.
Yeah.
It just kept trickling down.
But we were talking about this yesterday too, this idea of like what even qualifies as a crypto catalyst now?
Great question, yeah.
quality it's clearly not currency debasement because the the precious metals trade has
responded historically to currency to space this debasement right i mean for the last
three years or actually two and a half years gold and silver have been on this face ripper
uh you know hitting new all-time highs every month and every debasement headline sends precious
metals flying for the last three
months crypto hasn't participated in any of this stuff i mean we talked about raising the military
budget to 1.5 trillion like four weeks ago gold had a huge gap up on that bitcoin didn't even move
yeah and so that that's what i mean again i'm not coming out like overtly bearish on crypto or
anything but i'm just saying it is puzzling to me that it just cannot catch a bit like there and it seems like there's a different excuse every
time right there's sometimes like the quantum trade is rallying and then people go oh it's
fears about the quantum trade and it's like even on days where the quantum stocks are down it's
still down and it's like i i just i don't know what qualifies as a crypto catalyst so i was
gonna ask you that i don't know i i have also I can commiserate with you because I have also had very difficulty
making sense of this. You know, it used to be a risk asset. It seemed like, okay,
if the stocks were up, then it would go up and stocks were down or go down. And it certainly
hasn't behaved as gold for as long as I can remember. And the notion of scarcity, I mean, I don't know.
I really don't know.
I'm not going to be helpful here.
Unless you have –
No, I mean, I'm glad you agreed.
You get more rules.
You get more direct rules of the road that are favorable.
That could be a catalyst, right, because that helps the companies.
break because it helps the companies but yeah i mean i feel like we've crossed like a lot of
But, yeah.
those hurdles like the etf moment sort of crossed the institutional participation hurdle and then
you know you had billions and billions of dollars of institutional money going to bitcoin and
ethereum and a handful of other crypto related assets over
the last two years.
And it stabilized the markets, I would say, to a degree, especially last year, maybe
increased the correlation of Bitcoin to broader equity and asset markets.
But in the last four months, I just don't know what's going on.
It's just a very, very puzzling correlation.
So, yeah, I'm just as confused as you are, but I'm glad that you echo that.
Yes, I am also very confused.
I don't think I'm adding value here, unfortunately.
Yeah, I don't think I am either
because people ask me that question all the time
and they're like, why isn't crypto catching a bid?
Like my members and subscribers will ask me
and I'm like, I don't know.
Maybe that speaks to the infancy of the asset class as well, right?
Yeah, no, it does.
Yeah.
And now people are talking about like, oh, is it, you know,
is it still a four-year cycle asset class?
And I'm like, you know,
people thought that way about the market for decades too, right?
Like just expected to crash every five years.
Well, I think you could say that about the economy too.
I don't think we're in employer economic cycles anymore.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And so it's like the cycles for everything is expanded.
And now you added to that an enormous amount of short-term leverage.
Like historically, there's no comparison to what it is today for how much money,
you have billions and billions of dollars every day is dumped into zero DT and one DT calls.
When you add that dynamic to it, then it makes sense that the cycles are shorter because they're more vicious. You know, you have flash crashes like you had,
I mean, last April was a flash crash. The S&P 500 fell on, you know, 25% peak to drop in a very,
very short amount of time. You have flash crashes like that that get bought up in two sessions.
amount of time, you have flash crashes like that that get bought up in two sessions.
And it's like, you know, is that is that a cycle ending sign normally?
Like, you know, 20 years ago, would that have led to a decline in stocks that lasted four
or five months before there was a recovery?
Maybe.
And maybe it's all the short term leverage that's allowing stocks to not only fall quickly,
but snap back very quickly as well.
And I mean, for me, as a guy that's been trading for this only fall quickly, but snap back very quickly as well. And I mean,
for me, as a guy that's been trading for this is my 14th year, the action to me on an individual
stock basis certainly seems more volatile than ever. And it certainly seems like things are
getting priced in and priced out much more quickly than ever before. And I think that's a function of
short term leverage. And maybe that has some bearing on crypto as well, because now you have those leverage instruments in the crypto industry
as well, except with even more leverage. You know, people are going 150, 200x leverage on some of
these crypto platforms. But don't you also think it's a function of technology? Because you can
move a lot faster now. The settlement periods also are shorter, right? Beforehand, you looked at a newspaper
for stock quotes. Now you're online and you've got Robinhood and stuff. So I think that's also
a factor we can't discount. Yeah. Accessibility to the markets, I completely agree, has increased
probably by five or six magnitudes in the last 20 years. And then when you put the accessibility thing aside,
think about just access to information.
I mean, all investors are more knowledgeable than they were,
or the average investor is more knowledgeable about market ongoings than they were 20 years ago because we live in such a headline-driven environment.
Now everything's digitized.
Everyone's on social media apps.
News circulates very quickly.
It's not like back in the day.
Now you have a different problem with
you can statistics plays for both teams every team and whatever you want you know you can make
any argument based off of yeah you can position yourself more creatively yeah you can position
yourself more creatively more easily and there's more retail has access to more instruments than
they ever did before more types of instruments more ever did before, more types of instruments,
more types of options, more types of ETFs. It really complicates the ability for the market to handle all of that leverage and all of that betting in one fell swoop. And so what ends up
happening is these moments of indiscriminate selling where the market just, you'll have days
where everything high beta is down 15, 20% and'll have days where everything high beta is down 15,
20% and you'll have days everything high beta is up 15, 20%. It's becoming more and more like
one big trade than ever before in my view. And that is good if you're a sharp observer and you
can react quickly. And it can be bad if you're somebody that's easily caught up in narratives
and headlines, because then you're going to end up making mistakes in a market like this. So yeah, it's, it's interesting. I mean, I'm doing well in it,
so I don't mind, but it is weird. It's a weird market. Well, it's a new reality, right? It's
a double-edged sword. And like you said, if, you know, I'm, I'm personally a longer term investor.
I, I, I'm not a trader, but like you have, you can use opportunities like the Liberation Day or like
headlines if you think, or even like today with Microsoft, if you believe in certain names and
you can get in, you can find entry points and then you can ride them out. But
the days of more plastic markets, I think, are behind us because of a lot of the factors you talked about and the speed with which everyone is able to invest and trade.
And that just makes for more volatility, more opportunity, but more choppiness.
stock talk was there um looking back on yesterday obviously we also had via the earnings
we are about 10 minutes nine minutes from the stock market being closed right now
actually follow the speakers if you guys haven't already we appreciate jennifer for showing for
being up here uh shout out stock talk the wolf account if you enjoy live free conversations make sure you're following that Wolf
account
Stock Sniper
all great people
make sure you are
following the speakers
I want to make sure
I get that in there
before the earnings
come up
it is a very busy day
we do have Apple
earnings coming up
Stock Talk
when you're looking
back towards yesterday
are there any kind of
points or anything
that's kind of
sticking with you
any kind of
whether it was one of the
earnings obviously microsoft is down pretty big as jennifer was saying there meta is up pretty big
i know that's not the area you're super focused in but i don't know were there any kind of stuff
from from yesterday jerome powell the earnings that are sticking with you a little bit more
any um stuff that gave you some good second secondary you know plays running off of
them they're smaller in your midcast space yeah no i got stopped out of um crml today which was
unfortunate because that stupid rare earth headline but it was only a five percent position
so i took like a 0.6 percent haircut on what would have been a bigger move, actually 0.8% haircut
on what could have been a much bigger move.
So I'm okay with that.
It's a little bit of a rug burn, but not bad.
I mean, total drawdown on the portfolio today across all positions was just 0.3%.
So that's not bad considering the level of beta I have.
Total performance for the year is still at 52% year to date.
So crushing the market. I mean, the S&P 500 is up 1% on the year still at 52% year to date. So crushing the market.
I mean, the S&P 500 is up 1% on the year, 1.4%.
So I'm very happy with the performance.
But yeah, VIAVI had a monster, monster report this morning on what I thought was hitting all the notes that I really wanted it to.
So we got long VIAVI last year, October 1358.
The first earnings report that we went through was five days after opening the position.
We opened on October 24th.
The first earnings report was October 29th.
And that stock gapped up 20% on good synergy for their spirit acquisition.
And then last night they reported a blowout quarter,
really, really good across all metrics.
Inter-quarter, it was just a slight beat on revenue
and a big beat on EPS,
but the guidance was a big beat across the board.
And then this morning we woke up
to a lot of price target raises.
Needham raising the price target to 28,
Rosenblatt to 27, B. Riley to 26,
Suska Hunter to 25, Stiefel to 24. so all price target
raised across the board for that name that name is going to close today up about 17 percent
it's been a core position for me for about well since october really i think it was about
four or five weeks no it was it was right after the earnings that i designated as a core position
for our members so since then it's been the third largest weighting in my portfolio.
So it sits behind Inersis and Amcor in weighting.
And so, yeah, when your third largest position is up 17%
and it's options heavy, that does a lot for the portfolio.
So that floated a lot of the potential damage today.
So, yeah, that's kind of where i'm at with most of the performance today
thermon group was green for us about four and a half percent on a really really nice report for
mod modine which is one of the data center cooling names thermon group also thermal management name
so that was about four percent in sympathy uh pre-, one of my grid plays up 3% today. OSS, one of the only
small caps I own, up 1.6. ENS, my largest position, up 1.6. Huntington Ingalls, the shipbuilding
position, up 0.3. Pangea Logistics, my Arctic Shipping play, also up 0.3. So we had about
five or six positions green. Got hit, like I said, on CRML, and Centris had a drawdown today.
But Centris, I'm'm not selling that's a core
position you know i owned it at 96 so yeah down 11 today but you know we're still up quite a bit
on that stock so still holding that one that is my favorite nuclear stock still and i have no plans
to sell i don't really care about the day-to-day volatility on that um amcord a little bit of a
pullback in the morning but recovered nicely it's back 50 now. Synaptics as well had a nice little pullback this morning, but recovered.
They have earnings next week. Great Lakes Dredging Dock, GLDD, which is my dredging play. I talked
to you guys about that a couple of weeks ago. It has done very well. JP Morgan upgraded it last
week as well. $20 price target. So that thing has been moving nicely uh good daily structure building on that as well um so yeah i'm comfortable with where i'm at so
yeah the greenland basket is down to just pangea logistics now um and then from there we'll see i
might add another one but crml was kind of not the type of play I normally go long on. So I don't mind getting kicked in the teeth by that one.
Today, it's nice to get, you know, a loser every once in a while.
We've had like 30 picks in a row green.
So, you know, I wanted to get a little bit of humbling done by the market.
So that did that for me today.
But I'm probably going to stick to more of my type of plays going forward.
You know, that was one that I kind of maybe bid on too anxiously,
too overzealously considering how hot the start to the year was.
So it happens, part of the game.
But because of the sizing, very, very manageable drawdown.
And that's why sizing is so important.
You know, if you go through my portfolio, most of my positions are, you know,
four to
nine percent, depending on the position.
And then there's a couple like Inersis and Amcor that are much bigger than that.
But I mean, the only reason Inersis is at the weighting that it's at is because I just
like really, really love that stock.
And I think it's so cheap still.
So we'll see what happens on that earnings next week.
I have 11 earnings reports coming up in the next three weeks on my position.
So gonna be a lot of decisions to make
about holding, cutting, adding to, et cetera, et cetera,
on number of names.
So I will look into that
as this earnings season progresses.
But for now, I'm very, very happy with the performance.
I mean, I don't know anyone that's at 50% a year to date for the first month anyone that shares their portfolio publicly
I guess I mean there's people out there that I'm sure are doing better than me, but I don't think they share their portfolio publicly
So out of people that do pretty sure I haven't seen anyone that's that's doing as well as us
So I'm very very happy with the performance so far this year even though we did catch a little bit of a road bump
With one of those stocks today.
But part of the game.
It's because I bought some of it.
It was the ultimate demise.
Yeah, you should have told me that. I would have sold it.
I was kidding.
Did you buy more BM&R?
No, I don't think Evan's buying any more BM&R.
I would imagine not.
I've actually thought about it. No, don't do it,'s buying any more bmr i would imagine not i've actually thought about it
no don't do it please just buy some other stuff
yeah maybe just buy some eth at some point i'd buy some you're like a glutton it's only 1800
i mean by cost i am up on it not the the BM&R, but the Ethereum.
Yeah, I do want to say something really quickly about me stopping out of positions.
I am not
a person that stops out of positions
that, like,
because I don't like them anymore.
I stop out of positions because they hit max risk.
Very often, when I stop out of a position,
it goes up right after because very often i'm selling
at like a weekly base or you know a weekly like even today with crml it's at the weekly 90ma i
would not be surprised at all if all the rare earth stocks rip tomorrow and rip into the end
of the week i would not be surprised at all but i have to manage risk right right? And so for me, I have a max risk points. When the stock gets to that risk point, I take the loss
and it's backfired on me so, so many times,
but it doesn't matter because that's just the way I operate.
Depending on your strategy,
you have to have rules about exiting.
And for me, my exit rules are not necessarily level-based.
They're max pain-based, right?
So like, where is the point
where I'm not willing to take any more drawdown right and that's where I sell
and so my entries are very technically driven my exits are not and that's
something that people need to understand because a lot of times I saw a stock
people like dude you sold at the bottom, LOL. Like that doesn't matter.
I did 500% last year selling a lot of bottoms.
So I want people to know that.
I do sell the bottom frequently.
That to me is not, that doesn't bother me.
For me, it's purely a function of risk, max risk, when max risk is hit, when you don't
want to take any more drawdown on the position.
That's really what it is and so yeah that's just I want to make that
note because I know there's gonna be people I think I actually fully expect
those those rare stocks to get a bit they all sold into really really
convenient spots today but I don't feel to be like oh my god yes sold it and
then it went up because that's how people are but it doesn't matter you
know my performance speaks for itself I rules, and so I follow those rules.
Did you just go dark for me?
Yeah, yeah, no, I forgot to unmute. i forgot to unmute i forgot to unmute we did get
the market closed there we have a bunch of earnings coming up here apple visa western
digital sandus should be really interesting interesting uh sooner i also just put out a post
so we did just get the market closed there that is not a
also not a bad take from stock talk having the rules sticking to them i think you can't really
argue with the performance there so um yeah but we did just get the market closed you should expect
apple's earnings to be out around 4 30 p.m eastern i will keep an eye on the rest of these
ones sam what are
you uh excited for on these earnings coming out here well i'll tell you something okay the apple
earnings probably not as important the sandisk and western digital earnings those are probably
pretty important not probably they are important because we've heard about the bottleneck from memory for quite some time.
If that show stops playing, I think we're going to be in trouble, right?
But arguably, these memory stocks just don't stop going up.
And it's really because of their EPS growth is just astronomical.
Every single quarter makes them look a lot cheaper than they are in a forward earnings basis. And yeah, it's not stocks that bring a lot more to say about that than I do.
May or may not have participated in the rare earth materials, rare earth minerals trade,
and it is what it is. I'm not going to complain. I hit the buy button, so it's all good. I did add to Zeta
today at Amazon. I actually added Amazon calls for a couple of years out today. And why did
I add to Amazon? Right. So one, it seemed like a great opportunity to add to Amazon.
You saw Azure basically grow at 39% and growing 35% plus for the last few quarters and likely going to continue
accelerating, if anything, or stay elevated. Amazon accelerated growth. It's the largest
hyperscale in the entire world. They have 36% operating margins, I believe, somewhere close to
there. Also, advertising is a high margin business for them as well. And that's also growing. So
their two largest businesses are growing the fastest that are high margin, not largest business. Their two highest margin
businesses are growing the fastest, advertising and AWS. You saw two earnings yesterday that
basically gave you a hint at exactly what's going to happen to Amazon with these two businesses.
You saw Meta basically show a reacceleration of their advertising to 30% for their entire business for next quarter, which is insane for a company of this size.
That's why you see Meta appear about 10%.
Plus, you know, everyone's on one side of the boat, got very bearish Meta.
And that's what happens when everyone goes to one side of the boat.
They run to the other and everyone buys a stock.
That's what happened to Wall Street.
Microsoft showed massive growth in Azure, right? So being the
largest hyperscale in the entire world projected to grow, continue accelerating with AWS this year.
By the way, I'm seeing a little headline here. I haven't gotten the chance to get a little bit
deeper and we are going to have earnings coming out here any second. So I apologize. We're going to have to... Robinhood, little story that the U.S.
ways tapping Robinhood
for Trump accounts for children.
The stock is up a couple percent.
Wow, there you go.
Robinhood's finally coming back.
Right.
Did it recover the 200-day
moving average today?
Let's see here.
Oh, no.
It's still below
the 200-day moving average
even after this move.
We'll see.
Oh, wait, no.
It's back above
the 200-day moving average. That's good news. That's good news. I think Robinhood is just being pinned
by the price of crypto. If crypto goes down, less traders in crypto means less fees for crypto. And
that's where they make a lot of money off of. But, you know, the thesis is still intact of Robinhood.
I don't think it's going anywhere. Just people are buying other stuff right now, just the way it is.
But anyways, for Amazon, I think they're going to come around 20%, 21% for AWS growth.
Their office is going to increase CapEx.
Like if Meta is spending $115 to $130 billion in CapEx, like Amazon's going to be way higher.
They've always been the highest.
I think we're probably going to hear a lot of news as far as a lot of their RPO for
their cloud business coming from Anthropic.
They own, what is it, like 15% of Anthropic?
And I don't think that's talked about enough because Anthropic is going to be like, what,
a $500 billion company soon.
They're obviously participating in OpenAI.
And OpenAI is just becoming that there's too many hands with very expensive hands in
their pockets right now that are putting their hands in OpenAI.
It's just if OpenAI fails, we're going to be in a lot of trouble, right?
So I think it's in everyone's best interest who's long the market, long the AI theme that
OpenAI does not fail.
And that's the reason why Microsoft is basically down because 40% of the RPOs from OpenAI, and according to the CDS or credit spreads with Oracle,
is that the market does not believe Oracle's another payoff.
It's death had an immense sum because most of their RPOs come from OpenAI.
And basically anything that touches OpenAI is just cooked right now from what the market's saying.
And anything that touches Anthropic is gold.
And Anthropic is partially,
I don't know if it's a majority shareholder,
but Amazon owns a lot of Anthropic
and they are pretty early on it.
And if a lot of their business comes from Anthropic,
that would be very good for Amazon.
But we got another week to see that through.
We'll see what happens with that one.
We have Apple reporting today.
I don't think Apple is really going to be, I mean, it is the second largest company in the
whole market, so it is going to be a market mover. But I don't think it's going to be-
By the way, those earnings do come out, Apple, for anyone wondering.
4.30, right?
Yeah, 4.30 p.m. Eastern is the time those numbers come out.
Yeah, love that. Robinhood is already fading some of that move. We'll see what happens to that one.
The headline is, United States government is considering handing the fintech Robinhood a key role in overseeing the new Trump accounts it's creating for the children.
I do want to go over to StockSniper really quickly because I know right now we're getting a lot of numbers probably out.
Western Digital is out.
Yeah, a lot of names are probably out right now.
Yes.
I know you were looking for what you were, but tell me through some of the earnings you're seeing right now.
Western Digital, $3.017 billion.
Expected $2.94 billion.
2.13 EPS.
Expected $1.93.
Double beat for Western Digital there.
Decker's Brands, $1.95 billion versus $1.87 billion expected.
$3.33 EPS versus $2.77 EPS.
KLA, we got $3.29 billion here versus $3.25 billion expected. EPS is at $8.85, expected at $8.80.
That is three beats thus far. Just like you were saying there, we got one more also that's
interesting is Visa. I know a lot of people care about this one 10.90 billion first 10.69 billion expected $3.17 EPS first $3.14
expected EPS that is another beat there as well SanDisk is I believe just reporting now also 3
billion revenue 2.69 billion expected that's a 12% beat or um six dollars 20 eps for 3.54 expected eps on
sandisk which is another one there um obviously the one whoa sandus this there must be a one-time
thing here on sandisk and montev i see you have your hand up as well it's yeah sorry just a little
harder than numbers 6.2 billion on ep uh 6.2 on eps wall Wall Street was expecting $3.12
on SanDisk.
I'd imagine there's a one-time thing there.
SanDisk's stock
is up 10% in after hours
right now following its earnings.
SNDK continuing.
For anyone wondering, SanDisk is now up
126% so far this year.
Oh my god. That's wild.
Yeah, that one is crazy.
I'm very curious on what they said there to make it go up, but...
There's a pie constraint.
$4.4 billion in revenue for SanDisk.
Monit, have you ever had a hand up?
Holy shit, I almost just clicked the link to end up in this basis.
Not about SanDisk.
I can't explain anything about SanDisk's run in the last six months.
It just makes no sense whatsoever.
So I'll leave that topic altogether.
A couple of things I wanted to catch up on what Sam was saying,
but Visa, double beat, still looking through,
it's just flashing by 3.17 versus 3.14 expected.
Cross-border volume is up 12%.
Payments volume up 8% transaction
processed 69.4 billion all those are slightly better than I'm saying thank
you revenue is also beat so that is visa 10.9 revenue versus 10.687 estimates.
So nice beat by Visa there.
But going back to what Sam was saying,
look, I actually like Amazon a lot for all the reasons he said.
But if they do invest in OpenAI, I'm'm not touching it i'm just walking away uh this is
they're gonna do it they're gonna do it but it's too big of a company come on
no 40 billion dollars is far better spent almost anything else they could open they could open a
warehouse and shut it the next day and it would still be a better spend than, you know, dumping it on. Look, you create all kinds of problems with this. Okay. But going back, best of my
knowledge and what I could find, Amazon's stake is about 8% in Anthropic and Google's is about
14.2% or something like that, below 15%.
So Amazon started much later, which is why their stake is lower, right?
They came in a much later round than Google did.
Anyway, going back, right?
Look, Anthropic has been, you know, primarily in AWS to begin with.
Now, if you throw open AI into the picture, it's going to muddy the waters.
It's going to cause Anthropic to pull back on.
They already are going into GCP,
but AWS remains their largest deployment.
So it's not a great idea as far as I'm concerned,
throwing 40 billion of all things into open AI open AI just in the last round you know
there were reports out that the only big money spender was was soft bank nobody
else is willing to pony up and now suddenly this is a better deal
Microsoft's number right you you go start looking into it,
there's a lot of questionable things there,
but there's also a one-time profit.
You know, there's a couple of people
that called it out today, good for them.
They caught it.
There's a significant one-time profit in those numbers.
And there's a whole lot of accounting nightmare
waiting to unravel there.
It's not gonna take take Microsoft down they're
very large very profitable very well managed but this there's a lot of shit going on there
there you know payables you know starting to scale up some of the explanation for that is that they have a huge payable which is primarily to Nvidia and that's
because they have built their data centers but not turned it on and they don't know Nvidia until
you know until the power is turned on and they are starting to use them or something like that
that's their contract whatever it is I have to you know dig in, dig in and see how much truth there is to that. But there's a significant,
you know, close to 7 billion or so payable accounts payable there that's been, you know,
sitting there for a while. So it's not normal business terms like net 30, net 60, whatever.
But it seems to be that there is some something on with actually putting those into use before NVIDIA gets paid.
The other case somebody was pondering was, you know, the large increase in RPO from open is almost certainly because of open AI.
is almost certainly because of OpenAI
and people are now starting to wonder
whether Oracle is backing off or unable to meet
or some form of both OpenAI's committed data center capacity
and that's coming back to Microsoft.
None of them good reasons, right? None of them is anything that the market should ignore,
and they didn't today.
It's cheap fundamentally at this point
if the numbers are clean.
If the balance sheet starts getting questioned like this
more and more, then I'm not sure we're done.
You just saw Oracle, you know, I called it out when it was all-time high,
and I said, this is crazy, and this is going to go down.
And it's half.
It's down 50%.
I'm not saying it's a short here at all.
In fact, I've not said it's a short since you know uh low 200s right i don't want to take
that chance i want to take the easy short i'm not going to fight the market but you know in case of
oracle we we pulled back 50 i'm not suggesting that's going to happen with microsoft but i'm
just saying the more you start questioning the numbers, the greater the chance that the pullback does not ease, or at least the recovery does not start.
And the only other thing I wanted to add was I was wrong about software.
Well, I'm wrong for now.
But so there's really no recovery, right?
And I expected a recovery and I was wrong.
So I just want to call it out.
You know, I didn't get it. It's very difficult to time bottoms.
You know, if you get it right, it's more luck than anything else.
And I've always called this out.
So I was wrong there,
but fundamentals are even better at this point in time than they were last quarter. So, you know,
it's, it's a matter of time before the narrative ceases to overwhelm numbers. And, you know, I
have, I have the account size to wait on it and start adding to my positions.
And I'm not suggesting anybody do that because, again, you are trying to pick the bottom.
And that is a crapshoot at best.
For the very best people, it's a crapshoot.
So don't do that.
Wait for confirmation of the turn.
But again, the narrative that software is dead does not have a weight of data to support it.
None whatsoever.
It is a narrative.
Whether the data comes in at some point in time, yeah, sure. It will
come in. But as it stands
now, you know, you're
not getting AI to write code and throw out
enterprise software. It just
is not happening.
Before I go
to the hands,
Stock Talk.
Do you have any thoughts for any of these earnings moves?
Interesting for you.
Anything standing out to you?
Sandus stock is up 15% in after hours.
Continuing there.
That one is having a nice day.
Visa stock is down 2% in after hours.
Apple, which I know is the big one for the day that a lot of people will be paying attention to.
That obviously I'm excited for.
I know you're not.
Don't care as much about um that stock comes out at 4 30 p.m eastern so in like 14 minutes or so KLAC KLA Corp is down seven percent I saw someone posting to me about Decker's
Decker stock is up 20%. I wonder what happened there.
Western Digital up 1%. Stock Talk, was there anything in these kind of news reports,
anything in the earnings after the close that's standing on to you?
Or did you see this Robinhood story?
I did.
I was reading actually more about the Robinhood story.
Yeah, the Robinhood story is nice.
Robinhood is not really a stock I worry about anymore because of how deep my cost base advantage is.
But I mean, I still own it, so I like to see it go up.
It's been struggling these last couple of weeks, been in a short-term downtrend since 140.
It's fallen. I mean, it's 40% from the highs.
Ran into the 200 day-to-rend since 140 um it's fallen i mean it's 40 from the highs ran into the 200 day today and fell through it and now you're getting this catalyst um you know sometimes
catalysts are very i'll say sometimes a lot of times catalysts are very very interestingly timed
around um these types of spots on the chart so 200 day potential reclaim for robin tomorrow uh which on a catalyst would
be a really nice look i think that probably sends this thing back to 125 in short order
but they do have earnings coming up on the 10th so those will have to go well obviously for that
to happen but yeah nice quarter from them sandisk just wild results i mean the memory theme has been
relentless for quite a while.
You know, I've tried to get exposure through some mid-caps.
The problem is there's just not a lot, and the ones that there are are very expensive.
So, you know, I don't want to play that game on the memory side.
But, you know, VIAVIA has indirect memory market exposure.
And so, you know, for the memory players that are doing network testing, they're getting a lot of partnerships from that.
So I guess I have some indirect memory market exposure also through Amcor.
You get some indirect exposure, but it's pretty indirect.
You know, I would like some more direct exposure to the memory market because it does seem like it's going to continue to be sort of choked into the end of the year, but
it's tricky for me to find
the types of stocks I like in that space.
I don't know. We'll see.
A position could emerge,
but I'm still working on it.
Yeah, great quarter
from Sandisk. I mean, what am I going to say? That's an excellent
quarter and an excellent reaction.'s up yeah i was just i'm going to respond to what monitive was talking
about a little bit earlier um yeah i don't know about that whole amazon open ai investment i mean
it just seems like i mean i know that they use Azure because they
have that big partnership with Microsoft. But are they going to maybe, are they relying on like
Amazon for some business? And that way, you know, they basically are swapping equity for
some sort of goods or services provided. That's kind of how I would think about it.
I would think about it. Other than that, you mentioned software. Software is getting really
interesting. I think what was interesting was today, at the end of the day, there was like
$4 million of GitLab $50 calls and stocks at 35 right now. That's pretty insane. And just for July.
And there was really big call buying for Snowflake Workday,
and I forgot one other name,
as well as some big call buys for IGV, the software index.
So I'm wondering, you know, like the selling is pretty brutal. I don't know. It's a
tough one, though, because I feel like just, you know, as recently as last week, you know, people
were saying, oh, the selling has gone too far. Even myself, you know, I had a post where I bought
some stuff. But when I realized the bounce was too weak, right into resistance, I sold. I sold
because I didn't think it had enough. You know take stabs at lows, but if I don't
think it has the strength to persist, then I exit the trade. But I don't know. Today,
you're seeing a lot more supportive flow. It kind of baffles me how Microsoft can have
such an ugly day and the indices basically recovered to flat.
Just knowing how large of a company it is, maybe how much it can weigh on sentiment.
And if you look at ServiceNow, dude, I think ServiceNow had highest volume ever,
but to the downside today.
And so like some of these things, I don't even know what to make of them.
It's like, you know, like, do you want to, is that good or bad?
Like, did people step in to buy the dip or did everybody just dump their stock?
It's really hard to make that call.
And a lot of these stocks are just in the middle of nowhere.
So as much as it's like fundamentally, I like a lot of these names. And I do think the software narrative is overblown, at least for the near term.
I don't know if markets looking past and like maybe example, this sector is no longer, you know,
considered the highest of quality, then, you know, people are using free cash flow multiples.
But if you net out this, you know, stock based comp, you know, it all of a sudden goes from like
30 times free cash flow multiple to like 80 times and 30 times already pretty expensive in any sector
for businesses that are getting a little bit more mature. And then if you make it 80 times,
then it's ridiculous. So that becomes a problem. Like whenever these are really highly sought out
companies, it's okay to pay out with stock-based comp. When your stock is going up, it's okay to
pay with stock-based comp because the dilution actually ends up being quite minimal.
But when your stock price is going down,
it's like this double effect
because you're going to have to issue more stock
at lower prices.
So I don't know.
It's almost like too hard bucket.
And I thought it was interesting
that everyone wants to call the bottom on software.
Dude, I mean, even me to an extent, fundamentally.
Dangerous game to play.
I know, and it's the week where the clawed box.
That's one of the craziest movies I've ever seen on IGV this morning.
Wasn't it down almost 9% at one point?
I didn't watch IGV.
I was just looking at every other name.
Yeah, the index was down like, I think almost 9%.
Well, I mean, I'm sure if Microsoft and ServiceNow are probably like really big holdings and
that they're both down like 10%.
You know, so that makes sense.
That makes sense.
And dude, like every single software stock I know just knifed lower today.
I mean, dude, but I mean, like, you know, the argument that people are making, right?
They're making this argument that like, hey, yeah, software is going to get killed, but
not yet.
Right.
And like, that's...
That's how the market works.
That's how the market works.
Yeah.
It's like, I keep seeing like really, really smart people, really smart people that I respect
a lot in the software space.
And I'm not a software specialist.
I have friends that are in the industry.
I even talked to Monitiv a lot about software because he's been in the industry for so long.
I have other friends that work at hyperscaler companies and work at some of the Mag-7 that
I talk to about software a lot when I want opinions.
And I've been like so many of them have just like one of my buddies had 80% of his portfolio.
He's a good friend of mine.
He has like a 16, $17 million portfolio, a really, really successful guy.
But he's a software engineer. He's made most of his money from just trading and he had 80% of his portfolio this is September of last year
and he is on the AI team at I won't name which mag 7 but one of the mag 7 he's on
he's on the AI team as a software engineer and he was talking
about how internally so much of the work is being done with internal ai systems that he himself got
spooked out and now 12 of his portfolio is software he like dumped all of it in september
to october of last year and uh he was talking to me he was like look all of it in September or October of last year. And he was talking to me and he was like, look, all of the guys that I'm talking to are saying, oh, it's an overreaction software because it's not going to be for another four years or five years.
That software really gets impacted by, you know, customizable AI agents that can build and code.
uh ai agents that can build and code and basically once it graduates from vibe coding
to ai doing real sophisticated coding he says that's the kill moment but he said the problem
is is like how do you play that what you buy the stocks now and you're like oh i'm just gonna sell
before that moment comes like the market's forward looking if you think you have three to five years of runway on major software programs that's
yeah i mean like here's the thing right like in corporations you have you have tons of softwares
that you use like you know people use like 10 different vendors and so there's a couple thoughts
here one is like if it's seat based, that's an issue.
Because if white collar jobs get reduced, then you're going to have less seats at your business,
which means that, you know, the software company is going to be selling less seats. That's an issue
off the bat. And then down the line, like you're saying, if like you could vibe code an equivalent,
now I don't know necessarily who's going to go out there and sign up with, you know, the GitLab knockoff brand. But, you know, if you can guarantee that it's going to
work and you're going to give them an 80% discount because you don't have any of the overhead,
like there could be startups that continue, like, you know, basically just ends up eroding your
margins down to zero because everyone has to cut down their prices to land any contracts. So that is another issue. Yeah. So I think ultimately like you're trying to sue that
guy last year over something like this. I mean, I don't know how I feel about DocuSign because
it's not a sophisticated, you know, integrated enterprise tech. I agree with you. I'm not,
I'm not trying to analogize it, but did that happen last year? No, but like, yeah. You know, I'm not sure about that story. I'm not sure.
I think somebody made a DocuSign knockoff last year and they'd like sued it.
I mean, wasn't it Apple that you could just like literally take a photo and just, you know, like
basically sign anything or whatever? Just like, or, you know, like if you had a document, you
could just like sign it in your iPhone or stuff.
I don't really short stocks, but there will be a day at short DocuSign.
I mean, yeah, some of those things are going to zero for sure um uh yeah so you know i think on the
software side it is just like you know you're kind of guessing i think maybe some of the things
like i don't understand why some of the cyber security stocks are getting killed like rubric
going straight down after i had one of like the best quarters we saw last in q3
it's just straight down every single day nice and lower like that one doesn't make a lot of
sense to me some of these yeah the soft like the the cyber security doesn't make sense to me like
or you know crowd being way down or I mean I guess those are probably valuation based but rubrics
not even that expensive uh you know compared to the metrics they're putting up and then you know
obviously cloudflare very very, very expensive,
but going to be a winner because the more AI there is,
the more like you're going to need kind of defense.
So, you know, even those aren't catching a bid.
I think the problem right now is that like,
you're going to have to like make calls of like,
which one's the winner and which one's not.
And I think basically if you do infrastructure related
or consumption related, they'll probably
be fine. But in the near term, you're fighting this like really bad sentiment. And, you know,
just last thing on this is like, think about like, we just tried to call the bottom on software,
like obviously, today, it went even lower than last week. But last week, when CloudBot was like,
you know, released, and it was like the Cloud AI agents and Anthropic is raising a 2x, you know, their amount they're
about to raise. And that's when people are going to call the bottom on software. It's just a tough
call. I'm going to I got to hop off to go to a doctor appointment, but I was going to say
one last thing. I say all this about commodity software and it's hard
to invest in and then i bought zoom today so gg me i'll leave you with that well they own part of
andropics so that's that's that's kind of part of it yeah for sure all righty guys uh cheers
appreciate you sir we do have apple uh appreciate you logical for joining us up here we have apple
should be out any second a A large part of my portfolio.
It was initially down there a little bit in the after hours, but no numbers were out.
Initial spike was up by a percentage point or two.
Apple did report earnings.
I am looking at $143.8 billion.
Up 16% year-over-year stock talk.
16% year-over over year growth from apple wow eps two dollars
and 84 cents which is also a beat double beat from mr apple on his uh on its numbers wait what
16 16 16 growth for Apple What was the projection?
I think it was like
10 or 11
The projection was 10 or 11%
In growth?
Yeah, I think something like that
Because they said double digits
The difference between the projection
And the actual is
138.1 billion Is what analysts expected I have.
It might be a slightly different thing from other people.
Okay, so what's the difference in that?
What's last year's revenue number for this quarter?
Can I get this post out and then I will tell you?
I just want to know what the gap between, because 60% sounds good, but I want to know what the estimate was.
That's a big freaking move for Apple.
Is this supposed to be Apple's seasonally strongest quarter or what?
Yeah, I think this would be the seasonally strongest quarter.
Okay, let me get, now I will go and answer the question for everyone.
16% growth?
No, I mean, just in general, that's a good report.
EPS is up almost 20% year over year.
What's up with the quarter over quarter jump in EPS?
Yeah, I think this is a good point.
Monitiv, is this the standard quarter that Apple beats big, Monitiv?
Normally, Q4 is a very good quarter for Apple because they have holiday sales.
But I'm saying, is this better than...
I'm still looking through the numbers.
I mean, the numbers are all massive double-digit beats.
Crazy.
Quarter-over-quarter in year-over-year.
I mean, the headline.
Okay, so same quarter last year was $124.3 billion.
Would you say $124.3?
Okay, let's do the math.
Yeah.
$124.3 versus $138.5.
Okay, so they were...
Yeah, you're right.
I didn't know that $6 billion
would make that much of a gap
on the percentages, but it does.
I think rounding is doing some big help here.
Headline says...
Wait, sorry.
iPhone revenue came in.
No, no, no.
Never mind.
I'm looking at the wrong one here.
Hold on.
There's the thing.
Is it posted by them already?
Yeah, no.
I do see the forum out.
You can say what you're going to say. I see China was a big beat here. China and iPhone 17 revenues, which were the two main data sets people were
looking for, were both big beats. iPhone was expected to be $77.6 billion to $80 billion.
iPhone revenue came in at $85.27 billion. That's a massive beat.
Yeah, they have $2.5 billion active devices. That's a third beat. They have 2.5 billion active devices. That's a third
of the world. Hell.
Apple says
iPhone had unprecedented
demand for the iPhone
during the quarter.
54 billion in cash flow,
32 billion return to shareholders.
These are massive numbers.
These are insane numbers
wonderful company great company so america's stock doing in after hours
three percent billion uh let's see year over year let's say 58 versus 52, Americas. 38 versus 33 for Europe.
China is the big one from 18 to 25.
That would be 40, 40, 40 something percent jump.
That is massive.
Rest of Asia, 20%.
China is the huge jump.
40%.
Over 40%.
iPhone is up from 69 to 85.
Mac is down a touch.
iPad is up a touch.
Wearables is down a touch.
Services is up a touch. Wearables is down a touch. Services is up almost 20%.
So it's iPhone and services.
Their highest margin products are really killing it.
Crazy.
Yeah, this is quite the quarter for for apple like you were saying there the iphones
they sold 85.3 billion dollars worth of iphones walsh was expecting 78.3 billion
that's quite the quite a large beat they're reporting at 25.5 billion dollars to china
walsh was expecting 21 billion i want to find the forward guidance here.
They don't really give it on the call. I think they do, actually.
Okay, so we have to wait for forward guidance.
Last time they guided towards 10-11% and they just gave us 16.
They don't, right? You have to sort of read
between the lines. But the debt
is up substantially. $9 billion
additional debt long-term.
This is pretty good. it's a good quarter yep
there are a lot of uh secondary type of names that like iphone makers components makers all this stuff like that that would probably be impacted by this apple stock up two percent
apple has declared a 26 percent 26 cent per share cash dividend in line with the previous one
there you go they basically declared that apple money market account is open again
effectively when the market weakens it's going to be apple again that's your money
market this is nice very good i have to dig through some of these uh financing activities
a little bit but uh it looks good increase in cash cash equivalents, it's $9 billion, yeah, $45 billion in cash, not bad.
So their cash paid for income taxes net, that is where most of the change come from so the quarter ending december 2024 they paid 18.6 billion this quarter they paid 3.4
that's that 15 billion
which accounts for all of the additional cash that's built up
i've got to dig through this.
There's some interesting stuff here.
They are sitting on a large debt pile, right? So the total debt is just shy of $129 billion.
I'm seeing a quote.
That's their long term, right?
They have short term liabilities of another $162 billion.
So it's like they owe more than most countries do.
Tim Cook was asked on CNBC about the the beat in China. I think it's a result of the product
resonating with the Chinese in a huge way. We just saw a lift that was much greater than we
thought we would see. And so we were surprised, but it's been but it's very product driven that
love the iPhone. This is a fabulous quarter.
Any nice things to say about Apple Stock Talk?
I don't know if I'm going to get to be able to say that often.
Yeah, it's a great quarter.
I already said that three times.
It's a great quarter.
He heard you.
He just wanted you to say that.
I know what I'm saying.
He doesn't get to ask this question, right?
Yeah, I mean, it's a great quarter.
I don't see anything wrong with this.
A big beat in everything that they needed a beat on,
including China and iPhone sales,
and pretty good-looking chart, too,
if this gap upholds, if it can stay above,
get above 262.
That's a great technical look as well
on top of a strong quarter.
I mean, yeah.
Apple, this is a good quarter.
I can't complain.
I don't own it.
So now that Apple is a double-digit growth company,
do you naturally say that?
It's not.
It's not going to be a TTM 20% grower or anything.
They're rebounding
off of a very low base.
Apple had a very, very
weak last year for volumes.
So you're rebounding off of a low base.
Always have to think of data contextually.
This is also why
I caution people from just buying stocks
by looking at PE ratiosE. ratios because people, a lot of people, especially novice investors, make mistakes like that as well.
When you buy stocks, you know, at troughs, sometimes they can look really cheap and then they can get expensive really quickly.
So you just have to be careful about stuff like that apple's not one of those stocks i mean the business is cyclical
to a degree but it's not one of those stocks that i'm referring to i'm just saying in general you
can't just look at one metric yeah the year over year growth looks good but that's not gonna
you know they're not gonna post 16 year over year growth all year. But yeah, it's a great quarter. It's a great quarter. You can't, can't complain.
They, you know,
one thing you didn't want to see was China revenue to continue to deteriorate and
then get another miss on iPhone sales. That would have been really ugly.
And so, yeah, it's nice, nice look.
I mean,
there have been some nice reports and larger caps that have been faded already
this season. So we'll see.
But, yeah, I don't have anything bad to say about Apple this time.
Guidance.
They're going to come down to guidance.
They don't say until the call.
Are we listening to the call in here?
No, we're not going to be listening to the call in here.
No, we're not going to be listening to the call on here. Oh. No, no.
But you guys should listen out for the call
because they will be giving the forward guidance
about 20, 30 minutes into it.
They will give you guys what to expect going forward
for next quarter.
It's the first quarter of the year,
so they might give it to you for the full year.
Who knows?
But yeah, definitely should be on the lookout for that.
After we end the spaces, not during.
Yeah, no, after we end the spaces.
The call will be available as a recording after
if you want to check that out.
Yeah, you guys can definitely come back.
There were some good insights.
Shout out to Jennifer.
We appreciate her on the first part.
That was a good conversation.
We got into some live earnings.
And I'm sure there were some other news stories throughout the day.
But Apple stock up about 2%.
I mean, it could have been a little bit of a bigger move.
We're saying here how great of a quarter it was.
And we're slowly trickling down here.
Give it a little bit of a back.
With my luck luck Apple's about
to be right here that's that's what about that so far last quarter it was up
right it was like down it was up a little bit and then I was down and just
like thrust it back up so he's talked up look at look at their consolidated cash flow statement, the very last page of that PDF.
That's what I'm talking about, supplemental cash flow disclosure.
Look at that and let me know what you think.
Very last page?
Very last line.
The last line. The last line.
The last door.
Okay.
There was a couple other news stories today,
but the majority of the news stories were earnings.
So we'll keep this one out.
We'll talk through some of the other topics,
look through some of the other names.
OpenAI seems to be a big topic of this one going on right now.
Not that... Obviously with NVIDIA and Amazon.
Not that anybody here would care, but
SAP got clocked.
What did?
SAP.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Interesting.
Their investment
in Anthropic is also
worth about $6 billion.
I think they paid $130, $140 million for it.
It's going to be a lot of ghost companies relying on their investments in these other companies.
It's an interesting time.
$223 billion company.
I think Zoom would probably have a much more dramatic
effect for having
a stake in Anthropik. Yeah, Zoom's a
$27 billion company. I don't know how big their stake
is though but I mean that's
going to matter for that one.
It was $18 billion last year, $3 billion
this year. What was the point you were trying to make?
I think that's where
some of the
earning jump could come from lower tax rate.
I have to go dig.
I don't think it's a lower tax rate.
I think it's just less activity.
Well, they sold a lot more.
Can't be paying less tax
so they got benefit
from something that's a big
difference
I got it again I'm not suggesting anything
I'm just saying that number stands
out like a sore thumb out to see
what it is
yeah I agree it stands out
I'm just trying to think.
Yeah, because they generated almost twice the cash.
Well, I'm just going through the balance sheet.
Well, they put it in a disclosure, so there's something there, right, that was meaningful enough to disclose separately.
Well, there's the negative $5 billion balance in cash-use and investing activities.
It was a positive...
They had a $9.8 billion gain on the investing activities in the other quarter, right?
Yeah, that's just writing down something.
Yeah, no, no, I know.
But so maybe there was a tax deferment associated with that investment.
What was that investment?
I don't know.
What did Apple invest $5 billion in this quarter, Evan?
No, no, no. They wrote it off this quarter.
They might have invested in it five years ago or not.
Yeah, true. Anyway, we, no. They wrote it off this quarter. They might have invested in it five years ago. Who not? Yeah, true.
Anyway, we'll take it off. They did just make a $2 billion investment into a company called QAI. They didn't invest something.
Yeah, but they wouldn't have written it off so fast.
I mean, unless they bought something and then
they immediately found out that it was worthless or something, which would be a legal issue all over the map.
That's not it.
But anyway, I will do some digging.
I don't want to suggest anything.
I'm just saying it stands out.
And the fact that they had to put it in a disclosure tells me there's a reason for it.
But I agree.
It's a good quarter.
It's good for the markets, right?
It's good for the indexes.
You know, Apple doing well,
Apple being stable,
that gives us, what,
three of the Mag 7s now with a beat?
Well, Microsoft also beat,
but that's a different story.
I see here Apple acquired RAC 7 a video game company I may 27 20 25 I don't know if that's I don't off by William oh that's all right we'll find
out soon enough no it's a small company yeah no Apple makes lots and lots of
very small acquisitions they do not make a lot of large ones there's one here
today it was probably not an acquisition. It was probably some stuff with R&D or other things like that.
Stock talk.
Can I ask you about one or two other topics?
Yeah, that's what I'm here for.
That's what he's here for.
Robotaxis are hitting kids.
Tell me more.
Why are you supporting a technology that hits kids?
It's five. All right, so let me give you guys let me let me that hasn't any kids yet all right so there was
a story today that u.s regulators are launching an investigation into google-owned waymo after
one of its robo taxis apparently hit a kid during drop-off hours in elementary school. The kid ran out behind a double-parked SUV,
and he got hit by the car.
Waymo put out their response.
The kid is fine going through it.
Waymo kind of said that they had a call 911,
and the Waymo brakes, so it wasn't as bad of a collision.
They had their excuses and stuff like that,
but I'm sure this is a concern. I'm sure this is something people have been waiting for. Waymo is out here hitting kids.
Now you can tell me how Tesla has not hit any kids.
Yeah, Tesla hasn't hit any kids. But no, I mean, look, it is an issue. I actually think it's bad
for everyone. I didn't even try to spin it
today as good for tesla because um if the local courts in santa monica say that waymo is at fault
that is a huge headwind for autonomous driving companies in general, including Tesla, right? Like regulators
aren't going to care at a certain point because the thing with, with skepticism, I talked about
this actually this, this week when we talked about the nuclear industry and I talked about how like
for decades nuclear development has been inhibited largely just because of, you know, the, um, what's the term? It's slipping my mind. The stigmas,
uh, surrounding it. Right. And, and the same thing is true for any technology. Once you like
have a stigma that has some like real world events, and I'm not saying a kid getting,
cause the kid's fine. The kid's not dead or anything. The kid died. I would be
speaking about this in a much more aggressive tone, but the kid's fine, thankfully. But the
thing is with stigmas is they're very easy to build. You know, people don't need to die for
stigmas to develop. You, there just be perceived danger. Right. And that just gets carried by
narrative. And at a certain point it's a headwind so what you don't
want to see is that you know now we might this kid if a local court rules it's their fault
you know then that just inhibits adoption for for self-driving vehicles right because people are
like okay well if it could if it could hit the kid at and it really it only hit him at i think
it was like it slowed down to six or seven miles per hour when it hit him, but he ran out behind a double
parked SUV.
So maybe the guy that was double parked, maybe it's really his fault, but either way, the
kid ran out behind it.
The vehicle's already coming down the road and obviously could not see the kid because
he's behind the double parked SUV where he should have been parked.
And the kid ran out and then the car tried to stop.
And, you know, like a person would have hit him in the same scenario is the point I'm trying to make.
But I'm not defending it.
What I'm saying is that a person would have hit him in the same scenario.
The car just couldn't break quickly enough by the time the kid ran out the kid ran out like literally right in
front of the car so i'm not like smashing waymo for this but it is a it is a problem because
they'll have to answer for answer for it now and yeah the kid could have been more hurt especially
if the car didn't come to a full stop and like ran him over or something so yeah it's a problem but
you don't want to see more incidents like that. You'd hope that this is just an isolated incident because you see one more incident like that and then people will just run with it.
Right. And then cities will just stop approving it.
Because as soon as you create a stigma, then it becomes a political issue very quickly, very quickly, like overnight.
As soon as the stigma is like propelled, you know, propagated by the media, especially if it's done by the media, then political parties take sides.
People have different different political attitudes take sides.
I mean, even nonpolitical issues are immediately politicized today.
Everyone knows that. I don't need to. I'm not blowing your mind by saying that. corrosive and it's also, you know, fuel on the fire for stigmas. Because what makes stigmas
matter in policy and technology development is when they become political issues. Because then
legislators of different political affiliations will make it their mission to not allow those
things to happen in their states or in their localities. And then half the country is against
the technology. And then it's like almost impossible. So tech has to stay stigma free
to see widespread adoption is really what I'm saying. And that's what happened with the cell
phone was very stigma free. There was no, it wasn't hurting people. You know, cell phones were blowing up in people's pockets
very early on and, you know, killing people and maiming people would have probably taken another
decade for cell phones to become mainstream, but they didn't. Cell phones were relatively
harmless. They got better quickly. You know, we had touch screens within five or six years of the introduction of them and then you know they just took off because there was
a stigma free technology the same thing with like the computer just extremely useful and it didn't
kill anyone didn't hurt anyone and so it's it's you have to avoid this but unfortunately happened
today and i think it's bad for the whole industry i I think that's why Tesla wasn't up on it.
Because I think, like, all things being equal, you'd be like, oh, that's bad for Waymo, that's good for Tesla.
And I think the reason Tesla wasn't up on that news today was because I think it's bad for the industry.
You can't have these cars hit people, period.
cars hit people, period. Whether it's another driver's fault or not. Like, do you think of
Whether it's another driver's fault or not.
an accident happened, let's say on a highway, which now Waymo's starting to do highways in
certain cities. You think of an accident happened between a Waymo and a highway, even if it was the
other driver's fault, do you think it would matter? No. It wouldn't matter because regulators could
still argue that there's something about the human instinct that would have prevented the accident or
whatever. Like, you just cannot allow it to to happen this is why waymo has not done highway
you don't think those vehicles are capable of driving on the highway absolutely they are
the reason waymo even after operating for years waymo's provided what like hundreds of thousands
of rides now i don't know how many they've provided but they provide a lot of rides the
reason they just started going on the highway is for this reason, because you have an accident on the highway and someone dies.
It doesn't fucking matter if the dude didn't have his blinker on,
crossed in front of you.
Even if somebody T-bones you or side clips you into the barrier,
it doesn't matter because there's no driver in that car.
And so the driver's going to be like,
dude, he can say anything he wants to.
Even if there's a camera on it, it's not going to matter.
Even if you could prove in court,
look, this idiot ran into me.
This sort of stuff doesn't matter
when it comes to new technologies.
You just have to stay scot-free.
You have to not hurt people, not kill people.
That's how you get to mass adoption.
So the progress we've seen in the last two years
in autonomous vehicles is insane. They're everywhere now. You go to Vegas, you go to Scottsdale, you go to Austin, you go to Los Angeles, San Diego, so on and using them. They're everywhere. I was just in Vegas. They're everywhere. Zoox's are everywhere. Waymo's are everywhere. You know, in Austin, they're everywhere.
In Dallas now, they're there. They've launched Waymo and they're I see them downtown all the
time. I see when I order food downtown, it's an AV ride robot. Like every time it's close to my
house, maybe a robot. I fucking I can't even opt out of it. I want to opt out of it because it's actually slower than a driver, but I can't. And so it's like the, the, the
autonomous technology has taken off like on a rocket ship in the last two years ago. A lot of
people don't even realize that. Like we went from five years ago, people saying like, that's stupid.
We're, we're, we're 15 years away from a robot being able to deliver your food.
I've had like, you know, 13 deliveries from an AVRI robot so far in Dallas, uh, and over the
course of a few months, like, so it's happening already, right? It's just a matter of scale and
skepticism hurts scale. Thankfully, food delivery robots won't be hurting people, so that'll probably continue to scale.
But, yeah, it's not a good thing.
I guess that was a roundabout way to say it's not a good thing for any of the companies.
I don't think it's just like a Waymo problem.
Yeah.
No, I definitely do think it is a problem for all of them.
This doesn't seem, I don't know, I don't think it's getting some of the attention that I
maybe thought it could have or would have in an area.
So maybe that point hasn't come out, but I think it's kind of at least avoided what could
have been a very touchy subject here for the most part so far.
I get StockTalk's point on that, but it's an
impossible bar to set. So then it comes down to like, what does society think of whether,
you know, a child runs out, gets hit by a human driver? How different is it? Is it a higher risk
or not? And I think it comes down to what society thinks. I agree with Stock Talk's overall point,
but I just think that it is an impossible bar that you're not going to achieve.
So it comes down to what is the perception by society of these accidents as they happen because they're going to happen.
you have autonomous vehicles crashing into autonomous vehicles,
if that happens, which I actually don't think it'll happen much,
then I don't think it matters.
But I think it's just, I just don't think courts are going to side with
the autonomous vehicle companies in the cases of injury.
Like, I want to believe that people look at all these scenarios logically
and that the courts will especially look at these scenarios logically,
but I can't convince myself of that because at the end of the day,
it's about injury of a human being by a robot, whether or not it's the human being's fault.
Like, in order to get hurt by your computer, you have to literally pick it up and smash yourself in the head with it.
Like, that's how you get hurt by your computer.
Or to get hurt by your cell phone, you'd have to, like, beat yourself with your cell phone, right?
Like, it's just, it's's gonna be difficult in court to say like
dude but look look at the cam we have you know these things these cars teslas waymos
zooks is they all have cameras a lot of them so it's not gonna be a problem with like proving in
court that it was the driver's fault it's just like i just don't see it happening at scale like court siding with the robot like over the human driver i just don't see it happening at scale, like court siding with the robot, like over the human
driver. I just don't see that happening at scale. I mean, it's the same reason, like we require
drivers to have license in the road. Like that argument is going to come up, right? Like that,
oh, these people are trained and like, we trust the human instinct and the human pilot. Like,
do you think if I'm going to give an example of this at an extreme level, but like we're testing autonomous fighter aircraft now and companion aircraft, you know, in the sky with an autonomous aircraft that
we would like look at the roll the footage and be like was it the aircraft's fault or was it the
the pilot and then and you know um the airplane's fault of course not they'd probably ground the
aircraft the autonomous aircraft and figure out what happened and probably either switch
providers or or go through you know months or years of refinement before they they relaunched
it because it's it's just not a precedent we've set a society yet that the courts and that the
higher powers and that authorities will side with robots over humans like we're not there yet in
terms of scale i think in 20 years we probably will be where, you know, it'll be a, you know, somebody gets hurt by a robot on the
road. It'll be a matter of just like property damage and who's at fault and all that. But I
don't think we're there yet. That's the issue I'm having. And if you have too many of these
incidents, like I agree with you, there will be incidents, but if you have too many of these
incidents too early on in the adoption curve, it can set back adoption for by a lot you know and that that that's the concern i guess that i
have i'm not like bearish on the ecosystem because of like this kid got hit i'm just like he's fine
the kid's like actually fine i hit him at six miles per hour like he had some injuries but
he's like treated on the scene is what the article said so the the kid is fine, thankfully, but I don't think this is the end all be all.
I'm just saying this is a warning sign
to all these guys like,
hey, this better be an isolated incident.
Don't let more collisions happen with human beings
or else it's going to be a headwind
to the adoption curve.
That's really what I'm trying to say.
Yeah, it'll definitely be interesting to see how it plays out because it inevitably will happen.
You know, you used like an airplane example there.
And I think back to like when we first started having commercial flights.
And, of course, there were accidents and, you know, they reassess things.
But it didn't really seem to slow down a whole lot, you know, the growth of commercial flights back then.
There was, yeah, aircraft grounded, there was changes made and stuff. But
when I think about it, I don't see how it's going to be that big of a difference other than,
and I'm sure somebody will make this point, other than deeper pockets by a corporation being the
owner, you know, when you have these ambulance chaser type of lawyers and lawsuits in a sue-happy society in the U.S.
But apart from that, I don't see how it's any different, like a human hitting them or,
you know, a corporation-owned autonomous vehicle hitting them.
I don't see how big of a difference it's going to be when it comes to the court side of things.
big of a difference it's going to be when it comes to the court side of things. And it does seem like,
I mean, the transportation department, it seems like is on board with this. You know, that's what
I've had, you know, one of my friends, uh, just sent me a message. He was saying that the, uh,
the NTHSA is all behind AV, uh, autonomous vehicles. So I, I don't know. It's, it's one
of those things like you worry about it, but I don't, I just, I don't know. It's one of those things you worry about it,
but I don't
see where it's going to be as big of
an issue because I feel like
most people are going to accept the fact that
to get there, these things are going to happen.
It's just a matter of
to your point,
I guess, TuckTuck, if
three, four happen in
succession, that's where something starts to go viral and then people get outrage over it.
But barring something like that happening where you have multiple happen and back to back to back, I don't see where a major setback would come from it.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's the thing. I hope it's not just an incident.
And the good thing is these have been operating for a long time, and this is like the first time I've ever heard of like a kid being hit.
But again, it's magnified by the fact that it's a kid, right?
Like that's just magnifies it.
Like it's an elementary school kid.
So yeah, you can't be hitting kids.
I honestly think they shouldn't even like,
there's no need for them to operate around elementary schools.
They shouldn't. Like the kid, elementary schools they shouldn't like the with
the kid what elementary schools kids are not getting picked up by autonomous vehicles not yet
that's not the target up market i don't think they should operate around them just to be safe
because honestly if you hit an adult like it's just easier to to brush brush it away it's just
like it's just always magnified when it's a kid. And so,
yeah,
I don't know.
I mean,
it shouldn't have happened,
but,
there also has to be a recognition that like,
these vehicles will drive better than humans,
but,
you can't have other human drivers
doing things like double parking. Like, and that's
the problem. Like you can't have human drivers like, and he was double parked on the side of
the road that was hugging the sidewalk in a no park area that like obstructed the view of the
vehicle as it was going down the road so that's why it's
an issue i'm not saying we just double parked in general but um we have to like recognize that
they're like human drivers are still human and they're going to be on the road with autonomous
vehicles for the first decade of this thing at least and so i hope that courts acknowledge this recognition that if a human driver makes a legal error, then that causes an accident, that we have to hold the human driver accountable.
I mean, there's just no precedent for that in modern history.
like modern history but i hope that eventually that that's adopted because you won't be able
to get real robotics and autonomous adoption like throughout the nation until like m says
they're just treated like any other corporate entities like you know if a walmart truck driver
hits you or whatever or or walmart walmart's trucks, you know, has a, does it not been maintained and slides on the
road and hits a bunch of cars or whatever, or like any of these corporate lawsuits that get
filed, like that should be, we should just leave it up to the civil courts in those cases and leave
it up to, you know, in, in certain cases of negligence and stuff, leave it up to the criminal
courts. But, um, that's what I hope, but yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Regulation
sometimes takes a lot, takes a long time to catch up. And like Elon Musk talks about this all the
time. He's like, you know, we'd be a lot further along if there wasn't these like huge regulatory
and judicial hurdles. But that's the trade-off of being in this country, right? I mean, I prefer our
system to the dictatorships that are on the other side of the world. And so if you want to live in
a system like this, that's the tradeoff.
Some things are slower.
Some things do have more regulatory and judicial hurdles.
But, you know, I prefer that to not having any.
So, yeah, I guess we just wait and see how it progresses.
But, yeah, it was a bad thing for the industry, I think.
A bad little scar on the cheek
but not that big of a deal because no one died and you know we'll see how the courts handle it
if it does go to some sort of civil court what would be really bad is if Santa Monica or wherever the general area of operation that has approved that vehicle is, like, stops them from operating.
That'll be bad.
That'll probably see those stocks go down.
StarTalk, I think we're going to have to close the spaces here.
I got a call that I'm listening in on
I wonder if there's anything you want to leave the people with
what you're working on at the gym
today
and then if you're watching for tomorrow
normally they say, oh I was going to buy that Monday
so what are you watching today and tomorrow for Monday?
There are a couple stocks I want to buy still
I'm trying to
wrap up research but the thing with me in earnings season is is like i'm not a big
earnings gambler you know if there's a position that i've owned for a while and i have a cushion
on it i'll hold it through earnings but i'm not a big earnings gambler so i'm gonna wait for the
next couple weeks to be over let let let the the stocks i'm
looking at get through their earnings reports and then if there's something that doesn't have the
reaction that i think it deserves then i'll go pick it up post earnings and see how it did but
um yeah i'm comfortable with where am i right now i have 17 positions, really effectively 16. One's just a small lotto position.
And so I'm comfortable with most of them and comfortable with holding most of them through earnings.
So we'll see.
I'll get more direction like come end of Feb.
I'll get more direction on where the portfolio is at, where the positions I'm looking at are.
And then I'll go from there.
But there's seven or eight stocks I like a lot that, you know,
I don't really need to do more research on them, honestly.
I like them all a lot, but just waiting for the right technical spots.
I saw some of them at nice buy spots today,
but a lot of them have earnings in the next couple weeks.
So, yeah, I'm just being patient.
I'm not trying to rush into anything,
because I made some silly decisions this week,
some silly entries like on CRML and a few others that, you know, headline or not,
just sloppy entries.
And so I want to focus up and just stick to my MO and stick to, like,
my deep research plays.
And so I have a list of them ready to go.
I just need to wait for the right opportunity to jump in. So, yeah, that's what I'm going to go. I just need to wait for the right opportunity to jump in.
So, yeah, that's what I'm going to do.
And where can they find out this information when you start to share it first?
Obviously, second, stocks on spaces.
First?
Yeah, this whole month, I mean, we're basically,
I guess the service is basically 50% off this whole month
because prices are going to double on March 1st. month i mean we're basically i guess the service is basically 50 off this whole month because uh
prices are going to double on march 1st so if you want to sign up before then you get to keep
your current price but march 1st prices are going to double so yeah i share my whole portfolio there
i share all the weightings i share when i enter and when i exit um position and I share my research too like on every stock so like you know
I have a thesis on most of the stocks I enter I explain why I'm entering and you can read all that
stuff there too you can go back and look at everything I've done for the last I think the
history in there goes back four years you can look at all the journal entries, all the changes in the portfolio, what I added,
what I did in 2022, what I did in 2023, what I did in 2024, what I did in 2025, what I
did this year.
You can see all of it.
You can see everything I've done this year so far to get the 50% return and everything
else too.
So it's pretty transparent.
I think it's the best mid-cap research service
in the world but obviously that's biased for me saying it but i think our my performance over the
last uh three years proves that um so yeah you can come see for yourself we have a lot of good
reviews thousands of members um our membership base doubled last year. Barely anybody cancels.
I mean, I think all the data speaks for itself.
But yeah, Link is in my bio.
We're effectively 50% off until March 1st
because prices are going to double then.
So yeah, check it out if you want.
If you're serious about investing
and you have like, you know,
it's probably not the best community
if you have like less than $1,000 in your account.
But if you have, you know, a high five, six, seven, eight figure account, it's a good community for people like that.
Because, you know, we trade a lot of stocks and have a lot of long term holdings as well.
Do a lot of research.
A lot of people just, you know, use it to get names on their radar that not a lot of research a lot of people just you know use it to get names on their radar that
not a lot of people talk about you know everything from amcor ens plpc you know kratos when no one
was talking about it viv which is now two earnings gap ups in a row since we bought it in october
huntington ingles which has more than doubled since we bought it last year shipbuilding stock
um you know tons of names i
mean i could just go down the list but there's been tons of names like what i consider high alpha
you know stocks that people are not looking at and then by the time they're looking at it they
we they've doubled for us or tripled for us so um you know i've been centrist energy for example
i've been talking about since was 30 bucks in that server and you's a $300 stock now. So,
yeah.
It's a good place to be if you're serious about stocks
and if you're an active portfolio
person.
See you in there.
Check it out.
I appreciate everyone.
Follow the speakers. If you enjoy live, live free content the people on this panel are a lot of really great people to go in and follow yeah down to the
scout we're live every single Monday through Thursday 3 to 5 p.m. Eastern at least we appreciate
you all this was a great week go check out those Apple earnings let's hope they give us some more
double digits double digit guidance going forward 20% that'd be cool have a
great one everyone
