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STOCK MARKET TALK
Recorded: March 27, 2025 Duration: 2:00:24Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, experts analyzed the impact of geopolitical tensions and economic policies on market dynamics, emphasizing the interconnectedness of traditional and crypto markets. Key insights included the potential for resilience amidst volatility, the importance of sentiment analysis, and the ongoing evolution of trading platforms like Robinhood, which are adapting to meet the needs of a new generation of investors.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone.
Happy Thursday, March the 27th.
Almost at the end of March already.
Quick little market update as we hit Power Hour here on Stocks on Spaces,
the show we run each and every day, Monday through Thursday.
Right now at Power Hour until an hour or so after the market, getting all kinds of different
thoughts and perspectives around everything happening in the market. I'm sure we'll have
obviously a big conversation around the tariff stuff that happened yesterday with Trump after
hours, kind of toward the end of our space yesterday. A lot of that stuff was going into,
I don't know about going into effect,
but coming out and being signed and on schedule, I guess, for April the 2nd
to start charging on April the 3rd.
So I'm sure that will be a topic of discussion.
Do want to do a quick market overview real fast
before we start going around to the team today.
We've gone a long way to go nowhere.
So right now, SPY is basically break even down about 50 cents. QQQ down about a quarter of a
percent. IWM and the Dow both the same. Looking across kind of a mixed bag across tech in general.
Tesla is up today. It was up a lot more, gave it back. Apple is green.
Microsoft is green. Costco, Amazon, Netflix, also green. NVIDIA red, Google red, Broadcom,
kind of the one that sticks out very, very red, and then Meta slightly red as I look through the
watch list. Some other things that have moved around today in general,
most of them kind of right back to where they were. Rivian stuck out. It was up very nicely
today. Hood had the big event last night. I'm sure we may hear some stuff about that
in our conversation as well today. But they are slightly red today, down about a percent,
maybe a little sell the news there. But some exciting things that came out of that presentation last night. And yeah, that's basically where we're at over in crypto is
basically breakeven as well. So across the different major market areas, pretty much a
nothing day. Now of note, we did go down and fill that gap on the daily from Friday to Monday and
have basically slightly reclaimed into yesterday's range
on the downside sitting right around break even as I was saying.
And with that, that's pretty much the updates I have across the board for the market and
I'm excited to hear what everyone's got on their minds today.
Dimitri, we've got you up here on stage.
I want to kick it straight over to you first and let you kick us
off on this Thursday afternoon. How are you, sir? Strikeout on the first batter with Dimitri.
Oh, hey, sorry, I didn't hear you were speaking. Yes, there he is, Dimitri. Yeah, how are you?
Oh, there he is. Hey, how are you guys doing? Good, good. Got back from my trip from New York
about a week from today. Actually, I was there speaking on a panel about the energy transition
for FGV. It's like the McKinsey of Brazil, except way bigger. In fact, I don't even think they pay
taxes. That's how big they are. But anyways, they're really really super great companies super interesting yeah so i was there talking about the energy transition
it's interesting it's kind of like a bossa nova to terra nova kind of change because you had like
industrialization in the 50s and 60s and then you have this neo-industrialization but with a new
energy paradigm theoretically where you're seeing like a lot of targeted industrial policy, not just Brazil, but globally targeting, you know, energy transition stuff like batteries.
You see, you know, in the technology sector, semiconductors and quantum, which I was going to talk about.
That actually segues very well into some quantum updates.
I just tweeted about this yesterday, but Jensen Wong said that NVIDIA is going to open a quantum research lab in Boston,
which is really interesting. And we've been seeing more developments like China theoretically had
some, I think, breakthrough in quantum recently. I published an intelligence report about two weeks
ago, if memory serves. And more recently, JP Morgan actually certified a so-called truly random number using a quantum computer.
Now, the reason why that's significant is because it's a world first in that the numbers aren't actually random.
Because for most random generated numbers from computers that you can use to encrypt sensitive data, they aren't actually random.
from computers that you can use to encrypt sensitive data, they aren't actually random.
There are a lot of predetermined sequences.
And that computers that run on a set of programmed mathematical frameworks and operations will
always return roughly to the same answer.
And that raises the risk profiles to the extent that it creates a predictive level that hackers
could potentially hack into.
But with quantum computing, they basically were able to create a way to create
a truly random number. And the reason why that's significant is because it's the first case of an
actual real world application of quantum computing in the context of cyber, which is not surprising.
There's a lot more momentum building on building a post quantum encryptionantum encryption sort of technology infrastructure.
I think the U.S.'s latest jet actually has quantum encryptions in it,
if memory serves, or something adjacent to that.
So you're already seeing it be incorporated into military hardware
on a very, very small scale,
but I think it's going to become much bigger as time goes on.
So anyways, that was really interesting.
And then a few days ago, I think it was either March 24th or 25th, PSI Quantum, it's like
the startup, is raising about $750 million or so at a pre-money valuation of about $6
billion.
And that's being led by BlackRock.
So again, seeing more development there.
QTUM is still chilling.
It's a little bit down.
But again, for me, this is a long-term investment, not something that I'm just trading on a short-term basis.
As for trade wars, in my view, the short version of this, and Stock Talk talked about this.
He specifically, I think, tweeted this out, basically, from the Wall Street Journal, which said that basically my take with Trump 1.0 versus
2.0 is Trump 2.0 is much more volatile and bellicose in his rhetoric. But if you look at the
actual policies that follow, they're a lot more tame relative to his first administration. So
yes, we do see tariffs. There's a 25%, you know, aluminum steel
tariff on everything on or rather, on all countries that are exporting aluminum and steel to the US,
the EU is looking at their own counter tariffs, but even that's being delayed to I think, like
mid April. And Trump announced, you know, the vehicles and 25% tariffs on vehicles, but he has also made a lot of exceptions.
And the direct quote here is, targeted tariffs on specific industries like semiconductors,
cars and pharmaceuticals will not be included in the Trump's administration,
April 2nd reciprocal tariff deadline. So what we're seeing is basically Trump at the beginning
have a lot of volatility saying tariffs, tariffs, tariffs, we'll go back, they'll reimpose. And what
that shows is that he's actually not interested in a prolonged trade war,
but actually having very, very tangible concessions be granted by their counterparts.
So for me, I thought that was actually a very interesting idea to trade around to the extent
that I don't think we're going to see a prolonged trade war. And that's something that I think
myself and a lot of other investors and policymakers were concerned about heading into his administration. But I think after February,
we began to get some more clarity. Obviously, gold prices are surging, recently touched past
3,100. But yeah, that's really it for me, a geopolitical scene. Red Sea obviously saw some
disruptions. I'm actually working on a little project right now to see how you can calculate geopolitical
risks into oil prices looking at the Red Sea.
So if anything comes up with that, I'll let you know.
But yeah, that's pretty much it for me.
Thanks for having me on.
So it's absolute pleasure.
I missed last Thursday's session.
Yeah, great thoughts and great to have you again, Dimitri.
You're always welcome on these spaces.
And of course, as always during the conversation, if anyone says something that piques your interest that you want to respond to or add color to or maybe push back on even, we love the open dialogue across these spaces.
But in the meantime, I do want to continue around the panel.
And Mr. Blake Millard, we have you up here today.
We'd love to get some of your thoughts around the market, what you're seeing out there.
Hey, guys. I hope you're seeing out there. Hey, guys.
I hope everyone's well out there.
You know, I would just say that despite a lot of the carnage we've seen, I think the primary long-term uptrends for most of the major indices remain intact.
Although a lot of charts, as we all can see, look quite ugly at the moment.
I still think this is concentrated around the momentum and high beta and tech unwind that we've
seen capital rotating into other markets, underloved areas, international, that kind of thing.
other markets, under-loved areas, international, that kind of thing.
But, you know, I've had a lot of conversations with clients this week,
and sort of the way I'm characterizing at least my thought process,
it's like, you guys want bad news right now?
Like, here's the kitchen sink.
It's like, what possibly what possibly, what, what other headline out there
can really surprise me at this point in terms of being pretty horrible, if not just falling
short of expectations. So, you know, we can talk about sentiment. Um, we got the AAI, uh, survey
bears are now above 50% for five consecutive weeks. That's only happened a few times in history.
It's like the October 90.
That was like a major low in the early 90s.
You're talking like the GFC and you're talking the 2022 bear market.
Earlier this week, what was that?
The conference board.
That was like the largest two-month decline in terms of forward
stock market expectations and the survey's 40-year history um you know looking at like historical
analysis of the data suggests that these types of sentiment declines often precede strong market
performance absent a recession of course um so sort of when I put those two together,
those are, you know, good contrarian buy signals,
especially when you see sentiment gets so washed out on the downside.
You know, I'm looking at like money flows,
institutional money seems to have fully degrossed long short hedge funds
have like their lowest equity exposure in, I forgot, was golden sacks chart, five, six years.
Every single week you're seeing earnings revisions come down.
So that's like the bottom up analysts that, you know, net downgrades every single year or sorry, every single week for the year.
And now we're almost
through the first quarter um and then that's the bottom up and analysts and when you look like top
down the strategists whether you care or not doesn't really matter but they're taking down
estimates and upgrading recession but as i said it's like you want bad news here's the kitchen
sink it's i feel like we're watching.
We're just marching through, you know, especially with basketball.
We're marching through this madness of a market right now where it seems that nothing can go right.
And I think that's often where opportunities can present themselves.
So, again, it might not just be the playbook from 2023, 2024.
You might have to actually do some homework and look elsewhere.
But I think there's still enough supporting this market in my work that I don't want to say that there is no risk of recession. obviously that has risen uh quite a bit in the
past month or two but i still think there's enough strength underpinning uh for me it always starts
with the labor market uh there's definitely cracks around the edges but this has definitely been the
strongest labor market that i can remember in a long time and has been able to
fight off a lot of different headwinds. You know, when I see different surveys taken,
people care more about inflation than tariffs. So that just sort of, in my head, speaks to like
a Fed put, no matter how hard they're aggressively, they're talking and the messaging, I think, is incredible.
The amount of synchronized messaging from this administration, especially when you look versus the previous administration,
I think their messaging is pretty incredible, just how much they're on the same page.
But, you know, again, when you hear people caring more about inflation than tariffs, I think that just, again, speaks to the Fed put that, you know, prices have come down.
We're sort of stuck in that last mile.
We know a lot of that just comes from housing.
But if the market, I think, gets it all shaky, you're going to see some cuts.
And I think the Fed is going to be there um what else
quarter and rebalancing is coming up right you know right now so you have pensions that now have
uh probably some losses in the equity side of the book or where they've lightened up so they're
going to be adding to equity so i think that is sort of a coming, you know, tailwind. I also look at like the VIX curve being inverted.
So to me, that just shows that like the near term volatility that we have has like an expiration
date. We saw this as recently as the election. I've seen this over the years. And once you sort of get through that market clearing
event, generally, the market will resolve in the direction of the underlying trend. It doesn't
always have to be that way. But that does show to me when you look at the VIX curve,
that it's just a lot of near term stuff stuff all related to tariffs. And tariffs are a small part of our GDP.
It's like, I forgot the number, it's like 8%, 10% if I have that right.
So I think that's kind of all that's online.
Sorry, I was going in a million different directions,
but just sort of everything that's come up in client conversations,
that's sort of where things have meandered.
So I'll turn it back.
Can I ask you a question, Blake?
Yeah, go ahead.
So I see that you clearly make a distinction between tariffs and inflation.
If I look at what most economists say, they say tariffs lead to inflation.
Like almost certainly. so how do you look
at that that's a great point um that is obviously one school of thought i sort of think of it
differently in the fact that tariffs are essentially a tax taxes generally can curb demand. So if you're looking at like aggregate demand,
that can come down as a result of higher prices.
You know, especially when you look at the United States,
70% of this economy is consumer-driven.
Now, a lot of that comes from the upper quartiles
that are a little bit more inflation-resistant.
But I still think, as you can see in just what I was speaking,
all of the data from like a sentiments perspective
can't really get worse at this point.
And when you have sentiment,
not only from investors and consumers,
and then it bleeds over to CEOs and boardrooms
and how they make capital allocation decisions.
You know, when you really weigh on sentiment, and that creates this sort of pessimistic
near-term view, a lot of those decisions to spend or build or undertake new projects,
like those can easily get shelved, maybe not for the whole year,
but at least for the next quarter or two. And again, I think that's where you're seeing
a lot of those earnings come down that I was speaking to, because I think you just have to
get behind the idea that people are going to be a lot more conservative and play it safe when there's just a tremendous
amount of uncertainty.
So I hear what you're saying.
I just sort of view it perhaps a little bit differently.
Yeah, well, yeah, I think that was very interesting.
So thanks.
Yeah, logical. So your hand go up.
Yeah. Here's the thing. I actually was feeling quite bullish that this was probably oversold and we would probably rip back up, especially as we started getting headlines starting as early as last Friday and through the weekend around, you know, Trump about to do reciprocal tariffs,
basically walking back a lot of the stuff that he was talking about. But yesterday's auto tariffs
are very different. And I'm just basing my decisions off of like the news that constantly
comes, which is so, you know, I'm bouncing between
bearish and bullish constantly based on the information, which is not great. Obviously,
it's a very volatile market, but I'm just, you know, when new information comes in, I'm factoring
that into my decision making. And so if you think about like what those auto tariffs will do to the
auto industry, I mean, it will be very, very, very bad. And that will cause a spike in
unemployment. That'll cause, I would think, GDP reduction and demand in that sector. And so,
you know, from what I'm, from what it feels like, you know, basically, Trump said, he came out and
said, I'm going to get rates down.
And he's not going to argue with the Fed.
He's going to change his policies and he's going to force the Fed's hand to lower rates.
And when he tried to do that with this whole tariff talk, that's when all of the markets started bleeding, especially we're overvalued market.
Look for a reason to sell.
You know, rates, the 10 year dropped, but it still
remained pretty strong around that 4.3 level. I mean, we saw maybe as low as like 4.1, 4.15,
whatever, but it wasn't really going below four. And now we've ripped to four threes. And I'm not,
you know, obviously in terms of like higher prices mean inflation, maybe, you know, initially.
But if demand comes down and those prices have to be reduced, basically all that's going to happen is you're going to slow the revenue growth.
A lot of these companies in these sectors, it just it doesn't net out to anything bullish.
And it totally feels like, you know, we keep seeing this phrase around on Fintuit lately, which is, you know, Trump is basically the boy who cried wolf.
And he kept doing it, doing it, and the market stopped caring what he was going to say.
And I think that he knows that he started to lose credibility.
And then he came out with these tariffs, which are actually very bad for the economy.
So I think, you know, he didn't want to lose credibility. I think he
wanted to keep, you know, all that going. So look, it feels like he's going to cause a recession.
And I think it's clear at this point that many businesses are factoring in the impact to the economy. And whether these things carry out
or not, it almost stops mattering. Because I think businesses and consumers, based on headlines,
will begin to change their patterns. And I believe that is why we've seen over the last few weeks,
a lot of ad tech names that are exposed to marketing budgets of businesses basically fall off a cliff after great reports. And I've constantly said, I'm concerned that that might be implying that we've seen peak ad cycle. And so there's already places that we're starting to see potential slowdowns. You know, there's obviously anecdotal stories of that.
And if more sectors are going to be hit by tariffs,
then their marketing budgets are going to get slashed.
Their demand forecasts are going to come down.
Their forecasts, their outlooks on their reports are going to be bad.
It just feels like he's basically pushing for a recession.
So I just, I think it's important that, you know,
you take into
account like all this stuff it's I get it it's bearish or you know not bearish
or whatever but like if you're just listening to what's happening it
definitely is not bullish and I would not try to spin this as bullish in any
way and if you actually look at the daily on Spy, yes, we potentially filled that gap from Friday to Monday.
But the last three days, you had an evening star candle pattern.
That red candle yesterday was really ugly.
And it typically marks reversals.
And people were saying, well, it's just a low volume pullback.
It's like, dude, it was a huge rejection and just to see the body of that candle be so long tells you that it doesn't
take a lot of volume of selling to push this market down that starts that has me questioning
the liquidity in this market because we know obviously you know anyone with eyes can see
there's a bear flag on these charts. It almost seems too obvious.
And I think I'd rather wait to see how this plays out one way or another before I decide to get more aggressive.
Because, yeah, there's just too many things that are in, like, too many tallies in the negative column right now.
That's my assessment.
Jump in, Chris.
Yeah.
I wanted to talk about
the remark about
the ad tag names.
I think that was a
really interesting one.
Indeed, you often see that
that, you know,
ad tag
front runs um I think I think in
in general um you know if you if you ask me what I'm looking at uh today I was looking at the
muddy waters short report on app loving um and that's the third short report on app loving i think that you know i've um i know
i know attack quite well i've i've uh been a the trade desk uh shareholders since uh i think may
2019 um and and i know the space quite well and lots of my subscribers of Potential Multibarracks asked me
like you know Ablovin and I looked at it and it's so like typical attack actually except for the
trade desk then um meaning that it's so you know it's very hard to see what's going on what's going on behind the scenes
um so when I read that you know I've not I've not completely dug through the
the report yet uh the Muddy Waters report but you know Muddy Muddy Waters is not just
your average short seller a short seller um and i think that actually what he's what they are saying
is that um apploving is um you know if they when they look at the code that abloving uses they um
They, you know, they're actually saying that AppLovin's software shows that they are breaking the rules of the terms of service that, you know, companies like Facebook, TikTok, and others have, which is, of course, you know, not what you want to see.
They also think that they estimate the churn at 23% of customers, which is, you know, very high.
Like, you know, if you know the trade s, they have never had churn um of of even five percent um so 23 percent even
if they're off by you know even if they're off by 10 that's a huge number um so and and you know
the third you know main thing that they say is that they they only you know or more than half of their
targeting is actually retargeting so you you know you're shopping online um you know looking at a
pair of shoes or so but you don't buy them and later you see an ad uh for those exact same shoes popping up um that's called retargeting and um you know it's it's
generally known as not really effective um so it's it's you know the of of um attack so I think that um the um if I if I look at what the
trade desk says uh they missed for the first time since they're a public company uh and slightly by the way then they still had 22.4 something um revenue growth uh they guided for
18 19 something um i'm i'm looking at that as well if they blow it out of the water i think the economy will be still pretty strong um if you know they just hit it um so it's just in line
i think that we could start worrying about the economy a bit more right now i think we're in the
you know just like the market itself it's it's like in the we don't know phase uh I think that the same goes for the economy in
general we don't know because also things can change so fast like you know one one tweet um
to say that that way and and could be completely different um so I think uh that um if you if you
want to look at attack I think the trade desk is um you know it's it's down I
don't know I haven't looked today but it's down like more than 40 percent from its high and that's
a quality company uh if you're a long-term investor I think um the trade desk is very
attractive right now even even if we would go through a recession of course then you wouldn't um have to expect
positive returns in the first you know few quarters or so uh but I'm I'm you know I've
I've been following this company for so long and I know they will come back and um
that's uh that's why I'm very bullish on on the trade, and not just in words, but also voting with my money.
Wolfie, I see your hands up down there. I want to go over your direction next.
I thought I saw a second hand, but if somebody put it down, just throw it back up.
We'll go to you after, Wolfie.
So I was just going to make a comment on the Apple.
I guess I'll make a comment and then just give you my thoughts for the day.
But the Apple, and this is not the first short report.
There have been a couple.
And in the first two, after the first two, excuse me, I think the CEO or CFO put out a statement basically saying that the short reports are targeting and they're unscrupulous.
And they go through the accounting with a big accounting
firm and, you know, really tried to defend the stock and stock ripped on the back of it. But
what he failed to do is he failed to address two comments in the short report. I haven't read the
Muddy Waters report, but I assume that they probably tapped into some of the same stuff
that the other two did. And one of them, one of the accusations is there's like a gift card laundering, repatriation,
repatriation, cross-border payments to avoid exchange accusation, where like they say,
you know, if you get someone to purchase or order X, you'll get Y in gift cards. And they cited numerous examples of it.
And then the second one was an acquisition directly towards a board member of theirs,
where he set up an exchange thing called Flip, which is like's like a scroll of ads, right? And so they didn't
address either of those two things. And the specific for the ad thing that the board member
set up, it's called flip, is it has TCPA lawsuits. And so the comments that I'm sorry, I don't know from from growth to value just made about how they kind of do something different than some of the other ad companies.
That's that's like the specific thing, but it never got addressed in in the rebuttal for the first couple of short reports.
So I just want to make that comment. The comment
about TTD, where he's like, it's down like whatever, it's down like 63% off its all-time
high. And it's down, I think, 54% from earnings to the recent lows. It got to the 2023 breakout
level. I mentioned it last week, I think Thursday, as a possible mean reversion setup.
You got that mean reversion for TTD off of that 53 level, call it, the 2023 breakout level into
the 20-day, and then it just failed. So for me, as a trader, not an investor, I'm not speaking
to it in terms of investment, I want that 53, call it 52, 53 level to hold for me to like as a trader.
Now for like thoughts on the day or all that other stuff.
I mentioned yesterday.
Well, could I ask you a question about that?
Go for it.
I'm not sure.
Somebody said last week that it was going to 40.
And I said, I would love that.
But it was not you then.
Yeah, no.
So if it breaks that 53 level
i would say then you've got like this gap down to the right it breaks 53 and got a gap to 50 from
2023 it doesn't hold that then you got a drop to like that 41 i'm assuming that's that's what they
were talking about but um you know i saw that it was at a breakout level last week and if you looked
at like weekly calls they were trading basically pennies on the dollar versus what you what this thing normally trades at. So it gave you this
like a really good asymmetric risk reward at rally from that 53 what it gets this week, like 62,
63. I'm not sure. But yeah, if it doesn't hold that level, then sure, maybe it can get down to
40. And I'm with you. If it gets down to 40, it's interesting. But I'm not as well
versed in that space as you are. So I default to you on that one. Outside of that, yesterday,
I said it was like pretty much a quiet day for me. It's just like unloading stuff. I did mention
that I took one trade yesterday. I took a couple of different strikes on Dollar Tree. I said it was a very similar setup to some of that Johnson & Johnson that earlier in the year where they announced earnings,
holds the prior lows, and then Johnson & Johnson takes off from there.
Got the same kind of thing on Dollar Tree.
You can take a look at some of these strikes on a weekly perspective.
Some of them up 800,000, 900,000%, and then for the April 17 and May 16 strikes, those are up 400,000 or 500%.
So I'm bringing this up as a point because I mentioned it yesterday that I took it as a trade, but that's the kind of stuff that I'm looking for.
I'm looking for stuff that gets beaten up.
It comes into some sort of support level, goes through whatever
catalyst risk that there is. And then once that's over, if it gives you some sort of life,
it gives you this asymmetric risk return. And that's the kind of stuff I'm looking for.
You know, outside of that, I feel like there's a lot of, there's a lot of, a lot of digestion taking place with some of these names.
And there's a lot of just premium burn for some of these names that have ripped pretty aggressively.
Specifically, if you just take a look at Tesla, ran up to that 200-day, closed above it, kind of trapped people above the 200-day, went right back down to the five day held it and now
it's back to the 200 day does the same thing right so you're going to have these push pulls on a
shorter time frame and a longer time frame in my opinion um you know between call it 200 and you
know 20 or 205 depending on the stock or whatever um for the S&P, for this thing to really kind of give you the
second leg higher, you want to see that 5,800 level really break out. If it doesn't, then you've
got basically a 5,650 as your floor. From a positioning standpoint, below there, it really
opens it up back down to some of those recent lows. You could kind of draw out a trend line from 2024, the beginning of 2024,
and you can just kind of see February 2024 lows, April 2024 lows, August 5 lows,
and then the recent lows. You just draw out a line there. That's basically kind of like the trend
that we're holding on the S&P, and it's kind of like a push-pull between that trend and some of these positioning levels.
So like the 5,800 level on the upside.
So obviously, everybody's waiting for PCE tomorrow.
So I don't want to get too cute.
Give you another setup.
I mentioned it two days ago as well.
If you just take a look at some of these, again, value names, some of these beaten up, boring boomer names, take a look at Campbell's Soup, CPB.
It rallied in February from this $40 level, got up as high as I think $43, sold all the way back off to that $40 level, excuse me, $38, $39, $40 level, held
that level again, and in the last two days, kind of spiked off of it.
As long as it can kind of hold prior days lows, it could kind of get more squeezed back
up to that $100 day into that $42 level.
And for these types of stocks, these value-boring boomer name stocks, if you just take a look at their options, if you're trading the liquid ones, I'm not talking about the ones that are illiquid.
If you just trade some of these liquid names, you basically get pennies to dollars if the move works in your favor.
If it doesn't, it doesn't really cost you too much as long as you're not levering into it if you're trading against some of these levels.
And I'm saying this as a trader. I'm not saying this is an investment. I'm not telling you what
to do. I'm just kind of giving different ideas for different types of trades that I'm looking
for in this environment. Obviously, when things go, when the market is healthy and you get the
follow through on some of these tech names and some of this momentum in the S&P and the Qs,
you'll get all of your favorite names to move,
and then you'll go, great, Apple, Google, Meta,
all that stuff's moving.
One last note I wanted to point out,
and I don't know if you guys talked about it yesterday
or anything like that,
but there is a note yesterday that came out
about NVIDIA potentially trying to buy a reseller.
And it's not like a huge thing, but it does kind of like make me perk up a little bit
and want to pay attention to how some of this stuff shakes out.
Because there's already this perception that for some of these CapEx cuts could impact some of these, like the values of some of these chips.
that one way they can shore up you know depreciation on some of these um chips or some of these prices
and kind of like create some some minor price controls uh is to buy some of these resellers
or is to like obfuscate the market in that in that respect i'm not saying that that's what's
happening uh but it is something to kind of keep an eye on in the next couple of weeks months
whatever especially with like core weave coming out um here in the next couple of weeks, months, whatever, especially with like core weave coming out here in the next couple of days. So I want to pay attention to that moving forward in the next
couple of weeks, months, whatever. Also, any additional reductions in spend for some of these
mega cap names into the AI play really gives you some downside tail risk, especially if you've got
a real one. I know obviously we talked about Microsoft yesterday, and then the inverse happened with Apple, where they said they were going to
buy some. So it just depends on how it plays out for some of these stocks. I know I'm speaking for
a while, so I'll just stop there. Yeah, I just want to say something about Microsoft. Yeah,
they cut that one, but they said they were still going to invest $80 billion.
It was immediately bought by Google and Meta.
I don't think people look at the headlines and those you know, those are worrying.
And that's why you click on it, of course.
But I think that, you know, AI spending, you know,
if you talk about big cloud, big tech cloud players,
is still, you know, very strong into the foreseeable future.
Maybe further out.
And, yeah, especially if there would be a recession that
that's different of course i i agree with you i'm just saying from a from a nvidia standpoint
because you know their expectations are they beat an insane number and then we sell the stock
anyways right so if there's any kind of uh softening at all on some of these prints for some of these spends for Nvidia chips.
You know, any marginal decline could impact the share price
just because their expectations are through the roof.
Yeah, couldn't agree more.
Yeah, I want to comment on that.
Microsoft canceling a lot of data center leases.
You know, I mean, they've, we've got to remember, they have a pretty tight partnership with OpenAI.
And I pointed this out many times that they have a stipulation in the contract that once OpenAI unlocks AGI, which will happen at some point, It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.
Microsoft doesn't have IP rights to it.
So they got to figure out what they're going to do.
Obviously, they're spending a lot of money trying to expand the data center
being the second largest hyperscaler in the entire world.
But at the same time, I would even argue a lot of the cloud revenue that's on their sheets, that it's mixed in with sales from other products that, quote unquote, could be tied in with their intelligent cloud platform.
But either way, I don't think as far as Microsoft being the largest company in the world when it comes to software and productivity, I think that this is when it comes to question where their take in the whole this premium here makes a lot more sense than when it was trading near $500 probably a few months ago.
That was when I had sold my Microsoft position because it was just going to happen seeing the licenses for their Microsoft
co-pilot seats not growing as much as people had expected it to be and even from a first-hand
point of view user of it I find other chatbots with large language models a lot more efficient
and Microsoft does have that edge because it integrates with their own applications,
especially the Microsoft Office Suite.
But at the same time,
does it really provide the value
where this really makes sense
to upgrade your already expensive
Microsoft productivity suites,
seats, and your licenses with enterprise license,
what is like 30 bucks a month or something?
I'm not the one to question
exactly how enterprises are going to spend their money, but I'm more of like the numbers
person. And it didn't look like it was going to take off as much as it was. And I think that was
supposed to be their tailwind when it comes to that. Other than that, you know, pairing that up,
I mean, it's a great company in terms of a type of skill. Being the second largest cloud provider
in the entire world is definitely a big deal. And they're not, by any means, slowing down their growth rate to some significant degree. But I think that when
you think of the hyperscalers, they have already taken it to the chin pretty hard, pretty quickly,
probably before the market kind of turned over and started sniffing out the AI spend starting
to slow down a little bit. Microsoft was one of the, I think they're the only mega cap that actually decreased their guidance for capex spend this year. I don't think that it's necessarily in
terms that they don't see the data center expansion being as great as they did. I think it's more of
re-strategizing and realigning where they want to spend their money in. And perhaps the question
that came from DeepSeq in regards to, you know, before that, it was like we are GPU compute constrained.
Now it's more like we're network bandwidth and network throughput constrained.
And it's not about how fast can you process the data, but how fast can you send the data through all the channels and mediums.
And I think that's where that's probably where the edge is when it comes
to a lot of this. And I might be wrong, but that's the way I'm positioning it. And I'm not necessarily
someone who's like, let me buy, you know, the GPU compute companies and videos that's going to do
well in the long run. I mean, they are, they are pretty much the leaders in the entire industry
when it comes to data center. But when it comes to that asymmetric risk and reward
that you're talking about, Wolf,
that's when I start to question like, wait,
I know there's less risk with NVIDIA
with a lot of other names,
but at the same time, like you're saying,
if NVIDIA even hints at any type of like non-trajectory
going the upward vertical direction continuously,
the market has already priced in slower growth,
but if they come closer and they contract margins,
yeah, that's definitely not just going to impact NVIDIA.
You've seen it impacts everything across the board
that could have caught some sort of tailwind on this.
Sam, the only, so the other thing that I don't think
people have really spoken about in detail is how much of these government spend cuts
are going to impact just going through to something like Microsoft, for example.
I mean, you can assume that some of their, you can assume that about like five to just
conservatively about five to 10% of their revenues come from some of this government spend on some of these data data builds and some of
these license builds so i i don't know i don't have the answer but i'm assuming that that might
be one of the reasons that they you know kind of put out these i don't want to call them downside
these, I don't want to call them downside revisions, but just like spend revisions.
revisions but just like spend revisions
Oh, I'm sorry. Were you just making a comment? Are you asking me?
No, no. I'm just saying that that's another thing. If you want to follow up on that, go for it. But
I'm saying like, I think that's another thing that they're taking into consideration with
Microsoft, I think. Well, I mean, you know,
they have a lot of enterprise customers and I can't think of it off the top of my head, but I'm sure
obviously they have productivity licenses with a lot of government entities and agencies and stuff.
I mean, they're basically the owners when it comes to productivity in terms of enterprise-wide
software. But I mean, that's been priced into the company, right?
Like that's already been assumed in the market.
Like the market's not going to be like,
oh, Microsoft Office is no longer like the market doesn't really,
they're not too concerned about that.
They're concerned about the growth
and just justifying its existing valuation.
It needs to sustain this momentum.
And even though Microsoft is not,
well, it is a growth stock in my opinion,
but it's not like as much of a growth stock as you think of, you know, other growth companies,
especially in cybersecurity and data and whatever, it still needs to sustain that momentum. And that
goes with the market. I mean, being at nearly $3 trillion, I don't even know if they're over
$3 trillion anymore, to be honest, but they need to perform. And that's pretty much with tech across the board. And any hint of that, I think the market's actually in price discovery
whenever it comes to all of these news coming out. And that's really what we see the volatility
coming from is that there is so much price discovery and there's so much new information
coming out and so much uncertainty that the market can't exactly find a footing. And even if the VIX
is below 20, it's still going to have these radical moves, not to that degree when VIX is above 20.
But that keeps people pretty uneasy, keeps people pretty uncertain.
And you can already see it with all the commentary we've had in these spaces.
Like there's not a single person here who's like so 100% sure we're going lower, so 100% sure.
People are unsure.
And I mean, that is usually the case when it comes to market.
But ask people what the case was it comes to market but ask people
what the case was probably four months ago probably not the same thing i'm not there are some people
on here who probably have called it way before and you're gonna give them that but at the same
time it's like the uncertainty is definitely a lot higher now and that puts into question
the momentum that a lot of these companies are having i mean even google today is massively
underperforming the market and just a couple couple of months ago, people didn't think so, right?
So, you know, I mean, your guess is as good as mine with that.
I'm just going to take it in day by day.
I'm focusing on one long term.
Really good conversation so far this afternoon.
I want to make sure we get around to the rest of our panelists.
Steven, Mr. Big Beat, would love to bring you in on the conversation.
See if you have any thoughts around this market.
Yeah, I mean, let's be honest.
About a week and a half ago, two weeks now, I guess the Big Beat bottom is still in.
Look, I've heard so much negativity here that it makes me even more bullish on this market.
And look, if there's this much negativity out there,
and the market's holding up the way that it is, it means that cash is, yes, it's still sitting
on the sidelines, but it's being implemented right into the system. The only difference is
it's coming out of the MAG-7 and going into other things, right? And one of the things that I kept
saying even on my own show was not that the market itself is becoming more of a stock pickers market
than it is in overall, let's just buy the SAP. But I've heard from people constantly, and I heard
someone say it earlier than their clients are absolutely right. They're nervous. And I love
nervous money. Nervous money makes all of us hear money. It makes volatility go up. It makes the
movements even bigger and stronger.
But I said the same thing a couple of weeks ago, right? If you are pearl clutching your charts,
this is the worst time to trade right now. This is not a good time for it to be trading. This is
a good time to find good quality stocks, good quality investments, and start making a movement
into them, right? One of the things that I kept saying, and then of course, look at the market now,
it's been up almost straight up now from here.
Yeah, it's had a little bit of stair-stepping,
but the truth of the matter is,
is that the one thing that I heard
out of all of the companies that were reporting earnings,
they said one thing, bad guidance.
No one really gave good guidance,
even though 88% those s p stocks the
the uh beat on earnings you heard not very good guidance they they kept referring to the same
things the themes that we're hearing today tariffs uh the same things that we're hearing today the
united states exceptionalism is falling apart um the same things that we're hearing again today
there's problems in ukraine with russia there's problems in taiwan there's problems here hamas um if all of these things
are actually being talked about in the markets and the markets are still holding up with the nasdaq
only being down 100 bitcoin is still at 87 000 nothing moving around there if all of those
things are happening it's the same thing I told my mom earlier last week.
Don't worry about it.
Go out and ride around your golf cart.
Everything's fine.
Don't listen to the news.
The news is wrong.
They're just trying to get everybody.
I mean, I think Trump really wants the market to go down.
He's saying, I want interest rates to go down.
And if you can't get the Fed to do it,
which I think they will,
I think you're going to see two to three Fed cuts here with inflation starting to become a check
again. I think with that, you're going to see a boom. Michael Saylor told you that. He said,
any risk on, Bitcoin is going to go to the roof. I mean, if you can see all of this going on and
you see cash on the sidelines, damn skippy i bet you warren buffett can't wait to put
his money back into something right i bet you that the hedge funds are looking for something
um i think i've heard earlier about carson block and muddy water if you're checking murth
if you listen to those guys you have your head checked um but i understand it you know i get it
that uh there's some issues trade desk being one. But today, it's opening day in baseball.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
It's not the Trade Desk.
It's AppLovin.
AppLovin's down like 25%.
Yeah, appreciate it.
Big, big difference.
These guys almost tackled you on that, man.
I love this stuff.
It's opening day in baseball.
It's still basketball.
The volume is down.
Everybody should take a break. Relax. Life is okay. And I think that's what you're starting
to see now. People are starting to kind of discount Trump as, okay, look, he's the businessman.
He's trying to go balls in. And here we go. I get it. I understand it. But at this point,
at some point, people are going to forget about him most people do rarely do does the
administration make people move in the markets right usually a good president is someone you
don't really know and doesn't you're not worried about every tweet well we have to with this
president i don't get that i mean we've we lived through it the first time right i'm telling you
this the markets are okay the machine is still working and everybody is able to talk
about it. Things aren't happening in a way that makes everybody run to the hills. What I am saying
is, look, just be careful out there. We saw the VIX. The VIX gets under 17 or around 17. Buy it.
If it gets around 20, 25, 26, I shorted it right it's a great short and a great violent two
weeks ago and i still think the same thing right we have we have as traders an amazing opportunity
right now this is probably one of the best trading times in a very long time when you have the right
kind of volatility you see it you don't even have to look at your charts you just have to listen to
what's going on and you'll be like oh oh, well, there's another silly tweet about tariffs. Guess
what's going to happen? We saw it this morning with Ferrari. Race. A ton of money on race. Stock
was falling. Oh, automotive tariffs. Well, that's a great thing. 10% added to the stock.
Stock jumps to 3%, 4% automatically. That was easy by calls. I mean, that's the kind of stuff that I think that when you're looking at algo trading,
the algos are no longer looking at, oh, the stock hit a certain price.
I can't let the thing buy it, let the thing sell it.
No, the algos are looking and watching for news.
So should we.
I think charts right now, charts are okay.
But don't be pearl clutching your charts as I've been saying lately
don't charts out to be honest with you and this is somebody's been charting since the graph paper
and pen 35 years ago right I love charts but right now the markets are telling you one thing
and I'm going to tell you I reiterate this all the time the stock market is about one thing
it is the path of least resistance and the market's already taken its dump.
So, and I just heard my friend Jay Woods talking about it the other day.
You know what?
We might be getting close to the bottom here.
I called it two weeks ago.
Now, now we're up.
But I don't, I think the stair steps up and the elevator down has been done.
I think right now, I think people are nibbling back in and they're kind of holding their nose and going, okay, I get it.
Trump's going to say this or that down the road. But of that i think is already being factored in and i think you're going to see
the fed actually start to cut rates in here and when it does the market is going to explode and
everybody that's short is going to get burnt and everybody like hey i told you so and i don't want
to be that person i want to i i love this i love what wolf and stock all you guys here stock market
talk is doing.
You're helping people understand the market a little bit better.
From those old of us who have been around, in my case, 35 years this year.
Wow.
You're learning.
You saw that when that capitulation happened.
So many retail young traders got really, really scared, jumped in the shorts, and got burnt.
They dumped in those zero DTEs and all of a sudden the market turned
around on them. They didn't know what to do. I don't know. This is not,
I don't know if this is the bottom. The bottom is not being yet.
Those of us who sit there and go, you know what? It actually is.
There's the capitulation you've been looking for. There's the flush.
And that was good. And what I'm saying now is dip your toe back in.
Don't worry about it. I had a good conversation with my friend, Michael
Litt. If you don't know who Michael Litt is, he's the guy that wrote the paper on the big short.
Been a friend of mine for almost 10 years now. And I said, and he's on my show this morning.
And I said, Michael, just tell us what's going on with the Trump administration. He goes,
it's very simple. They told you this is a wall street friendly administration. Let them get
through their stuff. What they need
to get through is Scott Bissett knows what he's doing. Listen a little bit to Lutnick. Lutnick,
who is still the head of Cantor Fitzgerald, you think he wants his talks to go down? No. So
they're going to get their little administration kicks in right now. They're going to get their
tariffs in and then things are going to be back to normal. And we're going to be laughing about
this with the Dow Jones at $40,000 and $50,000.
Not where we're at now.
So I don't think that the worries is the worry if that's worrying you right now about the market.
If you're worried about NVIDIA right now, what they're doing.
I promise you, they're doing the one thing that they always do.
Apple does the same thing during downturns.
They're innovating.
They are doing research.
They took all that cash that took off the sidelines. They're not
buying back their stock. You know what they're doing?
They're innovating. They're bringing new stuff
to the markets, right? You're seeing NVIDIA
with their new chipset. You're seeing AMD
trying to do their new thing. That's what I think
is happening right now. And I think by the summer
we're all going to be smiling and not
down on each other because of what the latest
Trump tweet and Trump tariff is. But that's just my opinion. And I really appreciate you guys
having me on. I love what you guys are doing. Appreciate that, Stephen. And I want to make
sure we get everyone's thoughts in. Ariel, you've been waiting patiently up here. Let's go over to
you next, please. Hey, thanks for having me. And, you know,
I mentioned two days ago that, you know, semiconductors all look bad, right? And then
yesterday, as they all start to break down, and a majority of them are in stage four downtrends,
you know, it just doesn't help the market. And while I, you know, do agree with Big Beat that,
you know, the market historically, if market historically, if we look back in
five years or 10 years, these will potentially be just little blips in time. But the reality is,
is that the market's going to continue to be choppy when the group that pretty much kicked
off our bull market has effectively led us higher for the last two years. You know, when a majority of the stocks,
whether it be ALAB or CRDO or TSM,
or the list goes on and on, ASML, KLAC,
all of them, NVIDIA included,
are in stage four downtrends.
And they're one of the biggest groups
in the entire stock market.
We're gonna be dealing with CHOP.
So is it okay to dip your toe back into the market?
I would say it depends what you're buying, right?
You know, a day like yesterday, while, you know, semiconductors are breaking down across
the board, oil and gas stocks continue to trend higher.
So, you know, am I just trying to, you know, ignore what I'm seeing with tech stocks and
software names and semiconductors and just start to rebuy stocks
that are in downtrends. The reality is, is none of us here know how long these downtrends might last.
So, you know, trying to be part of a downtrend or nibble in when we don't know how long the
carnage can go on for, I think for some people that is the wrong formula because if you're buying the dip
and things continue to dip, you're eventually going to capitulate. So I think it's okay to
nibble, but you have to be nibbling on the best looking charts on things that are in uptrends.
And the reality is, is there just not much of that. And even when I made my note of the semiconductors two days ago about how horrible all of them
look, right?
I mean, the very next morning, they're leading the market lower and the market's rolling
over because NVIDIA is getting crushed, right?
Because ABGO is getting crushed.
And look at ABGO today, right?
It confirms your breakdown below the 200 day moving average. So I don't really want to
be part of stocks that are breaking down because I don't know, like anybody else here, how long
that breakdown lasts for. And I think that that's the important part. So if you're going to be
nibbling, make sure that you are focused on leading groups. Things within the top 40 groups
is normally a pretty good place to be. But I don't
even think that, you know, there's that many places to focus on that look good, right? Other
than oil and gas and, you know, gold, some people might say gold's a little extended, but positioning
doesn't say that. So, you know, it's tough, right? It's like, like I said, if you have a very,
very long time horizon, and you are comfortable with potentially watching your money go even lower, right, you're effectively just catching a falling knife right now or like on an app loving or like on a TTD.
But if you have a 30 year, 20 year, 10 year time horizon, you know, the odds are is that this will look like a look like a good opportunity to buy.
have looked like a good opportunity to buy. So, right. It's kind of a catch 22 and it's more so
dependent on, you know, what kind of a trader you are or an investor for that matter. And,
you know, I think that that's an important caveat. So just to, just to bear in mind, you know, when,
when you are out here, you know, potentially buying some of these dips. So, you know, don't
step in front of semiconductors that are a cyclical group and they'll continue to go down for as long as they want to go down for. And the reality is, is they're going down because institutions are selling them. It's something that I've, you know, made mention of here for the last few weeks. So I'm not going to necessarily distray from my thoughts just because things have gotten cheaper. Like I said, what's gotten cheap can get cheaper. So, you know, that that's kind of will be my attitude pretty much perpetually.
I'm not here to call bottoms on anything myself or nobody else knows where the bottom is.
You know, do some people feel like maybe based on fundamentals, things have gotten cheap?
You know, that's fine.
I think it's totally fair.
But again, the reality is, is, you know, NVIDIA is at 111 today and you could think that it's the bottom.
that it's the bottom, but what's to stop it from going to 100 or 90 or 80 or 70? If you just took
But what's to stop it from going to 100 or 90 or 80 or 70?
a peek at a chart like Celsius or Sedge or Elf or ANF or, I mean, you name it, even NVIDIA back in
22, the reality is, is that when things go on big stage four downtrends, none of us know where that
bottom lies and there's no sense in
trying to find it. And when things turn back up and they go back into stage two uptrends and at
the very minimum, they're above their 200 day moving average, then we can be more interested.
And what will give me a little bit more conviction is when it's not just one stock within the group,
right? The same way I can list off 10, 12 stocks that look bad for semiconductors.
I would want that to be the case for the upside too.
So, you know, when there's multiple stocks within a group that looks strong, well, then
we can get excited about it.
But the fact is, is that, you know, when you talk about software stocks, you know, all
it takes is one short report and, you know, for like an app loving and it's down 20% on the day. So this is what happens when charts are on their backside. And again, I don't know where it ends. None of us do. Anybody who tells you that they do are just lying. If you have a 30 year time horizon, you know, any buys in the market with a 30 year time horizon tend to do pretty well, especially if you're, you know,
dollar cost averaging into indexes. But again, that's a whole nother strategy for a whole nother
day and for somebody totally different. So if you're an active trader, you know, if your career
is trading and you're buying stocks in stage four downtrends because of price, you know, that's a
dangerous formula. So that's not something that, you know, I would ever preach or tell anybody to do. But again, you know, teach their own. And, you know, again, we'll see what happens on April 2nd with the tariffs. You know, it'll be interesting to sidelines for me unless I'm buying stocks within the top 40 groups.
And, you know, it's hard to ignore what SHEL or, you know, CVX or LB or WMB are doing, right? It's
like oil and gas is acting really strong. So, you know, do institute and for the record, you know,
like some of these stocks like a Chevron are only, you know, 15% off their all
time highs. And the thing that they sell oil and gas is 50% off of his highs. So, you know,
just imagine if oil found its bottom near 65 and then continues to press higher. The reality is,
is that these stocks have a much higher potential to do well because they're above their 200 day
moving average versus, you know, perform poorly. So,
you know, that's, that's kind of my thinking for now. And, um, you know, we'll see what,
we'll see what the next few weeks bring us, but, you know, I'm sure NVIDIA will have its day under the sun again, but it's just not today and it's not for semiconductors. And, you know, I don't
want to, you know, be the one to call a bottom. You know, I'm not, I don't carry enough conviction
with calling bottoms, um, as I do just locating
group strength.
Yeah. Wolfie saw your hand up down there.
Yeah. I'm just going to piggyback off of that.
I think there's like two really important points that he gave there.
One, the 200 day comment. I mean. If you just take a look at,
like, pick any of these chip names, right? Outside of like SanDisk, which is a rehash IPO.
Just take NVIDIA, for example, trades like 14% off its 200-day. Take ARM, Qualcomm, Micron, Marvell, everybody's favorite one, AMD, they
all are significantly below their 200-day. Generally speaking, you could just use that
as a line of demarcation for bull bear, if something's in an uptrend or a downtrend,
just a generalized rule. Then the second part that he said is, he's not, based on what he said from my interpretation,
he's not saying, I'm bearish the market.
He's saying, I'm bearish the sector, and I'd rather find sectors that are working.
And he gave oil and gas, which is another thing that we've mentioned here.
And that's like, if you're trading,
that's the path of least resistance. Trying to find what is working in your favor and sticking
with it until it stops working. And then when it stops working, being aware enough to be like,
okay, this has stopped working. I need for it to build out a base or return back to strength or whatever
the case may be for me to actually participate.
The important part there is like you make a dollar trading in video or you make a dollar
trading Exxon, you still make a dollar, right?
So it's a lot easier if you're trading, right?
This is not like in terms of an investor, 30-year time, all that stuff, different game.
But in terms of trading, trying to make a dollar, it's irrelevant where you make that dollar so long as you stick to whatever fundamental trade disciplines you have.
And it's different for everybody, but I just think him pointing out the 200 day is a really um really important piece of
information so if you just like just to put numbers around it nvidia or non-nvidia amd for example
amd rallied from it's you know from the middle of march 95 bucks to 115 that's a 20 rally right
and if you just take a look despite that 20 rally% rally, AMD is still 21% off its 200 day.
So like, despite it moving that aggressively, it's still significantly below that, that,
that bold bear line of demarcation, if you just use it as a simple, as a simple tool. And that
just tells you how distressed this thing has gotten, how beaten up this thing has gotten.
And if you just, if you just marry that concept with, you know with any of them, Avgo just broke down yesterday,
and it followed through today, just broke its 200-day. Go back and see the last time that that
happened. And these are just really important levels to just keep in the back of your mind.
And you want to see them actually get reclaimed in order to see some broad, or you want to see
some really long- term broadening out.
And if you take that approach, just flip it and look at some of the stocks that are working today.
They were in a similar sense in a similar situation years ago, had that sell off, had
that broadening out base bottom and then reclaim some of these levels and start to march higher.
I think it's a really important thing to say for people who want to trade, not invest. I want to jump in here real fast. A couple updates.
Lululemon did report earnings. They double beat, but they have very weak guidance here. They lowered
guidance pretty much across the board. Q1 and fiscal year 25 guidance much lower, and the stock is trading down 8% right now.
That's Lululemon.
We also had a little bit of a sell-off there at the end of the day before the bell.
The UK Prime Minister Starmer used the term trade war in response to the Trump tariffs,
so that may have spooked the market a little bit there.
End of the close.
And Stock Cyber, we haven't heard from you. And then we'll get over to StockTalk and get his
thoughts on the day. Yeah, I wanted to talk earlier about the Lululemon earnings. And it's
very interesting that we brought it up earlier today on the trading space about would you rather
own Nike or Lulu? I think that my initial answer remains the same, especially after seeing this
guide, but they did double beat. Revenue came in slightly higher and the EPS came in slightly higher.
However, their guidance is down the toilet and that's why we're seeing the stock send down
pretty hard. Just like we saw with the implied move, it's pretty much right there. We were
expecting a $25 move in either direction but as far as trading
goes for today I didn't really do too much I had a little bit of a late start today had an
appointment early in the morning unfortunately I really missed the long setup that I was really
looking for I was looking for 565 as a psych level to see if we could get your bounce on there
but unfortunately I was not in the market today and there to see this.
Would have been an epic long, but I can't really get them all. I'm not too worried about that.
But as far as investing goes, I haven't really bought any shares lately or haven't really
touched anything. I'm personally just still holding everything that I have. Not really
necessarily looking to try to make something out of nothing, especially in a time of uncertainty
right now. But I could tell you that if SPY itself and the entire market overall wants to go down 5%
more, I do have cash sitting on the side that I will be ready to deploy if we can see this. So
in this market, really, I'm just looking for better dollar cost averages on some of the quality names
that I own. And if I can find something that really is talking to me, then I'll go ahead
and look to do that.
I've been monitoring just a couple of these growth names, but I was kind of away for a
bit earlier.
But did we really talk about Robinhood or dive into that?
No, we really haven't spoke a whole lot about that on this space with the Robinhood space
last night, obviously introducing the private
banking and some of those other features. So if you wanted to mention some of those and bring them
up, I'd love to hear some different comments around this. So I'm going to go ahead and say,
you know, I'm a huge fan of Robinhood. I've been, you know, buying the stock. I like to personally
buy it below 40, but I got an average in the mid-30s right now. And, you know, I've been
buying it up throughout this year, especially when we saw that pretty harsh dip that we saw.
I don't know. I'm taking a look at the daily here. I believe it was like two weeks ago or so. It
wasn't that long ago. But, you know, we saw, yeah, it was two weeks ago. You know, we saw Robinhood
fall back into the mid-30s. You know, I decided I'm going to add some more shares there. And this
is a name that, you know, I love, I like this name a lot. You know, I understand why people
have had some valuation concerns with them. But, you know, when I take a look at some of their
charts and when it comes towards their competitors and companies in this space that really matter,
you know, they're focused on their AUC because when they have more assets under custody,
they frequently have more uninvested cash and they're able to basically lend more money and make more money.
That's how most of these brokerages pretty much make money.
Obviously, they have payment for order flow, but that only really accounts for about 30 to 35 percent of Robinhood's revenue.
They're mostly looking to make money off of the lending programs.
They're really starting to capitalize it.
And we've seen
recent explosions in their assets under custody. That's one thing that's really gotten my attention.
But as far as it goes, I've given the whole ramble about how I like seeing companies adapt.
And I've talked about the betting election contracts and about how they're increasing
float capital there. But my thing with Robinhood that I really like, you know, that we kind of saw from
this was, you know, they're now offering to be able to bring cash to your door, right? Like,
you literally just have to click a couple of buttons and cash will be personally delivered
to you. I think that's awesome. You know, again, they could probably just cover ATM fees a lot
cheaper than they could have somebody actually physically deliver cash to someone's door.
I know that, like, you know, that's a $2, $3 ATM fee just about everywhere.
You know, obviously, if you're at the casinos or you're at some places, it's a $10 fee, whatever.
But, you know, again, much more expensive for them to do it this way.
But I believe that their thesis on this, you know, is if we look at cash spending, cash spending has
repetitively been down. And I can't even tell you personally the last time I've used cash.
I probably keep $100 on me and I haven't touched very rare occasions when I actually need to use
cash. I think that their thesis on this is because this is unique. I don't really know of,
at least I haven't researched this thoroughly, but I don't really know of any other services that are really offering
cash brought to your door. So, you know, I really like that Robinhood is just trying to be different
here with this. And I anticipate that they're going to see a lot less people capitalizing on
this or using this feature than originally anticipated or the way that we might be thinking
about it. So I think that's really what they're going for and they're going to be unique with this. And, you know, I really like also the
betting contracts that we've seen open for March Madness. I got to say, I have not touched it
strategically just because I know that that's my demise. I'm not a good sports better at all,
but, you know, I really like seeing them kind of expand into a bunch of markets. I know a lot of
people want to see them focus on, you know, retirement plans and kind of
just focus on growing their AUC more so.
But, you know, I personally, the way I see it is the more streams of revenue they have
and, you know, the higher they can grow these streams of revenue, the more money the company
is going to make.
So, you know, yes, I understand totally the perspective about how it's kind of looked
at more as a degenerative app when they're releasing some of these betting contracts.
But personally, you know, I think that's just more money.
And, you know, I mean, we see CalC, we see Polymarket, we see a lot of other competitors that are, you know, just absolutely raking it on all these betting contracts.
And, you know, sports betting has repetitively been increasing in popularity, especially with the laws changing and it being
available in more states than it ever has been. I think that it's an amazing move by Robinhood,
but that's just my two cents on the topic. So Robinhood did introduce some really
interesting things, basically private banking, where you're going to have access to a form of wealth management,
I guess would be the term, or portfolio management for a low cost, a capped cost,
which I like that because it does add more revenue to their business.
They also introduced AI that I thought was pretty interesting.
I thought that was a really cool feature to add in there.
Honestly, my opinion on the cash delivery thing, I think that is a marketing
ploy, which will pay for itself as far as the marketing goes. Earlier in a space, somebody
mentioned they saw it like on Good Morning America or something today. So I would say that that
already pretty much worked out from the marketing side of things. Honestly, I think they probably
lose money off of that, but I do think that the attention grabber is there so if you're checking
the boxes for attention grabbing and then some really interesting new features i thought the
event went very well and i'm curious to see what all everyone else thinks on that sam see your hand
up down there yeah um it's actually really funny because i i wasn't watching the actual event but i
read i read about i read about the service that they're offering.
I also read the articles that came out on it.
And it's pretty interesting what they're going for.
I think the thing that's notable about Robinhood is that don't take for granted what they're going to say they're going to release right now, but what they might be doing later.
And when you think about this company, because I am a shareholder of this company.
When you think about this company, the amount of features and the amount of products are rolling out is very quickly.
You could tell that Vlad has a very big vision for Robinhood, and it's probably not going to stop from where we see today.
I mean, they're going to be bringing in, especially the active portfolio management, like they're basically competing with the likes of wealth front uh betterment also um i don't know if you guys use m1 finance i used to use that a long time ago but
now that they bring that to their platform things like oh well cool i could probably put something
aside there you know just to not really pay too much attention but just like maybe dollar cost
averaging or something like that and also they're they're cut with these with these private banking
as well as the additional products they're offering like they're kind of it looks like they're kind of going for uh charles schwab and there's no way
that they can actually compete with charles schwab to that that size even the exposure and
the moat with the clients that are there but even offering the private banking services does
kind of tighten their moat and does keep the retention within their company uh to keep people
within their ecosystem but most importantly the importantly, the benefits you offer for a gold subscription,
the benefits are expanding.
And it's only $5 a month.
And I'm not trying to advertise it, but there are a lot of benefits that I
would just like, you know, I'll just pay $5 a month.
It's not really that big of a deal, right?
Like that's how much I lose when I sneeze, right?
So today, that's how much I lost when I sneeze.
But when you really think about it, I think when you're buying Robinhood, you're not buying it for what it is today.
It's a growth stock for sure, but you're buying it for what it might be in the future.
And even though I would even say like the valuation isn't egregious like a lot of other stocks.
But even if that was the case, it kind of reminds me of, I don't want to compare it exactly because that is a
connotation with it but like tesla in like 2021 i'm not saying it's going to go down but
it was the top of the town back then right and it seems like today it probably is robin hood and
you even saw it last night during the during the releases like the stock was up like six seven eight
percent and completely fade into today so there's definitely a lot of hype and excitement around it.
I am looking to probably add to the position, but in the midst of all the sweetness and other things available, I'm probably not going to add to it right now, keeping it small.
But I mean, I even shared in the nest what my take was on it.
Just pretty quick, high-level stuff.
But it is pretty interesting what's happening.
I mean, thinking of Vlad, he's not just CEO, but he's sort of he's kind of acting like a product manager right he's thinking
of more ways to integrate more features and he like he's supposed he's a ceo but the the vision
that he probably has i don't think we've seen it yet um but it is quite an interesting story
playing out and it does get more interesting as the price comes down as well. I'm not going to lie. Stock talk, are you here with us?
I am. I am. There he is. Well, we've been through the whole panel. We've hit a ton of topics and
we hadn't heard from you just yet, Mr. Stock Tariff.
I'd love to hear your take on what's going on.
I'm sure you've got plenty of things to hit on.
And then, of course, we have a great panel up here to bounce things around with.
Yeah, I didn't do much today.
I actually wasn't even there for the open today.
I usually do a live pre-market stream.
But I was busy this morning with a
couple other things. I mean, look, I think, I don't know, we were sort of talking about
this yesterday. There was a space last night where a couple of people were on that I jumped
on. Michael Cantor was on there and a couple of other smart people that I like to talk
to. For those that don't know, Michael Cantra is the CIO at Piper Sandler.
And I enjoy talking to him about these topics when we get to them.
But we were sort of going back and forth last night and kind of revisited that Deutsche Bank
survey that I brought up a couple of days ago on these spaces.
a couple of days ago on these spaces.
And the response I got from everybody was pretty funny
because it was very reflective of the survey itself.
Like, you know, there were some guys on that panel
that probably have a much deeper understanding of trade dynamics
than I frankly even hope to have.
But, you know, there are 30, 40-year market vets up there on that panel yesterday
that literally have zero idea what to expect.
And that dynamic itself of uncertainty and lack of clarity is probably the most toxic thing for markets.
And in spite of that, you know, we are still within the bounds of a 10% correction.
You know, we've come all the way down. There's been a lot of noise. The selling under the
surface in individual stocks has certainly been worse than the selling at the index level. But
I mean, all that said, you know, we have fallen within the bounds of a 10% correction.
We haven't really had much enthusiasm on the rebound, which is a bit concerning.
But not a single tariff has been signed yet.
Not one tariff has been signed into law.
We've had a lot of conversations about it.
We've had a lot of conversations about it, right? We've had a lot of executive orders.
We've had a lot of blood in the water, if you will, from a speculative standpoint,
but nothing has happened. And so for the market to be down 10%, sentiment to be really, really, really bad. A lot of individual stocks to be down 40 to 50 percent.
All on speculation is a pretty rare event for markets.
You know, and when we do get those sort of corrections, you look at last year,
they tend to be V-shaped recovery. So I don't know. I mean, at the risk of being repetitive,
I continue to be patient in this market. I don't think this I mean, at the risk of being repetitive, I continue to be patient in this market.
I don't think this is a market where, you know, you want to be aggressively grabbing longs when the market's consolidating.
I don't think it's a market where you want to be shorting the hole either.
I mean, we stick-saved the 50-week moving average two weeks in a row last Friday and the week before that as well.
We're holding the 50 weeks still.
You know, we gave up the 200-day, which is amazing,
but we're still holding the 50-week for the third consecutive week
after pretty aggressive selling.
If somebody put a gun to my head and said,
going into April 2nd, you know,
would you say the situation has a chance of a higher probability of worsening?
Or would you say the base case is a higher probability of softening?
I would say the base case is a much higher probability of softening between now and then.
I mean, what else can really be said on the topic, right?
Like, I mean, can they say 50% tariffs?
Like, maybe. Is that going to happen? I don't think so.
So I think the worst has been sort of speculated on from a tariff standpoint.
I continue to believe that markets are more concerned about confidence, economic confidence than they are about tariffs.
I continue to believe that. I do not think that like reciprocal tariffs are that big of a deal, to be frank. So, yeah, I mean, fuck, I'm kind of
getting tired talking about tariffs, but it seems to be the only thing on the table. There's not a
lot else to chat about, at least for me today, I mean, no individual analyst reports that I really jumped on this morning.
Oppenheimer came out on some of the speculative names.
Aurora Innovation, Dicker AUR, which I think did decently today.
They came out on that this morning with a $15 target.
It's about the only report I saw that was interesting.
I think there was a Duolingo price target upgrade to $410 from DA Davidson.
I don't know how that did today,
but I believe it was green earlier in the session as well.
But I didn't trade anything, didn't buy anything today.
You know, my feet have been kind of slow moving
in this kind of market because, again,
I don't feel the need to, like, chase every ball, right?
There's a lot of people out there that are looking for, quote-unquote, new leaders, new relative strength candidates.
And most of them are just getting dragged by their feet back and forth in the market.
It's like a lot of these guys are like, oh, look here.
Look at this relative strength candidate.
I'm going to get along here, guys.
And then two days later, it's down 6%.
There's been a lot of that.
So I don't like exposing myself to action like
that. I've mentioned this a million times, again, at risk of being repetitive, but I think environment
matters a lot more than setup. And the environment's just a choppy mess right now. So I'd like to wait
for some clarity. I'd like to get some sort of resolution on the topic of tariffs. I don't know when and if that's going to happen.
But at this point, I've just had a headache from tracking this thing back and forth.
I feel like a madman tracking this tariff conversation back and forth.
But, yeah, I mean, there's not too much else to say.
I know, you know, we've gone on some big rants these last couple of days,
but not too much new in the market today.
You know, we just kind of have to see how markets react to the data going forward.
If we can get back above that 200 day, I honestly did not expect bulls to give it back so quickly.
I was pretty surprised by that, actually. I thought, you know, we'd at least hold it for a couple of days.
But to give it back two days after we took it was pretty disappointing. So clearly not a lot of energy
on the bid side. But I do think for another big leg lower, we will need another negative catalyst.
I don't think we go another 10% down without a negative catalyst. Now, that could be just the implementation of tariffs without any sort of softness.
That could be the catalyst.
I don't think it's going to be, but that could be.
But, yeah, we're going to need something else to bring us down further, in my view.
I feel like sellers are maybe a bit exhausted down here, or at least I hope so.
We'll see.
But technically speaking, the picture's not pretty. I mean, what do you like about this technical picture? I mean, we have a bunch of
great chartists on this panel. I don't think any of them are going to come up and say, yeah,
the S&P 500 on the index level looks great, technically. I don't think anyone's going to
make that argument. So until you're out of the woods
from a technical structure standpoint,
I think that's when you can start
getting a little bit more confident.
And if that happens to coincide
with a softening in the base case tariff narrative,
great.
In that situation,
I think we can get a real rally in these markets.
I don't know what sort of probability
I would assign to
that outcome. It wouldn't be greater than 50%, but that would be the ideal scenario for bulls.
We get a little bit of softening, a little bit of clarity on the tariff end. Markets find their way
to rebuilding above the 200-day during that period. And then we get to push over the 50 in
a serious market rally. The thing to keep in mind if that does happen, though, will be to use 2022 somewhat as a
reference, right?
You know, we had monster counter trend rallies in 2022.
And I believe four out of five of those counter trend rallies, I'd have to go back and check,
failed to retake the previous highs.
So that's an indication to watch for, right?
If you do get a monster rally, let's say close to the highs here, be careful because
if we don't retake them, you could be headed for, you know, another really volatile year
where we have these minus 10%, plus 10%, minus 10%, plus 10% chop, which is actually much, much harder to trade
than the sort of chop that people are used to,
which is like minus 1%, plus 1%, minus 1%, plus 1%.
That kind of chop people find annoying.
The chop that we got in 2022,
you have to be a very dynamic trader to trade that
because when markets swing like a pendulum like that,
where stocks go down 40% over a three-week period then rebound 35 over a three-week period then go down 35 i
mean if you're trading individual stocks in that environment like you have to be really good and
we're not quite there yet because you know we're still only barely at the end of march here
we're three months into the year so we don't know for certain still only barely at the end of march here uh we're three
months into the year so we don't know for certain what the course of the year is going to look like
but the technical picture doesn't look pretty right now um and so yeah you have to keep that
in the back of your mind you can't just ignore the technical picture on the index level and then
you know whistle past the graveyard um i think you have to be cognizant of that while you're
trading so not a whole lot of new i know a lot of that stuff that i've said yesterday and said the day before as well but
um yeah there's just i mean not a whole lot to talk about besides tariffs and
and the individual stock opportunities when they arise
blake do we still have you up here on stage
Have you up here on stage?
Showing me that Blake was still a speaker, but I don't know.
This thing, the app's been glitching for the last two to three hours.
It finally started loading for me again, but there for a while, I was struggling.
I would love to have Blake's take on the chart side of things, but if we don't have him, that's fine.
Stock Talk, what did you think about the hood event last night? Are you getting bags of cash delivered to your door?
I thought it was excellent. I think, you know, they're really making the pivot to financial
ecosystem from brokerage. And I think they're doing it effectively. I think they're probably
at this point innovating at a faster pace than anyone else in the brokerage space.
It's funny because investing.com is doing like a write-up, I guess, of some trading communities and stuff.
So they sent me some questions to answer last night.
And it's funny because that was like sort of in the questions.
This idea of like if trading has changed in the last five to ten years, if if trading has changed in the last five to 10 years,
if the market has changed in the last five to 10 years, and the legacy guys are going to hate me
for this. Like my mentor, who's been a trader on Wall Street for 40 years, I talked to him like
every day. He hates when I say this, because his favorite phrase is the markets never change.
So he's always told me the markets never changed. It's what he's always told me. The markets never change. It's never different this time.
You know, that's like the killing phrase, right?
That's like the phrase that everyone says
when they're at peak performance
and they're like, oh, come on, you know,
market's changed.
It's different now.
He hates when people say that.
And I do too, but,
but, and I do think there's a but that's important here, things about the market do change.
And I think one of the big things that has, I think, inarguably changed in the last 10 years, and Robinhood is a huge component of this, is the democratization of access to the markets.
is the democratization of access to the markets.
And, you know, I don't know how old everyone is on the panel,
but if you think back 10 years ago, even 15 years ago,
for some of you that are younger, maybe when you were growing up 20 years ago,
you might remember this with your parents.
But, like, in Canada, I have a lot of cousins in Canada.
Just eight years ago in Canada, I have a lot of cousins in Canada. Just eight years ago in Canada,
my cousins had to
call a brokerage. This is
eight years ago. Had to call a
broker in their TD account in
Canada to place at OpenTrades.
So they'd call him, tell him the
limit price, he would then put the
limit order in, and then they
would get notified of the fill.
That's ridiculous.
If you told somebody that today, they would laugh in your face.
They'd be like, what the hell?
I'm not going to do that.
Then you had to call an 800 number to check the price.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
So think about that eight years ago.
Eight years ago.
Not like decades ago to now.
You download an app on your phone, deposit 500 bucks instantaneously,
and boom, you're in the markets.
Like anyone can do it.
A kid can do it.
Like you got your first job.
Cool.
You made a couple hundred bucks.
Boom.
I'm an investor.
Like I don't, I'm not knocking those people for doing it, by the way.
I think it's great that young people are investing.
I'm not at all like making some kind of sly comment about that.
My point about that is to say that that's a dramatically
different standpoint of market participation than where we were a decade ago or even less than a
decade ago. And if you want to be analytical and you want to be measured, you know, a lot of legacy
guys are going to say, oh, it doesn't matter. Like nothing has changed. Well, I think it does matter.
going to say oh it doesn't matter like nothing has changed well i think it does matter right
a there's a lot more retail participation b more americans own stocks than ever that curve's kind
of gone up anyway regardless of where the technology's gone that that number goes up every
year but you're at what like 65 of americans owning stocks um you know these could be digital commission-free brokerage apps are getting millions and millions
of new downloads and new accounts every year. We had like 7 million brand new brokerage accounts
open during COVID. And then the two years after it was like four and five million a pop. That's
a lot of people joining the market. You know, even if they only have a couple thousand bucks, a couple hundred bucks.
And so in the medium term, I think it does change aspects about volatility in the market, especially.
Another thing that me and Cantor were talking about last night was this idea of the proliferation of narratives and how that's changed.
You know, rewind the clock a little bit further
than calling into your broker.
Rewind the clock 20 years
and you had people,
you had a market that was really dictated by,
it's still dictated by institutions,
but it was entirely dictated by institutions.
Like if you were an everyday person 20 years ago,
you probably weren't exposed to political headlines and economic headlines the way people on social media are today.
Not even remotely.
You know, people 20 years ago would read the paper on Monday and be like, oh, this might happen in markets this week.
We see feeds of headlines 24-7.
Like if something bad happens, it doesn't take a news cycle for that to proliferate to the retail trading environment.
It happens instantaneously.
If something bad happens, a tariff announcement is made, I don't want to say bad.
Let's say something catalytic happens is the right way to put it.
A tariff announcement is made, Everyone tweets about it. Some people are playing phone where they're not tweeting all
the details or just tweeting the fear inducing details or just tweeting the good stuff and not
the bad stuff. So you have this huge bias lens put over all of the information. Then you have
it proliferated immediately, usually in a superficial way. And then you have this cohort of 20 million retail traders
that are mostly, I don't say mostly brand new,
but millions of them are brand new to the market
who are reacting to this information.
And then we wonder why index level volatility
on a three-year basis is like its highest ever
because dynamics have changed a little bit.
Has the market changed?
I mean, no.
Like psychology, principles of psychology and buying and investing and trading, those
are longstanding principles.
Those have not changed.
But the dynamics of the market and the ability to induce volatility has changed as a product of
both democratization of access and democratization of access to information you know both of those
things and it's happened simultaneously like when robinard went public and commission-free
brokerages basically became a thing overnight when that happened that was kind of coinciding with the ramp in not only global
social media usage, but was also coinciding with the ramp in sort of factionization on social media,
which led to way more engagement, people spending a lot more time. And most people lean on the
political angle of that. But it's
not just political information that gets disseminated through social media. It's usually political
inclinations that drive people to spend a lot of time on those platforms. But there's
tons of other information on those feeds, right? Financial information, like I'm referencing, and so much else that informs those people's opinions. So we live in an environment where I feel headline volatility is
higher than ever. I don't think it's going away. And, you know, as we get closer to a reality where
24-hour trading exists, and more and more democratization of retail access occurs globally,
I think that's only going to accelerate.
And all that being said, I think the single greatest company in position to benefit
from the rise of retail trading is Robinhood.
I think they've positioned themselves.
It's why I own a pretty significant amount of stock.
I was buying it pretty aggressively at the beginning of last year of a cost basis under
20 bucks.
Um, I'd be willing to add more around 20 bucks if it ever did come back down there.
But, um, yeah, I, I find that to be a fantastic company last year at the beginning of the
year, I wanted to have a position.
I didn't know if I wanted to have a long-term position.
But the options I bought in January and February of last year ended up going in the money very quickly.
And then, you know, I started doing more research on the business.
And, you know, sometimes you kind of lead, walk yourself into the investment, if you will.
But I'm a big fan of Robinhood and what they've done.
And that's coming from somebody that hated the company and hated the stock when they
IPO'd.
I thought it was a joke.
And I've never been a big fan of the brokerage business, but I don't think they're a broker
anymore.
So I should say not just a broker anymore.
And so, yeah, I'm a huge fan of the presentation last night and huge fan of the
opportunity for them over the next decade. What's up, Sam?
Yeah. I mean, I just wanted to add on to that. It kind of feels like this can be looked at
from a bullish perspective, from different perspectives. I mean, I'm looking at it, of course,
from a fundamental point of view,
especially when it comes to looking at the quantitative analysis.
Like when I think of the app from even a software background,
like just the flexibility of the application.
When I say flexibility, I mean like the fact that it's very fluid
during the app experience. I feel like the UI experience has a lot to do whether
something's going to stick or not. And you can kind of tell, like when you download an app
on your phone, like people delete an app in like two minutes, if it's just hard to use,
hard to figure out, things are clunky, they're not really loading properly, the placement of how the
app looks like, whatever. Rob obviously has a huge product team
and a huge engineering team working on this all the time.
But one thing that I find with companies
that are very successful
usually is their customer support.
Now, there are probably stories out there
where people have some disgruntledness
about how bad support is.
They don't reply with it.
In my experience, you message them,
you get a response, boom, boom boom boom boom it's easy to keep track
of easy to use your phone and switch out different apps on your phone while continuing to maintain
the conversation as it comes back reminds me of the customer support experience with amazon and
couple that with a great product i mean if they're executing the management front seems like a pretty
good recipe to do very well.
But with that being said, though, you know,
and I was actually asking, you're going to go to an elevator soon
because you usually get an elevator around this time.
But I was like, wait for you to get an elevator or something.
But I was going to ask you from your perspective,
because, you know, obviously you're a big shareholder of Amazon.
Like, does that take into play as to the reason why you like Amazon
so much? Obviously not just AWS, which is
definitely a bull case for a lot of people, but
as far as just how good their app is,
I mean, there's little disagreements and everything,
but it's usually fixed
after a few weeks or a month.
You're talking about the Amazon app?
The Amazon app and the same thing I see with Robinhood as well.
I actually don't love the Amazon app, to be honest.
I love Amazon. I hate the app too. I Robinhood as well. I actually don't love the Amazon app, to be honest. I love Amazon.
I think it's the best company.
I hate the app too.
I do it all online.
I hate the app.
Yeah, I think the app's kind of clunky, to be fair.
I actually think the Amazon app needs a lot of aesthetic work.
Robinhood, I completely agree with you.
Robinhood, I think the UI UX is beautiful.
Like, I mean, compared to other brokers,
I mean, Robinhood's UIUX is pretty much as good
as it gets.
I really like Weebles as well, but Robinhood UIUX is certainly way better than any legacy
American brokers.
I think the IBKR interface is terrible.
I love the IBKR as a broker.
I used them for many years, but I think the interface is terrible.
I think the interface on things for Swim is terrible.
I think the interface on pretty much everything
outside of Robinhood and Weeble is terrible in my opinion
now interface UI UX
is a preference thing
so obviously some people are going to like stuff
that other people don't like
there's no objective opinion that's correct here
but I actually don't love the Amazon app
I love Amazon for different reasons
I just think
I don't know
I think Amazon is pretty definitively, in my opinion, the greatest company in the world. They
have way too much optionality for a company of their size. You know, I've talked about this a
million times, but way too much optionality in healthcare and a million other verticals. I mean,
they're already scaling their access to healthcare with a new AI tool that I think
was really clever, where they're letting customers ask questions to a specialized AI healthcare
tool.
And then they're directly linking those prime members to their one medical program, which
is very, very smart.
You know, most of these LLMs that are taking queries about people's health problems,
even though most of them say disclosures of like, you must consult a health professional,
they're still embracing it.
Like, you look at GPT's last release, they used an example of somebody making a health
query to the LLM.
Grok did the same thing. So I think, you know, there is a huge
healthcare aspect in my view to AI in terms of a personal care standpoint that I think
is right around the corner. I don't think it's years away. I think middle of next year, end of next year, you'll see big AI integration with telehealth.
I think, to be fair, it's going to change the face of American health care.
In a country where we don't have a socialized health care system like our Canadian neighbors or our European neighbors,
a lot of
Americans view healthcare as a service by need, as opposed to, you know, something that they should
be checking on regularly. You know, I believe America from a per capita standpoint, I could be
wrong, out of all developed nations, our people go to the doctor of the lease, which isn't surprising,
again, considering the structure of our healthcare system. But I think what it does
open the door for, if you will, which this tends to happen in America, in most industries,
we tend to lead the way. But I think it does open the door for America to kind of
It has opened the door for America to kind of embrace slash adopt a next-gen healthcare system where the vast majority of care is done digitally.
I don't necessarily mean this in the same way that people were saying it during COVID, where people were like, oh, buy Teladoc because healthcare is going to be telehealth everywhere and yada, yada, yada.
I don't mean it in that way.
I mean it in the way of doing this at scale in one or two years in a sweeping fashion.
And I think very few companies are going to be able to do that outside of Amazon.
If you look at the telehealth landscape, you look at companies like Teladoc, One Medical, which is Amazon's company.
And then you look at some of the peripheral companies.
There's even some telemedicine companies for pets now.
It's one of those landscapes that reminds me a lot of sports betting.
And this is precisely the same problem that DraftKings having in the sports betting space.
If you look at the sports betting space,
it's a bloodbath for customer acquisition, right?
Everyone's spending enormous amounts of money
for customer acquisition,
offering $300 free bets, et cetera, et cetera.
And the issue with that is,
is when you spend aggressively for customer acquisition
in a highly competitive space
with very little product differentiation differentiation you lead to an industry
where it's hard to generate substantial margin because you're again you have very
little product differentiation you know people can do the same thing on your
product and they can't on someone else's when somebody downloads FanDuel for
example they placed a couple bets, how they're doing is really
less relevant, but they placed a couple bets, and then they see a promotion on their feed that says,
oh, sign up for DraftKings, and you'll get $500. Well, okay, yeah, I'm going to do that. I mean,
I can place the same bet on DraftKings. I may not like the UI as much, but very few people are going to turn that down.
And so what happens is you have a very unsticky customer, right?
There's very little product allegiance on sports betting platforms in the short term.
You know, after the promotions are done, yeah, people generally pick a platform and stick with it.
But in the short to medium term, you can't lean on your customers being sticky in a place like that. And the same thing
goes for telehealth. Most telehealth providers are operating around a covered blanket of
physicians that are relatively the same. You know, if you use one telehealth platform,
you could probably get access to the similar quality physicians in your area that you would on another telehealth platform.
So there's not a tremendous amount of product differentiation, right?
The differentiation is in the service provider, not in the service itself.
It's an important distinction to make.
And so in telehealth, you're going to have the same problem where it's going to be a bloodbath in customer acquisition.
And in order to overcome that, you're going to have the same problem where it's going to be a bloodbath in customer acquisition. And in order to overcome that, you're going to need product differentiation.
And in my view, a company like Amazon is one of the only companies that will be able to provide that in a meaningful way,
whether it's layering what you're getting from the telehealth offering with other services and products,
which obviously Amazon has plenty of, or whether it comes to offering some unique advantage or cost benefit that only Amazon can provide. And if you look
at this from a pricing standpoint, they've sort of already done that. I mean, I think today the
pricing for Amazon Health, if you want to use the telehealth extension is like $9 a month. And then
I think with the in-person optionality, I think it's an extra $5 a month. And then I think with the in-person optionality,
I think it's an extra $5 a month.
I think it comes to 14.
Again, these are tiny numbers.
When you think about them in respect
to what Americans spend on healthcare,
what they're used to spending on healthcare,
there's a lot of people whose co-pays
when they just go to the doctor are like 100 bucks.
If you sign up for Amazon One Medical, you can talk to a doctor at any time, 24-7 for $9 if you're a Prime member.
That's pretty compelling.
I have a lot of friends that I've told about that that are Amazon Prime members.
They're like, what?
No, you're lying.
$9 a month, and they go, and they're like, what?
They sign up.
So I've seen a lot of people that are just surprised at the pricing.
But I don't know how we jump to Amazon i can sam asked me about amazon but you guys know me and amazon i could talk about it forever but yeah the the i think
they have a unique advantage in that space um from a scaling and product differentiation
standpoint and i explained why i think that's important so I like Sam's point about the UI and stuff.
And I do think it is a massive benefit to have a solid UI.
And it makes the product stickier, right?
Just in general.
Now, when it comes to hood, the first thing I'm going to say is just the counterpoint
here.
From a trading perspective, hood is still very, very far behind.
Robinhood is behind Webull and most of
these other trading platforms. They just are. The Robinhood legend that they came out with,
good idea, but still, I would say years behind what Webull or Toss or what these other ones
offer you. And that to me is still a slight problem that needs to be addressed. But then everything else that Robinhood's doing, I absolutely love.
Honestly, if they would address that, I think that should be a big focus.
But I see Vlad, you know, Vlad's a visionary.
He wants to make it the all-in-one app.
He wants to make it very convenient.
I mean, he basically announced that they're a digital bank at this point, right?
I mean, they basically have digital banking with checking and savings accounts, payments, you could send money to people around
the world. So adding that in and having the all-in-one shop for stuff, I like that approach.
And then another point I'll add here, anyone that's under the age of, let's say 37,
It's under the age of, let's say, 37.
That's kind of the perfect age range for this because that's the technology changeover, right?
Anybody under that age grew up definitely with internet in their house at some point.
The iPhone came out by the time they were in high school or younger.
And in the digital world is what they grew up with.
And that's where Robinhood is, is making strides.
And that's what Vlad's entire vision for this entire thing is,
right.
It's going after this generation and,
and trying to capitalize on a big movement.
I mean,
Charles Schwab was mentioned in a lot of,
of the older generations that are in to his point are going to transfer
wealth down to the younger generation, whether it's inheritance
or whatever it is, they're going to transfer to people that grew up in that age range, that grew
up from the time, for example, when I was probably a senior in high school, somewhere in there,
whenever the iPhone was released. And I had a dial-up modem when I was a kid. We had a PC, we had internet, but seeing that changeover
from basically the pre-internet age and the pre-cell phone age to the smartphones and everything
in the middle of my lifetime as I was becoming an adult, I think everyone in the mid-30s to younger,
that is a huge demographic that they're naturally going to be drawn to something like Robinhood.
So I love Vlad's thoughts to go after that demographic. And I think he's onto something as far as, okay, if I get these young generation in now that want the convenience, they want
everything digital because that's what they grew up with, they will put everything into one spot.
They will want to move their brokerage accounts there
or anything they inherit from their parents,
anything like that,
they'll want to have it over there.
And I think that's a great approach for everything.
And then the digital banking side of things.
I mean, at this point,
if you can have your checking account,
your savings account,
your retirement accounts,
all that in one spot on one app
and easily track it, keep control of it
and move things around within it. I mean, that sounds way better than having things in a bunch
of different places. Now, at a certain point, a certain level of wealth, obviously, FDIC insurance,
things like that, of course, you want things spread out. But I get the main point here is
the average person. I think that's very, I think it's a great move by Robinhood because I
think that is a very desirable thing is to be able to have all those things. Now, getting cash
delivered to you, is that a real thing? I still think that that was just a marketing ploy. And it
worked if that's what it was. But most people, I think, if anything, the angle there is, okay,
you have your checking, your savings, whatever, your everyday money in Robinhood, as well as your other accounts.
Okay, well, maybe you can go to an ATM, or if you need to, you can have cash delivered to you.
Maybe it's just filling in that hole for digital banking as well.
So I thought the presentation was great.
I think their vision is very, very strong going forward, And I think that they're kind of the first ones there.
The only thing that I would complain about would be from a trader perspective, they are still so far behind all the competition.
Yeah, I agree.
Because I'd love to use their platform, but I have the same problem.
like they just like the Robin Hood legend is just not good enough so yeah they need to make a better
Like they just, like the Robin Hood legend thing is just not good enough.
tool for for professional traders or not even professional just professional traders but like
serious traders they need better tools I agree with that but the point you're making about you
know having I'm sorry go for it we're gonna jump in oh sorry I thought somebody was speaking um
the point you're making about having everything in one place, like, yeah, that's super important.
And I think people underestimate the importance of that.
It's funny because I'll bring Amazon up back here as an analogy, but Americans love convenience.
Like, love it.
They go to capital L.
If you look at the last 10 years, there's really a tremendous amount of attestation to this in the public markets.
You know, the rise of DoorDash and Uber are a huge testament to the American desire for convenience, right?
The fact that people are willing to pay 40% more for a meal just to have it delivered to their door is insane. You know, you look at
e-commerce in the wake of Amazon, right? E-commerce sort of arised with Amazon. But if you look at
e-commerce before Amazon became the juggernaut that it is, people generally went to multiple
different retailers for multiple different things.
You know, this is another thing where you guys can put yourself in the shoes of when you were kids.
Throw it back to when your mom would take you shopping.
Like, did you guys just go to General Mart and buy everything you needed?
You go to the grocery store, you buy your groceries, you go to the
someplace for clothing, whatever, Nike, Adidas, whatever, then you go somewhere else for,
you know, furniture, then you go somewhere else for like a handbag. That's not the reality of
commerce anymore. Amazon changed that. Amazon said, well, do people really want to do that?
Or do they want to go to one place and get everything? And the answer turns out, well, do people really want to do that? Or do they want to go to one place and get everything?
And the answer turns out, yeah, they do want to do that.
You know, that did end up being the answer.
And then Amazon started layering in internal products and selling those as well.
You know, the offering of membership, yada, yada.
So that, to me, is the future of commerce. The future of commerce is...
We do have a cutoff, by the way. Sorry.
The future of commerce is monopolistic, in my view. The future of commerce is going to
be these massive hubs that offer everything. And in the same way, I think the future of
finance is that way as well. Right? Like, I mean, they made this point last night in our presentation, but, like, why do you
have your assets in such an inconvenient way, right?
Like, why do we have bank accounts and then brokerage accounts and then transfer accounts
and then you have a Venmo account to send money to your friends after dinner or whatever?
Like, there's a, we have a really sloppy financial ecosystem
considering how advanced the technology is and i think more and more people are realizing that
and companies like robin hood are taking advantage of it to say hey the technology's here already
like why are we still living in 2008 where we have to treat the financial ecosystem like this series of vaults. We don't.
We're at the point where encryption and authentication services are at the level
where people care to protect their money. They can do it pretty effectively and pretty easily
in a digital way. And if they can have everything in one place,
obviously activity is going to go up, right?
You look at activity, trade volume,
all the things these guys make money off of,
like in terms of the brokerages,
you look at all the things they make money off of
and you ask yourself,
okay, what if I could layer on 30 or 40 existing services
and make it fluid to access those services through the application?
That's pretty compelling.
All right.
I've got to close this out because we've got to jump over to Wolf Financial
for our venture capital space.
Great talk today, as always.
Stock Talk, appreciate you.
Sam, Ariel, Blake joined us today, Stock Sniper,
several others were up here earlier.
Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. And we're off tomorrow because tomorrow's Friday. We'll be back on
Monday. See you guys then. Thank you.
