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The future of AI | Stock Market Talk with ThemesETFs
Recorded: Dec. 23, 2025 Duration: 2:54:27Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. What is up?
What is up, everybody?
How are you guys doing?
I appreciate you hanging out here for another day of stocks on spaces i
did post this tweet a little bit earlier talking about like you know if you're here on this day
the tomorrow is a half day christmas eve tomorrow it's a holiday week happy christmas merry christmas
happy holidays to everyone if you're here today you might be a degenerate the chances of you being
a degenerate are probably non-zero. So we are all here today.
I am here getting ready for this. So I appreciate you all coming in and hanging out with us,
taking a look at my portfolio quickly. The ETF portfolio is up 0.4% today. We got Loo up 0.5%.
We got QQQ up 0.4%. QTOP outperforming a little bit. I am wondering, there must be something dragging us down here a little bit.
It is the BTCI I have, also POW.
POW POW.
Those names are dragging the portfolio a little bit underperformance on the ETF side.
But yet, up 0.4% there.
Spying QQQ doing decent enough.
Looking at the other portfolio, the individual stock portfolio is red.
Shout out to crypto again mag
sevens looking good though Apple Nvidia all of them are green Tesla is the lone red mag seven
name that is standing out there taking a scroll through the the rest of the the names the watch
list the portfolio let's actually switch over here I see we got sniper requesting I am actually was
sniper in person right now for the record cool guy but also logical and uh and options mike i appreciate you being here
the best name in my portfolio today the novo nordisk uh sorry in my watch list i do not own
any no novo nordisk up 6.7 today after their weight loss drug pill got approved.
They got a pill approved.
So maybe within the next six months,
those injections will probably be happening significantly less.
Although I do believe, and logically I know you're deeper in the space,
the efficacy-wise, the injections still are performing better.
But it's like, am I going to inject myself with something,
or am I going to take a pill, and it's be like 80% of the outcome?
The worst thing...
Yeah, they definitely do perform.
But I'd imagine the uptake on these pills
are going to be so much more.
Marvell is also a name that's
standing out. And NVIDIA.
NVIDIA had some interesting news this morning
around tariffs
and stuff like that on will tariffs be delayed? What is going to ultimately end up going there? So there had some interesting news this morning around tariffs and stuff like that on will
tariffs be delayed, what is going to ultimately end up going there.
So there's some interesting stuff in the world of the semiconductor space.
Mag 7 generally outperforming a little bit.
When I scroll towards the other end of this watch list, the red side of it, BM&R is the
number one on the bottom.
There we go.
Classic.
Core Weave also down here, Strategy,
Rivian. Rivian has been performing pretty decent over the last couple of weeks. I see I'm having connections. Just let me know if the sound starts to be really bad. Coinbase also down here. So a
lot of crypto, a couple other themes. Obviously yesterday was quite the day in the space and the
drone area. So I know a lot of those ones might be pulling back. FJET, one that I've done some work with in the past,
doing some work with right now.
I actually own a little bit of the stock as well.
So definitely keep that in mind.
Yesterday was at 30.
Today we're back down at 13.
So yeah, that's quite the move on FJET.
The new IPO, gonna be volatile,
but that is a hilarious one on my screen.
I saw Rocket Lab this morning was red,
and I know on the space it started to tick a little bit higher.
Yeah, Rocket Lab, not so bad.
Down 0.1%. We'll see if that
one can end up closing green.
Alright.
Enough jibber-jabber from me.
I did see Options mic in the crowd first,
but he was not the first one on stage. That was a
logical thesis. I could not get in.
I had to restart Twitter.
It wouldn't let me select the microphone.
Okay, that's a fair excuse.
Give it a logical.
Let me go first, man.
That's cool.
I just think it was just weird.
Mike, you kick us off, bro.
It's been tradition.
We don't break tradition today, the day before Christmas Eve.
All right.
The Eve of Christmas Eve.
Eve of Christmas Eve.
You know, this is exactly the type of action I think we all look for this week.
It's a slow melt up.
You had a, you know, we had the data this morning, which was, I'm not sure I believe what to believe in that data because it was kind of contradictory.
You had an incredible GDP number and a horrible, durable goods number.
Usually those are lock and step together.
So I think the Fed's going to have a handful figuring out what data is real and good or what's not. But the market said, don't care,
shot up. And here we are on the SPY about a buck 50 or so from the all time high here,
a buck 70 from the all time high. And you know, you can talk a lot about this market,
but it remains strong. So you're saying we're less than $2 off of all time high for SPYs?
Yep. Less than $2.
QQQ.
Q's are way off yet. Q's got a way to go. Q's, the all time high is 637. So we got a ways to go to get there.
And where are we at right now?
621.
621.
Yep. The21, yep.
The banks, another day today, JP Morgan, new all-time high, Citigroup, Bank of America,
Wells Fargo, they all continue to be very, very strong.
Energy is having a nice-
637?
Yeah.
637.
Yep.
They continue to be strong.
But today was, you know,
out of the gate, I was looking at Amazon this morning.
It had that nice little look to it.
I jumped on stock then. I'm still long at my portfolio.
And then I jumped on calls and I'm still in those calls here.
And I'm planning on swinging them at least through until tomorrow morning.
We'll see where we go from there.
As somebody, I think you said, NVIDIA had a beautiful day today.
Yesterday couldn't go with the news. Today decided, let's go.
It's having a nice day.
Meta tried to go today.
Google, another nice big move today.
And they just kind of, you know, volume is light.
We're 43 million shares.
It's quiet in terms of option flow.
There's just not a lot going on out there.
But this is typical.
And I think you look now for a little melt-up tomorrow officially.
Jeff Hirsch was here.
He'd say tomorrow is when the Santa Claus rally officially begins,
runs through the first trading day of January, which will be next Friday.
And you know, overall,
I don't have anything to say except it's just the holidays. Merry Christmas,
happy Kwanzaa, happy Hanukkah, which we've already celebrated,
happy Festivus for the rest of us. And yeah, I mean,
this is the type of market we usually get this time of year.
So let's be grateful and enjoy it i was talking with a stock stamp here earlier and
he was saying there was a little bit of flow uh in some of these ways i heard a netflix was the
big one of the day like 1.8 million or something yeah besides that not much right um are you
asking me or mike um yeah we did did see a massive Netflix trade today.
I'm pulling it up again.
But that was the biggest trade of the day.
It was 1.8 million premium or 1.8 million.
There was also a 5.6 million video one that came in later.
But yeah, we see Netflix.
But this is it looks like it's going to be a neutral trade now,
considering it looks like the other trader has added other things after or since.
But there still is 76,872 open interest on that Netflix.
And it's going to sound crazy, but one dollar strike.
Somebody's deep in the money there.
Yeah, definitely, definitely. I was going to talk with him a little bit we were like you know
uh 100k lot on hymns versus is like not very common but the the tuslos the invidia's the
institutions trading these can can get some large numbers in those ones
yeah you know it's important to understand perspective when you're looking at flow
um and sometimes i see people in the the comments when people other people are posting flow and they're saying like, oh, $100,000 is not that large, you know, you have to consider the name and the premium behind it trades because you can find million dollar trades on SPY daily.
That doesn't necessarily mean there's anything indicative of anything going on.
But when you see like a $350,000 core weave short, that is something that is unusual and that's something that pops out.
And an example of today, we saw $351.6K going into the $85 core we put.
There is regular flow all the time.
It's important sometimes to just check it out and notice,
but you have to really understand the bias behind it
and understand that if it's a neutral side,
there's lots of people selling options.
I think that the best indicators often are just hitting the bid and ask on calls and puts.
Option buyers tend to be a
little more irregular than option sellers. See, I kind of use it differently. I like use flow to
look for momentum. I want to look for names that they just keep hitting over and over again. These
are small orders that have that kind of repeat flow coming into it throughout the day and to
create, you know, then we know we have momentum there. Today, NVIDIA had that momentum uh you know for me i called out one two
three four five six seven different call alerts on nvidia which on a day like today is quite a bit
so you know i look at things a little differently i look for it a little bit differently you do it
i chose i used to use those big unusual ones i have found in the last
these don't work as well as they used to because typically the funds are hiding what they're doing
with it they're their masks are tied to something.
Oh, I'm not denying that at all.
I absolutely agree with what you just said, especially if I was using this towards conviction.
By no means do I notice an irregular trade and that is enough conviction for me to enter any kind of trade or buy stock accordingly towards that.
But I do look at that as support while in a trade
or considering a trade. And that is just an additional thing to consider. But I do totally
agree with your assertion there that the best way to use flow or to use pretty much any kind
of options flow actually is to look at overall what has happened in all the trades collectively
as opposed to looking for singular trades i absolutely agree yeah some good thoughts there good thoughts there logical i wonder if uh
option slow something you you look at at all give a chime in on that conversation and feel free to
jump around i know that weight loss pill it's not i wonder what it did to some of the smaller cap names that you're trading in there but that was obviously one that was standing out
i imagine eli lily is going to follow soon there is that is something that i'm interested in
i don't know if you have any thoughts there and you just want to jump into it
yeah sure i'll give some thoughts i was actually curious let's see what would be vktx only up two
percent the other small cap that's in the space in in the GLP-1 space, that has yet to be acquired.
Of course, I sold it for a tax loss sale, and it's up 11% today, GPCR.
After MetSara MTSR, which was bought by Pfizer recently for like $9.2 billion in a bidding war against Novo Nordisk,
it's pretty funny that Novo Nordisk was trying to buy out
other GLP-1 players that just shows you how not confident
they are in their own product.
But GPCR up 11% today.
So they're up more than Novo Nordisk on this.
GPCR is probably going to be the next winner potential
buyout candidate in this space.
I'm in a tax off-selling period on it.
So I just had a bad entry. And
yeah, I don't want to buy it back until that period is over. So yeah, I think GPCR is a very
good name. If you're looking for M&A candidates, just because that's kind of what's going on in
the bio space. As for options flow, I've been following, I follow it.
I subscribe to a guy on Twitter.
His name is Options Hawk.
He's like 100K followers.
He's really, really good.
Joe Kunkel, I think his name is.
Yeah, he's real sharp.
He posts a lot of good flow.
Just talking about this on another space.
But yeah, he posts very notable, he posts very notable significant flows.
Sometimes it catches smid caps lately for the last two or three weeks.
They've been, you know, the flow he's been posting has just been nonstop
in size selling puts on big tech.
All the different names, the meta, the Amazon's, the Google's.
I saw another, you know, he posted a $14 million put sale today on Google for January 30th. Very big premium there. I was saying maybe
two weeks ago, someone had bought $110 million of NVIDIA leaps and look at NVIDIA today.
So, you know, when you see flow like that, where it's in size, it helps me understand the
market backdrop. So big put sells, especially in the money, that's bullish. That means that
they're willing to be assigned the stock. That means that someone's willing to buy the dip.
And it's very important, I think, for market indicator, just because we all know that the Mag7 make up a big
portion of the overall S&P. So if they're able to remain strong, then the market will be able to
stay resilient. So what has been the case for the last two weeks? We've seen IWM make a new all-time
high. We've seen RSP make a new all-time high. But Qs have been lagging. I mean, they're lagging.
They're losing the 50-day, barely reclaiming it. But queues have been lagging. I mean, they're lagging, they're losing the 50 day,
you know, barely reclaiming it. But the funny thing is that the strongest, the most notable flow
recently has been all of the mag seven names and the big tech names. So I just think that's
really indicative of the market is probably going higher. Because the weak part that I've been
concerned about is tech not catching a bid. But people are, you know, kind of underlying behind the scenes,
buying the dip in size there. So if tech is able to join the party, then this market
inevitably goes higher. It's a no brainer, like RSP, making a new all time high, and
then you see strength in the queues, that'll definitely push the S&P to new all-time highs, right?
So yeah, options flow, I think that's key.
Man, I just saw a huge, huge, huge, huge
options flow for FXI,
which is large cap China.
China's been pretty beaten down
the last couple of months.
I don't care too much for China,
but the amount of flow there,
the dollar amounts is insane.
Like $40 million worth of premium.
So I have to…
What's all about that right now?
I haven't looked into a little.
So I have 150 down from 200, which is about 25% pullback.
Obviously, you can get a nice return there.
I just decided to follow the flow directly
on FXI to get China exposure without having to pick a winner. But yeah, I mean, obviously,
if FXI is doing well, that probably means KWeb is doing well, which is, you know, the
cues for China. And then... China Craneshares. I don't know if you saw Gab was with them in person the other day.
Oh, that's dope.
Yeah, I mean, they're goats because KWeb is a very notable ETF in the world.
So yes, I mean, look, you got to assume if people are bullish China,
then they're bullish China tech, you would imagine.
Which means that if FXI does well, it probably means that KWeb's doing well.
Probably means that BA FXI does well, it probably means that KWeb is doing well, probably means that Baba is doing well.
But I liked it as a China exposure because I wasn't sure about China,
to be honest, heading into the year.
But that kind of flow makes me think it again and just consider it.
So anyways, yeah, so flow-wise, I think it's important to follow flow.
As for the big tech flow I've been seeing,
I'm not the type of person to really follow that flow
in terms of taking my own trade on it.
But that's mostly because I don't really trade big tech.
I do own Amazon calls.
But I don't spend my capital or time thinking about trading Google.
thinking about trading Google. I'd rather go for higher beta SMID caps. But that kind of flow is
I'd rather go for higher beta, smid caps.
just good for me to know that the market is going to be resilient and hold up and probably head
higher. So that kind of signal tells me, all right, if tech holds up, SPY holds up, risk back on, baby.
on baby so you know we did lose the 50 day last week intra-week but we quickly reclaimed it uh i
think the spx is headed for an all-time closing high let me check my chart here let's see yeah
spx headed for an all-time closing high again today very bullish it hasn't made an all-time high
like an intro that intraday one i think the
intraday all-time high was on october 29 so we're just below that right now but it's a on a closing
basis we're close we're higher we actually close higher than those highs even as of december 11th
so i mean yeah market looks good um market looks good. And then you got to think about this too, right? The Santa rally technically starts tomorrow. It's like December 24th to January 2nd or something like that. And I think you get like an average gain of about 1.5%. I believe the data was. And we didn't a Santa Rally last year or the year before.
And I think history shows that we've never had a period where you didn't have three Santa Rally's in a row.
So odds are, you know, nothing has to happen, right?
Because you can have a first ever thing in history happen can happen, of course.
But here's the scenario.
Odds of a Santa Rally are quite high. The average return
of a Santa Rally would put us at a new all-time high. If you get a new all-time high after a
recent correction, typically you don't get another correction for the next quarter.
And yeah, I mean, you're seeing the biggest flow come from tech, which has been the weak spot.
You know, RSPIWM, the rest of the breath is doing well. So you couple that with strong tech, which has been the weak spot. RSPI, WM, the rest of breath is doing well.
You couple that with strong tech,
all of a sudden, you're definitely heading higher
in this market.
All the signs point to, this is all good.
I see
Stock Talk's joining us up here, so
I'll pass it on.
What does the volume look like today?
I'd imagine it's been pretty low.
Yeah, it's not that high, but the VIX hit a year-to-date low today.'d imagine it's been pretty low yeah it's not that high but
you know the vix hit a year-to-date low today i know that's pretty insane i was not expecting that
because it was my volume is actually better than i thought it would be it's 45 million shares okay
yeah you got 40 minutes to go so you know it's not it's not high but to be honest the most bullish
environments are this kind of like low volume drift up higher.
That's typically been better for the environment.
So you could continue.
At the end of the day, price is the only thing that pays.
You know, spy today at the highs of the day,
making new highs of day towards the end of the day.
I don't know.
There's a lot to like.
And, you know, I don't know if any of you guys follow that Subu trades guy. Obviously, there have been quite a few, I would say, conflicting signals in terms of what viewpoint you take or what data you take into account.
But I saw one that he posted, I think, today or yesterday, where it was like when the VIX goes to 28 and then it gets cut in half or something like that,
basically when we go from very high volatility to lower volatility,
whatever that threshold is that he defined,
you're higher one year later 100% of the time,
one month later 100% of the time, stuff like that.
So I mean, it just looks, everything is kind of pointing to the market rally.
The market's going to continue
to rally here yeah that i was not very much not expecting to look and see a vix under 14
because in my head when i had been thinking about the vix over the last couple weeks or whatever it
was i was expecting like a 16 17 even a even a 20 handle, something like that looking in. But yeah, this is, it's a very interesting,
the conversations on here two weeks ago,
whatever it was when we were at some breaking points,
when we were at pivot points, when we were at close levels,
when we even broke below those levels and you kind of fast forward to now,
we got stick save again and again. I don't know.
Last week or whatever it was, I was kind of saying,
listen, we haven't had that headline to drive us lower.
This is probably just chop going up.
I don't know if we've had that headline to take us higher yet.
It feels like it might just end up in a chop point,
and this is a high end of a range until we get some catalyst.
But if the market won't but I'm a little surprised
to see it. I saw 1369.
I don't know if it ticked down at all,
but the VIX was an intriguing look at it.
We haven't really had any catalysts
this year to the upside, but the market's still up
20%.
Which is curious
because it kind of suggests that
we've gotten
this year that we didn't get last year.
We still haven't quite gotten the AI theme,
companies being profitable from it.
But the Broadcom theme,
I feel like it has widened out
this year.
The general
consensus is saying.
There are themes that have emerged
in the news,
or in policy initiatives, or in comments made by Satya or Sam Altman or Elon.
That's where the themes have come from.
Let's just take a pause.
Think about the nuclear theme.
Where did that come from?
Trump's mouth.
Where did the aerospace and defense theme come from?
Trump's mouth.
where did the space data centers and space theme come from Elon's mouth where did the big pickup
Where did the space, data centers and space theme come from?
Elon's mouth.
in GPU versus TPU trade come from well Google's earnings Sundar Pichai's mouth like we these
aren't catalysts this is narrative guidance right this is a bunch of really influential people
guiding a narrative that people are buying into.
But the market isn't like, okay, in part the market is going up because of these themes,
because they're creating bidding enthusiasm. But it's not a catalyst for the overall market.
Like what macro catalysts have we had this year?
Yeah, I guess we started cutting rates into the tail end of the year.
You can maybe say, okay, before we're looking about that, rates will be X percent lower
by the summer of next year.
That's about the only quote unquote macro catalyst we've gotten.
And even last year, like over the macro catalyst driving the market, the point I'm making is
that the market's natural form is to go up.
That's the market's natural form.
Like, it's funny when we look at the Santa Claus rally, we look at like seasonality and
stuff, right?
If you pull up a seasonality of the SPY chart, anyone can do this.
Type in SPY, overlay it over 50 years or 70 years, whatever you want to do.
I recommend probably just doing 25 years, not to go too far back.
But whatever you want to do, it'll work out the same way.
Every month is seasonally strong for SPY.
Every single month.
Like, why?
Because the markets usually go up.
So it's part of why I don't factor seasonality too much into my analysis, but the markets
are built to go up.
And so they go up without any sort of inorganic or external stimulus.
stimulus. The burden of proof is always more so on the bears than it is on the bulls. Always.
The burden of proof is always more so on the bears than it is on the bulls.
Always.
Even if you're on the, even after a three-year raging bull market, it's still like the bears
still have to prove why people should sell their stocks. Actually, I hate to be the sky,
there is one month over the last 100 years which has negative returns. Okay, whatever. So 11 out
of 12 months. But you get my point. It's September. September is the month.
Just so everyone knows.
Sure. But 11 out of 12 months, we're green.
Like that's, you know, just kind of, it should give you perspective on what the market is supposed to be doing normally.
And when you're looking, in my view, when you're looking for catalysts, you need to say what can disrupt the market's normal course of operation, which is higher.
And we'll see.
There's a lot of chances this year.
The tariff stuff, you know, this AI, Oracle debt situation, you know, all the $2 trillion in commitments that are probably not going to happen.
All of these factors, like they were, these were causes for people to sell stocks.
And for blips this year, they did, right?
In September, October, November, there was some selling.
In April, March, February, April, there was some selling.
So there was these two, three-month periods where there was a lot of individual stock selling.
There was some panic.
The fear and greed index was going to fear every 3% move down.
That kind of gives you perspective on what could or could happen and how the market would respond to it and our ability to recover.
All of these things have been pretty positive this year.
Most of the corrections we've had in the last three years, in fact, have just been bought. And, you know, you can call it
climbing walls of worry. I know some people like to use that phrasing, but in reality, I don't even
think you need to go that far. I think you just need to say, Hey, look, the market's supposed to
go up. It goes up 70% of the time, 11 out of 12 months are green seasonally.
And so that's the natural state of affairs.
And if you want to disrupt the natural state of affairs, you need a really, really good reason
to get people to sell stocks.
And we're in an interesting spot now
because not only are rate cuts impending,
but you still have an exorbitant amount of money
on the sidelines.
I don't think all of that money market fund money
is amenable to going into equities. amount of money on the sidelines. I don't think all of that money market fund money is
amenable to going into equities. So I wouldn't say like, oh, look at that,
$6 trillion is going to go into equities. No, I wouldn't say that. But I do think a trillion,
two trillion of that could find its way into equities with lower rates, which is a catalyst, not to mention this Trump accounts program expanding pretty rapidly, which is,
again, it's less about the money that's going into the market.
People are like, oh, what is a couple billion dollars going into the market matters?
It doesn't.
It's about the perception and the broadness of importance of the market.
When every kid has a stake, the market becomes more important,
and that will reflect in the government as well. Because then when the market's down,
you're not just screwing over the top 10%, you're screwing over all these kids that are trying to compound their wealth, these babies that are going to compound their wealth. And that factor
is emerging too next year, as this money starts going out
to children that are born so you know i don't know i'm not saying you're headed for a secular
10-year trend but if we were this would be a hell of a start to one right three years straight up
20 gains on the indexes you know all things being equal i wouldn't expect that again next year just
because it's pretty rare to get three plus 20 percent years and then get another one.
But is it fair to say, hey, the market's probably going to be up next year?
I mean, all things being equal, if nothing changes between now and then, yeah.
And there's other things that could emerge.
But I don't know.
It looks pretty good.
And today you had a lot of rate sensitive names get sold because of the strong GDP print, which probably pushes out some rate cuts if that strength continues.
But, I mean, look at SPY today.
You know, there was a very, very healthy ability for the market to go up today, even without all the spec.
And that's what you like to see, or at least that's what I like to see.
I mean, you know, I had a mixed bag today.
I had a couple positions red, but not by much.
The positions I had red were down by 0.8%, 1%.
Nebius was down a little bit more than that.
But then I had, you know, AVAV green, Kratos green, OSS green, ENS green, Amcor green,
LEU green, HII green, DPRO is going to finish green here too.
You know, with most of the major spec indexes red.
So I'm fine with the action here
um and you know you'll get you're gonna need a good a very good reason for people to get out
of this market at this point because um it's been resilient very resilient um and so yeah
that's kind of my view.
Yeah, we had a good chat yesterday going through all of different sectors
and themes we're excited for in 2026.
What actually might be coming
versus this hype and this narrative
and the stuff like that.
So, yeah.
Actually, Mike, you tend to leave in the first hour
so you missed some of those conversations.
You got any thoughts on what Stock Talk is talking about there?
I mean, I tend to agree with him.
I mean, the market wants to go up.
Its natural form is to go up.
The only catalyst really we've had this year, I think he's right about,
was the interest rate cuts starting to come in.
I think next year is going to be more volatile.
I don't know if we can get a 20 year or not that's a tough call but the other thing i think is going to bother the markets
next year the midterms are coming in midterm years always tend to be a little bit more difficult
uh it's you know uncertain and it really just it's around uncertainty right you know you know
who's going to control what and how how's this going to affect the presidency and things that
are getting done i think that'll come into play. But I agree.
The market's natural form is to go up.
We have no real reason for it to come down here right now.
I mean, everything that's been there, tariffs, whatever, has been blown off and bought back.
And, you know, we talked about the data, conflicting data this morning that doesn't make sense.
And the market just doesn't care.
And I think that's all you got to really care about.
If the market doesn't care, you don't care.
Just keep playing it to the long side. And, you know and you know like to see this rally continue just to push up and it's nice to
see the broaden out a little bit with names like amazon coming back into play i'd like to see that
one wake up i still think that was a fabulous report and have no idea why they keep selling it's good stuff there mr options mike by the way i end up in the nest above yeah okay
i think they've been less above that that chart with each month and even the red month isn't like
uh like when you look at median it's the smallest off of the the variation so it's not like it's
you look at median it's the smallest off of the the variation so it's not like it's
a massive red month marks the mind to go up
mike what has the the last couple days with trades been for you you've been trading less size yeah
um i'm really just not trading much i'm just picking something so today you know yesterday
i traded palantir and tesla and today I've just done two trades on Amazon.
One was stock on the open and got out, and then I grabbed a bunch of options on it,
trimmed them up earlier this morning, and just holding some, and we'll hold them overnight.
I'm not trying to just chase things here.
The market here is, from a day trader perspective, it gets a little tough.
It's choppy.
Things move slowly, especially on options. They can really kill you because, you know, they're decaying rapidly. So, you know,
it's just find that trade, find what has momentum and then go for it. And that's really what I
focus on here. And I think, you know, tomorrow is a half day session. Tomorrow's likely to be a
very brutal day, very, very quiet day here in the markets. So just keep that in mind for trading
tomorrow. It's a great day to take off.
Today is probably a great day to take off,
but I'm glad you guys are, everyone is here hanging out with us.
Yeah, tomorrow market does close at 1 p.m. Eastern.
Market is closed on Thursday.
SEC Edgar is literally not going to be up tomorrow, Thursday or Friday.
Oh, the federal government's closed tomorrow. I don't know what that means about all these press releases. Well, the federal government's closed i don't know what that means about all these press releases well the federal government's closed tomorrow now yeah
but so a lot of people distribute stuff through edgar and all these like other pr news wires like
friday might be a very lacking news day as well i i don't know i mean i mean you know who wants
to really put out press right now i mean mean, you've got to ask yourself that.
Most executives are gone, right? They're done for the year. You know, they're on vacation.
They're spending time with their families and everything. You know, most companies are in quiet mode here.
There's no earnings, you know, no data coming at us of any note. The Fed governors mostly don't want to speak.
I mean, it's just a quiet time of year and it's good. It makes it nice and easy.
You can take some small stuff, sit in it, and then walk away.
I decided to take a little trip.
So that's what I did during this time.
I do want to wish everybody a very Merry Christmas to those that celebrate,
and I look forward to seeing you guys next week after the holiday.
Thank you
for hanging out with us.
We appreciate you being here and echo that.
Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates
the holidays. Catch you soon.
Appreciate you being here.
Appreciate you being
here. Logical, I have
no idea anything about this company, but
someone said LNTH
can be the next big biotech. What is this company, but someone said LNTH can be the next big
biotech.
What is this company?
That's the wrong tick.
The wrong tick.
LNTH.
It's like, you know what it is?
One of those value traps that everyone's like, oh my god, it's trading at like 15 times earnings
and it's buying by stock.
It doesn't mean that you can't get a decent return from it, but the potential of that
stock is already known. Because like, okay, so let me look up LNC real quick.
I forget the market cap is like 5 billion, maybe 4.5 billion, right?
That's just, I know this stock very well because it's screened so well and everyone, blah,
blah, blah.
The problem that people make with some of these biotech stocks
is that they fail to realize that the total addressable market for many biotech stocks
have what's called peak sales. It's not like a software company that has every enterprise
on God's green earth as their potential customer. And so that's why whenever you're, look, we talk about this all the
time, me and Stock Talk, when we cover different sectors. And this is something that you learn just
by doing this for years and studying and learning about new sectors, is that every sector has a
different metric that you need to base it off of. Like in the ad tech industry, they go by adjusted
EBITDA. If you go into software, they talk about annual recurring revenue or net retention rates or free cash flows.
And then people argue with you about stock-based compensation.
But my point is that every sector and industry has these kinds of metrics.
And for biotechs, it's peak sales.
And so the issue with this company is that it'll do fine.
You know, it might even have a 40% upside from here.
I don't know.
I haven't checked lately.
And, you know, because but their main drug is already very well known
as a blockbuster drug, which means greater than $1 billion of peak sales.
Here, let me just in real time, pull up LNTH investor relations.
Let's go look up their recent filings. Okay, reports third quarter. Okay, they did 384
million in revenue. Obviously, that's really good. Gap fully diluted, 41 cents.
Adjusted is like 127.
I don't know which one we believe.
Upcoming retirement of CEO.
Okay, nobody cares.
Announce PDUFA date.
Okay, so they have like another drug
that's coming to market.
We'd have to go and figure out,
you know, what's the peak sales of that drug
and apply a multiple there.
But closed acquisition of life
molecular imaging in July. So, you know, they're already turning into acquisitions. So this is what
I'm getting from this, right? Okay, hold on. They repurchased $100 million of shares of common stock.
This is what you want a company to do because they're just printing cash now because their drug franchise
is just a money printer. They've kind of soaked up their addressable market.
It's a very high margin business. And until their patent cliff comes, they'll just be printing a
billion plus a year on that drug and just the extra profits. What are you going to do with it?
Well, they're going to turn around, they're going to make acquisitions so they can find new verticals to grow they're going to reinvest into
their pipeline which clearly they're headed for a padufa i mean like could this business be good
yes but like let's just take a look at the revenue worldwide worldwide revenue in q3 384 million
you know what it was in 2024 378 million this thing grew 1.4% year over year that speaks to exactly
what I'm talking about which is that they are already saturating their addressable market.
So and then they break it down by their different drugs and so their main drug sales of pillar
battery not to pronounce this pillar if I don't know okay decrease. Decrease of 7.4%. Sales of Dfinity, another drug, which is a third
as big as that other franchise, increase of 6%. Okay, so yeah, this is a, you want to
buy these companies when they are, you know, earlier stage, earlier launch, you're making
a contrarian bet that they will one get approval
if they're still clinical, or they will eat up market share or they're, you know, people
don't think their launch is going to go successfully, or their peak sales is actually much bigger
than people think or they're going to, you know, eat. Yeah, so that's kind of what you
want to bet on. And that's kind of where the alpha is. Seeing a company that's already reached
its peak of a drug, like in terms of the addressable market is, you know, and then now you're basically
making bets that their side bets are going to work out, like they're making these acquisitions
or their PDUFA date is going to get approval. I mean, it totally could. And but you'd have
to like make now an opinion on like, what is that worth that new segment? Clearly, like their second franchise
is, you know, at a third of the revenue run rate of their main franchise. So you have
to go figure out what does that peak sales look like? I'm just talking like I haven't
done deep research on all their new avenues. But like, yeah, they're turning around buying,
you know, $100 million shares. Look, not saying this isn't a bad place to park your money. But, you know, if people are like,
well, it trades at 15 times earnings. It's like, yeah, but also trades at like, I don't know,
three times peak sales. That's the more important number. People know that these things are high
margin businesses, but they know that their sales are limited. That's why they go off peak sales
and not earnings numbers to determine what that number should be.
So I've looked at this before,
but I think people just come to this stock
and many others like it when they don't realize
what like peak sales mean in this sector
or they're like newer to it.
We got another question from my long term portfolio.
Well, more comment.
He said ABCL is a good buy IMO, not financial advice.
Smiley face.
Disagree.
You ABCL guy?
Hardcore disagree.
It's a retail bullshit stock.
Sorry, I'm probably gonna get all sorts of people cussing me out for that one.
But I don't side with these.
I don't side with, you know, retail stocks just because they're getting a lot of buzz.
Okay. So like real quick, ABCL, even after the recent pullback, okay, which is pulled back like 50% or 40%, ABCL is still trading at $1.1 billion market cap.
Okay. So let's go look at ABCL investor relations.
I'm pretty sure they're in phase one.
So hold on, let me tell you.
Does this mean that I could be wrong on a 10 year timeframe?
Okay, maybe I could be, right?
Maybe their main drug and blah, blah, blah, blah, but they're probably gonna dilute the
crap out of you by then.
Okay, so hold on.
Generated loss of $57 million in the quarter.
Okay.
Continue to, so two of their programs, the two programs in phase one clinical trials.
You know how far that is from making revenue?
Okay.
It's very far.
They're burning $57 million a quarter.
Okay.
Let's take a quick look at their liquidity.
Quick look at their liquidity, $523 million.
$523 million.
Okay, so let's say they have the upwards limit of the $680 million that they're quoting.
Okay, so this still trades at two times cash.
They have phase one drugs that probably won't reach commercialization if they get approved, right?
They're burning like $250 million a year.
So they have about two, two and a half years of cash runway.
Okay, two and a half years of cash runway.
So in two years, they won't have any cash,
which means that if this stock goes sideways,
it'll still be trading at $1 billion.
And they'll still be very far from anywhere near commercialization.
Like, I'm not saying that their phase one data can't hit.
And then, you know, the stock goes up and then they have an offering and then they dilute all the shareholders.
Like, that's what happens when you look at these.
That's the only way they have to raise cash.
They don't have a revenue business.
have a revenue business. That's what people don't get when it comes to clinical trial businesses.
That's what people don't get when it comes to clinical trial businesses.
And let me just remind people, okay, that many phase three companies with high odds of approval,
like six months ago, were trading below cash. That means that, first off, this is phase one,
which means it has years of cash burn ahead of it. Phase three companies that were headed for like Padufas were trading below cash.
This thing is years away, years of cash burning ahead, and it's trading at two times cash.
There's zero alpha in this name.
None.
I mean, you can hope for a retail pump, but that's not a thesis.
I appreciate the pause there.
Let's see if they respond.
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to... I'm just...
I don't want to be like...
No response yet.
I'll be following along.
Yeah, go for it.
I'm going to keep it real, bro.
Like, I'm not going to sit here and tell people...
You know, because I see these things and I'm just like,
have you even...
I don't know.
Like, have we even, like, know, like, have we even like
studied the industry? Do we? Because that makes zero sense. I don't think anyone serious
would be long that thing. I mean, maybe there's, you know, alpha, but I bet you you're, you
know, you're down 50% before you can blink or diluted like crazy. So the drag on your
returns are gonna be disgusting. And I don't know i don't see it
oh i was on mute that whole time i was on mute that whole time got a question another question
from the crowd this one uh we're gonna have another one for you after logical i'm actually seeing
this empress just put one uh but we got a question about iridium i believe that is what the actual
name is irdm stock talk i know there's one we would play have played around a little
i stopped out of it that was all it was no but it's not even specifically on that, just kind of thoughts on it.
Do you have opinions on it?
Yeah, I think compared to the other space and satellite stocks, it's cheap.
That's it.
Yeah.
I want to make a comment on this one because, you know,
Iridium, the chart did look nice, and I spoke with Stockback briefly.
I know he was completely just in for Lotto,
and because it's cheap relative to the peers and, you know,
the theme is right, and he's right just in for Lotto. And because it's cheap relative to the peers and, you know, the theme is right.
And he's right about the theme being hot.
We all see Rocket Lab and Sats and all this other stuff.
And, you know, when I looked at the business, it is cheap.
It's just such an underwhelming business that I just couldn't get excited about it.
And in this market, people just want to pay up a zillion times sales instead of buying something.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I don't think the business is the issue i actually don't mind the business model the the main i think overhang is the fact that
spacex is eating their lunch and so you know it's that makes sense it's a melting ice cube if you
will um yeah that makes sense that's why i think people there's a headwind to the stock but i think
if the space stocks stay strong they've had a kind of choppy last couple days.
I think if they stay strong, I think that stock will go to like $25, $30.
There's actually another space and satellite stock that I'm looking at right now that is also cheap that I think would do the same.
Don't tell me it's Planet Labs again.
We back?
It's not Planet Labs.
Planet Labs is not cheap.
Anyway, I was going to say.
Yeah, there are other names that are cheap.
When you're looking at themes, there's a couple ways you can play it.
You can play it with a thematic leader that's going to go up a lot,
or you can play it with a meme stock that has high short interest.
Those are generally not fundamentally attractive opportunities alternatively you can play a theme with cheap stocks
so like objectively cheap companies that are attached to the same things those
tend to move less but they tend to be easier to hold in my view so sometimes I
do that now that's not always the case.
Like, you know, I own a lot of expensive stocks like Kratos and Robinhood and etc.
But when I was attaching myself to those themes, those stocks were not as ridiculously price.
Like Robinhood at 19 versus Robinhood today or Kratos at 20 versus Kratos today.
Very different prices in terms of their valuations.
And so, you know,
I don't mind holding those now that I have a deep cost advantage,
but I'm getting involved in the theme.
It's tough for me to like take a core position in a name that like,
I find hard to defend its valuation.
So it just depends on what point of the site stage of the cycle you're at.
For me, at least based on the types of stocks that i'm picking and you know i think we're pretty deep
into this cycle yeah sure maybe next year we go up again and the year after we go up again or
whatever maybe we're in a 10-year secular bull market either way i feel more comfortable pivoting
to more reasonably priced names um and even when i'm looking at these themes. Now, again, there are exceptions to that.
Like with the drone theme, I opened up DPRO.
I mean, that's not a fundamentally attractive stock necessarily,
but I do think compared to its peers in that space,
it is trading at a very, very reasonable market cap.
That's a different way to look at valuation, right?
You're looking at relative valuation in that case.
You're saying, okay, here's every stock in the industry trading at a billion dollar market cap. This one's,
you know, trading five times lower. I think that that presents an interesting risk reward for,
you know, a new contract or whatever. That's...
Were there drone stocks?
Yeah. What?
I'll let you finish your thought. I'm going to come out there. Sorry.
Yeah. And then alternatively, I took in the same theme of the drones, I took AVAV calls. Right.
And that was because I didn't want to initiate a core position in it here at these prices.
You know, next market crash, that'll probably be a name that I buy in size.
But I wanted to get exposure to it over the next couple of weeks because I thought it was going to move off of that 200 day.
And it did. It was a 5 percent on Friday. Our calls were up a lot.
And then yesterday it was up another 5 percent. And then yesterday it was up another 5%. And then today it was up another 2%. So that's a big move on the drone, in my view, the best drone stock, the drone large cap, the best pure play at least. And that's a hell of a move. I mean, my contracts today are up 140% as of the close on that.
contracts today are up 140% out of the close on that. So I chose to play that that way. It was a
large cap stock. Didn't want to take a core position at this current valuation, but I felt
like it was going to move. So I took close to the money calls expiring in January, and those are a
dub already. And then the D pro shares are up 25%. That moved a lot faster than AVAV because it's
a smaller market cap, right? But that's also not a story where I can look at it and go,
oh, well, it's fundamentally sound.
It's cheap.
Of course it's not.
But I still bought it.
So it just depends from theme to theme or what I'm looking for.
You know, sometimes I, you know, occasionally I say never buy memes.
Occasionally I will buy a meme stock.
You know, if I think the opportunity is ripe,
if I think the theme is about to heat up,
in these kind of cases I will buy a meme stock.
Sometimes.
Rarely, but sometimes.
And, you know, in other cases...
You and our baby.
Yeah, in other cases, I'll look at relative valuation
and just say, okay, where's the best place I can put myself?
And then sometimes I'll layer a stock like that
with calls on a large cap,
which is what I did with the drones.
So, yeah, I don't know.
It's tough for me to talk from like a black and
white chalkboard standpoint, which is what a lot of the questions, even I get on discord are that,
you know, they're like, Hey, do you cut every stock when it goes below the 21 EMA? Like, no,
it's conditional, right? It depends on why I own the stock, what the theme is. I think the theme
is going to last, um, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So
there are no quote unquote hard rules for me, but that's by virtue of experience. I think for
newer traders, you have to have hard rules. Like I think once you get good at markets and, you know,
don't rely on yourself to dictate that or anyone else, just look at your performance. If your
performance is consistently good over five, six, seven five six seven eight nine years then you're good at markets but um you look at your
own performance and you make the deduction like okay i'm skilled enough now to start breaking my
rules and that's when you get to super performance in my opinion like having rules is as important
in markets as knowing when to break them.
And some of my best stocks this year have been from me breaking rules,
either on my risk management or on my entry or on the duration of my hold or something like that.
Like, there's some rule that I gave flexibility to or said,
you know what, typically I'd cut the stock and I'm it because of X Y and Z that often lends itself to super
performance on those high conviction names so build rules trade with the
rules prove to yourself that you're good at stock picking and good at management
and you can dramatically outperform the indexes and after you've done that over
several years then you can start saying okay I can start breaking my rules with
certain exceptions and certain stocks that I'm higher conviction on.
And then, you know, you end up with big bangers
in those cases if you do it right.
So, yeah.
The question I interrupted you on, my bad on that,
because it was drones and stuff.
I saw the headline about DJI yesterday after the close.
Did that just come yesterday?
Was there no rumor or anything before that?
Well, there was a statement yesterday morning from the White House,
and then there was another statement to close.
And then there was a statement this morning from the Chinese Commerce Ministry,
which says, please don't do it.
So we'll see.
I mean, if DJI gets taken off the covered list.
That's huge.
That's 60% of the market, 70% of the market.
Yeah, it's a huge deal.
The commercial market.
It's not like a minor candle.
It's a huge deal.
70% of the commercial drone market in the United States.
So I'm going to say 80%.
Yeah, that's the low number.
I've seen 70 to 90.
So it's like.
Yeah, I don't know what the exact number is,
but the point is the vast majority of U.S. commercial drones
come from that one company.
And the U.S. government has not followed up on the fact
that that ban is or not going to come.
Like that hasn't been...
There's been no statement from the White House or anyone else saying,
yeah, we're actually not going to ban them.
Now, China did ask for it this morning.
Maybe they call Trump and maybe as part of this trade deal which i don't even know what the hell has been
going on without i haven't signed anything yet with them but i guess those negotiations are
still continuing maybe it factors into that who knows but the bid under those stocks has been very
nice for these last couple days so wait what's the what's the was it did you say a china negotiation
Wait, what's the...
Did you say a China negotiation?
I was talking about the DJI ban.
Okay.
Understand the China aspect of it.
Yeah, so
DJI is a Chinese company.
And they...
Did you...
I don't know if you even heard me talk about this before, logical?
I don't think so.
Okay, so the reason I got back into drone stocks is this week, there's an impending ban.
There's something called the FCC covered list, okay?
And what it is, is it's foreign entities that are covered by the FCC, which means they are not allowed to introduce new products into the United States market.
allowed to introduce new products into the United States market. And so DJI is a Chinese company,
is a very, I don't know what the breakdown of it, it's like D Dengjuan something, I don't know how
to pronounce it, but the abbreviation is DJI. And they are impending to be added to the FCC
covered lists by close today. And if that happens,
they will not be able to introduce new products into the U.S. market.
And they currently control 70-
Is that for the whole company or just the drones?
Please, let me finish.
70 to 80% of the market is controlled by these guys.
So they're going to be banned
from putting new products into the market,
which would inhibit all of their customers
from getting new products
next year, which means they would have to replace them with U.S. products.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, so that is a huge catalyst for the drone industry, in my opinion.
I wonder if it'll actually happen.
I saw you and I both follow Eli on Capital.
He posted something, I think it was yesterday or two days ago.
Rubio swaps Hawk for diplomat
and year-end pivot on China.
Basically,
you can finish.
Yeah, I just want to say,
it sounds like his quote is,
our job is to find opportunities
to work together with the Chinese Communist Party,
the Chinese government.
That's what Rubio told reporters in Washington.
So I don't know.
It seems like kind of a softer stance.
And I know you don't like trading China, dude.
I took a trade today.
I was mentioning it earlier.
I saw the biggest call flow I've ever seen.
Well, I wouldn't say the biggest I've ever seen,
but it was up there.
Somebody slapped $40 million of FXI calls for May.
I don't know.
I just feel like maybe we're not decoupling quite yet.
I'm trying to see if this...
DJI is a popular company outside of just drones.
For anyone who doesn't know, uses their mics and stuff.
It doesn't seem like this is going to impact the other parts of the business,
drones specifically. And I think this also ties into that headline this morning
which i thought was a little bit confusing about uh china the us and china and tariffs and it being
extended until 2017 i was looking at some of the stocks and uh certain ones were were moving
different directions than i would have expected. But that headline did feel like something that was a part of
greater negotiations going on.
The tariff chip headline that came out this morning.
Yeah, I mean, there's a chance it'll be included
in negotiations with China,
but I don't
think that that really matters. I think that
the intention is clear here,
which is that this is the next theme where there's going to be on-shoring.
I said this in August with the semi-chips.
No one believed me.
Amcor since then has been one of the best-performing stocks in the entire sector.
P-Lab as well.
This will happen with drones next year.
You know, given the fact of what we've seen as what the most modern conflict is, you know,
Ukraine-Russia is a drone war.
The fact that this didn't happen two years ago is probably a mistake.
I'm not saying ban DJI.
I probably don't think that's the move.
I think it's just creating the own, you know, US S based ones and really investing in that.
But I'm surprised given, you know,
the real life examples you've seen that this was not something that happened more sooner.
I know the theme has gotten hot versus year or two years ago,
but that's been the stocks.
I don't know if we've had the, unless I miss a stock talk,
I'm sure you would have dug in deeper.
I don't know if we've had from a government level,
like a real investment in this one.
No, no, we haven't.
We haven't had a real investment yet.
But the tea leaves for real themes get laid very early.
It becomes very obvious.
Like at the end of last year, I was like, okay, it's going to be nuclear next year.
And it was.
It's very obvious.
Like the policy footprint is not, you can't hide it.
The intention behind a policy footprint is very obvious.
It's in the language.
Like Huntington Ingalls, HII, I've been in this stock all year.
All year.
No one gave a shit about it when I was talking about it in March.
At 200 bucks, people were like, okay, who cares?
Boring ass company.
This stock's $350 today.
You know?
And that was obvious.
Trump said shitbuilding in every fucking
speech for like three months.
And then you get the executive order
last week or whatever, this week,
with the Trump-class frigates.
You think that's the end of it?
Think the administration is going to roll over now
and not make it a priority? No, they're going to expand
the Philadelphia shipyard.
They've already put the pieces in place to do that.
They're going to start building frigates there. Whether you think it's a good idea or not this is the problem this is what
people get lost in is they get lost in their personal opinion on the policy that doesn't matter
that doesn't matter it was the same thing with nuclear energy last year people were like well
nuclear is not ready for this like it'll actually be in that gas like okay how have nat gas stocks
done versus nuclear stocks over the prior one year
do you want to make money or do you care about like uh being right i mean it doesn't matter it doesn't matter whether you think these technologies are viable or not there will be
money flow because the president of the united states is reiterating these things over and over
and over again and to the extent that he can control the agencies beneath him to any degree, whether that's the FCC or NASA or any of these organizations that are related to
aerospace and defense or the military, especially the DOD, which he does control, then what are we
talking about? I mean, he's able to just whip off two or three ships over a two to three-year period
without really going through congressional approval, just rerouting DOD funds. He could do that over and over again. The Philly expansion of their
port is going to be enormous based on what he's saying. And, you know, if you think shipbuilding
can't come back to the United States, okay, that's fine, but there's money to be made.
And so that's how I think of these themes. Like because a theme is obvious you don't want to brush it off
in fact usually when it's very
obvious you want to dive in
because that's where all the money
is going to go and I think
next year aerospace and defense drones
by extension is going to be an enormous
theme it was a big theme this year it's going to be enormous next
year look at the relative strength in those
aerospace and defense stocks headed into the close of this
year that people don't want to sell them.
What's your thoughts on the
rare earth trade then? Because it's kind of a similar vein.
Yeah, I think it's a similar vein.
I hesitate to believe
we're actually going to reshore rare earths because
of how dirty and disgusting
of a process it is and how much
toxic waste there is.
I have a feeling we're just going to pawn it on Australia. Based on what I've
read over the last six or seven months, that seems to be the direction that we're headed.
Australia has a lot of uninhabitable, unused land that would be perfect for rare earth refining.
They also have an enormous amount of discovered, located stockpiles of rare earths that haven't yet, the infrastructure
hasn't been built to access them yet, but a couple of billion dollars will solve that,
which is nothing from a government standpoint. So I think we're going to pawn rare earths on
Australia. Do I think it's a bad long for next year? No, I actually like the relative strength
like the relative strength of those names these last couple of sessions but i don't have any
of those names these last couple of sessions, but I don't have any exposure currently.
exposure currently um but yeah it's it's funny because i just saw a video on twitter and it was
like one of those dumb videos where i mean it wasn't that dumb to be outside opening where
they take like the size of the us on the map and then like copy paste it into on other parts of
the world and obviously like
africa is like freaking huge but i didn't realize that australia is basically as big as you know
northern america so yeah i get that they totally have a ton of land i had no clue and you would
see that i actually do follow australian stocks and australian markets a fair amount because
i did not know at last scene was austral, yeah, there's quite a few companies that actually started in Australia. But they do
have a lot of materials companies and I've followed those very closely. There's some
that are like some of the best stocks in like, all markets have started from there. Like
big one is Mater Group, mad.ax, Duratech, d-u-r.ax. I mean, there's
a lot of these kind of engineering-esque companies. And I know there's a bunch of Australian miners
that people fawn over. I have been deep in the microcap value Twitter algorithm for years.
So I just generally been exposed. So that actually makes a ton of sense to me.
I had one friend who lost a lot of money on this one.
I don't even know how we got to this point, but BBAU, BBXU,
I don't know, one of those names.
Back in the day.
What an interesting time.
But BHP is the one that I looked into right away there after you talking about it.
But I know it's a little bigger.
I'm going to check a couple of these that i used to follow for a long time
and see if they're how they're holding up right now um let's see
the end the s p 500 did uh i don't know if it was spx specifically but the s p 500 i see mp
might know as well while you're looking into that. Obviously, it did close the day at a new record high closing price.
Yeah, that's what I was saying.
And by the way, so you remember Stock Talk when we were on here and I was basically saying like the SPX made an all-time high.
And then we said like basically if you get a 5% correction and then a new all-time high, then you don't see another correction for the next quarter.
That's just generally what the data has showed.
We never actually saw a new all-time high, then you don't see another correction for the next quarter. That's just generally what the data has showed. We never actually saw a new all-time high when I mentioned this stat before, but we saw a new all-time closing high. That was on December
11th. And then today you got yet another new all-time closing high. So pretty good. But we
haven't seen a new all-time high. The October 29th high still stands as the intraday high.
new all-time high the October 29th high still stands as the intraday high.
I care more about closing high than I do the intraday high.
Yeah, I agree with you.
Interesting.
They can just sell it down and that's kind of bearish.
But if you close at the high, it's like very constructive.
I won't lie to you when I'm making the posts of it closing at an all time high closing
price as opposed to anything else.
I feel a little cheeky.
No, I think it's, I think it is important.
And the fact that, you know, the market is quite strong.
I mean, do you see the S&P today?
I mean, it got a nice little spike at the end of the day with some volume and it closed
at the highs of the day.
It's just really nice.
It's really nice action, man.
Nobody's selling this market.
We got an amp joining us up here.
Stock talk. One thing I was gonna I was saying when I think you weren't up here yet. But
you know, we've been talking a lot about like market internals and like the strength of
the market and you know, is this healthy and then we've kind of you know obviously everyone anyone with a chart can look at and see that RSP made new all-time
high IWM new all-time high recently SMP didn't Q's didn't if anything Q's have been kind of
the weakest one right uh but what I was saying is like the last two weeks all I've been seeing
is very bullish flow of non-stop put selling high delta in the
money for like all the mega cap names, Google, Amazon, big time, like leaps and calls. Like I
was saying two weeks, a week or two ago, there's $110 million of Nvidia leaps bought. So you know,
while tech was lagging on the charts, the underlying flow was dramatically leaning towards very bullish for tech.
And then now you're starting to see tech follow through.
So it's really nice.
Yeah, the Qs definitely do have a little bit of work to do.
But I liked today's candle for the Qs.
It was nice.
You got a little bit of a soft pullback yesterday,
held above the 9-21, and then today pushing.
You get clearance over 623.
You're going to probably go right back to the highs.
Obviously, you don't want to see the Qs get rejected here
because that would look double-toppy for the Qs.
But, yeah, they have a little bit more work to do than Spy does.
Yeah, they have a little bit more work to do than Spy does.
Spy is looking great.
How often and how strong can these names even move differently than each other?
I get QQQ is more tech and stuff, but at the end of the day...
They can.
I mean, I think it's still like...
What is the weighting on S&P 500 for non-tech?
It's still a decent amount.
Like, there's still a little bit more...
I mean, yeah, Spy is a tech index
because of the top constituents being a ton of weight.
But there's more non-tech in Spy than there is in the Qs.
So, like, for what that's worth,
there is an ability for Spy to, like, hold up better
during these blips of rotation than there is for the Qs.
But, yeah, I think the Qs look fine.
I mean, they're above the 921 EMA.
I'm not going to be negative on them in that situation.
So my bias is still going to be up.
But structurally, they haven't taken out the highs yet.
We haven't gotten that all-time high close on the Qs yet.
So, yeah, I would like to see that before I get really, really confident on tech.
But, yeah, I mean, I have a ton of tech exposure. So if I'm putting my money where my mouth is, then, yeah, I think like to see that before I get really, really confident on tech. But yeah, I mean, I have a ton of tech exposure.
So if I'm putting my money where my mouth is, then yeah, I think it's going higher.
I think what you said is kind of key for why the RSP is making new all-time highs, right?
Like if you basically equal weight everything.
So certain sectors have way more names in it than maybe the tech sector, because, you
know, it's like five to 10 names in what is traditional tech that
makes up what 35% of the index.
But that means that the other 75% is split across, you know, the rest of like
the, the fortune 500.
Um, and, and then you, I think it's something like, I don't know if you have
like 70 names in like energy and industrials or something like that, but it's
just like, clearly they don't from a market cap weighting make up a big portion.
I didn't get sector specific,
but two thirds of the stocks are non-tech.
One third of the market cap of the funds
or the weighting, sorry, is non-tech.
Which is, you know, very good to see
the rest of the market participating
because I feel like that's kind of been the bear case
is like, oh, it's only, you know,
it's five stocks pushing the market higher.
And it's like, well, you want to check that again?
Even within those large cap stocks at the top, besides Amazon for brief points,
they've all had their moments when they've been rallying and leading the market over the last year or so.
Even those top names have also shifted a little bit and expanded.
I think if like my-
When Amazon though, what's happening?
What do you mean?
I don't know. I just feel like it should be higher, but whatever.
I mean, I think today's GDP numbers were pretty, pretty great, honestly.
And it just shows that the consumer is actually the reason why this economy is holding up very nicely.
It's not all just AI spend.
So that's pretty good.
And that's probably very meaningful for Amazon because if anything, people know AWS is really accelerating,
but people are concerned that there might be consumer softness.
And I just think you can't really say that anymore when the consumer
drove you know a big beat in the gdp i just think one of the really interesting cases on um
or headwinds that's been discussed recently for amazon which i think is actually pretty legitimate
is um this idea of AI driven commerce and I've given this like a lot of thought these
like last couple weeks I think it's actually a legitimate concern so at one
of Amazon's biggest advantages is like the idea that their users the prime
users when they want to buy anything,
when they're doing their Christmas shopping,
Amazon is like their point of contact, their initial point of contact.
So people who use Amazon a lot will probably understand quickly where I'm going with this.
But when you want to buy something,
like let's say you're on a restock your kitchen or something, you're out of cleaning supplies,
you need a new scrub daddy or whatever, you go to Amazon and you just type all those things in,
you add to cart and you just buy it. And then it's there and you know, whatever, two hours
or a day or two days. So in a way, their advantage is like discoverability combined combined with this customer loyalty angle.
There's a good argument that AI-driven commerce,
what I mean by AI-driven commerce is like people going to LLMs to give them suggestions on what to buy.
That could be disruptive.
But won't it just lead them back to Amazon?
It could, but it could also lead them to the big box retailers.
It could become the second vehicle by which we redirect traffic to commerce websites.
Before LLMs, very often, people who didn't use Amazon would just Google.
They'd be like, black leather boots for sale or whatever on Google.
And then there are a bunch of options that pop up and I click through a couple of websites, see something that I can buy it.
That was like the initial rendition of shopping on the Internet.
And then things got better, right?
better, right? Certain providers like Amazon started saying, okay, we'll just keep, you know,
cheap and good version of all these products on our website in one place and its consumers will
come to us. There's a chance that this is disruptive to that by offering more options and
taking away the advantage of quote unquote, everything being in one place. You know, I mean,
think about it now with apps like shop and route and a bunch of these apps that I'm sure people have seen when they're doing online shopping that just instant connect to your card,
link to the shipping.
It's a one-click buy, right?
So if you can do a one-click buy through your LLM, you're not really going to care where it's coming from. I think over time,
consumers will become less discretionary in terms of the source
and will care more about the price
and will care more about whether the product is specifically what they need
as dictated by the LLM.
So it's very early to be having this conversation.
I'm not saying it's a good data or anything,
but it's something I've been thinking about.
I think it's interesting like i think the dynamic
there is interesting like how is this going to affect e-commerce when if we just have everything
embedded into llms because look if you believe okay step one here is you're of the belief that
llms will slowly erode the use of broad-based search.
I believe that.
Some people do, some people don't.
If you believe that, then the next step is to say,
okay, well, how will they impact consumer discretion in the e-commerce space,
which is currently a very manual process, right?
Yeah, there's digitization involved,
but I'm saying the idea of consumer discretion
in the e-commerce space is still a very manual process. It isn't as manual as it was when everyone was going to the mall, right? Because then you have like X amount every SKU and you know, every,
you're not going to have every store in your local mall. So that version of commerce was
very much directed by the purveyors of product. Like the people who were in your local mall were
directing, you know, what you had available to you to select from. E-commerce blew that out of the
water because they were like, Hey, dude, it doesn't matter. We have a warehouse with all the SKUs.
You can see every SKU we have of every piece of clothing or even with the car industry, right?
When Tesla started selling cars online, they're like, you don't need to go to the dealership.
Whatever you want, we have it at the factory.
You just order it online. And so this just blew up.
This expanded consumer choice dramatically, like by magnitudes.
expanded consumer choice dramatically, like by magnitudes.
And so when that happened, then a lot of leverage was given to the middlemen, right?
The online stores, if you will, a lot of leverage was given to them
in terms of what they wanted to present consumers, how they wanted to present it,
you know, things like sponsored products.
Anyone who's ever been on Amazon has seen top three, four listings, whatever four listings whatever sponsor products things like factors like that started emerging and manipulating
consumer choice and now we're giving the power back to the consumer with llms
you see what i'm saying like now the discretion is returning to the consumers and they have a better
tool by which to execute that discretion and they don't have to lean on your e-commerce
algorithms or your suggestions or your sponsored products to make that choice. So I don't know,
what I'm saying might be a little hard to follow for some people in the audience, but I think,
I hope it's somewhat clear. It's the idea of a return to discretion with a lot more options
than a brick and mortar phase. And I think that that's's going to change i don't know what it's
going to change i'm still trying to wrap my mind around it like how can i profit from this but
that's something i've been thinking a lot about you know next year that'll be next what i also
think is interesting stock talk is i don't think any of us think that llms are also like the moat
here that's going to do it like everyone's going to have their own one going into it so it's like what is that competitive advantage going forward i'm curious well no he's
saying that the llm will not it's not it's agnostic to any e-commerce platform it'll just
tell you the best deal for what you're looking for which makes sense one i don't yeah like you
said i think it's a little too early to have this conversation because i bet you it won't do that
though i bet you each company is going to have their own LLM
and it will favor their stuff.
There'll be partnerships.
Yeah, there'll be partnerships.
Yeah, that's true, too.
Like, you see Anthropic with Amazon.
So if you're using Anthropic,
dude, most regular consumers are probably using ChatGPT.
So that's interesting.
I don't know.
But hey, here's another thing, though, right?
Like, you said Shop.
Shop failed at logistics, and they use Amazon logistics now.
So it's like, even if the other e-commerce platforms wins,
I think the reason why Amazon wins is because of their logistics.
Yes, yes, I agree with that.
That advantage is not going anywhere.
And logistics is going to be huge.
To an extent, I think Amazon maybe is even a better investment in logistics than it is in e-commerce, which is 100% e-commerce.
I think the reason why the e-commerce platform is so valuable is because they can swap because they have all the data.
They can decide which of the third party products turn into first party products, buy out these small things that are doing a ton of sales that have high margins.
And then that's why you see like Amazon Basicsics on a bunch of wires and backpacks and stuff
like that.
So they just have so much monetizable data.
It's amazing.
I mean, also for Amazon, though, I think maybe it didn't like the consumer number today.
That's why I was strong today.
I don't really care to make every generation notable.
But I'm thinking that it could potentially have a Google moment next year on the Tranium chips,
especially if you couple that with the AWS re-excel.
I don't know.
I think it could be a very interesting year for Amazon in 26.
And I think you don't need a lot to go right at this valuation
yeah no i i like amazon i mean i own amazon i'm not i don't want to make it come come across like
i'm making a bear case for amazon i just think things are going to change in commerce very
rapidly because of llms because you know again to the bottom line point I made, it gives power back to the consumer, actually.
Yeah, I mean, I can't ever...
Dude, I spend a bazillion dollars with Amazon every year.
Yeah, me too.
I've been like that for years.
They're the only place I buy anything.
I mean, I do all my grocery shopping through them, too, now.
Me too, man. Whole Foods all day long.
Like, it's not a big deal.
Yeah, it's too convenient.
I don't have time for that.
Yeah, dude, I'll pay the $10 a month for the, you know,
grocery subscription. It's a no-brainer.
I don't have to go in person.
$10 per order to $10 per month
and that was like, alright.
Yeah, well, the funny thing is too, because they
own Amazon Fresh, they own Whole Foods,
so just funneling this
to their own businesses, it's just
incredible, man.
Yeah, no, they're behemoth for sure.
I think the point made like on the logistic side
they don't really have any peers and so and it's not good we're forgetting about something that
was a major theme i mean we talk robotics shipbuilding or i'm sorry drones shipbuilding
but like robotics is gonna be probably it's something that they are gonna benefit the most
from imagine you're able to squeeze out incremental 3% to 5% operating margins on the retail business. On that volume of revenue, it's just insane amount of profits.
I think it's not priced for that at all. I think what Amazon and Walmart and Target and all these
companies should do right now is go to these guys and make deals, make insane deals. I don't know
what the number is going to be,
but, you know, they get a percentage,
some small percentage of redirected traffic.
I think you have to capitalize on that now
before it balloons, because then they'll have leverage.
If you allow, like, let's say,
and keep this in mind also,
e-commerce is a shit ton of global runway.
We act like e-commerce is like a saturated business.
It's not at all.
Globally, it's like nothing.
Globally, I think it's like 20 or 30%.
So, yeah, there's a ton of runway for e-commerce, like no question about that. I don't think people factor in enough how much these LLMs will gain leverage quickly over the entire browsing of the internet.
I still talk to people.
I was out this weekend with some friends.
Nobody's really using LLMs extensively. I was talking to one of my friends. He's like,
dude, I still Google stuff all the time. I'm like, that's stupid, dude. Like why?
You know? And there are people that could benefit from them dramatically that aren't using them.
So I still think there's an awareness level to be unlocked. And when that happens, I think you're going to see an enormous amount of control over the entire Internet flow to these frontier model makers.
Because people are going to be engaging with the Internet as a whole through them.
Eventually.
Eventually, you'll just have embeds into the API where you won't even need to go to a browser.
I think that's part of why there's been this initiative from OpenAI to get Google Chrome earlier in the year,
which was like a moonshot for them, not really a possibility at that time.
But it may emerge as a possibility for them to build their own browser.
They already have.
That was perplexity, by the way.
What did you say?
It was OpenAI, too, that was trying to get it, way what'd you say yeah it was open yeah too that
it was trying to get it for sure i think they both were yeah i remember the drama anyway
these guys are the i'm just brainstorming here and speculating but i think the end game is for
llm mainframes like the the the ui and ux that you engage with to essentially become a browser,
that seems like the end game.
I don't see why not, because right now they're just redirecting machines,
or you research on them and you stay on them or whatever.
At a certain point, it makes more sense to me for them to just be an integrated whole.
And at that point, if you're an e-commerce company,
trying to strike a deal for redirects is going to be insane, because because they all have an enormous amount of leverage you have to do it early
it's like the same way i felt about um sports betting and prediction markets like i think
they made a mistake i think they waited too long and that prediction markets are huge
i think you have to do the same thing here if you're e-commerce then you have to go to these
guys and be like okay like you may not
be directing a ton of traffic today but we'd like to reward you for whatever you are and when that
vein of traffic expands it'll become much more lucrative i mean open ai has to think
opening an anthropic right now what they are in their offices right now thinking about is how do
we generate money right that's a huge advantage that google has
right now because google has a real business google has a multi-trillion dollar business
before this ai thing ever emerged right google has youtube and google search and all of their
other subsidiaries and products and google deep mind and waymo like google is a behemoth and they
have a very very capable frontier model now.
Now, opening Ionanthropic, be like, how do we have, they have to build businesses.
They know that.
And if Google's smart, which I think, you know, I've been impressed by Sunder these
last nine or 10 months.
If Google's smart, they will not pursue aggressive monetization of Gemini.
And when I say that, people are probably like, what?
Why not?
And the reason is because then you commoditize out your competitors. and if Google keeps Gemini close to free to use,
and, you know, keeps Nano Banana Pro 3 close to free to use,
by close to free, I mean, like, not an exorbitant subscription,
it inhibits the ability for OpenAI and Anthropic
to monetize their core product,
and by virtue of that, makes them less competitive to Google, to monetize their core product.
And by virtue of that,
makes them less competitive to Google because Google has a real business.
So I think it sounds counterintuitive,
but I think that would be
the strategically right decision for Google.
And for OpenAI and Anthropic,
what they have to be thinking about right now
is how do we make money?
Because selling an LLM subscription,
we've realized is
not the right way to do that. That's not the end game. And so e-commerce is a huge access point
where they can go to Amazon and be like, look, give us X percent of every redirect that turns
into a sale. And, you know, you get the ball rolling there and turn it into like an e-commerce
giant. And then you start doing the same thing with other corners of the Internet as well and other industries.
So, yeah, I don't know.
This is all speculation, probably not around the corner, but I think this is that's where we're headed.
You're headed for like a world where people just have an earpin in or a Google Glass on and they're just talking to their LLM like,
Hey, I need toilet paper. Pick it up. Give me the lowest cost price. I like Charmin Ultra Plus.
Oh, okay. I need three more scrub daddies. Pick those up. You have my card saved already.
I want the lowest price on the market for a six pack. Okay. I need beer for this weekend.
Put an order in lowest price. And like that like that's how commerce is going to be.
It's just inevitable, right?
You're already headed there.
Like we're already voice integrations are picking up rapidly in every kind of app.
And we're trying to make devices and personal compute devices smaller and smaller.
You're going to inevitably be trained by technology to care less about the
things that you normally cared about as a discretionary consumer.
Because the entire, what is happening right now in the background is this attempt from
the frontier model companies to convince you that you can trust these AI blindly.
And even if you're one of those more skeptical people, you consider yourself a very intelligent person, and you're like, no, I'm never going to trust AI blindly. And even if you're one of those more skeptical people, you're like,
consider yourself a very intelligent person. And you're like, no, I'm never going to like
trust the blindly. I'm always going to check and verify or whatever. You may think that, but
habit is powerful and convenience is powerful. Even the smartest people fall into habit and
convenience. So you may think you can resist it,
but the truth is 90% of the population won't be able to.
And then eventually you'll just become power LLM users
and that will be your life.
Like you will engage with them to do everything.
Plan a trip, book a flight,
and they will be able to...
The process that you've all gone through for your whole lives, when you buy a TV, and you're going online and looking at reviews on these
websites, and, you know, you're, well, what's the difference between OLED and this and that, like,
the LLMs can do all of that in one one hundredth of the time that you can, one one thousandth,
probably, of the time that you can. So one thousandth probably of the time that you can.
So whether you're looking for a car or TV or a plane ticket or accommodations on a vacation,
all of those things will, they're already better done by the LLM.
It's just that people don't know this en masse, so they still manually do it themselves. But in a year from now, I just don't, I don't think anyone smart will be doing that.
I think they'll just be deferring to the LLM to crunch those numbers for them compare
the data compare the prices how long is gonna take me to go to every website
that's selling a 77 inch OLED TV okay I don't know hours do where all the
prices manually to click through them no but LLM can do it in one second and so
it it returns the power to the consumer it makes you
a consumer that no longer needs to have personal discretion as the only thing you're going to have
personal discretion over is what you want to buy you're going to have much less discretion over and
in fact in fact i think i take i'll take that with a grain of salt you're even going to have
less discretion over what you want to buy you even going to have less discretion over what you
want to buy. You're going to have less preference there too, because the AI is going to suggest to
you a better option that would better suit you. And it's going to explain to you why it's better.
You're like, oh, well, I thought I wanted the Sony, but that's a damn good argument. I'm going
to get the Samsung. Like that's what we're headed for. You're headed for like a society that's going
to be instructed by AI. It's sad, but that's just inevitable.
Think about where all the balls are rolling and all these places,
like how convenient things are getting.
People are getting dumber too because AI is doing all the critical thinking.
So that'll play a role as well.
But yeah, we're headed for a very weird dystopian future.
And I keep saying it's too early to have conversations about this.
I really think this stuff is like 10 years away, maybe less.
So maybe it's not too early to start having conversations about it.
I do fall back on whatever you look in history and when people project it forward,
what stuff is going to look like, they're always wrong.
It's always wrong.
It's always wrong.
So like, yeah.
It won't look exactly like that
there's a lot of imagination i tend to be but kind of the point i'm getting this here i tend to be
more something like this i hear you i hear yourself this time may be different but why is that well
why is that pessimistic though i'm not i'm not necessarily even answering that i'm more saying
here there's a fear right now with jobs and everything that ai is going to take everyone's
jobs but when you look at all the past stuff new stuff has been created on top of it.
And I don't see this time as different.
Yeah, I hear that argument all the time.
I think this time is different because
in the past, they were all tools.
And that's why jobs were created, because they were tools.
The steam engine was a tool.
The car was a tool.
The computer was a tool.
AI is the first thing that purports to be the user and not the tool.
Right? Like the explorer and not the tool.
The tool for AI is the data that it has.
And so this is the first truly agentic technology of all time.
Really. Computers were never agentic. Computers have to be turned on. Everything has to be inputted manually through a keyboard. That's not agentic at all. The analogy between the
computer age and the AI age is a terrible one, in my view, and it's used way too frequently.
A computer was a tool. It was a much better tool than the ones prior to it. It was a
much more transformative tool in terms of efficiency for the ones prior to it, but it was a tool. It
required a human operator to sit in a chair and click the buttons. AI does not require that.
AI requires some systemic operators somewhere that can then thereby replace all of the other 300 or 1,000
systemic operators that were previously required, right? So that's the difference to me. I don't
think it's hyperbolic to say AI is going to replace most jobs. I don't think that's hyperbolic
at all. I actually think that that's optimistic to say most jobs.
It's a better paralegal than you are. But then the question is, what's next?
It's a better accountant than you are.
It's a better researcher than you are.
It's a better mathematician than you are.
But, Doctor, that's also not the point that I'm making here.
The point that is kind of coming up is something new always comes out of it.
I have no idea what that future is.
Yeah, sure, something new will come out.
There will be robot operators.
But that's not enough jobs.
It's not enough jobs.
There will be new jobs.
But it won't be enough. It's just basic
math.
Okay, people who used to ride
horse buggies,
used to drive horse buggies around, carriages,
call them the
taxis of the past.
These are charged people in American cities.
Oh, if you have a carriage, you ride around town, people need a ride, you take them.
What did those people start doing when cars came around?
The same thing, but with a car, right?
That's the difference.
Or when we went from a soldier carrying a rifle, you just took his sword and gave him a rifle you
didn't replace the soldier do you see what i'm saying that's the difference is now you replace
the soldier okay you have an accountant in a room he was doing accounting uh with a pen and and
parchment then you gave him a typewriter made it easier then you give him a computer it made it easier in none of those was the accountant replaced now it is
you see that's the difference people keep saying well ai is just another technology
every other technology we've had we've been fine jobs have been plentiful yeah because
all the other technologies were tools to a human operator.
That is the fundamental difference.
That is indisputable.
Like, that's what makes AI different.
Now, instead of having 100 accountants on computers, you need one AI software that can do the job of all 100 of those accountants in one 100th of the time.
Same thing for paralegals, okay?
You're a lawyer. You have a paralegal, okay?
She's going to go explore some case precedent work for you for an upcoming case.
You want her to find six precedent cases or whatever that you can review.
Can she do that faster or can the AI do it faster?
And who's going to do it more accurately?
There's no question.
It's not even debatable.
And that's with today's LLMs.
Today's.
Not next year's or five years from now.
That's with today's LLMs.
They're already better than every paralegal in the country.
They're already better than every accountant in the country.
They're already better than every basic...
I mean, these people are...
There's no matter how smart you are,
you don't have an infinite library of knowledge knowledge and you don't have an ability to learn concepts and review information in minutes.
You just don't.
You could be Elon Musk.
You could be Albert Einstein.
It doesn't matter.
You can't compete with a computer that can think.
And even to the extent that you don't believe that today's machine learning and LLMs true thinking which is a huge amount of debate about this in the industry which i think is fucking so
dumb what does it matter like if it's truly thinking or not what does it matter if it's
better at answering everything than you what who cares we always sit sit around debating oh is it
a true brain is Is it really thinking?
No, it's just processing information and using probabilities.
Okay, it still outperforms every human.
If you were to give AI the test, right,
they gave it like PhD level exams at 50 different subjects.
If you were to give that to any human on earth,
no one out of the 8 billion people that is alive would outperform it.
Across all of those, yeah, maybe if you gave
the head surgeon in New York
General the medical exam part of it, maybe he
beats it in the medical exam, but he's going to
beat it in European history? No.
Of course not.
Or is he going to beat it in accounting? No.
No one would even
question that.
Right? So
what are we talking about? this is the first technology that says
forget about giving the human a new tool i don't need the human at all
the human's a redundancy here the human operator becomes a redundancy and it's worse than that it
becomes an inefficient redundancy and And that's the scary part.
And I keep hearing arguments, and I'm like, none of them make sense to me.
None of them make sense to me.
Not just from you.
I'm not dismissing what you said.
I'll give you one or two things are coming to my mind here.
One, regulation.
I imagine if the entire U.S. population is now now out of a job they'll regulate us into a job
will that keep you competitive i have no idea international what if gdp growth goes to 22
percent or something like that like asset owners i have you know like would the government be like
oh my god you know but but the economy's going 20 but what happens in that scenario that feels like a ubi and
we're all just living life in miami but if everyone has the same amount of money does i i what does
that even look like i don't know um that's gonna be a really tough it's gonna be a tough society
to be in man because if you don't have assets at that point then what's your way of making more
money you know maybe you make like a business and sell
t-shirts or have a restaurant i don't it'll freeze the socioeconomic ladder yeah oh i mean yeah
exactly like people who are rich are just going to be rich forever and probably continue to get
richer and it's like but i mean it's how's that everyone's like though what's that i said how's
that different from today's k-shaped economy it's just going to be an accelerated version of today's k-shaped economy yeah and if anything everyone's life still improves
because the people at the bottom probably see the highest increase in quality of life still through
ubi i don't know yeah yeah i agree with that that aspect i brought the example with cell phones
like when you know when people were like you know, with this technology advancement and all this focus on innovation and stuff, like, it doesn't really help the average person.
And that's just another dumb take.
Like, when we think of the cell phone, we take it for granted in the United States, right?
People are like, okay, whatever.
I mean, especially people that are born now, right?
When I was growing up and cell phones were first becoming mainstream, my dad used to have a big cell phone and then he had the smaller Nokia with a little satellite
antenna. And then, you know, they got a little bit better every year. I remember playing Snake
on his Nokia and stuff. But what it did do is it made the rest of the world benefit as well. Like, okay, India, which is still a pretty
poor country, right? Something like 60% of their population has had cell phones now, right? Do you
think that that's improved their quality of life? Of course. Or when, you know, the light bulb was
invented, like, yeah, in the first 10 years, it was a luxury for, you know, the big cities had
light bulbs everywhere. But then eventually what? Those light bulbs proliferated. And then people
in third world countries who were relying on fire by night had light bulbs. Yeah, sure. Maybe they
just had one, but you don't think that improved their quality of life? It did. So technology is
the best thing we can do for humanity always. And I know that people, they misperceive it
because what they see is the Elon Musks
getting a trillion dollars
and they see Google and Apple and Amazon
hitting three, four trillion market caps
and they go, oh, what a brutal capitalist,
ugly society where this can happen.
Like, yeah, okay, look, there are very, very rich,
extremely rich entities and people.
But the products that they have created to get so rich have unequivocally raised the bar for quality of life everywhere on Earth, not just in the United States.
The cell phone, the light bulb, the Internet, the microchip, all of these things, you know, modern materials, modern alloys, modern
plastics, you know, innovations in agriculture, innovations in agricultural chemicals, all of
these things, biotech, I could go on and on, every industry, literally, innovation and advancement,
all these industries have improved quality of life everywhere, period.
Now, the degree by which they proliferate and how fair that proliferation is, right?
Of course, when cell phones get invented, everyone on earth doesn't instantly get a cell phone.
I understand that it doesn't work that way.
But over time, the prices of all technologies go down.
And as they go down, it aids in the proliferation of
those technologies. And as they proliferate, everyone's life gets better. And so yeah,
AI will do that too. But the thing we're going to have to grapple with is how do we operate
in a global economy where full employment no longer becomes a realistic priority?
That's the question that we're going to have to grapple with in the next decade.
How do we sit down as a society and say,
for the last thousand years,
having a job has been the barometer
of prosperity and economic strength,
and having full employment in your economy
has been a huge barometer of economic strength.
How do we step away from that and make sure that people can survive?
And I don't know.
I don't know the answer to that.
But the governments of the world will have to figure it out.
The most obvious and gone-to answer is universal basic income.
I'm a capitalist, so in a natural state of order, I don't want to see that.
But that may be the only solution in that type of world.
I don't know.
Elon says universal high income.
Yeah, I guess.
I don't know.
I don't know what it looks like because we've never been in a society like that where you know maybe unemployment you know 20 years from now unemployment's like 20 percent how do you
grapple with an economy like that you know are there riots and uprisings all the time is it
a more violent society i don't know i i don't know i don't know i i want to be an optimist
about everything too but you
also have to consider the realistic possibilities of like what what is likely to happen and like
this is a very powerful technology and it's getting better every day like the new gemini
model is outstanding the gpt 5.2 pro is outstanding um uh gpt 5.2 pro now is pulling live financial data which is so much better um made my life
easier but yeah these things are getting better every day and we're building more and more compute
and the first bout of compute the trillion dollars that's been spent this year doesn't
even go online till q1 of next year so who knows how much better they're going to get next year.
But we haven't even seen what true investment
looks like in the training payoff yet.
The models that have been released now have been
released on actually very little capital investment.
Most of the capital investment is going into the new facilities, which will train the next frontier models.
Then we'll see.
Did this pay off or not?
But, yeah, we're in a crazy world, man.
We're in a crazy world.
You know, one other thought.
I think what we think about this from a U.S.-centric view, and I'm sure it will be in there.
If the world gets to that point, it's probably a U.S.-driven thing.
We're trying to, too too i don't know i
don't know what the rest of whatever but i feel like being in the u.s would be a part of no matter
what we kind of talked everyone's base would be moving up would be a part of that upwards k pretty
much everyone and it's the rest of the world what does that end up looking like i don't know but
i mean it still seems like the u.s would be a relative leader in that scenario. Yeah. Yeah. Because we're we're a mature power
that like AI's ability to replace labor input essentially is beneficial to no economy more
than the United States. Because we are a services based mature economy, and one of our biggest competitive disadvantages versus China
is the cost of labor.
That's why we don't build anything here anymore, right?
Because our cost of labor is too high.
I mean, we build stuff here, but we build very high-end stuff,
aerospace stuff and high-end chip design and things like that,
we don't build plastic toys and T-shirts anymore because you can't pay an American enough to do
that without making the cost of those materials prohibitive., American society stands to benefit the most from AI because it will allow us to integrate AI with robotics and fill those labor needs that we can't put onto the American citizen because of the per capita GDP that we have and the level of wealth we have relative to the rest of the world that we can now produce in this country.
And we'll be able to produce things again. And then you'll have a mature services based economy with a production
backbone driven by AI and robotics. It might be the greatest economy of all time.
I mean, we already we have been for a long time, but that would be an extreme upgrade
because then we have no weaknesses as a mature economic power.
as a mature economic power so yeah the united states stands to benefit the most from this um
So, yeah, the United States stands to benefit the most from this.
but i mean china will still compete because you know that you see the nukes were powerful like
getting to that agi endpoint is going to be the it's going to be the biggest weapon ever um
and the scary part is is once somebody gets there the other person won't be far behind
and so then you'll just have,
you know, like wars are going to be fought with AI systems.
You'll just have a bunch of robots
operated by a data center somewhere,
some sort of rugged data center,
shout out OSS,
that's positioned somewhere on the battlefield.
And you'll have that data center protected.
Okay.
This is how it's going to be.
It's going to be like RTS games
I don't know if anyone grew up playing a Star Wars Starcraft or Warcraft back in
the day RTS but this idea of like having a base a center thought a thinking
center it's data center and then that data center deploying robots and other autonomous assets and then the
other country you're fighting with has a data center that is deploying robots and autonomous
assets and your goal is to you know your armies fight and you got to destroy the other guy's data
center like that's the gonna be the future of warfare fair it's fucking weird to think about
you know you're not even gonna need people to fight anymore
and so that's another area where like would you rather fight a war with a million drones
or like if you had an army it doesn't matter the footprint of of human soldiers will be in a matter
less too like all of this stuff this is where we're headed. You know, it's an inevitability. I can't think my way out of it. I like to play devil's advocate
whenever I speculate about stuff like this, but I can't think my way out of this, this end game where
everything is AI. It's just better at our jobs. All of them, including fighting, including
accounting, including law, including math, everything. It's better than us at everything.
through the military aspect there of it.
But these chatbots and everything like that
is the brain of this stuff,
but there is going to be a body attached with it.
And it is very interesting to see
how that's going to kind of uptake
and what's really going to drive first.
I feel like a lot of people think of AI right now
specifically through online.
And Tesla might be one of the first companies that
actually gets this out in the real world with fsd um at scale we'll see but i feel like a lot of
people myself included maybe think the the the robotics revolution i don't know i i do wonder
what the time frame on a lot of this stuff is on the robotic side of it.
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, a couple of years.
Dude, we're moving so fast. I mean, a couple of years, I'd say, before it starts becoming mainstream. I don't know about humanoids,
but humanoids might take longer.
But, yeah, I mean,
there's no way around this, really.
There's too much money going into these things.
There's way too much promise of efficiency.
Like, everyone sees the golden goose everyone sees the the uh um
pot of gold at the end of the rainbow if you will like these guys aren't idiots like why are all the
smartest people in the world dumping all their money into this you know um they know about the
dot-com bubble you think these guys many of them lived through it of them lost a shitload of money living through it.
And those same guys are dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into this
because they know, they see the pot of gold, they're like,
oh my God, dude, if we can create AI autonomous robotic systems
that we can deploy to do real world labor, then it's game over.
Because the blue collar side has, you know, I mean, sorry, the blue collar side has, you know, uh, I mean, sorry,
the white collar side has already been decided, right? Like this, this idea that a human accountant
can compete with an AI is hilarious now. So, you know, you don't think KPMG and all these guys of
Deloitte and, and, you know, EY or something Young, you think these guys don't see this and know this?
And they're sort of scratching their head like,
wait a second, we're spending hundreds of millions of dollars
hiring college recruits to come in here
and fuck up balance sheets for a year
before they know what they're doing.
And why?
Why are we doing that? When an AI can do it? Entry-level accounting? Are we joking?
Do we, did the human really need to do that? No. Entry-level anything, any kind of data input,
any job that requires you to use an Excel spreadsheet or compile data, even if you're not using an Excel spreadsheet or review data or error check data or anything is better done by a machine than you.
So that's today.
In a year from now, it'll be better than anyone ever at all of those things.
Any person to ever be born,
it will be better than all of them.
And maybe at a certain point, even simultaneously.
Today, if you were to just estimate with today's best AI,
let's say with Gemini,
you were to give it a research task,
how many people would you need to complete that research task faster
i can't even think of a number
like some of the tasks i give chat gpt pro overnight to do for me some of the research
tasks i like before i go to sleep i assign gpt pro like five or six tasks to study for me. And then I go to bed and I wake up in the
morning. It's done in my view, weeks of research. And in fact, that was done long before I woke up.
It's not like when I wake up, it's ready. It's probably ready an hour after I said it.
By the time I fall asleep, it's probably answered the questions, to be honest.
sleep that's probably answered the questions to be honest how many people ten thousand
like to produce an eight page detailed report on a company in six minutes how many people do you need
i don't even know because you're going to answer to that question
this is the problem that people are are kind of losing perspective of is like
what is the problem that people are kind of losing perspective of is like, what is the replacement factor?
How many people can one thinking machine replace?
Just one.
It's scary to think about.
It's terrifying, actually.
An entire floor of accountants.
Like in a KPMG office in New York,
what, you have 600 accountants on a floor.
You could play small with one locally run LLM on one computer.
And it'll do a better job than all of them and make less mistakes.
I don't know.
It's just terrifying, kind of.
But it's a reality, too.
Emp, do we have you up here?
Yes, sir.
You got any thoughts on this conversation here? A little bit of a
different one. Emp likes to talk.
Emp probably has some thoughts here.
It's just hard to wrap your mind around a lot of this.
I try to think back,
and I've tried to ask other people as well,
what was it like when televisions came out
and things like that?
Just things that really changed
the day-to-day life of everything.
And I think that this is just such an order of magnitude above that.
And you see even people like Elon and them talking about, you know,
UBI is probably the most likely outcome or the most probable outcome in all of
this, which I think a lot of people are going to hear that.
And probably not really like that because you wonder where does individuality go and
personal merits and stuff like that. So it is a very utopian thought process. But what I keep
going back to and what I'm really stuck on is the amount of data center build out that is planned
that's not even close to breaking ground yet. And I know Stock Talk's mentioned this a couple times.
And that's where I'm hung up the most right now.
I get maybe the robotics are going to be a big part of that as well.
But I just think about like I'm sitting here playing with the Nano Banana thing right now,
trying to generate some graphics and stuff.
And what it can do today in its infancy is what I would call it.
It's still hard for me to wrap my brain around where this is going in six months,
18 months, three, five years, as Stock Talk was saying there.
I really cannot, I can't open my mind up enough, I don't think, to really see where it's going to go.
And then the only fallback that I have is,
you know, a lot of people thought,
what, 20, 30 years ago,
that we'd be having flying cars by now.
And we're almost there with the EVA dolls and stuff like that.
But here we are, you know,
creating funny graphics with LLMs.
But at the same time, they're, I don't know.
It's like, you see these futuristic thoughts sometimes
and it's like, oh, we're going
to have this, this and this. And sometimes that doesn't come all the way through. But then things
that you never imagined do come through. I mean, I remember as a kid thinking about like, I mean,
I look at the iPhone and I remember as a kid being told like, oh, you're not going to have
a calculator in your pocket the rest of your life. You got to learn how to do this, you know, on pen and paper or pencil and paper and all this
stuff. And, and then you think about Stock Talk's example of the Nokia. And I think about, you know,
my mom had a bag phone in her car when I was a kid. And we thought that that was crazy technology
back then where you could pick up, you know, in, in the car, you could just dial, dial somebody up
and call them while you're driving down the road. And then now you could pick up, you know, in the car, you could just dial somebody up and call
them while you're driving down the road. And then now you literally have the entire world and AI
all right there in your pocket at all times. So I don't know, my brain still can't wrap fully around
where the AI thing even goes, where it even takes us. And then, and it really gets interesting when you start thinking about the UBI and how, how does, how does that change? Because you can look back at the industrial
revolution. You can look back at, you know, the printing press, even all, you know, all the way
back through history, these major inventions that really, you know, change things, change access to
knowledge and things like that. But the AI projections just seem so far exponentially larger than any of those moments in time as well.
So I'm really perplexed by what's coming next.
Yep, it's going to be a very interesting time.
We're born in an interesting time.
Are these bots going to be able to do illegal things?
I was trying to break the model a little bit.
Who's going to be the drug dealer?
I'm not saying whatever, but I don't know.
Is it about to be a robot?
Yeah.
I'm intrigued to see.
Some secondhand on the side.
I don't know. It's interesting times. We should be having Paul join us soon. I'm excited for the conversation that we're going to have,
honestly, continuing on this one, because I do find it to be a very interesting one.
I think timeframes is the question here. You made a good point. When you look back on history,
every single time we try and project forward what it's going to be and when stuff's going to happen, it's consistently
wrong. And sometimes it's a lack
of imagination, actually. There's been a couple
times where it's over superseded
ideas. DocTalk, I think you were talking about this
semi-recently. And then
there's times on flying cars and other things
like that where it maybe
doesn't happen as
quickly as you think it's going to be.
What's up, Paul?
Do we got you up here?
Yeah.
Hey guys, how are you?
I'm doing well.
I'm doing well.
I appreciate you joining us up here today.
Yeah.
I appreciate being here.
This is, uh, this is like my last hurrah for the week.
And then, uh, I'm shutting down for a little bit.
So you guys, yeah, get, get a little time with the fam.
Uh, enjoy Christmas Eve and Christmas day. you guys are time yeah get get a little time with the fam uh enjoy christmas eve and christmas day
and then uh heading to heading to warmer weather on christmas day with my kids so we can get in
the sunshine a little bit relax and try to uh enjoy some quiet time where are you going going
down to fort lauderdale yeah fort lauderdale no don't worry i'm not i'm not in the area as well
i'm not in the celebrity status i could i can almost give you my my direct location and i promise nobody will come but
it's uh yeah we're heading down to fort lauderdale we we're in connecticut normally and uh it's great
to just be in the sunshine the weather looks like it's going to be amazing over the next couple
weeks so um we're going to do that instead of uh staying in the cold yeah i am actually down in
florida as well.
I'll be 15, 20 minutes away from Fort Lauderdale.
Nice.
Maybe what I mean.
Send me a note.
Send me a note.
We're having a little existential crisis on the spaces here,
talking about AI and humanoid robotics
and kind of playing through the end game here
of where this stuff kind of ends up at.
And I'm just curious your thoughts a little bit. We're kind of ends up at. And, um, I'm just curious your, your thoughts a little
bit. We're kind of talking about like, uh, the future, uh, and every single industrial revolution.
I, my kind of point was, um, you know, new jobs are created from this and, and stock talk was
making a good point that in the past, it was always tools to enhance humans. And this is the
first time where this is really able to replace humans in pretty much every single job. Well, there's no replacing humans.
Like, that's number one.
So there's a great conversation.
I brought this up to you guys before with Jensen Wong and Joe Rogan.
And he talked about radiology and how when they were first looking at AI, radiology was the first place that they looked.
And what they were concerned about was that radiology jobs were going
to go away. But here was the thing. What AI was great at was the imaging. And so imaging,
there could be human error. And you could look at something differently. Two people could look
at it differently. They could pick up on different signs. But when you have AI, you get to collect
all this data from all of these images, and you can pick out things that are there that you might miss with the human eyes.
So people were really nervous about that. But imaging is not the whole part of radiology.
This is what he explained. I'm not some kind of expert, but he was talking about this.
And he said, the interesting thing about it was, the better the AI got at recognizing what was
going on in the images, the greater the need
for more radiologists. So while radiologists were worried that their jobs were going to be taken
from them, what actually happened was you were able to look at more images more quickly, and the
need for radiologists went up. So there are more radiologists today and a greater demand for
radiologists today because AI is so good at examining the images.
But what AI can't do is sit down with the patient and talk to them about the image, tell them what it means, and then develop a treatment plan and get them referred.
So there's going to be changes.
And the way that we work is going to change.
And the level of our expertise is going to change, for sure. When I first started, believe it or not, in this industry,
I used to hear stories about my firm. I first started at a company called New York Life
Insurance Company. I was in their headquarters at 51 Madison in New York City. It was a beautiful building that's a landmark in the city.
And I remember it's a Cass Gilbert building, same architect that built a Woolworth building,
unbelievable limestone gargoyles on it, just incredible. And I remember them telling me
stories about what payday used to be like. So payday was, you know, they would go down to the vault.
The actual cash was in the vault. They would gather all this cash. Then they would take a
wheel truck and they would go station to station to station to station. And they would, you know,
first of all, they had to count it by hand and make sure that it was all accurate.
hand and make sure that it was all accurate. Then they had to go station a station with
wads of cash and pay each individual employee with that wad of cash. Okay, so it's not AI,
but we had technological advances, right? And you didn't have to have cash in the building anymore.
So that vault is now a museum. And they take people that come to the head home office and they
give them tours.
They look at the vault and it's really, really cool.
And they tell the story.
You don't have to walk around with big wads of cash anymore because you have electronic
transfer, right?
And you have ACH and it goes directly from your employee to your bank account.
It doesn't mean that people stopped working.
It doesn't mean that people stopped working.
It means that they stopped doing those jobs.
It means that they stopped doing those jobs.
And I think when you think about AI, think about how much better your work life could
Think about all the menial tasks that you do on a day-to-day basis that don't allow you
to use your expertise, that don't allow you to actually solve problems.
You're literally doing menial tasks all day long.
And now they're getting better and we're much more advanced than that.
But, you know, like people were worried about those jobs.
But what happened was it created different jobs.
And I think that's like progress.
And there's the other Milton Friedman story of how he was walking by a
construction site one day and he saw saw all these guys with shovels digging
out holes. They were excavating. And he said to somebody, well, why don't they use heavy equipment?
Why don't they use diggers? And they were like, well, if we use the diggers, then everybody
loses their jobs. And his response was, well, if they take away the shovels and use teaspoons,
you could hire more people. But you're less productive. So I think what we have to look at
is the more productive we get, the less we get away from menial tasks, things that could be
automated, the greater we're going to produce. The more we produce, the more we're going to need the
expertise of human beings or the guidance of human beings or the oversight of human beings.
So the jobs will change. Our roles will change. But I think in the end, you always need a human
connection and you always need sales and you always need service. I'll give you another great
example because I just had this
conversation with my son who's a business major at Miami of Ohio, and he's in his second year,
but he loves physiology. He loves kinesiology. He loves working out. He's so good at it. He
understands the body. He understands the joints. He understands positioning during exercise
movements. And I said, how do you like business? And he's like, I like it. And he's learning about accounting and spreadsheets and all these
various different things. And then he's learning about financial products and things like that,
but he's got this passion for this other thing. And I said to him, why don't you think about
maybe doing that as a profession because you love it so much, you're very knowledgeable about it, you dig into it and all that stuff.
And the other thing that pops into my head was, wow, that's a job that will go on forever,
like working with patients, helping them, showing them how to do certain exercises,
overseeing them, like managing their progress.
Will AI play a role in that?
Absolutely.
But they'll always need to be somebody who's an expert, who understands the body, who is like overseeing it, communicating with the patients, things like that. So
technology is going to have its place in everything that we do. But I could tell you what,
if you were somebody that was cleaning public bathrooms, wouldn't
you rather have a robot doing that?
Wouldn't you rather manage the fleet of robots, go in and check and inspect to see that it's
clean already, as opposed to actually doing the work?
I mean, again, I come from New York.
I've been in the Grand Central bathrooms, which some people report are clean public
bathrooms. No, thanks. I don't want to clean that. I would rather have a robot go in, blast that
thing until it's completely sanitized, and then just come in and inspect it. There are always
going to be things that robots could do better. They're going to take away the tough jobs. They're
going to take away the hard work. They're going to take away the menial tasks. We're going to be able to do all that stuff.
But at the end of the day, it's going to make our lives better, more productive. And with more
production, we're going to actually have bigger and better roles that are more meaningful.
And here's the kicker. We're going to have more free time. We're going to be able to
eliminate the heavy, heavy, heavy workloads that we all have. And we're going to be able to eliminate the heavy, heavy, heavy workloads that we all have.
And we're going to be able to do more meaningful things with our lives.
And if you could think about AI that way, in the most altruistic way,
it's going to be a good thing. And that's what I hope we could focus on as an industry, as a society, as human beings.
Don't look at the negative.
Look at the positive and become part of the solution and not the problem.
And if we could do that, I think that's a good way to think about it, look at it, and
and prepare yourself for the future. If you are doing a menial task today, like if you are
prepare yourself for the future.
like the old bean counter, like that job went away. You needed to be ahead of that.
But if you're not a bean counter, if you're not doing something that AI can do, there's plenty
for you to do. Go focus on those things. And the last part that I'll say is more free time means more
time spent with your children. More free time means more time doing the things that you enjoy.
Maybe that's an extra round of golf a week. Maybe that's a walk in the woods to clear your head.
Those are all really positive things that could come out of getting away from the
menial tasks that we do on a day-to-day basis. And so that's the way I prefer to look at it.
That's the way that I like to position it. And that's what I think AI could bring in the future.
And the one last thing that I'll say to that is to people that are in managerial roles,
including myself, you have to be conscious of the fact that you can't pay people to break their back when they're not going to need to break their back.
We're going to use technology to be smarter and more efficient, and there's a responsibility that goes along with that, and we just have to be cognizant of that.
We still have to know that human beings are important have to be cognizant of that. Like we still have to know
that human beings are important,
that they're a part of the process.
Like look at what we're doing right now.
We're having a conversation,
human beings interacting.
Like it's so important.
Why do you think Wolf is so successful?
Because people come together
with other human beings
and they talk and they share ideas
and they interact.
All that stuff is
critically important. No robot could take that away from you. And that's what we have to make
sure that we're conscious of. Remaining human, having those human interactions, and taking care
of each other. And I think if we do that, we're going to be way more productive, but we're also
going to be way more fulfilled. And that's my view on ai
it was a really great run through there paul i i appreciate you for for laying it down there uh i want to say a couple things before i bring stock talk and some others into it
uh just look at the housekeeping things you guys should definitely make sure you're following all
the amazing speakers up here um this has been a fantastic hour in the spaces everyone on here is
a regular we really appreciate paul from the Leverage Shares team for supporting us.
The whole team supporting us and themes and all that stuff.
We're actually going to be talking more about the thematic ETFs today.
And I want to be able to talk a little ticker specific here.
So I do just want to read a quick disclosure read.
Obviously, we are working with them.
But with ETFs, an investor should carefully consider a fund's investment objectives,
risk, charges, expenses, all that type of stuff before investing.
You can find that quite often on the prospectus and summary prospectus on that website.
It has all that information about the themes ETFs from leverage shares.
To obtain the prospectus, you can go over to the website, themesetfs.com.
Funds prospectus and key information documents should be read
carefully before investing. We are excited to be working with Paul and the Themes ETFs team.
They're creating some really great, interesting products out there. And I love these thematic
ETFs because no matter what coming out of it, these are really smart people, really smart
stuff that they're doing their research and telling you, here is what we think off of it. So even if that product isn't specifically for you,
going in there and doing some research off of it can be some good lessons from that.
But Stock Talk, if I could bring you into the conversation, we had some thoughts there from
Paul on the AI landscape and the future of it.
I'm curious if you have any thoughts.
Yeah, I think Paul's a little more optimistic than I am about the role of humans in all this.
But yeah, look, I think it's good to think optimistically about it.
But yeah, I don't agree with the take
that humans are going to just find new things to do.
I was kind of talking about it earlier, I think this was before Paul was here,
but I think this is just the first agentic technology of all time,
first truly agentic technology.
And so, yeah, I think it does endanger human labor.
We'll have to address that through a lot of factors, whether that's government intervention, regulation, UBI, all sorts of
things that could be potential solutions. But I think the pace at which it's advancing
and the acceleration of that pace with the new infrastructure that's
going to come online next year. I have a hard time imagining that it won't just begin to outright
replace human operators at some point. And that doesn't mean that we won't have anything to do,
you know. Like you said earlier, you know, you can go for a walk or, you know, go play golf and
things like that. You'll be able to do fun things.
But productive things, I don't know.
You know, there'll be, in the immediate term, there's a lot of infrastructure jobs that are going to get a lot of importance added to them.
Things like, you know, plumbers, electric infrastructure build-out, line runners, things like that.
infrastructure build-out, line runners, things like that, jobs that are involved in the build-out
of the power grid infrastructure and things like that. But I don't know where else really we're
going to see enormous growth in human productivity. I think we're going to every year pawn off a
little bit more incrementally to the thinking machines.
And over time, I think that's going to accelerate.
But, you know, you could stay optimistic about it.
I think that that's always a good way to look at things and hope that it turns out, you know, well for most human laborers.
And maybe it does.
But from a labor standpoint, it's hard for me to wrap my mind around that.
Yeah, and I don't want to make it sound like I know the answer.
I just happen to live with an optimistic viewpoint.
And the world has changed so substantially through other technological revolutions.
revolutions. And I just have, I have hope in humanity. I have hope that, you know, the progress
And I just have hope in humanity.
that we make will lead to more and more progress from a human perspective. So like, I don't want
to act like I know the answers. I'm just telling you what I think and how I think about it
optimistically and in a positive, like, believe me, if I had a crystal ball, I would tell you,
I don't. And, um, but that's just the way I kind of view it. And I'm a very optimistic person. And, um, you know, I, I believe in humanity. That's,
that's all the only thing I could say, will there be disruptions? Of course there'll be disruptions.
And I I've said this even in the past, because it was always like really fun to me when, you know,
manufacturing was leaving. This is going back like 10 or so years ago. I'd get in
the cabs, coming from a conference, somebody might ask me what I do, and I would tell them what I do,
and they would say, hey, I was in this industry, now I'm driving an Uber, and I really got
displaced and stuff like that. What it showed me was that people are saying, oh, there's more
jobs than we can hire, and people will make the switch to, you know, the chip sector or
this sector. And I would be like, if you were a coal miner and your coal mining job went away,
or you were working at a, like a manufacturing plant, you're not going to turn around and start
writing code for like Tesla. Like you can't do that. Like you don't have that job qualification.
You don't have that skill. You don't have the know-how, right?
So there's always like a displacement.
And then there's like, you know, you know, some kind of transition.
So I don't want to make it sound like it's going to be completely rosy.
I also don't want to be so optimistic that I don't realize that, you know, some people
might not be able to make that adjustment.
I did say in that, you know, like if you're a bean counter and your job could be done easily by AI, you do need to think about that.
And you do need to make a transition sooner rather than later.
You have to think about what's next because you're right.
It's going to happen quickly.
Um, so there'll always be displacement and there's always going to be transitional periods.
So there will always be displacement and there's always going to be transitional periods.
I think what I was saying is like in the future, a little bit out further when this stuff gets
developed and, you know, you start to think about, you know, all the things that I could do
to be, to make us more efficient and more productive, my view and my hope, um, and what
I'll hang on to is that we'll all be better off for it. And that's what I really hope
for. Otherwise, what's the purpose of technology? We could just blow it all up and go back to
being an agrarian society where we grow our own vegetables, hunt for our own food,
and do all that other stuff. And that might be more fulfilling and more satisfying and all that
stuff. But I think the genie's out of the bottle. I don't think that's a possibility anymore. Um, and so, you know, but who knows? I could be wrong about
that too. There was a period way back in history called the dark ages where there was a lot of
progress and there was a lot of writing and there was a lot of stuff and then poof, it all went away.
And there was a period of time where there's just like, it seems like there was no progress,
no recordings, no anything. Uh, who knows what happened in that period of time?
And maybe that could be in our future.
Again, like I said, I don't have ability to predict the future.
I just really am.
I live life every day with an optimism, whether I take a beating on a trade that I make or
an investment's not working out the way that I want it to make.
I just wake up every day feeling really optimistic and, um, looking forward to the future. So that's one of the
things that I think about. I think about, you know, how this could help us make us more productive,
but you're right. And I don't want to downplay it. I don't know that it's going to work out
that way and we'll just have to see how things go, but that's what I, how I view it. but that's what i how i view it and that's how i hope for i will say also one of the
uh pinned up in the nest above is is a bunch of the the magic etfs from themes also some of the
other ones uh in there as well uh but the humanoid robotics one etf ticker b-o-t-t bravo omega tango tango uh is is one that fits into this theme pretty well um
if this is going that area it's it's definitely going to end up you know benefiting this theme
here specifically so um yeah the humanoid robotics one is a very interesting one within this area as
well yeah and i mean we we literally had to change it up a little bit because when we first launched the fund three years ago, it was a robotics fund.
And that was what the index was tied to.
And so what we found was that, like you just talked about, technology is changing so quickly that we went from industrial robotics and more simple robotics to humanoid robotics, which is going to change the way that
we do things. And our autonomous driving, we would include that in there. So you'll see
companies like Tesla in the portfolio. You'll see companies like NVIDIA in the portfolio.
But then you'll see some other companies that have bigger positions that some people might not even
know, like Helium Robot Company or T-Robotics or Rainbow Robotics,
Erudyne. I mean, everybody probably knows that one. Clobot. There's a lot of different,
we specifically wanted to change this to an international strategy that specializes on
what robotics are going to look like over the next, you know, three to 10 years. And we see
this as, you know, humanoid robotics really, really picking up steam and, you know, potentially
within the next, you know, five to 10 years, you know, people will own their own robots that will
be doing things. Some of these plays, you know, are in the chip space. Like we said, we mentioned
NVIDIA, Tesla with autonomous driving and with, with, um, their humanoid robotics, um, that they're building,
uh, really going to be, uh, so it's like multifaceted there on one side, it's autonomous
driving, which we consider part of the robotic space. And then it's also, um, humanoid robotics.
humanoid robotics. So yeah, we just wanted to make sure that we were capturing
the future of robotics and not being stagnant. And what you'll see is, as this builds out,
we think this is an excellent time to get into a space like this. And we've seen
super solid returns in the portfolio, up 50%, 49.3% year to date.
And we, you know, we, we believe that there's going to be continued growth in
this space.
I'm curious, actually, I'm curious your thoughts on the international market outside of China, specifically.
Are there names in the humanoid robotics space that are interesting outside of those other areas?
I feel like we specifically talk about U.S. companies a lot, a little bit in the China ones.
I don't know too much about what the European landscapes, I i kind of just assume based on other industries where that might look
like um but i would be curious of of what globally the uh the robotics and maybe what parts of the
world i'm sure china south korea japan us are the ones leading this yeah well yeah well so when you
look at the breakdown of the countries because we have that on the website so take a look at the breakdown of the countries, because we have that on the website, take a look at the country breakdown.
Actually, the highest percentage country in this portfolio is coming from Korea at 38.4%.
You got the United States at 25%.
China's at 21%.
We have Hong Kong in there at 5.43%.
Maybe we're still holding on that Hong Kong doesn't, you know, part of China, but it is.
So if you add those up, that's 26%.
That would put us a little bit ahead of the United States.
And then 5.42% in Japan and Canada at 3.17%.
I don't see any, I don't see big exposure in Europe, but that doesn't surprise me because
Europe has lagged in technology for lots of different reasons.
And so, you know, you don't talk about Europe when
you talk about AI. You don't talk about Europe when you talk about advanced technology. You
don't talk about Europe when you talk about chips. It's really like a United States and Asia play
with a very, very small percentage in Canada. So that's where you're seeing the country breakdown,
but that's where the activity is. That's where, you know, um, you know, this, uh,
robotics revolution is taking place. That's where there are a lot of chips being done.
That's where a lot of software is being created, uh, so on and so forth. So, uh, that's how the
breakdown is. And if you think about it, it's very, very Asia heavy. Um, and then, and the second largest component of that, I'll even just say North America.
But Asia is a very heavy Asia portfolio.
When you break it down,
that includes Korea, China, and Japan.
It's funny.
On the space, we were also talking about
some positive flow on the china names
i forget what etf or it was but we were talking earlier about people are starting to bet more on
the the chinese market wanted to pick up a little bit we'll say it's a it's an interesting one going
forward we've definitely had those talks there um about who is taking this market seriously and who is not. Stock talk, you have, I know we're a U.S. first one,
but I know you're very interested in this area.
Have you looked into any of the Korean names, the Korean landscape,
maybe even not necessarily to invest in,
but seeing what the competitive landscape is like?
Sorry, what industry?
Korea, specifically humanoid robotics.
I'd imagine there are plenty
of names that continuously pop up yeah i've looked like uh at a couple korean companies but um yeah
the growth in in the korean market this year has been crazy one of the best performing uh em so
yeah korea looks great um i'm currently just sticking to u.S. stocks. My portfolio, I don't have any
exposure right now. I might pick some up next year, but we'll see.
Yeah. And I think there's a lot of people that are shy away from specific country exposure if
they have to go do it themselves. And that's why we try to create these ETFs to make it easy for
U.S. investors to get exposure to other countries, including Asia, China, so on and so forth, so that they can get that exposure in a U.S. ETF and not have to worry about getting that on their own or trying to get it on some Asian exchange or something like that.
So that's the reason why these ETFs work and they're becoming more and more popular.
Yes, you go on the website and take a look.
A lot of these names are not US listed.
A lot of them are KS, Korean listed.
It's interesting that their tickers are just numbers.
I always find that intriguing.
But yeah, a lot of these names are not names that are exposed.
And obviously,
I'm going to quote a performance here on how it's done this year. That does not mean anything about
the future. Pass does not equal the future. But I know we were talking about the Korean market
doing well. The ETF is up 49% today, this year, so far this year, ticker bot on that one. Again,
pass doesn't equal the future. But these non-us listed names on these
kind of other major exchanges around the world there there is some interesting stuff yeah and
we don't like to talk about performance because you know like in any given year a sector could
do bad these are sector specific thematic etfs if you want exposure to that we're trying to get
you the best exposure that we can at the lowest price. The performance speaks for itself. But if there was a crisis in a certain sector or if there was
a crisis in a particular country or something like that, that would be impacted in the exposure
that we provide. It's just you have to convinced and convinced that you want to be in this sector
that you're okay with being in the country so you know we have a uh a chinese ai instrument
called dragon drgn and you know the number one two thing two questions i always get asked is
uh when we talk about that is it's like you know what are the safeguards for investing in chinese
companies and i say there are none like i'm I'm honest. Like, I'm not going to say, like,
I have no safeguards for investing in Chinese companies, nor do I have any safeguards for
investing in U.S. companies. And I understand the differences between the reporting and all
the information that you get in the U.S. versus what you get in China. However, these are listed on two exchanges in China,
and there are requirements.
Whether you believe the numbers or not, that's up to you.
But the first thing you have to do when you're thinking about investing
in a specific thematic ETF or sector-based ETF is like,
one, do I believe in the investment in that thematic, in that sector,
in that region?
And if you do, then it's like,
take a look at how the portfolio is constructed. In our case, it's a passive strategy and it's
run on an index. There are 25 names in the portfolio when it comes to the Chinese AI
instrument. And if you're comfortable investing in Chinese companies, if you're comfortable
knowing that because they list
on exchanges in China that you're getting the right information and that you can rely on that
information and that's your first and foremost conviction, then you can start to think about
what instruments that you want to invest in. And so if you pass that first test, then you can
start thinking about it. But for sure, you have to be comfortable
investing in the theme and in the country. And if those two things check off, then this is a good
option for you. Yeah, for sure. Just throwing this out there. You should always know what you
guys are investing in. It is important to ask these questions.
It is important that you can,
I'm sure you can DM the Leverage Shares account.
Actually, I don't know if you can there.
Maybe it's email.
Actually, it's probably where that has to go.
No, we have an info.
If you go on our website,
there'll be for info
and you can always email us.
We will get back to you.
In fact, sometimes I even look at it
and get back to people myself.
So happy to do that.
Ask the questions. It is do that. Ask the questions.
It is important that you ask the questions in this area.
So shout out to that.
Another topic that we've been talking about on the space a little bit was obviously rare earth metals as we've kind of gotten down this thing.
And how do we actually run all this stuff?
How do we actually run all this stuff?
And where does all this come from?
And where does all this come from?
Obviously, one of the ETFs that you guys have,
the Lithium and Battery Metal Miners ETF,
ticker L-I-M-I, Lima Indigo, Mary Indigo.
So we'll go on that one, L-I-M-I.
One of the specific conversation that we had here
was around maybe the U.S.
Like, is the U.S. about an import?
Okay, taking a step back.
We were talking about AI and all this stuff
and how the next theme that might be onshored was...
Oh, it was drones. It was drones.
And then kind of coming from that was talking about
the rare earth materials that were coming from that.
And the question was, are we going to reshore
this rare earth material mining?
And the answer is probably not, maybe not, given the way
it kind of is destructive to the environment and all the extra stuff there. And it's just
enough to deal with. And the conversation we had was exporting this off onto Australia.
And as I was looking into the LIMI ETF, it's very interesting that Australia is actually the
highest represented country.
And actually, the U.S. is at 11% here.
So I'm curious on this theme here in LIMI, if the general thought you think is there the same?
It is interesting to see Australia being the leading name in this ETF.
Also, a lot of China exposure, which we know are very much needed. Yeah, I mean, we need rare earth minerals.
We can't get them all from the United States. And so there's other countries that we rely on.
And because of that, we're invested in those spaces. You know, I don't know if you guys just
recently saw that, um, the U S Trump is going down with, uh, one of the Senator, I think,
I think it's a Senator or maybe the governor of Louisiana. I can't remember who, but they're
going to Greenland again. And, you know, a big a big part of Greenland, they're talking about how it's strategic for us from a security perspective
and stuff like that. But part of that security is rare earth minerals. And Greenland has a great
amount of lithium. So when you think about everything that we just talked about before,
the electrification of vehicles battery storage global lithium
like is is very much in demand and we had that blip with china so when he talks about security
it's not just about like physical security national security from the standpoint of like
you know having a strategic post where they are uh it's a lot of it has to do with rare earth minerals. And so we have to go where the
minerals are. So if that's Australia, that makes sense that we have a high component
to Australian companies and we have a good relationship with Australia. You'll see stuff
in China and other places where we can get access to lithium. And so, yeah, total sense to me that
we are in those parts of the countries. You can see, again, a pretty decent percent in Canada.
I think we're at 11.4% allocated in companies that are based in Canada, 11.4% in the United States.
11.4% in the United States. But make no mistake, the Netherlands, that 0.97%
that's in the portfolio, the Dutch control Greenland. And I think potentially there's
more to come from something like that. But what you'll see is where the company breakdowns are
thriving within the portfolio today, And that's why you get those
weights. We're pretty agnostic. It's not like we're saying we need to be in Australia or we
need to be in China. I think what you see with a portfolio like this is where you get the exposure
to lithium mining, so on and so forth. And that's why you'll see that country break down that way.
you know, that's why you'll see that company breakdown, uh, that country breakdown that way.
Um, so yeah, that, that just makes a ton of sense to me. Those are our partners. That's
where the lithium is. And that's why, uh, the exposure rests in those places.
Yeah, that is some good points there. It makes sense. It sense it's it's definitely a part of the market that um
rare earths in general it's a huge part of the market it's a huge part of national security
and the same way that we positioned ourselves uh from a national security standpoint in lots
of different places where the fuel was the energy was the oil was now it's all about repositioning
was the energy was the oil was now it's all about repositioning for uh you know you know all these
minerals naturals minerals so like it's a it's a definitely even a change from how we used to think
about energy and how we used to think about strategic partnerships around the globe so um
this is definitely coming to the forefront now, and it's a very, very important component to this whole technological revolution we're talking about.
Yeah, for sure, for sure.
Paul, were there any other conversations that you were maybe coming in excited to have on here?
Yeah, you know, I'm still really excited about financials
and the large financials.
And it's interesting because we talk about,
you know, our exposure within our ETS,
but, you know, we get interest from various different countries.
And so I was literally on the phone with a bank in Thailand who manages funds,
and they like US exposure to ETFs to capture some of the exposure for their ETFs. And it was really
interesting. These are people at a bank, people at a fund. And when I mentioned GSIB, which is our
globally systemically important bank ETF with the symbol GSIB,
they literally had to have me break down specifically what a GSIB was, how it's determined,
so on and so forth. When you think about a globally systemically important bank,
I mean, the number one thing is it's designated by the Financial Stability Board and Basel III as globally systemically important.
The reason why we think that is so important when we talk about why it's investable is because we're entering a lot of uncertainties in the world, like what we were talking about before. And so number one, these G-SIBs are very like structurally
strong and they're built to withstand stress. So, you know, because of the regulations that
they're forced to comply with, global regulations, you know, they have higher capital buffers and more stringent liquidity requirements,
enhanced supervisory oversight, and they have resolution planning in case they run into
losses. They have great earnings power. And the beneficiaries of all this current macro
investment that's happening around the globe, highest net income,
they have fee income diversification, global scale advantages, and they're interconnected.
So they're all working together.
They have an implicit backdrop, right?
The whole book, Too Big to Fail.
Well, these 29 companies that are designated as GSIBs, they are the too big to fail because
they're so deeply embedded in everything that we do globally that, you know, there'll be
support when it's needed.
You know, like when we had that regional bank crisis a couple of years ago, you know, it
was like, hey, if they can't withstand, somebody will eat them up and, you know, some of these
banks will fail.
Like nobody's letting JP Morgan fail.
Nobody's letting Goldman Sachs fail. Nobody's letting JP Morgan fail. Nobody's letting
Goldman Sachs fail. That game is over. And so there's a reason to believe that they have
support levels. They have regulatory clarity. So we're talking about, do you want to invest?
Can you trust? There's a ton of regulatory clarity here. And so we just believe that these banks are very
well positioned. I want to give you one more point. They're starting to be looked at as technology
companies, as fintech companies, because they are transitioning from these global financial
institutions to these very high-tech financial institutions.
And they're able to do that with major investments and major scale.
And that has to do with the tokenization of assets and various different things.
And so perhaps, perhaps, and this is just me thinking out loud,
they're going to start to be valued differently, more like a fintech
company and like a fintech company at scale. And I talked about this a little bit yesterday,
I think, on one of the podcasts. Think about that from the standpoint of when Walmart started to do
e-commerce, their valuation changed and they started to get a higher valuation and people
started to think of it more as like an e-commerce company than just a retailer. And so I think that you could start to make that same
implication when you're starting to think about some of the largest financial institutions.
And just like we talked about AI, this transformation is going to happen quickly,
quicker than we think. And if they could pull it off and they could pull it off at scale, which I do believe that it's either they do it or they fail. And I don't think
they have any desire to fail because they're putting a lot of investment in this. Not only
are you going to see them grow exponentially, but you're going to see their valuations increase.
And so as that happens, we believe there's a lot of tailwinds around the financials
that aren't even built in yet.
And you're going to see them traded higher multiples with that expansion and with that growth.
So we really are into the financials.
One of the themes that also, I happen to believe blockchain is something that is not going to, it might create small other companies on the side of it,
but I less think it's going to be that whole new ecosystem.
And these globally systemic important banks are going to utilize crypto
technology and blockchain technology to become whatever is marginally more
profitable.
And that is going to lead to a lot higher outcomes as well.
So I even think there's more themes on this financial side.
A hundred percent.
I really think crypto, I think if they get it wrong, I think that these are the type of names that are going to win the most from this blockchain.
And what they're going to do is they're going to buy up these companies.
There's no doubt about it.
If they have advantages from buying up a lot of these blockchain companies. They're going to buy them.
And it's just like every other industry that starts to form a revolution.
It's like you either...
I don't even think they need to buy the companies for the record.
I think they just utilize the tech.
Yeah.
I think that these global...
These G-Cib banks are in some prime locations.
I think a lot of fintechs are as well.
But obviously, the too big to fail thing is 100% there.
I apologize for interrupting.
No, you don't ever have to apologize for interrupting.
It's a good point.
Yeah, the GCIT theme is definitely a very interesting one.
Stock Talk.
Stock Talk's a smid cap investor,
so I know he's not going to have any specific thoughts on that one,
but what about on financials?
In general,
if that's an area of interest for you, Mr. Stock Talk?
Not really.
I mean, you know, it's always tough for me.
I sometimes want to answer these questions as honestly as possible,
but no, not really right now.
I mean, I don't have any financial exposure in the portfolio currently,
except for Robinhood, which, you know,
I have no plans to sell
at any time in the near future um but outside of that i mean i think that kind of covers it for me in terms of financial exposure i could get some more boring exposure to like you know there's
some regional banks that i think are interesting that i've looked at but not been really been able
to develop conviction on i've looked at like 4 payments, thought about that stock a few times,
but again, haven't really been able to develop conviction on it. I've looked at Pagaya, PGY,
haven't been able to really develop conviction on it. So there's some names I've looked at
to get more quote unquote financials exposure, but I haven't really pulled the trigger. It's not,
it's not an
area of focus for me. The themes I'm focused on are aerospace and defense, data centers,
robotics, nuclear energy, those types of themes. So chips, things like that. So it's just not in
my purview as a tech focused investor. Yeah. So I'll say just to reiterate,
I'm a big Robinhood fan as well. We love Robinhood. We think Robinhood's a great stock. It's just different, right? Because
it's not as big. It doesn't have as much scale, right? And that stock is up 82% for the year.
So congratulations. It's a great play. If you're looking for a diversified approach and you're not
as individually stock-driven or you want to add exposure, this strategy on the G-SYS is up 58%
this year. And again, we're not just talking about performance, but I'm just trying to show
you that there's growth in some of these larger names. And when we think about the thematics,
we're thinking about giving you exposure to high-conviction areas of the market
in certain sectors or in
certain thematics. And this is one that we just think is attractive and it's gaining a lot of
interest. But I would agree with you, like companies like Robinhood should not be ignored.
Like they're excellent, excellent individual opportunities right now and they're doing very
well. I rolled out banking today. Oh, and the other thing that I would say to that is we also love defense, aerospace and defense.
And so you had asked me before about other themes that we're thinking about, and I know I sound like a broken record, but it doesn't change overnight.
So, you know, we have an ETF called NATO, N-A-T-O, and it's a transatlantic defense ETF.
N-A-T-O. And it's a transatlantic defense ETF. And so it is all aerospace and defense companies
that are within U.S. and NATO member countries. And we just, you know, there's so many reasons
why, and I've said it a hundred times, why we like this space. But with all the geopolitical
risks that's happening and all the new technological advances that are happening in
aerospace and ammunitions and drones and so on and so forth, we see a long runway for investment in this. And we could just follow
the investment. Today, there was some really good news around companies like RTX, Lockheed Martin,
Northrop Grumman, and some good moves early in the afternoon. I haven't followed it later in
the afternoon, but I saw them doing really well and having a nice move early in the afternoon. I haven't followed it later in the afternoon,
but I saw them doing really well and having a nice move earlier in the day.
We just think this is a theme that's going to continue to grow with the evolution and the technological advances that has to happen in the military, that has to happen in cybersecurity,
that has to happen in drone technology, that has to happen in munitions. We could hear about these
Bunker Buster missiles and these Patri patriot missiles and how intelligent they are that's
only going to advance you know we don't take the battle to the war field i don't know if you guys
saw the new ken burns american revolution uh uh war documentary you know they were literally like
running up to each other and stabbing each other with bayonets we're never fighting wars like that
anymore like it's all high technology and it's all cyber and all that stuff so if you're looking
for advancements and things like that and we see that the nato member countries are 100 committed
to increasing their spend from two percent to five percent over the next 10 years two percent
to five percent of gd GDP over the next 10 years.
And so we just think the investment's there.
It's going to continue to be there for a long period of time.
These companies will be the beneficiary.
And again, it's a portfolio that goes across not only the United States,
who right now is the leader in aerospace and technology,
but also in the European countries that are NATO member countries that are now forced to be self-sustainable when it comes to defense
and have to get prepared for that and re-up their militaries,
re-up their defense capabilities, so on and so forth.
So another great theme that we're really positive on
that we see a lot of interest in.
Funny timing, by the way. Lockheed Martin was just awarded a $10 billion contract
modification. Yeah. I mean, it just is what it is. This is why I say don't try to time it.
This is an ongoing investment that's going to continue to happen. And there are certain players
in the space that are going to be the beneficiaries of it. Could there always be other companies that
come up that build new technologies and things like that? Yeah, sure. And if you want to, you know, go and
try to find those names, I, you know, everybody's entitled to do it the way that they want to do it.
And, you know, if you're really good at doing that, you can find some, you know, canaries in
the coal mine or the next great thing. But there's a lot of great companies out there right now that
we know are the beneficiaries of these big contracts. And, you know, there's a really nice growth story there. And, you know, we just continue to be
bullish on aerospace and defense. And we think that, you know, within those NATO member countries,
there's guaranteed spend. So we like them very much. I shouldn't say guaranteed spend,
committed spend, anything could change, but right now there's committed spend there was also a story this morning paul or this after oh there's
last couple days around drones and a lot of dji and maybe there was possibly a band in the us
one of the drone names which i'm sure are part of the the nato etf as well yeah we have been yeah and we tend to have like the the large uh larger companies uh that are active in
all these places and so yeah drones are a big part of the portfolio uh ammunitions and defense
and missile technology aerospace uh you name it it's a really holistic portfolio with a lot of great companies
that are doing a lot of great work. So for sure, drones are included in here. And then even when
you look at the country weights, with the exception of a small percentage in Hong Kong,
it's all NATO member countries. There's a 0.05% weight to Hong Kong, but everything else
is in NATO member countries that are really dependent on building up their defense. And so
yeah, it's a really solid portfolio, diversified just enough to get you all the right exposure,
but not be overly diversified so that you're missing the opportunity.
And then the bulk of it right now is in the United States
with the rest of it pretty much,
with the exception of that 0.5% in Hong Kong,
pretty much in Europe, in these NATO member countries.
That is a good breakdown right there.
Leverage shares account, first of all, just in general, posts really great stuff.
We have the EU version posting a lot of great graphics.
The Themes ETF account posting some really great stuff as well.
But if you click in to that Leverage Shares account today, you guys posted a couple charts and graphics,
which really showed the recent success that you guys have been having.
showed the recent success that you guys have been having so definitely a big congratulations on that
So definitely a big congratulations on that one.
one um i would just love to hear your thoughts on on the year where this is maybe i think we'll get
it next week with you but we're kind of at that point here it's as i could tell it's been quite
the uh the blockbuster year for you guys over at leverage here so definitely congratulations on
that i'm curious just any thoughts on that what you're excited about, all that good stuff?
Yeah, we're just building and growing.
We went from a startup to over a billion dollars in assets in 12 months.
And I know what the growth trajectory looks like once you get to that spot because I've done it at other places before.
And it's my job to make sure this thing goes. I also know that we have some commitments that are coming in in the first half of next year already.
So I'm really excited about that.
And I think we're just going to get to another level next year.
We're going to continue to do what we do well,
which is offer thematic and sector-based ETFs
in high-growth areas.
We're going to make sure that they're pure plays,
and we're going to make sure that they're among the lowest on the street. And we're also going
to continue to innovate on the other side with our single-stock leverage ETFs in very popular,
high-volume trading companies that investors want so we can give them leverage exposure.
And then we've got some other things in the pipeline
that I can't talk about right now, but are very interesting. And a couple of those ideas may have
come from the conversations that we've had here because we always listen to what investors are
talking about and what people are interested in. And so I'm just excited for the growth.
interested in. And so I'm just excited for the growth. We've set out to be the next great
asset manager in the ETF space. And we had a wonderful year and we're well on our way.
We got a lot of hard work to do, but we're a seasoned group of professionals that really,
really love this work. Some of the best things that I do. That's why, you know, it's like five
o'clock the day before Christmas Eve.
A lot of people are taking it slow.
And I wouldn't be any other place but talking to you and the people that listen to your show.
Because I just love the action.
And I love the intelligence. And I love people that are truly interested in investing and what that means for themselves
and what that means for themselves and their life.
and their life.
And so I just think more of this,
more building, more growing,
more providing investors what they need.
And we're so happy and pleased and privileged to do that.
So I just want to thank you guys for the partnership.
Thank you for your incredibly intelligent audience
who always makes us think we take a lot of what they say, uh, what they
write, what they post, bring it back to the drawing board. And we'll continue to do that.
Um, and to everybody that's on the call. And I said this the other day, we're winding down to
the end of the year. I hope you get some time to sort of unwind, um, enjoy time with friends and
family. And, um, you know, we will, uh, we'll be working hard. Um, and, uh and we can't wait for 2026.
We think it's going to be a big growth year.
Really appreciate you guys, Paul.
You guys are doing a bunch of awesome stuff there
and I encourage everyone in the crowd,
no matter what you come take out of this,
go check out the account.
Go do some research on the website.
Take a look into it.
It will help you out.
Then tag them in posts,
all that stuff,
questions,
maybe email them stuff.
There's so much great stuff going on here.
So much research to have come from this.
And our goal is to work with extremely reputable people,
putting out great products,
and then just putting them in front of people.
You guys,
we want you to make a strategic smart decisions.
Everything we do is to try and arm you guys with that information.
And we want you to make smart decisions. And our goal is to try and arm you guys with that information.
And we want you to make smart decisions. And our goal is to keep all of our content for free and work with really reputable people who allow you to make those decisions, whether it's what to put
money in or whatever the stuff there. Yeah. But Paul, we are really appreciative of you guys. I
am super excited to see all the stuff that leverage
shares comes in and does in 2026 and beyond you guys are doing a lot of awesome stuff yeah the
last thing i'll say is it's hard to battle all the giants out there this industry rewards the
giants rewards the people that have been around for a long time and when you're a newcomer you
have to like be um you know working hard every single day to earn every single dollar that we get in investment. And I
just want everybody to know that we appreciate every single dollar. We work really, really hard,
tirelessly to make sure that we take care of that and that we provide you with the exact investment
that you put that hard-earned dollar into. So we're just going to continue to work hard every
day. We appreciate every single cent. And we just want to thank everybody who, you know, pays attention to us, invests with us.
We'll keep working hard for you.
So with that, just going to say Merry Christmas, Happy New Year.
Have a great time.
Have a blast.
Have a glass of champagne from me.
Toast the New Year.
And we'll be back whenever you want us.
And no better way to end it.
Shout out.
Tweet pinned up in the nest above. Has some
of the stuff there. The best place for all the
information that you guys need is on the
Leverchairs website, the DMZTS
website. Go in and check that out.
It has everything you need.
Definitely ask questions. We appreciate you
all. The stock market closes early
tomorrow at 1 p.m. Eastern, so we will not
be having stocks on spaces and obviously is
closed on Thursday. This is our last stocks inaces of the week. It's Tuesday. That feels
extremely weird, but I appreciate all of you. I hope you guys all have a Merry Christmas.
Happy Holidays. I'm not going to say Happy New Year because every single one of you are required
to come back on Monday or Tuesday of next week because we'll be live on Spaces. So Merry Christmas.
Happy Holidays to everyone. We are really appreciative
of all of you.
And I am excited
for Monday of next week
where we get to be back on Stocks and Spaces. Have a good one, everyone.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Actually,
Stock Talk.
What's up?
You know what feels like a great thing to do?
What?
A Christmas sale.
Nothing feels people's cheers in a little Christmas sale.
The group's getting too big.
Group's getting too big.
No more sales.
Prices are actually going up.
We're doing the opposite of a sale.
Prices are going to double again next year.
So no more sales.
Probably no more sales ever.
Group's getting too big.
So yeah. I wish I could.
It just doesn't make sense.
Way too many members, no one's canceling.
So I have to keep it, I have to preserve the alpha somewhat and not just have 30,000 people in there.
So yeah, no sales, but if you guys wanna join,
I'm gonna be doing the same thing I was doing this year.
Just deep research in this mid-cap category, really focused picks.
It's obviously worked very well for us this year.
But same process next year.
Maybe just different sectors, different themes, and so on and so forth.
So if you're interested, come sign up.
But no more sales.
Always worth an effort.
I tried for you all.
All right.
Follow the speakers.
I appreciate you all.
Amp any clever words.
By the way, Wolf Trading will be live tomorrow morning.
Mark, it's open.
We're live.
Exactly.
The DGens are DGening.
We're out, yeah.
We're out, yeah.
All right. Goodbye.
