Chit Chat Stocks - Meta, Microsoft, and Tesla; Silver/Gold and Dollar Debasement; Burry's Wild GameStop Pitch $GME

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

The Investing Power Hour is live-streamed every Thursday on the Chit Chat Stocks Podcast YouTube channel at 5:00 PM EST. This week we discussed: (00:00) Introduction (01:37) Microsoft's Earnings Breakdown (04:18) CapEx and Cloud Commitments (10:08) Meta's Earnings (12:38) Tesla's Earnings (28:18) Investments in AI (33:59) The State of the Automotive Market (36:04) Tesla's Valuation and Future Prospects (40:33) The Musk Empire and Its Financial Maneuvering (43:23) ASML's Growth and Market Position (46:14) GameStop and Michael Burry's Investment Philosophy (50:50) Small Cap Insights: Vital Farms (55:03) The Surge of Silver and Gold Prices (01:03:58) Meme Stocks and Market Speculation ***************************************************** Subscribe to Emerging Moats Research: emergingmoats.com  ********************************************************************* Chit Chat Stocks is presented by Interactive Brokers. Get professional pricing, global access, and premier technology with the best brokerage for investors today:  https://www.interactivebrokers.com/  Interactive Brokers is a member of SIPC.  ********************************************************************* Fiscal.ai is building the future of financial data. With custom charts, AI-generated research reports, and endless analytical tools, you can get up to speed on any stock around the globe. All for a reasonable price.  Use our LINK and get 15% off any premium plan: ⁠https://fiscal.ai/chitchat  ********************************************************************* Disclosure: Chit Chat Stocks hosts and guests are not financial advisors, and nothing they say on this show is formal advice or a recommendation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is presented by Interactive Brokers. You research your investments, but did you research your broker? In 2025, IBKR retail clients averaged a 19.2% return, beating the S&P 500's 17.9%. Over time, the broker you choose makes a difference. If you want to learn why, head on over to ibkr.com slash 2025. More on this later in the show. Welcome to Chit Chat Stocks, a podcast that helps you discover your next great investment. I'm one of your hosts, Ryan Henderson, and I am joined as always by the one and only

Brett Schaefer. Today, we've got our weekly Power Hour episode where we talk all things financial markets and it is earning season. So we've got plenty to discuss. Microsoft just reported an hour ago as of this recording, Meta reported, Tesla reported. This might be the biggest day for the quarter, actually. But yes, we do these live every Thursday at 5 p.m. Eastern time on YouTube.

So if you ever want to ask us any questions, head on over to chit chat stocks on YouTube and at five o'clock Eastern time on Thursdays, we'll be going live. So you can ask us any questions in the comments. Brett, where do we want to start? Well, did you say that this one was Wednesday? I was doing some work, putting up our, putting up our thumbnail. This one we are doing Wednesday. So it is a day before, but it's how about our world?

90% of them are on Thursdays. And then if we have something in our schedule, it'll be Wednesday at the same time. Either way, it comes out early Friday morning, East Coast time. But always publish to the podcast players on Fridays. On Fridays for the podcast players. Yes, yes, yes. Let's talk Microsoft. There's just so many earnings to go through.

I do want to save time, though, for at the end of the episode, maybe, Burry's, I don't even know how to describe it, intricate pitch for GameStop. it was kind of out of the blue very very surprising read as well as what's happening in gold silver and the devaluing of the dollar but before we get to all those we have so many earnings to discuss ryan what happened to microsoft i didn't even look i'm seeing you have a chart here your friends your your team at fiscal ai updated the capex is is literally going off the chart that that uh that you have on my screen here just about yeah yeah it was a bit of a bizarre quarter for Microsoft, kind of a mixed bag. I should give a shout out to Fiscal.ai

because the numbers were up really quick today. So if you're someone that likes to watch earnings very closely and pour through all the numbers immediately after, I know that not everyone does that, but some of us do. Fiscal.ai is a super helpful tool for it. If we go by segment, it looked pretty good across the board so azure which seems to drive most of the business grew 39 year over year that's azure and other cloud services is what they group it as microsoft 365 consumer up 29 microsoft commercial up 17 linkedin up 11 dynamics 365 which admittedly i don't know that business super well uh up 19 windows up one percent xbox minus five so xbox is the only business for them uh only segment that wasn't growing i gotta say bobby kodak over

at activision timed that departure perfectly selling to xbox i think they uh microsoft might of got left with a bag there uh yeah the uh money ball as they say right he's he's one of the the most surprising acting role i think i've ever heard of my life do you remember this ryan are you he was in money yeah he was the owner of the oakland days really yeah that's right absolutely fascinating him and brad pitt chopping it up in the acting room that is and he was good he was good at his job but yes i agree bobby kodak a lot of people have poor opinions of but as a capital allocator and timing the market quite good and it might be time for microsoft to let's say just maybe get rid of this thing sell it i know it just kind of treads water and it

i don't know i just imagine it's a bit of a drag on costs because i don't know i've been in and out of the gaming industry as an investor probably for the better part of the last five years and hyper competitive xbox is kind of i don't want to say in no man's land but they've got some you would think it's a better business than it is that's that's probably how i'll leave things but the thing that stood out here was there must have been i don't know if this was one transaction with OpenAI or what exactly happened here, but the commercial remaining performance obligations, which is basically their cloud backlog, grew from $392 billion to $625 billion quarter over quarter. So it grew 110% compared to last year.

This is like what we saw with Oracle, where it's basically just one big commitment, I'm guessing from a single customer. It's got to be OpenAI. I don't know who else would commit to that. Who else would commit? Yeah, that audacious number. I will say there was an article, these are developing here. I saw either earlier this week, it was probably late last week, that Altman was in the desert.

I think we talked about this on the show, trying to raise money, trying to raise $50 billion from some of the Gulf states. And we'll say also at the same time, Saudi Arabia is trying to raise funds from other gulf states because they're do you remember that those projects i would follow for kind of a joke segment the line all the the resorts the futurist the the skyscraper that was going to be 30 miles long it turns out that hasn't worked out and they might need some money but altman i guess is not getting what he wants there and he i don't know who dropped it but there was an article in the wall street journal that softbank is in talks to invest 30 billion more dollars into open ai so

second choice to the gulf states but maybe uh masa sun well it feels like a very adam newman move again we've mentioned that but that's where these commitments come from if those don't come through these remaining performance obligations i mean are worthless yeah and i think they are like most people i don't think that's what most analysts care about for for the business i mean they're like the cloud growth is good and they have you know real earnings to show for so it's not like microsoft's just clinging to this and it's microsoft didn't it's not like they bragged about this like oracle different than oracle yeah yeah this was just kind of an accounting have to i guess like if you get that much of a commitment from open ai you have to put it somewhere and i

guess it belongs in your commercial remaining performance obligations but the part that caught me off guard and it seems like caught analysts off guard as well capex grew 89 percent year over year so and maybe you can share the chart but for anyone listening it's basically Here are the quarterly CapEx figures from Microsoft for the last two years, $11 billion, $14 billion, $15 billion, $16 billion, $17 billion, $17 billion, $19 billion, $30 billion this quarter. So just a massive quarter over quarter jump. I don't know. I got to listen to the conference call because I don't know what happened. I don't know what caused this. But investors seem to be souring on the CapEx plans a little bit because the stock was down after hours despite beating sort of across the board on the top and bottom line. is this the like a memory chip uh supply shortage i've heard that that's causing a lot of increase in capex budgets oh okay maybe that could be incremental i would yeah i would be curious what the dollar amount is versus like all right the same time a year ago what was the same like

per data center or per maybe i don't you know wanna how you describe a unit of chip capacity or something like that, or per supercomputer, however you want to describe it, maybe that is going up. And we have, as you're right, we have seen memory prices rise. I think maybe this is one of those moments where investors are going, all right, that ROIC better show up. These are some large numbers because, man, that revenue on the back end better be there. and there is nervousness around open ai burning so much money every year i think compared to amazon

and alphabet microsoft is in a little trickier of a situation where they could put in a bunch of capex open ai sure he is the dominant player today in usage but their losses are nothing to sneeze at and the projector losses are nothing to sneeze at so if things go wrong microsoft could see quite a bit of an overbuild, I would guess. And that's maybe what investors are thinking about, you know, whoa, $30 billion a quarter. That is quite large. And I think, I don't know if you put it, again, this happened an hour before recording, so we're trying to get all the information as quickly as possible. I believe Meta is guiding for well over $100 billion in CapEx this year. So the competition is going to continue and i could just see investors get nervous about that it is i mean

the music keeps playing for the ai infrastructure thing like in investment theme if you own memory chip stocks if you own hell nvidia uh some of the other players too any of the ancillary ones that like provide uh sort of the picks and shovels providers for the infrastructure so like amphenol stuff like that you're like as long as capex forecasts continue to increase each quarter i think the music will keep playing that is the music right there yeah that is playing the music we have thank you for the uh comment there i don't know why i didn't respond there but i wanted to say thank you don't know who was commenting but they said the guide for meta was 115 billion to 135 billion dollars for 2026 that is a huge jump especially because

they don't have a third-party cloud service yeah now i will say the advertising growth for meta is really strong the like ad impressions grew 18 percent yearly year on top of pretty good ad impressions growth last year this is it's it kind of shocks me how how much ad impressions can grow for meta every quarter because and maybe this is a testament to their platforms that the ads have almost become like just like integrated with the experience but it feels like a heavy ad load to begin with And they're still finding new places to deploy these ads. Part of that is the people on their platforms continue to grow. So daily active people still growing 7% year over year, which just boggles my mind. They're at almost 4 billion people. the uh a lot of those are very at this point are very very i'll just say not valuable people as

they're the kind of lower end of the gdp per capita areas lower end of the income per capita areas that are just getting their smartphones but i agree i mean they're still growing that's one of the areas i guess i i've never really spent any time on instagram so i don't know with any personal experience what like how that how it works but it feels like perfect place to have advertisements and at some point you go out there's too much ad load but they keep optimizing that that algo and i guess this is where the return on that capex is coming but you mentioned here they're seeing a big contraction in margins what were exactly the figures there do we had those on fiscal yet or is that something that they should be up there already yeah all

right let me check are you talking gross or operating uh operating for sure i assume gross margins contracted a little bit too headcount grew a little bit but it shouldn't have been i think headcount only grew like six percent year over year whereas revenue is growing 24 so i'm not 100 sure what that is there maybe it's the depreciation of all this capex but we'll see well okay so i think if we look at the margin it's kind of been normalized at 41 but last quarter sorry last year in the same quarter was at 48 so year over year it's down a lot but it's been around the 40 range since september 2023 it is i think of all the ceos the last one to throw in the towel on capex plans would be mark zuckerberg

like yeah they're still spending reality labs losses are still growing if everyone want like let's say a year down the road all the big tech companies say shoot we overbuilt met is going to be the last one to to admit it i think we have a comment that says 115 billion is larger than their operating cash flow or close to it that's insane that yeah that's that's truly insane it this here's the thing for like microsoft let's go back to microsoft for example i guess meta at least they have a very good gauge on like consumer demand because they're building it for their own applications whereas although i will say they don't know what usage is going to be like for llama so maybe they are grossly overestimating their like model usage but i

would project low yeah microsoft tsmc report reported last week and they talked about how how much attention they are paying to true customer demand like they're going to the customers making sure that the ai is improving their businesses and it's worthwhile for them to keep increasing capacity i wonder if microsoft's kind of just thinking well we see we see strong demand everywhere let's just increase let's let's spend as much as we can to increase capacity and we'll fill it up somewhere whether it's open ai whether it's our own services what happens if everyone thinks that though i know and i can't i could totally be wrong i'm sure they've done more analysis that i'm talking about here but god why can't why can't they just add capacity slowly

they're afraid they're going to miss out on the race the race to ai greatness i'm sure open ai wants more capacity i'm not i'm not exactly sure on that that front i would think if you're open ai though you should now let's put you in a tough position competing with alphabet wouldn't you want to raise prices on your heavy usage tiers but then you maybe people switch to gemini i'm not exactly sure it's a tough it's a tough position because everyone kind of has knives out and they're getting very defensive but they have to go on the attack i think you understand what i mean no no the fact that everyone's going full in here makes it tougher for everyone else yeah and it really starts with opening i and the company in the

most difficult position is probably tsmc because they have to contract and predict on a multi-year period on what their capex is going to be because if they start constructing a factory now it will be ready in two to three years so all their capex this year or most of it like for the beginning of construction is not going to show up until 2028. So they have to think that the party is going to keep continuing until then. And that's why TSMC is probably the most tremendous, where maybe Microsoft,

Amazon, Meta, why not any other, Alphabet can maybe slow down faster. Who knows? Yeah, I'm just kind of stuck in no man's land with these companies. I don't know what, well,

Microsoft has always felt a little expensive to begin with but like google right now it basically puts this massive question mark on a business that was otherwise like so easy to own and i guess at least with google they've got very easy ways to monetize it but like it's bizarre to me that if google didn't have all this capex i think it might still trade at a similar multiple yeah maybe but people wouldn't you think you're wouldn't you think investors discount it because it's like and i'm saying

this for google but it applies to microsoft and meta and stuff it wouldn't you think the investors would be concerned by the capex spend and like give it a discount on the multiple because that yeah yeah i agree would you buy any of the big tech stocks today uh i'd buy amazon that's it you research your investments you analyze markets you manage risk but did you research your broker in 2025 ibkr clients outperformed the s&p 500 retail clients averaged 19.2% while hedge fund clients averaged 28.91% compared to the index's 17.9%. IBKR's lower trading costs, competitive rates, efficient execution, and access to more than 160 global markets helps investors keep more of what they earn and put more capital to work. Over time,

the brokerage you choose makes a difference. If you care about performance, find out why the best informed investors choose interactive brokers at ibkr.com slash 2025 interactive brokers is a member of sipc speaking of headcount reduction 16 000 layoffs see that this morning i did i did they have so many employees still from the 2020 2021 hiring spree i think their corporate headcount was like 300,000 across the world. So when you see a number like that, and it was 30,000 in total because this was part of the plan from October,

I think was 14,000. Yeah, I wonder what divisions they are. And I saw they're shutting down the Amazon Go stores. I think that's a good sign. That was kind of a road to nowhere. But then another thing I saw is they're starting to test grocery stores that are hybrid delivery centers

that are twice the size of a Target. Yeah. That's massive. I know. Seems too big to me, but we'll see. I mean, if they're hybrid delivery centers... Then our whole thing is Anthropic. Yeah.

Speaking of, maybe we can talk about that now. Amazon has massive investment in Anthropic. And as I was looking at this, so we talked about this last week on the Power Hour, but Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, they all have like rumors about potentially wanting to go public. All for $500 billion, yeah. Yeah, the valuations are getting extreme. The. Anthropic, I believe, actually raised money earlier this year or plan to raise money at a 350 billion dollar valuation and was like the round was oversubscribed, so. it sounds like they're going to be raising a 350 billion dollar valuation amazon with their massive stake i think it's 15 percent stake in anthropic is going to get a big

increase in gap eps because the mark to market on their uh investment portfolio as i was looking at that i saw zoom also has a big stake in anthropic and well it's not big for anthropic but it's big for zoom and i assumed because zoom stock was up 18 in the last five days because apparently some uh some investment bank wrote a note mentioning the the stake in anthropic and i realized the world just didn't know that zoom i guess had a stake in anthropic like a bunch of investors never knew that i guess I honestly didn't. But apparently the stake was made or the investment was made and publicized in 2023.

So this isn't new information. It was, they've had a stake since 2023. It was like a $50 million investment. Today, it's estimated to be worth between $2 to $4 billion. Last week, Zoom had a market cap of $16 billion. So potentially 25% of their market cap was- And it could be higher. It could.

I think their EV is down to, is well below that too, at least according to fiscal. And Zoom's market cap now is $24 billion. So it's gone up quite a bit on this news, especially as Anthropic, I think, raised their guidance for revenue for this year to something like $50 billion, which is quite insane. The number could be wrong. I don't have that in my notes. But it's interesting. That's for sure. i saw someone say that if you're not long zoom you're short anthropic

could be true yeah honestly this might be the best way to play it that might have been one of the best ways to get for public market investors to get exposure to anthropic if they wanted to because you're probably buying i'm guessing it couldn't have been that expensive zoom on a cash flow multiple prior to this because they've been kind of bombed out maybe i'll double check here on fiscal but i assume you're buying 12 times yeah okay so it was probably about 10 times last week you're buying zoom at like 10 times cash flow and getting this massive stake in anthropic alongside it and i looked apparently they also have a stake in core weave uh zoom does 175 million dollar valuation roughly less optimistic about that one

but it could be worth something well i mean i guess that one's easier to mark right it's easier to get rid of true true true yeah maybe we'll think about a divestiture you know uh but what else they got perplexity they own some perplexity i'm not sure the value on that one but i guess my question is and honestly we're probably going to see next year i would guess we see a whole bunch of big like eps surprises like gap earning surprises from mark to market assets on these ai investments and this quarter not even next year i bet you'll see it with amazon you'll see it with zoom you'll probably see it with wix and their base 44 acquisition you know who invested in Anthropic

really early through his defunct company. Sam Bankman Freed. Freed? Freed. Yeah, he's sitting there in prison like, once I get out, once I get this pardon,

I'm gonna make him worth a lot of money. Yeah, they did. I think it was because of a lot of his investment fund well they invest in robin hood which has done well they invest in anthropic but i i believe it was also because of the recovery of the price of bitcoin mainly and other cryptos okay the uh i guess my question to you is how do you feel about public companies having these big vc funds

if they're good at it that's good some stuff strategic you could look at strategic investments from someone like Amazon and to Rivian and things like that, where you can have a relationship for your business or one of your cost centers. But some companies are good. Some companies are bad. Zoom seems to have at least an early track record that's good. The best by far. And people, you know, know I love this company, but Google Ventures has been phenomenal. I think they own 8% of SpaceX. It might be diluted at the IPO, but that could be worth $100 billion at the IPO. I don't know if it's worth $100 billion, but it could be marked at $100 billion this year. It feels, things are getting exciting.

Is it the blow-off time? You know, it's hard to say, but things are getting fun. Yeah, honestly. And I guess you could make the case that for Zoom, like, for big tech, it makes sense. uh there are strategic reasons to give the ev company eight billion dollars or whatever it gives them capital to invest in their fleet which ultimately helps you and then you sign like whatever uh an actual business deal with them as well i think you've seen that probably in some of these circular ai deals also but well yeah nvidia and gore we've had some i'll say some dirty it's

dirty it's dirty stuff there was a new one it's it's a few billion of yeah but i i don't i don't have the numbers in front of me but i read it in the paper and yeah well maybe maybe core maybe nvidia sees it optimal to keep coreweave alive even if it costs them a lot of money to do so yeah and i keep thinking like why wouldn't is it a bad sign that zoom would rather do this than invest in their own business but couldn't have been that they got they got much better returns than investing in their own business they got a lot of cash flow still buying back a lot yeah yeah i guess for a company like zoom i think where are they going to put it they've tried to expand the product suite and they haven't really been that successful i mean okay i

I guess I shouldn't say that. I haven't followed it that closely. But their core business seems stable. And if you feel like you've got a home-run investment in the private markets, I suppose you should take it. We've gone a little long on this here, though. Do we want to talk Tesla earnings, former big tech? Actually, is this big tech again? somewhat in the subscriber chat

on Substack which people should join it's completely free they asked well can you get the big three tech companies that are Microsoft and Tesla I see two big tech companies and a mid-sized automotive company that's just my eyes

the report is interesting as usual they have a lot of commentary by market cap it is top ten it is top ten for sure I'll say one thing with Tesla is that it's so covered by so many people that they look at every little detail. They're trying to look through like different business filings. Ooh, they're about to launch here and there and there. But sometimes we get to look at the forest instead

of the trees. And I think annual earnings, Q4 earnings are a good time to do that. Look at the full year numbers. Automotive revenues are down 10% on the year. Other revenues are growing in the double digits, but much smaller businesses, they are, I mean, They're not significantly smaller, but they are smaller than the automotive business. Gross profit was down 2%, so you have a little bit of a margin recovery there. Operating income was $4.3 billion. This is the lowest level. They generated in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 higher operating income in all of those years.

They're at 1.1 million full self-driving subscriptions. That's a lot on the roads in America. I saw that they you know maybe that software is getting better Lemonade did you see this Lemonade is offering a discount that seems like good marketing for Lemonade

I've been completely wrong on that business but 1.1 million full self driving subscriptions what would you say per subscribers worth today I have no idea how much does it cost isn't it like 5 grand

no they eliminated the one time so it's okay it's just on a monthly or annual or let's hit the google machine a monthly subscription of 99 dollars well what do you think what's the lifetime value of a tesla itself what's the lifetime in years yeah maybe 10 years people own it for 10 years I think you can mark this at $10K? Lifetime value, $10,000.

All right, so right now there's $10 billion worth of value. And I know they call it full self-driving. It's really driver assist at the moment. Well, the market gap is $1.4 trillion, Ryan. So it's worth

$10 billion. Maybe they can get 10 million people to join on this. But back to the earnings, they talked about huge increases. Hold on. Is this their services and other revenue, I assume? It would be, yes. That's included in there. Services is also the charging stations, things of that nature. And then there's energy, which is all energy generation.

Okay, makes sense. Continue. Okay, let's keep going. They talk about huge increases in AI capacity, AI infrastructure specifically for them. They're also investing $2 billion directly into XAI, which, again, there's so many complications here, it's very, very hard to get to everything. They're investing in a lot of battery manufacturing capacity. When I look at this, though, you know, they're supposed to be launching the Tesla semi-truck

and the cybercab in full production. They're supposed to be expanding production. But I'm just confused how free cash flow is positive. While operating margin is down, even though they are entering a large CapEx cycle, you have r and d for things like optimus which is mentioned plenty of times in the quarter it confuses me how that's how that's possible just given the slim margins and look you see meta guiding for over 100 billion they may have neutral free cash flow next year or barely positive i it just i don't really understand uh what's happening there and pretty usual you know

it's a lot of vague technology promises in the deck i was reading through it trying to get any hard facts. The stock is trading up after hours. Kind of hard to say why that's happening. The conference call with Musk is probably going on right now. He usually holds court, kind of has some points he wants to say. But the only other thing I'll look at is the market cap right now is $1.4 trillion. There's still some major SPC dilution coming through. And even And without including that, we're trading at 333 times trailing earnings. Feels like Groundhog Day with this stock. Each quarter they go, don't worry, don't worry.

The next few quarters, we're ramping. And then you get a couple quarters later, don't worry, don't worry. Next few quarters, we're ramping. And I feel like we've been doing this for the last few years. Yeah, I mean, despite the different business lines, the fsd the energy generation storage this business still revolves around sales of the car like full self-driving revolves around sales of the car obviously um it accounts for 75 percent of their revenue automotive sales

optimists sorry it's not it does not contribute to the top line yet for the believers but it that if you look purely automotive revenue it's pretty concerning chart like demands down quite a bit from highs and they're down yeah you've seen obviously it's a different market but like byd for example deliveries continue to grow and and it becomes more competitive electric vehicle deliveries across the board probably continuing to grow uh like in in total across all the other companies that have created evs now so i just it's hard to find the bull i'm cynical yeah it is hard to find the bull case at 1.4 trillion dollar market cap and yes yes yeah if yeah go ahead you could like

fsd is looking like a pretty good business it's looking like services to apple's iphone honestly if you think about it not that problem no way once it gets to 100 billion in revenue maybe maybe sure uh sure but like if you compare it to like software revenue to hardware revenue it seems like it's on the trajectory that services was five years ago and it is something that hopefully as it gets better it will cost more uh for for customers if you're if you're a tesla bull i think that's kind of the thinking there is there's pricing power the i would like that story i could i could buy into that story like i'm probably never going to own tesla honestly just because my gripes with musk

but if if i were a bull i could buy into that story at the right price but we're so far from the right price that it just doesn't seem likely how big let me let me phrase it to you this way is there any price where you would own tesla probably not with the leadership no i mean clearly it's a good brand you can't deny that but no and look there's just i don't like companies that self-deal i mean they're clearly giving two billion dollars to xai because xai needs the money and the return on that is very well to be determined so things like that I don't like. Here's what I'll say. I could understand the bull case when automotive deliveries were growing and they were taking market share. But now that that's disappeared,

you're in a very fragile spot. I just have difficulties finding where the ROI is going to be, where if you're a $1.4 trillion market cap, you probably need a path to at least $50 to $100 billion in operating earnings within a decade, probably $100 billion. If you're going to discount that properly where is that going to happen if full self-driving matures okay sure you could be doing a couple billion in operating earnings but like where how is that going to affect the market cap it ain't the analogy to apple makes sense but it's not 100 billion dollars in revenue probably with 40 billion dollars in earnings they're nowhere close to that so know if someone looked at this just with a sober eye like didn't know who tesla was i think they'd

be lost on on why it's priced the way it is if i was a finance professor i would do that the the blind resumes that would be a fun one to do for for her classes you see value this value this company for me without knowing the i would probably just get into arguments i like that the i would get into arguments with the students that are like i'm up 200 on tesla what are you talking about i would that's probably what i would do for an hour but we have we have questions from the chats uh tyler says what do you guys think happens to tesla in a bear market do you think it will remain meme-y a meme stock or could it knock tesla down to a permanently lower plateau i think it's going to be a high beta stock it probably crashes farther than the market

there is a lot of reflect and maybe not reflexivity there's a lot of capital in the musk empire that's a bit how do i say it leveraged to all of this stuff and i'd be curious what's going to happen the other one here which i hadn't thought about do you guys think tesla is improperly accounting for depreciating leases where the loss of the 7500 tax credit will cause used tesla values to decrease beyond what was accounted for in the lease that's logical i'm not sure if they are i can't prove anything but that does seem logical there's going to be an automotive i have no idea much better i have no idea yeah automotive analysts do much better work but the one thing

i've noticed with tesla is that trying to get into the accounting trickery and the nitty-gritty hurts more than it helps and it tends to have very little like throughout tesla's history as a public company people have been very right uh cynics about yeah about some of the accounting trickery going on and it hasn't mattered for the stock so yeah they eventually pulled the rabbit out of the hat yeah and i kind of think now at this point especially if spacex goes public there's so much money in the Musk empire that he can kind of move stuff from place to place

that's what he's doing, the XAI that he can prop stuff up SpaceX and Tesla are both investing in XAI that's look, $2 billion versus the size of Tesla is not that big of a deal but I could there's been rumors of SpaceX acquiring

XAI, which remember merged with Twitter slash X, it's all confusing what if they all merge together space that was a josh wolf theory from a well from a while back josh wolf had this theory that it was just all going to be end up being one company called x i i wouldn't doubt tesla and and the theory is like from the sun or from the space to earth the whole it spans the whole it would be quite a story it would be quite a story here's the last question i have on this company how many years of kind of the same thing of promises but

the financials are treading water does it take for the stock to actually go down all right folks before we move on let's talk about our home for investment research fiscal ai fiscal ai is the complete stock research platform for fundamental investors we use it every single day here at chit chat stocks it has everything you need to research individual companies from 20 years of financial data to company specific segments and kpis earnings call transcripts morningstar reports and insider ownership data and much much more and they just lowered the price of their highest tier by 60 if you want a complete enterprise grade financial data terminal, check out Fiscal.ai. If you use our link, fiscal.ai.chitchat, you will automatically

get two weeks of Fiscal Pro for free, no card required. And if you want to upgrade, our link will get you 15% off any paid plan. Again, that's fiscal.ai.chitchat. The link will be in the show notes. All right, listeners, I want to take this time to remind you about the Emerging Moat Stock Research Service, a newsletter that will produce a stock research report every four weeks, regular updates on existing stocks in the emerging moats universe we have an upcoming schedule including a research report on wix.com we have interactive brokers american express nintendo airbnb melnet and much more please if you want reach out and get a complimentary free trial you can do that by contacting me through the link in the show notes and giving me a dm on substack

i hope you'll try out the service i i don't know i i don't i just feel like it can keep going on forever forever at some point some point it ends if it's just stable like this i could just see it him finding a new way each quarter to like keep people happy forever the carrot can dangle forever oh come on i don't know i said this three years ago that's what i'm saying yeah you know and revenue is down point though i know at some point it's got a some point it will end it could be five years from now and who knows maybe they will pull the rabbit out of that but it does feel like groundhog day all right asml last earnings here yeah the big the big boys this is turning into a big tech company

record bookings 13 billion euros gross margin above 50 percent operating margin above 35 percent euv system sales revenue of 39 percent they authorize a new buyback program which might be dangerous at their valuation but we'll leave that at that service authorized important word there authorized i like it when wix authorizes two billion dollars at a five billion dollar market cap but i would have liked them to do that after my research report was finished uh we're back to asml Their services revenue has grown by 18% annually since 2012, which is just a really nice part of the growth story. And if we look at the valuation, I think us, any listener would kick themselves that they

didn't buy this thing. The EV to EBIT went from 20 in July of 2025 to 40 today. Stock's gone on a massive run. Yeah, I should have paid more attention. Can you guess the average price of an ASML EUV machine in 2025? The high NA or just EUV on average? Just EUV on average in U.S. dollars. U.S. dollars?

$300 million. Awfully close. $284 million this brand works sometimes that's insane I think the high NA ones which is the updated version I don't know why it's called high but I think it helps with more advanced manufacturing

those are pushing $400 to $500 million how do you do they have a financing arm no their only customers are intel samsung micron uh tsmc smic they all got the money yeah it's true it's kind of like the so intel they're basically selling to the u.s government yeah yeah that's true yeah that's fair yeah did you see boeing they're back a little bit things have stabilized 600 deliveries this year 600 deliveries they are on the right path they're getting back to those 2018 levels prior to the uh max crashes

and covid um the golden age of seattle will return right maybe well i think a lot of the jobs are relocating yeah the golden age of bowen could return without seattle in charleston south yeah the yeah they're interesting and i think it proves that that company when you have a manufacturing person running it it does a lot better compared to a finance person but anything else on asml no it is if you were ranking the best moats would you put it number one in the world yeah

no might be right no it's high you can argue you can argue a lot of things is it higher than TSMC I mean I used to make the argument well I used to make the argument for TSMC

but I've had people smarter than myself explain that they are you know they're not alone they're they're just ahead but asml stands alone right i mean i don't know anyone else that's selling 300 million dollar uv machines that take three three airplanes to ship that's fair i mean they are kind of a bottleneck but no i mean i guess it's subjective Maybe Hermes, kind of a different moat altogether, but could be up there. No, there's other ones out there.

There's plenty of other ones. Should we talk Michael Burry and GameStop? Starbucks? Did you read this? No. I didn't read this. Starbucks is boring. I wanted to mention, yeah, it is.

It's actually in 100% in no man's land. It's a business I want to like That I just can't get behind I had decent comp sales But I kind of might be A Brian Nichol doubter He's probably going to do the best he can

What's going to happen to this business Are they going to get bigger I don't understand They didn't read this Michael Burry 8 000 words on gamestop it's a bit strange he's a unique man uh but he is long gamestop i think i think i should definitely go read that to make sure he's actually buying i don't know if he set a price target lower but either way he's attracted to the setup at the right price says he knows it's a bad business but he believes in ryan cohen and the cash shell holding company that has essentially

been formed. Ryan Cohen is the runs GameStop now. GameStop, not GameStock. GME now has a bunch of cash warrants and convertible notes. These get converted to shares at around $30 for GameStop share price or above, which would raise your book value per share out of thin air using financial engineering. Again, this is what Burry is saying in his lengthy report, not me. Burry is arguing that if GME falls to $20 or into the teens, you are buying as a simple bet on Cohen's capital allocation. Is he getting too cute here?

Maybe it's a bit of a contrarian take because everyone hates GME for fundamental analysis because if you're, yeah, people like us go, I'd never buy it. So it's just discarded and no one analyzes it. But I feel like you're just getting too cute. You're betting that Cohen's gonna do the right, maybe not the right thing is the wrong word,

but turned into a Buffett-esque, Berkshire-esque, shell conglomerate. And a lot has to go right here when you're kind of just trading at net asset value with a declining business. Feels too cute. There has got to be easier ways to make money than getting back involved with GME. it sometimes feels to me like for a guy that sort of builds this persona that he doesn't want to be in the limelight he likes to do the most

controversial things sensational write-up yeah exactly yeah he wants to get involved with companies that are the hardest to analyze whether it's shorts on tesla shorts on palantir i wouldn't say palantir is that hard to analyze per se but the controversial ones when you would think there's stuff that's like less followed that he could be making money in right i think it's nvidia not tesla but either way your fault no i mean way back when didn't way back yeah sure to have what have a short like a few years ago maybe although don't quote us on any of this yeah it feels too complicated to me i think i have a nice rule of thumb where if you have to write so much over a pitch like for a stock pitch then it's too complicated to make sense and it's too

many things have to go right yeah i like a lot of different opportunities but i feel since his newsletter is very popular it's obviously gme is an extremely popular stock it was worth spending a couple minutes on should we talk i'll give you the order here because we have 12 minutes or 10 12 minutes or so silver and gold and dollar devaluation small cap of the week from a listener or a bubble watch what one do you want to go first these are all my talks let's do the small cap of the week eat our veggies here okay this is from kade invests on substack i'd say go check him out i believe he has his own newsletter. If you need a small cap of the week, consider Vital Farms. I'll give a quick

elevator pitch. Vital Farms is an ethically sourced egg producer. Contrary to every other player in the egg industry, Vital Farms does not own its own farms. Rather, it works with small family-owned farms and sells those eggs under one unified brand. Selling eggs in the store, you probably recognize the branding if you saw it. Not to the store, what other producers do. However, the stock price is driven in the short term by social media posts But what its eggs contain in one recent incident was when a lab found linoleum in Vital Farms eggs. That can't be good.

Actually, I don't even know. No. The next section here says, however, the market overreacted as linoleum has a place in the human diet. They expect $1 billion in annual revenue by 2027, meaning they traded roughly 12 times 2027 operating income if margins stay put. Finally, they have $145 million in cash, which is roughly 10% of their market cap. Thank you for your consideration.

Nice sign up there. Like a Truth Social post. The, you know, the brand seems good, but it's still eggs. That's really what holds me back. Hey, these, yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I read the pitch there on the notes, and it is kind of an interesting pitch. I love when consumer scandals happen.

I don't know. It kind of gets me more interested. But check this out. I am about to share my screen for all the listeners. Total revenue has grown from, let's go 2020. It's grown at a 30% annual rate over the last five years. That's nice. Operating profit, $80 million over the last 12 months. And you said, what, $1.2 billion EVA? I think it's at like 14 times operating income. I am interested and I do recognize the brand. I will admit I don't have expertise in the egg industry by any means. Well, remember when prices were soaring? I feel like I've heard the pitch that they're a little more insulated from the cyclicality of the normal egg prices because they go for these local farms, so they're always going to be priced at a premium.

When we've seen egg prices just balloon and then crash, kind of like a nice cyclical industry, same as cocoa. And what else? Well, cocoa is also chocolate. Coffee in the last few years. It feels like a solid brand, but I just can't. Where's the moat? Maybe if you were really confident in management,

capital allocation, and the growth trajectory, and price stability, if you're confident in those four things, that's what I'd want to check out before getting interested here. Because, you know, valuation looks okay. Yeah. Yeah, the numbers look good. i am going to pull up a chart here brett that will lead us to our next segment this year is the one year returns of the ishares silver trust

oh yeah 300 percent over the last year yes what is happening i will try to figure it out uh I have someone in the comments that says, having a great month because of gold. I'll be talking about gold too. 21% of the portfolio. Hey, that's been a nice run for metals here. I can't deny it. Well, let's talk about silver first.

It's up to $113. It was at $30 at the start of last year. Ryan mentioned hundreds of percent in the last year or so. I guess silver. I was trying to look up reasons why this is happening, theories why this is happening. Silver is much more illiquid than gold. It can swing wildly.

And apparently, silver is used in AI infrastructure. And the theory is that we're going to have a shortage, which is dragging price momentum. At the same time, China also enforced export restrictions. So there's this narrative out there, people are driving the price, and then it becomes a trading tool where people are day trading it. I saw the volume on SLV was just skyrocketing. With silver, I'm sure it takes a while to get mines online. and gold and silver mines are notoriously the liars with a hole in front.

What's the Mark Twain quote? A mine is just a hole with a liar in front of it, right? Something like that. A hole in the ground with a liar on top. I don't know. It's something along those lines. Either way, there's a lot of gold and silver mines that talk about mining and then don't actually do much.

But I'm sure the cure for high prices will be high prices where there's enough silver out there in the world and more will be mined at this higher price. But in the short run, it felt like something that, yeah, it totally makes sense what happened. I mean, you kind of have almost a short squeeze mentality and then you have supply getting restricted by China. It's quite interesting.

Now, gold's a different story because it's purely on, you know, debasement fears. It's purely on people scared of dollars, fiat currency, stuff like that. And now in this month, gold has broken out. It's up to about $5,300 an ounce. Apparently, China is buying up a bunch of gold. And our old friends, haven't heard this name in a long time, Tether, welcome back to the party. They are in any bull market you could hope for. They are buying one or two tons a week, about 2% of global demand as a backing to its stable coins. They also launched a gold-backed

stablecoin of some regard, although I get confused on all this stuff. My question, though, is right away, if the price of gold collapses, doesn't the collateral behind the stablecoins get wiped out? I'm just asking questions. Now, at the same time, you have dollar debasement fears. The dollar index is at its lowest level in years, but it's nowhere near what you would call a collapse versus any historical average. And there have been a lot of talks from the US administration about being okay with the dollar going down in value, and they're not going to intervene here. But they They would also actually like currencies such as the Japanese yen to revalue, kind of similar to what happened in the Plaza Accords of 1985, to make the dollar cheaper for exports. Where, for example, if you go to a country like Japan, you'll find that even though it's the same first world country, stuff like if you're paying in the US dollar, stuff like food is half the price, which doesn't really make sense.

Now, switch that to manufacturing for a country like China, Japan, or countries around Asia, and you can see that it puts the United States at a disadvantage in that regard. So there's incentives for why they would want the dollar to go down, and maybe people are seeing that. That's why gold is skyrocketing. And then at the same time, Bitcoin is still below $90,000 USD. It is not rising along with gold and silver. So my thought, there's a lot of stuff here. If you're a stock investor, keep looking for stocks with international exposure or just international stocks in general. You may have holders of, just for example, if you think the dollar's going to go down, you know,

I'm a Mexican airport guy, that their earnings will be higher in US dollars if by 10% of the dollar goes down by 10% versus the Mexican peso. It's just that simple. And there might be some hedging in there, but you can think of it like that. And as we learned from Lee Liu in our study overview of him, he added to his framework in the later years, you want to maintain purchasing power in the place that you're spending money. And this is something I think a lot of people are thinking about. You also probably are going to have potentially people holding US treasuries that are international buyers worried about dollar debasement because if the value of the dollar goes down versus their currency, well, if you buy US treasuries, then you get that 3%

interest, but the dollar went down by 10%, you actually lost money. There's probably worries from international investors. Overall, I think the incentives are for the dollar to weaken and for probably the US government to lead that. People are speculating that. There's been some commentary from the president and other people around that. It's interesting. It's interesting. I don't own any of this stuff outside of some international stocks, but what are your thoughts, Ryan? Okay. When I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my head of office has a forever setting.

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At participating A&W locations in Ontario. Congrats to everyone who has owned silver or gold over the last 12 months. the i don't know the industry very well i don't know if there's like big uh barriers to entry for miners um like mining silver is it restrictive are there regulatory issues all that stuff i assume there's you know some level of barriers to entry but my my concern i saw a picture of uh like a commodities conference like it was i think like a i don't know exactly what it was but someone took a picture it's like at the commodities conference and the place was packed like standing room only to listen to people speak about this and it just and the guy said like basically it's

now i've never seen it this packed so many people are showing up and he was excited for the big short that's the scene from the big short right right it's what i'm thinking is wouldn't isn't that not what you want because it would almost be better i imagine for silver and gold mining companies or silver and gold investors for this to happen over a more gradual time period because the sheer speed of this price rise is going to draw capital to the industry faster which is going to like all cycles i imagine increased supply drive down cost uh so i i could be wrong again with like maybe the barriers to entry are higher than i think but i don't see a world where it doesn't start to this massive price increase doesn't become the cure for its own price increase

i guess that's kind of the motto in the commodities world high prices are the cure for high prices that's the toughest thing about this market is if you're looking at all right i have exposure to silver i have exposure to gold or something like that well what point do you sell and it's a lot different than a stock where you can go all right i'll sell maybe sell if it gets to an extreme multiple of 50 times 60 times something like that maybe higher if it's a high growth stock but you can kind of hold and let the compounding take care of itself yeah it's tough it's tough to decide when to sell because you're almost like all right 90 100 110 it's just arbitrary it's kind of just like a casino price in your mind is just

waiting on waiting on the the horse track yeah i agree that's the hardest part about this but It's a good call by everyone that has been in on the metals. I feel like when something goes up 100% or 300% or 400% in a year, that's a little hint that you might need to take some chips off the table. Should we close out, Ryan, with a, I want to read this bubble watch headline. Did you see this? I did not.

Well, this is in the Wall Street Journal this morning. this $14 billion meme stock says it is developing an herbal remedy for autism. Here's a quote. Despite recurring losses, no revenue, and no sellable products, RegenCell finished last week with a $15.5 billion stock market value of 50% since year-end and 126-fold since its initial public offering in 2021. It only spent $1 million in R&D last year. Bringing a drug to market can cost significantly more than that. Here's a quote. Despite these precarious fundamentals for all, but the most daring traders for GenCell is an actionable shorting. It can be even riskier than holding it. Its chief executive owns 89% of the company, meaning the public vote

is thin and the stock is prone to explosive short squeezes. Cost of buying the shares for a short sale is exorbitant. If an investor can find someone to lend them, eventually the company is going to have to raise money. Oh, well, this is my thoughts. Eventually the company is going to have to raise money and that feels like the right time to short as it will add more to the outstanding float at a larger market cap it's quite fascinating that this is happening and is allowed to happen is it cayman islands corp it's just chinese scam company and the nasdaq is just saying yeah go ahead list strange to me you it's kind of puts like the ceo here is sort have been no man's land though because i feel like i've said that a lot today but

he's basically got 15 billion dollars essentially in paper net worth tied up into this thing but one of the primary reasons that his paper net worth is that high is because he owns so much of it and the flow is so thin so like if he sold it he's going to drive down his own price you kind of see what i'm saying where it's kind of the trap with like lock-up periods post ipo it's like yeah you could like it's not that bad if you own a small trunk you can get rid of it you can you know realize the value but if you own 89 you got to file a form four or whatever announce you're selling you're kind of you're going to have to eat some drawdowns he's not gonna be worth 10 billion dollars for he's not actually worth 10 billion dollars he might be on

paper for a year but they better pull some miracle thing out of that here yeah all right well we're going along ryan anything before i close things out for the listeners nope i think that's gonna do it i'll let you uh take us out all right as a disclosure we are not financial advisors anything we say on this show is not formal advice or recommendation ryan irony podcast guests may hold securities discussed in this podcast, may have held them in the past, and may buy, sell, or hold them in the future. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Do you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know, the same way you can skip an ad.

I get it. I'm Siaya, and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today, I'm still figuring it out. Somehow, things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll. So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem.