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Stock Market Talk | China Stocks with Krane Shares
Recorded: Feb. 17, 2026 Duration: 2:44:43Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, key figures like Warren Buffett and Stanley Druckenmiller are set to unveil their latest portfolio updates, signaling a potential shift in institutional investment strategies towards crypto assets. The anticipation of 13F filings highlights a growing trend of traditional investors engaging with the crypto market, with discussions around partnerships, token launches, and fundraising activities indicating a vibrant future for digital currencies.
Full Transcription
all right there we go i thought you know i thought it felt a little weird that we only had like 40
people in there at that point a little bit into it i have no idea what you heard or didn't hear rug the space is nice and early good time to start
it i'll get the title i'll get everything settled out in a little bit but i do appreciate everyone
for coming in here hanging out with us and joining us on this space is only one rug allowed so we got
it done early out of the way 13fF deadline day. That is today. All the
big institutional investors in the world, they're going to be telling us, or maybe at least in the
US, what their holdings were as of the end of Q4, as of the end of 2025. Live on the spaces,
Warren Buffett will be giving out his final portfolio update. Warren Buffett stepped down
as the CEO and is now just the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. That is as of the end of Q4. This is when the portfolio is updated.
So we are about to get what Warren Buffett's final portfolio looked like. Stanley Druckenmiller,
Bill Ackman will be coming up after the close. There are a lot more portfolios that will be
updated. We will bring as many of them as few as we can. We did just get a Stanley Druckenmiller portfolio update,
so I know Stock Talk is a fan.
I'm excited to dig in a little bit deeper onto that one.
If anyone has any news stories, any stocks, any 13Fs
that they really want us to cover,
in the bottom right of your screen,
there's a little chat button or a comment button
or a purple one or whatever it is.
Go in, click that, throw some comments, throw some thoughts, throw whatever news story you want in there,
and we will probably have some time to dig into it.
I'm going to change the title.
I'm going to get some stuff into it.
But the thing that I am excited about today, the thing that I think will be driving the theme of the conversation on this basis today,
are these 13F filings.
So yeah, Options Mike, we already got a rug out of the way.
How are we doing, sir?
There is an earnings or two after the close, Palo Alto, Cadence, etc.
NNE, some nanonuclear, Toll Brothers, Devon Energy, so some earnings as well.
But what's going on in your world?
This market continues to trade very, veryly um you know i would have thought
you know felt like we're gonna break down this morning right the market was dropping we're losing
levels we're below yes friday's lows and and then all of a sudden we just debounced right back to
highs of the day pull back a little bit during lunch and now we're just off the high of the day
and you know this market really just doesn't want to easily pick a direction
but you know the action has definitely changed we're not getting the big bounces like we did the
last four or five times we did this little three percent pullback here so uh i'm really a little
bit cautious uh in this market right now trying to wait to see what it really wants to do um
i was talking with the guys at lunch and this market needs to rotate back to tech if it really
wants to push, right?
It's kind of rotated everywhere else. It's done the banks that they've come in.
It can go back there. It had this big move on energy. We saw silver, gold had this huge move, right?
We saw consumer staples and safety names with big moves like Coke and Pepsi and CL, for example, and Poptor & Gamble and B bmy and j&j costco walmart so you know the real place that's lagging
is is the tech software space that it just doesn't seem to want to go back to now some names are
having a nice day there today and you know i'll be honest with you that's kind of where i i focus
today um you know for me um you know i took some nice trades in there i shorted uh what did i do i
i shorted amazon today i took a small loss on loss on video right after the open there on some calls.
So I tried to bounce it and it wouldn't push and the market kind of come in. So I got out of it.
And I think that's the one thing you have to realize when the market's not with you and you're in a long position or a short position and the market's going against you.
Think before you just sit in it. Quite a nice trade on some Tesla puts as well.
Then I traded Apple long and I'm back in video,
though I have very little left on there and some Arch 200 calls as it's had a
nice move off the lows and I speed bottom.
Yeah.
Again,
just seeing,
is this just a one day thing here?
Are we going to actually get some follow through on it?
You should be happy today,
Evan Apple,
your name there having a nice little day today.
Took all Friday's weakness back and golfed that candle right back up into the 21 day and the 8 day here.
And, you know, it's just this kind of action that just makes it very difficult.
This constant back and forth is going back and forth here.
And for me, from my portfolio perspective, I'm just waiting before I add here.
There's things I want, but I kind of feel like this is just not the time yet the market gives needs
to give me a little bit more clarity sounds like the Iran thing has been punted again
on hold as we're going to wait a couple weeks for Iran to come back with us with a proposal
which is a good thing so it sounds like nothing's going to be happening there anytime in the
near future and yeah you know some names here this week but they're not really market bloopers so the most part of the walmart on thursday morning definitely has my
attention and just got to see what's going on i know tesla bounced they had their first cyber cab
rolled off the assembly line in texas so big news for them
it was a a nice move for apple off the open if only i never became the bmr guy i was just the
apple guy now i will say i said this earlier if you look at the some of the comments on apple and
where it was we've been doing this space for a long time apple's up a good little bit maybe not
as much as the market but uh some of the conversations we were having at apple lower
numbers it's it's been a good watch they had some good stuff around wearables and different stuff
they're launching it's kind of maybe trying to counteract
the last week's stories of
Siri delayed. There's a launch
event coming for Apple March 4th.
Exciting. We'll see.
Yeah, but that March 4th doesn't look
like much the way they're doing. It looks like just
some minor updates to products.
No, so it's like a hardware.
So the rumors are it's going to be
an iPhone SE launch, which is their cheaper iPhone, are it's going to be an iPhone SE launch,
which is their cheaper iPhone.
And it's going to be some MacBooks. I think the iPhone SE actually
will be interesting. And I've said this once or twice.
I won't keep repeating it throughout. We'll get the point across.
For a company not participating in
AI, these
Claudebots, whatever we want to call it,
it's actually not really that anymore.
OpenClaw.
There's a lot of mac minis being
used at all these places and this is the first time over the last three four or five years that
any apple product anything in that route has i feel like been kind of used been excited anything
around that in the uh in the ai arena so probably more on the empirical side maybe not actually we'll
see what ends up reporting apple is quite the behemoth so
but you know it's nice to see some sort of Apple participation in that general AI narrative
interesting times interesting move in the market today as well we'll see if we end up closing
higher my single stock portfolio is a little red right now not much like 0.01 or something we'll
see where the rest of the day takes us
brian lunge you got any thoughts in general here i'm gonna prompt you guys on 13fs like i said i
do want to talk a lot about these portfolio updates i could read through some of them as
well as we're going into it but um anything else interesting for you mr lunge Lunch? I mean, I kind of echo what Mike's been saying. This is a, it's a tricky
market. It's, it's, you know, I've been doing this a long, long time. And I always think,
you know, I've seen it all. And then I see something different. It's so weird that the,
you know, if you look at the SPX over the last few weeks, it hasn't been very far off of its all-time highs on a closing basis. Yet under the surface, you have names that are just imploding,
you know, obviously the software names, but, you know, other names that have dropped, you know,
your draft kings and things like that, that have dropped 20, 25, 30 percent. And they're,
in some cases, 75 percent or more off their all-time highs.
It's a really, really weird dynamic.
You would expect when you see that many names that are that well-known taking that many hits,
you would see the indexes rolling over.
Yes, we've seen some weakness, a little bit more relative weakness in the queues,
but it's very odd. And I think the other thing too is
one of the things I've noticed on Twitter, FinTwit X, whatever you want to call it these days,
is it used to be that you could get some valuable information from Twitter if you had a really good
curation filter. And you have to adjust your filter every now and then,
but it's gotten very, very hard in the last couple months because I'm sure everyone has
seen these posts I'm talking about. Somebody comes out and makes some definitive statement,
here's why AI data centers are going to replace crypto miners in the next five years, right?
Here's what you need to know, dot, dot, dot.
And then a 500-word, what I call AI copy slop of why that's the thesis.
And these people can create these narratives and make them sound very authoritative.
And you just go, okay.
And most of it's just junk right most of
it's junk you really have to sift through the content out there to get any
sort of valuable information and I think this just highlights the fact that
technical analysis is becoming more and more important and that if you don't
know technical analysis if you don't know how to read charts if you don't
know the relationship between price and volume and how it can help you put the odds in your favor, you really ought to get up to speed because it's just going to be harder and harder to get any sort of real signal, I think, from anything that's out, at least that retail investors can access.
So if we're going to talk a little bit about technical analysis, I like to keep it simple.
Can I just say one comment I will say?
No, you cannot say a comment. You're not allowed to say it. Go ahead. What's your comment?
I disagree. I think the exact same tools that are allowing for the – first of all, social media has always been that thing.
of all, social media has always been that thing. It's easier to make slop and sound more professional
with AI, but the same tools that make that easier also make it easier to detect and funnel through
stuff. So my recommendation would be to actually try to utilize some AI tools to help sift through
content stuff. Maybe it's an AI tracker. Is this post written by AI? Someone else. Maybe it's a
fact tracker while you're writing on the side. I've enjoyed some of these AI native web browsers, which just have assistance built into the side.
And then you can kind of just ask questions directly against what you're doing. I'll just
throw in there, is this accurate? A lot of times before I read a thread. So my recommendation be
to you is the thing that's changed the most is AI. And you can also utilize that into your kind of
game here to help sift through the stuff because
I mean I don't disagree that it's there is a lot of garbage you have to sift through the sift through
but um yeah well and technical analysis you can keep going yeah so look uh the great thing about
living in a United Safe America is we can feel free to disagree with each other right uh and
and I I think there's some of your points that are
valid. But for me, I just like to keep things simple, right? The simpler, the better for me.
That's my style. The more noise I can filter out. And I just see this endless loop in AI. I'll give
you great examples. People write by hand, and then they find out, oh, I can use AI tools to write better.
And then they start doing AI tools.
And then they run what they did through AI through a platform to see if it shows that it's AI.
And if it does, they can click a button that humanizes it.
So we're literally in this copy-slop loop that I just think is ridiculous.
But that being said, it's never a bad idea to
understand technical analysis. And if we're talking about technical analysis, I try to keep
it really simple, right? I don't try to overcomplicate things. And so when you're looking
for a pullback to end, the first thing that has to happen, it has to happen by definition,
it can't happen in another way, is price has to stop going down, right? We saw price
stop going down on Friday on the SPX. It held. It's going back up now. The next thing we want to see
is recapturing moving averages. It's a progressive process. You do the 8, the 21, the 50. You want to
recapture levels, and then you want to find a base from which you can trade against, right? And that
puts the odds in your favor.
You can define your risk, how much you're willing to lose.
I think it's significant that we have not seen one of those big, massive red sticks
really get a follow-through.
Yes, we had two down days last week in the Qs, but if you look at the SPX and you just
go through your charts and you look all the way back to that big down day we had on the 10th of October,
and then there's a big down day on the 20th of November, and then the 17th of December,
and then the 20th of January, and then the one that we had two weeks ago on Thursday the 5th,
and then the one we had on Thursday. We've yet to see price actually continue through after a big red stick like that so as of now
i'm looking at basically the six seven nine five level as a level you can trade against
um does that guarantee things are going to work out no but i think it's a good spot i bought some
igv uh calls today some 81 calls short for Friday. Generally, I'll go out a
lot longer on my calls. I've got to be perfect on my timing, but I feel like we're at a spot
where the odds say we have a good chance at a massive counter trend rally. Now, does that mean
that the pullback's over? No, it just means we're getting some relief from the selling. Then we'll
have to wait for the move after the move. So that's how I'm positioning myself in this shortened week.
I appreciate the thoughts and the insights there.
Brian, I'm going to go to Larry here, and then we're going to start talking through some of these 13 Fs.
I think that a part of this will also be like, I want to hear the thoughts, some of the TA around a lot of the stocks that were bought and sold and all that stuff here. So good conversation
in common. I appreciate the thoughts there. Again, a lot of the largest investors in the world will
be updating their portfolios today during the spaces. Warren Buffett will be giving out his
last portfolio update. We will also be having some live earnings. Get excited for that. Make
sure you're checking out all the speakers up here.
I appreciate all of them for joining in.
Mr. Larry, Mr. Larry Thompson, how are you doing, sir?
Yo, what's up?
I'm doing fantastic. I'm excited to have you back into the conversation.
Good to hear you're doing well.
Yeah, all's good here.
Yeah, just want to start off on some weird thoughts
like i was saying there 13s a lot of stocks to kind of look into that these people were
at least long a couple months ago who knows now but uh what are you seeing in this market anything
since last we talked yeah i think the 13s stuff i'm just a market nerd so obviously a lot of stuff
i do is technical analysis based from like a signal perspective.
But I do enjoy learning about I'll take, you know, a lot of those aggregate all the 13 S and then just like rip through the charts after.
So that'll be a fun exercise.
Obviously, when they bought and sold and the timing and all of that is nuanced.
That is nuanced, but I do enjoy doing that.
But I do enjoy doing that.
The thing I'm looking at right now in the market is really just, I think, with the AI story, obviously, like most people, I love talking about it.
I love the hypotheticals of what can occur.
I think one of the things I'm realizing is I like to follow longer-term trends.
I like to trade breakoutsouts and a lot of things are
failed breakouts. If you look at something like financials, it failed to break out.
Look at consumer discretionary, it failed to break out. Look at communication services,
it failed to break out. So XLF, XLY, and XLC. But the other side of the token is if we're in a failed breakout market,
we tend to also be in a failed breakdown market, with the exception being software,
right? Software has been the area that did succeed the breakdown. So with that,
you take that logic and then partner on top of it, kind of what Brian was saying about IGV.
Take that logic and then partner on top of it, kind of what Brian was saying about IGV.
IGV is kind of at the bottom of its range.
It's holding this 200-week simple moving average, which to me isn't anything magical.
It's just a risk level.
Like, I can manage risk against that really well, which is what I care about.
Same thing with the mag.
So you look at the mag 7.
The MAG7, I posted this chart yesterday, but essentially if you run an AVWAP, anchor volume weighted average price, from its former highs in 2024 and from the April lows in 2025, that lines up really well with its 200-day moving average, which would make what's happening right now in the MAG7 a failed breakdown.
I posted this chart yesterday.
would make what's happening right now in the MAG7 a failed breakdown. So for me, it's counterintuitive,
but the market is telling me to trade the lows and sell the highs. So if the market's telling
me that, I have to kind of counterintuitively do that to my process until the larger trends
start to resolve higher. And then if you look at the market, what's it doing? It's trading sideways. And sideways is basically a mean reversion strategy. So I have started adding
these mean reversion type trades where you're buying well-defined risk at the lows, hopefully
the lows, right? And something like, we can take the mags chart here, right? Like the $60 level in
mags, right? That lines up well with the 200-day,
it lines up well with those VWAPs, like I said. And not that I'm then forecasting that it's going
to break to all-time highs and this is going to be a 70% upside, just that we have well-defined
risk in a market that's very messy. So I think that's what I'm looking at is those types of
bottom. And same thing, XLF, that chart looks similar.
Consumer discretionary is kind of failing here.
But MAGS and XLF, those are two areas that I'm kind of highlighting.
The other dynamic I'm thinking about in the market is, I think to Brian's point earlier,
and then also to your point about AI, what is really going to happen is AI is going to be a tool of those who use it to help themselves
learn and those who use it instead of learning. And if you're using it to help yourself take
ownership and learn, it's going to be a better skill set. So for example, people talking about
bifurcation in the market or people talking about tech breaking down.
AI is probably saying tech's breaking down. But then if you take the ownership and look through technology, it's only one sector in technology breaking down, and that's software. So it's kind
of, it allows you to have this nuanced approach. And with that nuanced approach, one of the things
I'm looking at is, like I mentioned, financials kind of
struggling a little bit, failed breakout. Look at banks. So an ETF I like is KBE. It holds about
100 banks, roughly equally weighted. It's pulling back to the $63 range on a longer term time frame
chart. So it's this huge base. And it's not getting below those lows from its highs in 2024. So it's just a huge base
breakout that's now pulling back. RSI is staying above 50. So underlying uptrend that's pulling
back to a polarity zone, I like those types of trades. And I think if I think through AI from a
small brain perspective, one of the places that's going to be slow to adapt it is areas with high
regulation. Banks are not going to sit there and say, yep, let's try this brand new AI software
we just got. Banks have tons of, they have friction for expenses. Like it's very hard to even go to
dinner at a large bank and expense it. So same thing with regional banks. There's so many
bureaucratic loopholes.
And you might think, well, AI can disrupt all that. It's not going to disrupt the bank itself
from taking time to implement these processes. So I think that's why you're seeing banks do okay
while you see something like maybe brokers that rely on their data side struggling a little bit.
So there's a little bifurcation within financials that I think
you can take advantage of from a bank perspective. So banks, I think, look decent, kind of mentioned
XLF, maybe that MAG-7 trade if you like something like that. The other thing I'm looking at right
now is whether or not aerospace and defense stocks, so ITA is the ETF. I don't like to give a ton of
individual names on here, but ITA is the ETF for aerospace and't like to give a ton of individual names on here, but ITA is the ETF
for aerospace and defense stocks. You zoom out on that chart, you can kind of see it's pulled back
and then now it's having some follow through. So it's breaking this down channel and it's been
leadership and RSI is above that 50. So that's the areas of the market I'm kind of evaluating.
I still like, I think home builders still kind of have some room here, even though they're kind of down today. I want to see follow through in home builders. And then
still biotechs. I think biotechs as a whole, this is just a consolidation sideways.
So names within biotechs continue to look good. I think that's an area that we're underestimating
what computing power does for biotechs as a whole and just the ability for them
these smaller companies to advance drug care as a whole so those are a couple of my thoughts right
now i appreciate it great rundown across a bunch of different sectors uh and not all those like
just uh mag 7 different ones i enjoy watching defense i enjoy washing a bunch of the others
um and yeah these 13fs tonight is the night so you'll get a good rundown of them hopefully
my thread is the one you go through but anyone is good it's a good time out there
quick question for you ellie does elliot management follow 13f that might be a dumb question
yes yes yes they do right they will be out there Yeah, they're one of the ones I like to look at because I'm a CPA by trade,
and transactional CPA, so more like the actual buying and selling of the company.
So I find their stuff to be interesting a lot of times.
I think they do a great job with the companies they tend to be involved with.
So that's one that I keep on my short list.
Can you give me one second?
I can actually even tell you what time you should expect them.
So, yeah, give me a second.
I'll come back on that one.
What's up, Sean?
Yeah, because they took a position in Southwest last year, I believe.
And I don't know if you've looked at the Southwest chart,
but it's gone vertical. It's up I don't know if you've looked at the Southwest chart, but it's gone vertical.
It's up, I don't know how much percent at this point.
It's from 22 to 54.
So it's doubled since it's COVID low or since the 2024 lows.
And that's one that Elliott Management kind of got involved with.
So, I mean, that thing could keep going.
And so I'm curious what they're doing
with their stake in that because that chart you can obviously see their involvement has really
helped improve whatever was occurring there yeah i will keep you updated on that one i actually
don't have time for you uh unfortunately but i will say uh the deadline is tonight the deadline
is tonight a majority of them will be in by like 4 or 5 p.m eastern a lot of the times someone like
a warren buffett berkshire hathaway they get in their own kind of zone 405 p.m eastern a uh bill
ackman tends to be like 4 4 10 4 15 p.m eastern i don't know elliott management there's a there
are certain companies that literally have like 7 000 companies within their 13 fs so uh they just get picked up differently by different places
um but yeah that that is today i will be auto refreshing this throughout the entire time so
i'll let you know if i see anything elite management related i have not quite yet
uh yeah and definitely guys as always feel free to jump back in on the conversation here i did
see shy joining us up here, hanging out.
Shy, there's been a lot of 13Fs coming out.
I saw one or two interesting things last night.
I believe it was Bridgewater, Ray Dalio founded.
Obviously not there anymore, but kind of made them famous.
And then George Soros both had Salesforce as a top three holding for them,
which I thought was a little bit of interesting.
I'm seeing Amazon across a lot of these 13Fs towards the top,
obviously Google and some of the other ones.
A lot of these kind of Howard Marks, Chase Coleman,
kind of more mid-cap type names,
sorry, Stanley Druckenmiller,
more of these mid-cap names that I don't know as much of,
which I'm excited to dig in a little bit deeper.
But Shai, has there been anything on these 13Fs
that have stood out for you?
Got any thoughts on the Salesforce and just anything in general?
Appreciate you being here.
Yeah, I mean, Salesforce is one I'm in the minority in
of just disagreeing their place in the new AI stack.
I know a lot of people that we work with at Futurum,
as well as the institution side, They are big fans of Salesforce. I think there clearly will be a niche for the system of records players out there.
I just don't see how CRM is, Salesforce isn't one of those names in that legacy layer, the
new AI stack, where AI agents use it as plumbing, essentially.
They pass through it.
That's why I like to call it the plumbing layer, these legacy layers, because they're
just going to read the data, write whatever update they want, create the tickets, and
complete tasks externally, not really in the Salesforce ecosystem.
So I think it's more of a legacy layer.
But however, I'm clearly in the minority in that because i do think that
common theme 13f was that as well as uh and future i'm sorry like they are big fans of that
name however the i do want to add also on the 13f this all the data you're getting right now all the
ads are the pre-chat gbt moment for Claude Cowork. I do think that's
going to change
a lot of potential
allocation in the
tech space. I know that
Stanley,
he just reported
trying to figure out right now.
Yes, Stanley
Drunkenmiller, he just
got in past hour. He added a lot of xlf which which
i thought was a little bit interesting yeah so i think there's a there is a rotation kind of away
from tech towards i guess i want to say non-tech but it's more of the real world that's excluded
from the platform shift that ai is causing in the whole enterprise spend space.
That includes a lot of like the retail, like Costco and Walmart. The reason they are just so
their valuation is like 35 times earnings where you have an Amazon, a Meta, and then 20 times
earnings because they are secluded from all the AI FUD right now. Because clearly the market is
very uncomfortable with the amount of um money
that's being spent on ai infrastructure year after year after year incrementally the growth is
is definitely it's strong but the dollar amount is even stronger and it feels like it's not going
to go away anytime soon so all the money that's being spent on these data centers the gpus these ai models like it is still all in
theory that we're there is going to be an economic return on all this investment we're seeing signs
of it already like meta they're guiding to 30 growth uh at that scale is absolutely mind-boggling
and they're showing how they can charge more for their ads and also produce better metrics with it.
So they're showing that they are going to be an application winner.
But other than Palantir and Cloudflare, there is kind of a tricky application layer winner pool
where nobody really has proven that AI has been this re-accelerator for them.
They've had multiple years trying to figure it out.
And right now you're seeing the market just paint all these software names with the same
brush when really 95, there's going to be a handful of real application winners.
The rest are just going to essentially be priced into that legacy layer of the new AI
stack.
And I think that it's going to be a prolonged doghouse for a lot of these names because it's not going to be any kind of V-shaped recovery from one earnings report, for example.
AI was supposed to disrupt Google as a perfect example.
I don't think these software names are going to a V shape recovery that Google did, but Google was in the doghouse for multiple quarters that AI
was going to disrupt their search business.
Then eventually as time gave on,
Google proved the durability of their search business model while AI was
getting more and more popularity and showed that the business wasn't even
getting dented. It was actually improving and using as a tailwind.
So that was enough.
Enough time went by that the market felt comfortable.
Like that won't be a headwind.
It's going to be a tailwind.
And then we heard, then you saw the other AI infrastructure that Google is trying to,
has been doing with the TPU business, Google Cloud.
So like that's why their re-rating was so aggressive.
But software, it's going to take multiple-rating was so aggressive, but software,
it's, it's going to take multiple quarters and it's not going to take any kind of headline report that's going to change the narrative. Like this morning, like ServiceNow, you finally had a CEO
put his money where his mouth is, buy $3 million of shares and all the executives are not going to
go through their sale, uh, sale program. stock was up four to five percent pre-market
i haven't checked today but i probably is ready because software is pretty red right now so it is
shy it is red it gave that whole pop back because that's that's just all show like this is just
waving a hand because the core issue right now is every single software company is going through a
legacy layer test it's if you are essentially a seed based model, you're living in a new world where AI agents
are going to reduce the amount of knowledge workers.
If you do not own data, your own data, then you are at risk that these AI agents will
generate all the alpha that you've had because you don't own the data,
they can get it elsewhere. And then C, I think it's really, really surprising. Like if you don't
have, if you're purely doing AI in the digital world, but not really doing anything in the
structural, physical world, like Cloudflare, they are are clear they have a structural angle real world angle angle you have tesla real world angle you have a handful like pounds here they
orchestrate decisions in the real world through the government through um industrials like you
have to ask yourself like does this software company it's purely digital is it purely just
yourself, like, does this software company, is it purely digital? Is it purely just some kind of
HR feature? Is it purely a project management tool? Is it some kind of CRM or ticketing? Like,
there is a real risk because they're always going to be there. I disagree with the popular take that
AI is going to kill SaaS. I think that's low-hanging fruit that's easy to get eyeballs on.
But there is a real risk that's much more
powerful that traditional stats will be that legacy layer that will still be there but they're
going to look under price all the incremental profit pool is going to move up the stack
on top of them and it's going to go towards the orchestration layer pounds here connectivity
layer for cloudflare they're going to be the biggest picks and shovels winner for AI agents. Security Layer. I mean, I think right now you're seeing CrowdStrike, Palo Alto, Zscaler. do with software development, sells ads into games, but because they're afraid the gaming industry is going to go away, they're killing it, or it's going to be AI-driven.
It's just insane.
I think it's more corporate governance for AppLovin.
I just don't think people truly believe in the fundamentals.
I agree with you.
I think everyone thinks gaming industry is going to be one of those disrupted industries.
But I think for app loving like those
are it really is number of fundamentals are truly hard to believe in and if you know the space it is
a black box already it's a very gray area the how they operate in uh and there is like oh it's if
there's corporate governance that's putting the bucket up too noisy and software we're not going
to touch you so yeah i agree with that software, we're not going to touch you.
So yeah, I agree with that.
Evan, you were going to say something before I answered Mike?
Palo Alto earnings coming up after the close today.
Penn W should be an interesting day.
Like I said, 13Fs might take the cake here.
Warren Buffett gives his last portfolio update at the exact same time Palo Alto reports earnings.
I'm sorry.
I know where I'll be. But
PennW earnings coming up after the close. Do you have any thoughts?
Yeah, I think they're in a pickle. I think that you have to prove, if you're in a software company,
it doesn't matter what your mode is or advantage in a new AI economy, you have to show metrics that
show reacceleration. I think right now, they're guiding for deceleration in revenue, RPO,
and I want to say their next-gen ARR growth as well. It doesn't mean it's a bad company. I just
think that they're not going to be able to show the metrics that will actually be able to move
the needle for them in this SaaSpocalypse server in right now. However, long-term,
web server in right now.
However, long term, I think I've always been,
I've always criticized their business model
with land and expand.
Like they haven't proven the ability
to organically grow themselves.
They've always had to acquire the latest and greatest
to put inside their platform angle.
Because again, like they started as hardware,
now they're trying to turn into cloud,
which you're succeeding in,
but they want to be this network security platform and i think that they made a couple acquisitions
recently i know cyborg's one of them i always butcher the other name but it was the observability
one either way uh market did not like either chronosphere that's what it was chronosphere
for four bill uh market didn't
like either of those acquisitions because they came at they spent 30 billion dollars on these
two companies uh it doesn't matter what's how the synergy is for those kind of acquisitions if it
happens within like a six-month time frame or within a year time frame you're gonna be kind
of pulling the sidelines of like let's see how this
as time goes on see how this works out but you're spending 30 billion dollars uh i we get that
cyber security is a highly fragmented industry but you don't want to be another salesforce 2.0
like salesforce has an awful track record on acquisitions and i think that's why they're
also like i'm shocked that
people are so bullish on them. I want to say like half of their total assets are in goodwill.
They've spent so much money on, I think it was like $30 billion on Slack. They spent $10 billion
on Informatica, which was the net looking back now hindsight, hindsight, but that was a wrong
time to make that kind of move, spend that much money. I think
Tableau 16 bill, like these were not good acquisitions. These are not acquisitions meant
for the AI economy, but they still sit on their balance sheet. And I think that there's always
risk that if you adopt this business model of constantly acquiring assets to fit a platform
narrative, you're going to fumble along the way because nobody's perfect.
And Salesforce is still, like their balance sheet is anchored by that.
Palo Alto, there is a risk on that.
However, I do think that CyberArk was an underrated acquisition.
I think, clearly, that was before the chat to you, you see more for AI agents, but machines are going to outnumber humans like 100 to 1 with the amount of attacks that are going to be in security space.
And I think that that was a really great acquisition to fit into their
platform narrative. But to answer your question, Evan, like today, uh, I just,
until unless they show some kind of, whoa, um, print of like,
that was caught everyone off guard. There's a reacceleration happening.
I don't think the stock really change uh moves too much however uh
yeah i just don't think so because pounds here had the most ridiculous earnings i've seen in
quite a while they sold that off completely cloudflare also had insane earnings uh with insane
rpo reacceleration that sold off so again, these are just earnings reports are meant essentially to be maybe a catalyst
to change a narrative, but the narrative that's whole space feels right now is a structural,
are you gonna be structurally relevant in the next decade?
And right now the pace that AI is going at the speed, the disruption, I just don't know
how a lot of these, like how you can underwrite a
monday.com, what they're going to look like in five years. And at the end of the day, these
multiples, these terminal multiples are showing you how comfortable you are underwriting the stock,
how many years down the line that they're still going to be able to produce this cash flow. And
Monday trading at, I want to say it's like a third of their
market cap is in cash. Don't quote me on that, but they're criminally cheap. It's just like,
I don't know how you can see what a CRM tool or project management tool like that's going to look
like in five years, let alone in two years. So it's really crazy times to be in, but there's
also going to be opportunity right now because everything in software is going down. It doesn't matter what you do. It's in, it's, uh, the carnage
is very real. I don't have enough cash on the silence because I've, I've been buying, like,
I've been adding pounds here, for example, for first time in years, I got in the same and under
10. I've been buying it post earnings because I do think part of my thesis as well.
Also, sorry if I'm running too late.
Let me know if you need to talk at all.
But part of my thesis as well is I think the software spend as a whole is going to increase in the next five years.
And the issue, though, is it's going to be in a way distributed in a really ridiculous,
uneven way.
I think there's going to be a handful of names
that are going to get this kind of scarcity premium
because they're not going to be at risk of this AI tsunami.
They're proving they're going to be a winner.
And they know that the enterprise spend towards software
will increase, not decrease.
It's just the allocation of this distribution of this
is going to be radically uneven.
So Palantir is clearly going to be that massive winner
because the bottleneck right now in the enterprise space
is these models are getting cheaper and more powerful.
Now, what do you do with that information?
Palantir sits in between those cheap, powerful models
and then this messy, vulnerable enterprise data that they
can govern. They have the governance ability, the audit ability. You can trust them because the
governments essentially trust them for decades. That level of first mover advantage is it's hard
to put a value on that at this moment. And enterprises, they know of it. They hear of
their competitors, especially in
the industrial sector. A lot of these sectors that aren't sexy, they hear,
like, whoa, they made how much on their ROI from adopting ontology? CTOs talk to each other. CIOs
talk to each other. So I think that Palantir, yes, is trading at 100 times earnings. I don't know what the metric is exactly, but they also have a four-year CAGR of 80% on their GAAP EPS.
So their PEG is actually not as expensive as you would think.
I think that who knows what they're going to look like in two years when everyone in the market was expecting a deceleration year for Palantir in 2026, going from 50-something percent to low 40s.
They got it for a reacceleration in the 60s.
And not just that, they destroyed the operating margins expectations to 70%.
So it's so hard to underwrite what Palantir is going to be in two years, because for the past year alone, like they've just destroyed all estimates.
And yeah, so I think that's like one of the safe havens a bit of this software space where I want to buy the pain because a lot of the names are just going down for a real reason.
going down for a real reason, but it should be a lot more like niche than just like, I'm
censusing all software to be disrupted, which is the phase right now. But yeah, I'll pass it back
to you, Evan. Hey, let me just make a quick comment there, Shay. I think one of the things
that is going to make these software companies, some of these software companies, a little bit less vulnerable,
is if they have proprietary data.
Like if you want to take a private market example like Bloomberg, right?
So Bloomberg's got a lot of things that can be disrupted by AI, by LLMs, but they can't disrupt its proprietary data.
They have agreements, exclusive agreements with the exchange and no
one else can get that data. So that actually makes them more valuable. So I wonder, you know,
does Palantir, I would imagine Palantir has access to certain data information sources that maybe
can't easily be accessed. And if that's the case, I would think that that would make them more
valuable going forward. Does that sound right? They control all their customers' data.
Here's an example of what a sales pitch looks like for Palantir.
They go into the room.
Palantir legit just asks their customers, what do you want AI to do for you?
And essentially, Palantir spends, it's not even that long anymore.
I want to say it's a couple of weeks, implementing all the customization
that this organization needs in order to get
to their AI initiative and they do it for them.
But the companies, their clients are very hands-off
because they trust Palantir a ton and their product a ton.
So Palantir does control their data,
but yeah, you're absolutely right, Brian.
That's why one of the three questions
that every software needs to ask yourselves,
when I talked earlier about the legacy layer test,
is like, do you actually control the data,
or can an AI agent get this elsewhere?
That's probably the most important question
among the three that I went over earlier on.
You need to ask yourself that.
Like ServiceNow, I think they're a blue-chip SaaS company.
I think they have management in place to figure it out.
But at this stage, it's a risk to buy the stock right now because they're at 18 times
free cash flow.
I don't know what their business model is going to look like in 18 years, for example.
I think that a lot of things are changing at a rapid pace, and they do not control data.
So they made an acquisition recently.
I forgot what the company's called to get in the security space.
So like maybe there's an angle there.
They're trying to get on on devices for whatever reason.
But that's like service now is like one of those question
stocks right. I'm waiting to see him out just because of what
Brian was mentioning, like they don't really own any data.
Awesome.
Great back and forth there, Shai.
Thank you for giving us
all of those insights there. Definitely did not
go on for too long. I enjoy these spaces.
Just good conversations, people going
back and forth. Palantir is
a very interesting one. We get some good insights.
Maybe we'll even have some people from the team back onto this spaces. I'm just going to keep
saying this. We're about 10, 12 minutes from the close right here. Warren Buffett's final
portfolio update coming out around 4.05 PM Eastern in Berkshire Hathaway, giving out their
portfolio update. Bill Ackman, Gates, et cetera, all of their portfolios will be updated after the close 13f's important to
note that these are their holdings as of the end of q4 as of the end of 2025 a little bit delayed
here um i actually wanted to play this a little bit of a game here i'd be curious of like what
everyone up here's portfolios would have looked like if it was more of like a snapchat snapshot
from a month and a half ago a year ago I'm sure my portfolio wouldn't look too different.
Sock Talks would maybe have a name or two in there.
And I'm sure everyone down below, you guys can kind of think through that process as well.
But there are some caveats.
There's also some more advanced tactics and things that people can have on
that maybe doesn't necessarily have to get into 13S,
but it is a good showing of what people are holding.
We also do have Palo Alto, Pan W reporting earnings after the close, so a lot going on today.
13Fs, a very interesting conversation.
Stock Talk, we talk a lot about Stanley Druckenmiller up here.
Duquesne Family Office did update their portfolio.
Some of their top buys during the quarter include XLF, some financials
they brought some
RSP, equal weight S&P 500
they bought some EWZ
Brazil, these are all just
those names, when I look over towards their largest
holdings, which are more of the SMED cap names
Natera is still
NTRA, still the largest in SMED
second, and then Teva
Pharma is their third largest
I know we talked a lot
about stanley jock and miller on here i don't know if there's any other 13 f's that were standing
out for you today um but yeah anything uh you want to throw into the conversation stock talk
um before we really dig into anything standing out um no no. I mean, today's action was pretty much no cigar action, as I like to call it. I don't think the bounces on the queues were meaningful enough off the lows. We'll see how they act into the end of the week. But I still have my caution hat on when it comes to the major indexes.
I did not like the weekly close on the queues on Friday.
I put some very, very small hedges on, just 1.5% of the port.
So not really anything meaningful, but I'll be willing to upsize those hedges.
Can I ask what you did to hedge?
I just bought SQQQ calls.
So inverse QQQQ leverage calls.
I bought the 75 calls on that.
It's just a way to express that caution.
But like I said, it was a very, very small position, 1.5%.
So I'd be willing to upsize that to closer to 3%
if we fail to close this week above that 21-week EMA.
I'd be willing to upsize those hedges.
So we'll see.
We'll see into Friday how the market acts.
But it was nice to see a little
bit of seller exhaustion at the lows today in some names. But I don't think the broader market
gave me enough juice today to throw caution to the wind. So most of my names were kind of in a
consolidation day, kind of flat. Synaptics was down about 6% today, but I'm not worried about
that. Weekly structure on that chart still looks great in my opinion so i'm not worried about
that move but outside of that mostly consolidation day for the rest of my positions and that's fine
that's normal as far as the index action goes we have those blips of relative strength today
and transports and airlines financials uh XLI, industrials had a pretty
decent day today. So you're seeing those blips of rotation. But again, I don't think the market
as a whole can hold up if that's all we get. I really do think you need tech and momentum to
start re-participating here pretty soon, or else I think you're also
going to see those quote-unquote safe haven areas roll over as well. So obviously, if you have a
bullish bias here, you don't want that to happen. But I would say I'm incrementally cautious here
until we get more carnage in the major indexes. And if you get a bigger breakdown on SPY, I think that'd be an issue.
SPY closed last week below the 50-day,
is now battling to kind of hold that 100-day.
The weekly structure still looks fine, in my view.
So we'll see.
There's plenty of days left, obviously, in this week into Friday. So going into Friday, I'll be attentive to that.
But for now, I'm pretty relaxed with the action for today.
I didn't see anything overly concerning for today.
So we'll see.
At some point, though, I do think sellers will get exhausted here on tech.
I don't know about on software, but I think on tech broadly,
you'll probably see some green shoots at some point.
But I don't know when.
So I'm more of a react guy than
a predict guy so we'll wait for that to happen but no new positions for me or anything today
so um no not too much to touch on specifically you look at apple at all stock talk
um i look at it just like as a cornerstone of the market i don't own it but yeah i look at it just like as a cornerstone of the market. I don't own it, but yeah, I look at it.
Wonderful company.
What about it?
I just, yeah, I bought it on this last pullback.
And I think I already said this on another space a couple weeks ago.
I've had terrible trouble trading it.
And then I got lucky most recently.
It's just holding this 50 RSI and shaping back up. And when I think about
tech businesses that aren't going to be overly disrupted by AI, like I don't think the iPhone's
going away, which is like kind of ironic. So I was just this setup there against this like 255
level, that 2024 high, it just gives you a clean polarity zone risk reward. If you are looking
at a tech name, it's not like someone's going to come out tomorrow and be like,
all right, no more iPhones are being used. And even if they are, it's a retail product. So you're
still going to have the boomers who spend the most not using an iPhone for probably till death,
to be honest. So I was just curious. curious yeah i don't think it looks bad i
think it looks decent um but i'm not a large cap guy so yeah it's not something i'm gonna be trading
but yeah i mean it looks looks good i mean it's nice to see like i mean i mean the google which
you know on the daily obviously looks kind of ugly we have one two three four like almost
eight nine sessions in a row to the downside. So
I even think that looks potentially interesting here on the weekly chart. Um, but yeah, I mean,
there's not like a severe major breakdown in like the mag seven to where I'm, you know, like,
let's get out of the market completely. But, um, I am watching all of them. Like,
I don't like how Microsoft's's acting i don't like how um
amazon's acting or has been acting yeah so yeah there are some mag seven names where i look at
them and go oh but apple's not one of them i agree with you apple probably is one of the nicer charts
out of that group so yeah um yeah i would i would say that that's pretty pretty decent place to be
yeah cool the the other thing I wanted to add,
Evan, you mentioned some exposure to financials.
I'm not Mr. Rocket scientist here.
I used to work in this space a little bit though.
The regulation around some financial information is just
so strong versus other information
from data protection perspectives. Like you have
the TILA agreement, Truth and Lending Act agreement, you have a bunch of stuff that I think
that's probably why you're seeing banks hold up so well, because a company can't just come along
and then be like, yeah, we took a regional bank's information on the underwriting practices and now we're utilizing it.
So I think that's one of the reasons you're seeing banks specifically within financials hold up so well.
It's kind of at the bottom of its range.
It's below its 200-day.
But I think if banks roll over from this 51 range, I even think if you lose – I think if you lose financials or tech, I don't think you can
lose financials and still the market hold together. I think that's like another caveat is like,
because financials just represent so much of the risk pool from the people that are then lending to
these industrial companies, these energy companies that are actually doing decent.
companies, these energy companies that are actually doing decent.
You know, I don't know if this is empirical or not,
stock talk, but one thing I will say about Apple,
there's been no time in this, I said this earlier,
so we're just saying that I'm sorry if you're on,
if you were one of the first few hundred people in space,
few 50 people in space, shout out to you anyway,
you get to hear it twice.
This is one of the few times, this is maybe one of the only times
over the last three,4 years that Apple has seemingly
participated a little bit in any
of the exciting parts about
AI and talking about this open claw
thing and just seeing everyone going out and buying
MacBooks we'll actually see if this is
empirical or real in the numbers
Apple's quite a big beast and these are $600
MacBooks
so we'll see how many people are buying but
it's at least making me feel good,
which I don't know if that's what we want here,
to see an Apple product being used
at the edge of the AI stuff
and things that people are excited about.
Something that we haven't seen in the last couple of years.
Do you think that's why it's holding up?
I didn't even connect the dots.
I was just connecting the dots
because Apple is not a digital product. It's a real world. I think that's why it's holding up? I didn't even connect the dots. I was just connecting the dots because Apple is not a digital product.
It's a real world.
I think that's the stronger theme.
I think that's probably more of what it is, and maybe it's just a thing.
But I have never seen videos like this, excitement around AI and Apple products linked in the same thing.
That hasn't happened over the last four years.
Maybe I'm wrong.
You know, Evan, one thing here, and I'm putting on my tinfoil hat so you can block me if you need,
but how do we know that, like, where do we get to a point where AI isn't creating videos to promote AI?
Like, how do we know the, like, I'm just curious.
Like, how is, how do we know, like, Claudebot isn't creating videos of people using Claudebot to then promote Claudebot?
Like, I'm just curious because my feed is filled with it, too. Claudebot isn't creating videos of people using Claudebot to then promote Claudebot.
I'm just curious because my feed is filled with it too.
And then I reached out to one of my friends who, he's just a big brain.
He works with neural networks, with computers.
And he's like, a lot of this stuff is going to be good, but don't link your bank account,
blah, blah, blah, because there's security risk, which also gets back to the reason I think financials are doing well.
But I'm just curious, how much of that is amplified by the fact that it is an AI technology,
so the algorithm is then just like, hey, let's just keep pumping this? It is interesting because
I'm curious to see if the sales around Mac minis and stuff are actually what is occurring.
The other thing I would say, Shay, in general, when tech corrects,
Apple tends to correct less.
So, and that's like just over the historical term.
If you look at the rate of change in technology
and when it drops below,
it's 12 week rate of change drops below positive,
Apple tends to outperform.
And I think that just has to do with the balance sheet. And
like you said, it's kind of the same as ever business versus the other tech where cash flows
have to be proven in the future. It's not as hard to prove the fact that people are going to buy new
phones. We did just get a market close there, by the way. I want to get the Edgar search up first.
Normally what's going to happen here, Warren Buffett again.
I am excited to watch this.
I enjoy this.
They're going to release the 13F.
It's going to come out on their Edgar website, SEC Edgar website.
You can go and find it for yourself.
It'll take two, three, four minutes-ish, something like that.
A lot of these different rappers, I'm going to get mine from rallies,
but there's different websites you can go through and look and they'll kind of make it look a little
prettier but warren buffett berkshire hathaway he about to be updating their uh their portfolio
this is the last update that berkshire hathaway is going to give with warren buffett as a ceo so
this is like when you're saying uh looking at what Warren Buffett left as his holdings,
we ever do anything going forward of like,
how does Warren Buffett and Berkshire Warren Buffett's holdings do 10 years later?
They're going to be as of what we see today.
So I find that to be a little interesting.
Stock talk.
Are you just so excited for this?
I know this is your favorite moment every quarter as well.
Yeah, I'm super excited.
There are some rumors that he sold some Apple
or whoever did sold some more Apple.
So maybe see a little sell there.
Every once in a while, there is a new stock that is added
and the stock does go up.
Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway does have the sauce.
So you might see a stock up 10-ish
percent on this one. Let me keep updating some stuff. We do also have Palo Alto, PENW,
which will be reporting earnings after the close, PENW reporting earnings.
Yeah, a lot of these 13Fs should be coming out in the next little bit. I know there was some
stories around Bill Ackman adding some
meta stock, adding some other stuff. So we should see that actually kind of finalize what he was
actually doing here in the next couple of minutes. I'd be curious if anyone down below has any
thoughts on what stock you guys think Warren Buffett bought this past quarter, if you think
Warren Buffett bought any stocks. I'd be curious to hear your guys' take. There is a purple 10 in the bottom right of your screen. I would love to
hear if you guys think Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway, made any moves during the quarter.
Mike Spangler said one minute ago, Apple will go to the 200th day before this is over. Take it to
the bank. That's what he thinks. All right.
Yeah.
Let's give the SEC Edgar website a little refresh.
Still not there.
Let me put my other thing.
Cadence Design Systems CDNS just reported earnings.
CDNS stock is moving higher by 5%. Up by 5% in after hours.
Beat EPS, beat revenue.
CDNS is that ticker.
Ticker CDNS.
Expand Energy just reported some earnings.
Not seeing a real big mover there.
Okay. Not seeing a real big mover there. Cadence, forward guidance is in line with expectations.
So pretty good there.
All right. This is kind of that awkward moment in between, but we will be having Warren Buffett,
Berkshire Hathaway portfolio update. Also, Palo Alto, ticker PANW, earnings should be coming out
in two minutes or so. Wall Street is expecting EPS to come in at around 76 cents. Wall Street
is expecting revenue to come in around $2.58 billion for Palo Alto Networks, ticker PANW.
Let me get that chart up in front of me.
This is the earnings that I was the most interested in today.
Okay, let me check something.
Nice.
Palo Alto with a small tick up.
Let's give this a refresh.
Ooh, 13Fs.
Stock Talk, have you ever looked into Palo Alto before?
I know it's too big but i i you know one
of the bigger dogs yeah i can't i can't build conviction on stuff like that like i can't buy
you know like i heard shay earlier talking about like some opportunities and
some software names like cloudflare and palantir and stuff like that like i can't buy names like that and hold it because like you know cloud flare
trades at what like 40 times sales 210p palantir trades at like 30 40 times sales like 80 forward
p 205 trailing p like i can't hold a business like that and just like close my eyes and feel okay about it because like in theory,
your ROI on a stock like that is going to take like a decade.
Like, you know, and, and obviously it doesn't work like that.
I mean, stocks go up and go down for, you know,
they have runs and periods of consolidation,
but I just can't buy like expensive,
very expensive stocks and hold them
with conviction just it doesn't work for me and as a result of that i miss out on some opportunities
but i'm okay with that you know on the contrary sometimes what i can do is buy a stock when i
think it's cheap and then over time it becomes expensive i'm okay with holding a stock like that because
i have a deep cost-based advantage and like if you're going to invest in anything there's going
to be periods where the stock's expensive and there's gonna be periods where the stock's cheap
so if you're planning on holding something for years yeah you're gonna have to sit through
periods of cyclical underperformance where the stock's expensive so that's a different game psychologically but me opening a new position in a stock that's
trading at like 100 or 200 p i just can't do it um you know because i would be constantly worried
that any bad news would lead to a 20 or 30 sell-off and in a name and i was actually going
to jump in earlier when which i was here when he said this but he was like oh i don't really understand why like cloudflare and palantir sold off on earnings
like i do i understand why because they're expensive right and so for me it's much easier
to go into an earnings report uh for a new position where i know the stock is cheap uh aka
the expectations are low.
And it's much easier for stocks like that
to do well on earnings,
or even not even do well,
even if they post an in-line earnings,
it's much easier for stocks like that to hold up
following their report.
So my criteria for stocks
is very different for names that I already own versus names that I'm taking a new position in.
I have a very, very different criteria.
There are stocks in my portfolio today that I think are expensive, like Kratos, for example, I think is expensive.
But I still own it because I think they're in a very, very important secular multi-theme exposure.
And I've owned it since the 20s.
So, yeah, is it expensive in
the nineties? Sure. But I'm not going to sell it just because of that, because I understand that
holding a stock like that for years is going to mean I'm going to encounter periods where it's
more expensive than I'd like. But to me, that's not a reason to sell it. Now, on the contrary,
if I didn't own Kratos today, I wouldn't be buying it here. So that's the difference.
It's like I treat new positions very differently from existing positions.
And, you know, for better or worse, there are opportunities I miss because of that.
But there are also bullets that I dodge because of that.
So there's tradeoffs like there is in every kind of strategy in trading.
I think every, no matter who you are what style of trading
you have what criteria you have for buys and exits there's always trade-offs there's no style
or strategy in the world that doesn't have trade-offs right like if you're a guy who
buys it at the 21 emas and risks off the daily 21 ema all the time there's going to be moments
where you're faked out but there's also going to be moments where you're faked out. But there's also going to be moments where you save your ass by exiting at that point
and you watch the stock fall to the 50-day.
So there's trade-offs in every form of strategy, technical, fundamental, a mix, thematic, whatever,
there's trade-offs.
And so I understand there's trade-offs to having that perspective on valuation,
but it just makes my life easier.
So I don't have to like stare at my portfolio
and have 10 positions trading at 200p
wondering when the crash is going to come, you know?
So that's how I think about those things differently.
We did just get a lot-
Yeah, the cybersecurity names are all too expensive for me
was the real reason I gave that answer.
That's fair.
Palo Alto, we did just get a lot of stuff here.
Berkshire Hathaway updated its portfolio.
Buffett's portfolio is out.
Palo Alto, I'm still trying to get some more stuff
there. PennW did report
earnings. EPS was above
expectations. Revenue was above expectations.
Forward guidance was a little bit weak.
They said they expect EPS
between 78 to 80 cents
next quarter. Wall Street wanted 92 cents.
A lot of the forward guidance is...
Some of it's above. Revenue is above, so EPS is below.
They also lowered their fiscal year adjusted EPS guidance
while raising their fiscal year revenue guidance.
Interesting.
So Palo Alto saying profits are going to be lower than expected.
Revenue is going to be lower than expected. Revenue is going to be higher than expected. Pan W stock initially moving lower. We did also just get a bunch of 13Fs. We got David Tepper. We got Berkshire Hathaway, which I'm trying to get a little bit of an update here. But Pan W stock initial move is down 2%.
But 10W stock initial move is down 2%.
Okay, so now I do have Buffett's portfolio in front of me.
New position, New York Times, ticker NYT.
Warren Buffett ending his time investing in some newspapers.
NYT stock up 1.3% in After Hours.
Lowered his holdings in Apple, again.
Lowered the holdings in Bank of America, DeVita, Constellation Brands, Aon, Google, lowered his holdings in Amazon by 77%.
Stock talk, he increased his holdings in four names, Chevron, this is Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway.
Lowered his Amazon holding by 77%, I don't blame him.
Yeah, so he did, well, I don't blame them yeah so he did well I don't know
something on your legacy for the next 10 years I'd keep those Amazon chairs in
my I mean no I'm keeping my Amazon like my Amazon cost basis is like in the 80s
so I'm keeping my Amazon but I mean, it's acted like shit. Absolutely. No question about that.
Jassy just can't bring the sex appeal back to Amazon.
He just, I don't know,
he can't bring the juice
back. You know, Bezos
had the sort of
he had the juice, you know.
Founders tend to be able to do that.
They tend to be able to sell narrative really well, and Jassy's
just done a poor job of it. So, I don't think he narrative really well, and Jassy's just done a poor job of it.
So I don't think he's a bad CEO,
and I think he's done a great job with AWS,
but sometimes being a good CEO is not enough.
Sometimes you've got to sell the story, you know,
and guys like Elon and Zuckerberg and Bezos are proof of that,
where if you sell the story well enough, you sell the stock.
And yeah, I just don't think Jassy's a great salesman,
is the way I would describe it.
He added also Lamar Advertising and then Domino's Pizza.
Big DPZ guy.
Domino's Pizza increased by 20%. Lamar Advertising, Warren Buffett picked that up? Incre increase the holdings in it by a tiny bit
la mr. that's interesting billboards is that stock moving hard it's up he
increased it by point zero two percent so they bought like a share to maybe did
some drip I don't know if there's dividends there. Stock is moving higher.
Like 0.0.
Hey, they increased their holdings by 0.02%
and the stock is up by 0.02%
and after hours was meant to be.
Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway,
updating their portfolio.
A little increase in those Lamar advertising.
Sold Pool Corp. Well,ar advertising. Sold Pool Corp.
Reduced holdings in Pool Corp.
Let's see if they fully sold out of anything.
We also get David Tepper in front of me as well.
I don't see anything that Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway fully sold out of during the quarter.
be sold out of during the quarter.
Stock Talk, were there any other
of these 13Fs that stood out to you?
I really only look at drugs.
Did you see it?
Yeah, I did.
I thought XLF was interesting
in a lot of RSP.
I just noticed a lot of ETFs coming towards the top.
Yeah. I mean, a lot of the ETFs coming towards the top. Yeah.
I mean, I don't like that because I like when he picks individual stocks.
But, I mean, last quarter when I looked at it, he had a bunch of healthcare.
I actually wanted to buy Teva, and I didn't.
I was like, oh, I might follow him into Teva.
And that thing ended up going crazy.
So I'm kind of bummed about that.
But, yeah, I mean, I don't like looking at like celebrity investors and stuff and just like automatically doing what they do.
But I have a lot of respect for Druckenmiller.
So it's different for me with his stuff.
Like I think he's probably the smartest or one of the smartest active managers that actually has a reputation that's out there.
I mean, some of the new guys are pretty good. But as far as, like, the legacy guys that have a long track record,
I think he's probably the smartest manager out there.
So I respect him a lot, and I respect what he says a lot.
So I do look at his 13-and-a-half every season,
but that's pretty much it.
I don't, like, look at, like, my style and Buffett's style
are way too different, so that wouldn't be helpful to me um i look at iron horns occasionally too like i look at some of the other
ones but i'm like howard marks and stuff there's some of these other guys who have like a lot of
mid-cap names that i see in there yeah yeah there i mean a lot of them have mid-cap names i mean
mid-cap names are where the alpha is a lot of these money man active managers like drunk loves
mid-caps and a lot of these active managers like
mid caps, because again, that's where the alpha is. That's like where you, I preach this all the
time, but I mean, I learned it from those guys. That's where a lot of the opportunity is because
they're not covered as well. Nobody knows, like not nobody knows, but the broader public,
the broader investing public is not aware of those names. So that's where I like to focus.
That's where some of these managers like to focus too,
especially when you look at their highest weighted positions.
They're very often mid-cap.
So, yeah, I mean, if there's something like out of the blue
that I see a bunch of these guys picking up,
I'm going to pay attention and be like, okay,
is it something that's interesting to me?
But when they're operating in stuff that's not in my wheelhouse,
like, for example, Druck has been pretty focused on healthcare
these last couple of quarters,
that I'm not going to force myself to, like, buy it just because they did,
you know?
I'm not going to force myself to, like, mirror their actions
just because I respect them.
But I do try to glean insights from it.
And Druck has certainly been on point about those healthcare exposures he picked
up. I think almost all of them are trading higher since he first picked them up. So,
yeah, I mean, he knows what he's doing. I don't need to be the guy to say that he knows what he's
doing. Everyone knows that Druckenmiller knows what he's doing. So, yeah, he's been excellent
as usual. But yeah, I do pay attention to his. I don't pay much attention to the other ones, to be honest.
I mean, if there's something really, really unique, like, that I own that somebody's picking up, then, yeah, I'll be like, okay, cool.
But that rarely happens because I'm focused on, like, really, really specific themes.
These guys tend to be focused on broader exposures, right?
They want to get broader, you industry level exposure and that's also
why drugs picking up more ETFs lately too right so he doesn't have to do doesn't
have to worry about the stock picking work like his XLF position and that
stuff so yeah I do pay attention mostly to drug with a special attention on mid
caps and I don't really pay much attention to any of the other guys.
That is fair enough.
I appreciate the honesty, the honest insights.
Did you look into Einhorn's at all this time?
He hasn't updated it yet.
I'll let you know when he does, actually.
I don't think he posted this yet, right?
Nope, he did not.
David Tepper reduced a lot of stuff on here.
One of the things, didn't add too many new positions, a South Korea ETF.
I'm seeing a lot more of these international ETFs.
Yeah. Some themes across the board here.
Taiwan and South Korea are pretty popular.
So is Brazil.
Yeah, someone else added Brazil.
Brazil, Taiwan, South Koreaa those are all pretty popular from
howard marks added a new
position have you ever looked in this company
looks abroad maybe i don't know
cv at the end aero
grupo aero mexico okay
it's from mexico yeah
mexican airline i think i don't know
specifically i think so he also started
uh looks like there's a spack or something that
he bought something of.
Rice Acquisition Corp.
K-R-S-P.
K-R-S-P?
Yeah.
Howard Marks.
I don't know if I know what that is.
It's a SPAC, I think.
He bought some Infosys
Infosys, and he bought some
and he bought some O-N-I-T.
ONIT. I've never heard of that
I've never heard of that ticker.
ticker.
Onity Group.
Financial Services
Holdings. More on the small cap.
Those are some of the names that Howard Marks
started positions in.
I thought it was interesting.
Nvidia and Meta just announced a major expansion to their partnership.
I need to see more on this, but... What is this?
Today,
NVIDIA and META announced a major expansion in their partnership to accelerate
META's long-term AI
roadmap and support long-term infrastructure.
META is deploying millions of NVIDIA, Blackwell,
and Ruby GPUs
to power hyperscale data centers.
META is the first large-scale
hyperscale gray CPU
only deployment. Okay, I don't think that means anything.
Today's news, Meta, okay.
All right, well, we've got to post that really quick.
But a little NVIDIA meta headline being shared.
There you go.
Anytime you hear NVIDIA partnership with any of the Mag 7
that's going to be
we're buying more chips
that's the extended partnership
yeah
this is a major expansion
of their partnership
CPUs are being mentioned here I don't know if that is specific around anything else but
or they just want to get hype about other things but talking a little bit about cpus
and so i can't okay yeah so i just saw that headline crossing pretty spot on there there was a lot of interesting
news from today um stock talk have i asked you about if you used open claw or anything like that
have you played around with it i have i was gonna get it set up this week for one of my buddies um
i already bought all the stuff that i need, the Mac Mini and everything,
but I'm moving to a new place in like 10 days,
so I'm just going to wait until I'm moving to a new place
and then have him come to the office and set it up.
So we're going to see.
So I should have it by the start of next month,
I should have that whole system set up,
so then we can talk about it and I can explain if there's anything cool
that I'm able to do with it.
It'll probably be by the beginning of next month.
Okay. Interesting.
I am very curious on this.
It feels like a deep-sea type of moment.
People aren't taking it the same way as a stock reaction,
but a fundamental change to certain things.
Maybe move some things forward.
We shall see.
Oh God,
what did I just,
sometimes when people send me something and I don't have the good context
around it,
it's like,
what just happened?
Okay,
cool.
Bill Ackman did just update his portfolio.
Reduced holdings by 86% in Google.
Bill Ackman is most of the way out of Google stock now.
And he did buy a lot of meta.
Meta, sorry, M-E-T-A, meta platforms.
So meta platforms, we already didn-E-T-A, meta platforms, so meta platforms
we already didn't know this was going to happen
and I don't know if this was
coordinated by Buffett to Ackman
but Bill Ackman did buy
a lot of Amazon shares during the quarter
he increased his holdings by 65%
did Mr. Bill Ackman
Bill Ackman's
not a very good trader, so
well, is Warren Buff Is Warren Buffett?
Warren Buffett's a great investor.
Bill Ackman, I would say, is a decent investor in a very, very specific niche of food companies.
But he's not a good trader.
Druckenmiller is both a good investor and a good trader. Druckenmiller is both.
He's both a good investor and a good trader.
Same thing with Lynch.
But yeah, I mean, I don't think Ackman has a very impressive recent track record of stock picks, to be honest.
Not a big Nike guy?
That's fair.
You did make a comment once.
It was like the same people who like Disney stock or whatever.
The same people who love Nike.
Same shareholders.
But there's a couple of those names.
I don't know.
Meta's a good buy.
Increasing the Amazon.
We're basically getting some Mag 7 in here.
I've never.
I don't mind that.
I don't mind the Meta buy or the Amazon buy.
I don't blame people for doing either thing with Amazon.
I don't blame people for buying Amazon here or selling it because I
understand the people who are selling it are probably frustrated with the
price action.
And the people who are buying it understand that it's still a very,
very good company.
And it's doing very well.
you know,
I don't blame people on either side for Amazon meta.
I think it's actually a very,
very reasonable evaluation.
One of the most reasonable evaluations it's been out in a long time.
So I don't blame him for buying that either.
But I just don't care to really follow Ackman's activity
because he's just not very good at being active.
I mean, look what he did with Netflix.
His last three positions, he just butchered the entries and exits.
So you could say, okay, everyone makes mistakes.
Yeah, I agree but when
you're at that level doing that pretty consistently is kind of disappointing
and yeah Ackman has not been a very good trader last several years he does make
an attempt at it it's also tough because these 13 s come out you can't really
hide we're all just gonna talk about it
but those are some fair points there
Tiger Global Chase Coleman started new positions in service now netflix wealthfront what is wlth is this an ipo
second person i've seen in the stock
new ish i know it did ipo during the quarter so at least two of these people this wlth stock
which ipo december 12th wealthfront corporation on a digital investment
advisory services interesting chase coleman tiger global is that one you've looked into at all it
is a newish ipo one billion dollar market cap though i have not looked at that one yeah new ipo
tiger global and someone else was in this. I remember seeing that.
New IPOs are tough for me because I need price history
and I need earnings history to build conviction.
And so there have been some new IPOs in the past that I've looked at
and been like, oh, I find this really interesting
and just not bought them because I can't build conviction.
And that's the whole game for me is being able to be like confident in what I own.
So I like to have at least four quarters of earnings history.
I mean, preferably much more than that, but at the very least, four quarters of earnings history.
And I like to have a chart that is, you know, that has a lot of historical data on it.
that is, you know, that has a lot of historical data on it. I want to see how price acted around
various levels, where it was rejected and where it was bought up. And so I need both price history
and earnings history to build conviction, which is why I almost never buy new IPOs,
you know, for better or worse. There are times I miss out on stuff because of that, but
for better or worse, that's kind of one of my rules i just don't buy new new stocks because i can't build conviction i think also it's just a little tough to
i don't know companies go public at prices that are good for them they're not going to go public
at prices that aren't good for them that doesn't mean there isn't long-term opportunities there
you stuff but i don't know i'll say i think i think there's some fair points a little price
action doesn't hurt anybody.
I definitely understand that from the perspective of a trader for sure.
I imagine those first couple days,
I don't know if you're scaling down a bunch,
but yeah.
New York Times.
What is their market cap?
$12 billion.
You ever trade to New York Times stock talk?
You get excited about newspapers
making a big turnaround?
Hell no.
Hell no.
Never.
That's crazy to me that that's the market cap
of the New York Times.
What do you think?
I'm not surprised it's around there.
I didn't think it would be much higher.
I mean, I don't know what the
financials look like on that, but let's see.
I mean, that
looks expensive.
That doesn't look cheap to me
for that. I mean, price the book of six,
peg of 2.62
forward P of 25 on that business I don't know it is an interesting one I
switched over to George Soros George Soros and his portfolio a lot of ads a
lot of moves around I assume he's a little bit more of an active guy. 206 positions in here.
Also old.
Just kind of a fact.
Microsoft.
Taiwan Semiconductor.
TSMC is a new position for him.
Dayforce.
Ticker D-A-Y.
What's the market cap there?
Oh, wrong one.
Did this get acquired or something?
Why is this not showing up?
I'm going to assume they got acquired because I have heard of that one. Electric Ark, Cyber Ark.
Okay. I think all those names just got acquired. Somebody likes to play that one.
Confluence, Ally Financial. I'm starting to assume that this is not going to be the most
valuable portfolio to look into based on the type of trades that are happening there.
Some of these people can go in and guess what? We got a David Einhorn update here, Stock Talk.
David Einhorn just updated his portfolio. Let me send this somewhere else very quickly,
Very quickly, and then I will read this to you.
and then I will read this to you.
All right.
David Einhorn added Warner Bros. Discovery.
SPB.
What is SPB?
Spectrum Brands.
Is this actually like cable?
Have you ever heard of SPB before spectrum brands holdings no i'm uh
stb no sp as in peter and then b as in bravo
oh yeah spectrum yeah i know spectrum yeah i know spectrum as like the internet wi-fi i don't know
if that's i don't think i assume this is yeah it's not what thisFi. I don't know if that's what this is. I assume this is...
It's not what this is.
Global pet care, home and garden, home and personal care.
Okay, never mind.
Then I don't know what this is.
I have not seen that one before.
SPB, David Einhorn.
You want to maybe look into that a little bit?
He also added... We can come back to that one
hsic which is one that i've seen before henry sheen
nine billion dollar market cap he also added enterro resources
bkv corporation i've never seen bkv all right this this is a good one. We have some interesting stuff here to dig into.
Global payments, Deckers.
He also added some slide insurance holdings.
Those are all brand new holdings.
What did he fully sell out of?
A company called Cedro Limited,
a company called Nexstar Media,
HP, HPQ, and then Vanek Oil Services ETF.
That's with David Einhorn.
Some of the stuff that David Einhorn did today.
Did you get a chance?
Are you digging into SPB at all?
Is there any initial reaction thoughts on numbers?
No, I mean, I'm not going to be able to dig into these that quickly, but I will look at some of these.
What about some of the other ones that he added?
H-S-I-C,
Henry Sheen, Antero Resources,
EKV Corporation?
That was one I had never seen before.
Yeah, I'm not familiar with most of these, but I'm going
through some of them right now and seeing.
I'm still looking at some of the drug stuff to honest I don't get that some of these I don't get so I'm like
you know they must be seeing something or knowing something that I don't know
it's also a different market from a month and a half ago.
Stock Talk, I actually also – I wanted to do this with you because I am very curious.
Did you put out like an end-of-year portfolio thing in your Discord
that we can maybe scroll back to?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I post portfolio updates every week.
I would be super – what do you think a 13F would look like for you?
Because this is, again,
this would be your holdings
as of December 31st.
I was looking...
I'll scroll back.
It's there.
I mean, it's every week.
It's posted,
so it's got to go to the last Friday of last year.
Let's see here.
12-3, 12-5, 12-10.
Give me a second.
Ooh, did we?
There it is.
From 19.
I don't see one after that.
We might have a little bit of a...
Yeah, from 19 and then...
Oh, no, yeah, because nothing changed.
So that's the last one.
There's no changes since that one.
So, yeah, that would be the last one.'s no changes since that one. So
Yeah, that would be the last one. So deal I mean the differences there are
Well, that was I don't own that anymore so the only differences are
Between that and today would be the ads of synaptics and the ads of pangea logistics and the
Add and sale of GLDD which I'm already out of
And obviously I have some lotto's and I have a hedge now and sqqq, but everything else is pretty much the same
But yeah, that's there's not much of a difference from December outside of synaptics and geologistics.
So each of these investors are very different in traders and stuff like that.
Michael Burry, who we don't even see the 13S for anymore, is going to be all over the place, super crazy and stuff like that.
What you see on the state is not going to be that different.
Some people, it's going to be very similar.
Warren Buffett, there's not going to be that many moves.
Some of them are a little more active.
David Einhorn's pretty active.
Leon, sorry, Stanley Druckenmiller seems pretty active as well.
But yours is, oh, Bill Gates also out yours is uh somewhere in the middle
decently there um portfolio size as well let me pull up stanley drunkenmiller
i think there's a lot of positions in here only 98 so stanley drunkenmiller maybe it's just there's
a whole team stuff behind it 98 positions dav. David Einhorn, we were just looking through there.
41 positions.
Are they, do they have too many positions? I mean, you're not going to go in and say
that we could frame it in a different way. Do you like, it's just different types of
investors.
Yeah. I mean, it's different when you're managing other people's money.
If I was managing other people's money, if I was managing a fund, I would have more positions than I currently run.
I run 10 to 20 positions at a time.
I don't mean to provide such a big range, but it really is 10 to 20.
Sometimes it's 10, sometimes it's 17, 18.
So I like to stay in that ballpark.
For me, it gets really, really hard to manage stocks when I have over 20 stocks because then I got to constantly go back and do chart reviews.
I do chart reviews on all my positions every week.
So, you know, and I have to monitor the financials of all those companies, the earnings of all those companies.
So for one guy managing a portfolio,
it's difficult when I get over 20 positions, it becomes overwhelming. So for me, I like to stay under 20. But for guys like this, like they have a staff, you know, they have like a whole team,
and they're managing other people's money. And so for them, diversification sometimes
prevents them from like, one bad call, you know, affecting their performance or affecting the money that they're managing.
And so I understand why guys like Druckenmiller want to have more positions.
I mean, it's still too many for me to ever be able to manage on my own,
but I understand why they have more positions than I do.
I mean, they're playing a different game, right?
These guys are money managers. I'm just a retail trader.
So it's the same reason why I don't compare my performance to these guys. You know, like last year I did 505%. These guys are not going to come close to
that kind of performance because they have less ability to take that much risk, right? I mean,
there's a reason they're called hedge funds, right? These guys are constantly concerned about
risk management, capital preservation. I can take swings for home runs because I'm just one guy managing his
own portfolio. It's an entirely different game. So I don't compare my performance. I don't like
look at these guys and go, haha, I beat you in performance. That would be silly for me to say
they're managing billions of dollars instead of millions. And on top of that, they're managing
other people's money and not their own. So it's a whole different game. So I don't compare the number of holdings I have or the performance I have with these guys.
These guys are much, much more accomplished traders and investors than I am.
Like, Druckenmiller is leaps and bounds, more knowledgeable and more talented than I am.
I would never, you know, come close to comparing my performance or my stock picking to him.
But I also understand that we're playing a different game.
And I have the ability to like, you know, swing for the fences,
whereas he is not going to do that.
So he's more diversified.
He's more deliberate with some of his picks.
You know, even some of the things right now, like XLF and the Brazil ETF,
like, you know, he probably doesn't want to pick individual stocks
in those categories because he probably can't develop conviction so he's going
to the ETFs I almost never buy ETFs because again it's just not worth it for
me for the ROI and the beta and the amount of work I put in the individual
stocks just not worth it so there's a lot of things that are very different
between what hedge fund managers do versus what individual retail traders
should be doing. And I actually think one of the mistakes that individual retail traders make a lot
is trying to trade like these guys, like trying to replicate what these guys do, you know,
having a hundred positions and, you know, buying everything they buy and selling everything when
they buy it, sell it. That's, I don't think very productive for most people who are retail traders to be doing but so that's why i don't do that
um but yeah there's a lot there's a lot of differences between being a hedge fund manager
being a retail trader it's not the same game at all there's a lot of warren buffett quotes out
there warren buffett quote good for everything i'm just gonna keep saying it because i'm not
gonna say it again tomorrow today was the last portfolio update that warren buffett quote good for everything i'm just gonna keep saying it because i'm not gonna say it again tomorrow today was the last portfolio update that warren buffett is ever
going to give as him as ceo of berkshire hathaway uh but there's a good warren buffett quote for
everything if you guys want to see what his last portfolio looked like pinned up in the nest above
that's a whole thread that is my favorite 13f thread go in check it out some interesting stuff
going on there.
He's talked a lot about, like, you know, it's a very different game managing billions, tens, hundreds of billions versus millions.
You know, Warren Buffett, people kind of call him old and, you know, he lost in touch in the market.
And the guy is 95.
He probably did maybe a little bit.
But also, like, once you get to that scale, it's a very different game that you have going on there.
And if he was managing millions of dollars, he probably, or tens or thousands of dollars, he probably would be beating all of us.
And he probably would have exponentially higher returns.
It's just kind of, it is interesting to see.
It's just like, Stock Talk, even the style that you invest, at a certain scale, if you're investing in two to 10 to $12 billion companies and your fund is at $300 billion, let's, you know, we'll, we'll project forward a couple of years.
It's going well, beating the market. We get some money in, uh,
some good stuff going on. You literally like,
there comes a point where for you to get a position in IRC matters,
you got to buy the whole company or something.
So there is a scale where like a lot of names just become less available.
It's interesting.
What do you even think of hedge funds?
Have you ever invested in a hedge fund before?
No, no.
I mean, it's a very, very different game.
It's about you have to constantly be concerned
about performance you can't really like you know you're you can't really think about stocks in the
way that i like to think about stocks as a hedge fund manager you can't think about stocks in like
a multi-year time frame you have to constantly be on top of the ball on a quarter by quarter basis
for performance because people look at that
and that's how they decided to allocate their money and you also can't as a hedge fund manager
take the type of risk that I take you know when I have like really really high conviction positions
like for example last year with Amcor like when Amcor was in the 20s and 30s I put a huge amount
of weight behind it you know I had like had like 15, 20% of my,
we still have 15% of my portfolio in it.
But back then I had, you know,
a shit ton of options on it at every strike,
all out of the money options,
no hedges on the position.
You can't do that as a manager.
Like you can't take 20% of your capital
and just throw it into a stock
in naked call options to the upside.
Like, I mean, you you can you're not gonna
last very long doing that though so the type of like conviction driven stock picking stock picker
that i am it just is a different game it's a totally different game and so yeah i mean i've
looked at them now but i've never invested in them and and i also understand that it's it's a
it's a different prop it's an it's a, it's a different prop. It's an,
it's an entirely different proposition and entirely different game than I'm
currently playing. And with the game that I'm currently playing,
I'm doing very well. So, you know,
I don't feel the need to change the strategy up.
Yeah, that is fair.
That is fair.
Okay, sorry.
None of those, at least that BQV stock hasn't really moved much.
Yeah, I don't know.
Hedge funds are really interesting.
I've never been a very big hedge fund guy, but I'd be curious's see what down below what anyone has been saying during the spaces again we appreciate everyone joining in make sure
you are following the speakers does Druckenmiller have an X account is what
the first question I see from American flag Stanley Druckenmiller I do not
believe he is active on X.
We got another person.
Does anyone want to comment on Ondas?
O-N-D-S.
You know, for a small, medium-sized company stock talk,
they do think that a lot of people talk about that name on here.
Ondas. O-N-D-S. Yeah, people like it.
It's a retail favorite name.
It's a favorite in your group as well.
I'm not interested in it at all.
The chart looks good, though.
For people who are in it, the chart looks good.
Do I think it's overvalued?
Yes.
Do I think that that's going to matter?
Not really.
If the drone theme stays hot, that stock will go up.
So if you want to use it as a proxy to train the drone theme go for it but just understand it trades at 200 times sales it's pretty
crazy
yeah they do like the company does like 10 million in revenue a quarter and it's a
4.5 billion market cap so not something I'm ever gonna buy but yeah I get the people
are you know the thing is is retail traders who are new to stocks get very
easily impressed right they hear about a technology that they think is cool and
then they're like this technology is really cool, guys. It's going
to scale. It's an awesome technology. And I want to invest in it because it's the future.
This is what I hear from like a lot of retail traders. That's a stupid way to think about
stocks. Like stocks are about valuation and earnings power. That's what that's what stocks
are about. That's what the game is. Just because you think a company's cool or a product's cool, or you like the fact that ONDS has cool counter drone technology. Nice. That's awesome. It trades
at 200 times sales. So yeah, maybe one big contract can change that. But for me, it's just
not something I can bring myself to buy. And the same thing goes for most of the drone stocks. Most of the pure play drone stocks are very expensive. And, you know, again, for good reason, because we
are pivoting to drones, but too expensive for me to like build any conviction or buy them at these
prices. So that's my thoughts on that. The charts are nice though. So from a technical standpoint,
yeah, they're trending higher,
and they look set up to go higher.
So I'm not telling you to short them,
but it's just not a stock that I can own and feel comfortable about it.
That is fair.
On this question down below from the crowd.
Someone very much asking,
second time asking,
GEHC, GE Healthcare.
Not a name that I think that would be on your radar.
Too big of a market cap for me.
Too big of a market cap for me,
but nice chart.
Nice chart in all time frames.
Daily, weekly, and monthly are nice.
That's going higher. I wouldn't be surprised to see that stock 100 plus pretty soon once once upon a time there
was a trade in like any hp or something like there hpq it might have been we got a little bit bigger
sometimes you i know you're a smith cap guy but sometimes we get down into the smaller names
you ever go up into the larger ones?
I mean, I own large caps. But most of them are kind of legacy positions.
When was the last time you bought a new mega cap name?
I own Robinhood, Tesla, Amazon, Nebius, Huntington Ingalls, Kratos, Amcor.
Kratos, Amcor, they're all large caps.
They're all large caps.
Amcor was a mid cap when I bought it.
It was a 5 billion mark cap when I bought it.
Now it's 11.5.
Kratos, same thing.
When I bought that in the 20s, it was a mid cap.
Now it's not 16 billion mark cap now.
Huntington Ingalls, same thing.
I bought it when it was a mid cap. It's a large cap now.ton Ingalls, same thing. I bought it when it was a mid-cap.
It's a large cap now.
Nebius, same thing.
I bought it when it was a mid-cap.
It's now 25 billion market cap.
Robinhood, that was a large cap, but it's still a large cap.
Tesla, Amazon.
So yeah, I mean, I have large caps in my portfolio,
but I don't buy large caps generally.
I buy them when they're mid caps and then let them grow.
What you eating?
Earlier, it sounded like when you have something stuck in your teeth
and you're using one of those pick things to get it out,
you were talking about what you were doing.
Reno Rice Krispie.
Oh, gym time coming up soon.
Guys, getting ready for the full point on it.
I love it.
You get the ones with the M&Ms in them,
or just...
No, this one's actually great. This one's a brown
butter Rice Krispie, and it's
fire. It's not like
a Rice Krispie
from the brand Rice Krispie.
It's just a Rice
Krispie, like a homemade one.
No, I didn't make it, but
from a bakery.
That is fair.
Interesting.
There was one that was also a little interesting for me. David Tepper.
Appaloosa.
Appaloosa. Apelosa.
However you want to say it.
There's actually a couple interesting things in here.
Like I said, the South Korea Fund.
Interesting.
New position.
Fourth largest holding for David Tepper.
Micron.
Ticker MU.
This is as of December 31st, so he's doing pretty decent on it.
Micron coming in there. The other thing that I'm seeing here that's a little interesting,
maybe in on the conversation we're going to have at the top of the hour, Alibaba.
Alibaba is David Tepper's still his largest holding. He did sell some shares of it, but
yeah. He also owns some Pinduoduo.
Yeah.
He also owns some Pinduoduo.
We got Mr. David Tepper in the world of the China markets and stuff like that.
Stock talk.
You ever find yourselves trading China stocks?
I mean, I've traded them occasionally, but I don't ever hold them.
When I do go international exposure,
I like to go to South America, if I do.
That's like the international exposure
I probably trust the most.
I mean, I like other emerging markets.
I don't have any exposure to them,
but I like Southeast Asia.
I like the emerging Southeastern Asian economies.
I like Malaysia.
And pretty much any nation in Southeast Asia, I think, is growing
pretty quickly and doing pretty well. Then you go to South America, I feel the same way pretty much
about most of South America. If I was going to invest in international exposures, I'd go South
America first and then Southeast Asia second.
But I don't have any exposure currently in the portfolio. So if I was going to, in theory,
that's where I would go. I certainly wouldn't go to China. There's just too much. There's not
enough rule of law in Chinese equities for me to be okay with it. There's too much top-down policy that comes
from the Chinese government that is unpredictable, and I just don't like dealing with it. I mean,
Chinese equities have been a nice place to be for the last couple of years. They perform pretty well,
but it's just not my wheelhouse, so I stay away from those. If I do decide to pick up
international exposure, sometimes it will most likely be in South America,
99% chance of that.
Lithium was an interesting time.
A lot of the lithium triangle.
Yeah, that's one time when I was very focused on South America,
but it's been years since I've been in those lithium stocks.
So not an area that I'm interested in getting back in.
The pricing mechanisms are way too complicated.
The supply and demand curve is basically controlled entirely by the Chinese.
So, yeah, it's not an area I'm interested in getting back in.
The analysis has become too complicated.
A couple of years ago, I thought it was a little bit easier
to identify the choke points in the lithium industry. Now I'm just like, it's become too complicated. A couple of years ago, I thought it was a little bit easier to identify the choke points in the lithium industry.
Now I'm just like, it's way too complicated.
So I'm not going to bring myself to try to figure that out.
Yeah, it was an interesting time.
Is there a specific sector in South America
that would be more intriguing for you?
I like financials in South America a lot.
Big NewBank, LA guy?
Yeah, I think both of those are excellent stocks.
I like e-commerce and financials in South America probably mostly.
So the two you mentioned right there are front and center, MercadoLibre and Nubank.
I like both those companies a lot.
I think they execute very well.
Good management teams, good earnings growth, just great companies.
Whenever I'm looking at emerging market economies in general, financials tends to be where I'm most interested.
In general, financials tends to be where I'm most interested.
Infrastructure is another place, but infrastructure is a little tricky because the stages in which emerging markets and emerging economies approach infrastructure can vary dramatically.
Some of them have an overt focus on actual road infrastructure in the early innings of their economy.
Others focus on electric infrastructure. you know, and so it just depends.
And it varies a lot from country to country.
Whereas with financials and e-commerce, that tends to be pretty broad, you know, a pretty
pretty broad area of preference for emerging markets and emerging economies. So I think it's
broad area of preference for emerging markets and emerging economies.
easier to win when you're investing in financials or e-commerce in these kind of countries. I think
it's a little harder when you try to take a more nuanced approach. So that tends to be where I
would focus or where I like to focus if I am looking at emerging markets. But again, I just don't have any exposure currently. So that could change.
But for now, I don't have any exposure.
And if I was going to get exposure, it would be in those areas.
Okay. we're bringing pretty close to a wrap up time oh no my bad my bad i did not unmute there my bad i did not unmute there i was talking about crypto i feel like um international finance
and crypto are a very linked bunch there and And I'm a little surprised with that thought there in thesis
that there isn't one or two.
I get crypto is a weird place.
I find it to be incredibly strange.
I don't love a lot of parts of it,
but I'm surprised there aren't some more parts that are interesting for you.
Ethereum, water's warm.
You can get in.
I have bought some above you so there are
some bag holders which you could uh join in on and go the other way the the only thing that's
interesting to me in the crypto universe is the idea of tokenization and i'm not sure that ethereum
is the only way to play that it might be the base layer way to play it but I just have no interest in crypto broadly not just because of
the price action but because it's just hard to build conviction for me it's very hard for me to
like tie myself to some kind of crypto asset and then you know expect something to happen when I
buy stocks I'm expecting things to happen and my ability to track those things is directly related to the fact that they're companies and that they report earnings and that they tell me what's happening on the earnings call.
And then I can make the assessment, hey, did this thing that I thought was going to happen, did it happen already?
Or is it more likely to happen now?
Or are they on their way to making it happen?
That's how I track stocks.
In crypto, it's just a bunch of people buying crypto assets from each other with the hope
that the price goes higher.
And I just can't, like, I can't build conviction around that.
So, yeah, I have no interest in crypto at all.
Bitcoin, Ethereum, all of it.
I have zero interest.
It can go higher.
It can go lower.
I don't care.
Bitcoin could go to 500K and I would just shrug my shoulders.
It doesn't matter.
I've done better in stocks than Bitcoin has performed for the last five, six, seven, eight eight nine years like i've outperformed bitcoin on a year-to-year basis
easily with just mid-cap stocks not needing to buy a single crypto token of any kind like
i mean my my whole portfolio did over 500 last year i don't know what bitcoin's return was but
it was lower than that the year before my whole portfolio did 260 i don't know what bitcoin's
return was but it was lower than that.
Like, if I can pick a diversified basket of mid-caps and put up returns like that, why do I need crypto?
It doesn't serve any purpose to me.
If I can outperform the crypto assets with stocks, then why?
You know, why even bat an eye? Why even consider it?
So, I don't I
just don't think about it so yeah I just have just a very very little interest
and if I do have interest like I said it's in the technology aspect which is
the tokenization of assets but again I just I'm struggling to kind of wrap my mind around the idea that buying one of these assets, like buying Ethereum, for example, is the right way to play that.
I think there's going to be companies that lead the tokenization charge that will be better investments to play tokenization than the actual assets themselves.
the actual assets themselves that's my view on it you know i think like in that kind of world where
That's my view on it.
everything is tokenized i think a company like robin hood that would be enforcing that tokenization
i think would be a better investment than the actual uh you know asset so yeah i i i'm not
interested is the short answer.
We tried.
Every once in a while.
At some point in the future, we'll get someone else on here.
I'm not saying I never will buy any Ethereum or will never trade it.
I'm not saying that. Can you commit to never buying any BMNR?
I probably will never buy any BMNR, yeah.
That's probably not going to happen.
But I may buy some Ethereum at some point, who knows.
You know, the stars have to align for me to feel convicted to do something like that.
And the stars have not aligned.
And I felt the same way about it when it was at, you know, when Bitcoin was at $122.
you know what Bitcoin was 122 like I think it's become a the difference of my opinion today
versus my opinion on Bitcoin five years ago the only difference is that I think it's now become
a sort of too big to fail asset however that doesn't mean that I think it's a compelling
investment either right just because it's too big to fail does not mean that it's an enormously
compelling asset that I feel like I have to be in at all times. I actually think to some degrees,
the fact that it's too big to fail has actually made it less interesting as a speculative asset
because of the level of institutional involvement and the fact that most of that asset now is controlled by
institutions. And, you know, that, that actually, in some cases, makes it less interesting as a
speculative vehicle. So I don't know, just, I've tried in a lot of different ways, like play devil's
advocate and like, take another viewpoint on it. But it's been really, really hard for me to build any interest.
And I think if I wasn't doing well in equities,
like if I was having trouble over the last few years,
finding mid caps that could triple or quadruple,
which I found plenty of them.
But if I was having trouble finding those, then yeah,
maybe I'd be like, you know what?
I want some juice.
I want some higher returns.
I'm going to look at crypto but I haven't had
an issue with that so
yeah it's just
it's difficult for me
to want to buy crypto assets
yeah
those are some fair expected answers that that i ended up uh expecting to have here
but um but yeah stock talk i appreciate you as always for hanging out here we got another really
fun and exciting conversation coming up here i'll change the title in a second, but who do we have from the Crane Shares team
joining us up here? Hi there, it's Henry Green, Senior Investment Strategist. How's it going?
Mr. Henry, I'm doing fantastic. I hope you're doing well as well.
Doing very well. Thank you. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Today
was a really interesting day. A lot of 13Fs,
a lot of institutional investors kind of giving some updates.
There was one or two
that had some positions in here
that obviously like even a David Tepper,
Alibaba being his largest holding,
Pinduoduo being another one up there.
I am very excited for this conversation.
One or two quick housekeeping notes
before we do it.
Obviously, CraneShares,
a lot of you guys will know them for their KWeb ETF, the China Internet ETF. And I want to be
able to talk through some more tickers and stuff like that. So I'm going to read out a quick
disclaimer, and then we will jump right into this conversation. Investors should carefully consider
funds investment objectives, risks, and charges and expenses before investing.
A fund's prospectus and summary prospectus contain this information and more about the
crane share ETFs.
To obtain the fund's information, go to thecraneshares.com, craneshares.com, not thecraneshares,
just craneshares.com.
I'll get that linked up in the nest above.
A fund's prospectus and key information document should be read carefully before investing.
We're excited to be working with the CraneShares team.
You guys know we've been doing stocks on spaces for free every single Monday through Thursday,
3 to 5 p.m. Eastern at least.
We love having people coming on and having some of these interesting conversations here
in After Hours, and we appreciate the CraneShares team for coming in and supporting us so um if i could just throw it over to you first and what are you excited to
chat about chat about i am excited about 13fs there are some interesting ones in this china area
but um yeah i would love to just give the floor to you i'll get some stuff pinned up in the nest
above change that title everything but yeah yeah i think you know i have not seen the 13fs yet i
think that's a good starting point um you know a lot of these especially the china internet stocks
in k web you know they had a really good year in 2025 mostly on that ai enthusiasm. But, you know, it's interesting you bring up 13Fs because what we're seeing
is they're still under-owned. Emerging markets managers, active managers are still, on the
whole, underweight to China, along with a lot of institutional investors. And that's,
again, underweight relative to their benchmarks right so like despite this strong
performance we're still seeing that chronic underweight and and that hasn't reversed itself
yet right but maybe that's changing with the 13 f's but the 13 f's will be you know uh so-called
smart money right and um so we've seen them being kind of tactical in this space.
Yeah.
So as I'm looking through it, there was one or two people who did buy,
like I'm just looking at Alibaba specifically.
And this was for this quarter.
Dennis Fong of Shaw Spring Partners.
Imagine we have $500 million, added some Alibaba stock.
That and Amazon were the two names that he added during the quarter.
Alibaba came in to be his fourth largest holding,
and then Amazon was a little bit down there.
I pinned a couple of those tweets up in the nest above.
Obviously, CraneShares, you guys have a lot of different ETFs and products out there.
There are some newer ones that we're getting in on the single stock area.
We were also
talking about mercado libre a little before but um that's we pinned up in the nest above alibaba
as i'm digging through into to see a little bit more of these 13 f's and who owns what um talk
me through a little bit more of like the thinking behind the these etfs that we have in the world
uh obviously kweb is super popular what was the thinking behind the launching a lot of these 2X single stock ETFs centered around the China area?
Sure. I mean, 2X ETFs are the latest trend in ETFs. They become quite popular,
especially among retail traders as an easy, simple way to basically leverage a position.
And we were initially hesitant to get into the space.
We weren't sure if kind of the hype would last.
You know, we traditionally have been more, you know, like the advisor channel has been our bread and butter.
So, but then we've been, we've advanced where we've been doing more kind of trying to connect
with individual investors, retail investors.
And we saw, we just basically figured, found out that there would be demand for these.
And then we didn't just launch,
not just for any stocks, but stocks that we, of course, follow closely. And we wanted to be able to say, well, we have the research and frequent updates and even management relationships to kind
of back these things up where, you know, if you're buying a product from if you're trading one of our
products, right, you can go on our website, you follow our blog china last night.com and actually get real updates and insights on these
companies so that was the the um impetus behind uh launching the 2x but also just specifically in
these names so we have jd.com that's kjd baidu kbu, KBDU, of course, Alibaba, KBAB, Mercado Libre, KMLI.
So yeah, and we've seen good traction with these.
People like to trade these.
And again, we're perennially constructive on the China space.
But really right now, there's a lot of interesting things happening.
And, you know, just after that great year, great performance year, as I said, in 2025.
And what's most interesting to me is I'm really excited.
Well, curious about this latest earnings cycle for China Internet companies,
just because there's been so much kind of dynamism in the space where the stocks have
risen mostly on this AI story.
But there's still the consumers still kind of crawling back in China, back to growth.
kind of crawling back in China, back to growth.
And so I still want to see, I've said to a few people,
I still want to see return to like for Alibaba, right?
Cloud has been growing really quickly,
but their core e-commerce business hasn't been growing so much.
So I really want to see evidence of that in these earnings releases,
as well as profitability,
because they had
extreme competition in the instant delivery space for the e-commerce platforms. So that's hurt their
margins. We want to see those coming back. And then, of course, I mean, the AI growth story
will still be there. But, you know, there are just these other elements that it's interesting,
even though, you know, these stocks did so well in 2025 on that AI
story without the consumer story.
So when we get that consumer story back in the mix as well, that could, to me, be even
more upside for these companies potentially.
So I think that's really exciting.
Alibaba earnings, March 3rd.
So a couple weeks away
anyone who doesn't know
a lot of options
for any active traders
you guys know options
don't trade in after hours
the 2x single stock ETFs do
we did get one or two
interesting new buys
there was another
new interesting buy
on Alibaba stock
actually Daniel Loeb
in third point
bought some
Alibaba stock
during Q4
so that was a new position that they added let me find it in front of me to get the exact Globe and Third Point bought some Alibaba stock during Q4.
So that was a new position that they added.
Let me find it in front of me to get the exact amount of shares.
Ooh, it is not quite there.
They added, looks like they added 825,000 shares of Alibaba during the quarter.
Another headline that I saw recently around Alibaba was around the launch of Quen 3.5.
Yeah.
And obviously AI models are super popular around here.
We have companies like Anthropic and OpenAI getting some really crazy
valuations here.
And those companies are worth,
I'm going to say multiple times what Alibaba is worth here so I'm curious on
the quen of the world
I'm sure a couple of these other companies have AI models
but what that landscape looks up there
looks like in China what are
the models leading the companies leading
yeah
so it's interesting
when you talk about
valuation multiples
we like to look at we've done this for a few companies, looking at what's called some of the parts analysis, where you strip out the different parts of the business and value them on their own merits and then sum it together rather than just taking whatever the market cap is and the broad earnings. And we know that these Chinese companies, China stocks are undervalued relative to U.S. across the board.
And then that becomes even more pronounced when you do this sum of the parts analysis.
So we noticed for Baidu specifically, we saw Waymo get valued at, I think it was $110 billion.
And then Baidu has a pretty expansive robo-taxi network that's just expanded in Dubai.
And they're really a leader.
They're probably number two next to Waymo, if not on par with Waymo, depending on how you measure these things. And so that would suggest, you know, Baidu, the company itself, its market cap,
the market cap is only 50 billion, which is half of just the valuation of Waymo,
if I'm not mistaken. And so that's just a really incredible story. I mean, obviously,
that would imply Baidu should be worth five times more. But even if not five times, right, that's obviously
highly speculative and unlikely to get there. But just even if there is, and we do think there is
perhaps a, always will be a discount for companies in China just because of different regulatory
environment, different political environment, etc., developing country. Even so, it's probably not, probably the equilibrium level is probably not
as pronounced as we've seen. And even you could cut that premium in half, right, and still have
tremendous upside. So you could also think about it the same way with the AI models, right? Alibaba,
You could also think about it the same way with the AI models, right?
Alibaba, their QN model, they're probably number one in China among the publicly traded names,
though ByteDance has a model, and that might actually be higher in terms of users than QN and activity.
But ByteDance is not publicly traded, so there's not really a way to trade
that on the public markets.
But yeah, I mean, if you look at what OpenAI is getting valued at, I mean, it really does
suggest that even though they've had this strong run, right, you know, Alibaba could
be valued at, could claim a higher valuation if they're really if investors are really
applying the same multiples to these ai models you know and again and and then just talking about
i guess part of your question is right the difference between uh the ai model large
language model landscape in china versus the us and And that's really that in China, the models are mostly free.
Like they don't really have that much premium type of service or content.
And the rationale there is that they get the, they use the large language models to actually drive cloud usage, usage
of their cloud computing services.
And that's a huge growth area.
China's enterprise cloud usage in China is quite low compared to the United States.
So there's a lot of penetration to make up for there.
And so it's just a different, it's kind of a different business model in China. And then the other reason for this,
that's one reason why these models are mostly free. The other reason is there's a focus on
open source. Open source is really common in China ever since, I mean, DeepSea kind of made it that way. They went open source.
So like QN is open source and the others mostly are open source. And that's just kind of the way
it is. And that's interesting because it allows people to kind of take, okay, use this model and
apply it to what they're doing.
And, you know, it's kind of like these companies are giving it away.
So maybe they could increase the profitability there a little bit.
But again, this open source culture makes that difficult.
And I think so it's really in China, it's all about the cloud, where that drives cloud
computing spend.
So yeah, it's interesting.
Yeah, no, that is very interesting.
That is very interesting.
I appreciate some of those insights coming in there.
Like I said, we have this talk here.
I really just don't know much about what's going on in the China market.
So it is really interesting here.
What does the cloud environment look like there? Is it like a lot of the alibaba where i know alibaba
is a big cloud player um but what are some of the other ones is that like a dominant dominant player
uh it's pretty split tencent is between kind of alibaba and tencent uh are the largest players uh baidu is a smaller one um
and then there are a few um even smaller ones some of which are private right but it's kind of those
are the big three when it comes to cloud it's alibaba tencent and baidu for sure um and it's, yeah, it's one of those things.
It's like internet penetration, right?
That was a big story in China.
You know, when we started doing this with K-Web
was, okay, you know,
you just have this rising internet penetration rate
and that just leads to more adoption,
more spending from consumers online, right?
We used to call, still call, you know, Alibaba and JD and these e-commerce companies
is like the transmission engine, so to speak, for China's consumer.
And so not to say that that story has played itself out,
but internet penetration is pretty high in China.
What's not so high, though, is actually cloud penetration, specifically enterprise cloud.
A lot of businesses in China still are not on the cloud.
And so these AI models are sort of a carrot, if you will, to get businesses on cloud,
you know, using, utilizing those services, paying for those services.
And I think that's a story that's going to play out
over the next decade and be very important for the space.
Yeah.
But, yeah, I mean, that's kind of what the gist
of what my perspective is on cloud growth in China.
Okay, that is very interesting.
I'd love to ask another little bit of a different question here.
We'll just go industry, industry specific.
I know I'm looking at the tweet pinned up with a nest above.
A lot of those tickers there are also e-commerce names.
And the one non-China name iners there are also e-commerce names and uh the one non-china
name in there is also an e-commerce name so i'm curious of of what e-commerce looks like in in
that part of the world i know it's a lot of like a lot of the life is is in single apps that are
super apps and a delivery can happen super quickly i i imagine infrastructure is maybe ahead of some
of the stuff in the u. the area, but I'm curious
of what the e-commerce world looks like there.
In China?
Yeah, sorry.
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
So there's instant delivery right now is kind of the hot dot, right?
There's instant delivery right now is kind of the hot dot, right?
Is all these companies.
So Meituan was always focused on more so than JD and Alibaba focused on restaurant delivery.
And that was kind of their bread and butter.
And then they expanded a little bit.
You know, they're another super app you can order.
I actually ordered when I was in China, would basically call the equivalent of an Uber through Meituan.
So it's like it's kind of like local services.
If you could think about it that way.
Local services like Uber.
Right.
Because Uber has like rides and then it also has like food and grocery and stuff so meituan you can kind of think of as being like that in terms of local services being a
leader in local services and then what happened was you had so Alibaba had a
smaller stake in in a similar business grocery delivery and food delivery through that of a problem called
Elema, but they weren't really nearly the size of Meituan.
And then the big change was JD entering the space.
And when I say the space, I mean this idea of instant commerce,
where you're not ordering something that's like a large...
I mean, you can order almost anything,
but these are things that are coming.
You're going to get delivered in an hour or two,
and in some cases, like 30 minutes, right?
And so JD entered that space, which kind of shocked the industry.
No one really expected this because JD had carved out this very strong brand recognition moat, so to speak, in like electronics and appliances and generally kind of larger items that would take longer to be delivered and would have these kind of life, they could handle like kind of life cycle logistics and all of that.
So it was really unexpected, right?
And so JD jumps into this space. They spend a ton of money to get people using their instant commerce platform.
And that just pushes this, that just pushed this price war, really.
I mean, just a race to the bottom to give the highest discounts.
I mean, I've seen, heard stories of like, you know, you'd get, you could get like a
cup of coffee delivered for like basically free or it would cost like one renminbi,
like, which is crazy.
And so, you know, so all the companies and all these companies said that, well, we have to
compete in this because there are cross-selling opportunities that JD is, of course, going
to take advantage of.
And then also because, again, and coming back to what I said earlier was about this consumer
pie, so to speak, of e-commerce consumption.
As the growth is kind of of it hasn't stopped completely
but it's really really slowed so we happen is what happened is you know these companies are
competing for the same wallets like literally the same people living in urban areas um and so
when one company is offering oh i can get you get you this, that, and the other thing in 30 minutes to an hour,
it's everybody has to do that too and try to get that same, because it's the same people, essentially,
that they're all targeting as a result of the slower growth overall.
And so that just created this whole kind of downward trend in their profit margins,
which we mostly think is over.
There have been, you know, a few instances where, you know, they've kind of realized,
I think the market has reshuffled and there's kind of a realization of, okay, you know,
some people are using JD only and some people are using Alibaba and that's kind of like
calmed down a bit. And then there's also a policy element to this where the regulators, SAMR in China said,
you know, OK, we don't want this instant delivery craze to harm the mom and pop shops.
So like the brick and mortar restaurants and stores and all of that
kind of thing. Right. And so you got to kind of tap the brakes a little bit there because you had
a situation where people were literally like my colleague who goes to China is from there. And
he was like, yeah, like you'd see people just showing up like the restaurants restaurants would be empty because everybody was getting a better deal by ordering online and so it's kind of a crazy
situation and then they also said well we don't want this to turn into like a profit spiral just
a lowering and lowering of the profitability of these companies so so there was some regulatory
impetus there um so anyway, that goes, suffice to
say, I'm very curious to look at the profitability that's going to come up in these earnings and how
and if it's really over, right, this kind of price war. So that's what I'm looking for in these
earnings. Obviously, cloud growth, you know, AI growth growth i think that's still going to be there
that's not played out that's great and all but i think i'm i'm i'm more interested right now for
these companies in this in their fundamental uh kind of old school so to speak because it's kind
of crazy to say call e-commerce old school but you know i'm looking at okay what are these businesses
still healthy i know they're growing cloud really well, and that's great, and that's accounted for most of the return 2025,
but I think to go higher, we need to see return to growth
and or profitability in these core commerce businesses.
Can I, I want to kind of touch back on one of the things you were talking about earlier.
And a lot of US investors looking at China, the differences in policy, the differences
in government and stuff is going to be a conversation that comes up a lot.
I'm curious how you guys think about that, how you guys communicate that to other people
when it gets asked if there's any ways maybe to take advantage of it.
I'm curious your thoughts around when that question comes up or comment comes up.
Yeah, sure.
So there's a few angles to that, I think.
One is there's a bit of a shock. I think there's still kind of a shock from the internet regulatory crackdowns of 2021,
2022, where it appeared that the government in China, the market regulators were kind of just
acting unilaterally, doing things that weren't really good for investors, you know, and they kind of said,
OK, we're going to do all these anti-monopoly laws and Internet regulations, and a lot of which was
pretty forward thinking. And I think honestly, some of it, you know,
in the we could I could end up think we could end up seeing here in the United States. You know,
I think our we haven't done a lot to regulate our internet.
Obviously, it takes a lot longer to do things like this in the United States because we have
a democratic political process. But there's still kind of that shock factor there. And so
anytime anything comes up where there's like, oh, X investigation or some company getting a fine or
whatnot, people ask us, oh, is the regulatory cycle starting again? And there's some anxiety there. And we usually say that, you know,
let's look at structurally, like where they've accomplished, they've accomplished a lot
in that period, in that stress time for this market, for the K-Web companies,
that period in that stress time for this market for the K-Web companies, the government actually
accomplished a lot and I think is ahead of a lot of other places in terms of looking at,
you know, what is antitrust in the internet world look like, right? What is privacy and data
protection in the internet world look like, you know, to us. Obviously, China has a different
conception of that than we might here in the United States.
But they've accomplished so much.
So we say, you know, right now, no,
I don't think they're returning to this regulatory cycle.
I don't see, we don't see kind of an overarching
structural reason why they would,
given how much they've accomplished.
Okay, and then I guess the other part of this, the other angle, another angle here is just geopolitics, right?
You know, that comes up a lot.
And then that's more obviously on the U.S. side, you know, and but it does.
But it's kind of like the interplay between the two because it's like, you know, it looks like we're going into a deal.
Trump's going to make a deal with China.
It's been confirmed that he's going to go over there in April.
So things are looking better there, but that's always like a, uh, um, you know, there's always a trade going on, you know, and where they're exchanging, like, you know, are they going to allow rare earth
exports in exchange for Nvidia chips and things like this? And that does weigh, even though, again,
this is something that doesn't really matter for the fundamentals of these internet companies in
China, but is very much on the mind of investors. People worry about things like delisting,
et cetera, et cetera. And that influences the stock prices, right? And yeah.
And then the third thing I think is a really positive, I think that for AI development,
you know, China's just, they have a huge population, you know, it's, and it's much more connected, meaning online, than India.
I mean, we know India just surpassed China in terms of population,
but it's not as connected.
The people, just internet penetration is a lot lower.
So when you're developing AI models, AI systems, data is really important. And China has probably the most data,
user data, of any country anywhere by far. And that's really important. And it's also important
that I think the government there has prioritized and figured out, for the most part, how to
allow companies and also the government itself to use that data. They've established rules around user data privacy that can still allow for the kind of,
you know, polls and looking at various trends and behavioral data to help develop AI systems
at the same time. So I think they're ahead in that and I think that's positive. So yeah, I think those are kind of three different angles to think about,
uh, you know, China's, uh, governance differences in the U S and how it
impacts these companies.
Yeah.
I think there's some good points there.
There's, there's going to be some of the drawbacks, but also the benefits of
when they want to get something done that user data, if they want to get it
used by these companies, um, and they're government backed, I i'm sure i'm sure there won't be problems coming in there and
i imagine that some of these industries going forward we spend a lot of times talking about
humanoid robotics with you yeah through this china lens and obviously coid shout out to that one koid
is another one of the crane chairs uh products humanoid robot etf that you guys have a lot of
international exposure a lot of china exposure i imagine as we go forward to that part of this game that part of the world that data will be
more and more useful and honestly that's just one example that i'm thinking of right now i
imagine there's gonna be more of it but that that data is is like gold going forward yeah absolutely
absolutely um yeah and then robotics i mean's like, robotics is the physical manifestation of artificial intelligence.
And it's not so much that, it's interesting, like, we've done, I've had the privilege of actually interacting with humanoid robots. And what is most commonly done in terms of like,
so not all of them can do this,
but some of them can actually respond on their own
and talk to people in real time.
And that's just because it's like talking,
it's as though you're like talking to,
it's just the voice feature of like, say, a chat GPT.
Right. And so it's, in a way, it's just the voice feature of like say chat gpt right and so it's in a way
it's like not that uh uh um you know not that crazy to think of right i mean you can text with
chat gpt you could even talk with chat gpt on your phone you know it's just doing it in a robot right and so the control systems for robots are still being developed
um what amazes me the most about what's coming out of china is the uh actually the physical
engineering in these things is is um quite impressive i was at the other night an event
I was at the other night an event here in New York where they had humanoid robots actually doing Tai Chi, which is crazy.
Just the way these guys are able to move is quite striking and unexpected.
And to me, right now in the robotics side, it impresses me the most.
But obviously these will be um the way to kind
of embody ai but that hasn't really happened that much in the sense that they're just running
uh large language models currently right um and then when it comes to china so china's by far
already the leader in the mass production of humanoid robots And they've been able to leverage a very developed industrial base,
leveraging facilities that were previously used to make cars, specifically electric vehicles,
to make humanoid robots as well, because a lot of the components, I believe, I'm not an expert, but a lot of the components and practices
can be applied to that industry. And we've seen Tesla, like Elon Musk talks about this. That's
why he's like, okay, yeah, Tesla is going to be the one, not a new company, Tesla is going to be
the one making their, his, I think it's the Optimus, right? And so China just has that advantage because they have a huge industrial base for producing electric vehicles. Many, many different companies doing that and that are transitioning into robotics.
They had unveiled, I think it was like last year, at some point in Q4, they unveiled a robot that people thought was like, oh, that's the most human-like movement I'd ever seen.
There were even people saying, oh, like, is that, like, claiming, oh, is that really like a human in a robot suit?
And they opened it up to show that no it's not so it's just a lot of
incredible just in the the physical um technology and the movement like there's just so much
incredible innovation going on and and and you wouldn't think it here we don't see it that much
but it's like it it's real you know um so yeah it's it's a really exciting space. And then that's, of course, going to help, we think, in the long run with their demographic issues.
I was speaking with chief economist at CICC, the largest investment bank in China.
He was saying that the youth today, young people in China, like they don't, a lot of people don't want to work in these kind of lower level manufacturing jobs.
And also there are fewer of them, right?
They have a pretty low birth rate, though not the lowest in Asia or the world.
That's Korea.
And so robotics is really going to help keep productivity up with when China loses, you know, has a demographic decline, which we're already seeing,
loses that kind of demographic dividend
that they've been benefiting from.
So, yeah.
Yeah, no, I appreciate those insights there.
The population is a very interesting one.
Again, I'm sure a lot of American mindsets coming in here.
Just the scale, the amount of people in China, 3, 4, 5x, whatever it is,
closer to 5x, larger than the U.S.
Maybe closer between 4 to 5x.
I mean, that is pretty freaking huge.
We're talking about large numbers here.
We're talking about large numbers here.
There are multiple cities at such large scales.
There are multiple cities at such large scales.
And it will be very interesting to see how that country deals eventually with an aging population.
Everything like that.
Demographics is an intriguing one on top of this.
I don't know if healthcare is...
What does healthcare look like in China?
Yeah, so healthcare is another interesting industry.
We have an ETF for it, K-U-R-E, Cure.
It's China Healthcare.
And yeah, the healthcare industry in China is, I think, very much a long play on an aging
population as would be quite obvious.
Older people require more healthcare services in general.
And so that's one growth story.
But there's another growth story, but it's kind of two-pronged.
There's another growth driver, which is that you've seen Chinese healthcare firms come out with real innovations now.
care firms come out with real innovations now.
There's a currently, I don't think it's, it hasn't been FDA approved in the United States,
but Innovent Biologics, I believe it developed what was found to be in initial trials,
the most effective lung cancer treatment.
So that's really interesting. And we're seeing a lot more of this exporting of actual pharmaceutical,
you know, intellectual property through partnerships with global firms, Eli Lilly,
AstraZeneca. And that's another driver in China healthcare that shouldn't be overlooked.
other driver in China healthcare that shouldn't be overlooked.
And so it's kind of, yeah, you got, when you think about the healthcare industry in China,
it's like you have this rising domestic demand, but you also have these companies going global
and seeking global demand because of the innovations that are coming out of China.
And those are driven by, you know, there's just a real, you know, China's always
prioritized STEM education. They have a lot of people with the knowledge and the experience to
be developing these technologies. And so that's very exciting. So yeah, it's not just a local consumer play. It's a multi-fronged investment thesis.
You see that reflected in our ETF cure as well.
I do have the tweet pinned up in the nest above.
It has a couple of the ETFs we talked about earlier.
Obviously, down below, there's the link to the website.
Let me also just pin up in the nest above. the etfs we talked about earlier and obviously down below there's the link to the website which
let me also just pin up in the nest above but people the website fantastic place i'm sure it has
information and other good stuff like that blogs all of those things but prospectus every single
etf great place to start your research as we said earlier um is there anything we didn't talk about
on the spaces any topics anything like that that you were excited to talk there anything we didn't talk about on the spaces? Any topics, anything like that
that you were excited to talk about that we didn't cover?
I think I just
would just touch on
it's Chinese New Year right now,
so the markets
over there are closed.
in today, Hong Kong closed for a couple days
and mainland is closed all week um so it's just important to keep in mind just if you're trading
even if it's u.s listed stocks and it's funny because alibaba so i actually have alibaba you
said march but i actually have alibaba earnings earnings coming later this week on Friday, I think.
Interesting.
Yeah.
What's that?
What's that? What's that?
What's that?
Why don't you ask it?
They change it.
They change it.
But anyway, yeah, while you look that up, just be cognizant that,
you know, for some of these, when the underlying market's closed,
you're going to get kind of potentially price movements that aren't priced until it reopens,
even if it's U.S.-listed stocks, right? Because a lot of them trade in Hong Kong, too.
When that reopens, you know. Just good to bear in mind.
Personally, I'd wait until next week
to trade China because of that.
Good time to do some research
and become more educated
for when it does open up
and you can have some more of the moves.
Right.
And that is now the... Oh uh it didn't pin up and i also
saw alibaba earnings might not be fully confirmed on the date is what the the thing is happening
yeah uh but i do see what you are saying yeah and it's been it's it's been tough it's it's
way dumb kweb just because these companies are reporting so late.
And I think this happens a lot for Q4 just because of the Lunar New Year holiday.
A lot of them, like in the K-Web Top 10, I'm just looking,
are slated to report in March.
It's like half, more than half.
And that's kind of weighed on, like, if you look at K-Web,
it's now down, I think, year to date and we had a big down down trend i think it was like last week on thursday and
um and because you had netties netties missed estimates um i think top and bottom line
slowing gaming growth which is like unfortunate, but that's
net ease. And I think it just caused a sell off because you didn't have other earnings coming in.
There's just no other information until these companies report in March. And so, you know,
yeah, I mean, I think that's kind of maybe a tactical opportunity with Caleb. If you think
earnings are going to be good or even with the with some of the 2X funds, right?
But it's just important to keep in mind that, you know,
when there's bad news, right, and there's not a lot of other information,
that's what takes over, you know?
So, and we saw that a little bit in KWeb last week.
That makes sense. That makes sense.
I'm curious, what is your specific area, we say area of
expertise, maybe part that gets you the most excited? Obviously, China's a big country.
The market is a big and very diverse area. I'm curious if they're just for you personally,
so I can kind of keep in the back of my head as well. And you can also just throw in anything you
want to leave the people with. with obviously we really enjoy having you on
these spaces it's been some good conversations here a lot of it's a very different topic than
we talk about every single day and i just don't know don't have that knowledge in the space so i
get to learn on these spaces and obviously uh crane shares team very respected people in the
space but um yeah i'd love to hear
more about kind of your area in specific and we can also just kind of throw into anything you want
to leave the people uh with uh sure so i mean my uh most of my experience is with the you know the
k web companies uh china internet um you know i. I've been writing, we do a quarterly earnings report and analysis
called the China Internet Report every quarter.
And I've been writing that for almost six years now for Crane.
for Crane.
And so, yeah, that's been my main focus
in my time here at Crane.
And obviously that's our largest ETF,
so it just extends to command the most resources.
But I think, you know, I've been doing more.
We have AGIX, which is global AI, and then, of course, K-O-I-D-Coid, which is robotics, also global.
So I think it's been interesting to see that China story, what we've been seeing going on in China, reflected elsewhere in the world.
And in terms of within China, what I'm most excited about as an investment I'm excited for some of these robotics IPOs
you know we have Koi'd but yeah it's funny because we have a robot we actually
have a robot in our office that we use yeah for demonstrations um and it's made by unitary uh which is a
a robotics leader they're based in in china in hangzhou and uh but they're and they are going
looks like they're gonna go public very soon uh and they'll probably be the first
but there are a lot of others to come. I met somebody from Booster Robotics.
That's another one in China.
I mean, there's so many.
I mean, there's a core, well, there's a core, I think, like four or five that we're really looking at for when they go public.
And then once they go public, we'll be able to include them in our fund and just, yeah, look at those for a new way to
trade this burgeoning industry that I think a lot of people is just is is not on a lot of people's
minds. I mean, in the US, I mean, you had like Elon kind of talks about it sometimes, but it
doesn't really seem to be a focus. I don't see, you know, Optimus on the internet all the time.
I don't even know if you can order those yet.
So, like, I just think it's a story
that's not told a lot
and it's something that's going to be led by China.
So I would really look out for those,
like Unitary IPO coming and a few others.
I think that's going to be
a really interesting story to track
and a potential trading opportunity as well.
I'm excited to talk about it on this basis.
Yeah.
A lot of good conversations we have coming forward.
Humanoid robots is one that is obviously a super exciting one.
Honestly, just robotics.
I feel like just that area of segment, we talk through a lot of humanoid robotics here, but I just think the area in general is really exciting. And, you know, over the next couple years, you'll see going forward, I enjoy also seeing how it feels like every single couple years, there is some new big development that comes up in AI that, you know, changes the way we think. Maybe it's this open claw thing. Maybe it's something going forward.
Obviously, Deep Seek was a moment there,
and it just kind of makes more possible.
And basically, the whole game is making stuff cheaper.
So it's a very interesting area in the humanoid robots,
the AI area, and obviously China is a part of the market
that is going to be applying to competition.
I think every single conversation I hear, and I really center this, is like around Europe. And it'll be a client competition. Every single conversation I hear
and I really center this is around Europe.
It will be a very interesting battle for Europe
between China and US.
But the conversations are like,
help, we need AI.
From the Europe side, we don't really have it.
And then there's two sides that are really
competing into lead.
I'm interested to hear more
about the other.
For sure. I think that they'll have both in Europe. it to lead um yeah i'm interested to hear more about the other oh for sure for sure you know i
think yeah i think that they'll have both in europe i i i think they'll rely on china for
some things in the u.s for others i think that china does i think they'll do i mean you know
it it's simple economic principle or whatever, like whatever somebody does best is,
is what they'll sell.
And I think China does better with like the hardware type of stuff.
So including robotics,
and even just simple like telecommunications infrastructure.
And then I think the U S does software better or at the very least,
like,
there's more of a cultural trust and understanding between the US and Europe than there is between Europe and China.
So I think they'll rely more on the US on the software side.
And then more on China for hardware, if that makes sense.
Yeah, that does.
That does.
I am excited to see it all play out.
See what direction you can come in when here i
appreciate you for joining in on the spaces everyone should go in and make sure they are
following that crane shares account you are interested in this area i'm sure that is a
great place to start doing more research looking and stuff obviously the website as well we just
got a little uh you know the heads up that there's going to be a nice report after the earnings. We're obviously going to talk about it more on these spaces, help you guys get
directed to it, but kind of be on the ready for and look out for that. Pinned up in the nest above
is the link to that website. Is there anything else as people are starting to do their research
looking to this area that maybe you think can be at the start of their research?
area that maybe you think can be at the start of their research?
Yeah, I mean, I think our previous reports are a good place to start.
So each one of those, even if it's old earnings, right, there's a theme focus.
So it's our latest one.
We did a conversation with Kwaisho, which is AI video generation and also video platform.
So there's just a lot of little nuggets you can find in those those old reports obviously i'm biased um because i wrote them um
but uh yeah i think that's a great place um our website we got a lot of robotics content and uh
we'll have more to come you know uh it's it's we're it's it's cool to be involved
at least from an investment side in industry that's so new um and it'll evolve over time and
then we'll keep uh we'll try to keep people informed um you know right now it's like
i think with robotics it's like uh convincing people oh it's this is real and this is not a gimmick
because it seems just um like a gimmick i mean even when we we have a robot in the office people
like oh this is like you know uh rather silly um but it i think it's going to transform a lot of
uh industries a lot of supply chains um and and make a big difference for countries not even
China but like Korea and Japan just with really low birth rates it's gonna be hard I think it's
gonna help them keep up their productivity so anyway more to come in the robotics I'm hoping
that in the it will have more robust uh robotics research because like right now it's just that's
where kind of the public is at and even where the industry is at in the in the publicly traded you know sector just once we
get these ipos i think we'll just have more information to digest and we'll be able to do
more in-depth analysis on that so stay tuned but anyway yeah greenchairs.com china internet report
you can find it under reports in our research tab. So, yeah, that's all I got.
Appreciate you.
Everyone should check out, like I said, follow that KoreanShare's account.
Do what he was saying there.
Go to the website.
Check out those previous reports.
I hope everyone had a great day, has a great day going forward.
A lot of 13Fs flying out here.
So, you can go check out the tweets going on in that direction as well.
But I appreciate everyone.
I hope you guys had a great day.
We'll catch you tomorrow.
And same time, same place, 3 p.m. Eastern.
Have a great one, team.
Bye.
