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WOLF MONDAY SPACES
Recorded: June 12, 2023 Duration: 3:01:37Space Recording
Full Transcription
Yo, yo.
Yo, yo.
Let's get that tweet of yours pinned up top.
Sounds good. I'll throw it up there right now.
Word.
What's going on, Michael?
Oh, not too much.
Another strong day in the markets.
Yeah, it was interesting because everything was still running today.
I did notice a little bit of that pullback on W,
but I assume you're probably fully out of that already.
Yeah, I hit out most of that.
It was a good ride, but, you know, I don't think it's a good company.
So it's kind of a hit and run.
Yeah, it makes sense.
I'm still watching VIST, if you remember me talking about that one a while back.
So, Michael, Michael Saw, you're on here.
VIST hit $24 on Thursday.
Yeah, insane.
Awesome.
And how about, as long as we're throwing up names, how about Oprah?
You see Oprah?
Is it still going?
Oh, God.
I'm going to feel a lot of FOMO here.
Oh, man.
Because I talked about this when you and me were talking about it.
When was that?
Was that like two weeks ago?
Months ago.
No, no, no, no, no.
When you followed up again and you were like, okay.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that's a couple weeks ago, yeah.
I'm like, even since then, it went up another $4.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
This is going crazy.
Okay.
I guess there is plenty to keep our eyes on going into today's space.
For those in the audience that aren't familiar, we're going to do some market sentiment first
and then some stock picks.
Obviously, the stock market has been going crazy.
Keep in mind, it's a little bit of a tougher week to do stock picking because there's two
major binary events being CPI and FOMC that we do have to work around.
So with that being said, people are probably going to be a little bit more tentative or
they're just going to go completely all for it.
So I think that you will be thoroughly entertained regardless of the direction that people go in.
We are going to start out with some market sentiment.
We can start that out with yourself, Nick, if you'd like to lead us off here.
Sure thing.
Man, what a strong market this has been.
And a reminder to myself as well that you just have to follow price and take a look at volume
as a secondary option and not try to get too ahead of yourself.
This was a mistake that I made kind of going into last week.
I thought the market felt frothy last week.
So I started to be a little bit more, what's the right word?
I guess like acting quicker on my long positions.
And then whenever I put on a new long position, I would hedge a little bit with S-Triple-Q.
And today I got burnt a little bit selling the last bit of IoT, flipping LSCC for a nice move.
But this is definitely a rally that I need to go back and study because I made a couple judgment mistakes here when it goes back to market breadth at the start of the rally that really kept me more reserved instead of participating in this monster rally.
So right now, like you said, because there's CPI news, FOMC news, we are extending the short term.
That doesn't mean we can't get more extended.
But at least at this point, I need to take just a quick step back, let some of the news settle into price and then go from there.
But this has been a rally that I need to go back and study because I've definitely made my mistakes along the way.
I love what you're saying there, you know, actually stating, you're not saying I need to do just completely different going forward.
You're saying I'm going to look back, I'm going to study, see what I saw then, what do I see now, make comparisons.
And if you do that enough times with enough of these types of situations, you can start to detect patterns and adjust your approach to it, right?
A hundred percent, because with trading, I don't think anyone on this panel is looking for a hundred percent win rate or a hundred percent gains on every trade.
We're looking for a market edge and to be able to turn that edge over and over and over when it's available.
So if I can go from a strategy that's 50 percent to 52 percent, that's that's an edge that that I want to build.
But that two percent takes a lot of effort, a lot of time studying emotional, not just price action, but also like your emotion, emotions to that price action.
So lots of good feedback for me to go through.
Perfect.
OK, well, I appreciate you starting us off, Nick.
It definitely was an interesting one.
And what was funny to me was that I felt like you were going to get it on one of yours, either the the Unity long or the for I'm short.
Were you surprised with, you know, you had that pump day, I think, up on Unity, right?
And then or maybe was that, oh, did you not get that because it was Monday night?
Right.
So Monday was announced that their Apple partnership.
That's what took it off.
But the second day when it pulled in and didn't have any response to the closing price of the previous day, that was a real kind of like risk off signal for me with that trade.
So I ended up not taking that, but it's still consolidating here.
So a stock that I have on my watch list, but it didn't have that type of power that you would expect.
And when you have those day two moves after like a really high volume and relatively strong closing range, you really expect a move kind of like IOT went with.
And that that was a trade I did take, but just ended up selling a little bit too quickly.
All right.
Very fair.
Yeah.
I mean, very hard to manage some of these trades, especially if you weren't big on them throughout the past couple of weeks as well.
Props to this, it did hold.
But yeah, nice job.
You've been talking IOT for a while and that's up 60% just in the last, I mean, really the last 12 days.
That thing went from 19 to 30.
Pretty crazy moves.
Okay.
Let's go and keep it rolling here.
Michael Knauss, would you like to cover some of your market sentiment thoughts?
Yeah, sure thing.
And first to Nick there, right?
Don't beat yourself up too much about missing the bull market, quote unquote, so far, right?
I always go back to the Jesse Livermore quote, right?
Which the top 20% and the bottom 20% are the most expensive, right?
We're just looking for the meat and the move.
So I think it's totally acceptable and totally normal that, you know, that 420 break should have been the trigger for a lot of people.
I know it was a trigger for me to get kind of aggressive.
You know, and again, you'll never grab the bottom and you'll never grab the top.
I know you know this is more for the audience and everything, but, you know, you're just trying to grab that little bit, if you can, somewhere in the middle there, right?
So I don't think we have to worry too much about, I think we've got a lot of that to go.
So I'm not too worried about missing anything.
And for the audience, I think it's important to make sure you don't have FOMO, right?
Is, you know, if this is the beginning of a new trend, there's going to be a lot of time to get involved and a lot of time to make a lot of money off it.
So, you know, just make sure you stay patient and pick your spots and have your stops and all that kind of stuff.
Because, you know, who knows, maybe we revert from here.
But for the market overall, the only thing that has me worried is that we are at the August highs, right?
Which was both the exact, you know, let's call it 332 or 432-ish on the market.
And, you know, completely fell apart there.
And we're back there again on the weekly chart.
We're now starting our fifth week up in a row to hit that level.
So it's not that I think that, you know, a major top is coming or anything like that.
But when you're up five weeks in a row into a resistance point, a major pivot like that,
I think you kind of have to sit back and say, okay, is it time for a little bit of rest?
Is it time for some back and fill?
We haven't had a drama segment in the news in a while, and that usually follows price.
So I wouldn't be shocked if in the next week or so some sort of, I don't know, floor or ceiling
or something to do with Trump or whatever is going to happen next is going to kind of shake things up
and give us a little bit more indecision when we start to chop sideways.
And to be honest, that would be healthy.
You know, the last thing that any serious investor wants is a market that just goes up every single day
or every single week, because if you look at those on charts, those are always the ones
that fall apart, the ugliest and the quickest.
So, again, I don't see any reason to be bearish.
But I do see a reason to say, okay, we're up four weeks in a row.
Maybe if I've got some good gains, I lock some in.
Maybe be patient, wait for a pullback or some sort of consolidation.
But, you know, the only counter to that would be if everybody's waiting for that,
then we're just going to continue to rip through.
But with all the news and all that kind of stuff, I was in a bit of profit-taking mode today.
So I would accept any sort of a pullback or a rest period going forward.
I think it would be healthy.
Okay. Yeah.
I mean, it's super interesting.
Imagine if it doesn't pull back.
We just keep rocketing.
It's like, where does retail get in?
All right, Ben, I know you wanted to pop in early here.
You want to take the mic?
Yeah, sure.
And I've got to get my picks because I'm feeling a little bit under the weather.
But, yeah, as far as sentiment goes, you know, I've been pretty bullish risk assets the last couple weeks.
RK, I think it's been about two weeks in a row I've kind of had this thesis of some money rotating out of SPY and Mega Captain to RK and risk assets.
And that's worked really, really well.
And this chart continues to look great.
And the charts on SPY looks really great as well.
But we do have, as you mentioned, CPI tomorrow, FOMC Wednesday.
And nothing goes up in a straight line.
So, you know, while I continue to like, you know, all of these indices, but especially ARK, at some point, man, you've got to have a pullback, you know, maybe a 20 DMA, something like that.
And now is as good a time as any before these risk events, you know, to take some off the table or be more cautious.
You know, if you're on margin, get out of margin, you know, maybe not a great time for call options, something like that.
That's kind of what's been on my mind today and going into the next couple days with these risk events.
And with that, I'm just going to roll, you know, right into the picks.
It's really hard, man.
A lot of these charts, especially these risk assets, look great, like, you know, Plug and SoFi.
And there's 20, like, other ones that are above key moving averages, 50 DMA, 50-week moving average.
And they look like they just want to keep on going.
But I've participated in a big chunk of this rally already.
So I think actually my first pick is going to be VIX, which is VIX-y.
I found an ETF. I'm long VIX call spreads right now.
But as far as the ticker symbol here, let's go with the VIX-y, V-I-X-Y.
You know, maybe we'll get a surprise in the next couple days.
Maybe not.
Maybe there won't be a surprise, but maybe a sell the news or something like that.
But as far as a pick, because I'm very hard-pressed to pick something like a, again, like a Plug or SoFi or something, even though the charts look great.
I'm looking for something that hasn't broken out yet that maybe needs to have its turn.
So I'm going to go with this AI stock called S-O-U-N.
S-O-U-N is like related to sound.
It's sound AI.
I don't know exactly what they do.
But looking at the chart of this AI stocks and other AI stocks, I feel like this one really hasn't had its turn yet.
And today it had its highest close.
It actually tied its highest close at 315.
It was the close.
It tied its highest close since all this AI hype began, at least over the last three months.
It did have an earlier pop.
I don't know what that was about back in February.
But over the last three months when most of these AI stocks had been rocketing, $3.15 has been its highest close.
And it just matched that close here today at 315.
So I'm thinking it could have its turn.
And, you know, what I like to do, story trading is kind of stack my catalysts with other pillars, sentiment catalysts, technicals, and fundamentals.
So the other reason I like it besides these technicals, I want to try to anticipate a breakout based on other factors.
So other factors that can lend itself to breaking out of this area is there was kind of a sympathy play here.
There was a stock today, AAUD, like a penny stock that was up like 120% because of some sort of news from Meta regarding audio AI.
Now, I didn't look into it.
I don't know what that news is exactly.
But whatever it is, it seems like it could be positive sentiment for this other, you know, audio AI stock, S-O-U-N.
So that's my pick, S-O-U-N and Vixie.
And, again, S-O-U-N simply because it hasn't really broken out yet and maybe it wants to have its turn.
And last thing I want to add as a bonus, like last week, I think I gave you a bonus, like micro cap that I didn't want to put as part of the competition because it's risky.
But APRN, APRN, had a great week last week, reverse split and some big news.
And I think the news really de-risks this.
So this is actually one of my larger positions.
And I think this one you can continue to hold.
I haven't really sold any yet.
Still full max position on APRN, Blue APRN.
And I think there's going to be significant additional catalysts in the next few weeks.
They're going to have debt-free.
They've got cash coming in and lots of other kind of restructuring type of catalysts I'm expecting over the next couple weeks can maybe send this much higher.
So I'll hang around if you have any questions on that.
Yeah, SOU and I am familiar with SoundHound AI.
And they are in an interesting spot.
It's a little bit tough to tell off of the actual fundamentals if there's something there.
But like you said, there's an AI playing field going on here, right?
And not all AI stocks are equal.
And I think SOU is one of the ones that has had some better moves within it.
I think that they would need a bit of perhaps a catalyst or some news to come out or something along those lines to get going here.
It's been a little bit, right?
They dropped an SEC filing about two weeks ago, the proxy statement.
But nothing else too much on that.
So maybe if NVIDIA or some of these others do start to run, that's where the bounce comes from for them.
That's where I would think that that would happen.
But yeah, good point that they are at the high of the last three months.
And that chart, at least on the three-month chart, looks pretty decent.
Then the other one outside of that that you did mention was VIXY, right, Vixie?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't trade Vixie.
I have VIX call spreads.
But hopefully I'll track with VIX if something blows up this week.
Yeah.
Vixie is pretty crazy.
Obviously, it's significantly down over the last year, right?
But we've had more stability and uptrends down like 80%, 70%.
Honestly, sorry to interject.
It's not that I'm thinking anything's going to blow up.
I just didn't know what else to pick because everything's up so much.
I'm like, what can I hold on to that will maybe be relatively stable and give me some upside optionality?
And that's really reason for that pick.
Got it.
Yep.
So, VIXY's, you know, when COVID hit, this thing went from $44 to $200 in like a month, less.
So, that was, you know, obviously a big black swan event.
But curious to see what, you know, rates changing and potentially and CPI and other stuff can do to it.
It sometimes does get these little pops and bounces.
Okay.
Really good stuff.
Ben, any other comments for us?
No other comments, but have you been following that Blue Apron?
We talked about it a little bit last week.
Yes.
Curious to your thoughts on that.
My thoughts are that I misplayed it because I came in on the stock, held it for a few days there,
and then sold it after I saw it start dropping post-split.
And then, of course, it went up 60% that afternoon.
Thanks, Blue Apron.
Love to see it.
Appreciate that.
It was up 90% at the peak.
Oh, man.
I wish I would have handheld you this season.
But I helped through the whole thing.
But more to come.
Yeah.
Shout out them.
It wasn't a big position for me.
It would have been anything too crazy.
But, yeah, shout out Blue Apron.
They did make that move about 60% up right after I sold that day.
But, yeah, I did have my eyes on it.
If there's any other high-shorted pieces along those lines that you think we should have on our radar,
definitely put them there.
Sounds good.
All right.
I'm going to try to listen the rest of the time, but have a great week.
Good luck, everyone.
Okay.
Thank you, Ben.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Mike Saul, you're up.
Hi, everybody.
Hi, Wolf.
Okay, so what's going on?
Well, a couple of weeks we've been watching for that August high to get tested.
It got tested on Friday.
Rejected.
Today it busted through.
Talking about the S&P 500.
You can use whatever you want to use to track it.
The SPY, the cash, the futures, whatever it is.
So what does that mean?
Does that mean it's all clear ahead?
Maybe.
Not a really big breakout buyer, unless we have a nice consolidation under it.
Did what we have, is what we have considered a nice consolidation?
It remains to be seen.
I would love to have a firm position on this, but I'm going to just do a quick good news,
bad news, right?
So the good news is it's a breakout.
The good news is it's new 52-week highs.
The good news is it's a new bull market, right?
We're 20% off the lows.
Great.
Bad news is everybody's calling it a new bull market.
Bad news is we took out the highs, right?
A lot of times, that's not always the best move.
It's a time for, you know, that liquidity shows up and people like to sell into that.
Didn't look like that happened today, though.
What is more neutral remain to be seen news?
Well, the CPI, I think a lot of is going into the CPI that really, I don't know how much
it's going to matter because I think the big event this week, and I think it's on everybody's
mind, is the FOMC meeting.
What are they going to do?
Are they finally going to pause?
And what is that pause going to be viewed as, right?
Is it buy the rate hike, sell the pause?
It's an event that everybody's expecting.
So, okay, hey, look, they paused.
Wow.
So you're telling me they did what they did.
Now, some people say, well, the market likes that, right?
Because the market likes, it doesn't like surprises.
It likes to see what it expects.
So if we're expecting us to pause and we pause, it's like, okay, good.
We got it right.
Let's just keep buying.
That's an excuse to keep buying.
So again, I would like to see some back and fill.
I would like to see some sideways consolidation here.
But as people should know by now, what I like, the market doesn't call me up and say, hey, what
are you like today, Mike?
Oh, okay.
Let's do that, right?
Unfortunately, I don't have that much swag.
I never did either, by the way.
So just because I would like to see something and because a lot of people would probably
like to see that, especially those that missed this whole ride that are looking to get in.
So I think the big question is, is performance going to have to now start to be chased or
is, you know, or are they going to wait for things to come back down and buy it there?
So I think that's going to be the big question.
So I'm sorry to cut in front of the winner for this week, but I have to give my picks
now because my son has an event tonight at school and I got to actually take my one shower
a week.
Did I say that?
Did I say that publicly?
And then go to this.
So I have to give my two picks now.
So these two picks kind of see where I'm leaning overall.
The first one is the leveraged Russell, the TNA.
So why?
Why am I looking at the leveraged Russell?
Well, the Russell has been lagging, as we all know, the small caps have been lagging here.
You know, a lot of you see a lot of charts and a lot of commentary on Fintwit and elsewhere
about how this whole market rally is just about four or five stocks, whatever it is.
And usually what we like what we see is we see that rotation into small caps once the foundation
is set.
I think that Russell could play a little bit of catch up here.
I was going to just call the IWM, but hey, you know, if you're going to go, go big.
So might as well do the three-time leverage TNA.
I think the Russell catches up.
The second one, and again, you know, the challenge with this contest, and I'm not complaining
just because I don't win every week, but the challenge is, is that it's a week to week.
So maybe, you know, if I had a, if I was going to pick something week to week, I would
say, yeah, okay, I'll throw the TNA in there.
I think it can, it can go this week.
Now, this next one, I don't know if it's going to go this week.
I don't know if it's going to go, it may take a couple of weeks, but I think that it's
undervalued and I think that it's in position to capitalize on the washout.
And that's the regional bank ETF, KRE.
Why?
I think it's overdone.
Remember, it seemed like just yesterday we had those, that 24-hour marathon of spaces
talking about how Silicon Valley is going to destroy the economy and everything.
And I was sitting there, I remember messaging New Wolf and saying, yeah, no, there'll be
a deal by Sunday night.
I don't know why everybody's wasting their breath and energy on this.
This is not going to happen.
There's no way they're going to let this happen.
So, you know, there was fallout of it and there were a couple others.
And it turns out that these were just, you know, whether it was a Ponzi scheme bank, as
I heard somebody call it, or whether it was a crypto bank or whatever it was.
But I just think that the regional banks are overdone here.
And I think the regional banks are set up to, you know, get some appreciation here.
I think the best way to play them is with the KRE.
I don't think it's going to be a bond burner like an AI stock or something that can gain,
you know, 20, 30 percent in a week.
I don't think it could do that.
But I think that, you know, the downside is limited at this point.
So that's what I'm looking at, TNA and KRE.
All right.
TNA as well as KRE.
TNA has been getting a lot of love.
That's kind of, you know, what people look at that or they look at IWM and they see it
setting up.
I really like this one, too.
It's kind of popped up 20 percent in the past month, but really still seems like it's one
of the ones that has a little bit more room to go there, in my opinion.
And you were doing those both long, right, Mike?
Yeah, that's correct.
I mean, I would never try to short a leveraged long ETF or just an ETF in general, right?
I would try to take the short side of it.
That's me.
I'm not saying that's wrong.
But, yeah, both sides are on the wall.
Yeah, TNA is still kind of holding that 200-day right here.
It's actually in the cloud.
I think Nick kind of uses the cloud for this with the 200 EMA and SMA.
And it's right in between those two.
So looking for it to see if it can get over the EMA, which would be at 36.5.
And that's where I think it could get a nice pop right there as it breaks through that.
But, yeah, I've been seeing a lot of love for the small caps and it hasn't gone misplaced.
Everyone that's talked about TNA.
And, you know, if you take a look at just going over to IWM, they look very, very similar, obviously.
I believe it's just a little bit of a leveraged version.
And so you can continue to kind of keep your eyes on both of those.
And then KRE, I've not looked at in a little bit, but I did see that DPST was making a run for the hills last week.
It was up like 15% in the past week and 50% in the past month.
Absolutely insane.
This thing went from 43 to 65 in one month.
So I do agree that we are seeing that pop back.
And KRE went from 35 to 43, so not quite that same move yet.
But I like where it's stabilizing here.
So I think that is a solid play.
Maybe that's one they'll have to play around some options with.
All right.
KRE, TNA, really good stuff.
Any other comments from yourself, Mike Saul?
No, just as always, thanks for coming on.
And I hate to cut off the person who won the contest because, you know, I wouldn't like it if somebody didn't let me go first either.
So I apologize for that.
But my son's graduating this year, so it'll all be over soon anyway.
Well, the interesting thing to this contest is we had a lot of speakers on last week.
And some of the people who did well are not here currently.
For example, TNA got picked last week by TSDR.
And he also picked TARC, which between the two returned over 21%.
However, he's not here.
Right.
Also, Vegas had great picks last week.
She had Tesla and Amazon.
Tesla went up 15.5%.
Hasn't had a red day in two weeks.
That, you know, between that and Amazon, she was up 16.5%.
And she's not here.
Right.
So we're kind of going down the list a little bit here.
So overall, you know, props to you, Mike, because, you know, I think with, you know, nice, nice, the short play on the Myrna there.
And then props to Ben.
I think there was around, you know, 6-7% there between PLCR and ARKK.
I have a feeling that, oh, and then even G-Knotts had some green and stuff like that.
I have a feeling it's going to be Jordan here, though.
I think that, I think Jordan might be taking the dub of the people that are on the panel.
I know, surprise, surprise, we're kind of breaking the news a little bit early here.
But, yeah, really good to having you on, Mike Saul.
Appreciate the stock picks.
And with that, Jordan, let's come to you.
Let's do your market sentiment first, though, and then we can hype this up a little.
Yeah, sounds good.
Hey, guys.
It's another beautiful day in the markets, you know, spy, absolutely ripping.
It was kind of choppy at the beginning of the day.
I wasn't really expecting this big of a move, but not going to complain about it at all.
You know, this whole year, we've consistently seen higher highs and higher lows.
So I'm still bullish.
There's nothing telling me to be bearish.
I'm still going to stay bullish.
Of course, we have CPI coming out tomorrow.
That could change some things.
But I really don't think it's going to change too much of my sentiment overall.
And, yeah, so I'm staying bullish for the most part.
We've seen AI, the whole AI space kind of just consolidate, pull back a little bit.
But still looking good.
As soon as that starts kicking off again, we'll obviously see NVIDIA, I think, break out of this little range that it's stuck in right now.
But NVIDIA is also looking great.
Just overall, things are looking good, in my opinion.
Of course, I do think we need to pull back on the spy a little bit.
But just looking at IWM right now on the daily chart as well.
That's, you know, that's bull flagging right now on some lowering volume, just getting a little bit of consolidation.
So things are still looking good, in my opinion.
I'm going to stay bullish overall, and until anything tells me different, I'm going to stay that way.
So, you know.
Yeah, I agree with you.
I also did not see coming off this morning this type of price action because spy really wasn't doing a whole lot.
Well, and it's on Monday before CPI, right?
Like, I was not expecting any of this.
But can't complain at all, that's for sure.
Yeah, because you can see, right, that first hour does nothing.
Next hour doesn't really do anything.
You kind of get that candle then coming in at 1130.
Yeah, it wasn't really until power hour kicked off.
Pops off VWAP, but then, yeah, the big move started in around 245 for that move.
Really, really nice.
Okay, well.
I really didn't trade much on spy either today.
I basically just caught that play on AVGO.
I took one little scalp on spy, but that was it.
I just kind of watched it go all day.
Understood.
Okay, so I actually was kind of hinting at this beforehand, but it does look like through scanning through this that, Jordan, have you taken the dub on the Money Crew Spaces yet?
I took the dub on the AVGO trade.
I'm kind of sad that I took the dub because I took it a little early.
But it's all good, man.
It's all good.
All right.
We secured the profits.
We can talk about that one in a second, but I'm talking about taking the win on the picks for the week and basically just having the highest return.
From what I was seeing, it looked like you had two picks last week.
One of the picks being AI and the other pick being AVGO.
Like you were saying, you did take that win on AVGO, and you returned between them over 13.7%, 13.77, in fact.
Very nicely done on that one.
So shout out to Jordan for those picks.
In fact, though, me and Jordan were talking about how did he find AVGO, which ended up being pretty much the winning pick for him here.
And we put out a thread on it today.
So it is pinned to the top of the space.
In fact, for those who want to see how he found the winning pick, used something called Net Institutional Flow and Net Options Sentiment.
We have all the details.
We put together this little thread and put it up top.
And shout out to our friends at Prospero.
We actually used AI to find this.
And one of the picks that Jordan picked was AI.
So AI is now picking itself to win competitions, and it's doing it successfully.
So what do you know?
We're all doomed sooner than later.
But, yeah, go ahead and check that out if you want to see how Jordan found AVGO as his winning pick.
It's pinned to the top of the space.
It's on Jordan's timeline.
And Jordan, we can – or actually, I'll come back around, and we'll get your two stock picks for the week in a second.
We just have one to go off with for market sentiment.
But are there any comments you want to make on finding that AVGO pick and the tweet pinned up top before I go over?
You know, it was a combination of using that Prospero app for sure.
And then just TA, you know, normal technical analysis.
I noticed a nice bull flag on the daily chart after a big, impulsive, bullish move.
We just had, you know, lowering volume and consolidation, right?
Holding that daily 90MA.
It looked like a good setup to me, and I just happened to get in at the perfect time.
So, yeah, it was overall a great trade.
I'm stoked.
So, yeah, good stuff.
Fantastic.
Okay, let's keep going with some market sentiment here.
All right, Paper, fill us in on your thoughts on market sentiment.
What's going on, man?
I am – I'm bullish, dude.
That's all I can tell you.
I'm looking at even, like, you know, FedWatch data.
It's like everything looks pretty much priced in.
I mean, they're pricing in pause, skip this Wednesday, and then looks like, like, either a hike next month or the month after.
So, like, what's the worst that could happen is kind of where my head goes, and I'm like, okay.
I mean, I don't even have a bad – it's all priced in.
So, it's like I actually don't think that there's going to be a huge reaction on FOMC, but at the same time, you know, it is FOMC, so I'm going to be fairly light in general.
And so, I do expect some chop, but I don't expect – I don't expect them – I'd be really hard-pressed to see, like, what would they have to say for them to really crack this rally.
I mean, yeah, it's extended.
You know, yeah, things are getting overvalued for sure, but, you know, like everyone's talking about IWM, you know, that's the breath.
It's honestly, if you look at RSP, which I don't know if Jaguar is on here, he might tell you guys about RSP.
RSP is stronger than IWM right now, and I look at that, I'm like, it's not junk breath, it's quality breath, and it's some kind of sector rotation also.
So, I'm constructive.
If we get a pullback, that's fine.
And, you know, I'm cautiously optimistic, but, I mean, I even took off my target short today because I was like, I don't think I want to be short this thing anymore.
You know, it's like, how can I be short when the market's ripping the face off the bears right now?
It's like, I can't – the trend is my friend, man.
And so, right now, I'm just going to trade the trend.
I'm not going to step in front of it.
I think this is the same thing, you know, when I flipped bullish, like, 380, something, 390, something like that.
It was just like – I remember talking to you about it.
I was like, there will be a time and a day that it comes to be a bear, but where is the market going to be at that point in time?
You know what?
I don't know, right?
Like, maybe it's 450, and then you can be a bear, and it gets back to 430.
But that's basically where we are right now, so I don't want to miss that whole thing either.
So, until I get a real technical breakdown, you know, I'm just going to be – I'm going to be long unless it's – you know, there are a couple clear shorts that are nice, right?
Like, the target short was good, but at the same time, it's like I'm quicker to take off my shorts right now than I am to take down my long, if that makes sense.
So, oddly enough, I feel weird about it, but it's kind of like one of those whatever markets, right?
Like, I'm just going to go with it, and whatever the trend is, like, I just need to do that and put my whatever thesis off to the side and trade the charts that are in front of me right now.
That's an interesting point about more likely to take off, you said, the shorts than the longs.
Yeah, I mean, you know, we all have groups, right?
And it's like I'll look around, whether it's Twitter or whoever.
I mean, we were on some space with PV the other day, and somebody came on and was like, how come you're not – you guys aren't embarrassed?
I'm like, because there's no technical breakdown.
And that was, like, 30 points ago.
So, it's like, you know, things can be overbought for forever, you know, and things can continue to go.
What's true, I can say right now, is that clearly the pain trade is higher.
And so, as long as that's kind of like the sentiment, there's still bears out there being like, oh, it's overdone or we're overextended.
And that, to me, that's like the sentiment is like the pain trade could go higher.
There are still things that are actually really low that are good opportunities to snag that have a lot of room to move.
Like, we're looking at, by the way, industrials.
Look at Boeing today.
That breakout is like a six-, seven-month consolidation, right?
The entire industrial sector is like a year-long consolidation.
If we do go into any kind of growth, right, like it will be the builder boom.
And, like, you know, energy, industrials, they actually kind of let us out of this, if you think about it.
So, I wouldn't be surprised to see them lead us higher at this also, right?
Now that big tech has made big moves, although I'm seeing Apple, like, closing towards 185, like, this is crazy.
You would think it's crazy, but do I want to short that?
Like, running in front of a speeding train is just as bad as trying to catch a falling knife.
So, no, I'm not going to short that either, right?
Not until I get some technical triggers or actual technical breakdowns.
No way.
Sorry, that's my – but, you know, I'm fast on the trigger, dude.
So, like, if that happens Thursday, Friday, guess who's going to be short?
Right now, I'm just going to watch the charts.
Appreciate that explanation.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Okay, we've got one more for market sentiment, then we are going to get into these stock picks.
So, I hope you all in the audience are ready.
Jaguar, turn it over to you for some market sentiment.
Hi, everyone.
Okay, so, I've mentioned this a couple times in the past, that we are past the phase when inflation was a worry for everyone,
and we are entering a phase where labor market will become a bigger and bigger worry.
And so, we're in the transition phase right now.
It should not surprise everyone or anyone when you get a very low CPI tomorrow.
It should also not surprise anyone that, as a reactionary move, the Fed will pause on Wednesday, this week.
Back in early April, I made this case that it's time to transition.
Inflation is over.
The next phase that should be concerned for the market, which is still in early development, is going to be labor.
So, what did we get last week?
We got the weekly jobless claims spiking sharply, massively, from 234,000 to 261,000.
Market took a pass on that at that particular point, but now we're going to get another report this week on Thursday, right?
And so, if we continue to trend higher in the weekly jobless claims, ultimately, it's going to matter for ADP as well as NFP data.
Similar to, think of when, if you go back almost, you know, a year and a half ago, when CPI was starting to trend higher, above 2%, 2.5%, 3%, it didn't matter at that particular point, right?
Back in 2021.
In fact, the very first time when I wrote for clients, for Jack clients, that CPI is going in the wrong direction and it's going to ultimately compress the multiples for growth stocks was in March of 2021.
We're talking more than two years ago.
But I did not expect CPI to go as high as it did, almost 9%.
And I was expecting it to only go to 5% or 6%, but even then, I was worried that it was going to crack the market.
The point being that I see the similar kind of now trend appearing, where nobody is concerned at the moment about what's happening in the weekly jobless claims and the cracks that we're seeing in the labor market that are forming, because it's not big enough yet.
It's not making headlines yet.
But ultimately, I believe it will make headlines.
It's 261,000 claims last week.
If we start to get 280, 290, we pass 300,000 psychological barrier, it's going to hammer stocks.
That's my view on the broader market.
I don't know if it will happen this week, but the thing about weekly jobless claims are when they really start to move, they go violently higher and very, very quickly.
So, having said that, and by the way, previously, if you study all the prior six bear markets, I've done extensive exercise on all of those, the point when the market starts to really get concerned about the claims and the labor market is once we get to 325,000 to 350,000 level on a recurring basis in the weekly jobless claims.
And so, watch out, that's the most important trend.
Labor market, every Thursday morning when it comes out at 830, weekly jobless claims.
So, that's my big picture view.
Do you want the picks now?
Do you want to go around everybody and then come back to me?
How do you want to do this, Will?
Yeah, we can actually probably go right into the picks, which works well.
And if you'd like to go first, I have no problem with that, Jaguar.
Yeah, so, you know, my concern is the overall overbought conditions in the market across the board everywhere.
The CNN fear and greed index is at 78 miles per hour.
The CBOE equity put over call ratio has collapsed to multi-year lows.
For every one put option that is trading in the market, there are three call buyers, which is the lowest reading.
The 10-day moving average of CBOE equity put over call ratio is around 0.55, which is a multi-year low, right?
The AAII bull-bear ratio is plus 20, which means way too many bulls than bears.
That's the highest reading, that's the highest spread in favor of bulls since November 2021.
The NAIM exposure index, which is a survey that's done weekly of money managers, thousands of them, is at 90% bulls.
You can simply Google search NAIM and you can find out yourself.
It's at 90% bulls, basically.
And that's the highest reading that we have seen since 2021, right?
And so, no concerns there either.
VIX has collapsed to under 15, and the only reason why it was slightly higher today was because contracts rolled off.
Otherwise, if you go by Friday, VIX was touching 13.5.
No fear there either.
And nobody's buying put options.
I mean, I watch these flows all the time.
Nobody's buying put options.
Anywhere on any indexes, every single person is bull, right?
Especially after we crossed the 20% threshold, when the S&P went off from the bottom 20%, it has really, basically, even if there were any bears left, they're gone, right?
You have the lead analyst at Bank of America that has been one of the biggest bears, flipped, basically said, bye-bye bear market and turned bullish on Friday with a big note issued by Bank of America on Friday.
So that bear is gone.
You have Goldman Sachs also turning bullish, gave up the 4,000 price target in the S&P, jacked it up to 4,500.
That was also over the weekend.
You do not have any bears left.
They're all gone.
They're in hibernation, which means even the smallest, tiniest accident can have a profound impact in the market.
Even the smallest accident can have a tiny impact.
So what I like to do in estates like this is I'm looking at some of the weakest trends that are in front of me today in the market,
because if this thing rolls over for any reason, those are the ones that are going to get hit the hardest first,
because they are not working even now when the market is raging higher.
They're not even working now.
And where are they?
They're all in cryptos.
They're all in cryptos.
So I have two shorts.
Both of them are shorts.
Two picks.
Both are shorts.
First one, short Coinbase.
Again, that was the last week's pick, too.
And second one, short MicroStrategy, MSTR.
So short Coinbase and short MicroStrategy.
A quick word about Binance, because it's all tied to Bitcoin as well as what we are seeing in the crypto.
I don't know if this was covered earlier in any other spaces or whatnot,
but the big news today regarding Binance is there is a Binance has hired a criminal defense attorney.
His name is George Kenelos, I think.
This is telling me that they are expecting government indictment against, you know,
with criminal charges against Binance very, very soon.
And why?
Because previously, under the deposition, it was revealed that Binance was caught facilitating money laundering for Russia,
while also taking deposits from Hamas.
I mean, all of these news are flying under the radar.
What people don't realize is that the liquidity as it dries up in Binance,
and remember, they have been periodically halting, you know, deposits as well as movement of cryptos in Binance as well.
There was a suspension of that for a few hours over the weekend as well.
Tomorrow, June 13th, is the day when, after which, according to my understanding,
you cannot withdraw or deposit anything from Binance, and the criminal charges are coming pretty soon.
That is going to materially dry up the liquidity in Bitcoin.
So I expect more pressure, downward pressure on Bitcoin.
Bitcoin, that's going to pressure MicroStrategy, which is a direct play on Bitcoin.
Meanwhile, Coinbase has its own problems, whole bunch of set of problems, right?
And so those are continuing to come in.
I won't go into the specific details of it.
We saw it last week as well.
I expect more troubles ahead for Coinbase.
So both of these, Coinbase and MicroStrategy, I could also throw Mara as well as Riot into this too.
But because this is a contest, weekly contest, and I want a higher beta play, particularly on Bitcoin,
I will go with MicroStrategy because if that starts to break down,
specifically my support level that I'm watching closely is $266 per share.
If we start to see this thing break down below that, we may see this thing go straight to $220 or $200,
which will require Bitcoin to sell off, but also Coinbase at the same time.
Yeah, I definitely think it's going to be so fascinating to see how crypto reacts to this Binance ecosystem
kind of coming down towards a lot of the banks pulling away from supporting it as well.
So I'm certainly keeping my eyes as well on these names, like the ones that you picked.
You know, I know that she went kind of with that short on Coin last week, and it looked promising,
and then it didn't really do a whole ton to the short side throughout the week.
I mean, it ended up coming back down a little bit today and yesterday, I believe,
but it did have that big pop midweek.
So let's see.
Yeah, today down 5%, but still up 7.5% on the week, even coming out of that big drop.
So I'm curious to see if this one does get pounded down a little bit further.
And then that other one, MSTR, I haven't looked at the MSTR chart in a while,
kind of forming a little bit of a symmetrical wedge.
Doesn't look great either, but it hasn't had that big drop-off yet, that Coinbase kind of had.
So maybe that does come when it drops below like maybe $270 or something in that area.
Yeah, good ones to keep an eye on.
And I appreciate you kind of elaborating, you know, the approach with the competition style.
Some great comments there from Jaguar.
If we have some room at the end of this one, maybe we'll double back around and do a little
bit more crypto talk.
But for right now, I want to bring it to our champ from last week.
Shout out to Jordan for the winning stock picks.
I'm excited to hear your picks for this next week, Jordan, as well as the thesis behind
them and how you picked them.
Yeah, well, I got two more long picks this week to go with my sentiment.
The first one's going to be AI again.
We did good last week, but I think there's more upside potential here.
We've just been consolidating above this $36 level today in the past few days.
We've gone down and tested that level a few times and we're holding that really well.
Similar to AVGO, just consolidating on lowering volume here, looking for that bullish breakout.
And then I'm also doing AVGO again.
So AVGO started that impulsive move out today where I did sell my position, but I might be
looking to get some more out of it because I do think, you know, one of my price targets
is 900 bucks.
So I do think we get there.
If we want to get above 900 bucks, you know, we have that 921.78 to test that previous high.
So I'd love to see a test of that, but first price target is going to be 900 bucks.
So looking for that to still continue, had rising volume today, breaking out of that structure.
So it looks great, in my opinion.
AI is looking great.
So yeah, those are my two picks for the week.
So just rolling with the same ones from last week?
Rolling with the same ones.
Very interesting.
Okay.
Well, you heard a lot of the thesis.
You also heard, again, the way that Jordan picked that AVGO pick for last week was outlined
in the tweet that we have on the top of the space.
If you want to have a free tool to use AI for some stock picking and to measure some of
the sentiment, as well as the net options, you can check it out for yourself.
It's free up there to check out.
And shout out to Jordan, again, for winning last week's competition.
And we'll see if he's able to capture it again by rolling forward these AI and AVGO picks.
Okay.
Really good.
Paper.
I would love to come over to you at this point and get your picks for the coming week.
I got you your paper gains.
Let's go paper.
That's me.
Is it my turn?
Oh, you.
All right.
One second.
Okay.
Oh, so usually you too.
So I am looking at everything that people have picked and you don't have Vegas here today,
huh?
Yeah, Vegas.
I'm going to go for it on this one.
I don't ever really do this, but I'm doing this in real life via equity, but I'm going
to go long Adobe.
A-D-B-E.
So this thing has been on an absolute insane tear, like true story.
But what I'll say is I went long the stock 370, and I've just been averaging up the entire
time.
I'm looking at it.
I'm like, there's so much upside potential.
I do think it has run a bit, but I still think that there's a ton of room on this.
I'm pretty positive.
Like they're going to absolutely crush it.
And then the forecast, it's just, I don't know if they're going to raise or, and what
that raise is going to look like.
The Firefly catalyst in terms of their AI product, I just think it's just too good to
not be involved here.
And quite frankly, I haven't trimmed a single piece of this position yet.
It's just every day.
It's so fricking strong.
It blows my mind.
It's cracking through resistance levels.
I mean, literally on a daily basis, we have earnings on Thursday.
And this is why I say I normally wouldn't take a position like this or use it for the
competition.
But in this instance, I'm going to go for it because I think it goes higher.
I still think it's, I still think it's got room.
So the second one, I'm, I think that would probably be fine as it is, but just because
it's a little bit of a coin flip, I'm going to go with another one that's kind of risk it
for the biscuit sentiment here and that's S-O-X-L.
So, um, Sox-L.
So I'm actually short puts in Sox-S, by the way, and short calls, but it's, I was looking
at it on Friday.
I'm like, okay, AMD looks like it's going to flag out here, like pretty heavy in a large
way.
Even looking at Jordan's, you know, AVGO pick, looking at things like Intel today and
the breath in, in the semi, uh, sector overall, uh, just completely widening, uh, even Micron
getting a little bit of a bid, bouncing off support today, uh, uh, doing a retest of a
breakout.
I just look at the whole sector.
Maybe Nvidia pulls back, right?
Like that's fine.
And it's not, it's actually, it's just stabilizing.
It's not even going down, mind you.
So I don't think that Nvidia goes down.
If it was going to go down, it would have done it already.
AMD is a perfect example of like a gap to the upside, half got filled today and hold
closing at the high.
This thing's going higher.
How high does it go?
I don't know.
The entire sector looks like the breath is widening inside of semis.
Uh, so I think SOXL is a good way to play that, uh, at least in the, in the short term.
So that's going to be my second pick.
So you said your short puts on SOXL?
Uh, I'm short, actually.
So I have SOXL and I have a wheel on SOXL.
So short, I'm actually short in the money calls and short puts.
Overall, are you, it sounds like you're bullish on semis though.
I think semis are in a technical setup for another leg higher across the board.
Got it.
Got it.
Okay.
Sounds good.
Something to continue to keep on the radar for sure.
So, uh, these two picks right here are going to be, uh, Adobe as the first one long.
And then the second one officially was?
SOXL long.
3X leveraged semiconductors.
SOXL long.
Okay.
Yeah.
Sounds good.
Taking the semi route as well as Adobe, which does report earnings this week.
I definitely, uh, think those are two interesting ones.
Adobe has had a crazy month.
It's up 40.
It has, man.
It has had a crazy month, but I'm, I'm just.
I like the stock, man.
So I can say, even if you pull this back on a weekly chart, you're just now.
And I mean, just now starting to break.
It just broke the 200 week moving average the other day.
I know technicals really don't matter at all when it comes to earnings and things like that.
So if anybody ever tries to do that, just don't waste your time.
It's not worth it.
But in this case, I just, I think that the SAS, so it's typically like semis and then SAS
as in, in terms of sector SAS, meaning like software as a service.
So that's Adobe.
Uh, that's, and, and if you stick with this AI theme, Adobe is the one in that sector that
I want to be long.
That's the one I want to bet on.
Yeah.
Adobe just absolutely been going crazy, but yeah, sounds like so.
So both the ones that you're taking are just very much leaning into, uh, that relative
strength lately.
Um, and the way that it's, while Adobe's up 40% this month, Soxel is up 76% this month.
So yeah.
Okay.
This is the thing.
It's like, do they look overdone?
Yeah, sure they do.
But does it mean they can't go higher?
No, it doesn't.
Absolutely is a possibility.
Um, and like you were kind of mentioning, there's ways to play them as well, where you're
a little bit more hedged.
Okay.
I definitely, I'm liking the picks tonight.
Uh, just a reminder, cause I'm getting a couple of DMs.
I do post all the picks after the space.
The only person that's gone short has been Jaguar.
He had two shorts.
Everything else has been long for the entire evening.
And all those will go out on a post, uh, from my page right after the space is finished
in about 10 to 15 minutes.
So you do not have to worry about writing them down or commenting or anything like that.
You can just get them right off my timeline, follow my speakers, and you will be able
to keep up with their picks throughout the week as they execute, follow the Wolf account,
and you will have all the picks laid out for you on your timeline.
Nice and easy.
Let's go over to a couple others for some picks here.
Mike.
Well, can I ask a quick question?
Um, it's good.
I think it's for my clarification for others too.
Um, for the contest, what exactly the price is used as a starting point?
Because we do this on Monday night, right?
So is the closing price on Monday or is it the opening price on Tuesday?
What is the starting point?
Uh, closing price on Tuesday for Google finance data.
But, uh, I guess we're open to hearing someone had mentioned in the chat, maybe switching
it to the current price of the show.
I mean, it's more manual work to do that and notate that, but Wolf, up to you.
Yeah.
I mean, we wait.
So, so right now, Ben, it takes it from the closing price on Mondays, right?
Is that correct?
Morning currently.
No, I think it, it takes it from the opening Tuesday morning to the opening Monday morning.
Open to open.
Close.
Open tomorrow to close.
Open on Tuesday to close on Monday is what it's been doing.
Yeah.
Okay.
So that makes sense because I, I heard you Wolf say earlier that, uh, the Coinbase trade did
not work out, but actually, because we made that pick on Monday night last week when I,
when I, when I, that was my top short.
And then that same night or actually Tuesday morning before the market opened, the stock
was down more than 20%.
So if you pick the opening price on Tuesday morning, it did not capture that move, which
makes sense.
So is that, is that what it's tracking around, Ben?
Yeah, yeah, that's correct.
It's tracking the opening Tuesday morning to the close Monday, Monday close.
But, but to, to his point, right?
If we had captured that Coinbase price at Showtime, you know, he would have done much
better.
So, um, maybe we move it to Monday night.
Yeah.
The only problem.
I would just keep it the way it is because it was a pure luck of draw right there.
So with Coinbase, so I don't, you guys don't need to change anything.
I was just curious.
That's all.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, we can talk about it offline.
Well, later.
Yeah, sure.
Okay.
No problem.
I appreciate the clarification and hopefully that's helpful for the audience to know when
these are tracked from as well.
All right.
Michael Knauss, want to hop in here?
Yeah, sure thing.
So I'm, for those who don't know, I'm a quantitative technical trader.
So, uh, most of what I do is I run algorithms that, um, I've back tested.
So I know that the stocks within the algorithms have some edge and then I scan through them
myself and apply a layer of technical analysis to it.
So the picks that I'm giving are, are ones that we're doing well from that, the algorithm that
I run for this one, which is kind of a weekly rotation into relative strength.
So there's going to be some stuff that makes perfect sense because it's going to be in the
hot sectors, usually when the hot sectors are going on.
So, uh, also both I've posted in the little chat bubble below.
So if you want to take a look at the charts, they're, they're there for you.
So, uh, the first one is MPWR and this one's another semiconductor, but, uh, at least to
me, a lesser known one, monolithic power systems.
Um, I'm not a fundamental guy.
I don't really pay attention to that stuff, but, uh, it's number one ranked in the, in
the relative strength algorithm right now, uh, doing very well, breaking this 500 base.
It's a fairly expensive one.
Uh, so, you know, a little bull flag breaking out of that kind of looks like a little bit
of a muted version of the, the VG chart that, uh, that, um, was being talked about there
before.
Looks good.
It looks good from a weekly chart as well, where, you know, it's breaking out.
It's got a little bit of resistance around five 50 and then, you know, the next is kind
of 600 give or take.
So, but, you know, I don't think that shocks anyone's semiconductor, you can kind of throw
a dart at some of the semiconductor spaces.
But one thing to note is that in, you know, kind of extreme bear markets or bubbles or whatever
you want to call it, bull markets or bubbles, where we're seeing here with semis and AI and
all that kind of stuff is that eventually everything gets lifted up.
So usually it makes sense to go after the leaders, but sometimes when you're in these
kind of really euphoric states, um, things that haven't moved crazy like MPWR can sometimes
kind of catch up to the pack is, you know, the rising tide floats all ships.
Uh, it's not generally how the market works, but it can work a lot in, uh, in really bullish
markets.
So that's, uh, MPWR with that one, the next one I'm looking at here, which is a stock out
of Hong Kong, which is also going to be somewhat tech related with everything else going on.
It's called giga cloud technology.
And the ticker there is GCT.
I have no idea what happened on, uh, what two, three days ago there, uh, on the 24th of
May where it gapped all the way to $12 and then over the next few days sold all the way
to six.
But if you zoom out and kind of ignore that look, the longer term travel putting in this
nice, big, long rounded bottom base here that's been happening for forever for pretty
much the beginning of the stock, which is, um, stock's not very old.
It's a, it's a fairly recent IPO.
So I'm trying to grab the date here, uh, August, 2022.
So it IPO went to 60 bucks and then just immediately crashed down.
It's been putting in this kind of rounded bottom ever since then.
So if it can get over that, uh, that initial hump and start to push higher, then I, I could
definitely see it, um, you know, trying to at least challenge that gap up, whatever earnings
happened were definitely positive.
And then someone sold into those earnings, pushing it back down.
So that puts us all the way to almost 12 bucks, which is a pretty good gain there.
Um, again, the only thing to know with this one is that it is out of Hong Kong.
So the, uh, volume is pretty good.
The float is only 6 million shares as well.
So this is one of those that's going to be a little bit wilder.
So if you know, you got a risk appetite, this may be one to take a look at.
Um, but if you don't, then MPWR would be more of the one to settle with.
So I got one for the high risk people out there and the low risk people.
So that's GCT and MPWR.
GCT, right?
Yep.
That's right.
Giga cloud technology.
Giga cloud.
All right.
Now you're, uh, putting some code words into here.
All right.
Keep my eyes on.
Yeah.
Keep my eyes on it right now.
Um, like you said, this one has kind of fallen since that IPO and just starting to round out
of the base, had that pump back on earnings, gave it all up.
See if it can move up here.
I was looking at the other one as well, monolithic power systems.
It's interesting.
Like you said, in the semi industry.
So kind of makes sense as pulling from there.
They do like semiconductor solutions and power delivery architecture.
And they are right up at all time highs.
And if you look at the five year on this chart, it looks really nice.
You know, $25 billion company.
So not a small cap.
Um, I like this pick.
I think it's interesting.
And here's to see if we just start seeing stuff breaking out and setting those new all
time highs.
Cause it feels like a lot of these are still being overshadowed by the last few years of
data, you know?
Okay.
Perfect.
Really good stuff there for Michael.
We got about five more minutes.
So let me go ahead and bring in Nick and excited to hear from Nick a couple of picks
and the reasoning behind them.
All right.
First one we'll go with is CCJ.
I was hoping it wouldn't move before our call today, uh, but it did during my weekend
routine.
I noticed a lot of uranium stocks actually showing relative strength the last week or
Um, and this is one that had a nice rally on volume, uh, to start the month and then just
traded sideways just under that $31 pivot and pushed out today.
Uh, full disclosure, I do have a position in this already, but, um, looking good with
the very strong close today.
So this, this might be one where, okay, this is the week that the market pulls back and then
this pulls back as well.
But that entire group is starting to catch my eye.
So we'll see if we could just get more continuation there.
Um, it had a, it's high was back in, let's see, April 11th of, uh, 2022 and that was at
$32.
So we're, we're coming up to that right now.
Might have to put in a handle here, but, um, that, that group theme, uh, that Michael was
talking about with semiconductors, I want to find the next theme that starts to work.
And, uh, not to say semis can't continue on, they, they look great, but, uh, something
that hasn't already made these, uh, very large moves with might be the uranium group.
So CCJ on the long side.
And then, uh, second pick is going to be NNOX.
This is one that has a, uh, kind of trades best after a pullback to the, either the 10
day or the 20 day moving average hasn't quite gotten to the 20 day, uh, since the initial
breakout on what day was that?
May 1st, but May 1st heaviest volume in over a year from there wrote it's five day EMA all
the way up to about 20 bucks, uh, from 10 to 20.
And from there has had these pullbacks where people forget about the stock.
It pulls back on extremely light volume.
And then once it does pop back over the 10 day moving average, it tends to have a couple
of days where it runs and a very high beta name.
So if you can manage your risk on the downside, you can have more asymmetric reward to your risk
there.
And this one aligns up a little bit better with the competition because it's already
gone through, uh, kind of three pullback days, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday of last week.
Today closed at the high of the day, right on that 10 day moving average, um, and continues
to put in higher lows as it climbs here.
So, uh, and then OX on the long side will be my second pick.
Yeah.
I wish I was in CCJ.
Anyway, I, uh, was talking about it last week with some people and kind of talking about
how it had that big move up and then the wind up and it already started making that next
move today.
And that's like a pretty classic setup that you look for.
Where did you enter that?
Um, I got in a little bit late around 31 15.
So, um, ideal entry point would have just been through Friday's high.
Um, but I, I was looking at something else during it and should have had that stop loss
place, but still looking good.
Um, where would you take profit?
Um, I am going to try and hold this piece.
It wasn't a super large position.
Um, just 8% at this point, but I have my stop under today's low.
Uh, when a sock opens on the low of the day or right around the low of the day, I tend
to use that as my stop and try to hold for a little bit longer move, especially looking
at this weekly chart.
Um, like you said, it's wound up, it has a really nice, just VCP volatility contraction
pattern through here.
Uh, so this is one that I'll, I'll try and play for a longer move just because I don't
have like too much size on it.
So a general market pullback, it's not going to like tank my account or anything, but because
of like how this is setting up, how the group setting up and the way I've position sized
it, I'm more so playing defense versus looking to sell that and that whole piece into strength.
All right, perfect.
So give my eyes on CCJ and then NNOX.
That's one that comes across my radar often as well.
Um, we're hitting the end of this space.
So what I'm going to do right now for the audience is I am going to tweet out all the
picks.
So they are now on my timeline.
You can go find them nice and easy.
Any of the speakers would really appreciate if any of you can share those with your audiences
so that they can see your picks.
Obviously there's some top tier picks across the board last week.
Lots of wins and excited to see if this next week can be the same.
Nick, did you have any other final comments before I, uh, roll into my next space?
Uh, no, should be a very fun week with a lot of news driven price action.
So sit back and have a plan for whichever way the market goes.
Always plan beforehand.
So you're just executing.
And if you need to change the plan afterwards, change the plan afterwards.
But while the market's open, don't, don't let emotions, don't let price.
Don't, don't let anything like pull you away from managing risk there.
All right.
Sounds good.
Well, thank you, Nick, Ben, Michael, paper, and Jordan for being awesome on this space.
Thank you, Jordan, for sharing out the post right there, as well as, uh, any others that
have gone ahead and interacted with that.
It is the last post on my timeline.
So appreciate y'all hopping in, checking it out.
And I'm excited to get into our next space right now.
Speaking of which, Mr. David Meltzer, how have you been?
Amazing, man.
It's been way too long.
Thank you so much for including me in your incredible room.
Oh, it's a pleasure.
I'm glad we got to meet in person and now we're good to follow up on it.
So, David, would you be open to giving a brief introduction for the audience?
You are, and we're going to chat with David for about 20 minutes here, just to heads up
to the audience, and you're going to want to stay for this.
Go for it, David.
Oh, awesome.
Well, Dave Meltzer, speaker, author, entrepreneur, been an eclectic entrepreneur, I call it.
I was involved in Web1 way back in 1992.
My first exit was in 95.
We sold West Publishing to Thomson Reuters for $3.4 billion.
Got in the middleware space, learned the Silicon Valley route, Sand Hill Road, raised a couple
hundred million dollars with every path in the middleware space, and then ventured to
Samsung's, as their CEO of their phone division, the world's first convergence device in 1999.
So, if you're not getting a feel for it, I'm old.
Convergence devices turned into smartphones.
I was blessed in 2004 to meet a gentleman named Lee Steinberg, and took all of that technology
background of the web and wireless and hardware into sports.
So, I ran the most notable sports agency in the world from there, where I built real relationship
capital by running Lee Steinberg Sports and Entertainment.
Most people know from the movie Jerry Maguire.
They based that movie off of our firm.
And then Warren Moon, the Hall of Fame quarterback, and I started a global sports marketing company
over the last 12 years, and have moved into media, as everybody else has, but ironically
enough, in my own personal brand.
And so, I do a lot of investments now, give hopefully good advice in entrepreneurship and
investing with a variety of different TV shows, podcasts, and a lot of free content.
I've been doing free Fridays trainings for over 23 years, which I would love to have everybody
join me.
Anytime we do meetups around the world, we do VIP dinners, we'll be in just this week alone.
We'll be in Indy, Kentucky, New York, Philly, and Chicago.
So, if anybody wants to join in any capacity, I'm here to be of service and value.
My mission in life is to empower over a billion people, to be happy by making a lot of money,
helping a lot of people, and having a lot of fun.
And I hope to help all of you, if possible.
So, thanks for letting me join, and I'm really excited to be of service and see how I can help.
Yeah, absolutely.
And awesome to have you on here, David.
By the way, there's just a little bit of like a scraping sound, like something hitting
your mic, just in case you're next to something.
Yeah, probably my beard, so let me pull away from my face.
Perfect, perfect, no problem.
So, I just wanted to kind of lead off with a question right now to you, which is, right
now, in this current environment, what do you think are the most important things that
entrepreneurs should be focused on, and where do you see opportunity?
Oh, absolutely.
Number one, taking inventory of your own skills and your company's skills, knowledge of what
you actually do and who you know, and then your desire.
And because there's such an acceleration of change, especially with technology and the
economic environment, the better we can align the skills, knowledge, and desire, the capabilities
that we have personally and professionally, as a company and individual, with what's doing
well today, what's stable today, and what we think is going to be doing well in the future,
the greater we'll reduce any risks, but take advantage of opportunities, options, and touches
of favor that other people may not be aware of because they're so afraid.
And this will be a great indicator on how to lean into what you want to do, who can help
you, who you can help, and how best to get it done.
And I think when we look inside first, when there's so much calamity and chaos outside,
that we're able to take a better control and have a better perspective of how to make that
money by aligning with what's doing well.
There's always something that's doing well.
There's always things that are stable, and you can also mitigate those long-term lottery
tickets that give you the excitement and joy of being an entrepreneur.
But it all starts, you can't find outside of you what you aren't looking for inside of
you.
So skills, knowledge, and desire aligned with the market in all three capacities, you will
do just fine.
This is where the margins of millionaires are made.
I love that.
The margins where millionaires are made.
That's huge.
Okay.
Right now, as well, everybody has access to the internet, social media, a lot of pieces
like this.
You've successfully branded through those, as well as the conferences.
What are some of the ways you think people can actively build their network while adding
top-tier talent people, mentors to it?
What's some of the best ways they can go about building that network?
Well, first of all, I see one of my unbelievable mentors and friends here, Grant, and he's
an expert at it as well.
You've got to show up in four ways.
You've got to show up every day in person, and you have to figure out how to be of service
and value and how to ask for help.
You have to show up via email every day and be of service and of value and ask for help.
You have to show up on the phone every day and be of service and of value and ask for
help, and especially in social media and traditional media.
You have to show up every single day, seven days a week, and figure out how you can be
of service and value.
See, value is created in two ways.
It's giving people more of what they like and taking away some of what they don't like.
And in order to do so, you have to show up every day, and you have to ask people, what
are you doing today?
What are you interested in today?
And find out what they like and what you don't like, because then you can provide value simply
by saying, hey, would it help you if blank?
And when you can get to a point where you can provide service and value by giving someone
more of what they like or taking away what they don't like, it then gives you an opportunity
to ask the even more poignant question, do you know anyone that can help me?
The fastest and easiest way to get to where you want to be, find somebody that's sitting
in a situation that you want to be in and ask them for help.
And like I said, I see Grant here, and he helps millions of people exactly in this way,
but he shows up every day in person, on the phone, via email, media.
The key is to show up and to figure out by being more interested than interesting how you
can be of service and value, how you can help people get more of what they like and take
away what they don't like.
Hey, Grant.
Good to see you up here.
Yo, yo, what's going on, everybody?
Man, I'm listening to David.
David, I love listening to you, man.
And every time I hear you, I start to have to challenge kind of some of what I'm thinking
about and what I do every day, because on a day-to-day basis, I probably give people
a lot to think about that they don't like.
Well, I love you, and you challenged me to be a better self, and I love the fact that
we say a lot of the same things in different ways, but we also say different things, and
it's great for the community to hear different things.
You just know how to say it.
You know how to say it where people like you better.
Yeah.
It's the diplomacy of being a sports agent.
You know, I know how to.
But you know, the truth vibrates the fastest, Grant.
And I will tell you that I have made more money by listening to you and help more people.
And the authenticity of your opinion, to me, resonates so well.
And look, I'm a guy, when you listen to Grant Cardone, you know, you got to listen through,
you know, just some of the comments that may not rub you the correct way and get down to
the core value and intention, because nobody has a better intention than you.
And, you know, sometimes things are taken out of context.
Sometimes we say things, you know, too quickly.
And when you're showing up every day, like I said, it gets dangerous, because shit, man,
you know, my wife will pick out stuff that I've said, Grant, and say, are you kidding
This is not coming across the right way.
And, you know, it is the danger of helping people.
I want to add one more thing.
10% of the people, people will love you no matter what, and 10% will hate you no matter what,
no matter what you say, no matter how you say it.
So just keep being you and keep with good intentions being you like Grant Cardone, and
you'll end up fine.
By the way, both those 10%, neither one of them convert to anything.
Exactly.
That's so smart.
Take that, write that down, people, and really think about what he just said, because that's
the truth.
Grant, what do you think entrepreneurs should be focused on right now in this current market
environment in order to rapidly scale their business?
Well, I think that people should be really, yeah, I agree with what part of what Dave said
about the, you got to find out what you're good at, like, and I think people should be
looking at their money right now.
I think most people have a very blind vulnerability around money and finance because the way we've
been miseducated or indoctrinated.
You know, of all the people I work with every year, whether it's VPs or presidents or CEO
startups or mid-level management or sales teams, almost no one knows anything about money.
They don't know how to get it.
When they do get it, they're worried about losing it or they don't know how to spend it.
They don't know how to invest it.
Very few people know what to do with it once they get it.
Most of the targets that are set that I had a guy in my office today, you know, and his
targets, just even setting financial targets.
He had every target set except a financial target.
And there's not a target you can possibly create in your life that you can come up with
anything, no matter how passionate you're about, that money is not involved.
And I think we're moving into a financial time in America where, you know, and I've been
rubbing people the wrong way with what it takes to have finances and to have some kind of financial
freedom.
And it's, you know, it's everybody's starting to see it now with this inflation thing.
One minute you can't earn anything at the bank, you know, and next minute you're paying a
7% mortgage.
So you either miss the cycle or you're getting hammered for it.
And I think the financial thing, people need to pay attention.
Hey, what are my assets?
What are my liabilities?
The things you bought yesterday, last year, or two years ago may not be assets today.
They may be liabilities to you.
And you got to, you got to, you know, pivot, figure out what mistakes you've made and change
the game up so you can get wherever you're trying to go.
Any thoughts on that, David?
Yeah, well, I agree 100% in people get caught up in the lack of knowing what they want and
who can help them and who they can help.
But I look at money as an energy, and that's why most people don't know how to make it,
don't know how to keep it, don't know how to give it, don't know how to execute on it.
And let me go through just energetically.
If you believe money is an energy, energy has three characteristics.
I've been blessed to study some physics, quantum physics, and metaphysics, just enough to be
dangerous.
But I do know three characteristics of money.
And regardless of interest rates, supply and demand, these three characteristics will help
you to attain a lifetime wealth, a legacy, a financial legacy.
And I do agree, especially with what Grant said, when money plays a role in everything
in the man-made constructs that we live in, every single thing.
Money doesn't buy you love or happiness, but it allows you to shop.
And if you shop for the right things for the right reasons, it will make you happy.
I love my wife, she's super spiritual and woo-woo, and she's like, let's manifest this
5,000 square foot penthouse in downtown San Diego.
I'm like, I'm not manifesting, I'll manifest the money to buy it, but someone's not going
to give me that penthouse.
And so let's look at the three characteristics of energy.
And the first is that energy, which money is energy, it aggregates on itself.
So you'll notice people like Grant Cardone, our friends, we attract money.
And that's because money aggregates on itself, energy will attract more like energy.
Secondarily, it exponentially grows.
And so when we understand the energy of money and see where our money and how our money can
exponentially grow and create strategies that are around the exponentiality of growth,
in one of the simplest ways to think about this and studying Einstein, for example, in
the rule of 72, ask yourself, you know, if I, Dave Meltzer said, hey, would you rather have
a million dollars today?
Or if I gave you a penny and doubled every day for 30 days, what would you rather have?
Most people will take the million dollars, but because of the exponentiality and attraction
or aggregation of money, it's worth 5.3 million after 30 days and then 10.6 million the next
day.
But yet the human mind and awareness doesn't understand exponentiality of outcomes.
And then the third one is aligned with human nature of what we most desire that satisfies
And it's that money, the energy of money accelerates.
So it actually comes faster and faster.
And if you look at people who make a lot of money, it's because they've aggregated the
money by buying proper assets at the proper time.
They've had exponentially growth of that asset, whatever it may be, and it's accelerated.
So now their money's doubling faster even.
And so if you don't understand the construct of money, of energy, aggregating the exponentiality
of growth and acceleration, then you're going to be behind the eight ball.
And the only way to figure it out is to ask for help.
The thing that drives me crazy, Grant, is that there's people like you that make billions
of dollars and are on everywhere saying, hey, if you want to help, make an investment in yourself
and come and learn how to do this.
It's not rocket science.
You know, physics and metaphysics may be rocket science, but money and making money and keeping
it and allowing it to grow is not rocket science.
This historical, like money always goes up and down, right?
I can tell you money will go up and down and so will your assets go up and down.
But there's a ton of people out there that have the experience to help you understand the
market itself and which assets are good to buy right now.
For example, if interest rates are high, find something that cash flows today and you have
guaranteed yourself a future asset that's going to cash flow when interest rates go back
down, right?
There's some obvious mathematical decisions that can be made and you don't have to even
know them.
There's tons of people that are out there helping.
And, you know, I think understanding money as an energy and your own philosophy and asking
for help are the key ways in which to grow your own wealth aligned with your own timing
and risk tolerance.
Nailed it, David.
Really, really good stuff.
We just got about two, three more minutes here.
And then we have an interview coming up actually with Andrew, who's up here on the panel with
us, co-founder of HUD8 Mining and CEO of Tokens.com.
Andrew, you want to throw a comment or two into the conversation we're having here before
we get to yours?
Not yet, but hey, David, good to hear you speak.
We chatted a couple of years ago, if you recall.
I do.
Thanks for joining.
I thought you were going to say, don't listen to these two idiots.
Hold on for a few minutes.
I'll tell you the truth.
But thank you for joining.
Perfect.
Appreciate you being up here, Andrew.
Grant, any other comments from yourself on things that you've been driving, especially
young entrepreneurs?
You know, I'm pretty young.
I'm 24 years old.
And so it's exciting to be able to pick the brains of guys like yourselves.
So curious if you have any other pieces of advice, Grant, that you're driving.
Yeah, just that I think people underestimate what they're capable of doing.
They also underestimate the effort it's going to take to do it.
And the last thing they underestimate is if you can possibly think beyond your beyond, whatever
that is, and then hang in there long enough to see it to fruition, it is actually better
than you ever.
Anybody says they got to some place and that it wasn't worth it, they quit before they got
to the real place.
Because the real place should be a tremendous victory and pleasure and solve a lot of problems
for not just you, but other people.
Do you listen to any David Goggins, Grant?
Oh, yeah.
I've had David on my stage.
I've interviewed him a couple times.
I love what David says.
He does.
Yeah.
What you said resonated with me.
I was listening to some David Goggins the other day, and he said two things.
He said, first, most people think they're more than they actually are.
He said, most people think that they're doing more than they are in a given day, and they
need to rewire that mindset.
And then number two, he also said, I don't want to kind of mess up the quote here, but
basically he was saying, we've never had weaker times.
It is easier to rise above the crop now more than ever.
And I can resonate with that.
I think that there's a lot of interesting things happening in the world, but if you're
willing to put in whatever it takes, you can really get to that achievement spot and
resonate with what he was saying there.
Any other comments from yourself, Grant?
Yeah, mine have always been weak, man.
You can go back thousands of years, and they've been talking about this same problem.
Lack of discipline, lack of ethics, lack of morals, lack of persistence.
It goes back thousands and thousands of years.
I don't think that's a new thing.
Understood.
Understood.
Well, I appreciate you hopping in and adding some...
Yeah, love you guys.
Appreciate you, Wolf.
Thanks, Grant.
David, anything?
Always good to be with you, David.
Vice versa.
Go ahead, Wolf.
I was just going to say, any other comments you'd like to share with the audience?
And then we're going to roll into our next space.
Yeah, I just want to pile on to what Grant said, right?
You will never overachieve your own self-image.
And so have a keen look at what you think of yourself, your own worthiness.
Remember, I am happy, healthy, wealthy, and worthy.
What am I doing to interfere with it?
And it's usually fear of the past or fear of the future that's creating that interference.
And then just to tie into Goggins and Grant, you know, if you want great in your life, it's going to start with hard.
If you want amazing in your life, it's going to start with impossible.
So have the right mindset, heart set, and handset.
Ask for help.
I promise you that it is hard work or it's and you have a high image.
It's unbelievable the amount of health, wealth, happiness, and worthiness that you can have in your life.
People in the right ideas, this is one of those places.
Listen to Andrew.
He knows what he's talking about as well.
Please invite me back.
I appreciate everyone.
Please email me.
Anyone that wants to meet up, wants my book, wants to come to training for free, whatever it is, david at dmelter.com.
Please reach out to me directly, david at dmelter.com.
Thank you, everyone.
Thanks so much, David.
I hope I get to see you in person again soon.
I hope so.
Thanks again.
Invite me back.
I will.
I will.
Okay, everybody, you just heard from David Meltzer and Grant Cardone on the topic of entrepreneurship and innovation.
And we're going to roll right into my next space.
We already have Andrew Kugel up here with us.
We are going to be talking with him.
He is the CEO and founder of tokens.com.
That's right.
They nailed it with SEO.
And I'm excited to hear from them.
So, Andrew, I'm going to turn it over to you first to give us some introduction, some background on yourself, the team, the company, and then we'll take it from there.
Yeah, thanks.
And one thing I would probably add, you know, two great speakers there and David and Grant.
But, you know, for the listeners, delayed gratification, which I think was kind of an indirect way of a lot of the things they were saying, has been so big.
And delayed gratification to me is, you know, not going to that party or not taking that instant gratification and instead working on yourself and putting the time and effort it needed to get that larger reward at a later date.
And that's something I really instilled into my kids.
And, you know, I had to develop at a young age.
And that meant sometimes not going to the parties.
It meant not going on that date.
A whole bunch of different things.
So, just something I'd throw out there for the listeners.
But, you know, my background, I was an investment banker for 20 years in Toronto, suit and tie every day, lots of clients.
And I was primarily in hard assets like real estate.
And back in 2016, I got really fascinated with Bitcoin.
I went to my firm and I said, I'd like to start a blockchain, Bitcoin financing department.
And through that, I was able to be involved with some really great IPOs.
Andrew, the sound quality is rough, unfortunately.
I don't know if you're on Wi-Fi, not on Wi-Fi, headphones, not on headphones.
You might want to try adjusting something.
Sure.
It's a little grating.
Yeah.
Okay.
Is this any better right now?
I think that's a little bit better.
Yeah.
Okay.
Let's try that.
So, back to what I was saying.
I was an investment banker for 20 years.
And I got involved in blockchain stock in 2016, 2017.
And I got really fascinated with Bitcoin.
And I brought a lot of companies to public.
I helped bring them to companies like Galaxy Digital with Mike Novogratz, Hive and Frank Holmes, a few other ones as well.
And while I was sitting around with some clients one night, we had an idea to build a Bitcoin miner.
And we created Headate Mining, which some listeners might be familiar with.
And that sort of got me onto the road of entrepreneurship.
Since then, I've launched tokens.com, Metaverse Group, Hulk Labs, as well as, you know, provided leadership to a few other companies as well.
Okay, perfect.
Yeah, certainly have had a pretty awesome career.
So, let's talk about, first off, let's start with the size of this market.
Because you're hitting Web3 market.
You're hitting crypto market.
And I want people to understand kind of the scale of this and what you're really trying to accomplish here.
Yeah, and so, what I want the listeners to understand is there's a massive market that's coming.
And it's what I call the Zalpha generation.
Okay, this is Generation Z, which is born in 1996 to 2012.
And then Alpha generation, which is 2013 to 2025.
This together, the Zalpha's, as I call them, will comprise the largest generation in human history.
Okay, they're going to be larger than the baby boomers.
By the end of this decade, they will be 45% of the workforce with trillions in spending power.
Okay, so these are all people who are under the age of 25 right now.
They have crypto wallets before bank accounts.
They've grown up digitally.
And they're going to decide and change the way that things are done.
And so, things like the Metaverse, you know, a lot of people have dismissed the Metaverse now.
But let's just look at what's going on.
Two of the largest companies in the world, Apple and Meta, have designed and started putting things out to, I guess, cater to this Metaverse.
You look at companies like Roblox.
Do you know Roblox has close to 70 million kids on it daily?
70 million unique kids on it daily.
And so, you think about the size of this market.
The size of this market is going to be essentially every single piece of consumer technology in the world as it changes and adopts to this new generation.
I've got to cut it once more.
The sound is, Kyle, can you hear?
It's like the echo completely reverberating through for me.
I'm not sure, Andrew, if it's an empty room or something.
Or maybe you could try putting in headphones.
But Kyle or soundstage.
How about this?
Is this better?
He's on speakerphone, I think.
Yeah, if you just pick up the handset and talk directly into the phone, it might be better.
Yep.
Yeah, much better now.
I don't know.
Okay, he dropped down for a second.
I think he was revamping to get back on.
I just want to have, you know, top-tier experience for the audience.
And so, hopefully, for any of you that are excited to listen as I am, it's hard to get on CEOs of publicly traded firms onto Twitter spaces.
So, I'm pretty excited to hear from Andrew.
And I just wanted to make sure that his sound quality was top-tier.
While we're getting him back up, I'm also going ahead and I'm putting a little post in the top of the space that has some info on Tokens.com in case you'd like to look through it and get a better idea of some of the stuff they're doing.
I'd also like to welcome Mr. Rob Nunn to the stage.
Good to have you up here.
And we got Andrew back up on stage, so we're good to keep it rolling here.
And I appreciate the patience from the audience.
Andrew, we got you back up here.
It was really good sounding right at the end there before you dropped off.
Let's see how it is now.
You'll just need to unmute.
Is this better, I hope?
Oh, wow.
So much better.
So much better.
Okay, good.
So, why don't I get back to what I was saying?
Basically, this is just going to be a massive market.
It's going to encapsulate every single piece of consumer technology on the planet as it has to cater to this new generation, which I hope everybody caught.
It's going to be the largest generation in history with trillions in spending power.
And it's going to be close to 50% of the workforce by the end of the decade.
Fascinating how fast it's continuing to grow.
And also, if I do speak over anyone at any point, just let me know.
Sometimes it cuts in a little bit of now.
But I think we're looking pretty good here.
So, let me follow up on kind of the idea of size, right?
Because every investment bank projects this, like you said, to be a multi-trillion dollar opportunity.
And like you said, being driven really by the younger generation, Generation Z, Generation Alpha, which are also, coincidentally, the largest generations in human history.
So, this group that we're hitting on, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, they behave differently than the baby boomers and millennials that came before them.
And so, you kind of need to adapt to them.
So, walk me through what that process looks like and how you target this group.
So, the way we target to this group is we've created a few different areas.
One of them is called Hulk Labs.
And it's a gaming studio, a Web3 gaming studio, where we've done analysis on hundreds and hundreds of games.
And the idea here is we're going to start creating our own games that cater to this generation and integrate in Web3, so token economics.
And what we're also doing is we're doing sort of a white-label service to large corporations where we're helping to build customized games for them.
And so, this is sort of us providing branded games that corporations can use to target this sector.
And I'll give you some examples of not some of the work we've done.
Our work is still confidential, but some examples that are live out there.
So, for example, Gucci has something called Gucci Gardens in Roblox, okay?
And I mentioned before, close to 70 million kids in Roblox.
Think about that.
This is prime branding for these marketers.
Walmart built an entire game within Roblox as well.
Again, what's the reason?
They weren't selling anything.
This is all about communicating to this generation who you are and starting to build brand loyalty at a very early stage.
And so, one of the things that we're doing is we're helping these very large corporations create brand loyalty, but also to communicate who they are.
One of our other subsidiaries, and Tokens.com is the parent company to several subsidiaries that focuses on targeting this generation, but one of our other subsidiaries is called Metaverse Group.
And what Metaverse Group does is we're providing these three-dimensional experiences for companies and hosting events.
So, one of the things we did, we held this Metaverse Fashion Week, which was done on our digital land.
The first one attracted over 100,000 people and had names like Dolce & Gabbana, Tommy Hilfiger, DKNY, and Forever 21.
And so, what we're doing is we're helping these brands, and fashion is huge here, but we're helping these brands take their Web 2 experiences, their current websites, and translate that into ways that are more relatable to this new generation.
Yeah, I definitely want to continue to dig further into that.
One quick note to everyone in the audience.
I did just pin to the top of the space a single tweet.
If you're in the space, just scroll up to the top of the space.
It'll be right above where I am.
It'll say shared by Wolf.
Click into that tweet, and that's got the materials that you'll want to check out to continue being a part of this discussion.
So, it takes you right to Tokens.com up there, and that's where you can see a lot of the pieces.
Speaking, in fact, since we're talking about the website for a second, Andrew, what do you think would be best for people to review in here?
Because there's a lot of material.
You have some stuff right on the homepage, and then you have an investors tab, a news tab, a media tab.
What do you see as the best way for people to navigate this that are interested in the company?
So, I think the best ways is you can look at the investor deck that you can access off any page.
You can click on that, and that's pretty current.
I would also encourage people to go check out our cool websites at metaversegroup.com and halklabs.com.
I think we have some great domains there, and those companies are doing some really unique things.
They're both revenue positive, and again, our view is we're targeting these areas, but more importantly, as a public company, what we're trying to do is give people exposure to this.
And one of the things I recognize in my days as a banker is you have all these what I would call high net worth individuals, family offices, and mutual fund institutions that can't do this on their own.
They just don't have the capability, the know-how to buy crypto, secure crypto, or put on these events or do these things.
And so, tokens.com is really a vehicle, a diversified vehicle, that people can invest in to give you exposure to this area, which again, hopefully I'm making a proper case here.
I believe it's just going to explode over the course of the next five to ten years.
We're in early into what I would call the low-hanging fruit here, the metaverse, gaming.
Again, look at what Apple is doing.
For everybody who's calling, you know, dismissing the metaverse, Apple just launched a product.
And if you think about Apple's history, they take products that might seem complicated, simplify them for the mainstream, and they're launching this brand new headset, which looks incredible, by the way.
Meta has also pivoted into that direction, and pretty much every single brand in the world now has a metaverse strategy, a Web3 strategy, that they're starting to go down that path.
Because they know if they don't start catering to this new generation, these kids aren't going to know who they are.
I have got three kids in that generation, and I've got to tell you, they don't watch TV the way we do.
They don't watch cable TV.
They stream.
That's how they do their music.
That's how they gather their information.
They meet their friends in Roblox.
They go to the metaverse.
If you don't cater to them, they're not going to know who you are once they have the dollars to spend.
Yeah, definitely some good points, and I can agree with you that people are taking a whole different approach to media and to vision and to everything along those lines, and they're getting it through different ways.
Let me go through.
I've got definitely some stuff mixing around in my head here, but I want to talk a little bit about more within to this generation.
So there's a discussion here really on the metaverse and its main uses, main uses being communication, work, education, entertainment, gaming, and more than that even.
There are several more segments that haven't, like you said, evolved in decades.
So I would love to hear from you a little bit more on what you see as kind of the variety of those sectors, where it really mainly focuses into, and then how those sectors have to evolve, and how that fits back into what your company's doing.
Okay, that's a really broad question.
So when you look at these different sectors, I said this before, I think the metaverse is going to actually impact the way most consumer technology is used.
And I'll give you some examples.
Let's go into the medical field.
You'll be able to do virtual medical visits.
You'll be able to sort of do several things where you can provide testing through your phone, and you can interact with a doctor or a hospital all virtually.
You'll be able to do things.
Think about higher education.
You could have a university professor, the best in his field, that is lecturing to an audience that is located globally and able to interact with each other.
Think about things like workplace safety, the ability to train various people in sensitive areas such as the military or something like a nuclear power plant, where you need several people coordinated and working together.
These are the types of areas you could do some testing where several people can be involved at once.
Think about music concerts and arts.
We've already seen that certain artists can hold concerts and things like EDM shows in the metaverse that attract thousands and even up to millions of people.
Why?
It allows for global connectivity, an audience that is anywhere in the world, and participate and be there without actually being there.
And so when I think about the future, it's a lot like the internet back in like 2000.
We can see the potential here.
We can see all the things going on.
But there's a lot of things that we haven't yet discovered that people are out there are working on today.
You know, tomorrow's technology giants are being built today.
I'm a really firm believer in that.
And if you look at the money and how it's flowing, we're going to be, you know, provided with all new ways of interacting with technology over the next five to ten years.
But again, it's going to primarily cater to this younger generation that's growing up on iPads.
They're growing up with phones.
Everything is digital for them from the day they were born.
Okay.
Before I go down, I have a couple more questions.
I also want to bring in some of the panelists.
We have some really intelligent speakers that are up here that I'm sure have some great questions for you as well.
We just had a, you know, we scheduled this space a few weeks ago.
We had a whopping amount of news over this past week in the world of crypto.
We'd love to hear your take on what's happening and where you see this, how you see this affecting the ecosystem.
Yeah.
So, okay.
Sensitive topic that could get me in trouble.
I think the U.S. government has been being a little bit gutless here.
Crypto has been around for a while.
There's certainly a motivated government right now, particularly in the U.S., that is pushing this sector out.
When you look at what's happening in places like Asia and the Middle East, there's a real risk here that the United States, followed by Canada, are going to scare away a lot of entrepreneurs to places offshore where they're able to function normally.
There needs to be a better transparency.
The sector absolutely needs regulation.
But this is not being done properly and it's not being done fairly.
And I think you're going to see some real ramifications here is a lot of smart people in what is a burgeoning sector that's going to really transpire across everything is pushing offshore.
And I think in 10 years, we'll look back and this will be it'll be an interesting moment in time where I think regulators will look back and recognize they made a very large mistake.
OK, that's fair. I won't push you too much farther down that topic.
I'm curious, though, do you see there being any potential benefits to what you're doing?
Sorry, to what I'm doing at tokens.com?
Yes.
Oh, absolutely. So the approach that we've taken is to go more on the software side.
And so we recognize not just the volatility in crypto, but that it's a real sensitive topic for regulators.
So the area that we've been tackling is more what I call the low hanging fruit.
So things like gaming.
Gaming is the largest part of the entertainment industry in the world.
It's larger than music.
It is larger than film.
And so what we're doing is recognizing that there's this massive cohort of people that don't have access to computer, but they have access to phones that are interested in playing these Web3 games.
And so we're tackling that.
We're recognizing that you have large corporations, OK, massive corporations that we deal with.
That are seeking ways to connect with this new audience.
And so we're helping them to do that and providing consulting services.
We're using our digital land to rent it out to them.
We're using our architects to build things for them.
And so what we are doing is, in a sense, redefining what e-commerce looks like.
And, you know, I'll say this as a point, and I'd love to get people's feedback.
I don't think e-commerce has changed in 25 years.
It's largely the exact same thing.
And this is the first pivot or chance for a pivot that we've seen in a very long time when it comes to e-commerce,
especially in accessing this new generation.
And so if you ask me, like, what are we doing at Tokens.com, I think we're on the cutting, you know,
the precipice of changing the way e-commerce is done, the way brands and companies think about e-commerce,
and as a way of allowing them and providing them a bridge to access this new consumer.
So I think what we're doing is hugely important.
And we've got a, you know, I'm extremely excited about all the things that we're doing.
So let's talk about the stock for a minute here.
Stock is up 28% year to date.
Had a really nice move up in January.
I was up, I think, like 100%, 200% at that point.
You got a fun ticker going on here.
Smurf is the ticker.
Would love to hear the background on picking that ticker, as well as right now, you know,
where you see this stock going, some of the financials behind it,
some of the pieces that we can talk about there.
Yeah, so the share price has been challenged, for sure.
Back in 2021, we were caught up in the, you know, what I would call the hype cycle of the metaverse.
And, you know, our market cap went to 400 million.
We were getting, you know, we were on CNN, CNBC, The New York Times, Forbes was writing articles in Fortune.
And then all of a sudden, people started to see Meta did their pivot
and started to not deliver on sort of what the media had sensationalized.
The media always needs to sensationalize something and to dump on something else.
And I think what happened in 2020, sorry, 2022 is asset prices for pretty much everything in the world dropped.
They were super pumped up via, you know, COVID relief and money printing that happened in 2020 and into 2021,
where I think everything hit highs and was sensationalized in 2021.
Reality set in in 2022.
And by all means, our stock came back down to reality.
Do I feel like we're undervalued today?
Absolutely.
We're trading at below our cash and token value.
We're doing all these exciting things.
However, the reality is, is that the audience for small cap crypto related stories today is smaller than it was before.
And the hype cycle has now moved on to AI, which, by the way, I think AI and the metaverse are like a match made in heaven.
Think about the virtual stores that we're building for clients being manned by AI driven bots that can provide conversations
and provide you information on products and then guide you back to the website for a purchase or to speak to an actual person.
I mean, the possibilities are quite large there.
But for sure, look, I think our share price has suffered.
And as we continue to develop and build more revenues and add more clients, and we have an impressive list already,
I believe that you'll see big changes in that.
You know, one of our clients, this is interesting.
One of our clients is KB Home, which is one of the largest home builders in the United States.
I believe the fourth largest home builder.
And we've created three replica model homes for them in the metaverse that people can visit and customize.
And so you can change the backsplash, the color of the floors, the way the lights look.
You can see how far is the washroom from the kitchen to the bedroom.
How big is the garage?
You customize it, hit a link, and then it connects you to a person that can actually provide you with information on the cost of that home and where you can build it.
Again, these are some of the possibilities and how this is changing real estate, you know, as another example.
So back to the things we're doing, I think we need to show more clients, we need to put up more revenue, and hopefully the market starts to take notice.
In terms of Smurf, it's a great story.
So as a Canadian company, to list in the U.S., we need to have an F at the end of our, you know, it's got to be five letters that ends in an F.
And I did a search for five-letter words that end in F, and the F stands for foreign.
And the only ticker that came up that wasn't taken was thief.
I thought that would be a terrible ticker.
So I started researching, what are other things out there that are memorable?
And Smurf came up, and I said, you know what?
It's a little cheeky, but no one's going to forget our ticker symbol.
So we went with that.
Yeah, it's a pretty fun one.
I definitely enjoyed seeing that come up and kind of poking around with it.
And I actually appreciate you teaching us something as well about some of the regulations around what the ticker needs to have.
You mentioned the clients.
We'd be curious to hear about some of your other clients and how you go about acquiring new clientele.
Yeah, so very soon we're going to be launching for one of the top three accounting firms in the world.
Essentially, we're building a – it's going to be a global launch for offices in Canada, the U.S., and Australia.
And essentially what it is, it's going to be like an information center.
It's going to be a place for them, again, to reach and access this new generation and people who are using these places.
Another cool one we did recently was Lancia.
Lancia is an automobile manufacturer company from Italy, so sort of a customized, specialized car manufacturer.
We did an unveiling for them, so you could actually see some of the existing cars.
And then they did an unveiling of a new model in the Metaverse, so you could go there, walk around the car, and check it out.
We did some stuff for Forever 21, which was a virtual store.
That was part of the first Metaverse Fashion Week last year that had over – close to 110,000 people attend.
And we, for Forever 21, we did sort of a DJ booth.
We had music, NFTs for sale.
And this was something that was really interesting.
The average time spent in that store by a visitor was about 25 minutes.
Now, compare that.
To me, that's almost equivalent to somebody going into the physical store and probably longer than someone might spend on their website.
So you think about that, 25 minutes is a good amount of time for someone to get sort of a brand familiarity, a little bit of branding, maybe buy an NFT, a piece of virtual clothing, listen to the music, interact with other people that like that brand.
That's the power of some of the things that we're doing.
We did something similar recently for DKNY, some NFTs that were part of that, and they sold out, I believe, within an hour.
Today, NFTs have sort of, I think, a different thing.
I don't think necessarily people are buying NFTs for resale value anymore, but what they're doing is they're using them as passes.
So you can get the NFT, you can use it as a pass into another venue or something else, or possibly even a discount at the store.
And so these are just tools that we're working on.
Again, it's all part of redefining what e-commerce looks like in order for our clients to build brand loyalty with this new generation.
Yeah, that's a really interesting stat that they're spending 25 minutes there, kind of the in-between between the web and the in-person, but one where they may spend more time than either.
One more time, if you haven't already, I do encourage you, I have a link pinned to the top of the space.
There's just one tweet pinned to the top of the space.
If you're in the audience, scroll up to the top and click in there.
That's going to give you all the info that you need to follow along with what we're discussing.
If you have any questions, they're probably solved in there.
And then if you're on desktop, all you've got to do is go to my latest replies, scroll through my replies, and you will see the tweet in there.
It starts with, are you an innovative investor?
That is the opening of the tweet, so go ahead and check that out.
Let me throw one more question into here, and then, Kyle, maybe I'll bring you in.
Or actually, Kyle, do you want to hop into the conversation here?
You got any thoughts or questions?
Hey, hey, thanks so much for tuning me in, Gav.
And, Andrew, it's been a fascinating conversation so far.
I, for context, work in the security token industry.
So we're taking blockchain-based technologies and applying it to real-world assets in a similar way to you going public,
but essentially issuing, you know, blockchain-based tokens for private assets and more illiquid structures.
And so the main question that I had is that when you're dealing with earnings calls,
when you're dealing with some of your larger shareholders in the current market climate, what are their biggest concerns?
Is it around the similar types of things that the government is dealing with here in the United States?
Or are you facing these different challenges, or are they not really phased by what's currently going on?
I would love to hear some of your aspects around what the investor, what the money is really thinking about in these types of markets
and how that might differ from kind of the media narratives and some of the political stuff.
Yeah, thanks.
So we've always been pretty transparent.
Like, we don't do anything that the government or regulators are looking at.
We don't – everything we do is B2B.
We only deal with large corporates.
We have nothing retail.
And where I think the regulators, the SEC and in Canada, the OSC are really looking at stuff is
they're sort of targeting people that are doing retail-type businesses.
So things like staking or trading, exchanges.
We don't do any of that.
What we're really doing is providing a service.
It's almost like an elaborate website potentially for people or providing, you know,
how you build a game for these different corporations.
And so I think we've astutely avoided the areas of what are controversy and stayed to the areas that are, you know,
really there's nothing to regulate.
What do investors want?
So some of the key things that we talk to investors about is liquidity.
You know, right now we trade about, on average, about 200,000 shares a day.
There's some days that we trade, you know, a million.
Back in 2021, we were trading $4 million to $5 million a day.
So certainly there's a focus on, you know, the ability to get in, but then the ability to get out if you need to.
And so that's a big question.
I think there's a lot of questions around, you know, who the clients are.
What does the client pipeline look like?
You know, we're constantly pitching and trying to add, you know, new roster of clients.
But those are sort of the things where we're going.
But what I can't tell you is that generally the mutual fund investors that we have,
what they're really looking for is they're saying to me,
they like what we do because it gives them exposure that's backed by assets
because we do own a bunch of ETH and digital land in these places.
They like having the exposure that's backed by assets that gives them sort of, you know,
as this Web3 Zalpha generation thing continues to roll,
they want to have ways to have that exposure in their portfolios.
Even if it's 1%, even if it's 5%, they want that exposure because I think they can connect the dots
and see that this is just going to be a completely massive area that's going to dominate,
you know, in the next few years, it's going to dominate the way people are positioning themselves,
e-commerce, the way things are sold, concerts, art, social media.
And again, we're not, you know, we've come up with this as well,
but you can again look at the big players, Apple and Meta.
These guys are seeing the same things we're seeing.
It's just not, you know, things don't happen overnight.
It's not a light switch.
It's an evolution.
And I think once the media can learn to sort of see that and not sensationalize things for the momentary gain,
I think people will jump on and see that things are moving really fast,
regardless of what's happening in the media or the stock market.
That makes total sense.
I think that another question that I had is a lot of the clients that we work with see value in the transparency of blockchain ledgers and things like that.
Have you ever considered working closer with tokenizing real world assets and exploring what that might mean?
Or is that something that due to the regulatory constraints around what that might look like?
You've stayed mostly in the gaming and kind of more commodity style of industry.
Have you seen any value in potentially tokenizing real assets and what that might mean for the economy?
So, I think you said it properly.
I see a ton of value.
People see a ton of value.
It's not an area that I want to touch.
I think that's a regulatory hotbed and not something that, you know, we don't need to be the white knight to save that part of the industry.
Somebody will come along at some point and do it as the regulators and everybody gets together and thinks that through.
That's not something I want to tackle right now.
I'd rather go for the low-hanging fruit.
Right.
Makes total sense.
And I think that from moving forward, how do you see the changing landscape affecting business models if innovation moves outside of the U.S.?
How will that affect your business and how might that affect the innovation that comes from a lot of the technologies that you build your business around?
So, in some ways, it'll help our business because with us being domiciled in Canada, you know, the friendly neighbor and having employees in the United States, we become a reliable, known group to work with.
Especially when you look at our past clients, you can say, okay, we've worked with some of the top companies in the world.
We're a reliable, known commodity.
But what I think is really going to happen here is in these areas, like you talked about the tokenization of real-world assets.
We talk about the ability just to trade tokens.
You know, is it a security?
Is it a commodity?
It's been so vague.
Like, it's really frustrating to watch it from the sidelines to think that this very important area is being so mishandled by regulators and by the government, you know, spreading sort of, you know, I read such nonsense every day coming from, you know, certain politicians.
You know, you look at things like Elizabeth Warren and, you know, Bitcoin is responsible for the fentanyl crisis.
Like, things that are just complete stretches and, you know, out of the ordinary.
It's responsible for all the, you know, terrorist activities.
Let's be real clear.
The number one currency in the world for nefarious criminal activities is the U.S. dollar.
Bitcoin and other blockchains aren't great for doing that because you can always track them down through the blockchain and see where it goes.
And so they should be encouraging the Binances and the Coinbases out there to actually be, provide them with a regulatory environment that allows them to grow and attract people because this industry is not going away just because the U.S. pushes it offshore is not going to make it disappear.
Awesome.
And the final question, I certainly have plenty more.
I just want to make sure that everyone here on the panel has an opportunity.
I see the crypto sensei has his hands up, but just I'm a tech founder.
I work in mostly the private markets.
I'm sure there's a lot of entrepreneurs that are in the audience listening and excited to have you here.
Thanks again for being here.
The question I have is, could you just give us a little bit of your experience being a public company in such an innovative and wildly changing industry?
What are some of the things that you learned throughout the process and what has your experience been in being really a trailblazer in this space?
So, you know, my approach is different than a lot of people in the sector.
As an investment banker, I helped a lot of people become millionaires.
A lot of people you can go and speak to and say, I helped them get public.
I helped them raise money.
I helped those businesses become billion-dollar entities.
And I developed an expertise, which was raising capital and identifying that, for me anyways, that there's this very large audience of public market investors
who prefer to get their exposure to any sector through an investment, whether it's Robinhood or Wells Fargo or whatever other quest trade out there, however they do it.
And I've essentially made my career here as an entrepreneur by finding out what it is that those investors want to get exposure to and providing it to them as a public company.
I like it a lot better than private equity.
Private equity, you're locked up for a long time.
There's no liquidity.
It's a lot more invasive.
This is great, except when you're not in a good market.
It's obviously harder to raise capital, but not impossible.
I get offered capital once a week.
I wouldn't raise capital at these prices.
And we have a pretty healthy balance sheet.
Like I said, between our tokens and cash, we probably have over $15 million, so certainly larger than our market cap.
But being public has its challenges.
You're subject to the whims of the market.
And there's a lot of reporting, and you're certainly more on the radar of any regulator.
But that said, when this market is active, there's people who want exposure to these assets that don't want to do it themselves.
Even to own your own Bitcoin, you want to go buy your own ledger or your own piece of Metaverse land.
For some people, it's daunting.
It's a lot of work.
We're providing a vehicle or a way for them to get this exposure into this area that's growing very quickly in a way they're accustomed to.
And essentially, that's really how I've built my career.
Awesome.
Thanks so much for all of those answers.
I want to pass it over to Crypto Sensei.
Feel free to fire away.
Hey, thanks for having me, guys.
Thanks, Gavin.
Andrew, it's been a pleasure listening to you speak and appreciate everything that you're doing for the space.
I think right now, we have basically one rogue regulator in the U.S., and it's really causing harm to the overall aspect of crypto globally.
And I think the time is running out as far as the SEC to sue people.
I think you are going to get some regulatory clarity here in late 2023 into 2024 from the U.S.
because you have MICA coming into play, and you have the U.K. working on regulation.
You have the UAE.
You have Singapore.
You have all these other places that already have favorable places for crypto projects to go.
So I do think the U.S. and Canada won't be too far behind going into 2024, 2025 as we get there.
But you did pick two great things to be in, right?
The metaverse, gaming, and payments really are the top three crypto use cases that we're looking at right now.
So you did say that Generation Z is going to have all this money coming in.
And what are you guys working to kind of – do you guys have focus groups?
I mean, what are you guys working to maybe collect information from a younger generation to kind of help you guys kind of pivot in your business style,
what you guys are going after, what you guys are investing in?
Are you guys talking with younger people, or are you guys hiring younger people?
So I'm just kind of curious, too, how are you guys staying relevant with younger people,
and what are you guys looking to do as you build out this company and this project?
Yeah, so great question, and really it's all of the above.
I've got three kids in that generation, so I study and watch what they do.
You know, I'll throw them into different metaverses to see what they like and what they don't like.
We've got some great guys who are part of that generation in their early 20s that work for us,
guys that are abroad who are – we've got a guy, James Hewitt, who's considered one of the top gameonomics guys in the entire planet
with this massive Discord following.
He was one of the pioneers who's putting out free gaming calculators for people to use,
and so we're leveraging this sort of knowledge base of, A, having people in that age group,
soliciting, just doing a bunch of research.
And, you know, a lot of what is shaped for me is, you know, I'm in my early 50s,
and I'm not a baby boomer, but I was right below the baby boomers.
I'm about four or five years off of being a baby boomer.
And what I notice is the entire world today, every platform, the way we do banking, politics, the thoughts,
everything has really been influenced and set up for the baby boomers.
Why?
They were the largest generation in history.
That's where all the money resides, and so thus, everything we do is a platform set up by the baby boomers.
As a believer in seeing how they influenced everything, as they're starting to die off and pass their wealth down,
I'm starting to see, like, my kids are different than I was as a kid.
Like, again, I used to go hang out at the shopping mall.
My kids have never stepped foot into a mall.
Like, they don't even know what that is, right?
They go and they learn about things online through going through the metaverses.
And so, I think it's personal experience.
I think it's hiring people in the space.
I think it's doing just a ton of reading and seeing what's out there.
And, you know, you can see a whole bunch of different things changing today.
Whether it's the way people feel about things like climate change, gender identity politics, whatever it is,
we're dealing with a new generation that thinks differently, behaves differently,
and it's not going to be them adjusting to us.
It's going to be technology companies, brands, e-commerce, all having to adjust to them.
And so, we're keeping a real close eye on it.
And, again, this thing that Apple launched, the Apple VR headset last week that was launched,
I don't think people recognize how monumental that is, okay?
These things are only going to get more and more powerful.
And I'll make a prediction.
By the end of this decade, in seven, eight years, you're not going to have a phone anymore.
You're just going to have a set of glasses, and you'll be able to speak on a phone with that.
You'll be able to read.
It's going to be AR, VR, you know, a little bit of everything that's going to basically be your control panel for your life.
And this is just the starting point for that stuff.
And I don't think people realize.
Like, think about where, you know, a cell phone started.
Remember how big a cell phone used to be versus what they are today?
Today, this thing that was launched by Apple and the Meta Quest, those are examples of, like, the early days of the cell phones.
The way this technology is going, how it's going to compress, become more portable, and more dynamic, it's just going to change everything.
I completely agree with you.
And, you know, you basically need to jump on the bandwagon or just kind of you're going to fall off, right, of future technology and growth.
I 100% agree with you.
I mean, Africa is the largest country.
They have the largest population under 24, and I'm working with a couple of crypto projects that are releasing, like, a blockchain phone in Africa and doing some other things.
And it's pretty incredible to talk in some of these meetings and how they're building out, you know, VR and augmented reality training sessions, right?
And so I'll give you an example of when they were building a training module for an HVAC company.
And, you know, for the first time, somebody that's sitting, you know, at home and not in a factory or not in a workstation can actually put on goggles and twist a wire or, you know, grab a tool and fix stuff.
And you're actually – you're on hands learning for the first time in history, really.
And to be able to do that, you know, with all the COVID lockdown that we had and all this stuff, it's just a breakthrough in technology.
And that's all this is, right?
It's just technology.
It's software.
And so as more and more people kind of wake up to the idea, I think you're going to be a very busy man over the next five to six years.
What else are you guys looking to – are you guys just kind of, you know, sitting in that – comfortable in the metaverse and gaming space?
Are you guys going to branch out into payments or any other type of opportunities?
I know you talked a little bit about Ethereum and owning some metaverse space, but are you guys working on any other angles besides those?
Well, we're always exploring different angles.
I mean, one of the things is when you explore new things, it requires capital, and it requires a lot of smart people.
And so we're looking at a bunch of acquisitions.
Some of the areas that we're looking at are like how do you incorporate things like NFTs into loyalty programs as ways of keeping clients?
So, hey, we can help you get in there and reach a client or a potential client, teach them who they are, but how do you keep them?
And so we're looking at, you know, NFT, blockchain-based loyalty programs.
There's a whole bunch of various things that we're looking at.
We're looking at integrating in AI.
I mentioned earlier, you know, we build all these virtual stores for different brands, but right now they're not really properly manned, okay?
It's more of a gimmicky thing today.
You can go in, you click here, you can buy it, and it takes you back to the Web2 website.
But what if we can use and plug into some of these conversational AI programs out there to have a functionality where you can go in,
and maybe it's a virtual running shoe company or real, and it can talk you through the products.
Hey, here's a new color.
Where, oh, you purchased this last time.
This might be a complement to what you've purchased in the past.
And it can either create and help you create a sale right there, or it can lead you back to the Web2 website.
Because remember, we're not telling companies to drop their existing infrastructure, their websites.
They've poured, you know, millions and billions into designing those.
We're trying to create the bridge between Web2 and Web3 so that people can either transact in Web3 or go back to the Web2 websites.
And so those are the areas we're exploring.
We're really focused on helping to define what e-commerce is going to look like into the future.
Thank you, Andrew.
I really appreciate you answering.
I'll give you some time for maybe some other panelists up here.
I know there's some great speakers, but I appreciate you answering those questions.
And, man, it's an exciting time.
And just thank you for what you're doing for the space and, you know, investors alike.
Yeah, one comment.
You mentioned Africa.
And just before you jump, but we were doing some work in Africa, building a player network there.
And one thing we noticed is there's, like, a huge amount of people, young people, who are starting to come online.
And they're doing it via cell phones.
They're not going out and buying, like, the $2,000, $3,000 laptop.
It's all being done by mobile phones.
And I think that people who start catering to this, again, this generation via mobile application is going to have a massive advantage.
Yeah, I'm actually working with a company called BioFi.
Actually, you can take a look at them.
They created an actual real blockchain-enabled phone where people can buy the phone out of the box and actually launch, you know, a validator node or, you know, trading bots or doing different things actually on their phone.
And so it's going to be the first time in history where you can actually buy a phone that can pay you back over time just by running some software on it and as it runs in the background.
And since Africa has the biggest population under 24, I mean, it's going to be one of the biggest booms I think the world's ever seen as far as going into that space and being able to do a lot more on your cell phone than you could before.
That's wild.
That's so cool to hear something like that.
And again, this is the opportunity, like, where American regulators are missing the bigger picture here is that, you know, all of this really stems from blockchain technology.
And if we're not helping companies to innovate, the talented pool of people are just going to take off and leave and go to other countries and companies are going to move.
We're going to lose employment and we're going to lose the edge to something that could be quite prolific and large in the future.
Yeah, I know. And that's a whole different conversation talking about the tax deficit, right, and creating regulation where companies can thrive and you can take more tax revenue off.
I mean, it just makes sense to make clear guidance and clear rules so people can act appropriately in the space and build and grow.
I'm totally with you, man.
And I think the U.S. will come around here in 2024, but it's been a rough road.
And I think they've lost a lot of good players and a lot of good talent that have already gone overseas.
And it's just sad to see.
Agree.
Really nice rundown there.
Going to bring it over to some of our other speakers in a minute now.
But I think there's a couple of things that are interesting here.
One thing is really there's like, like you mentioned, the hype cycle, right?
AI is a big hype cycle right now.
Media shifted off metaverse.
Sector is still growing.
Do you see this as the point to get involved with the metaverse and crypto while the hype has shifted so that when it inevitably, you know, we know these things work in cycles.
There's opportunity later on to capitalize on.
So this is not investment advice, but the answer is yes.
Here's one thing I know for sure.
At some point.
So right now we're starting to see a whole bunch of companies redefine themselves as AI companies, even though they have very little to do with AI.
We're seeing that public companies because it's a way of attracting, you know, people are like, give me an AI stock.
But inevitably what's going to happen is in two years or one year or whenever this hype cycle ends, there will be disappointment.
There will be companies and people who have lost money.
And the media will once again be putting down that thing and saying AI just didn't deliver what it was supposed to deliver.
It will be wrong and short sighted.
However, that is just how it works.
You know, once people get bored of talking about AI, media will go and sensationalize something else and maybe something from the past.
And that could be the metaverse again.
And, you know, this the new Apple gear could be the catalyst for that.
If meta comes out with something new and interesting or, you know, there could be a dark horse out there that pops up and create something really interesting that will bring the attention back to the space.
But again, what I would encourage people to do is, you know, I study this stuff daily.
Every single day there is a new announcement in the space.
You know, I don't know if people read about Epic Games and Nike doing this new thing, the eSwoosh.
There's, you know, every single fashion brand.
And I saw a thing Barbie's launching a thing every day somebody new is building something in the metaverse and Web3.
You have the major corporations in the world building hardware towards this.
And media is saying that this sector is dead.
It doesn't make sense.
I wouldn't believe that.
Look at the facts, not the stories that are baseless.
Appreciate that, Andrew.
Rob, you've been up here for a little while with us.
You got any thoughts or questions?
Hi, Devin.
Yeah, I do, actually.
You were talking before about eCommerce and how this could help accelerate it.
Could you explain a little bit more about how that, if I've understood that line correctly and how that works in your head?
Yeah.
So, to me, it's a convergence of a couple things.
So, number one, let's start with my initial premise is eCommerce hasn't changed.
You go to Amazon, click running shoes or computer or whatever it is, and then you get a whole bunch of stuff that comes up.
It's all two-dimensional.
You've got some reviews.
You click on it.
You can click on different pictures.
It's the same way things have been done for a long time.
Well, I can tell you for sure Amazon, because we've been going in there and trying to talk to them as well, is working on a whole bunch of revolutionary things to change the way that is done.
To create three-dimensional, like what if you could go into a metaverse-type environment and look at a piece of clothing, the avatar or whatever has your actual measurements, and you could do sort of virtual fittings where you could look at things.
It gives you information, and there is a virtual salesperson there that could be AI-driven or an actual person behind there somewhere that is actually talking to you and giving you that information.
It's also about how do you integrate things like NFTs into this.
So one of the things I love about NFT technology is it gives you provenance, and provenance is a word taken from the art world, which is really the history and origins of a piece of art.
But with NFT technology, when it resides on the blockchain, you could really create provenance for anything in the world.
So we talked earlier about the tokenization of things when you can create value to it, which, again, I think that's inevitable it's going to happen.
But what if you just wanted to see the origin history of something?
So did this really come from Nike or Gucci or wherever I bought it from?
What are the other prices that it's traded for?
All that information will reside on the blockchain.
I'll give you another example for e-commerce.
So Ticketmaster is doing a lot of work here, and one of the things that creators and artists hate, they absolutely abhor, is when you buy a ticket, and then it gets resold several times, and by the time it gets to the actual person who goes to the concert, it sells for $75, and the ultimate payer pays $500.
They see none of the incremental delta between $75 and $500.
If you could put something onto the blockchain, that ticket, and sell it that way, the artist could notionally take a percentage of the amount of money every time it changes hands.
For example, they could take 5% or 10% of that value of the ticket every time it changes hands.
That's a huge win.
I'll give you guys another example.
This is really interesting.
Back last year, Nike bought a digital shoe company.
So basically, NFT-based digital shoes that you could buy or sell.
Nike made $100 million selling these shoes in the first year, $100 million, but then they made another $100 million from royalty sales.
The way that worked is that every time the shoes changed ownership hands, so maybe the initial shoe sells for $500, the next time it trades for $2,000, Nike would take a royalty.
And I believe it was 5% royalty every time that shoe changed ownership.
They made another $100 million from the royalty sales every time those shoes traded.
So $200 million in total for something that doesn't actually exist physically, they made with super high margins.
What else can we apply this to?
Every time something moves, there can be a royalty.
How about YouTube videos for the people that take it?
One of the things right now is you go on Facebook or any of these places, you put a picture up, and they own it.
In fact, I was reading a statistic.
90% of e-commerce revenues today and traffic flow to about four companies in the world, and we know who those companies are.
So when I talk about e-commerce changing, it's about how e-commerce and the digital buying experience is delivered,
but it's also about where the ownership and where the money goes.
And I think it's about time that people can start taking ownership of that through Web3 mechanisms that I think is going to be really important into the future.
That's really cool.
I mean, for me, e-commerce is still, and everyone's going to laugh at me, but e-commerce is still ridiculously early.
And so I think last year was the first year that the United States saw 15% of commerce trade done in e-commerce.
So we're still only 15% 1.5% of the economy.
And I think the UK, where I am, it's only a third or something still.
So anything that kind of increases adoption, that's the thing that's going to be the kicker for anything that's adopted, I think, longer term.
Beyond it being sort of fun will be whether or not it actually changes that percentage.
Do you see it changing that percentage or is this more of a sort of engaging current people to maintain interest?
No, I totally agree with you.
Again, when you look at the demographics for the kids who have grown up purely digital,
they're not going to go to the mall for their shopping.
They're going to demand more purchases and more e-commerce, more online purchasing.
So I completely agree with you.
I think that we're just at the beginning of e-commerce,
but I think e-commerce is going to need to change to adopt to this new generation
that likes to see things differently than, again, today,
I believe everything is set up to target the baby boomer generation.
And I think things will change to target the Zalpha generation.
Right, very cool.
Thanks for your answer.
CryptoPit is handled up, so I'll be interested.
What I was going to say, just to add a little bit of value here,
you know, people buy NFTs and people always want to be unique, right?
If you go out and you spend $150 on a shirt and you can scan a QR code
and instantly that shirt becomes an NFT that you can bring into the metaverse
or actually resell on the secondary market,
now you've created just a whole new way of reselling and getting royalties on items, right?
And people want to be unique.
I mean, imagine, you know, you're buying a Louis Vuitton wallet or a purse or something like that,
and you can scan the QR code and then bring that person to the metaverse.
I mean, there's just so many different possibilities that you could do with this,
and it really does open up companies to just a whole new revenue source.
And it also gives people the ability to be unique out in the world and stand out
and wear what they want to and kind of show what they want to.
And when you have this in this metaverse space, it really –
our attention spans nowadays, right, with TikTok and all this stuff is like three to five seconds.
And when you can really immerse somebody in a different reality or a different world
and they can kind of, like you said, spend 25 minutes in the store.
I can't tell you the last time I was in the store for 25 minutes.
Maybe it was Costco or something, but you really go into a store and you get out pretty quickly
because there's so many people that are so packed.
But when you have this metaverse, you really can open up all these new ideas
and ways of creating value for your brand.
And it's just – we're just at the start of something just truly groundbreaking and revolutionary
that is just going to take the whole world by storm over the next five years.
How long do you reckon that adoption takes?
Because I've got – I'm quite skeptic at the pace at which people believe this will be adopted.
Well, you need regulation globally before you can do anything, right?
You just had the iOS CEO come together on May 23rd.
130 members came together and agreed on digital asset securities globally, right?
And they created, I think, 18 frameworks or 18 rules around so the whole world could kind of be on the same type of regulation.
And then you have the G20 working on something very similar, right?
Because you need everybody on some type of minimum requirements for the same type of laws that way.
So value and things can flow over borders without having kind of any kind of issues with regulators.
But you're already seeing it, right?
You're seeing the whole world other than the U.S. and Canada right now racing to adopt blockchain technology.
And every country has their own reason for doing this.
Some of it's bringing people that are not banked or underbanked onto CBDC, things like that, being able to get loans, go to school, all that kind of stuff, right?
But you really are going to see a huge push 2024 as MICA rolls out in the European Union, Eurozone.
That's 27 nations that are countries that are going to get regulation.
And then you have the U.K. already working on it.
You have the UAE, you have Singapore, you have Australia, you have Japan.
You have all of these countries coming together to create a regulatory framework.
And you're going to see that globally in 2025, the latest by 2025.
Love the rundown.
Real quick, we have about two minutes left here.
So, Andrew, we'd love for you to address all the points made across there.
And in addition with that, any other pieces that you want to share for people that are doing research into Tokens.com?
We'd love to hear that as well.
Yeah, I mean, thank you very much.
This was great.
Again, I would encourage people to study history and see what demographics and how they influence consumer buying power and culture.
And really, at Tokens.com, you should view us as a holding company.
The parent company to several different entities where we're really just trying to get a piece of this pie that we think is small today, but it's going to be a multi-trillion dollar business.
And, you know, it's not just us saying that.
Citibank just put out a report.
Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan all have reports talking about, you know, this being a trillion dollar industry.
I would encourage people to dig up the Citibank report.
It came out in March, and it talks about the size of the gaming market, CBDCs, all this stuff, and how, you know, they're saying by 2030, blockchain and Web3 is going to be measured by billions of users and trillions of dollars.
We're not even close to that yet.
It's still very early.
And so, again, people should go out and do their research and try to find ways.
You know, we talked about ways to make money.
I think companies that can figure out how to cater to this new generation are going to be the giants of tomorrow.
Yeah, you absolutely nailed it on there.
Well, Andrew, it was a pleasure having you on.
The hour flew by, and that typically happens when we have great conversations, so just a hallmark of it.
I got DMs from people in the audience that enjoyed this.
You can see the comments, literally just people commenting that they're enjoying the discussion.
Obviously, the speakers on the panel, top tier.
So really a pleasure having you on, and I hope we get to do this again with yourselves.
Awesome.
Thank you guys so much.
Appreciate it.
Absolutely.
Thank you to Andrew, Kyle, Rob, Sensei, TJ, who was on here.
We really appreciate the entirety of the panel.
And we're going to roll into our last space for the evening now.
So we might have some new speakers coming up.
I do, so we already have Quinn and the Ape Together Strong documentary.
We're going to be talking about the Ape documentary tonight.
So I'm going to bring in the account right now.
It's Ape Together Strong documentary, if you might call it one of that.
And we'll get rolling with it.
First off, Quinn, Ape Together Strong.
Is there anyone else from your team that's joining us up on stage, or are we good to get going?
Finley's up there in the Ape Together Strong Twitter there.
Yeah.
As far as I know, it's just us two.
All right.
Perfect.
Well, then, we've got about 30 minutes to chat here.
So I'm going to turn it over to yourself, Quinn, if you want to start us off.
And you can give some introductions on you guys, your background, and what you're doing here.
Yeah, certainly.
So my name's Quinn.
I'm originally just kind of a musician, actually, from Portland, Oregon.
My brother has been a filmmaker.
We've both kind of done both things our entire lives.
And in January of 21, we saw what was happening with GameStop being squeezed and decided that
we wanted to take a closer look and make a documentary.
I'm a little more involved than that, but that's kind of why we're here today.
We made this film.
It took this crazy ride for the last two and a half years.
And I'm incredibly proud of the film that we've made.
I'm happy to be here with you all, bro.
Yeah, I'm Finley Mulligan.
My brother's Quinn Mulligan.
Mulligan Brothers, we kind of go by around.
But, yeah, I'm a filmmaker.
I work at a place called Laika, which is a stop-motion studio.
Went at BAFTA, Golden Globe for Missing Link, Cuba and the Two Strings, or Coraline, if you've
seen that.
And I left stop-motion to work on this documentary.
And like my brother said, we were bought in in January of 21 and saw what happened way back
then on January 28 and decided that we had to correct the narrative that had been kind
of spun by the mainstream media.
In our view, it just painted a bad picture of retail investors in general, and we wanted
to be a counterpoint to that.
Understood.
So walk me through a little bit about how you went and go about doing that, what you
built.
Yeah, totally.
So, like I said, I was bought in in January in GameStop, like a lot of people did, right?
And once they took away the buy button, we put a call out on Reddit that basically said,
hey, you know, we've all seen how the news has been covering this.
Who wants a real documentary about what's going on?
Like one from the perspective of us who were kind of going through this experience.
And the response was overwhelmingly positive.
And from there, we kind of crowdsourced the film and its content and in its creation.
I mean, I ended up posting on Reddit again saying, okay, it sounds like people want to
watch this movie, want this thing to get created.
So what do you want in it?
What should we cover?
And just like these retail investors have been on Reddit communicating with each other about
stocks or finances, we started communicating with each other about research about what's
happening in our capital markets that could allow for this insane event to happen with
GameStop.
And as we went on, we ended up crowdfunding about a third of the budget for the film,
which is nearly $200,000, which is bonkers.
But I think a testament to how passionate these retail investors are for this cause and for
at least one kind of truthful narrative about the people going through it to be out there.
So from there, we got going and hit up a ton of people to try to interview for the documentary.
But from the start, we wanted to make sure to not only represent retail investors and
normal everyday people, but to make sure that we have experts, people that know what
they're talking about, people like Dave Lauer, people like Dennis Keller or Better Markets,
people like Suzanne Trimbath, people who have been doing this and fighting for these issues
for quite a long time and partially to kind of legitimize the concerns that these investors
had, but also because this documentary was exploratory in a lot of ways.
So we had to, we're film guys and music guys, like we're not stock guys.
So we really had to learn from these people as well and kind of figure out how to tell
a truthful narrative about the people, but while also remaining factual about the circumstances
that led to this crazy thing that's still going on for so many people.
Really interesting point.
So let's kind of dig a little bit further below the surface on some of these pieces.
Also to the audience, if you do have questions that you want to ask, you can just DM me directly
and I have my DMs are open.
So if you're someone that's part of, you know, the movement here, you were kind of involved
or interested in this, you can go ahead and just shoot that out to me.
Let's talk about the challenges, which you kind of hit on a little bit there with the interviewing,
but what were the biggest challenges in making this movie?
And then what were the biggest positive surprises?
I think one of the positive surprises for me was how readily available people were to
like give their story and talk to us generally.
And some of the higher ups, you know, like Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets, you know,
that's, he's kind of a heavy hitter.
Dave Lauer is incredibly intelligent and knowledgeable on these subjects.
And he was also willing to talk to us.
Suzanne Trimbeth has been, had to talk to us as well.
Like these are people that have been working in these fields for a long time.
And we were just kind of a tiny little indie documentary trying to bootstrap itself into
fruition.
So to have people like that be generous with their time was not just a surprise, but it was
a welcome one.
We were super happy about that.
Um, and just how many everyday people let us into their homes and lives to talk about
why they got involved in this thing in the first place.
Um, to me, those are some of the most positive surprises that we came across.
Yeah.
I think one of the most like surprising negatives that kind of was a theme through all the
interviews is that retail investors are largely the product in this, in this giant system
that wall street now is, or our capital markets have become.
And, you know, as surprising as that was, I guess it's, it was no surprise.
It was just kind of shocking to hear it laid so bare by all of these people and that it's
just kind of understood that if you're getting into the game as a retail investor, money's
being made off of you.
And that's just how it works.
So that was kind of the biggest surprise, I guess, kind of, but more just like, um, shocking
to have it confirmed so hard what we were suspecting all along.
Yeah.
It was certainly like, like, you know, surprising information and then you're like, oh, well,
yeah, that, that does make sense.
Yeah.
Maybe not so surprising, but let's talk about the surprises.
What were the biggest surprises that you uncovered?
I mean, just that, right.
I think it really is having a clear picture of, of the way that retail investors are taking
advantage of to make rich people richer, right?
Dave says something in the documentary, he says, you know, gains are privatized and losses
are socialized, which is such a good line.
And I can't stop saying it for all kinds of situations, really.
But I mean, like take payment for order flow, right?
You have brokers that are incentivizing traders to trade a lot and to trade often.
They don't care if you're investing, they call it investing, of course.
But their goal is to have you give them enough volume to get paid as much as humanly possible.
And meanwhile, the SEC charges brokers like Robinhood with misleading customers about revenue
sources, failing to satisfy duty of best execution.
I mean, even Citadel Securities, back in 2004, before they got into the game of payment for
order flow, you know, they said that PFOP creates serious conflicts of interest and should
be banned.
And it is banned elsewhere in the world.
So I think as far as the surprise was, it was just digging into that and really seeing
the mechanics of how this works and how true ownership of your shares works.
You know, how you can directly register your shares if you'd like.
You can learn about these things if you put time into it.
But people mostly just kind of take their broker's word for things.
And I think that's where people get stuck, of course.
But also, brokers aren't incentivized to be very truthful or forthright about how they
make money off of you and where that might conflict with your own investment choices.
That was surprising.
Yeah.
Also, the ratio of fines to how much money, you know, big market firms make.
If someone's making $200 million off of breaking some regulation and then the fine's only $10,000,
you can be sure they're going to keep doing it and just call it a line item.
Just going through reading fine after fine for kind of the same issues over and over and over and over
was disheartening and that was surprising.
So there's lots of things like that where it's just kind of people are just like,
oh, well, that's just the way it works.
You play the game.
And in my mind, I'm kind of like, but fuck this game.
I don't like this game.
This is a game where, you know, if any person that's kind of in the lower rungs of society
breaks a law, like it can straight up ruin their life.
Whereas if someone at the top decides that they want to break a law, they just get a
little slap on the wrist, take the change out of their pockets and say, well, good luck
next time.
Please don't do that again.
It's frustrating.
Especially when their mistakes can ruin multiple lives.
You know, someone goes to prison for years and years for a lead charge, whereas a giant
bank or a giant investment firm loses everybody's retirements for like a bunch of teachers.
And meanwhile, you have the mainstream media complaining about retail investors' choices.
That's, you know, it's a big, nasty web, as we all know.
And hopefully this film does a small part in at least breaking open a window into a little
piece of this puzzle that a lot of people out there are behind and are angry about and
want change with.
Yeah, and I think the film is more about the greater, you know, corruption endemic to our
capital markets.
It's more about the bigger issues.
We certainly take the whole, you know, meme stop craze as an entry point to get into this.
But by and large, like for us, that whole situation, the way it unfolded was our entry point to
really starting to, to really start understanding how our markets are basically working against,
you know, the everyday people.
So let's talk about the apes.
Who are the apes?
What are the apes?
Give me what your guys take on this.
Yeah, I mean, if you get your info from, you know, CNBC or from Fox or whatever, you're
probably going to think that there are a bunch of like crazy 20 something white guys in their
parents' basement, like looking to like make a video game out of our markets.
But the truth is, you know, this, this whole thing was born out of a time in the pandemic
where I think a lot of blue collar people for the first time in a long time had
a chance to step back from the daily grind that they find themselves in, right?
And I think a lot of people, given time, will want to look at how they can better the lives
for them and their families.
And this is what happened in that period.
But people didn't have to go to work for a second.
They had a stimulus check that let them buy groceries, pay the bills.
And they thought, OK, maybe I'll learn about how I can use investments to better the lives
for me, right?
And my family.
And this thing popped off at that time.
And with GameStop, especially, you see on these subreddits or whatever, people explaining
what a short squeeze is, how it works.
There's a lot of people like that jumped in, sure, without knowing what's going on.
But a ton of people could understand what was happening.
Like, it's clear that these firms had bitten off more than they could chew.
They were caught with their pants down.
And these retail investors honestly made a good play, a play that if they were industry
heavies, would probably be applauded for like, oh, man, you got me, you know, whatever.
But what's different is when these retail investors make the good play, the system works against
them, the rules change, and they're the ones that end up having to hold or hold the bag.
And it's not that these people are these crazy lunatics in their parents' basements.
These are real, everyday people who learned something, got in, made a good decision, and
then were screwed over by their brokers.
So when we talked to these people and had them send videos to us or whatever, the diversity
in this group of people is pretty enormous.
You have very wealthy people.
You have very poor people.
You have people in the middle, all different socioeconomic backgrounds.
So I think it's hard to put one, like, monolithic view of who the, quote, Hs are.
But for me, it's these people that are trying to work together to make real change and hopefully
lasting change in our capital markets so that we can have more transparency, more fairness,
and hopefully a better world for the next people that come along and try to make up a better
lives for themselves by participating in our financial system.
And, you know, like, the diversity in the group doesn't just extend to, you know, backgrounds
and socioeconomic situations, economic situations.
It's also some people are looking for reform in our markets.
Some people just really love the companies they're investing in.
Some people are looking for that big payday.
And there's definitely some blending of those three things within the communities that are
kind of involved in all of this.
But, you know, the reasons for people getting in may not be the reasons that they're still
All of those things were just as diverse as the groups of people that we spoke to.
That's a super good point, actually.
I really like that because we're allowed to do whatever we want with our money, right?
Like, it becomes dangerous when people are kind of preyed upon in a way that leans them
toward doing something that's maybe not good for themselves.
But we can do whatever we want.
And when you see, like, the media blast these people for making a trade rather than investing
or not thinking about the fundamentals or this or that, which many are, by the way, but
it's the condescension there is so hypocritical.
I mean, you look at giant, like, high-speed speculators, as I think Dave calls them, but
these high-speed trading firms that they're not working off of fundamentals, right?
Like, they're making money off of how the system works until that loophole's plugged.
Like, they're racing to beat each other on technology.
Like, these companies are not looking at fundamentals in any meaningful way, I don't think, anymore.
It's about speed, and it's about being first to a loophole.
And, you know, I think, remember, there's totally right in that these people are all
investing in different ways or trading in different ways, and it just doesn't matter
because, like, we're all should be allowed to have the same options ahead of us, even
if we're not a, like, quote, like, professional trader.
Perfect.
Appreciate that.
Kind of a follow-up question on the same topic.
Now that we've kind of defined who they are, what lasting impression do you think this
ape saga is going to have on Wall Street?
Well, I would hope that, you know, that people would think of retail investors' best interest
a little more before making a big old bet against them, because once in a while, you're going
to get enough people pissed off at the same time about the same thing for them to get loud
about it.
And I hope they never stop being loud about it, honestly.
So I think lasting change, you might have, you know, certain things like payment for order
full, possibly being banned at some point.
Like, that'd be a good one.
There's, well, for, in my opinion, anyway.
But there's, mostly I just hope that people are more involved in the way that their financial
systems work.
And I hope that because they're more involved and more aware that they, you know, work towards
getting regulations passed that help them in their future, rather than just having it be
a system that only works for a select few.
I hope the lasting impression is that, you know, the bigwigs on Wall Street kind of think
twice, I guess, before just treating retail as the product.
You know, like a lot of these people that are involved with this have grown quite knowledgeable
about the inner workings of our capital markets.
And it's a very few areas that the Apes are mostly focused in, right?
And there's enough people behind those few areas where you're going to see more things
like what we, the investors, are doing in their engagement with the government and the
SEC to try to open a door for retail investors to have a better line of communication with
our regulators.
And that's something like, you tell me like three years ago, you think the SEC chair would
be talking to a bunch of Redditors on like a video conference.
And that would just be bonkers to me.
But it's happening.
You know, these things are happening.
And I don't think it would have happened if it weren't for the Apes.
And I hope that we kind of get off of this corner of the internet.
And I hope that our film can help open the door for people that maybe are curious or they
thought it was a funny, weird story or whatever.
But for them to see that this stuff's still going on, these people are still fighting,
and that there's more to it than just like these click-baity headlines that you see.
There's a lot of real work and meaningful work being done right now to make the financial
system in this country and elsewhere better for the people who are actually creating the
wealth that Wall Street is extracting from Main Street.
All right.
Fantastic.
We've got about 10 to 12 minutes left here.
I have seen that the audience has actually swollen a bit since we started talking about
this topic.
Nice.
Yeah.
We were at 180 when we started.
About 50 more hopping in here.
So clearly some interest.
Can you give us more details for the people that joined about where they can find the documentary?
All this different like stuff about it, how long it is, who's in it, all the different
like fun facts.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's available right now on Vimeo.
It's available on Amazon for rental and purchase and Apple TV.
Um, uh, there's a ton of great people in it.
Uh, Dave Lauer's in there.
Suzanne Trimbath is in there.
Susan Trimbath.
Um, we have a good range of regular everyday investors, um, that kind of help us tell the
story from different perspectives and kind of tie these narratives together, commonalities,
differences.
Dennis Kelliger of Better Markets speaks very well in the documentary to a lot of these issues.
Uh, and then we have some people that were involved directly in the subreddits, uh, where
this, these ideas were born.
Um, one of them is buttfarm69, which is hilarious, his name.
Um, but you know, you have people like him sharing, uh, information and means about the
intricacies of our capital markets.
It's kind of nutty.
Um, you know, there's just a ton of great people in it.
Um, we definitely use humor as a way to sort of enter into some of these bigger issues.
Uh, for us, humor was a big part of what helped us understand kind of some of these concepts
that are a little more complicated, um, by way of the subreddits and memes.
Um, so we tried to incorporate that same kind of humorous spirit into the film.
Um, yeah.
And I think we also have like, you know, a former SEC brand chief, Lisa Prakansa, who
breaks things down so well and in such an entertaining, a clear way.
Um, and we have Alex Cohen, who's a co-founder of We The Investors, along with Dave Lauer.
Um, so a wide range of both experts and, you know, normal people or apes.
Not that y'all aren't normal experts.
I see you in there.
You're normal to me.
Uh, but yeah, it's, it's just, it's a good swap of people.
And beyond the streamers that we have, we're also, this should kind of tie in with what
Andrew was speaking to in the previous segment, is that we've actually just teamed up with
NJJ Publishing.
They are a, uh, a game creator in the web three space.
And we've just created an NFT ticket.
And what this does is it, as long as you hold this NFT ticket in your wallet, you go to
our screening room that we have hosted on our, our website.
And it provides token gated access to not only the film, but to bonus material and a little
mini game that they created about the film that connects you to other resources that are
kind of surrounding the apes.
So we're really excited to see what this can kind of do to empower creators to have more
of a one-on-one relationship with their audience and to truly own their, their own creative
material.
So, uh, NFTs are here now for us and that's pretty exciting as well.
But, um, other than that, it's, it's, yeah, the typical Amazon, Apple, and then Vimeo, which
is a great place for, for creatives as well.
Fascinating to hear.
Hey, Brian, is that you behind the account?
Did you want to throw any questions into the mix here?
Or anybody behind the Bullish account want to share any thoughts?
No, this is great.
Thank you guys for, uh, for doing this, Wolf.
And, uh, I encourage everybody in the audience to click into the, uh, Eaps Together Strong
account and, uh, go check it out.
Go watch the trailer.
It's a bonkers story, y'all.
Like, you really should watch it.
And even if, like, you're listening to this call and you're not part of the EAP community
or whatever, and you're like, ah, these guys are just a bunch of yahoos.
They're, they're a bunch of weirdos.
Like, okay, so watch it.
You'll always be entertained.
And I think you might be surprised by what you see.
Uh, but, uh, it's, it's a, it's a great movie.
We, we're really proud of it and encourage everybody to just, just check it out.
Give it a win.
Yeah, it's, it's extreme.
I think it's, I'm going to go ahead and say it's the most entertaining documentary on our
financial systems ever made.
Uh, it's the only one with a guy named Bud Farm 69.
Yeah, that's true.
And he is really well spoken.
And it's great.
Yeah.
And if you want to watch it as an NFT, um, and be part of this kind of new cutting edge
way for creators to, uh, spread their, their creations, go to, I believe it's on Loop
Exchange, um, check it out there.
We also have posts all over our Twitter as well, which is apes together doc.
Got it.
Makes sense.
Okay.
Um, let's talk about kind of the initial response that you've gotten to this.
How many people has this really been put out in front of?
What's the feedback that you guys are getting and what do you guys think you're going to
do after this?
Yeah, it's been super positive so far.
Um, we released on Amazon first and the goal there was to, I mean, they have 200 million
people that go on their website or their, uh, their system, their streaming service uses,
uh, every day.
So that's a huge market, obviously.
And for us, it was important to try to get their algorithm kicked in.
So we put everyone to everybody there first.
And so far the reviews of people that have watched it on IMDb and Amazon are just, are
crazy.
They're really positive.
So at the very least, we feel like we did the community, uh, right in what we did and
hopefully represented what's going on in a, in a fair way that hasn't yet really been
out there.
Um, the New York times, you know, they said, uh, that it was, it was like the big shorter
compared to the Michael Moore.
Like, so like great New York times review as well.
So the story is starting to get out there and the goal now is to, um, push it out of
our little community of, you know, a few hundred thousand people that are on the ape side of
things, but it's just not enough.
We need to get out there into households that aren't privy to what's going on, or at least
heard about this, maybe forgot about it and would be curious and would want to know what
we uncover in the doc and what they should know about the way that their investments are
being handled by the brokers that they know and trust.
So it's, we, we hope that people, uh, share this as much as possible, get it out there
and hopefully get it in front of a bunch of eyeballs.
Yeah.
You are going to know that they're going to love this thing.
Or be really angry.
If our 97% on Rotten Tomatoes and our five stars on Amazon, you know, and like 9.1 on
AMDB or any indication, we think that a lot of those people who have no idea what's going
on will also like the film.
Um, so we're, we're stoked that people are loving it.
Uh, we can't wait for more people to see it.
We're pretty biased to be clear.
Yeah, that's true.
Oh, that's perfectly fair.
Understandable.
Uh, no problems around that.
So again, for those that are joining in, uh, the two fellows that I've up on stage have
worked pretty hard to put together this apes together, strong documentary, uh, the documentary,
you can just go through the links on their page.
Uh, you can look at their pinned tweet as well.
That has some good information on it.
Um, I'm curious, how many people total ended up being involved in this?
How many people did you interview to put this together?
I know that I believe, uh, Quinn, you did the music for yourself.
Like what was the kind of the team effort behind all this coming together?
Uh, yeah, I did all the music again, musician background.
So, you know, I'm coming from a world where you make two cents every six months off of Spotify.
You know, you have 400,000 listens or whatever.
Um, so for me, the NFT side of things, it's really cool.
Anyway, that's kind of an aside.
I did all the music.
Um, my brother did the editing.
We co-directed the film.
Um, we kind of engineered and, uh, laid out the whole crowdfunding system.
Um, you know, we held the cameras, we did whatever needed to be done.
Basically, this is a documentary that is a labor of love from start to finish.
Uh, so anytime something needed to be done, we just kind of looked at each other side
a bit and went, all right, let's do it.
Um, but yeah, yeah, we kind of treated it like, like the poor kids that we, uh, grew
up as, you know, and probably still are, let's be honest.
It was like, uh, you know, we had these, this so much donations from the, from the community
that we wanted to really respect them and what they were doing.
So like every decision was like, should we just share a bed in this hotel?
We probably should just share that shit.
And then we just shared a bed in a lot of hotels.
Like we were trying to be really frugal, but it was also, we also had some amazing professionals
that helped us out.
Uh, you know, Martin Lopez, he's sound for like Sam Raimi and, and, and Marvel movies
and, um, Kath Raich from company three is an incredible colorist.
So like we, we did have help come in DP, great professionals come in and help where, uh, where
it would be the most kind of bang for the buck from the crowdfunded film.
It's like crowdfunding a couple hundred thousand is no small feat, but also like crowdfunding
the information, I guess you could say, like the people that helped us on background who
we can't talk about are, you know, we thank them too.
And then to all the Redditors and the DD, the due diligence that's, that's being done
on these, on these forums, it's like, it's pretty impressive.
Like, you know, you got to kind of weed through what, you know, it's not like a professional
publication.
So of course it's going to be hopefully the cream rises to the top.
But I mean, if you check out subreddits, like super stonk, like they're still doing
some pretty incredible stuff to try and continue this conversation and to, uh, help retail investors
have a better future by just digging in and continuing the fight.
Uh, it's, it's pretty impressive and seeing what other people are doing in space calls and
so forth.
So, um, the people that helped us, we interviewed probably 20 people.
Um, not everyone made it in the film, of course, but beyond that, there's, you know, hundreds
who sent us videos telling us their stories and why this is important to them.
And of those people that sent us their stories, almost everybody ended up saying that they just
want to help their mom like retire.
And like, let that sink in.
Like you have hundreds of people that just want to help their mom not worry in the, in
her old age.
Like it's, it's super moving, but I think indicative of what's wrong with our financial
system.
Like you have, we're going off a bit of a tangent here, but during the pandemic, like
back to that, you have a ton of people like struggling in a very real way.
And they had been for years while, while watching the news spout about this incredible, unstoppable
economy.
And when they tried to dip their toes in, they got their wrists slapped.
And I think a lot of people were ready and willing to say, you know what?
Not this time.
And they're still fighting and it's, it's incredibly moving.
Love the run down there, guys.
I think you give a lot of good insights and hopefully enticed a couple hundred more viewers
to come in from here.
Always nice to see the space grow.
It shows a clear interest in what we are talking about.
And I appreciate you guys hopping on and sharing the film with me so I can enjoy a good giggle
as well.
I do got to wrap this up.
I got another call coming up here.
So let's just go through some quick final comments.
Quinn, anything else you would like to keep on people's radar moving forward?
Yeah, just check out the film, however you want to check it out, whether that's Amazon,
Vimeo, or Apple TV.
But, again, we're super excited about the idea of offering the ticket to see the film
as an NFT.
The game that, you know, not just JPEG made is awesome.
I made the music for that too, which is really fun making a little video game song.
So, yeah, it's a really cool thing.
I want to see way more of that happening with creators.
As the previous call said, that's going to balloon blockchain.
You know, blockchain will balloon and all that.
It will turn into a massive industry.
So to kind of get a look at the very beginnings of it and take part in it, it's exciting.
It's a cool thing.
So we're happy about it.
And thanks to everyone for listening.
Absolutely.
And yourself?
Oh, God.
Just kind of parrot that, you know, like thank you, everybody, for being a part of this thing
with us, for everyone that's here that is an ape or helped with interviews or anything
else.
I'll see you, Dave.
I'll see you.
We appreciate everything you all do.
And we hope that everybody keeps fighting and keeps the eye on the prize.
You know, this battle's not left and right.
It's up and down.
And so keep your head nuts to the grindstone.
Ignore the bullshit and keep rocking.
Keep rocking.
Never said that in my life.
I guess I'll say it here.
Keep rocking, rolling, everybody.
You just had a kid.
So my brain doesn't work anymore.
Straight up.
Keep on rocking in the free world.
Yeah.
Sally Ford.
There we go.
Okay.
Really good stuff there.
Thanks to the Apes Together Strong team for hopping on and chatting with us today.
And hopefully y'all in the audience enjoyed it.
If you really liked it and you're an ape, you can go ahead and go over to their page.
Give them a follow.
Comment on some of their posts.
Let them know that you enjoyed the space.
That way they know that they should be doing more of them.
That's going to do it for this one.
Thank you to Bullish for helping to set it up.
Appreciate all the people that have been in here for the last few hours.
Actually, I've been on Spaces for 11 hours today.
So it's been a fun day.
And I'm going to go and I'm going to hop to some pitch calls.
Fun, fun, fun.
Take care, everybody.
Have a great rest of your evening.
Peace.
