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Recorded: April 16, 2025 Duration: 3:23:15Space Recording
Short Summary
In a volatile market characterized by significant declines in major indices, discussions centered around the impact of geopolitical tensions and regulatory changes on the tech sector, particularly Nvidia. The conversation highlighted the need for caution among investors, with a focus on identifying resilient stocks and the potential for Bitcoin to serve as a hedge against market uncertainty.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone.
Happy Wednesday, April the 16th.
Hopefully happy.
Market's not very happy today.
QQQ down 3.85% currently.
SPY down 2.7%.
IWM and the Dow both 1.8% down.
VIX up over 10%, almost 11% here.
Yeah, a lot of things rad.
Market is down. It's an interesting day there's been a lot of news a lot of things going on we did see uh some nvidia news after hours basically as we were
closing up shop last night we saw some additional commentary from the White House around China with 245%
that came out of a press briefing
and several other things.
Jerome Powell spoke today. It's been a very interesting
day. Evan,
Mr. Broken iPhone,
do we got you up there?
The power's out too here, by the way, now.
No power, no phone.
Evan's on the struggle bus today.
It's just a day. I don't know. Rough day. Evan's on the struggle bus today. It's just a day.
I don't know.
Rough day.
Stock's down.
Great day.
Great day for spaces.
It's maybe a sideline Devon day.
We are in power hour, and we've continued tracking down pretty much all day.
We had a little opening pop there in the morning into the lunch hour.
And then nothing really good has happened since then, unless you're Long Gold or Oil or VIX, I guess.
I don't know.
We'll jump into it.
I am excited to hear what everyone has to say.
Options Mike, one of our regulars, it's always up here right on time.
Options Mike, you're like clockwork.
I almost feel like you should text me when to open the space. You know what? I could do that.
I would take up that responsibility here if it'll save the markets.
I can't make that kind of promise. I'm well, actually. It didn't play out exactly how I was
hoping it would play out, we once we invalidated one thesis
right the other thesis was clear as day and here we are making new lows on the day here what have
what have you been doing how was trading and what any thoughts around everything going on
well let me start with thoughts because it's been a wicked day for Nvidia and semis you know so
Nvidia is getting hit with a 5.5 billion dollar bill for
the administration for one year to trade to trade their ai chips to china that is a 20 billion last
year in china that is a quarter of their revenue that is going to hit their margins by about 15
then they're getting a congressional inquiry into them then there's a whole bunch of other crap going
on i mean it's just been a horrible day for the semis in general asml earnings you know they were you
know not great there so that started the ball rolling today and then by the way amd is getting
hit in this every every one of the semis are going to get hit on these on these charges to sell to
china which you know i just don't understand if you don't want to sell just say you can't sell
why do they have to pay to sell either either don't let them sell or let them sell and let China pay and you get your tariff money. I just, whatever.
confrontational as I think I've ever heard him towards the White House. And he didn't specifically
say it, but if you listen to it, he said in his tones, he was basically saying, this is your fault.
We're not fixing this. We're going to have to sit here and make some very hard decisions. And
we're basically going to have to push back our mandate to next year, basically because of what
you're doing. And that's what got this market rolling the market was hoping powell did it down something i was hoping powell would come on and
be softer in his stance he's not i expect you're going to get a nasty reaction at some point
from uh the man in charge up top on that because it was that kind of uh reaction uh what else is
going on um we got time on semi tomorrow morning.
Retail sales were better than expected.
That was a little bit of a shock,
but I guess people are buying here ahead of tariffs.
That seems to be a lot of what's going on.
And the market was trying to take out the 21 day.
The last couple of days has completely rolled over.
We gap down.
We've rolled over now.
We've lost the eight day.
We have this little bit of support around 520,
and then suddenly we're not looking so good. A couple of days ago, the market felt better. We don't feel
so good here. For me personally today, I'm not adding to any long terms here until we get a
better clear signal. I did a couple of day trades. I grabbed stock on crowd because the options were
just a liquid. Made some money there. I traded some NVIDIA puts, barely made any money, even
though that would have been played, but it shook me out. Made some money on i traded some nvidia puts barely made any money even though that
would have been play but it shook me out made some money on tqqq and then gave some of it back and
you know just this action to me is just it's tough here i got caught off guard with the big
sell-off on pow i tried to get short didn't fill didn't chase you know try not to chase sometimes
you should chase and i just didn't do it. And, you know, just looking around here, we need a leadership.
We're not finding it anywhere.
The market's looking for good news, and it really just can't find it.
And that's the problem.
You know, there's no good news coming.
You know, as much as the White House wants to talk, and the White House is just becoming noise at this point, it's all, you know, we're working on all these deals, but there's no news.
And none of the other countries are talking about these deals right it's just just the white house that's
talking about the deals and the tariffs are staying in place you know or sitting there was
an overhang and uh in the meantime nothing's changing here and earnings so far have not been
all that good they haven't been bad and there's a lot of uncertainty out there so i you know it's a
great time to hunker down a little bit to see what's going to go on here.
I'm trying to remain bullish,
but right now I'm not looking so good,
and tomorrow's the last trading day of the week.
There's an old Wall Street saying,
markets don't bottom on Fridays.
Well, tomorrow's a Friday,
so if you're thinking this little range low is in today,
I don't know.
We'll see.
And unfortunately, I got to run in a couple minutes today,
Wemp.
I have a meeting I have to get out to.
At least it's not a bleeding kid in the back of your car today.
No, no bleeding kids in the back of the car. I'm actually meeting a member who's in town for dinner.
Well, Gary, that's probably one of the best points I've heard. We are glad that Options Mike doesn't have any bleeding children going to urgent care.
But yeah, Mike, I don't think I can disagree with anything that you presented there.
I mean, I look at this and it is very hard.
I mean, you're reaching to find something positive right now.
That's it.
I mean, that's the best I can say.
And I don't like to make
generic statements, but...
And as we're talking here,
Bess had just said,
we're prepared to completely
cut off Iran
from being able to supply any oil.
Okay.
So there's another, you know,
more war drums towards Iran, right?
As they're going into the discussion.
So, you know, it's just,
it's hard to find anything here to like.
Anyway, thanks for having me as always.
Yeah, always great to have you. White House announces press briefing at 4.30 p.m. Somebody is tweeting that out.
That'll be interesting. Gary, you jumped in there a little bit. You made a great point already with the bleeding kid, but would love to hear what else is on your mind today. Well, listen, like I think it was Mr. Hankey or someone of the South Park guys, never trust
something that bleeds for seven days and doesn't die. Still one of my favorite quotes from South
Park. I just got done paying my taxes and I paid more in taxes last year than I ever made in a W2
job ever because I sold Apple at 260. i also pushed gold in my newsletter with
newmont back in february and then yesterday wolfie gave me some street street cred with netflix uh as
one of my calls which turned out to be a great one and then i you know told folks last night hey
start to trim it uh maybe this year i'm gonna have more of a tax bill on short-term games
that's kind of the thing but don't follow me because i'm gonna lose you money honest to god Maybe this year I'm going to have more of a tax bill on short term games.
That's kind of the thing.
But don't follow me because I'm going to lose you money.
Honest to God, my portfolio is still large cap tech.
I think Powell, if you didn't listen to Powell, let me just summarize it this way.
I hate Trump and I'm not going to help him.
So the market is going to continue down.
Essentially, the market took another 2% down on that one. NVIDIA, $5 billion write-off, but all they can talk about is how demand is off the
charts. These are older chips, but I'm still not sure where the demand goes. Before you announced
that press conference, the note that I have, EMP, was I am so tempted right now to buy TQQQ because let's be honest, there will be a tweet from Truth Social that says, hey, maybe it's a good time to buy.
I don't want to be caught off sides when that happens.
If you guys are traders, understand I am not a trader.
I am a long-term investor.
I still think we have a lot of danger. We have a,
what are you coming off? Two years in a row where we had plus 20% and then before that you had COVID
and the one year that we were down. If I told you that you had a 24%, a 20% and then a 10% loss
out of the next three years, would you still invest? The answer is yes. And I think
that's what we're in right now. It feels hard. I don't think this feels as bad as 2008. I don't
think this feels as bad as 2000. But Lord knows there's one person that's in charge of this entire
market. And even Powell said it, they're not going to make policy based on uncertainty.
So I think the only thing that you have to do right now is trade, but pick stocks that you
like. I often say it, and I've said it many times on here before, have a list of five stocks that
if they are down 10% or more, you go and buy them, no questions asked, none. Doesn't matter
what the valuation is. Doesn't matter what the valuation is.
Doesn't matter if you like the stock
and it's a good company.
If it falls 10%, just buy it.
It doesn't mean go out and buy,
what's the newest, Webull?
That was up 400% in a day.
It doesn't mean go out and buy that one.
It means go out and buy good companies
that are on your list.
And if they fall, just set up an alert,
whether it's in Seeking Alpha, whether it's in in your brokerage whether it's in your charting program
like trend spider set it up and have that alert ready because
it cut out there for everyone else yeah i i cut out because i got the call but
there you are i i i think i'm done
i i hopefully i got those uh that they just have a list of five stops if they fall 10 or more
hopefully i got that one in yeah that was basically the last thing that came through for me but
yeah it makes sense, right?
And everyone's got their different perspectives on stuff.
And that does seem to be a common thing.
By good companies, I hear a lot of people say that.
Gary, appreciate you joining in.
Of course, if anybody has any comments, throw up a hand and we'll play piggyback.
We'll get some dialogue going in this.
In the meantime, Urkel, we have you up here today.
Appreciate you joining us.
We'd love to get your perspective.
Sure, yeah.
I'm not a huge macro guy, as those of you who've been tuning in lately know.
However, it's hard to ignore the uncertainty that we have.
And I think Tesla, or not Tesla, sorry, NVIDIA yesterday was a clear-cut example of how much
unknown there still is in terms of policy
and impact and of course next week we have a ton of mag 7 reporting so and you know the markets
hate uncertainty you and I aren't buying Apple based on what Apple did last year we're buying
Apple based on what it can do next quarter and a year from now and three years from now so
there's just a ton of uncertainty
ahead, something we've all kind of discussed on these spaces over the last weeks and months. So
just something to keep in mind if, you know, if there's still no clarity in terms of tariffs and
trade and things like that, obviously, we're going to continue to see this chop. And, you know,
depending on what headlines or issues are at the forefront you know
the impact can be bigger or smaller in the short-term trading in terms of trend what I'm
looking at SPY I posted this chart on my timeline bounced off the long-term trend
and then rejected at the previous highs or where we broke down three weeks ago. That was the high last week
during that rally. And then we're kind of trending downwards after consolidation on Monday and
Tuesday. So really, after the significant push to the upside, we consolidated Monday, Tuesday.
And this morning, you could tell every bounce off support was very small. So the markets weren't
that eager to push higher. You could tell they were just
waiting for something to drag them down. And of course, we got that with Powell and drove us
lower. So, you know, in terms of long term trend, SPY is still holding long term trend. And a lot
of these stocks are still holding below last week or sorry, above last week's lows. Whether
you're looking at NVIDIA or or tesla or even palantir you
know that that's up to 90 from i think the 65 or 68 lows last week so there's still a lot to like
generally speaking however if you're a very short-term trader the moving averages and the
supports they keep shifting very quickly so you got to be on point one
thing I'm really liking is Bitcoin I find that Bitcoin even last week and the
week before during the volatility has held up tremendously well it did reject
that the eighty six point five resistance last week but even today it's holding up
really well and if you look at Mstr for example that's been a fantastic trade off this 300 305 area up to 320 all week and that's looking for
direction too so you know in the absence of more clarity and with netflix reporting uh soon and
all of the mag 7 coming and not knowing whether or not we're going to get any guidance or what
that might look like.
It's still very choppy. There's still a ton of risk out there.
We were hoping to see maybe some resolution or progress with China, but it sounds like now the U.S. is trying to isolate them.
So, you know, the rhetoric is still there.
So just tons and tons of uncertainty.
So if you're a long-term investor, you know, as long as SPY is holding long-term trend, I don't mind some nice, you know, buys when we get some significant dips,
like one of the previous speakers was alluding to. And as a short-term trader, if you can trade
both directions too, I mean, this is as good as it's going to get. You know, usually you take a
stock for a swing and you catch 5%, 7%, 8% over two weeks, you can catch that in two days
in both directions right now. So if you're sharp and you're in tune with certain stocks,
know the key levels intuitively, there's certainly a lot of money to be made in the very short term.
In the long term, again, a big lack of clarity in terms of direction and impact on the global economy.
So definitely good reason to have hedges in place, have some cash on hand if big opportunities come up and continue to play it safe rather than aggressive until we have a little more clarity.
ergo when you look at this from a technical perspective can you paint anything decent
on a daily chart right now you know i again for me i'm liking the look of crypto personally um i
had hood i shared the hood setup last week at 40 41 that had a significant move on friday
palantir on some news last week had a nice bounce
but i'm looking at crypto right now just for today if you're talking very short-term trade bitcoin
holding this 84k area if you look at mstr mstr's hugging this 305 level and it's hugged it all day
and twice it's bounced into the 317 to 320 support range and it's holding 305 right now so if bitcoin
holds up there's been a number of opportunities to trade mstr in that 305 to 317 range for day
trades and bitcoin miners that have gotten you know abused for the better part of a year at this
point have potentially put in bottoms maybe that's a that's a big statement
bold statement to make so I'm not saying that with any kind of confidence but Mara Marathon
has rallied 20-30% off last week's lows despite today's weakness so no I don't like the setups
on the daily obviously with these drops you you're not going to have any significant upside positive
constructive setups so when I'm trading this market I'm basically playing level to level so
MSTR as an example from 305 to 317 Mara from yesterday I've played the 1210 area is support
it's provided some bounces to 12 50 12 60 that's this week last
week we had some of these at much better levels like palantir at 84 85 that's a major support
level and it had a significant rally this week but no i'm not seeing anything in terms of upside
setup i'm just looking at support areas and seeing whether or not there are playable bounces off those
supports but trend has to play ball and with markets dumping you know there's a little reward
to much more risk to trying to play bounces off support so nothing constructive in terms of upside
setup particularly in tech crypto you know those sectors, you've got gold rallying to all
time highs. So a little different there. But no, just looking at support levels right now and
determining, you know, strength on individual basis, determining whether or not there's a
playable bounce there. Appreciate those thoughts and your perspective. As always, Urkel, thanks for joining on this Wednesday afternoon. Let's keep going around the panel. Logical saw you come up here, I think, one of the next people up here. So love to get your thoughts next. We'll continue around.
some direction no one up here is going to tell you anything that is going to help you and really
navigate this volatility but i think the only thing to say is uh you know this feels like an
environment where if you have a lot of equity exposure then you need to have some sort of
hedges in place which is kind of what we've been talking about for some time now um i think that
you know we had pal talk and obviously markets dumped, but the one thing that didn't
dump was TLT. I noticed that the May rate cut chances went up a lot, probably due to a lot of
his comments around the slowing economy. And, you know, he was seeing signs of that already.
So, yeah, I mean mean we're in a weird situation
really it just comes down to this fiscal policy it's um it's pretty dumb at this point because
you know the the economy is kind of getting to a place where it could have just worked if we didn't
have all of this overhang of the tariffs you know we're seeing inflation come down. We're seeing unemployment still be
strong. We could be in a situation where we could have already been cutting back down towards the
neutral rate and just kind of humming along. And we just basically threw a wrench in all of this
with these tariffs. And tariffs to some degree might have been constructive, but the situation we're in right now is not constructive at all.
And it's just more uncertainty.
And if these were realized, then it would be a lot more pain for equities.
And you're still coming into these prints with very elevated valuations.
Like Apple, I was just looking at Apple yesterday. I mean,
it's still trading at 32 times trailing multiple, very expensive for the type of growth you're
getting there. I think that there are attractive equities, but, you know, if the large cap growth
and whatnot are going to get hit, then, you know, all equities are going to get hit. So
that's something to be, you know, cautious of is the fact that equities really are
correlated. And so until there's some sort of event or catalyst that's going to differentiate
one sector from another, all equities are sort of moving together. I'm not necessarily super
bearish or, you know, I'm not bearish or bullish. I'm just kind of in the middle right now. I think
that there's a lot more deals today in the market than there were two months ago if we get some sort
of reasonable resolution from all of this i mean you could totally see um recovery uh but you know
for the time being it's it's very murky investors are you know cautious to put money to work and
that's that's what i mean There's really markets looking for direction.
We don't have that. It's very hazy. And it's a weird time because, you know, there's a lot of
data out there that basically tells you that if this is a situation where we have a stock market
crash or a bear market where there is no recession, then it always is a good buying opportunity.
But that question mark still remains of if this ends up being a recession. And if so, you know, is it a prolonged one? Is it going
to be a, is it going to be a painful one? And my thought is, I don't think our government has shown
or the Fed has shown any tolerance for pain. And I'm not saying you sit around waiting for the Fed put, considering
basically, J-PAL today said there is no Fed put, which is probably why markets tanked as
hard as they did. But this really isn't a Fed issue. It's a policy issue around these tariffs.
So just as quickly as they've been put on, they could be taken off.
You know, whether that happens or not, I don't think so.
But, you know, I think as long as you get some sort of clarity resolution, we could still keep tariffs on.
But just, you know, figuring out what that level is, you know, 145% on China is not a reasonable or realistic situation. And I think he knows that
too. So once the pissing contest is over, I think, you know, we could probably start to
stabilize a little bit and get a little bit, you know, better outlooks from different companies.
I mean, you saw United Airlines basically came out yesterday with their earnings report and gave two different earnings forecasts, one of a, you know,
recession situation or not a recession situation and very different outcomes and outlook. So
I don't know if that's going to be a trend for what these companies end up doing. Hopefully,
we start getting some clarity, but obviously, it's taking longer than people anticipating. So,
you know, if you are long equities, I think having some hedges is fine. Um, I'd be interested to see what this press briefing is going to be,
uh, after hours and with a special guest, as they said, I mean, they did say that, um, you know,
there were talks today with Japan potentially around some sort of tariff deal. You know, it wouldn't surprise me if we finally got something
and Japan does seem like a reasonable ally to us.
So, yeah, I mean, that would be constructive for markets.
But yeah, like Stock Talk has said in prior shows,
it's like you really do need China to come to the table
and a deal with China is really what's going to give us the
ability to see a sustainable uptrend. Even if we saw some sort of Japan deal, it's nice. It's a
good first step. It's nice. I think market's still going to take that positively, but it's not the
bread and butter we're looking for. So we'll see. I don't think anyone talking here is going to be able to give direction one way or another
because I think we're all just as confused of what happens from here
because the story is developing with every new headline.
Appreciate those thoughts, logical.
Shai, good afternoon, sir.
Afternoon, afternoon. Yeah, what an eventful day in the market
i had a feeling today was going to be somewhat ugly after yesterday's new uh nvidia news um
and yeah it's it's unfortunate guys uh i gotta say we're still in a bear market we had that
april sun bottom there's a pretty explosive recovery
however i was still somewhat defensive because you have to be you have to be somewhat defensive
and under the turn of day moving average so like i didn't empty all my cash outs uh i was
constantly communicating that it just feels like there's gonna be more pain ahead the east versus west has uh is not gonna be ending anytime
soon it seems like and also the confidence lost from consumers investors enterprises the past
month like that's going to take some time to recover it's not going to be a v-shaped type
of recovery like it was a lot of confidence loss that takes time to build back up not just looking at the technical charge which
again is so freaking ugly like queues is just going lower and lower uh from the two and j
moving average and what we got from nvidia yesterday afternoon is another indication where
things might get ugly for not just nvidia for everyone else because compute uh is going to be somewhat of a strategic
resource now in my opinion for leverage between the east and west and that is not going to just
end with nvidia nvidia is the launching point of that there's a choke point you can call it
but this uh global free-for-all uh days where it's all like work together, globalization, like it's better the future.
I think those days are over.
They're going to start weaponizing compute and it's going to start in NVIDIA, but it's going to affect other avenues as well because it's all about compute containment.
And I get why U.S. or Trump wanted to do this because you clearly are seeing Chinese LLM scaling deep seek post deep seek.
And like you don't want your rival AI stack being built on American Silicon, even if it's age 20, which was the golden loophole that wasn't strong enough to wasn't weak enough to stay legal.
uh strong enough to wasn't uh weak enough to stay legal it was just weak enough to stay legal but
strong enough to meet the china needs to kind of buy it and implement it i think those days are
over the line is moving so the world has to adjust and that's kind of what you're saying today with
semiconductors just bleeding out a bit and causing uh taking the indices down with it and
i i know they everything's red now,
but in the first half of today,
there was some interesting strength being had.
And it was in software.
Again, this is earlier today.
Now everything's just bloody because Qs are down 4.4%.
But even then, there's relative strength happening
for some reason in software.
Cloudflare is down 1%, Snowflake 1%, MongoDB 1%.
Those names were just like, they were green in green the first half today and they're showing strength
today so that's an interesting note but yeah this uh hopefully this in one hour is a press conference
maybe from the White House maybe that is somewhat of a catalyst to uh buck this pullback but i don't know what i heard from pal today is essentially
not uh what the bulls wanted to hear it was they lacked the tools and the policies backdrop is
they're operating in an environment where it's just things are moving too fast too radically and
uh they aren't able to really respond with any kind of precision they're in a way uh they're
uh they aren't able to really respond with any kind of precision they're in a way
stuck stuck in mud that's kind of the theme where everyone's just waiting pausing uh so no like i
don't think i don't see fatter pal pivoting now like i think he's pausing not by choice but because
you can't forward guidance doesn't work when like the rules are being written in real time like you
can't just predict what the world's going to be like in three weeks three months when things are changing so quickly week by week and
i think that there there's going to be more noise like it's just not going to be a clean environment
and you have to be able to adjust like it's not going to be it's kind of like i've been coining this
phrase for on our podcast uh with logical and sam but like 2025 is the year of accumulation like
we're going to get past this but i think we're stuck in mud but there's going to be some real
opportunities to get some early disruptors in the fourth industrial revolution and you don't have to
there's no sense of urgency because we're not going to be getting out of this macro mess that we're in for quite some time uh and even if we did the confidence is going to take
some time to build back up and earnings cycle this earnings season is not going to be the savior at
all there's going to be a ton of nuances that will cause a ton of more um mess in the narrative that
won't provide the bulls the clarity they need to catch a bid so be patient
wait until the uh we're at least above the 200 day but if you guys don't want to wait till then
just wait until the key moving averages aren't sloping downwards and just wait until they start
basing out but if you're a long-term investor like i am five plus year time horizon like this is kind
of the time where you accumulate those early disruptors and that's
what i haven't added in a couple in a week or two and i'm trying to raise my cash position ahead of
this earning season but i will probably be adding once we get some wonky gap downs from macro driven
uh one-offs that causes socks to socks i have high convictions on to sell off when the thesis
isn't breaking it's just the world around it is crumbling a bit.
Sam, I'll pass it to you.
Yeah, I just wanted to touch on the part
where you were talking about the software stocks,
finding some strength today.
I've been tracking the IGV, which is a software ETF,
mostly comprised of software stocks,
and looking at the ratio of that over SMH
and also over the Qs. And even looking at the ratio of that over SMH and also over the Qs.
And even looking at dates like today, even on a long-term daily trend,
IGV is outperforming the Qs and also outperforming the SOX ETF year-to-date
and has been quite for some time.
Obviously, there is a lot of peaks and valleys in there, sharp turns,
but overall the trend is up.
Not necessarily saying that software is going to outperform both of those ETFs, but that it is finding strength relative to those two.
And we definitely saw that today.
In fact, the IGV over QQQ ratio is actually positive in the same estimation.
You can already see it with the individual names that are out there.
Is that necessarily a rotation?
I mean, all three of them are down, but is that necessarily a rotation for the long term?
I don't know.
We'll have to wait and see.
But like you're saying, the Mahuso upgrade for Cloudflare, I mean, everyone's always saying that Cloudflare is expensive.
There's a reason why it always stays expensive.
Same there, CrowdStrike.
I mean, CrowdStrike was almost like $ yesterday, which is pretty wild to think that the market
was still about 12% down from all-time highs if CrowdStrike is about to go to an all-time
high.
Cloudflare is nowhere near its all-time high.
But if you think of these companies, the fact that they have a pretty solid moat in terms
of what they do.
And when you think about the long-term perspective, like cybersecurity is not going anywhere,
neither is DNS resolution as well as network security.
These companies are not going anywhere.
So if I'm looking at buying something
while prices are suppressed,
one of the last things we're going to do
is to allocate a large amount of money
to things that are more speculative
and stay more focused on the leaders and companies
that can weather an economic slowdown, even a recession or even the D word for that matter
that we haven't seen in a long time.
But anyways, also more long-term focused here, trying to also build a cash position.
I am bullish on long-term rates.
The Fed does not control the long end of the curve.
They only control the short-term. And from what it appears today, long-term yields. The Fed does not control the long and the curve. They only control
the short-term. And from what it appears today, long-term yields are actually coming down right
now in light of what the Fed is saying as far as inflation goes. Long-term yields look a little
bit more past the two-year, are seeing much favorable liquidity conditions in the long-term.
But the short-term rates are going to follow whatever the Fed's doing since those are very
well adjusted for what the Fed is actually saying in terms of the Fed fund futures market.
Next month, we have about a 10% to 15% chance of a cut. Just a few days ago, we were around 20%
to 30%. So that is changing fast, especially given the commentary today. Not really looking
for a stick save here from Powell. I don't think anyone really is.
I don't know if anyone was actually expecting that in the first place,
but certainly it looks like the market was somewhat expecting,
at least had some sort of hope and clarity in that.
But, you know, time to embrace the volatility.
I mean, this is something we need to get used to.
If this is an accumulation year,
then you're going to expect massive rallies and massive sell-offs
like you've seen in the last few days with sharp reversals. Best to wait for better prices if you're going to be deploying
your cash. I mean, like you, I have a few percentage of cash position and some bit
outcated in TLT, which is finding some proof today. But at the same time, I'm not expecting
TLT to make it run all the way to 100 plus, but at least stay within the range of 3.8% to 4.5%.
And I think we're kind of in the
middle of the range right now. So maybe from a short term perspective, you can trade the long
term yields. But from a long term perspective, everything is really going to be a hedge against
the long term holds in the portfolio. Because as a long term investor, you're focusing less on
timing the market per se, but more on getting in at ideal prices. Because really, you just want to
buy wonderful companies at fair prices. You don just want to buy wonderful companies at fair prices.
You don't want to buy fair companies at cheap prices because that's going to leave you hanging
in case the market does come back.
Those might not come back.
There's a high probability that the leaders will come back, especially in a secular trend.
So if we do have that AI wave forthcoming and continuing, which I do expect the leaders will definitely thrive.
So just,
it's all about the probabilities game and definitely the leaders are well
positioned for that.
Appreciate those thoughts,
Sam.
And something like you're having fun.
Yeah.
He's chilling over here in the backseat.
I want to be a good dad.
I don't want to do everything I'm going to do with him.
I'm just kidding around.
Nah, he's a good kid.
Sell everything.
I think that's what he said.
I don't know.
I couldn't hear clearly enough.
But yeah, appreciate those thoughts.
Let's keep it moving.
Matt Caruso, great to have you on the space again.
See if you have any thoughts to throw into the mix here.
Yeah, thanks for having me on again.
This is kind of one of those max pain type of markets. I mean,
it's always like the same playbook when you get into these very volatile markets.
It's hard to grab too many fundamental viewpoints, like the other speakers kind of brought up,
like no one has a hard answer. And that's the truth for everyone, regardless. I mean,
if policy is being taken day by day, how could investors have a super clear picture?
So what this market kind of comes down to is one of positioning.
It's just basically most markets, you know, it's about general growth and trajectory of earnings and all the rest.
When you get into this kind of market environment, and I've been, you know, my first year trading
pro was 2008.
So, you know, baptism by fire and financial crisis and all the rest.
And the swings are dominated by positioning.
When people in the short term are piled to the short side, you're going to get these hard rips higher.
And then after once that short position works off and we kind of get we levitate to what are maybe fairer prices or whatnot,
then after the pressure could just as easily come back to the downside until there's like a resolution. So, you know, you don't have to be an outright bearer
where, you know, you can't do anything in the market, but you have to be really caught like
the same rules of that you will use or the same tactics that you'll use in a bull market where
we're gapping up and, you know, we're going to have momentum ignition to the upside doesn't
work the same way, you know, so you have to either to either, in this market, you have to look at it two ways.
One, if there's tremendous weakness, are we at a short-term turning point where there's
been just tremendous selling in the short term?
You need to have your tools to be able to figure that out.
I like to look at what I call my FOMO indicator.
I look at the percentage of stocks above their five days.
So when only 5% of stocks are above their five day, everyone's had the recent impulse to sell
some stocks. That usually is a good washed out indicator to the downside. And so either you want
to position long in that environment, which is the opposite of what you usually do. In this kind
of environment, you're only really rewarded when you buy kind of the weakest of markets,
when everybody is washed out. Then at that point, there's room to kind rewarded when you buy kind of the weakest of markets, when everybody
is washed out. Then at that point, there's room to kind of rebound. Any kind of spark of good news
will cause a rally. Beyond that, if you're going to be adding into strength, you have to then look
at it from a different viewpoint. Then the viewpoint has to be, is it over? Are we at the
start of a bull market? Which is a whole different question. If you're at the start of a bull market,
then you can restart accumulating normally and all the rest. But if it's just a reflex rally off the bottom, we don't think the
worst is over, then you have to step aside. Or if you do test the waters, like step aside very quickly.
So I like to kind of use position ranges to keep myself out of trouble. So in this kind of
environment before I think we've embarked on a new bull market, I stay in the zero to 30% exposure level.
It keeps me sane because just trying to be fully in cash for someone who trades for a living and loves trading is hard because then you kind of feel disconnected.
So trading with smaller amounts keeps you connected, allows you to have a good vibe for the market, which is something that is a real thing.
When you're actively trading, you have a better understanding
of where the turning points are and all the rest.
And then actively looking, is the worst over?
Do we have any kind of technical signals
or news-driven signals that the worst is over?
I was hoping Powell would be a little more accommodative.
It's kind of frustrating that he's not.
So then the ball kind of comes back
into the court of politicians,
which is a lot more erratic.
It's just any political
negotiation always goes down to five minutes before midnight. If you look at any time there's
been a debt ceiling problem or this and that, it's always 11.55 PM. Oh, we got a deal and
government shutdown averted. So that's just the way politicians negotiate. So it's going to be
headline driven. And if it's headline driven, then you have to trade at the extremes.
It's basically you can think of extremes and everything in the middle is a gap of momentum
that moves quickly.
So know your levels, know your exposure, know what you can withstand.
There's going to be trapdoor moments to the downsides, be trapdoor moments to the upside.
So it's a handle with care.
It's tradable.
I remember like, you know, I always will talk to the clients like my first year trading
pro was 08 and I had a good year, a fair year, and it was just trading to the long side,
you know, using these tactics.
You need to only engage when there's extreme downside weakness.
So you finally have an asymmetric setup where there's more upside than downside.
And you have to be very cognizant of your buying power.
I mean, it's, if you run out of buying power and the market just keeps imploding on you, there's no way to fix that trade.
There's no way to trade around it.
You're just kind of in the headlights.
So knowing general positioning, your buying power, where the extremes are, and whether or not we're starting a bull market,
that's really the day-to-day game plan that you have to run in this market, more than choice.
So that's how I'm approaching things, it's uh not as it's not as um it's more entertaining let's say
it's probably not it's not as a long-term fruitful as a as a nice big beautiful bull market but
there's there's always a way to tackle everything yeah great thoughts there matt uh kirk got you up here how are you doing today what's on your mind i'm i'm
doing well i'm i feel like i should be more exhausted but i was more exhausted last week
with all the back and forth i think today i'm just looking at this going okay there's not how much
i could do personally but what are your thoughts well i would echo something that matt just said
is avoid the middle of the market i think that if you're trying to out-trade the headlines,
that you are playing a very risky game.
If you enjoy gambling, I would suggest just go finding a craps table
or something instead.
The middle of the market is something that you can do
if you're a trend trader when there are trends to follow.
And right now there aren't trends.
I'm thinking of this year more in terms of a Paul Tudor Jones year,
and that is there is a pivot that we caught at the top,
and now we have to look for the pivot near the bottom.
I have kind of thought about the different things that I've
learned in 30 years of doing this now. And one of the best comments that I can remember,
and I don't remember who it was, it might've been David Einhorn, but he said something to
the effect of, you know, you do your best to hedge and then you just realize that I should have gone to cash.
And so I take that very seriously.
You know, I've been 50 to 60 percent cash now since February.
For a little while, we own SPY puts.
You know, we're basically even on the year.
basically even on the year.
And I feel pretty good about that
as I've been using covered calls
and some selective trimming here and there
and some cash secured put sales
to generate some income
and keep me focused on my dozen or so best stock ideas
because if this market does turn up,
my high beta stuff, which is beat to shit right now, will go straight up.
And I can live with scaling in with my cash.
I did reduce my outlook for the year.
I came into the year neutral to bearish and got a little picked on for that.
I have shifted to bearish as of, you know, basically the end of February.
And I think, and I posted this chart on my X feed.
It's near the top.
It might not be at the top, but it's near the top.
I see a gigantic head and shoulders playing out right now when you factor in just the charts.
But then when you add the quantitative analysis, it seems to back it up.
And when you think through the idea that maybe our allies don't really cut any particularly good deals until Trump is out of office or about to be out of office.
I just see that the next three, three and a half years could be a real big roller coaster.
And I do think we get quantitative easing.
When I said 2026 a few months ago, I kind of got laughed at for that
too. I think I'm spot on with that. I think we get QE next year. If we use it the right way,
then we solve some long-term problems and we get some sugar in the system. If we use it the wrong way, we just get the sugar.
Either way, I think you're looking to find bottoms.
I think you're almost there on the small and mid-caps because they are already, you know,
the small caps in particular were already beat to hell.
The mid-caps have trailed, and they're usually the sweet spot.
Large caps, you know, that's the headlines.
But, you know, it's only really the top 40 or 50 stocks that anybody should be interested in the first place.
So, you know, if you're trading QQQ or SPY, I get it.
I trade QQQ and some other ETFs.
and some other ETFs.
But again, our base case is that, you know,
I think we're going to make a run at the 2022 lows.
And if that doesn't hold,
then that means we're in a financial crisis.
I don't really see a financial crisis.
I do kind of think about this really just as a long-term transition
that we're doing clumsily.
And, you know, it's America.
It all works out in the end.
And we know how to print money now.
If they do it the right way, we get minimal inflation.
If they just spray paints, then we get a lot of inflation after the fact.
You know, one argument, one narrative you're going to hear this year
is the stagflation argument, but they're skipping a step. On the front end, you don't get inflation.
You get deflation because it's recessionary. And then when they spray the money, then you get
the inflation and it still takes growth some time to catch up. And then as inflation comes back down
and growth goes back up, you get into that better quartile. So I don't think this is horribly
unpredictable if you're looking at it in slightly longer timeframes. Day-to-day, man, if you're a savant, you're probably killing it.
My trader is killing it, but I don't even play in that sandbox.
So I do think that energy remains interesting.
If we get an outright recession and not just a recession scare,
then I think that energy probably does pretty well
coming out. And if there's an attack in the Middle East on Iran, then I think energy does
pretty well. So that's one of those out there, you know, things that could happen, one of the
catalysts that could happen. We do have massive buildup of military forces
in the Middle East. I have a friend that was deployed out there recently, and I know that
they're accumulating bombers. What is it? Diego Garcia is where they're doing it.
Our AI, we have our own AI sandbox. You know, we've been building it this year,
and we asked it a question about Black Swan events.
And, you know, when you talk about Iran or some of the other stuff,
those are all knowns, right?
So they're not really Black Swans
because, you know, several percent of the people are talking about it.
It's not completely unknown. The thing that I don't of the people are talking about it, it's not completely unknown.
The thing that I don't think many people are talking about, and our AI came up with this,
and I think I agree with it, is that given the pace of technology and the kind of cloak and dagger approach to geopolitics using cyber warfare,
using cyber warfare, we think that the potential for a major, major cyber disruption,
whether it's financial or in the utilities or whatever, is exponentially higher than it's been in the past.
So if that happens, let's suppose most of the grid goes down for a
few days. I mean, think about what that does. So we're worried about black swans right now
because when geopolitics get out of control, that's when things seem to happen.
Not that we're smart enough to know what the black swans would be,
but it kind of makes sense that it could be technology driven. So we'll see. I do not see
China cutting a deal with Trump. Unless they can extract something out of him that they think is
more important to them than it is to us, we'll see. I just don't see them caving. They can flood the world with
their products. And they're talking to Europe about it right now. I just think they're going
to pivot away from the United States. And I think they're going to eat the pain in the short term.
And we're going to have to reckon with the fact that we have decided to de-globalize our economy to the extent that we can.
And, you know, while I'm against that, they don't call and ask me.
I just have to live in that world.
So, you know, I am outright bearish, obviously.
And I think that we can challenge the 2022 lows.
And I'm a little worried that we get a financial crisis, kind of the Jeremy Grantham thing.
You know, I never really think that's a high probability, but it's higher than normal.
So I do think that people have to be aware of it. And
if you're a trader, sometimes, you know, you got to listen to Charlie Munger and just
close the drawer for a while, right? Just stop making hard decisions. If you're a poker player,
Andy Duke, you know, wrote a book, Thinking in Bets. You know, when you play poker,
you try to avoid making hard decisions until it's really make money time.
And I would encourage people to really think about what they're doing from the standpoint of risk management and try to avoid hard decisions, I guess, would be the most important thing that I think I could say.
Appreciate those thoughts, Kirk.
Mr. Stock Talk, how are you?
What's going on?
What's going on?
I'm just watching this short cover rally here into the end of the day.
What's on your mind today?
I mean, goodness, this is going to be repetitive, huh,
over the last couple of weeks.
Look, not much has changed,
at least in terms of the macro backdrop.
I'm starting to grow concerned about what the policy goals are here.
You know, I think initially I was willing to give the idea of negotiation the benefit of the doubt.
And I think the reasonable person in me and I'm by no means an economist, but I've spent my entire
adult life trading stocks and following financial markets. It's like what I live and breathe every
day. And so I feel like I have a pretty decent understanding of the way businesses function.
And I think most people that do, which includes probably everybody on this panel, are worried mostly because confidence is a very sensitive thing in the economy.
It's momentum driven.
We've talked about this before.
It's part of why bull markets don't end until something happens.
Right.
I mean, you think about the technology bull market post global financial crisis.
It's like a 12 year run of everyone being overweight tech, tech going up every single year, pretty much.
I mean, outside of like two years in that 12 year span.
That type of market momentum takes on a tremendous amount of economic confidence to
build. Everyone just has to be down to spend, to invest, to bid up stocks at high multiples.
And in the last couple of weeks, I think there's been an attempt to decipher this policy.
I said this yesterday, I actually think policy clarity has improved.
And I know some people would hear that and be like, what are you talking about?
I mean, I think, frankly speaking, if you just follow the official White House statements now, we do have a pretty good tracking of how the policy is shifting.
That's not exactly encouraging, though. And the reason for that is because it's becoming clearer, at least to me,
that this might be a hardline policy stance, that there may not be the level of flexibility
on negotiating tariffs that we originally thought there was. And I hope that's not the case still,
you know, I'm retaining that optimism that that's not the case, but
I just think there's a tremendous underestimation of the
economic impact here. And I think people think that this is like going to be, you know,
liberation day, if you will, you know, a new age for America and workers are going to be,
you know, met with all these new jobs. I think in the process of trying to
I think in the process of trying to save the middle class or rebirth the middle class in America, we're actually going to brutally punish the middle and lower class with these level of tariffs.
Powell has been, whatever you think of him, has been pretty calm and collected for the majority of this cycle.
I would actually say for the entirety of this cycle, outside of maybe that Jackson Hole appearance that everyone remembers.
I think outside of that, he has been incredibly collected.
Outside of that, he has been incredibly collected.
Again, whether you agree or disagree with him, calm in his rhetoric, pretty non-panic oriented.
And today I do not think he was cool or collected.
I mean, his voice might have been, but I think his statements were pretty concerning.
I know a lot of people think he's playing politics.
I disagree with that.
I know that he doesn't like Trump, probably, and Trump probably doesn't like him.
But I think putting that aside, you know, he has a legacy at play here, too. You know, he doesn't want to fuck up the economy out of spite for Trump. That would be pretty odd,
you know, like if he if that was his goal, because,
you know, in hindsight, when people look back on Powell's tenure, they're going to look back on
how well he handled this. So I think he is trying again, whether you disagree or agree with his
approach, he is trying it what in his view is the right approach. And, you know, I saw a lot of
people talking about the fact that today he said, well,
you know, we won't bail out the stock market. That's bullshit. Anyone that's been in the
markets for long enough knows that's bullshit. The Fed will bail out the stock market if it
goes low enough. The question is how low. And the other point of that is, is obviously Powell's not
going to get up there and say, yeah, we'll bail out the stock market.
Don't worry, because then markets would fucking rip.
You know, so people have to understand that when rhetoric is being delivered by the Fed, especially by Powell, he has to be cognizant of what the impact of his rhetoric would be.
And as a consequence of that, he's not always going to tell you the truth.
You know, the Fed chair's job is not to tell you the truth. You know, the Fed chair's job is not to tell you the truth.
The Fed's chair's job is to use his rhetoric to manage market expectations, to stabilize markets,
and to reduce volatility as much as possible. All he said really today effectively was that
the markets are volatile and they should be volatile, which is an accurate statement.
Right. Inflation expectations are shifting dramatically. Business confidence is shifting
dramatically. And, you know, at the start of this, there was a little bit of finger pointing at data
like the Michigan data to say, hey, look, Democrat respondents are completely different survey responses than Republican
respondents. That's true. But you don't have to just look at the Michigan data to get a feel for
consumer confidence and business confidence. Listen to the earnings calls. Listen to what
the companies are telling you. Listen to what NVIDIA said yesterday about the export controls
on H20s. Listen to what United Airlines said when they
provided two macro scenarios. Listen to what the bank said. Listen to what Jamie Dimon said,
right? Jamie Dimon, like, who, you know, arguably has a stronger grasp on the American economy than
anyone in the country. You know, they run the biggest bank in the world, the biggest bank in
the United States also, obviously. And he's not confident about this. He thinks policy
needs to be rolled back. Elon Musk, who's in favor of almost everything the president does,
he's in the administration, thinks this policy needs to be rolled back, right? He's been using
his brother, Kimball, as sort of a proxy to deliver that message for those who haven't noticed.
And in fact, he's delivered that message himself. If you go back and listen to either his Rogan appearances
or go and look at his tweets from the beginning of this policy
when he's calling Navarro an idiot
so there's people within the administration that are loudly saying
this is dumb, this is going to kill the economy
but for whatever reason
Trump is deferring to Navarro and Lutnik on this
and I think that's problematic because
I think those are probably the two least reliable people to defer to. I'm starting to get shocked by
Bessent's word circus that he's putting out there. Bessent's trying to walk around this issue
because he's much, much smarter than he's putting off in the media.
You know, Scott Basant has 35 years of professional market experience.
You know, he knows about the equity markets.
He knows about the bond markets intimately.
You know, so I can't believe or I refuse to believe that Basant is sitting there in his office going like, yeah, this is working great.
I think he knows this is not working.
And for whatever reason, he I guess out of political loyalty, not I guess that that's really the only reason out of political loyalty.
He's saying, you know what, this is going to work.
Countries are going to come to the table.
So it's a fucking mess.
And the White House at this point,
like, come on, we got 245% tariffs on China now?
Like, at this point, you just put it at 1,000%
and trade embargo China.
Like, literally.
And I'm not saying that hyperbolically.
I mean, okay, what?
If China retaliates again here, which they said they won't, then tariffs go to 345 percent and then 445 percent.
Like, what are we even doing? You know, anyone who looks at those numbers knows that that doesn't make any sense for the vast majority of goods that would be applicable to that.
And at the same time, like, again, if this is negotiation, we seem to be doing an awfully poor job of pointing out our weak spots.
Like within the first week of this, we go, well, you know what?
We can't do 245 percent tariffs or 145 percent or whatever they were at the time on semiconductors.
So those are just going to retroactively apply to the 20 percent fentanyl tariffs.
But the other stuff, oh, we're coming for you on the other stuff.
Like we're basically showing China our hand to say, hey, guess what? We can't do without the chips and the electronics. So we're not going to tariff those as highly. But everything
else, oh, you know, watch out. Like, look, we have leverage. I'm not dismissing the United
States leverage. We have a tremendous amount of leverage as a purchasing power body,
but we're using it poorly. Like flat out, we are just using it poorly.
This isn't tactful. This isn't strategic. This is just poorly executed, flat out.
And I don't know, it just baffles me because I want to say I know Trump is smarter than this.
And for me, it feels like there is a lot of noise in the different members of the administration that are voicing their opinions on this issue.
And I think if you look at the report that came out from Bloomberg this morning, which a lot of people misquoted, even I misquoted originally when I tweeted it, saying that the statement came from China.
It actually came from an ex-Chinese minister that Bloomberg was citing. that are not only talking shit, frankly,
but they're also just saying random,
unconfirmed policy statements on national television.
And then they get walked back 30 minutes later,
or they get, you know, the White House comes out
and be like, no, that's not it, actually.
The 20% tariffs apply to these three categories,
not the five he named.
Like, that sort of inconsistency in messaging is just completely unnecessary. You know, President Trump can just go to Lutnik and
Navarro and be like, hey, guys, I know you're doing a bunch of media appearances, but here's a
one pager that keeps you guys all on the same page, literally. They haven't even made an attempt
to do that. Like you can't send out a one pager to the four finance officials in the administration
and say, hey, guys, this is our stance on tariffs.
Don't deviate from this stance.
Just that alone, like that one step would bring tremendous rebound and confidence in
the markets because there would be certainty around the path of policy.
But we failed to do that for whatever reason.
I guess people think this gray area negotiation is effective.
I don't.
And I mean, I'm not the best negotiator in the world, but I think anybody that has a basic understanding of social and emotional intelligence
knows that that's probably not the best way to go about it.
You can use leverage effectively. You can use it powerfully. But, you know, you don't have to use
it flippantly. You don't have to use it, you know, haphazardly to the extent that I don't even know
what we're doing now. Like, I don't know what the policy goal is. I don't know what the end game is
here. I'm confused, frankly. And again, I think
I'm somebody that understands this issue pretty well. So I want to know what the end game is.
And I want to know what the policy path is. And the markets want to know too.
Markets are beginning to just scratch their head, like what the hell is going on?
You know, are these exemptions in place permanently? Which companies are exempted?
Is Apple going to get special treatment like Trump said? Is NVIDIA going to get special treatment like Trump said? Is the permitting
only going to apply to U.S. designers or is it also going to apply to U.S. manufacturers of chips?
What about the automobile industry? Trump said pauses are coming. When are they coming?
Are they coming only for Ford and GM? Are parts going to be exempted or no? Like we don't know
the answers to any of those questions because there's been no fucking
page issued by the White House.
Like, all of those questions could be answered in 600 words, like, on a single page.
So why haven't they been answered?
I think it's because, again, the market is perceiving this as uncertainty.
But I think within the administration, there is a level of policy implementation uncertainty.
So I don't think it's just the markets taking this on feedback saying, fuck, we don't know what's going to happen.
Everyone's saying something different.
I think the administration itself is confused on how to roll this out.
And I think that there's clearly some clash going on between probably the Navarro and Lutnik camp and the Besant and Elon camp.
I think that there's probably a clash going on.
And I think both of them are probably trying to get the president's ears.
And I would imagine Besant's commentary is you're going to blow the bond market up.
And Elon's commentary is American companies need more time to move manufacturing.
And on the flip side, you have Navarro and Lutnik who are like, this is unfair. We have to change
it now. We only have four years. If we don't start now, it's never going to happen, which is like,
it sounds reasonable to people when they hear that, right? Especially people who are like,
you know, and I'm very pro-America. I'm not knocking people that are pro-America. You know,
I've been conservative my whole life. I support and still do support this administration.
But I think a lot of people hear that and they go, yeah, they get gung-ho.
They get fired up.
They're like, yes, we're doing this for America.
And that keeps the blinders on.
But again, Americans will suffer in this scenario.
Millions of them will suffer.
Millions of them will lose their jobs if this carries through.
It's just unnecessary.
And, yeah, I don't know.
We always kind of end my remarks at that kind of level of disappointment.
I'm just disappointed.
I think there's a lot of unnecessary damage that's been done.
trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars in value have been wiped out.
Trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars in value have been wiped out.
Economic confidence has been arguably punched to the extent that it will be
very difficult to repair.
Businesses have already begun to scale back investments.
I have a buddy that, and I'll reference him indirectly here, but I have a buddy
that works out of one of the northern United States, states, I won't name the state, and Canada.
And he does an import-export business.
And they were planning to invest $34 million this year.
In the United States, by the way, not abroad.
They were planning to invest $34 million in the United States
in six new warehouses, a fleet of new vehicles,
and some other infrastructure.
34 million. And they're a pretty big company, but they're not like a multi-multi-billion dollar
company, but they're a pretty big company. And I was talking to him two weeks ago, and he was like,
dude, I can't spend that money. He's like, what am I going to do, allocate that money? And then,
you know, I don't know how interest rates are going to change as a result of the policy.
I don't know how FX with Canada is going to change as a result of the policy.
He doesn't know how long the Canadian fentanyl tariffs will last. He doesn't know if those
fentanyl tariffs could go up. He's like, he said one of his advisors told him that they're temporary,
but he went and looked at the messaging and he's like, I couldn't find anything that suggested that.
So this is how business owners are thinking about this.
And that's just one example.
But go through any of the earnings calls that have happened so far this season and these big public companies will tell you effectively the same thing.
So is that good for America? If American companies stop spending money
because they're scared, because they don't know what's going to happen next? Is that good for
America? Is that good for American jobs? Is it good for American wages? I don't think so.
And is it avoidable? Abso-fucking-lutely it's avoidable. You know, this was an economy with
tremendous confidence just four months ago. In fact, Trump's election led to a boost in economic confidence. People were excited about this administration because they saw deregulation on the horizon, lower taxes on the horizon, a more favorable business environment, less red tape and licensing and permits. People were excited about that, right? They're excited about the capital inflow that that incentivizes. But this tariff overhang is much more impactful than any of those things,
especially in the short term. Because anybody who said, you know what, I'm going to allocate
another $100 million or another billion dollars because the regulatory environment is going to
be more favorable. Now they have another factor to consider. And, you know, for many of them, it's outweighing in
the other direction. So, yeah, I don't know. We got to walk this back. And I hope it's sooner
than later, because China sure as hell doesn't seem like they're going to be the ones to do it.
And we thought that might be the case. Maybe it'll still be the case. I think today's remarks at least express the idea that they want to talk.
But I don't know when they'll come to the table or if it'll have to be us first.
But the world is, again, hanging in the balance. The world economy is hanging in the balance of two 80-year-old men getting on the phone.
getting on the phone and they need to get on the phone sooner than later. But outside all the
And they need to get on the phone sooner than later.
tariff drama, um, I did make a, an ad today on a biotech name. Um, I'm not taking a lot of longs
in this environment. I've been pretty slow, uh, moving and just kind of patient, but I did take
an ad on ticker ASND, Ascendis Pharma, RBC Capital had a report this morning
giving them a 205 price target.
Most of the charts I've been looking at
in this environment from a catalyst trading standpoint
have not been good.
Daily charts on most stuff are not pretty, obviously.
Even the stuff that is holding above the 200-day,
you know, either has a sloping resistance
on a 9-21 downsloping 9-21 EMA
or some other technical overhang.
And so not a lot of clean charts out there.
But I did pull up this chart this morning.
It was like, hey, pretty clean chart considering the market environment.
Above all the short-term moving averages, 100-day, 200-day, 50-day, 9-21 EMA stacked all in the correct order.
9-21 EMA sloping up.
You know, you had an inside day yesterday, and now price pushing back above the highs. So,
I liked the action on this technically, and then the RBC report sounded pretty bullish. So,
I did make an ad on that name, that biotech name today. It's about a 9.3 billion market cap,
so it's not a small cap biotech or anything. It's about a 9.3 billion market cap. So it's not a small cap biotech or anything. It's almost $10 billion company, but I did make a small ad on that today.
Nothing else really. Not much activity. Like I said, I'm trying to be patient. I still have a pretty big cash pile. I am not in a rush at all to deploy it. Didn't chase last week's bounce
with that cash. Not planning on chasing, frankly,
any bounces until the story changes in the background. And for me, the only thing that
can change the story in the background is a de-escalation with China. That's the only thing
I care about. I don't care about South Korea coming to the table. I don't care about Japan
coming to the table. I don't frankly care about any individual country coming to the table. I
only care about de-escalation with China because otherwise the global economy is at risk. That's
all that matters. It's literally the only thing that matters. And you're going to see a lot of
noise in the next couple of months and weeks about people calculating tariff impacts. People
are going to give you 12-paragraph economic dissertations on what the tariffs might or
might not do. It's pretty simple in my view.
100% plus tariffs, mutual tariffs on the US and China, it just does not work for the global economy and you will cause a global recession. You had an estimate this morning that global
growth will fall to 2.3%. I think that's modest. I think if those tariffs remain in place,
global growth will fall a lot more than that. And I also think that China knows that and I think if those tariffs remain in place, global growth will fall a lot more than that.
And I also think that China knows that.
And I think the United States knows that.
So, you know, something's got to give.
Somebody's got to give up here and be like, you know what?
We thought about it and this is dumb.
They're not going to say it like that because the political optics of that will be horrendous. But somebody has to, one side has to come to the plate here and be like,
we have assessed with our allies and realized this is the wrong decision.
Again,
my fear is that that's not a politically tenable.
What do you think of that Wall Street Journal story or whatever article that
came out saying the whole point of this was turn everyone against China.
That some of the talks that they're having or for,
to close these countries off and trading with China. Yeah, I just don't know how feasible that is. And the other part of the other problem with that is, is that like, we are not similar
economies at all. And this idea that like, we are competitors for the world's business is ludicrous.
like we are competitors for the world's business is ludicrous.
Like if you say, if somebody says to you, yeah,
China and the United States are economies that are competing for the same
business internationally, that person is an idiot.
Like that is factually not true. It's not an opinion.
Like China's economy is fundamentally different from the United States.
Their per capita GDP is a fraction of ours. They are a manufacturing and export driven economy.
We're a services driven economy that consumes a third of the world's stuff. It's a completely
dramatically, you know, black and white difference between our economies. We're both
juggernauts. You know, the United
States and China together make up over 40% of global GDP. Like we are the only important
economies. That is true. But we're not the same. And the idea that like we can put countries
into this, I don't know, pick a side decision economically is madness. Like, do you do we
really think that countries are going to, you know, de-risk China completely and have
dramatically higher costs in the short term so that they can buy cotton t-shirts made in America
for five times the price? Like, have we lost our minds? No one is going to do that.
And to the extent that we think it's economically expedient for them,
like, our allies are already on our side on this issue. Like, are we under the
presumption that the European Union is pro-China? Dude, they haven't even let their cars be sold in
China for years and years and years, because they're worried about them dumping them on the market.
Same thing with solar panels.
Look up EU regulations against China, economic regulations, over the last 10 years.
Look it up on your favorite LLM.
The EU doesn't like China either.
Neither does Canada.
neither does like anyone in any nation in the west go look at the rhetoric at the un or at nato
Neither does any nation in the West.
or at the g20 and ask yourself do these are these nations do these nations have affinity with china
no the only nations that have any sort of alliance style affinity with china are regions that fall in
china's sphere of geographical influence nations that China can actually exhibit geographical
leverage on by proximity. Those are the nations that cooperate with China because they have
no choice because China is the dominant economy in the hemisphere. The countries in the West
are all almost universally anti-China. We're fixing something that isn't broke.
That's the best way to phrase this. We're acting like our allies are aligned with China.
Is China intricately woven itself into the global economy sort of indispensably? Yes. Is that a
problem that needs to be addressed? Yes. But it's going to take
a decade plus to solve that problem, probably longer. And pretending that we can solve that
problem overnight after 40 years of globalization that has made every economy dramatically
interdependent is just unrealistic. So you can want better things for America. You
can want more manufacturing in America. I want all these things too, but you can want those things
and also recognize that the time period necessary to facilitate that transition is much, much,
much longer than we are giving or allowing.
That's...
That point that you brought up of
you know, if we don't get this done now
is what he's being whispered in his ear.
I mean, if this
doesn't get done in four years, is it going to happen?
What do you mean
if it doesn't get done in four years?
This is a very drastic thing that whoever comes after
Trump, at least if there's this type of chaos, won't support it and will roll it back.
So he probably is sitting there thinking he has a clock on this.
There's a pain point for every president.
We just don't know what it is.
For him, it seems to be that Besant's attention to the bond market
might have been his pain point for the 90-day delay.
I don't want to say it might have been. It was. The question becomes, will he react to the bond market might have been his pain point for the 90-day delay. I don't want to say might have been. It was. The question becomes, will he react to the bond market again? Or was that a
one-time thing? Or the next time the bond market panics, is he going to say, well, I already gave
you a pause. I can't do much more than that. That's the hard part here. Do I think he's going
to cave to market pressure? I hope so. I hope so eventually. But I also know that I can't forecast this administration's decision making based on my logical deductions because they had acted in a way that I thought was logical and procedural and effective starting on April 2nd, then I'd be like, yeah, I think I can reasonably forecast where we're headed.
But because they have frankly acted haphazardly.
I don't know where we're headed.
I don't know if if if the next bond market panic is going to be enough to induce a policy change. And the tricky thing here is we keep hearing the word delay and pause,
but that really just tables the problem. Are enough deals going to be signed in the next 90
days to where three months from now, we're actually in a better base case? Or are two deals going to
be signed out of the 75 countries that called us, and 90 days from now, we're actually in a better base case or are two deals going to be signed out of the 75
countries that called us and 90 days from now we're basically in the same place we were
because that's not great either you know in that case the 90-day pause was really just a breather
um so yeah this is just a dumb decision. Tariffs are too high. The timeline is not long enough.
Those are the parts of this that I'm criticizing. I do agree. And I've said this in the past and
I'll reiterate it again. I do agree with tariffs as a tool to reshore manufacturing and critical
industries, specifically in shipbuilding and semiconductors and steel. I want to see those
industries back in America. I support the necessary actions to get those industries back in America.
But that doesn't mean we need to have numbers like 145 percent.
And it doesn't mean we have to have a timeline like three months or two weeks.
We need a longer timeline.
We need to give American companies more time.
We need to give American citizens more time to find new jobs, especially
anybody employed in international supply chain, anybody employed in shipping. You know, these
people need time to find new jobs. Car companies need time to build new supply chains. Semiconductor
needs semiconductor companies need time to build factories in Arizona. This takes time.
You know, I wish we could snap our fingers and build a million
new factories in America. I really wish we could. It is not possible. And the stance we're taking
is that it should be possible that, you know, come on, guys, snap your fingers, get to move in,
start shipping your cranes and vehicle fleets across the ocean and firing your international
employees and rehiring American employees and training the workforces and, you know,
building new supply chain partners and financing new factories for parts providers. Like,
I mean, what are we talking about? Like, does anybody reasonable believe that this is doable
in three months? No, not a soul, not Bill Ackman, not Jamie Dimon, not Elon Musk, not
Larry Fink. And if you think they're all globalists, I don't know, pick your favorite
market person or financial person and see what they've said on this issue.
You know, even the ones that were in support of the policy have not been in support of the rollout
and think that this is just frankly poor policymaking. And I'm in that camp as well.
So, yeah, I just expect there to be more done here and I expect someone to cave. I just don't
know who it's going to be and I don't know when it's going to happen. But if it takes three months for China to come to the negotiating
table, it'll probably be too late. It needs to happen sooner than that. If it takes three months
of 150 or 250, whatever the number is, I don't even know what the number is. 250 now, 245%.
If those tariffs stay in place, then you kill everything. Kill jobs, kill investment, kill asset prices.
You get a full kill switch on the global economy if you keep those tariffs in place.
There's no alternative.
And I'd be happy to hear somebody convince me otherwise, but I don't think anybody will be able to.
But I'm happy to hear a counter to that.
But yeah, I'll let's go back to the panel.
But yeah, let's go back to the panel.
Enough of my ranting.
Enough of my ranting.
Stock Tug, if we did somehow snap our fingers and have those factories show up,
do we even have the labor force to support that?
If we do, we don't have it yet.
And people will say, well, Americans can do those jobs too.
Yeah, I'm not one of those people that's in the camp.
You've heard people like, you heard Vivek say this on the campaign trail. I'm not in the camp that Americans are somehow dumber or Americans are somehow less talenteditable spirit and capitalist energy. Like, I don't think
what America has is, you know, packageable and replaceable. But, you know, I do think we need
more infrastructure in place to have better homegrown, more talented workforces. I think
we need better education infrastructure in place. I think we need, you know, more attention to early career training the way that a lot of other countries do. I think
we need more specialization in our education. I think we need, you know, we need a lot of things
done at the infrastructure and at the bottom level to make America's workforce ready for,
you know, millions of high-tech manufacturing jobs now again
that can't happen overnight i wish it could but it can't
one of the things i'm trying to understand like game theory wise is why would you go to war
with mexico and canada and everyone else before you go to war with Mexico and Canada and everyone else before you go to war with China?
And then you're going to go and say, hey, everyone, let's be friends and go after China.
That makes no sense. You antagonize everyone and then you're like, oh, yeah, let's go after China.
If your ultimate goal was China, then why would you go i don't know this is it does it makes no sense
like it's this i think a lot of these policies are just basically trump shooting from the hip
and the administration having to just basically cover for him and then he kind of changes his
mind and then you know it's just back and forth back and forth i i know some people think that
this is like 40 chess like you know art of the deal, blah, blah, blah.
And then I have to like swiftly remind people, like, first of all, art of the deal was shadow written by somebody else.
Okay. And Trump has basically blown up six, six other companies.
And Trump, like his, his main real estate holdings are basically something that he just held for a long time.
Like, I don't think
he's run a very successful business. And now it's kind of starting to show that he's implementing
some of the same policies that made his other ventures fail. This indecisiveness, this literally
like moving in one direction and taking things away and then moving in a direction, why those
businesses failed. And now he's playing that same game here in the U.S.
Back in the first term, we had Gary Cohn and some of the other advisors around him keeping him somewhat.
There were like guardrails around him.
This time around, he doesn't have very many guardrails.
The only guardrail that I see right now is Scott Bessent.
And then everyone else is just basically like a court jester.
Yeah, Mr. President, you're the smartest guy in the world.
And like I said, no one's there to challenge him.
And I think we're dealing with the fallout of that.
Kurt, do you have something to jump in with?
Well, first, I just followed Chris Patel.
I had to chuckle a couple of times while he was speaking to me.
To me, he hit a lot of things on the head.
I think the game theory question is interesting about Canada and Mexico.
I think that that's just that President Trump truly believes that those are the easiest jobs to move back to America.
I think that that's what that's all about.
And the fentanyl, for sure.
But ultimately, it is pretty clear to me that this is a long-term mercantilist play that may or may not work out in our favor,
hard to know. I think that we ultimately, the laws of reflexivity just play out and we end up
back on the same long-term trend as we've been on for a hundred years. But, you know but we're deviating from the lines right now. And as an investor,
you have to understand that America has geographic, systematic, military, diplomatic, financial, technology, and labor force and legal advantages to the rest of the world.
And we're on the best piece of rock to boot. So the United States has
exceptional advantages to the rest of the world. And right now, I think that it's a legitimate question,
two legitimate questions. One, especially in light that Truth Social is going to be
offering portfolio management based on Trump policies, if there's a conflict of interest that is significant to the point of influencing things in a way that is
not good. I'm trying to be diplomatic here. And also with regard to Trump's business history,
you know, I do think it's pretty telling. I'm a very good amateur poker player that's cashed maybe a dozen professional tournaments.
And I try to think that way.
And one thing that I know, having gone to too many casinos in my life, is that they print money.
So the idea that you could bankrupt a casino has always just kind of blown my mind.
The idea that you could bankrupt a casino has always just kind of blown my mind.
And I think that Buffett's pointing out that had Trump just invested in the S&P 500 index, he'd be richer versus managing his own affairs.
So, you know, I don't want to pile on President Trump because I do think that some of the things he says are absolutely true when he points out the problems.
And I think that when he said, you know, the Bernie people should love me, I think there's pretty legitimate things there.
things there. The one thing I will say about the labor force, as one of the resident economists
who's overrated as a group, but pretty good individually, I think that the skills mismatch
in this country has to be addressed in a better way. I don't think either party has done a good
job, whether it's pushing people to choice or just having a rigid public education system.
I think that, well, we have between three and six million job mismatches right now.
And we have attitudes that maybe need some adjusting.
I think you probably, most of you saw the chart that was floating around out there.
75% of Americans want there to be more manufacturing and industrial jobs here, but only 25% of the people would do them.
You know, I think that between skilled trades and manufacturing and industry, and really the manufacturing industry jobs are at least engineering light types of skills are required. We need to focus
on that somehow educationally. And I think the healthcare system is on the verge of a crisis for
personnel. You know, I really think that we have to find a way to make post high school education,
make post high school education, well, high school education better, more like the German system,
and post high school education between community colleges, apprentice programs,
technical colleges, and then universities, we have to do that better. And again, I don't think either party's done a great job.
So, you know, it's not a partisan thing.
I just think that we have had decades of inertia punctuated by fits of bad policy that have left us in a skills deficit and, frankly, a motivational deficit for doing things.
You know, I've worked construction.
I worked in a meatpacking plant.
I was very proud when they let me cut the cow in half.
You know, we as Americans, you know, I don't know how much time you want to give me,
but when I was in college, went on a trip to Michigan to fish, and it was with my buddy's grandfather
and his best friend from England who had moved to the States.
They were both in the military, both World War II veterans, and they sat us down one
night, bought us the most amazing porterhouses ever because we didn't catch any damn fish.
But they said, look, at some point in your life, and we see the seeds of it now, and we think it started in the 80s, and this was 1992 when they were saying this.
They said, look, at some point America gets so fat, dumb, and happy that they end up being upset.
And then they do stupid things.
And they choose leaders and they misbehave and they don't do the hard work.
And then you have a crisis.
I don't know if that's where we're at, but I think we're too close to it.
to it. And I think that we individually need to deal with it. And as investors,
And I think that we individually need to deal with it.
you know, we have to recognize what Stock Talk said. This isn't going to be fast.
It's just not going to be fast. And the 10% tariff they said is a baseline. I believe them.
I believed it when Musk said there'd be some pain on the front end. I believe it when they say 10% is the baseline. I'm actually kind of okay with that. You know, if they put it all
towards border security and infrastructure. So instead of tax breaks for guys making a million
bucks a year. So I would just say as the economist here, there's a lot of small things from education, actually a lot of big
things from education to attitude, to tax policy, to unwinding the reciprocal end of the tariffs,
except where they're very specifically needed to get this all accomplished. And I do think the game
theory part of Mexico and Canada is Trump just thinks those are his jobs to take. And I do think the game theory part on Mexico and Canada is Trump just thinks those are his jobs to take.
And I really don't know that that's neighborly.
By the way, the White House press secretary is set to start talking a little bit, and apparently she's going to have a special guest, is what the report was.
So it might be LeBron, it might be Jerome Powell, we don't know, we'll see.
Yeah, I've got that pulled up, watching that.
Market did rally there a little bit at the end of the day to close down. Kikiku 3%, Spy 2.2%.
Costco announced a dividend increase was the only real news story that kind of caught my attention.
After hours there, Evan, did you have anything else that you saw?
It looks like Intel put out something similar to what NVIDIA and AMD put out.
I don't know how much the impact is, but yeah.
Looks like that also came on in that browser.
You are on mute right now if you are trying to talk.
But, if no one is talking here, which is only Chris, do we have you?
Yeah.
You know what's pissing me off a little bit?
Not that the markets are down.
I could care less the markets are down right now because I have a hedged position.
But what's really pissing me off is that because of all of this
that's happening right now, Bernie and AOC are starting to get popular.
And let me tell you this, like I was in the car with my wife and she was telling me about
her girl's trip that she just came back from, from Denver.
Believe it or not, there are people willing to vote for AOC and Bernie to get down.
And I'm like, wait, what?
Like, are you like you thought that the economy was bad under Trump?
If Bernie and AOC are the ones that end up being the leaders of our economic policy,
we are going to be in a world of hurt.
I mean, this is the same woman that said Amazon shouldn't come to New York City because it's going to hurt poor people. I was like floored by that because I lived in New York. So I was like, wait a second. Amazon is coming with all these jobs, all this money to expand. And she was like, no, we don't want them. Like that is the person who could possibly be in a position to dictate economic policy in the US.
And it's this pendulum that keeps swinging back and forth.
And the pendulum keeps getting harder and harder on the other side.
So we got Trump and then we had an overreaction with the whole Biden thing where we accepted
Biden and then the pendulum swung back even harder to Trump.
Like, are we going to get full-on socialist when the pendulum swings
the other direction until something like moronic happens and the country basically goes under i
mean is that like how empires end where you just have these wild swings and policy and you don't
get the common sense guy anymore in the middle i mean mean, come on. Like, like, I felt like maybe the politicians,
like in 20 years ago, it was, it was pretty, pretty simple, right? Control the border,
keep the economy strong, right? Educate your people, keep healthcare spending in check. I
mean, these are all common sense policies and I, no one wants to do them. Everyone's just like,
oh, I mean, just swing this shit in whatever direction. And what's funny is the leaders we get right now, we have to make a
choice. Either men are allowed into girls' bathrooms or terrible economic policy. This
is where we are in society now. I think what's, you know, there's actually an interesting appearance.
And, you know, I think another thing I want to mention, I know there's going to be people that
are pro-Trump, anti-Trump. As somebody that supported this administration, what I will say
is put my bias aside. We can address this topic without commenting about our opinions on any
politicians. We can address this topic purely from a policy standpoint.
And I think that's probably a more intelligent way to do it.
I think it's probably more informative for the audience as well.
So I think, you know, we don't need to give our personal political opinions
just to criticize the policy or be supportive of the policy.
So I want to make that point first and foremost.
Second thing, I do think there's an interesting idea about how speaking of political parties in the United States, the view, the economic view of the Republican Party has changed. referencing this, but you go back and look at Bernie interviews from as recent as 2017,
2018, 2019, and he was very pro-tariffs to bring back middle-class jobs to America,
was sort of almost pounding the table on it. And there's a period of time where a lot of
the progressive left in the United States was pounding the table on tariffs
as a way to bring fairness back to the American worker in a system of international trade where
companies were just prioritizing the best labor costs they could get without regard to providing
jobs for the country they're from or whatever else. So that premise has changed in the last seven or eight years or so,
maybe in the last decade, where a lot of the new conservative movement
actually sees tariffs as a tool to affect the same sort of change.
So it's kind of like this, what was formerly a progressive left policy is now being adopted by new conservatives because they view it as a way to protect America and deliver an America first agenda. For me personally, my opinion is somewhere in between where I do think tariffs are
an effective strategic tool. And I do think they should be used for the industries, like I mentioned
earlier. But I don't think they should be used in a sweeping fashion. And I don't think they should
be as high as they are. So I think you can have a nuanced view on this. I don't think it has to be
one or the other. But I do think it's interesting, as you mentioned, how it does seem that Republican economic policy has shifted from,
you know, modern Republicans like, you know, Reagan, who obviously was not pro-tariffs.
You know, he saw them as a strategic cool
and did not see them as a long-duration solution.
Or even if you look at more recent modern Republicans,
he gave him go to, you know, the Bushes,
and, you know, they as well were sort of globalists
in the sense that they wanted free trade
and were not in favor of sweeping broad tariffs.
So, yeah, political attitudes have shifted in this country, probably for different reasons. wanted free trade and and and we're not in favor of of sweeping broad tariffs so yeah political
attitudes have shifted in this country probably for different reasons i don't think the new
conservative movement is adopting a formerly progressive left position for the same reasons
right they probably have a very different lens on it they view it as protectionist the progressive
left probably views it as a way to uplift the middle class. Those kind of overlap, but they have a different lens on them in terms of policy support. probably born from a place of emotion.
You know, when I wrote about this topic
and why I was not in favor of the role out of the policy,
I wrote like a pretty long form post.
I don't know, some of you might have seen it in the audience.
Maybe some others didn't.
But when I wrote that post, I made a point that said,
look, I empathize with, you know, Americans in middle America
who have generations of family in a single industry.
And when you ask those people, hey, what are middle class jobs to you?
They're going to tell you.
You know, my grandfather built cars.
Or my grandfather worked in a steel mill.
Or, you know, my grandfather, whatever, built something in America, right?
He was a coal
miner or any of these jobs, these traditional middle America legacy family jobs where your
grandpa did it, you know, his son did it, his son did it. And, you know, it becomes these sort of
families develop an emotional attachment over these industries. And I think rightfully so.
I'm not dismissing the fact that they do. What I'm saying is, is that a lot of times people
become so connected to industries as a way of providing for their families that they
become tunnel visioned on the idea that the only way to bring back economic prosperity to the
people in their communities and the people in their families is to bring those specific jobs back. You know, no, I don't want to make
some other high tech product. I want to make a car because, you know, my, I've had generations
of family that have worked in Detroit building cars and I want to build a car too. And it's like,
And I want to build a car too.
And it's like because of the way economies change and transform as they become wealthier, sometimes economies naturally lose industry.
And I have to keep swinging back to this point because without reiterating this point, people will continue to think of my opinion differently.
But I am in favor of doing
that in very specific industries. As I've said multiple, multiple times, the problem becomes when
you develop the belief that all industry can be brought back to America. That is not true.
Right? All industry cannot be brought back here. Apparel manufacturing cannot be brought back here because our our our wages are too high.
Our people earn too much. And again, I say that broadly speaking, because I know there are poor Americans and I know there are Americans in middle America and forgotten rural communities that are struggling who would love to have even minimum wage jobs.
And I'm not saying that those people should shouldn't have those jobs.
What I'm saying is, is that even at the American minimum wage, you cannot compete with the labor labor cost of these other nations.
You just can't. And so there are certain certain industries that we won't be able to bring back.
Right. And so I think our focus should be on the ones that we can bring back,
the ones that have higher, high paying enough jobs that Americans can fill those roles and do well.
And, you know, the products can still be priced appropriately.
That that makes sense, I think. And I wish more people were
thinking that way. But it seems that most people I've talked to, and most people on my Twitter feed,
at least, are on polar ends of this issue. And both sides are speaking in absolute terms. It's either tariffs and big tariffs on everyone or no tariffs, tariffs are bad.
You know, you can never use them. And I don't think either of those are the answer.
I think both of those positions are frankly ridiculous. You know, they can be used as a
strategic tool for developing economies.
They're not just reserved for infant industries, although they're more effectively used when they are used to protect infant industries.
They can be used by developed economies for very specific strategic national interests.
That's the reason that a mature economy like the United States would employ these things, not so that we can, you know,
protect our infant apparel industry. Like, you know, it's just that sort of stuff is nonsensical.
And not to mention our apparel industry and retail industry is an infant anyway. We have multiple,
you know, 50 plus billion dollar companies in retail and apparel. So my point is, is that we're not a small economy anymore.
We're not a young economy anymore. Most of our industries are very mature. They can compete on
the international stage. They don't need the government's help to do so. Most American
industries produce world-class products. We still manufacture more stuff than anyone but China.
We still manufacture more stuff than anyone but China.
You know, we still have world-class leading manufacturing.
Look at what SpaceX builds and show me any other company in the world that builds what
SpaceX builds or anything close.
SpaceX arguably has the most advanced technological hardware on the planet, and it's made in America
by Americans, right?
Whenever somebody says, oh, America doesn't make stuff
anymore. I always send them a picture of the starship. I'm like, does that look like stuff?
Cause we made that and we made it here and American like, yeah. Is there imported talent
at SpaceX? Yeah. Like there is at every other American company, but they build great things
build great things in America. So do so many other great American companies that we forget about,
in America. So do so many other great American companies that we forget about, you know,
you know, Tesla, the cars that they sell here, they build in America, right? Do they have
international cars too? And do they have a ton of exposure to China, like a lot of other American
companies? Yeah. But that's the product of 30 years of globalization, 40 years of globalization,
where companies have reached out to the international markets. Why wouldn't they?
We were in a system of international trade.
You know, some people now, like I've seen comments,
these sort of comments on people's threads where, you know,
there's a lot of American small business owners
that have been posting about this policy saying, you know,
why they want reprieve from it
and why they think it should be delayed or adjusted.
And you see people in the comments saying,
well, you're not really an American business. You know, you might be American and you might sell to Americans, but you're getting your stuff from abroad. So you're not
an American business and you should fix that. And, you know, sucks for you, but get with the program.
That's the type of comments I'm seeing on these posts. And I'm disappointed by that as an American to say that we are we're pointing the finger to American businesses, homegrown American businesses built by Americans who were born in America that by no fault of their own access the global economy.
the global economy, because they were allowed to for the last 40 years. In fact, they were
encouraged to do so for the last 40 years, right? Put yourself in the shoes if you're not a business
owner, which, you know, some of you in the audience might be, some of you might not be.
If you are or aren't a business owner, put yourself in the shoes of one and say,
okay, if I operated a business over the last 40 years and I could find cheaper labor,
maybe cheaper services, certainly a higher volume of clientele by going international with my product, by accessing international product markets.
Would I just not do it out of principle?
Right.
Would I not do would I not seek higher margins and more volume on my business out of out of just out of principle to say, well, all my
business, everything I do should be in America, because if it's not, then I'm not American and
I'm anti-America. And, you know, I'm a traitor to my country because I found a cheaper supply chain
abroad, which may allowed me to make for better priced products for the American market. That's
insane. Like, that's an insane position to take in my opinion we're blaming american small businesses
because they access a free international market and now by reverting this policy in such short
order we're forcing those businesses to unravel 30 40 years of reliance without an outlet and we're
not giving them an offer we're just saying
hey fuck you you should have been buying american the whole time and guess what now you have to and
you have to do within three months or you're screwed let's take a look at just one example
of where we win when we don't focus on this whole like oh we need to reshore everything
look at the guy who developed the ring camera. He went on
Shark Tank. He had the ring camera. They didn't like it, whatever. He ended up getting funding
from elsewhere, made the product, sold it. Amazon took it over. Amazon manufactured it in whatever
country and then sold it around the world. All of that capital came from that person working on that
idea, getting it, and then being able to cheaply manufacture it, sell it to the rest of the world.
And what happened? All of that money came to Amazon. All of that money came to him as an
entrepreneur, right? And that is the story with most businesses where instead of focusing on the
production part of it, we focus on the innovative portions of it.
And that innovation is what makes us a thriving economy where people are like, listen, I don't want to just make widgets.
I want to design widgets. I want to improve widgets.
I want to work in an industry that that tailors to different segments.
I mean, our talents could be used somewhere else where
the total benefit comes to the country. I mean, look at all these people that come on Shark Tank.
You think half of them could even remotely produce what they're producing if the cost
basis of the product that they have was something that couldn't be sold internationally? I mean,
you think about it. It's because China makes things super cheap that we're able to sell to everybody else. If we ended up using just American labor, the cost of that one item would be so high. We couldn't sell it anywhere else. Literally, you couldn't sell it anywhere else in the world. And you could say, oh, well, we kept manufacturing here in the US. Yeah, but the rest of the world couldn't afford what we were building. So what happened? The entire business doesn't work. The math doesn't work. So instead of focusing on trying to bring
everything back, yeah, there's certain industries for national security, totally agree we should
bring back. But dude, let us, let Americans be Americans. Let people find their way into the
most innovative parts of the economy okay and you it doesn't
mean and you don't need this my daddy was a steel worker so i want to be a steel worker okay that's
fine that's a that's a noble profession you know go for it if you can find one but if you can't
find it find something else that's going to be able to utilize your talent you know and i and
that's the other thing too like we have a, very talented population when it comes to innovating things.
And we're saying, no, no, no, you don't need to innovate.
You need to just get with the program.
You need to do things that everyone else is doing, like conform.
And I'm anti-conformist.
I'm always about let people choose where they want to go.
And this is, this is not the way to do it, which is, I don't know, like, I'm hoping still to this day, that what we're seeing right
now is some sort of, I want to hurt the economy in the short term, so I can long term take credit
for, you know, for, for the recovery portion, you know, and maybe that's the mindset that's happening here.
Because I think there has to be a breaking point
where the economy is going to collapse.
A lot of people are going to get hurt.
And then it's like, oh, well, you know,
we're here to help and we're here to support.
Yeah, but it's too late.
It's almost like you bring the economy to the cliff
and you're about to toss us off and you pull us back.
And it's like, see, look how good, good of a guy I am.
I didn't toss you off the cliff.
Yeah, but you're the one who brought me to the cliff in the first place, bro.
You know?
Yep.
It's a, it's a shit show.
Do we have a hard stop today? no i do not think we do right
no we are we're all good who's the special guest um it was lebron james actually
okay evan's trolling i don't know who it was uh it was it doesn't look like it's anyone market
related yeah there's a lady talking right now that has something to do with this I don't know who it was. It doesn't look like it's anyone market related.
There's a lady talking right now that has something to do with this
court. The guy that
got sent to El Salvador.
Terrorists is what they're calling him.
Deportation, that whole story
that's been going on. There's a lady
talking right now. This is the only thing that's come out so far.
I'm watching.
We do have Frank up here here we haven't heard Frank talk
plus I just can't hear him I saw some JPMorgan estimates out of boat for Nvidia and AMD talking about the hit that they might end up taking in video
was like 15 to 16 billion in their data center segment
out of like $180 billion of revenue
was what JP Marianne was saying.
Any interesting analyst reports out?
I feel like we haven't talked about that much
over the last couple of days.
There was a lot of stuff out this morning.
I mean, I already brought that biotech one that I bought.
But outside of that, I mean, yeah, there's a lot of commentary,
mostly negative commentary on individual stocks.
Analysts are starting to point out what names they see performing well
during a recessionary environment.
You have people going back to their global financial crisis books.
Jeffries was talking about three names they think are performers.
What were the three names?
I actually only have the report on one of them, which was from Grocery Outlet, ticker
GEO, which I think actually ended up performing well today on that report. Let me check.
Yeah, it was up about 5% today on that report. But Jeffrey says, we believe value retailers
with grocery exposure are the best
positioned in the current week economic environment. And grocery outlet fits well to
this framework. Grocery outlet is undergoing a turnaround after operational missteps
that resulted in lower than average EBITDA margins. Value is at the core of this biz model.
And during the global financial crisis, grocery outlet outperformed most retailers. It was plus 27% over comps on a two-year stack during the global financial crisis
versus a grocery peer average of just 6%.
We believe Grocery Outlet can return to outperforming as the company improves its price gaps versus peers.
Based on our study and survey, customers defer to grocery outlet during times of economic weakness.
Their basket is significantly cheaper than peers like Wegmans, Giant, and Target.
The only peer with lower prices was Walmart.
However, we do see Walmart at risk due to multiple in a weaker economic scenario.
However, we see upside for grocery outlet relative to SSS and expect 2025 and 2026 comps of 2.9% versus the
current consensus of 2.4% and 3.2% versus the current consensus of 2.8%. We're raising our
price target to $18 from $13 and upgrading the stock from hold to buy. That's from Jeffries
this morning on grocery outlet. I thought that was an interesting report. I wanted to snag it
this morning at near flat, but I couldn't get it in pre-market so i didn't take it but it ended
up doing well today uh i think closed up about five and a half percent um very similar to the
commentary that has been out recently on stocks like easy pawn ticker easy pw you go pull up that
chart you look how well it's held up in this market environment it's pretty shocking like no one has sold that stock so pawn shop stocks value grocery retailers um have been incredibly strong
in this market most of them have not even given up their daily 21 emas which for people that know
their charge is a pretty thin line in the sand and you know the vast majority of even market
leading names sold way below that spot
many weeks ago. So there are a handful of names holding up well. In another area is specialty
insurance that's been holding up really well. One of the names that I've owned in that category
pretty much all year has been Heritage Insurance, ticker HRTG. If you look at that stock, it's up
pretty dramatically year to date and it's done nothing but go up. You look at that stock, it's up pretty dramatically year to date. And it's done nothing
but go up. You look at how it's performed during the market corrections and it hasn't budged,
right? That stock's up 50% year to date, 48% year to date. And it's a specialty insurance company.
You had another one get commented on this morning in specialty insurance by Piper Sandler,
which is Bo Specialty Holdings,
sticker BOW. They put a $44 price target on it. Not a dramatic amount of upside,
but I understand the conservatism considering the market environment. But even if you go pull up
Bo, it'll look very similar to the HRTG chart that I just mentioned. Extremely, extremely strong in
this environment, right? That stock's above the daily nine and 21
EMAs. Can't say that about a lot of stocks in this environment, right? So specialty insurance,
value retailers, pawn shops, this is where the bid is right now. Now, is that indicative that
recession is coming? Well, yeah, that would indicate so, but it doesn't mean that that
bid's going to remain there forever. You know, if these names start to lose strength and break down, I think that'd be a pretty
positive indicator for the breadth of equities.
But you're continuing to see a day-to-day bid on these names.
You're continuing to see very, very strong support on these names.
Like sellers are not flocking in.
You know, you look at your market leading names, your tech names, your semi names.
On market down days, those are dropping 6%, 7%, 8%. Even your mega caps are dropping 5%, 6%. Those are big drops. Those are hundreds of billions of dollars of market capitalization
erased. Some of these small and mid cap names in the categories I mentioned are not selling at all.
You're talking about down half
a percent on days like today. Another area of relative strength that I've personally noticed,
and I do have some exposures here. One of my favorites is Kratos. You look at ticker KTOS,
look how well it's held up in this market environment. During that whole defense spending
drama, it came, peeled down to the 200 days. Since then, it's rallied from 26 to 33 in a choppy
market environment. That's a big move. And another stock holding above its daily 9 and 21 EMAs.
You want to go deeper into that mid-cap defense basket? Cool, we can. Let's go to MRCY,
2.8 billion market cap above the daily 9 and 21 EMAs. Look at how it performs on days where
the market's down. Tons of relative strengths.
Another mid-cap defense name, look at Leonardo DRS, ticker DRS, above the 9 and 21 daily EMAs.
No selling on this name during days of market weakness. It was on 1% today.
You know, Mercy this week, I think, was even up on the week. You know, you look at Kratos,
it was up a percent today.
So there's spots of strength. They're few and far between. They're very, very specific. In order to find them, I don't think you can take a traditional sector-based approach to this market. I think if
you're trying to be a long trader in this environment, you want to stock pick effectively,
I think you have to take an industry-based approach. Stock picking becomes harder during choppy markets and highly volatile markets. It becomes even harder when you pair that
volatility with macroeconomic concerns. And that's the environment we're in right now. So,
you know, you can't really take a broad-based approach to finding relative strength in this
environment. You can't pull up a sector chart and say, well, that's three days of relative
outperformance for healthcare. I'm going to buy it, you know, healthcare and call it a day. You
can't do that because it's not the entirety of these sectors that's performing. It's very specific
sub-industries that are performing well and very specific sub-industries that are holding up. So
if you want to capture, you know, longs in this environment, which is hard to do.
you know, longs in this environment, which is hard to do.
Kirk, I saw you raise your hand.
Oh, no, I was just going to get in on some of the earnings talk when you were finished up.
No, I'm finished up. Go for it.
You know, I follow earnings pretty closely.
pretty closely. I know it doesn't always sound like I do, but that's high on my list.
I know it doesn't always sound like I do, but that's high on my list.
And at the start of the year, FactSet and Refinitiv had the consensus earnings growth
for the year at between 11% and 12%. Right now, they're down to between 7% and 8%.
And I think that six or eight weeks from now, we're going to be making a run at zero.
that six or eight weeks from now, we're going to be making a run at zero.
So I would watch tomorrow's earnings closely because you have some heavy hitters in there,
including Taiwan Semiconductor, American Express, Blackstone, Schwab is out there.
They'll probably blow things out on the trading.
But Manpower, a bunch of other banks.
I think tomorrow's potentially one of the canaries in the coal mine.
Blackstone is on my buy list.
I only have about 40 stocks that I really consider to be on my buy list.
And my buy price for them is below $100 a share.
below $100 a share. I would be surprised if they don't toot their own horn, but they warn
significantly about the way things are going. So I would be really interested if I were anybody
watching the market at what Blackstone says tomorrow morning. I think that'd be one that
everybody should be listening to.
Do you think we're going to see more of this UAL-style guidance?
Where they're giving us two forms of guidance, one for recession case scenario, one for base case?
I don't know.
I guess some companies will do that, especially the manufacturers.
I guess it makes sense for UAL and Delta and some of the airlines.
I've been flying around a lot lately.
Back in February when I was in Vegas, I told you all that Vegas was slow.
We know that travel has fallen 20%, 30 percent is what they're talking about.
I mean, I'm getting I'm getting my 10 percent month over month alone.
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, yeah, I guess you could get that.
You know, I guess that's kind of how we do things. Right.
We have our base case and then we have our to the moon and to the shitter cases.
So, you know, I guess it's concerning to me that they have a to the shitter case, right?
So I just I think Blackstone as, you know, one of the 800 pound gorillas in private equity.
I think they're a very good company to listen to, especially since they're conservative on their private credit.
You know, some of the companies that are aggressive on private credit, they scare the hell out of me. Blackstone, I like the way they're managed. KKR too. So I, yeah, Apollo to
an extent. But, you know, those three, listen to those three earnings because their insights on on the economy are pretty deep.
And if all of a sudden, six or eight weeks from now,
2025 earnings growth is supposed to be almost zero, right?
If it goes from 11 to 12 to 7 to 8 to 2 to 3 or something along those lines, you know, how do you keep valuations still at that second standard deviation to the high side?
You know, how do you keep that?
You know, at some point, you know, I don't know if we ever, ever get back to the baseline with all the money in the world.
But I just I can see 20 and 30 percent coming off this market pretty easily, actually.
And I want people to listen to Blackstone.
If I had to tell anybody to listen to one report, listen to Blackstone tomorrow morning.
Yeah, I'll be listening.
I think a lot of the earnings are going to matter.
I do expect there to be a lot of what UAL did.
I do expect there to be a lot of what UAL did.
I think, you know, first of all, it's very rare, as you know, Kirk, for companies to do that.
But I think they did it early in the earnings season to attempt to set a precedent.
I expect other travel companies will probably follow that precedent.
I also think some of the companies that have extreme exposure to tariffs, companies like the apparel retailers, right, like your Lululemons of the world, Nike.
I think those companies also have an incentive to do this because, again, especially the EPS outlook is going to be dramatically impacted by this.
So I think the idea that these companies can provide a confident base case
without some sort of alternate scenario is kind of like ludicrous.
I mean, no matter how good you are at math,
no matter how good of a C-suite manager you are,
like, I don't know how you could do the math on that.
You know, like if in in one scenario tariffs are 100%
and in another scenario tariffs are 20%,
how do you do an EPS outlook?
I can't do one.
I know some pretty smart modeling guys.
If I gave them that scenario, they'd be like,
what are you asking me to do?
I can't model two completely dramatically different guys. If I gave them that scenario, they'd be like, what are you asking me to do? Like,
I can't, I can't model two completely dramatically different cost scenarios and expect to give you one answer. Right. So, um, I think more companies are going to do that, frankly. Um, I think you're
going to see more of this, Hey, in the case of recession, this is our guidance in the case of
no recession. This is our guidance in the case of tariffs staying on. This is hey, in the case of recession, this is our guidance. In the case of no recession, this is our guidance. In the case of tariffs staying on, this is our guidance. In the case
of tariffs coming off, this is our guidance. I think it makes sense to do. I know a lot of people
are going to think it's cheeky and sort of attempting to escape accountability. I don't
see it that way. I think it's just a reflection of uncertainty.
Look, UAL had a pretty positive earnings response on the idea that their base case outcome was pretty good. And if we don't go into a recession that, you know, people wanted to bid up that
stock. But I think with travel, it's much more binary. Like, I think we can look at travel and say, okay, you know, in a recessionary outcome, these guys obviously get slammed.
But, you know, in a non-recessionary outcome, they probably do fine.
That's a pretty sensible and straightforward thing to say about travel.
It is not that straightforward are other industries where you could get a recessionary outcome and the earnings results probably won't be that much different from a non-recessionary outcome.
And there are other industries where it's going to be dramatically different.
And the same thing applies to tariffs in a vacuum, even if you take the recessionary conversation out of it.
So, yeah, I don't know. It's a head scratcher.
I don't know how this earnings season is going to go,
but hopefully we find some spots of optimism.
I'm sure there's some CEOs out there that'll just...
Is Netflix going to be one of them?
I pinned the earnings calendar up in the nest above for tomorrow,
and there's a link below if you guys want to find that.
It has more information.
But Netflix is one that they came out yesterday or two days ago or what,
and this was like an internal meeting.
They said put some big lofty targets out there to double revenue over the next
five years, double their valuation, whatever it is.
So is Netflix going to be one of those arenas?
Or is Netflix tariff proof?
Are we going to tariff Netflix?
Yeah, I think Netflix – look, I think part of the reason Netflix and Spotify had such strong bids at the start of this scenario, I don't know how they've done since I haven't really paid attention to much attention to those stocks.
But part of that is tariff immunity. And part of that is the idea that in an environment where prices are broadly picking up, right? Like this happened during COVID as well.
When, or it also happened during the Russia-Ukraine war, okay?
When you have spurts of inflation, broad inflation, okay?
And you have specific supply chains
that are causing that inflation, right?
Which is what happened during COVID.
We had a major supply chain issue.
And then during the Russia-Ukraine war,
we had a major commodity issue, right? Those are different chokes.
They're both still price chokes, but they're different chokes. But when you have either of
those scenarios, what happens is you get broad-based inflation, even in categories that
are not effective, right? Because the price sensitivity of the consumer dictates that if less price sensitive, right?
Then you're going to raise your prices too.
You're going to take advantage of that broad-based inflation and raise your prices too.
And that's exactly what you're going to see with software companies
and some subscription companies that are not directly impacted by tariffs,
but say, oh my God, the price for everything else are going up.
We're going to raise our prices too.
Now, there could be a
damning effect for that. Have you seen Sony
raising a lot of prices recently?
They're raising Europe and then whatever.
I just saw an article today. They're raising the price of their
subscription in Canada.
Dude, I was buying some stuff online a couple of
days ago and the prices seemed higher.
Maybe it's a placebo. I fucked up
my phone last night.
I'm on a secondary phone. I got to go to the Apple store. There's no Apple store here. That's a placebo. Stack Talk. I fucked up my phone last night. So I'm on like a secondary phone.
I gotta go to the Apple store, dude.
Running out of plane.
There's no Apple store here.
That's the problem.
What?
Oh, in Puerto Rico?
Yeah, there's like third-party ones or whatever.
But I have Apple care.
I just want to like, you know, go to the Apple store.
Yeah, I gotta get that new phone and new iPad.
I feel kind of naked, honestly.
I don't know about an iPad
I like having an iPad just for when I'm walking around I like to walk around a lot but um so I
saw a video of a guy like taking a video with his iPad like on the train while everyone else was
using their phones that's you no no no no I don't like no I mean walking around in the house. I don't take... Gotcha. Okay, well, you... That's what you think what it sounded like.
You think I just, like, carry my iPad in public?
Yes, that's what it sounded like right there.
Just that.
No way, no way.
But anyway, what was I saying?
What were we just talking about?
Something about China or tariffs, probably.
Netflix.
No, we were talking about earnings.
Netflix, yeah.
The SaaS public, like, survived. Yeah, subscription Netflix. Yeah. Subscription businesses. Yeah. So
subscription businesses get greater pricing power during periods of broad-based inflation because
by virtue of the consumer being durable or less sensitive to the price increases. So
that's one advantage, but also they're just blankly tariff insulated. And one thing I think
is going to happen if this tariff situation stays in place, which for now, let's just operate under that assumption,
because I don't know who's going to blink first, but let's operate under the hypothetical
assumption that these tariffs remain in place for the rest of the year. What I think is going to
happen in the next few months is you're going to see a more specific trade develop under the market.
So right now the market's trading as one big trade, right?
For the most part, everything's selling when the market's selling.
Everything's getting bid when the market's getting bid up, right?
And it's happening in a pretty broad-based way.
Remember that market rebound last week?
Everything got bid and got bid huge, right?
Some stocks were up 20%, 30%, 40% last week.
So right now it's one big trade, but what's going to happen, I think, as the market gets more and
more used to this tariff outcome and they stay in place for longer is you're going to start seeing
a trade develop in the market where the non-tariff impacted names are going to start
getting monstrous bids. And a lot of the categories
I mentioned earlier when I was going through some of those mid-cap stocks, those are some of the
categories that I think could see those monster bids. But you're going to start seeing companies
that don't have tariff exposure, whose businesses and margins won't be impacted by tariffs. You're
going to start seeing money flow to those companies because they're going to be viewed as
the safe havens in an environment like this.
You know, I don't think and this might be controversial. I don't think your safe havens
are going to be the ones that they usually are in times of economic hardship. Like,
I think a lot of people are looking at analogs from the global financial crisis and dot com
bubble and saying, hey, where was the money rotating to then? Where were the relative
outperforming sectors then? And I think the issue with that thinking is those sell-offs and those
bear markets were related to serious underlying economic problems. This is more related to a
highly unpredictable overhead policy on trade that is having a waterfall effect on the rest
of the economy. So it's a little different.
And I think as a consequence of that, people are going to look for insulation more than they're going to look for outperformance. And I think a lot of those spots where people are looking for
insulation, areas like pawn shops, mid-cap defense, those areas are going to become your leaders as a
product of people seeking insulation for the tariffs. So that's my baseline view right now.
If the tariffs remain in place, I think the air, those sectors, I brought up four or five of them
earlier. I think those industries are going to become more and more obvious as this tariff
situation drags on because, you know, not everyone's going to stay in the sidelines in a market
environment like this. You are going to have traders. You're going to have fast money funds. You're going to have wealthy retail traders that want to get exposure to this sort of
new world order thematic.
And they're going to be looking for exposures that regardless of if tariffs go up, down,
sideways, regardless of tariffs last three years or three months, they'll be insulated.
And there's probably, I don't know, a bucket of at
least 200 names on the market that you can find that have decent charts that would fit that bill.
So I think over the next few weeks, that's where my focus is going to be on building a really,
really concise list of about 10 of those names that I think have proven technical resilience,
have the ability to outperform in a high tariff environment,
and have the ability to withstand weakness in the broader economy. I think if you can find a stock
or a company that fits those three bills, technically strong, tariff insulated, and
resilience in a weak economy, that'll give you a really good starting point to start creating a list
of stocks that could perform well in this environment. Not saying they will, but could perform well in this market environment. And the nice thing as a trader or as
a swing trader or even as a medium term investor, the really nice thing about being technically
literate in market environments like this is if you find a chart that is holding up well on the
daily, that's sitting above all its moving averages, you have points of risk. So you can have a short leash, right? Some people think the beauty of the stock
market is it's not a blackjack table. You know, if you put $100,000 into a stock, your downside
is not $100,000. You know, if you have a point of risk at which you've said, okay, I'm out,
you can really, really minimize your downside
risk, right? And so to market environment like this, you can be really tight with that and say,
you know what, I like this stock, it's tariff insulated, it's held up well, technically,
it's above the nine and 21 EMAs, I'm going to take a stab at it here. And if it gives up the 21 EMA
on the daily, I'll be out, that'll be my maximum point of risk, right? So that could be a 2% or 3% maximum point of risk for you. And in an alternative scenario, the stock outperforms for
an entire quarter and you find a winning position in a really tricky market. So the risk reward can
be good if you can find those market leading names, like some of the ones I brought up earlier
in this environment. If you can find those names that are holding up well technically. And to all the people that think, you know, line drawing doesn't matter, technical
analysis doesn't matter, you know, pull up the S&P 500 chart on the daily and pull up your 9 and
20 on EMAs and look at the action in the last two weeks and tell me that the levels don't matter.
You know, you'd be crazy to think so. We're getting action where we're pushing in to these levels within five to 10 cents, getting instantly rejected. We're seeing
a pretty good affinity to the moving averages, although it's on a downside. We're seeing a
pretty good affinity with respecting the moving averages from a technical structure standpoint.
And a lot of individual names are doing that too.
You know, some of these stronger names on big sell days, they're bleeding two or 3% coming down softly on low volume into their 21 EMAs.
And the next day, time we get a green day, they're ripping six, seven, eight, nine, 10%.
Those are where your opportunities are.
And there's a lot of those stocks, you know,
for those that are in our discord, we've been, we've been talking about a handful of them. We
picked up another one of them today. Um, and finding those stocks can give you some reprieve,
right? While your long-term holdings might be getting smacked, right? And a lot of people's
are, most people's are in this environment. You can can find upside trades you can find sort of hedges
against the broader market in a way even though they're longs um by doing that work right and
some of you who stare at the market all day or listen to these spaces all day or scroll your
twitter field all day like you might as well you're spending six hours looking at the market anyway
you might as well go and do some relative strength analysis, start making short lists, you know, find five, maybe 10 stocks that are doing really well in
this environment and be like, hmm, I'll find, let me find a good entry point on one of these and
just take a stab, you know, with a really, really tight risk parameter. You don't need to use
options. You don't need to use like weekly calls to do this.
You know, you can just buy shares, nice and easy,
set a one or two or 3% stop loss, you know,
and be like, I'll take a stab.
And if the markets go lower, okay, cool.
I'll cut it for a little loss and I'll revisit it later.
Because in a choppy environment like this,
you can't do much better. You know, none of you have a crystal ball.
You don't know if you're going to buy something and it'll be down 20% the next week. In an environment where indexes are swinging
five, 6% a day, yeah, that's going to happen. And so as a trader, you have to operate with a
strict risk environment. Obviously, for you investors out there who are accumulating shares
in your favorite companies, you're going to think a little bit differently. And you obviously probably not going to use stop losses. But even if you're one of those people, you know, be careful, be careful,
because you go look at some of the charts from 2022 and some of those names never recovered their highs, not even close.
You know, it's been years. We had two monster year bull market and some of those names
still aren't back to highs from 2022. Right. A lot of those are good companies that aren't going
anywhere that have moats, some of them, you know, and so you got to be careful pricing, you know,
what your stock was worth during the peak of a bull market, it doesn't mean the stock's automatically going back
to those prices. And if you just keep averaging into it in perpetuity, thinking that, you know,
it's going to go back there when the market recovers, be careful about that attitude.
Because market thematics change. And as a result of that, the multiples assigned to those thematics
also change. This is a tried and true fact for all of market history. The hot sector doesn't
remain the hot sector forever. Eventually, the markets move on to the next big thing,
and all the multiple premium goes there instead and sectors get left behind
great companies by the way that can last 20 30 40 years get left behind all the time and by left
behind i mean from a stock price standpoint you know some of them continue to be market leaders
in their industries but the stocks haven't moved in 10 years some of them continue to be market leaders in their industries, but the stocks haven't moved in 10 years. Some of them continue to have moats in their industries, but the stocks haven't moved in three and a half, four years, five years.
Why does that happen?
Attitude, energy, story, narrative, things that you can't measure with the balance sheet or with technical analysis.
You know, hype is a, it's a big thing.
Sounds like it's just, yeah, whatever.
You're talking about market hype, who cares?
It matters a lot.
It matters a lot to the way your stocks are priced, the attitude about those stocks, the
willingness to sell those stocks, the willingness to hold those stocks, that too.
Attitudes change. Price can change attitudes
sometimes. Sometimes just the price going down makes people lose faith. You see this all the
time, especially with cult shareholder bases like Tesla or Palantir or some of these small cap
companies that have cult retail shareholder bases. You see this all the time where when the stock's going up, no one asks any questions.
They're all just like, oh, we hit it.
We hit the jackpot.
We're all geniuses.
The stock's going up every day.
No one asks why it's going up.
No one asks if the valuation is tenable anymore.
But what happens when the stock starts going down?
Everyone starts asking questions, right right why is it down you know i i didn't care why it was up a thousand percent in two years
but why is it down ten percent now why is it down another ten percent why is it down another ten
percent where's the floor well it's a great company and it's down 30 from the high so it
must be a great buy right wrong all the greatest companies you can think of have gone down 80, 90% from
their highs. Some of them more. My point is, is that marking the value of buy based on the extent
of the drawdown is a poor way of doing things. And in the very long run, when you do encounter
bear markets, you will bury yourself alive attempting this.
You'll be dumping money into a losing position that goes lower and lower and lower and lower and lower.
And there's a very good chance, a very good chance, that many of those positions will not return to their peak bull market highs.
That's just the truth.
The S&P 500 will.
Okay?
The S&P 500 will go back to all-time highs,
whether it's this year or next year
or five years from now, it will.
Or 10 years from now, it will.
Your individual stock may not, okay?
That's a simple, just like you have to pound
that into your head.
And this goes for investors and traders.
I know a lot of what I say, I talk to traders specifically.
I talk about stop losses and how what the technical picture looks like on the daily chart.
That's what I'm talking to traders.
This is not talking to traders.
This is talking to investors too.
Those of you out there who have been buying your favorite name for the last five weeks straight,
and it's just going lower and lower and lower and lower.
I'm not telling you what to do.
Keep doing whatever you think you want to do.
But just remember, there's no guarantee.
Nobody came to you.
Warren Buffett didn't come to you and provide you a guarantee
that your favorite stock is going back to all-time highs.
And there's a good chance Warren Buffett probably doesn't even own your favorite stock
because most of you own tech stocks.
May 5th, he's speaking.
I think I'm trying to go.
Yeah, I mean, I would love to go, actually.
Where is he speaking?
Omaha, Nebraska.
Annual press conference.
Annual shareholder conference.
Let's go, dude.
I'll go with you.
You got to try.
Omaha is a beautiful place, let me tell you.
You know, we actually – I'm still getting confirmation about my ticket.
I don't know if it's like 100% or anything, but
it might get four.
So there might be actually two extra.
I'm going to start getting on it right now.
I'll send you a lollipop.
No, it's not even that.
Just try and find another source.
You just have to be a shareholder.
That's it.
Okay. Proceed it. Okay.
Proceeding to buy.
Buy one share right now.
10,000 shares.
That's kind of the general process of it.
May 5th, yeah, Omaha, Nebraska.
Guys, I'm now a Berkshire shareholder.
Let's go.
Congrats.
You fly into Omaha,
you land in the middle of a bunch of cornfields,
and then all of a sudden there's a city that pops up.
A little cornfields.
Am I flying to Omaha, or is there an airport an hour away in Nebraska or something?
Is Omaha big enough to have its own airport?
I think Omaha's the only place big enough for an airport.
Gotcha, that's fair.
Because I think we played in Lincoln twice when I was in college
and we flew into whatever, the greater Omaha area.
Costco, by the way, today raises dividend up to $1.30 per share,
quarterly dividend.
Getting close to that $1.50.
It does feel natural.
I mean, all jokes aside,
it generally feels like that's where they're going to go next.
Stock Talk, I saw you tweet out the poly market, betting markets for the Fed's decision.
It's pretty much getting close to that certainty point.
It's been there once, but that Jerome Powell is not going to be cutting rates at this next meeting.
The June one is even, if I remember correctly, was starting to signal that he's not going to be cutting rates.
I think it was still actually signaling towards 25-point cut,
but I don't know.
The language is definitely not giving you confidence in that bet.
It's 46% 25-point cut, 44% no cut at the June meeting,
not the next one or the one after it.
So I'm watching these markets.
They change super quickly.
Obviously, that's kind of one of the points of them.
And then after 25-point cut is going in.
But that's definitely a conversation to watch.
Jerome Powell has spoken a lot over the last couple weeks as well.
Yeah, I think the reason markets shifted like that today
is because people heard the comments where he said,
we're not going to bail the market out.
Like, I don't know.
I don't know if people are stupid or something,
but I guess they are.
Like, are we genuinely in the belief
that the Federal Reserve does not care about the stock market?
Obviously not.
Like, obviously that would be stupid to think.
The Federal Reserve has always responded to market crashes
because they generally lead to a lack of economic confidence broadly.
And that's exactly what's happening right now.
This isn't just the market decline, which is part of why I think the criticism like
that some people are putting on like, oh, the only people that hate this tariff policy
are like the stock bros and the Wall Street bros.
First of all, 62% of Americans own stocks.
So it's not just the Wall Street pros.
Second of all, the impact that a market decline has on the broader economy is very real.
Yes, the market is not the economy.
But when companies' stocks go down, what do they do?
Your stock goes down 40%, what do you do?
You fire people.
You slow investment and CapEx spend.
You slow spend in general, frankly.
And you have a lesser ability to raise capital in more favorable terms.
Those are the four real, objectively true things that happen when a stock goes down.
That's not my opinion.
That is what happens when a stock goes down dramatically.
Okay? That's not my opinion. That is what happens when a stock goes down dramatically. OK, that is not good for the economy when all of the biggest companies in the country are having that happen at once.
When all of the biggest countries in the companies in the country, Jesus, are having their stocks go down 30, 40% consecutively, right, together,
concurrently, sorry, is the right word, then that's a problem.
That's a problem.
Did you share many thoughts on that Nvidia news story yesterday?
Because the one piece that I kind of wanted to pick your brain on is,
are we going to see some of our blue chip companies be used as pawns
in this war at this point i mean this this trade war quote unquote that people want to call it
we're seeing nvidia used as a pawn here in a way is that i thought going into today that
the market would take it that way and be a little bit self-shocked by that that development yesterday
do you think that's a problem?
And do you think that we will see, you know,
some of these companies being used?
I hate to use the term pawn, but that's kind of what, I mean,
they're using them as a chess piece here.
Yeah, I think it's a huge problem.
And the reason why I think it's a problem is because I think it's the
precedent it sets is dangerous. Like, you know, I, again,
this is something I've seen where people are commenting on that post that I made today about that. Like, you know, again, this is something I've seen where
people are commenting on that post that I made today about that. And they're like, yeah, let's
go exert maximum pressure. Like, don't let them get a single chip. You know, we can do this. Look,
I am no, no pro China guy. Okay. I'm not pro China in any way, shape or form. I think they're
the biggest threat to the United States in the world. And I think we do need to address them strategically. Okay. But
China can exert pressure on those companies too. Let us not forget that all of, not all of,
but most of the biggest American businesses, Apple, Tesla, Visa, MasterCard, go down the list,
Apple, Tesla, Visa, MasterCard, go down the list, have 20, 30 percent of their business in China.
This isn't Russia where we're selling some Coke and McDonald's and we have a few consulting companies and we can shift that exposure to Europe and sort of shrug it off like we did post Russia Ukraine war. We're just like,
okay, American companies leave Russia, they left. There wasn't much of an economic hiccup from it.
There was a little bit of short term impact. Some guys took a couple billion dollar hits,
you know, but, you know, over the course of a few years, it was a bump in the road for most
companies that had to shut down operations there. There are exceptions. There are a few companies that really suffered. I'm not saying every company made off well,
but broadly speaking, the largest American companies were able to shrug Russia off with
relative ease. On the contrary, that is not what can happen with China. You can't just shrug off China exposure.
Apple certainly can't do it overnight.
And Trump said yesterday,
I like Tim Cook.
I want to find some exemptions for Apple.
They're going to have to.
Or else iPhones are going to be fucking $3,000, $5,000
because there's not going to be
access to many of them.
And also, how are they going to move
manufacturing that quickly?
I mean,
they started moving manufacturing in India.
They got what,
like,
you know,
less than a quarter of the needed production there.
So that's going to take time too.
And they got to train talent pools in India.
yeah,
I think it's a huge problem because if we keep using NVIDIA and these
other companies as like levers to say, Hey, you know, NVIDIA, put pressure on China, go to another American company, put pressure on China.
I get why in theory it sounds good.
Oh, we're exerting leverage.
But it's bad because China will eventually do the same thing.
In fact, you go back last year.
You go back last year, I thought they were going to do it earlier.
I thought they were going to do it earlier.
Like when the Biden administration was putting all those restrictions on AI chips and China just restricted rare earth exports.
I was like, dude, we made off pretty good on that.
That's a pretty good tit for tat.
You know, although we really need rare earth exports, we were able to find American companies were able to find ways around it for at least a quarter or two.
companies were able to find ways around it for at least a quarter or two.
Now, China's been sort of, I don't want to say held back, but they've been restrained
on their use of levers.
Like if they want to, they could say, we're going to stop letting you sell American cars
in China, even if they're made here.
Then boom, Tesla stock goes down 30%, you know, or we're not going to let you operate American payment companies in China.
Boom. Those stocks go down 20, 30 percent, you know, or we're going to put a 150 percent tax on all Apple products produced in China before they're allowed to be exported.
before they're allowed to be exported.
You know, what does that do?
Apple stock goes down 20% on that.
Like, these are sweeping actions they can make in one day
that would lead to trillions and trillions of dollars
in additional market damage
and would also potentially lead to some of our companies
losing global leadership position as a result of that.
Keep in mind, one reason American companies are able to maintain the level of leadership that we are
is because they're so big, because they have so much capital and so much capital raising power.
Right. You look at the list of the top 25 companies in the world, 21 are American.
OK, like I know that's a flag waving moment
and hell yeah, you know, USA. But when those stocks go down, that reduces the leverage that
we have. You know, it reduces our economic influence on the rest of the world.
And it also makes the companies in these other countries able to be more competitive.
You know, there are other hundred plus billion, 200 plus billion companies in the world. There
are other companies. There aren't many outside of the United States, but there are. And in many
of those cases, they have better financial metrics than their American peers. But their valuations are much lower.
Why? Well, that's because our market has a premium. We have a $60 trillion stock market.
We make up the vast majority of global equities because everyone wants to invest in America
because America is number one. We've been number one since World War II. We've been the beacon of innovation.
We've produced the best products in the world, although the Chinese have produced many more of them and have been pretty good copycats in our wake.
But America's been the shit for 70 years.
Our debt has been the highest demand in the world.
I don't know if you get these Timu ads for a forklift or some weird stuff like a race car.
I get some weird Timu ads. I'm sorry. Continue on. No, I do get weird Timu ads. It's funny.
But my point is that we've been in pole vault position. We've been in leadership position
forever. And that's given our companies not only a huge market premium that they enjoy, by which they can raise capital, but it's led to huge amounts of foreign investment come into a developed country.
Right. When you look at foreign investment flows globally, where do they go?
Usually foreign investment flows usually go to quickly developing and growing economies.
Right. That's where people want to invest because they're like, there's growth there. We still are in the top five for foreign investment flows in the world,
even though we're the biggest economy in the world. And we're not growing nearly as fast.
Why do we get all that foreign money? Because we are number one. Our debt's the safest. Our
military is the strongest. We innovate the most. We have the biggest companies in the world. We have a third of all global consumption power. We are by far the most
powerful nation in the world. And we will continue to be, in my view, even in spite of these tariffs
and the economic turmoil they're going to cause. But by recognizing that we're the most powerful
nation in the world, we also have to recognize the susceptibility of our competitive advantages.
And one of those competitive advantages is the fact that American companies enjoy huge
market premiums and trade at massive market valuations, which allows them to dwarf their
international competition, right?
That is an ability you have to be careful about taking away.
It's part of the reason why the stock market is never allowed to crash.
It's why we got a V-shaped recovery during COVID.
It's why the global financial crisis was followed by a massive global fiscal stimulus effort
and incentive effort to reinvigorate economic activity.
We recognize the importance of a strong market as it relates
to a strong economy yes they're not the same thing they are intimately related and we need to find a
way to get that messaging through to the right people because you know enough ranting from me
and everybody else on twitter about this issue, hopefully people like Elon and people like Besant can sober up and get that messaging to Trump. And I don't mean sober up literally like
they're drinking. I mean, sober up in terms of the policy narrative and get that message to Trump,
because I think there's very few people that are close enough to communicate this to him.
I do think his intentions are good. I know a lot of people are going to knock that. I do think his intentions are to bring jobs back to America,
and he thinks tariffs are the right way to do it. I just think he's been poorly advised on
how to roll out that policy, and I think he's been poorly advised on what the consequences
of that policy will be on American people. Forget about the global citizen. What the impact is going to be
on American people, I think is disastrous and needs to be more closely considered. So hopefully
that'll happen. Again, there are some people like, you know, in the Trump administration that follow
me that hopefully read some of my tweets, you know, but I'm not going to name them.
But there are a handful of people.
And so hopefully you guys hear the concerns from people that support this administration.
Howard Letnick follows you?
No, but some very close Trump advisors, not just Elon, do follow me, though.
I'm not going to name them just because you can see them.
If you follow them, you'll see them on my Follow-by page.
But, yeah.
Ludnick does not follow me because...
Does Pan Bondi follow you?
Can you ask about pardons?
Why do you ask me one by one?
No, she does not.
But, yeah.
I just hope people in this administration are...
Does Kanye follow you?
Hearing...
No, he doesn't.
People in this administration are are does kanye follow you hearing no he doesn't um people in his administration are hearing uh the logic that's coming from people who support the administration and uh
want to see better policy making on this issue so that's what i'm hoping for but who knows
who knows well we're in a weird spot right now.
We're just waiting for this first trade deal.
There was some talks this morning around Japan and them coming over,
but I didn't see many headlines about what actually happened
from that meeting with the Japanese delegate.
I don't know, Emp, if you saw that.
Yeah, I haven't seen anything out of that.
That press briefing that happened a while ago was nothing.
It was basically they had a lady come out and talk about that immigration scenario, and that was it.
But at the very end, when she was walking off, Levitt did say that the president will be at a dinner tonight.
That's basically the only nugget we got out of the entire thing.
Food does taste good.
Hertz rental car is now up.
I'm surprised we did not get an update on Japan.
That meeting is over, so what happened?
We would have heard if it was good, is my thought.
Yeah, that's what's worrying me, too.
Wouldn't they have boasted it if it was good?
I don't know.
Hopefully we get some news on that.
There's been nothing out of there so far.
Do you see China out-memeing the U.S. right now?
The China-I'm-Busy account?
Do we need to hire some, uh, some meat, some meat lords.
I'd pay a cent or two if all Americans do it.
Urkel, I know you had your hand up like 40 minutes ago at one point.
I did. Yeah. Um,
this is probably going to take our conversation back like 30 minutes and I
put my hand down cause I was picking up my daughter from school and it was going to be noisy.
But it was related to Stock Talk's comment about areas of strength if markets are going to be weak and looking at potential sectors that may outperform. And I just wanted to chime in on that because he made
some great points. And I think the one sleeper for me, and I say this at the risk of sounding
like a bit of a crypto maxi, but Bitcoin has been holding up really, really well during these last
six, eight weeks or so. And if money flees, you know for short-term traders looking to catch big rallies or you know
big potential moves to the upside bitcoin may or may not be decoupling from the broader markets
we've seen it happen once or twice before in the past and if you look at the weekly chart
absent of the wicks up and down the bodies of the candles over the last eight weeks or so are
kind of sitting in that 80 to 85k range. So there's some significant consolidation going on
on Bitcoin. So that's just something I wanted to say, you know, keep your eyes on that, especially
if you're a short term trader. And I know there are long-term investors who are long Bitcoin who will also say you should have crypto exposure in your portfolio.
I'm not talking long-term. I'm just talking short-term for areas of strength.
Because, you know, while the administration is kind of going after global trade and it is impacting some companies,
and we're seeing it impact stock prices across the board, they're also very pro-crypto.
And crypto has held up very, very well. So that's just something I wanted to say, an area that could
potentially outperform, given this eight-week consolidation period. At the start of this
space, as I mentioned, MSTR at $3.05 and Bitcoin. and if you look at mstr it's down like
three four percent from last week's highs and it's up about uh forgive my math it's getting
late in the day but like 25 30 off that 230 low where it's also been consolidating so
you're seeing about an eight nine week week base forming on Bitcoin, whereas equities and the broader markets seem to be struggling a lot more.
So I just wanted to point out, and again, it's not being a Bitcoin or crypto maxi, just as a short term trader, if I'm looking at pockets of strength and given this administration stance on crypto, I wouldn't look past bitcoin making a significant move and then we know the
proxies tend to move quite violently too so just something i'm keeping an eye on and i just wanted
to point that out when stock talk was talking about um sectors that may outperform during weakness
bitcoin has held up pretty well uh through. Still hanging out around this 85. Maybe it dipped around, you know, Bob, but hanging out on this level pretty well.
Sorry, just to chime in real quick, because I know Stock Talk also mentioned moving averages.
It's, you know, Bitcoin's daily chart is sitting on the 5,920 EMAs on top of.
And the resistance point, I put a chart up on my feet if you want to have a look is
86.5 K on a weekly timeframe if we can close above that on Sunday
Or you know a Sunday from now not specifically this weekend
That could potentially initiate a bigger move up and you know when you look at risk assets an MSTR
That's one of the first stocks people started attacking when the downturn started. And it has held up considerably well over the last six, seven weeks or so.
So just sorry, just to jump in on that note, that's all I wanted to throw out there is
crypto is holding up exceptionally well.
Did you guys see the True Social or whatever? They're now partnering to make ETFs.
So we got Trump making ETFs.
Is he just going to throw in real estate and all the things that he has?
Is that where he's going?
I know Stock Talk, you were making the joke about his real estate stuff.
Do we care about Trump coin, the real estate?
If it's to make money, maybe that makes some more sense in some of the decisions.
You buying Trump coin?
No, I'm not. What's your thoughts on Bitcoin, though, actually?
I know you've had some thoughts here in the past.
You've had 12-hour
rant spaces with people about Bitcoin.
I don't know when that was.
Yeah, I mean,
it's a different time. It's held up pretty well.
Is it a good trading vehicle right now?
Yeah, I mean,
I think
it's held up well in the tail end
of the sell-off, but I mean, year-to-date
not really. Sort of performed
with the SPY year-to-date.
I do agree that
as we stand today, the technical
picture does look better
for Bitcoin
than it does for stocks.
So I will agree with that, with what Urkel said.
But I mean, you know, year to date,
SPI's down, what, like 10%?
And Bitcoin's down year to date.
I mean, I don't know.
What, like 12%, 13%?
Wow, I don't know what the number is.
But so, yeah, I don't think I don't think Bitcoin has been a safe haven per se.
I think the reason for that, too, is because there's a lot of institutional ownership now in Bitcoin, which has made it more tied to the broader market.
So I think when you see delevering events in the broader market, you tend to get downside of Bitcoin as well. I think it's kind of become more of a, I don't want to say traditional asset,
but it's become more of a market correlated asset
than it was years ago.
And I think that means Bitcoin's going to trade more in line
with equities.
Like I think in an equity crash scenario,
I think Bitcoin also goes down a lot.
So I don't know if it's a safe haven.
What I would look for
when I'm speaking about...
One thing Justy said, it definitely
has traded very close to
the markets recently, but also
this is a very different market than the last one.
I wonder if that correlation starts
to change at some point soon.
This is a very different type of global macro environment that if you totally in two years from now actually was good for Bitcoin in some weird way.
God, I hate how loud Twitter might get, but I mean like...
No, no.
That was actually the point I was going to bring up, which is that Bitcoin, whatever you may think of it, has no impact from tariffs.
Right? going to bring up, which is that Bitcoin, whatever you may think of it, has no impact from tariffs. Right. Like the enthusiasm that supports the price that is related to the health of the economy. Right. So there's a distinction there. Is Bitcoin impacted by
tariffs? No, Bitcoin's not a business. It doesn't have any physical products or goods. It's just a, you know, it's a digital asset, right? So from that perspective, yeah, it's tariff insulated. product of that, then the price gets earned. And when you see deleveraging of traditional financial
assets by institutions, they'll also delever their Bitcoin holdings in that case where babies get
thrown out with the bathwater. But yeah, I think multiple things can be true at once. First thing
being true, yes, it is true that Bitcoin has held up well in the last week or two weeks or so. It
is true that Bitcoin technically looks better here than SPY does.
Those things I think are true. What I don't think is true is that Bitcoin has been a safe
haven during the sell-off because it's down more year to date than SPY is. I also think that
as this sell-off worsens, if it does, you got to put an if before that because the sell-off may
not worsen, but if this sell-off worsens, I think you will see speculative assets get hit more.
And the local floors for those speculative assets can fall out and those stocks can go lower.
And that would include Bitcoin as well.
Other things that I think are true, Bitcoin is too big to fail now.
So I don't think it's going to zero.
I think 10 years ago, you could have made the argument that maybe it would So I don't think it's going to zero. I think 10 years
ago, you could have made the argument that maybe it would. I don't think it's going to zero.
So my opinion on that has changed. I do think now it's sort of an indisposable part of the
financial ecosystem. There's too much money in it now for it to just kaput to zero. I think it'll
function as a speculative exposure on markets the way most speculative assets do, which is that it
will go up a lot during bull markets and it'll go down a lot during bear markets. So that remains
my view on the way that it'll function. I don't think that right now people should be looking for
purely relative strength. I think they should be looking for purely relative strength.
I think they should be looking for relative strength with a reason, as I mentioned earlier.
And I think some of the industries I brought up, which are tariff insulated, I think are good to look at.
But as I mentioned, Bitcoin's technically tariff insulated too.
And so there is an environment where as the market rotates to this, which assets are insulated from tariffs, as the market rotates
to that trade, I do think there is a good shot that Bitcoin is a part of that trade,
that Bitcoin is one of the things that gets bid when that trade starts picking up steam.
But I also think the categories that I brought up earlier would get bid when that theme starts
picking up steam. The areas like,
you know, mid cap defense, which I've talked about all year, which a lot of those stocks are
actually still green year to date in this market environment. You know, stocks like specialty
insurance, which I brought up earlier, certain biotech names that are very cash rich, certain
government services names that are being prioritized. I've brought up this stock
before, but name like CoreCivic, who's doing detention services at the US border, right? And
just got a big contract renewed recently. And look at that chart. That chart's held up extremely,
extremely well in this market environment as well. So I think you find areas like that that have a reason to perform, that have logical
immunity to tariffs, but also have really, really strong daily charts and have shown you through
price, through price, that the market wants to keep those things, that there are not sellers
in those stocks. And so those, I think, the areas you pay attention to.
And yeah, to reiterate, I do agree with Urkel.
I think Bitcoin can become a part of that trade.
I think it has a good shot to become a part of that trade.
By the way, Trump did just put out a post, I think, about the Japan meeting.
Yeah, a great honor to have just met with the Japanese delegate on trade. Big progress.
So we did get some comments out about it.
Wait, what did he say?
He said that he met with the Japan
trade delegation
progress.
Doesn't say anything.
Well, that's good.
I mean, it's not bad.
Better than what we were saying before.
Meeting happens.
Yeah, I mean, at least we're chatting with somebody.
I mean, you know, Japan matters.
Japan probably matters more than anyone on the list outside of, like, China.
And because, keep in mind, the Japanese economic situation at home is volatile, too.
Right? the Japanese economic situation at home is volatile too, right?
Like that's an,
their economy is sort of a time bomb that we want to keep from going off as well. Right.
So there's a multi-tier incentive to getting something done with Japan.
Who's we is my question mark there.
It's clearly not everyone.
I guess not everyone.
I guess not everyone, but yeah, there's like,
there's a second order impact to japan's economy blowing up
um you know uh and and also with japan the currency trade with the end there's a second
and third order impact that u.s officials probably want to avoid as well i imagine that's why japan's
at the top list of the priorities one of the reasons i mean there's probably they're definitely
top five or top 10.
I mean, there's only five or 10 countries that really matter when you think about it.
If you're going to lump the EU together, UK, India, China, Japan.
No, Japan.
Japan is the third largest standalone GDP.
Like Japan matters a lot.
Like I said, more than anyone on that list outside of China.
Right.
I would say the EU matters more if you can collectively bargain with
them, right? If we're treating the EU as a single entity, then yeah, I'd put that over Japan. But
the list really goes China, EU, Japan. You can strike those three deals, then this whole tariff
thing is behind us. But those are three pretty big deals to sign, right? The EU seems like they're a little deer in the headlights right now with this whole thing.
So, I don't know.
I just find it funny that they, like, why pick the fight everywhere at once, you know?
Why not pick the fight one at a time and then, you know, let shock in and then bam, you know, your playbook.
Maybe you need to come up with two or three different strategies,
get a little creative with it.
Or maybe you just hit for trying to first and go for everyone else after.
I don't know.
Evan, go with the drug bar approach.
When you're drunk in a bar, you fight everyone.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, Evan, I couldn't agree more.
Why not take this step- step, country by country,
year by year, rather than
doing this in a
one swoop.
I don't know.
I don't fucking know what's going on.
See, Kevin's down there. Kevin, if you want to jump up
and get your thoughts.
Evan, have you used
Hertz rental car lately?
I have not.
I've never been using it though.
It's up by 120% from yesterday.
So he had one of those
exclusions where Buffett
didn't have the show for a while.
I wonder if he just wanted to do it
because Buffett did it.
Yeah, he wants to be the mini Buffett.
Did you see that leak that came out
that he's the one that suggested that headline?
Was it Forbes who released that,
or who was it when he was on the cover?
I did not see this, no.
Okay, there was a cover he was on,
I don't know, it was a couple years ago,
and it was like, the next Buffett,
and then somebody leaked this exchange he had
with the editor
when he said, you should title it
the next Buffett.
That made me laugh
so hard when I saw that.
He definitely has made some comparisons
here. We'll see.
I enjoy. He always
references Buffett when he's writing his like
you know, long posts. I enjoy looking at Buffett when he's writing his long posts.
I enjoy looking at Buffett's track record that he posts every year.
He's up like 5 million percent or something in the S&P 500,
something like 35,000 or something like that percentage in the same period.
Dude, Buffett's an OG.
Regardless of your opinion on Buffett, Buffett's an OG, dude. It's one thing, regardless of your opinion on Buffett,
Buffett's like an amazing stock picker.
And he speaks in very specific industries that he knows well,
that he knows the companies well and the industries well,
and he sticks with them for a long period of time and compounds.
He's a great investor.
Stock talk.
Who's the Warren Buffett of trading? Who's'll rush more give me give me some of your favorite
traders i mean for the definition of traders loose right but i mean i love drucken miller
peter lynch is probably my favorite of all time i've read like when i started trading and investing
peter lynch was like god to me. I still think Peter Lynch is like,
I think he gives the most astute market advice. When you listen to him talk, I think he makes
things that seem really complicated at face value, like managing expectations about markets.
I think Peter Lynch makes it really simple. I know this is a cliche that a lot of people say,
but I think the hallmark of an expert or a goat in something
is somebody who can make really complicated stuff
really straightforward and simple.
I think Peter Lynch is the best at that.
But it's not just that he's great at giving market advice.
His track record speaks for itself,
and he's historically a great, great trader.
So, I mean, obviously you have to give a nod to the Medallion Fund.
You have to give a nod to these hyper-performance funds
that have put up insane numbers.
But I would say Peter Lynch is my GOAT.
You should post more clips.
I know people are going to disagree with that.
His clips of him on here do well. You should post more clips. I know people are going to disagree with that.
The clips of him on here do well.
You should get some videos and post them.
Yeah, you know me.
I'm always too lazy to clip that stuff, but maybe I should. Yeah, I have some Peter Lynch videos that I've saved on my computer
that are really good, some classics.
Do you watch him every once in a while?
I do, dude.
I think he's brilliant.
I think he's great.
Peter Lynch is amazing.
All right. Who's...
No, never mind. I won't push you that way.
I was going to say... No, never mind.
Emp, over to you.
Before I just say something, we start going.
I think we're at the
point of the show where this is normally where you say something silly.
I was going to ask who your least favorite trader is.
I was going to start getting you to call people out if you want.
Nothing crazy.
I mean, I know he loves Michael Burry.
I know we love the fear and greed index.
Didn't get quite up into fear.
I think he's
I don't know, I think people glorify him too much
because of one big trade
but I think he's a short guy
no, I mean, I don't think he's on the level of
like Lynch and Druckenmiller
and Buffett, like not even close
I mean, look how much
money he has
I mean, it's more than I have, but he's talking hundreds of millions
when Buffett's talking like 320.
I'm not saying I'm better than Michael Burry.
I want to be clear.
I'm not saying he sucks.
I'm better than him.
I'm saying compared to the goats.
Do you think your portfolio will perform better than Michael Burry
in the next five years?
I don't have nearly as much money as Michael Burry.
I'm not nearly as successful as him.
Michael Burry is much more successful than me.
But I'm not knocking him for who he is.
What I'm saying is that compared to the GOATs, I don't think he's going to be.
Do you think by the end of your career versus the end of his,
you will be more nodes?
Not even close.
I will not have more money than Michael Burry.
You don't have the movie coming?
I don't expect to have more money than Michael Burry.
What would we have to do to get you more money than Michael Burry?
I don't know. Magic?
I did this.
This Aquin report did make me go and look at the 13F website that I used.
We're about a month away from where we should be expecting a lot of those coming out.
There was one or two, like Dodge and Cox.
They have $100 billion of assets under management or portfolio value,
but they own a lot of names in here.
There's not many other people
who are anywhere close to the $300 billion
that Berkshire Hathaway has.
Someone who sees them a lot.
They definitely do stand out.
We got AJ coming up.
What's up, AJ?
What's up, AJ? What's up, buddy?
Yeah, yeah. Anything you want to add
into the conversation? No, I'm listening
while playing Call of Duty Warzone.
Oh. You know, it's funny.
I actually might have gotten FIFA on.
There's a power outage here.
I have, so we have to do
a generator, so some solace
with Wi-Fi.
So, you know, not horrible.
I did break my phone.
It's been a rough couple, like 24 hours, 6, 12 hours or something.
So my socks were down.
I'm bad luck.
I think I'm going to keep the space open.
I want to keep the space open until you admit to us how you broke your phone.
Oh, I just dropped it one too many times.
I didn't have a case either.
It's my fault.
But it's just unfortunate the place that it happened where there's just no Apple store or Apple Control just going to right away.
It just feels weird.
I'm definitely putting things out there that are half my fault.
I could also just not be here... It's all my fault.
There's not like an authorized
retailer that does Apple
repairs? Is it just
the screen?
I don't know.
It's like a $50 fix.
Apple cares like $10
or $30.
I recently had to get a brand new iPhone because my screen went
black. I feel like repairing it.
I don't know.
I'm kind of like AJ.
By Power Hour, I opened up this space,
but even right before it, I had Champions League on.
I wasn't even going to keep watching the market sell off today.
I was watching Champions League, too.
It was a nice goal by Martinelli.
Doc Talk. Nelly. Stock talk.
I think we're at a good place
in the spaces. Unless there's anything
you want to continue on.
I could just prod you with another ranting question.
what do you got going on?
I mean, nothing really, man.
We're just chilling in this market, just waiting for
conditions to improve.
What was the game the other night? guys it down in the spaces chat in the bottom right put some questions down there and
stock talk wants to rent I will say sure if you're if we're just gonna play a
prod stock talk here for a little bit you should give him a follow check out
the the link in his bio cool stuff urkel has literally his bio his lit like
bio in his like link or whatever you know what i mean if you're looking at his profile um
what was uh i do want to know how that game was the the crowd uh were they happy for luca
yeah dude it was awesome it was awesome like i was with a couple of my buddies who were like
lifelong maz fans born and raised in dallas and they were all wearing lakers jerseys Yeah, dude, it was awesome. It was awesome. Like, I was with a couple of my buddies who were, like, lifelong Mavs fans,
born and raised in Dallas, and they were all wearing Lakers jerseys.
At what stage did you realize, like, fuck, like, this is what we had?
Was it the entire game, or was there, like, points where you were just adding?
Everyone realized that five minutes after Shams tweeted it, everyone knew.
Dallas was downtrodden.
I'm still mad about it, but it but like if he was gonna go
anywhere I wanted it to be like of all places he could have gone Los Angeles
cuz I grew up a big Kobe fan so you know I have like tons of Kobe memorabilia in
my room it's like all I have actually I have a Magic Johnson jersey on the wall
1987 game war you should just honestly become a Lakers fan. Switch.
No, I mean, like when I was a kid. No, genuinely, what chance does Dallas have now?
That they want to lose.
I mean, Dallas sucks now, yeah.
You're a Lakers fan.
Yeah, I mean, I'm a Luka fan, so, you know.
Yeah.
Luka fan first, Lakers second, Dallas third, right?
Luka fan first, yeah.
I mean, Dallas second, I would say. I'm still a Mavericks fan, but. You think Mark Cuban's going to buy, Lakers second, Dallas third, right? Luka fan first, yeah. I mean, Dallas second, I would say.
I'm still a Mavericks fan, but...
Do you think Mark Cuban's going to buy the Lakers?
Is that what this is about?
I don't think Mark Cuban can afford the Lakers.
I mean, look, I'm a Grizzlies fan because I grew up an hour and a half away from Memphis,
but I lived in Fort Worth for a couple years.
I always kind of watched Dallas, you know, and Novitski and everybody were there.
And when Luka was there, I started to put the Mavs above the Grizz,
and then now it's completely reverted.
Like, I could care less about the Mavs at this point.
John Moran.
Celebration guy.
Big celebration guy.
That grenade celebration is amazing.
Crazy.
It's my new favorite.
It's hilarious.
I was watching Pat McAfee, and I think it was Sean's.
I was like, you know,
a great celebration would be like holstering the guns after.
It'd be like, it's over.
That would have been a great celebration.
But the grenade one was funny, too.
We need Ja to stay away from anything gun-related, please.
So, for the record, Jets fan here.
We have the draft next Thursday, right?
A week from tomorrow.
I'm going into it with zero hope for my team this year.
Absolutely no hope.
We're fucked.
Last year, I was saying we were going to win.
The year before, I said we were going to win it all.
At least make the playoffs.
Bottom of the barrel.
Jets, my fear is that we go like 6-10, 6-11, whatever it is,
and get like the 10th pick again.
It is crazy as bad as you guys
were. You guys don't even have the top pick.
It's gonna
no, it's in the dumps, honestly.
I don't even know. I have no hope right now.
Maybe this is the year it happens.
Nope, but I'm a Spurs fan,
but we're not going anywhere for a while.
I'm a Knicks fan. Good times.
Maybe. Hey, Pistons gonna... I don't know what about the Pistons. They're gonna give some problems to y' while. I'm a Knicks fan. Good times. Maybe. Hey, Pistons are going to...
I don't know what about the Pistons.
They're going to give some problems to y'all.
I'm not going to lie.
This play-in tournament thing is weird, by the way.
It's wild.
Like, the Grizzlies lose last night,
now they've got to go play...
Was it Dallas or somebody?
Yeah, I mean, I know there's some Dallas fans,
but other than that, is anyone even watching the East side?
That's two terrible teams.
The Hawks and the...
Is Anthony Davis playing?
I think so.
No, I didn't even watch...
Are you going?
Don't you literally have season tickets or something?
I can't hear him.
Is it me? No, it's not you. It hear him. Is it me?
No, it's not you.
It's not you.
Probably.
I didn't hear the elevator today.
Maybe that's what this is.
That would make sense.
I don't know.
I'm waiting for that.
Actually, I'm strangely into baseball this year.
Still mess.
You know, sports. Fun times.
Go sports.
This is totally what happens when stocks are down so much.
Em, what are you looking for tomorrow?
I know we have a lot of earnings coming up.
Is there any other headlines you're watching? I know we have a lot of earnings coming up. Is there any other headlines you're watching?
I know we have Powell today.
Let me check the macro calendar.
TSM in like what?
TSM in the morning?
TSM overnight will be interesting.
What do you do though?
We have some jobless claims tomorrow.
Housing starts, building permits.
And then we have Spar speaking to.
A couple other things, but not...
Mostly, I guess, is earnings.
Probably was the elevator for Stock Talk.
It's going to come back up.
Tomorrow is the...
Tomorrow's Friday
before a holiday weekend. I don't think
there's going to be much action.
Tomorrow's Thursday, but the stock market is closed on Friday. Good point.
Yeah, it's the Friday.
And when it's before a long weekend, a lot of people are already checked out.
They're taking the four-day weekend.
It seems like they checked out Tuesday.
Volumes dried out every day, Tuesday, Wednesday.
Volumes gone down.
Yeah, I don't have high expectations for tomorrow for either direction, unless there's some crazy
headline or something. Trump tries to send everybody
into a good weekend. Who knows?
Cold for everyone. Easter. I saw some cold deals
going on. I'm just trying to bait to get Kevin up here.
I even
saw, I think Trading Views is running
Easter, so. Kevin is on
vacation. That's right. He should just chill.
That's cool.
What a great week to go on vacation. I was going to
post this tweet, actually. I was like,
there's no better time to go on vacation.
Kevin's out there ripping lips.
I want to give Stock Talk a chance to come back up here
and maybe talk a little bit more about Stock Talk Insiders.
I know he's been ranting for the last hour.
But if not, I'm going to just throw this out here
with a follow-up of the speakers.
Make sure you're following the host of the spaces.
And what do you got going on tomorrow?
What's the schedule look like?
Busy day?
Decently.
I mean, spaces-wise, we got a lot of spaces tomorrow.
A lot of things to talk about.
And, of course, Friday, nothing.
So squeezing it in tomorrow, getting it done.
This little stream midday.
The small cap show we normally run on Mondays, which I'll tell you this.
I've never been big into small caps.
I know when I first got into trading and stuff a little bit, I paid attention to some penny stocks and small cap stuff.
But it really never was my lane.
But I'll tell you what, these small cap guys, listening to them, hosting them each and every Monday, they're finding winners out here in this market right now.
And I've actually taken out to,
I've responded to one of your tweets about some of these names
that I've gotten from these other shows.
I'm actually making some money on these little side plays
with these guys.
It's actually been pretty nice.
Some of these names just don't care about the market being down
we do have futures open right now
yeah it's not really doing anything
it opened up about 13 minutes ago
I don't know
you had that end of the day rally
you wonder if it comes back in and fills some of that
does it hold in here and move higher
who knows we don't really have any catalysts
to drive this
when you do
damage like you did today it's probably just float up slowly yeah and could you imagine trying to
load up a bunch of risk ahead of a three-day weekend not knowing what kind of headlines could
come out over the weekend and of course earning season really kicks into high gear next week.
So yeah,
I'm certainly personally not looking to add a bunch of risk tomorrow.
That's for sure.
I did also confirm Friday futures are closed.
I checked the CME group's website again.
So there's,
you get Netflix earnings tomorrow night,
which I will be paying attention to that.
I forgot to mention that,
Evan. I'm very excited.
A good host of Wolf Trading
would have reached out personally for a
confirmation to the CME group.
I should have got an interview. That's what I should have done.
Somebody from
the CME group. I don't know if Kevin's probably
got a connection over there.
No, it'll be interesting
when you have Netflix earnings after the bell
and futures will be basically closing by the time they get into their conference call.
And then obviously after hours will close and you have three days to think about it.
It's also interesting.
We got one tweet pinned up in the nest above
earnings tomorrow which i'm surprised other people didn't throw stuff up there but tomorrow
should be a big day as aj said at one point we got taiwan semiconductor reported earnings in like
six hours seven hours or whatever it is and an american american express i almost said it
weirdly carl schwab united health group all reporting earnings tomorrow morning and then
netflix blackstone as well. I know Kirk was stressing
that when I almost left it out. Then Netflix
after the close so watch out for that tomorrow.
Make sure you're following the speakers.
Urkel we appreciate you being up here.
I'll give Stock Talk one more
chance to come up here.
Next week gets a lot
busier though right?
Tesla's next
Tuesday so we'll see it for that
one and we also have have um what else do we have google google i think it's tentative i don't think
they've given out their their final date maybe they just did i think it's next thursday next
thursday looks like it's confirmed there's a bunch of big names next week a lot of names
i'm excited for like earning seasons we we talk about something other than tariffs every day
which will still be in the middle of every conversation you know it was funny when stock
talk was saying earlier and uh Kurt kind of brought it up too about what UAL did with giving
kind of multiple versions of the guidance I mean like taiwan semi comes out tonight and they're like
well if 10 tariffs this is what we see if it's 25 this is what we see if it's 145 this is what you
know it's like what they just like bring out a trump chart of percentages and what their eps will
be that would actually be funny a full full Trump chart with just different outcomes.
Just throw some random ones in there.
12.5% and 18.7%.
Negative 10%.
I want to see what the numbers are
at 34.9%.
Why?
We'll see.
That would be the ultimate troll job.
Alright, we're going to inspire.
If you're looking for the best, easiest recap of the day,
check out my pin post.
I also post my actual portfolio in real time there.
Every single Saturday Stock Talk.
Join us back up here.
There we go.
Stock Talk, I think we're going to wrap it up.
How was your – was that a Leo walk?
Yeah, no, I just had to take him down real quick.
He didn't want to go earlier, so he wanted to go right now so i just am a servant to leo let's talk talk what what i'm
picturing here is one of these ceos comes out with a trump poster board that has 10 percent tariff
eps 25 percent 37 percent and just like trolls him goes all the way down.
Wait, sorry.
Who does that?
One of these companies, one of these CEOs comes out and they give guidance
for every tariff level possible
all the way up to 245.
That would be hilarious, dude. I hope
somebody does that. That would be actually hysterical.
I don't know if he finds that funny, and that was just
his response.
He gave me five emojis. That's more
than you get.
That was actually funny.
Just confirming. I want to give you the
chance to talk a little bit through
some Stock Talk Insider talk.
We're running the spaces here. I know you got two hours
of rants. You can give us a little bit.
Most people probably know the drift. You know, if you want to know,
if you like what I say on these spaces and you want to know what I'm doing with my personal
portfolio, that's where I share that. I share with you guys what I buy, what I sell, how I hedge,
what puts I own. You know, we've owned puts through this whole sell-off that have done really
well. And all of that is logged and timestamped in a journal that you get access to. There's no
like, oh, I said I did this, but didn't do that. No, I just tell you exactly what I'm doing,
tell you what my portfolio weightings are, what percentage of my portfolio is in what stocks,
what percentage of my portfolio is in hedges, all that stuff. I share that. And then we have
six other analysts in the server, all people that I've known for a while that are great traders.
Urkel, who's up here with us, is one of them as well. And you get the same thing from them.
You get what they're doing every day what they're buying what they're selling
and you know some analysts might suit your style others might not that's why we have
you know six analysts in there all the content is organized and separated we have trade logs
channels where the trades go then we have research journals where all the explanations go
and the rationale behind why we're doing what we're doing.
So it's a very clean format, very straightforward.
We keep it real with you guys.
We keep it real with you guys when we're taking losses, when we're taking wins, how we're hedging.
All that good stuff is shared there.
So if that's something you're interested in, I know a lot of people in this market environment don't know how to protect their portfolios or
how to anticipate downside or what levels to watch. I know a lot of new traders and investors
are confused by those things. If you're one of those people, it might be a good option for you
to get some of that information and data and ideas from really experienced traders.
All of our analysts are really experienced,
have been doing this for many, many years.
Our head of research, Steve Yanezu,
has been doing this for like 30 plus years
and is very experienced.
He can teach you how to read SEC filings,
which most people have no clue how to do,
what to look for.
And he's also just really intelligent
in all parts of the market.
And he's been with us since the beginning. So we have a lot of really smart people in there
that are specialists in what they do. And so, yeah, I think it's a great thing. It's a great
resource if you're an active participant in the market, especially. But, you know, we have plenty
of reviews as well that you can go and read all verified users that have
been with us you can see how long they've been subscribed it's not like one of those review
pages where you could just add a review you have to have subscribed walk third-party verifies all
the reviews so it's legit stuff you know if people don't like the product and subscribe to it,
they can leave a review too. But as you'll find, there aren't many negative reviews. So
go check those out. You can find that all on my page at the link of my bio,
if you're interested in that. If not, as always, Stocks on Spaces will always be free. I'll be
here every day too. So if you just want to, if you prefer just listening to my macro rants,
that's cool as well. But if you want more micro stuff and
you want to know the stocks that i'm buying and stuff like that that's that's all provided on
discord so yep code tariffs for 245 off yeah we'll pay you pay you to come yeah uh i saw this really
funny article speaking of that uh i think it's from
morgan stanley analyst and he said uh i'm putting 200 percent tariffs on my barber because he never
buys a damn thing for me the quote was so funny yeah it was like i'm in a trade deficit with my
barber yeah that's what he said yeah how much do you pay for a haircut oh my goodness let's not get
into this conversation oh my god how much too much oh is it too much you're going down to
uptown then is it like is it just tell me like what just tell us too much too much i'll leave
it at like a hundred the haircuts are too damn expensive party more than 100 no no no
I used to go to the Mexican mall over in Fort Worth
and pay 20 bucks
yeah and that's what it's like 20 30 bucks
maybe it's like 40 in New York City right now
you give a little tip or something
I'm pretty like
censored about my hair though
I'm kind of
I like to have a quality haircut
so yeah I do pay more than I should for haircuts.
You learn something new on Stocks on Spaces every single day.
You just don't know what it's going to be.
Awesome.
Follow the speakers.
Follow the hosts.
See you back here.
Same time, same place tomorrow.
Maybe we're going to do a live stream maybe soon
maybe we may maybe in a year from now this is just a live stream we'll see we'll obviously
be still on x so we appreciate y'all have a great one catch you back tomorrow
see ya See you.
