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MARKET INSIGHTS | GOLD & GOLD MINING: INVESTING EFFICIENTLY $GDE $GDMN
Recorded: March 16, 2026 Duration: 2:33:34Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. All right, welcome in everybody.
Happy, happy Monday and a happy Monday it is.
Markets rebounding strongly here. Brian Lund, it's been a minute since you've had me hosting
the show. How's it going? Yeah. Hey, where have you been, buddy?
Oh, well, I'm getting married on Sunday. Oh, mazel tov, man.
Thank you. Yeah, that's what's been happening. Been busy living in Puerto Rico,
doing all the back-end things in the business
that have to be done, you know?
So we're scaling up.
Awesome.
Well, congratulations, man.
Thank you so much.
Well, I appreciate you jumping in here nice and timely
for Sean Hosting here for a while.
Today was a super fun day in the market,
strong rebounds.
We've got NVID's gtc conference that
is going on right now jensen wong is uh speaking currently or just finishing speaking at the
moment nvidia did sell off a little bit during this speech portion but it's still up over two
percent on the day at the high was up almost three percent on the day sitting at 183 down three percent
still year to date but still up 50% last 52 weeks.
And just still looking pretty good here.
You know, a lot of other names that I think people are looking at in similar categories.
MU having a great day today, up 4.87%.
And Sandisk was up several percent, almost 8% here today as well.
So a little bit of bounce in the market.
But I know a lot of people have been feeling these treacherous markets and feeling like,
hey, you have one day to the green side, next day right back down to the red side.
When you go and you look at these indexes, they reflect that.
QQQ is sitting exactly where it was all the way back on September 30th, 2025.
It really has not moved too much, and the range has been decently tight, a high of 639
area, low of 581. We're sitting right above our
200-day SMA. So it's interesting times here as we just continue to kind of chop across to the side
and SPY comes into its 200-day SMA. Brian, how have you been approaching these markets and what
do you take away from having a day like we are having today in this price action?
Yeah, so one of the things that I talked about on Friday
for my subscribers is I said, I called our daily update, the great yo-yo deception. And it's a
reference to analogy or a story or analog or metaphor, whatever you want to call it from
a really well-known financial planner, Rick Edelman, who I used to work with for a while.
And he used to give this analogy. It was in relation to long-term investing, right? It
wasn't about trading. It was long-term investing. He said, imagine you're watching a kid, a child
walking up a road and the child's got a yo-yo in his hand, right? And if you watch the yo-yo,
the yo-yo is going up and down and up and down, right? And that's the analog for the markets. They go up
and down, up and down. But if you zoom out, even though the yo-yo is going up and down,
the child is still progressing upwards. So the analogy there was, if you watch the market short
term, it's going to go up and down, up and down. But over time, over the long term, it will go,
It's going to go up and down, up and down.
But over time, over the long term, it will go – it has an upward bias.
So what I was saying is that right now we're seeing that yo-yoing, but in the short term, the market's rolling over.
You see these days where the market's up for a day or two and you go, oh, great.
And then it goes down, but it goes down more than it went up.
And if you zoom out, you see that we're slowly starting to roll over, even though a day like
today, you go, oh, we're up.
So it's a really deceptive market that just tends to be, or right now is grinding a little
bit lower.
I think what was interesting is last week, we had that big potential, and I say potential
because it's important, potential reversal bar on Monday.
Very strong reversal move. But the problem is we never confirmed it. You need to have a close
above the high of a candle like that to actually confirm that it is a potential reversal bar. And
we weren't able to do that. And then we just gave it up the rest of the week. So what I've been
doing in this market for the last few months is almost nothing, right?
I've been doing a little bit of selling puts lower on names that I like, that I want to acquire slowly over time, that I think are going to be winners for the next three to five years.
I'm selling those puts because if I get assigned those shares, that's fine because I'll get them at a lower
cost basis. If the stocks rally, I'll collect the premium and I'm in no hurry to acquire those
positions. And these are names that I've been talking about in real time over the last few
months, names like Poet, names like ONDS, names like Path, names like Bros, some of which are down short term.
But I've just been taking my time enjoying the end of winter
and trying not to be too glued to the screen
because a lot of people I know are jumping on every pop
and then they're getting stopped out on every drop
and they're just doing this thing over and over again
in the process and fortunately chopping their account up yeah you can definitely run yourself into the ground here staying too
active feels it feels like a good place to pick and choose your battles the yo-yo outline is
interesting right not necessarily knowing what's happening next here within some of these pieces
uh in terms of an area where you have uh interest, do you see anything that has had a continuation for you
and saying, well, this setup does look actually pretty good,
so I'm gonna not pay attention
to most of the rest of the market,
but this area I'll kind of gravitate towards.
Like for me right now,
I mentioned two of them when we opened the space
because they're two of my holdings,
but MU and SanDisk.
And we know that overall,
symptom-aligned lines of like SMH
has performed pretty decent this year.
And these names have held up as people are gravitating towards this idea of, you know, a digital land grab that NVIDIA is doing and the partners that they're going to need to accomplish with it and the money that they're going to spend.
So you do see some kind of catalyst there, or is it just a full kind of pullback and say, hey, not going to test these waters too much right here?
So if I have my choice, I always would be
swing trading. And the reason why is because if you take the ratio of effort towards profit,
it's always in your favor. And a great example of that was coming out of the tariff tantrum
last year, right? There was literally no need to day trade for about six months because all
the market did was trend like an MF-er, which is what
I want to see. I know traders say, oh, I love volatility. I don't love volatility. I don't want
choppy markets. I want a market that's just trends, right? So I haven't seen a lot of names that have
been in that wheelhouse, where I can honestly say this is a swing candidate. I don't really have to worry about
overnight risk or over weekend risk or news risk. Now, having said that, there are some names that
have firmed up a little bit that I like their action relative to what the rest of the market's
doing. And that's what you do in these markets where it's side to side or it's a pullback.
You look for the names that either don't pull back
at all. They may not be going higher, but they're not pulling back or they pull back the least. One
I think is really interesting, no pun intended here, is Wolf. Wolf has held up amazingly well
over the last few months, actually. It got a little bit of a hit on earnings, but it's
recovered from that. So I really like that.
And that's something I'm going to look at for when the market finally does stabilize and hopefully begins the next leg up.
That's a name I'm going to look at.
And another name that's been beaten up quite a bit or was beaten up quite a bit last year,
but has really showed some good relative strength since November and is looking a lot more productive
is CAVA, C-A-V-A, which is up almost 6% today.
So there are some names out there. But I guess what I worry about is I worry about people that
want to be the first guy back in the water. There's plenty of time once this market stabilizes,
whenever it does, whether it's this week, next week, two months from now, next quarter, for you to get in there for that ride back to all-time highs.
So I just – I wouldn't be too quick getting in there.
I'd wait to see some stabilization, recapturing some moving averages, some support resistance levels.
And I think the most important thing is I don't think this market is going to get into gear and it's going to find its stability until
the financials join in. XLF, where it's at right now, carry where it's at right now,
are not good for the market. It's almost impossible for markets to hit all-time highs
when you have XLF and the financials acting like they are now. So I just would caution people to
be patient.
We're going into that early springtime when we can get some malaise.
And there's a whole world out there besides the market.
I would just say wait until we're in a better spot and then hit those fat pitches instead of trying to chase everything
as it chops side to side.
Well, I like a couple of those setups that you outline there
i hadn't looked at kava in a little i just hear people talking about it every time i hear talk
people talk about kava they seem very excited you go to kava and it's had quite the run here
basically a 100 percent gain since the november lows that it had and just continuing to move up
and a great start to this year obviously as well if you look at that move i mean from almost 60
to 90 a huge move so that one looks fantastic. So I appreciate you putting that
on my radar. I do not trade Wolf. Unfortunately, it is just such a tough one. It's our namesake,
I know, and I own it because of that. And I can tell you, it's a tough one. But I see exactly
what you're talking about in terms of it building a base. Bakava, that's a great one right there.
I want to bring in – yeah, sorry, please.
Any other comments?
I was just going to say, look, I get it.
I've got no-go stocks that for some reason I just am never in sync with.
ICE is one of them.
WIN is another.
SSYS is another.
So I get what you're saying about Wolf.
I have option – and because of that, I have options on Wolf,
which are about 90 days out. So I get it you're saying about Wolf. I have option. And because of that, I have options on Wolf, which are about 90 days out.
So I get it.
They're slippery.
They always seem to do the wrong thing on me. So for those setups, I just risk premium paid.
And then I sit back and see if it moves in my direction.
And if it doesn't, I don't get frustrated.
Makes sense.
Something to keep an eye on.
We'll circle back around on that that i'm going to come over
here to options mike also i see scott radler in the audience i don't know if it's not letting you
get up on stage just feel free to dm me if it's giving you issues but uh options mike it's it's
me i'm back back in the driver's seat had to kick evan out what's going on gab nice to hear from you
man it's been forever i know i know the boys are atC today, NVIDIA GTC, and I get married on Sunday, so I was not allowed to go to GTC, so I'm here hosting the space.
Well, dude, congrats. Actually, that's why I was a couple minutes late. I was listening to NVIDIA, and I just had a killer $3 trade on stock on NVIDIA.
They just announced $1 trillion in revenue for 2027 to raise their guidance that is actually an insane
number they said it's it's basically doubles it from 500 billion they said one trillion in revenue
yep he's at least jensen says i see at least one trillion in revenue for 2027. They're only doing, I mean, they did $68 billion in a quarter.
But that's insane.
I mean, if you take even that $68 billion, that record quarter, that's only $272 billion
in a year run rate right there.
So that's a 4X, really, I feel like.
It's incredible, right?
I mean, if you think their PE is cheap now,
if that's real, their PE is dirt cheap. Yeah, that number is a little bit astounding.
I mean, the market doesn't even have a concept of how to value a company right now that does
a trillion dollars in revenue. And did he outline an expectation of keeping 60 to 75% margins on that?
They did not comment on that. Can you imagine your business does a trillion
dollars in revenue and has a 65, 70% gross profit margin? Cashflow machine. You make a $10 billion
investment in a company, it doesn't work. Okay, who cares next? Oh God, that blows my mind.
Yeah. What other takeaways there? Scott, did you have thoughts on that as well?
Yeah, I'm actually just starting doing like three things at once.
I got caught in this video on the way down.
I bought a lot of it.
Oh, so you're both trading it right now.
You and Options Mike are both in the trade.
So, Mike, are you still in the trade?
I sold a lot.
No, I grabbed 1,000 shares on it real quickly at 185.94 when I saw it popping and I got out at 188.76.
So I wasn't in option.
You know, that was one of those things I had no time.
I just had just no time to look around, grab options.
Just click.
And Scott, what trade are you in on it right now?
You said you're playing downside on this candle right here.
I was in shares, actually.
I started buying it on the pullback. It came into the bwap when he was speaking and i
got a little underwater and then all of a sudden just started to go and i started to offer it out
now i'm down to 20 just came in a lot uh the bwaps 2466 i think they definitely took what he said
out of context you know so now the algos are kind of figuring it out. So it's a little volatile. Very nice.
Very nice.
Yeah, yeah.
We'll see.
A lot of things spiked on that.
I actually had some spies on it.
The whole market, Scott.
I do like Iron, by the way.
I think Iron looks much better, CIFR.
I bought some options going out to this Friday and the following Friday.
I have a feeling they've been both quiet. You would think
that they get some kind of news,
kind of like MBIS-type news or something,
but those charts have been
pretty quiet for a while.
There's something else
that I was doing today.
I'm sorry. I'm just a little distracted.
I have too many things going on at one time.
You could take a minute if you want, Scott.
You want me to double back in a few?
Yeah, yeah.
Let some of the other guys talk for a sec.
I'm just trying to, I don't want to buy a dip here
and then all of a sudden everything was out of context
and get run over.
You're good.
Feel free to let us know if you take anything.
Yeah, let me double back to Mike
and we've got, let's talk to Joe B on stage as well here today.
Mike, appreciate you filling us in on that NVIDIA trade.
Want to walk through, I was just talking with Brian Lund aund a little bit you know just kind of yo-yo market concept and how to
approach it and you know especially as the type of trader that you are i mean for me today it was
just kind of like a little bit of a dead cat bounce there was there's we had that little gap up here
there was no power to this move up we didn't even break the eight day on the spy we in fact we almost we just finally got to it just about there here on this little pop uh in my
opinion less is more in this market honestly i was taking today very easy for me um i created nbis
with stock and i traded some tesla with some calls and made some money on the early on on those both
and then i you know the middle of the day i haven't been doing much because the market's really
just chopping around and you know i I don't mind scalping and doing
things like this. And then you have the Nvidia trade, which kind of just makes everything. But,
you know, when you're getting a headline driven market, it's extremely tough. When, you know,
the man in the White House is speaking ad nauseum of late and the market's learning to start tuning
it out for the most part. So you're not getting quite as much whip on it. But we need some good news, right?
You know, oil weakening down to 93 today, I think, is a good thing.
We'll see if this holds.
The market could use some good news.
It really wants to see this situation over there resolved.
And then we can get back to the rest of everything that's bothering us, which was, I mean, for whatever reason, they still don't love the uh trade on ai but you know
the numbers that nvidia keeps throwing out are just absolutely astounding so for me less is more um
being extra careful the worst thing you can do in a market like this is just get
stubborn you know uh i'm gonna hold i it's just gonna chop me around and come back because things
are not just coming back in this market and the other thing is you're seeing some disconnects out there
so for like example
Bitcoin's been trying to pop and now hood and coin aren't really following it when they were following it down and following it on up moves a
Couple months ago, so we're seeing some disconnects there and the sector I continue to watch the most right now is IGV in the software space
You know, I'm looking forward to put a lower, a low end, maybe IGV somewhere around 80.
And then, I'm sorry, a higher low end, somewhere around 80.
And then look for maybe an entrance into that and some of the software names that have been beaten the hell out of.
Other than that, let's take what the market gives us.
We have the Fed decision this week.
I sure think it's going to be a whole lot of nothing.
And I'm sure Micron's going to report a whole lot of nothing and i'm sure micron's going to report
a fabulous quarter and a huge guidance i don't just don't know if it's enough to move the stock
up here kind of like in video yeah that's fair i i don't think we'll get necessarily too much
as well from the fomc meeting how many more does jpao have uh? One more. He has April. There's no meeting in May.
And then we should be seeing, assuming he gets approved in time, Kevin Warsh in June.
Gotcha.
Makes sense to me.
Did you have one or two setups like Brian Lund pointed out, Kava and Wolf?
Did you have one or two like that that really were standing out to you still?
Like, hey, this is a good setup to stop performing in this market market i agree with mongkab i've been charting that one
it really is starting to firm up and look a heck of a lot better than it did uh again that igb
setup i like a lot well i really really like that setup for software and i still think meta is really
just well positioned i know um today they announced they're going to lay, you know, there's speculation they're going to lay up to 20 percent of their workforce up.
But, you know, that's a good thing.
I think Meta looks very continuous to look extremely strong down here.
It's not moving down as much as the market has been moving through all this.
And so that one, I'm still I have a small position in stock and I'm looking to add to it when the market decides it's done with this mess.
a small position in it in stock and i'm looking to add to it when the market decides it's done
with this mess yeah i actually want to get people's thoughts on this um because right now
for anyone that's looking meta is up 2.14 today now the whole market's up uh but they did like
you mentioned kind of the sweeping layoffs and maybe let's talk joeby uh if you want to jump in
on this or brian lund if you want to come back up on stage as well i'm just curious people's
thoughts here on it seems like what's driving the force actually
meta.
What they said is it's not that we're laying people off because we're replacing them necessarily
with AI.
We are laying people off because the cost of the AI that we are using is escalating so
rapidly.
And it also is kind of replacing people.
But it seems like that's a driving force here
is that like people are burning, you know,
billions and billions of these tokens
and they're spending so much on AI
that it seems to be like that's going to be the priority spend
versus people and headcount.
I agree.
And I don't think that is going to be the only one.
I think you're going to see this going across
all these big hyperscalers like Google and Microsoft and Amazon and Tesla or slash job.
XAI.
I don't doubt that AI is destroying jobs and will continue to destroy jobs.
But I think there is a little bit of a red herring here in the software space.
We saw what happened with, was it Block?
Or I can't remember.
Is it Block Square?
I can't remember where the hell.
Yeah, it is.
I think it's Block, yeah.
Same company.
Yeah, so there's this, I think a lot of these companies are using AI as a cover for the fact that they overhired during COVID, right?
And they probably still don't need
as many people. So I think it's a combination of things. I don't think it's purely AI is killing
jobs, but I do think Mike's right. I think the software space is ripe for this, and you're going
to see this probably as a trend for the rest of the year in that space. Which, look, it sucks for
people losing those jobs. I guess it also sucks for the economy because the year in that space. Which, look, it sucks for people losing those jobs.
I guess it also sucks for the economy because those are usually good paying jobs.
But you see what happens to these names when they announce the layoffs, right?
They move higher.
So that could be a theme going forward towards the rest of the year is
some of these names may get into play because of those layoffs,
whether it's from AI or just because they're hiring better
or managing better.
Let's talk, Joby.
You want to jump in on any thoughts in terms of overall conversation here,
AI, layoffs, general market pieces, things that you're watching?
Yeah, no, thanks for having me.
Interested to, or interesting to hear everybody's thoughts. Definitely interesting times that we're going through. But something from at least my world or what I'm watching in Joby is that they are blending this interesting space I think that we're in.
this interesting space I think that we're in.
Software's always going to be, for the foreseeable future,
you guys know a lot more about that field.
But software's always going to be king.
But plugging hardware into that is, I think,
a really key theme right now.
Obviously, defense stocks, some other things just in terms of communications
and direct-to-sell satellite with AST, really interesting name, AST Space Mobile, alongside
of Starlink and some of the things that they're doing. I'll let other people decide if they're
competitors or not, but really interesting technologies there those are things
that i think are for me exciting and when i see joby last week flying around you know piloted
e-v-tall flight with full wing-borne transition i know that sounds you know nerdy and in the weeds
but um that is you know the software that joby has developed making fly-by-wire unified flight controls,
which is the same that they use on the F-35 Strike Fighter.
That's what's controlling this whole aircraft, and they're flying around the Bay Area.
So software meets hardware.
That's what I'm looking at to try and stay a little bit more focused
and not too far head in the sand in terms of the global picture.
Obviously, if oil gets more expensive and manufacturing becomes more expensive and everything becomes a defense, you know, need and all sorts of layers,
I think it gets a little bit more complex.
But for Joby, what they've done is pretty exciting, I think, despite all the headwinds in the market per se.
They're definitely following the themes that you guys speak about.
NVIDIA, Joby is one of their partners as well for their real-world AI.
So anyway, just a couple of thoughts on my end from Joby, hopefully plugging in into the conversation.
Appreciate that.
Yeah, I can definitely see NVIDIA is talking a ton
about these partnerships on stage.
They were sharing a lot of that at GTC.
Mike, were you watching that part of it as well?
Anything stand out to you there and what they're doing?
I actually turned it off when I came on here
just because I couldn't be talking to my room,
talking to you guys and listening to him
at the same time listening to us here.
But they would listen, you know, he was going through and listening to all their partnerships, which is basically everybody at this point.
One of the interesting things he did say is that Oracle is was there.
They were their first customer, meaning they they were doing stuff with Oracle and paying them.
They definitely talk quite a bit about Amazon.
Amazon's had a nice pop and that, you know, they continue to be constrained, but, you know, by working with their apps and throwing
more stuff on the apps, they can help to help them come out of that constraint faster. So I think
they're going to see a change in AI. They're going to try to push stuff more into, you know,
more widespread, not just on the AI servers themselves, but doing other things. And, you know,
we talked a lot about the Ecoverse
and their Ecovips or Ecoverse is strong at this point.
It's very wide and large.
And he said, that's why we still support all of our GeForce
Kuda based GeForce graphics cards
because they're important to us.
I thought that was really cool.
Yeah, I like that, that they're mentioning that as well.
Scott, do we have you back?
You still in the trade there?
All right, I'll give him two seconds while he's still within this.
So, Mike, I want to go a little deeper with you, and let's talk, Joby.
Feel free to kind of cut at any time within these pieces as you would like to.
But I want to just kind of go from a little bit, some of the themes that have worked
over the past couple of months and just see from your technical perspective and what you're looking
at, how they're continuing to work. So one thing that was a huge piece, which less people are
talking about right now, which just has been intriguing to me as a setup is still precious
metals. You have gold, which has pulled back over the past week, just a little bit. You know,
when you look at some of the spot gold prices at the moment, we're trending right around 5,000.
So it's trading at 5,010 at the moment.
So still holding that.
Some of the other ones have taken a little bit
more off of the top at the moment.
SLV, silver at this point is roughly 36%
off of its all-time highs at the moment.
And then if we take a look at COPX, which got really popular,
that's also been trending a bit down, had a bit of a bounce today, but another one that has fallen,
you know, more than 20% from its high. So just curious, that's one area. I think some of the
others have been, you know, semiconductors has been very strong, but there's been a few things
which have kind of taken top of the mantle for portions of this year. And I'm just curious how
you're continuing to look at them inside of your repertoire. So, you know, throughout this year,
up until about the last couple of weeks, last three or four weeks, we've had leadership, right?
And you were bringing it up. We had, you had the semis were leading and it's been different names.
It's been the microns, the sandists, it's been the memory space and storage space. You had the
precious metals leading with gold and silver you had
pharma leading we had a big move there right so we've had this rotation the part of the financials
are strong one thing that's happened now and it started happening before the iran war was we've
lost leadership there's no leadership in this market right now for me what i find most interesting
is the precious metals are moving with the markets. This is not a safe haven right now.
Typically, when you have something going on like we have in Iran, the first thing they would do is go running to gold.
Gold is safe haven.
They would go running to that or bonds.
They're not buying bonds.
They've been selling them.
They're not buying gold.
They're not buying silver.
The dollar has been very strong during all this, which is interesting here.
So for me, now that everything's pulling back, you can go general market pop.
We'd look for new leadership to reassert itself.
I really think that the software space and the Mag7 are ripe for a rotation into it for leadership.
But that doesn't mean it's going to happen.
That's why I'm not jumping to start investing in them here.
I'm waiting for the market to tell me what's going to happen there.
The other thing to keep watching is energy.
Energy has had a nice little leadership role here and is still holding very strong based upon the strength of crude,
but it detached itself a bit where crude was going up and spiking.
Energy names like ExxonMobil and Chevron really aren't moving that much with it anymore.
So you're seeing that detachment there already signifying that that trade is probably over for now or not a time to get into it here. So yeah, I think for me, it's a time to be extra
careful. Cash is a position until you see what you're looking for longer term and just find
little things to make money here, right? Look for momentum like NVIDIA gave that nice trade today
for me. And otherwise than that, just stay out of the way and don't get married to the market.
Yeah, I think the energy trade is actually very interesting.
Let's talk, Joby, did you want to jump in?
Or I can just call you Travis if you prefer.
On that as well, kind of thinking about the energy side of things
and how that factors into kind of your world.
Sure.
I mean, I do know and it's something that'll be, you know be a big piece of what the future in terms of EVTOL and the VertiP some heavy-duty charging, which I think is
going to be pretty interesting as both existing infrastructure, which is parking lots and
some of these other unique real estate plays where people have kind of transformed parking
lots to be cloud kitchens in some respects. But that'll be an interesting play for the power side of things
coming into the vertiports. And there's already been a few articles that recently came out,
nothing officially announced, but that some of the FBOs, so fixed base operators where
private aircraft currently fly, but also where eVTOL will be in some of the initial use cases, that they'll just
be passing on the electric cost, which is pretty interesting because obviously they get part of
their revenue stream as an FBO. Currently, when they sell Jet-A fuel to different aircraft,
they're making quite a bit of money off of that. Now they will not. So that'll be an interesting
piece of how power you know, power
and energy on a broader scale, EVTOL, certainly the world that I look at, but overall, I think
energy and real estate are going to tie together a lot more uniquely than maybe in the past.
Yeah, the energy side of things, we've talked about a couple of different ETFs that I've used in that area to find names.
The one that I like best right now has been POW POW.
That one's up 22.3% year to date.
Some of the names that I've just been consistently looking at.
So options might be curious if you want to weigh in.
But Quanta is one that Jaguar really liked and talked about on the spaces in the past.
But Quanta is one that Jaguar really liked and talked about on the spaces in the past.
That is ticker PWR was the one when it came to power that a lot of people were looking at.
So that one is, I mean, basically near 52 week highs.
It's held up pretty nicely.
It's been trending for about a week or two here, but still holding up very nicely.
And we talked about a lot of these on the space not too long ago.
So I hope people actually remember some of this.
Another one is Powell Industries, P-O-W-L.
Let's take a look at what that one's up to.
Yeah, I mean, still holding pretty nicely.
Kind of doesn't look so different, to be honest, than some of those commodity charts that have pushed up really hard and then pulled back, you know, 10, 20% right here.
Hubble, H-U-B-B, is one other one that i think a lot of people are looking at hubble uh that
one's had a bigger pullback than some of the others so i wonder if there's going to be
more people getting interested in this one right here but yeah when it comes to power
options mike how are you thinking about this as a swing trade and investment specifically picking
out your names other items like that so for me this year um you know i i think the nuclear trade
is still alive and well.
But for me, it's staying away from the Oklos of the world, the NNEs, the SMRs, as they are completely speculative.
They have no revenue right now. Right. They're pre-revenue for at least another year or two, maybe.
They're lucky. So I'm approaching it where my name I really like.
I've been liking is GEV has been very good and strong.
And if you want to play the power of the nuclear game, I think you cannot go wrong with GEV.
They're just a stronger name out there.
They have lots of revenue.
They're strong.
They're already doing nuclear work.
And that's a good one.
The other one I really like this year was CEG, Constellation Energy.
You know, You get the added
benefit with them. They're not just into the nuclear power play, but they're also a utility,
right? So you get a little bit of both with them. Again, safer names, deeper pockets. I know them.
I don't know the other ones as well that you mentioned, Gav, so I can't really speak to them
other than their charts still look really good. But for me, if you want to play that, I think
those are the two names I like the best here right for me if you want to play that that that i think those are the two names i'd like the best here right now if you want to play
that nuclear power play and i think it has legs yeah i really like ge varanova as well that's one
that i learned about from the ais uh etf and that really helped them basically pull into the lead
and so that's one that i've been looking at for a while. And Scott, by the way, again, if at any point you want to jump in,
please do. But yeah, on GE, Veranova, you're sitting up 24.5% year to date right now. So yeah,
that's still holding up very, very nice on that side of things. And I see IAS sub 16.5% there.
One of the other names that's always been interesting to me in that area,
but it's not a U.S. name, so it's harder to invest in, is SK Hynix.
Are you familiar with that one, Travis or Mike?
I am not.
Yeah, I'm definitely not in my space.
Yeah, SK Hynix trades primarily on the Korean exchange.
So it's not really something that a lot of US investors are enforcing to get access to,
but it's just one of the best stocks out there, in my opinion, right now.
This is massively covering a lot of NVIDIA's memory needs.
And then also, you know, just plays into some of those picks and shovels of the AI side.
But they're actually up 11.5% today alone.
And year to date, the stock is up 55%.
And past 52 weeks, it is up 367%.
So that's one that sometimes I wish
like people had access to
directly invest in from the US stock market.
But this is one that I've only been able
to invest in through ETFs. But that whole Korean market, actually, this would be a great topic.
I got a couple of things here actually on my mind. International exposure, first off. Mike,
do you go for that at all? Is that something that you have in your portfolio, something that you're
leaning towards? Right now, I'm pretty much invested here in the U.S. and companies that
cover the international, they're U.S.-based companies that cover international.
I tend to stay away from a lot of international investment, especially China.
Too much unknown, too many high risks there.
For your long-term investor, I'd rather be in stuff I know that's U.S.-based and safer.
I will invest in European stuff once in a while.
Have you seen the Korean stock market this year?
And, you know, going through the roof and had the 12% pullback and turn around and shot it back 12%.
Yeah, it's incredibly nuts.
Yeah, they're just having a crazy move. a product from Direction, K-O-R-U, which is a 3X daily bull on MSCI South Korea, and it's up
89% year to date. They had a 21% move just today. So Korea really pushing hard, which is just an
interesting area to me as an investment. Most of my international investments are a little bit
broader. They're not typically so concentrated into you know specifically just china or specifically just korea um so it's been
interesting to me just kind of in general to uh watch some of these pieces travis i'm assuming
wow yeah sorry what were you saying there mike no i just looked at the chart on k or you wow
it's pretty crazy right just yeah it's nuts yeah i i mean i right? Yeah, it's nuts.
Yeah, I mean, I've just, it's worked out for me. I've had a good amount of international exposure personally over the past couple of years. Two of the bigger names for me have been FRDM,
which is just a Freedom 100 Emerging Markets. And so in a name like that, you very nicely are
getting something like SK Hynix, which I mentioned. So you're basically name like that, you very nicely are getting something like SK Hynix,
which I mentioned. So you're basically just looking at, you know, it's a weighted exposure
to emerging market equities based on personal and economic freedom metrics. So the reason that I
like that is because transparently it actually invests not really into so much China as much
because they don't really rank highly on the freedom metric.
So maybe I miss out on some of the exposure there, but I get things like TSM and Samsung
and SK Hynix, you know, Banco de Chile, like a lot of different stuff like that. And that one's
had a really nice past year, 57% up, 7.5% year to date. And so it's, it's given me exposure to areas that I do like. And then I think just
basically like, you know, an MSCI EAF ETF has been the rest of my exposure. And those have done fine,
you know, slightly green year to date in line with spy over the past, you know, year, maybe
slightly outperforming over the past year or two. So those have been kind of like my couple of pieces
that I've gravitated towards Travis, you you pretty pretty concentrated u.s i would assume
yeah everything for for my side is um you know i know there's uh in terms of the energy side there
is some interesting things that are happening um that i know are on the the canadian market and uh
you know it's interesting maybe more for your guy's side since heavier on the Canadian market. And it's interesting, maybe more for your guys' side,
since heavier on the trading.
But yeah, I think it's something that is a challenge
as for better or for worse right now,
everything for the US side of things,
we are insulated, which is great,
and we have the best market.
But also how much the macro
is just going to weigh down everything.
You know, I think it becomes more challenging
to find some of these opportunities,
especially if it's limited by just which exchange that it's on.
But no, interesting observation.
Which macro portions are you paying closest attention to?
I'm sorry?
You mentioned the macro side of things things i'm just curious which macro portions you're most closely paying attention to and when it comes to the u.s
side of things uh well you know for instance you know uh joe b side of things you know what's
interesting is watch the company they're doing you know both a huge amount of the work with the fa on
the domestic front, but also
that'll leverage things from the outside, whether that's Toyota in Japan from the trade
aspect, which Joby's been a great partner with Toyota for quite some time.
But moreover, I think for Joby specifically, it is an interesting thing to watch.
Dubai was going to be a test market for them and obviously with what's going on overseas it's makes it a little bit delicate when there's
you know things falling out of the sky you know nearby the airport but um you know that's the
the challenge of even things here with you know stateside everything um you know is going to be
impacted but joe be certainly um you know not uh not immune to
some of those downstream effects but yeah i i did think that that stuff was crazy last night when i
was seeing the dubai airport stuff and uh mike feel free to actually bring you back in here
scott either one of you but i'm curious to get your guys' thoughts because I saw, you know, Dubai airport pausing flights after, you know, missiles nearby.
And you had people on Twitter that were like, limit down incoming, you know, and then, of course, right, nothing.
And we even popped today and we had a great day in the market today.
So I'm just curious how you think about, like, your mindset going into these weekends and then out of these weekends when there's so much doom and gloom and some crazy things happening around the
world.
I think the market's trying to detach itself from what's going on over there
that, you know, this is, it's coming to the realization,
this is not going to be resolved overnight. The big,
the big thing is, you know,
if you cannot get the straights open sometime in the next week or two, I think
you're going to have bigger problems.
And that would be with the global economy potentially starting to see impacts there
and the price of oil continues to go up and gas going up.
And that would be a problem here in the US, as for Trump, he knows he's losing his support
for the Republican Party with the midterms coming up in six months. So you're
going to look for some type of resolution there. I know he's trying to call everybody to come in
and to patrol and defend the Straits, but there's an old adage, right? If you broke it, you fix it,
and we certainly did break it. So, you know, the rest of the world is not too willing to get
involved in this, and they do not want to put their warships in harm's way,
unless they absolutely have to for need of having to have that oil.
So I think you look at the markets trying to detach itself from that,
it's understanding this is going to be a long-term event,
that it's not going to wrap up easily.
You can't really, if Iran is unwilling to come to the table,
you can't just declare victory and walk away at this point.
You're kind of stuck there now. There's been bombs hitting everybody every day unfortunately through that
area and i think the markets just become numb to it as we all have you know it's kind of like when
you know he speaks non-stop and you can always tell when he's kind of just in one of those modes
and he just he just kind of rants and goes off, whether it's on social media or just pulls somebody from the press in to talk to. And you just kind of just learn to just
ignore that and just focus on what's important and from there. And right now, it's just horrible.
We're stuck in a situation where we don't have an easy exit from this and the market doesn't know
what to do, but this wasn't the only thing bothering the market. And just remember, you know, inflation has been showing
its ugly head. It's probably going to show worse if this continues to go. The AI trade
has been being unwound and, you know, just been lots of little things that's been bothering
the market here for the last couple of months. Earnings, well, overall not great this last
earnings period, but guess what? We start earnings again in about a month. So, you know, there's a lot of little things going on here. So killing
this war would be a great thing. And then we'll see from there. Oh, and you have the
whole thing with the Fed. You know, Powell, now the subpoena got quashed, but Trump said
he immediately would appeal it, which, by the way, I think it's foolish. Why appeal
it? He'll be gone in a month. Why just
let it go? And the Senate is purposely not interested in talking, hearing about the one
couple of Republicans are holding up, even hearing the confirmation hearing on Warsh until that's
resolved. So you got a lot of little things going on here. And I think the thing to do is just
the market will tell you. The market's going to tell you when it's ready to go. We'll see a change in character in the way we're trading.
We'll get momentum to the upside.
We won't just get these one-day little bounces like today.
And, you know, for me, when you come in on a day like today and you gap up, I'm very careful.
You know, are we going to hold it or are we not?
And honestly, the SPYs traded in a $3 range, $4 range, take the little pop in here all day long, a very tight range on the gap up, very little action.
So, you know, it just says be careful.
Put it on your hands.
Be patient.
The biggest problem we have is that we can't sit still.
And when you can't sit still, that's when you tend to make mistakes.
Yeah, that definitely circles back to what Brian Lund mentioned at the beginning of this show.
Brian, we were talking about a couple other pieces.
I need five minutes.
We'll probably be right back.
Yeah, you're good.
Thanks for letting me know, Mike.
Brian, we got you.
Yeah, I'm here.
I was just kind of talking about a few topics.
I'd love to get your thoughts on them.
We went over some thoughts on commodities as well as foreign markets and how they're trading right now.
You know, Korea having a huge day-to-day and really this year
and some of these different pieces.
And we also talked about some interesting thematics like power.
So just kind of curious to get your thoughts across the board here.
And then the last thing he was talking to was like,
maybe not paying attention to everything on social media
that you see Sunday night when people are calling for limit downs.
Yeah, you know, there's a phenomenon.
Yeah, exactly.
We've been saying this.
I know you haven't been here for the last few months, but like we've been saying this every Monday is that we see these Sunday night doom and gloom disaster tweets because of something that happened over the weekend. or at some point they reverse. So I always say that you really shouldn't be in the game of prediction
because the problem is not only may your prediction be incorrect,
but when you're so focused on what you think is going to happen,
you don't see what could happen.
And the best example of this was at the end of the bear market in,
I can never remember if it's 23 or 22 now.
I'm getting older.
But the point is,
we had high interest rates, inflation, mortgage rates were through the roof. Nobody thought that
housing stocks would be the place where the next rally would start because everyone had predictions
of doom and gloom. And of course, housing ripped for a year straight. So I would really encourage
people to turn up their curation, turn up their filters so that they can tune out a lot of that stuff.
It really doesn't help you in the market.
In fact, I think it almost harms you.
So, yeah, I totally agree with not paying attention to that doom and gloom. And the other thing too is, is now, now you get these big, um, God, man,
it's like, seems I, Twitter is getting less and less useful for, for me. And I've had to be so
much more aggressive on my curation because I'll just see these thousand word epic theses on why
this is going to happen. And that's, here's a, here's a great one, a Kraken, right? So Anderil
ends up getting a $20 billion contract awarded by the U.S. government.
And all you see all weekend is Kraken, Kraken, Kraken.
Now, Kraken, not the crypto exchange, but Kraken, the Canadian defense contractor who works with Anderil.
And that's all, it's going to go to the moon and watch Kraken.
We were in Kraken two months ago, right?
And OPTT and OPTX, right?
By the time everyone's screaming about it, that's not always, but that's often the time from a short-term perspective that it's a sell the news or the top is in. Now, Kraken, I believe, has a
longer term, a good trajectory longer term. But that's the point is if you're trying to trade something and you're
jumping on something when all the news is over Twitter,
that's probably the wrong spot.
Right.
So it's just,
yeah,
I think you really have to be wary of what's out there on the,
on the social interwebs these days.
Yeah.
I did a live stream on Kraken back in October.
I didn't, i didn't buy enough
unfortunately you never have enough when it's uh going through the roof right
we never we can never have enough you know and you always have too much when it's tanking though
that's how it is that a little bit i've been kind of yeah a little bit so one of the things also is
if you obsess about something all weekend long you're not
going to make the right decision on monday because you put these false narratives in your head of
what could have happened so then you know we had those like um like brian said those two big gap
downs if you were worried about you know 1987 or this or that or boom or bam you're just happy to
get the hell out of the way monday morning but meanwhile both those monday mornings were great
buying opportunities because they were reversed and they were great trades.
So I would say whatever you take on Friday,
you almost like you made your bed.
Like get the hell outside on the weekends.
What are you looking at Twitter all weekend along
about what could happen, what should happen?
Because you already made your decision
on what do you want to take in your active account?
What do you want to take in your swing account?
Maybe what do you do in your 401k?
If you triggered your blood on the street account, you know, because we're 5% off the
highs.
So you make that decision and then, you know, you want to look at what happened over the
weekend at some point.
But if you think about it all weekend long, you're going to drive yourself nuts.
And then all of a sudden, Monday morning, you know, you're not going to make the right decision because you're going to have just false
thoughts in your head of, oh, wow, I could just salvage this trade. I thought I was going to be
down this. And, you know, so bottom line is if you're also obsessing about it all weekend long,
you probably did too much. You probably have too much long, too much short, too much of something
because you shouldn't be obsessing about it because what you need to do is what you're kind of comfortable doing.
Obviously, you want to stretch a little bit and you want to put on a bigger trade if you love the trade or there are ways to make more money with size and holding and whatnot.
But if you're obsessing about something all weekend long, that means you probably are over your skis and you should not do that again.
Let me add to that and just brag on you a little bit, Scott, here.
I think one of the great things that you can do is have a regular reset, right?
And I think that reset, it's a mental, it's emotional, it's physical.
So if you're not aware, Scott does a red dog mindset every morning.
And I think that is such a key thing and such an overlooked part of trading.
Trading is a holistic – I hate the word holistic, but it is a holistic part of your life.
And if you're not in the right mindset, if you're not in the right physical shape, if you're not in the right emotional shape, no matter how hardcore you think you are, it will bleed over into your actions in the market.
bleed over into your actions in the market. And so I love what you do, Scott, because that Monday
morning, I'm sure you do it on Saturday and Sundays, is a great way to just reset and clear
the cobwebs out and filter all that other junk and get ready and focused for what you need to do,
which is make money. Yeah. The only reason why I'm still in this business since 1998 is because
of my routine and my process. I'm not the smartest guy out there. I didn't go to Harvard business or
have this crazy algo's working because I do have that reset. I have a sauna in my basement. I'm not the smartest guy out there. I didn't go to Harvard business or have this crazy
algo's working because I do have that reset. Like I have a sauna in my basement. I have an ice
barrel. No matter whether I'm up money, down money, or in a bad mood, I do that every single morning
in the same routine where, you know, I get in the sauna, I sweat for 20 minutes, let's say
to some 80s rock, think about my positions, think about a few different things that
could happen while my thoughts are elevated, kind of like a runner's high. People talk about a
runner's high. You get your best thoughts when you're out on the road or on the track. Well,
in the morning in the sauna, it's the same thing as a runner's high. Your endorphins are going up,
you're sweating, you feel good, you start thinking clearly. So then you put multiple scenarios in
your head. So when the market does open and one of the movements confirm one of your potential outcomes, then you
execute, you know, so having that, you know, the sun and then the ice barrel I do every day because
I just want to do something that I might not be in the mood to do and prove that I'll do it.
You know, so that's, you know, you put a little selected adversity on yourself for a selected
heart, you know, you can handle hard when hard happens.
So you put both of those together with the 630 club.
Then all of a sudden you have the routine and process to feel good.
And then you have the X's and O's from the 630 club with the charts and the levels,
you know, and I do that every single morning.
And then I hang out with the alpha team all day on the radio with positions, the whole,
you know, nine yards.
But those two things in the morning, really, if I happen to, for some reason, you know,
my phone turns off or I don't wake up and I wake up at eight o'clock in the morning versus 445,
I am so off for that day that, you know, I obviously have to manage my positions and whatnot.
But, you know, so the process and the comfort and the stabilization is what helps
you make your decisions when things are in motion versus being on tilt, you know, or being
uncomfortable, like a bad uncomfortable, not knowing the levels, not know why something did
something. Yeah, that's lack of preparation. So you need to prepare your mind by priming and then
prepare the day by multiple plans and then execute when you know
things are are supposed to be executed on scott how'd that nvidia trade finish up for you
um i gave some back i gave some back i i um i you know before he came out with that
outlandish statement i was buying the vWAP and it got a little against me.
And then all of a sudden it started to go.
And I kind of offered out over 75% of it, but I still had 25% and went down from 188.
I got stopped out at 184.
So I did get back some of that back.
But it's okay.
It comes with the territories market.
Whatever feeler I have left i lose on
you know so i should just take the trade but then when i take it off then obviously you know it goes
further um so i'm glad you said that scott because i feel like i'm the only one every time i leave a
runner on with options for stock and i put a stop down you know a little under where i made i always
lose money on it like nothing holds I thought it was just me.
No, it's not you.
Like, yeah, I rarely am like, wow, I'm glad I kept that on.
You know, that worked awesome.
It's really more like, like even this morning, I caught a trade in Tesla.
I was thinking, you know what, if we get above Friday's high of, you know, of 400, chances are there could be a little squeeze there.
And I was buying three, like 99s.
It got over 400.
I added to it, and I pieced out all the way up to 403.
And I'm like, let me try one more trade to retest 450.
And then I got stopped out of 397 on that end and gave back a third of the trade.
I got stopped out at break even.
My last two options after I sold eight for a small win, they weren't that much
I'm like, it just wouldn't give it to me
I said, I'm not going to let it go red today
I'm just not going to let it go red
Yeah, I know
I actually made a little bit too
and I was like, really?
I'm like, why couldn't it get above 400
hold 400 and actually have a good day
I don't know if any of you guys played
NVTS, NVTS is like a little
semiconductor, I'm like, yeah, but bull flag you got over 11 you went to 1160 why does it have to be a
doji you know pull back not work like let's work obviously some of the memory stocks are working
like they were really strong on friday when the market was going lower so if you took home mu or
sandus you're like wow that worked there's not so many times I feel like in the last four weeks,
I'm like, wow, that really followed the rules and worked.
Sometimes it's always going on and you're like, this is great.
And that only happens probably three times a year,
three times a decade,
which is another little presentation we do about cost averaging your career.
But lately it's like, like really did you just do that
like like even even nvidia like nvidia just went to 188 now it's back on 183 it's like you had to
it's filthy filthy it's absolutely filthy what they just did with nvidia it really is
let me throw out a real quick setup here that's looking pretty good now this is the codicil here
is if the market does what it's been doing, which is sells off tomorrow, probably not going to work.
But Palantir actually looks really good here.
It had a very narrow bar today.
There's something called an NR7 bar, and it means it's the narrowest range bar in the last seven bars.
Oftentimes, that is a prelude to – contraction precedes expansion.
is a prelude to, you know, contraction precedes expansion.
So if this makes a move and it goes in the direction that it's gone since, you know,
it started rallying in February, we could get a nice move.
But the key here is you can manage your risk on today's bar extremely tightly.
And that is a key for traders because that means you can size up.
And even if you get
stopped out, you won't lose as much. Now, the question is, do you take overnight risk, right?
Do you buy it here and see how it opens in the morning? I wouldn't only because of the overall
market win. So if we can get a flat open tomorrow and you can use today's low as something to trade
against, or if maybe you do a smaller size, hold it overnight,
or if you do what I'm probably going to do right now,
which is buy some options,
I think there's some potential here
for Palantir to make a nice move.
Logical, you want to weigh in here?
Sorry, is there a specific question on that?
I'm kind of multitasking.
Yeah, you're all good.
We were talking like software and some of these pieces right now for a second.
That was kind of just the midst of the convo.
But to be honest, if you need a few minutes to close and then kind of want to talk through
some of your positions, I'm all good with that as well.
Whatever's best for you.
No, I mean, I have general market comments.
I think the problem is right now getting too overly ahead of ourselves on any specific sector industry is really
tough to do because there are just so many in this market backdrop, failed breakouts,
failed recoveries.
You get smacked right back down to the lows.
So it's just not a very productive environment, I would think.
And while you have a lot of conflicting signals,
you have things like the IGV is the most oversold
that's been in blah, blah, blah.
Or we're now, RSI is most oversold since April 2025,
Lowe's Liberation Day.
Or sentiment is this low and all know all those things it's like
so there's enough evidence out there right now to tell me that the market could easily bounce from
here but it still just doesn't feel like there's any strength in this market so any bounce that
happens it's really going to be difficult for me to believe it. I do think that a lot of individual stocks look good if you can look out 18 to 24 months.
I don't think that this is going to be like the start of like some prolonged bear market.
I do think that crash risks are pretty high in the market at this point, especially if
there's no off ramp or de-escalation in the Iran situation.
If you have oil to have a sustained bid,
if oil stays higher, inflation stays higher,
rate cuts kind of are off the table or at least delayed.
So it just makes it a really tough environment.
And I think people should take a second to zoom out
and realize that before this Iran situation heated up,
the market was in a distribution since October.
And so we had problems before the Iran situation came in.
You had people basically selling out of big tech.
And the problem with that is we've been going sideways, which is fine.
But if you want those sellers to come back in and become buyers of this market, then
it's probably going to take them more than a couple percent or a few percent off the highs to get interested in that liquidity to come back and buy stuff up, which makes
me think that there is a chance that there's still crash risk in the market.
There is...
It's just really hard for me to get too constructive on the upside.
But like I said, bounces from here for sure
are very possible
and even likely at this point.
I think right now
what I've been kind of settling on is
I think one thing to note too
is like the people who speak on here,
you know, we all have different timeframes
and we trade very differently.
And so some people are like,
you know, flat by the end of the day
or, you know, don't hold risk overnight and things like that. And so that's really important. Because I think
in a market like this, it's extremely volatile day to day. I've seen some people make a killing day
trading. I'm personally not a day trader. So, you know, take everyone's words with a grain of salt,
because it may or may not be applicable to what kind of style you have. If you're a long-term
buy and hold investor, imagine you're in the indices. What are you down? 30% year-to-date
on a spike? Who cares? 2%? It's just like nothing's even happened. But if you're somebody who's
buying high beta growth stocks and you're swing trading them for years, you're probably down 40%,
50% on some of your holdings, which is tough. Or if you're somebody who's just day trading
50% on some of your holdings, which is tough.
Or if you're somebody who's just day trading, you know,
index like SPY calls, SPY puts day in and day out,
or like, you know, you just have a very different perspective on this market.
Some people love it. Some people hate it.
For me as a swing trader, I don't like it.
There's not really much to do.
I'm waiting for a better, more productive environment.
I think that if you, I mean, I spent, you know,
yesterday looking
through weekly charts, you could see that SPY on the weekly was rejected for the second
time below the 9 EMA. So rallies to the 9 EMA, which is now curling down, gets rejected
twice, who closes below the 21 EMA. Typically like bigger, you know, drawdowns typically
happen when you're below that 21 EMA and especially when
you're not able to show any strength to get back above it. So market just doesn't feel very
convincing to the upside. It takes a lot of liquidity to get, you know, big tech to move,
and they are still a large percentage of the S&P. So without them, it's tough. And, you know,
they have a ton of CapEx. Basically, with
the meta thing, I actually think that meta news is quite bearish for the market because
they told you that they are not going to step back on the CapEx investments. The CapEx
investments are why they are basically depleting all of their free cash flow. So people are
like, oh, the MAG7, Amazon's trading at 20 times PE. It's like, yeah, but what's their free cash flow
multiple? It's very, very, very high because their free cash flow is going to like zero.
So, you know, if you use a free cash flow multiple, you're going to say Mag7 have never
been more expensive. And because the question mark there is, well, is this like a one,
two year thing? Or is this going to be, you know is this going to be perpetual? So market's been pretty rational, I think.
It's going to be really tough to get new investors involved
in some of these names when they don't know
what the ROI is going to be.
And then with the meta news,
they basically just told you that they're willing
to sacrifice operating expenses
by laying off a bunch of their employees
to fund their CapEx investments.
Which is, I mean, it's fine,
but isn't that now potentially the risk that we've been worried about?
Which is, the consumer has big risk.
We had a very bad NFP jobs report that came in negative recently.
And now you're having layoffs picking up.
And that kind of thing is just like, you saw the block 40% layoff.
And now you're seeing meta 20% layoff.
Like, a lot of companies might follow suit
to keep their margins intact, etc.
And, you know, maybe that's why financials are kind of slipping.
You know, because XLF and all that,
I mean, two reasons, right?
If the big banks make up XLF,
then there's just obviously a lot of murkiness around,
you know, what the rate story is going to be if inflation's up with the Iran stuff.
But then now also you have, you know, maybe the high-end consumer,
aka the top of the K-shaped economy is going to have issues if there's going to be layoffs
and white-collar jobs, which are the big spenders in the economy.
So, and that's coming off
of the back of flat retail sales. When we expected growth, GDP lower than we expected it, NFP and
jobs report negative. I mean, so so the consumer doesn't look particularly strong. You have higher
inflation that ties the Fed's hands until the Iran situation deescalates, which means that they
can't, you know, cut rates. It's just It's just a really messy and ugly environment. I think the market's being
extremely rational to be weak. It was weak before the Iran situation. At a minimum, you want to see
the Iran situation resolved. So at least like, if like the inflation stuff comes right back down,
then, you know, rate cuts are back on the table because the consumer is weaker. And then all of a sudden, you could potentially be heading into a more of a
Goldilocks scenario where, you know, they can stimulate the economy and all that stuff. But
right now they can't. So you need to see that, I would say, to get a little bit more, yeah,
positive. There you go, let's cut in there. Yeah, yeah, I would agree with a lot of the points.
I was I was wanting to double tap into
your point about these potential layoffs and uh omar popped up on stage uh be curious because
someone that i saw posting was talking about how a lot of these layoffs are going to be caused not
be it's a multitude of things not just ai replacing jobs but also the cost of ai right you're spending
billions on tokens and it gets really expensive.
And so you might have to let some of the headcount go
because it's not feasible to keep both, right?
Like maybe people would even like to have both.
It just doesn't make sense financially to be there.
So that was kind of like one of the pieces as well.
So yeah, I want to come back around
on some of the thoughts we were saying,
but Omar was curious before,
I mean, and I want to hear from both of you guys
if we could talk some GTC and and just like nvidia and stuff like
that but um just curious on the layoffs first because we saw a really positive reaction for
block stock when that happened and then meta was up a couple percent today
i just want to say one thing before i let omar go and i'll let him take it just i understand the um
the token bit.
Dude, I'm like, I work a full-time job.
I was going to have to do like this crazy long analysis
in our Databricks backend data tables, blah, blah, blah.
And I'm connected to my Databricks via Claude in Cursor.
And I just like said, go find out why there's like so many anomalies in the data.
And it's just been running for like 10 minutes and looking at every single angle of the data.
So as somebody who is in this field, it's insane the amount of work that you're able
to do with AI.
I don't want to downplay that at all.
I think so far it feels like it's making you more efficient and able to do more work.
So it's intensifying the amount of work.
So I don't think it's necessarily the doomsday scenario I thought in the beginning.
But I agree with you that if you are going to take more here, then it's going to have
to take from somewhere else.
And I don't know how it all shakes out.
But yeah, I mean, these layoffs are, if they do site AI, whether it's based on investment
replacement, or they can do the more work with less and they don't need to be as bloated
with employees, there's going to be impacts to the economy from a consumer perspective anyways i'll
pass to mark yeah hey it's been an exciting first day of gtc over in silicon valley nvidia announced
their rubin platform it's going to be the successor to Blackwell, three nanometer process.
You've also got them announcing a 12-month product cycle. Their next generation,
Feynman, is going to be 1.6 nanometers. But I think on the employment question,
I'm a little bit of a... I have a different view on this than most of the market and most other people.
I think that when you look at Block,
I don't think this really had that much to do with AI.
I mean, look at the app we're on right now, Twitter,
also a Jack Dorsey company.
They cut what, 70%, 80% of the staff?
And they've still got this thing running
with Nikita Beer and maybe a few dozen engineers.
The company was just bloated
compared to what it actually needed to do its job.
And I think AI has probably definitely multiplied the force of those few
engineers they have left, definitely. I think Block was similarly bloated, but
if I'm going out and announcing layoffs in 2026, am I going to say, hey, we just hired too many
people? We're bloated. We need to cut back, which kind of sounds bearish.
Or am I going to spin it as, hey, well, AI is letting us lay these people off.
I think it sounds great to say that it's AI.
But really, the company was probably just bloated to begin with.
And the productivity gains from AI just accelerated that.
gains from AI just accelerated that. Now, my view generally in the macro sense
is that despite all this fear that AI is going to take all our jobs,
I think in the near term, AI is actually going to drive full employment because you're going to
have productivity gains, GDP growth, and ultimately a greater demand for humans. They might not be
doing exactly the same work. They don't need to do a lot of the busy work that AI can automate.
And I've played deeply with these systems. Unfortunately, the best models today are still not capable of operating fully unsupervised. You can't take that model and give
it the 80k salary you gave to a human and get the same quality of work. Now, an 80k salary that you
pay a human combined with the AI model, they're going to be a lot more productive.
But without that human steering the AI, knowing what it wants, it's just a bunch of weights on
disc, essentially. I kind of make an analogy to the self-driving world, where for a long time,
you had products like Tesla Autopilot, where it could sort of drive the car, but not well enough that you trusted to do it yourself.
You still needed the human there supervising it.
That's kind of where we are with AI.
These models can do incredible things with the direction of a human.
You put the right question in there.
You tell it what you want, what's wrong with its output, and it can do amazing things.
But it's still not fully capable of operating autonomously. So, I mean, you can see this in
development. Even though these models are extremely powerful, the difference between what a skilled
engineer can do with them and an unskilled engineer is still massive.
Now maybe when we get into a place where these models are so good that they're truly autonomous,
then maybe you start to see a different dynamic in the labor market.
But I see the near-term impacts as probably being positive for the labor market,
for productivity, and for definitely GDP growth.
Logical, any thoughts on that latter portion? And I do agree with you, Omar. I don't think that right
now ADK put into an AI is going to get you the same value, but it is making the employees far
more efficient.
I mean, I'll give you an example.
I had to make a little website.
Me and my friends are going on this trip,
and we have a house,
so we built a little website with AI to kind of manage it,
manage some of the payments,
different aspects of it.
And, you know, just asking the AI to build it,
it would do a really good job generating code really fast, certainly much faster than I could do it.
But it would make mistakes and things that seem obvious to a human, but are not obvious to an AI.
It doesn't have that intuitive sense of what we actually want, thinking about feature ideas like push notifications.
It's not having those ideas by itself. With the right direction, that model becomes incredibly
powerful. But without that direction, it's not going to do anything on its own. And that's why
I think a lot of the busy work is going away, certainly. If you have a job that's just entirely busy work that a model can do,
then, yeah, you might not have a job.
That profession might not continue to exist.
But in a macroeconomic sense,
humans are still an important part of the mix
and actually generating productivity out of these models.
Got it.
Logical SEO and mute in there.
I mean, I look, I've seen, I think the term that they use in AI is that like it's the
models sometimes hallucinate.
That is true.
But hallucination is something that will be very apparent to the user.
So yeah, I mean, for now I would consider the LLMs in the case that we have them to be very supervised.
There's always going to be in like the development of AI, this supervised learning versus unsupervised learning.
And so eventually these things are going to get better and better.
But that's how any technology is. That's how any,
you know, even in the beginning of like machine learning and computer vision, like you had to have a human's input to train the models and that kind of thing. So,
you know, this is the worst AI is ever going to be. And that's a scary thought.
So these things are going to get a lot better. Like if you just know exactly what to tell it and how to like engage with
it, then you can be basically a superhuman with it and become a super employee with it, which is
actually like, I'm literally doing a use case right now in the background. So I think that for now,
while people are still figuring out how to best harness it. I've been able to put out data
reports that would used to take me one to two weeks in one to two hours. It's insane
what we can do now. And so I'm obviously very optimistic about the future of AI. I think
that it's going to be great. And know, I've been speaking with others about is that like, you can probably get to a point eventually where, you know, you don't need
five engineers, you need three. And then you know, the number of your queries goes up by
like 50%. And then all of a sudden, you know, that can very well be a future in here, but
probably not there yet. I don't think that... But dude, the things that these things are developing very quickly,
like we're at a point where the LLMs,
like the fine print on the LLMs are saying that
this recent model version was actually,
you know, created using the old model version as an input to it.
So it's like, things are happening very quickly.
I'm a little concerned about what happens to to K-shaped economy once we really start to
see the impacts of this.
I don't think the impacts are there yet.
You've seen those charts of the number of people who actually use AI right now.
But if you're not using AI for your work to get ahead, you're absolutely cooked.
I know a lot of people were very critical about some of these articles that went viral
about what you should be doing, and it was pretty doomsday-y.
I think there was one that went viral
a month ago or something like that.
I do share concerns of what it looks like
for a lot of people because
whether or not Block was bloated or not,
the fact is that they can cut 40%
of their labor force tomorrow,
and those people don't have jobs now.
So who's going to hire them? I mean, you know, are you going to be the one who's aggressively hiring blocks,
you know, layoffs when you are seeing your competitors or peers do layoffs? Like, it's just,
it, you know, so I'm just wondering what's going to happen to the white collar labor force. And
they are the highest earners, they are the biggest spenders. And that's coming
at a time when the consumer already feels stretched. We're not seeing retail sales grow,
so we're not seeing spending grow. I'm thinking more about economy impacts on market. Do you see
this day to day? I feel like the consumer is pretty weak.
And this has been kind of like a strong point of the U.S. economy is the upper part of the
And that part is the one that's being the most targeted right now from these layoffs.
Yeah, good points.
I want to talk a little bit deeper about the GTC event specifically that happened today
because that's, you know, I think pushing things forward. One thing Omar wanted to ask you about, Jensen, I believe from everything that I'm seeing, say that they're going to, they're estimating a trillion dollars in revenue this up in 2027, I believe, or maybe it was between 2026, 2027, if you saw that exactly but it seems like they're expecting this whole industry to just skyrocket because they did you know record record revenues this last quarter and it was
less than 70 billion so to say we're going from there to a trillion in a year or two is a huge
jump yeah absolutely i mean the numbers just kind of boggle the mind even at this early stage but
honestly i think they're just getting started.
Pretty much the entire labor market is going to be going through these machines. Every worker is
going to have one of these models by their side. So, I mean, I think this is really just the
beginning for them. You saw them announce some new inference-focused chips through their Grok acquisition, GROQ.
That was a company they acquired.
These new chips are going to have nearly zero latency for inference.
So, yeah, as crazy as the numbers are getting,
I think they're really just getting started here.
I always like to relate things.
I just want to relate things back to the market, though.
It's like, what is it going to take, though, to get the market to buy into this right now?
Why is the market not impressed?
Because that is obviously very impressive.
I thought the last NVIDIA earnings report like the one in november was absolutely insane they like accelerated
growth the one that we got recently was very good very strong like the um you know they raised
guidance maybe the the the magnitude of the raises aren't as crazy but then you know he comes out
today and tells you hey we're gonna actually double our guidance like okay that's first off insane i don't know i'm wondering like
if they only raise their guidance by like seven percent or whatever it was uh in after the q4
report or whatever i mean you know if they're sitting here telling you that no way actually
we're gonna like raise it by like 50 to 100 percent why is this stock not up like 30 right now like i'm just trying to make sense because it doesn't trade at like a crazy
multiple so why isn't the the stock reacting why isn't the market reacting to this
it's a good question i mean i would say 36 is a pretty generous trailing earnings multiple for a hardware startup.
I think the market looks at this company and has a hard time believing that you can sustain these types of margins,
that as competition develops, they're going to maintain a dominating share.
In the hardware market, I mean, there's rarely been an example of a technology like this that hasn't been commoditized.
And I think, honestly, the market might be pricing that in a little too early.
It's sort of inevitable on a long time scale.
But Jensen kind of touched on this on his keynote.
He said, we've got this flywheel.
We have this massive installed base.
It's been 20 years since we've been making GPUs with CUDA so
we've got millions and millions of GPUs out there that can run CUDA that's why
developers are developing for CUDA and that's why you're seeing these things in
production which is then increasing the installed base it's really a flywheel
that takes a long time for these competition
competing GPUs and competing technologies to really break into.
But I think the market's looking at this and they're applying what they know
about hardware startups. And given what we know about hardware
startups, nobody really has 70% margins
and a dominating share of the industry super long term.
But NVIDIA's got some strong moats here, and I think they'll probably take a little bit longer to unwind than most investors are expecting.
Yeah, I think what has been interesting is that NVIDIA has been an extremely resilient story because it's like the core of ai i don't know how far behind their um you know their competitors are i mean it seems
like nobody's even on the map at this point so that gives them longevity gives them resilience
to their cash flows which is good um man i i just don't know what it's going to take for them to say
like these guys literally just said hey it's not billion, it's 1 trillion and the stock is flat.
Like, I just don't know what it's going to take.
Like, they're doing everything right and the market does not care.
I do wonder if the market's still just feeling, you know, how much Nvidia moved in a few-year period.
Maybe some of the bigger money was anticipating,
potentially, I guess, these skyrocketing numbers.
And that's the only thing that I can think of to it.
Yeah, I mean, also, let's think about it like this, too.
Well, what I'm about to say doesn't answer
why Nvidia isn't moving necessarily,
but why the market might not be moving on something like this is because their revenue is someone else's CapEx. So they basically
just said if they're expecting to see $1 trillion next year, that money's coming from somewhere.
And that money's probably coming from the hyperscalers, which means that the hyperscalers
are expected to again raise their CapEx guides in 2027 that's essentially what
he's saying it's a one-to-one correlation so that actually is a much larger headwind for big tech
uh going into next year which means that again people are probably not going to be like oh yes
let me invest in amazon and um you know meta when they're going to continue to burn you know
like 500 billion billion a year.
Like what?
Yeah, I mean, right now, I think a lot of the talk, like I did a couple of good videos
recently about NVIDIA with ticker symbol U for those that have seen his stuff on YouTube. And
we were just talking a lot about to how they're
the business has just grown so much in the variety of different areas that they're making money from
and just continue to expound. Now, obviously, a lot coming from data center,
large majority coming from data center, but good money being made in other areas. And
there's a couple of interesting things that they're doing, right? They're investing money
right here and there into a couple of the other smaller names that
are around them.
They're doing large partnerships.
They're investing into open AI.
I am curious as you go towards a trillion dollars with 60, 70% margins, how you properly
actually manage that capital.
I don't know if you want to become a Berkshire just sitting on the hundreds of billions of
dollars of cash.
I'm just kind of curious what the process is.
Or if most of that has really already been committed in large part and they're just going to be spending a lot of that money.
Omar, is that something that you've kind of delved into?
What aspect of it?
just what they're going to do with all the cash.
Just what they're going to do with all the cash.
Yeah, I mean, I think obviously NVIDIA is now
the largest stock on the market.
I think investors are just definitely kind of
thinking about the law of large numbers here.
What is the power build out here?
How much CapEx is required from all these different companies, as you said, to sustain this growth?
But I think really, more than anything, people just haven't internalized really how big this market could be.
There's a lot of struggles right now with building out these data centers, power output, things like that.
But I think they're getting more efficient.
They're overcoming these challenges slowly.
And they're ultimately going to continue to grow.
Yeah, excited to see where it can continue to go and grow i'm sure there's a lot of other stuff
that's going to be coming out if anybody else hasn't been watching gtc the feature is robotics
right now i've been just posted that they're doing that slide on stage where they're showing
all the different types of robotics from lg electronics and agility and figure and so many
others that are being listed there
at Humanoid Robots, right?
Obviously, kind of that Optimist-style robot.
He also continues to give some perplexity shout-outs, but you can see they kind of have just like
listed like a bunch of different Thinking Machine, you know, other partners of theirs
that they have.
So it's pretty expansive.
Good presentation.
If anyone hasn't checked it out, Evan over on the Stock Market News account is live tweeting
a lot of it and good pictures.
I think probably most of the slides that have come up, he's continued to put up on here.
The Vera Rubin family of chips is the big thing that they're continuing to talk about
here, right?
Obviously with the latest there, he said the Vera Rubin platform, seven chips, five rack
scale computers, one revolutionary AI for agentic AI, 40 million times more compute in just 10
years. So a huge jump forward there and obviously better cooling systems, right? More efficient
systems that they're continuing to have. I did a good video that's on our YouTube with
Mr. Harris from their data center department, which was really good as well. So it's just been
very interesting. And obviously today's a big day and it continues to lead the market. And I think it has good
potential upside. I do know that a lot of the people that are on stage are especially logical.
I think that you like to play in areas where you see potential higher upside, especially
both in the long term, but also shorter term, right? Things that have more potential for a
double and other pieces like that. Omar, how are you, just because it's been, I guess, a little
bit since I've been running the spaces and asked Omar, how are you, just because it's been, I guess, a little bit since I've been running
the spaces and asked you, how are you allocating right now across, you know, Tesla, NVIDIA
and others?
Yeah, I think NVIDIA is one of my biggest holdings now, probably second to Tesla.
But yeah, it's definitely been a really interesting GTC keynote. Thinking Machines,
Mira Morati's company, she left OpenAI as the CTO. They announced a big order for the new
Verirubin platform. I think this is really what's going to be driving the next growth cycle for
NVIDIA. All of these hyperscalers, all of these companies that are building these data centers,
they're obviously going to be placing an order for the new Vera Rubin.
And the announcement that they're moving to a 12 month product cycle is also really interesting.
It's difficult to do technically to actually ship on a 12 month schedule and not be delayed
by all the various things going on in the world. But assuming they can pull that off,
you're going to see those upgrade cycles tighten.
And that's going to be, I think, important for them.
They have some really cool technology on the consumer GPU side as well.
They're now using generative AI in sort of a hybrid process
with their game rendering.
So you're going to start seeing games
and 3D applications that are just hyper realistic. Essentially, they generate the game image through
their traditional sort of procedural process based on structured data. And then they have
the generative AI model that runs on top of that and adds this detail and realism that is going to make these games
and applications look photorealistic. So it's really interesting some of the technology that
they're unveiling. Some of it's a pretty natural progression of what we're seeing.
But you know why I like NVIDIA and why they're one of my largest holdings is a lot of this stuff you talked about is so nascent.
I think the humanoid robot market, it's really hot.
Everyone likes to talk about it.
But like autonomous driving, I think people in the short term are going to be frustrated
by how difficult it is to actually get something shippable.
Because, I mean, you're talking about kind of building
a human level of intelligence, really building life itself.
There are so many things it can do wrong,
so many ways it can mess up.
The difficulty, the quality of the AI you need
to make it safe is very high.
So I expect it to take a while for
these markets to flush out. But NVIDIA is doing something very interesting as they support these
companies. They're essentially like a little bit of a VC, where they're not only supplying
these companies with chips, but they're often making equity investments. So they're in a rare position
of not only generating massive amounts of earnings from the chips themselves, but actually
potentially owning downstream the value that's created in these companies. And in a lot of cases,
like I think with the humanoid robot market and to a lesser extent, some driving in other markets.
These markets are so nascent right now.
I don't think people have really began to conceptualize how much inference compute is
needed, how much training compute is needed to serve these markets, but also what the
equity itself is going to be worth long term.
So that's one of the really interesting things about NVIDIA's model.
And of course, as they're funding these companies, they're going and taking that capital and
buying more NVIDIA chips, something that people have made fun of a lot in memes.
But ultimately, as these markets flesh out, and I think right now we're nowhere with humanoid
robots, we're nowhere with most of these markets.
As they flesh out, you not only have greater strength in the core business driven by the expansion of these technologies,
you also have a level of equity appreciation as well where even if 80, 90% of these companies fail,
Even if 80%, 90% of these companies fail, there's probably going to be one or two or three big winners in there that, I mean, who knows, could be even bigger than NVIDIA someday.
Wouldn't that be a thing of craziness to think about how far something would have to grow?
I appreciate you answering the question
and then some logical, kind of flipping back to you,
just curious right now how you're allocating portfolio-wise
and if you're holding right now at all in this area.
Maybe not video specifically, but some of the adjacent names.
Yeah, I mean, so look, I will say I basically,
I have lowered my overall portfolio exposure just given market volatility.
So I'll say that off the bat.
I don't think it's like necessarily ever wise if you're a long-term investor to be just fully cashed.
I'm sitting on about 40% cash right now.
And what drove that level of decision is kind of two things.
One, I like the idea of having lower long exposure while there is volatility.
I wanted to basically have one foot in, one foot out until we can kind of get resolution in the market.
And I know you asked me specifically about the AI stuff, which I'll get to.
I know you asked me specifically about the AI stuff, which I'll get to.
But I just want to preface this so that you can kind of understand that my thought process
for portfolio management goes beyond any individual sector or why I might be underweight or something
in this area.
It might not always necessarily be that I'm bearish on it or anything.
It's just that the market dynamics require me to lower my exposure
for risk management. And the reason why I have such high cash position is I was sitting on a lot
of short-term realized cap gains year to date. I exited a bunch of winners. But then I was sitting
on a bunch of losers after this volatility. So I decided, hey, look, this market doesn't look good.
Let me cut a few of my holdings that are in the red.
Book some of those losses right off my gains.
So that's kind of where I netted out.
And I just decided to hold kind of my stronger holdings.
I've talked a lot about being a lot more biotech and healthcare.
I do think that there's actually a lot of AI opportunity there.
But in terms of like the tech side, which is like AI infrastructure, hardware, etc.
I definitely have a few holdings there. This Global Foundries, I think can be a very
interesting strategic player in the US while we do more of like the chips here. And they
actually have a partnership with Navitas. I heard, I think it was one of the guys earlier
talking about NVTS. But they're doing a lot of interesting work. They're on the physical AI side. They're
in space. They're doing a lot of stuff that's GFS. I have this company called STM, which
is typically an auto manufacturing chip EV company. They make chips for EVs. They're
in Europe. It's like a slow grower, kind of low margin chip maker, like
kind of slow and sleepy story. But a couple months ago, or not even a couple months ago,
like a month ago, they announced like this multi billion dollar potentially like 10s of
billions of dollars of partnership over the next few years with AWS. So I thought that
was very interesting. The chart looks really good. I've known this company, I've traded
it for like several years.
But this looks like a pretty interesting time where the business could be inflecting to more data center growth-y kind of environments.
So GFS, STM, those are larger caps than I typically hold in my portfolios.
And then there's ESSI, which is a company that I've typically crapped on a lot because they have 100% customer concentration in Dell, which typically will make me never take a position in a company that's just way too high of risk. But I saw recently that they actually added a Dell exec to their board.
And then you saw that insane Dell backlog.
They like raised their backlog by like double or triple or something.
And so knowing that this is kind of like a micro small cap
that is 100% dedicated to the Dell opportunity,
then you know that they're going to get a huge tailwind from that.
And so, yeah, I mean, those are right now kind of the few names that I have in this
space.
I've talked about other names that even StockTalk and I have had and like shared in the past
like Synaptics, which I think their edge AI compute platform is going to be really enticing.
But right now, with a lot of their revenue coming from Taiwan,
a lot of these companies that are in Taiwan or have a lot of this foreign international revenues,
I'm a little skeptical of in the very, very near term,
not longer or medium term,
just because we have a lot of geopolitical
tension and escalation.
So I'd rather kind of see some of that subside.
And I could totally understand like, I look at a company like Synaptics and it's, you
know, such a great company.
And I'm just sitting there like scratching my head like, why is this stock dwindling
every day, every day makes no sense.
Like this, this chart looked amazing, fundamentals
look great. And it's like, oh yeah, it's because they have such a high concentration to revenues
in Taiwan. And then over the weekend, you saw another one of those headlines from China,
basically doing military exercises near Taiwan and that kind of stuff. Now it's like, oh, well,
that makes sense. Why the company that has Taiwanese revenue has been very weak.
Not that, you know, we see those headlines once a year, once every two years,
and nothing really ever comes of them.
But you can just feel that kind of this like East versus West war has been kind of raging
and getting more and more serious over the last few years.
And I don't think anything will happen in Taiwan from China's perspective. And from Taiwan's semiconductor TSM, obviously,
we're building those foundries here now to be able to curb our reliance on the chips coming
out straight from Taiwan. But yeah, I mean, some of these smaller companies, there could be disruptions.
And so that's, I mean, I don't expect anything to get any crazier.
But like, that's just a company that I really like.
But yeah, so right now, I'm just being very particular on what I own in my portfolio.
And I'm not like, while I'm overall not certain about how this market has been acting, I've just been lowering my positions.
But I have like, you know, five to 10 other tech positions that I really like.
I even like a lot of names in software that have been deemed, you know, AI, they're going to be AI disrupted.
But in reality, they're actually seeing boosts in their revenue from AI use cases.
So I think there's gonna be a lot of compelling
software longs. And again, this is my background. So I do feel pretty confident with that.
But in an environment like this, it's just really tough to get some of these stocks going.
There's a lot of negative overhang in terms of sentiment. And it's just beyond the bounce
until the market can shape up. It's really tough to stick your neck out. So I'm just kind of waiting for some of this uncertainty.
And then there's easily like another five plus names
that I would like to add from tech
and specifically like AI enabled or AI beneficiary tech.
So waiting on that.
Appreciate you breaking down the entire stack.
One thing that I was thinking of,
first off, it's also a good point that you're talking
about with these companies, because you could see a company that's like, man, they have
a ton of CapEx getting spent on them.
And then it's like, well, it's all coming from one place, right?
Or they have this, it seems like a ton of revenue, but that concentration can really
make it scary.
And so it gives you the underlying reason as to why something might be selling off.
One thing which I saw Jensen talking about today was that applications will be the next
phase of AI.
And he was talking about a bunch of these areas, automotive, financial, healthcare,
life sciences, right?
All these different applications.
And you're seeing that in like a Conjobi, an AHR, a Palantir, right?
A little bit of meta, Google, Netflix, and some of these pieces.
It's going to be the way that people, I guess, ultimately interact with it. And then also one
thing, he kind of took the time to talk about optical scale up and said, we do not have enough
capacity and specifically took the time to call out the photonics bottleneck as well. And a lot
of people have been on that photonics train lately. Omar, curious your thoughts on those
two topics there,
him taking the time to call out that bottleneck
and any other bottlenecks that they have,
and then also him talking about applications
being the next phase here.
Yeah, I definitely think you're seeing that acceleration
in the application space.
I mean, look at the growth of things like OpenClaw
and these agents that are just running all the time,
running inference on these models constantly.
The user experience is evolving
from just a simple chat back and forth
to agents that are running constantly,
running inference all the time.
And I think that's a very different consumption model. Whereas before they were sort of bounded by how much an average user is going to spend time talking to the application.
Those applications are evolving. There's so many different use cases now,
so many different tools. And a lot of times these models are just running in the background,
running inference on companies' data, performing actions or using computers in the background.
And it's interesting that that same model that you can chat with really can be repurposed to use a computer and act as an agent or an assistant for you and there's really minimal change needed have you been setting up more of those like i don't
know i saw metabot you know open claude or whatever they call claude book and uh it just seemed to me like that, you know, that it popped up for a day, become a huge
thing.
Everyone's posting about it.
And then it like seemed like it brushed away.
But then Meta's buying it, which is kind of intriguing.
And I saw a ton of people setting up their Mac minis.
And that still seems to be a bit of a thing.
But I can't tell if people are still like, this is the best thing ever.
like this is the best thing ever, it's changed my life,
It's changed my life.
Or if there's some middle ground.
or if there's some middle ground, how do you feel about all that?
How do you feel about all that?
Yeah, I think there was a little bit of a fad there for sure.
But it hit on something that I think is going to be really big.
We don't just want to talk to these AI agents.
We want to ask them to do things for us.
Hey, can you get me a reservation at this restaurant?
Can you go look
through Zillow and look for houses in my price range and see if you can find something for me?
We want to ask them to actually do tasks for us. And that's kind of what the OpenClaw thing hit
at it. I think OpenAI has bought them out now. So that's really great for the creator.
NVIDIA actually had something to announce
their own sort of version of that. They call it Nemo Claw that they announced today. And I think
you're going to see this more and more with these agents actually using computers for us,
accomplishing tasks for us. And I don't think it's really going to go away. That particular tool, OpenClaw,
I'm not sure if they'll really be the dominant sort of agent,
but you think about it,
what's your typical job for a white-collar worker post-pandemic?
Well, they're probably working remotely in many cases,
especially during the pandemic,
and they're just using the computer, right?
They're joining Zoom meetings.
They're opening Google Docs.
They're doing their entire job on the computer.
Well, if you can give an agent a computer and have it use the computer, I mean, they
use the computer. I mean they can essentially be an employee for you. It might make sense to spend
can essentially be an employee for you.
$20,000 a year on AI tokens if it's replacing an admin assistant who is maybe making 60k, 80k.
So I think the computer use application is going to be really important and that's why you saw
NVIDIA mentioned it at GTC today. That's why I think it's going to continue to be really important. And that's why you saw NVIDIA mentioned a GTC today.
That's why I think it's going to continue to be a trend
and something that just seems common probably in a few years
to have these agents that can use computers working alongside people.
It's going to be pretty nuts.
Jeremy, I see you in the crowd.
Thanks for coming in early
if you want to jump up on stage join this bit of the convo that we're having uh sniper i got
you up here too right yes sir what do you think about that you know just people and computers
working side by side kind of like this vision that omar outlining. You know, I got to say, I think Omar's made quite a few great points.
I think that NVIDIA seeing $1 trillion in chip revenue by 2027 is absolutely absurd.
I think that with $1 trillion in chips, I can't even imagine what will get accomplished.
I think that this is also just the beginning.
I think like it's kind of funny how I remember once we were having a conversation and we were talking and people are going to say one day like, wow, you used to wash dishes back then, you know, and that would be considered old school's going to be the future. Necessarily a lot of simple tasks that we're all doing in a day to day life and every single day are not going to be really done by humans anymore.
And I think that this future is a lot closer than we anybody really thinks.
I think especially considering the massive revenue forecast that NVIDIA is saying and seeing that the projections are only growing faster and faster and faster.
seeing that the projections are only growing faster and faster and faster. And we're also
seeing infrastructure investments coming along a lot quicker than I personally anticipated.
I think that tells us we're progressing pretty quick in the overall AI development. I think that
within a year or two from now, it's basically the first problem was, how are we going to get
all these chips? It seems like the supply chain issue has been fixed and NVIDIA is pumping out chips.
The fact that they're going to be making a trillion dollars tells us that they're going to be able to produce a very large quantity of these chips.
The next question was, is how are we going to build the infrastructure behind it to do it?
Obviously, there's still a lot of work to be done over there on that side of things.
But we're seeing just about a new headline every
single day. We saw the $2 billion Nebius investment. We're seeing Iron getting deals.
We're seeing Cypher getting deals. We're seeing all these different infrastructure stocks collecting
deals pretty quickly. And I think that that problem is going to be solved. Obviously,
we have a bunch of tensions going on and there is room for disruptions, but I don't really personally see it disrupting the AI trade, at least in the near future.
I think that we're going to see coming pretty quickly.
I think we're going to see cars coming completely autonomous.
It seems like Tesla's progressing rapidly.
I'm personally really interested in seeing these cars completely autonomous.
I think it's funny that I like to make a joke, but I think that the Gen Xs will actually never have their driving privileges taken away
because I think that the cars will be driving themselves by the time that they're of the age of questionable driving.
I think that we're going to see Tesla's FSD really kind of take over.
And I think that if these cars are able to completely drive, I think it's going to dominate the transportation industry, especially because they're going to be able to transport people quickly, more efficiently.
I don't really see the need, you know, for human drivers anymore once that's kind of going and once that's really effective, especially in the rideshare industry.
But honestly, I know I'm a little bit all over the place but uh i think that
you know you're good real quick on that rideshare point that's also something that obviously
nvidia is really working on as well omar did you see any of them talking about that at all
at gtc today i mean it's obviously a branch with alpamayo that they're focused on. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is going to be a
huge, huge market for NVIDIA. And again, you know, we're at a really interesting juncture
in autonomous driving where a few years ago, people were asking if it was possible.
Today, we're in a world where millions of driverless rides are happening
every year in the United States with Waymo.
You've got Tesla with 8 million cars.
You can just push a button, drive from start to finish.
They're also now deploying driverless robo-taxis with nobody supervising them in Austin,
and they want to expand to a lot more cities.
We're now at the stage where we've proven this technology can work and it's going to scale
up. And 99.9% of driving in the United States and definitely around the world is still manual.
So I think any reasonable person who looks at this space is going to say,
we're going to see a huge growth in autonomous driving. That percentage of 99.9% manual is only going in one direction,
down. And right now, every single self-driving system on the market is trained on NVIDIA.
Whether you're Waymo, whether you're NVIDIA's own models, whether you're Tesla,
they're all trained on NVIDIA. And a good portion of the market, pretty much everybody
except Tesla, Tesla makes their own chips for inference to go in the car that are, you know,
hyper efficient on electricity and all that. But pretty much everybody's using NVIDIA for inference.
So they are really a key player in the autonomous driving space. And hey, I mean, whether the car really works or not,
whether you can make money as a robo-taxi operator,
which nobody's actually making money
running these robo-taxi services yet.
But that's not really NVIDIA's problem.
They sell you the training compute.
They sell you the computer to put in the car.
And they're making money long before Uber or Waymo
or Zooks or anybody else
is making money they've now also got their alpameo models this is an open source self-driving model
that you can download and they're going to be launching a car with nvidia using this new
technology so tesla does have a really incredible technology now where you just get in the car, you push a button, it takes you to your destination and parks and you just get out of the car.
Every consumer is going to want this technology.
It's going to be table stakes.
And for every brand that isn't Tesla, they're probably going to be putting NVIDIA's GPUs in their car like Mercedes and Lucid and others are.
So I see this continuing to be a growing business for NVIDIA.
It's really nascent right now.
But when you think about it at meaningful scale a few years down the road where it's really a material portion of our road transportation.
I think this is going to be a much, much bigger business for NVIDIA.
I am hyped. I'm hyped. You get me excited, Omar.
Jeremy, I know we're going to have a conversation on another topic here in a few,
but we've been talking about NVIDIA GTC and tech and AI.
Any thoughts in this area?
Yeah, it's interesting.
I mean, there's been a lot of rotation
within the tech space.
I mean, I think you hear the SaaSpocalypse
and the software stocks being under pressure.
I think some of the things have been overdone.
You know, in NVIDIA, we've done,
we sort of manage a bunch of active and index strategies. And I'm going out there and calling NVIDIA a value stock. Actually, I think we're one of the first value
funds to put NVIDIA in. We put NVIDIA as the top holding in WTV, our US value fund. When you look
at something like the S&P 500 value, it has in its top holdings, Apple.
It has Tesla.
I think Tesla is a very interesting tech stock, but not a value stock by any stretch.
And some of these other value indexes have some strange parts of the MAG-7.
But NVIDIA, I think, is one of the lowest relative valuations in that group for some
of the best growth rates.
So we made it our top holding in our value fund, interestingly, last week. And we're believers in all that's being talked about in the
incessant demand for more compute. And at the growth rates that it's outlined and the valuation
it is, I think it's basically at a S&P 500 multiple, but growing much, much faster. And
so I think it is probably the quote unquotequote deepest value within the MAG-7.
And if they do manage to pull in a trillion dollars over the next year plus, year and
a half plus, that valuation as a value stock becomes even more friendly, yeah?
I think so.
I mean, it's pretty reasonably priced near the S&P multiple, even before today's, in
terms of what people are outlining as its future growth rate.
So yeah, we upped its weight in all of our dividend indexes last week and in the value
fund, which is more actively managed, made it our top weight on Friday.
That's exciting.
Anything else in terms of this general market jeremy that you are interested in
a lot of the more swing traders on here even some of the investors are just kind of waiting to see
clear direction at the moment seems to be the vibe that i'm getting yeah i mean i think it's
obviously the the middle east conflict is sort of top of mind for everybody and what's happening to oil.
I think we're, you know, we do think it's going to get resolved.
And so, you know, obviously, oil can spike much further on sort of a pickup in the conflict.
But I think we're kind of sellers of the rally in oil.
I think that that is also, you know, longer term heading back down.
And, you know, of course, the short term spike can happen. But I think we would be lightening oil exposure. Last week, as we
increased NVIDIA, we lowered some of the Chevrons and Exons in some of our portfolios that came in
the year overweight and said, hey, these gains really sort of cashed in and sort of lowered some weight in those types of stocks.
But I think, you know, coming back to that AI story, you see, you know, a story like Meta today,
sort of rumors of 20% workforce reduction.
They were one of the first year of efficiency type stocks where people way over expanded in the tech sector
and hired a bunch of employees.
I think you're going
to get more general margin improvement. And some of the rotation from the mega caps to small caps
started happening on, well, the Fed's going to cut rates, they borrow more. And so small caps
were benefiting from the Fed coming down. But they also have the most, I think, upside on
margins. They've been under punching from an earnings perspective
the last few years.
And the combination of the Fed cutting rates
and getting to learn how to use these tools in a cheaper way,
I think is unlocks some of that broader rotation story as well.
Very cool.
Very cool.
I want to rotate into this next convo here in a second
omar always appreciate you jumping on love having these conversations uh if you want to come back
tomorrow i know it's been rare for me to be hosting stacks on spaces but i'll be hosting
again tomorrow did you have any other thoughts in terms of ai nvidia gtc Any other pieces here that you wanted to go over?
I think we covered quite a bit. I would just say I don't think this is a bubble at all. I think the productivity
improvements you're just starting to see. The models are just starting to get good
enough to really improve productivity. If I'm more productive,
if I don't have to do my dishes,
I'm generating a lot more value, right? I'm a lawyer. I'm generating more billable hours
and I'm getting more work done in a billable hour, increasing the value of it.
I feel like we focus too much on sort of terminator scenarios and is this going to kill us all? Is this going to destroy the labor market?
And we're not focusing enough on the really profound increases in productivity that I
think are going to drive economic growth in a way we can't really imagine in the next
few years.
So I think what we're seeing is overall very positive. I think people are overall indexing a little bit too negative on some of these sort of worst case scenarios.
Yeah, I agree. A lot of bright times ahead for sure.
Thank you, Omar, for coming up for that piece of the convo.
Feel free to stick around if you'd like.
For the audience, something that I've been talking about a lot on Spaces, and we talked about it earlier today for about 30 minutes, is this commodity side of things, specifically gold and just having some exposure to that's an area where I really wanted to explore deeper and deeper.
And so excited to have Jeremy Schwartz on from the team over at Wisdom Tree Funds.
He's the global chief investment officer
for a conversation around this
because you guys built some very unique products
in this area.
I'm gonna go ahead and tag them up top in a second,
but, and read off the disclosure in a second here as well.
But Jeremy, would you mind
just giving a brief introduction of yourself
and then we'll dive into this? Awesome. Well, thanks for having us. Yeah,
I've been at WisdomTree a little bit over 20 years now. So I worked with Professor Jeremy
Siegel at the Wharton School. We do a weekly podcast behind the markets, been working with
him for like 25 years. And we joined WisdomTree as they're getting funding today as a global firm,
probably about $150 billion across the world with about $ $90 billion in the U.S., $60 billion in Europe.
And in Europe, we have a real leadership in commodities.
We had acquired a firm called Seven, Eight Years Ago that was one of the first entries into the gold market.
And so today of our $60 billion in Europe, about $40 billion is focused on commodities with some leadership position
really across a lot of the commodities from gold, silver, copper, baskets.
We see laundress in rare earths as part of this funding of all the energy needs we see,
nuclear.
It's a really broad portfolio of assets that we have as a global firm. But it's hard to
compete with just some of the largest, very heavily traded gold products in the US. Our
philosophy has been, you got to be first if you're going to be beta, or you got to have a unique spin
on top of it. So there's been well-covered gold instruments in the US, and it's hard to be like
a seventh or eighth to market with something like that. But I think one of the key insights we had is trying to provide
capital efficient exposure to gold. And by that, I mean, usually if you're going to add gold into
a portfolio, it's like, what are you going to sell to add gold into it? And I do think people
should create more room than their portfolio. When I look at the US investor,
the average investor in the US is about $14 trillion in ETFs, the market I cover very closely.
Less than 2% of that is in commodities. It's like $230 billion, $240 billion in commodities,
so less than 2%. And gold does make a big part of it. But if you looked at the relative passive allocation,
just take all the assets, liquid assets, it would have 12% to 13% in gold, not less than 2%. So I
think people have just been under allocated to this asset class. But part of it is like,
where do you fund it from? And then we can talk about what we do with the capital efficient ways
that you could keep your stocks and add gold that doing that but i think the big thesis is that people have been under allocated
to commodities in in the u.s
yeah i think i would agree with that and people are probably waking up
to that thought as well once they're seeing performance brian lunge who was on it earlier
had a great point he said when it's going up you're always underweighted when it it's going down, you're always overweighted, right? And that's kind of how it
could feel sometimes. But I think people truly probably do have an underweighting. And I think
that there are some studies even showing people saying, you know, we should maybe have, you know,
a 10, 12 and a half percent weighting to this commodities area. So something interesting to
be aware of. Before we dive too much farther into this, I want to give
a couple of shout outs real quick for helping get this set up. So big thank you here off the top,
actually, to SIBO, who's helping to coordinate this. If anyone's unfamiliar, based out of Chicago,
big exchange together there. And so as we get into this, and we're doing this together with them,
and Wisdom Tree for the investors in the audience, just please carefully consider a fund's investment
objectives, risk, charges, and expenses prior to investing. And the fund's prospectus and summary
prospectus contain that and other information regarding the Wisdom Tree funds. And you can find
them right on the Wisdom Tree website, which is at wisdomtree.com. And there is an investment page
there for the US investors
that lists all the different ETFs and strategies.
WisdomTree is one of the largest firms in the world
doing this by AUM
and also are publicly traded themselves under WT as well,
which you can check out.
So again, to obtain a funds prospectus
from some of your perspectives,
just visit that website, wisdomtree.com.
And those should be read carefully prior to any investing.
Excited to be collaborating and working together with WisdomTree and SIBO. And thank you to SIBO for helping
coordinate the space. So let's get into these products. I liked how you prefaced it a bit.
You said, hey, we're not going to just be the eighth or 20th gold product to market. We're
going to go unique here. So these two products that we're discussing today, GDE and GDMN,
are unique in that they are efficient, you know, equity strategy funds.
They're efficient in the way they're going about this and they're performing well.
So GDE is up 7% year to date and is up 70% in the last 52 weeks.
And then GDMN in those same time periods, year to date is up 17% and one year is up 179%.
So incredible performance on these. And certainly people
should go ahead and add them to their watch list. But Jeremy, can you go a little bit deeper into
what separates these from people thinking, oh, another gold fund or something like that?
Yeah. Well, for the more active traders, GDMN was designed as a competitor to the traditional
gold miners. There's a very large gold miners and there's
gold miners juniors concepts. And for a while, they hadn't gone anywhere while gold had really
gone up substantially over a decade plus period. And the miners had this reputation of being
bad stores of capital and would hedge gold at the wrong time and just weren't run with high corporate governance.
They were sort of left in the dust until really beginning of 2024.
They started to take off more as gold was rising.
But one of the things when I first started buying gold, I bought both the miners and gold.
And I had had sort of 50-50 allocation to both of them personally.
And we started thinking, well, we started doing more capital efficient ideas seven or eight years ago. We combined stocks and bonds futures and sort of
a leveraged 60-40, one and a half times 60-40. We became known for this 90-60 framework. Actually,
I got the idea from conversations that were circulating on Twitter at the time. And people
were talking about, hey, people really need to do this capital efficient framework. It needs to be a
lot of innovation that. And we innovated with that first launch.
And this was sort of an extension of this.
The gold overlays were an extension.
And, you know, the miners plus gold, you know, we don't do dollar for dollar, but it's very,
very close to that.
It's a 90-90 framework.
So every dollar we get into the fund, 90 cents goes into miners and 90 cents goes into gold
futures.
You try to keep that 90-90 relationship, you rebalance back, you know, roll the futures
quarterly and you're trying to maintain, you know, close to that 90-90 relationship.
But it's effectively replicating if you bought some, you know, miners and gold yourselves,
but, you know, using some leverage.
So the cost of leverage is just that short-term interest rate on the
future. And so that GDMN is for people who are really bullish gold and the miners in particular,
you get that extra gold overlay on top of miners. As you said, as the miners have been
moving, this has done even way better with the gold futures on top. And then GDE is more of a core long-term solution. It's give you
core equities. It's our version of large cap 500 stocks in the US with that gold overlay.
And it's the same 90-90 combination where every $1.90 goes into core 500 large stocks and 90
cents into the gold futures overlay. So I think that one is for people who say,
what am I going to sell to add gold in? Do I want to sell stocks? Do I want to sell bonds?
This is a way you can just add it without really having to sacrifice your core equity position.
We did one later with tips as well. But I think that sort of suite of gold overlay strategies
has certainly proven quite useful.
And I think you're going to see more leverage sometimes gets a bad name in terms of the daily resets and the long-term compounding of high volatile asset classes.
But this is what we call sort of prudent leverage, where you're adding futures in a very reasonable
way and we're balancing on a regular cycle to get back to those target allocations.
But it just lets your portfolios add a little bit more. And it's going to be,
if you go to, I have an account at one of the largest brokerages in the US and a good size
account. And the margin rates are like 10% if you wanted to borrow to go more than your full portfolio.
This is going to be the best price margin using futures on top of it to get your exposure.
You know, it's a very reasonable way of adding institutional caliber leverage using the futures market.
And, you know, you can see some really great results so far with how these funds have been performing since we launched them.
Yeah, performance speaks for itself in that category. But just to kind of elaborate further
on some of the pieces that you were outlining that right in this GDE fund was in Tree Efficient
Gold Plus Equity Strategy Fund. You're integrating gold, but you're not sacrificing core equity
exposure, which I don't think people really want to sacrifice that core equity exposure right now.
I think that a lot of people feel perhaps similar to me that this market is not done yet, right?
But then arithmetic, if this is going to be our roaring 20s again, there's still some time until 29 to keep running here.
And so I don't think people want to leave it.
And then when you look at GDMN, again, you're combining gold miner equities with gold futures, giving
that potential upside sensitivity to gold prices, but still embedding the bullion exposure
in simple strategy.
So they're pretty different strategies, though, it seems like to me, when you kind of look
between the two different funds.
Yeah, I mean, one is for the more active trader, like the miners.
You know, when I look the the traditional largest mining funds
now a 30 billion dollar type fund for the leading you know miners fund in the market uh and this is
just one way to get you know you can put less of your own portfolio in it to get a similar
notion of upside to to gold so it lets your portfolio do more uh with with getting you know
putting the the futures on top of the miners. But I do still think the miners are
relatively reasonably priced given all the big moves in gold. Their break-even rates are much
lower than where the current gold price is. Now, you had energy prices being low for a while was
helpful. The surging energy prices is one of their costs of mining could go up.
But I think this oil price spike is a bit more temporary.
We see oil heading back down.
I think we would be sellers of oil more than buyers of oil here.
And so I think that margin pressure could get rectified pretty quickly.
But yeah, we like the capital efficient framework.
I think we're going to do,
it's one of our biggest growth areas.
We're continuing to launch things like that.
I think we're going to do more
in the commodity overlay space soon.
Yeah, we're big believers in this concept.
Love it.
Let's talk a little bit about
this recent price activity we've seen overall in
the gold space. So after a powerful rally earlier this year, the recent pullback appears pretty
driven by the stronger dollar dynamics, right? Shifting rate expectations rather than necessarily
a structural shift in gold's role in portfolios. When I look at GLD, we had a massive run-up,
or if I just look at spot gold, actually, let's just use spot gold
for a second here, because we're trading at like 5000, basically sharp, right 5000 and six. So
5000 sharp, you're up 15.5% still year to date. At one point year to date, you were touching
basically 6000 at the top there pretty much, I think we had like this, this huge move, right,
which then ended up, all right, all right.
You know, everybody like slowed down
for just a second right here.
And let's get our britches about us.
And then it's kind of pulled back a little bit.
Now it's traversed sideways.
Now, I think there's people that look at it
one of two ways.
You have probably your Peter Schiff's of the world
that say, this is the time, dollar's breaking.
Look at the chaos, right?
The opportunities here,
gold to 10,000. And of course, the miners are a whole other story there. Most of the miners
haven't even caught up to gold being at 5,000, let alone six, seven, right where it could get.
Most of them are valuing the miners, which is why I still see a great opportunity for
catch-up trade there. But just in your perspective, seeing this pullback, do you
think, it sounds like you're not of the thesis that, hey, we're just going to have another 10-year
traversing gold, but rather that there's a catalyst here that's going to continue moving.
Yeah, well, I come back to what could be the continued catalyst. And I think the US being
the US typical ETF investor, again, a $14 trillion market that people have less than 2% in commodities, they're so under allocated.
Like, where is this move coming from recently?
It's been central banks and it's been Asia.
It's been a lot of the Asian buyers, I think, China, India.
But a lot of the central banks have been some of the key movers.
When I look at some of the traditional ways we would develop a gold model, we'd look at
changes in the dollar, changes in inflation, changes in positioning, variables.
And it's definitely moved more than just the interest rates would say or where the dollars
moved.
I think it's been driven by positioning, but again, positioning out of Asia, not positioning
the U.S.
So I think as people think about their long term allocations, you know, that could be
that the U.S. investor, one of the largest investing pools around remains under position
for it, I think is, you know, one of the things that could keep driving it higher.
Appreciate that. All right, let me bring in a couple others on the panel.
Sniper, you want to jump in here?
Hey there. Yeah, I got a couple of questions that I was wondering. So I'll go ahead and start.
You know, it seems like GDMM targets roughly equal notational exposure towards gold miners and also gold equities.
And what's the current actual leverage multiple on the future sleeve?
And how do you adjust it dynamically during shifts of minor volatility or spikes?
Yeah, we try to bring it back to this 90-90 allocation.
So it is a strategic, it's not like trying to overly trade around it, but we come back to the 90-90 framework. So technically 1.8 times your notional. It's got really this 10% collateral buffer is why we keep that 90-90 framework in mind, but it'll roll the futures on a regular basis to come back
to that ratio and readjust, but it's not trying to make some tactical allocation to it. It's just
sort of this prudent leverage concept of adding the futures on top of the miners.
I think that's a great answer. If you could add like a knob to this fund, you know, for instance, a dynamic allocation slider or maybe some crypto exposure or maybe some tips overlay or some short dated calls or puts, what would it be? And why would you add that?
In terms of the miners in particular?
Yeah, specifically, if you could add something, you know something to this specific ETF, what would you add?
Well, we've done more with gold. I mentioned we did another gold overlay on top of TIPS. As people
think about TIPS bonds as another way of getting inflation protection and trying to just do more
with this gold overlay concept where you're putting different underlyings. GDE is core stocks. TIPS would be your inflation-adjusted
bonds. The miners is people who really look for upside on top of gold. I think one of the things
you'll see, they mentioned wisdom trees publicly traded. So today we announced a new acquisition in Europe
that does option strategies. And I think about you've seen in the ETF world, you've seen a lot
of explosion in downside protection strategies, income overlays, covered call overlays,
auto callables as a concept where you're doing structured notes as well, where you get income
on top of certain targets. I think as I look about what else I would do with gold and the
announcement that we were acquiring this London-based firm called Atlantic House that does
a lot with options, I think it would be something with options in gold. I think that's something
we're going to be exploring over the next 12, 24 months as we try to integrate Atlantic House to our offerings.
But it's really, the challenge with gold has been getting income off of it.
So there's a lot of different ways you can do income off gold, which is usually a covered call or something like that.
But I think we'll be looking to see what else we can do with that kind of concept later.
You know, I think that was a great answer.
I was kind of worried I didn't word that question correctly.
And I'm glad you hit the nail on the head right there.
One thing that also really jumps out to me, and it's right there, is the expense ratio is extremely low here.
We're looking at 0.2 to 0.545. But with futures rolling
and rebalancing costs going into the future, do you plan to maintain this expense ratio? Or is
this expense ratio just currently where you're sitting at right now? Yeah, 45 on the thematics,
I think is, has been our price point. We've done things like AI, cloud computing,
We've done things like AI, cloud computing, cybersecurity. The price point we've gone to market with has been 45 basis points across the board on all those. So I think that's a fairly competitive price point. I mean, I think some of the other miners' funds are generally higher. You might be able to find a handful that are lower, but I think it's
pretty reasonably priced. And also, there's very few doing that capital efficient overlay
at that price point. A lot of those are considerably higher price points than where we are.
And so 20 basis points for core equities plus the gold overlay. I think there's a number of gold
ETFs in the 40 to 50 basis point range that the biggest ones actually in gold. And so I think there's a number of gold ETFs in the 40 to 50 basis point range that the biggest ones actually in gold.
And so I think we struck a nice middle ground between very low priced beta for things like the S&P 500 and other things like that.
But sort of this more exotic combination of things, we do think it is fairly unique.
we do think it is fairly unique. Both of these funds are fairly unique in the marketplace today.
Both of these funds are fairly unique in the marketplace today.
And you have to be innovative to be able to charge anything within ETFs. And we think both
of these are actually both fairly innovative. Yeah, no, I absolutely agree there. And you're
definitely below the competition when it comes towards the expense ratios. Another question I'd
like to segue over to is,
how do you think about your position sizing? What triggers you to rebalance? Is this calendar-based
or is this threshold-based or is it based on drifts or is there some volatility targets that
you're going for? Yeah, we try to keep it within 5%, as I mentioned, the sort of 90-90 combination.
If things drift more than 5% away, we'll bring it back to that 90-90 is the goal.
And then also then there's the, you know, the futures have a normal quarterly cycle.
So I think it's those two factors.
One is the quarterly cycle and one is just if it drifts more than 5%.
Nice. Yeah, I agree.
I like that thesis right there. Some people now are pretty much looking
at gold and labeling it as more of a risk on macro asset. And in some cycles, it can be that,
in some cycles, it can be different. But do you look at these ETFs as more as a pure inflation
hedge? Or how has this changed in how you talk about GDE's role?
What specific role does it play in a portfolio? Is it more of a multi-asset diversifier,
or is this like a strict tail hedge, risk hedge? Yeah, gold has served many functions
over time. I mean, long-term, it's protected from inflation. So if I look at the last 50 years
since we left the gold standard in the 1970s, in our long-term returns, it's actually done better than bonds on a real inflation-adjusted basis.
Part of that was it was depressed in price in the 1970s.
They kept it artificially low until it started floating.
Then it had this big catch-up in the 70s and 80s.
And then it sort of flatlined for a while and now has had another resurgence.
I do think it is now we've had a lot of geopolitical conflicts.
It's been strong in those type of scenarios.
But it's also been as people think about the purchasing power of the dollar debt and deficits and sort of fiat generally everywhere.
Bitcoin was taking some of that oxygen for a while of the new community buying
Bitcoin. And some people think Bitcoin is going to eat into gold's market share. But also the
rise of Bitcoin also has in some ways recatalyzed gold in recent times. So we think they both are
good long-term uses for that sort of fear about purchasing power of different currencies,
debt and deficits. But the best of both worlds with these funds here is that you don't have to
reduce your core equity. I mean, I think the biggest challenge is the Warren Buffett kind
of comment that you get gold. It's basically this thing you could watch. It doesn't produce income.
It's not a productive
asset from that perspective. It's just this sort of long-term store of value inflation hedge,
and in some periods has these really big moves that hedge all sorts of different risks in the
market, particularly tough times in the market. It's been a very good hedge for. And so I think we do just view it as this useful
extra diversifier that people are under allocated to, but combining it with equities
is one way where you get the best of both worlds.
Yeah, I think that definitely does help you get the best of both worlds there.
Let me ask you now, how is the capital efficient?
I'm sorry?
Real quick, real quick.
I just wanted to jump in with a question here on a piece from before, and then I'll turn
it back over to you.
This was specifically to the miners, because people can look and see that the miners have
outperformed so much in comparison to the other products.
If people look at GDMN right now, they'll see it's up 179% over the past year and up 333% since you launched
it back in 2021. Obviously, most of that performance has basically come since the start of 2025. It was
pretty flat up until then and has then skyrocketed. My theory on the miners is that there's a lot more
room to go here. And I look at them and I talk with people that own actual gold mining facilities and mines
and pieces like this. And they're telling me that it has just not been re-rated. And at this point,
people are still valuing gold maybe at $3,500 now. And so even though they've outperformed so
strongly, especially after this recent pullback, which we can see where we got all the way up to
on this $141 per share, it's back to $111. That's where I'm like, okay, this is getting really interesting to me. I actually know people in this industry who were
shorting spot gold, longing the miners. So I've seen a couple of different ways that people are
playing it. But just curious your thoughts on that mining aspect and re-rating.
Well, one of the things we have on the website is some of the valuation ratios of all the ETFs
that we have. And so when I look at the PE ratio as of today, it's sort of 19 times trailing, but 11 times
this year's expected earnings or estimated earnings or next 12-month earnings, 11 times.
I mean, the S&P is 21, 22 times.
So it's basically half the PE ratio of the S&P. Now, to my point on, these companies have been historically viewed as
not great stewards of capital. The dividend yield is less than 1%. The buyback yield is a little bit
less than 1%. So I think there is room for these companies to return more cash to shareholders.
That might help with the sort of rating multiple. But 11 times earnings fully is what you're saying. It's a very,
very low multiple. It's sort of like a very, very depressed people not believing that these earnings
staying power are long lasting. And so I do think that that is a, you can get a little bit of a
better valuation. Most of the gold continues to go higher, you'll obviously get more earnings
growth as well.
So I do think that there's a lot to your point that these stocks are still very, very
recently priced.
Yeah, I appreciate you agreeing with me there.
Thank you for bringing in the actual data in terms of how people are viewing them.
But yeah, I'm on the same page.
And then why do you think that the tips plus gold combination really matters in today's
environment? I feel like people are not as focused on tips these days. Yeah, partly because when you
look at rates, they're pretty low generally for 20, 10 year, you know, the tips yield is going
to be right around 2%. You know, so it's not like such a high return by itself.
And so if you just took the 2% real yield, it would double your purchasing power in 36 years.
But when you add gold on top of it, it's sort of the double inflation kicker.
It's where you get the CPI-type inflation on top of bonds.
If that moves more than expected, you get some gains from just the actual CP type inflation on top of bonds if that you know moves more than expected you know you
get some some gains from from just the actual cpi inflation and then you get the gold overlay on top
and so it's i think a way to get a little bit more out of your bond portfolio bonds are not really
i think high return you know they're just like a diversifier today you know two percent real
returns not that exciting of a return it really just comes down to hedging the other risks in your portfolio.
And so I think inflation is one of those key risks, and TIPS is one way for that.
And gold is a second additional hedge.
So I think in some ways, the TIPS plus gold is just a more complete set of diversifiers.
You know, there's not really such a high return in TIPS itself.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Snape, you were talking about capital efficiency.
I want to hear that question, if you could go back to that.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
You caught me snacking for a second there.
You know, I was going to ask you, how is the capital efficiency from futures versus holding physical gold or spot equities held up in the practice during the 2024 to 2026 gold run in equity volatility?
Yeah, I think it does exactly what it says it is.
You know, I think it's been very, very straightforward.
People can
put some portfolio analysis together. We have a bunch of different tools on our website that
shows you if you want to combine different things together, how they look. But it's effectively,
the cost of leverage is the short-term interest rate. And interest rates are decently low, 3% to 4% at the moment.
And so the cost of the futures, again, as I said, you're not going to get leverage at
a better rate anywhere else yourself as a direct consumer.
I mean, it's sort of institutional style borrowing costs to get more out of your portfolio.
If you're going to use leverage, you have to pay for it some ways.
And the futures are really just the best breed way to do that and to the lowest borrowing costs
you can get. So I think it's been exactly as expected. It's a fairly straightforward
concept. So it does exactly what it says it's going to do with no surprises.
Yeah, I think that's a pretty great answer and pretty straightforward, honestly.
Back to you, Gev.
Yeah, I had a follow-up here.
I want to talk macro here with our last five-ish minutes.
Just, Jeremy, if you can kind of go through what you've been looking at in terms of, you
know, a lot of people were expecting a big pullback today.
And we saw Dubai's airport having issues yesterday.
And you're seeing inflows and out of weak dollar, strong dollar, kind of back and forth.
What do you make of everything that's kind of happening and then kind of relating it back to this?
Well, I think the, and right before we came on, you guys were talking about the NVIDIA GTC meeting.
I mean, AI fears and excitement are the yin and yang of the market.
You had this Atrini piece out a few weeks ago talking about, you know,
will we have this big set of job layoffs that cascade into this downside scenario that, you know, people fear
the job losses. And you'll see little anecdotes like Meta laying off 20% of the workforce. You saw
Jack Dorsey from Block layoff half his workforce. And will AI eat into all these software companies that we're going to vibe code, you know,
a new CRM platform. We're sort of more believers that, you know, we would rather build on top of
Salesforce and replace Salesforce. Actually, we talked about right before coming on our value
fund where NVIDIA is now the top position. We made Salesforce the number two position
because we think the fears over, you know, that SaaS apocalypse are again overdone and that, you know, a lot of these companies are going to actually be AI winners.
I think Adobe is another example where people think you're just going to all of a sudden no longer need these image tools that Adobe has and you're going to do it all in AI.
And so, you know, that is also at one of its lowest multiples, yet doing a lot of high buybacks.
And so, you know, that is also at one of its lowest multiples, yet doing a lot of high buybacks.
So there's this fear out there about AI coming for your job, you know, is like the key narrative that everybody's confronting.
But, you know, we think there's a very pro-growth story here that if you're more productive, and you can go to my, you know, so my timeline in history, we, you know, Professor Siegel, I've worked with again, 25 years, wrote a, the counter trend piece to that Satrini piece talking about AI being one of the greatest boosts for industrial productivity and income is going to lead to rising real wages.
It's a more positive story than that sort of do me story.
But that is, I think, the overhang for the markets is thinking about the AI impacts in
the context of this geopolitical war.
So there's just more uncertainty.
And in that uncertain environment, I do think gold is a useful long-term overlay.
Again, I wouldn't want to give up on my equities.
We're believers in the markets at reasonable valuations.
I liked your comments, Gav, on just the miners being cheap. I actually still think at 11 times that is a reasonable place to be. But you're finding pockets of value in places that you
didn't find value also, like these software stocks that used to be some of the most expensive stocks
around that now people fear are completely going to be displaced and I think
someone gets gets overdone on the downside as well but with with all the geopolitical ideas
gold I think is a nice useful overlay yeah I like where it's at as well and you know I was buying
gold last year and it was nice that it continued into this year, even with some other pieces.
Now, I will say you got a little pushback from our audience on NVIDIA being a value stock.
They asked if you could define what you see as value and what you see as growth.
Yeah, I mean, so WTV is focused a lot on, you know, traditionally high shareholder yields, high dividends, high buybacks.
I think you saw Salesforce talk about another $25 billion buyback.
You can get up to a double-digit buyback yield.
That's one of our classic measures of value.
But just a standard, we were talking about the miners at 11 times forward PE.
When I look at NVIDIA forward PE at 22, it's exactly the S&P forward PE.
So it's right at a market multiple, but its growth rate is dramatically higher.
I mean, you look at the last five years versus the market.
It probably had earnings growth five times to the market the last five years.
Now, it's obviously more about the next five years than the last five years. But I think over the next five years, it's expected to well outpace the S&P,
the general S&P company on a growth rate.
So looking at its forward PE,
also near one of its lowest levels going back for years.
But also just as valuation relative as growth
compared to everybody else
is why we identified this as one of our favorite value ideas today.
Yeah, and also to put in for people in perspective, $60 billion today, $1 trillion by 2027, 16x in three years.
No company history has ever done that.
Not Apple, not Google, not Amazon. Nobody.
So just keep remembering what you're looking at here as it continues to move. Really interesting
conversation again with Jeremy Shorts from Wisdom Tree. If anybody didn't catch the beginning of
this to kind of wrap things up, Jeremy, can you just give one more wrap up of these two specific products, GDE, GMNN, what's in them and how people should go about their research
coming out of the space of them? Yeah, well, again, thank you so much for hosting us and
having this conversation. So GDE is basically a capital vision way of combining stocks and gold
together. So if the idea is what are you
going to sell to add gold into your portfolio, this lets you keep your broad core equities,
500 largest stocks in the market, very much like a large cap S&P 500 type exposure. It's our own
500 largest stocks by market cap. And then we add gold futures on top of it. And so the ratio is 90-90. So every dollar that comes in the fund, 90 cents goes into the stock portfolio and 90 cents into gold futures.
And then, you know, the miners with GDMN is the largest gold miners in the world. And then we
put a market cap weighted and we go and we add the gold futures in the same way, 90-90 combination of
the best miners and futures that we can combine. So both have been just unique ways of adding more
gold to your portfolio. Well outlined. Jeremy, it was a pleasure having you on, and I've done some space shows with us
before. I encourage everybody to go ahead and give Jeremy a follow, check out everything that
WisdomTree is doing. Again, if you want to check out the prospectus, summary prospectus for these
ETFs, which everybody should read carefully prior to potentially investing, those are right on
WisdomTree.com. You can see them on the website.
You can go to wisdomtree.com slash investments to see the ETFs and those different pieces.
Appreciate you coming on. I really enjoyed this. This is an area that I'm personally invested in.
I own both gold as well as miners. And so for me, when I learned of these funds,
I was super excited to dig in further and have a chance to talk with you about them.
Thanks so much. It was great.
All right. That's going to do it about them. Thanks so much. It was great. All right.
That's going to do it for today.
Thanks, everyone that tuned in.
Always fun hosting stocks on Spaces.
It's been a minute since I did it personally.
Evan's usually the host on here.
Stock Talk as well, but they were at NVIDIA's GTC event this week.
So they are going to be doing that.
I will hold it down tomorrow as well.
We should have a good crew for the space to come on. So 3 p.m. Eastern tomorrow. Go ahead and tune in. Reminder, as always, 8 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time tomorrow, we will have our Wolf European Space, 9 a.m. opening bell live trading. Our live trading show will run on YouTube all throughout the day and so much more. So good things continuing to come.
Appreciate everyone that's been a part of this.
Sniper, you got any final comments for this one?
I think I'm pretty good.
All right.
Minutio Perfecto.
Thank you to Fast Stock Market News for hanging out with us, Stock Market News account, and
the Wolf account for being on stage.
Wishing everybody a great rest of your Monday and a fantastic week.
And we'll see you on the next one.
Take care. Thank you.
