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SPACEX AND XAI MERGER CONFIRMED | INVESTING IN FOUNDERS WITH $FFF
Recorded: Feb. 2, 2026 Duration: 2:32:42Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, key insights emerged around the strategic partnership for critical minerals, the anticipation of token launches, and the growth potential of major tech players like Palantir and Meta. The conversation also highlighted ongoing trends in Bitcoin and Ethereum, emphasizing the interconnectedness of traditional markets and the crypto landscape.
Full Transcription
what is up everybody how are you guys doing i hope you are already and excited for another week
of stocks on spaces this should
be another great one should be a busy conversation here we do have scott redler should be joining us
on this one i saw him post a tweet so the mondays first 45 minutes or so here with scott
always enjoy that time he should be joining us we also do have palantir earnings coming up after
the close tltTR reporting earnings.
Disney reported earnings this morning.
So a lot of stuff going on.
A couple news stories.
Not the busiest of news days.
I'm seeing, I'm getting a spam of notifications right now.
One in there was at least news.
U.S. Treasury says it borrowed, says it to borrow 574 billion in Q1.
I don't necessarily know how that compares to anything else.
But we did have a
couple news stories on the day. A couple large movers. Apple is up 3%. I did see NVIDIA getting
an interesting candle. I didn't see any news. That stock is down around 2%. Obviously, silver and gold
have been quite the conversation. Ripping Friday had quite the move down. A little lower today was much more red last night. And it's a little bit better today. I do see Scott requesting up here.
But yeah, a lot of this week is looking forward. We still have some Magnificent Seven reporting
earnings. Amazon, Google, etc. Like I was saying, Disney reported earnings this morning. Palantir,
which is a popular one, reports earnings today after the close. Oracle is a name that is getting a lot
of interest, and it was higher this morning. I haven't double-checked in since, but that is a
stock that was moving higher off of them issuing debt. Interesting. Oh, wow. Here we go. Oracle
stock now down 1% on the day. Quite the reversal there. But there was some volatility around that
name, around them doing $45 to $50 billion of debt over the next little bit. There were some acquisitions,
Devin Energy and Cotera. There was also the Rare Earths, if you saw a little bit of a turn around,
I have it seven hours ago. What time did I post this? 7.15 a.m. Eastern, maybe it was a little
bit below it before it. But there was President Trump set to launch a strategic critical minerals stockpile
with $12 billion in seed money.
That is according to a Bloomberg report
that I saw this morning.
We did have a bunch of news stories.
I'm sure there will be plenty more
that we're going to talk about here.
Scott, Mr. Scott Redler, how are you doing, sir?
I'm excited to have you back on the spaces.
Yeah, it feels like I was, I just it feels like there were some holidays on Mondays,
and then I had a few different trade shows I had to go to, this and that.
So I apologize.
And we had some stuff.
Yeah, it was crazy.
No, but I'm excited to have you back.
It feels like maybe we're in the same place we were a month ago with the market,
but I feel like a lot of noise has happened in between at least. But crypto is a little
lower.
I feel like there's still a little bit of...
Why don't I
not kind of lead you into question here.
How are you feeling the market has changed in the last
month? From the conversations we were having
then to what you're seeing now
and just in general, how you're feeling about the market?
I just think that
every three weeks when sentiment gets really loud one way,
it just winds up going the other way.
And as soon as sectors are declared dead, they usually bounce, you know, vice versa.
It's like I feel like everybody was getting so on the small caps train.
And then like two weeks ago on a Wednesday, all of a sudden the IWM peaked and, you know,
and then some of the mega cap tech sort of woke up.
And then all of a sudden, you know, they became back in play.
You know, obviously you had the gold and silver parabolic ramp up to end their really strong trend that worked very well for people.
but it's like almost like I talk about the fine line.
But it's like almost like I talk about the fine line.
There's really, really, really a fine line in the past month of, you know,
being, you know, wrong and really wrong or being right and,
and really right,
like losing a little bit of money or losing a lot or making a little or
making a lot. And right now where we stand right here, it's, you know,
I feel like coming in today,
there were some traders scratching their head, including me,
like how the hell are we one and a half percent or less near the all-time high.
It feels like there's a lot of sectors that are just broken, you know, or not great.
You know, you look at software, you look at Microsoft,
like, you know, lows of everything almost.
And Oracle couldn't hold a bid.
And it really is just a very specific tape.
And you have to be really really
on your toes and see subtle changes subtle changes when you know on thursday all of a sudden you know
gold got really stretched and then slv broke below 106 and it gave you some clues like you better
you know lighten up so you're that far from the eighth day i actually you know made some good
money in gold puts um but if you tried the week before in gold puts and you lost money and didn't go back to it,
you miss this move.
So it's like a very like you're doing things when it wants to.
It's making it very hard for people to stay with moves like obviously, you know, MU and
Sandisk and those names, the memory names are just like runaway
trains. There's no stops. There's just keep going, keep going, keep going. And once you think it's
over, it's not. And then, you know, when something's really bad, they don't, you know,
it doesn't even give you a bounce attempt, you know, where like, you know, there's not, it's not,
it's not really forgiving. That's a good word too. There's some things that just aren't forgiving.
Like today, you know, I was in Apple, an apple on friday and um they didn't make it
look great in the first part of the day and then my play was i'm like listen it's post earnings
apple showed relative strength friday um you know let's see how it goes and like today it had to go
up nine almost ten dollars but why couldn't it do it on friday to to pay some of the people who
were looking for a nice payday with options playing it for earnings you know just it's
just not nice it's like throwing sand on on you know in the face of it's a sandbox done not playing
nice it would be nice that they reward you for doing things that that are right like apple like
if you didn't have options for this week and you went for friday you're waking up this week you're like why didn't my my apple options work out you know into earnings
so they're doing things when they want to do it so you almost yet you have to have some conviction
like this is what the six time google's above 340 it's finally above 350 an all-time high
with earnings wednesday so at least that's playing nice technically i like when things play by the
rules that we've learned over
the course of 20 years you know got above 340 50 went to 344 if you're looking for an all-time high
trade you got paid but you really had to be watching it because it was weak and then it just
went um so anyway i'm just kind of rambling along but there are these subtle things that happen that
you need to be aware of if you're trading actively for a living. Like in January, I think in the first week of January, I was up more in that week than
I was up in a lot of different months.
And then, you know, I probably lost half of it twice in the course of January based on
the action.
And then wound up making decent money in January.
But like I was way off the highs of the first week of January.
Just little things. Anyway, so here we are. Uh, I'm not going to just keep talking about what
happened. Um, I am accumulating. So someone said to him, I'm accumulating some Amazon options for
earnings. I'm accumulating some, some two 55s for, for Friday, thinking that if, uh, you know,
it gets a decent size move, it takes out the all-time high area.
And also going out a week that, you know, if it's going to happen, you know, we're almost lower than we were last quarter.
We're in the same spot we were, you know, two quarters ago.
So I'm playing that for earnings.
I'm not playing Palantir for earnings or Google.
Google, they're paying you price.
That's always cool when they give you that all-time high trade and you don't have to
take it into the binary event.
As far as the medals today, I didn't do it yet.
I've stared at it a bunch of times.
GLD is playing with Friday's low.
I was thinking about selling some 420 puts just to get exposure in it
because it's very whippy.
It came so far.
So if you're going to do that, you have to be really prepared to say,
hey, I'll buy it at 420 if it gets there for Friday.
But this is the type of trade where everyone's probably like,
oh, I'd love one more gap down in silver and gold and buy it tomorrow
where they don't give it to you.
But at least if you were short cover.
This is your day to cover gold, cover silver,
and now let it just be a range trade. And um just you know again like like you said i feel like a lot of last year was
the same thing like a month ago you know it's the same similar action you get two weeks of of some
kind of um you know i don't even know if it's special but some kind of move and then and then
they then there's a reversion to the mean.
And then if you think the reversion to the mean is a real move,
sometimes it just isn't.
So you just got to keep moving, keep moving,
if that makes any sense.
Yeah, no, I think that does.
I think that does.
I think there was a lot of really good insights in there.
I am very curious on this critical minerals, rare earth play in this one,
because there are some kind of silvers and golds,
or maybe the golds more,
that are kind of just ripping off of sentiments and stuff,
or even the data center plays.
Copper, I know, has been a theme there.
There's just two or three.
There's a debasement thing.
There's a lot of people interested in the commodities for different reasons.
And I also find it interesting how long these people have been waiting.
And then you kind of see the charts of the last five, ten years, gold versus S&P 500, gold versus NASDAQ.
And it's nine and a half, 9.75 years of underperformance.
And then one very short, uh hard move to the upside i am curious to see if
where if where we are in that rally if if that was a local top for you know obviously it was a local
top if it was days and weeks or months years decades i don't know nobody knows like everyone's
gonna make believe they know but that that was a harsh break like that i would be very surprised if we're back at the highs that we were at last week in gold and silver in the next
like six weeks i'm not going out six months six years i'm just saying the next six weeks
you know you're going to probably have a lot of packing and filling a lot of range trading a lot
of you know close strong open week close week open strong so if you're going to trade gold and silver
you really have to trade gold and silver it's it's not much attention but i think it's a noisy trade now you had a great
trade it held the 8 and 21 day for the last three months they gave you also some nice you know
patterns to to sink your teeth into and then finally you know they paid the shorts that were
caught in a pain trade or you know or not depending if you didn't go back to it but for now
you know it's just like a ring now you have 422 in the GLD and maybe it bounces back to, you know, 447 or 452. And I
think it's just a range trade now, depending on your, on your timeframe. You know, most people,
like I have friends, you know, who are older than me, let's say, you know, there's not that many
people older. No, I'm kidding. Um, that, you know, they, they've accumulated gold and silver and silver for for 15 years and i was begging them to sell some and none of them want to sell
something if i have to sell my gold that um you know i'm paying 35 in taxes you know it's a it's
a collectible tax i'm never doing i'm never so like the real real real investors they probably
you know maybe they sold a small portion of their gold and silver. So this really has been kind of like probably a fast money trade also,
a hedge fund trade also.
Say that again?
I'm going to say, so you're telling me there's a 35% tax
when you buy physical gold on the capital gains?
Yep, that's what I think it is.
It's a collectible.
So if you've been buying gold for 10 years and you decide to sell it,
sell it, you know, last week, you had to pay a 35% tax.
So basically, you have to think that it's going to go down 35% in order to break even on what you just sold to pay your taxes.
Did you hear anything from any of your friends about getting way below spot?
Because a lot of people I know tried to sell physical silver
and gold last week and unless they had 25 000 or more they were getting way quoted way low off of
the spot no actually that's interesting that probably gave you some clues that we're going
lower same way right when silver was like 88 it was trading like 105 in in shanghai so you knew that
hey there's demand there's still a short squeeze don't be short yet so there's things to think
about you know for sophisticated traders that really do their homework yeah if if they're not
willing to pay you that then they know that you know it's only going to probably be there for a
short period of time same way if you if they're selling their silver at 104 when it's 82 chances are it's probably going to 110 or 20 and that's what it did but um that's
interesting yeah because i mean think think think if you're the local coin shop guy right and you're
buying silver on thursday at five percent below spot you just got smashed on friday so they were
they were building in like 25 to 30 percent uh buffer there because they just
thought it was too parabolic yeah yeah yeah it's that's that that that would have been that's good
information that could have given some conviction to really stay short that uh that these guys know
more than most people but but also i will say when silver was 40 and you had that that really
really good chart um i remember saying to two or three guys who were silver people,
you know, I'm like, silver looks great.
It's about to take off.
And they're like, it's fundamentally, it shouldn't be going anywhere.
I'm like, well, on the chart, it looks like it's going to
take this out. And then when it was like at 82,
I'm like, you're going to sell some silver? Of course
not. There's nothing stopping it.
I'm like, okay, at 42,
you didn't like it. Now at 84, you can't sell
any. But yeah, so it's it's
there are definitely little clues in everything that you do and you just have to also you have to
know where to look and that was good information same way it was good information to keep you from
shorting too early that was good information to say hey you better be careful here besides when
really when silver if you look at slv when it when it gapped up on um thursday and then failed
to hold 106
that's what gave me a little bit of conviction to be you know a lot longer in the zsl which i
started buying on like a dollar 70 and uh you know to stay with the gold puts and sell calls i sold
calls which was a little scary up there but up but when i saw that loose and white action on
thursday i'm like there's no way it's going to make a new high tomorrow which was friday so i was selling premium for like two and a half dollars at that high and
that was that was that was easier almost than the puts you know the following day because they just
zeroed that out and then they paid the puts at the end of day and then and then into today
but um anyhow so yeah so now it's just you know it's good though like everyone was too hyper
focused on it you know pain trades are stressful you know they call it pain trade because you know
you sell too early you're in pain and you start shorting too early you're in pain and that's that's
that that's describes a move that goes way too long gets way too severe in one direction to the
upside so this move you know clear that out so traders don't have to worry about whether or not they're
missing a move or whether they're getting cabochord.
Now it's just going to be kind of like scalp trading at ends of the envelope if you focus
here.
You got any thoughts on a very interesting mover over the last couple of days, weeks
and stuff like that has been crypto.
And Bitcoin and Ethereum specifically, obviously, breaking below some key levels.
I'm sure below all of the moving averages.
I believe people were saying that Bitcoin was getting to the 2025 low is what it just broke below.
I could be wrong there.
But I'm going to take a look at that in a second right now.
But do you have any updated thoughts on Bitcoin, Ethereum, how you're you're trading it recently sure what you're kind of watching go forward well bitcoin again just like
gold you need to know your time frame you know i've i've said for like four or five years you
could buy bitcoin every single month you know with a direct deposit the same way you should
be doing gold and silver and at some point it's you know it's part of your pie chart if you have
100 allocation if you're an asset allocator you should be buying you know a small percentage of bitcoin and or ethereum every single
month but if you trade for a living you know bitcoin has been lagging ever since it did the
false breakout of like 124 to 127 and then failed right around 110 you know it's been it's been sold
on strength every single time you know all the way back up to when I retested the 98 and just rolled over on January 20th.
But this weekend, everyone was talking about it.
And I actually said, I'm like, guys, long term investment, guys, 74 to 76,000 is is a spot, you know.
And then everyone's, you know, it's going to 60.
No, it's going to 30.
No, I'm like, I get what you're saying. What I'm saying is that if you look back to the cup and handle pattern, which is what
I look at technicals, you know, the 73.8 was a high and then it put in a big, nice bull
flag and then broke out November 4th of 2024 right through the 74 area went to 110.
I'm like, this is a spot.
So then you look at it, you know, this weekend I went to 74.5 and now it's giving you a bounce
attempt.
So A, it was a decent spot if you picked up a little bit as an investor and also as a trader.
I remember when I was really trading Bitcoin a lot in 2020, I would put these limit orders in at levels that I thought.
I would get hit, wake up in the morning, and then all of a sudden, you're making really good money because you got hit in your spot because you put it in there on the chart.
So, if I were trading Bitcoin a little bit more actively, I would have had a few bids in starting from 76,000,
probably down to the two day to 69.
I went to 74,500, you know, did a little reversal.
Now you want to see, hey, 80,500 was that last little low on November 17th.
Kind of take that back or does it get rejected?
Because every time Bitcoin has tried to bounce
since it broke you know in november it's been a really really you know feeble nothing from nothing
bounces so we're gonna have to see what type of bounce off of this 74.5 level does does it do
you know the eight days you know you know you really have room up to 84 000 so um anyway if
someone's an investor in bitcoin or wanted to get involved, I think the
75,000 is one spot. And then I use a tier system. So if it did happen to go down to the 54,000 area,
which a lot of people are talking about, or the 55, you could buy more. But again, if you get paid
for a living, you're looking to get paid in February, maybe that's not the spot, except for
it was from Saturday to today. But two weeks from now, maybe it's not the spot, except for it was from Saturday to today. But two weeks
from now, maybe it's not. It's funny, when Bitcoin's going higher, it's digital gold. When
Bitcoin's in a corrective phase, it's a Ponzi scheme. So it's just the way the narrative
changes. Kind of like when Tesla is below the A21 day, Elon Musk is eccentric and he's a weirdo, but when it's above the
820 of the acting grade, he's a genius.
But anyway, I think Bitcoin is, you know, the high that it put in, you know, this year,
the 120, it should get taken out.
It's just a matter of, is it going to take a year?
Is it going to take two years?
You know, who knows?
All I know is that I do think that there's institutional interest, you know, um, there's
properties to it.
I'm not going to explain like, cause I'm not a fundamental whatever guy.
I'm just going to say, you know, if you know your timeframe, you could put every single
month into, into Bitcoin, if into your asset allocation, you'll be just fine over time.
If you get a good course to average, if you trade it for a living, I mean, like, you know,
it's just a momentum sector.
And there's sometimes when crypto is awesome, there's sometimes when it's lagging like it did all through, you know, all through November, December.
So that kind of created the downside move.
And now we have a little reversal.
And we'll see what happens here.
Is it just, you know, an active turn or is it more? But Bitcoin, just like Apple, just like Amazon,
just like any of these sectors, you know,
they follow momentum rules and Bitcoin follows,
you know, is like one of the fastest ones.
So it can make you money and it can lose you money
just the same way gold did, you know,
for lots of different types of people
over the course of the past three months.
But you would think some money came out, some fast money came out of gold and silver.
And now, you know, they're probably saying, hey, Bitcoin here at $75,000.
You know, maybe, you know, it's worth a look.
So it's bouncing today.
I haven't, you know, I would say as far as the people like, what do I think of Mr.?
Is Mr. the same thing as long-term capital where it's going to default?
I really don't know all i
know is that mister's also been a broken name you know it's been broken ever since it had to get
above 440 and failed in july it's been sold on every rally it hasn't showed relative strength
it's been an avoid for most of my crew um you know and at least you also had those who who made
a lot of money with mister because it did follow the technicals all the way up to the peak.
I will say I feel sorry for the investors that have been accumulating BNR,
Tom Lee's scenario, because it came out, it had one big move to 161,
and then literally it's had a bunch of fake-outs since July,
and all it keeps doing is making lower lows,
and I think that's going to be a problem for Tom Lee as well as whatever's going on.
And Scott, how about he's sitting on almost $6 billion in losses at this point?
That's insane.
Yeah, I like Tom Lee just because he's usually bullish,
and I'd rather have someone be an Uber bull because over time the bull market does win,
but that's in the S&P, that's in the Qs.
But some of the times, like december or he's still saying oh bitcoin's gonna be 175
175 000 like what the hell is he talking about it's not a shot the way it looks or you know he
just kept staying the course and you know i get mad at people on the internet when it's like when
they're wrong and instead of just saying they're wrong and moving on they get louder and louder because you have to protect their narrative but that's how you know you put
traders out of business you know for people oh tom lee's been awesome he's been so correct
if he says ethereum's going to 12 000 by january you know i could buy more bmnr and and ignore the
action and ignore the action ethereum which you, I guess everyone has to learn their lesson in one way or another.
So I'm hoping that Bitcoin holds around here so you don't have some kind of really big displacement in Mr.
Or Ethereum holds around here and doesn't, you know, otherwise BMNR is going to really, I don't even know what's going to happen.
I'm there, but it's for everyone else
to figure out. As a trader, there's some things called like Widowmakers or Battlegrounds, and
Mr. has been a battleground for a while, and this BMNR, I feel like it's definitely, we'll see how
it goes from here. I'm not going to talk too much about it. I'm not involved right now. I tried it
once last week and got stopped out, but there I know guys who believe so much in it.
They've been buying this thing since 40.
And we'll see how it goes for them.
What are you doing with that option, Mike?
I know you probably placed some options here and there,
but you're not trying to accumulate something that looks like this.
I mean, I have a very small piece of my portfolio in ibid scott for bitcoin and it's
right it's underwater now i i am looking to add to it but i'm not i'm not worried about it right
because it's a straight bitcoin yeah i'm i've been i've been avoiding mstr and bmnr because i just
the charts look like that and it just seems they don't want these leveraged bitcoin companies
anymore they they just don't want anything to do with them well you don't you know so you couldn't buy bitcoin really unless you had a price account now
you could buy ibit through blackrock and who the hell needs mister you know because and every i
remember when bmr was looking good each time and then they would do an offering i'm like why do you
want to be in bmr instead of ethereum every time it goes up they have to do an offering so they
could buy more just you know just and if it's going to go up, they have to do an offering so they can buy more.
And if it's going to go up, it's going to go up because Ethereum is going up.
So just buy Ethereum.
And I look at that loss he's sitting on there.
And I sit there and wonder, at what point do investors just get called on all these offerings, all this money?
What's going to happen there?
I mean, I could see that company just going going out going under if they're not careful i agree then what's going to happen to tom lee
the funny thing is tom lee and his technician you know for the past year when you know they
disagree because the technician you know he's reading the technicals they're not just
supporting a narrative that could be wrong, which is an opinion. Right?
But anyway, I would think he tried to use his fame from being an Uber bull in a bull market.
I bet you somebody probably talked him into this whole thing, saying, let's use your name. You've been right pretty much in the crypto bull market
and the S&P bull market.
Let's create this vehicle.
We'll sell your name.
And I almost feel bad that if this thing does go to 15 or lower,
no one's going to know the people behind it,
but they're all going to, you know, Tom Lee's going to have a –
They're all going to remember Tom Lee.
Presenting his face anywhere.
You know what else had a really nice move today,
and I charted on Saturday, and I got so busy this morning with Apple and trading AMD.
I missed it.
It was Walmart hit a new all-time high.
It had a beautiful breakout.
Did it climb over a trillion?
I know it got very close.
It's close.
Just off the highs of the day right now, right there.
Look at this move.
Beautiful little move.
And my room party.
I know it woke up.
Actually, it gave you a wake up on Friday.
So it gave you day one Friday, and now it gave you a a wake up on Friday. So it gave you a day one Friday
and now it gave you a follow through on Tuesday.
That's all you could ask for.
Yeah.
And I just got so busy with Apple and AMD,
and I was looking at the banks.
I was watching Wells Fargo for a gap fill
in Bank of America,
both of which went into their gaps
and are moving nicely.
I just lost track of Walmart
with all the news this morning
with that news on Oracle and everything.
I completely lost track of it. I just wanted this morning with that news on Oracle and everything. I completely lost track of it.
I just wanted to kick myself, and I finally looked at it.
Because it's probably one of the easiest trades of the day.
Look at that thing.
I see it.
I see that.
You had a nice upper bull flag.
It held the 21-day last week, and then it showed relative strength on Friday.
Woke up.
That should have been your buy.
And then it cleared that pivot, and yeah, that's beautiful.
And no big dips today either on the five-minute chart, right?
We don't get moves like this easily anymore.
No, look at Apple.
Apple, like now, you know, it's making anyone who missed it, like, not be able to buy it.
It's up 948.
You had one trade to the VWAP today that I bought more.
Other than that, it's been like a rager.
And every sell has been a bad sell.
Like, I'm trying not to sell anymore.
The VWAP right now in Apple is 264.60. It's trading 26 a rager, and every sell has been a bad sell. I'm trying not to sell anymore. The VWAP right now in Apple is $264.60.
It's trading $269 almost.
Yeah, and that open, right, that big pop, and then it gave it all back and went lower.
I'm like, these moves, you have to really watch them closely and wait for that to come back
because that's been the ML.
They like to drop, pop things and then drop them, get people to chase on the open lately.
It's just we're trading in a weird market, Scott.
You've been doing this a long time, too.
I mean, the actions just, intraday action just seems sloppier than I remember for a long time.
Yeah, they definitely.
You know, as an investor, no concerns.
Yeah, if you're an investor, listen, like I saw, like, Barry, whatever the guy's name is, he wrote how, you know, Wall Street's ripping off Main Street.
I'm like, no, they're not. You could put money in mutual in a in a 401k every single month for 2030 is going to make a
ton of money you could also buy a stock that you know that's going to go that could double or
triple and if if if the if the racks are are stealing a teeny or an eighth they're not
ripping off wall street like that's just a know, just a sensational statement to say, oh, don't be in the stock market because, you know, Wall Street's ripping you off.
What are they ripping you off?
Anyway, so everyone's in the business of doing something.
Like you work in a deli, you get a free sandwich.
I'm just saying.
So if you want to work on Wall Street, there are ways that Wall Street firms make money besides providing liquidity and doing everything else that they do.
I mean, it is definitely a market of you have to find the right names each day.
It is not a generic market.
I've been saying for a while the MO of this market is you go up, you put a new all-time high and buy a very small bit and then you yank back.
And we've been doing that for the last three months, right?
We don't get these follow-through days to the upside. But right we don't get these follow-through days to the upside but we also don't get the
follow-through days to the downside you know no no actually the last week when we fell that
that thursday you know i got stopped out of a lot of positions and then i shorted that bounce and
they brought it all the way back to 694. so i got stopped out of some longs and i lost short i'm
like what the hell's going on here this run yougee cord for the spies wasn't even for the stocks.
Yeah.
It's a series of higher highs and a series of higher lows in the last three months.
There's nothing wrong.
It's just we're stuck.
And when you're stuck, you got to look around for what has momentum.
And you also have to be disciplined, Scott.
And I think it took me a long time to learn this, say i'm just i won't trade as aggressively i'll sit back i'll take what the
market's going to give me and if i don't see what i like i'll just sit there i'll just won't take a
trade i know we all need money but you don't have to make all you know you know we all have a daily
kind of goal we all guide to but it's a daily goal that really need to make over the horse of the
month you miss it for a day or two it's okay that's true i've told people like you know you have a daily goal but really look at like week by week so this way
you're not worried about the day like worry about the setup do the right move at the right time
don't worry about you know the day just you know just do the right trade at the right time when it
presents itself not a daily goal you know you kind of have in your head what's a good day what's a
bad day so you protect it at times.
But there are just some days where you push it, and then you have a bad day,
and then on the day that things work out, you have to make a lot more
because you're making up for the bad day, and that's just not fun.
I don't know about you.
I love Meta's report.
I bought some actually a little bit higher here on the day after earnings.
I liked Apple's report i think it got unduly punished because it didn't what they didn't
want to talk about their ai which right fine but i thought that was a great report yeah even like
let's go back to meta for a second so meta went to what 744 and then they kind of you know if you
looked like you were going to buy a dip on friday because it was lower with the futures they didn't
let you make any money and then they today you know the mark dials up 500 points nasdaq's going like what why is meta down
seven points it's like come on like let people who are buying a dip in meta make some money this
had a good report great guidance so they're going to play with everyone until finally it starts to
go again so we'll see when that is but i But I think that's something I was telling people we have to watch closer
because, again, it hasn't done anything in six months.
And finally, strong reports, strong guidance.
So there's going to be a pivot that you want to buy for the turn.
And then in the decent market,
Why wouldn't this be back above the high of last week at some point?
why wouldn't this be back above the high of last week at some point?
Yeah, but overall, I don't have any complaints of this market.
You know, finding ways to make money.
Even Intel has been acting better.
Yeah.
God forbid.
Let me ask you a question.
So Tesla, just real quick.
I know I was, you know, I went to Florida to speak at the Market Rebellion conference as their keynote speaker. Nice. So I was you know I went to I went to Florida to speak at the market rebellion conference as their keynote speaker
So I was on the road. It was strong with Apple on Friday
That's what I saw and I actually bought some TSLLs and this morning I saw it down
Was it just down because there was no more talk on whether SpaceX will go public through Tesla?
So there's a couple things this morning. You had the European delivery numbers which were They were, they've been bad forever, which I don't think matters all that much anymore, but that was at it.
I think what's hitting it is there's a lot of talk that SpaceX and XAI are going to merge, and it looks like that might finalize this week.
And I think the issue there becomes, Scott, for me, when you look at it, that would put them at a 1.1 billion valuation without any of their investors making money.
Right. And it's current valuation for the last last round of funding.
Tesla's a 1.6 billion. That is a massive amount of dilution you're going to have to put out there for Tesla to merge with that company, SpaceX slash XAI.
I don't know how easy that's going to be to sell you know i think it'd be great to have
elon in one place personally yeah yeah to be streamlined i have to understand the more truth
like he streamlined all his assets you know because right now it feels like tesla's going
to be dead stuck like it's it's trying to get rid of some car divisions it's trying to obviously
focus on autonomous at converting factories to making robots and those kind of cars.
So they're going to be investing for the next year.
So it's just going to be ugly numbers for a year unless they reverse SpaceX into Tesla and then, you know, they screw some of the private investors.
But, you know, that would be genius for the average person.
You know, i don't know
how they would structure i'm not that smart but if you take you know instead of having an ipo with
spacex or however you merge it in like there's definitely some way you can do it where you know
it streamlines elon it it helps tesla you know itself you know and plus all the investors in it
because spacex well what does it have the millionaires and the billionaires and the hedge
funds those are the only people
that bring money in SpaceX by going public not the average investor no one
owns that they own it they own it from you know one of the last few rounds if
that so yeah so I think I think you hit it and I've been saying the same thing
you know it Tesla for me is dead money for the next year I mean they're they're
the revenue is gonna drop their profits to drop they already said on their conference
call their margins are going to drop you know it's it's about waiting now for the the the pivot
to complete and the revenue and profits to start to come in from that from the cyber cab to the
robotics right to whatever all that stuff to start to come to fruition.
Yeah, that's why, you know, everyone's like a show me now, show me now, even Elon, like,
I don't think he wants Tesla to be, you know, 80 points lower than this, you know, and the sentiment around him be so negative when he's all these things ready to come public. So if he
figured out a way to get them all together and save Tesla. Tesla at $550 or more,
everyone loves him a lot more than
Tesla's down at $350.
In the media, everywhere, social media.
I don't know. We'll see what he
could figure out.
You were...
Sorry.
I was going to say,
you were talking about Amazon there, about one of the
ones you were playing or looking around on options.
I was curious why Amazon over some of the other ones.
I just think that Amazon's been such an underperformer for the past year.
They've done so much.
They've earned so much.
And here you are.
If you look at the chart of Amazon, Amazon was actually in this spot,
the exact same spot one year ago.
February 3rd, Amazon was right here at 243, you know,
and then it was, it had a great report, last report, it went to 258, then market kind of,
I think, shit the bed a little bit, excuse my French, and it came in with it, and now it's
like setting up again, so if, you know, one of these times it's going to deliver and not look
back, so I'm just thinking this one might be it, So, you know, at least I have my defined risk. So I'm buying some, what did I buy so far? I bought the 255s,
the like 420. So if it does take out that, you know, the 258, 216 gets to like 275, which I
think could happen, you know, you can get paid pretty well on the 255s and then maybe even do
the 260s because they're a little cheaper.
You need a bigger move.
But maybe look for, like, some kind of lotto move where if it, you know,
really knocks the ball out of the park, maybe it clears that 260.
You can see, you know, 280.
Who knows?
And so maybe it's a reach.
But for me, I feel like I've tried it a bunch of times.
And last quarter I actually made really good money on it because I got got out quick this time maybe it'll be stickier but we'll see
i think google you know it's already above 340 50 so google could be like 348 coming the report
so it already took out the technical level it already paid you for doing whatever you're doing
and as far as palantir is concerned you know i don't know i just obviously last quarter was priced for perfection and it was at the all-time high so
no matter what it did it was going to either sell off after the print or sell off into it and it sold
off you know obviously they you know what's it called um they got it lowered they didn't even
give you a way out i feel like it's a better setup this time you know if they if it's strong and great
guidance and the ceo does what he usually does like hey it could be up to 15 but um for me i'm just i'd rather just you know be on the
sideline for that one yeah i'm with you on amazon i'm still very long that in stock and i just i
think that one's just been consolidating and you know it looks great and when they really flip that
switch on ai that that that could be the sleeping giant that just takes off, kind of like Google was before it went.
So I love Amazon here.
I really do.
So I haven't sold any of it going to earnings.
Again, I'm willing to sit with, I think, my average cost is down around $200 a share, too.
So I have, you know, I have some space.
So I have some space.
Cool.
Cool.
So you take the shares into the print besides options just because, you know, you're not looking to get it.
You want it to work, but if it doesn't work, it's not like it's going to take away your lunch in February where, you know, you're looking for paychecks like most of my prop traders.
Sure.
Shares are my long-term account.
In fact, if I'm worried about it, I'll generally do some cover calls.
I'll go sell some out-of money cover calls against it right you know
at that point and figure it out but honestly I thought the last no I feel I
feel like last it goes to 280 285 you can be miserable if you sold 260 calls
that's exactly it and I thought last report was great and pop big and then it
came back in and I don't know why they won't let it release, but it was a fabulous report.
And so, you know, I don't expect them to be as constrained as they were last reported on the AWS side of it.
Right. And then just a matter of what Jeff McKenzie is going to do with the 17% of the shares they have left over.
Don't they know they could sell it higher if they just let it run after a
report instead of suffocating it?
We'll see.
Agreed.
Agreed.
All right.
Let's see.
Where's,
where's some of the,
the guys that love those,
the mid cap stocks and all the individual names.
Yeah.
Stock talk up here.
I know we pin two names up here.
ENS and VIAVI,
which are one of the main ones.
Those are just plays of my first and third largest positions.
Just happened to both be up 730% as of today, so I thought that was interesting.
Wow, I remember when you came on, you were talking about this last year.
150 or lower?
ENS at 110, VIAVI at 13.
So VIAVI now back-to-back earnings gap ups via v's almost 26 now so my march contracts i had the march 14 calls that i bought last october those are up 730
today um that's what happens when you get back-to-back earnings gap ups iv expansion on
those contracts when i bought those contracts they were trading at like 50 iv i don't know what they are now but um yeah that's been just a wonderful name to own and
you know you look at the monthly chart on vavi and zoom out talk about range and this thing's
breaking out of like a 20-year base stocks been public since the dot-com bubble uh spent the last
25 years basically trading in this $5 to $15 range,
just bouncing up and down, you know, a cyclical trader really.
And now you look at that monthly chart,
you zoom out to 1999 when this thing went public,
and you realize, wow, there's a ton of range here.
So, sorry, 94 when this thing went public,
and then ran to 700 a share during the dot-com bubble
and came all the way back down.
And, you know, now it's trying to push to the top of this base.
If this thing can get over 27 bucks,
which is the local high from back in 2004,
then that would really be a multi-decade base breakout
and I think would be, you know,
part of the reason why I still own it,
even after this massive gain. So that's, VIAVI is my third largest position. ENS is my biggest position.
ENS actually has earnings this week. VIAVI had earnings last week.
We also picked up some GME $24 calls last week on GameStop. Those are up like close to 90% as
of today. I sold 55% of them to cover the cost basis keeping the other
45 their expiry uh they expire march 20th so i'll keep the rest it's a free trade now which is nice
you know it's always good to get that cushion early and then sell you know half the contracts
or a little over half the contracts cover the cost and then, you know, rotate that capital elsewhere. So that's what I'm doing with that on GameStop.
And then I have a lot of earnings for my portfolio.
I'm running 17 positions currently.
So we have, I think, about 10 reporting in the next two weeks.
This week I have Synaptics, which is one of my newer positions.
They report on the 5th.
We have Thurman Group, which actually is doing great today.'s a four and a half percent on a Craig Hallam report that
came out this morning calling them a leader in thermal management which is
really what my thesis was on that one last year we got into Thurman group at
36 late last year that sucks 47 today now so nice little cushion on that one as
well Huntington Ingalls HII my ship my shipbuilding stock, which has more than
doubled for us now. It's trading at $420. They also report this week on the 5th. Amazon legacy
position for me. I mean, I own it since the 80s, but still holding that, obviously. Small waiting,
but they report this week. Inersis, ENS, which is my largest position, reports on the 4th.
So on Wednesday, I have such an enormous cushion on that that I don't really care what happens on the earnings,
but all things being equal, I mean, I would expect it to do well.
That stock is still very cheap.
It's nice when you own a stock and it doubles and it's still cheap.
That's always a great feeling because it makes it a lot easier to hold it.
So I still think that stock is very very reasonably priced uh even after um what has
been really a monster move i mean you pull up the weekly chart on ens and just admire it really i
mean this thing has gone i'm looking at it right now like you and you called it like i'm not gonna
you know you called it a few times i was on and i'm looking at the lines that i made in the charts the last few times we spoke about in the last year and like wow that's when we spoke
about it you know i mean 110 when i had that major broke out october 10th and then we spoke about it
i think again you like calling it still cheap at 150 and it broke out again yeah and it's good
stuff um let me ask you a question about one name that did really well for us
and now just everyone hates it, you know, like Path.
Like what happened there?
Like why did they let this thing do?
So I just took the snipe on that on earnings, you know.
I took the earnings gap up and just exited that.
That's not a name that I don't really love the business.
But on the last earnings report, I thought that the expectations were low, you know.
And so I bought it at whatever, 12, sold it at 18 and haven't looked at it since then. But that's
not a name I'm going to revisit. That's not really a high conviction name for me or anything. That
was just a trade. I've added a lot of different positions this year that, you know, in kind of
a little bit more boring sectors.
a little bit more boring sectors. I have a lot of shipbuilding exposure and shipping exposure.
I have a lot of shipbuilding exposure and shipping exposure.
You know, Pangea Logistics is one we opened recently, PANL.
That chart is gorgeous, and that's making new highs today.
P-A-N-L?
Yeah, that's one of the only two small caps I own.
I only own two small caps out of the 17 positions I have,
but that's one of them, and it's been gorgeous.
It's pushing into the local highs again today.
I just like the way this thing's trading, these big gap ups.
Then you get a week or two of consolidation in a relatively tight range.
It lets the 50-day catch up, and then it just bounces off the 50-day and rips again.
And then, you know, now we're getting sort of more of a high and tight consolidation after this move.
But, yeah, I mean, this name is really interesting to me.
I don't think you were here
when I first covered it, Scott, a couple of weeks ago, but we got in at 723. So I have a nice
cushion on this one up 20% on shares up almost 300% on the options. I own the 7.5 calls for May.
But the simple thesis here is that these guys are a beneficiary of Arctic activity.
So they have a fleet
of about 40 ships and of those 40 ships 30 of them are what we call ice class vessels which are
required to operate in the arctic um in in waters that have thick ice you know you need specialized
ships specialized hulls for that and of those 10 ships they have uh 30 of their fleet half of them
are polar certified which is required to operate in the Arctic.
So this is just a pretty straightforward thesis where I think this company is going to benefit from greater activity in and around Greenland.
And one of the best things about them is that they're the only U.S. company to have ever built a commercial port in Greenland.
Full stop.
The only U.S. company.
And it's a 500 million market cap.
So they're, in my view, a specialized logistics company
that has a lot of relevance now
because of what's happening in Greenland
and the interest around Greenland.
And the cool thing about this play is
a lot of people are debating, like,
are we going to get Greenland?
Is it going to be sovereign?
Are we going to build bases there?
The cool thing about a play like this is
it doesn't matter whether the U.S. gets Greenland or not. If there's greater
activity in the Arctic, these guys win. So that, I like kind of the winner agnostic aspect of that
trade, but that one's been doing well for us. They have earnings coming up in March,
so there's quite a while still until I have to worry about that report. But yeah, I like to rotate the peripheral
positions of my portfolio a lot. Like, you know, my three largest positions from last year are still
my three largest positions, E&S, Amcor, VF. But the rest of my stack has changed a little bit,
you know, and that's kind of how it works. I have spots in the portfolio that are for trading,
and then I have other spots in the portfolio that are for trading and then i have other spots in the portfolio that are for holding and you know allowing the the story to play out so just
really depends on the purpose of the position but yeah path is not one that i've looked back at since
that earnings i sold on the earnings pop and then just kind of moved on which ended up being a great
decision because that thing's back at 12 bucks um so yeah that ended up being a good decision in
hindsight um but yeah i feel pretty comfortable
with our with where i'm at today we have 11 positions green pretty bright green too um you
know vav up four percent thr up four and a half nebius up three and a half pangio logistics up
three and a half plpc up three ens up three scene up two and a half so portfolio is singing i don't
have any any issues with the price action.
I didn't sell anything last week, which is, I think, the right decision.
But, you know, there are a lot of people that just couldn't hold through Friday's selling.
I understand that.
Depending on your cost basis, it makes it tough.
I talk a lot about cost basis valuing.
And people, you know, depending on what sort of trader you are, what style you are, a lot
of people think it doesn't matter to them. They just really care about, you know, profits and profits
out. But for me, as a guy that likes to hold certain stocks for months, in some cases, years,
cost basis does matter. Because, you know, days like last week, where you get back to back days
of selling and all the high beta stuff, you know, minus 10% one day, minus 8% the next day,
if you don't have a strong cost base on those positions you will be shaken out whether what is that it's not
purely a function of psychology it's just a function of risk management like you're not
going to hold through a drawdown like that if you bought the stock right before the drawdown
you know and so right now i get value cost yeah i value buying at the right times
yeah and sometimes if you know you're chasing
it a little bit because sometimes these things are relentless you have to know that you're buying
it wrong and you almost want it to pull back so you can get a better cost basis you know so i i
fully get that you know like even like look at apple today so it's like if you didn't buy apple
on friday now it's up 10 you're like what do i do you know if you think it's going to be much better
if you buy it up 10 today you know you might have to be buying it three dollars lower tomorrow or you just
wait where you miss it sometimes like these things just go and they don't let you in and that's
and like kind of like the narrative of this tape it's like you know if it's going lower and you
try and play bounces they punish you you know for trying it like look at microsoft today if you
didn't if you tried microsoft because oracle was higher you know now it's down seven and it showed you it was really
heavy in the first hour while everything else seemed good but this is different this is like
the megacap techs that are trading vehicles like you're you're doing your research you're holding
these things for quarters and years and that's the way you develop wealth you know if you're
like you know i have a thousand prop traders i need to net money every month and get a paycheck.
So we have to be a little bit more specific, you know, and at this point, it's hard to be that specific because, you know, we're actually not really.
Things change.
They're showing you when they change.
You just have to like really be trading that spot and watching it.
Otherwise, you might miss things.
And then if might miss things and
then if you miss things and it changes you can get run over um anyway that's a whole different topic
yeah i mean this kind of market you know where we get these like headline driven gap ups gap
downs in the market you know a lot of volatility in the midst of an uptrend i think you have to
kind of prioritize your psychology a little bit.
Like you have to like make the acknowledgement that you're a human operator,
you know?
And I think a lot of people because about gamified investing has become like,
forget that component of it.
You're going to be susceptible to fear and greed.
It's really,
really hard.
I mean,
you've been training for a lot of times,
long time,
Scott,
but you know,
I've been training for most of my adult life too.
And same with pretty much everyone in this panel, it, you've been training for a lot of times, long time, Scott. I've been training for most of my adult life, too. And same with pretty much everyone on this panel.
You can never avoid that.
You know, you're always you still probably have moments where you are a bit fearful or a bit greedy.
Right. Or a bit you get FOMO.
I mean, that kind of stuff never goes away.
And so if you don't take the measures to protect your psychology, you will be susceptible to it. And one of the
best measures you can take to protect your psychology is buying at good prices, buying
when stocks are based out, not when they're gapping up, you know, and that's, it's tough
because a lot of times people aren't interested when a stock's been spent three months basing
out. They think it's just a boring opportunity or the market doesn't care. But when you buy stocks at those moments and then there's some multiple expansion or there's
a catalyst, you get an immediate cushion very early in the trade. And then it becomes
light work to manage it. It becomes a lot less stressful. So I always-
Plus you see it. You're there. It's like you're paying to play. It's making you engaged so you
can see when it's time to go. Yeah, it's the house money mentality.
I mean, it's a lot easier to manage.
Like, you know, for me, I'm usually 15, 10 to 15 positions, sometimes more.
Right now I'm at 17.
When you have that many positions and you have options, compliments, and strategies on some of the positions and shares on all the positions, like, that's a lot to manage if you scroll through your portfolio and everything's red.
You know, and, or, you know know you got bad entries on half your positions that's it makes it tricky especially if you get
a market gap down day like you got a couple of those last week you get a day like that and then
you're like damn what do i sell you know you're just bleeding on everything so that's not the
position i like to put myself in like i'm scrolling through my portfolio right now i only have one position in my whole portfolio that I'm right on my cost basis.
Out of the 17 positions that I own, I have one position that I'm down on.
And, you know, that's not to say, okay, I'm a great stock picker.
I mean, I do think I'm a great stock picker, but that's not the point of that.
The point of that is to say,
the point of that is to say it makes it easier for me to manage volatility
because when I scroll through and I'm
like, oh, okay, yeah, I'm giving back a little bit of ground on these. But I flip out of the daily
chart, I look at the weekly chart, most of my stocks still riding their nine week EMAs or their
21 week EMAs to the upside in very, very clearly defined weekly uptrends. That doesn't concern you
if you have a deep cost based advantage. if you don't then you're kind of
i don't want to say victim but you are dancing to the tune of the daily chart if you have a bad
cost basis you are always dancing to the tune of the daily chart you see a 21 ema forfeit on the
daily and you're like god i better get out because this thing could fall to the 50 and i don't have
the cost basis room to sit through that but if you're up 60 on the shares well you don't give
a shit if it falls the 50 day you'll probably add more and so yeah no that's and it also depends on
how many you have sometimes i've had like 15 you know trailers left and then you get into a pocket
of weakness in the market and then you know those last few trailers are all down a bunch it all adds
up and you're like wait i have just way too many trailers on on this type of tape but yeah yeah exactly but again if you have you know if you have that cost basis it
helps and plus if you know your names i'm gonna say one more thing before i go because i learned
a lot trading dash from like 140 to to that 280 you know where guys that i knew had a real thesis
on it and they were involved and knew the nuts and bolts of it when it was acting great and every time the market had those bad days you know and it would go lower they knew they're like
ah you know what it's down on like 24 000 shares you know and then they knew when there was like a
200 000 share print on the open that it could be different so for you that has these names that you
know so well you you know you see the volume like you can take advantage of the over emotion when people are just selling it
and they're not the really,
the people who are involved in the name and you're buying it with the
institutions and keeping it intact.
So getting to know a name and knowing like,
are there real sellers in there or is it just down and it'll,
they'll take it back over the end of the day or tomorrow. But, but anyway,
that's just all part of the package and knowing what type of trade
you're going to be in and why you're in it and how long you've been in it and what you can handle.
But for me, I got to jump into the last, you know, I have to go and do my recap.
Looks great though. Like really, like you, you know, you're real thorough. I could see when
people were running a portfolio, like they should definitely be listening to what I have to say,
plus the experience of trading around it.
So kudos.
All right, I got to jump.
Appreciate you, Scott.
Yeah, so again.
Yeah, tell us where people find what you're doing.
No, I'm just saying out of Palantir, Google, and Amazon,
I'm kind of accumulating a little bit of Amazon
for what
hopefully will be a strong report you know i think there's a good setup here but um i'm not
taking palantir i would not short it here but it just you know it's it's probably too brought in
to short and that's what they do though and um who knows how much it's going to go up you know
from this area the range that you'll get paid on options and then you know google's not till
wednesday and there's no i never buy options in a stock when it's at all-time highs if you were you know, from this area, the range that you'll get paid on options. And then, you know, Google's not till Wednesday.
And there's no, I never buy options in a stock when it's at all time highs.
If you were going to play Google for earnings,
you should have been positioning last week into the weakness when I was down,
you know, at three 30, not here at three 44.
It's just to be too hard to make money.
And Apple's up 10 and change just like that.
I know you have to go, but where can we find more of the stuff you're doing?
Well, I do a free call every day, 630 Club on X.
Every single day I'm there, Monday through Thursday.
It's 20 minutes.
I usually go over the levels of a bunch of the indices, where the action is, what I'm looking at, what looks good, what the key to the day is.
the key to the day is that's free you know then if you want to spend the entire day a lot of people
That's free.
from the 630 club convert to members of the alpha team where we have about 400 people that trade
for a living trade real time that share ideas and do what we're doing here but all day long
um you know then i've read dog mindset if you want to if you want to subscribe above i do a
you know a wall street workout at 5 20 in the morning in my sauna that a lot of people kind of
tune in for i play a little 80 rock and get get the mind right because if your mind's not right you know
hard to execute like you know you're getting tilted this and that and kind of the the 20 and
5 20 attaches itself to the 6 30 club at some point it might be you know a product down the
road so people who've been watching the the 6 30 for free since 2020, there's about 5,000 views.
It's only $10 to,
to become a premium subscriber,
you know,
to my overall Twitter,
which I also find a lot better because it's so hard to see what people ask me
and what they have to say with all the bots.
Every time I tweet,
there's like 17 different attachments to it.
So by becoming rather,
you know,
the red dog mindset subscriber,
I could just press subscribers and all all I will see is subscribers.
I'll never see the bots because they're not going to pay for it, and I can really answer questions and interact.
But if you really trade for a living, the Alpha Team is the place to go.
I'm sure there's a lot of groups like that, but this group is pretty special.
Everyone wants everyone to win, and it's like having your own think tank.
But overall, yeah.
So go to t3lab.com.
There's a lot of things you could see there.
And then I could also quarterback it from the 630 Club,
which is Monday through Thursday,
and I'm starting to do some Fridays
because everyone keeps asking me for it.
Shout out. I appreciate you. Follow Scott. Follow everyone keeps asking me for it. Shout out.
I appreciate you.
Follow Scott.
Follow the other speakers.
All right.
Have a great week, guys.
And, you know, always hit me up.
I have these Mondays.
By the way, Scott at T3Live.com.
Scott at T3Live.com is my email.
If you have questions, I usually can get to them and answer them.
So Scott, S-C-O-T-T, at T, the letter three, the number live.com.
And it's my real email.
It's not answered by my staff.
Or AI.
Bodbot.
A Mac Mini somewhere in the world.
I don't know if you've seen those memes, but
I appreciate you. We are at our
what, seven minutes
from Palantir earnings?
PLTR reporting earnings after the close today.
So get excited for that one.
I know a lot of you guys are going to be watching it.
Stock talk, obligatory answer, question, Q&A here.
But you just jacked up about Palantir Earnings coming up here.
Are you excited?
Name you watch at all?
It would be if it was a small cap name.
It's in the right areas.
I would be lying if I said I cared about Palantir earnings.
Yeah.
So, no, I do not care about Palantir earnings.
It's in the right sectors you're interested in, just $400 billion.
Yeah, just a ridiculous valuation that I'm not.
I mean, I can't wrap my mind around it.
I mean, I'm not saying a stock's going to go up or down.
It's just not something that's not in my purview at all.
He does not want the wrath.
I'm sure a lot of you guys are Palantir fans.
Down below, I'm curious.
I see 27 comments.
In the bottom right of your screen, there is a purple 27.
I'm looking right now.
I want you guys to comment down below what you guys think of these Palantir earnings,
how you think they're going to go. Use just one word, just one word how you think Palantir's earnings are going
to go today, coming out in about six minutes or so. StockSniper, do we have you? Yes, sir.
Why don't you read us through some of these Palantir numbers, what we're expecting?
Yeah, so there's a couple of interesting sets to watch for Palantir. We're expecting the total revenue to come in at $1.34 billion and EPS to come in around $0.21.
I'm seeing it at $0.22, $0.23.
It depends which provider you're looking at, but just in that general area.
Last quarter's report, they came in at $0.21, so pretty much most people are looking for it to be constant.
be constant and revenue was at $1.18 billion. So they're looking for a little bit of total
And revenue was at $1.18 billion.
So they're looking for a little bit of total revenue growth.
revenue growth. When we look at the options data on Palantir, the implied move is sitting at $12.93
or 8.64%. We're coming into this report with 3,214,749 open interest. Out of the last four
reports, we've seen some mixed reactions. Last quarter, we were minus 7.49. Before, it was a
plus 7.85 and then a minus 12.05
and then a plus 23.99% when we saw that monstrous reaction. The two main data sets that everybody
wants to see is they want to see just like similar towards NVIDIA earnings when you see somebody
coming in or trading at a very high multiple and priced for perfection, they're pretty much,
the expectations are through the roof. We're expecting commercial revenue growth to be coming in at 124% growth year over
year. We want to see if Palantir is going to continue to maintain this. And again, this was
a surprise coming from a couple quarters ago, just this exceptional rate there. And we want to
see government revenue growth come in at 52% year over year. This is another interesting data set
that we're looking at. But those are pretty much the two main things that people are looking for.
I think that a surprise in either commercial or government revenue, both sides, could cause a
pretty nice reaction both directions in the stock. It's coming in high, low, whatever it could be.
But those are going to be the two main data sets to watch for Palantir's earnings today.
And let's see if they can continue to surprise everybody,
which they consistently have for quite a while.
Thank you for that, sir.
So, yeah, thank you for that, sir.
Can you summarize? What is the implied move? Did you say it?
Can you summarize?
What is the implied move?
Did you say it?
Yeah, I did.
Yeah, I did.
The implied move is sitting at $12.93, or 8.64%.
You can find this written down under the spaces.
And what is it historically?
Historically, based off the last four reactions,
minus 7, plus 7, minus 12, and plus 23.99.
I just put out this post that I'm going to pin up in the next above.
You guys should go comment that, share it out, let people know that we are live.
Just data says Palantir.
We'll see its tax cut.
33% like other companies in Q4 calendar year.
Is this FaceNado or ForceNado?
It says Pump for how he thinks Palantir's earnings are going to go.
Lakeside says Carp banging on the desk.
Broad Sword says Huge.
Best Beat. Let me up. Stock Talk. says carp banging on the desk. Broad sword says huge. Best
beat. Let me up.
Stock talk. I think you don't want to say
anything bad about Palantir's earnings.
We got a pro Palantir comment
section coming down below. I hope it's higher
for everyone. I do own some. I own some
in my IRA. Me not being interested
doesn't mean I think they're going to be bad.
Yeah. Stock talk. Can you tell me why you hate
Palantir?
Relax. I don't want to get any
rap. I don't hate Palantir.
I don't buy stocks that are
trading at whatever
it's trading at. I just don't
buy stocks that are trading at valuations like that.
My story with Palantir
five years ago or something, I bought it
$25, $24. Then I
sold it like $6 or seven dollars for tax
loss harvesting it didn't buy and so that sucked and then i bought back i don't know when this was
but my cost basis is 26 in the ira a little smaller than i have in some of the other accounts
but you know it's we were trading at 150 cost basis is 26 they're not bad again the numbers
should be out in two minutes or so palantir the numbers should be out in two minutes or so
palantir's numbers should be out in two minutes sniper do you know what segments that we should
be looking at here obviously government versus um commercial spacex confirms merger with xai
what did i just say whoa yeah basically the two numbers that I said people are going to be looking for,
124% commercial revenue growth is what we want to see them maintain,
and we want to see government revenue 52% year-over-year growth.
A surprise 5%, 10% in either direction for both of those numbers,
I think could cause a reaction in the stock.
What?
I didn't even order it.
He did not order the food.
We got one minute.
I am seeing this headline here.
Musk SpaceX confirms merger with XAI and company membo.
I'm looking into that right now.
I think it's from an internal company memo that just leaked.
Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, I think it's from an internal company memo that just leaked. I'm trying to find the memo. Yeah, I think so too.
Yeah, I think it's an internal company email.
Ooh, Palantir's number should be out.
Let me get this post out really quickly.
What is Palantir stock doing?
Rushed TLTR stock.
Up initially 8%.
Palantir is up
8% initial move
so Palantir's revenue came in
at 1.40 billion
EPS came in at .25
I'm looking for the additional details
both beats
a little
double beat action
for Palantir sending the stock higher I wonder
what forward guidance is
try it since you do a post here I see it at 4% now
it says this just delayed no okay it's pulled back a little okay let me know if
you end up getting some some more of these numbers,
but Palantir's initial move is higher, was up like 8%,
now is up to Elon Musk's SpaceX and Stock Talk.
Let me know if you see more information on that one.
I'm seeing commercial revenue of $507 million,
which is up 137% year-over-year for Palantir.
Government revenue, 570 million.
Profitability,
adjusted EPS was a beat.
Outlook, Q1 revenue,
they said they got it between
1.532 billion
to 1.536 billion.
Wall Street wanted 1.36 billion.
That is a nice beat there.
Let me get this post up.
But yeah, Palantir forward guidance
coming in above expectation.
They also said
revenue for the full year. They expect revenue for the full year, they expected...
Whoa.
Revenue for the full year, they guided to between $7.182 billion to $7.198 billion.
WashU wanted $6.22 billion.
So pretty big beats on this forward guidance.
Yeah, let me dig in a little deeper on Palantir.
Stock is back up to 8% down.
I literally took the screenshot at the one moment there
that this was not.
Next quarter.
Snappa, any numbers you're seeing?
Anything you're seeing that's interesting?
I just sent the post out.
Come on, Tim.
You should come up as well. You've pretty much read off everything that everyone's looking for.
Gotcha.
Okay.
Sorry, I'm just getting this post up really quickly.
8% move thus far.
Nice move on Palantir.
SpaceX.
And let me try and dig in and see if I can find more on the SpaceX XAI story.
Here we go.
Elon Musk plans to merge SpaceX and XAI, according to people familiar with the matter, in a deal that encompasses the billionaires increasingly...
Well, okay.
The deal was announced in a memo asking not to be identified.
Bloomberg News earlier reports...
So nothing really in here, just that a memo happened.
Yeah, but Bloomberg is reporting that
SpaceX
sent a report to employees
internally about the merger that is happening.
Dov, do we have you up here?
Indeed you do.
What is up? How are you doing?
Palantir is up 8% in after hours.
Big numbers.
Big numbers. Yeah, Eps and revenue coming in above
expectations i don't know if you heard the forward guidance 1.5 something billion uh is what they
they guided towards next quarter while she won 1.3 something full year they guided towards 7.2
billion basically a little below that while she won 6 6.2 billion. So pretty nice, nice beat here in the numbers.
From the PLTR up 7%, but also SpaceX doing a little bit of a
announcing the merger internally with XAI.
Yeah, pretty cool.
A couple of things happening at once.
Good for founder-led companies, that's for sure.
Bunch of them popping off today.
Yeah, I'm excited to see what Palantir can do.
You know, obviously most of the market kind of had a little
dump the last uh couple of days and they're still down a bit on the year but this is definitely a
nice jolt and earnings are always interesting with carp i love to hear him you know on the mic
talking about all the different pieces and insights and uh you know last earnings was
interesting it was basically uh kind of the top there their last
earnings they popped all the way up to 221 um and then basically sold off and then after that went
all the way from there down to you know 148 so interested to see you know if they can get
something similar to more similar to the two three earnings before that where you know if you look at
those earnings they had nice runs right off the back of them even at the one in august which ended
up having a little self afterwards they went from 157 off the back of them. Even the one in August, which ended up having a little sell off afterwards, they went from
157 all the way up to 187.
Before that, you had earnings at 108 and had that whole run just continuous after it.
So I'd be interested to see if they can run back like that.
And super, super key for Palantir.
I don't know if this was mentioned already from a technical perspective.
Palantir broke below their 200-day S closed below their 200 asma for the first time i can see
since may of 2023 april of 2023 looks like the last time that they closed below their 200 sma i
mean they they had tapped it back in uh july of 2024 but never closed below it and now if we can
get a little bit more room here
and close it like 160, they would be back above it.
So that would be a super, super key level for Palantir.
This right here is actually insanely important.
So that's one thing that I'm really watching.
Thank you for that information, sir.
Yeah, I know Michael is somewhere in the audience
if you want to request up. Jump on stage here.
Any thoughts here on what's happening with Palantins and those other pieces?
Let me send you the co-host just in case you see him as well.
You got any thoughts on SpaceX and XAI merging together?
I feel like there's a lot of discussion here,
and maybe someone like StockTalk has more insights than I perhaps do in terms of this.
But a lot of discussion around this being a need for funds, liquidity, or not necessarily a need, but like Elon trying to move money to different places.
Make sure that, you know, there's funding, that shareholders are whole.
I haven't dug so far into it. StockTalk okay have you had a chance to dig into it sorry what was what did you say on palantir no no no no spacex
yeah i'm that's what i'm reading about right now i don't really i can't find the memo itself but
um i'm pretty sure it's legit because ed Ludlow is the one that put this out.
He is on it, Edward Ludlow.
But the Bloomberg article does not have much else
besides literally just that it happened.
Space-based AI is the only way to scale the technology.
That's apparently what they said in the memo,
but I can't find the actual memo,
which I think is probably by design.
I'm sure somebody has it internally.
Maybe Bloomberg has it or something,
but I can't find the actual memo.
I'm looking though.
Is this surprising for you?
Is there a world where SpaceX and XAI are public in one area
and all of Elon Musk's companies are public
and then Tesla is a separate company like i feel like that doesn't it doesn't feel great for tesla
that would not be a great scenario i think yeah i mean it'll it'll take away a lot of
inflows that go into tesla for the sake of like becoming an elon
so i mean it'll it's um it's something that you have to kind of monitor
going into the IPO. I don't think that,
I don't think that like he doesn't want them all to be merged. I think he does. I think he wants
all of his companies to be under one umbrella, but it's going to be really difficult to pull off a merger with tesla because you need board approval you need shareholder approval and
it probably wouldn't be the best terms in the world for tesla it's easier to do that with xai
because he has a lot more control in terms of percentage ownership of both xai and tesla
he can force the issue on that i don't know know how they would fold Tesla into this, though.
And I'm not really sure that the synergies are there.
Maybe there are synergies there from a manufacturing standpoint,
because Tesla has a lot of manufacturing capacity that can be...
Dude, humanoid robots in space.
What do you mean?
Yeah, yeah, I mean...
Am I?
Just because products would look cool together doesn't mean there's actual business synergies.
But yeah, it's a nice idea.
I just don't know if it's going to be as easy
as slapping together XAI and SpaceX.
He can make a SpaceX and XAI merger happen very quickly.
I mean, he controls both companies.
Apparently, he just did yeah i mean they're
confirming their intent to merge i think some of the headlines are misleading confirms merger is
misleading they're confirming their intent to merge ahead of the ipo so they haven't merged
they're just confirming their intent to merge which i guess is the same thing because no one's
going to be able to prevent that from happening if elon wants that because he has you know north of 40 control in both companies i think he has north of 60 control
in xai if i'm not mistaken so yeah i mean he knows why apparently 1.25 billion dollar valuation on
the spacex and xAI merger. Trillion.
What?
$1.5 trillion.
Yeah, trillion, not billion.
I was like, billion.
Yeah, 1.5 trillion, that makes sense.
Yeah, I mean, it's going to be an interesting combination.
I mean, XAI is like, effectively, the business is really just Twitter and Grok.
And, you know, is that overtly synergistic with SpaceX either?
Probably not.
But can they force the synergy by just using it as, like, the software component of the business and then using SpaceX as the hardware component of the business?
That's essentially what I think they're going to be trying to do here.
So I don't know what products they intend to enforce with this,
but Elon understands that the market views his companies as a proxy to him. And so this is just
an attempt to create a really, really powerful proxy exposure to Elon and anyone who wants to
bet on Elon will just buy that stock. And so, yeah, do I think it's a great thing for Tesla?
No, but do I think that they'll probably
try to get tesla involved in a you know a merger at some point yeah is it going to be as easy as
merging with xai no so there's some nuance here but it's interesting nonetheless most shareholder
meetings are not very interesting warren buffett did a good job by sharing his thoughts each time
getting people there every year.
Elon Musk, Tesla, they're having some crazy vote every single year.
2025, it was Give Me Money.
2026, it's going to be merged with my company.
Is that what you kind of just heard?
Hey, it worked in 2035. It went well.
I would personally hate to see SpaceX, XAI, and all these other companies.
I mean, why not put Boring Company and Neuralink in there at some point?
Interesting.
Yeah, I mean, we merge them all.
Like, yeah, sure, why not?
But, I mean, Boring Company and Neuralink are just – Boring.
Maybe they just need to merge together.
Boring.
Boring.
Boring.
Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring.
Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring.
Boring. Boring. Boring.
Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. Boring. B good combo name. But Boring Company and Neuralink are just not really companies at scale that I think you would want involved in that right now.
The thing with involving Tesla in it is, again, they have an enormous amount of manufacturing capacity
because they have these huge giga factories that can produce anything, really.
Right now, they're outfitted to produce cars, but they're pivoting some of them to Optimus.
Who knows?
If a merger happens at some point
between the new SpaceX, XAI, and Tesla,
then maybe some of those factories
will be producing parts for SpaceX as well.
Who knows?
But yeah, I mean, it's hard for me to comment right now
because I haven't read the memo,
but it's hard for me to say more than that.
But I'm sure we'll find out more.
I'm sure Elon will put some tweets out this week about it nice awesome quickly before i go
over to the next person you guys are enjoying this spaces this type of live free conversations
make sure you are following this host account up here make sure you are following all the amazing
speakers up here especially when someone says something smart, enjoyable, interesting,
anything like that.
Space is a great way to find new people.
And yeah, it's also, you know, you're hearing people's voice live
versus thoughts behind a keeper.
I think it's a very different take.
So go in, check out the people.
It's very easy to follow them.
Truth is, you can unfollow them later if you don't enjoy the content.
But these are really smart people,
and we enjoy them joining in the conversation.
I would love to throw it over to Michael, bring you into the conversation.
Michael, how are you doing, sir?
Doing great.
Thanks for throwing it over.
Yeah, no, I am excited to hear your thoughts.
We got some interesting news here in the last 10, 15, 20 minutes for two major companies.
We had Palantir earnings,
which was a pretty large beat across the board. One more time, Palantir beat EPS,
beat revenue, both a decent bit. What I found more interesting was the forward guidance. Revenue expected to be around $1.53 billion next quarter. Walsh wanted $1.3 billion. So nice little beat
there. Revenue for the full year guided to around seven
point two billion a little bit below that while she wants six point two billion decent numbers
there and then there's a story going around that spacex sent a memo internally talking about they
have confirmed their intent to merge with xai two very interesting stories in a little bit i'd be
curious if you have any uh takes on. Yeah. So first we'll do
Palantir and then we'll do SpaceX. Palantir, probably something we've thought a little bit
more deeply about. SpaceX, something probably just thinking about the live with you. So on Palantir,
as you know, at our firm, at Founders, we invest over very long periods of time. So our holding
period is probably a decade. So I heard some of your earlier speakers that are looking for an hour or a weekly trade.
We're literally looking at 10, 20 years.
And so as you mentioned, Palantir both beat on earnings and revenue and raised.
We're looking at three core drivers that we think will continue to allow them to perform for the next decade.
So number one, we're looking at the AI platform or AIP, and we're seeing triple digit growth in US commercial sales,
137% growth year over year. So obviously a very strong number. The second one that Alex likes to
talk about a lot, which typically had showed up in venture economics, but is the rule of 40 score.
which typically had showed up in venture economics, but is the rule of 40 score.
This quarter, Palantir put up a rule of 40 score of 127%. That's up from 114% last quarter. So
absolutely astonishing metrics on the rule of 40 score. And then the final thing that we want to
look at is not only are these deals that they're signing, are they good deals? Are they great deals? So we like to look at total contract value or TCV
and TCV accelerated 138% year on year this quarter. So again, our firm doesn't look at
things for a day or an hour or even a quarter. We're looking at things for a decade or multi
decade period for very long-term compounding. But these are some of the drivers that we're looking at that looks like Palantir
will continue to beat and exceed expectations. So with that, I'll pause and see if either of
you have questions or any of the listeners, and then maybe we'll go into a quick hit on SpaceX
and what I think. Again, I haven't done a ton of work beyond the headlines, but I think I have
some ideas on why those two pieces make sense putting together.
I'm curious if there's a part on Palantir
that is more interesting from you.
Obviously the government and commercial business,
both around 500-ish million dollars right now in revenue.
Similar size segments, obviously different growths,
probably different trajectories
different levels of safety in them i'm curious if there's a part of the the business that is
more interesting for you there especially as you're maybe looking through these numbers more
long term anything like that and you can just go right into the spacex part maybe there is a good
little segue there between space and defense yeah so as you're right as you mentioned those are two
very different businesses obviously the traditional sales cycle in defense is much longer and much stickier and commercial is a bit faster.
So I don't think we have an opinion right now in the company's growth trajectory of where they're generating revenue from.
But obviously, those are two very separate businesses.
very separate businesses. On the SpaceX side, given that power is the current constraint on
data centers, I don't think that Elon is wrong in that this concept that data centers can perhaps
be very effective in space where you're getting essentially unlimited power. And so I think the concept of putting your AI data center company
into your space company to take advantage of the fact that you have a significant advantage,
I think it's two orders of magnitude at least, 100x advantage on launch costs,
and now you're potentially stepping out of the power constraint issue.
I think it's very interesting. And I think the final thing is, people ask us why we are so
focused on founders. Obviously, Elon is probably the ultimate example. He's courageous, he's
relentless, he executes. And one of the most important ones is moral authority to change course when needed.
And given Elon's track record,
if Elon sees the opportunity to deconstrain himself
from some of the power problems
that others are facing on Earth,
I think at this point it's pretty interesting to us.
Yeah, I think those are some good thoughts there. I think those are some good thoughts there i think there's some good thoughts there um yeah no i guess it sorry i want to jump in i got a question real quick for you
michael uh just look at these founder-led companies being so top of minor now and shout out palantir
by the way i don't know if you were listening before i was kind of just doing a little technical
analysis we really want to close above this 200MA, and we just pushed back over 160 here on PLTR
for those that are watching with me.
One thing that's always so interesting about founder-led companies, and especially around
earnings, is getting to listen to them on the call, right?
I feel like the calls that have founders leading the call probably get so many more shareholders
actually tuning in, I think, to listen to what that
founder is going to say.
Like we play the calls on here, you know, and typically people are much more apt to
listen to Alex Karp, right?
Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, pieces like that are really recognizable names.
I'm curious your thought on, do you think that that's a big asset for these companies,
right?
That not only are they having the founder who cares and typically owns a lot of the company, but that they also are like the spokesperson for that company when it
comes to earning, sharing important data, sharing vision, pieces like that. Yeah, absolutely. I
think there's, it's an app, the difference between a founder-led call and a non-founder-led call are
stark. A non-founder-led call is typically a tightly scripted,
even just beyond the press release, even the talking points are tightly scripted by investor relations. And the founders tend to really riff and tell you what's on their mind. And so I think
it's a lot more informative for the listener. And I think a lot of, you know, in general,
most people tell you what's going on. So if you listen to a founder
led call, they'll tell you where the direction of their company is going. And typically, you know,
again, kind of aligning with our viewpoint, founders think typically in very long time scales.
So, you know, certain listeners on the call might be wanting to know what happened this quarter,
what margins look like, but the founder is going to tell you what he's thinking about doing five,
10 or 20 years from now. And again, that's how we believe you really compound your money. So yes,
we think that the founders give investors an opportunity to really understand where they're
going to take their company. And if you listen to them, they're likely going to take it there.
And if you listen to them, they're likely going to take it there.
Yeah, I like the emphasis that they always put behind it.
Do you think, this is another general question, we actually tweeted a good graphic.
I don't know if you put that up top, Evan, you might want to pin that up top.
There's a graphic about all these founder-led companies.
And there's some that I think people know more about, you know, the obvious ones, which
we're talking about, NVIDIA, Meta, Robinhood, Tesla, Palantir, sit on there. But some
of the best performing companies over the last couple of years are also on here. Carvana, for
example, right, has been going kind of crazy, especially over the last year or so that stocks
just gone absolutely nuts. MercadoLibre, maybe people don't necessarily think of, but some of these
others like still have that founder at the helm. So do you kind of put like a differentiation on
and just like as an investor person, I think a lot of people in the crowd, you might be able to
relate to this. Like some of my biggest holdings are Tesla, Robinhood, right? Have had chances to
interact with the CEOs, you know, see them constantly in the timeline. It allows you to
build conviction.
What do you think about some of these?
I mean, Monster.
Monster was like the best performing stock for forever.
And now it's just next to NVIDIA.
Just curious how you think about it
with some of these companies
where it's founder-led
and the founder is very publicly prominent
and they are out there and they are speaking
or it's founder-led on the back
and people don't even really realize,
I think for a lot of these companies
that they are founder-led.
Like, how do you differentiate that?
Does it give you more confidence in when we're the founder super out there?
Or regardless, having a founder at the helm is a great thing.
That's a great question.
I don't think I've thought through that.
We've looked at this at a very detailed data level, and we haven't seen a differentiation between those two.
And to your point, yes,
some build very publicly, you know, obviously, Elon, you know, Jensen has become very famous, given what's gone on with Nvidia, but you're right. You know, Monster Beverage kind of built
quietly, rich Fairbanks builds Capital One quite quietly. You know, you know, people think these are only tech companies. Waste Solutions
is actually a founder led company. So it's not just kind of brash,
top of mind tech CEOs that are running these founder led companies. It's all across
the GIC sectors are led by founders.
And yeah, to your point, some are very public about it,
tweeting 10 times a day to be great faces of their companies.
And some just do it very quietly and are not well-known.
Yeah, I'm excited today.
Alex Karp, Ernie's call after the the close actually probably coming up
in the next little bit he likes to end his earnings calls with a nice message to retail
shareholders which always likes to get posted around it's always an interesting one the that
is probably a fact uh that the earnings calls for these people for these founders tend to be a lot
more interesting is what we can call it than than the earnings calls for some of the other ones.
Yeah, so, never mind.
I was going to go down the GameStop route where they don't even do an earnings call anymore.
It's an interesting time.
Stock Talk, if I could ask you a question.
Maybe it doesn't matter so much.
Time frame is different stuff here but when you have a name that goes into like your um
your long-term basket your core holdings basket how important is like management the founder
in those decisions i mean i like i like if a company's founder led it's a good thing it's a
positive thing it has a lot of historical precedent but it's a requirement for me um i mean i i haven't really gone through my portfolio and seen really analyze how many are
founder-led and how many are not but i mean i would say out of the 17 positions i have maybe a half
i can't i haven't looked at it i mean i could go look at do the math tomorrow or something and see
the exact percentage but i care care about management as a whole.
It being founder-led isn't the only indicator of quality to me. I mean, I think
it depends on the industry a lot. Sometimes in certain industries, you need networking is more
valuable than it is in other industries. For example, in aerospace and defense, you want a
well-networked C-suite but in other industries you know you want
different aspects to to the leadership so it just depends on the type of company it is but yes i
care about management the short answer is yes i care about management but it doesn't not have to
be founder-led no do you look at just uh like ceos or likeFOs? I guess CFO is maybe even less important.
I look at the whole C-suite.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I look at the whole C-suite.
And then, you know, again, depending on the industry,
sometimes I will look a little further down the chain.
But generally I'm looking at the C-suite and I'm just trying to figure out
like what they've done,
what the reputation is, you know, in certain industries, M&A matters more than others. And
so sometimes I'll look, you know, you have any M&A experience, you know, what deals have you closed,
you know, were they good deals, were they bad deals, I'll look at stuff like that.
But management isn't like in the top three things I look at.
I do look at it, but it's not the top three things I look at. You know, the first and foremost, I look at thematic relevance,
which is because I'm a thematic trader and investor.
So I care about thematic relevance.
Once I've established thematic relevance, then I look at the valuation,
you know, both forward and TTM valuation.
I asked myself, is it reasonably priced?
Could the multiple expand more?
And then I look at the chart and based on those three things,
I make a decision generally and stuff like management or product market fit
or technological differentiation or all of these other factors.
I look at them, but they're not as high value as like those top
three points of Confluence, theme, chart, fundamentals. That's really where most of my
picks come from. That sort of trifecta. And if all those boxes are checked for me, I pretty much,
I'm just going to buy the stock. I mean, it's going to be really hard for me to find something
in the quality of management or quality of product that's going to deter me if all of the other three major factors are giving me the green light.
So if I like the theme, the chart, and the valuation, there's a 95% chance I'm going to at least buy the stock in some way, shape, or form.
Sometimes that might be just, oh, I'll take some calls.
Sometimes it might be a full position. It depends. But when it comes to the core positions,
like you're alluding to, I have, I don't know, in the portfolio right now, I think I have 10
core positions. The core positions are never designated upon purchase. I don't buy a stock
and then say, hey, this is a core position. That's not how it works. I buy a stock and then over the course of one or two or three quarters, sometimes it
just takes one quarter, right?
Sometimes I'll buy a stock and the very next quarter is like validating everything that
I had theorized.
If that happens, that could be like VIAV, for example.
We bought VIAV, I think it was in October, November, whenever it was.
The earnings were five days after the purchase.
And they confirmed everything that I had written in my thesis.
So I designated it as a core position five days after opening it.
Now there's other instances where it takes two or three quarters for me to be like,
oh, okay, now it's happening.
And then, you know, I mark it with a star on my journal and, you know, I treat it differently.
The designation of core positions, not just like for funsies.
When I designate a stock as a core position in my portfolio, the management of that position becomes fundamentally different than the way I manage trades you know in my view trades should be managed with discipline you should have
rules um that's how i was taught to trade all the good traders i know have rules now my core
positions i break those rules right and that's that's what it means to be a core position is
like i'm willing to give you more runway, to give you a longer leash.
I'm willing to let the stock slip under the 21 EMA.
I'm willing to let the stock enter a short-term downtrend because my conviction in the research is high enough that I'm willing to be more generous with the charge structure.
That's really the distinction of
core position versus trading position. Now, being generous with the chart structure doesn't mean I
ignore the chart. It means that on those core positions, I'm more so focused on the weekly
and monthly charts than I am on the daily chart. And with the trading positions, I'm very overtly
focused on the daily chart. The daily chart starts breaking down in the trading position, I'm out.
I'll figure it out later. I'll maybe reenter later or whatever. But if the daily charge starts breaking down in the trading position. I'm out. I'll figure it out later. Like I'll maybe reenter later or whatever. But if the daily charge starts breaking out on a
stock I've owned for nine months and I'm up 500% on the stock, no, I'm not going to sell it just
because the daily chart breaks down. So the designation is more about what sort of rules
apply to that position, what the conviction level is and how it's going to be managed based on that.
That's why I make that designation in my portfolio. So yeah, that's a simple, simple way to explain the difference for me.
And I know for everyone it's, it's, it's different, but for me and my portfolio,
that's, that's the distinction.
Gotcha.
I appreciate you.
And let me know as you are looking into more, if you end up finding that memo or anything deeper into it.
Yeah, I couldn't find it. I couldn't find it. I don't think the memo has been leaked.
I'm pretty sure Bloomberg has it. And that's where the headline came from, because the original headline is from Bloomberg.
But I don't see the memo. So I don't know. Maybe it'll be leaked later this week or something, but I don't see the actual memo.
I only see a quote from the memo, which was also put out by Bloomberg,
which says, space-based AI is the only way to scale
the technology.
So that's the only thing that we know.
Yeah, and it's 10 beers in space, baby.
Here we come.
Yeah, I'm not sure that that's going to happen
in the immediate term, but...
But, you know, it is a cool idea.
There's plenty of space
on the ground, for now. There's plenty of space on the ground for now.
Elon's trying to make the arguments
around
how much
power you can
generate or get from solar
in space versus on Earth.
But I'm sure that the cost benefits
don't really make sense at this point in time
it does seem a little far-fetched
but hey, the whole thing is
1.25 trillion is a large number
but also a reported
15 billion dollars of revenue
is also quite a large number as well
Starlink is a real thing
yeah, Starlink is a very real business Starlink is a real thing. Yeah, Starlink is a very real business.
Yeah.
Starlink is a real business.
And that's really their revenue generating component of the business.
I mean, you look down the ladder and you're not going to invest in SpaceX if you want an immediate return.
And all of the private investors in SpaceX know that.
And all of Elon's investors in general are not short-term oriented.
He knows that. He knows his investor base intimately. I would say arguably better than
most CEOs, if not all CEOs. He knows what he's doing. He's selling a stock.
You know, Elon is a manager first and foremost. He's an aggregator of talent. He's a
foremost, he's an aggregator of talent. He's a delegator, but he's also a salesman and he
recognizes that his job is to sell stock. And most CEOs who don't recognize that have poorly
performing stocks. Okay. Another great example is his carp, the CEO of Palantir. He is a good
salesman. He knows how to sell his stock. He knows how to sell the fact that they operate in a niche
and are very dominant within that niche. Markuckerberg is great at selling a stock jensen
wong is great at selling a stock the best ceos are great i will say you did just list four founders
you did just list four founders yeah i mean founders are obviously better at selling their
stock than non-founders right i mean because they founded the company they can sell the story from day one but um a lot of people uh that i've seen say look i don't want my ceo to be a salesman because i
think it's cheesy or i think it's promotional or whatever that's stupid that is just a stupid way
to look at it like you do want your ceo to be a salesman you just want him to be a tasteful
salesman you don't want him tweeting buy the tasteful salesman. You don't want him tweeting, buy the stock.
I mean, that would be silly.
But you need them to sell the story.
That happens every once in a while.
Yeah, I mean, yeah.
Some of them do do that every once in a while.
But you don't want to see too much of that.
You don't want to see people coming out and saying, oh, short squeeze the stock or things like that.
That's garbage.
But you do want to see people, CEOs, sell the story and convince their investor base
of the story. And that's going to vary from investor base to investor base. Your investor
base in an oil and gas stock or a legacy healthcare stock is not going to want to hear the same
things as an investor base in Tesla or in SpaceX or in Palantir. They don't want to hear the same things as an investor base in Tesla or in SpaceX or in Palantir. They don't want to hear
the same things. The investors in growth companies want to hear that you're going to grow, that you
have exciting new products in the pipeline that could or could not penetrate newly emerging
markets. And investors in oil and gas companies and legacy healthcare companies, they want to hear about earnings growth and right-sizing the ship and stabilizing margins and that sort of stuff.
So knowing that distinction is important.
The CEO has to know that distinction, and anyone who owns the stock should know that distinction.
Every time you buy a stock, you should know, who are my fellow shareholders?
What do they want?
What do they expect?
And if you don't understand that well,
you're going to have a hard time holding the stock
because you're not going to understand the volatility.
You're not going to understand why the gap downs are happening,
why the gap ups are happening,
because that's driven by the expectations of the shareholder bases.
And shareholder bases vary dramatically from stock to stock to stock.
Yeah, do you mind if I jump back in here yeah yeah i'd love to i think that's a great thread
that i'd like to take another direction a further direction then i'll come back on a spacex thought
so i think it's important to know how investors are thinking about the stock and which metrics
to show meaning are people thinking about this like a value stock? Are they thinking about like a gross stock, a GARP stock, or some of these great founder-led companies? People are probably
still thinking about almost on venture metrics, even though they're in the public markets.
And then there's obviously subcategories of that, whether it's a cyclical stock or deep cyclical,
but I think it's very important to understand what metrics the market
is weighing the performance on and how those metrics will cause the equities to behave.
And then just looping back on SpaceX, I think there was a question as to whether,
you know, the space-based data centers are near-term, medium-term, or long-term. And I think there
was a last speaker was saying maybe that's longer term. We think that could be sooner rather than
later. Obviously, Elon and the team put, you know, Starlink up quite quickly on a relative basis.
That infrastructure is already there, those
connects between those satellites are already there. I think we could see space-based data
centers in 12 to 36 months. I don't think this is a 36 months to 10 years item. I think this is a 12
to 36 months timeframe item. Over. Interesting. First of all, I like like the over i'm a fan of that you uh that that is a pretty
short time frame but and so is that the you're thinking to starting it in space or do you think
that is where it starts to kind of get meaningful from space i think that's first um first space
first beginning i don't think that's scale.
I think that's first couple test
constellations.
Stock talk, what do you think?
About?
When do we start to get these kind of
data centers in space?
A realistic time frame for at least the test
constellations to start
going up and you know at least progress being made in the department as opposed to it being like hey
this is something that's 10 years out that's a hard question to answer because
i don't think that they're necessary yet um you know elon does i i don't think that they're
necessary yet i mean we haven't even like the stuff that we invested in last year i mean that
not we but like you know american technology companies invested last year to the tune of a trillion plus dollars, hasn't even gone online yet.
So, I just don't know, like, Jensen Wong, actually, this weekend, there was a lot of stories out about Jensen versus OpenAI.
a lot of stories out about Jensen versus OpenAI.
His comments from the interview on the street,
and I think he was in Korea,
and then there was another interview.
He did a lot of interviews this weekend that were on X,
but he sort of made some offhand comments
about we didn't invest in this round.
Yes, we said we want to invest $100 billion,
but we meant over multiple rounds.
We'll look at the next round. And people took it as like him sort of being noncommittal towards OpenAI. But what he was alluding to in his answers to those questions was financial discipline.
Today's model companies are not being financially disciplined.
Anthropic, OpenAI, XAI.
I would agree with that.
And I think his point that he's trying to make is that let's see.
I think there's a public statement, by the way, from XAI saying they've joined SpaceX.
Sorry.
So they're confirming it on their own too?
Yeah.
I think there are some more public
statements going around right now somewhere.
SpaceX has acquired XAI, forming one of the
most ambitious vertically integrated
engines on Earth, is a post
from
SpaceX.
SpaceX has acquired
XAI to form the most ambitious
blah blah blah vertical company in the world
direct to this
chapter. Current advances in AI
deployment in the long terms.
I'm trying to see more language if it's actually done.
Data centers in space is what they're talking about here.
Alright.
But yeah, there is the
press release out by SpaceX.
They just tweeted it. I bet you XAI
put something out.
Official, XAI joins
SpaceX.
Yeah, and it looks like Elon
is saying that within two to three years,
space will become the lowest cost
location for AI computing.
Going back to his view on unlimited solar power,
making solar panels five times more efficient than those on Earth.
So we'll see.
We'll see if it happens in sub 36 months or post 36 months.
Are you surprised that this is happening, this here obviously it's been rumored michael
a little bit over the last couple days and weeks that something like this was coming
it kind of i don't know maybe it was a little unexpected maybe it wasn't for some people
who are watching i'm curious your thought here and yeah elon companies coming together
you know i think that in the past elon Elon has taken things apart and put them back together when it makes sense.
And if this view that he has on getting around a power bottleneck by using solar and space to get around it, I think it makes sense.
So it certainly doesn't surprise me just given that it's been
talked about for a bit. I certainly am no expert on space or AI. So you're kind of tapping my
fundamental knowledge on this, but from a headline perspective and just kind of understanding where
how I think Elon's thinking about the world and trying to get around the power constraint. I think it makes sense. And I think that,
you know, there's some discussion about, there was some discussion earlier about compute efficiency
and whether people are being compute effective. So let's talk about that. I think in every major
technological revolution, looking back to the railroads, looking back to the telecom build out.
At the beginning stage of all of these technological revolutions, there is a lot of
capital destruction. So certainly some of the people deploying capital will not do it in an
effective way. Probably the railroads are the best best um analog to this but for all the guys
that that aren't rolling out quickly i think the memphis data center um got built in two weeks or
online in two weeks or some crazy number and it also kind of becomes a flywheel where if you're trying to get the latest
chips and Jensen's making them and he knows you're going to deploy them in two weeks when everyone
else is going to take 18 months, guess who's going to get the chips first, right? Because
that's now a self-fulfilling arms race that's being driven by the chip vendors. So I think that
there, and I hate to elucidate the obvious, but there's going to be
a lot of capital destroyed by those people that aren't deploying it effectively. And there's going
to be some really smart, differentiated capital deployments as well. Yeah, no, I appreciate that.
What is Tesla stock doing here michael thank you for for the
insights there i wonder if tesla is moving this palantir saw my screen that stock is up
eight percent right here and after hours they're doing nothing it's fine nothing interesting
stock talk what's your uh initial reaction here to it being confirmed now. This also came a little bit out of nowhere.
Reading is the thing they posted.
Yeah.
The press release I did just
post it as well.
So it was a little bit of a
long one.
That's what she said.
But yeah, sorry.
Sometimes it's just there.
I've been watching too much of The's just there. I'm just talking about space-based data centers.
I've been watching too much of The Office, honestly.
I apologize.
First time?
First time? No, no, no.
It's just a good background thing.
Ryan, you've been sending some messages here.
I know we've had some new stories coming out.
Karadyne was a big mover.
They had some earnings. What are you watching this market you also spacex oh teradyne up 20
spacex i don't know if you want to call the the the teradyne numbers were great one 180 ups beats
1.36 they got back over a billion uh revenue the estimate was $969 million, over 20%, right at 21%.
That was out in the middle of that conversation.
A lot of great conversations going on here in the space.
Let's hear.
Talk to me.
One thing we haven't talked about much.
I mean, we have, but I don't know your insights on it.
You were a space guy.
You're playing this thing there.
You're excited for the SpaceX IPO.
Obviously, big news going on right now. XI confirmed merger they're coming up here space
he's been pretty hot excited for this this potential SpaceX IPO coming up I mean it's
I feel like it's impossible not to be bullish SpaceX when if you look at the the data are you bullish at 1.5 1.25 trillion though
i mean honestly whenever that ipo comes out it's probably the top of the space thematic for
a short period of time you know whether it be you know six nine months 18 months something like that
that's probably kind of a peak it probably runs up to that. I mean, that has to be the most anticipated IPO of the last decade, if not, I don't want
to say ever because that's a dangerous term to use, but it's got to be the most anticipated
one in years, in a long time.
And when you look at the data and you see that of all the satellites from low Earth
on, SpaceX owns
half. They have more than half
of all the satellites that are floating
up there. That's including
all the different sovereign nations, all the other companies,
private companies, all that stuff.
It's hard not to see what they've built
and how far ahead they are and
not be bullish to them. I'm a best
in breed type of guy. Whenever I
look at different thematics and stuff, I, I,
I prefer to invest in the, in the best strongest company of that sector.
Walmart, almost a trillion, 10 billion away from a trillion.
So it's a great day for, for that as well.
Might pass Berkshire and it'll be a top 10 market cap publicly traded companies
too. If you take out Saudi Aramco. So there's your fun fact of the day.
Walmart just keeps chugging. Teradine's chart is incredible too.
I can't get over that. I didn't, I,
I feel like stock talk is Teradine not a name that you cover or follow much.
Maybe just hadn't had a good setup for you,
but like Teradine seems like it's one of the ones that would be in your
wheelhouse before it made this parabolic move i do follow it um i just i looked at it actually
um late last year like in november um around a buck 60 buck 50 on that 50-day test that it had
in november uh but i just got occupied with other stuff i should have bought it
there i mean the stock's 100 higher now well actually almost more than that but um yeah i
have looked at it many times i've just never been able to get the entry i want sometimes i'll be
scouting stuff and like you know waiting for a 50-day test or a 21 ema test and then some other
stuff comes up on my radar and then you know i get distracted
but i think one of the reasons i didn't pull the trigger on this one back then was because
i still felt like the ttm valuation was a bit rich you know trades at like 13 14 times sales 70 p
it's not really fundamentally something that makes me excited so yeah i don't know i have looked at
it it is a quality company.
I thought about buying it late last year, but it just never got my entry.
That's really the simple answer.
But the stock's done great.
I'm sure all the owners of that name are very, very pleased.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the stock's just an insane move.
It's a math equation, was my comment earlier at this point,
with that parabolic move that's making the upside.
Interesting, just Evan, real fast on the bigger picture of the indices here.
I mean, you're 10 points away from all-time high on the S&P.
The NASDAQ, it's been consolidating since October in this range.
It looked like it was going to get rough,
gets bought up overnight, has a nice reaction today to reclaim everything basically that you
can reclaim. We're back to the same point as before. We've got a ton of earnings coming down
later this week that if Amazon, I mean, Google just does fine and continues to do what it's doing at all-time highs today, Amazon looks set up to make a move if it's got strong earnings report.
There's several others in all those different little tech sectors reporting throughout the next 48, 72 hours.
You get a couple good reports, and the market looks like it could finally get out of this box. I just don't know.
I'm still, since November, I've been saying with things just doing, all the MAG7 doing different
things, NASDAQ's just kind of hanging out while the rest of the market continues to broaden.
And there's still pretty healthy signs. And once again, it looks like we've shaken off
some of the news and the different pieces going on. We got a trade deal with India apparently
today, lowered some tariffs on them. So I don't know. It feels like the market's still in buy
the dip mode. Once again, I mean, higher lows, higher lows. I mean, Stock Talk can look at the
chart and tell you the same thing. It's pretty simple. You're above all the major moving averages
again. every dip just
keeps getting bought right back up higher lows structure is great yeah yeah i mean you can't
complain and there's a lot of stocks like that where you know they're just riding the emace the
upside they're above all the moving averages on the daily monthly weekly i mean you know they're
in good sectors they have reasonable valuations those are the stocks you want to own in this market.
You know, there's contrarian games you can play in every bull market that have asymmetric upside.
I think it's unnecessary.
And, you know, I see people like, I think a great example of this is the software trade, right? The trade around IGV, which had a terrible week last week on on the dumper days.
I mean, I think it had a minus nine percent day and minus six percent day back to back or something like that on the index.
And some of those names bounce today with the market.
But, you know, that that index still looks horrific on the daily, especially.
I mean, you look at Twitter and you see a lot of people saying, well, you know, software is oversold.
Like, I want to try to play for a bounce here like this is an overreaction because of ai so on and so forth you can take
trades like that i'm not like saying you can't but in this market i just don't understand why you
would i mean there are stocks plenty of stocks in plenty of sectors in this market that are above
all the moving averages on all time frames are showing relentless bids.
They get bought up every time they tap their 21 EMA or their 50 day.
Like those are the stocks you want to own.
Like why put the effort in and the capital in and the opportunity costs trying to hit some of these asymmetric upside contrarian trades?
Why do that in a bull market?
I just have never understood that
mentality. But I think it's largely because people want to seem smart. They want to be like,
well, I faded the crowd and look at me. I hit a home run. I just don't think that's how you make
money consistently in markets. Consensus trades are generally pretty good trades.
And, you know, the market consensus is right about 80% of the time.
Druckenmiller talks about this all the time, about how he hates contrarians for this reason.
He's like, the market's right about 80% of the time.
Why would you fade the market?
And, you know, right now you can look across, you don't have to look at the space theme or the quantum theme or any of these sort of speculative themes.
You can look at, you know, my shipbuilding basket, for example.
You know, with real earnings potential, you know, you look at the dredging names, GLDD.
You look at some of the shipping names.
You know, you could find stocks with real earnings, real earnings growth, a real shot at multiple expansion, very strong charts,
a lot of thematic relevance.
You can just buy them and hold them in a bull market.
You don't have to be cute.
You don't have to be like,
what are people not looking at?
Where's the asymmetry here?
I just don't think that that's a winning strategy in a bull market.
I think you focus on the strength. You ride the strength while you have it. And then when those uptrends break,
you ask yourself why they're breaking. And if it's for a good reason, then you close the trade there.
And it sounds overtly simple, but that's because it is. Making money in a bull market is not hard.
It's not supposed to be hard. It's not supposed to be hard. And if you're making it harder than it needs
to be, you're probably buying the wrong things. If you're buying stocks that are pinned under their
200-day moving average in a six-month downtrend, what are you hoping for? You're hoping that you're
going to run into an earnings report and get a 20% gap up? Okay, but what about the opportunity
cost in three months until then? There's a lot of money to be made. And if you're sitting on
the sidelines chasing contrarian trades, it's tough to be consistent. And I've seen a lot of
that these last few years. And a lot of it comes from sub stack writers and blog writers who write
six page thesis on a contrarian asymmetric trade, and it takes five and a half months to pan out.
I mean, can you make money on that? Yeah. I mean,
is it the right way to allocate your capital? I think absolutely not. So yeah, opportunity cost
matters. Your entry matters. Um, and you shouldn't be scared of consensus. The term crowded trade is probably the most overused phrase on all of Fintwit.
Anytime more than five people like a stock, people say it's a crowded trade. That's not how it works.
That's not how it works. Every stock is fully owned.
Once you acknowledge that, you realize that a lot of times this idea of crowded trades or asymmetry is just an illusion.
You think people don't like the stock because it's boring
or it's been trading sideways or whatever, but it's fully owned.
Every stock is fully owned.
The shares are owned by somebody.
Some entity owns them.
So once you acknowledge that and put that in the back of your mind,
the whole idea of contrarian trades being attractive becomes less attractive.
And, you know, you ride strength.
Ride strength.
Yeah, let me jump in here.
I am very excited.
There was a good talk there.
We are live every single Monday through Thursday,
3 to 5 p.m. Eastern at least.
You should make sure you are following this account that is hosting up here.
You should make sure that you are following all the speakers up here.
Today, I'm really excited.
We have another little conversation coming up here.
We are continuing for at least the next 30 minutes or so,
talking a little bit about founders,
talking a little bit about some of the news stories, some of the stuff that we've been talking about here.
But this was a fantastic conversation as always,
and you should definitely make sure that you guys are following all of the speakers.
We are very lucky to have Michael and the Founders ETFs team coming up here
and having a good conversations for the next 30 minutes.
We're going to talk a little bit about fund specific stuff. So I do want to read out some disclosures quickly so we can
talk about that and have a good candid conversation. But I'm very excited for this one.
Investors should carefully consider a fund's prospectus, objectives, risks, charges, all that
stuff before investing a fund's prospectus. And summary prospectus contain this information and more about the
founders ETFs funds to obtain a fund's prospectus and summary prospectus visit their website at
founders ETFs calm a fund's prospectus and summary prospectus should be read carefully
before investing we're excited to be working with the founder ETF ETFs team. All right, I am very excited for this conversation
that we have coming up here.
If I could throw it over to Mr. Michael,
and you can kind of introduce us into the next topic
that we have here a little bit.
Talking about the importance of founders,
I know you guys created a fund here,
ticker FFF, Frank, Frank, Frank,
and you guys can pull that up
and look into some of the funds holdings. Obviously, Palantir being founder-led, Frank, Frank, Frank, and you guys can pull that up and look into some of the funds holdings.
Obviously, Palantir being founder-led, Alex Karp, that stock is up in after hours. I believe that
would take the fund to be doing okay there. But yeah, I'd like to jump in a little bit on the
thesis here around founders and what you guys were thinking. There's a lot of material pinned
up in the nest above. And as I was saying there, Perspectives website is a really great place to go. And let me actually go
in and link that. But there's a couple tweets pinned up in the nest above with a little bit
more information, some studies and some research that's gone in the past, which I'm sure we'll
talk about. But yeah, I would love to intro into it and why this exists. You know, some of the
studies and research that you guys have done in the past around founders outperforming or founder led companies outperforming non-founder led companies.
We appreciate you joining in and hanging out with us today on the show.
Yeah, it was great to be here. And it was appreciated being able to weigh in on,
obviously, the excitement around Palantir's earnings and kind of out of the blue,
had the excitement around SpaceX, again, hitting some of our high
level themes that these founders are charismatic and they're relentless and they've got the
moral authority to pivot when needed.
And it sounds like Elon wanted to pivot as far as how he wanted to grow two of his companies
and thought that two would work better under one roof.
So just quick background.
Yeah, thanks for the intro. We do manage the
Founders 100 ETF, FFF. And the theory there is we looked at a bunch of research, and I think you
referenced maybe the Bain study. Bain, for example, looked at the founder-led stocks within the S&P 500 from 1990 to 2014. And those stocks outperformed the market by 3x.
So if you put that into compounding terms, that's sort of 3% to 5% better than
the S&P. And so we built a thesis and a fund around this. What's super interesting is there's not a consolidated place,
at least that we know of, to go look at a histogram of when founders came in and out of
their publicly traded companies. It doesn't exist in Bloomberg. It doesn't exist in FactSet. For
example, in Bloomberg, you can see who the founder was recently, but not back in history. So our team
actually dug through old press releases, old SEC filings, old newspaper
clippings. I don't think we ever had to go quite to microfiche, but right up until that point to
find all this data. And so now we have an 11,000 stock database going back 30 years to be able to
look at how founder-led stocks behave. And what our research showed there is that founder-led companies tend to outperform.
I'll give you three more hits on this and then pause if you'd like to ask a question
or anyone listening today.
We'd love to hear from you.
But the idea being, we see Mike Saylor get on TV and he waves his arms around the MAG-7,
but even he hasn't done the work.
If you look at quote, today's constituents of the mag seven, three are driving all the
outperformance. It's meta, uh, Palantir and Nvidia. And then you can do the same thing.
If you look at the NASDAQ 100, about 20 names are driving the entire NASDAQ 100.
Those names are all founder led. And this next data point is probably not gonna surprise you.
If you look at the S&P 500,
most of the performance is coming
from the 37 founder-led companies.
So if we think about all the great work
that folks are doing, whether the folks that you're doing,
we think about whether it's an analyst,
a retail investor, whether it's an analyst at a Tiger Cub or Fidelity or Wellington, every one of those guys are looking for a sustainable advantage in the business.
And we think that the sustainable advantage that a typical classic investor would look at, whether it's revenue growth or margins, upstream of that is how founders behave and drive their company. And we think that gives a long-term fundamental edge. So with that,
I'll pause and maybe let you ask any additional questions.
Yeah, no, I think that is really, really interesting there. I am curious, how does it
work if founders were to step down from this? And I'm curious also on how you guys went
about weighting the holdings in the ETF. Awesome. Those are two great questions. And I'm going to
add a third to it, which is how we select the stocks, because that ties to how we get rid of
them. So let's talk about how we sell them, but I think let's start with how we buy them.
them, but I think let's start with how we buy them. So we start with the 200 largest by market
cap founder led stocks. And then some of my teammates and I, we're ex-Sanford Bernstein
folks. So we run a Bernstein factor model that picks what we believe to be the 100 best. And we
run a portfolio of that. And then we'll talk about how we weight it. So we
weight it with a modified market cap weighting. So we rebalance and reconstitute the portfolio
quarterly. And during a rebalance, we limit any position to 7%. And for example, if we ran a
market weight without a modification, I think NVIDIA right now would be 40%, 4-0 of the portfolio.
We love Elon. We think he's going to do a great job.
But anyone who wants to have that much exposed to Nvidia should just buy the stock.
You've hired us to build a really robust portfolio.
So we take 200 of the largest.
We run a factor model to pick the 100 best.
We do a modified market weight where
we cap 7% is the biggest a stock can be. So for example, some of that market cap that
would be NVIDIA is put down into the other 99 names down below or Meta or Tesla because
they would have blown through the 7% limit. They can get larger obviously during the quarter.
For example, I think that Meta currently has grown to 8.3%
and NVIDIA has grown to 8.9%. And then getting to the beginning of your question, but I felt it
was important to talk about how we buy and how we constitute. Now, how do we sell? If the founder
leaves, when they announce that they're leaving, we sell the stock. I think the prospectus says
we have 90 days to sell it. I would tell you in practicality, we're going to move as quickly as
we can. The data shows that as soon as the founder announces they're leaving, stock price tends to
suffer. So we sell it, for example, so when Warren said he was going to leave early in the year,
I think he said announced in May or June, we would have been out immediately then. And we don't wait for the actual leaving the company to sell the stock
because you already start to see stock performance drag as soon as the founder announces that
they're leaving. And I will define founder because we haven't done that yet. So we define founder
has to be the person that originally came up with the company,
number one. And two, they have to have an executive role. So they can't just still be
working at the company. They have to be chief executive as an officer. That's an obvious one.
There's times the chief technology officer is running the company. So Larry Ellison would be
the simplest example of that.
And there's times a chief medical officer or chief scientific officer is running a medical
or scientific company. And I suppose in a fashion or retail company, it could be the CMO or CDO as
well. But the founder has to maintain an executive title. So for example, there was a point in time that Mr. Bezos was still at Amazon, but he wasn't
running the company. And so during that time period, we had already sold the stock.
Gotcha. That makes sense. Mr. Gov, I'd like to throw it over to you if you have any questions.
Dr. Gov, I'd like to throw it over to you if you have any questions.
Yeah, we have some stuff pinned up top that I was hoping we could speak to within these pieces.
But one of the things really that stood out to me was from this Bain & Co study.
They were looking at these found-related companies all the way back from the 90s.
And this was from 1990 to 2014 that they did it. But transparently,
because of the moves that we've seen in NVIDIA, Tesla and others, I would believe that it's
significantly accelerated from there. During that time period, they outperformed 3.1 times better.
But my guess is that that's stretched pretty heavily up to this point and just continued
to outperform at this point. And I was just curious if you could go through a little bit more in depth as to what you really believe is kind of the root cause of
this and how people can factor it into their research as a quantifiable factor. And then
speaking of factors, if you could talk a little bit more to your factor model, I know that there's
some pieces that you can, can't speak to, but just a little bit more into the decision-making,
the weighting pieces like that. Okay. So let's take that into three pieces. And if I forget one, please bring me back to make
sure that all three pieces are answered. So let's talk about the qualitative attributes of founders.
Then we'll talk about quantitatively, how we think you see those flowing through the income
statements and the balance sheets and driving equity performance. So thinking about qualitatively,
we just think that founders tend to be different than professional CEOs. So they tend to be,
you've heard me use the word relentless, charismatic,
the way they execute tends to be different. And we think this concept of moral
authority is really differentiating. I mean, back to Mr. Musk and SpaceX, can you imagine if
the hired CEO of a traditional Fortune 100 company said that he was going to, you know, merge two seemingly
unrelated businesses together where these founders tend to be visionaries and they're
skating to where the puck is going. Again, using SpaceX and XAI as an example, Elon's talking about
grid constraints and power constraints and various other constraints that exist on earth and seeing how his 100x
competitive advantage in launch costs combined with power, a 5x power pickup. Now all of a sudden
you merge those two concepts together. And we think that's kind of the, that's the vision side
of these founders. And then obviously you have to have the execution side.
I think I've used a statistic earlier
that they turned the Memphis Data Center on
in two weeks.
And there's an infamous story where Elon
and I think his cousins were flying to Sacramento
Christmas after he bought Twitter.
And they were talking about taking down
and moving some rack was going to take six months.
And he literally told the pilots, put it down here.
They went and rented a rider truck and moved it themselves.
And so it's just only founders bring that mentality.
So now let's talk about that's the qualitative factors.
Now, the quantitative factors and remind, make sure I don't skip over a concept called reward to risk, which is what we're going to all drive to, which is why we think this basket of stocks will continue to outperform over time.
Obviously, historical results do not guarantee the future, but why we believe it's worth continuing to invest in.
So if you look at founder-led companies, the top lines are typically
much higher. I think in the last couple quarters we looked at, they were driving revenue growth at
60% higher. They were driving earnings growth at 90% higher, much higher free cash flow margins.
And typically a founder-led company runs at net cash versus net debt. So that's how the qualitative factors of how a founder manages
turn into quantitative performance flowing through the income statement and the balance sheet.
And then as you turn that into a basket of securities, there's an institutional risk
measure called reward to risk that we really look at. Because obviously my team and I, no one's seeing my face,
just my voice, but I've been in the public markets starting 25 years ago. And these large
alphas typically don't exist in the marketplace. So we had to ask ourselves, why is it there?
And the reason we think it there has to do with this risk metric called reward to risk. So we looked at 105 quarters, that's about 27 years, going back to March 10th, 99. Why March 10th, 99? That's when the triple Qs launched. And we wanted to understand, should you put your money in the S&P 500, the triple Qs, or a strategy like this? And we want to do an honest assessment of it. So we looked at those 105 quarters, and interestingly, 70% of the quarters, all three of us were up, and 30% of
the quarters, all three of us were down. So we're moving in about the same patterns, but here's
what's really interesting. In an up quarter, we were up about 9.6%, but only down, say, 9.2.
So that's positive asymmetry.
Now, the QQQs, well, they beat us on the upside.
So if we were up, say, a 9.6, they were up 9.7 or 9.8, but they would give up 11.6% on a down quarter.
So that's heavy negative asymmetry.
Same thing with the S&P 500.
They had a slight negative asymmetry. Same thing with the S&P 500. They had a slight negative asymmetry.
So we think that's why all of this qualitative founder difference that comes down through the funnel of better income statement and balance sheet performance ends up with better reward to risk for a basket of these securities.
risk for a basket of these securities. Yeah, I appreciate the breakdown on risk reward there,
because I think that's ultimately what a lot of it comes down to. And you did answer
a lot of my pieces there in terms of quantitative, qualitative, a good amount of stuff there on
factor modeling as well. So I appreciate the rundown. I do want to see if others have questions,
but I guess the one other question
that I would have, and I just always like to ask this to fund managers is where do you see this
fitting into someone's portfolio right now? Let's say someone runs like a lot of, I think our
audience runs satellite style portfolios, right? Broad-based index funds, some stock picking around
that. Where do you think this fits into the overall average retail portfolio?
Yes.
So we think this is core growth. So we think this is a good product to own as your core growth holding.
You know, obviously we look at benchmarking against the S&P 500.
I'm going to pick on the triple Qs. I think that we are a one-for-one substitution, meaning
I'm going to pick on the triple Qs.
for people that own the triple Qs, I would replace it with this. The Qs were originally designed as
this tech index in 1999, but NASDAQ has been slowly eroding the quality of the holdings from
an innovation perspective, meaning they've been putting in more and more old line companies. And the reason they do this is to generate listings.
So you're getting more and more drift away from innovation. And so our ETF is pure American
innovation. And we think it is one of the only, if not the only way to have a direct broad market
exposure to pure innovation. So I think that's where we would talk about putting it in the portfolio is it is core equity, certainly on
the growth side. And I would, for me, I think it's a one for one replacement of the Qs. And I do owe
you, Gav. I knew you had asked me three things last time, and I covered kind of two and a half.
But on the factor model, what I would say is it is proprietary.
I'm going to give you some general color on it, but I'm going to talk about why it exists.
We think about the outperformance that we're trying to generate in two ways.
So number one, we look at a pure founder index that's the 200 companies that
i talked to you about uh selective independently calculates and publishes that so if you if you
went and looked at that and overlaid it versus the s p 500 over the last 27 years you would see that
it has 400 basis points of outperformance. Probably should really
remind everyone that that is not a fund. That is a historical backtest, can't be relied on for
future performance, and is for pure academic research only. Now, you asked about the factor
model, and the reason I want to give that baseline is the factor model then runs on top of that,
which we hope to generate,, say another 150 basis points,
we think it will. And those factors, they're very basic. There's a couple of balance sheet
metrics. There's some earnings metrics. There's some growth metrics, maybe one accounting quality
metric that's very high level. But here's how I would think about it is we believe every founder is an
incredible pizza chef. We don't believe there's a single founder on the planet who doesn't make
great pizza. What we're doing is we're just the expediter standing in the kitchen and making sure
that none of the pizza crust is burnt. So our model really looks for burnt crust rather than
whether it has the best pepperoni in the world, if that makes sense.
Understood. Yeah. Removing those that, you know, have potential for failure,
and then basically utilizing the rest of the group to hit the winners rather than necessarily going in and just needing to pick all the best winners. I think that that does make sense. I
don't know if I summed it back to you as well as I wanted to, but I understand exactly what you're saying in my head in terms of how that would lead to proper return.
Okay, I kind of have one more question, and then I apologize if anyone else on the panel does want to go for jumping after me. But Evan, did you want to go first?
Nope, nope. I'm here for after you.
Okay. I wanted to ask you, Michael, we're in the big 2026 now. Do you think that this concept of founder-led companies will continue to accelerate?
I did mention that there was outperformance from 1990 to 2014 of 3.1 times as strong return for founder-led companies to the S&P 500.
But I think over the last 10 years, it's really accelerated.
I think companies now are actually employing this as a strategy as well,
building a social presence around their CEOs and putting IR dollars to work there.
And I'm curious if you think that this thematic, I mean, you probably do because you made this,
maybe you can speak to it, launching this now, I could see this continuing to just escalate,
speak to it, launching this now, I could see this continuing to just escalate, especially in an era
where I think more people have the ability to become a founder, if that makes sense.
Yeah. So I'll try and stay organized. And if I forget, try and bring me back to them. So
yes, more founders are staying. So the amount of founder led publicly traded companies is
increasing.
Quick historical date on that.
When I started in the markets in the late 90s, they actually did something that you probably don't even believe.
So in the late 90s, they would take these brilliant founders.
In order to take them public, they would push them aside and they would bring in some middle
level manager from Procter & Gamble or Colgate or GE or Home Depot to run these companies.
And it didn't work very well.
Unfortunately, it was short-lived. And so yes, now founders stay and get the support
to keep moving. You talked about whether this trend will continue. Yes. There's actually a
follow-up to the Bain study that now shows that that trend is accelerating. that growth is even, the lead is even bigger from the 2014 to 2025 study.
So Bain has said, not only is it there, it's accelerating. Then sometimes you'll get pushback
and people say, oh, this is just because of these big tech companies and free capital and the
quasi-monopolies they have. You can, if you go Googling around, there's PhD papers from the 1970s and 1980s talking about
this. So this is a pervasive theme. We believe, again, historical results do not guarantee the
future, but we think it's a rich place to continue investing in. And then we think there's some other structural changes. For example, we think there's about the way we run
money, we think over very long periods of time is about a 550 basis point differential to the S&P
500. We see, and again, this may not happen, but we see that actually growing and here's why.
The S&P 500, the way they manage it, tends to be fairly backwards looking.
The index is built for stability, not for performance.
So what's happening is companies are growing faster.
S&P's rules don't really keep up for it.
If you remember how big Tesla had got, had become before it was put in the index, the
same thing is going to happen with SpaceX and others. So we think that if you had to ask how I see the world, I think our spread will
widen out for the next decade and then converge for the 10 years to 20 years off of that.
And the reason I believe that is that for the next decade, these faster growing companies will be immediately bought
by us. For example, we can buy at the IPO for these great companies that are led by founders,
where say it may take the S&P 500 four to five years to put them in. So we think over the next
10 years, we actually generate additional alpha. But sadly, we think from 10 to 20 years out,
they're going to converge. And that's because we don't even, it's my belief that there will not be
non-founder-led companies in the Fortune 100 20 years from now.
There might be two or three, right?
Lilly has a great CEO.
Microsoft is doing a nice job.
But the world is getting so competitive at these big companies that kind of your old,
good old boy got the job
because he went to the right country club um you know leaves the office at three o'clock
those are over if you want to win for for the next 30 years it's it's these relentless founders
are going to be in the driver's seat so to summarize we think that we we think this not
only is the opportunity there we think it actually expands over the next decade.
And then, you know, when we have this conversation 11 years from now, we'll have to see what's happening next.
I pinned another post up in the nest above, which kind of was one of the comments to one of the posts that we were talking about earlier. And he kind of showed, he created, he generated assets things of the founder-led index,
and it outperformed 1,500 over the last 10 years.
So it's just kind of showing that trend continuing past that Bain study that we had earlier,
which again, a couple of tweets pinned up in the nest above.
Michael, I did want to make sure we got one or two extra things in there
as people are doing their research into FFF, the ETF that you guys have, the ETF that we've been talking here, led around founders.
Is there something that maybe they should know going into this, maybe some thoughts on where they should start their research?
Obviously, the website, summary perspectives, there's some good stuff there.
But any other things we haven't talked about on this space that you, you know, you were excited to cover on here?
Um, I think you guys have done a great job of asking some of the most important questions,
but, you know, obviously we've put a lot of information, um, on the website that'll drive
you not only to what we're talking about on the website, but also the prospectus, um, which is,
uh, we actually, we wrote a lot about our strategy and
frankly, probably a lot of the proprietary stuff that other fund companies don't do. So
I would encourage anyone on here to go read it. We're very accessible. You know, I'm the portfolio
manager and I field all the calls. So if anybody pokes around and finds our website and wants to learn more um you know i'll be the one answering it um so you know the easiest way to
find me you've got me up here on twitter twitter but founder etfs.com so founder etfs.com tons of
information there uh you can actually book a call directly with me.
I think there's a calendar link to do that.
So I think that's, you know, I think that that's a great place to start.
I think that, you know, looking at our underlying portfolio and sort of seeing that we're investing in these very innovative companies
led by these very charismatic leaders.
I think I've done a podcast or two.
Hopefully we'll have some more conversations here.
I think you guys have really done a great job
of educating investors.
And I think it's very neat
that you've helped people who want to trade. That's not
particularly what I do. Maybe I was just never good at it. I was always a better investor than
a trader. And so you're providing education for people who want to trade, but also for people
that want to invest for the very long term. We really love the power of compounding.
We think that this vehicle is a great way for people to compound over very long
periods of time. And, you know, that our founders, you know, do a good job of helping people. You
know, for example, I talked about the triple Qs. I think they only have 21 founder-led companies,
but one third of the growth came from the founders. So I think that as people want to
grow and protect their wealth, investing in the founders to let them deploy and grow your capital,
I think is a very good long-term way of making money. This is not get the quarter right. This
may not even be to get the year right. You know, just to give some historical perspective, last year, so kind of prior to launching this, I ran a test portfolio and not the exact strategy because we were still testing and, you know, we've been as far as 850 basis points ahead of the market.
We were as far behind as 850 basis points behind.
I think we're back to 600 behind.
So if you believe in this strategy long term, these stocks on a relative basis are cheaper
because we're about 600 basis points behind.
And again, we hope that we're going to end up 500 ahead.
So that would be 1100 basis point move.
Again, can't promise that,
but that's what we've designed the portfolios to do.
And again, I think the best thing that you can do,
I love that when people are publicly
available to answer questions.
So definitely go in and take these people up on it.
Appreciate Michael and the team for coming in on this, on the spaces.
There is a bunch of tweets pinned up in the nest above the last one of which up there,
if you were looking up there is that link to the website, which as we were saying earlier,
is a great place to start your research, book a call, go in and do that good stuff.
You should also make sure you are following Michael and that founder's ETF account that
are both up here.
A lot of really great posts going up from both of those.
I know that was kind of a final words there.
So it's all good if you don't have anything else.
But Michael, is there anything else you want to leave the people with on this piece?
Obviously, we have a live stream coming up later this week, which I'm excited for the
insights we have coming up on that.
But yeah, any final words here on this conversation?
Yeah, hopefully we can get, you know, people want to drop a note here, either, you know,
in the comments or send it to you or I directly.
We'll make sure to address it on the stream.
But I think one thing to really talk about back to Gav's question of where do we fit
in people's portfolios?
One thing that I love about our portfolio is we have super high active share. I think we're
85-ish. It could be a little more or less, but we have 85% active share to the S&P 500.
What that means is our portfolio is 85% different than the S&P 500. I think we're 70-ish active
share to the QQs. So if people are putting us in their,
building out a basket portfolio of ETFs,
we are very different holdings than what's out there.
And we think that's very important.
Typically an active mutual fund will celebrate
if they have one to 7% active share
and we're running at 85% active share.
So it's a great compounding vehicle and it is a vehicle
that is very different than the s p 500 or the queues for a core growth holding we're actually
different than holding owning those products perfect thank you very much michael this is a
very interesting product that you've created here.
I can see why you guys did it.
I am surprised that it took so long to create a great product like this.
So go in, check it out.
Again, one more time, the ticker is FFF, Frank, Frank, Frank.
Go in, search it up.
Link to the website is up in the next above.
There are a lot of resources available.
And we do have another conversation coming up with Michael and the team.
So if you get the questions to us quick enough,
we can maybe even ask them coming up on Wednesday.
So get excited for that.
One more time, follow the speakers up here.
We enjoy these type of,
if you enjoy these type of live free conversations,
make sure you're following Stocks on Spaces.
We'll be back live again tomorrow.
AMD earnings, get excited.
I appreciate you michael
i appreciate the team have a great one everyone yeah thanks for great questions thank you michael
appreciate you
