Animal Spirits Podcast - The Best Stocks in History (EP. 457)

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

On episode 457 of Animal Spirits, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Michael Batnick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠���⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ben Carlson⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ discuss: how markets are controlling the war, the cost of higher energy prices, why the stock market isn't falling more, why the Fed shouldn't raise rates, the Forrest Gump market, why gold is down 20%, the not-so-K-shaped economy, AI is making us work more, accidental landlords, how to create a good business and more. This episode is sponsored by Invesco and Janus Henderson Investors. Learn more at https://www.invesco.com  Learn more at https://www.janushenderson.com/ Sign up for The Compound newsletter and never miss out: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠thecompoundnews.com/subscribe⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Find complete show notes on our blogs: Ben Carlson’s ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠A Wealth of Common Sense⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Michael Batnick’s ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Irrelevant Investor⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Feel free to shoot us an email at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.   Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. The Compound Media, Incorporated, an affiliate of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ritholtz Wealth Management⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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this information. Read it carefully before investing Investco Distributors Inc. Today's show is brought to you by Janice Henderson and Janice Henderson investors. We believe working together is the way to work better, like combining your portfolio plans and our in-depth strategy, your valued assets and our valuable insights, your mission and our vision, always working. working in perfect harmony to find the right investment opportunities, Janice Henderson investors, investing in a brighter future together. Visit janicehenderson.com. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael

Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ridholt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ridholtz, wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Michael, yesterday it was your birthday. I feel, I've said this before, people say I'm crank.

In middle-aged birthdays shouldn't matter anymore, don't matter anymore. Would you get upset if someone didn't tell you happy birthday that was a friend or family member? Would you care? You didn't tell me happy birthday. And you cried and we spoke. And matter of fact, you're the only person that didn't say after birthday. No, I'm not upset. In my defense, I didn't realize it was your birthday until after we spoke.

I should have known because, again, your birthday is the bottom of the COVID crash. So it should be in here because I have that memory of it. I just think after you turn 21, your birthdays don't matter anymore. When you're 30, 40, 50, yeah, it's like, all right, it's a milestone. Especially when you're middle-aged and have kids, the only birthdays that matter are the kids' birthdays, and then you move on and your birthday doesn't matter anymore. Fair or unfair?

Both. Okay. I think it's a personal choice. I think it's a weird, like, it's a weird, not Hill to die on, but like. Yeah, I'm not dying. I'm just saying, like, to me, I don't care about my birthdays anymore. They're meaning. Yeah, that's fair.

Yeah. Okay. I like it. I'm a nostalgic. I'm an emotional milestone type of guy. I mean, I'll probably, like, buy myself something stupid when I turn 50, but other than that, I like when I hear from people that I haven't heard from in a while, you know, just like a checking, it feels good.

But, yeah, I don't like to, like, celebrate my own birthday. I don't make a big deal out of it. Yeah, okay. See, my wife always says, like, why don't you send this person to text on their birthday? I'm like, I don't care if they send me one. That's the golden rule. All right, that's weird. That's weird.

I'm living how I want to live. You out of principle will not wish somebody a happy birthday. That's a choice. I'll just, let's get to it. All right. Thank you, though. Thank you for, um, Nothing, I guess.

Yes, happy birthday. We celebrated your birthday on your 40th last year. It was a huge blowout bash. Isn't that, doesn't that... I don't I fulfilling my duties for the next decade after that? Sure. I think that's good enough. All right.

Markets rule everything around us. Mike Bird tweeted yesterday. I think the fact that military action and major announcements now seem to be coordinated around market open and closed times is going to be one of the most... one of the more fascinating and telling tidbits about this era administration. Markets basically rule everything now. Fair? That's it, right?

For the most part. Right now, markets are just all powerful. They control the thing. The reason that it seems like we got to tackle Monday yesterday with the Iran War is because we're worried about oil prices. We're worried about bond yield spiking. We're worried about inflation. Markets are the transistor, whatever you call it. Like, markets are the regulator.

That's right. They're the piston. Is that right? The judge and the jury. Don't know. But last week, I was talking with Labithola and Josh and with some people at the firm, like, why won't we just get the washout already? And we said this and it's true. It's the Trump put.

Like, it's hard to get too bearish when, because yesterday I looked at my phone in the morning for the 47th time checking the markets as I do at 9 o'clock. And it was a spike. And I didn't immediately. I knew that something was said from the administration about the war being over. I thought it was equally weird. So that, the market, the SP was up like 2.5% I think at the highs. And then somebody from the Iranian administration said, whoa, whoa, whoa, fake news. They're trying to manipulate the oil micro, something along those lines.

And I was kind of surprised that the market didn't immediately give all of it back. Were you? A little bit. Yes. It came off the highs, but it was still, the market at the lows of the sell-off was still up 1%. I found that to be interesting. You have been saying this for the last two weeks, and you said it last week in a Slack channel too,

that like, listen, the reason things aren't rolling over more and the technicians always say the market has a memory. And the memory everyone has now is that 10% up day. Yeah. The markets are up 10% in a day. That's what everyone is remembering. And they don't want to be caught off sides again. And it's weird that markets are looking past this stuff now

and worrying more about that than the other way. Yeah. I just think that psychology of the market is really interesting. Because obviously is not always like that. So I do think the longer this goes on, perhaps the mark will finally just fall out of bed. Like everything will really and truly roll over. But maybe not. Maybe it is just in a perpetual, what happened in loss?

What's that word that I'm looking for called where you're stuck between two worlds? Not vertigo. It sounds like that. Vertigo? No, it sounds like vertigo. I know that's not the word. Pergatory. Oh, just like Vertigo.

Not like Vertigo. Pergatory. Yes, we are in a market. The market is in purgatory. I tend to agree that markets probably should roll over if the longer this lasts because all the oil people are saying there's already, it's not like the prices can just go back and everything's fine. The supply has been disrupted and it's going to be disrupted for a number of months now.

And obviously the longer this goes on. That's not really a U.S. problem. That's the rest of the world problem. But that here's the thing with oil and we'll get into this. but when the price of oil rises, it's not just gas that goes up, it's the price of everything. Energy makes the world go around. Here's the thing that feels like a bad movie plot.

This is from unusual whales, and a bunch of people caught this yesterday. Just before we leave this topic, just one last thing. You can very credibly argue that the market did roll over. 40% of the index is in a bare market. So even though it's not showing up the index level, under the surface. Yeah, that doesn't count. Oh, it's a bare market underneath the surface. I don't like those.

Give me a real bear market. Well, I'm a huge bare market on the surface. guy. You, not a stock market guy, don't know about this, huge bear market on the surface guy. That's happened a million times over the last 10 years where you have the internals washout and then and then it's over. Yeah, but that's not the same thing. Okay, just five minutes before Trump's announcement to halt the attacks on Iran, massive trades reportedly hit the market. People were buying futures. People were selling oil. It says they were four to six times larger than anything else at the time. So these are like unusual trades, obviously. These

these gains, these trades should not have been placed. I'm sure there was some polymark at stuff or Kelsey stuff that happened. This is the kind of thing that feels like a bad movie plot where people are trying to profit off of war. Just slip a slope, man. The insider trading stuff to me is, I don't like it. I hate it. I think this is gross, disgusting.

I think everybody is on the same side of that one. Obviously not. People are doing it. People in high positions. No, no. I'm saying, no. Nobody likes insider trading. People in the White House do.

I don't know. People do. Can you just, can you, why are you in this take? I think 100% there is a unanimous consensus. Yeah, I know the people that are doing the trade. And why doesn't it, why doesn't it stop? If it's 100% consensus, why isn't, why doesn't someone get a slap on this? Hey, knock it off.

What do you do? There are a lot of things in this world that is 100% disapproval rating that happens. True. Okay. Who is for fentanyl except for the people taking it? And I guess the people selling it. People selling it. I don't know.

Can you imagine trying to create like a macro fundamental model of this market to track what's going on? Like there are people who are trying to like every day there's announcement trying to like, well, here's what this means for. for this supply and demand and this. That's why it's like the tariff announcement because like it changes so fast and move so quickly. You know how when you have, I made this analogy on Twitter,

I'll make it to you. When your kids are little, especially when they're toddlers, they could wake up from a nap or wake up from like going to bed the night before and be a completely different person than when they went to sleep. Like how many,

I feel like every kid wakes up angry and like has the don't talk to me for a half hour vibe after a nap, you know? And it's like they can be a completely different person. That's the market these days. it's a completely different person from one day to the next based on an announcement. Correct. So I think that if you're trying to like map this stuff out on a fundamental basis, you're wasting your time.

That's my point. I thought this was a very well-said, well-ridden tweet. A rare tweet from our friend Super Mugatu, Dan McMertruch. Someone DM'd me like two months ago and said, hey, what happened to this guy? Where did he go? I like to follow him on Twitter. Occasionally, he gets back into the conversation. Dan's living his best life in Miami.

Killing it. All right, Dan said, note to self. Very scary times. Remember that the reason bears sound smart and end up looking stupid so often is that there are always several highly salient bear arguments. Whereas the reality that there are several billion people trying to make things better and solve problems

is intellectually unsatisfying and fuzzy. This is amplified in the era of eyeball maximizing feet. dominating people's conception of the world. Do not be fooled by the psychological games of people seeking to dominate attention. Do not ignore legitimate issues. But most importantly, do not forget that 95% of the world is trying to rig the game to work out. There is a vast conspiracy to grow the economy, f*** over bears, and increase asset prices. It's called society. And this is the part of the market meaning more than ever these days. I remember Josh wrote about this, like, after the financial crisis about, hey, do you think like the government

and people in power are really going to try to let this thing go under and not going to do everything in power to keep it going? That's the thing. Like, if you think the world is going to end and people aren't just going to constantly send out the bazookas and spend more money and do more stuff and rig the game to go higher, you're not paying attention. Right. Seriously. I mean, yes, sometimes, of course. You don't have to like it. That's the reality. Well, who doesn't like that? the people who are betting the permabairs. They hate it.

I'm not talking on the permadevers. So the 11 dumb people on Twitter. Yeah, sometimes the train falls off the tracks. Guess what? We rebuild. Yes. Okay. So getting back to the oil stuff,

this is a chart from, I don't remember who this is from. Energy products are at an incredibly low contribution to U.S. household personal consumption. So in the 70s and 80s, energy spending is a percentage of household budgets was got to up to over 6% by the early 80s after the energy shock. Now it's down to 2%.

So the point is there's a way higher capacity to handle if gas prices stay at $4 or $5 a gallon for an extended period of time. It seems like households have the ability to eat it because it's not like it's a huge part of their budget. And how about corporations? Obviously, we're talking about the stock market here. Think Apple cares about the price of energy? But that would be the pushback would be that like the price of

everything has to go up, though. The price of all the inputs, the price of, it's not just gasoline. It's the, you know, airplane, airline tickets are going to be more expensive. So that's the thing. This is like the midwit. This is like the midwit meme conversation, right? A little bit. But I guess that's the point is that people wondering, well, geez, won't four or five dollar a gallon gas totally derel of the economy? Probably not. I think we've learned maybe the margin of safety is lower this time, but everything that has been thrown at the economy this decade. it's been able to withstand. And so the question is, does it still have enough ammunition to withstand this current onslaught, however long it lasts?

The market is betting right now that it does, that it can. Which, again, I think is so interesting to me that the market is so willing to look past all this stuff. Literally knowing absolutely less than nothing about the situation in the Middle East, is it, it's a little bit hard to imagine this lasting into the summer? Yeah, I agree. But I don't know what, if we back off, this one straight, again, I don't get why it's called a straight.

Someone's got to explain it to me. I'll chat GPT it. This thing is like the most important piece of land in the world's going forward now. Like, it has more importance going forward. It's funny because Josh always says like, oh, the straight-of-hormoos, remember for years, that was his joke. And now it actually really does finally matter? But does this, does that thing just stop mattering? All of a sudden, it seems to me like it's going to be used every time that there's something going on, unless we completely take it over.

Well, matter to what? The world, the energy prices. Well, of course it matters. Of course it does. All right, Pantheon macro, Carl Cantania, in $150 barrel oil scenario, we think inflation would peak in Q2 at about 6%. Of course, oil crashed yesterday.

What was it? Did it finish the day down 8% or 9% or something like that? That's what it was down in the morning at least. The question is, how long does this have to happen until we get there? I don't know. I guess this is like the what-if market right now. what if this lasts? What if the market keeps looking past it? What if? What if? What if? What if? How about this? Mike Dorning, a bunch of people posted this. Investors are now betting overall U.S. inflation over the next 12 months will surge above 5%. Implied inflation rate rate from one year break even per Bloomberg. Now, again, a lot of this stuff is before yesterday. So who knows? And the Wall Street Journal had a chart that shows market is implying a probability of a higher higher probability of a rate hike than a rate cut this year. Now, here's my question to you. That's not happening.

What good would a rate hike do? You hike rakes just so you can bring them back down? This is an exogenous shock. I don't... Since one is destroying demand, a good thing, a good idea. I understand why we had to do in 2012. Yes, that made sense. Obviously, that made sense at the time.

But for something like this, come on. But Colin, so Colin says in the span of three weeks, the market went from expecting three rate cuts in 2026 to now expecting a rate hike. That's incredible. But I guess you could see a scenario where we back off and then that flips again. And it goes back. And those expectations don't matter. But my point is, why would, what good would a rate hike do besides potentially push the economy more towards slowing down further?

If there was a market for these two lines flipping, I would say through the end of 2026. By the way, I had to look at the... I had to Google what yours said the other day. I was writing something. I was like, wait, is it? No, it can't be 2026. This is really... Sure enough.

And AI is not making us dumber? It's not helping our memory. All right. Anyway, my point is this. I would say, I would guess that yes, these lines would flip would be at like, what, 92% that they'd flip back? That would be a pretty, yes.

That's like an even better bet than Seattle not winning the Super Bowl. Something like that. You know, I got a lot of emails, a lot of emails about Seattle winning the Super Bowl. Not a single one patting me on the back for predicting one battle. That's just the way the world works, right?

Nobody wants to give you credit. They want to bring you down. One battle after another was consensus. What was your payout on that? That's the difference. No, it wasn't. It was like 85 cents. Okay, that sounds consensus to me.

You bet on the horse with the lowest odds of weight. It might have even been less. Okay. I'm not going to give you a pat on the bat for that. Everyone thought that was going to win. Hold on. This was not a recent bet.

I did this months and months and months ago. I'll find what the payout was. It might have been 70 something cents. Okay. I love the forest scump analogy, so I'm going to give you this. So the S&P at the lows was down 6.8%. Maybe it rolls over and goes further. But that's the biggest drawdown so far this year.

And I feel like there's a lot of people who just want to rip the bandit off and get the correction over with. It's the member in the storm, Lieutenant Dan's up on the mast and he's screaming, like, this is all you got. You call this a storm? I feel like there's a lot of people who just want, like, hey, listen, we have the reasons. Let's just do it already. Can we just get the correction? And maybe that's one of the reasons we're not getting it.

So many people seem to just like, all right, fine, let's do it. Higher oil prices, higher inflation, war, uncertainty, volatility, and it just won't happen. I can't. Well, when you say this. a lot of people. I feel like there's a survey in your brain. Like you're doing a lot of projecting. You have no evidence that there's a lot of people that are on a lot of investors assume that with everything, all the headlines going on and everything happening that we should be in a correction right now. Those are different things. Yeah, of course. I think there's a lot of people that say,

given the state of everything, we should be lower. That's what I'm talking about. You're saying, you're saying there's a lot of investors who want the bandit to be ripped off and that's why we're not ripping it off. No, just assume like this, it should be. Given all these variables, we should be in a correction. We should be. That's what I'm saying. Is this a, no, correction is 10% right? There's a pullback. 5% is, yeah, 5% is a pullback. It's a, healthy.

It's a, this is nothing. Wait, wait, when does the correction go from healthy to not healthy? A healthy percent to 15%. 15%? 15% not healthy anymore. 10% healthy. 15% check your triglycerides. No what I mean?

Oh, I spoke to a trainer yesterday, speaking of. Okay. Putting some feelers out there. Not liking how I'm looking naked. In a gym or in a online trainer again? I want somebody to come to my house. I'm too embarrassed to go to a gym. Just not my scene.

I've never been to a gym. Can't start now. Jim's a great place. You get to go to the bathroom and see naked, 70-year-old men walking around in the locker. That does sound enticing. Plus, the home visit, even for Zoom, it was way too much money.

$200 a session. Come on, man. In this economy? How much is a home session going to be? That's going to even more expensive. It does the same thing, whether it's home or... Okay. Is that, that can't be the going rate for a trainer.

Wait, it was $200 per session? Per session, right? That's very expensive. I don't know what their going rate is. That seems very expensive to me. Yeah. If you worked out four times a week, geez, that's, yeah. I'm not doing that.

I'm not working out four times a week, and I'm definitely not paying $200 per four times a week. See, and you think AI is going to take all the job. This is, this is my analogy. You can go on chat GPT right now, find the best, you say this is my body. This is what I want to do. This is my weight. This is the stuff that pains me.

This is what I want to change about myself. Create the most personalized workout plan possible you can for me. You can do that right now. Use these dumbbells. Use this weight. Do this many reps. Do this many sets. And guess what?

Some people still need a personal trainer. Yeah. That's why AI has not taken all the job. I know this is not rocket science. I need somebody to watch me. I have no discipline. I'm a child. Exactly.

And this is why financial advisors are never going out of business because of AI. Preach, brother. All right. Here's a headline that my friend shared with me. I predicted the 2008 financial crisis. What is coming may be worse. This was in the New York Times. And here's the lead.

At the start of the 2008 financial crisis, I was at a hedge fund. By its end, I was at the U.S. Treasury. At both, I worked with people only a few. few years out of college. The drama of 2008 was all they knew about financial markets. Remember what's happening? I told them, you'll never see anything like this again. Now I'm not so sure. Maybe they'll see worse. This is from Rick Bookstabber. We've had Rick on the podcast before. And this piece, got to be honest, was complete trash. No offense. So I read it. Actually, you know what, offense. Rick is a nice guy. But come on, man.

what is the point of this? First of all, what was in here were so, there was nothing in here. Now, it's for a general audience, so I understand maybe that's, but there was nothing novel in here. It was AI, it was private credit,

it was concentration in the S&P 500. Dude, come on. Yeah. And what are we doing here? Risk is too far out of the spectrum. You feel good about publishing this? There has to be a catalyst. In his defense,

maybe he didn't write the headline, But the whole point of the article, yes, I, no, I, I, does not feel, again, there has to be a catalyst for this stuff happening. It can't just happen because people are taking too much risk. That's way too vague. There has to be like, what is it going to cause this? I agree. But think about how many people, how many people read this and did something that they're going to regret with their portfolio. Now, he might truly think that he's helping people that this is really were about to enter 2008 and I'm saving people.

All right, maybe. I suppose he won't be the first or last to have done that in the last 15 years. How many headlines have there been since 2008 that read, I predicted the 2008 crisis, or he predicted, or she predicted. There's been a million of them. And not one of them has ever come to fruition. I got a question for you. I have a theory, but gold is down.

I think if you're an intraday person, you are, gold is down 20%. If you're not an intradite person. If you're looking at just G&D. I don't understand. Are those not real prices? It is. But if you're looking historic. It's just easier to do opening clothes.

So gold is down, we'll call it 20%. Okay? It's down quite a bit. It's selling off hard. I have a theory here. I want you to make, I want you to tell me why you think it's down so much first. Well, I want to hear your theory first.

I don't have a theory. I don't know if you, because you usually have more realistic theories. Mine are more like out in the, you know. Okay. All right. So before you give me your garbage take, um,

Todd Sone has a chart showing the daily gold ETF flows on a rolling 20-day sum. And negative two standard deviations on the outflows. The worst four-day sell-off since 2000. Or no, that's wrong. It says 2013. No, this chart just goes to 2000. It's since 2013. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, that's right.

Okay. So worst four-day sell-off since 2013. So the reason why gold does fall on so much is because there are more sellers and buyers. What's your theory? Well, duh. But so we had a trend following hedge fund that we invested in in 2008. And it was the only thing in 2008 that went up. It was up like 15%.

Everything else was down. Everything got killed. And in 2009, we asked the manager, like, how is business going? You must be getting a ton of money coming in because of this early 2009. Things were still not like people. didn't know what was going to happen. And they said, no, it's the craziest thing. We're the, we're the only thing that's up in anyone's portfolio this year. And we're the ATM. Everyone is pulling from us because we're the only thing doing well. And if you need to sell, what are you

going to sell? The thing that's down or the thing that's up? And I think gold is in an ATM effect right now. Like people are a little worried about what's going to happen here and they need to sell something. And what are you going to sell when you're a little worried, the thing that's up a lot. I like it. It's the ATM effect. I like it. Yep. I buy that. So, Yes, more sellers and buyers, but I think that you have correctly identified why there happened to be more of one than the other. Yeah, you wouldn't sell the thing that's getting smoked. You sell the thing that's doing really well.

All right. So I mentioned that the markets rule everything around us. Did the bond market win again? Because we got two-year treasury in March, like, I guess this is like two weeks ago, three weeks ago, the two-year hit the low of the year at below 3.4%. Then it shot up to 3.8% and maybe intraday higher. Is this just another thing of the bond market spooking the administration again to be like, okay, all right, we cannot upset the bond market.

It really is pricing in rate hikes and not, you know, higher inflation and this is not good. Yeah, the yields are shooting again higher this morning. It really is just remarkable. So, the yields are still going up again or back up again. It is remarkable that the market is just hanging in there. Right. Because mortgage rates are back to six and a half percent. Right?

Like this This is going to have Even if the ripple effects Are again a few months If we stopped everything now It's still some ripple effects Oh I have a better I have a better movie analogy

For the market not selling off Okay Outside of Forest Gump I know what you did last summer What Jennifer Love Hewitt is screaming What are you waiting for? Oh That's pretty good

Thank you All right Did you read the new Besson Binder piece No I'm over it I will I retired Okay. I don't need an update. I'm good. I thought the update was interesting. So he, the first one, he went to 2016 and he said, you know, 89 firms accounted for $43 trillion in net wealth creation, right? 60% of companies underperformed T-bills over the long term, all this stuff. Like, groundbreaking research. You're over it. But he updated this through 2025. And now, so again, 89 firms, $43 trillion in total net creation, right? Now, 46. Six firms account for half of the $91 trillion in net wealth creation.

So it's just saying this past 10-year period is just the concentration has got even more. Like, it's a smaller and smaller number of stocks that have made the most wealth over the long history of the stock market. Yes. We know this to be true. I can, I can, my ability to be, huh, has gone to zero for something like this. Really? Nothing.

There's nothing else that can come out of this type of a study. I also reject it a little bit. I mean, obviously the takeaway is this is why you index. You don't need to convince me of that. I'm already there. I've been there. Yeah. You cast it a wide net so you can make sure you get these winners.

The interesting thing to me. But hold on. But also, and also, like, yes, we know that buy and holding forever individual stocks is a terrible idea. Empirically, most stocks are not worth marrying. Guess what? I don't think a lot of people know that. I think the school of the school of Warren Buffett taught people that you just buy and hold stocks forever and you'll be fine.

That's true. That's true. I think there's a lot of people who need to learn this lesson. That's true. But and also in the real world, and this is the biggest gripe that I have, nobody does this, okay? Nobody buys a stock at the IPO and holds it forever. And when I say nobody, yes, there are people that have made fortunes doing that over,

but like in general, nobody actually buys the stock at the IPO and that doesn't sell it forever. This is not the way. way that markets function. People are buying and selling every day. And so just because stock XYZ, Disney, for example, Home Depot, for example, these are at multi-decade lows relative to the market. Like in other words, Home Depot hasn't outperformed the index over 30 years or something crazy, right? Does that mean that there were opportunities to make money in Disney or Home Depot over time against the market over a seven-year window? Yeah, all right. We give this cabinet every time. But it's true. It is true. You're right. Look at Table 2. So this gives the stocks with the highest

annualized returns over at least a 20-year period. And Nvidia's the highest, which is crazy, 37% per year, go back to 99. Netflix, but look at some of these other names that you've never heard of. Axon Enterprise, Plenum Publishing, Lynn Broadcasting, Pioneer Group. A lot of these companies that you've never heard of before, again, these are all like 20-year-plus periods. There's a lot of them on here that would surprise you that you've never heard of before. Manor care. I haven't heard most of these.

companies. Exactly. That's surprising to me. Anyway, all right. Fine. You're not impressed anymore with Bess and Binder. I am. I think it's, I think it's, I think this is some of those important research that's been done this century on the stock market. This is, I agree. Well, this is major confirmation bias for you. And I'm not saying that in a bad way. But this is like hammering home what you believe to be wholly ground. And I, but I think before I saw this research, this research is, it's, It's more concentrated and more confirmation bias than I would have even thought before I saw the data. You saw this and you were like, I knew it. And here's proof.

And me too. No, I'm saying it's surprising to be how concentrated it really is. I never would have thought it would be this concentrated. It really is. My only point is, not my only point. We saw that start. This is like 2017. When did this first come out?

It's just there's been five iterations. Yeah. And he did the update and it's even more. So, all right. Mr. Bass and Midder, professor. Could you give us three years? Give us like three, four years until the next one. All right.

It's such a hater. Me and the hater, you hate happy birthdays, you grouch. Duncan said I'm going to get, I'm going to get trolled hard for that take. That's fine. I've given it before. Yeah, Ben the grouch. That's true. But you're not actually a grouch in real life, but this is a weird thing.

No, I'm really not. I just, anyway. Which is funny, because if you ask my parents, I loved my birthdays when I was growing up. My mom would always make fun of me. I was so into it. And now I just don't care anymore. Oh, so you got birthday shamed. You're embarrassed.

Maybe I'm fighting back against being shamed. The truth comes out. All right. You know what? Fine. Nobody say happy birthday. See if I care. I don't care at all.

Minding my business. So this is interesting. This is from Jason Furman in the New York Times. He wrote an op-ed. He said, if you hate Trump's economy, I have news for you. And he breaks down the economy under Joe Biden and the economy under Trump. And it was basically 2024 versus 2025 or later. And he breaks it down by GDP and inflation and real earnings growth and the S&P performance

and mortgage rates and the unemployment rate and gasoline prices and the budget deficit and trade deficit, all this stuff. And honestly, it looks almost exactly the same. Right? Like all the stuff Trump has done and the economy basically is the same. All the stuff Biden did. A lot of people hated the stuff Biden did. The economy looks the same as it does today.

A lot of people hate the stuff Trump is doing. The economy looks the same as it did under Biden. Can I just point that one thing? It's the direction. Sure. You know the memes? You know the memes where it's like Bitcoin at $70,000 and Bitcoin at $70,000 like a week ago versus today? And it's like Jennifer Aniston and the guy with the woman who's on his face.

Yeah. But the other part that we've talked about a lot is you look at the sentiment among Republicans and Democrats when Biden was elected. then the Republicans hated the economy. Trump was elected. Now they love it. Biden was elected. Democrats love the economy. Trump was elected.

Now they hate it. The point is it's the same economy. Yes, more or less. Shouldn't or should not, a number like this consumer sentiment, shouldn't it be capped at 100, just zero to 100? How come it goes all the way up to 140?

That's a really good point. It's kind of like the QBR rating in football. Why is it like 159 or something? Why isn't it? Everything should be capped at 100 or 10. Yeah. A perfect 158.3. Oh, yeah?

How about we just stop being cute and just cap it at 100? I guess the point is all this stuff that's gone on this decade. And the economy is so big and dynamic, it's really hard to, like, it's turn in a battleship. Right? It's not like this thing pivoted on a dime. It takes a while and all the stuff that these presidents do, it matters. in the headlines and the short term and some market stuff, but for the economy overall, it's really hard for them to change the overall shape of it.

That trend is hard to break, whatever trend it's on. Okay. Last week we spoke about new home sales. I think maybe this is a better demonstration of what we were talking about, pending home sales. So not just new. lowest level in history. It is amazing.

It really is amazing that the market... So why is this index should go to 100 as well? That's a great point. Why does it go to 130? All right, new rule. 100 is the max for all these indexes. It's a great point, Ben. The housing market is in an absolute ice age.

Yeah, why isn't the market lower? Isn't housing a third of the economy? It is pretty bizarre. Housing is like 20% of the economy, that includes all the construction and furniture and moving and all the other costs that are lending. If you work for a mortgage lender and you've been waiting for years and years and years, for mortgage rates to fall so the housing market can become unthought and it just hasn't happened yet,

it's got to be exceedingly frustrating. I can't even imagine working in that industry. Well, I think it's beyond frustrating. These people's livelihoods have been taken away. All right. This ties in nicely with the best and been there. study. I had Claude making this chart, scroll down to the real estate section. So Home Depot stock is getting smushed. Okay. It is breaking below what had been support.

It is now the lowest that it's been in a long time since. Don't you think a lot of the renovation stuff was pulled forward? Well, of course. So this is how the market works. So Home Depot was flat since April of 2021. So I had Claude do this thing for me. I said, hey, show me the cumulative U.S. home sales over the last, what is it, five years basically, where Home Depot has gone nowhere or has delivered, let me rephrase it, home depotively zero percent returns for its shareholders over this time period. Of course, it went up a lot, came down a lot, but over, if you bought it five years ago,

thinking there would be a home boom, you were right and you lost money. So $9 trillion worth of cumulative sales since April 2021. And Home Depot, which theoretically would have been one of the biggest beneficiaries of all of this home sales, the stock has gone nowhere. And this is why, for me, I have a very difficult time buying and holding a stock. I know too much. Yeah. I've seen too much, Ben.

I was bullish on the housing market in 2021, and I bought Zillow. And it's been crushed since then, done nothing essentially. I sold it a while ago. There's so many examples of this. Yeah, it's hard. Of companies just winning and their stocks anticipating the win and just pulling forward a lot of returns and then eventually investors getting disappointed.

Over and over and over and over and over and over. and over and over again. All right. So last week we did an update on, what did we update that we were wrong? Oh, the GDP now is 5% and it really came in under 1%. Right? I like doing these throwbacks

to previous episodes. Ernie Tedeski did the share of total expenditures by top 10 households by income. And there's that chart going around from Moody's that shows the top 10% is spending 50% of all the money, right? Unfair, K-shaped economy. Matthew Klein said, this doesn't match

the data. Ernie Tedeski said, yes, let me find it. The share of expenditures by the top 10% of households is actually 22%, 23%, and it's lower than it was pre-pandemic. The actual data for this. They're basically saying there's kind of a data era in the Moody's. It's not picking this upright. He's saying it's actually lower now than it was pre-pendemic. And it's pretty flat, too, because if you look at this chart, he's going by 0.2% for every tick there.

It hasn't changed at all, basically. last 10 years. Wait, so where did the misreported data derive from? That's a good question. I don't understand this stuff enough. But they're saying, like, if you check it with the other sources, it's wrong. The way that they're looking at the disposable income is not right. It's not the top 10% is not spending 50%. How do I know that? This one is right. What does total expenditures include or not include?

I want to know what I want to know what was causing the gap in the data. I do too. All right. Matthew Klein had a whole piece on this. I'll send it to you. It's in my, I wrote a blog post about it. Oh, what did you inflation adjust here? Oh, man, you are really into the Claude charts now.

The charts that Claude produces look really good, aren't they? They're so good because not only, so I had an oil, I had an inflation adjust to oil and gasoline. Not only does it do that, but it also like annotates the charts. Yes. So for all of the stuff. I did it one last week for median house price. versus median income.

And it showed me like the peaks and the valleys on the top. Like it's really, really good. So, yeah, and for all the peaks and the troughs, it gives you the date and the why. Yes. Great stuff. All right. Claude's coming for Charcot Kid Matt.

Never. New vehicles. What's going on? I didn't, I miss this article. Okay. New York Times has an article. It's just crazy. High car payments make ownership feel impossible.

And it's not because, most people buy a car every what? Five to seven years maybe. So I think there's a lot of people who are now cycling in going, whoa, and they interviewed a lot of these people being like, this is crazy. And they interviewed someone who was a 20-some year old who bought a brand new

$80,000 car and had to get it repossessed because they couldn't afford the payment. That didn't happen when we were kids. Of course not. But it says the new... Am I making that up? No, you're right. The new car.

stuff is way, way different. The first car that I bought, when I was kicked out of school for the second time, I was home and I was working full-time for years because I had to pay rent in Indiana, like a schmahawk, which, whatever, another story for another time. But I was working full-time and my bank account was getting, my coffers were filling up because I was living at home and I was earning wages, Ben. And I bought a used G35. Remember that car?

The sedan. You don't remember the Infinity G35? You were really not a car guy. Okay. So anyhow, I paid $26,000 for it. And that was like a cool car for a kid to be driving. Wait, I thought you said this didn't happen. You did it.

It was $26,000. Okay. That sounds a lot for back then. My first car was, you'll be surprised. You hear this, a Honda Accord that had 110,000 miles on it, and we bought it for $2,500. Yeah, but your parents gave that to you. Of course. My brother had it, then I got it.

You know, I paid for this with my grown-up money. So this says- $60,000 car, $80,000 car for a kid? Nuts. The average monthly new car payment reached $774 in January. up from 58 in January 2021, or the 20% of new car borrowers agreed to pay over $1,000 a month at the end of last year,

which was a record. I tend to agree. I think this is another social media thing where more people now think they deserve a new car than did in the past. I think, and maybe that's a misread on my part, but it's, I can't believe more people aren't just buying used cars.

But you know, that's what I was about to say. So my infinity was probably three or four years old when I bought it. Why aren't people buying used cars? Right. You buy a car that just comes off a lease and it's, yeah, because the depreciation right off a lot is huge. Not so.

All right. Let's talk AI. From the Wall Street Journal, AI isn't lightning workloads, is making them more intense. Okay? So they look at an analysis of 164,000 workers' digital work activity, and they did this, they tracked it. What happened when people started using AI? How did it impact their work?

Covering more than 443 million hours of work across over 1,100 employees, making one of the biggest studies of AI's effectiveness. on work habits to date. They looked at like the activity, 180 days before and after they started using the tools. And they find that AI intensified activity across nearly every category, the time they spent on email, messaging and chat apps, more than doubled by their use of business management tools such as human resources or accounting growths 94%. So the whole study said, people who use AI end up working more, not less.

I also think there's this thing where could we see a fake productivity boom where people are worried AI is going to take their job, so they actually work harder. Are we going to see a five-year fake, fake productivity boom? Because people are scared of AI taking a job, so they actually work harder. This has been my thesis. And some people will say, just wait, when AI improves, these numbers won't, this won't be the same. A, it'll take over.

But this has been my thesis the whole time that it's just going to make a lot of people work a lot more. I wonder what the output of the work is. Is it better quality, I would imagine it is. It's, dude, oops, I just leave that by accident. It's too early for these type of studies. I'm happy that they're out there. See, I knew you were going to say that.

Well, it is. That's the retort. It's like, it's like measuring the impact of the iPhone in 2007. Okay. What's the point? Chat's been out since 2022. True. I'm just saying.

Still, still quite early. Okay. I knew that would be, I knew that would be the retort. You know me so well. Yeah. Not well enough to say happy birthday, but David Levin tweeted. This is quite literally what Skynet does. Listen, so you're free and clear this summer when

My birthday, don't say happy birthday to me. I can't help it. I love you. I say happy birthday. That's what you do for people that you care about. You just, hey, thinking about you. Good to see you. How you doing?

All right, engineers wanted to make humanoid robots look more realistic. So they successfully grew actual living human skin in a lab and permanently attached it directly to the metal face of a robotic machine. So somebody grabbed that and said, this is quite literally what Skynet does to infiltrate the human resistance with the T-800, T-850, and T-88-8-8-8-8-8-Series, Terminators, which are Cyberdine Systems, infiltrator units covered in bioengineered, living tissue, including skin, blood and hair, over a metal end of skeleton. Dude, we were just talking about this recently.

I think you re-watch T2. That scene where Arnold cuts the skin of the right into arm and rips it off. Ficking rocked my world when I was, I remember, I wasn't allowed to see that movie when it came out. I was like six years old. My dad wouldn't let me say it. He took my brother and his friend to see it. So I probably saw it like two years later, but I had to be eight or nine years old.

And it like shook the ground. So did you ever, so my son is trying to move on to all the other action movies now? So all the expendables movies are on Netflix. Did you ever watch those movies? I only saw the first one. It was quite good. No? I mean, I don't know.

They might be some of the worst action movies ever made by like legitimate people. Every action star is in them. Oh yeah. I mean, but my son loves. I have zero memory of it other than having a great time. There's like four of them. Okay. So our friends at Cranecher's had a role.

at Futureproof last week or two weeks ago. And I made the point, again, that if you're the first person to buy a robot and the robot turns around and kills you, that's on you, not the robot. That's fair, right? Like, you don't want to be the first person to buy a robot. If it turns on it, because it's so strong, that's all I'm saying. But if you, I asked the robot. What's your favorite dance?

And it actually did the robot. Movies and robots, I watched over the weekend. Not good. mercy, which was a pretty blatant rip-off of minority report. Okay. I saw that it was on Amazon. I was going to watch it, too. Not good?

No. Okay. In fact, bad. Watchable, but barely. You know what? It's like you can put it on in the background while you write a blog post at 1130 at night. Okay. It's one of those.

So you do know me. All right. Anyhow, nobody wants this. Please. I don't want to see. I don't want to say this in the world ever. I know it's coming. All this stuff that people don't like.

So, for example, somebody emailed us. It's cool to think about the ability of the tech and what it means for business owners. But just know that if it is implemented at scale across an entire company, it is going to cost at least three people their job. Real jobs that offer value for small businesses. real people who are part of a healthy company culture who work together to deliver a product customers. I know the tech is new, so the possibilities are exciting.

But because of this, the marketing team who takes leads and turns them to estimates, estimators and project coordinator who schedules the crews to do the actual work are now on their way out the door. Not to mention the marketers who get leads aren't mentioned, but I'm sure there is tech that shrinks that team as well. I guess it's cool for owners and profitability, but not really. It just kind of sucks. And honestly, for what?

To grow the pie at what cost? And this person is saying what I'm sure a lot of us are feeling. Oh, yeah. And not to be call it's call it a lot of people hate AI. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't really, I don't disagree with this person. Do I want everything to stay the way it is?

Like, do we need? No, yeah. I wish you could stay the way it is. but for better and for worse, that's not how the world works. This is the history of the world. Yeah, it really is. Yeah.

And so I'm bullish. I think in 50 years, like I don't think that people will look back on like, this is a watershed moment up the end of humanity. But the dis, you know, not to be this dead horse, you talk about this every week.

Yeah, the displacement of now to then, it's going to be terrible. Real people. Losing their livelihood. It's fucking tragic. Here's another one. Michael and Ben, regarding the debate on yesterday's pot

about whether AI is making people, smarter or not. I can confirm that Ben is correct on this one. Sorry, Michael, but AI is absolutely making society less smart. All right, so here's the context. High school teacher. 90% of students have no desire to use AI the way Michael does as an amazing tool to follow their curiosity seeds. Michael's take assumes that most people have things they are curious about, and that's a very fair point. He said, unfortunately, most students do not have interest anymore. This is a super depressing email. They go home after. school, ask chat CBT to do their homework for them, and then scroll on their phones for eight

hours. I promise you that when they are asking chat to do their homework, they aren't doing it because they want to learn more about biology. Of course. It's not every student, but most are like this. If you thought the gap between the haves and the half-knots is bad now, it's going to get way worse than the next generation between the 90% of young adults that are addicted to social media and condition to outsource all of their thinking to AI and the 10% who are learning to think for themselves. I no longer consider my primary job to be teaching content to students. My main goal is to prevent as many young adults as I can

from being ruined by technology. This seems a little bit dire. It's a little over the top. Do you get the sense... But I get it, but I understand. I get the sense just from having my kids in school that technology has made teachers, I don't know what percentage, just...

I feel like it's beaten down a lot of teachers. And you hear stories all the time about the, it's not just the technology, but kids wanting to get their own way. And in the past, it was kind of like the, I've just heard a lot of times that it's harder to punish kids these days. And it's not as easy. And it just seems like the collective centpen among teachers is way lower than it was when we grew up. Didn't it seem like, and I went to a Catholic school. So I had some nuns. And it just seemed like the teachers all just like nothing.

this stuff didn't get them, nothing got them down. It's like they just did stuff. Like, if you liked it, great. If you didn't like it, I don't care either. It seems like the teachers nowadays are just way more beaten down

by a lot of this stuff that's going on in the world. Is that fair? I don't know. Dealing with phones, dealing with the way, different ways kids are these days, I think it's a lot harder

to be a teacher today than it was in the past. Oh, yes, for sure. I have a friend who's a teacher in my hometown. And he said he has kids bring a note from a doctor saying,

And my friend is kind of an old school kind of guy. He's a throwback kind of guy. And the kid hands him a note, and it says from the doctor, I can't remember what the reasoning was, but the kid needs access to their phone for their anxiety. Like, they have to have a phone on them. So the parents obviously signed off on this. And my friend takes the note, and he crumbles it up,

and he throws it in the trash, and he says, go sit down. But that's the kind of thing, right? I don't know what the... What is wrong with those parents? Right. They coerced a doctrine anyway. Are you... Pretty sad.

Wow. Wow, wow, wow, wow. All right. This is a really uplifting episode so far. My God. What is wrong with those people? All right. What do we got?

The Bitcoin buffer UTFs are working. Okay. This is from Todd-Sone. We had the Calamos. You were intrigued by this. I used one of these. funds. When I sold my Bitcoin, it was the Thanksgiving of 2024 maybe or something. Yeah. No, 25. Okay. And so I, I know, what's going to? You're right. So I initially, I thought, like, I don't want to miss out of potential upside. So I put it in some of these buffered ETFs and Bitcoin crashed and it worked. Yeah. It did work.

Remember, like the zero percent downside one? It looks like it's working. So, yeah. Cool to say. All right, this is interesting. real quick, we mentioned hyper liquid last weekend or last show. I was looking at it over the weekend, the S&P 500. Now, interestingly, I noticed that they called it the USA 500. Why? They don't have carte blanche to just use S&P's proprietary data, right? So this is, so our friend Frank Chaparro has a substack about this stuff. And he quoted Cameron Drinkwater.

Great last name. Chief Product and Operations Officer at Dow Jones indices. This collaboration expands access and utility of our flagship benchmarks within digital trading environments. We believe digitally native investors should demand the institutional quality standards that define our indices. We are thrilled to work with trade to do so. So anyhow, interesting on two fronts.

Remember, we spoke a couple of weeks ago about the moat for some of these companies that are getting destroyed by AI. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You can't just snap your fingers and replace the ratings agencies just because you think you could rate a credit with a robot. That's not how it works. So I thought it was interesting on that front. And also because we had a headline from the Washington saying that the New York Stock Exchange, kind of an established player and the financial ecosystem, said Tuesday that it was joining with Securitized to develop its tokenized securities trading platform. This would mark a step forward from the tokenized stocks traded outside of the U.S.

Under these current offerings, token holders aren't granted the same benefit. All right. Anyway, this is not particularly relevant. I don't think to like 95% of this audience. But I wonder. I just wonder what the liquidity is going to be for these products. I'm guessing at first it's going to be, you know, not great. But for people, for, for crypto natives, for people that have all their money on the crypto blockchain,

who don't want to move their account, their money from Coinbase, back into Fidelity, back to the Coinbase. you have your money and these crypto-native solutions, and particularly for people outside of the United States, that want to use their stable coins to access U.S. securities, that's what this is for. Again, not applicable to a lot of people, but the New York Stock Exchange getting in here, S&P getting in here,

noteworthy. It is funny how much people want to know over the weekend what's going on, especially in a geopolitical crisis like this. Yeah, dude. Where's the S&P trading? But doesn't it seem like the after hours there's always like a bigger overreaction, and then the market opens and it kind of comes down a little. Yeah.

But it's not for you. I think it's, but it's going to be interesting. Yeah, people are going to want to use it, but I don't know. You know, I mean, the market used to be open Saturday from 9 to noon back in the day. I think it stopped in the 50s. We haven't spoken about these stocks in a while. Dude, Microsoft is getting f***ing annihilated. It's down.

On what now? It's so it's at fresh lows. lowest level since April of lowest level since April 2025. Is it too simple to think that people are using using it as a proxy for open AI? Sure. Yes, I do. It's down 31%. By the way, all of the, all of the software names that I sold not to brag have rolled over big time.

Not very confident aspiring. Salesforce is breaking not to new lows, but breaking the recent range of, you know, it's, it's settled down, breaking down. breaking down. Not great. Microsoft down 30, Microsoft down almost a third is kind of crazy. With a, with a market only down six.

Not, listen, I was talking to Jimmy Labanthal about this. It's going lower. Obviously, the sellers are in control, okay? Duh,

you don't need to be a genius to figure that out. This seems like getting close to plug your nose and buy territory. It does. Now, I... For a company like this?

I will wait for it to stop going lower. Not saying I'm going to nail the bottom of this. I don't even know if I'm going to buy it. But this seems like it's a, an overreaction at this point. Down 31%. Come on. That's a lot.

You know, who's selling? So this thing went from $4 trillion at the peak to $2.8 trillion now in market- I'll tell you who's selling. If you're in a stock that is in a 30% drawdown and it's your real money, yeah, you're scared, right? I mean, this is, we know how human behavior works, but. Well, it's also people looking for AI losers. that's the truth we've been on this.

So I think all the MagSsev is still down on the year. Barry sent me this article. I regret buying. I wish I'd never bought a house at the cut. And they go through all these stories of people who bought a house. They realize like, wait, this is going to be a fixer upper and it's going to take way longer than I thought. I'll read some quotes me an article. My home felt like these golden handcuffs trapping me in the job I hated.

This is my 39-year-old. if I just invested my money in the stock market instead of buying a home, I'd be a lot richer. Andrea 27 from Michigan. So in the 2010s after the great financial crisis and the housing market crashed, there was all these stories in like the Atlantic and all the coastal elitist wrote all these pieces being like, homeownership is dead. Millennials are never going to buy a home. No one's going to buy a home anymore because they saw housing prices crash. And I said, I'm shorting this take to high heaven. There's no way. People are going to buy homes. That's what people do. People get married. They buy homes. This is what happens. This is the next stage in life. Do you think

that there will be a decent percentage of the next generation that's going to change their minds about homeownership and just go, no, I would rather invest in the stock market and rent. No. I don't think even like a 10%, 15% of them are like, no, I don't want to. Yes. Yes, I do believe that. I think that this is going to be a real thing for some people. I do believe that there will be a certain percentage of the homeownership,

newly homeownership population. I don't know if it's 5 or 15, that will experience buyers and more. they got a shitty house, whatever, their job, their life status changed. Of course, that's going to happen. However, you have to think about the alternative. If you need to be in a house because you are a growing family, it's just in certain places difficult and in other places impossible to rent. Yeah, I think it's such a stark difference between buying and

selling. Like, if you don't have rich parents to help you or an inheritance in San Francisco or New York City, like, you have no shot at buying a home. Well, it depends on the neighborhood. But on Long Island, for example, you can't rent a house. I mean, yes, maybe, like, maybe they, you know, maybe there's like houses here and there barely, you know, few per neighborhood. You're right. And Grandin-Ralge, if you want to be in a house, you got to buy it. So this is interesting because, so the Wall Street Journal had this piece, their home wouldn't sell so they became America's latest accidental landlords. And They told those people who, like, I put it on the market. People weren't buying what I was putting out for the offer.

So I decided, listen, I got a 3% mortgage. I'm going to rent it. I'm going to just buy a new house and I'll be a landlord. And they said that this is 2.2% of rental listings on Zillow in November had previously been listed for sale. In some places, Houston, Denver, Austin, Tampa, it's even higher. It's like 4%, which doesn't sound like that much, but it's the highest has been on record, they're saying.

And so people list their house. They can't sell it so they decide just to rent it instead. and they have all these stories about people going, oh, this is awful. What a terrible experience this was. My home got wrecked. The bathrooms were gross. I had to fix stuff.

I didn't want to do this. I think that's being it, you know, owning rental homes can be, can work for people who know what they're doing. If you don't know what you're doing, I would not want to be in that position. I did that. And I got very lucky.

I could not have gotten luckier with the timing of it. When I bought it, when I sold it. And it wasn't fun. and I had like almost no problems. Owning a house, whether, you know, even if it's your own house that you live, it's a money pit. It's a lot of responsibility. And it's the type of thing that everybody, it's a type of thing that you can't know until you know.

So remember, I actually have a positive story on this. It was probably like 18 months ago. We had a little shingle problem with the roof. We had a little leak and a roof rate of come. Remember he said, listen, I don't even show up to your house for less than 500 bucks. It's $500 to get me in the door, and then whatever it costs. And it took the guy 10 minutes and I paid him, I don't know, $1,200. It was ridiculous.

But like, what are you going to do? I can't get up in a fixed roof myself. So at our place on the lake, it's really, really windy. And I had like five or six shingles that blew up. My neighbor said, hey, Ben, something's wrong with these shingles. They blew up. So I got a recommendation for a different roofer, try someone else. The guy came.

He said, oh, yeah, I get up there, and I could cock him down and I'd staple him in place. And he said, you know what? And he got up there. And I took him 10 minutes. He fixed these six shingles that I'd, probably could have never done. I would have messed it up somehow. And he's like, I didn't leave the top because he wanted to have a little, whatever, he's explaining to me. I don't know he's talking about. I said, all right, that's awesome. Great work. What do I,

what do I, what's easiest way to pay you? He goes, no, free of charge. So what I mean free of charge? And he said, this is how we grow our business. We have no marketing budget. If we have a small job like this, that's going to take a few minutes. And this guy drew 45 minutes to get there probably. He said, we do it free of charge. All I ask is that word of mouth. If someone asks you for a roofer, you use us and tell me. And I said, I said, I said, love that guy. Wow, that is a great business today. He said, you know what? What's crazy? Our business is growing like crazy. We're moving to the east side

of the state. We're moving to the north. He's like, he's like, it actually works. Isn't it so? That is such a great idea. Isn't it so obvious to do shit to behave that way? I want to come back to us in a second. You know who didn't behave this way? The guy that charged me 500 bucks to take a dump in my house, leave a stain and tell me I need to spend $8,000 on a new boiler that I didn't need. That guy will

never get my business again. I mean, obviously. All right. There is There is a perception among people in general. And even at our company, Ridholtz Wealth Management, that if you respond to somebody immediately, that they might perceive you as being not busy. Right? Right.

You understand that mentality? It's self-concant. It's insecurity, I suppose. Right. Don't they something better to do with their time? Yeah. Right. The opposite is true.

the opposite is true. This is a hashtag business life lesson for Michael. I love it when I get an email back right away. Of course you do. That's great. Of course you do. So we have a friend in our neighborhood

that does our insurance. He does everybody's insurance. And if you email him with anything or text him, he responds to you immediately and always. And if you need something to be taken care of, He does it immediately and always every single time. And when I get that response, I don't think, huh, he must not be busy.

He is one of the busiest people that I know. He doesn't have time to not answer things immediately because it will just stack up. Right. So this should be common sense stuff, right? It's typically the point of view of a younger person who is like insecure because they don't, like, the life experience and whatever, like, oh, if I respond too fast, they must think that I'm not, no, I'm telling you, it feels so good when a service person responds immediately. Yes. And guess what? If I have a big roofing issue, I'm never calling another company again, ever.

And I'm going to tell, I'm going to tell all my friends about this in the area. This is the company up to call. Anytime, exactly. Anytime somebody tells me, hey, do you know insurance person? Yes, I have the best guy. The best. He responds to you immediately. I was really interested in the guy's like, it works better than you can imagine. Our business is growing like crazy. And I was like, that is, that made my day the fact that this guy didn't try to bend me over to fix a couple of shingles. People get excited to share positive stories in their life. Right?

Because it's unusual. I went at the soccer. My daughter's soccer game this weekend I told like five people the story because I'm like, it was awesome. I'm going to send you the name of this person. Yeah. Anyway, if you want to speak to my insurance guy on Long Island, I'll set you right up. Yeah, your car broker. Although, do we blame your car broker at all for the fact that you always get a terrible car?

Is it their fault at all? Is it your fault? You know, real quick, because this is not a very interesting story. There was two accidents. My car and Robin's car were each in an accident within three weeks of each other. I have been in an accident since 2002. Someone nailed you? I was coming.

I was pulling out of Starbucks. And I was coming this way. And she, like, came in from behind me because this is a camera, right? So, like, if somebody was behind me, I would have seen it. I hit her. It's like, how did you hit? I'm like, I'm so sorry. Are you okay?

Give me your number. I'll take care of it. It was very minor damage. I texted her. She never responded. They don't want to do it, huh? Anyway, and then somebody backed into my wife, so I took the car. This is, who cares?

Very not interesting. Fun stuff. All right. So, private credit. This is from CNBC. Let's say this for next week. This story is not going anywhere. here's here's the here's the only the the the the teaser that I will say yes private credit has problems

or yes there will be problems in private credit there's no doubt about it don't insert our don't insult our intelligence and tell us that the portfolio is performing we know nobody's worried about the performance today it's people worried about future disruption with a lot of these software companies yeah this is an illiquid asset class so it's not like all the sudden in a month things will automatically be better and you'll notice like it's it's so slow moving. I don't know what changes the current trajectory. Here's the LOL and all of this.

The Cliffwater Direct Lending Index, which traces its inception back to 2005. The worst year, of course, is 2008. The return was negative 6.5%. It is really kind of amazing that we're spending this much time on it. And we should be spending a lot of time in it. But if you contextualize it this way, that let's just assume 2027 maybe is a bad year

and it's going to lose, I'm making this up, I can't know. 4%. It's just kind of hilarious. Like, that's a bad day in the stock market. Right. It's not going to be like a 50% loss or something. Like people, yes. Okay.

All right. We'll get more into this next week. We'll actually put a pin in this as well. Calshy raised more than a billion dollars at a valuation of $22 billion. I don't get it. We'll cover this in depth next week. One thing that I do like. Big number.

One thing that I love, Delta 1, Walter Bloomberg, tweeted, Cal sheet to block athletes and politicians are trading. Thank God. Thank God they're doing something, right? A lot of people are like, why is this not a regulation already? Why did they have to do this? The government should tell them this. It's nuts.

It's nuts. Again, another thing, 100% approval rating. Government officials, particularly elected officials, that are making laws should not be allowed to own individual stocks. If you, if people in the financial media that are anchors can't own individual stocks, are you fucking kidding me? It's crazy. All right.

Bloomberg got this big, Bloomberg got this huge feature. Slashing tax bills for the, for rich investors is a one trillion dollar business. And it goes through all these different ways that people are not, it's saying like, listen, I know active managers can't beat the index. So I would rather have tax efficient strategy. And it goes to all these different. the tax were long short stuff, 351 conversions, box spread borrowing, no distribution ETFs like box these private placement life insurance and direct indexing and exchange funds,

all this stuff now that you can do. And I don't think people outside with wealth management industry realize how big this tax-aware investing stuff is getting and going to be. And it's just going to get bigger as baby boomers need to sell down their assets in the years ahead. This is going to be an enormous business. And I think people who aren't in this, if people who aren't rich knew how easy it is, not easy, how many avenues there are to defer taxes, I think they would be madder than they are about the rich. The solutions that are out there now are kind of the same. If you have assets, if you have a million dollars, I'm making that number up,

if you have an investable portfolio of any size, the tools that are available to you through wealth managers like us, it's mind-blowing stuff. There are times when we've said, I can't believe this is legal, but it is. We've got tax lawyers on it and tax, you know, people look through these with a fine tooth comb to make sure, like, this is on the up and up. And it kind of seems like, how is this even possible? But people have realized ways. Now, there's no, there's, there's, there is no free lunch with this stuff. No, taxes are paid eventually.

These are like deferral strategies. But we know a tax, if you have a lot of money and you can't put all this money into a tax deferred IRA or whatever. the ability to defer taxes and let it compound just makes the money way bigger. So anyway, this is a thing that in the years ahead of wealth manager, this is going to be the thing. I don't care if you all perform the index. I care if you're on an after-tax basis. All right. Great news in Movie Land.

Project Hail Mary joins Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer in becoming only the second non-sequel or non-franchised installment for the past decade to open to $80 million more domestically. IMAX kicked ass, 20% of the overall domestic market. Nuts with 2% of the theaters, whatever you said.

Yeah, it was, it was so good. The book was amazing. I think when we found out that they were making a movie out of this, we were like, how are they going to do the alien? I was nervous.

Two nitpicks that I have. Did you watch the movie or no? I haven't seen it yet. Okay, so two nipicks that I have. It was too long. Whatever. It was. It was 15, 20 minutes too long. Maybe I missed it. But, and this is not a spoiler. The premise of the book and the movie, which was very true to the book, is that Ryan Gosling wakes up on a spaceship and he doesn't remember how we got there. It's a great start to it. Yeah. To the book. I remember that. And there are all these flashbacks. and slowly he's putting the pieces back together. I don't know if in the movie they made it clear that he didn't remember how he got there. Because there's not like that exposition

where he's not like, hey, where am I? Right. Yeah. Now maybe they explained that I just missed it. Maybe I wasn't paying attention. But anyway, that aside, this was exactly what you want from a blockbuster. It was so good.

It was so much fun. It was super kid friendly. Matter of fact, I'm going to take Kobe probably this weekend to go see it. Because it is, I want him to have that type of experience like I did seeing all these movies at a young age. It is one of those things that he's nine years old. He's going to remember seeing this for the rest of his life. So I haven't taken George from IMAX yet. So I might have to do that for this weekend for him.

So we had a trip this weekend. We were on the road. We went to a March Madness game from Michigan women's basketball game. My daughters loved it. So we're driving. On the way there, my wife put on, she listens to the Kelsey Brothers podcast because she's a Tilosv fan. So, of course, she follows the Kelsey Brothers.

And they had Ryan Gosling on. Is there a person right now in entertainment with a better? approval rating than Ryan Gosling. No. I mean, he had, I listened to him on the podcast, and I've never heard on the podcast for. He had amazing stories. He was funny. He's kind of, he still seems down to earth.

I don't think there's anyone with a better approval rating than him right now. Everyone loves that guy. And how could you not? The story of the, of the movie is that there are these little microbes that are eating the sun. And of course, it's going to kill everybody on the planet. And so Gasseling talked about how Andy Weir was part of writing the movie. And the whole thing was like, he gave all the credit to this guy I wrote the book. He's like, we wanted to say true to this guy's book because the book was so good.

We just didn't want to mess it up. But so Ryan Gossing had chemistry. So he meets an alien out there and they team up to tackle the problem. Not a spoiler. It's in the trailer. He had on-screen chemistry with this alien. Like it was just so much fun. It was so great.

And the IMAX is like, at least the one in New York City, the giant. giant one in Lincoln Square. You can't get in it. It's like sold out forever. Interesting. I'm sure. It's just a better way to watch the movie. It made me really happy.

It was so good. Okay. Any other recommendations for you? No, just I'm enjoying DTF quite a bit. Okay. I took your recommendation. I watched the first episode. I love the show is with subtle humor like that.

The show made me laugh at the time. It's very funny. It's, but you have to, I feel like you have to have the right. Some people wouldn't think so. Some people, but, But I really liked it. I watched Rooster 2. I plowed through the first few episodes of that.

Good call. That's a U-S show, right? Sometimes it's nice to just have a 20 to 30-minute show that doesn't have, like, it's not like the weight of the world on it. It's just kind of a relaxing show. It's light. But here's what I love. Because this was in good fortune, which did you watch yet?

The Keanu one. What's that? The Aziz Ansari, Seth, Roh, no, no, no. I haven't seen it. I love how people with the cold plunged and saunos are getting roasted now. I feel like that's a great thing to roast, because they totally roast rich people doing the cold plunge into the sauna, back to the cold plunge, back to the sauna, and talking about how great it is for you. And they do that in Rooster, too. And because this is the kind of thing where, you know, the old joke, like, how do you tell someone to Harvard? Because talk to him for five minutes and they'll tell you. You can't have a cold plunge in a sauna today without telling someone about it. You have to tell someone. It's impossible to have one in it. And not tell you about it. There's somebody in our life close to us that...

The cold plunge person? That just got Asana and a cold plunge. Who do you think it is? Okay. I have no idea. Come on, dude. One guess. That works with us?

Yes. Oh. Barry. No. Chris. Oh, that's true. Oh, Chris. Okay.

That's true. I guess I couldn't see Barry getting a cold plunge. But yes. Barry has no patience for that. Of course, Chris is getting a son in it. I guess what? I'm going to partake. I'm a huge schvitz guy.

I love a sauna. But I just love a sauna too, but I wouldn't do the cold plunge. I love how these things become fads, though. And it's like you have to tell someone about it. It's so good for your circulation. Anyway, my wife and I watched Hamnet, which is on Peacock. Wait, hold on, hold on, just a question. On Rooster, do you think that anything will happen in the show,

or do you sort of just think this is what it is? I think this is kind of what it is. is, which I like. And I love that Steve Krell is still doing this kind of stuff. Yeah, it's just, it's just very easy. There's nothing mean about it. It's not cynical. It's not an AI nonsense. It's just good. And setting a show on a college campus just works all the time. That setting always works. Steve Krell is, I think, an underrated actor for how good he is. I think he's subtly a very good actor. Anyway, so Hamnet is on Peacock now. So my wife and I watched it last night. and the star, she won the, I think her name is Jesse Buckley,

she won Best Actress at the Oscar. Did you bet on that one? I did not. Okay. So this is not a Michael movie. It's a, I think it's got true and fictionalized parts about William Shakespeare's actual life. Okay? His kids, his wife.

And the first three quarters of the movie are kind of a rough watch in some ways. It's not a, it's not a, it's not, it's kind of a sad story. I didn't, I had no idea what it was about. I went in totally blind, okay? It's a, it's a sad story. And the last half hour of the movie is unbelievable. It's so good. And the ending is amazing and I couldn't believe like, I can't believe.

I was ready to like hate this movie. Like, ah, it's just kind of depressing and it's really well acted. Everyone in it is a great actor. The performances are amazing. But I'm like, God, it's such a downer. And then the end happened and I'm like, wow, that was very powerful. Were you on your phone the entire time? I watched the whole movie.

I was not on my phone at all. Impressive. I don't think it's a Michael movie. Oh, I know it's not. Yeah, no. Tell Robin to watch it, but do you, probably not for you. No, you wouldn't make it like 20 minutes of the movie. Yeah, she doesn't, she doesn't, I don't think, I don't think it's for her either.

She doesn't love the movie. But it got me thinking. She's not a huge movie person. Bill Shakespeare, if he's alive today, what streamer is he writing for? He starts out at HBO, then Paramount Poetman. Paramount poaches him. He'd be writing a show because he did theater. So he'd be writing streaming shows.

So he'd start on Netflix or start on HBO because he'd do like highbrow. Then he'd go to Netflix. Then Paramount would poach him probably. Right? I'm trying to think what would Bill Shakespeare be writing about these days if he's doing a show. And I'm not going to lie. I've never seen Hamlet. I did not know what Hamlet was about.

Does that make me an idiot? That's one of those things I probably should know. I had no idea. I knew the lines. I know to be or not to be is from that. I had no idea. I know it's a tragedy. I couldn't have told you what the plot of Hamlet is. Did you see Billy Madison? Shouldn't have pulled you up with anything you need to know? Close enough. All right. Yeah, Hamnet. It's a film, that's for sure. But I enjoyed it.

Okay. Especially the end. All right. Animal Spirits at the Compound News.com. Happy birthday to Michael. Hope you had a great day. That's too late. I reject your birthday. Wishes. Thank you. All right. We'll see next time. You know what the worst one is. Happy B-day. H-B-D. See you next week.