The Compound and Friends - Bull Trap or the Real Thing? Plus, Dana Mattioli on Amazon, Coinbase Joins the S&P 500, China Tariffs LOL

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

On this TCAF Tuesday, Downtown Josh Brown sits down with Dana Mattioli of The WSJ to discuss her new book "The Everything War" and Amazon's plan to stay on top forever. Then at 42:00, hear an all-new episode of What Are Your Thoughts with ⁠⁠Josh Brown and ⁠⁠Michael Batnick⁠⁠! This episode is sponsored by Public. Fund your account in five minutes or less and earn up to $10,000 when you transfer your investments by visiting: https://public.com/WAYT   Sign up for ⁠⁠The Compound Newsletter⁠⁠ and never miss out! Instagram: ⁠⁠https://instagram.com/thecompoundnews⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠https://twitter.com/thecompoundnews⁠⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-compound-media/⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@thecompoundnews⁠⁠ Public Disclosure: All investing involves the risk of loss, including loss of principal. Brokerage services for US-listed, registered securities, options and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA & SIPC. Public Investing offers a High-Yield Cash Account where funds from this account are automatically deposited into partner banks where they earn interest and are eligible for FDIC insurance; Public Investing is not a bank. Cryptocurrency trading services are offered by Bakkt Crypto Solutions, LLC (NMLS ID 1890144), which is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity by the NYSDFS. Cryptocurrency is highly speculative, involves a high degree of risk, and has the potential for loss of the entire amount of an investment. Cryptocurrency holdings are not protected by the FDIC or SIPC. *Rate as of 3/5/25. APY is variable and subject to change. **Terms and Conditions apply. Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Josh Brown are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. The Compound Media, Incorporated, an affiliate of ⁠⁠Ritholtz Wealth Management⁠⁠, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here ⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers⁠⁠. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: ⁠⁠https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the compound and friends. It is Tuesday, May 13th. We have an action packed show for you this evening. I want to tell you about our sponsor public.com. I use public. I have the app on my phone and I have to tell you it is the easiest way to move money from a bank, move it back out, buy stocks, buy crypto options. It's just like lightning fast, super lightweight.

It pops open. You could do whatever you want with it. And it's worth checking out. Not only can you trade there, you could put your cash to work with a high yield cash account. Currently at a 4.1% APY, you can move money in from other brokerage accounts that you might have out there and if you do so you can earn up to $10,000 for transferring those investments over Find out more at public.com slash W-a-y-t as in what are your thoughts? That's public.com slash W-a-y-t this has been paid for by public investing full disclosures in the podcast description Okay, we talked to Dana Mattioli this week Dana won a

Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on big tech specifically she is the Amazon beat reporter at the Wall Street Journal and She's out with a new book called The Everything War. She's conducted hundreds and hundreds of interviews, current employees at Amazon, former employees of Amazon, suppliers, competitors, vendors. She's got internal documents. She just spent years of her life writing this epic story of how Amazon became Amazon. And I think you're absolutely going to love checking out the book, but you can also listen

to us discuss it. And we talk a little bit about Metta and some of the other things happening in large cap tech and Dana is just terrific. So I think you'll love that. And then in the B block, it's an all new edition of What Are Your Thoughts? It's Michael Batnick and myself and a lot is going on here. First things first, are we in a bull trap? If so, I have to tell you, this is a good one.

This looks all the way like the real thing. At this point, I would be surprised if it turns out to be a bull trap, but you never know and we will go through some of the ins and outs of that terminology, what it means, what to look for. We also take a look at some breakouts and stocks that we've been talking about for a while. Uber, Toast, we talk about the breakdown in Google last week, Coinbase joining the S&P 500. There's just a whole host of stuff happening and we do it all for you as usual. So please stick around, enjoy the show and we'll see you soon. Welcome to The Compound and Friends. All opinions expressed by Josh Brown, Michael Batnick and

their castmates are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Red Holt's Wealth Management. This podcast is for their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ritholtz Wealth Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. All right. We are live from the compound.

I'm here with Dana Matioli. Dana is an investigative journalist and senior reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Dana say hello to everyone. Hi everyone. All right. Dana is a senior reporter, but I think the thing that is most interesting about the work that you're doing is the coverage universe. You're talking about, you're not just reporting, you're kind of putting together this bigger story about all of the companies that matter the most to investors

right now. These are the largest market cap. These are the most exciting headline generating businesses and you're extremely well sourced. You've done deep dives into companies like Amazon for years. You have a Pulitzer Prize, do I have that right? Yeah, we got one last week as part of a team. Okay, congratulations on that. And your book, The Everything War, which we're gonna talk more about. John, put that graphic down.

I wanna show people the real thing. This is the actual, it's so good, I can't stop reading it. I'm about halfway through it as I told you. But it really tells the story of one of these gigantic technology companies and kind of how it started and how it got to where it is. It's the story of Amazon, of course. But before we talk about that, I just want to kind of get into some of your recent reporting on some of these companies because we talk about this stuff from an investing

perspective and you're looking at this stuff as kind of like a larger story of how it impacts the whole world, how these companies are impacting the whole world. What is it at this moment right now that you think is most interesting about the tech giants now that they seem to be playing along with the administration and really heavily impacted by a lot of political issues like trade that maybe 10 years ago it wouldn't have been as impactful. But now they're like right at the center of all this stuff. I just find it remarkable that the giant 180s we've seen almost all of the tech titans do. And I think at their core, these are really pragmatic people.

And there's a lot of downside. If this goes the way of Trump 1.0, where they make enemies, they live through that. Some of them with really bad effect. If you think about Amazon being just castrated by the administration. So I think they've really learned their lesson and you know we've chronicled how they've bent the knee in lots of different ways. And you know I think it's too soon to tell if they're getting the payoff that they want there but they're definitely not getting you know beat up like they were the first term.

When you so when you see at the inauguration, you see them in front row seats, obviously Elon Musk, but then you see Mark Zuckerberg, and then you see Jeff Bezos, and they're all kind of lined up, Sacha, and look, it's not weird for captains of industry to be at a presidential inauguration. We've seen that in every era. But I guess the question is, did they ever really believe in the liberal ideology or was that also a shortcut?

Was that also expedience to do all the DEI stuff that they were doing and just kind of like, go along to get along? But in the end, it's just about the competitive position of the business and whoever seems to be in power, whether it's the left, the right, the end, it's just about the competitive position of the business and whoever seems to be in power, whether it's the left, the right, the liberals, the conservatives, it's just about like, hey, let me just make sure that I'm in the good graces of the people that are

currently in power. What do you think is the thought process there? I think at the core, many of these tech CEOs are more libertarian. Okay. Though they, you know, more socially, they lean left, they're more conservative fiscally, they believe in like open markets and the likes. And what's fascinating to me is they had a horrible relationship with the Biden administration. Yeah.

Like, he was really tough on them. He didn't want to take meetings. He did things that really clamped their success. And they have very liberal worker bases, right? So that's something they also have to think about when they're in the political realm. I just think this time that they really spent a lot of time game planning

with their public policy offices, taking a look at Trump 1.0, taking a look at the Biden administration, maybe going too far in certain things that they were really pushed away from. I had a big story last summer about Elon Musk's political evolution, which is just, it was a wild story. He was all in on the Democrats for the longest time.

If you look at his businesses, they're about climate change. They're about reversing climate change, right? He had said openly that he voted for Obama. He really wanted to be part of the Democratic Party, but he felt pushed out. Biden spurned him. He would not mention him when talking about these big electric vehicle summits, even though they make the vast preponderance of electric vehicles in the US. And when I speak to some of these CEOs in private and some of the senior leaders at these tech companies, there's that sentiment that they felt a little bit pushed out of the Democratic Party. This is like the funniest thing is like they did

this electric vehicle summit. Elon Musk is the most important figure and always will be in the history of the electric vehicle revolution. However far it goes, whether we ever see it be 10 or 20% of automobiles, you know, like however long this, you cannot say that we would even have electric vehicles if not for Elon Musk.

And then they have this summit and they don't invite him because he's anti-union. Exactly, and then he credits Mary Barra for electrifying the whole industry when they had like the pittance of the market share and EVs and stuff like that. There were some own goals that really did backfire here with the tech titans. And we've seen this broader shift in the Valley in a way that I've never seen, you know, in the journal for 19 years. I haven't seen these CEOs and companies move right like I did this last election cycle.

Yeah. So I think what's really interesting about that is then the union leadership are pro-Biden because Biden is actually doing the things for the unions that would help them. But the union membership is almost universally Trump in some of these cases. And so it's just a weird thing to have pushed out somebody like an Elon Musk because it's what the unions are telling you to do. And then you don't even really have the support of the rank and file union people in the auto industry. That's right. Okay.

So now we're in this situation where Silicon Valley and the companies in your coverage universe, Dana, are playing along with the administration. In some cases, some of the people are taking active roles in the administration. It seems like it's a kinder, gentler FTC. Seems like it may be a kinder, gentler, IRS, like a lot of the deregulation and the hopes about like less holding back of a big business, but not all of them. Like they're not getting everything they want. And you had a story about Zuckerberg thinking that Trump might have his back in settling

a suit. Tell us a little bit about what you're reporting, told you there. Sure, I mean, Zuckerberg has done a lot of legwork to try to ingratiate himself to Donald Trump and his administration. This was a CEO, if you remember, that Trump said that maybe he should put in prison for past offenses.

And so he was really on the outs with this administration and disliked because of banning Trump from Facebook and Instagram after the insurrection and other things that people around Trump found really odious. So once it becomes clear that Trump is going to win the election, Zuckerberg really makes a lot of efforts here. He not only does the requisite $1 million donation the inaugural fund that we saw all of them do after that.

That was like a big move. He goes to the- Moralago visit. He goes to Moralago, has dinner with Trump and gives him this gift of these new sunglasses that Facebook is making. But he also settled a $25 million lawsuit with Trump that many lawyers thought is a frivolous lawsuit that did not need to be

settled. So he does a lot of things along those lines and he feels good. He feels good that maybe his antitrust problem is going to go away. And it comes time for this big meta lawsuit to finally play out in public, go to trial. And he also lobbies Trump's team personally to, you know, maybe take their foot off the gas here. And it just does not work. I don't know if it is a kindler gentler FTC, to be honest. Andrew Ferguson has spoken very critically, he's the chair of the FTC, very critically about big tech. And some of the things he's done have been sort of in step with former chair Lena Cahn. Not very conservative in nature in some ways. And behind the scenes, Duck tried to settle with the FTC and he made a very small offer to them. He said, I can't remember what the first offer was. It was

like a pittance. And the FTC said, you know, you're too far away from where we want to be. We're thinking this should be a $30 billion settlement, like the biggest in history. And then Zuckerberg comes back with another offer. I think it was around 1 billion and they said $18 billion or we have no deal. And it's in trial. So that it definitely has not worked for him in that way. Zuckerberg recently bought a big piece of real estate in Washington, DC.

Nobody would do that unless they had a business reason that they felt that they would be spending a lot of time in Washington, DC. And it's almost the exact price is what Bezos paid a few years ago. That's right. Bezos also bought a big piece. Twenty three million dollars.

That's right. Okay. So, we're now at the point, I guess we're through the first hundred days of the administration. The stocks themselves are trading okay, especially given all the chaos from the trade war. Today is a great day. We're recording this on Monday because it looks like most of the tariffs that we had been worried about since early April have come off. You're seeing the Amazons, the Teslas, the Metas, they're all up huge on day.

But even beside that, these stocks have been doing okay this year because maybe it's not quite a kindler, gentler FTC, but it does appear that these companies can do business in a way that maybe it looked like the Biden administration, if we had another version of that or if we had Kamala Harris, it might be a little bit tougher. So I think some of the pressure feels like it's come off, even for Bezos, who is not Trump's best friend. Yeah, I think that's right. I was looking at Amazon's market cap today. It's back up to $2.2 trillion. So it's doing really well. And there's been some measures that could be very helpful for Amazon. They're very exposed to the tariff situation.

So, you know, the contours of a deal that was struck today with China is really helpful for a company like Amazon. You know, the Trump administration is also making changes to things like the Consumer Protection Bureau, which oversees dangerous products. There's a big case with Amazon there. If that were to be dismantled or, you know, other things happen to it a big case of Amazon there. If that were to be dismantled or other things happen to it, that could help Amazon too. So there are things in the margins

that could definitely help these giants. So I want to talk about Amazon. Just let's give people a little bit of background. So you effectively became the Amazon reporter for the Wall Street Journal. So did you ask for that or did they say, this is your beat, we want you to, this is now one of the most important companies in the world, we want you to focus and go deep into what's happening in Amazon. How did that come about? No, I totally asked for it. Okay.

I was the Wall Street Journal's mergers and acquisitions reporter for six years. I loved that beat. I spoke to a lot of investors in that time. And basically my whole job is to break which companies are buying other companies. And I got burnt out because it's like an exhausting beat. You work every weekend, but I loved it so much. And I couldn't think of like anything as exciting as M&A. When I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, except for Amazon, because toward the end of that beep, I started seeing companies doing really dumb mergers

that made really no sense, that were not creating shareholder value. Out of a position of fear, they were worried about Amazon coming into the healthcare space or the industrial space or the logistics space and like eating their lunch. So they were trying to Amazon proof their businesses. And they just thought like this was the most feared company in corporate America.

It's a giant black box by design. And I wanted to get into that black box. So I pitched this beat to my then editor in chief, Matt Murray, and the head of business at the Wall Street Journal and said, I want to get inside the black box. And they said, if you think you could do it, then do it. You've got this really great passage that illustrates that idea. So Amazon starts with books because famously they're the most cost effective thing to ship. You know, based on its size, what its weight is going to be.

It's just cardboard and pages and it's easy to package. It's, it's, it's an easy place to start. It's not just books for the sake of books. It's easy to package. It's an easy place to start. It's not just books for the sake of books. It's a prototype. This is you. On July 13th, 1999, after Capelli, is that Jerry Capelli? I can't remember his first name. After Capelli sent his press release announcing that Amazon would expand into selling toys

and electronics. The phones began ringing off the hook. Wall Street loved Amazon's expansion rinse and repeat approach with each new category it expanded in. Amazon chose growth over profits. Those gains came at the expense of its rivals. It was seen as a zero sum game for every item that Amazon sold in the new categories it entered. It meant a loss from a physical store that merchandised that item. is a zero sum game for every item that Amazon sold in the new categories it entered, it

meant a loss from a physical store that merchandised that item. So like they would just announce, oh, now we're doing toys. Now we're doing CDs. Now we're doing, right? They would put a survey out to their customers. What else do you want us to sell? People would say auto parts. Okay, great.

We're doing auto parts. And every time they did that, stock price would go up 5% 10% And it became that's the rinse and repeat aspect to this So you're looking at companies that are starting to announce mergers. It's like well, what's what's the purpose of this? We need to get big enough so that when Amazon comes our way, we're ready. That's send them off It's a a defensive play. Okay. So I find that fascinating because it's like kind of still in effect.

Like Amazon is now running TV commercials for telehealth. And like effectively, this is an area where one of my physicians was like going into like, they would say, all right, we're going to do X number of telehealth appointments now going forward because people's habits change during the pandemic. And we recognize that. And there are people who want a doctor's visit, but they don't want to come here. Okay, we're now going to offer that. Okay, that sounded great.

And then it's like, well, Amazon is now in that business too. So it might not have been the best investment that you could have made. I used to go to one medical and then Amazon bought it and I was in the middle of like writing this book, I had to find a new doctor. I mean, their tentacles are just everywhere. I think everyone just equates them with an online retailer. And yeah, they're all the biggest 40% of everything sold online in the US is on Amazon. But they're almost impossible to avoid. They're a utility at this point. Even if you want to boycott them,

it's really, really hard. Right, so as a shareholder, I definitely don't want people to boycott them. A lot of the things that they've done are, if you look at these things from a shareholder perspective, they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to maximize profit, which is profits weren't important in the early stages. They would have argued back then, no, no, no, we're maximizing growth, profits later, and it sort of worked. Then you look at the share price of Walgreens, CVS, like this is clearly the next cat.

To me, when I look at CVS, Walgreens, I experienced the stores in person. I think of Walden books and I think of Borders. Is that the way it looks to you from your reporting? It's funny you bring those two about, you probably haven't gotten to it yet in the book, but there's a chapter about CVS and Aetna doing that catastrophic MNAVL because of Amazon. They would speak about it in every boardroom meeting. They were so nervous about Amazon getting into the healthcare space that they do this

$69 billion deal, biggest in their history to insulate themselves. And it's just gone haywire. If you look at the market value of CVS, Aetna today, it's way less than the market value. If you would just add up the both companies market values before they, you know, before they combined. And it's a cautionary tale. And I do think that these companies have not figured out the proper way to, to Amazon proof. And a lot of them are, you know, circling bankruptcy or feel like relics from the past that are just not going to be around for the next generation. Dana, do you have

a sense of why Amazon has so far avoided things like retail brokerage, insurance? I know there was this joint effort with improbably Berkshire Hathaway, JP Morgan and Amazon to figure out healthcare. And healthcare is so ridiculous that within two years they just said forget it. But they haven't really gone into life insurance, for example. And like from my perspective, it just seems so obvious. There's no reason why people wouldn't buy a life insurance policy from Amazon. So there must be something about certain financial businesses or maybe healthcare related businesses where they study it internally or they test some things out and they just say, this is not a great idea. Do you think

those are purely financial calculations or is there something else that maybe keeps them away from doing those things? You know, they're not afraid of complicated areas but I think, you know, they do weigh the regulatory environment of certain areas and you know, life insurance financials could be a bit thorny. Yeah.

Interestingly, they're, they have not shied away from healthcare. It's the biggest area of GDP spending in the country. It's too big to ignore. Health insurance, but not healthcare itself. Correct. They've been in healthcare. That's a big goal of the current CEO, Andy Jassy.

That's one area where they've actually had some big misses. You mentioned Haven, Warren Buffett, Jamie Dimon, Jeff Bezos initiative that cratered. What do you think happened there? It wasn't as exciting as when they started to dig into the details or nobody had the time to really focus on it? Oh, I just think it was massively complicated. I think they underestimated how complicated it was. Okay. When you think about Andy Jassy and his tenure as CEO, I think, all right, so let me actually back up. One of the things I think people have gotten wrong

on Andy Jassy was that he was sort of like, I don't wanna say a fresh start, but kind of like, all right, let's give the ball to somebody else. He had been with Jeff since extremely early in everything Amazon's done. He was kind of the guy in the room who Jeff would look at and say, what do you think just happened when they walked out of a meeting? And I think that was underestimated.

So I think people looked at it like, yeah, it's a fresh start, but I always looked at it as like, oh, this is pretty awesome actually, because this is somebody that knows the way Jeff would think about every twist and turn better than anyone else on earth. What was your impression when they made him the CEO and how he's done so far in the couple of years

that he's been running the show? I totally agree with you. He started at the company a few weeks before the IPO in the 90s, okay? Yeah. He was Jeff's technical advisor in every meeting with him. This is not like a totally new start. This is like a proxy for Jeff.

Yeah. In a lot of ways, right? So, and he embodies the culture. He helped create the culture of the company, which is like a very important thing in Amazon for better or worse. The book gets into a lot of the toxic behaviors that Amazon because of that. Um, you know, so I think, you know, you see a continuation of some of the things that

Jeff would have done, but then you see him making his mark in other areas. Like I said, healthcare is a big initiative for Andy in a way that I don't think it was for Jeff in the same way. Um, so there, you know, there's some areas where they diverge a bit, but I think this is very much about continuity. What's the state of the US government versus Amazon, the various different fronts that they may or may not be fighting regulators on? Where does it stand right now for shareholders and investors who can't quite keep up with all the different conflicts and concerns that exist right now?

Yeah. Okay. So the good question, the one area that Jeff and Andy really differ a lot is their approach to Washington, DC. For most of Jeff's tenure, he ignored Washington, DC. He made some really high profile missteps. He did not wanna engage in a way that most big companies did. And he actually offended a lot of people, okay?

Andy is very diplomatic. When he first got into the office of CEO, he made a point to go to DC and meet with Congress people, meet with the people who are now saying that the company's a monopoly. Because in 2023, the Federal Trade Commission, under Lena Conn, filed a lawsuit against Amazon calling them an illegal monopoly,

and that goes to trial next year. And if you read the case closely, which I have, there's language in there that could mean that the company gets broken up. This is a very serious lawsuit. And so this is an area that they do take very seriously now. And so this is, you know, this scenario that they do take very seriously now, it's an area that Andy takes very seriously

that Jeff might not have. And he's, you know, done a lot of damage control to clean up some of the messes that the company had made for itself. You know, the third part of the book gets into how badly Amazon and Jeff mismanaged Washington, DC. All the own goals. You think they should have been more political all along Sadly, Amazon and Jeff mismanaged Washington, DC. You think they should have been more political all along and have made allies like had planted better seeds.

Not only that, they should have just avoided pissing everyone off. They made so many enemies on the Hill from both parties. This became like the one thing that the Democrats and the Republicans could agree on was that this is a monopoly and maybe should be broken up and that they're doing illegal things. Okay. So that's where I want to, that's where I want to go next. Um, one of the things that you get into very early on is the origins of why Lena con is at the FTC to begin with.

She basically looked at this decision that had been made where they were going to treat monopoly as something where like if it's in the if it's in the best interest of consumers, they're going to be easier on it. And if it's anti consumer, then they're going to be tougher. The problem with that is Amazon is incredible for consumers. Amazon is a very difficult competitor for other businesses, but the consumers are not harmed. And so if that was the standard that they were looking at Amazon along those lines, it was going to be really hard to go after them. People said, wait a minute, I get my stuff faster. I get it cheaper. There are multiple merchants on the site competing with each other to undersell. This is great.

Why are you going after Amazon? I love Amazon. So that kind of has enabled them to get as far as they have without a major challenge like the one that they currently face. That's what's been flipped on its head. It's not the antitrust rules. It's the interpretation of the antitrust rules. Do I have that right?

Yeah, you do. And I would say with one caveat, in the early days, Amazon did undercut everyone on prices so it could build its monopoly. So that it could put Sears out of business and they could put Circuit City out of business and it could just,

it didn't have to worry about profits, right? So it could really offer low prices. And then the whole retail landscape is this graveyard of former retailers that it used to compete against. It has benefited from this perception that it has the lowest prices for years after that's actually been true. Pro being pro consumer. That was the vibe. That it was low prices lower than everyone else. Now, which really fascinating is now that they have this retail graveyard, what they've done is they've been able to extract tons of fees from all those third party sellers on the website.

So a few years ago, they used to take 19 cents on the dollar from someone selling something on Amazon. Today, that's 45 cents on the dollar. So those sellers have had to raise their prices on Amazon. So we all pay more to buy those prices so that they have some sort of margin. And that gets concealed when you think about Amazon. and that's what the FTC calls out. Okay. This type of behaviors raising prices and creating this like inflationary.

So the third party sellers thing, you've got a section of book we talk about. At first, they try to launch an eBay clone. The problem is nobody shows up for it. Turns out people just like going to eBay and eBay is doing it better. And they had already reached this nucleus of buyers and sellers where it was really hard to justify a reason for there to be a second one. But they pivot that effort into Marketplace, which is for the first time, not only can you buy from Amazon, but you can buy from a third party who may even be competing with

Amazon itself on Amazon. Consumers love it. It opens up this whole new world of more sellers selling more things. And I think it's good for Amazon because they don't have to hold the inventory, but they can satisfy the transaction. Okay. So that becomes really important to Amazon. It's like the happiest mistake because it opens the doors to all these sellers, right?

It's like the best mistake you can make. Right. But the sellers are like frogs hopping into a pot of water that's not yet boiling. Because they give up their own e-commerce ambitions of building their own sites, their own marketplaces. They just say, you know what? I could just sell tons of stuff right there. That's sort of what happens on one side. The other side is Amazon without having to hold inventory, but having every skew you could possibly buy, you have those monoline retailers like your linens and things you talk about in the book.

How could we possibly justify being a standalone operator? That's kind of how that all plays out. But again, most of it is to the benefit of the consumer. So this suit, the current suit is really more about competing businesses. And now these competing businesses are like, we can't even make money on this side. Like it was one thing when we can make money, we can't make money at all. Yeah, it's actually not even about competing businesses. It's about them kind of extorting their third party sellers. And it actually is, it is a standard consumer welfare lawsuit about prices being raised for

consumers, which is interesting because the FTC had moved away from that under LinaCon, but this is sort of her white whale. And I think this is more of a carefully constructed lawsuit. Okay. Amazon would say, we tried it the other way. We let third party sellers handle their own shipping and logistics. And it was a customer service nightmare. And so these are Amazon customers. And the only way to do this business and preserve our reputation as the best place to buy things

online is to force these third party sellers or not force persuade these third party sellers to use us for shipping and fulfillment. There is some merit to that argument to anyone that's ever attempted an e-commerce transaction with somebody other than Amazon. Amazon's just better at getting the thing to your door. Sure. I mean, it's the biggest logistic network in the US, bigger than UPS and FedEx, right?

They're very good at shipping. But I think a lot of those sellers would say they are being forced to use Amazon logistics because then if you're not, you can't be on Amazon Prime and that's where 200 million members are, right? So it's this pay to play atmosphere, they would say. Right. So I guess the court is going to have to look at what's in the best interest. So it's tricky because I could see both arguments. If Amazon's logistics are literally the best

version for the consumer, you can sort of understand why they would charge the third party sellers more to be able to have access to it. Yeah, it'd be interesting to see where they come up, you know, what they come up with on remedies. You can almost see them making a world where Amazon logistics has to be its own company. They spin it out. Yeah. And then it's, you know, a separate competitor.

And that can be something that's explored. I don't think it would be like an AWS spinoff because it doesn't really have any bearing on the argument they made, but I think that logistics would be a big part of it. I wonder how Shopify factors into this because effectively the pitch on Shopify is we can give any seller, um, Amazon like payment and shipping and fulfillment capabilities? And would Amazon be able to point to them and say, what do you mean monopoly? Spotify is right there based in Canada, but millions of merchants all over the place utilizing

their services, we compete with them. I guess the flip side of that would be, well, why can't a merchant on Amazon using it to get customers use their Shopify shipping to fulfill the two day promise and stay in prime, right? If they're so good. The case about Alphabet paying Apple billions of dollars for Google to be the default search engine on the iOS ecosystem's browsers, it actually went against the tech giants. And there is going to be a remedy.

And we don't know exactly what it's going to be. Wall Street has weighed in by selling off shares of Alphabet because it looks like they're not going to be able to maintain their hold or at least pay to maintain it the way that they were. So this case against Amazon and its outcome absolutely is going to have a big impact, especially in a worst case scenario. I know it's early, but how do you think this thing ultimately plays out? Well, it's early, but like how do you think this thing ultimately plays out? Well, it's interesting. The book makes a lot of comparisons between Jeff Bezos and John Rockefeller of Standard Oil. And I think Amazon... In the first chapter, you start down that road. Exactly.

And what happened with Standard Oil, and like there's just so many similarities, it's kind of crazy. What happened with Standard Oil is they, John Rockefeller fought a breakup of Standard Oil, tooth and nail. He did not want his company to be broken up. In 1911, Supreme Court breaks it up into 34 different companies. 20 years after the antitrust suit started. Exactly.

Yeah. Exactly. And it winds up being the best thing to ever happen to John Rockefeller or Standard Oil because all those companies separated from each other become behemoths in their own right. And some of them quadruple in stock market value. Okay. Like, and he's wealthier beyond compare. And I think that there could be like an analog here with Amazon that, you know, they're resisting a breakup. You know, this conglomerate model serves them very well.

They're like one of the last conglomerates that actually works because they're able to leverage their power with their vendors and their competitors and the people they compete against, it's a great effect. But I think if it were to be broken up, it might even be a standard oil sort of scenario where it unleashes more value. So I love that idea.

I think a lot of people are starting to talk about, you know, they think about the problems at Alphabet. Well, what if YouTube were a standalone business or okay. So the baby bells, which were spun out of AT&T when that was broken up, that was done along regional lines. They basically created like the Northeast and the Southeast and the Southwest and each of those became standalone companies. And then they all re-merged with other companies anyway to the point where they basically don't exist anymore. I don't know exactly how Standard

Oil, along which lines those pieces were broken up. I feel like it was like Texaco and... Exxon is one of them. Exxon. Volvo is one of them, right? Was that regional too or was that? I think some of it was regional, but not all of it. Like there was Standard Oil of New Jersey, for instance, that became its own thing. And then some of them wound up merging again later. Chevron was originally a Standard Oil company, right?

I guess the question is like if Amazon were to contemplate, well, I guess if a breakup were forced on them as the ultimate remedy and then maybe they fought that for five or 10 years. But like what if let's say they exceeded to it and they said, you know what, you're right, we'll break up. We don't want to deal with this anymore. Along what lines? You separating the third party marketplace business from the first party business or we're taking the

Lord of the Rings show and spinning that out into its own. I can't even imagine what the different permutations could be, but I feel like there could be so many of them. I mean, this is like 12 different publicly traded companies in one company. Their advertising arm, the retail arm, cloud computing, logistics, movie studio, you name it. Right? It's just literally everywhere. Kuiper's coming online now, right?

That's another business that's gonna compete with SpaceX. So there's just so many different ways you could hypothetically chop it up. But if you read the FTC lawsuit, that's really focused on one area. So I'd imagine logistics could be a big part of that. Okay. You mentioned Kuiper.

So let's end with that and then we'll tell people where they can get the book to read more. This is going to be the head to head that I think they launched 127 satellites last week or two weeks ago. They want to have their own version of Starlink. I think it's great for the world and for the consumer for it not just to be Starlink. Like I think having two at least two players there offering internet service. And so it's going to be somebody versus Tesla or somebody versus Elon Musk. Amazon versus Elon Musk, sounds like it even has a shot.

Do you think that this is gonna be a really interesting battle? Do you think that this is gonna be kind of like a mano a mano, Musk versus Bezos, even though Bezos isn't the CEO per se of Amazon right now? He's executive chair still. So he's still very much involved. This is something very much like that was part of Jeff's vision here, you know, deals with space, which is one of his like big areas.

I think it's really fascinating for a very long time. Starlink has been the player in this space, no pun intended. And to see Amazon come online, I mean, later than they wanted to, I think it could, you know, we could see some big ramifications here. So it's kind of exciting to watch. Yeah, prime users having a discount for internet service as like an introductory way to build market share sounds like it's really going to make the SpaceX folks not very happy with having that as a competitor.

So if they can get the capacity online and get more of, I think they said they want to have like 1200 satellites in the sky in the next two years or something like that. It sounds like it's going to be the next battleground. Timing is interesting too, because it comes right as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk sort of settle their years long pissing match, you know, or Elon would really criticize him online a lot about Blue Origin, his space rocket company. So, settled it at least for now. For now.

All right. So I want to send people to where they can get the book because I've been an Amazon shareholder forever but I learned so much just going back through some of the old stories. And your reporting is really, I mentioned to you before we started recording, it seems like you've had a thousand conversations with people about this company in order to write this book. It's just so well done.

And there's so much in here that I think most people haven't heard before or didn't fully understand. So I wanted to congratulate you on the everything war. And I asked you before, like, what was the most exciting feedback that you got? You mentioned the company was like, not as combative about what you wrote and what you published. Well, I was very methodical on that. I spoke to 600 people and I had hundreds of pages of internal documents to bulletproof

it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think it's incredible and I want people who are looking for their next great business book to strongly consider The Everything War. Dana, thank you so much for coming by and chatting with me. I really appreciated it and hope we talk again.

Thanks for having me. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to What Are Your Thoughts? An all new edition. It's Tuesday night, five o'clock on the East Coast. That means Michael and I are live interacting with the chat. Chad say hello to Michael. He's going to pay attention. He's going to pay attention. He wants to see. No, I'm not. You have my full attention. He's going to pay attention. He wants to see.

You have my full attention. That's how I do it here. All right. Joe Altomaro is here. Akbar Mohammed. What up? Ben is here. Jay Luther, John Carlo. Magnus is back.

Chris is back. Georgie, we see you. The doctor is here. Guys, Nicole is in the chat tonight. Say hello to Nicole, everybody. All right. We got, we got the whole, the whole gang is here. Guys, Nicole is in the chat tonight. Say hello to Nicole, everybody. All right. We got the whole gang is here. This is an incredible moment in market history. I have almost never seen anything like this in my entire life. And we have so much to talk about. But before we do, Michael, we have a sponsor tonight. Who's the sponsor of the show? Guys, it's public. And I want you to do something. Leave the old

boring legacy outdated platforms that make it hard for you to invest. Public makes it really easy. What do you want? Crypto stocks, good old fashioned bonds. They got it. Cash account. Like a high Like a high interest cash account if you don't know what to invest in. Or you want to sit out. You want to say, you know what, this is not for me. I'm going to earn a little bit of interest while I figure out what I think is going to happen or how much risk I want to take.

That's always an option too. I'll tell you another thing. You also can get a up to $10,000 if you transfer an existing brokerage account over to Public. So let's tell people where to go. Public.com slash W-A-Y-T to learn more paid for by Public Investing, full disclosures in podcast description. All right.

Here's what I want to start. And I know you wanted to start here too. Josh was right. So we had like, you weren't debating me really. You just, you weren't understanding what I was trying to say. We had this conversation. So much. No, no, no, no, no.

I don't think you were on the other side of this from me. You just were like, you're like, wait, I don't understand. That's all. But we had like a little, a flare up on the show a couple weeks ago, because Cali was on last week. It was like, why, like, what is the market responding to? Why is the market rallying? Right?

And I don't know. All I know is the market looks like they're now laughing at the tariff headlines. So my best guess at the time, and now it seems like it was the right guess, my best guess is the market no longer believes, circa early May, what it believed in early April, which was that tariffs were going to be here to stay. They were going to get worse. People just basically said, you know what, he's capitulating already. Carve out for semiconductors, carve out for phones. Now he's talking to the auto industry.

Now he's telling the retailers, don't worry, and winking. So it was just like kind of like the stock market each day was like, yeah, this tariff thing's not real. And that's where it ended up landing. And nobody could really predict that in advance. But I feel like day by day, stocks started to just decide this is all going to be a big joke in the end. And that's what ended up happening. You had a capitulation over the weekend. So I just wanted to get your take on, was that the right, was that the right instinct? Like

why stocks are rallying? They definitely weren't rallying because we're going to get all this tariff revenue that's going to offset income tax. Yeah. All right. Well, if you've rewound during the throws of the sell off, I was pretty vocal saying that I don't believe him. And I was saying at the time that I could end up being wrong, but I don't believe that he doesn't care about the stock market. I don't believe that he doesn't care about the scoreboard. He's a narcissist and I think-

That was the right call. Yeah. So, okay. However, I am still surprised at the stock market's reaction. So, for example, I am surprised that over the last 24 sessions, according to Mike Cicardi, the S&P 500 is up 18 1 1⁄2%.

That has only happened, a 24 session 18 1 1⁄2% rally has only happened a 24 session 18 and a half percent rally has only happened in 1982 at the bottom, in 2009 at the bottom, and in 2020 at the bottom. This V-shaped recovery has me surprised. Bespoke tweeted, the last time the S&P 500 erased a 15% decline percent decline in under six weeks was 1982. This is rare. This is highly unusual. So I cannot believe that we've had a V-shape recovery that took back all of the declines, because if you ask me, and if you ask the average investor,

are things better today? What's going on in the chat? Nothing. I think the whole stream is in unison, basically confirming what you're saying. OK. If you go back and listen to what you were saying, you were actually saying in real time, no way.

Yeah, I was. Now, but I'm still absolutely flabbergasted that the market hasn't said, you know what? All right, this is a confidence game, and we are not as confident in the multiple that we should be applying to our stocks, given all of this. And given that earnings are probably going to slow down,

there's probably going to be some negative impact to the market. But the market is looking all the way past that because they are temporary setbacks is what the market is saying, I think. I was super bearish in late March and right through the bottom of the market and probably, look, I bought stocks anyway, just because that's what I do. But I absolutely did not think that we would retrace the entirety of the sell-off and then be looking at a situation where you're now 5% or 4% from back to the highs. We're up on the year. Like what?

Yeah. 100%. In a million years, I never would have guessed it, which, look, I think speaks to why it's so hard to try to guess which direction the next 10% is going to be. I don't know anyone that can reliably do it. And I don't even know that even if you can do it, like even if you can say the next 10% is going to be this, and then it happens, well then what do you do? Then you have to make another guess. And then that leads to another guess.

So I was super bearish throughout the month of April, still sort of bearish, not super bearish anymore, because prices went up. And I think that's how it lands on regular people. When things on the screen get better, you start thinking about, well, maybe it wasn't as bad as I thought. And then when it happens every single day for three weeks, it's like impossible to not consider the fact that stocks sniffed out the truth, which is the whole thing's

a joke. And of course, Trump was going to capitulate. It was only a matter of whether or not he had somebody else do it for him. In this case, he sent Scott to Geneva and he said, do me a favor, don't come back here without something good. I don't want to hear it anymore, or whatever he said. And that's what he got. By the way, Peter Navarro was not sent to Switzerland.

That was probably good for 7% of the S&Ps rally. Lotnik was sent to a TV studio. Besant was sent to Geneva to meet the Chinese. And Peter Navarro was sent to his bedroom without supper. No, basically, right? Have you seen him? No, thank God. They basically said, hey, do yourself a favor,

shut the fuck up, we're trying to get this thing back on track, and he's gone, like that. You think that wasn't the conversation? Stop. You're off TV until we tell you. You ghoul. Nobody wants to hear your bullshit anymore. So look, I think where we are now is like super insane. And I don't know, if you threw money at all these stocks during the course of the market bottoming in April, what do you do now? You keep them all? I'm not selling anything.

It keeps going up. I haven't sold that. You bought a bunch of shit too. I bought Nvidia, Uber, CrowdStrike. Oh yeah, so you bought CrowdStrike in the 300s? Yeah, so I'm up like 30% on a lot of these names. I'm probably going to light it up a little bit. Not because I've been paying attention to the numbers.

I'm probably going to be paying attention to the numbers. I'm probably going to be paying attention to the numbers. I'm probably going to be paying attention to the numbers. I'm probably going to be paying attention to the numbers. I'm probably going to be paying attention to the numbers. I'm probably going to be paying attention to the numbers. I'm probably going to be paying attention to the numbers. I'm probably going to be paying attention to the numbers. I'm probably going to be paying attention to the numbers. Oh yeah, so I bought CrowdStrike in the 300s. Yeah, so I'm up like 30% on a lot of these names. I'm probably going to lighten up a little bit. Not because I've been pinning on the future of these stocks, but it's 30% in three weeks.

So I doubled my Amazon position. I added to Uber. What else did I do? I didn't buy Starbucks. That was the one I should have bought. Oh, I bought more toast. We're gonna talk about Uber and toast later. I think there's a silver lining just purely from-

Oh, Netflix. I bought Netflix. We did it on the air during the show. That I might sell some of that. That's up a lot, dude. You have to remind yourself how you were feeling four weeks ago. We were all nervous.

And let this be a lesson. Let this be a lesson for the next time something like this happens. I still am nervous. I understand that now the trade uncertainty is gone. What are you nervous about? We're not gone, but significantly diminished. What are you nervous about?

145% is not 30%. But 30% is still not great for the economy, unless everything is an exception. But everything's going to be exempt. Everything that matters. Yeah. Great. Here's what I'm a little bit nervous about. You would think that at some point, yields are going to matter and be somewhat of a head

wound for stocks. The 10-year hit 4.5% today. In recent history, that has kept a lid on stocks. You know what's funny compared to the shit that we were worried about like three weeks ago? That almost seems quaint. No, I'm making up reasons to be worried. The VIX is under 20. The market's not worried. Why would you be worried? Let's do some stuff here. Anyway, for those who aren't paying as close attention to this, basically Trump went from 145% tariff on China, circa the first week of April,

and that is now down to 30% and probably going even lower. It's like, and by the way, that's not like the new tariff level. That's the baseline level while they negotiate. And I think they gave themselves another 90 days. So this is the New York time. Let's do the next chart. So this shows that chart.

And then below it is the tariffs imposed by China, which went from 10% on certain things like nap gas, coal and farm machinery to 34% on April 4th, 84% on April 9th, 125% on April 11th, now 10% on May 12th. So China took almost all the tariffs off. So did we. Nobody made any concessions. This is the New York Times.

President Trump made big promises with his China tariffs. China needs us more than we need it. America can outlast China in a trade war. Those advantages will let the administration get big concessions and rebalance global commerce. Trump's actions, however, suggest that talk was bluster. China made no concessions by now Most of us are familiar with this pattern Trump makes big claims about what his tariffs can get Only for him to later back down without the other country giving up anything meaningful

It happened with Mexico Canada and most of the Liberation Day levies Despite his claims America seems to need other countries trade as much as they need ours All right, so that's the that's the New York Times weighing in on that. I wanted to ask you, because stocks rallied as furiously as they did, does that mean that the whole theory where, hey, we're going to get all this tax money from overseas and that's going to be what pays for the extension of the tax cuts in the TCJ. So is this like proof that the market never believed in that story and never will?

I think so. Yeah. Can you expound on that or what do you think? No, I don't know about the tax code. So I don't want to pin you on everything. Okay. I don't know about this shit. So I point.

One of the things that one of the things the responses from Howard Lutnick over the last six weeks is of course we have to do the tariffs because we're going to extend the tax cuts and China is going to pay for our tax cuts. The stock market rallying to this extent tells you that literally there's not a soul on earth who believed that story. Like not one, literally not one person believes that. All right, so here's a question. Is this a bull trap?

No. So now we're 4% from the all time high. Like is this the rally that sucks everybody back in right before we resume the downward trend. What do you think? Well, I almost reject that premise because I don't think the people that sold bought back. It happened too quickly.

But if they did, and I don't think they did because it was just a blistering speed. No, I don't think it's a bull trap. I do believe that those were the lows, but I don't believe it with everything I got. If you told me that the economy weakens and we go into a recession later in the year and we take out the lows, I would not be surprised. You don't think people who sold stocks in February, March, April bought anything at all? I didn't say that.

You said that. So the hedge funds did not buy back in? Or maybe that's what the last five days have been about. If you panicked in early April, I don't believe the market gave you a chance to buy back in or maybe that's what the last five days have been. I'm just saying if you panicked in early April, I don't believe the market gave you a chance to buy back in. It usually doesn't. So if you panic sold, you never really got the all clear until Saturday that the thing that made you panic is not going to be a thing anymore.

The lows were on April 8th. At that level, we were down 19 and change from the highs. And then you had the up 10% day where we were going to do the pause. And then I think like we gave like a little bit back and then we just, we haven't looked back. So if you look at every single day, every single candlestick from somebody that might have sold in April, when was a great time to get back in? Because the fears were still there.

That's my point. I agree. Yeah. You probably didn't believe the rally because why would you when all the headlines are saying we're going to retest the lows, why would you believe the rally? So I think that had you panicked, you're probably still on the sidelines waiting for a better opportunity. And what do you do now?

I have no idea. I agree because if you were panicked, the reason you were panicked was because you thought the tariffs would cause a recession. Especially the tariff, which people didn't care about the Canada thing or Mexico thing. It's the China thing is the thing, right? Let's just put that out there. So the announcement of the deal with Britain, which was last week, might have been the thing that got you to unpanic a little. Come on, I don't want to bother that.

But you really didn't get what you needed until this Saturday, meaning yesterday would have been your first chance to say, all right, I was worried about the China thing. Now we're going to make make a big beautiful deal. I'll put that back on. So listen, the day after we had that up 10% day, we got lower by like 3% the next morning. And for the next one, two, three, for the next seven days, we gave back half of that gain.

Do you remember that? That 10% candle, we gave back half of it over the next seven trading sessions. So you probably thought, well, we're rolling over, we're gonna be tested lows. You didn't buy then. And you probably thought, well, we're rolling over, we're going to be tested loads. You didn't buy then. And then we bounced, we haven't looked back since. So I think that like, yeah, I'm sure traders got back in, but for like the average person

that panic sold, they're not back in. No way. All right. Let's define. So this is what I'm going to tell you. If this is a bull trap, and my operating assumption is that it's not, I reserve the right to change my mind, of course, but I just can't see how it would be. If it is, it's the most elaborate ball trap I have literally ever seen.

And the reason I don't think it is now is because of what we heard during earnings season. But we'll get to the reason in a second. I want to start by defining the term. A bull trap is a lower volume rally that occurs in the midst of a bear market that ends up being a head fake and sucks people back in. And there have been some really convincing examples where it looked like, oh, the bull market is resuming, but it was just a bull trap. And we talked about this, Michael, you and I, a couple of shows ago, the 2000 to 2002 bear market, which I probably still have PTSD from, but the S&P rallied 5% or more on 10 separate occasions. This chart comes from chart kid Matt. So those blue squiggles higher amidst this grueling 51% bear market, those are instances of the

S&P rallying 5% or more and then as you can tell, falling apart and seeing lower lows later on. And every time that happened, less and less people wanted to play along, which is why you get lower highs on the way down. So that's what an example looks like of multiple bull traps inside of a bear market. Centerpoint Securities has this really great thing on bull traps. And I just want to show you a couple of their charts. I mean, these are illustrations, they're not charts.

So like that's, you know, if you were to take a crayon and illustrate for somebody, what does a bull trap look like? That's a really, to me, that's a really good, great example because it actually breaks the downtrend and you think you're out of the woods. But this one has gone way further than this illustration, which is why it's really hard for me to believe that this is a setup that's going to trick everybody.

We made it hard. We got back all the losses. It's over. Not saying that we can't fall, but we got back all the losses. Usually in a real bull trap, you rally back to a resistance level, usually the downtrend and you challenge it and fail. That didn't happen here. Usually there are big momentum divergences or volume divergences and that's not the case here. Like the volume, even anecdotally, the things that Robinhood is saying

with trading volumes, the ETF flows, like all of that stuff is confirmation, not divergence. But let me show you what it would look like if it were a bull trap. So like very simply put, like a market rally that's accompanied by low volume, meaning like people are buying, but not to the same extent they were on the way up. That's a classic tell. And so when you have really high volume,

like what we've had, that's how you go all the way. That's a potential bull reversal. Last month, we learned that retailers, retailers, that retail traders, retail investors, had the highest amount of buying ever. I think they bought like $50 billion worth of stock in a week. It was off the charts. So this is the opposite of a low volume bounce.

Let's put this chart up. So we talk about a negative divergence. You don't have it here. No, it's confirming. a negative divergence. You don't have it here. You see the confirmation from RSI. Relative strength is 67. MACTI, which is Moving Average Convergence Divergence, up and to the right. So you're not getting that kind of classic divergence with this rally. So we've come all the way back and you're getting the momentum. And let me show you, I made this this rally. So we've come all the way back and you're getting the momentum. And let me show you, I made this this morning.

Here's an example of a negative divergence. February. So as you can see, we come out of the election, the stock market, which is in purple, just rips higher. And 14-day relative strength or 14-day RSI is ripping with it. And then as you head into January, you see where I have that red line. That's momentum falling apart as the purple line continues to rally. That's a classic, and a lot of our technician friends pointed out at the time, that's a

classic divergence in momentum versus price and you know look what ends up eventually happening the market literally has the stool kicked out from under it and confirms that lower momentum not vice versa now look at the way back up the purple and the orange line are almost perfectly synced together so you had the negative divergence already. It wasn't this month, it was four months ago. Am I explaining that well, Mike? Yeah, yeah. Okay, last thing on this,

and then we can move on on the bull trap thing. Put this last chart up. The difference between a bull trap and a bullish move, you see that volume spike with the buying in the bullish move, that's what's happening now. So like, I don't know what's going to happen. But if you say to me like, is this the bull trap that gets everybody, sucks everybody back in?

Not according to the classic definition of how I learned what a bull trap is. Yeah, I'm with you. Ryan Dietrich tweeted, over 55% and now it's over 60, but this was earlier today, over 55% of components in the S&P 500 made a new 20-day high today. Okay? New 20-day high. This is yet another clue the lows are likely in and better times are coming. It's been higher a year later, 29 out of 30 times.

So I take this- And the 16% average return? Yeah, I take this sort of stuff times. So I take this- And a 16% average return? Yeah, I take this sort of stuff seriously. When you have this overwhelming amount of buying, and we had the breath thrusts earlier in the year, and when the psychology, the collective psychology of the market goes from everybody out to everybody in, historically, that is the bottom. And it's hard to imagine given all the headline noise, but yet again. Look at this roller coaster.

Put this up. This is the S&P 500 performance year to date. I asked Sean and Matt to put this together. So this is the downturn starting from February. This is S&P, not NASDAQ. Close enough. 18.9%, I guess, on a closing basis. Mental.

And then almost perfectly symmetrical, I would say in about two-thirds of the time it took to fall, you come back 17.3%. So you're not quite back to where you are in early February at the top. You were 58.44 going into today. The high was 6144. Back at 6144, all the strategists had price targets of 7,000, 6,800, blah, blah, blah. That's like almost a perfectly symmetrical comeback. We're not quite all the way back, but like, my God. And all the strategies, all of them,

and it's not their fault, I would have done the same, that's the job. All of them lowered their price targets. We're gonna do that in a second, put a pin on that. What's this next chart? Oh, percentage of S&P 500 stocks above their 20 day, that's the left pane, 50 day, 200 day moving averages. This is interesting. So the S&P is back above the 200 as of today. It's got to be right. I mean, it's right there. But only half the stocks

are I think the mag seven X alphabet did a lot of the heavy lifting here. Just eyeball test. Look at did a lot of the heavy lifting here. Just eyeball test. Look at Nvidia went nuts today. Microsoft went crazy last week. Meta had a decent run. Apple even. So just like Tesla had a big bounce. So I think that Mag-7 is still doing

a lot of the heavy lifting. Even though you now have a lot of stocks above their 20 day, you still only have about half the market above its 200. Do you find that somewhat meaningful? Is that the next thing that has to catch up? I mean, RSP looks great too. I don't know. I don't know that I find it super meaningful at only half or above.

All right. Here are the sector returns off the market lows. What jumps out to you here? From the market lows. So April 8th, this is every sector and how much they're up off the low. I'll tell you what jumps out at me, but what jumps out to me is this is literally exactly how you would draw it up from the top to the bottom. Like if you said, all right, there's going to be a huge market recovery, rank the sectors

in order of what you think will happen happen more or less. How about this? The top five versus the bottom five, you would draw it up like that. So the bottom five is healthcare staples, youths, energy and real estate. The top five is technology, industrials, discretionary materials and financials. You would, you would, that's exactly how you would draw it up. Tax fine. I got, I got, I got somebody, uh, here Bill Griebel's is saying-7 is not doing the heavy lifting. It's underperforming the S&P QQQ year to date.

Hansom, we're saying from the April 8th low, the technology sector spider is up 26.7%. Listen, Mr. McNeer. And the market is not, sir. Josh is very sensitive to people disagreeing with him, so I would tread lightly. All right. Here's the New York Stock Exchange advanced decline line. What else could you ask for? Yeah, it's all the things. Pretty good. So again, this is important. If this is a bull trap, it wouldn't look like this. It would maybe you'd be like somewhere in the middle of that channel. Because we already got

above where the previous highs were, not the all-time highs, but before, we're higher than the liberation they dump. That's right. So the question is, is this a bull trap? It's already been answered. No. Well, let me say one thing. This new, I'll put that back up. This New York Stock Exchange Advanced Decline Line includes a lot of bullshit.

All the closed end funds that trade there and bonds. So this is better. Here's the S&P 500 advanced decline line. And by the way, the next time somebody shows you an NYSE advanced decline line, say no thank you, show me the S&P. Here it is. Look, look, it's an all time high.

Yeah. So it's tough for this to be a bull, it's tough for this to be a bull trap. The market has had a lot of bullshit thrown at it. We were talking with Neil last week or two weeks ago, and we said, this is a bull market. You had the biggest intraday declines erased in three years off bad news.

That's what happens in the bull market. It shrugs off bad news. You might not like it. Here's GLD happens in the bull market. It trucks up bad news. You might not like it but- Here's GLD. Hanging in there. Yeah. Up 23.3% year to date, 5.4% off all-time highs, which is nothing. That's one bad day. So even with the stock market meltup over the last five weeks- Hanging in there.

GLD is not backing off. I find that interesting, don't you? Yeah, I do. You would have thought money would fly out of there once we got the re-certainty that we've been joking around about, but it didn't. So that's, I don't know if that's people or central banks. We had a couple of charts from a friend of the show, Todd Sohn, Strategis. These are ETF flows off the lows. So this is in price, guys. This is the amount of dollars coming into and out of. The number one was very interesting. So interesting, right? I think Todd sent us

this today or yesterday. So the number one asset gathering ETF from the low on April 8th is treasury bill ETFs. That part not surprising. So short duration bonds is number two. No, this is surprising to me. To me, as Todd writes, he says category flows have suggested equity rally skepticism since the low. So to me, this is exactly what I suggested at the top of the show. People are not buying back in. The people that sold went to bills and bonds and they still got to get back in. What's not surprising about it to me is when you sell stocks and you're not buying more stocks, that's where you go.

Yeah. So that's the part that's not surprising. You're saying it's surprising or it's not surprising? I would have thought that given the rally, money would have had to flow into these ETFs, the market ETFs. And it did, it did, it certainly did, it's just not the leaders.

Here are the surprises. put that back up spot crypto was the number three category of ETF asset gathering that's why five point three billion dollars came racing into the safety of spot crypto ETFs okay that's crazy growth so growth factor equity five bills factor equity, there's the money. So there's the money that came in. Precious metals at $4 billion, okay, less surprising. More bonds, European equity was actually net positive, that's actually interesting. They bought Japanese equities on a net basis too, that's interesting.

Not crazy amounts, but enough that it made the chart. All right. These were the big losers. Here's what they sold. Small cap stocks couldn't get arrested. They sold 5.5 billion worth of small cap equity ETFs since the lows on April 8th. Cyclical sector ETFs, which I don't even know. Would that just be like S&P materials? Materials, industrials. They sold Chinese stocks, negative $3.7 billion. They sold the long bond, $3.3 billion.

I guess that's probably mostly TLT. And then they sold the defensive sector ETF token negative money, which I suppose is somewhat surprising, but maybe that's the nature of tariffs was that the defensive sectors are hit just as hard in the worst case scenario. They held up really well in the sell-off, so maybe that's just profit taking. I don't know. Okay. Next chart.

We have one more from Todd. This is interesting. This is the same dollar went to equity and to fixed income since the April low. So the people who were buying something in equal amount, and I don't know if cash T-bills are in here as fixed income because maybe that's misleading. What do you think about this? They are. They are.

So that's the source of that. If anyone's going to get caught in this bull trap or look stupid as a result of this bull trap, not being a bull trap, it's the chief strategists. So chart off. Sam Rowe wrote this morning Goldman Sachs and your Denny Research led Wall Street in slashing their year-end S&P 500 targets as the stock market tumbled. In the following weeks, RBC, Sokjen, Oppenheimer, B of A, JP Morgan, BMO, BIMO, Citi, CFRA, and Deutsche Bank all revised their targets lower.

On Monday, Goldman and Yardeni revised their targets again, this time up after the US and China agreed to temporary lower tariffs. Goldman sees the year ending at 6,100, up from 5,900. Yordani sees 6,500, up from 6,000. Sam writes, we're not going to pretend like the swing in the S&P 500 itself isn't influencing these revisions. Right. This is just marking to market, right? That's all they're doing.

What are they supposed to do? They were, they marked it down for a reason, the reason changed and then they got to mark it up. Well, that's not my criticism. I have no criticism. I don't think I would be any better at this, but you're in January, full speed ahead with a 7,000 target. And then, liberation, the lead up to liberation day, the stock market crashes. Then you cut your target to lower than where the market is, right as it bottoms. Then it rallies for five weeks and you

raise your target. You should take your target and shove it up someone's ass because nobody needs to actually read it. If we're just like, oh, here's my year end target is 6,500 unless there's a market crash, in which case it'll be 5,500. Oh, that's amazing. And then if there's a recovery, it'll be back to 6,500. So what does the target do literally? What is it about? I don't think anybody cares about the target.

The financial media cares. Right. Yeah. That's it. Every time they raise the target, lower target. Yeah, that's it. I think, look, I think it's the hardest job on Wall Street to come up with a price target for anything, especially the whole stock market. But don't make it even worse by changing, by marking your target

to market every time there's a correction. If you're a bull, be a bull and eat it, live through it, or don't be so bullish. If there's that much uncertainty that the minute something negative happens, you have to chop your target down, it shouldn't be as high as it was in the first place. Is that like a reasonable takeaway? That's harsh. So what do you do? Stop publishing targets?

Can't do that. I don't know. It's a stupid thing. We know. We know it's complete clownery. All right. Let's talk about Google. So you were on the air last week when there was a report. Where did the report come from? Was it Apple who made this report? It was Eddie Q testifying in court about the antitrust suit and pointing out, hey, it's

not like anyone's searching Google anymore anyway. And Eddie Q is who? The number three person at Apple. So the market, the Google, the market, Google fell 8% on the day. And I, I don't know when I bought the stock, but I sold the stock for a 4% loss. And I was pretty proud of myself because I think it would have been very easy to be like, yeah, it's so cheap and this is a great buying opportunity.

Maybe just add, but I'm like, you know what? I'm not 4%. Why am I? Why am I? Who gives a shit? Just get rid of it. Right? Like I don't need to be dying this sell.

So here's what I'm saying. You're lucky you were only down 4%. What do you mean? I'm saying you could have been down 20% really easily, you were only down 40, a 4. So, let's start this chart from where Google's revenue comes from, and really, it's search. I mean, we know that, right?

Like, there's, yes, the cloud is growing really nicely and YouTube is a huge engine, of course, but it's- 50% of revenue's search. I mean, we know that, right? Like there's, yes, the cloud is growing really nicely and YouTube is a huge engine, of course, but it's- 50% of revenue is search. That's it. It's search. That's it. So in my opinion, it's possible that we look back and we say, oh wow, remember when we thought that like people were gonna stop using search

and chat, chat off please. But this is going to be an overhang probably like forever. And even though we learned last quarter, I don't know, when did they report? Three, four weeks ago? We learned that search grew 11% last quarter. And to me, when I saw that report, I was like, okay. Like, yeah, we might be afraid of chat you,

it's still growing really, really, really healthy healthily. The problem is it doesn't necessarily matter that the stock is cheap. It doesn't necessarily matter that it's growing. What matters is the threat of its crown jewel is going to be under assault for God knows how long. So I want to hold on to try something then I'll give the mic back to you. So Chartkin made these, chart on please.

This is Google since ChatGBT was launched and it's actually up 60%, which is not that much less than the queues. The queues were up almost 80% over the same time. So under performance, but not dramatically. But here's the thing, the forward PE is as low as it's been chart basically ever. And what changes this?

I don't know. Next chart. So what I had, what I had Matt do here was compare over the last one, three and five years, all of the mag seven names. And yeah, over the last year, it's the only one that is down. It's down 6% over the last year. Every other Mac 7 name is up. Over the last three years,

it's the second worst performer behind Tesla. And over the last five years, it's the second worst performer only in front of Amazon. So yes, it's cheap. Yes, if you're a value investor and you have a long-term time horizon, you might very well be rewarded. But for me, that's not my objective with Google.

I don't want the headache and I think the headache is not going away. Okay. So I want to tackle that 11% stat that you just threw out. You said the growth of search was 11%. Here's the thing. That's not the growth of search. That's the growth of revenues from search. True.

Like, Metta used to do that. They would just throw another ad in. of search. That's the growth of revenues from search. Meta used to do that. They would just throw another ad in. Increasing the ad load makes the product worse and makes the revenue higher today. But it costs you customers in the future as people grow fatigued. You ever try to read something at thestreet.com? No. Holy shit. I dare you to accidentally click a link from, I don't even know how you would No. When they see the street.com, they will not click it because they know what's about to happen. Video ad, close it. Another video ad, try to close it.

It pops something else. Ticker scrolling across the bottom, ticker scrolling across the top. A pop-up, a form to fill out. By the time you get to the second paragraph, you have seen 19 ads. Do you know why they're doing that? Because the traffic is doing this for the most part and no disrespect to anybody who's doing a column there. I know they have like talented people, but they have turned that site into a torture

chamber for the reader. And now I'm sure and I think like private equity owns it or somebody took it off the market. Now I'm sure whoever they were doing it to impress internally, hey look, our revenue was up. Okay, but were the views up? Were the reads up? Were the subscriptions up?

Or is the usage up? No, but the revenue's up. So Google can continue to add more buttons and bells and forms and ad units and blocks of things tracking you, they could do that for the next 10 years and somehow grow revenue. But the street has already decided that that revenue growth, A, has decelerated to the point where it's a point of no return and B, is not being accompanied by increased usage of the product. And that's why it's a 15 multiple. Now I just said all that, but what I want

to say next is if you are a value investor, you should be buying Google Hand over Fist. Because that's what value investing is. It's accepting all of the things that people have decided are negative about the stock and saying, yeah, but I'm going to invest anyway because I think either the negatives are overstated or the company can fix it. I believe the negatives are overstated. I think that the threat from chat GBT is overstated, but I also don't think the threat is going away. And the market doesn't think the threat is going away. And the market doesn't think the threat is going away.

So if Google rolls over and it falls another 15, 20%, I will buy it back and hold it. It's just not there yet for me. I called it PayPal on TV, and that might've been harsh. Like PayPal still grows, PayPal still has hundreds of millions of people that use it. The problem is there's enough competition there

that it's never going to be able to grow the way it used to. It's not going to get its old multiple back. And the stock sells at 11 times earnings. I think Google Search is going to be a hugely profitable business. For a long time. For a long 20 years. I don't know.

You know what's funny, Tresha? I almost forgot to mention this. We've done this segment multiple times five years ago, a couple, I don't remember one, which mag seven stock is like the least disruptible. And I think I'm pretty sure I said Apple was the most disruptible. I would have said alphabet is the least disruptible. But I think we both said, at least I think I said it was Google because it was impossible to envision ChatGBT. And the market share that Google had seemed fully impenetrable. So it shook me a little bit in a good way.

I would have said, I would have, I would say, of course you can't envision ChatGBT even if it comes along. You can't envision it as a private company being able to raise $100 billion. You can't envision the speed with which that app reached a critical mass of users faster than TikTok, faster than like literally anything that's ever happened before. There were so many things that you could not have seen coming. And at that time, you're talking about a company that has 95% market share. Right. Unheard of.

That doesn't exist anywhere in the world. But they had that. So that's why they looked the least disruptible. Then the next phase of that conversation is, okay, maybe somebody could come along with a better version of search, but Google's got a lot of resources. They'll reinvent themselves. They'll cannibalize their own thing and they'll, they'll do it too. And that still might be how this turns out.

Maybe it doesn't look well. Market doesn't like it. The market doesn't like it, but they are not giving up. They're built. They're working on, um, you know, they're working on their own bots and their own, uh, AI assistance and products that they will weave into their core products and they'll get usage of. And I think it's not like unsurvivable.

I just think it's a tougher stock than it's ever been before. Will Google outperform the Q's over the next three years? I'd say you would have to have a bear market for Google to outperform the rest of what's in that index. Be my guess. Because that index has gigantic companies that we almost never talk about, like Service Now. And these companies are probably going to be 20% growers with 40% margins.

And I don't think people are going to race them with Alphabet. So I'd say probably not unless you get a bear market. All right. Let's touch on inflation. We got a CPI report, April CPI rose 0.2% month over month on both headline and core, which was below expectations. The year over year was plus 2.3%. On headline, core was plus 2.8%.

Those were below expectations. There's nothing really jumps out at me, like lower egg prices, stupid shit like that. Services prices, X energy were up slightly. I don't even know how important that is to the calculation. Rent wasn't crazy. Airline prices were way down. Airline fares are in the services component, fell by 2.8% month over month.

That's a third consecutive negative month for airline prices and negative 8% year over year. So that's good. Sticky part is auto insurance, but like there's nothing in there that would spook you. And I don't know. I guess the question is, is that the last tame inflation report we're going to get? And now we get the tariff era inflation reports. So, yeah, I don't know. I don't knowiff-era inflation reports? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what the future inflation reports are going to hold, but this did surprise me. I'm looking at CME FedWatch tool, and a week ago,

there was a 30% implied probability of a rate cut in June. And that's basically gone now. I'm 30% down to 8%. So the market seems to think- With 100% chance of two rate cuts this year and like a 20% chance of a third. But- Like for the rest of the year. Where do you think inflation will show up

in the coming reports? I don't think inflation is the problem. I think goods inflation is the problem, not overall inflation. And I think services deflation will be disinflationary if goods inflation is high because high prices will kill demand and will hurt companies and companies will lay people off. And I actually don't view the tariffs as permanently inflationary. I think you wish that would be the case is this the last tame inflation report is that what you? Asked me yeah, because none of this stuff was in effect for April

Some of some of it though you we effectively had an embargo with China I don't know. I don't know how much you've how much time you spent like reading or looking at this I haven't spent much time at all spent reading or looking at this. I haven't spent much time at all. But from what I surmise, what spooked Trump was the retailer saying, expect empty shelves. If we're going to have Christmas, we need to start getting shit in now and not getting it. What we had was not a trade war. The level of tariff was so high, it effectively became an embargo. Like ships stopped coming here,

or China stopped exporting here and started sending things elsewhere, and then maybe it would end up coming here. But hang on, wait, but if the tariffs are on pause again for another 90 days, why would you think that this is gonna be the last time inflation report? They're not on pause. They're at 30% now.

We thought they would be at 145%. You see? So they bought- I thought on Sunday they announced that they paused them again, no? No, it's 30. The level's 30. But then again, half the shit is exempt. Right? So, dude, my point is when I say we had an embargo, I mean like ships not moving. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I understand. Okay. So when I say the last of the tame inflation reports, I don't mean next month is 9% inflation again. I mean weird shit that took place during the course of May because of the gap between when the tariffs were paused and when they were fully on. Like ships stopped moving. That's-

So I'll turn this around on you. I'm asking. I don't know the answer. I'm asking you to think. I have no idea. What do you think? I think here's the best case scenario. There are some weird readings in certain categories, and the market ignores it because the reality

has changed. I think that's likely. So like you could get a really bizarre reading in one segment of the economy, some sort of industrial material was tough to come by or whatever shipping rates and then in the market yawns because they're like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we know that's because of the 145% tariffs that are no longer happening. So that's like the best case. Sometimes the market is really hard to figure out.

Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's hard. Yesterday we had Trump tweeting 80% declines in medicine prices or whatever the number was, whatever he said. And XLV was up like 4% of the day and you're like, wait, what? And yesterday you would have said, well, the market clearly doesn't believe him. It's looking past it. OK, that would have made sense. And then today, XLV was down 3%. They dumped a really bad day. The worst performer sector by far. Sometimes the market is confusing. So one of the reasons why we keep the best stocks in the market list is to kind of check our priors.

And it's like a bias elimination machine where you might not believe in something, but like price is price and the buyers and sellers in the market just they could agree with you or disagree with you and you should at least know. And one of the things that happened last week, Sean came to me and said, yo, Carvana is the best stock in the market. And I said, no way. You have the, like I didn't say it to him, but I said to myself, he probably has the ticker wrong. No, it's like literally a best stock in the market. And the reason why I put this chart up, one of the reasons why, not the only reason why, this is the Mannheim used vehicle value index.

You probably heard a lot about this in 2021. This just turned upward. The Cox Automotive Mannheim used vehicle value index, which tracks prices of used vehicles sold at wholesale auctions increased, you adding Mike? 4.9% year over year. It's important to note this was a 2.7% month over month increase, which would be a 32% annualized increase. Sean writes, automotive prices are going higher and demand for a value-oriented service offering is in the midst of heating up. So we wrote this up for CNBC Pro yesterday. Here's a chart of Carvana.

Unbelievable. You know what a breakout looks like. But let me ask you this. So if the tariffs are reversed or don't go through, can all of that demand that like, holy shit, I better buy a car now, can that reverse in two seconds? I don't think it's holy shit, I better buy a car now. I think it's the used car being a better value than the car that can't be made or sold new because it's stuck in Mexico or the parts aren't coming in or whatever. I think that's what this is about. The other thing it's about is on May 7th they put up an insane earnings report, They put up an insane earnings report, 40% revenue growth. Net income was up 6X from the year prior.

Carvana is one of the craziest stocks. Dude, they did $49 million in net income in Q1 last year. That's $373 million this year. I mean, it's just an insane story. Operating margin, 9.3% versus 4% last year doubled their operating margin. So there's a stock at an RSI of 71, made a 52 week high yesterday, made another 52 week high today. I would never be bullish Carvana in the midst of a trade war.

What the hell do I know? The market is saying the stock is working. This company is positioned better than I would have guessed. And it forces you to understand the story. Yeah. No, I love it. I don't know that I've ever seen a stock go down 99% which it did. It went from 370. Let me give you the number. It hit $3.55 in December of 2022. It hit $375 in August of 2022. 99% fall to 355. And now it's at a record high.

No, it's not. $2.93. A 52 week high, excuse me. But I don't think I've ever seen a stock like this. Now, even if you're not bullish on the used car market, Sean writes, this is one of the most fragmented markets in the country, any industry. Automotive News says 2.3% of market share

is owned by the top dealership brand. 11.1% of total market share is the top 100 dealerships. That means 90% of this market has yet to have consolidated and Carvana probably has the financial wherewithal to consolidate as much of it as they want at this stage in the game. So look, I'm not like buying the stock or going crazy, but we wrote it up. It's on the list. It's a $39 billion market cap.

Yeah. I don't know how big is what's the TAM on used cars. It's going to be enormous. And what if they decide we're not just going to sell cars, we're going to do something else like Robinhood is doing with every other vertical and financial services. What if they say we're going to take football bets? All right. Good. What if they get into crypto? You want to do this recession chart really quickly? Layoff chart, rather?

All right, real quick. Real quick. So I thought this was notable. We're looking at, for those of you who are listening, this is from Goldman, the share of companies mentioning recession increased during Q1 earnings calls by 23%. All right, that's not a surprise. But here's what makes this very different than the two prior

spikes when you had recession mentioned spike. It was not accompanied by layoffs. So layoffs, mention of layoffs only rose 2%. So it's hard to have a recession when there's no layoffs. And then not LOL, in fact, the opposite of LOL. But ironically, there was a big announcement today from Microsoft that they're going to trim its worldwide workforce by 3%, which would mean almost 7,000 people are affected by the job cuts. It's nothing.

It's a better headline than it is a story. At 6,000 people, Goldman lays off 3% of its workforce every year. So no layoffs, no layoffs, no recessions. We can move on. What's next? Coin is the last one we're going to do and then we'll do a mystery chart and make the case. Coinbase joining the S&P 500.

Let's pull up a chart. Stocks up 20 something percent today. Holy shit, right? This is the first crypto component in the S&P 500. And this I'm showing you guys a chart of inception back to the IPO, which of course was in 2021 or the end of 2020. It's not quite back to where it was initially when it came public, but it's come most of the way back.

It's one of the most volatile stocks I've ever seen at its current market cap, but it's now replacing Discover Financial Services, which is going to be acquired by Capital One. Is it poetic to you that it's replacing a- TradFi? TradFi giant. I mean, the TradFi giant's not going out of business. It's getting acquired, but still it's a little bit poetic, right? Yeah, no, it is. I think they were like, it was cute. It was cute.

Here's why that matters. This is the assets index to the S&P 500. Put this chart up, 1.6 trillion in ETFs, 5.3 trillion in mutual funds and insurance products, another 3 trillion in ETF exchange traded derivatives. What Bitwise has the slide saying, they equate that to about $15 billion worth of demand to buy shares of Coinbase. Hence the 22% rally in the stock today. Pretty big moment. It is a big moment. It's wild, dude. The sentiment, if you think people were worried about the stock market a couple of weeks ago,

and they were, crypto Twitter was in full on panic mode. Absolute panic. When? Oh, in April? In early April, and for good reason. And for good reason. So when the stock hit 73, there were calls for, I saw a call for 10th, like people were

freaking out. And it is just unbelievable. Why were the crypto people panicked about tariffs? You would think that crypto is a solution to tariffs. Just price action. When your assets getting killed, you get bearish. But the fact that ETH is up 50% over the last week, 63% over the past month, and Bitcoin is up,

it's a wild move, really without any explanation. Big catalyst coming up. It's just, it's, it's a wild move. Really without any explanation. Big catalyst coming up Schwab said, uh, they're going to do digital assets. Sometimes Morgan Stanley for retail Morgan Stanley as well. So that's a lot. That's two huge pools of capital, trillion dollars, but 53% in a week. Are you kidding me? Yeah. I told dude, this is, this is, uh, why this is the market that went. All Yeah. Dude, this is this is a while. This is the market that went all right. Make the case. I don't have a new stock I want to talk about. We'll talk about some stocks that we've profiled here before because they both just reported

earnings last week and I wasn't on the show Tuesday night and I know people want to hear from us on this stuff. So Uber is the first one. This is a new all time high. I'm showing you, I guess, what is this? A one year chart. I'm showing you a one year chart here, but you take my word for it. Never before has it traded at 90. You can see it's been consolidating for a year and then it broke out. I mean, the stock is on my best stocks in the market list.

Obviously it's been for a week now. 72 RSI, not too overbought. Is this your biggest holding? Yeah. I think it was neck and neck with Nvidia until just now. But Nvidia went up a lot too, so I'm not 100% sure. But my top three are Nvidia, Uber and Apple. Wait, Apple? I had no idea. Yeah. So I'm not a hundred percent sure but my top three are Nvidia Uber and Apple and

Wait Apple. I had no idea. Yeah, I never saw I just never saw it So it's not I didn't buy a lot of it I just never sold it and it's thousand X. So what you know, it just doesn't stop going up Let's put up this second chart of uber Like very simply put this is the story. I bought the stock after the IPO was my first purchase and then I bought it in the 20s and I bought it in the 60s. I've been buying and selling the stock but in the last four years, I started to build

a position and I stopped trading it. This is the earnings versus the stock price. So what I'm showing you guys is trailing 12 months earnings of $5.71 a share versus a share price of 90. It's not an expensive stock. Look at when the earnings. It's not a mystery. Yeah, it's not a mystery. Like shut, like it's not, yeah, they were,

on a daily basis. Who are you about, Josh, who are on a, on a DDD basis. Josh, who are you about to flame? You had to say shut the, who are you talking to? Like people, people equated this to a bubble when it came public because they weren't earning money. People were like, oh, Uber, it's not profitable. They'll never get to profitability.

Really never. We, that's the, that's what you want to say, never? Just watch the price of oil go to negative $30 a barrel. You say never in the financial market? That tells me how unsophisticated you are. So this company came out of the gates losing a ton of money. They were under the cloud of a CEO scandal, the likes of which was so extreme, Brian Koppelman had to make a movie about it. It was like a book about the scandals at Uber.

They were tracking people on the app in god mode, and they were flouting the rules in every municipality. They were operating around the world. They would operate first and ask permission later. It was this whole thing. It was wild. Then no sooner did they emerge from that, they find Dara to be the new CEO. He has to now sell all these assets all over the world.

They sell the Chinese assets because China will never let them compete with their homegrown companies. They have to like take losses on all this autonomous stuff they were doing because they're burning money. So they do that. Then it's COVID. No one will ever get into an Uber again. LOL.

Uber Eats ends up saving the company. True story. Then after that, it's the inflation. All the inflation is too high. People aren't going to take rides or the drivers aren't going to want to drive for Uber because they're not getting paid enough or whatever it is. The reopening. All right. They do that. Now it's work from home.

Nobody's going to take an Uber to work anymore. Okay, they get through that. Then this Elon Musk shit starts with CyberCab, stock gets hammered. It's like every year another crisis for Uber and new record high today. And look at the earnings. When in doubt, if you have nothing else to guide you, if the earnings line is going up into the right and you have a reasonable basis to think that that can continue, the stock should work.

So that's what I wanted to show people there. Let's do toast really quickly. I think this is Uber for restaurants, dude. And I made the case for the stock and I'm long and I just bought more before the earnings. You see the post earnings pop here was tremendous. They added 6,000 more restaurants in the last quarter. They added the whole- Do they have any competitors?

There's got to be one too, right? Clover, which is owned by Fiserv. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, I know. Just like regular square. But they own it. Yeah, I know. And just like regular square. But they own it. They own this business. They have 120,000 customers and they have the Marriott. They just added the Hilton chain. They just added Applebee's.

They're now doing enterprise deals with these companies that have hundreds of restaurants. It's like just standardized on toast or take rate is 50 basis points, you're gonna love us. And I think it's a wrap. Like what put that chart back up? I'm not saying they're not gonna like struggle with competition but like what this looks like to me is they are now acknowledged to be the Uber of their space. Every restaurant, every bar, souvenir shops, you name it, they're just going to be like standardizing on toast. This is going to be the platform that every employee of every hospitality business and every owner learns how to use.

They're going to become super entrenched and they're going to be able to sell a lot of other stuff to these to these places and they become in this I know in a chart off I know in a recession people worry about overall gross value of restaurant spending I think the uber restaurants excuse me the toast powered restaurants will do better in recessions because those are the types of restaurants that do better in recessions because those are the types of restaurants that are like on their game and tracking their costs and are running professional business. And I think they'll become indispensable in a tough economic environment.

I don't think people turn toast off and say, let's go back to a pen and paper to track all the checks and everything that's happening. So that's the thesis there, not selling it. I know it's up a lot. I'm gonna let it develop. What do you think? I like it, I like it. All right, I got nothing else.

Let's do a mystery chart and we'll bounce out of here. All right, John, if you'd please. All right, Josh, well, this is a stock. It trades on the stock market. It's a newly issued stock. And that's, it went out today at an all time high. Newly issued. Did it come public or was it spun off?

Public. It had an IPO. Oh. It's Robinhood. No. Okay. and an IPO recently. This is look at the date. Oh, you're showing me since inception. Yeah.

Oh, it came public this year. The chat is saying core weave. The chat is right. Wow. Let's put it up. Round of applause for the chat. That is a big win. It's a big deal.

Biff got this one. Who else? R. Sterling got this one. Jerry Carsey said Reddit. Incorrect, sir. What's going on with CoreWeave? So this just trades with Nvidia, right? Is that basically how that thing acts?

I don't know. More or less? But this is a very, this is a stock that came public under a lot of scrutiny from yourself included as well as a lot of other commentators. And you love to say it. This is important. It's good. It's good stuff.

Yeah. I still don't want to own it. I like, I respect new all-time highs. I think if I want AI, I want Nvidia, not Coreweave. Okay. Well. Both can go up. Yeah.

No disrespect. All right, guys. Thank you so much for hanging with us this evening. We appreciate you. Those of you who came for the live on YouTube, we know you're the best already. People listening out in podcast land, shout to the Apple listeners, Spotify listeners. We love you too. Make sure to check out an all new animal spirits tomorrow morning with Michael and Ben. We'll do Ask the Compound later this week and an all new edition of the Compound and Friends on Friday. Thanks so much guys. We'll see you soon. Whether you're just getting started as an investor or you're managing a multi-million dollar portfolio, Ridholtz Wealth Management has the solution for you.

It all starts with building the right financial plan. To speak with a certified financial planner today, visit ridholtzwealth.com. Don't forget to check us out at youtube.com slash the compound RWM. Make sure to leave a rating and review on your favorite podcasting app. If you love investing podcasts, check out Michael and Ben every Wednesday morning on Animal Spirits. Thanks for listening!