Power Lunch - Stocks Continue to Slide 9/25/25

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

Stocks continue sliding as all three major averages are tracking for a negative week. We sit down with Tiger 21's Michael Sonnenfeldt to get a read into how the ultra-wealthy are investing.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This market has echoes of the dot-com bubble. So says one of the world's great investors. Welcome to Power Lunch, everybody. I am Brian Sullivan, Kelly, out today. Stocks and your money down a little bit today and this week. As the topic we first raised on this show a few days ago, is some of the AI hype overdone, now getting a lot more attention that is hitting

some once red-hot stocks like Oracle as investors get a little bit jumpy. In fact, one firm slapping a sell rating on Oracle sees a huge pullback coming. That analyst is here in minutes. Plus, two power players in the house right now. Joe Muglia, former TD Ameritrade Chair and CEO, and now founder of FG Nexus, here to give us his take on the markets

and the big money in college sports with Paul Hickey and Michael Sonnenfeld, founder of Tiger 21, on investing trends among the ultra-wealthy. As the kids say, that's a lot of show. And let's start with that big theme. Whether some of the hundreds of billions of dollars that companies like Open AI and Nvidia and Oracle and everybody else are talking about may never materialize. Because we either simply can't make the electricity to power the data centers or companies

realize they aren't making a return on AI and so they cut back or maybe some combination of the above. That spending spree has soared stocks. The NASDAQ 100 more than doubled in five years. and much of that doubling is actually just a couple of companies. In fact, 10 companies, nine stocks because Google trades twice, are now a whopping 52% of the NASDAQ 100. Now, to a grizzled old veteran like myself,

it's feeling a little 1990-ish. In fact, look at that chart. You can see we're actually more concentrated at top than we were back then. And today on CNBC, mega hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin said, this market is starting to smell a little like the late 90s. Here's what he said. There's obviously echoes of the dot-com bubble in this moment. All right.

And let's take a step back. The dot-com bubble, there was a huge amount of capital that flowed into what today we referred to as the internet. Now, the true winners and losers were not readily identifiable at the start of that whole bubble. But move forward 10, 15, 20 years later. there's no doubt that the world was radically transformed by that moment in time, radically and in very positive ways.

So let's talk about that and these markets with two of our favorite people. Joe Mowgli as former CEO and chair of TD Ameritrade, also co-founder and executive advisor of FG Nexus. Paul Hickey is co-founder of a bespoke investment group on set. And I just found out both these guys went to the same high school. No Rams. Bizarre is that. But anyway, welcome.

Appreciate it. Joe, thank you guys for coming in. Are you worried that this market is anything like 2000 to 2002? I'm not. And here's the reason why I think. I don't think we really, really know, Brian, what the future of AI is going to be. I mean, we have an idea what it can be. We understand the significant productivity they can have with us,

the incredible impact is going to have on margins. But you go back to the 90s for me. I appreciate the parallel. But the dot-com bubble, everybody was coming to market. A lot of those companies, more like a SPAC craze, not as bad, but more like a spac craze. A lot of those companies weren't very, very good companies. But you had a pretty significant five-year run.

And when it blew up, it blew up. They didn't have good balance sheets. Most of them weren't profitable, et cetera. Now, today, fast forward on this, I think this is still the beginning. This is 1994-95 as far as back then goes for today. But look at the companies. Look at the Magnificent Seven.

They got incredible balance sheets. If they were totally wrong in terms of investing $50, $500 billion, they'd be okay. Wildly profitable. Wildly profitable. Wilderrific. InV-VIDIA wildly profitable. Oracle wildly profitable, but Open AI is not.

And Open AI seems to be the one driving all of this. Invidia invests in Open AI, which invests in Oracle, which invests in Open AI, which invests in Nvidia. I think one of the things that brilliant with what Alma's doing as far as Open AI goes, he's doing strategic alliances with a lot of the other really great firms that are very much involved with this. And that partnership, I think is going to help mobile span the next few years. But these companies are really, really solid companies. And it's not at all like it was in the 90s. The 90s, we did not have real companies doing the whole internet thing. Today we do.

Well, they created metrics, Paul. I don't know if you're, you know, you're probably too young to remember this. I was at the NASDAQ. They used things like revenue per eyeball. They were literally making up financial metrics to justify the existence and the sky high stock prices of some of those companies. Actually, have a picture of myself in 99 at the NASDAQ. I'll tweet that out later.

Are you worried at all? So for the longer term, not necessarily worried. In the shorter term, though, I think. We've gotten very extended over the shorter term. And in our weekly report we sent out last week, we did a little exercise. Let's take this step back to April. And as unsustainable as the selling was in April and as extreme as we got relative to the 200-day moving averages and the major averages. Now, coming to the last weekend, the NASDAQ, the semis, the tech sector, communication services,

they were just as extreme to the upside as they were to the downside in April. So over the short-term basis there, these things need to rest. Otherwise, we are going to get a situation like 1999 where things are just way out of control. And then when you get that situation, the fall can be much further. I heard this stat on halftime was Josh Brown had it. Scott had it. It's the NASDAQ 100 is now 101 trading days above the 50-day moving average. And if we go another 30 days, it'll be an all-time record.

And what that goes to, I think, Paul, of some of the short-term momentum that you're talking about and whether it might be overdone? Yeah. So, I mean, another similar stat is we've been at over-bought levels on 90-percent of trading days over the last four months for the NASDAQ. When you look back, that's an extreme. Very seldom, do you see that? And when you have seen that, the shorter-term returns of the index have been weaker than average. They haven't necessarily been negative, but they've been weaker than average. So you do need to see some sort of pause in the market here. But the big fanfare, though, Brian and Paul is about the bubble.

Now, I don't look at a bubble the way I think maybe a lot of other people are looking at bubbles today. I think it's exaggeration. The dot-com area, that was a bubble. That was a three-year recession after that. The mortgage fiasco, 2008, that was a bubble, and that we were in pain there for a couple of years. I think it is overdone, and we're going to have a correction. A correction is not the same blow-up as a bubble. So I think it's critical to be able to stay bullish.

You need to know how to manage your portfolio if you're an individual investor. If you don't have a position, I think you've got to be careful getting in, but you don't want to miss it. Now. Now. Dollar cost average. Your dollar cost to average, and that will help you. If you have a position, you should be managing the risk anyway, and you should be trimming into strength and buy it into weakness. How do you manage the risk, then?

If I have a position into strength, for example, in our own stuff, when the, when the, when the, when spy hit 650, we started to trim across the board. If we look at individual stocks, kind of a little bit overdone, they had a great run, we start to trim. So you trim into strength But when there's a correction, you've got to jump back in and Buy. If you don't have a position And you miss this thing This is a pretty big miss. If you miss this thing, that's why you dollar cost average.

And you put in so much money every month But you handle a correction, not above. So I want to be clear. It's not my job to sit here and say we're in a bow. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying, what I said earlier this week, and now I'm glad it's getting a little more attention is that I do energy. I talk about energy.

And when they talk about these data centers and all this $850 billion in capital spending in the United States alone, $2 trillion globally, according to HSBC. That's going to take literally electricity. And the people I talk to on and off the air and on and off the record tell me they don't know where the power is coming from. And if I hear that, I do worry, Joe, that if we have a day where somebody close to NVIDIA or whatever says,

we're going to pull back our capital spending plans. I worry this is a market that could be extremely vaugh. vulnerable to that headline. You've done a great job, by the way, talking about for a long time. Well, thank you. What's going on? The whole energy world, specifically what's going on now with regard to the massive amount of power that we need to be able to get this stuff done. You can't just plug it into a grid.

No, nobody's going to happen. Right? You can't do that. So what do you need for that? I think you need a tremendous balance sheets. We've got significant companies that have tremendous balance sheets. And the United States is known for our capital markets. What we might be able to get done in the United States may not be what somebody else might be able to get done in another country.

So I'm not, I appreciate the challenge, but this is Wall Street. We have such entrepreneurial spirits that figure out a way to make money. And if they're making this much of an investment in AI, they're going to figure out a way to think to handle it, at least initially with natural gas and energy. Which falls right into one of your themes, because I read everything you guys put out. You do a great job at bespoke natural gas. is one of your themes right now. So I think so U.S. natural gas. It's so much cheaper U.S. natural gas versus natural gas in the rest of the world.

And we're going to need these. Because we're better at it. And we have a lot of it. We have a lot more of it. So what's the solution? Export it. You have Scheneria Energy, LNG exports. Venture Global.

Yeah, there's several companies that do it. Expand Energy. Nick Deloso, by the way. Good tease. He's going to be on the show, I think, October 7th. You didn't even know that. I didn't know that. Stay tuned, right?

But so you have that arbitrage. And just for what's the individual investor to do? Well, you know, so many individual investors are into indexing. You have this record concentration in the market. So you can do the S&P equal weight, you know, so you have exposure to all the companies. You don't have necessarily that high exposure, the 10 largest companies accounting for 40% of the S&P 500. This, you have more of a spreading your bets around. And the fact is, during most bull markets, the equal weight index tends to do better.

So this bull market, it's been an anomaly where the cap-weighted index has outperformed. Because there's big caps you're doing everything. Right. They've done everything. But you get that day where someone pulls back capital spending, and Navidia declines a lot like you were just saying the type of day. I'm not saying it will happen. I'm saying if it happened. Yes.

But if you see something like that or the deep seek back in January, that kind of day, the equal-weighted index held up a lot better than the cap-witted index. I sit tight for one second. We do have some politics to get to, but it has to do with the markets, too. Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, House Minority Leader holding a news conference right now. Federal funding running out next week, creating a risk of government shutdown. We're going to monitor that. We're not going to go to it. I don't think we're going to monitor that and then come back to it if you makes any comments about getting some kind of a deal done.

Joe, very quickly, what is the risk? Is there a risk to the markets if the government shuts down or we're just getting kind of used to it? Because it seems to happen all the time. I think it happens all the time. I think it happens every year. Now, there's a bit, I think a lot of times you think your viewers, there's a big difference between the discussions they have on the budget and our debt ceiling. Those are two different planets. So with regards to the budget, if indeed we shut down for a little while, they'd close national parks, they'd close some museums.

But they'd get there fixed in a week, and everybody that loses their job, they don't lose their job. They come back and they get reimbursed for what they had left anyway. So this is a ploy on the part of Congress to be able to get one side versus the other. And it, Brian, you're right, it happens every year, every year. So I don't think the market is going to overreact to that. Because the market, you could hate it politically, but the market just gets used to things that happen all the time. Paul Hickey doesn't happen all the time that you're in the house,

so we appreciate it. Go Rams, apparently. Joe Mugler, you're not done or we're not done with you. We're going to come back on. You're going to come back with us, talk about all the money in college sports because you have an illustrious career as a high school and college football coach as well. Will you do that for us? I'll be happy to do that.

Fantastic. Go get some lukees. Go get some lukewarm watered down coffee. Look at the video. You know that guy? I do know that. He's like, we got to score more than the other team and we can win. Playoffs.

We're talking about playoffs. There we go. Joe, we'll see in a few minutes. All right. So what does the bond market make about all this? The aforementioned Oracle just tapping the debt markets because it wants to do some of all this spending from debt, not cash flow. And by the way, a massive Oracle debt offering may actually be impacting treasuries.

Let's talk about all that. And maybe the government shut down as well because I'm just going to give it to Rick Santelli. And Rick, you do you. Talk about whatever you think is important right now. Well, I think the Oracle issue is important. Second largest investment grade deal of the year. And what I find interesting there is we can find a lot of reasons what they're going to tell us regarding why they're doing this for equity debt. But here's the way I look at it.

Interest rates, in my opinion, are going up. I was out there, what, a week and a half ago for the big 30th anniversary of Squawk Box. And all I could say is, if you're looking for an under 4% trade, do not hold your breath unless you like the color blue, because we're not going to spend a lot of time under 4% in a 10 year. And I think that many people at Oracle probably think the same way. So no, whatever reasons they put out there, the timing is key. So the Fed lowers rates on the 17th, and basically all maturities are higher in yields.

As a matter of fact, that two-year right now was hovering what? Right around 398-ish, under 4% that all that happened with regard to, or the 10-year, with regard to when the timing was. Look at how much higher in yield it is. So I think that Oracle putting this forth, listen, if you were Sully going to issue debt, you'd want to try to get the lowest interest rate possible, okay? Which means your assumption now to do it, what, a week plus after the Fed lowered rates, is because interest rates, in your opinion, probably aren't going to be any more conducive to throwing supply out in the debt market than they are now.

And I totally, totally agree with that very quickly. You know, durable good orders have been very, very volatile. If you look at that two-year chart I had in, the right side looks like somebody with a bad heartbeat there. See, this is what's going on with a lot of data after Liberation Day. But ultimately, if you start to average and mean revert, these wild moves, there's still solid numbers. 218,000 on initial claims was the smallest number since mid-July. These are impressive stats. And I know that there's other news that isn't as impressive.

But ultimately, Brian, I think rates are going higher, and I think companies would be very smart to throw any issuance they're pondering out. into the marketplace, ASAP. Back to you. Wow. Wrates going higher. Not music to a lot of mortgage buyers ears. Rick, thank you. All right. Coming up, more on Oracle because one analyst says, you got to sell. And he's here. Oh, welcome back. It is one of the hottest trades of the year. And today it is the most read article on CNBC Pro. Oracle's surge this year, up nearly 80%, being powered by what we've just been talking about. Massive spending plans around to AI. Oracle is making a $300 billion deal with Open AI for computing power. But a new note today raising concerns about this partnership saying that the market is materially overestimating the value

of all this revenue. Rothschild and Redburn is initiating Oracle with a sell rating and a $175 price target, which folks is about 40% below where we are. Right now, we got the analyst behind the call. That is Alex Hazel. It's now live from London. Alex, I'm sure you've received some choice and colorful comments to your email inbox today. But you call it as you see it. We appreciate it. What is the basis of this call?

Yeah, first of all, thanks for having me on the show. The basis is really, we see big headline figures in terms of like order wins and also revenues. But our work really shows that the value subscribed to this is relatively low because the business model is fundamentally. different. If you think about these deals, we're talking about single-tenant deals for dedicated clusters where, you know, the price and also the costs are pretty much fixed over the contract period. This is a sharp contrast, what we know from, you know, the Cloud 1.0, did we know it? And investors really price it, where you have basically sweated the asset over time. You have extended server lifetime. The hyperscalators then layered software and top. And all of a sudden,

you know, in the cloud, you had a business model with operating leverage and software like margins. this is not what we are seeing here in terms of like these large scale strategic deals where we where we have like big headline figures but actually the value is significantly lower. Do we think that the market is pricing in not only all the good news, but the single most optimistic scenario that everything that we've just been talking about ultimately plays out and then some? That's exactly what it is. I mean, we titled it.

It's a risky blue sky scenario. So we think, you know, the five-year guidance is worth around like $60 billion. And then the question really is how often do you have like a renewal cycle of these five years? So the market is pricing in already a very optimistic scenario and completely overlooks the risks. Yeah. And do you question the stuff that we've all just talking about? A lot of been made this week in particular about this so-called idea that it's a lot of circular money. It's this invest in A, invests in B, invest in C, which invests back in A.

Do you worry about that? I mean, from an Oracle perspective, our concern with the race is that is Oracle signing like long-term pieces for data centers, you know, where you have a duration of, let's say, 15 years. But then on the other hand, you only have five-year contract with Open AI. So there is a duration mismatch. And I think that's one of the concerns that we really have.

At some point, someone has to take these costs. Yeah, and then you may have heard our bond report just a moment ago, Alex, as you know, Oracle issuing billions in debt, They want to pay for a lot of this with debt, not with cash flow. Does that worry you at all? I think what is a concern is that the market is very likely to underestimate the CAPEX requirements. You know, for it to hit their 2030 target. We think that they have to spend significantly more than what consensus is expecting.

And we are just at the early innings of this CAPEX cycle. And we have already seen negative cash flow. So as the REM continues, obviously there's more capital being required, the closer we get to the bigger you know, Rembo. Listen, it is a bold call. It is a big call. It's getting a lot of attention. Alex, we know it's late there.

We appreciate you coming on. Alex Hazel of Rothschild and Redburn. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right. All right. Up next, AI fuel data centers driving. The explosive demand for energy at a staggering rate.

So even if you believe the boom, we're going to talk about three companies that may benefit from all of it. That's next. All right. So maybe you think we've been too negative today. Now let's find some opportunity. It's time now for today's market navigator. And your guest today believes that electricity might be the new oil because you guessed it.

AI spending plans mean that all the power we need and could find is going to be used. But how do we make money from all of this? Let's find out right now. Joining us is Rob Thummel. He is senior portfolio manager at Tortus Capital Rob. Perfect day. Perfect time to have this in market navigator. Who's going to win this big new race for power?

Well, all the electricity providers, Brian. So, for instance, I'm here in Kansas City just in my backyard, Evergy, right? It's the power provider to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey as well as Leslie Picker's parents. So for those reasons, it should trade it at a premium. But more so than that, it's actually increasing its data center presence. It could double its capacity, and it's going to increase its growth rate of its load growth rate from 4 to 6% to 6% to 8%. And so it's examples like that where we think that electricity power providers, like a local utility, Evergey, will benefit. And that's just one example. By the way, you made nice Leslie Picker drop there.

We actually had the CEO of Evergy on this program yesterday talking about nuclear power. So put that in your power plant and smoke it. Let's talk about riot platforms totally different because this is more on the Bitcoin side, sort of distributed energy. It is, Brad, but it's the same concept. What is the world? You talk about this all the time. It's one of the best reasons for you to be reporting on energy that you've ever seen. It's one of the best reasons for me to invest in energy. And I've been investing in energy for 30 years. Look what right platforms is doing. Right? It's a Bitcoin minor. Everybody thinks. Well, it's not benefiting from, well, it's benefiting a little bit from the fact that it's future is and where it's going to become a data center operator. It has a lot of available power. And what do the data center operators and what do the mega-cap techs need? They need, actually. And what are the data-center operators? And what do the mega-cap techs need? They need, actually. access to electricity. So that's what Riot Platform is going to do. It's basically going to offer

that capacity to these large mega caps who want that capacity right now. Some of its facilities, the Riot data centers or the current Bitcoin mines, are right next to Stargate or really close to Stargate in near Abilene, Texas. So this is a huge opportunity, we think, for riot platforms to really transform itself. Yeah, I love the ideas. Two very different ideas, Rob. We got a lot going on there. By the way, I got to take the show to Kansas City, one of my dearest friends of the world lives there, you're there. We've got creative planning there. We've got to take the show on the road to Kansas City, either Missouri or Kansas. I don't care. Rob, thank you very much. Well to see you, Brian. Thank you. All right, just no chief stuff.

All right, let's get down to McKinsey-Sagallos. They see NBC News Update. Mack. Brian, the 29-year-old suspect in the immigration facility shooting in Dallas yesterday, who killed at least one detainee then took his own life, may have been planning the attack for weeks. That's according to the FBI. Director Cash Patel says agents uncovered a document from the suspect listing DHS facilities, evidence of multiple searches for ballistics and the Charlie Kirk shooting video, and says he allegedly searched apps in late August that tracked the presence of ice agents. Now, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rawlins announced today that the USDA and Justice Department are investigating suppliers of crop inputs such as seeds and fertilizers for potential

antitrust violations. The probe comes as farmers are struggling with high production costs this year, brought on partly because of tariffs. Farmers are also dealing with lower crop prices. And FIFA today, unveiling the mascots for the 2026 World Cup being held in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, there is Clutch, the Bald Eagle U.S. mascot. Then Canada will have Maple the Moose, and Mexico's mascot will be a Jaguar named Zayu. The World Cup begins next June. Brian, back to you. Well, here's the problem. The jaguar is going to eat the eagle, and then the moose is going to trample the jaguar. And then Canada's going to win.

Excellent point. We can't have that. Mackenzie Sigalos, thank you very much. All right, on deck where the wealthy are putting their money, Michael Sonafeld, the founder of exclusive wealthy Peer Network, Tiger 21, let you know what they just found out. That's next. All right, welcome, welcome back. Let's now get some valuable insight on how the ultra-rich are investing.

Your next guest founded Tiger 21. It's an exclusive investor community. Over 1,700 members who collectively manage about $200 billion of their own money. Michael Sonnetfeld is back with us now. Michael, it's good to have you on. This is a stock market that not the last couple days, but really keeps going up. Are we seeing any more love from your members about stocks or is it still really about real estate? Actually, they just pulled back a couple of points in the last quarter.

from the stock market and from real estate, still strong in private equity. But for the first time, cash is coming up a little, fixed income is coming up a little, and gold and Bitcoin. So a little bit of a shift, maybe a little bit of caution. I was going to say that sounds a little cautious. Now, your members, and I've gotten to meet so many of them, they're from all over the country and all over the world, and they're fantastic. A lot of them founded and sold companies, a lot of them might own 100 Verizon stores.

And so they've got their pulse on the consumer. Do you feel like this is indicating a little economic nervousness? You know, we're still overwhelmingly waited for the mid and long term inequity. So there's long term bullish. But in the short term, it's a little choppy water. So people are trying to steady the boat in a rocky road. You said Bitcoin. Has it taken some time to dis...

I see it every quarter. There's a little more Bitcoin, a little more Bitcoin. I feel like it's finally crossing that hurdle of we got to own it. So Bitcoin as a market is still only a tenth the size of gold, but they both are secure assets in members' mind. For the first time, people aren't talking about Bitcoin just as speculation, but actually an alternative asset that can be held during tough times. Not everybody believes in it, but those that do are making a big splash.

It went from, so Bitcoin was sort of, you know, I've been coming to your meetings for over a decade, and Bitcoin has sort of spoken about in the hushed corners of the hallways five or six years ago. Now you've got panels on it. People are talking about it. It's gaining more acceptance. Do you have any visibility on what may be the next thing, private equity has been growing? Where are people turning to? You know, I think in this rotation, people are going a little more caution.

When you've created as much wealth as our members have, average. member over $100 million, they're looking to preserve wealth first and foremost and grow it secondly. So the growth part is less important than preserving what they have. That's a good rule. If you can keep what you have, you'll do pretty well. Is it then the return of capital more so than the return on capital? It's making sure that you're not taking crazy risk that set you backwards. It's much harder to make up lost ground than to stay steady and move forward. Well, this is an important thing, okay? And this is what I love about so many of your members, like Sean, you know, his fish guys and whatever.

You grew up scrappy. Joe Mowgli grew up. His dad, you know, was an Italian immigrant. You know, grew up with nothing. Just busted their butts. I almost said something else. Busted their butts. And so many of your members are first generation.

They made it. They did it. And now they've got the money. They want to enjoy it. And you help also, I think Tiger helps them guide to the next generation. because you also want to, to your point, not lose what you spent 50 years building, right? I mean, that's a critical aspect of being a founder. Yeah, you know, one of the things that's interesting, you take Warren Buffett, the world's supposedly

greatest investor. His track record has been 20%, but he's been doing it for 65 years. Our members to become Tiger members had higher returns than 20%, and they could never duplicate those returns as investors. So this divide between being an entrepreneur for five or ten or 20 years and creating extraordinary wealth. And then what do you do with it? It's the reason why Warren Buffett has told Desaurs to put it in the S&P because even they won't be able to get the benefit of his track record going forward. So when you say returns, do you mean that they're not investing in equities to the point?

You're saying is they're putting their money that they've made, let's say they own one restaurant, then they own two, then they own four, then they own six. than they own 16. They're reinvesting that capital and the sweat equity back in that business. But generally, when they've had a liquidity event and sold the business, now they're becoming investors. They've gone from entrepreneur to investor. A different skill, though. Completely different skill. And more importantly, their kids, if they want to preserve the wealth, are not going to do it as entrepreneurs, except in rare instance. They're going to have to do it in a diversified investment pool. Well, you made your fortune by taking huge risks in your 20s to build out Newport, Jersey City.

You did it. Harborside. Harborside. I don't know how you did it. I wouldn't have the onions, as they would have said, to have taken that kind of risk at that age. Do you still then go back to real estate? Is that still because that's how you started, that's still your love? Well, I had two detours along the way.

The first was I created Tiger 21, like any entrepreneur. That's pretty good detour. That's worked out well. And the other thing is, although it's not as much in trend, the energy conversation you've been having all day, renewable energy, it doesn't matter whether it's renewable or non-renewable. Electricity, yes, it is the new oil. Why? Because as we convert over time to electric motors and electric versions, we're going to need five times the amount of electricity that we currently have. I know a guy that's been talking about this, but. Yeah. And it's amazing. It is. And so how do we profit from that? You're going to have transmission lines. You're going to have new forms of transmission. You're going to have power producers. And you're going to have all the conversion from gas and oil eventually to electric, whether it's heaters, motors, engines, industrial heat. It's all going to convert to electricity eventually. And the people that are good at that, I think, are going, it's going to be hard to screw that up. That's a really good career path, I think, right now. Yeah. And for a future, for a future Tiger 21 member. There you go. I can't, we can't call them Tiger. Cubs because I think that's taken.

Yeah, no, we don't, we don't use that term. We don't use the Tiger Cubs. Michael Sinafeld, Tiger 21, founder, just a great group of people, always enjoy being a part of it. Michael, thank you. Thank you. All right. Still ahead. Joe is back.

The man who went from high school football to market boss to college football is back to talk about whether college sports might actually be the next bubble. Crypto Watch is sponsored by Crypto.com. Crypto.com is America's premier crypto platform. All right, you've probably heard there is a lot of money to be made in sports right now. Whether it's the rising valuations of professional sports, hey, today, CNBC breaking the news at the New England Patriots sold an 8% stake at a $9 billion valuation. Wow. But what about the whopping amount of money that is in college sports right now?

college athletes are making bank. It is the new era of directly paying players. If you're not familiar with it, some college athletes, or maybe even high school athletes these days, are now being paid in some cases millions of dollars to play sports, with many of them changing schools every year to get a bigger payday. The numbers overall folks that can be murky, because some of these so-called name, image, and likeness,

or N-I-L deals for short are multi-l. layered. But Sports Illustrated highlighted that as of the spring, Arch Manning was making an estimated $6.8 million per year to play quarterback at the University of Texas. The 10th highest paid athlete,

according to SI, was aching $3.1 million a year at Arizona State. Again, these numbers are from Sports Illustrated and just estimates. But let's talk about this new world. Back with us, Joe Muglia, of course, in addition to TD Ameritrade, his new

as founder and executive advisor at FG Nexus. You may not know this. Former head football coach at Coastal Carolina University was actually a high school and college coach before you went to Wall Street, right? Yes. And then you came back. So we're not randomly asking you about this topic.

Listen, my viewers know I'm a hokey. I love my hokey's. It's a weird time in Blacksburg, Virginia right now. Where is all this going? How does this shake out for college sports? Right now, Brian, I don't see an end in sight right now. It's too much money.

I don't know how you put the genie back in the bottle. It's not going to happen. That's never going to happen. If you go back four years when NIL was announced, I don't have a problem with the players getting paid. The Big Ten this year, I'm a bit close. I'm not that could be exact. Just TV revenue alone. Only TV revenue for football.

Each team probably going to get close to $100 million. Just for football Big Ten. Everybody's... How much? $100 million. Okay. In TV revenue. The TV revenue. But that's... The schools are So I want to be clear. I want to be very clear with our audience. By the way, one of my kids is recruited D1 athlete.

So, you know. There you go. Matt, we didn't get some of that. Right. No, I can't. But it's, and I played, you know, pretty good collegiate rugby at Virginia Tech. But I'll say this. I'm not saying the players shouldn't be paid.

I want these schools have gotten rich off them for years. What I don't want, though, is a situation where some schools pay in 50 million. Another school can't afford that. So they never, ever have a chance to compete. And it ruins college football. Right now. almost impossible to fix. The issue that I had four years ago, and I still have today, is that this is the most significant

thing to happen in the history of college athletics. And the NCAA, whose job is to protect the student athlete, totally abdicated the responsibility for this. It's ridiculous. A stat, you may find it. Stats is about a year old. NAA Division 3 and up, 570,000 student athletes. 2%.

Now, most of the stats you hear about the Division 1 athletes. Of the 570,000, 2% get $100 or more. 6% get $10,000 or more. That means 94%, 5 or 30,000 kids, do not get anything. That's right. Nothing, right? Well, theoretically they get the scholarship. That's what some people would argue there's the money.

That's fair. That's fair. But that's not NIL money. That's a scholarship money. Right. So, by the way, in the last four years, I've not heard one word about academics from the incidentally. No.

Oh, no, you never hear this. By the way, you're watching, you watch, and I love college football. I love college sports. You're watching college football. And the broadcasters are like, well, he transferred from this school before he went to that school, before we into this school, they never talk about, you know, like academics. Not anymore. No.

When is the person graduating? That's over. How are they in school for seven years? The, if the NFL is a great business model. They, they do a wonderful job. They make a lot of money. If the NFL ran themselves what college athletics is doing today in football, the NFL will go out of business.

Whoa, why do you say that? Because we just talked examples about the types of contracts, for example, a coach would get or a play we get. I predicted a year ago that three seasons from now, including this season, we'll probably have half a dozen or 10 student athletes football making eight figures. So that's a 20-year-old kid making $12 million. And to what extent that kid knows how to adapt to that $12 million is something else. I have a friend who, friend-ish, in the business, he has a 15-year-old client.

It's got a $600,000 check. NIL deal. Dad had to sign for it because he's a minor. I think the only way this works. $600 grand of 15 years old. I think you begin with powerful football. It's got to break away. totally from the NCAA.

Create a pro league, effectively. PCW, the professional collegiate. Fingo. We never talked about this, but that's what I agree. Make it like British soccer. Top 20 teams, whatever, boom. I thought the only thing you do about was energy. Energy, energy, energy, energy.

Half and half and car racing. But that's because some schools will never compete with the level of spending that an Oregon or an Ohio state or a Texas, you can't, never compete. If you did this, you break away, you use the NFL as a model, you have a whole different executive board. have salary caps, you have collective bargaining, you have real transparency, you have real contracts that really, really do matter, and you run it like a real business. Now, then the rest of the college athletics, and remember, you got to get something right first. You get football

right first. Then you work on men's basketball, and you work your way down the line. But you get something to work. Now you've got the rest of it, the ACAA, the amateur collegiate athletic association, called out the NCAA. They're never not going to make money. But you want to make big bucks. You've got to be recruited by the PCAA. And maybe, maybe the NCAA can come up with some sort of metric where, you know, girls tend to. is allowed this much money. Regardless of if you're not PCWA, girls tennis is allowed this much money, football is allowed this much

money, but at least you try to level the playing field. Then you have a Super Bowl, then you have the PCWA National Championship, then you have the NCAA National Championship. I love that because you're going to have I think hard feelings on the field too. If you have one wide receiver making a million dollars a year at NIL money and the other

wide receiver getting paid $30,000 and that guy's numbers are pretty close to this guy's numbers. There's going to be a lot. It's like pro, but these are 18 19-year-old, you know, young men. This is not... So the first thing that's going to happen there, that kid's going to wind up getting an agent.

And you're going to say, see how much to this guy's making a million dollars? Your numbers are the same. You should be getting a million dollars. By the way, if this school's not willing to give you a million dollars, go to Virginia Tech. They'll give you a million dollars. We will?

We'll get money all over the place. Oh, they're just dropping money from helicopters in Blacksburg these days, aren't they? That's right. Well, it's, I don't, you know, it's a, it feels like the Wild West. It is. But we're going to us. Well, you should be sheriff then.

Wild Joe Mogulah. We're going to bring you in. You know what I mean? When this first happened, when this first happened, and that concept came up, I said, I'd really be interested doing something like, but you have to have real authority. There's no way. There's no way the NCAA is going to say this. How about this idea?

I know we got to go, so maybe whatever, but listen to this, Joe. Whoever wins the national championship this year, the entire team, because everybody's got like seven years of eligibility now. Yeah. Should go to, say, for a hundred million, we're going to all just transfer. to another school. You're going to take the best team in the country, and we all move to some other school for the $100 million and then divvy that up. And I'm not joking. That could happen. Boom. It could happen. The entire Ohio State team transfers to Oregon. Now they went from red and silver to green and yellow. Some version of that. Some version of green and yellow. Joe Mowgliah, great discussion,

important topic. Joe, thanks for sticking around to you, by the way. Great to be on. All right. Coming up, TikTok in America is about the change, but by how much. much. Welcome back. President Trump expected to sign an executive order over the next hour related to the completion of a deal to sell TikTok's U.S. assets. Amen Jabber is at the White House with the very latest. Hey, Brian, the president is expected to sign that executive order related to this ongoing effort to buy TikTok just about a half an hour's time, but it is not exactly clear what we're going to see here. We don't know if any Chinese representatives of bite dance, the company that would be selling, or if any of the American investors who would

buying will be in the room. So we'll watch for that. We also don't have a purchase price yet, and we don't have any indication that the Chinese have made changes to their law that would be necessary to transfer this asset. And we also don't have a full list of the U.S. investors. We did get some new names from David Faber's reporting earlier today that the main group of investors will be made up of Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX, and they'll control a controlled a combined 45 percent of the company. Now, what I'm told that this, you know, executive order will do is assert that the deal is being, that's being contemplated here would be compliant with U.S. law on TikTok and therefore satisfy key national security concerns.

President Trump has said in just about every recent public discussion of TikTok how much he likes the service, how valuable it was to his campaign, and how much he wants to keep it operating. Against that background of the broader U.S.-China economic negotiations, though, Brian, not clear if that eagerness by the president makes the Chinese side more or less. likely to want to complete the deal, Brian. Back over to you. Do we have any idea whether it will change this, if this deal gets done, change TikTok's algorithm? Because that's the whole kerfuffle, right? That China may have too much access to American teens and consumers. Yeah, what officials have said is that the algorithm would be copied over in the deal that's being contemplated here.

And then U.S. teams would have the chance to look at the algorithm, inspect the source code for it, and then operate it in the U.S. So Oracle, in this case, is envisioned as the trusted security partner. So a lot of that work would fall on Oracle to inspect the algorithm and run it from here. One thing that is not really clear exactly is what data that algorithm will be trained on. Because, you know, as of now, TikTok is global, and so it's trained on an enormous amount of data. If it's just trained on U.S. data, that might lower the effectiveness of the algorithm. You know, we'll see exactly what they...

exactly what they what they end up doing when we get the documents. Amon Jabbers at the White House. Hopefully at about an hour we'll know the answer to a lot of these questions. Amen, really do appreciate that. Thank you very much. All right, folks, believe it or not, the S-FPs on pace for its longest losing streak in a month. I'm off tomorrow. See you Monday.

Closing bell starts right now.