Chit Chat Stocks - Private Credit Drawdown; Ackman's Latest Antics; Nike's Outlook; Tesla's Delivery Woes $NKE $TSLA

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

The Investing Power Hour is live-streamed every Thursday on the Chit Chat Stocks Podcast YouTube channel at 5:00 PM EST. This week we discussed: (00:00) Introduction (05:23) Exploring Alternative Asset Managers (15:26) Nike's Earnings (21:08) Bill Ackman's Controversial Strategies (39:06) Nicotine Pouches and Market Competition (40:59) Universal Music Group: Valuation and Future Prospects (44:03) Tesla's Production and Delivery Challenges (48:57) Asian Market Investments and ETF Strategies (52:00) SpaceX IPO and Market Implications (57:13) NASDAQ Changes and Retail Investor Impact ********************************** Subscribe to Emerging Moats Research: emergingmoats.com  ********************************************************************* Chit Chat Stocks is presented by Interactive Brokers. Get professional pricing, global access, and premier technology with the best brokerage for investors today:  https://www.interactivebrokers.com/  Interactive Brokers is a member of SIPC.  ********************************************************************* Check out Value Spotlight: Stockwriteup.com  ********************************************************************* Fiscal.ai is building the future of financial data. With custom charts, AI-generated research reports, and endless analytical tools, you can get up to speed on any stock around the globe. All for a reasonable price.  Use our LINK and get 15% off any premium plan: ⁠https://fiscal.ai/chitchat  ********************************************************************* Disclosure: Chit Chat Stocks hosts and guests are not financial advisors, and nothing they say on this show is formal advice or a recommendation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Brett Schaefer. We are doing our weekly Investing Power Hour episode today. We do these live on Thursdays at 5 p.m. Eastern time on YouTube. So if you ever want to ask us any questions, want to tune into the live show, just head on over to YouTube, 5 p.m. Eastern time on Thursdays. Look up Chit Chat Stocks and ask away. It's a little bit of a lighter week news-wise. We do have some interesting tidbits, interesting headlines, I think, as well.

We've got Bill Ackman. We're going to try not to talk too much about SpaceX because we're saving that for a special episode. We've got alternative asset manager drawdowns. So private equity, private credit is finally in the hot seat after quite a run for a decade. So we can talk about that as well. We got Nike earnings, Tesla's delivery numbers, some important stuff out of that. And a small cap of the week as well. But without further ado, Brett, welcome to the show. Where do you want to start?

Yeah, I just have a lot of tweets I found this week, random articles. Did you see? Well, first, we went back. We're on the way to the moon. We is in the United States and the globe. I guess we can say the whole globe is on the way to the moon. Three people from the US and one from Canada. Did you see this? Did you watch the launch? i didn't watch the launch heard about it but i did not watch did you i did and no matter what a launch is if you're watching it live you get nervous i'm like oh gosh please go go please go well please go well please no matter how many times rockets are launched yeah i know exactly what you mean it just maybe it's not the best industry to invest in you know nicotine sugar is better that's the fact that you're watching it i don't know for some reason it feels like a bigger moment and you just kind of feel like something's bound to go wrong but yeah it exciting i mean it it is timing up well with all the space enthusiasm from markets

i i've said it before but and i know we're launching right into spacex i think the valuation is going to surprise everyone like even the most optimistic forecast i think it will surprise we can uh yeah we can talk update on that potential valuation in bubble watch i also want to ask did you see that another maybe startup diy media company and technology got acquired uh by open ai did you see this i did uh and and i like the show uh but i find it a little perplexing for for one it feels sort of like a vanity project almost from open ai's perspective like open ai raised they they successfully raised their latest round and they turn around and buy this pretty successful tech podcast show but what's the tie-in with open ai and they said

they're going to let it run with total editorial independence which i guarantee isn't true i guarantee they'll stop talking about claude suspiciously yeah that's sure okay but if it's just maintain the editorial independence why are you buying a random news show or a random tech podcast it feels i agree i agree i was also fascinated to see and this makes me optimistic on our potential as a podcast even though they are bigger but it's not like they're anything as big as cnbc or some of the big sports shows or joe rogan out there they projected to do 30 million dollars in revenue this year and we need to renegotiate right with our sponsors now i'm just kidding we have great sponsors that they know yeah it is surprising because uh i think they

just do such a good job with production it must be because you don't really see that like the view count doesn't seem extraordinary but they've got a quite the slate of ads uh sponsors they've got quite the uh quite the look to the show it feels like a big budget production yeah sure sure and i i heard some arguments i was discussing this on twitter with some people because i was like, Hey, look at their numbers. Like, okay. On Spotify, they have about double the follower count of our own show. And yeah, they're bigger on YouTube, bigger on Twitter, but people were arguing that they have a very, very high value listener base. They also go every day and they're also three hours, but I would be curious to how many people actually watch the full three hour

show. Because if you're pitching advertisers, Hey, you're going to be at hour two and a half here and how many people actually get to that point or live watching during that yeah i know they had 50 000 people watching the show today it's because they got acquired and they were announcing that during the show it i would just i i don't i i don't understand the revenue numbers and that's probably just uh testament to how good their marketing team is because like hey they they they did a bang-up job getting about 20 sponsors for their show no yeah they i mean they do a really good job the uh this is a good chance to say if you're looking to buy a podcast we are available we are available let's get into the uh the meat of the show here i want to talk about

alternative asset managers oh okay okay so what what are these what what is this for any listener doesn't know this is private equity right there's private equity some of these are private credit but basically they are public companies that run basically various private investment rounds and it really varies on the alternative asset manager what they're investing in so like blue owl might look a lot different than apollo or carlisle group or whatever so but yes for the most part It is public companies that raise money from public markets, also raise money from, I believe, other investors as well. I'm not totally sure how that works. And then they invest largely in private assets.

There's sometimes that's bonds, debt, sometimes it's equity. But ultimately, these are harder to liquidate, but they also don't have to have the mark to market. So that's where a lot of people get conflicted with alternative asset managers, especially like publicly run private equity situations where it's like their public competitors are seeing massive drawdowns, but the private equity holder just doesn't market down because they say, well, we don't see it. We don't have to market down just because public investors do. So anyways, news came out this week that Blue Owl, I believe it's Blue Owl Capital, which is a fairly large alternative asset manager, I should say was a fairly large alternative asset manager. They are capping redemptions on their private credit fund at 5% after steep request level. So to kind of give some context on this for anyone who's not familiar with the machinations on how these work, basically, if you're running a private credit fund, really any fund, you can gate the amount of money that's able to be withdrawn during a certain period, whether it's like monthly, quarterly, like depending on what you set up in the agreement with your limited partners or your partners in general, you can limit how much money goes out the door. And this is a quote from the CNBC article talking about it. It says, the firm's flagship OCIC fund with about $36 billion in assets under management received redemption requests of about 22% of shares outstanding during the first quarter, the firm said.

now there there is real reason to do this sometimes it is because you're getting investors are getting scared and they want to pull out money in the case of private credit or private equity sometimes you cannot liquidate your assets uh fast enough or you can't find an appropriate buyer at the right price to be doing it in a sustainable or reasonable way for the rest of your investors so it makes some sense sometimes to get redemptions but here's what kind of throws me off. Blue Owl, and it was 22% redemption requests for the shares outstanding for their biggest fund. It was 40% for their smaller fund. So really high. Blue Owl is saying that there's a disconnect between what investors believe and what's really happening specifically around AI

software. They talked about this in their letter, like basically the same case that a whole bunch of people have made that like AI is not going to disrupt software, yada, yada. And that is what's causing the issues or the investor concern for Blue Owl. But software only accounts for 20% of their portfolio exposure. So there's probably concern beyond that, I imagine, from the investors looking for redemptions. Anyways, we'll see what happens with this. They do reserve the right to gate redemption. So there's nothing, I guess, illegal happening here. There are famous stories of this kind of thing happening. Michael Burry did it with Scion Capital back in the day. That was kind of the famous episode in the big short movie. But the bigger theme here is that alternative asset managers across the board are seeing big drawdowns. So I'm going to go, I'm going to rip through some of these.

Brookfield Asset Management, down 32% from Heise. Carlyle Group, 33%. Blue Owl, down 66%. Apollo, 39%. Blackstone, 44%. KKR, 46%. And Ares Capital Management, 46% as well. So some of these are almost getting cut in half.

do you have any interest or would you ever own some of these alternative asset managers yeah we have a comment here from tyler one of the tyler's joining thank you hopefully the other tyler can join us as well although i know everyone has their personal lives tyler says the ponzi doesn't work if everyone requests their money back at the same time i don't know if i would call it a ponzi because it's there's underlying businesses here but i get the sentiment And this is the downside of their business model, where no matter what happens, you're investing in things that are not as liquid that you can get out of rapidly, but your investors rapidly, meaning one quarter, might want to get out if the feelings are bad.

And it doesn't matter if you say, look, we're going to prove over the next three to five years here that our investment strategy is sound, that software is fine, all that good stuff but your aum might be significantly smaller if you can't convince your investors to stay i think that's the problem with this business i don't necessarily like these business models uh because of this it has been a very uh good industry yeah tyler says ponzi no incorrectly valued assets yes yeah you know people can argue what the proper valuation of this is but people argue what the proper valuation of anything is it i don't think it's a bad business like people talk about private equity evil private blah blah blah that's not what i'm i think people kind of

go about it the wrong way there i think it's just the asset or sorry i think people understand what i'm saying the liquidity mismatch where people might want their money if they get nervous but they can't get it back it's just tough and if you're still earning fees on that yeah that's that's where things get a little bit sticky but if i look at the actual businesses they're fine i mean, they were super popular a couple of years ago. AUM just kept going up and to the right, up and to the right. You get more fees, more fees. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what cockroaches are lurking, as Jamie Diamond famously said sometime over the last 12 months, which he says they're definitely lurking in private credit. I'm not going to pretend to

be an expert. I've read quite a few like journalist stories about the industry, and it seems like there's potentially some things under the hood that could be messy. For example, and I think this is how it works, I would probably need a diagram in front of me to make sure, but banks today, instead of doing a lot of this off-balance sheet stuff, securitizations, what have you, they lend to the private credit funds. So a big bank, J.P. Morgan, right? They lend to the private credit funds,

and the private credit funds are doing a lot of this riskier lending out of the purview of the regulators. And that's where people are worried that things could get mishandled. We had the thing with, what was it, First Parts? I have no idea if I'm getting that name wrong. But the auto one, I think you had that as a story, right? Where they double counted the receivables for collateral and stuff like that. Things just could get a little bit messy in that front.

it comes back to i think for when you're looking at one of these managers who do you trust to one market the best gather the best aum and has the best performance track record i kind of look at blackstone and kkr they probably have the longest track records there that's the one i trust the most but hey do i love these business models not not really no me neither And part of it is you just don't really know what you own under the hood. And part of it is you own a lot. So it's hard to know what exactly you all have exposure to. You're basically just taking a bet on management.

The thing that I hate is sort of the, they win both, companies like this win both ways with the whole, we're a public company investing in private assets because they're like, we We don't have to mark anything down because we don't, we're not seeing the downside. And sometimes that's true. Sometimes public market investors are overreacting to news, whatever. Like maybe we could take this AI software example. Maybe as the private business owner, they haven't seen the downsides to their business. But they don't have to mark down their assets.

But then when it comes to redemptions, they can also say, we can't sell our assets fast enough so we're going to keep all this money in sorry and this is the part that irks me and i saw someone saying uh blue owl is gating redemptions and the first comment was are they gating management fees too because right they could do that they could do that that would be that would be a nice thing to see like it's showing that you're aligned with shareholders yeah i imagine most of these companies oh they're not no i'm guessing blue will not be gating management fees the uh but that's kind of the part that irks me. It's like you get to prohibit investors from taking their money out while you are collecting management fees. If you decide, hey, we're not going to

take any management fees while we're gaining redemptions, that's okay with me. But I just don't like the idea that you potentially have underperforming assets and you're still just harvesting fees. You research your investments, you analyze markets, you manage risk. But did you research your broker? In 2025, IBKR clients outperformed the S&P 500. Retail clients averaged 19.2%, while hedge fund clients averaged 28.91%. Compared to the indexes, 17.9%. IBKR's lower trading costs, competitive rates, efficient execution, and access to more than 160 global markets helps investors keep more of what they earn and put more capital to work. Over time, the brokerage you choose makes a difference. If you care about performance, find out why the best

informed investors choose Interactive Brokers at IBKR.com slash 2025. Interactive Brokers is a member of SIPC. Sure. We have a comment here that says, Blue Owl is definitely the most reckless of the big private credit firms, private credit, private equity. People who specifically cover that industry really seem to love Apollo and KKR. Yeah, Let's add Apollo to the mix. I think they have a longstanding track record as well. Blue Owl, I think that's a great word to use, reckless. If I'm an investor in this industry, I want someone who's going to survive over the long term.

The business models can be good if you survive, gather more AUM. I bet a basket of Apollo, KKR, and Blackstone does fine going forward. But with a lot of lenders, it's just tough for me to get into that industry without being an expert. Because you don't know what's lurking. and it all comes down to trust so that's what i'll say at the end of the day do you want to talk about ryan uh i was trying to make a good segue here to this mortgage talk uh you know people people locked in to uh to to existing assets yeah the uh did you see this chart which part are you referring to this mortgage chart that i shared uh i'm trying to transition to an

entire another topic i thought you were talking about the bill ackman shenanigans which we can touch on in a second but let's start with this okay okay okay let me share this chart with you i think it's a very nice looking chart some people were calling it as a joke if you don't understand this is that's fine that means you're not on the internet as much as me they're calling it the rate replacement you understand this you know it's it's a bad joke i i don't follow that one but it's a very very very bad joke the essentially in housing there's been the rate lock-in where people had really low what sub three percent mortgages sub four percent mortgages and they outnumbered uh you know the existing ones that were at the current rate which is about

kind of hovered in between the high fives to seven percent over the last few years but if you look at this chart, since the rate hikes from the Fed, because people have been slowly moving to new houses, we've seen from 2022 through to today, the percentage of mortgages that are above 6% climbing higher, and the percentage of mortgages that are sub 3% going lower. And they finally crossed. So there's more 6% rate mortgages than 3%. We have a long ways to go, I would say, before all the 3% mortgages go away, because they're still at 20%. And I feel like that's that 20% that'll finally normalize the housing market, but it may take five years for that to happen. Fascinating chart. Yeah. I mean, if you look over the last three years or so on

that chart, it's basically gone from 25% to 20% of the share of mortgages that are below 3%. So fairly stubborn, you could say, but I think a lot of that is- The number of 6% is going up pretty quickly right i think a lot of that is refinances would be my guess people that were i mean you saw you saw the massive spike in sub three percent mortgages and what was that 2020 in that chart maybe you can 2021 yeah 2020 late 2020 2021 early 2022 probably a lot of refinances there i i feel like we've talked about this maybe four years in a row i don't know what the supply unlock is for existing home inventory for like people that are locked into these sub three percent mortgages maybe it's just a slow drip i think so as well yeah look seattle is finally

seeing an unlock i kind of follow that market closely our home market uh 30 growth in inventory year over year yeah well i think each state each region depending on what happens there's going to be a kind of a slow unlock and i think we'll affordability will finally arrive i hope yeah i remember thinking like i think this was three years ago and unaffordability home affordability was the worst it had i think ever been when rates initially spiked and home prices didn't come down and basically we came to the conclusion that either rates can come back down or home prices can come back down but ultimately people can't that there will not be a lot of home buyers at current prices given the median income or the third option was that the median both of

them stay the same home prices and rates and the median income just creeps up over the next 20 years until we get to like a good equilibrium we're going to mix both we're going to mix everything i think it seems to be a blend of all of them speaking of that data was from fannie mae so let's pivot to this here to hackman what what's what's the general up to what what is he having his soldiers you know marching on the front lines for i need to unblock him from twitter um just for content the the the podcast purposes him and elon i should probably unblock and look at what they're doing just just for entertainment but sorry you go what is he up to And maybe I'm just not thinking of enough people, but I don't know if there's any billionaire that has thrown his reputation away as much as Bill Ackman over the last three or four years.

Like, it just feels like he has torched his reputation in public. And I was scrolling through his Twitter. It is he spends a shocking amount of time on Twitter. If I were an investor, I would be concerned by that in his funds. the uh so he tweeted on march 27th fannie mae and fannie and freddie are stupidly cheap asymmetry at its best they could be a 10x and it could happen soon now to keep in mind fannie mae and freddie mac are both traded otc they aren't super high trading volumes following his tweet shares jumped 50 percent and i believe both of them now it's up like 35 percent over the last

four or five days this heap on december 30th last year he posted the exact same thing basically fannie and freddie are stupidly cheap it everyone should buy whatever are you insinuating something right it i know this isn't well i don't think this is technically illegal but he's literally just padding his stats for quarter end every time it allegedly let's say allegedly if someone wanted to you know so we don't get in trouble if someone wanted to pad their stats for quarter end this is what they would do yes someone with a big platform would tweet out how cheap they are uh on the last trading day or the last few trading days of the quarter hoping that the stocks would jump and then your net asset value that you could report to your investors would be

significantly higher what a terrible look for someone who up until like the last five years has had a phenomenal investment track record it just feels like phenomenal let's good it's good yeah i wish he would just stop tweeting honestly i i like i really liked following his investment analysis when he was sort of a younger investor but now the intermixing of politics and everything it just feels it's tiresome you're saying you're gonna desert as a as a soldier you're gonna abandon the front lines he needs your help okay it is a prime example of person makes a lot of money thinks he has expertise in every domain and you see it all the time with investors that do well uh anyway i found this frustrating that's that's good for me because i have no money and

i already think i'm an expert in every domain yeah exactly do we want to talk about some real news here some nike earnings sure yeah the company what i didn't even look at the earnings because i know you had them as a topic they're bad doing bad pretty bad i gotta tell you you're never invest in fashion is aging very very well don't break that my advice would be don't break that rule. Nike's revenue was flat year over year on a reported currency. Constant currency was down 3%. Wholesale revenue was up 5%. Direct revenue was down 4%. Gross profit, gross margins shrank a little bit. So gross profit declined 3%. Earnings per share down 35%. Here's the revenue growth by region north america up three percent that's okay europe middle east and africa up two

percent greater china down seven and then the rest of asia and latin america up one percent china nike's china revenue went from eight and a half billion in 2021 it was a big chunk of their growth engine honestly uh eight and a half billion in 2021 to six billion dollars today it's down 30 over the last four years my question is what's going wrong for them in china right now do you think this is just the chinese economic conditions because we have seen that like ferrari shipments to china are down like almost cut in half over the same time spending yeah it's been pretty weak this is probably part of the pop i mean it lines up pretty perfectly with the popping of their housing bubble which we don't really see in western markets english-speaking

markets but it was for all that we can understand just as big as our gfc but maybe handle a little bit uh cleaner i guess given that they have no uh democracy we don't need to get into that but they're also at the same time for nike i believe there's been a lot of local competition within sportswear shoes is it called anta something like that and yeah there's local competition and i would guess i mean if i was a chinese person like hey there's a local national champion now they make high quality sneakers like nike i would i would be like oh let's try those out that seems better yeah whether this is general economic conditions and the housing bubble affecting consumer spending or more just consumer habits changing this is the double-edged sword of growing

in china for any business but especially for a fashion company largely a fashion company i think this is something you should keep in mind if you are a lululemon shareholder today because china is the fastest growing market for them by far it's the majority of their new store expansion is going to be in china they're investing heavily into it funny enough despite all these consumer issues or economic condition issues in china lululemon's not not uh having any issues it seems so my bold prediction five years from now lululemon has more revenue than nike in China wow that'd be a big growth

you should buy Lululemon stock then it's trading pretty cheaply if you believe this can't do it? the only one I've owned in the past is Crocs that's a special use case that's just it's it's it's own beast

I feel like that's the and they're buying back so much stock I've been still following them on emerging modes research which people can check out in the show notes uh for for my email newsletter but that yeah like lululemon's just tough i had it as a psychological long i think at some point last year i thought there's maybe a good chance of a turnaround yeah it's just so unpredictable apparel is how am i just some nerdy finance

guy going to predict fashion trends and you have to predict you can't there's nothing durable about them if you invested ten thousand dollars let's let's uh you know what this is a good chance for us to do our uh fiscal plug here fiscal plug yeah yeah we're bringing out ryan's uh tweet threads for fiscal ai let's pull it up right here 10 years 10 year chart for nike for nike ten thousand dollars invested if you invested ten thousand dollars you would now have eight thousand four hundred dollars you would have lost sixteen hundred dollars over a decade hey and 10 year about 10 years ago is when we met phil knight for five seconds do you remember this yeah yeah that's true i think he was that many is now i think he was long gone from nike by that point

but well you know he still owns he still owns the you know a bunch of the company um yeah well nike update good every week we gotta have another reminder don't invest in apparel and i have another rule that i've made don't invest in restaurants restaurants i know it restaurants yeah it's tough restaurants are tough i feel like habits change like they do in in apparel chipotle seemed bulletproof for 10 years now cop sales are are very poor and and there seems to be sort of an exodus from consumers for that brand. We might be in the age of Kava now. All right, let's hit some listener questions.

We have someone in here that says, first-time listener, what are y'all's investment strategy? Hey, maybe someone's from the South there. Or what do you guys like investing in? All right, well, I guess I can maybe start. my philosophy. I add three pillars to my investing philosophy. Any long-time listeners heard this before. I care about valuation, management, and business quality. Business quality meaning, is there a moat? And I really like moats that I think can widen over a five

to 10-year period. That's the type of businesses I care about. It can be across all sorts of sectors. There are some that I like to avoid. Apparel, discretionary, because, well, it comes back to one of my frameworks which is emerging moats that's why i called the newsletter i write emerging moats and that's why i care about those things i really invest all across the board looking at my portfolio right now there's e-commerce there's fintech there's financials in general there's a consumer internet companies there's a lot of stuff i'll invest in industrials the sectors are not necessarily important it's really again am i finding good management teams that i like um and that's always up to the individual investor the stock's trading cheaply

based on a three to five year time horizon i guess i should mention our time horizon right similar we're not next quarter people we want to go on to a three to five year time horizon and then again business quality and do i think it can get better ryan any anything else from you No, for me, the name of Brett's newsletter, the Emerging Moats newsletter, is really what I am looking for in businesses. I want a company that has some competitive advantage, but I am confident or I feel confident that the competitive advantage will grow over the coming years. that's really the business i look for usually that ends up being network effects like airbnb or like maybe they're the low cost provider and they continue to sort of uh drive down costs more and more that's like an amazon for example that those are really a lot of the businesses i look for is basically do they have an emerging moat sometimes we'll venture out

outside of that, or I will. And then I've given myself a rule, which Brett has had to hold me to a couple of times. Anything I buy, I have to hold for longer than three years because that is enough time for me to really gauge whether my thesis is actually playing out. There's too many times where I end up reacting to price action over a short timeframe when I really haven't had enough concrete evidence of whether or not the business is actually evolving the way I'd want. All right. We also have a question regarding Phil Knight. Is he really like he was portrayed in the movie Air?

Well, he's very old when we saw him. And what's funny, the only thing I really remember is that we got a picture with him, which I always feel a little embarrassed with, but I thought it was cool. But him and his friends, he was worth, what would you say, $30 billion, something like that? And they were eating really limp-looking Subway sandwiches on like a white plastic table. And I just thought, huh, he's still hanging out with the regular folks. uh before he heads to his private suite yeah he uh uh we didn't really talk to him we just saw him and asked to take a picture and you know funny enough it was in like this sort of big tailgate

area no one really knew who he was which i thought was first i got i got it i read shoe dog i knew yeah and then we took a photo and a lot of people started to figure out who he was let's uh let's shift gears unless we've got oh we've got another question from tyler here has ryan added to his monday position i have not honestly buybacks adding to the position yeah sure did you see wicks their uh tender offer yes did you see this 30 percent 32 basically right 32 32 yeah basically took out almost a third of their share count in one gulp at 92 dollars a share and the stock dropped today i'm pretty sure yeah the stock's below that figure that is insane to me uh it's just tough it's just tough there's potential disruption

in the website building market um yeah yeah there is but i don't i don't think it's gonna bleed that bad like i still feel like they have a leadership position and people are going to want even with the modern day tools i think people are still going to want to drag and drop solution to customize their own websites and to actually build a lot of the performing functionality around their website as well so order intake uh what bookings payments processing that kind of stuff usually requires like partnerships uh from from the platform hosting this the website for you so that's not going to be all of them i do think there's probably some customers that will churn

but i think their core business partners will stick around well they'll have to come up with solutions i mean they're just going to have to improve and compete with the the llm website building types and they're gonna have to come up with their own solution with that which it looks like they have it's just an uncertain time period um yeah that's that's pretty much it but that's going to be and we should highlight our sponsor fiscal ai use our link fiscal.ai slash chitchat that's going to come up with one really funny shares outstanding chart which is gonna be flat and then boom it's gonna be like a it's gonna be like a wall of a cliff but given their sbc numbers it's gonna grow back in just a couple of years uh but yeah

ryan you're the one that works with fiscal ai any any new features or features to tease for ads ad this week i'm gonna tease the mcp now for those unfamiliar uh it's basically like the api plugin for uh your llm so if you've got like if you're a regular user of claude you probably know that sometimes it hallucinates a bit on the financial data you're not always sure where the financial data came from you can plug in uh the fiscal ai mcp now it hasn't been totally commercialized yet but it is doable uh you can plug it in for into cloud and then you've got basically uh industry institutional grade database plus all the cloud capabilities so modeling becomes easier all that stuff we do have a question oh and i will say the nike china

revenue all that stuff kpi is very accessible with uh fiscal.ai slash chit chat gets you 15 off and you automatically get two weeks free so no card required it's worth checking out question from uh ryan burns here in the chat any thoughts on the fda fast tracking of nicotine pouches being stalled or slowed turning point brands is down exclamation mark there's some there's tpp boys out there they love they love uh 30 point brands i've seen it with the sub stack chat phil morris international lobbyists and lawyers they got to be celebrating tonight it's like that scarface meme printing printing the money right that's that's that's all it is i know i can never tell like i see a lot of young male investors that pitch turning point brands and

talk about how superior the products are to to zint their nicotine pouch products i can never tell if they're just like you know when you're a fan of the business so then you become a fan of the product or if it's like truly superior kind of thing i i do think nicotine pouch space is getting more competitive my guess is that zin's market share will be significantly lower in five years yeah that's that's not a bad way to put it i i tend to agree turning point brands the chart is quite ugly. It looks like a Bill Huang chart with Paramount or

Farfetch. It's like a parable of both directions. It's in a rapid 50% drawdown here. I don't know about the exact business development with this. All I would say is

nicotine pouches are probably going to keep growing. They're probably going to keep growing internationally, which Turning Point Brands might struggle a little bit with. and I would recommend listening to our interview with Fabio from Mindset Capital. Capital Mindset. Mindset Capital or Capital Mindset.

There's two businesses, and I get dyslexic every time. It's Capital Mindset. Yeah, wow. 50% drawdown in a month? Yep. Earnings weren't that great, according to Wall Street. And this latest nicotine patch thing, I guess. so yeah maybe maybe it's a better buy here uh if we look let's look at the overview market cap

1.4 billion and then there's that nicotine pouch revenue that's growing really rapidly i think what is it in the hundreds of millions it's below 500 million so you know given those really really fat margins of that business you could be getting some good value and there's there's nice uh cash cows from the chewing tobacco and rolling papers so yeah okay let's do a little i don't know if dumpster diving is the proper term but uh digging for treasure let's say okay i found a new stock trading at its lowest valuation ever although it hasn't been public that long a business that you and i are from fairly familiar with universal music group trades at 14.9 times its earnings before interest and taxes would you ever own this oh that's a good question it feels like something

that's worth owning earnings are going to be stable you have price increases coming across the music streaming services is there just this is considered an ai loser is that it i honestly don't know maybe i i bet it's considered an ai loser because ai music and ai copyright singe the ai uh like songs that are similar to certain songs and they just take over playlists and stuff like that there's just been countless millions and millions of these songs being created i feel like that's it i'd want to look at they have a data point i believe like what spotify's market share is of the music play that's from these big labels because it feels super durable i mean people still listen to the beatles and old music and i feel like they will

50 years from now yeah i mean there's the back catalog which is going to be valuable for ever but there's also i think the appeal of signing with a big label is still pretty high for a young artist like it's not the the path to artist independence like success is not that clear if you don't partner with a big label so my gut says these these businesses are going to be just fine and then spotify is sort of the rising tide that lifts all boats it's going to be they're going to raise prices and it's just going to trickle through to these big labels so i uh i'm interested you know what the biggest thing that deters me is okay when i sell my business i want the best tax and investment

advice i want to help my kids and i want to give back to the community oh then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my head of office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth Advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IGPrivateWealth.com. New from Nespresso. Blend wellness into your coffee routine with the Coffee Plus range. infused with functional benefits. Choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins, like Coffee Plus B12 to help support immune function

and Coffee Plus B6 to keep your day moving. Or go with the flow and choose Ginseng Delight, our new double espresso with ginseng extract. Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning. Let your morning change you. Discover Coffee Plus on Nespresso.com. Bill Ackman. He loves UMG.

that's the biggest thing yeah i don't want to be associated yeah so we have tyler saying absolutely no way i'm listening to ai music that is brain rocked well here's the thing with the the ai play the the recommended playlist i feel like we all are we just don't know about it but i get your point i have the same feeling uh bill ackman was trying to promote another comment here bill ackman was trying to promote umg in some kind of spac scheme a few years ago yes you are right we were well aware of this and all of Bill Hackman's antics. Bill Spackman.

Bill Spackman. The Spark. Do you remember this? The Spark? It's kind of like Ipidar. Do you remember? It was a special Spack. Of course, it was a special Spack.

The General Windu. Anything else? Yeah, Universal Music Group is fascinating business, I'd say. Maybe it's one you can do for your next research episode, although I thought we already had a choice there.

DoorDash. DoorDash will be my next research episode. DoorDash, then UMG. That's a good lineup to me. What about Tesla or SpaceX? Yeah, let's do Tesla first. Let's talk Tesla. Maybe quick.

Tesla talk. They reported their delivery numbers this morning. Delivered 358,000 vehicles in Q1. Maybe you can pull this up on fiscal because they break it out by model, I believe. the so 358 000 vehicles in q1 missed analyst estimates by about 7 000 vehicles so fairly large miss the thing that and i've never really been able to wrap my head around this or how they manage this but they produced 408 000 vehicles so they produced 50 000 more vehicles than they delivered second quarter in a row where they've outproduced what they've delivered

that the 50 million uh excess production is the most is the 50 000 50 000 sorry 50 000 excess vehicles produced is the highest spread they've ever had on that figure so are there are any concerns over inventory build i mean it seems like yes right come on come on yeah yeah you know we've seen this historically a number of times and it kind of like delivers in production sort of ebbs and flows it seems yeah so i i can't tell if like this is them catching up to demand but it certainly doesn't feel that way there there is a little bit of timing at quarter end maybe but no one seems to care

stocks down a little bit but it's still nowhere near any sort of multiple of what the automotive business should be I saw a fascinating chart I think in the Wall Street Journal which there probably should be a game that every time I've mentioned the Wall Street Journal people should have to drink

because I do mention one article at least a week where they had across the entire EV industry in the United States after the EV credit went away it just demand fell off a cliff and the whole supply chain is suffering they're also seeing in china first time ever byd i believe reported a profit decline and the chinese government is getting actually into the mix within the ev sector which is hilarious the china the chinese government who is all ultra competition is saying you guys are being too competitive we need to

rationalize this market a bit so the chinese market is super intense and ev demand is falling off a cliff in the united states yeah margin is gonna be tough and it's no surprise that you produce 400 000 something vehicles you only deliver or sell 360 000 cash flow is going to be a concern this year if that continues who's this chart byd this is byd's total ev deliveries and They are down, what is this, 25% year over year? Yeah, 30% year over year. Pretty, yeah, quite the drop. You know who's actually performing okay in this space?

NIO. NIO, yeah, come back for the ages. Yeah, that stock was completely left for dead. I think we actually had a question on Twitter as well. Oh, about Asia? Is it worth taking an Asia stock basket approach? I have it written down at the end of the document here, Ryan. Is it time to buy a basket of Asian market ETFs that have fallen due to energy shortage due to the Iran war?

Sorry, I say it like an American. I don't know. I like some individual stocks in places like Korea and Japan. Vietnam seems very cheap. Philippines seems cheap. philippine stock exchange is interesting if we ever get a chance to buy it what what expertise do we have in these markets it's tough yeah i don't know if i would take a basket approach necessarily i i would probably be more inclined maybe more i i'd like to pick

the businesses honestly like uh coupon grab i don't own grab but i like the business model the uh i'd like to go one by one and market by market because investing in china is very different than investing in japan for example yeah some of these etfs like taiwan 30 tsmc so you got to look at the underlying i'm good with the holdings of these etfs yeah that might that might i will i'd rather have 100 uh someone said how long release do you think tesla has before the valuation starts to collapse if we assume the trends continue with revenue no idea again our working assumption is a merger with spacex you guys will forget all the listeners will forget about it in two years if it doesn't happen but if it does happen

you heard it here first is that our stance right yes it is we have another question will the spacex ipo directly impact uh tesla's share price as muskers move capital to spacex no here's what i think well that's an interesting thesis actually but i think this is until we hit like some sort of true true bear market recession whatever musk can play around with this as much as he wants if tesla is suffering he'll say i'm gonna merge tesla with spacex at a certain share price or whatever you know and he'll get another slap on the wrist and he he'll be fine and tesla shareholders will be fine i really think revenue and business performance has absolutely nothing to do with how tesla's stock price will perform over the next few years especially with spacex

coming public revenue revenue gross profit and operating earnings have been horrendous if if you told someone that they're going to fall off a cliff over the next three years in 2023 i'm pretty sure the stock's almost up over that time despite a huge collapse let's let's look let's confirm with fiscal but i'll do a little chart magic uh 2023 yeah it's a little higher yeah it was in the 200 in 2023 and now we're at 360 but if you think it's going to be a slow burn from here that's honestly you know that's that's that's a better short than that if you don't think it's going to go up like one of those 10x runs again that's a good point and maybe this is time to talk finally about spacex again they filed

confidentially for the ip confidentially for the ipo apparently it's coming in late june or july and unfortunately for us plebeians we do not get the s1 yet so we will be delaying that apparently it comes out a couple of weeks before the actual announcement um so well we'll do a special episode on the s1 late may early june we'll see but what just came through the line or the news wire the news line i don't know i'm calling it that is from bloomberg about an hour ago spacex boosted its target ipo valuation above two trillion dollars as the world's most valuable startup gears up to pitch potentially the biggest ever market debut didn't it's only getting 750 billion uh 750 billion would have been in earlier in 2025 then they merged with xai

and twitter in late 20 no earlier this year which should be worth 25 trillion dollars and then they originally pitched 1.5 trillion and now they've bumped up to two yeah it should have hurt their valuation if anything but no to show this chart this is since the fourth quarter of 2022 and i'm just going to talk through it because people might not be able to see yeah the bottom of the bear market there operating profit for tesla is down 68 since that time stock price is up 234 i'm telling you it the fundamentals the business performance it simply doesn't matter today they missed on deliveries and i bet this was it yeah it's down it's down like five percent okay all right well we're one elon tweet away from that bumping back up the yeah it's usually high beta to the to the

nasdaq and do you want to do you want to talk about what uh a listener actually had a nice question on this and what what the uh what old musky might be doing to the nasdaq here i bullying regularly yeah yeah okay here's a question from the substack check again you can it's a little bit wonky with the newsletter but the sub stack check is totally free if you sign up for the emerging modes free tier and you just join the chat on the app you don't have to pay for anything we talk a lot about the podcast they're not sure if you guys previously talked about it but if not we'll love your thoughts on the recently confirmed nasdaq changes that accelerate new public companies to the nasdaq 100 these changes will allow newly

public companies to be added to the index up in 15 days rather than the historical three months additionally adjustments were made to float minimums and multiples for market capitalization based on the initial float minimum was 10 but spacex will float five percent and have a 3x market cap multiplier for waiting purposes reddit seems to think this will have a retail have retail as bag holders for spacex and open ai yeah it's probably fair i agree with them kabuki had a sub stack people might think i'm crazy saying this guy's name but he went somewhat viral. He had a few quotes I think make sense. Quote, NASDAQ recently circulated a NASDAQ 100 index consultation. They are officially seeking feedback from investors on proposed updates to

their index methodology. But let's be real. This consultation is NASDAQ speak for letting us know what they're going to force feed us like a baggy foie gras duck. Did I say that right? We're not very cultured people. A thinly veiled blueprint for how to forcefully transfer wealth from the retirement counts of passive retail investors directly into the pockets of corporate insiders and early investors yeah i think my first thinking is if you have a two trillion dollar valuation and it's at 150 times sales and you're transferring the ownership from insiders to retail yeah that's that's tough yeah don't invest get out of your index funds it uh maybe don't do that it does feel like they're i mean it's going to be probably what five percent or more of nasdaq 100 at a two

billion dollar valuation probably something like that yeah it it makes me a little angry honestly but i'm gonna you know what let me pose it to you this way if you were a shareholder of nasdaq the 100 the qqq or something no no no shareholder of the company would you be okay with them doing this purely so they can have the listing fees uh sure maybe i i don't know because look there was a commenter and i was stealing this in the future on the kabuki post that said that he has given nasdaq a new nickname otc plus speaking of right that's brand deterioration right speaking of flawed exchanges have you seen the exodus from the london stock exchange going on uh yes i thought that's happened over the last

decade i mean it has but there was another one this two weeks ago maybe uh ashted group well renamed itself to sunbelt rentals the it's the parent company of sunbelt rentals which is like the biggest competitor to united rentals changed their name changed their primary listing from the london stock exchange to the nyse wise is planning a move as well ferguson recently did this which i think is like the largest hvac company in the world as an eric and i like it because i don't have to do currency exchanges on my yeah on my analysis they'll have they'll have u.s dollars that i think was the biggest we did a whole episode on stock exchanges i think that's the biggest bear case uh is pure globalization and digitization of financial

markets means that everyone can just listen in the united states and there's just a winner take all for the u.s exchanges yeah or at least the largest companies right yeah british american And tobacco, apparently, considering a move as well, being pressured by activists. Good, good, good. That's good work. I do get annoyed with having to think about the exchanges, like the currency exchange. Hey, maybe they can fix their IR pages because you know what I can tell companies from Europe is if I have to Google search the company name quarterly results and then click on a

direct link instead of going to their IR page and being able to figure out where it is. it's like they don't know how to design a website that i'm going to give this is i'm going to turn this into a shameless plug for fiscal that is one of the biggest benefits for me about fiscal is that it's standardized investor relations pages so it's just brought into the same place because i i was so sick of it of trying to navigate uk companies ir yeah yeah ir sites um let's see Lastly on SpaceX, did you see E-Trade is going to win the retail wars on this? No. No. What is this? So this was CNBC reporting the brokerages are competing for who will feed the individual investors who want to buy SpaceX at 200 times sales.

And E-Trade is apparently winning and say it's going to get the distribution to sell to retail. Can I get what I'm saying, Ryan? So you have to be an E-Trade customer to do this. While Robinhood and SoFi are going to be out of the picture. To me, I envision it like the Joker scene in The Dark Knight where he splits the pool cues, and they're going to do the tryouts. It's like, all right, who's going to feed me my money? No one's making money here.

I'm just going to bully you until I get this cheap, cheap distribution. But E-Trade's the one that came to the table. If you were rational, why would you not use Robinhood here? I know. well i guess i don't really know e-trade's user base like i don't know how big that is but this i find it all a little disheartening if this gets bit up past two trillion everyone well if this is successful if this listing ipo is successful and it's above one and a half trillion it goes to show how much of the world now simply just does not care about

or doesn't look at fundamentals which is whatever maybe they've outperformed me but it's it makes me very anti-passive it makes me like become one of the index fund bear truthers oh yeah join join the club life's too short i never want to be yeah we're gonna make the t-shirt eventually uh let's see before we close things out we have rod alsman i believe this is rod uh past guest really recent guest that says w-o-s-g.l or just rolex maybe come retailer distributor should become the major majority us revs this year could see them relocating at some point in the next few years that'd be interesting um we have someone that's saying uh i'm noah the short seller and i'm shorting the usa that's a good way to end it okay thank you noah unfortunately

if we're just talking about like indexes i could see that being okay yeah maybe maybe i uh that might be too bold of a take but we have someone here that says morgan stanley owns e-trade okay that makes sense because morgan stanley and spit and the musk empire have a giant relationship so maybe that maybe they're doing him a favor all right any other big topics i don't think so we had a small cap of the week that we didn't get to i know we have so many people that ask us sometimes sometimes it doesn't get to us uh or sometimes we don't get to it yeah i think that's gonna do it um if i can lay things out of here as a disclosure we're not financial advisors anything we say on

this show is not formal advice or recommendation ryan i or any podcast guests may hold security discussed in this podcast may have held them in the past and may buy sell or hold them in the future thank you everyone for tuning in and we'll see you next time i finally had a light bulb moment about a stock we've all heard about growing at 18% a year and a 15 PE. I shared this insight in a special deep dive report to subscribers of my research service value spotlight. The report is called a generational moment, reigniting human connections through a tangible network of intangible assets. Chit chat listeners can get a discount to my research as stock writeup.com. That's stock W R I T E U P.com.