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TALKING ABOUT BILL ACKMAN | INVESTING LIKE ACKMAN WITH INCOME? $ACKY
Recorded: Sept. 2, 2025 Duration: 2:33:54Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. What is up?
What is up?
How is everybody doing?
We are back.
Market's red today.
I bet you my portfolio is underperforming.
Let's see.
Nope. There it is. SPY is down about 1%.
QQQ is down about 1.1%. My portfolio is down about 1.4%. There we go. Stonks. I hope you guys
are all doing well. A lot of the MAG-7s down by a little bit more than 1% today. Boeing
standing out as a green name in my portfolio. When I take a look at the
heat map, there's a little bit of green. There are some names, Starbucks and McDonald's and a Pepsi
and a T-Mobile. And there was a couple of news stories on pretty much all of those,
which we will end up talking throughout the spaces. But I hope you guys are all
enjoyed your three-day weekend, a little long weekend. The market obviously could
be doing better today, but we shall see how we end up performing here. We've got a bunch of our
friends here. We already have 111 people in probably, what, a minute, minute and a half.
I think we're excited for the market. My defense ETF is up today. Interesting.
President Trump is talking right now.
He was relocating the U.S. Air Force Base over to Alabama or the U.S.
Sorry, not Air Force.
U.S. Space Command.
Apple losing lead something.
What's that supposed to mean?
Oh, Apple on watch.
They're losing some kind of lead engineer or something something i couldn't i couldn't hear the full
thing over trump speaking gotcha yeah i know a lot going on right now honestly if you interrupt
in if trump actually says apple loses lead ai robotics researcher to meta there it is there
you go all right so listen you you everyone up here has sat up told me how bad apple's ai is and then you're gonna
also tell me it's bad when they lose someone from it like i don't know guys but you can't have your
cake and eat it too although that apple play i've been calling for running into the the iphone event
is not having its best day today that iphone event is a week from today. But I appreciate you guys chiming in.
And, Emp, welcome back.
We appreciate you being here.
I know you got a lot going on in different years and directions and stuff,
but let us know if Trump ends up saying anything.
Has there been anything yet so far?
Sorry.
No, no.
He had some comments on a radio show a little bit earlier,
but since he's gone live here on the White House account,
there's not much. They're asking him questions now.
Obviously, the entire announcement was moving from Colorado to Huntsville
with the Space Force, and then now he's kind of starting to hit
some mostly political talking points so far.
I'm going to join Meadow. Sorry, I was getting that post out
uh you know for three-day weekends really do get to me you don't realize how how addicted
in a bad word but how excited you are about the market in a good way until you're on that that
monday and the market's just open you check your portfolio and it hasn't moved. But I am excited for today.
We've got plenty of speakers.
We're really past earnings season,
so there shouldn't really be any earnings today
after the close.
Zscaler will be reporting earnings.
Maybe we'll mention that for a little bit.
NFP on Friday.
Besides that, when we're talking on the macro calendar,
it honestly isn't even looking that crazy as well.
For me the the big
event of the week is actually something that we've been talking a little bit is actually the nfl being
back i think that will impact a good amount of stocks i stayed had a good win over the weekend
but enough of this uh intro stuff here let's uh let's start the conversation off. Options, Mike, we had you up here.
You got a...
What's bothering you?
Bothering me?
No, nothing particularly bothering me.
I mean, you know, we gapped down on Friday,
and you got follow-through to the 8th day,
and you got a big gap down today,
and we're under the 21-day on the SPY.
And the market's in a little bit of a pullback situation here. Now, how far this goes, I don't know. The last time we closed under the 21 day was back on August 1st, so first
trading day of the month. Kind of symmetry if we do that again here in September. And then we gapped
up the next day and we squeezed everybody that was short the market and then ran to a new all-time
high. That kind of seems to be how this market works.
You know, two weeks ago when we had four or five down days in a row, we gapped up and squeezed everybody to a new all time high.
You know, there's no really good reason the market's doing this other than maybe it's tired.
You know, if you look out there, some names are showing more strength than others.
For what it's worth, coin went green and is holding it.
Palantir went green and is holding it.
So they came buying those back up here.
Microsoft defended the 500 area again.
AMD pushed back up off the lows.
Google's the highs of the day, hoods near highs and meta, not as much that much power.
But overall, things are kind of, you know, there's no real heavy selling pressure here today evan but they're definitely hiding in
gold if you look at gold at an all-time high here today and silver near the highs they're they're
definitely moving to gold they're hiding in gold uh obviously there's something you know they're
worried about something or that's just a safety place right now uh you know overall the banks which have been so strong and leading, they're down a little bit today
with the markets, but they're not falling apart.
They're not collapsing.
The VIX spiked up into the 1870 area, but it's come off the highs for a while now.
And the market looks like it's trying to push up.
It's still out of the Bollinger Bands as we speak here by quite a bit, but not going
anywhere. It's not looking particularly harmful here or problematic at the moment uh
bonds all day have been kind of funky here uh we've had a little bit of a front market popping
here market uh on bonds markets uh bonds dumping here ahead of the anticipated rate cut two weeks
from tomorrow i think it's the fed meeting so some weirdness going on out there, energy holding in, the XLE with a big gap there,
and Chevron, but it couldn't push into them today.
It touched them, kissed them, it danced around it, but couldn't put it in.
I'm trying not to overly read into this.
I know seasonality, every big firm out there, Goldman, Morgan Stanley,
a couple others talked about how historically
September is by far the worst month of returns in the market. But that doesn't mean it has to
be the case. And I do really believe if we can get any kind of good weakness in this market,
it'll be a very viable dip into the end of the year. Unless we get some type of, you know,
just, you know, chaotic event that comes into the nature of the markets. So right now, if you're looking at the SPY,
a 3% pullback would put you at $629.99 if you want to be precise.
The 50-day is also sitting right at that spot,
and that would make a lot of sense to pop down there and test that.
5% is down at $617.
So you start going on your charts, you start putting some levels on there
and saying, okay, this is places I'm interested in maybe looking to buy
and see how we react around them. It's also a great time to get your shopping list
together for everybody who's missed out on some of these names. You know, Snow had a great report.
NVIDIA, any dip I think is probably viable long-term there. I think AMD might be viable
if we get a nice little dip on it as well. As you said, I still, I got rid of my options. Apple has
an event next week i mean
it typically runs into that and apples didn't really fall apart today it's you know it's kind
of holding okay and i think that's just kind of things here things are kind of holding okay it was
uh and boeing's had a good day boeing's green i mean they came running back for a couple names
uh pepsi had the news that uh elliot took a four4 billion stake and they sold that news off today.
And just kind of being careful here. I did a lot of little trades today.
Took a couple paper cuts, had a couple decent ones, didn't have any home runs, wasn't looking for them.
But, you know, trade with TQQQ, called Palantir, trade a little bit of SPX and a little bit of NVIDIA.
So trade a little bit of everything here and there.
Took a couple of paper cuts, but didn't let things sit too long to get in trouble.
That's about it.
Yeah, I appreciate you, Mike.
And as always, everyone can feel free to jump in on the conversations.
I'm curious.
Oh, and welcome back, Em.
Yeah, excited to have him back.
So it was a three-day weekend, which one, on contracts means, you know,
this is our quote-unquote Monday.
It's really Tuesday, but there's only four days left until expiry.
Maybe there's more energy on the three-day weekends coming into it.
I'm just curious on what today what this morning if there was any
differences on a day like today there was there was volume in that first hour and then it kind
of faded off right i think we did about 20 million i don't remember exactly 20 million shares in the
first hour which is about 8 million higher than we've been doing but since then it really dropped
off so whatever it was it it quickly kind of dissipated.
And maybe they're just waiting here.
I don't know.
Maybe they're concerned about the whole tariff thing.
But I think there's just so much on that that I can't even put my head around it right now.
So that plays out a little further. Appreciate you there. Let's go over to uh godfather next once you uh intro us in a little bit and some
of the topics that you've been watching this week or i guess today yeah so um um it does it kind of
feels uh as i said in the small cap show a bit like coming back after the christmas holidays
with with the adults back in the room um you know, this market that incessantly, you know, afforded short-term momentum trade gains.
You know, is this, is it, is it a change here?
You know, do we, do we actually see a September swoon?
I won't, you know, reiterate these seasonality things.
I think everybody knows that it's typical that we do
see some sort of a summer swoon. My feed, at least, is full of all this talk about global
yield surging. I know there's some additional talk about that being accentuated by this tariff
situation. I think that's a little bit of noise around the edge.
And the bottom line is that, you know, inflation is stubborn and deficit spending continues.
As much as Trump likes to trumpet the fact that he's bringing in all this money in tariffs,
the reality is that deficit spending continues apace in the US. You know, there was some
the deficit spending continues apace in the U.S.
You know, there was some 200 billion in new issuance just in the last five weeks.
So a stubborn inflation and a weak labor market.
And, you know, we saw ISM relatively weak and the revisions even weaker.
This all kind of points to a stipulationary environment, which is, of course, the Fed's worst nightmare and not great for markets.
So, you know, what does it boil down to?
I think, and it's kind of been my premise all the way through this year,
that the cadence of future rate cuts is less than what the market expects.
You know, you've got this, you know, central bank cutting across the globe,
yet you've got, you know, longer end yields
surging. So, you know, in spite of this, you've got global equity sentiment. If you sort of pile
together all of the indicators, the volatility, the put-call ratios, the surveys, you know, all
this kind of stuff, that's sort of the 93rd percentile, and you've got valuations that are
up around the same level. So there's a disconnect here. It's certainly, you know, the market would coincide. Those kind of conditions would coincide.
Max positioning, max margin debt, you know, add on all these things, you know, into a couple of
weeks here where there's not a lot of earnings and we've got, you know, a bunch of economic data,
jolts, of course, employment numbers at the end of the week.
So, you know, I think there's the conditions are right for penetration of the 50 days.
You know, we're flirting with it with the queues today.
Mike mentioned how close we are on the S&P.
You know, I think it's kind of anomalous that the IWM is still 4% away from its 50.
I see all of these names, you know, dipping below.
But that said, I also agree with what Mike said.
You know, these things will be viable going into the fall.
So, you know, what does it mean?
It means, you know, keep your powder dry.
It means, you know, save yourself for really compelling setups.
you know, save yourself for really compelling setups. You know, personally, I added a few more
shorts in this market in anticipation that the next two to three weeks, you know, could lead to
more of a headwind than a tailwind in terms of general market, especially when it comes to some
of these leadership groups and technology names, which, you know, seem to be the most sensitive to
a view that rates are not going down or down as much
at the pace that the market would like. So you've got that. I've been on this particular space
talking at length about, I'm bullish about housing going into the second half of the year. I thought
it was interesting that there's more chatter coming out, you know, through Bessent about, you know, going into the midterms of the Trump administration starting to pull triggers from a
regulatory standpoint and other things to stimulate the housing market. But I'm cautious,
a little bit cautious there in so much as, you know, last time they did cut rates, we did see
the 10-year go up. And here we are at levels on the 10-year today
that we haven't seen since the 1st of August. And we're flirting with over 5% in the 30-year.
So this is what really matters. So I'm keeping that on the radar screen. I don't currently have
a position there, but I have been trading in and out of the NAIL ETF as it reacts to the market,
more as a trading day in swings type
trades. But longer term, I do think that group, with some help from administration and environment
that's friendly on rates, could be one of the bigger winners in the second half of the year.
I am playing gold for all the reasons I just mentioned with respect to rates here and silver
breaking to a 13-year high. You know, these moves tend to have, you know,
some legs to them over at least multi-days.
So again, in this long-term investing here,
this is swing trading.
It's interesting to see, as we speak,
you know, at new highs of the day on gold,
despite these big moves that occurred over the weekend.
So these are the sort of things that I'm watching and yeah,
we're in focus.
You mentioned Zscaler.
I think,
you know,
the other names later this week and a light earnings calendar that,
at least on my radar,
AEO,
American Eagle next,
I guess tomorrow after close CRM,
CRDO. And then of course, AVGO and Broadcom on Thursday.
Those are one of the biggies for me.
I'll leave it there.
Nice.
I appreciate you, Godfather.
Yeah, there are definitely an earnings or two this week that are very interesting,
and they are very large.
Broadcom, Salesforce, Lululemon maybe in its heyday.
We'll see.
But Broadcom, Salesforce will be some interesting ones.
I know Sam and a lot of other people will be interested in the GitLab.
It's going to be an interesting week.
I appreciate you, Godfather.
Wolfie, I want to throw it over to you next
and just kind of get your initial thoughts here.
We're on these Monday spaces.
What are you excited?
Yeah, did you say two seconds?
Or you say, what's up?
No, you said Monday.
I said Tuesday.
It is Tuesday.
It feels like Monday.
But I feel like the stocks on spaces and during the week, I like to kind of go through and just get everyone's thoughts.
I feel like it's a good way to start it off.
How are we feeling?
You know, what are you excited for this week?
If there's any known events, what may be event stories from last week or over the weekend or kind of nagging in your head that you're digging in on a little bit?
They're kind of nagging in your head that you're digging in on a little bit.
How are we feeling?
How are we feeling?
I mean, as far as the market's concerned,
I don't think anything's changed from my perspective from the other day till now.
I think the one clerical thing that you can point to
is that we finally actually broke the 20-day.
I know we undercut it late August and and then you know reclaimed it got an incremental
high or whatever but the 50 day is going to be basically your spot in the sand on the s&p
6325 call it give or take um you know i i don't like
trying to you know chase one way or the other i think for the last few weeks i've been pretty
clear where i've been i've been hiding in like energy and some of these uh cyclical trades and
they've been working i trimmed quite a bit i just have some runners left on some of these energy
names for now because i think they've performed now for almost two and a half weeks um you know
the gold breakout was notable there was a
time it was like three weeks ago we were talking about you know some of these trades and i think
you had i think her name is i think her name is mish i don't remember but whenever you had her on
i think you know she and i shared a similar sentiment about being uh long gold it was like
on a ratio chart uh versus crypto versus some of the other assets versus silver especially where it was uh you know a viable zone and it's it broke out today
um i do think that the yields kind of hovering 30 years especially hovering around five percent
uh with um you know a 90 plus certainty of of rates being cut is kind of a tell.
I think Godfather spoke on it pretty nicely there.
I don't need to get into the exact points on it.
But yeah, I think if you've got something that's working,
you lighten up as it goes, you do all that and you manage it.
I don't like to also on the
other side i don't like to try to find uh exogenous type sell-offs into resistance so like
um take a look at the vix for example shot back up to the 200 day it did that in early august and
then reset and here we are it backed off now
if it breaks out you know then then you might be onto something but given that it hasn't uh i think
you just kind of like set up your levels set up what's uh outperforming what looks good and move
from there so on that note you know china's specifically baba has been outperforming since their earnings and their ai uh stuff i think you i think we talked about it already um and it still is outperforming
somewhere around hive day it's one that i own uh some of these other you know type of rotationary
plays have been been outperforming you take a look at what like worked earlier in the session it was basically like xlp xlv and energy there's kind of like a flight that's in conjunction with like the
precious metal so it's like a flight to safety you know let's figure it out later type of thing
um but i do think that you know some of these stocks so they could go like i'll just pick on
amazon for example uh they trade back to its 50 day. It's going to be like your, your bull bear, you know,
point in the sand inflection point or whatever. And then I think there's some stuff that's like
kind of working under the, under the hood for lack of a better word that, um, you know,
it's kind of going unnoticed. So for example, uh, there was a fear that they would have the um
they would have the 7 500 ev tax credit uh you know come completely off the table and stocks like
rivian for example specifically let me pick on that one because i've been watching it
um they they sold off pretty aggressively.
And Rivian sold off for the last like three months or so,
back down to the $12 level.
Well, you know, since they've made an amendment to the amendment to the amendment,
where now you can get the credit so long as you have the agreement in place by a set date,
particularly that stock, stocks outperforming performing today breaking out of a downtrend reclaimed a 200 day retested it this morning and now pressing
back towards last last week's high so like there are things that kind of work another one that was
working earlier i'm not sure if it's we're going to check uh yeah another one that's working earlier
is alta right um you know kind of sold off on the back earnings and then right back to where it was so there are
things that you know they're buying that we'll see if it's like a one or two day thing or if it's like
a beginning of some sort of like rotationary thing again um you know specifically china for
me is the one i want to pay attention to because that's been underperforming for quite some time
so if there's like some sort of flight to safety to international specifically to china i think there's a lot of room to possibly run especially
ahead of some you know some rumored thing that we're going to have probably in the next couple
of months when things don't look that too hot they'll float out the china stuff so you know
it's one thing i want to pay attention to um And then outside of that, I like some of these.
I've liked some of these industrial names.
I've liked deer for the year.
Caterpillar has been, you know, really, really doing awesome.
But they are starting to show some signs of fatigue.
Deer broke its 200 day today, for example.
Cats flirting with its 50 day and
and those are like important names to pay attention to especially from a
from from the perspective of the dow given the dow is as price weighted not uh market cap weighted
so yeah i think i think some of these beaten up names um that that there might be candidates for rotation. I can think like some of these retail names,
some of these like idiosyncratic dispersion type of,
you know, asymmetric opportunities.
Take a look at AEO, for example,
like is this Winnie thing going to be the beginning of something
or is it just going to be like a hype thing?
I tend to think this is possibly the start of something,
especially with the Travisvis kelsey signing as well um and then you know some of these some of these uh some of these types of
moves that you wouldn't expect to be working that i've been working like win for example
stock's been on fire i think it's given back some but you know some of these uh betting plays, for example, like some of this stuff's been working
and it's moving kind of against what your quote-unquote macro would tell you.
And it's possibly positioning ahead of a rate cut cycle,
maybe run it hot type of thing.
But, you know, that's kind of like where my head's at.
I don't think that I...
Go for it.
I love a good buy the hype, sell the actual event.
This is the actual NFL being back.
I am really, really interested to see what type of dent these betting markets put into
the fan duels of the world.
And if they actually do...
Fan duel, dApps, I'm sure.
But football is the ultimate litmus test. of the world and if they actually do like spend will adapt i'm sure you know but you know football
is the ultimate litmus test well if you listen to robin hood they said that 95 of their contracts
that were traded and the prediction markets were on sports and five percent were on uh you know
other stuff you know and and football is the king of that so this is the the real litmus test and
we'll see yeah i don't so for me i don't think that's going to be
you know one of those winner take all type of things i think there's just the pie grows right
like you you have a robin hood account maybe it's an options account and like for for many people
especially a young cohort you know what's the difference between betting on a shit coin betting
on an option betting on an event there's really. It's like, this is my funny money.
It's my play money.
Maybe I can take a small amount, turn it into something meaningful.
I think that the young cohort specifically, that's how they think.
But I do want to see if some of these moves.
Just take a look at DraftKings, for example.
DraftKings off of the April lows was trading at 30 bucks it's pushing like
close to 50 now uh 50 basically like it's a line in the sand that's where it broke down from
you know early march uh after a really solid uh earnings a really solid earnings in february and
then it's just like kind of sort of off. So like getting to like critical points,
the one again, for me,
that that's kind of been interesting has been when,
especially since they have like a Macau,
a Macau foothold, you know?
So I want to see,
is this one of those things where,
you know, all these names continue to rise?
Or are we going to get to a point where like what you said,
the numbers are good,
the math's going to have to start mapping.
So it's kind of like what I want to see.
It also to me is like a gauge of risk appetite.
Like if people are still willing to gamble, how bad can things be kind of thing?
Or, you know, the flip side or the devil's advocate to that is maybe people have gotten so bad they're willing to gamble at all.
But I don't think we're there yet.
I don't think we're there yet.
So but that's that's pretty much it.
From my I don't want to like hog the mic or anything more than i have so just kind of like where i'm
at look for idiosyncratic plays look for things that could possibly rip rotations and then watch
your levels if we sell off to important levels and we hold willing to take a shot but for me
i like to stay you know away from some of these megas because I feel like there's other stocks that can perform here in the short term.
Speaking of those prediction apps, I opened my CalShea for the first time in a while and I had money on there.
I thought I opened, I was like, ooh, that's interesting.
And then I actually checked and I deposited more than I had.
But it was kind of like extra money.
So I was like, yeah, whatever, we'll bet it.
So I put it in.
How high will Ethereum reach this year?
Will it get above $6,000?
I took yes.
And it was like, what, three to one ounce, something like that?
33%, 35%. So I'll let you know.
I'll let you all know.
Real quick, the Apple headline was not just an AI.
It was their chief engineer for robotics AI.
So if Apple is going to develop potentially this, like, you know, whatever it was, tabletop thing, AI thing.
So whoever that person is probably in charge of it but we spent so much time on this space is
telling me why a little ai top thing makes no sense so that person it's not it's not it's not
hold on a second it's not a we it was it was stock talk who told you that um but i i mean i think a
lot i think a lot of people here don't know what it is and they want to see what it is before they could you know it just doesn't sound sounds weird you see apple's head of uh robotics
though ahead of the project who's working on the desktop uh thing he's going to meta does that make
you bearish meadow i'm kidding but um so apple probably forced him to make a tabletop robotic
classic no i'm gonna go with the thing that was him well we'll see what it even is but Apple probably forced him to make a tabletop robotic and that's why he left. Classic. No, I'm going to go
with the thing that was him. Well, we'll see what it even
is, but
yeah. Interesting times.
Call me off guard there at the end. The Rivian
conversation.
Wolfie is Rivian one you've taken?
I know you said you're just watching
it, right? Yeah.
It kind of fits it fits
with the rate cut theme a little bit not directly but more easy money and so i've been long rivian
i've been long rivian since last year i've uh you know i've taken options twice now and i play it
basically into this like ten dollar range last year i was playing in ten dollar range this year
i'm playing it just like riding a trend but uh rivian and I'm not comparing Rivian to Tesla so don't take
this away but Rivian's got a similar setup to Tesla in that they're making a mass market vehicle
and if they could bring down their their burn rate uh and then they have some sort of adoption
on this mass market vehicle that's supposed to sell at around 45k then you know it's undervalued
right so it's it's that kind of setup no one's no one's saying they're coming for tesla no one's
saying any of that stuff but it's that similar setup um it's kind of now 2026 story because
that's when they're they're uh r2 supposed to launch and yeah if rates come in and you know
people can have interest rates at a lower price and then their ASP comes down and it's a mass market vehicle, I do think they could take some sort of share in the EV market.
I'm not saying they're going to come for anybody in particular, but I think a meaningful uptick for them is a meaningful uptick for the stock.
So what does meaningful mean?
You do the math, do whatever, and you can figure that out.
But I don't think they have to be like an actual competitor for the stock to actually move significantly.
So, yeah, on back of sell offs for the way I've been playing it, I've been taking, you know, next year calls and that's been working for the better part of a year.
It's ticked up to 17 bucks, give or take twice now in the last year.
That's going to be the next level that I want to pay attention to on a breakout. I think if it gets above that $17 level, that Hopium into next year for their R2 launch probably takes hold. And then
rubber meets the road, for lack of a better word. That's when the numbers have to matter,
and we'll see what happens. So I've been trying to take more positions in this more,
I guess, Rivian 17 billion.
So I don't know what we call that.
Technical old terms would be large cap,
but that feels more like the mid cap range nowadays.
I've been trying to take more plays in that area as we've talked and just where my risk reward is actually at versus where my portfolio is at.
And Rivian was one of the names that I have taken a position in.
And, you know, it's not saying it will go to necessary points,
but there's the ifs there and the opportunity in front of it
does seem pretty large and is a compelling thing,
especially as they get more into this autonomous area.
I wonder, so Rivian is one that I've been building,
honestly, across a couple portfolios.
My average cost basis, let's say, is like 13.10, 13.12.
And it honestly is
meaningful position for me. I would say
a top 10, top 5 individual stock
holding now, top 10.
So, I don't know. Does anyone else have any
thoughts on Arrivian?
Stock talk, could I maybe throw that at you?
Was there some news, or are you just talking about it in general?
So there was news wolfie
was talking about i have not dug in too far into myself uh into it myself but i think it was
something around the ev tax credit and maybe it it not being as immediate fall off as before
um but just in general that kind of just rivian play the the the taking a flyer chance on it you
know rate cuts going down, a little easier money.
Is there an opportunity there on Rivian?
Honestly, I'm thinking of similar Lyft type vibe there.
Is that something?
I wouldn't classify it with Lyft at all.
I think Lyft is outperforming these last couple weeks
because it's just really cheap.
I don't think Rivian's cheap.
But the technical structure is good here the monthly
weekly and daily charts are constructive um you could probably catch an easy move from here to 16
from there on i mean there's some supply you have to eat through um i mean look two or three good
months and this thing is going to look incredible coming off the lows from the monthly perspective.
But it's going to need two or three good months.
And, you know, that's going to be tricky to string together here in the back half of the year.
Is it a trade that is my type of trade?
I mean, volume profile is not really particularly decisive.
I'm not a big fan of the company or the management personally.
I know Hamid is a big fan, isn't come up here, and has done a lot of great research on them.
But I'm personally not a fan of the management.
And I'm also not a fan of the Tesla comps.
Because I don't think Tesla is a trillion dollar company or whatever it is.
Mark Kemp is today of 700 billion or whatever because of EVs. I just don't think that's the
case. I think that premium comes from Elon Musk primarily. And, you know, on the periphery comes
from the idea that Tesla has optionality. I don't think Rivian has any of that optionality.
Rivian is nothing but a car company.
You know, there's an attempt to make them seem like more than that because they're painted
as a peer to Tesla, but I don't see them as a peer.
So yeah, I mean, is there a trade to be made there?
Probably the chart looks good.
Is it a stock that I'm particularly interested in?
Gotcha, gotcha.
No worries on that one.
I actually think you should trade at a discount to Tesla,
if I'm being really honest.
I mean, Tesla's a trillion-dollar company.
Rivian is $16 billion, so I'd argue it is.
I mean, they're not.
They're not direct comms on volume standpoint, obviously.
And, I mean...
So what is Tesla the car company worth?
Maybe it's $100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000?
I don't know.
Maybe like with the autonomous stuff in there.
I mean, look, car companies are not valuable.
Cars are commodities.
They always are and they always will be.
Hardware is only valuable and deserving of a leadership position multiple if that hardware is hard for others to build.
That's like literally the only scenario where hardware sustains multiple premium and sustains that level of speculation.
That's really rare.
It's really rare for it to be hard to build stuff.
In fact,
chips is one of the only areas where that rings true, right? Chips are hard to build,
and they're hard to design too. And so in chips, you see a lot of companies enjoying multiples
like that. And in many cases, they don't even really seem expensive. NVIDIA being a good example
of that, where stock has gone up a lot,, valuation has gone up a lot, but it's not technically expensive on paper.
That's rare to find.
And in the car business, it's perhaps even more rare than it is in other industries.
So, yeah, I just don't get the Rivian bull case, the long-term bull case.
I don't get it.
It doesn't make sense to me.
Like, what, they're going to sell more cars?
Okay.
I just don't see what high-mar margin component of their business is even potentially possible.
So I think if you are looking at EV companies and you want to like find the next quote unquote
Tesla, you try to find a company that has a high margin optionality business on the
side that they can flex and hype up and tell stories about and drive the stock price.
Rivian doesn't have those things.
All right.
We can keep on moving there.
I like to leave that pause there in case anyone does want to jump in.
But, yeah, we'll see.
Maybe next time when Hamid's up up here we'll dig more into this conversation
as well we enjoy the back and forth i think it is good uh stock geek you've been hanging out
uh with us for a while any parts of the conversation that have been interesting for
you anything you're watching today yes sir good to be here guys thanks for having me
uh interesting day with yields up and small caps still on a relative basis, at least outperforming
the megas. That's, that's unusual. So that's, that's interesting. There's also some underlying
strength in a few areas like retail. Biotech is another one. There's like, you know, it's a,
it's a strange day. It looks like the algos are trying to figure out what the hell they want to do.
But yeah, there's pockets of strength, pockets of small cap weakness,
despite the fact that you've got yields up.
So yeah, trying to make sense of it on a one day basis is a little difficult.
We're going to have to see how the rest of the league plays out.
ways out. But I'm in the Baba trade that's doing well still. Hoping that the AI narrative catches
But I'm in the Baba trade.
That's doing well still.
a little more fire there on the China side. I also have a small sympathy play there with VNet,
which is basically like a Chinese data center builder. We'll see if that goes anywhere. It's
not having a great day today, but I think if the AI narrative does catch fire there on the China side, that could be one
that has some more upside. Yeah. I mean, honestly, other than that, just kind of watching action,
looking for some opportunities. And this week, y'all mentioned a few of the high profile earnings
reports, Lulu, Battleground stock. I don't have a position, but I'll be watching that closely on
Thursday. It's basically sitting at its 20-year low in terms of valuation multiple.
I think it's only been lower once during the GFC.
And international side of the business is a bright spot, but domestic is weak.
And you had Gap last week with weakness and Athleta and Athleisure on their side.
So it's going to be tough.
I think they're going to have to put up good domestic numbers to beat back the bear narrative. But I am going to be watching that one because
there's a potential for a big move there on Thursday. And other than that, yeah, I agree
on the Rivian stuff. I was just looking at the numbers here again. The guidance for this year
is 46,000 vehicles delivered at the high end, but they're still going to burn close to 4 billion,
you know, negative 2.2 billion of adjusted EBITDA. And then you throw in another 1.8,
1.9 billion of CapEx they got to spend on top. Man, that's like, where's the, you know, where's
the profitability scaling going to come from here? It's tough, but you know but maybe in a few years, if they could four or five X the output
and production, maybe you get there. But yeah, this is a tough one as I'm looking at the
numbers here. But nonetheless, price action obviously can tell a different story than
the fundamentals from time to time. So yeah, no other groundbreaking thoughts outside that.
Yeah, no, I appreciate that.
You know, the market is a little forward looking and we'll see.
There is this new line that they want to get to that more profitable way,
but clearly they just need to sell more cars and they need to change their lineup.
But I appreciate the thoughts there.
Honestly, we'll probably maybe even dig into more deep thoughts on specific stocks.
If anyone has any nice things to say about BM&R, I'd be interested to hear thoughts.
Appreciate you stock geeks.
Kirk, you a BM&R guy?
Not really, no.
I bought a whole bunch of Ethereum back in summer and late 2020, and I sold it all at the start of this year.
So, not a big believer in the whole story, to be honest with you.
What about it, though? What made you sell?
So, you know, I was up 900%, so that was a pretty good reason to sell.
Why not get back? So what got you in in the first place?
I just thought it sold off so much that with all the money printing that people largely were going to conflate crypto as one big group.
Largely, we're going to conflate crypto as one big group.
They look at Ethereum in a similar way to Bitcoin, which they should not.
And I think that's changed as time has gone by.
I think people are understanding the differentiation.
I tried to do a mathematical modeling of what it would take for Ethereum to be worth its price.
And by taking a look at the fees that it generated, and I got to the point where I was like,
okay, if they can take over 5 or 10 or 20% of the revenues that are in software as a service,
then it started to make sense.
But the problem with Ethereum is that if it replaces a lot of software as a service,
necessarily the fees have to be much lower than the types of revenues that the SAAS companies are generating.
So I have a hard time thinking that Ethereum is going to get there anytime soon.
I've talked to private equity firms about doing real estate transactions using blockchain.
So I just think we're a lot further away from this all adopting.
I think that there's potential for disruption, a lot of potential for disruption, not only
from other blockchain technologies, but quantum computing.
other blockchain technologies, but quantum computing.
So it just seemed like the easy money had been made.
You know, I had a big gain.
I did buy 32 and fractional.
So I had 32 of them to do the validation.
And I had a guy handling that for me because I didn't understand it.
I think he charged me too much.
But, you know, I think the reality is that there's a lot of hype in this right now.
I know Tom Lee is a big deal.
And I think that maybe in the very long term, this can become something that software as a service incorporates or somehow replaces parts of that business.
And I think that maybe in the very long term,
But I just think it's a long, hard road, and I think it's already priced for the successes that might not come for 10 or 20 years.
Interesting, interesting. That is fair enough.
Yeah, I do think that people need to model it out.
I mean, it's not like Bitcoin, right?
So what is it really competing with and how does it get revenue? And I think it's very likely that your big SAAS companies end up being, you know, I think they offer a different alternative at some point.
The thought is right now is the alternative they're going to offer is more like it being built on ethereum like a layer two or whatever it is but it doesn't have to be doesn't have to be
doesn't have to be and and i'm i'm sure they'd prefer that it wasn't
right i mean why would they want to compete you know one, one thing that I maybe disagree with on that
is the timeframe for when the value for these chains
is going to be delivering that value.
It doesn't have to be Ethereum,
but I think the underlying idea of stable coins
and then tokenization and all that stuff is,
I would not classify that as decade out timeframes.
And I would classify that as probably
within the five year timeframe,
which I think the market can start to speculate on a little bit more.
My opinion,
but we'll see.
You know,
I was at CES 2020 and this was a big topic back then.
you know,
we're already five years into that two years.
And so I think there's a lot to be determined.
I think the big difference, and this dangerous thing to say, is the regulation around it, that the U.S. has been very anti this.
And, you know, maybe there has been, maybe we would be at a different place if it wasn't like that.
a different place if it wasn't like that but i also think that one thing that ethereum has in
favor and ethereum like bait well more stable coins than ethereum itself is that propagates
and pushes the us dollar whereas bitcoin kind of goes against that so even in future administrations
i find it hard to believe that a stable coin grabbing scale and and propagating the us dollar
even more across the world and then token.S. dollar even more across the world, and then tokenization, propagating U.S. stocks more across the world.
To me, that's something that future administrations would be hard to kind of walk back, whereas Bitcoin, that is kind of an anti-U.S. dollar thing.
So, I don't know.
I understand that argument, I do.
And the idea is that the stablecoins will give us more penetration into emerging markets, right?
The problem with that is there's just not a lot of money there.
We want to cannibalize other U.S. Treasury and note sales because we're going to be able to put it into, you know, stable coins that try to get us this teeny tiny slice of the pie that is emerging markets, when you take out your Indias and Chinas and a couple in Southeast Asia,
which are never going to do this anyway if they're not already on our side,
you're basically taking a look at Africa and South America.
I just don't really see the stablecoin argument to be with you.
I understand it. I've been thinking about it for years.
I just can't see where it circumvents or supersedes the geopolitics that are out there.
You know, it disrupts really big piles of money. I mean, I could be wrong,
but I think that it's a hard enough bet that I'm going to anti-duke this one.
You know, anti-duke, Thinking in Bets, great book.
If you don't have to make a hard decision, don't make it.
And I think that this is a really hard decision.
And maybe it pays off someday,
but I don't think it's soon,
and I don't think it's soon,
and I don't think the regulatory thing was, I think that was always coming.
I don't think it's that big of a deal, to be honest with you.
It was going to happen one way or the other. And it's just, if you take a look at the numbers,
I mean, if you really break down the numbers, and now you've got AI to do it for you,
if you really break down the numbers, and now you got AI to do it for you, if you really break down the numbers, the prices don't make sense. They just don't make sense
for what's going to happen in the next year or two. So do you want to bet on something that's
less certain and further out or more certain and closer to you? To me, this is less certain and further out.
So I take a pass.
If you become a billionaire on it, God bless you.
I hope you're buying stakes for everybody.
But I think it's a hard bet.
I just really think it's a hard bet.
And even though the stock market has become even more like a casino
than it's ever been, I'm still trying
to avoid really hard bets.
I think there's actually, I did have something to talk to you about, though, is I've been
researching the regional banks all year.
And I got put onto it by a couple of people who have been kind to me over the years.
by a couple of people who have been kind to me over the years.
And, you know, I was in San Francisco
checking out some of the old First Republic banks
that are now JP Morgan a while back.
I really think that there's some big banking problems coming
and they've been able to do the extended pretend for a long time.
If we get an economic slowdown or, God forbid, a recession, there are
a lot of banks that really have a problem. And we've seen some slight deterioration in the repo
market already. But what I really think I'm targeting, and I'm actually thinking of shorting a few banks. Our banks in the Southwest in particular,
Phoenix and Las Vegas, because Las Vegas is really beat to shit right now. So that means that there's
going to be a lot of foreclosures that's already starting. You can look up the data.
The cars are getting repossessed. If cars are getting repossessed, that's really bad
because that's usually the last thing people get rid of.
And I think Phoenix, and I'm going there again in a couple of weeks,
man, it's just so damn hot.
And it's so landlocked now.
I don't see...
Intel's got a problem.
You know, they're a big deal.
I'm going to be staying right by Intel.
I see Phoenix is having a problem.
So when you take a look at the data, right, okay, you have this idea that there might be a problem, so you look at the data.
The data out west is not good.
And, you know, there are certain banks that you should be real concerned with.
I would not be an investor in First Busey, B-U-S-E. I would not be an investor in Cathay
General Bank Corp, C-A-T-Y. I think they both can come down 20% to 60%. But the one that might
leave a mark, because the other two are smaller banks, 2 and 3 billion,
is Western Alliance Bank Corp that's in both cities, Las Vegas and Phoenix.
And they've rebounded off their 2022 bottom, which was similar to their 2020 bottom.
And they're up almost triple.
This is a bank that I think could go first republic on us.
Sovereign, SVB, that sort of thing.
I'm very strongly considering taking a pretty strong short position here.
And, you know, it's not an exciting stock.
It's not something that most people have been in.
But at a $10 billion market cap with a pretty small dividend yield because the
share price has gone up so much i think at a minimum we have uh momentum on this stock that
is falling off uh the revisions are terrible the valuation's not good at this price they don't have
a lot of growth they don't have a lot of growth. They don't have a lot of profitability. They really don't have anything great going for them at all. And they're technically stretched.
Does it tip over soon? I don't know. It's at a spot where it could break out a little bit further.
But if it doesn't break out, then it's probably rolling over. And it's a pretty cheap short. And if you're making macro bets,
I think it's a pretty easy one to play into a weakening macro environment. And that's what
I'm looking for. I'm looking for things that I can't really get too beat up on if we don't get
a macro shock or we don't get a recession or we don't get a slowdown.
But again, all the data is pointing to at least a slowdown. And, you know, a lot of valuations are stretched, especially in the banking sector, which doesn't really make a lot of sense.
So, you know, I'll take that for what it's worth. I am pretty deep into the financial
sector, even though I rarely invest in it. I've mainly shorted it in my career,
and I've used it as a macro bet.
Interesting, interesting. Kirk, how much of your calculus goes into
you know the quote-unquote deregulation that's coming
how much of my what how much of your calculus like how much do you how much do you take into
effect the quote-unquote deregulation that's coming or i'll take it a step further or uh
the loosening of regulations and kind of like uh, you know, quid pro quo, buy our debt, get beneficial treatment.
Right.
So, you know, whether it's SLR or whatever is going on out there, to me, what's going on in deregulation right now is similar to the five, six years leading up to the financial crisis.
I don't like the fact that they're going to put private equity in the 401k plans
because I don't think that they'll do it well. Not that I'm against private equity, right? You
guys know I play in that space. But I think that most people don't understand the leverage that's out there.
I don't think that enough people understand the idea of don't be the exit liquidity.
So I think the deregulation in general is going to be overdone because I think it's going to be more deregulated than what we did before the financial crisis.
And clearly, we tried to tighten the screws too tight after.
You know, we never seem to be at equilibrium.
So I am very concerned about that.
I don't know the timeframe though, right?
I mean, that is really the hardest part
because if they can find a way
to put one more big lump of liquidity into the system
to justify the price to M2 ratios
by raising M2, then how long can this go? I don't know, but I do think that given valuations in a lot of spots and on aggregate,
that we're on thin ice.
I don't know if we're ready to fall through or if we're going to slide all the way across and make it to shore again.
I don't know.
But I think that the bets are getting harder and harder.
And I'm trying to take less risk at a time when there's a lot of pom-poms and cheerleaders out
there, which in my career has on four different occasions been the signal to say, hmm, maybe I
should go a little bit higher up in the bleachers. Because, I mean, look, we have twice as many
traders now as we did seven or eight years ago. And I've written articles saying that I think
actually the millennials are pretty damn good traders. So I would ask you this.
We can't predict exactly when a macro thing is going to happen, whether deregulation is going to
exactly when a macro thing is going to happen, whether deregulation is going to cause a spike
and a crash. I mean, I think it probably does. But I think what we can ask is, are the millennials
good enough traders when their nine-day moving average gets broken and when their 20-day moving
average gets broken, are they going to sit there like deer in the headlights or are they going to
be among the first to sell? I think they're going to sell. I think are they going to sit there like deer in the headlights or are they going to be among the first to sell?
I think they're going to sell. I think traders are going to sell.
And now that you have twice as many traders up to, what, one-fifth of the market is trading, which is huge,
what does that do to trigger algorithms?
You know, how far down does it go if the millennials flip the switch?
And this is a question I asked four years ago. When the millennials decide to flip the switch,
because they've accumulated some wealth as traders, and in this market, the good traders
have made a lot of money, does it cause a panic? And my guess is that it does
because there's already this huge underlying pessimism, right?
It's good for me, but it's bad for everybody else.
The world's all fucked up, but I'm hanging in there.
So I just see whatever happens to the bad side,
whether it's the next one or the one after.
At some point,
deregulation is definitely part of that because if it pumps things up, you know, higher than
they are now, then we're already high.
That just means that it's an elevator shaft that we could potentially get thrown into.
So fuck it, just buy some more chain link then. get thrown into.
So fuck it, just buy some more Chainlink then.
You know what, I bought that one about four years ago too when it was nothing and Coinbase
was giving it away for free if you answered three questions.
So, you know, it's funny you mentioned Chainlink.
I think there's some rationale behind Chainlink, don't you?
I mean, I don't know which ones really survive, though.
I don't know which ones get adopted.
But, yeah, hey, YOLO, if you want to gamble, gamble.
I'm going to Vegas to gamble.
I'd rather throw $1,000 on the craps table and look at pretty girls and drink for free.
But if you want to throw $1,000 into a spec stock,
maybe your odds of winning are the same as winning Powerball tonight.
Or tomorrow, whenever they have it.
No, it's tonight. Good shout.
Billion bucks, right?
1.1 billion.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Stakes on me if I win it.
I will say, I feel like
just from a pure gambling perspective,
your odds are probably better
on the stock market than in Vegas.
Way better.
On the stock market?
Yeah.
Versus Vegas?
Yeah.
Stock talk.
Depends what you play and who you are.
Stock talk, have you done some kind of study there or something?
You answered that one really quick.
I'm a pretty avid Vegas goer.
And, you know, a couple of years ago, I would say I was a pretty avid gambler, too.
But I don't gamble as much as I used to.
But, I mean, no, I don't have any data to back the idea that gambling in the stock market is easier than gambling in casinos, but I would bet my stock market.
70% of stocks go up 70% of the time.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's just a much easier game. Like even, even if you're like to Kirk's
example, like putting a thousand dollars on a blackjack table versus putting a thousand dollars
in a meme stock. I mean, if you put any modicum of analysis into it,
your odds are exponentially higher.
I mean, it's just better than 50-50, certainly,
if you put, again, any modicum of analysis into it.
So yeah, no, I do agree that the market is more of a casino than ever.
I'm 100% with Kirk on that.
I do think there's more parts of the market to speculate on than ever before.
I think there's probably higher returns in those parts of the market than ever before.
But, I mean, I just don't think it's like 50-50 crapshoot gambling like a casino.
And even in the casino, I mean, getting 50-50 odds is pretty impossible.
odds is pretty impossible even if you get close like 47 or 48 percent odds like i mean again i
Even if you get close, like 47% or 48% odds.
think if you're thinking about what you're doing in the markets your odds are exponentially higher
than that there's no way they're not i mean unless you're just like really really really
fucking bad i mean i guess there's some people that are really really bad at markets where they
just like pick the wrong stocks constantly i mean i'm sure there's people like that but
i mean if you have any semblance of, like, you know, ability to monitor themes or analyze catalysts or analyze fundamentals or whatever your style is, like, if you're even half decent at it, your odds are way better, way better in stocks.
Way better.
Not even close.
Yeah, I'm not disagreeing with you.
I just suspected you had, like, some numbers. No, I don't disagreeing with you. I just suspected you had some numbers.
No, I don't have a metadata analysis on it or anything, no.
But I would love for someone, if they did have it, to...
Yeah, that's what I'm going to do tonight.
That sounds fun.
Yeah.
I'm sure it will indicate what I am saying.
But, I mean, then again, a lot of stock market statistics are also stupid statistics that are way too generalized like the statistic like 99 of traders fail that's
like a stupid statistic with no context right like i imagine generally that statistic is referring to
day traders and it might be true when it comes to day traders but there's no way that's true for like
all traders right because if you're a medium or long-term trader, there's no way 99% of them fail.
I mean, those are practically medium-term investors.
So, yeah, I mean, there's a ton of dumb statistics around the stock market that make no sense,
that people regurgitate all the time that I don't even know where they came from.
But, yeah, that's probably one of them.
I don't think the market is, is as much gambling as actual gambling
is. I think day trading is less profitable than people think it is. Um, Oh yeah. Day trading is,
I I've never, I've, I don't even think I've ever met a trader who is consistently profitable on
like a 10 year plus basis by day trading purely i don't
think i've ever met anyone there's a lot of people that say they are but i don't i've never met
anyone that's proven it by like taking screenshots their brokerage on a 10-year basis and showing
that they've outperformed the market by just day trading no way i mean so yeah day trading is
garbage it's garbage and it's sold to a lot of people as like a promise to get rich but it's
garbage i mean no one gets rich by like making scallops on day trades it's garbage and it's sold to a lot of people as like a promise to get rich but it's garbage i mean no one gets rich by like making scalps on day trades it's almost mathematically impossible
actually yeah it is it's it's a garbage strategy and it's probably the most discussed strategy on
twitter which is disappointing it's like the most talked about right like day trading zero dt options
or just day trading in general or like i wake up every morning and day trade SPX and visa.
Like that's the kind of stuff that gets talked about on Twitter outside of
maybe a handful of very exceptional day traders that I'm,
I'm really talking about like the 1% of the 1% outside of a handful,
maybe in the world,
I mean,
you're not going to be consistently profitable day trading.
And this is a message that goes out to people in the audience, maybe who have been trying
it for years and are confused why they're not consistently profitable.
Yeah, you're not the chances that you get there as purely a day trader.
I'm not saying you never take day trades.
I take day trades occasionally, you know, if some big news comes out or something like
I'm saying you can never take a day trade.
But for people that only day trade, I mean mean i would love to see what the results are for you over a 10-year period because it's
probably not good i will say a lot of the the better traders that i do talk to that i think
of and not all of them i've seen some actually interesting strategies but the people that i
think of as best do tend to be more in that swing trade category.
Yeah.
Yeah, no matter how good your technical analysis abilities are,
you're not going to be...
I mean, maybe you'll be consistently profitable
to the extent that you'll make $10 a year trading,
but if you want to make real money,
actual real money, and really grow your portfolio,
you're not going to do it through day trading.
You're just not.
You're just not.
And for people who disagree with that, point to me the successful day trader who grew their account for 10 years straight doing just that.
I'm not talking about when you include their investments.
No, I'm talking about somebody who's just day traded on an account.
Like show me those returns on a 10-year period.
There's no way they're good.
They might have one or two good years, but it's just not a recipe for success.
Actually, one time I saw that...
Hey, hold on, real quick.
Real quick, real quick.
I see Apple and Google and some of these other megas are sprinting after hours.
Not sure if there's a headline, but
I just wanted to call it out for Evan.
Apple. I see it, but
who knows if these... U.S. Judge Issues
Sealed Decision on Google Online Search Decision.
Oh, baby, Apple.
I mean,
do we know what the decision is?
But yeah, there is a headline. Thank you
for that. I haven't seen what that's faded
well we'll give it a second you did you see a decision in google online search in the case
i want to wait and see what's actually happening there but um yeah i appreciate that call out
someone did comment down below saying respectfully stock talk is wrong on this one.
Let's see.
Most day traders probably won't even make it 10 years.
Finally, someone talking about the gambling stock market comparisons.
So just some of the comments there.
I want to hear thoughts.
Like, listen, we're here to have an open debate.
Wait, somebody said I was wrong about the day trader thing?
I think someone said you were wrong about the day trader thing.
But listen, like...
I'm curious what they said.
What'd they say?
Literally just that you are wrong.
Yeah, so...
Oh, I guess I'm wrong.
Dogecat has been...
Out of, like, more context.
Whoever that was in the audience that thinks I'm wrong about the day trading thing, please
tell me your story.
Genuinely.
I'm not...
I'm not...
It also is not a random comment or two.
I've seen them comment before.
Not, like...
Okay, cool.
You said...
All right, well, non-random commenter.
Dogecat. Please tell me why you know otherwise i imagine you're saying that either because
you're consistently profitable day trading or that you know someone who is
and i would love to know who that person is so let me know in the comments
I'm trying to dig it
You know
I'm pretty consistent with day trading
and I don't think your comment's
incorrect
I think the better way to look
at it is
if you're consistently good at
day trading
effectively scalping for day trading,
then you're probably doing it in a healthy market.
And if you're doing it in a healthy market,
you probably will make more money leveraging for more than those,
you know,
concentrated periods of time.
So I,
I co-sign,
I co-sign the,
you know, let's say that's a good way to
textualize it that's a good way yeah because for me I you know and I can
point to you know multiple periods of time where most of my trades were day
trades but they came when you know for example Tesla goes from whatever it was
a hundred to two thousand whatever it got to.
I don't remember.
It got split.
But, you know, and if you're just trading a couple of lots, a couple of dollars at a time, you do that four or five, six times a day, you can make good money over time.
But that doesn't come close.
So what it returned, I'm just speaking about my experience, to what it returned, you know, just being in the fucking trade, right?
Yeah, just by holding it yeah and so there are times where it's advantageous um you know i i did trade
probably more than most people up here but there are way more days in this environment especially
where i go like two three four days where i don't do anything because there's there's no setup and
and the odds of the odds are not in my favor so that's that's just the i think that's the better way if you want because i don't know what that
person's gripe is but i assume that maybe it's somewhere yeah i think a lot of people's gripe
is like in bull markets this is what i think happens i think a lot of people push back on
these kind of strategy conversations because first of all, everyone has different strategies. And second of all, a lot of strategies of different kinds tend to work in bull markets, right? Like in the
last two years, pick a strategy, pick a long strategy, obviously, not a short strategy,
pick a long strategy of your choice, fundamental, technical, theme driven, technically driven.
Pick anything.
And if you had applied that trading strategy in the last two years, you probably did pretty well.
Right.
But that's confirmation bias.
And that's a product of a bull market.
Right.
Like people think because they did well using something that it is a good strategy.
Like that is the market giving you opportunity, right?
How you choose to take advantage of it.
Sure. That's up to you.
I'm not dictating that.
What I am saying is,
is that over the course of a longer period of time in the markets where you
trade through more diverse market situations,
you are not going to make money doing that.
And so I think that's also what Wolfie is sort of saying in a different way as well,
in that in a healthy market, yes, you can make money day trading.
By healthy market, I mean bull market.
In a bull market, yes, you can make money day trading because everything's going up all the time
and you're just day trading to the long side.
Yeah, you're probably going to be in the green a lot.
But you'll make more money in that type of market, riding the winners for a durable period than you will elsewise.
And also, on top of all of this, for most of you, for 99 percent of you in the audience, there's also tax implications.
And that same thing applies to the debate.
I remember Jaguar. I mean, Jaguar had a debate up here about options rolling.
Right. The same thing applies there too. There
are tax implications by constantly rolling your options, right? So you have to consider those
things too. And I mean, that's really at the bottom. The tax implications are really at the
bottom of the rung for me, even though they are, they can be a big factor depending on how much
size you're trading. But I think even without the tax implications, you consider the top-down strategy implications,
you consider the function of bull markets, which is to float leading stocks.
That is a bull market.
When you think of what is a bull market, it's a market in which the leading stocks go higher
and higher and higher and higher until they don't.
And then the bull market stops.
That's generally the most simple and basic way to paint a bull market. And in those types of markets, owning the leading stocks and
holding them has much higher ROI on your capital and much tax preferred ROI on your capital,
uh, then day trading those leading stocks. So yeah, I mean, even if you can be profitable in
Even if you can be profitable in a bull market day trading, it is not the most efficient use of your capital.
a bull market day trading, it is not the most efficient use of your capital.
All right.
So Apple is 1.
Well, now it's 1% after hours.
Google's up 2.5% after hours.
Also, Zscaler reported Q4.
It's fiscal year, 2025 earnings.
$719.2 million versus 707 estimate.
Up 21% year over year.
Non-gap EPS, 89 cents versus 80 cents.
And the guide was an increase. They were up 10% year over year non-gap EPS 89 cents versus 80 cents and the guide was an increase they were up 10% after hours and now they're only up 5% which is still good
but Google is obviously the bigger news I don't see what the verdict was but the March is running
right now yeah I'm still looking around it seems like Reuters is the source of this one and sealed decision.
I guess that means seals from us as well.
But I don't know who knows.
Someone does.
Apple has, what's up a little bit more?
Has pulled.
So buy them both till the decision is basically what they're telling you.
We call the sneaky reclaim of the 21 EMA into the close on the S&P 500 while we were chatting.
And listen, these moves.
Apple's a large stock and can
impact that tomorrow, so
we won't only just reclaim it, possibly. It could be a nice move.
Yeah, I don't know
if anyone's listening to Trump's comments
and the tariff stuff, but
he seemed like...
I don't know. It seemed
like a fake rebuttal. I don't know if anyone
was actually... At first, I read the headlines and I listened to the commentary and he was like, oh, if this
appeal gets knocked over, then we're going to have to return the tariff money. And like,
I wouldn't want to do that. We really need tariffs. And he said, if the Supreme court
reverses the appeal, he said, tariffs might come back. Like, I don't know if anyone was listening to his comments, but they were way different tone wise than his last set of comments on tariff.
Like, he seemed like he's I don't want to get ahead of myself, but maybe trying to weaponize this appeals court ruling into an off ramp.
I don't know.
But he was like, yeah, if the Supreme Court
shoots down the appeals ruling,
we might bring tariffs back.
What do you mean might?
So I don't know.
I don't know.
There were some weird comments from Trump
with 30 minutes before close.
I know we didn't talk about those much,
but they were peculiar.
His use of language was peculiar.
I also saw Kratos.
By the way, I saw Kratos moving a little bit off of it,
but moved lower.
Yeah, that's from the space board moving to Huntsville.
Which, for the record,
when they say Trump is making an announcement
on the calendar the next day,
just know it can be literally anything.
It was FIFA last time before this,
and the before time that, it was the Apple thingy.
So it was. I'm seeing the first more information around this Google Apple thing. It was FIFA last time before this and the before time that it was the Apple thingy. So it was, um, I'm seeing the first more information around this Google Apple thing. It's saying
Google must share information with competitors to remedy online search monopoly. So definitely
falling short of some of the, the more extreme stuff there, but I'm just starting to see some
of that information trickle out. I'm still watching. I think Google is at a tie of the after hours now after that.
Yeah, it's 5%.
This thing is running.
That is a big move.
That's like an earnings move.
What's the headline at?
Someone knows something.
So, first of all, it's U.S. judge issued sealed decision in Google online search monopoly case.
We got that about five minutes ago. And then now it's Google will share information. Yeah, yeah, yeah's U.S. Judge issued sealed decision in Google online search monopoly case. We got that about five minutes ago.
And then now it's Google must share information.
Google will not have to sell off Chrome.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Let me go.
Google must share information with competitors to remedy online monopolies is the one thing.
And that one that he just said there is Google will not have to sell Chrome.
Judge determines an online business.
So we'll see.
Google moving higher, though.
Wait, they said that they do not have to sell Chrome?
Do not have to sell Chrome.
Oh, well, then that's it, then.
Damn, I guess that $38 billion offer
is not going to happen, then.
He's talking about perplexity,
who made a bid in to acquire them,
which is more than their valuation.
But it was a good PR move.
Shout out perplexity.
Google must share information with contenders,
but it seems to be falling short of more of the extreme
ones. Honestly, the Google Chrome
part wasn't even the extreme ones. I still
haven't seen more on the search business and
their relationship with Apple.
What I
don't understand about the browser business
is I don't understand the stickiness.
I don't get it.
What browser do you use?
I mean, I use several browsers. Right
now I'm using Brave on my MacBook and on my desktop. I think I just use the default browser,
the default Microsoft. Like, I don't even, I never like open up. I don't remember the last
time I double clicked on Chrome, but I get that it's the most popular browser. I'm not like,
what do you use on your phone? What do I have on here?
Safari.
Other than Safari,
I would think Chrome.
But I mean.
Just think your average person,
because like you're a pretty tech savvy person.
Your average person's using Google Chrome
somewhere or another.
Every Android user is using it.
Most iPhone users are downloading Chrome and using that.
And anything that they just look up
rapidly, they're on Chrome.
That wasn't the one
conversation here. Chrome wasn't even
the conversation here. It's the search business.
And, you know, the way
they're trying to get the... Well, Chrome was the conversation
because that was a big part of this potential ruling,
was them being forced to sell Chrome.
So that was important. It was a part of it, but to me, the search conversation here is the real one
and why they're maybe taking a step back.
And it looks like it's going to be beneficial for Apple
that they'll be able to keep that relationship.
I haven't seen confirmation on that either.
Yeah, they'll probably be able to keep that relationship based on the headline.
But yeah, I know that it is sticky i'm not saying
like i'm surprised a lot of people are using it i know that it's sticky i just don't understand why
and i guess maybe complacency is what it is because i don't think like pound for pound
most of the browsers have a lot of points of differentiation. I mean, maybe some are a little better than others.
Most have the duplicate page feature.
Most have the incognito or private window feature.
Most have saving and bookmarking.
Most have like, I just, I don't know.
The browser business to me makes no sense.
I just don't get it. And maybe I'm just, you know, maybe that's why I stay away from those stocks, but I don't get it.
Have you tried Comet? Perplexity?
I've tried it.
Yeah, I've tried it. I've tried it.
To me, browsers should just be simpler.
Like, simpler the better.
But, I mean, I don't know.
There's people that want different features from them.
You spend a lot of time in your browser, so I get that perspective.
But to me, it seems like just complacency from the Google Chrome standpoint.
I guess, like, a lot of people just downloaded it uh you know when the
internet explorer to google chrome shift happened a lot of people just downloaded it and just haven't
switched off of it i guess i just don't know what's compelling users to be like i love chrome
i just don't get that part but whatever
anyone have any thoughts or takes on that my take is anyone up here absolutely love chrome and if so why do you love it
like over other browsers so most most browsers most browsers that sorry real quick most browsers
that aren't chrome that people use are basically chrome wrappers. So when you say Chrome, I think you should speak to more than just one specific thing.
But I use the Chrome wrappers or the Chrome type
of browsers over Safari.
I just think it's a little cleaner, a little sleeker.
There's a lot of things that I could add to it,
like the metal wallets, for example.
It's just easier.
So that's my take on it.
But on a phone, i just use the standard
you know i use safari in a phone um but i do think that on the desktop chrome is the most widely used
and community shared uh as far as developer side or people who want to use add-ons for it
and that alone is already going to give you like a lot of power in terms of knowing which add-ons work better,
which availability for add-ons for different applications.
I mean, TweetHunter uses...
See, that's insightful.
Is there, like, a way bigger add-on library for them than other browsers?
Way bigger. It's the most widely used one.
For the phone, though, a little bit different story.
I agree with Wolf.
I mean, most people use phones.
They're just going to use Safari.
Like, that's just a fact. Uh, but the thing is that
I didn't know the desktop add on, uh, library was that much more, you know,
deep.
So the other thing is with Chrome, there's kind of the, the same Apple,
like argument where people get in the, in the like Apple sphere of everything
talks to each other. Chrome's the same way. Well, if you have Chrome on your computer,
Chrome on your phone, you have Gmail, all that stuff,
it all talks to each other and you're all wrapped up in it.
Yeah, so I guess anyway, it's the ecosystem thing.
Yeah, I get that.
And I think maybe part of what's informing
that ecosystem feeling is, you know,
the pervasiveness of Gmail as well, right?
And so you can, you know, there's sort of an integrative thing there. feeling is the pervasiveness of Gmail as well.
There's sort of an integrative thing there.
I do like how in Chrome you can just flip through multiple Google accounts in the top right too seamlessly.
I guess that there are some user advantages.
You know?
Sam, what's up i mean i was gonna say from probably from a caching perspective
also security perspective desktop chrome is probably the best approach to use because you're
you're talking about just the ability to have insight that google is managing this this application
for a lot of people.
So they do the testing and everything.
I mean, if you use Safari, of course, on a desktop, also Edge as well.
But Chrome is always just the preferred one from a developer standpoint.
On the phone, though, I mean, it doesn't matter whether you're using Gmail or whatever on your Safari browser.
It is going to be regardless.
I do know that, like I said before,
when it comes to the additional add-on community,
the support that you get when you use Chrome
is just vastly bigger than any other browser I've seen,
in my opinion.
Also, to touch on the software development side,
it's just way easier to find integrations
with Chrome versus anything else.
So I mean, I feel like once you get that community on there,
you already get the additional testing against particular applications.
People will be more inclined to release add-ons for Google Marketplace
when it comes to the add-ons itself.
It's already driving more community usage on it.
It is little of the driver when it comes to OS-independent software.
So that goes with macOS or that goes with Windows and so on.
Chrome is usually just the default choice of browser for that.
All right, here is the headline, the beautiful headline I was looking for. Judge rules Google not required to end payments to Apple and other partners for preloading Google products.
Oh, you should have just interrupted me for that one.
No, no, no.
It's okay.
It literally came out after.
Now that's the big one.
It's up like almost 7% after hours.
That's an insane move.
That is an earnings move right there.
That's insane.
This was a huge overhang.
Also for Apple, too.
I mean, losing that would have been bad.
And I also think, you know,
they set this precedent for that strategy with Apple,
which they've kind of gone on
for letting other companies deal with all the AI,
CapEx, which is Anthropic.
They broke out some numbers today,
which maybe we'll talk about.
Hey, maybe Apple has another 20 billion dollar payment coming their way or something for the per year have to do nothing yeah no this is definitely good for both google and wonderful
company what a great stock iphone event is a week there are new iphones coming out a week from today
doc talk are you excited for the Apple iPhone Air,
which is reportedly coming?
I'm super excited.
I'm preparing for it.
I got my jersey on and everything.
Judge bars Google from exclusive contracts for internet search.
Okay, is Apple moving lower?
There is maybe a little caveat there.
Google, though, it was a rule that they do not have to sell their Android operating system.
What I've seen so far they have to do is data sharing with competitors,
and they can't do exclusive contracts for internet search.
But can do the deals for Apple for preloaded stuff.
We will have to sell it.
Okay.
I think,
I think,
let me see what it's at.
I think we've pretty much closed the gap on the queues on the back of the
smooth,
right?
Yeah.
So we're about a dollar away from closing that gap.
So it's going to be interesting how we open tomorrow
and how they react tomorrow in the open
on the back of some of these moves.
Because we've effectively closed
the gap that we
had today. This market,
every time,
it's like now, the last couple weeks
have been maybe a little different than the months
before it.
But it's a strong market.
Every time there are these moments, they're closed pretty quickly.
For a while, it was intraday.
For a little now, it's more after hours.
Or maybe after a couple days.
We'll see, though. We shall see now.
We shall see.
What is Google's market cap now, Evan?
Because it's 2.5 trillion. New all-time high by far.
2.56 trillion at the close.
So, wow.
That is a $150 to $200 billion move right there.
Not to mention apple apple closed
that 2.71 is roughly 2.71 2.75 is where that puts google wow apple great company it puts them at
closer to like 3.54 up from 3.4 at the close so we'll see but they listen that is we are a long way away from the open.
We'll see what ends up happening there.
That is a crazy move.
Evan, how does Apple tie into this?
So is it because they have such a partnership with Google?
Where does Apple tie into this so much?
U.S. judge rules Google not required to end payments to Apple and other partners for preloading Google products.
There was a headline in there that I thought was a little bit less positive for Apple.
But let me find the exact thing what that one was.
I still need to fully understand.
I still need to fully understand. Let me get to it. Sorry.
Let me get to it.
Sorry.
I'll try something different.
Oh, judge bars Google from exclusive contracts for internet search.
So that does seem a little negative for their deal.
So maybe the Apple deal has to change.
But yeah, that's how Apple works into this.
Google pays Apple $20 billion a year or something it was,
straight profits for Apple,
for them to be the default search engine on Apple devices.
So it seems like that might be changing a little bit,
changing a little bit, but it seems like there
but it seems like there is other ways that Apple could benefit from it.
is other ways that Apple could benefit from it.
maybe the market's digging into
an Apple-Gemini
app partnership that maybe
Apple pays, or Google pays $30 billion,
$40 billion to be the default
AI something app on Apple, or the
pre-installed one.
Other
platforms, I mean, you don't
think they're going to do that?
No, I mean, I don't think that's gonna matter much to google like 20 billion is a lot i mean sorry whatever the difference is a lot don't get me wrong but the long end of the game is that they
still are getting all that data by default on apple iphones like that is just a major win.
Crazy.
This thing was trading on 135 just a few months ago.
That's insane.
Almost.
Wow.
Apple's up 4% now.
What a great company.
I did say I am holding Apple 240 calls, calls 919 going into the iPhone event,
you know,
the run up into it.
So hopefully we hold here.
I'm going to,
I would sell these later in the week maybe,
but Hey,
sometimes you get lucky on a, on a,
on a trade that could have a good percentage clearly is not a part of that.
Well,
it did come back to test its 20-day moving average today.
It bounced right off of that.
All right.
Now you're looking at higher highs since April or March.
Sam, anything else you're watching today?
I was looking at Gscaler.
They had really good earnings,
but they faded quite a bit.
They just started their earnings call.
GitLab's going to be reporting tomorrow.
That's going to be an interesting one.
That's a big position for me.
And I mean, really today,
it just seemed like the market wanted to...
I think the Ques basically closed below the
20 ma last friday and that was that was perceived as bearish and today just like freaking
save that 50 ma like that's just it just doesn't want to go down just doesn't want to go down
the other side of that sam is uh s&p did close it's above it right now but did
close under the 20 day um that's true but above the 21 ema correct stock talk qqq i was watching
right at the open we were basically sitting right on that 50 day moving average and then pushed up
you know it dipped down below it a little bit pushed up there was a volume shelf on spy as well that we kind of played around with and just sat on top of so
yep i mean is anything in trouble no structurally i mean stock talk can tell you as well it
structurally is anything really changed yet no could it yes but has it no i mean
if we have the lows today then it would have been a little bit less pretty.
But yeah, we came back and recapped them.
So we'll see how the end of the week goes.
But yeah, it looks fine for now.
Another thing that wasn't mentioned on here yet was I was watching was gold.
New all-time highs, just absolutely flying, massive candle,
breakout of
what five-month base at this point yeah i mentioned i mentioned it sir
sorry if i missed it but still yeah huge huge breakout in gold i mean what's that
basically end of april yeah that was a big breakout right there oil also a very good day today if it's anything worth
noting the bitcoin ratio uh bitcoin has been outperforming eth for the last couple days now
so we'll see that yeah before we go to the oil because i know josh is up here but the bitcoin
itself is you know try to hold in at that same area and push back up.
B'Elanna did have a nice day as well,
but Ethereum seems like too many eyes are on the,
on the boiling water right now, as they say.
So I have a feeling this is now going to become an anti-ETH,
anti-BMNR space because of, uh of I am now going into BMNR.
But we'll see.
Just remember Apple's here at 240.
It's all in your head, sir.
I got BMNR too, but Evan thinks the world's
against him. I'm also in BMNR.
I don't... I closed my
BMNR shorts if that helps.
No, I'll stand on that hill with Evan.
Don't worry, Evan.
Apple might be the most owned stock in the world,
so there's more people on your team than against you.
You know, I was never against Apple making new all-time right this year.
Like, I don't know why people would doubt it.
That financial engineering is just not going to go anywhere for quite some time.
Like, you can't...
You can't be bearish, Apple. It's crazy.
They have too much cash for the financial engineering to stop anytime soon.
Dude, can I ask you the question again?
Do you think Apple will be the largest company in the world again at some point in time?
Yes.
Not unless they win the new hardware phase or era, if you will, that's coming.
It will come probably pretty quickly.
I'd be more concerned about them dropping to number four.
I think that's more likely.
I think that's more likely too, yeah.
They are close to the one right now.
Nvidia could just be down like 10% tomorrow.
It's just so volatile that you can easily have those swings, right?
Apple would just keep chugging along no matter what.
Any of these other two stocks slip,
Microsoft slips, NVIDIA slips, like boom, Apple's number one.
I don't know if they're going to sustain it,
but I think they'll always be up there.
I think based on their current roadmaps,
Microsoft, Meta, NVIDIA are all much more powerful stories.
And even Amazon are much better stories
and have much more upside than
than they do and and that's purely because i don't know what they're gonna do next yet
like i know you think i just hate apple and no matter what they do i'm always gonna shoot it
down that's not true you know if they if they hit an ace card on whatever their next hardware
product is then that could be the light at the end of the tunnel for them to return to
growth.
But the iPhone is not going to return them to growth.
It's just not going to happen.
I mean,
even if iPhone sales,
let's say in China,
miraculously recover to bring Apple back into number two or number three
position in China,
which would be literally miraculous at the pace things are going right now.
Let's say that happened.
That's going to return them to what?
On that quarter, maybe 6% or 7% growth on that inflection quarter.
And then once the inflection, if there is one, fizzles out,
you'll go back to normalized numbers on the international sales
and you'll be looking at 2% to 3% growth, most of it coming from services.
If that's a business you want to own, own it know if you want to own it for the cash pile or
the clout you know own it the stock's going to keep going up the market keeps going up but
it's just much less interesting of a story to me than pretty much every other mag 7 name
so i was never one to believe that apple is not a consumer discretionary play i mean in my opinion
if you look at XLY,
and then you look at Amazon, Tesla, and so on,
these are really being weighed down by,
well, maybe not so much AWS in terms of Amazon,
but these are really being weighed down
by the consumer sentiment.
Once that comes back,
you're going to see that entire sector
just come roaring back.
Consumer discretionary XLY is 40% or 20% Amazon, 20% Tesla.
And those have just been laggards across this whole race.
Like I'm a big believer that Amazon, you know, is really going to come back, but I'm mostly
buying Amazon for its AWS story.
But if the consumer really does come back, lower rates, people start getting jobs and
everything, or people's wages start going up higher and so on, I'm just going to bring Apple up with it.
Until then, I don't think Apple is going to come up with some almighty device and I'm
just going to be like, oh, I want an iPhone now.
I don't think that's going to make a difference.
I think they are the forefront of the largest and fastest growing handheld device market
in the entire world.
They're basically setting the standards.
That's where all the data goes.
That's where all the data is headed anyway.
If they own that market, and that's the reason why they're still one of the most expensive
companies in the world, is because they literally hold that by the chin right there.
If the consumer does come back, which it will at some point, considering that we're going
to be expecting some of these AI software and integrations of features to the consumer,
we've seen it mostly from the enterprise standpoint for quite some time.
That's really what's driving NVIDIA, Microsoft, Google, and everything back up there because of that enterprise factor. But once you get consumer coming back, you're going to see a
lot of these handheld or what do they call them? Skin devices. I don't know, phones, watches,
eyepieces and everything. That's all going to come back. And then you're going to start to see
like meta really round out in that sector, as well as Amazon with e-commerce.
Apple of course is probably going to come back from that one.
Like that wave is going to come back.
And I don't think you need a brand new space.
I don't know what that was for some reason.
I forgot the term, but that is when Apple is going to come back,
like roaring back.
It's not going to be about whether they release like an almighty iPhone or
something. back like roaring back it's not going to be about whether they release like an almighty iphone or something by the way i know you uh i know you're not like bearish in apple i know that i don't
think i don't think anyone really in this panel is like crazy enough to start shorting apple that
the amount of market yeah hell no it's funny because i i
had you know there was somebody that said that in the comments like a few months ago was like oh
how's your apple short been working out and i was like dude i'm not short apple i would never short
a mag 7 name and i generally don't short individual stocks anyway i'm gonna short anything if i'm
bearish i usually short the indexes uh but yeah i don't short individual stocks typically unless
there's a really really really really good reason to do it.
But, um, yeah, no, I'm not going to short Apple.
I'm not suggesting that people do that.
I just don't think it's an interesting story anymore.
It was.
What I will say from a technical area, once it broke above that, like two 15 level, the
month going into a big event where it has a historic move. Like every year it has a run up into it
and you break above a big level.
To me, the trade from Apple 220 up to 240, 250,
whatever it is, has been quite clear.
So all these conversations about Apple in the past.
Last time you asked me about it, the chart looked good.
The chart can look good, right?
It's just generally when you're asking me about a company,
I imagine you're asking me about a company, I imagine you're
asking me about the story.
It's going to get stuffed in the face next week, probably.
That's how this goes historically.
The chart looked very good when all of you guys were talking about trading it.
The chart looked great, you know, and you can trade anything.
You know, you can even trade stocks that are going out of business.
Bankruptcy trades are some of the most explosive trades on the market.
So, yeah, you can trade anything.
You know, make money on yeah, you can trade anything. Make money on something, congratulations.
But yeah, just as a story,
as somebody who's a positional trader
and I think of myself as a portfolio builder,
I just don't see any interest
to want to own it personally.
But there's people out there
that want to own it for different reasons
or maybe have owned it for decades
and want to just keep owning it
because they have.
That's a different conversation this three says though you know you
should run up into the iphone events it's going to pull back after it because stock talk's going
to be on the space of that day saying guys it's it's the same iphone as last year there's no
innovation that he's going to buy one i wish i was influential enough. But that's what the conversation is going to be.
I want to see it hold up at breakout level.
Everyone bought ahead of the tariffs.
Yeah, we'll see.
It'll be interesting.
You're right, there was some pull forward.
I want to make sure we get over...
The World Trade Organization Director General was saying, too, this morning.
He was saying he started to see disruptions in global trade
and he said you know the economy held up in the front half of the year largely because of pull
forward demand in advance of those tariffs and he said hey if they end up going into place it could
be very disruptive for the economy and then we get the appeals court decision shooting down the
tariffs and now the trump administration is taking it to the Supreme Court tomorrow, asking for an expedited ruling.
And so that's something to watch this week.
It'll be funny if the markets react negatively to that.
That'll be interesting.
Well, the other thing, Sok Sok, you had a green dollar today, green yields, green gold,
green oil.
What does that tell you?
It doesn't tell me a lot on a one-day basis, right? But I will say in the last three or four days of weakness for the equity markets and for speculative assets, we have seen that.
So maybe it's starting to become a better trend.
XLE looks great.
We talked about this last week.
Technically, XLE looks fantastic for continuation.
So if it continues the upside, that wouldn't surprise me. great we talked about this last week technically xoe looks fantastic for continuation so you know
if it continues the upside that wouldn't surprise me uh but a lot of those rotational sectors xoe
xlv even this morning i don't know what kre ended up doing today but this morning it looked good
before i guess it sold off intraday with the other stuff but um yeah i mean some of those
rotational indexes quote unquote look good right now and so maybe that's a sign. But yeah, I'd like to see more follow through like on a multi week basis. What you don't want to see is you don't want to just see those areas being treated as defensive retreats where when the market equity markets are weak and Bitcoin's weak, everyone's just rotating into those names. What you'd rather see is consolidation in those other assets and then
those names continue to perform, right? Like to see energy and gold continue to perform in that
situation. I think that'll be tricky. I think what's more likely is, you know, whatever the
sell-off in equities ends, you'll just see the leaders reemerge. That's usually what happens.
And that's what I tend to expect when we get this kind of action.
But maybe it's different this time.
And maybe, you know, this is the start of a real rotation, right?
Because you look at last year and most of the rotative action was faded pretty quickly.
And in the cases where it wasn't faded, it just led to, you know, three or four month
consolidation where there wasn't really much money to be made on those names.
And most of the money flow and price action was in the market leaders last year.
If you look at the front half of this year, obviously, we had a lot of noise with the
tariff sell-off, Liberation Day sell-off that sent most stocks lower.
But post that sell-off, so post-April, we've kind of seen the same scenario where the highest
return stocks off the April lows are your market leading stocks prior to that sell off.
And now in the last couple of weeks by now, that's what I mean by now.
The last couple of weeks, we've seen a lot of those leaders stall and or pull back significantly.
energy, gold, some biotech names, some housing names, some staples names start to catch some
performance drift where they didn't perform in the front half of the year. So does that continue?
Maybe, but we'll have to wait and see. I would like to see more consistent action in those names
before saying, hey, look, maybe it's time to reposition into those sectors. But there's some
people that have already caught fantastic moves off the lows in a lot of those areas.
So we'll see how it goes.
But it's not an area where I'm starting to rotate money into right now.
But I could be compelled to do so if we see this action persist for a few more weeks.
We're dancing around the oil energy conversation.
The market's been talking about it a little bit more.
We got a Josh Young up here.
Josh, I want to bring you into this conversation a little bit.
Maybe give us some thoughts.
I want to ask you a question about just a stock.
Well, not less of a question, just more about a stock.
Occidental Petroleum.
Warren Buffett name.
You got any thoughts on that one?
I believe the level he was buying at was like 60 or something.
Maybe. I don't know. know obviously it's been lower but where does that name kind of fit or what are your general thoughts on it and any thoughts you want to add into the conversation around the energy oil
so i'd appreciate you being there yeah yeah no thanks for having me no i think it's uh i think
um eventually there there should be a material shift over to energy stocks just because there's such a large portion of market earnings and such a small portion of the market capitalization.
part of the sort of AI value chain that hasn't traded up yet and still trades at very low
multiples versus, you know, I think we talked about this last time I was on one area spaces,
I think last week, where a lot of the other sort of names across that value chain, even outside of
the sort of sexy AI names, still traded double digit multiples, whereas the energy stocks are
sort of that single digit number.
You know, Oxy is always tough for me just because they have this direct air capture CO2 business that they've put a ton of money into and is 100% dependent on government sort of subsidies
and regulations. I tend to not like to invest in businesses that have been regulated into existence.
And then the specifics around that are a little ridiculous to me.
Like it's way easier and more efficient to capture CO2 at the source rather than just directly from the air.
Um, so that's always been hard to me.
So that's always been hard to me.
Um, and then I'm, I'm surprised that Oxy still has the same management team as they've had
for a while.
The, the current CEO almost spent and current board almost bankrupted the company, um, in
what was it?
2018, 2019, when they levered up to go buy a competitor, they actually outbid Chevron
and paid Chevron a billion dollar break fee in order to buy in a Darko and then almost went bankrupt less than 18 months later, had to issue a bunch of stock and warrants and other stuff.
And, you know, had to issue Buffett this like very expensive preferred.
And then, you know, after that, Buffett ended up buying stock. But it's just it's sort of surprising and weird to me that they have the same board and management, considering they, you know, many energy companies had trouble during COVID.
But Oxy, I think, was one of the biggest that was very, very close to bankruptcy.
And that was fully the fault, I would say, of the management board.
management and board. So I would, you know, the fundamentals, I guess, are fine, but I just,
I like to invest with people I like and trust and not people that sort of gamble the company
in exchange for higher executive compensation. I hear, I appreciate the thoughts on that. Well,
Josh, I've been seeing a lot more interest in the energy sector,
even specifically oil and gas over the last couple of weeks and stuff.
I mean, you were talking about it there.
Yeah, here, let me just share one more thing,
and then I'll hand it off to Kirk.
So I posted up in the Nest, there's this theory that is held up,
if you look in the past, and the past may not repeat, but it may,
where you basically get gold first and then some other commodities and then oil in terms of
price movements and investment interest and then capital expenditures. And I think people treat
this as a sort of pure technical analysis when there's some fundamental stuff too.
One of the biggest puzzles in the oil and gas space right now has been how there could
have been such big forecasts of oil inventory builds, which would imply a big oversupply
in the market and why all of the banks have been bearish and almost all of the sort of
big pundits on TV and whatever,
like I got on CNBC a few months ago and they're like, wait, you're bullish? Like they're like
checking their show notes because just everyone before and after me was bearish and very like
more bearish and whatever. And the best explanation is actually from this price chart. So this is
sort of, I think, the convergence of technicals
with fundamentals. When you look at all of the investment bank work on oil and gas,
that you don't see a line item for mining related demand for oil. But these big mining projects use
huge amounts of diesel and then lesser amounts of other kinds of oil or oil products. And so
there's been, I just saw this news item where they were blaming it on the weather or something.
There's been extra diesel use and no one could explain it.
And you can literally see it on that chart, which is when gold goes up, people start expanding their gold mines.
They restart ones that had been mothballed.
When other commodities go up, they do the same.
Copper, there's a lot more
restart and expansion activity than there was a year ago and so on. And so it should be obvious,
I guess, that when you have higher commodity prices, you're going to have more mining activity
for those commodities. And mining is actually one of the biggest sort of swing demand centers for oil.
So anyway, that's, I think, one of the reasons it's the price is doing better than everyone
thought.
And it's a reason to track, if you like energy, to track gold, because the higher gold goes,
historically, the higher oil ends up going with some lag. I saw we lost out in there for a second.
No, yeah, I was having some troubles there.
I appreciate the thoughts there, Josh.
We're going to, you know, we like to get some of our oil and gas guys
and we'll do a discussion.
We'll dig more in on one or two of these other days,
but I appreciate you for hanging out with us, Josh.
We're also going to be joined by Adam Paddy
in about nine minutes or so.
I'm excited about that.
This shares some friends of the channel.
Before I go over to you, Kirk.
I just wanted to ask Josh what he thought
about the accidental debt to Berkshire at this point,
if it's basically just a way for Berkshire to get paid
and that's soaking up a lot of the money
that could otherwise go to the rest of the shareholders.
I bought it in 2020.
I haven't owned it since it was around 60.
And then I know that you follow the Canadian oil and gas
plays better than I do.
Do you have any thoughts about those?
Oh, yeah, sure.
So, yeah, I mean, I think the problem with the Berkshire debt
was actually more related to the history of it
and how many shares had to get issued,
or I guess the company chose to issue in order to meet their obligations.
I guess the company chose to issue in order to meet their obligations.
And again, I think it's just, I think it's, I have a general corporate governance problem
with American companies and foreign companies have even bigger governance problems.
But in America, it's very easy to fire someone who's an entry level employee or a low sort
someone who's an entry-level employee or a low sort of wage earner. The rig hands are easy to
of wage earner.
fire. The secretary is easy to fire. And it's almost impossible to fire a CEO of a company.
And even when they massively underperform and risk the business and almost go bankrupt,
they get huge bonuses. They get awarded stock at low prices. And so that describes Occidental Petroleum to a T. So it's
very, it's less about the cost today, which is frankly not material in my opinion, versus sort
of the overall size of the business and the cashflow potential and so on. And more about the
huge number of shares that exist that shouldn't have existed. And the huge amount of high cost
debt that the company had to issue and just the whole mess from this deal that was not
necessary. I mean, just the arrogance and ridiculousness of trying to outbid Chevron
as a company much smaller with a much worse financial situation. And I think it's aged
very poorly in terms of how those assets have performed. The assets were fine. It just wasn't worth trashing these other assets that Occidental already had, in my opinion. So I think that's sort of the companies. And I think actually it's sort of weird, even as that's happened,
a couple of the hottest names, sort of like one of the biggest natural gas producers up there
and one of the oil producers has actually traded off. They've traded off pretty recently.
So maybe people are a little less excited now than they were about Canadian companies
and oil and gas, let's say a few months ago. But the small companies and generally the Canadian companies, they benefit a lot from a very
low Canadian dollar versus US dollar. So this is probably true for non-oil and gas companies too.
When you look across sort of emerging markets, this dollar weakness that we've experienced,
if it continues, it could actually drive, especially for sort of real
asset businesses and businesses where they have local expenses and local currency, but their
revenues are denominated in dollars, they've benefited a lot from a higher dollar. And then
actually they're still benefiting from, it sort of turns around where, you know, their, what is it, their margins
get a little worse, but the value of what they produce goes up a lot as that sort of currency
effect reverses. So it's a pretty interesting setup, I think, both for Canadian oil and gas
companies, and especially for the small ones, as well as for some of the other international ones.
Gotcha. I appreciate that. I appreciate the question.
I am going to jump here because we are getting a little close on time
with this stuff,
but definitely make sure you're following Josh and Kirk
and all the speakers up here and all that stuff,
especially when they're talking about stuff that you are interested in
or find great stuff.
We appreciate them,
really smart people.
And they are great follows on X.
There was one or two
news stories that I just wanted to have
some quick talks about
and comments, these aren't that big
and then Adam's going to join us
I don't want to ask him about Apple
but a couple other stuff in there
we did get a stock talk commenting on one of my posts
about Starbucks adding
Starbucks is adding
to launch protein-packed
cold foam and lattes later this month.
I was surprised
at the protein figures that you shared
in that post for cold foam.
Between 15 to 36 grams
are going to be... If I can get 36 grams
of protein and a little bit of cold foam, dude,
that's pretty good.
There is a general theme that is going on
around these companies
and all these kind of retail companies adding protein-flavored stuff
or protein-packed stuff.
That is a theme you're going to see going into weird areas
if you haven't already, but this is the latest example of that.
I saw we got a comment on StockTalk on that one.
He's just going to eat the foam is what he said.
I mean, I would.
If there's 36 grams of protein and a little bit of cold foam,
I'll just order a venti cold foam.
Talking about AI, though, today,
we mentioned it quickly.
Anthropic put out a story
saying they closed their
$13 billion fundraising round
at $183 billion post-money valuation.
But what I thought was interesting
is they said they passed
a $5 billion run rate in August. Maybe the way they worded interesting is they said they passed a $5 billion run rate in August.
Maybe the way they worded it is they said, we started 2025 at $1 billion run rate revenue and passed $5 billion just eight months later.
So maybe not August, but as of that, basically, they scaled from an $86 billion company a month up to like a $460 billion a month revenue company.
416, roughly, is where they're at.
So, I mean, that is quite impressive.
Wait, what?
You mean 416 million?
Did I say billion?
Yeah, I apologize.
416 million.
I was about to say 416 billion.
No way.
416 million now, up from 83 million run rate company per year at the start of the year.
So, I mean, I'm not doing it profitably, but that is quite the move on Anthropic, which I just thought was impressive.
And we've kind of talked about these spaces, about OpenAI, and I've kind of thought up here, like, I don't necessarily see, understand the value as much.
understand the value as much.
But these type of numbers,
a company growing at that scale that quickly,
into a year, I mean, what should that be valued at?
Clearly, I guess the market says $183 billion.
The market also says OpenAI is worth $500, so...
I don't think...
I mean, a company that made $83 million
was making $83 million a month.
Valuations are not going to make sense for those names. I mean, if you're a market-leading AI company, a month evaluations are not going to make sense for those names i mean you're a market leading ai company the valuations are not going to make
sense like on a balance sheet at least there's revenue being had though i'd rather that than
the knock line yeah i mean there's revenue being i mean you'd rather pay 300 billion because there's
revenue being at i mean i don't know 183 billion and you know well yeah i mean for opening eyes
500 or whatever and opening eyes revenue i imagine is
what incrementally higher than that i mean i don't think that much higher right they did what
5 billion in revenue last year maybe they're doing 10 this year i don't know what their revenue growth
is year year over year maybe it's more than that but i mean yeah the valuations if you're just
looking at these on revenue multiples are obviously crazy, but they're, they're also the market leading AI companies, right? So,
you know, it's very hard to,
it's not very hard.
It is impossible to value market leading companies in new,
new industries. It's impossible to do it in like a,
a fundamentally driven way.
Like if you wanted to build a model
to value open AI, you're not going to come to 500 billion by modeling it. You know,
unless you have some crazy assumptions that no one can reasonably make. Um, so yeah, I mean,
this is, it's in private markets, it's easier to get away with that sort
of stuff because they're less liquid. You know, you have less propensity for the stock to pull
in the other direction for many mechanical reasons, including short selling, you know,
put options, et cetera. You don't have that pressure on the valuation in private markets.
And so it's a different ballgame a little bit.
But even if they were on public markets, I mean, OpenAI would trade at a crazy valuation,
right, even on the public market.
So, yeah, it's just trying to encapsulate those types of names or analyze them on a fundamental analysis basis is just
a fool's errand.
There's no point.
Yeah, I appreciate the thoughts there, Stock Talk.
And then we got Adam, Patty, joining us.
And we'll kind of dig in more about yourself in a second.
But I think that the natural conversation we'll be having here fits well with one of
the big news stories we've had in After Hours around Apple and Google.
It really was the story around Google, but Apple stock is up a good bit in After Hours.
The story was around Google's antitrust ruling that it was not as bad as feared that they were going to have to share some information with competitors,
with competitors, that they won't have to sell off their Chrome unit, that they won't have to
that they won't have to sell off their Chrome unit, that they won't have to sell off other things.
sell off other things. But as a part of that, the judge ruled that Google is not required to end
payments to Apple and other partners for preloading Google products. Interestingly, they are barred
from exclusive contracts for internet search. So the same business model Apple and Google were
using in the past may not be able to do the same, but the market doesn't seem to think that that's going to be a big problem.
And, you know, preloading apps is a big enough business for them.
But I wonder, Adam,
if you've gotten the chance to see any of this Google Apple ruling news and
after hours. And obviously when you're a, have a, have an ETF,
OMAH shout out to it. And we'll, we'll talk more into it.
That kind of plays around the Buffett names.
Apple up a good bit is not going to be bad for you.
Yeah.
And honestly, hey, guys, how you doing?
We appreciate you being there.
Well, thanks for having me.
And frankly, honestly, I haven't read it.
I started reading it and then I needed to get on and I flipped on with you guys.
But look, it's been a big overhang over both stocks, really.
And particularly with Apple.
Apple's had some drag for various reasons for the last six to seven months.
So I think any kind of good news is very good news for this stock, which has been lagging pretty significantly out of the MAG-7.
Why don't you talk to us a little bit?
We've had you on the spaces a couple times.
Adam, Patty is the CEO over at VistaShares. VistaShares is a bunch of
different products in ETFs we've talked about over the last couple of weeks. And we'll jump
into the conversation here, but why don't you introduce yourself a little bit for anyone who's
maybe hearing you for the first time. And then what are some of the stuff and things that you've
been excited about and watching recently?
Sure. Well, thanks again for having me. Yeah, look, VistaShares are trying to create interesting solutions that solve problems for investors. And so everything we do is white
space. We're not looking to bring out Me Too products and we're bringing out new products
that really have not existed that, again, that solve problems for investors, whether it's improving your portfolio or providing you new trading vehicles, you know, trying to, you know, bring more of there. We have QUSA, which is our quality USA
stocks. Both of those provide 15% annual income target paid monthly. We've got our flagship
super cycle ETF, which is AIS, which is the AI infrastructure ETF, provides exposure to
all those companies that are soaking up these hundreds of billions of dollars
in CapEx that are being deployed by the MAG-7 and other companies around the world.
And then, of course, we have Wilds, which is our tactical alpha product, which gives
traders a kind of a more diversified approach to the 2x leverage space. So instead of betting on
a 2x leverage Tesla, what we're doing is we're looking at
investor sentiment and trying to identify those companies that have the strongest investor
sentiment defined by where investors are putting their money. So every month we're looking at where
the flows are going into the 2x leveraged space, and we're finding the five hottest stocks,
and we're putting those in a portfolio, and we're levering those up 2x and then next week we've got a big launch coming which
i'd love to talk about at some point um in our target 15 area which i think is going to be really
exciting i am excited yeah actually i i wanted to jump right into that launch because i know that
you i believe you can talk about it at this point and share some more details and you've had a lot
of success with a couple of the with really all the etfs you put out obviously omh has led the
way from an um standpoint and ais has really shown the performance that I think people are
looking to see in that AI sector but I know that me and you have talked a little bit about this new
launch that's coming so I'd love to just give you the floor to kind of cover that here because
there might be some people who want to start their research ASAP. Yeah I'm really excited about this
product so the launch is happening next Tuesday on 9.9.
So, you know, as you mentioned, OMAH has been extremely successful because who doesn't want to invest like Warren Buffett, but get, you know, 15% annual income paid monthly. So we,
you know, saw the success, we saw how it resonated with investors, we've seen how it's performed.
And we said, well, that's really exciting. Now, of course, there's only one Warren Buffett, but, you know, are there others out there that have, you know, high conviction portfolios of interesting companies?
And, you know, we came, we did a lot of analysis that's Bill Ackman. So on the ninth, next Tuesday, we're launching ACKY, which is invest like Bill Ackman, but with 15 percent income annually paid paid monthly.
So similar to O&H, just a different set of companies in the portfolio.
Of course, we're not affiliated with Warren Buffett or Bill Ackman. What we're doing is we're looking into their portfolios and identifying those stocks and we're acquiring
those. And then we have a data-driven option strategy overlaying those stocks to generate
the 15% annual income. Okay. That's very interesting., I changed the title by the way, for anyone who was curious on that, but, um, I'm curious on like, you know, so Buffett has like 20, 30, 40 stocks.
So we've kind of picked the top 15 in there.
Um, plus Berkshire Hathaway.
I'm curious.
I'm like, can we talk about how it ends up working?
Is it, is it like, yeah, I mean, maybe we have to find out more, but the first thing
I'm noticing, and by the way, for anyone who's curious what Bill Ackman
owns, it's 20% Uber right now, 18% Brookfield, restaurant brands, and 10%.
Amazon is 10% roughly, and then you can go in and look at the rest of them.
But is this going to be like, how different do we think as you're kind of building this
is going to be from the Buffett one?
This is really intriguing.
Yeah, I mean, Buffett is 21 securities. So,
you know, we obviously are focused on the publicly traded, the largest publicly traded securities.
So, OMAH is, you know, it's the top holding is always BRKB, and then it's the next 20 largest
publicly traded holdings, with Apple being the largest outside of BRKB. And this is different.
This is a more concentrated portfolio.
So Bill Ackman's portfolio,
we've got 11 or 12 different securities in there.
And he has a different portfolio strategy.
He's an activist investor.
He looks for undervalued companies
or companies that he believes are undervalued.
And he will go in there
and put in highly concentrated positions into those
and hold for the long-term, which is why we thought it was ideal for this type of strategy, because, you know, we wanted to find a manager that we respect, that we have, you know, that we believe in.
But that's not trading in and out of stops, you know, daily, weekly, monthly.
What Bill Ackman does is he has conviction. So he's holding his securities for the long term and he's trying to
effect change through the boards or however he does it to increase value of his holdings.
So we thought it was a really intriguing way to give investors just different type of exposure
that they don't have available to them today. And particularly when you layer on the 15%
annual income. Does it become harder on the 15 percent uh annual income
does it become harder to get that 15 annual income with less names if you have to maybe yeah yeah
yeah i mean well i mean harder well harder or easy depending on the securities right it's all based on the volatility of the underlying so um you know of course that's part of the analysis
when we look at you know we said okay well this portfolio looks really good from you know, of course, that's part of the analysis when we look at, you know, we said, OK, well, this portfolio looks really good from, you know, average holding time, you know, in terms of the conviction and that he's holding these securities.
But then we have to look at can we generate the one to five per month to get to that 15 percent annually?
And, you know, certainly, you know, we can. These are extremely highly liquid securities.
We can. These are extremely highly liquid securities. They trade a ton and they have the right levels of volatility where you can get in and out of the options efficiently over time.
Brookfield, Uber, Amazon, as you mentioned, is one of the largest holdings now, top five holding, Google.
So he's got some big names in there. And certainly the option markets are deep and liquid.
I want to bring in a couple others on the panel.
Just your thoughts here.
Like Lou, I know we've been chatting a little bit.
I'm curious to get your thoughts, this kind of move from Buffett to Ackman.
To me, it's interesting because with Buffett, obviously, there's a legend of Buffett.
But obviously, he's transitioning a little bit.
It's more Greg, and maybe it has been Greg for a little bit,
but with Ackman, he's got a long time horizon.
So I could see him just continuing to upswing here
and an ETF like this really having runway.
So curious to get your thoughts.
Yeah, no, look,
I think this is a really innovative approach for sure.
I love the high conviction of Ackman
and that it's a more concentrated portfolio,
which that's really kind of just brings up
some questions for me is, how do you manage that, right? Like with Ackman and that it's a more concentrated portfolio, which that's really kind of just brings up some questions for me is how do you manage that? With Ackman, he goes
activist and sometimes it gets really contentious with an herbal life. Do you have discretion in the
fund to decide when to sell? Maybe you've generated enough income, you've had enough upside and it's
getting too activist for you, you decide to move on? Or how do you mitigate that with just different
option strategies?
And then the other question is really along the options. Are you selling calls? Are you writing
puts? How are you generating that 15% annually? Yeah. So the core portfolio operates exactly
like OMAH. So we're an active ETF to an index. So what we've done is we've constructed an index that rebalances quarterly,
you know, based on the movements in the core portfolio. So, you know, this month, for instance,
we're picking up his change over into Amazon, for instance. We, of course, if he does a big change
in between the quarterly rebalance as an active fund, we can follow those changes as well.
So we can be nimble. We don't have to wait to the end of the quarter to make the change.
Okay. So you don't have that lag of like a 45 days before the 13 HRs are filed. You can see
it in real time and adjust if needed. That's correct. That is absolutely correct. And on the
options side, similar again to OMAH, we're not looking to maximize our income.
What we're looking to do is scrape 1.25% from the portfolio every month.
We're not looking to pay out 126 or 124.
We want to pay 125.
So we're selling out of the money calls.
And that's how we do it with OMAH as well.
We have other strategies available to us if market dynamics change to ensure that we can hit those numbers.
But out of the money calls of various durations, depending on the underlying volatility, the underlying security.
And once we hit that one, two, five, we're scraping it.
We're out of that position.
So we're not holding options positions, hoping to get that extra 1% or half percent and have
risk of having securities called away.
Once we hit the 1, 2, 5, we're out of it and we reset into a new position.
Okay.
That makes sense.
The other thing, just curious, did you do some backtesting?
I'm curious if Ackman's portfolio does better when he actually has even fewer securities
than that.
So maybe he starts narrowing down.
Did you do backtesting to show what it would look like with six versus eight or anything along those lines? We didn't change his portfolio.
Who am I to change his portfolio? So we, of course, looked at the performance of his holdings
over time as part of our due diligence and research into building the product.
Yeah, no, that's what I was referring to. Did you notice any, you know, unexpected outperformance when he actually has fewer
securities in there?
Because, you know, activist campaigns can be pretty challenging and time consuming.
Yeah, no, I mean, it's a good question.
And I don't want to just make up an answer.
I don't think we were able to tease that type of data out.
I mean, there were certainly times of outperformance, underperformance.
But of course, some of it was based on different market dynamics at that time.
I can go back and look and see if there was any kind of correlation with number of holdings,
but I'm not sure. Well, look, super congrats. I mean, I love this. This is democratizing access
to some of the greatest investors between Buffett and Ackman for anyone. I love the approach.
Definitely going to be taking a closer look at it here.
Great.
And we'll be teasing out some information over this week up to the launch,
you know, starting tomorrow, just getting the word out.
And, you know, we're really bullish on this.
We think this is a really exciting product.
And you know what?
It's made up of a bunch of names that most people don't own. I mean, of course, Alphabet and now Amazon, you know, maybe Uber.
But, you know, a lot of the names are not names that most investors have exposure to.
And if they do have exposure, it's very, very limited.
So, you know, again, it's all about diversification in your core portfolio, making sure that you're
not, you know, overly concentrated in the S&P 500 and the Qs that are, you know, 40,
45 percent mag seven at this point.
So, you know, we think it's a really good diversifier and we're really excited about getting this to market.
I wanted to, Adam,
is there anything else you want to cover on this one?
There were a couple of other items I wanted to touch on.
No, no, that's great.
Thanks for letting me bring it.
You guys were the first.
Your listeners are the first to hear of it.
So thanks for letting me do that.
Yeah, I'd put a note down for everyone.
And Adam, when is it going to go live? Yeah, Tuesday morning, 9-9. All right, Tuesday morning,
one week from today. Keep an eye out for A-C-K-Y, investing like Bill Ackman with that additional
target 15% income per year, 1.25% per month, obtained through selling those covered calls.
All right, I wanted to rotate
for a second. I always, you know, wild, it feels like doesn't get maybe the attention
that income products continue to get, but it's a, it's a pretty wild one, right? And it's within
the name there. And the performance has continued to be, you know, this thing moves like you'll
see in a general week, it could go five, 10%. It's still up 14.5% since you launched
it back in June. And you recently had a rebalance. And there were names that I guess I wasn't
expecting to come into there. Iron Q, Netflix. So maybe you could just tell people what's the
criteria we're one more time, because it's really interesting to me. People should take a look at
WILD. I actually look at this and it look at rebalances. And they tell me a little bit about
what's going on with these individual stocks, showing me how much capital and attention is coming to them when,
honestly, I might not have thought that way because how many double-leveraged IMQs and
Netflixes are there? I know of at least one or two, but it's impressive that they're driving
so much into them and then people can just capture that through this. Maybe you want to talk about
that for a second. Yeah, I love this product and it certainly has not gotten the love that we expected right out of the gate, but we have
conviction behind this product because it's just so good. Look, we know that markets are a lot,
very narrative driven right now. Investor sentiment is a major driver of stock market
performance. That's just the way it is. and certainly it's even more so over the last several years as social media has taken taken um you know hold and retail investors have become a
much more powerful force in the market um so you know we were looking at the 2x leverage space and
we you know we realized how attracted these were to to investors so they can you know you know
express their views of a single stock right you like You like meta, you could buy a 2X meta product
and hope for the best, right?
So we didn't want to do that.
Again, we're looking for a more institutional way
of playing high beta exposure.
So we went out and talked to a bunch
of institutional investors.
And what we found is that what they're looking for
is typically investor sentiment and looking at where the dollars are.
So they're looking to capitalize on the narrative. Right.
So we said, well, what better way to do that than to look at the two X levered ETFs?
Right. Because then you can really get a direct link to where investors are putting their money, because you could see which one of the 2x levered ETFs,
the single stock levered ETFs, have the most assets and ones that are growing the most.
So what we did is we put together a methodology that very simply looks at the largest double levered single stock ETFs
and then the ones that are attracting most assets.
So every month we look at that and we score them.
So it's scored 60% largest AUM, 40% fastest growing AUM. And we're looking at the top five names and we rebalance the portfolio every month to capture those five names. So we rebalanced last
week and now we've got Meta, Tesla, IonQ, AMD, and Netflix in there. So it's a different type of portfolio.
It's a way for investors to get high beta exposure,
try to generate that alpha without making a big bet on one name.
Because look, even if Tesla, I'm just using Tesla as an example,
Tesla might be doubling over the next six months.
But you know what, on the way there, you could have some big down days as well um so why take the chance on one single stock when you can have a
portfolio of the five hottest stocks um that kind of can't you know they can't they cancel each other
out in in tough days right so if the market comes down for tesla really hard in one day
you know you've got some buffer in there by having four other securities in there with you.
So we think it's a great, it's a very intelligent way of playing this space.
And, you know, we're, we love this product.
Stock talk, you want to jump in with any thoughts or questions here?
I know usually you touch on AIS and that's one that continues to keep, you know, really
interesting for me here, because I really don't believe that this AI trade is anywhere near being done and they've identified you know we've
talked about it several times a lot of names and it's held up super well um even with the market
you know not doing amazing the past month this is still up over a percent that time and it's still
up over 25 percent it's also over 24 percent year to date so to me it still just continues to hold
up really nicely.
I'm just curious, any thoughts you have around what we've been discussing?
Yeah, no, I think all of it's a great conversation. And, you know, I think Adam was always very thoughtful about the types of products they try to bring to market, which is refreshing because, you know, there's a lot of obviously, I think, underwhelming products out there as well.
But Vista does a great job of of getting to the
forefront with stuff that makes sense for investors that are looking for really specific exposures i
mean to follow up the omaha with a bill aquan etf i think is a smart move i know you know bill's
respected by a lot of people and uh has made some great calls in the past so uh being able to get
more vehicle driven exposure to him i think will be great um ais yeah i mean bill has
interacted with you on x can't say that for buffett yeah yeah that's true i mean buffett i don't know
if he's on x yes he is he is but i don't know if you like comments on much stuff but yeah yeah no
he's more of an observer he's more of an observer yeah exactly yeah i like ackman and you know i
think he has some smart takes.
He's definitely been a little bit more geared in some industries that I personally haven't been as interested in over the years,
especially fast food and fast casual food,
which he's done a great job of capturing some value in some of those names.
I think it's going to curate to a large group of investors who are big fans of Ackman.
And on AIS's side, yeah, it's held up extremely well, actually.
You know, especially with a lot of other market-leading AI names sort of cooling off or unwinding in these past couple weeks.
And, you know, I think the rotation of exposures that you guys are doing with AIS is excellent.
And that's part of what's keeping it above water. So, yeah, I think all around excellent,
excellent conversation and really, really curious to see how much reception this
Ackman product gets. I imagine it'll be pretty well received.
Yeah, I agree. And thank you for that. And yeah, with AIS, AIS has been getting quite a bit of
traction. Trading volumes have doubled over the last few months. Assets have doubled. And it's
no surprise. It's just a unique approach, right? So instead of kind of sticking all your cash into
an AI fund that has the MAG-7 and charges you 80 basis points for it.
What we're trying to do is we're trying to give you exposure to companies that you probably don't
own. We're looking at the companies that are soaking up all the CapEx that Microsoft and
Amazon and Google are deploying to build data centers and semiconductors. So it's all about
the supply chain. It's about the picks and shovels,
the hidden gems around the world that are soaking up the cash. And there are a lot of more industrial
names, frankly, because you need cooling systems to build data centers. So if you believe that
data centers are being built, which they are, and 30% of the cost of a data center is in cooling
systems, who's the leader in that? It's
Vertiv. You need Vertiv in your portfolio. So, I mean, that's the type of analysis we've gone
through with AIS, which is very different than I think any other product out there. And, you know,
we have an investment committee made up with John McNeil, the former president of Tesla,
Sonny Madra, who's the president of Grok. You know, these are the people that I work with.
Professor Whitelaw, the former dean of NYU Stern School of Business. You know, these are the people that I work with. Professor Whitelaw, the former dean of NYU Stern School of Business. You know, these are the people that are overseeing
AIS and all of our products, frankly, to, you know, to make sure that we're on top of the risks
and the opportunities for the portfolio. And, you know, it's a very different approach, I think,
that we're taking. And, you know, we got to get it right. We're a small company. You know, we recently went through 500 million in assets. We, you know, we started
selling in January, so we're growing very quickly, but we're small. So we got to get it right.
And we don't want to over promise and under deliver. So, you know, that's kind of our mantra.
Honestly, I think we're going to look back in two months, over a billion. Omaha will obviously be a big part of it.
And it's going to be a big part of this Ackman one.
I think this is a good idea.
My mind sitting here is how successful do we need these to be to like create their own like suite of them, super investor one.
With Ackman, there's a little bit of a different opportunity too.
And I'm curious if you guys thought about this.
With Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway, there's the argument, you just go buy BRKB, but there is not really that for
Ackman. Is there just a regular Ackman ETF with no income that you think is possible here too?
Yeah. Obviously we want to see that work, but. Yeah, it's approved. It's in the same registration
and it's approved. So we can bring that out the day after. So we're, you know, we're leading with this one. And, you know, if we see a little bit of traction,
we could bring out the, you know, the one without the income overlay right away.
So there are an obvious bunch of, I'm sorry, I bring this back. I'm, I think this is going to
be a big hit. I'm excited about this one. There's a lot of obvious other people too.
Maybe not as obvious.
Maybe we're getting some of the big hitters out of the way,
but there are a bunch of names.
So this concept seems like it scales as well.
There's a lot of interest in it.
How do I get Nancy Pelosi plus income?
Please, Adam.
Say it again.
I missed it.
You went, Adam.
I said, how do I get Nancy Pelosi plus income?
That's all i need
in life i'm good i'll put 100 of the portfolio in it right right that would actually be a good idea
we didn't file for that but um oh adam you could call it the you could call it the ppi etf pelosi
plus income it'll have a you know nice little tag to it everything oh i love that see we need you on
the product development team you can just lead it and you come up with great ideas like that. And I don't have to do anything. It's beautiful.
I'm just saying. So what bends the line between what you can do in this area and what you can't
do? I guess it's kind of maybe everywhere Evan's getting. Well, I mean, look, we're looking at the
portfolios that are publicly available. So, you know, anything that's publicly available is fair game.
You know, I mean, I was very clear to make sure that to say that we're not affiliated with Bill Ackman or Pershing Square because we're not.
We are, you know, we are, you know, paying homage to him. Right.
I mean, we think he's one of the best investors in the world, and we think that there's a way to get his, you know, his exposure to a broader range of investors.
So we're really big fans of his.
We have the pom-poms because we're going to be out there cheering him on.
Got it.
Yeah, that's exciting.
Congrats to you guys for building this stuff.
It's honestly, as someone who thinks on the marketing side, this is probably one of the easiest sells.
It's like, invest like Ackman.
We'll see if that's the one that comes out as well.
But invest with Ackman with some income.
It's already worked.
Once the Buffett won't watch out.
Evan, what's Ackman's, I don't know,
if you look back like 10 years, 20 years,
what is the track record look like?
Do we have that number?
Yeah, the website I use tells me how big his portfolio size is.
I was just looking and it was like 13 something billion.
So I can give you kind of like a general proxy.
And Adam, you can shut me up if you just know the number off the top of your head.
But right now it's $13.7 billion, the size of the portfolio.
Whereas, geez, it has been higher,
but it's also been lower.
Like five years ago,
it was $6, $7 billion worth of positions.
In like 2015, he had like $10 to $15.
So I can't give you a direct answer to that,
but over the last five years,
the amount of money here invested,
it's pretty much doubled. Yeah, I don't know five years, the amount of money here invested, it's pretty much
doubled. Yeah, I don't know the numbers off the top of my head. We did, of course, run them,
but I usually don't throw them out there because, you know, again, performance comes and goes,
and we're just trying to provide an exposure that we think is important. But, you know,
clearly he's done extremely well. He's one of the best investors in the world. He's been in that
position for many,
many years. And I think he's extremely well-respected and, if anything, getting better
as he's learned more. Adam, have you ever had a chance to talk with Ackman?
I have not. All right. We got to make it happen. We were on a space with him a couple of years
him a couple years ago when the banks crashed.
ago when the banks crashed. So we have had a chance to talk with him once before.
So we have had a chance to talk with him
once before.
He's terrific. He's a brilliant guy.
I follow him on X. I mean, I read
all his stuff, so I feel like I know
him, but I don't. It's a lot of reading.
Yeah, he writes some
long-form tweets.
Okay, so
I guess I'll move to another
Do you see? Mike does have his hand up. Oh, I can't to the end. Do you see?
Sorry, yeah.
Mike does have his hand up.
Mike does have his hand up.
Oh, I can't see your hands up.
Sorry, please.
Mike, go for it.
Hey, Adam.
Hey, Wolf.
Question.
Are you owning stock in the ETF?
Are you going to have Pershing Square stock actually in there too?
No, we are not.
We are not.
It's just the underlying holdings.
I love it, man. I got to tell you, that's a great idea of something totally different.
Get paid to wait.
Instead of buying the stock one at a time and sitting in it, you're getting paid the dividend to sit there and wait for Actons to work as magic.
I think that's a great idea.
And I'm all on board with the Nancy Pelosi ETF.
nancy pelosi etf let's do that it's a good one i am honestly i'm really intrigued to see i hope you
Let's do that.
That's a good one.
do bring out the regular ackman one i hope the the income one shoots up to like 100 million so we're
kind of um advice i wonder if the regular acumen one might even do better we'll see you know what
it's a great question and uh you know i was going to bring them both out at the
same time but i'm a conservative guy so i said let's let's continue with the omaha magic that
we've had with the omah and but yeah if we get some traction out of the gate that that i'll
commit right now we'll bring out the other one uh as well i have a actually one other question
before we do move to wrap up, and it's a little bit more
on the AI side. I'm just curious, as we've seen the rise now of these AI browsers, and then
some of these names have continued to push things forward with, you know, NBIS and a couple others.
Have there been any rebalances or changes to AIS? That was just something I wanted to make
sure I got in before we got through the show. Yeah, we have not made any portfolio additions or deletions for, you know, I guess probably six weeks or so or eight weeks or so.
So, no, we haven't had any, but we've got a long watch list.
So we're watching them.
You know, again, they've got to meet our criteria.
They've got to be in the infrastructure side.
They've got to have, you know, the right revenue numbers.
So, you know, we're pretty, you know, strict on what we put in or take out of the
portfolio. Okay, perfect. I appreciate that. Guys, I'm also looking at a couple of the comments down
below and they're a little bit, some good, some bad, but let's go through them, read them.
We got Dogecat saying Ackman has run about a 14% plus ROR net of expenses.
Newman says, sorry, guys, don't care about Ackman.
If it was Druckenmiller or Leeloo, I would say, but Ackman is not a great investor.
One man's opinion.
I don't know.
Someone said, how about Amazon has been a laggard?
And then someone asked, what was the ticker symbol?
It's pinned up in the nest above.
Acky is going what was the ticker symbol it's uh pinned up in the nest above a ck y is going to be the ticker if you want to see uh omah is kind of what we've been talking about
what it's been you know the first one and ackman is the second one so if you want to see maybe a
feel of how it will look like you can go and look up the omah etf and go to the website respect this
everything like that but uh but yeah those are just some of the comments I'm sure people like, listen, uh,
Adam, I don't think you're in here to say Bill Aquin is the greatest investor
of all time, but clearly there's an opportunity here. And people,
a lot of people do think he is the greatest investor of all time.
And I bet you the market's going to tell you this product was a good idea.
Those are some of the comments.
I appreciate it. Well, I'm, I'm a big drunken miller fan as well and uh
you know that might be something that comes soon as well who knows
doesn't he have like hundreds of positions though isn't that i would imagine that makes it a little
tough um he has more positions but he's got a concentrated port you know there's a certain
amount of concentration there that makes it a doable portfolio wait let me double check
duquesne, capital.
I like these ideas with Druckenmiller and all these different pieces.
It is making sense to me.
I guess I'm surprised that others hadn't necessarily done it beforehand, but it's pretty cool to see that you're leading the charge here.
I really can't think of too many others that put something together like this.
You can obviously copy trade on different platforms, but it's not necessarily like an
ETF format like this.
So definitely unique.
Definitely encourage people to check it out.
The Struckenmiller one.
Yeah.
The Struckenmiller one.
I'm looking at his holdings now.
I was a little wrong.
There's only 87.
And they are like this Aquin one.
There's some different names on here.
Yep.
I hope the Aquin one works out so we can keep getting more of these interesting ones.
Because this Struckenmiller one is probably would do really
good. People do like them.
Well, that's, that's approved as well.
And we've got two versions.
And steps ahead of me.
Yep. So again, you know, we're trying to bring out some unique stuff.
And you know, again, if Ackie goes, A-C-K-Y,
we can start piling, you know, pushing some more out there.
Sorry, Wolf. Honestly, I'm just excited about looking through this.
There is, this is, it's a sweet, that seems like a no brainer. I'm surprised more people
haven't done something like this, even if it's not the 15% income overlay on top of it, which
listen, for some people, that's exactly what they're looking for. For some people, it's great.
For some people, maybe they just want the growth and maybe a 2X concept.
I have no idea what it is or just the basic one.
So I just think the general idea of, hey, invest like Ackman, maybe a little delayed
on stuff, just makes too much sense.
I agree.
I agree.
Well, I appreciate the support.
All right.
We're in a good place on this one, Adam, I appreciate it to you. There's some tweets
pinned up in the nest above, the ticker's up in the nest above, but I'm sure we will also talk
more about this going forward. I know we got a little stock picks for the week spaces coming up
though. Gov, I'll throw it over to you and then see a wrap. Yeah, I know EMP is going to close
this one down, open up stock picks for the week, encourage everybody to come to that. It's going
to be hosted from the Wook Financial Account that's up here on stage in just one minute.
I definitely would advise everyone to go
and type in VistaShares.com
so you can go check out the website
where it has all the information on ETFs.
You're the first ones hearing about this new ETF,
so congrats first to the party.
Maybe start your research into that as soon as possible.
Adam, any final comments for us?
No, thanks a lot for your time. I appreciate all your listeners. And, you know, give me a follow on X, Adam Patti,
and of course, VistaSharesX. Love to, you know, keep you guys informed of what we're doing.
Perfect. Thanks so much, Adam. Appreciate you. Looking forward to talking again soon.
Thank you. Thank you. And to the listeners, I know Emp is going to close it out here,
but again, one more time, make sure you're following all the speakers up here follow adam's account up here we
have the vista shares account up here as well i wanted to mention that follow that account too
they share tons of information updates so if you're looking for it we love working with them
and i think enjoy following their accounts too and i'll turn it back over to you
yeah absolutely always great to have adam on here some really interesting things that they're doing
over there i would also just add real fast go to vista shares.com and check out all the different
etfs and uh you can see the updates we talked about wild uh you can see the updates and the
holdings on that one you can see right there on the home page aki that we talked about bill
ackman uh based strategy released next Tuesday on 9-9.
So put that on your radar.
Put it on your homework list.
Go to VistaShares.com.
Check all that out.
Big shout out to the whole Stocks on Spaces crew.
I'm dropping right now to go over to the Wolf Financial account,
open up our stock picks for the week.
And a little teaser. We had somebody that was long 2X Baba that absolutely ran away with the competition.
So come over there and see who that was. Who's that? Who's away with the competition so come over there see who
that was who's that uh he might he might be on stage right now i don't know we'll uh we'll have
to find out all right this was recorded great conversation today as always we'll be back same
time tomorrow power hour right here on stocks on spaces see you guys then Thank you.
