Chit Chat Stocks - Myles Udland | WallStreetBets & Buffett Legacy

Episode Date: February 2, 2021

Welcomed onto the show this week is Myles Udland. Myles is an anchor on Yahoo Finance and a popular fintwit personality. Before the discussion today, your hosts, Brett and Ryan, share their favorite stories from the week and try their best to avoid the headlines that everyone has already heard enough about. As always enjoy the show! Follow Myles Udland on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MylesUdland?s=20 Subscribe to 7 Investing with the code "CCM": https://7investing.com/subscribe/ Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ChitChatMoney Follow Chit Chat Money on Twitter: https://twitter.com/chitchatmoney Visit our website to see more from your hosts Ryan and Brett: https://www.chitchatmoney.com Timestamps Stories | (3:09) Fintwit | (17:46) Interview | (24:01) Hot Water | (1:34:07) Buy-Sell-Hold | (1:39:54) Anecdotal Evidence | (1:41:15) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Chit Chat Money. Today is Tuesday, February 2nd. We have a big announcement, but we also have an interview with Miles Udland. What do we want to talk about first? The interview or our big announcement? Yeah, we can do the announcement first. It's also our 100th episode, so congratulations for anyone that's come along. Hopefully we can get, I don't know, to some other random milestones along the way. That's our 100th Tuesday episode. Tuesday episode. We've done like probably 300 or so shows altogether. Yeah, exactly.

But yeah, I guess we should start. Yeah, the big announcement. We have a small fund going. The smallest fund probably in America. But it is going. It is going and it has started. It's called Arch Capital. And the only reason we're saying this on the show is as a full disclosure.

Right. We're legal now. We got problems with disclosures and all that crap. So it's trying to change much of the show. We just want you guys to know that we're not going to be like, just don't take our advice. Yeah, as always, don't take anything we say on the show as financial advice. As always, there could be clients of our partnership

could have funds invested in a stock that we talk about. We'll try not to talk about something. Sound like a disclosure. Oh, that's what the disclosure says. I'm just reading off the script. But, yeah, we don't want to talk about this too much. We'll talk about the interview next, right? Yeah, and it was fun.

Miles is a good guy to just break down the sort of the – really we just talked about GameStop and sort of some of the froth that's going on, I guess you could say. Yeah, and he is an anchor at Yahoo Finance. So he's dealing with kind of the biggest news in the market every day. This GameStop stuff is tiring, but we hope we didn't just repeat the same record. But, yeah, I don't know. I'm exhausted from this GameStop stuff. Yeah, there is a lot of GameStop stuff, especially in the interview.

But we try not to talk about it, hopefully, on the show. But before we move on to the show, and we have a new disclosure, by the way, so feel free to listen in over the music, sales pitch, use our code CCM at 7investing. They just had their new recommendations come out, and I like them a lot. Also, Austin has moved on. Rip, but congrats. Yeah, he's on that Emerging Managers program, which will be rooting for him. Yeah, I don't know. They had a great mix of stocks. You can get it for $7 for the first one, so it's $10 off the first month.

You can check them out. It's timely. They only do it once a month, and this is right when they announce them. Okay, without further ado, here you go. Welcome to Chit Chat Money. On this show, hosts Ryan Henderson and Brett Schaefer interview industry experts and riff on the world of investing. As a quick reminder, Chit Chat Money is a CCM Media Group podcast. Ryan and Brett are also general partners at Arch Capital, and Arch Capital may have positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Anything discussed on Chit Chat Money by Ryan or Brett or any other podcast guest is not formal advice or a recommendation.

Now please enjoy this episode. All right, welcome in. I'm kicking things off with, I guess we didn't say our stories in the intro, but my story is, is Facebook the ultimate sin stock? I'm just basically talking about earnings and have a few questions. What are you talking about? I'm going to talk about the DTCC, which is the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation. They were kind of a big part of the news this week with Robinhood and a lot of people don't know what they do. So I thought it'd be good to learn about it. Okay. I'll kick things off. Facebook reported full year earnings this week and they looked

really good so i'm going to go through some of those numbers revenue was 86 billion dollars for the year up 22 year over year other revenue so not advertising actually grew to almost 2 billion i imagine a lot of that's from oculus sales likely yep um and then operating income was about 33 billion for the quarter up 36 year over year so that's almost 40 operating margins um uh what else uh 1.84 billion daily active users up 11 2.8 billion monthly active users still growing at 12 12 i don't even know how that's possible um how many people are in the world again what eight seven seven i think it might be up now but i think it's going every day if it was seven like a few years ago i don't think a billion it grew a billion but you could be an absurd amount of

people i don't understand how they're still growing double digits um well more people are getting smartphones around the world so yeah keep growing yes um but they have 62 billion in cash and cash equivalents at the end of the quarter no long-term debt they authorized another 25 billion in share repurchase by the end of 2022 on top of the 9 billion still remaining uh from their last share repurchase announcement and their enterprise they traded an enterprise value of less than 20 times current operating cash flow. They seem cheap. The numbers seem incredible. But obviously there is that tail risk and some headwinds that are coming up. And so I took a quote from the conference call, actually a really interesting conference call. I encourage everyone to go read

it. But Zuckerberg kind of took some shots at Apple a little bit. He said, now, since I try to use these earnings calls to discuss aspects of the business strategy that I think are important to investors or for investors to understand i do want to highlight that we increasingly see apple as one of our biggest competitors imessage is a key linchpin of their ecosystem it comes pre-installed on every iphone and they preferenced it with private apis and permissions which is why imessage is the most used messaging service in the u.s and now we are also seeing apple's business depend more and more on gaining share in apps and services against us and other developers so apple has every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps

work which they regularly regularly do to preference their own and this impacts the growth of millions of businesses around the world including with the upcoming ios 14 changes many small businesses will no longer be able to reach their customers with targeted ads so everyone knows about sort of the uh crackdown on data collection that apple's uh sort of i don't think they've released it yet but they announced that it's going to come out with their new update and part of me thinks yes this is hurting small businesses like zuck said but i think it's really more concerning to zuck that maybe this is going to be a huge pitfall or a huge headwind coming up for their business yeah i mean we'll see the proof will be in the

pudding if the small businesses start complaining oh we're in our business isn't doing as well I mean, in reality, you know, you could also frame this as, all right, well, small businesses won't be able to spend as much on Facebook, you know, so it's in their, it's in Facebook's best interest to do this. So I don't think it's surprising that they take this position, but it's also in Apple's best interest to do the same. We'll see how the antitrust kind of comes down on them, but it's going to be a fun battle. it's kind of shaping up you would have thought it would have been uh either facebook versus google or apple versus google for other parts of the business but it's really kind of turned into facebook versus apple um that's how they're shaping it it's going to be like all right we're arming the power of the small businesses we're trying to make it so everyone can do blah blah

connect with all the stuff that they like to talk about over at facebook and then apple is going to say that we're the privacy centric business but then facebook's going to say well no you're just trying to make everything first party you're not making this an open open ecosystem stuff like that yeah and there is there's definitely some merit to that because we've seen spotify go through the same sort of struggles uh i think epic games just had their sort of lawsuit with them as well do you think do you think people give apple more credit or do you think they get a better sort of brand reputation than they deserve who uh everyone loves them and they think it everyone thinks privacy and security and then i mean no one's reputation is as bad as

facebook's yeah i don't really see how facebook wins that yeah the reputation with apple is clearly better than facebook even though like on on finn twit there's a lot of people that talk about facebook how they're actually doing fine and whatever you know it's not as bad apple isn't perfect at all but it is about that reputation in the marketplace um i don't know i've never really you know i'm one of those guys that doesn't really care for apple products that much so i don't know it's hard to tell okay so part of the reason i brought this up is because facebook is trading at a favorable multiple if they were to continue sort of the growth rate that they have been having um yeah i mean if they grow earnings at 100 or sorry you know if they double

earnings over the next three to five years that's a very very cheap multiple um but you gotta ask if they're going to continue to grow and if people so if some of the users have to choose to accept data harvesting because apparently i think that's part of the new upgrade you have to choose to accept it how much i don't think they call it data harvesting they call it target marketplace or whatever yeah um i mean that's they said in the conference call they're expecting a large people to reject it a large group of people to reject it and i would imagine like 90 percent of people are like yeah no i don't want that yeah it doesn't that completely like destroy their business i don't think it destroys them it just maybe their ads cpms or however they

call that might drop a bit because they can definitely still advertise there's no problem with advertising it's just without this it might target it it might be less effective that's the thing we'll see though right uh start looking at your instagram feed if you're getting advertisements for something random that has nothing to do with you maybe it's not working as well because you have seen on like instagram those ads i'm not instagram but you've mentioned before that the ads are really really strong so yeah all right well that was kind of i had some more questions but it's kind of around sin stock stuff not really worth the time yeah i mean it should be in the sin stock category if they continue to grow for the foreseeable future it probably will continue

to be at a discount just because people don't like it right yeah and that could be good for shareholders um but it seems different because it doesn't they haven't proven that it's a permanent business it's not like you know what i mean yeah what do you think is worse what what do you think is a worse sin stock ultra or facebook okay so if matt cochran is listening right now yeah close your close your ears all right uh but uh i don't know they're probably fairly equal the thing about ultria and those type of products is that they're probably more harmful to the individual but for facebook but facebook yeah yeah so it's like all right you're just harming yourself it's a personal choice it typically won't affect others unless you're doing it around children

which you can't do uh but facebook seems more of a societal type issue right we're kind of it's kind of hard to see why it's a sin stock people probably see it you know there's been all the documentaries and research on it but it's completely different and i don't know which one's worse but it's i know what one i think is a more reliable business and that's you know cigarettes but okay all right uh what's your story again uh the dtcc have you ever heard of this before uh i feel like i saw it on twitter a few times this week but yeah no explain it yeah so the clearing houses and brokerages are all over the news it's i think you know people want to understand how this stuff works um and what the dtc is or dtcc uh it stands for the depository

trust and clearing corporation and they're a conglomerate of multiple uh what you might call it clearing houses and stuff like that but the main thing they do is they're the backbone for brokerages and other places that trade financial instruments so they typically uh do trillions in dollar volume a day so all the you know the apps and the mortgage or sorry not the mortgages the investment banks use this you know stuff like that they're all going through this and settling with this clearinghouse so their purpose is to you know quote settle trades that's how it's described between buyers and sellers so when you are you buy a share of something on your trading platform as an individual the dtc funk dtcc excuse me functions by adjusting the share account owned

by each brokerage so if a brokerage is buying a stock it adds that to its account at dtcc and if it sells a stock, the DTCC adds cash to its account. Why does this exist is probably a question people have. Why don't brokerages do it themselves? It's kind of a safety net or an insurance, theoretically, to make sure all transactions go through regardless of whether a brokerage goes under. All right, does that make sense?

Yeah, go ahead. And then the settlement date is what makes it interesting. So the settlement date is always or typically, whatever the rule is two days after the transaction occurs which is why when you sell something you can't access the cash immediately in your account you have to wait a few business days or two excuse me all right okay yeah i'm following and then the dtcc requires brokerages to post collateral for their transactions in case the settlement date has a different price so this is what happened when wall street bets crowded into gamestop robinhood didn't have the collateral

needed to back up those shares, especially with the increased volatility of those shares. So when the settlement date occurs, it might have totally screwed over some of the parties in these transactions. And with over 50% of Robinhood users buying GameStop, that could really put a lot of their funds at jeopardy. So it's Robinhood responsible for that collateral.

It's not the clearinghouse. Robinhood has the post-collateral in case DTCC has to execute the trades or do whenever they finally clear the transactions. If the prices are totally different and super volatile and stuff like that, that can be a concern. And it's also a concern when a lot of users are on one side of the trade. You know what I'm saying? Right.

Because then you have to, you know, buy the shares. And then when you actually get the transactions, again, I don't know exactly how the exchange for shares and stuff like that works. That's a little above my pay grade. I know there's a ton of steps that go down with that. but that you know there's concern there uh so this is what happened when they came into here it's why they restricted trading on gamestop um and it also puts it also forces brokerages to put it more collateral if users buy on margin so that was likely a mistake that robin had made allowing users to go on margin so much right yeah yeah so that i mean that is you know robin has to

blame for that but the dtcc still has to cover and you know make sure this company has the collateral needed the funds needed to me so they don't go under and it is why they raised about 3.4 billion dollars over the past week no that was for investing in user growth that was yeah yeah investing in liquidity uh but so you know a lot of people out there blame it citadel they do have robin hood does have a suspicious relationship with citadel and the high frequency traders and payment for order flow and that should probably be investigated but in this situation they were just trying to make sure they didn't fail you know yeah my problem is why didn't vlad tenev come out and say that well i don't think he should have if he would just said like hey we have

collateral requirements that we can't meet when everyone's on the same side of the trade yeah but i don't think he wants to tell wall street bets that if you continue to do this or whatever you know what i mean and he also doesn't want to scare people uh to have a run on robin hood it would be like a run on the bank because if everyone starts selling and stuff like that there is this there's a chance you know if everyone starts doing something i know brokerages are a lot different than banks and you know there there's insurance behind everything and the sipc insurance but there is that risk if everyone starts leaving you know what i mean but he wasn't very forthcoming with how it was actually going yeah i don't i know his hands were tied but he

built the problem he made it so frictionless and so easy and it like it it seemed good in terms of growing customers but i mean i think you made it too inviting too gamified we talked about this with bill brewster i think we might even talked about it with miles when you gamify that experience so much and it's so easy to sign on and create an account are you surprised that you were the number one trading app yeah i know when a bubble emerges like my my friend uh who was signing up was like you know this this app is so green man and i was like yeah you're right it is so green they make it like just pop right at right at you but it seems like the biggest mistakes that robin had made was uh you know signing up for options which we've gone over it was so easy for us to

sign up for auctions and i assume everyone i think that signed up was extremely easy it was definitely yeah whatever they did was not on the up and up and they also allowed people to go on margin way too easily those two combinations are what screwed them and they took a lot of risk i don't really know why you know i mean they're getting bailed out by their investors which is fine you know that's how capitalism works but they took a lot of risk sometimes you get a lot of reward from it but you take a lot of risk yeah these are the consequences all right current state of fin twit um i i don't want to just go on and on about wall street bet so do you have anything better uh okay well there has been a lot of debates about the melvin capital which is a part

of this but separate you know of how like okay there's a lot of people out there defending melvin capital and these long short funds that got caught up in these trades right with the short positions what are your thoughts on that because i got some but i want to hear what you think well honestly i don't pay much attention to shorting so i'm sorry if i don't totally understand how the process works but i don't like shouldn't there have been more proper risk management on their side it just feels like there is a chance for any stock to do this yeah and we know the the power that social media has on groupthink and being able to get an army essentially together to do something at once i don't know if i feel that bad for melvin

capital yeah and there's a lot of people out there defending them and others who they're like well they're putting up 30 returns over the last five years and it's like yeah you put on a lot of risk to get those 30 returns it doesn't mean you got unlucky when a situation like this happens when you are super levered and the downside event occurs it's like yeah should i be able to charge 2 and 20 for the tqqq the 3x levered you know nasdaq etf i mean in a bull market i like fantastic but then you get an 80 percent drawdown you know or if you get a 30 percent drawdown in the nasdaq i mean you're you're looking pretty bad i don't know i just don't think like they're like yeah these guys are good investors like are they though if you're taking on all this risk i don't think

it makes you like you know what i mean yeah and it's like well their historical returns were great it's you know well at the end of the day who cares if they lose money in the end that was them taking on yeah you're right that's them taking on the risk and finally the downside came yeah um all right how is your no bitcoin no tesla thing been going it's tough you know that i can't comment on those things specifically but you know that you may haven't seen the rest of the develop you know the the gif where the guy's like i've made a huge mistake that's kind of what i've been thinking of it's been there's been too many developments you know i don't earning season too i like how tesla had earnings and like can't comment no one even cared about tesla earnings

which is unheard of yeah well i don't care either i can't comment on when does it end February 12th. Oh, gosh. You got the date right in mind. All right. Oh, okay. So two things. First of all, Dan McMurtry at SuperMugatu, I think is still his Twitter handle, had a tweet this week that said the golden age of short selling is coming.

I was thinking about this and I know this is basically what he was implying, but don't you think that bidding up – getting a group together, bidding up assets, dying businesses basically. I'm sorry, but there's no – if you look at like historical financials on GameStop and AMC, they don't look good. They could pivot. They could pivot. We talked with Nick Seifel about it, but the existing business is tough. But buying them as a group, trying to bid up the asset well above what it's worth, I don't think that necessarily deters short selling. It just deters them from announcing it publicly. If anything, it incentivizes it, doesn't it?

Yeah. Like everyone's going to see that eventually these things are going to revert. Yeah, I mean I would – You just have to have the time horizon to like endure it. Yeah, if you got a little bit ahead of the game and you bought some put options on GameStop about three months from now, I think you, I think, I don't, we don't do that. I don't do that typically. But I think that's a pretty easy trade to make depending on what premium or what, you know, what the cost basis is going to be on those put options. Also, did you see the Scott Galloway stuff this week? I assume you did. He's a little bit... I like Scott Galloway, but I could not stop – like what was the whole sex talk about?

I don't think every Robin Hood trader is like, well, since I'm not having sex, I'm going to go to the casino. Like it's not – what's happening? I feel like he's going a little crazy on us and I like – I do like him. I have liked him and it's been hard because a lot of people have contrary takes. A lot of people – Don't like him. A lot of people don't like him. I mean, to be honest, he has a lot of takes on Peloton and stuff that didn't work out.

But, I mean, if you look at his investment track record and stuff he actually invests in, it's pretty good. Yeah, he's gone off the rails the last few months. I don't know if it's COVID and we need to get him back in school. But, yeah, I hope he's doing okay because he's got the internet mob coming after him. I feel like you'll be like an NYU student showing up next semester. You're like, I chose not to have sex on here. I do not

I don't understand his takes there There are some good sub-tweets too Yeah, a lot of people do not A lot of people on Fintwit like that inverse Galloway ETF type deal I don't support it Anything else for current state of Fintwit? Nope

Next up we have our interview with Miles Udlund Any highlights for you? um to be honest we did it in the mayhem of last week uh so we honestly forget what we even talked about but it was fun uh love to have miles back on again and definitely i don't know yeah it's not like we're it's different than like a conversation with seven investing where we're talking about individual securities but this one was fun as well yeah yeah i like the uh i kind of like the SPAC conversation as well yeah yeah we talked GameStop obviously but uh that one was fun for me yeah the SPAC one yeah kind of opening up our eyes to uh how they might not be evil

you know we get a bad rap yeah we give them a bad rap but um all right uh without further ado here you go Cox panoramic wi-fi includes advanced security to help protect all your connected devices you'll get real-time alerts oh like this one so you don't have to worry about malware Or when your kid downloads a song from a shady link. And now all your computer can play is... Red color, red color, where are you? All blocked, thanks to Advanced Security, included with Cox Panoramic Wi-Fi. Advanced Security must be enabled in the Panoramic Wi-Fi app. Restrictions apply.

Today we are welcomed by Myles Udland. Myles is an anchor for Yahoo Finance, a popular Fintwit personality. He also has a sub stack called Late. Am I getting all that right? That's right. Okay. Welcome to the show. Why don't you give us sort of your background?

So what got you into finance to begin with? Yeah, thanks, boys, for having me. So I graduated college 2012 with a degree in English. And I was like, all right, here goes the world. And basically, a friend of a friend knew a small financial newswire company. I don't know if you guys have heard of it. Some listeners may have heard of it called the fly on the wall. It's run out of Summit, New Jersey. It's run by the main guy used to be on Wall Street back in the day. And essentially just a newswire. It's like a cheap version of Bloomberg. And my job was to sit in front of three screens and clip press releases, take out all the extraneous words and distill them into short bits that go on the feed. And this is, you know, Fly still does this today. So earning season, great example. It's like, you know, press release comes over and it says, you know, Honeywell today announces stellar results, first quarter, yada, yada, yada. So the job is cut a lot of stuff out. Honeywell reports X earnings per share, estimate X, publish. Um, so if you do that for, I guess I was there two years. So if you do that for seven, eight quarters, you start to internalize, you know, I mean, I didn't know what time the market opened when I started this job. So you start to learn a lot of things. You learn about, uh, earnings, all that good stuff.

um and from there uh you know i was reading all the things everybody reads but at that time bi was business insider was like the thing and you know joe eisenthal sam row uh that was kind of peak bi before you know before it sold to axle and i saw they were hiring so i sent sam an email and that was kind of kind of the rest from there and you know sam's still my editor over at yahoo so two of us been working together almost seven years now but um yeah that's the that's the short version of of how i got here i like that um i'm described as a fin twit personality that's a great uh i mean i'll i'll take that one all day yeah yeah and what do you guys do at uh well what do you do at yahoo finance now as like an anchor um do you are you doing i

think you do a newsletter with them too like what is the job like there yeah so yahoo finances has eight hours of live streaming on the site so the where it is now on the site i guess if you go to the home page if you pull it up um during market hours from nine to five when we're live there'll be like one main story up top and then right underneath it will be the video player um and in there so that's um that's where we are i do it from nine to eleven um julie hyman and brian sazi are anchoring it with me and i mean it's pretty standard you know version of a business media show i think it's a little bit looser than certainly looser than what you're going to find at bloomberg definitely a little looser i think um than what's on cnbc um but you know it's the

same run of um ceos executives um strategist types uh i you know i don't think it's perfect i don't think that that model for anything of linear streaming whether it's on the internet or on television is perfect no matter where you go i don't really know where it goes from here But, you know, that's the gig for, you know, that's the gig for now. And yeah, and then me and Sam write the morning brief newsletter for Yahoo. And that goes out, that goes out at six in the morning, but we, we like to write it the day before because we don't want it to just be reacting to the news. This week, obviously it's a little more challenging, but we have found that if you challenge yourself

to write something that will still be relevant 16 or 18 hours later, you're going to deliver or two subscribers something that's different than hey these three companies are reporting earnings or hey here's the story that you know everyone knows about you have to look at the 44th chart in you know the binky chata don't you bank note you can't just say here's you know here's two things right right okay uh and for reference if you're listening to this this coming out tuesday but we are recording this uh the thursday prior so this was the big robin hood band game stop day uh so we will get into that in a little bit uh should we go price check on game stop shares before we get going here or is it uh i think they hit the close right i had a i have no idea

can you check it on robin hood now is that oh you can't i usually just use google like a loser yeah 193.60 was the close today and it's up 20 after hours 234 but all right down 44 typical volatility so there's there's the reference check for the listeners on where we were at in stock market history when we sat down to have this conversation yeah okay uh before we get to that stuff let's talk a little bit about SPACs uh you referenced this in your latest sub stack and there's a lot of hype around SPACs right now. I think there was some figure of like an absurd amount of SPACs coming out within the first month of 2021. Do you think SPACs actually help level the playing field for retail investors? Because that's sort of the claim is like, you're getting these companies

earlier than you'd get with an IPO. So, you know, so I wrote a newsletter last summer that was about why there should be more public companies. And, you know, Mike Mobison over at Morgan Stanley has done a lot of work on this. I'm guessing you guys have seen some of the charts of the number of public listed stocks over time. It was like 7,500, 8,000 a couple of decades ago. And now it's like 3,800, right? There's like 3,800 stocks in the Wilshire 5,000. So I made the argument there should be more public companies. And I guess I got my answer, you know, now there now there are SPACs. So who am I to complain about the form through which they go public? But I mean, I don't know. I think that the SPAC concept does a lot of what the proponents of it

claim it does. So it does bring companies to market at an earlier stage. I think there's an interesting conversation to be had around what disclosures it requires when. It allows you to put out a deck of projections that you cannot do as part of the S1 process. Though at some point in the SPAC process, you also have to file a formal S1. The problem is it's the secondary document, not the primary document. So I don't think most investors read the full S1. They see the deck that shows it's basically the softbank chart of the WeWork turnaround, right? So I mean, i i think the spec format is okay i mean i don't exactly the thing though is like sitting here today given what's happened the last two weeks i'm not sure and i don't know where you guys come

down on this i'm not sure how it plays into this retail phenomenon as we know it now interesting yeah i think it's it gives another i mean okay their early stage it allows like investors to almost go at it like a vc mindset uh but that's tough you gotta have like a 10-year time horizon you got to be able to you know cover some losses stuff like that and it makes it easy i think to be highly speculative i don't know yeah and you mentioned we work who tried to sneak their SPAC in today right oh they is now yeah they announced a rumor i don't know if you saw that with a direct list it's going to be direct listing so um so i mean i think that's i think that's fine too i think other i think having more companies come come public is is good i don't think it's all bad but

you know i'm just looking i mean i'm looking at the performance in most of the specs today that at least the ones that i track and it was fine like it wasn't a washout relative to sort of what all we saw with the you know with all the short squeeze names so i think on that sense it's it's good um if anything i if i was a um i wonder about it from the management side like if i had a company and i've raised series a and b if my board tells me you've got to go public SPAC is the way I choose to do it. And now I'm giving up 20% of my company to a board member's former colleague at a bank who left to run a SPAC. I don't know if I would like that so much as a founder, but being a founder and running a good company is a lot different than being a good

investor and creating a good capital structure. So I think that that is also another part of this challenge for this space. And that's why I don't think SPACs are an asset class because they shouldn't be because obviously every company that comes public is different and just because you come public a certain way doesn't make it you know similar to anybody else yeah that's true it doesn't mean that the companies all fall into whatever sectors they fall into but speaking on those sponsorship fees i mean do you think they're i mean too high i mean i guess everyone has kind of a range on what they think they should be but the 20 it seems like it should go down over time uh what do you think about that i mean i think it will go down over time and it depends on the

It depends on the company, too, because, you know, there are some companies that are coming public that probably, and again, I'm going to contradict myself, given the kinds of companies that have come public, the companies coming public today have no business going public. But if we want to foster a market in which more companies at earlier stages do come public, then sure, fine. You're going to have to take dilution as a part of that process. I don't think it's super favorable, again, to the company. i'm not sure it matters so much for you know the public market investor i'm not i'm not sure that it it changes a huge deal um and i would say that well we're early in it so we've got a lot of these companies are going to start reporting results and and 10 q's and 10 k's and then we'll really see what it looks like in a couple years but if you look at like the returns of a lot of pe

sponsored um go privates then re-ipos in the last 10 or 15 years that's not exactly covering the alternative asset management space in glory, like the returns that public markets got then. So I don't think it's going to be that hard for SPAC companies to end up being better for secondary market investors than the prior iteration of this kind of, you know, liquidity dumping did. So, but we'll see, it's a bull market now. So everybody's a genius and everything goes up all the time. So I'm, I think it's also better, it's better to come public today than it is to go public in 2006 anyway. Yeah. I mean, if you're confident, you know, in your concept, you got to invest a lot of capital. Why not right now from a management perspective, but what do you think

about the concept companies going public? Because there's a, you know, when someone's going from a private equity or VC side they have, you know, I don't know, you're not getting the price every day. So that might contradict where, you know, a lot of times in the public markets, if you have a bad few quarters or things are going a little longer than you think um your stock can really take a hit and for someone like i don't know i guess a bad i'm trying to think of an example but like a nicola yeah like a nicola yeah someone like that yeah the uh if your company isn't doing that well and nicola is an example of like more of a fraud but if it's taking a little bit longer um and your stock takes a huge hit that can really derail confidence it can make it tough

to raise capital uh that you know i don't know about if that'll work in the long run i mean if you look at quantum scape like the stock went to 120 or whatever and i think it's closer to 50 now now granted this back went public at 10 so it's still up from 10 to 50 but yeah i mean if you're an employee like i know a lot of people who work at a lot of different public companies and especially ones that are um maybe have come public more recently let's say uh yeah everyone watches the stock price like everyone at the company that's their most of their net worth is tied up in the stock price so everyone watches it but i mean i would ask you guys like do you think that the public markets are a good um in general in the aggregate appreciate long-term business

prospects well or poorly that's a good question uh i don't know so the problem with specs for me is that it's allowing companies like you said that have no business being public to go public and raise capital and then it's becoming like we need to go public in order to fulfill our business like because we need the money and that's not for us at least that's not what we like we'd rather have a business that's living off its own cash flow yeah um but on the long-term mindset thing i don't know that's i think it's a tough question i don't know if that's answerable um i say like half sometimes i mean if you look at someone like bailey gifford they have a really long-term mindset i mean they're invested in amazon tesla and

all the other companies and they seem to have a long-term mindset they have a giant capital base i think they're patient uh but there is obviously a lot of inpatient money too so it's i don't know if the the spectrum is changing over time but these if you're investing in specs and you got to have a long-term mindset at least with these concept companies and uh i guess being public helps these companies that have these quote-unquote long-term mindsets because you constantly have capital i mean if you're doing secondary offerings or stuff like that you constantly have this piggy bank to tap into where you can go and get more money to then go and try to pay for the costs of these different initiatives that you're trying so i guess maybe being public helps uh that long-term

vision but it's a double-edged sword yeah yeah because i so i used to be like and i think the number one thing that my peers in the business media do wrongly is they will one take the line that public markets are too short-term focused just because company has support earnings and to say things like um it makes no sense that stock x is down after it reported good earnings like yeah you know or whatever or even i mean never use the word irrational because like who is you know who's to say but over the last like few years i've become extremely radicalized that public markets are amazing places for long-term business like near perfect allocators of capital and i understand there's exceptions to that but you know ryan your point about like quarterly

earnings instilling discipline i think when you look at a company like snap like being public saved that business and has created evan spiegel as a ceo who is i mean he was a kid he was he's the exact same age as me so he was 24 when it was getting buzzy 26 i think 27 when it went public 28 it was like oh he's going to get fired and now he's you know 31 32 and he's like a really good i think he's a really good ceo running a really interesting company and i think that only happened because he was public. And I think that that's sort of the blue sky view of public markets that I choose to have. I choose to say, in general, it will work out. And you ask the question, why is it going to work out rather than I think the reporter kind of cynicism tends to suggest,

here's why this isn't working now. And I'm not sure I think for an investor, it's probably better to have the former mindset rather than the latter, even though the latter doesn't make you sound pointing out mistakes and stuff makes you sound smarter i think than saying everything might be fine but i do think that the capital markets public markets in general are very good at um giving people leeway and they they do guide you i think to the right place um i think a big example a big example is netflix uh that shareholder base over the last decade the i mean the management's been fairly strong at telling the the proper story uh but they told them what they were going to do. They did it. Um, sometimes they made some mistakes,

but the shareholder base was patient. So, I mean, that's an example of long-term, you know, Yeah. From management's perspective, I'm sure it is difficult to weather the storm of people constantly looking at your earnings on a short-term basis and saying that you're never going to fulfill it. You're never going to get there. Uh, and you do sort of have that risk when you're a public company um just that management can sort of get derailed from the long-term goal it can it can add pressure like short-term pressure for sure i mean yeah if you do stay long-term focused the capital markets are or the public markets are a good place to be yeah and i think also it it forces you you know to use the netflix example again it forces you to

um and i think the story is a great point that um maybe and it kind of breaks down too by what sort of management team where the business is at like if you're going to be the ceo of mcdonald's Yeah, there's a story to tell there and there's a way to go about doing it. But most investors, most people have a view of McDonald's and what it is. And you can play on the margins with like, oh, now the all day breakfast story is a growth story. And, you know, the stock has responded to that. But if you're Netflix, or I mean, let's say, let's take a SPAC, like if you're Fisker, and you're Henrik Fisker, and you're like, we are going to build this beautiful electric vehicle that's going to compete, you know, with Tesla, with Faraday, with all these new cars, the public market will accept that vision if you're really good at actually executing and doing it. And so I think for a company like that, it's a great place to be. And I think that the discipline that's required by going out every three months and answering to the public markets, it's not even all that much different than being private because you still have board meetings.

You're still going to have key investors calling you. You're still going to have questions on that stuff. I think sometimes, and this happened in the last decade where the VC market or VCs started to hate going public, they hated the process, they hated the SEC. well they're still getting updates from their portfolio companies it's not like you can just go for years without reporting any financials um like unless you're adam newman or whatever and so i mean i know that it's a big ask to get the ir team ready for the call and take the calls from analysts and do the meetings after the call and it's hard for the cfo doing media and all that

but it's not so different from being private and i think it really helps you sharpen your focus if you're a good company, a good management team, you have a good vision. And I don't think it matters what stage in your life you're at. And so I guess there's a long way of saying SPACs are great. Um, you know, I'm sure some of the ones that have come public are total frauds now. Yeah. I think, I mean, if 90%, uh, yeah, we were talking about this earlier. Like we were like, all right, if 90% of these SPACs are kind of dead money at their current prices, there's a lot of speculation going on. Uh, but if 10% of them are solid companies and they're still public five years later i mean that's some more rocks that we as individual investors can turn over yeah

i mean if you get one if you get one half tesla out of all the ev renewable companies that have come public like then that's great you know i mean i don't forget all the names of them but we've we've had like four or five different ceos on the show that were like we had this kid austin russell from luminar um and there's a couple other luminar companies and then there's another company that's i forget the difference between all the different self-driving technologies but anyway they all came public and they all spacked and we talked to all of them and they all said the same stuff but like if even one of those companies works and like long term then i think it's probably good for everybody it's gonna be good for investors that's gonna be in you know

whatever etf and the nasdaq and maybe s&p one day and so on and so forth i mean if you want to get really idealistic about you know like capitalism it helps people invest you know to bring better technologies to people but that's a kind of another conversation it does i mean it the fact that it gives more it gives investors more options like uh you don't have to choose every option you don't have to invest in every spec but it hopefully gets more companies into the public that are available to us as individual investors uh but let's talk gamestop and wall street bets because that was the big headline for the day i'm wondering if our questions are even stale now but i think we I guess, first things first, this is one of the questions we actually jotted down here.

So I'll say that first, and then we can kind of go and get sidetracked. But obviously, for the longest time, investors said retail can't influence prices. It's dominated by institutions, and that's just the way it's always going to be. I mean, that's obviously changed, right? And I guess the question then is how much can they, how much influence can they have? Is there like a limit, you know, could they move a hundred billion dollar company, something like that? I think at this point, you know, Joe Eisenhower wrote about this in his newsletter for Bloomberg

this morning, meaning Thursday morning. And he said that the point of GameStop is that it now proves that there's essentially no limit on what any stock could do at any time. you know it reversed crashed up is i think the exact language he used and so i think that yeah you could be i mean isn't tesla an 800 billion dollar company that has gotten caught up in something similar over the last couple years so clearly and that is a lot of that is from the fanaticism of the base of that stock and though it played out over a somewhat longer time scale than the gamestop stuff it was fundamentally um very quote-unquote serious people looking at the

the financials and saying, this thing is a dog. And indeed, they did not look great for a long time. And true believers were like, Elon's great. The cars are awesome. And the cars have always been awesome. And I know people like to say, oh, the build quality on the Model 3, like it's spotty, the doors don't line up, yada, yada. But the cars are really cool. And people think it's great. And so the stock's going to go up. And that's been the story with Tesla. So there's probably no limit to how big a company um like no limit to the size of company that could be influenced by retail and i think the other thing too and i remember writing about this a little bit in the spring and seeing a lot of comments of people like retail doesn't matter because look at the you know look at all

the money that goes into bank america or apple um jpm like your your fidelity large cap in your 401k flows, those passive flows, yeah, that's most of the money that goes in. But I actually think that that makes obvious how little money is going to be required for retail to make an impact. And like you guys know, the Jesse Livermore guy, he's written about this a lot where the more money that goes into passive and the more money that's aggregated in vehicles that aren't actively managed, the less money is required, the fewer actors are required to mark to affect and set price at the margins. And so that's also a part of why the moves are happening today. You know, all my money goes into my 401k passively, same with my peers, same probably with you guys and

your friends and all of our friends and so on and so forth. So we're not making any individual decisions. But we represent most of the money that's going into the stock market. So it only takes, I don't know what the exact numbers are, but they're probably a lot smaller than you think. They're probably in the tens of millions of dollars in a stock that's pretty big to start shaping the bid and start, I mean, you see it sometimes like stock X is up 7% and you'll punch it in on Google or punch it on Yahoo and there's no answer. The answer could have been someone bought it and they weren't even that big of a buyer. And so I think that that's another part of the story that's playing out now, like it's screamingly obvious that it doesn't take a

lot of money to move a stock that's big. And, um, I don't know where it goes from here, but I think that that is like, that's just not going to change. Cause last time I checked, I don't feel like this is going to cause me to, you know, change my, how I'm saving for my retirement. Right. Like, I don't think like, I don't think you guys believe that passive investing is going get less popular, which means you probably have more opportunities for retail and all kinds of different stuff. Yeah, that is interesting. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. The combo is like low float, highly shorted. If there's only 10% of the shares outstanding that are actually actively traded, then I mean, it's really like it could be $100 billion company. But if there's

only $10 billion worth of shares or even less. And there's a lot of big active funds on the other side, like the five or $20 billion funds that are levered up on whatever structure, like 130, 100 long or whatever it is. That, I mean, that can create a very easy formula, like we saw with GameStop. And it doesn't have to be, I don't think it has to be a bankrupt company. It could be company that's doing fine that i don't know they just buy a lot of options on or try to just flood the markets with demand what what do you think about uh coordinated moves like what wall street bets provides you know i mean i guess it's not even groupthink really it's more like yeah attack uh what are you what are your thoughts on that well i mean i i think there's so the one story

that's going on right now which um i'd be interested for you guys thoughts on this too like this whole common man populism thing to me just smells like such such bullshit like that is and and i think that but but i think that's sort of where because you know and we were talking before we came on like we're all getting calls texts from people that we haven't heard from i got a text from a you know college buddy today that i haven't talked to in six months being like What's up with GameStop? But the narrative around that is that it's this populist uprising, which is clearly, like, yes, I think, right?

Yeah, I think – yeah. I mean, okay, one hedge fund had to liquidate some losses. I think they're okay. But the thing is, like, okay, they're sticking it to the rich for, like, a day, right? but in the long run if they squeeze the shorts i mean everyone loses money in aggregate i mean some people might sell it at the top but then it just becomes a game of roulette or chicken okay yeah and the other thing that's upsetting me is the people that are like trying to be the folk hero like the they are you know this is finally retail's day i'm like but retail in the

end is going to be the ones that get hurt like yeah they're going to get the hedge fund manager whoever it is that owns like co-owns the miami he's gonna be all right but like the retail investor that needs the money and decides to do it because his neighbor did it and so forth those are the ones that are getting hurt in the end right and these hedge funds have pensions as their clients right right um i mean maybe you should just be there should be an uprising it's two and twenty at least i'd agree with that i think there is i think there is yeah no one no one charges two no one charges two and 20 it's like one and it's more like one and one and a half and 15 i guess maybe um but but like i guess so the original question though about like coordination um

it's to me the question and like this is sort of how matt levine is is writing about it and i think he's exactly right you know so we can just parrot him the way the sec is going to see it or tends to look at it tends to look at it is there needs to be intent and like like a plan around we're going to pick this name for this reason we're going to plan to buy it at this point and sell it at that point to make this money and i think that a bunch of people on wall street bets talking about a name memeing a name some of them are serious some of them have thought about it some of them don't care some of them are just there you know for the lulls like i that to me is not really coordination in the sec type definition like there is um someone got arrested or i figured out exactly

what the what it was but the story was someone who worked at s&p and was part of the index committee was telling like his buddy to buy call options on a stock that was going to get included in the in an index you guys saw that one right and like so that's that's textbook coordination right i feel like if that's how the sec is looking at cases to prosecute the wall street bets is is not even on the same planet as that because people discussing an idea is not market manipulation i mean you guys talk about stocks you like on the show So names that you think are good, bad, indifferent, names you do own, don't own, names you might own, that's not market manipulation, talking about stocks. And I think the distance between market manipulation and the discussion that's being had on WallStreetBets was extremely wide.

I think it's narrowed a little bit this week, but I mean, I think the SEC's task in terms of coming down on someone or some entities is extremely challenging here. And I don't know, like, if, you know, I used to work for Henry Blodgett, and he was, I don't know what I should say about that. But he, you know, Eliot Spitzer made him the example, right during the tech bubble, someone gets made the example. And I think that you could argue it was kind of be it was kind of like a technicality, you had to pick a person and they had to serve as the avatar of excess in this era. And that is possibly an outcome here. But I don't think as far as, you know, I'm reading the boards, I'm sure you guys are reading the boards like to call that like coordinated manipulation it's like it's a little rich to me i think it's people clustering around an idea the way they do on the internet and um i think it's part of the way the world is i think that to apply a conspiratorial you know lens on it is i don't i don't care for that because i don't like conspiracy conspiratorial thinking because it's it's very attractive to a lot of people for a lot of reasons and i think there's too much of it well what do you think uh so there's a lot of heat on robin hood right now

and people for restricting trading which um you know granted the ignorance of people like it's fine they they don't know that that happens sometimes they make you you know increase your margin requirements and stuff like that but what are your thoughts on that and the uh well i guess the hedge funds or whatever or um i think there was the ceo of the nasdaq saying that they wanted to restrict trading on that does that that seems like it's not manipulation but they they gotta you know keep things fair right i guess here's a follow-up to that do you have any sympathy for people that lost money because they couldn't trade out of it uh when people stop or when the brokerage stopped yeah i definitely have sympathy for them but i don't think that it's i don't think

it's morally wrong that someone got stuck in a position and got cashed out at a level they didn't want like i definitely think that robin hood makes it i remember you guys talking to bill brewster about this like and and he knows more about the robin hood platform than than i do i don't even have an account i've thought for a long time i should like open a hundred dollar account just to like see how it works it'll blow your mind we have a guy yeah we both have zero dollar accounts so okay maybe like a few pennies yeah but i mean i i really should do it just to like yeah not even like 10 bucks just to see how it works because i so i don't want to talk too much about it i guess because i've never like been on robin hood i just know how it works and

i know a lot of people who use robin hood um so i have some sympathy in the sense that people definitely do not realize that that's a risk but it's also a risk if you have your money at e-trade or fidelity or interactive brokers as those people found out like people you know it's like i just i mean it comes back to um you know like freedom ain't free right you know cost what's the spread cost a dollar oh five right and so like um like i and i feel like that's kind of the lesson here people are like oh it's a free market system it's like well it's it's a managed free market system and i think that the nasdaq comments um i think they're from medina friedman like maybe they were a little clumsy, but at the same time, you know, anybody, any company can call the

exchange they're listed on and request a halt in their stock at any time. You know, that's what a news pending halt is. You ask the exchange to halt the stock. So people don't, I don't think a lot of people realize those mechanics. I don't think a lot of people realize that when you are like that the your broker doesn't have a hundred percent of the capital that you might be entitled to at any one time and so when things like this happen they can't open the market we were talking about this on the show this morning so thursday morning when you know gamestop is doing this that the other and i was like okay the market's indicating 30 down but there's really no market right now there's no functional market in gamestop shares the spread is too wide you can't actually

get a clearance at the price that is listed as the quote unquote market price. And I'm sure people got filled all over the place today. Tomorrow, Friday will be crazier, I'm assuming because it's month end, auction, expiration, and so on and so forth. So I have sympathy for people who get cashed out of that position. But I also don't think that it's like nefarious that the exchanges and the brokers can manage people's positions individually because they're in control of that platform like and i i guess this is the argument for blockchain or whatever right that's peer-to-peer like stock market's not peer-to-peer i have to go through an intermediary and the intermediary can decide if they so choose to make my position to which i appear entitled not actually the

position to which they will make me entitled at some point in the future yeah uh i think your comments on freeze and freeze true maybe commissions weren't so bad i think people are starting to maybe learn that um well yeah i guess and the thing about the i think people are realizing that um you know one when robin hood takes on your margin for you or however they do it when they allow you to do immediate transfers and all that type of stuff um you know if something was on the blockchain or something like that then maybe it wouldn't be as flexible the rules would have to be since it has no intermediary it would have to be way more rules-based and maybe it would be safer uh but people i don't think something like this would be able to happen or else the

whole system would all right wouldn't it collapse right if that uh i think the other thing too to realize is that like i mean i don't know there's probably gonna be people who don't like this but like the capital markets have never been better um like never it is incredible you can go buy pretty much any stock you want for free at any time and you get a pretty good mark and i i mean i think the strange thing and you know um and i've talked to brad katsuyama a few times like i think what i think what iex does is great for their customer which is an institutional shareholder who wants to move a lot of stock at one time and wants to get a fair mark on that bulk stock but if any of the three of us want to go do anything in the markets it's an absolutely

incredible you know phenomenal like incredible thing that we could go do whatever we want anytime for essentially for free and so i think that we get a little bit carried away talking about and have this week certainly um about the market's structure or sanctity or whatever because the old system was i call a guy who and i say what about this and or he calls me and they're like we like you for i mean wolf wall street's real movie that that kind of stuff actually happened right and that is you know front load mutual funds 10 load six percent you can still buy a front load mutual fund which is insane and the fees on each trade insane um commissions like all this stuff that you're just getting your face ripped off before you even have the right to a

stock and so to be like robin hood said i had game stop at 188 and then they sold me out at 166 and i was in at 65 because i read about it on reddit and my money went up you know one and a half x or whatever like to be like i'm getting screwed by the man i think we should take a step back and be like uh it used to be way worse you know so i don't know we uh we were reading uh or brett was reading up on markets like way back when in like the early like the turn of the century and they were like it's been so democratized i hate to use that word now but uh since then what was the curb markets and yeah they used to be the curb markets and the uh gosh what are those called uh i remember someone like jamie catherwood who's more of an actual expert on this thing was writing

about those stuff yeah yeah the i forget what it was called it's like those it's where the you're gonna you know because they didn't have the internet and telephone wires were kind of just getting into place where they would all go to like these, uh, rooms and there would just be this fake ticker going around and you just kind of day trade with it. Uh, but the curb markets, yeah. I mean, there was no listings, there was no SEC, there's no FDIC insurance or what's the other one, the SIPC insurance, none of that. Um, and after the great depression, I guess it kind of all got fixed, but yeah, the thing about the, you know, all the fees, the, the old commissions that were super high, all the, the management fees on mutual funds and not being able to just

trade it from your phone or from your computer um now you know maybe you might not get a bid at you might get cut out a few pennies or fractions of the pennies but i mean you kind of just fix that by putting in a limit order i think and your problems are solved i mean but you don't even need to worry about the limit order like think about it you can get on your phone and you know when i i wrote a story about um about that experiment that ramp capital did last year about the you know the twitter poll thing and he and i were talking about um and he was like if i was in college and i had a cell phone and i could trade stocks at any time basically at the mark basically at the market price i mean that is insane that's incredibly like that's just incredible technology

and i i think that what is getting lost is like i understand it's not a great look for ken griffin who owns the most expensive home in America, who has more money than any person probably should ever have. And he's on both sides of the trade, but he's on both sides of it for a fraction of a penny times a couple billion a day. And that's how he makes money. And the cost for that is sometimes it gets weird, but the benefit is it's free and it's pretty close to a fair price. And I just think that that trade-off is an amazing benefit to regular people like us, amazing benefit to retail investors who want to get involved, and I think hopefully will get more involved. And it's not perfect, but it is such a monumental improvement from the way the markets used to be structured. And if people think the deck is stacked now, again, I think any history that anybody would ever read about the stock market would prove how wildly favorable the market is today.

to you know to i guess we're consumers we call it yeah and i mean if you look at the famous like northern pacific one where um the two big investment banks like jp morgan and the other one called coon and lobe they screwed over um but it was in the opposite direction they were kind of like the wall street bets where they were trying to flood the market and they were kind of having a battle to own majority stake and then the short sellers got screwed i mean that was true free markets where if you were the most powerful player you'd come in and do whatever you wanted um i i don't know that seems a little fair now i guess the question is then do you think it's gone too far like uh do you think that maybe there should be a little bit of a barrier to entry like a

commission per trade or maybe a minimum account balance something like that um i think free commissions are i think free commissions are fine i don't think commissions have gone too far like i don't think they're pulling that back like think about anything in your life that um was a cost and is now free like getting on the internet like aol is not coming back in business with the discs um you know like so that's that's not happening yeah i think there might be refined rules around account balances i think the fact that you could have gone on robin hood and just start trading options is ridiculous like oh yeah me me and sam love to joke like oh you can't lose money trading options because like that is literally what people that's what it seems like i think

um it seems to people like you can't lose money in trading options which is not true that is not true for the listeners out there but um you know like that's crazy that that's allowed um and again i i would refer people back to the conversation with with bill about a lot of the problems that robin hood presents but yeah i mean the every the internet pushes everything as far as it can go till it can't take it i mean look at what's happening with social media i mean facebook is trying now to like back out of having anything to do with politics after it took its news feeds so far that forget about trump being the president like there were people inside the capital building because of stuff they saw that i mean that's all facebook right but that took years to get to that

point and now facebook's like oops maybe we shouldn't have done that or maybe we shouldn't have made it so easy for that to happen. So I don't think that the GameStop episode is even in the galaxy of something as extreme as that from a market's perspective, which means way crazier shit, way, way crazier shit is going to happen in markets before something material changes. I think with, you know, with access, with all the stuff we're talking about, right. The availability of trading and who can do it and how much it costs and all that stuff. So I think it's really exciting that that's you know oh it's been hilarious and that that's where i think yeah like that's where i think it's going so um i can't wait to sort of see how it ends but i don't think

that um i don't think this is even close to a tipping point or a breaking point like not even not even close at all maybe i'll be totally wrong it'll be hilarious actually if the sec comes down in like two weeks and they're like we're shutting down all this stuff and i'm just completely wrong but nothing about internet culture has suggests um i don't know if you guys would disagree but nothing about internet culture suggests that that's sort of the arc that that consumer subsidies tend to take no i think that makes sense i don't think they're going to be like imprisoning reddit user 1655 for his take on gamestop what would you do if you were the ceo would you be trying to just do as many at the money raises as you could they have one filed so i think they can if they want

so i it was like monday or tuesday morning kramer um i really like i really like um jim kramer i think he gets a bad rap but i think he's so good at the role he does which is a very specific thing but but anyway kramer was saying like if you're you know management needs to come out and they need to say something you know and it was like a version of his famous um you know uh they know nothing rant he always kind of falls into that that delivery like cadence he has so anyway but he's like management needs to come out and say something and i would agree like i think it's been crazy that they haven't gamestop hasn't said anything but you cannot raise money at this level like there's nothing for the company to do with a stock that's now at um 180 a share or whatever i

think you know they're and they're they just reported earnings i think in mid-december so their next earnings report doesn't come out until march so um and i guess it'll be february by the time this episode comes out, but that's still five, six weeks away. So I think they have to just sit on it. Like, I don't think there's anything to do because if you raise capital at 40 bucks a share and you're still hugely improving, like you're still getting, you're still getting so much more capital for the amount of shares you have to issue, right. Relative to what a capital raise would have looked like in, um, September, October, November, let alone the summer um and i'm not sure that the fundamentals will make it make more sense to do debt versus

do equity right so i think you'll have to come out with an equity raise but you can't do it at 100 something like you have to wait so there's really nothing for them to do like stories way beyond themselves now is there any way that this like ends up hurting gamestop in the end i guess people say stocks take the uh stairs up and the elevator down like is there any way that and obviously this elevator elevator both ways but uh i mean is there any way that they could get hurt out of this yeah you could definitely have like your investor base leave because they think it's too risky to be in the stock that's obviously a problem i think in this specific situation i think gamestop's in a great place because they've already had the activists come in

they've already agreed at the annual meeting to see i think it's three new board members yeah that's right including ryan cohen the you know the chewy guy so like they've already had that event so i think they're actually in a i think gamestop's in an amazing place where for reasons unrelated to their business they're going to get probably a let's call it 4x valuation for no reason plus they already got a 4x boost in in valuation or in market cap from the addition of you know ryan cohen his team and the activist you know kind of comments they've seen the last few months so i think gamestop's in an amazing spot from that standpoint but i don't think any company wants you know their stock to get caught up in anything like this because it's reputational

damage but at the same time like we all agree that gamestop's business of having outlets and strip malls stinks they know that the business isn't the business sucks so they need to change anyway so it probably couldn't have gotten much worse for the company from a fundamental standpoint um so but but yeah i don't think any company i don't think any company wants to see their stock up a thousand percent like that doesn't that doesn't make anybody feel good i wonder if uh if this had any influence on like people going to gamestop i know i thought about that like an actual impact on the business but yeah i mean maybe they'll turn into i i you know there is that like populist movement that we have we already talked about but maybe they'll be like

all right we got to support these guys now because they're our martyr in the in the fight against this what do they call them the suits the suits yeah i mean um i know like i'm trying to imagine i don't think there's one i don't think there's a game i don't know where there's a game stop around me there's a best buy on the corner i guess i can go there and ask someone about it but like i'd love to go into a game stop and be like like ask the person at the counter like hey do you have diamond hands like how you doing i'm sure they're getting it i'm sure they're getting it like everyone i had a friend who um he and this is this is last yeah last week um he was at the inauguration he's a reporter and you know he had like his security with him and stuff

and they're staying there he said it was awkward and then like the stock market came up and like boom then their conversation just like was on fire for the entire rest of the time they were there so um people want to talk i'm sure every you go on the street you can find anybody who has a has a take on it um i can only imagine what it's like in a store you guys should go if there's one near you well uh i think there was one that's my old there was one in my childhood mall that were many of my friends might not i don't know if it's still there anymore but any more game stop questions or should we i think uh yeah where do you all right how about this where do you guys think it will settle like where the stock will just spend a week inside of a five

percent range wow uh i probably might be a while but uh 20 i don't know it's hard to say i think this goes i think the momentum starts to go back to where it was uh like even before this started like uh i think once the selling starts it's gonna take a while to stop and especially with some of their like notable longs out yeah yeah so michael burry on like seven percent of the shares and he's completely out now uh so that i mean i feel like the the floor goes a little lower because someone like him's not there anymore so that could be a downside but i think it's really hard to judge but it's definitely not going to be a hundred um those diamond hands gone you know there's no telling yeah all right let's talk uh we wanted to talk berkshire and buffett

um brett you want to hit the first question yeah i mean so i don't know there was uh i guess this was inspired by there was a tweet of all the track records of all the famous investors i think it was a little dated it might have been like 10 years old uh but i had buffett you know with the most impressive at least i think of like 23 compounded for 54 years which is just insane because you know like 15 percent for 10 years is really good uh but do you think there's ever any going to be anyone that can replace Buffett or are there any candidates in the world today or is he just kind of a one-hit there's not a one-hit wonder but no one's ever going to replace him because there is also all these headlines now about the next Buffett like you know or Chamath is like

do you think anyone's actually going to be like that like have that sort of durability over time um I don't think anyone will want to like so I mean let's put it in like more fun terms like so in a week we're gonna get Brady versus Mahomes right I mean the thing with I mean Mahomes is probably better than Brady like ever was throwing the ball his mobility all that stuff but like the reason Brady did his stuff is because he's Tom Brady the way he's focused his drive I mean he's a crazy person you know he doesn't eat tomatoes like he does all this stuff warren buffett is a weird guy like have you guys read the books um yeah i've read stuff while he eats ice cream for breakfast and yeah like this guy is a this guy's a weirdo like he just sits in his office in omaha

and i've been out to the meeting like omaha is a fine city um but like and i i drove over to his house it's very close to where the berkshire office is which is pretty close to the downtown where the meeting is like his life is in a three three or four mile stretch um kind of in like northeast Omaha I guess so he just sits there and just does this stuff and he's just focused on his thing and I just don't see that being something that someone else does who's like this person would have to be a contemporary because what are you guys like 22 23 yeah he I'm a little older I'm 24 but yeah that he's 20 all right so we're you know within five six years of each other um do we know anyone like do you know anyone who let's say they were a billionaire

at 40 who would be like yeah i'm actually going to block out all the noise and then i'm just going to keep grinding on it for the next 45 years and then i'm going to be a 65 billionaire like you know all the content now is fire right it's about it's about retiring and about chilling and whatever and granted like it's not like it wasn't like that in the 70s you know i mean boomers weren't exactly like only focused and stuff but to be in the next buffet you'd have to just be such a unique person let alone in a unique investor which is why it's highly unlikely that um someone would ride it out that long because people have amazing track records for 20 years, 30 years, and they might retire or they might lose their touch, but they most

often retire because 20 or 30 years of killing it is usually enough. Not everyone wants to be 89 being the CEO of a $500 billion conglomerate, grinding over 10 Ks every day, eating McDonald's. Like that's not what most people want to do. So, I mean, Bill Gates to me is a great example of why there probably won't be another warren buffett because bill gates is an amazing manager he's a technical founder he knows the product he can actually do the stuff not like steve jobs but he learned how to be really good at business he was really good you know allocator of capital of ideas he's he's basically buffett and he decided to tap out and become a philanthropist instead of continue to run microsoft which probably would have gotten way big and bought stuff spun stuff

off had a little tech empire all those things like so that to me is why an example probably of why at least in our lifetimes there probably won't be another buffett yeah that's true i mean you could have like seen someone like drunken miller or drunken miller sorry not drunken miller but uh he i mean he put up trekker that was on pace it seemed like he had the temperament and he was insanely smart his ideas were great but he put up like a 25 year career and then it was like you know what i'm worth like a billion dollars i'm gonna retire to my family office i still like to invest a little bit but for sure ptj kind of in the same you know same mold like you go down i mean david einhorn is kind of that way like he's not even like even bill ackman to an extent

is in this ballpark because you know he had the herbal life episode and then he had the valiant episode actually was worse for the fund and his capital base went down because of that and i think you know bill's probably happier managing i don't know what he has probably seven to 10 billion, something like that. Like he's probably just like, that's a good amount of money. That's a good number. He can own 3% of a company. I actually don't know what his ownership stake is in like Chipotle, but you know, let's call it a 3%. He could own something like that in a big business, have a say, get on the phone with executives, take an activist position if he wants, but just sort of do his thing without being, you know, Buffett and that whole deal. So

So I think there's a lot of examples of people who thought they – I guess they thought they wanted to be Warren Buffett, and then they realized there's a lot more to it than just sitting on the table with Charlie. After like 30 years compounding at 25%, like your capital base is so big that these minor acquisitions are so trivial and you're just, your choices are so limited that it's probably not that attractive to most people to be picking from like 20 companies, which one you want to buy outright. Like it just gets tougher. I see why a lot of people walk away. yeah and and i think um you know that berkshire is so funny because like the last you know really five six years um like what was that precision cast parts they bought in 2015 i think maybe it's 2014 that was like 40 billion um and then after that it's just every year it's like it's the most fun fantasy football game for business reporters to guess like what they have i remember like for

three years I kept saying oh they're gonna buy Lowe's they're gonna buy Lowe's it's a natural takeover like you know it's uh it's good old-fashioned hardware synergies with the you know the Benjamin Moore business and like all this stuff and you know to your point Ryan like he doesn't want to buy Lowe's it's like so what now he's got this thing like he you can just buy 10% of the company and then sell it if he doesn't like it owning it managing it running the business It's so much harder than just sitting on your pile of capital. And, you know, he's rolled up so many things and done so well with them that, I don't know, probably just doesn't. That's why he gave the portfolio over to Ted and Todd, too, I think, because it's like, yeah, you know, I've seen it all.

Maybe I wonder if he was. I wonder if he's been in been in the been in the short squeeze, though. that i i i do not think so but we'll uh we'll see i saw i mean i did see yeah there was some tweets like what were they like buffett's you know quiet right now or something suspicious yeah i feel like i mean i think uh was it ben or michael batnick maybe who tweeted uh like your silence is yeah i think it was batnick or something and it just uh yeah i feel like on days like this i always think about what is warren buffett doing right now and it's just him probably reading in an attic like not checking twitter yeah but whatever um do you think people my age and investors in like their 20s uh don't appreciate buffett enough because of his cash drag

this decade um i don't think so they're i think i think the thing with with buffett like if you read like Larry Cunningham's book, which I'm guessing one or both of you have read, or even just go through all the letters, but the lessons of Warren Buffett's more useful because it gets through them all the faster. There's so much in there that's useful to learn that I don't think any generation of investors won't read it and appreciate what he did. I think there's certainly people who are going to get on his case about kind of underperforming and just sort of not not being on the ball like he's talked so much in the last handful of meetings about all the stocks he missed and it's like well yeah dude like you know you're talking to your shareholders like

they should be pissed but um you know obviously he controls the whole stock so it doesn't really matter but i mean look millennials tend to be hard on uh authority figures um if that makes sense. And so I think it's fine. I think 20, I think young, young people, um, look at older people and say, oh, this guy's a clown and you know, world was passed him by or whatever. And I think that's fine. I think that's normal, but I don't think that like, you know, people still read Ben Graham's book. I'm not sure how applicable it is. Um, I think Warren Buffett's old stuff is definitely more applicable than Ben Graham's, you know, than the Italian investor is. But, um, I think people respect him, you know, just enough, but it's funny. It's funny you mentioned

that because like at the meeting a couple years i had to do this thing where i would i had to go find the first person in line and like ask them a couple questions or whatever and i think it was two years ago one of it was like an 11 year old girl or whatever she was like there with her dad and she was like loved investing so i was asking her a couple things and i started to ask this question about like what did what did buffett miss this year or something or whatever and her dad was like fucking pissed at me and like ended it and was like please leave and like which is funny because like i probably shouldn't ask that question because like who cares but it is very indicative of this sense that people get antsy about his returns and it's like just pick up the most

recent annual report and look at the second page where it lists them over time like there's nothing to worry about here just because he's not thrown a fastball at a very weird bull market um that a lot of people nailed but i just if you look at the way it happened it was never going to be buffett's thing anyway yeah yeah because he's built this over what probably almost 60 years now um and he's not going to throw it away when someone's like hey you're not generating alpha you need to go into this levered strategy on uh i don't know what are they some call options on some some big name you're gonna buy out of the money tesla calls yeah something like something like that and he's like i think i mean we've got our you know fortune here i'm not going to ruin

on some crazy thing i mean we're all doing fine but it's even like that he wouldn't even buy tesla at all forget about the the calls like you know the whole market um and uh there's an and that's like the best episode where the guest i forget who it was was like the last decade was like west coast style of like growth it was like this company is going to grow and it's going to be the future. And they might not have great earnings power now, but they may in the future. Whereas the more East Coast style of Buffett style, the CFA style is, well, how much is the company earning in profits? And how much of that over time can I expect to get returned to me as a dividend, which is just not the world that I'm not so sure that we're ever going to live in that kind

of a world again. But Buffett is thinking there he's sitting and he's doing the math in his head. And he's like, how much of business X's cash will come back to me as a cash payment over time that I can then reinvest into something else. And this market just has not been about that. And so that's, you know, so that's where he quote unquote missed. But I don't think it's like totally, I don't think that means that he doesn't get it. Like, I think he knows why he didn't bet on these companies, but his system worked so well and didn't require him to hold his nose on a growth stock. So he's not, you know, he's not going to start now. Yeah, no, I totally agree. All right. Before we get to our wrap ups, we are going to do sort of a Mount Rushmore type thing. Who are your top three all time investors?

I think Buffett's fine. Yeah. Obvious number one. It's gotta be, I mean, it's gotta be Soros, right? um when you break a currency peg i think it counts as like a like a goat move like that can't really be yeah it'd be undone um and then honestly you know roaring kitty like there you go yeah yeah i don't know i might not have roaring kitty in mind but he's not I mean, if you back test over the last few months, maybe he's beating everyone. So the reason I was thinking about this and I was like, these guys are coming up with like some hipster names that I don't know of.

And I'm not going to be able to keep up with that. So I'm just going to pick the two most bland Mount Rushmores. And I'll let you guys fill in like whatever, whatever like edgy nouveau investor picks that you guys pulled out of your bags. yeah i mean i gotta put bucket one i gotta put bucket one and then i gotta put i mean i don't know i like drunken miller i think you keep calling him drunken drunk drunk and miller uh but yeah i like his style i don't know i think his track record is phenomenal and he kind of was one of the reasons why soros did so well um when they were a team together um i don't know my third one it's it's tough to put down i mean i don't want to say munger because well i'm gonna take

monger i'm a charlie and warren and uh i'm reading poor charlie's almanac right now he's up there for me uh how is that how is that book oh i never read it it's not like a story it's like uh all his speeches and stuff um but there's there's like excerpts from like people that knew him and that kind of stuff in there as well um but i like jesse livermore too i know he wasn't he's probably the best trader of all time and he might not apply to today but he maybe that's not a pseudonym he's the uh not the pseudonym no no uh he might be the best anonymous economist of all time though but the real jesse a little more i mean he he built like three fortunes yeah it ended up poorly with the great depression but yeah i don't know i mean he's kind of like he would be

all right go ahead no i was gonna say then you know the most modern pick i would i would i would say tepper if you're gonna pick someone like recent like it has to be like a new person um but yeah i mean i think i'm i'm really interested you know i've talked about this like from the media perspective with a lot of people that you know when i started coming up you hear about like these are the big investors you know like a big moment in my career was the icon ackman fight on ccc but like it's been a decade almost and like it's kind of all the same people hanging around that you're talking to like lee cooperman's on cnbc today losing his mind about um you know i don't know what he i mean he was just kind of doing his thing he's like i don't know he's got

to be in his 80s right like we're still bringing these guys out it's the same we're playing the same hits and so i don't know what the next decade looks like but we can do the math on a lot of these people and um they're probably not going to be around for the next decade so i don't know where and and then the guys in their 50s that are available like we can name them on one hand like Like, it's – Ackman does some media. Dan Loeb is around sometimes. He's on Twitter now. He's on Twitter.

Einhorn's off the scene. Steve Cohen tweets now, but, you know, he's off the scene. Mike Burry doesn't really do media. Like, I don't know what Steve Eisman does. Like, there's not a lot of people that are available that have these big records that we're talking about. So maybe it's – you know, maybe it's my job to, like, try to figure out who that is and surface these people but it's been interesting that like it's it gets late early in that you're

still talking about the same people and all of a sudden it's been 10 years and all of a sudden these people are like 85 and it's like all right well who's the bench and i don't really know who the good answer is there it'd be interesting to see if how people look at you know kathy wood and chamath in a decade from now i'm not rooting for them to fail or anything but it seems like they're being very aggressive um and maybe that we'll look back and be like all right they were those are the two you know people the younger people that ended up being the top ones but i'm not sure how it plays out you know i guess i guess you're i guess you're right it's sorry just it's the vcs that's the answer oh right right like i guess i guess we i guess we missed it yeah we talked

around it like it's it's all those guys shemov mark andreessen bill girley um you know go on go on down the line like that's who that's who's today's version of that so yeah i agree all right wrap up questions uh what's one financial saying that you disagree with um i disagree with um i guess i disagree with the uh there's more buyers than sellers um technically there's always the same amount of buyers and sellers on them you know technically every transaction clears one-to-one um but i i don't know if i disagree with it because i like you saying it as a joke because it is funny um is a way to describe technically it's also not technically like untrue um but uh it's just it's just kind of the one that like come comes to mind

i mean like i said before i think any invocation of rationality or irrationality you know market can stay irrational longer than you can say liquid. I think that's kind of stupid because I work, like to me, the market is syllogistic. It's reflexive, right? To use the Soros thing. And so the market price is the market price. And for you as an individual to say that the market is irrational is very self-important because there's a lot of information being aggregated in market prices. And so just because the market can say irrational longer than you can say solvent uh that's that's still your problem buddy that's not the market's problem and i think people frame it around it's still it's they framed around this thing of like well i'm not wrong

because the market is actually stupid and that's you know i don't think that's the way to say it yeah we can get a whole can of worms with the fed stuff with with those people too but uh i'll hit the last question what's one piece of advice uh for anyone starting out well we usually say investing i guess maybe investing journalism would be a better answer or investing in general tweet serious like you go on twitter like you can might take some time to figure out how to follow interact people eventually like there are people that i interact with on twitter that i've never met i don't know who they are they're anonymous but like people over time they just tweet at you and for a while you ignore it you don't see it and then you're like oh you start faving and then

you start replying and then all of a sudden people are just in the circle and you can get the feel the market you can get a feel of me you can get everything from being on twitter and um i wish i had been a lot more on twitter earlier in my career but you know it worked out in the end but i think that um i think people who because investing and being in media are similar that you have to know everything that's going on all the time even though you don't really want to like you just have to and like you find it on twitter so tweet more post more keep posting all right i agree with bad yeah i like that advice all right that is miles udlin miles thank you for joining us all right thanks boys appreciate it

welcome back in thanks again to miles for coming on the show you're welcome anytime you want uh but we have hot water next i have two okay i have two as well okay uh decency normalcy isn't hot water this week because wow really uh really meta there i know i can never figure out Who to put down. It's just funny. In San Francisco, you can officially get a verified badge crest on your actual house if you're an influencer, public figure, or represent a brand. I think you may have been caught up into a joke here that might not be real.

Are you sure? It was a tweet. I was unsure. The page is called Blue Check Homes, and it looked real. Oh, it's not a joke? All right. I'll go there right now. Okay.

Bluecheckhomes.com. Get a verified blue badge on your home. Hmm? It. oh this is a really well done prank if uh if they do it if it is well if it's a prank that's funny good prank if not uh that's tough it's gonna invite the angry mob once people rise up against these influencers you know those like uh the the really and the ones that have no like common sense about how like uh what do you call it like you know how there's there's that one instagram there

is, I think it's a model, Chrissy Teigen. Tone deaf, yes. They're extremely tone deaf. Like, it reminds me of Parasite, the movie when the guy's sitting angrily in the car with the mom, like, texting in the back. This is to track those mobs, you know, with the guillotine.

Here's what I'm reading. Who can apply? Homeowners who are prominent executives, thought leaders, influencers, authors, and journalists who represent prominent organizations include companies, brands, non-profit organizations, and media organizations. Check, check, check, and check.

We are currently only servicing homes in the Bay Area with plans to expand to other cities this summer. It's real. I'm pretty sure this is real. Okay, that's cool. Well, once they move up to Seattle, we're in business because we are all those, right? I'm a thought leader.

I can't believe thought leader. You can't. It's a terrible word. If you don't use that word ironically, it might be a red flag for me. Uninvestable. Okay. Robin Hood is in hot water. I'm surprised this is not for the average – this isn't for the reasons you're probably thinking of.

So I'm sure a lot of people heard that the employees had to work long hours because it was sort of a grueling week. They were under a lot of fire, under a lot of scrutiny. and a lot of the employees were also upset and thought they were apparently thought they were being uh not weren't not working in the best interest i guess of some of the users so robin hood uh the company got everyone 40 credit to doordash boom yeah that is that's one way to unquell an employee uprising i think there was an onion article written over it no it was an onion article um from like four years ago making fun of something like that that hadn't happened yet but they made the onion he says it's kind of like those simpsons in real life thing oh tech

i i dude silicon valley's insane like 72 hours straight just to like support this demand and And they're like, don't worry, DoorDash, you got $40 credit. Silicon Valley is insane. They're getting paid so much and it's $40? Like, come on. Yeah. Tell Citadel to front the bill. What do you have?

Okay, Ivan Hotwater for saying Clubhouse Media Group was a turd. Remember when I talked about how that influencer house that had no revenue was valued at like $300 million? well remember last night when that viral social app clubhouse uh had musk on yes okay and it's named clubhouse so today clubhouse media group which to be clear has no association with the audio app clubhouse is up over 100 as a valuation over a billion dollars oh you're talking about the like tiktok housing yeah that's a total it's nothing it's just a shell company that was owned by that chinese healthcare company that i talked about the other time uh yeah this is the number one reason it's a zoom technologist thing i think this is probably the biggest reason that i don't

believe in efficient market hypothesis oh yeah that may be like gamestop as well but uh i mean there's no no one can look at that and be like no it's efficient yeah efficient markets it depends but if you describe it as markets are priced efficiently all the time yeah i mean honestly that's been disproven for many decades okay uh anything else uh antitrust legislation from 100 years ago so exxon mobil and chevron have reportedly had merger talks which would finally bring the standard oil family back together it would just be the whole thing because exxon and mobil were both baby standard oils and then they merged i wonder if there's any rockefeller descendants uh looking for employment i think they're all fine with those uh they're all doing

just fine okay um yeah the amalgamated oil company or what do they call them standard oil trust yeah they call them the amalgamated copper amalgamated steel united states u.s steel very very creative names uh like we've talked about if those if those silicon valley companies the tech companies came in back then if you were like this is an uber they'd be like are you an alien okay uh buy sell hold that was it right yes all right buy sell hold the theme this week is wall street bet stonks uh except focus on the business not on the stonk right i won't amc blackberry which would you buy sell or hold i have no idea uh forget about the stock just the businesses want a neutral cash full evaluation or whatever it would be yeah uh isn't blackberry getting into like a different

business they've done it already over the last five years i know a lot of people have talked about that so i'll probably go with them security i think yeah something like that they like transition to software or something but don't quote me on that and i would never buy any of these without actually researching them uh so i will go with blackberry and then probably hold amc because they were able to raise all that equity and pay off all the debt and stuff like that right so good for them management was pretty smart although theaters and probably won't you know reopening play yes not priced in definitely not priced in uh gamestop yeah obviously yeah sorry i don't i feel like gamestop could have been all right but i feel like this incident

might be the demise of the business um i don't know why i don't know how but i feel like it could result in that then i get an earnings bump just from people being like support the cause arm the rebels congratulations okay uh anecdotal evidence um i have two but they're kind of bland okay then you go first okay uh didn't this stuff kind of make you bullish on charles schwab the company yes yes we were talking about them again we have we don't own this at all but we were talking about them at 39 a share which was a great multiple they're already up a ton i mean yeah i think they're like a permanent business yeah i just made me rethink it just made me rethink about it uh well they were down on the news and that did not make sense yeah that makes

no sense but my second one i'm sure a lot of people if you're listening to this and you're into finance you probably got a lot of texts and calls from people last week that have never been interested before oh there's probably someone that i know that's listening that has been texting me Yes. I got those as well and it made me realize how terrible of a teacher I am because when people – like I don't know what to say. I'm pretty bad too. Oh, I'm looking to like 5X my money. I'm like, okay, yeah. So the way to do that would be dollar cost average into an index for the next 20 years. People don't want to hear that. No. So I don't know what to tell them.

I was talking to someone, I was like, hey, look at this. They're giving up with an idea. It wasn't a bad idea or anything. I was like, well, you know, you kind of got to have like a year time horizon because the short term, you really don't know what's going to happen there. Like a year that long? I was like, yeah, it's not every day. That sounds, yeah.

No, it's tough. It's the short term for us. Yeah, you kind of got to let people kind of make the mistakes. I mean, it's not like people are being dumb. You just got to be patient. You come in thinking, all right, I'm going to make all this money right away. And that's just not how it works. Yeah.

All right. What do you have? All right. What are your thoughts on the short seller backlash? It seems like that it is just – it's like the army of the mob, the angry mob is just going after the wrong people, right? Because short sellers are general, you know? Yeah.

I mean, okay. I put this out there and I did get a lot of backlash for it because, you know, I actually like Toby Lutke. I like the Shopify business and what they're doing and I put out like you are either – if you're defying short sellers, if you're saying these are like terrible people and all they want is the demise of like capitalism, I think you're doing that in your own self-interest because I would – first of all, it feels like you're hiding something, like you don't want them to – so the way I see it, you're either short selling for – because you think something is a fraud or you think it's overvalued. If you think it's overvalued, you're basically just trying to capitalize on asymmetrical knowledge, right? So how is that any different than going long? As long as they're not new shares, it has no influence on the business. Yeah, you're preaching to the choir here.

But if you're shorting on valuation and then calling it a fraud, yeah, I guess that's – Oh, yeah, yeah. That's distorting in the wrong way. What Citron used to do, yeah, I mean, yeah, that's not smart. But if you think it's a fraud wholeheartedly and you say it, that's how you prevent fraud. Yeah, if you're looking at 13Fs and looking at who's shorting whatever they're holding over a long period of time, it doesn't matter yet. If the business is fine, it'll be fine. If it's a fraud, short sellers are great at getting frauds out of the way.

I love that they don't have – they're identifying companies. I love following all the short sellers not because I short stuff because if they're on to something if all the smart short sellers I'm looking at like Jano's, Mark Cohode's that go down the line if they're looking at stuff

or they're tweeting or writing or talking about how people should be worried about this, I'm short this I'm like alright, if I own that or we own that I'd be like alright, put up the red flag maybe we missed something here they're great detectives

like people are like well you're betting against the economy that's no or you're unpatriotic like that makes no sense to me yeah i agree sizing whatever you should be it should be against you know citadel yeah you can have an r you can be angry so do it you can be angry against uh funds using too much leverage that could you know have ripple effects across the economy uh but to be bad at shorting in general there's just no reason uh and speaking of that people talking about this topic on CNBC, I saw that they had Ja Rule on this morning, a great financial analyst,

which really made me think back to the Dave Chappelle bit, you know, like the help me Ja Rule thing. But the, is there, I don't know. I feel like CNBC should just be blocked out from any fundamental investor's mindset. They've lost me at Madden Money, Options Lunch or whatever, you know, all that stuff. It just, I don't know, it's not helping.

i like bloomberg though but and yahoo finance shout out shout out miles um yeah i don't think there should be a financial media outlet that's allowed to have ackman and jaw rule on you know ackman's fine but no if you're gonna go that route go that route i mean they also get buffett on oh yeah that's quick yeah but no yahoo finance has that but then they can also have jaw rule on that that shouldn't overlap yeah is that all that that is it okay thank you guys for listening thanks again miles to coming on the show uh promo code ccm promo code ccm new picks out seven run a fund now arch capital is the name by the way and yeah so you know don't take our advice we are not financial advisors anything we say or discuss here on chit chat money is not

formal advice or recommendation any uh stocks discussed on the show may be held and you know By us or our clients, we've got to update that as well. We're going on autopilot now, but we'll get back to it. All right, thanks for listening. See you next week.