The Compound and Friends - The COUGRs Trade Takes Wall Street, America Downgraded by Moodys, Walmart vs Trump

Episode Date: May 20, 2025

On this TCAF Tuesday, hear an all-new episode of What Are Your Thoughts with ⁠⁠Downtown Josh Brown⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠Michael Batnick⁠⁠! This episode is sponsored by Betterment Advisor Soluti...ons and Rocket Money. Grow your RIA your way by visiting: http://Betterment.com/advisors  Cancel your unwanted subscriptions today by visiting: https://rocketmoney.com/compound  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 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

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the compound and friends is Tuesday night, May 20th. And we had quite a show. I want to mention that tonight's episode is sponsored by our friends at Betterment Advisor Solutions. We are also sponsored by Rocket Money. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps you find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. Imagine an app where you open it up and all of your subscriptions are in one place. You know exactly where your money's going. And then you can look and say, do I even use that anymore? No.
Starting point is 00:00:44 Rocket Money can help you cancel. It's a dashboard and it's super helpful. And in this day and age, why spend money on things you don't actually use or need? Rocket Money is 5 million users, has saved a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions, saving members up to $740 a year when they use all of the app's premium features, cancel unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to rocketmoney.com slash compound today. All right. It's Michael and I tonight.
Starting point is 00:01:19 We did an all new edition of What Are Your Thoughts? It's been a big week already for news and it's only Tuesday. We cover like the Moody's downgrade of America. We look at 10 stocks that are just part of this new trend that we're calling the Cougars. And the Cougars are a particular group of stocks that does not seem to want to slow down or stop going up. It's a really interesting story. We take a look at a lot of different things that are happening. So stay tuned. I'll send you right into the show right now. Welcome to the compound and friends, all opinions expressed by Josh Brown, Michael Batnick, and their castmates are solely their
Starting point is 00:02:05 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. Hey everybody, welcome to an all new edition of What Are Your Thoughts? My name is Downtown Josh Brown. I'm here with my co-host, Mr. Michael Batnik. Michael, say hello.
Starting point is 00:02:51 What's up everybody? How we doing? Feeling good? All the usual psychopaths are in the live chat tonight. Okay. Yeah. Welcome. Georgie's here, Jerry, Cliff, Chris, the doctor is here, Roger is here, all the gangsters.
Starting point is 00:03:08 Somebody said Apple Dim says, I need Trump to restart the tariffs so I can buy some more stocks. Yeah, I'm with you, man. I'm with you. Who else? Michael Skyrose. What's up, man? We got a full house tonight
Starting point is 00:03:25 and it's a pretty exciting week. We got to within 3% of the record high for the S&P. Some selling this late this afternoon, but nothing crazy. They asked me today on TV, are we gonna punch through? The hell do I know? Looks like it. Actually, there was buying this afternoon, not to be too pedantic, but there was buying this afternoon.
Starting point is 00:03:48 Oh, maybe the last time I looked. Selling in the morning. Selling in the morning. And not really talked about very much as Bitcoin's right at an all time high. Like relative to the hype that you would have seen previously, nobody seems to care. Oh, that thing just will not stop. Every dip is getting bought. Pretty extraordinary.
Starting point is 00:04:06 All right. We have a sponsor tonight. I want to tell you guys about my friends at Betterment Advisor Solutions. This is actually a product that we use at our firm, Riddles Wealth Management, for our liftoff solution for investors with under $250,000 who want to begin to accumulate wealth and have a path. We provide that path. Today's show is brought to you by our sponsors
Starting point is 00:04:28 at Betterment Advisor Solutions. Imagining a better future, it's the first step. Investing in that future with Betterment Advisor Solutions is the next, whether you're launching your own practice, looking to streamline client onboarding, or just searching for efficient ways to scale your firm, Betterment Advisor Solutions is here to help.
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Starting point is 00:05:10 Invest involves risk, of course, performance not guaranteed. All right. Put that in there. Shout to Betterment advisor solutions. So I guess you're going to start. The big news that came out Friday after the close was a downgrade of the US Treasury as a bond issuer by the third of the triumvirate of credit ratings agencies, Moody's. And just give people a little bit of background. We saw Standard & Poor's do this in 2011. And it was during a fairly chaotic political moment
Starting point is 00:05:47 during the debt ceiling debate and amidst the European credit crisis. That was legit. Like that was scary. Yeah, and then two years ago, Fitch did it, 2023, and nobody paid any attention to it. Can I be honest? I genuinely don't remember that.
Starting point is 00:06:02 I didn't remember it either until Callie was writing about it internally. And I was like, oh yeah, that is a thing that happened that nobody cared about. In this particular case, this time it's Moody's. I don't know that that means anything more or less than when S&P does it or when Fitch does it. I could tell you right now, the stock market thought about it for eight minutes. Because honestly, I was like, I wrote about it. I wrote about it over the weekend.
Starting point is 00:06:33 It's like, is this going to be yet another thing that should be scary that nobody cares about? And yeah, that's what ended up happening. Politically motivated? I don't believe that. The White House instantly, their head of communications put out a note saying Mark Zandi, who is the, I guess the chief economist at Moody's or whatever his title is, is a former Obama appointee and has it out for the Trumps and the Republicans and he's a loser and whatever else they said.
Starting point is 00:07:13 Well if, listen, I honestly, I'm talking right out of my ass, I have no idea, but like if there was a Democrat in the White House, would this have happened? The Democrats have happened? Yeah, I think so. Oh you do? Okay. But, well, I don't so. I do? Okay. But well, I don't actually I'm not sure. Because if there were a Democrat in the White House, I don't
Starting point is 00:07:30 know what the conversation around extending the tax cuts at the end of the year would look like. And I also don't know what the payfors would would would look like. I don't I think this is like part of the it's not anTrump thing. It's just like, oh, here they go again, extending the tax cuts with no money to pay for it. And so if the Democrats were trying to do that, which I'm not sure that they would, maybe they would have had to do that. So it's politically motivated, but not in a partisan way. This is just what's happening in American politics right now. They're trying to get through this big, beautiful bill, which is going to be,
Starting point is 00:08:09 it's going to extend the existing tax cuts and more make even bigger tax cuts for different segments of the population. And it's not exactly clear where the money's going to come from to, to cover it other than Mexico economic growth. Well, it was originally it was going to be the tariffs, but I don't know that we're doing tariffs anymore. I don't know if that's really still a thing that we're doing. So not sure. All right.
Starting point is 00:08:35 So let's go through some charts. I mean, the fact is, yes, we have a spending problem. Not news to anybody. I think we know this is from John authors. By the way, Josh, credit to you. Great TKF with John authors and Chris Davis. You had fun. Oh that yeah No, it was great. I mean we missed you but those guys were those guys brought their a game and I was really good show Okay, so this is from John authors
Starting point is 00:08:56 The US federal deficit is the deepest in history Outside of a recession what we're looking at for people that are listening is the deficit as a share of GDP. And yeah, it's not great. It's what is it? Like, I don't know, 7% give or take. And the problem is, I think this is a legitimate problem. Like trot off for a sec, please. I have probably been more on the side of there's, we've always had a spending problem.
Starting point is 00:09:19 This is like not unique to now, but the problem is the numbers are getting so big. Next chart please. So for example, this is from the treasury site. We're looking at US government spending by category. And the top one is not surprising. It's social security. It's 22% of all that we're spending. Number three and four, not surprising, health and Medicare. Number five, national defense. But number two, net interest. And I understand, I understand that this is an asset for a lot of lenders. Most of it, not, not us citizens, but a lot of it is from our country. But nevertheless, my God, we're spending, I don't know, was it a trillion dollars on interest, whatever it is, it's is, it's a big number.
Starting point is 00:10:06 Can you put the first chart back up? This will not be popular on what I'm about to say, but that's how you know it's true. Number one, in every recession, the deficit gets way worse because we're forced to do things to support the economy and the people who are hardest hit in the recession to keep the wheels on track. Some would argue after the great financial crisis, which you could see, I guess you could see prior to the COVID dip,
Starting point is 00:10:38 you can see what happened with the deficit at first, blew out because of course it did. And they were rescuing banks and insurance companies and mortgage lenders and a lot of people who were underwater on their home loans and it was just a all-around disaster not just the United States but globally but that's when the deficit tends to get worse in a recession so we're not even in a recession right now. And the deficit spend like, mimics what it looks like when we are. Can you imagine what's going to happen if and when we do have a recession at the current level of deficit? That's one. The unpopular
Starting point is 00:11:19 part is the only time we've ever successfully balanced, I don't want to say balance the budget, but when the deficit actually turned into a surplus is when we have a stock market bubble. So you can see a tiny surplus after 1968 all the way on the left side of this chart. That's coming on the heels of this huge boom in the 1960s in the stock market. And then when everyone goes and pays taxes on the gains, you got a surplus. The same thing in the year 99, 2000, 2001. You had this huge bubble in stocks. People made a ton of money.
Starting point is 00:11:57 And the net result was Clinton was able to walk around saying, I balanced the budget. I have a surplus. No, you had a, um, Mop mobile telephony and wireless and dot com bubble. And the taxes on stock gains made it look like, um, you did something heroic. I was at the museum of American finance annual gala a couple of months ago. And one of the featured, one of the honorees who gave a speech was Dick Epphart and Dick Epphart was the leading Congress person at that time who was responsible to balance the budget and he gave like this 30-minute speech about all the negotiations and all the horse trading
Starting point is 00:12:41 with Republicans and with Clinton and the White House and how hard it was to get that done and then Bush in the White House. And it's like, none of that really actually mattered, dude. I didn't say this out loud at the gala. All that mattered was we had this massive stock market bubble, which temporarily made it look like we had our budget under control. The reality is we never do. We never do. We never do.
Starting point is 00:13:05 The only question is what direction is the size of the deficit going and how bad is it relative to overall GDP? There's no other conversation. No one's going to balance the budget. So what part of that was unpopular? People don't want to hear that you need a stock market bubble to be in surplus. People want to hear that it's like this political mission where the two sides come together and agree to cuts and whatever and all of a sudden, it's balanced budget.
Starting point is 00:13:32 No, it never happened. Who's arguing with surplus? We've had a deficit forever. That's my point. And that's not going to change. And if you have an insane stock market bubble from here and the down goes from 42,000 to 75,000, you might balance the budget for a year or two. All right. Well, check this out. Because you're going to be coasting on massive capital gains.
Starting point is 00:13:54 Look at this next chart. It's public debt. It's a net interest payment to GDP. And we're off the charts. And second place is Greece, not a great situation there. Then you've got Iceland number three. I mean, my God, these were, these are the countries that were in Michael Lewis's, what was the book in 2008? I can't remember 2009, whatever it was. Like these are the, the, the nations with the most upside down indebted status. So yeah, maybe we do deserve a downgrade slap on the wrist now. I mean, obviously if we're not AAA, then nobody is
Starting point is 00:14:28 because we are the definition of money good. You lend the US government money, you're getting your money back. Yeah, that net interest being paid by the US Treasury, they're paying it to the people that own the bonds. Here's the good news. Most of the people who own the bonds are Americans or American corporations or US banks or regular
Starting point is 00:14:48 people who have savings accounts, who have CDs. That's who owns money market funds. That's who owns the bonds. It's not a situation where we owe money all over the world, like 70% of the debt is held elsewhere. We're not one of those countries and- Like a Buddy Lebowski situation, am I right? Doesn't make it good, but we're paying ourselves
Starting point is 00:15:10 the interest at least for the most part. No, it dampens the blow a little bit for sure. At least we're paying ourselves. Where's the money going? Well, it's going back into the economy. Yeah. So it's going back, honestly, it's going back into bonds. People with huge treasury holdings
Starting point is 00:15:27 are buying more treasuries when they receive that interest. In some cases in an automated way. Let's wrap this up with what happened to the bond market the last two times again, N equals three, or N equals two. We have barely any data here. But in 2023, as listeners remember, we were in the midst of a nasty bond market sell-off. Chart on, please, John.
Starting point is 00:15:46 So that's the black line. Actually, yeah, they were going sideways and then big sell-off after that. We recovered and not bothered in 2011. Like market- Oh, this is bond prices. Yeah. The bond market didn't flinch really much at all. So the zero line is the day that the downgrade happened.
Starting point is 00:16:05 Correct. So bond sold off in 2023. Why don't I really remember? I guess it didn't last that long. These are days before and after. So for 75 days. You know why? We were probably in a jet ski.
Starting point is 00:16:21 And then let's look at the stock market. This is chart kids chart of the week at Exhibit A. Again, N equals two. 2011 was a scary time. The last time the debt was downgraded, I guess it did sort of knock the S&P off its track, but again, very small sample size. There's no investor alive who would tell you that a treasury downgrade is the reason they did anything meaningful with their portfolio. I mean, stock market investor. I mean, look, it's a notable thing that's
Starting point is 00:16:54 happened. Maybe if the thing in 2023 hadn't have happened, this one would be reacted to differently. Is that possible? I wrote over the weekend about just the way in which stocks have seemingly assessed every risk ahead of us and just completely ignored it. I don't know if that's a changing of the guard if we just have a new generation of investors that's just a lot more fearless and a lot less willing to sell or stop buying, that could be part of it. I haven't really thought that deeply about why we're ignoring these things,
Starting point is 00:17:33 but just the fact that we're completely ignoring it is notable in and of itself. I think it's muscle memory. It's 15 years about the dip. Right, it's like people like, oh, you're not gonna get me this time. Right. Yeah, I think that's true. I don't know that I would argue with that. But I also don't want to gloss over the fact like, oh, one day they'll be sorry. Okay. But
Starting point is 00:17:55 we had a bear market. We had a two-year bear market in 2022. It wasn't up forever. In fact, the stocks are most likely to get bought by these air quote dummies, these air quote know nothing investors, those stocks got hammered. I know we say this all the time, but it bears repeating for people that think this has been an easy ride. Netflix lost 75% of its value, so did Nvidia. Two thirds of its value more than that. Google, Amazon, they all got cut in half just three years ago.
Starting point is 00:18:21 Yeah. And then the other thing is like, well, if there was a recession, the deficit is going to get much worse, probably, but then the Fed is going to be cutting. And the net interest owed on the new bonds that are issued will be, I don't know, in the aggregate, it'll be lower, but it won't be getting worse. So that's a really big component of this is like where the Federal Reserve has interest rates. They're high relative to the amount of economic growth we're expecting this year because the Fed thinks they need to be high relative to that growth because of the risk of inflation.
Starting point is 00:18:58 The Fed won't be worried quite as much about inflation if GDP tanks, retail sales tank, unemployment spikes. So then I don't want to say it's a full on get out of jail free card, but the interest rate will be lowered and as a result, the treasury will be able to finance itself at a lower prevailing rate. So that's the mitigating factor that might end up helping this be less bad. Josh, did you read this article? This because I'll get. Did you read this article by David Brooks?
Starting point is 00:19:28 We are the most rejected generation. Yeah. What was your take on it? Because he's talking about your generation. I actually think this is like the people that are come. No, this is people coming out of college. This isn't. Yeah, I guess it's slightly younger. So this is this is a pretty scary article for parents of these of this generation. And Tara's not too far him. So this is a pretty scary article for parents of this generation, and Tara's not too far behind. So this is the upshot.
Starting point is 00:19:48 He said, by 1959, about half of American college applicants applied to just one school. But now you meet students who feel that they have to apply to 20 or 30 colleges in the hopes that there will be one or two that won't reject them. In the past two decades, the number of students applying to the 67 most selective colleges has has tripled to nearly 2 million a year while the number of places at those schools hasn't come close to keeping up. Roughly 54,000
Starting point is 00:20:13 students applied to be a part of the Harvard class of 2028 and roughly 1950 were accepted. That means 52,000 were rejected. The same basic picture applies to the summer internship race. Goldman Sachs, for example, has 2,700 internship positions, which, by the way, that's a lot of interns. Doing what? And they receive roughly 315,000 applicants. Every generation has its challenges. This seems pretty stark.
Starting point is 00:20:43 Well, this is what I'm living through. So I got my daughter into college, uh, last year she had, she just finished her freshman year at you Miami. They said they have 2,400 spots for freshmen and they said they got like 50,000 applications. That's a, that's a higher rejection rate than Princeton. I could, this is, this is what, and by the way, the funniest thing when you become a parent and you hear about the schools that That's a higher rejection rate than Princeton. And by the way, the funniest thing, when you become a parent and you hear about the schools that your friends' kids are applying to and getting rejected from, you're like, what?
Starting point is 00:21:14 Like, I know kids with GPAs above 90 coming out of my kid's high school that couldn't get into Ohio State and Maryland. Was it the thing where we used to apply to, I don't know, six to eight schools and now it's like, is it just the norm to just apply to 30? Here's what's the norm. You have to ED if you really want to get into a school and they offer early decision,
Starting point is 00:21:36 like the private schools, you have to do it. And so you can apply to 12 schools and have your safe schools and blah, blah, blah. But you have to really demonstrate to 12 schools and have your safe schools and blah, blah, blah. But you have to really demonstrate to these schools your commitment way before you send in an application. They all have these summer classes that are for high school kids. If you're, if you're dying to be at one of these schools, like a Tulane or Miami, you have to be in the, or Syracuse, you have to be in that summer program
Starting point is 00:22:05 as like an 11th grader. You have to do a visit and a tour, and they note like who came for the tour, because what they're looking for is commitment. And so when you ED or early decision or ED two, you can have an ED two school too. When you tell them, I did the tour, I did your summer classes, and I'm applying early
Starting point is 00:22:27 decision, meaning if you say yes to me, I'm locked in, I'm definitely coming. When you demonstrate that level of commitment and you're at the academic level where you belong to be in that school, you'll get in. You'll get in, but you have less flexibility. If they say yes, I don't care what the other schools tell you. You have to say no. So it's new. It's not just one thing that's causing this. He raps by saying that maybe the core problem is the overproduction of elites that we're turning out more knowledge worker graduates in their knowledge worker jobs, fact, or maybe it's just a feature of online life. It's easy to
Starting point is 00:23:03 apply to stuff and with more applicants, the competition grows ferocious. According to an article in Business Insider, the average knowledge worker job opening now receives 244 job applications compared with just 93 as recently as 2019. That is wild. Well, look, there's a reason for this. People with a college degree are living on average
Starting point is 00:23:29 seven years longer than people with that one. That doesn't seem in and of itself, seven years, big deal. That's on average. So like the people that you know in your life who have found the most success, the likelihood that they are a college graduate has been increasing. So basically we have this world where you can start a business and get wealthy, or you can join the middle class and have a shot of that translating into joining the upper class. But that's like pretty much it. And if you're not part of that world, you're not in a job that has access to a 401k and healthcare benefits maybe,
Starting point is 00:24:07 or if you are, you're a nurse or working for the state or police firefighter. But for most people, like just being locked out of that retirement savings thing is a really huge deal. And the impact of whether or not you're part of that knowledge economy, it compounds. So that when you're in your 30s, if you're in it, your life looks radically different than the people you graduated high school that didn't go down that college road.
Starting point is 00:24:37 Again, we're overgeneralizing. But people understand, you look at those charts, the average salary of somebody with a bachelor's degree versus the average salary of that with a bachelor's degree versus the average salary of that one, it's black and white. It's as stark as you could imagine. And the out or the way to do it differently is if your dad or mom owns a business and they're going to give it to you, they're going to mentor you and then hand it off. That's all right. That's a way to do this without college, I guess.
Starting point is 00:25:08 How many people are in that position? Not that many. Here's another possible explanation. It's not one thing. There's a whole confluence of factors that are leading to this, but this is from Sembliss and I definitely buy this. He said there's also an indirect sign that AI is impacting the job market for the last 30 years.
Starting point is 00:25:25 This is important. For the last 30 years, the unemployment rate for recent graduates was below the overall unemployment rate, meaning it was easier for new grads to get a job. This is now flipped, Michael says, with recent graduates having a higher rate of unemployment. This is a big deal. This is a really, really important chart. I think we're not ready for this as a society. Like where you can go to business school at a top 100 college and not have no and have nobody be interested in you because whatever your output is going to be in your first three years at a school,
Starting point is 00:25:59 we don't need to be done by by AI. Yeah, we don't need your grunt work. Thanks. No, thanks. We don't want to train you. Yeah, I don't know your grunt work. Thanks. No, thanks. We don't want to train you. Yeah. I don't know what the ramifications are. Something tells me the rubber is meeting the road right now. It is. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:26:14 It's not good. Yeah. And I'm very much in this world. I know hundreds of families where they have a kid that's either just started school, just graduated college. First of all, so I'm talking about Miami because I know it best, what percentage of the undergrads at U-Miami this year do you think
Starting point is 00:26:33 were majoring in business? A third? 40%. That's a ton, right? I mean, that's crazy. It's insane. Yeah. 40% in business? Think about how many different professions and vocations
Starting point is 00:26:47 There are in this world 40% are in the business school Now most of them are not getting the Goldman Sachs internship, which then leads to the Goldman Sachs job Which then leads to hopefully partnership at Goldman Sachs like the amount of people that are gonna get that from any given university even ship at Goldman Sachs, the amount of people that are going to get that from any given university, even Ross School of Business, Michigan, even Kelly School of Business, Indiana, those aren't... You're not guaranteed anything even if you can get into these business schools. So I don't really know what you do if corporate America decides, we used to hire 300 kids out of school every year.
Starting point is 00:27:26 Now we hire 100 because we've got software programs putting out the same level of work that they would have put out. And we're going to save a lot of money that way. And if that's where we are in this AI thing, if we're already there, I don't think we're ready for that. No, it's not good at all. So it's a, it's a really good piece by a symbol. It's not going to reference. I'm going to reference symbolist a little bit later. Um, this JP Morgan piece is interesting in the same vein. This came out at courts, I think today, JP Morgan hired 60,000 people in the last five years,
Starting point is 00:28:01 increasing its workforce by 23%. It looks like that's about to grind to a halt. Jeffrey Barnum, JP Morgan's CFO, told investors at a meeting in New York on Monday that the bank is telling managers to take a beat on hiring. Quote, we're asking people to resist headcount growth where possible and increase their focus on efficiency. AI will be a big part of that, he said, resulting in a 10% staffing reduction in divisions like account services, processing, and fraud.
Starting point is 00:28:35 Last thing, quote, it should go without saying, we'll never compromise on safety and soundness, we'll continue to hire and invest in high certainty areas. Um, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. AI. Um, I have a friend that works in the private bank at JP Morgan. They're, um, he said every day he's watching them train their employees, how to train their machines to eventually do the jobs of those employees and the employees almost like don't even know.
Starting point is 00:29:06 He, he said said it's like That's dystopian It's like watching cattle be marched into a slaughterhouse. They have no idea where they're headed They're there. They're they're training their software to do what they do, but better That's what that it's not just one firm. This is like a microcosm for the way. I think most large companies are going to start thinking. Bullish not really. Yeah, not for humanity. I don't think so. It's not. I don't know. I know it's not black or white. Like obviously there's there will be societal benefits.
Starting point is 00:29:42 But yes, it's there's some bad. Yeah, everybody can be a playwright now. All right, I want to introduce the Cougars. This is the hottest trade of the year. And I invented this term, so nobody knows what it is yet. That was so you. So on, Brent. All right. This is a trend that I've observed and I think others will observe it later. Wall Street has fallen in love with the stickiest subscription and app-based business models that consumers will not likely unsubscribe or discontinue their use of unless things get really bad. And I call these stocks the Cougars, which is an acronym stands for cancelled only under great recession. Is that good?
Starting point is 00:30:35 There's no, there's no, there's no E. Canceled only under great recession. Think of the services that you use that you wouldn't cancel unless it's like 2008. Cancel the only under great recession. Think of the services that you use that you wouldn't cancel unless it's like 2008. And then even in that case, you might have a hard time doing so. So there are a lot of things that I could have included in here, but I didn't. I could have included cybersecurity. of the enterprise software plays. that people are going to keep doing no matter what. These things- And subscriptions, those are not the same thing.
Starting point is 00:31:26 Correct, activities. Okay. Activities that are app-based or subscription-based. So like OnlyFans is both. So the crowd is saying like Apple Music and Amazon Prime. Yeah, both of those things, but I don't have them in here because they're so obvious. Here's what I have.
Starting point is 00:31:46 Robinhood, no one's gonna stop. We already know from 2022, we know from the crypto crash, nobody's gonna stop doing what they're doing on Robinhood. So they do have a subscription product called Robinhood Gold, and I think they've converted a lot of their users over to it, their power users. They're doing really well. I'm going to tell you right now, this company,
Starting point is 00:32:07 I don't know about the stock won't go down in a recession. I know it's got to be a really bad recession for the business to take a really big hit. Oh, to be clear, the stock will get pummeled in a recession, just like every other stock. Fine. Fine. But if that's in a bad recession, in a slowdown,
Starting point is 00:32:24 I don't know that's a negative Robinhood. People seem to be trading more when the market gets rocky. Yeah, I think the business will be just fine, but the stock will get hit. Keep going. Here's the point. The stock is up 88% since April 8th. Wow. Okay. It's up 72% year to date. I have a company called Sezzle in here. I don't know what the hell this is. It's a buy now pay later. The stock is up 230% since April 8th.
Starting point is 00:32:51 It's up 125% year to date. It's a $100 stock with a $3 billion market cap, SEZL. And if I show you this thing over the last six months, you'll fall out of your chair. I think it's up 1 thousand percent in six months. Oh, says life. I forgot I own this. I'm just kidding. So one of the things that I did in my research here is I took note of the number of users or accounts or subscribers says only has 658,000 people subscribed to their buy now pay later
Starting point is 00:33:22 service. Again, is anyone canceling their buy now pay later because they're worried about the economy? No, that might make more people use it. Well, well, well, well, well, well, well, you just don't pay and then the losses go up. They haven't seen that yet. They haven't seen that. So, Duolingo, look at this stock.
Starting point is 00:33:47 It's a $520 stock. It's up 60% this year. It's up 77% from the lows in April 8th. 74 million monthly active users, 5 million paying subscribers. Wait, what are those numbers one more time? Up 77% from April 8th. No, the users, the users. 74 million. Did you know that?
Starting point is 00:34:05 Holy shit. Wait, did you see Google's announcement today? You could do Google Meet, translate language, like real time. Yeah. Why does anybody, no offense, why does anybody do it? People want to learn the language. They don't want the cheat code. I guess.
Starting point is 00:34:18 All right, listen to me. 5 million paying subscribers, 74 million monthly actives. Nobody talks about this doc. It's up incredibly from the lows in April. Impressive. Hims and hers, 140% return from the low on April 8th. 2.4 million subscribers, people that are regularly getting penis pills and bald stuff and I'm not a doctor.
Starting point is 00:34:44 I don't know if you could tell. But this is like highly unlikely. The medical term is boner pill, sir. That's right. Highly unlikely for these people that are using the service or paying a subscription fee to go away. Oh, that's a staple. You're not gonna not take a boner pill.
Starting point is 00:35:01 No, of course not. Yeah. I mean, you gotta live. Netflix is the best example on here. Up 30% from the lows on April 8, up 33% year to date. One of the best names in the S&P. 300 million subscribers. Nobody cancels. They might downgrade.
Starting point is 00:35:19 OK. Spotify is on my list. Trades so good. Spotify is up 30% from the low. It has 678 million monthly actives, 268 million subscribers. Those people are not leaving. That's why the, that's this theme, this, this Cougar theme. Spotify is a Cougar.
Starting point is 00:35:38 Uber up 42%, 170 million, I may use30 million Uber One subscribers. You could say people might order less food from Uber because of how expensive it is. All right, I'll give you that. But more people are willing to drive for them, driving down their costs. And I think that's why this is the third best performing stock in the S&P year to date. By the way, I don't know if you know that Uber is the third best S&P 500 stock year to date up 52%. What's number one and two? Who cares? It's my highest conviction position. How do you like me now? Applovin is up 60%
Starting point is 00:36:17 off the lows. I don't know their user base. I just know that this is online games and their ad business is interwoven with online games and my God, what a name. DraftKings, 2 million monthly active users. These people are going nowhere, precisely nowhere, especially if they get laid off. Then what else are you doing? Match group, online dating, 16 million subscribers, stock is up 50% on the year. Bumble, same thing. Stock is up 55% this year, 56% from below on April 8th, 42 million monthly active users
Starting point is 00:36:59 on Bumble. Peloton, if you were going to cancel, you probably already have. This stock is up 27% from the April 8th low, 6.7 million members. Let me see what else I got. All right. So the point, let me wrap this up. Peloton smells like a me stock. I hate that I like it.
Starting point is 00:37:22 Give me my table. I put the top 10 on here. These are your Cougars. And yes, there were other big publicly traded companies making a lot of money from subscriptions, Costco, Amazon. Those are the obvious ones. This is like maybe the next tier down that people wouldn't necessarily associate with this theme.
Starting point is 00:37:43 But again, this is canceled only under great recession. I don't know what the S stands for, savings. Here's some individual charts. Look at this Sezzle piece of shit, whatever this is. Could you imagine? Look at that, look where this came from. I think it was under $10 this time last year. It's $100 stock, folks.
Starting point is 00:38:06 Is that Berkshire accumulating? Yeah. Here's Netflix. Bye. Wow. Gone. Spotify. What do you think's about to happen?
Starting point is 00:38:18 Higher. Do you want to be a professional technician to understand what's in the works here? DraftKings. This is interesting only in so far as you think about it from the low. This is not interesting. This is literally sideways. Sideways for a year. Not interesting. All right. Match. Next. Yeah. Not. Big recovery off the low. All right. Here's Hymns. This is becoming a meme stock. I mean, you can't trade this. Look at this wild shit. Wild shit. This is a meme stock and it's a, I hear it's a really popular stock on Robin hood and it's, um, it's a roller coaster, dude.
Starting point is 00:38:58 This thing was a 25 bucks. It's back at 60 like blink of an eye. This is for lunatics only. I mean, this is the Ozempic trade, basically. They're doing these compounded versions of all the fat loss shots, and they're delivering it right to your house, and they're making money hand over fist. Anyway, so this is the Cougars theme. I stole this from, we're going to talk to Rich Bernstein about this, but one of the other things Assemblist said, tech and interactive media stocks now account for 35% of market
Starting point is 00:39:33 wide earnings versus 19% a decade ago. This is what I was trying to explain to John Authors and Chris Davis on the Compound and Friends last week, a huge percentage of the S&P's market cap is now comprised of companies that have made themselves recession resilient and almost, you could call them borderline defensive because they don't require you to do a transaction with them. They're getting subscription revenue because you already agreed that you're a user. Nobody cancels because of inertia and things just don't get that bad. And that's what makes up the market cap of the S&P now. So they're not like classically defensive. They're defensive in the way that they charge their users. They've subscriptionized businesses that used to be transactional.
Starting point is 00:40:28 And this is not just publicly traded app companies. You know how I pay my exterminator? He's a subscription. Stablecoins? No. We agree at the beginning of the year, this is the annual rate outcome this many times. Who the hell is canceling the exterminator? You know what I mean?
Starting point is 00:40:47 So this is, I think, something that people have overlooked about the resilience of the S&P 500 and arguably maybe the whole economy. I think you're 100% right. And again, just to reiterate from Zambalist, tech and interactive media stocks account for 35% of market wide earnings versus 19% a decade ago. And Josh, the point that you just made about these now being defensive, not in the classic sense. So when you thought about defensive names previously, you would think of something like Procter and Gamble. Yeah. Right. Like in a recession, everybody needs
Starting point is 00:41:25 toothpaste. Everybody's got to have toilet paper. Well, guess what? Procter & Gamble had a margin of, I don't know, 14% on making that up. Apple's got a gross margin of what, 45%? Like these are, it's pun intended, apples and oranges. And that's why the market looks so much different than it used to. Yeah. because these companies have, they don't rely on you walking into a store and buying an iPhone to make their numbers. And they're growing mid teens, maybe not Apple, but like it's just, come on, what are we doing here?
Starting point is 00:41:54 All right, great point, Josh. Okay, sticking with this theme, and sticking with Sembilist. So in his recent post, he was talking about the push and pull of tariffs pulling the market down and AI spend pushing the market forward. He says, US companies spent a lot more time talking about AI than tariffs in the first quarter earnings calls.
Starting point is 00:42:17 This is according to empirical research. The market cap of AI plays, and this is really important, the market capitalization of AI plays is 2.6 times larger than their quote tariff victim category. So it's not that tariffs don't matter, of course they do, but the size of the AI plays is 2.6 times them. So Michael says, in other words, what can make the argument that AI is at least as important as tasks to equity investors, if not more so? I want to spend a second talking about, again, using Michael's research, the advancement that we're seeing in AI. So, try it on, please. So, there's a lot of dots here. This is a bit confusing for listeners and for people that are even looking at this. But what we're doing here is we're coming from June 2023, shortly after OpenAI was launched,
Starting point is 00:43:06 through today. And what you're looking at is PhD level science questions on the left versus US Math Olympiad selection exam on the right. And all that you need to know is that the proficiency of these models, whether it's Google Anthropic, DeepSeek, OpenAI, XAI, or MetaAI, it's going up and to the right. And the level at which these things are getting better
Starting point is 00:43:28 every day is exponentially growing. And not surprisingly, next chart, John, please, not surprisingly, the adoption is increasing big time. So they asked people in October, 2023, what the adoption rate was in various companies or various categories, whether it's marketing or knowledge workers or core product enhancement versus December 2024.
Starting point is 00:43:51 And it looks like it's doubled across the board. And then they asked in August of 2024 and May 2025 and just recently, what do you expect to be doing the next six months in terms of your AI adoption? And it's here, big time. Yeah. Let's, on the left side, so the adoption rate by, I guess, profession for AI, October 2023 versus December 2024.
Starting point is 00:44:18 So that's a 14-month period. And like, just as an example for people, if you worked in marketing in October of 2023, you would have, it was a 35% adoption rate of AI and now it's 55%. And not stop. And look at all these categories, sales, operations, customer onboarding, finance, legal, non-software R&D, human resources doubled the use of AI. Look, I don't know how much of this people are just saying,
Starting point is 00:44:55 yeah, yeah, yeah, we're using AI. But I just think about our business, and every company that approaches us has an AI bent to it. One of the things I thought was funny is all the future proof retreat was in Colorado. You were there, Chris was there, Anna, Barry, Jay, and everybody there was talking about data lakes. Like this is the whole thing is like controlling all of your client data in
Starting point is 00:45:25 one place and cleaning it up and making sure that it's- I am the Michael Phelps of data lakes. Making sure it's useful for what? For AI purposes so that you can turn AI loose on that data and learn shit about your business. And then I go on LinkedIn two days after the future proof event and every CTO of every financial advisory firm is making data lake announcements. So data lake is going to be determined the summer for our industry. I brought our own AI little thing here. So I want to play a clip. Just bear with us for a second.
Starting point is 00:45:58 It's not one and a half times speed. So forgive me. I just didn't want you to sit around here for two minutes. So, John, clip on, please. Welcome to the deep dive. Today, we're really digging into the current market market looking at it through the eyes of Richard Bernstein He's the CEO and CIO of Richard Bernstein advisors RPA, you know, and he used to be the chief investment strategist over at Merrill Lynch Yeah, and for this deep dive, we're mainly drawing on a conversation You have recently is on the compound channel the episode called the magnificent seven is a bubble exactly
Starting point is 00:46:20 So our mission here is to really get under the skin of Bernstein's argument about these Magnificent seven tech stocks we want to understand You know, how does this market stack up against history bubbles booms busts and maybe find some potential investment ideas that are getting sort of lost In all the noise. Okay, so right off the bat Bernstein isn't exactly subtle. You flat-out says the magnificent seven is a bubble That's pretty bold compared to many of his peers. What's his reasoning there? Well, it's interesting It's not just a gut feeling his firm RBA. They actually did some internal studies They asked, you know, are these seven companies really the only places with real growth globally? And surprisingly, a lot of the Magnificent Seven, they don't even pass basic growth screens
Starting point is 00:46:48 when you compare them to everything out there. Really? Yeah, I mean, they did this global growth ranking, right? So was that Scarlett Johansson? So that's Notebook LM, and I uploaded our podcast, and it gives you a 15-minute podcast from these two hosts. The AI made a fake podcast based on our real podcast? It's about one eighth of the time.
Starting point is 00:47:11 So it's like 12, 15 minutes. Is that good for us or bad for us? How much did I get paid for that? My point is, look what it can do today. It's a listenable, it sounds like a real conversation. So what I did, I said, because we have Richard Bernstein on this Thursday, I said, what are the four most important things that Richard said on the show? And it pulled out four dope quotes that I'm going to reference. So this is a boomer question. Why does it have to be in the form of a fake podcast? Why can't it
Starting point is 00:47:41 just be somebody? Why can't the AI just say these are the five things that Richard Bernstein said in case you don't have time to listen to the whole hour and a half? That's an option too. You could do that. I mean that sounds dumb to get a machine to create fake babble. That's not the point. My point is that this... I can't be what I do on the show can't be reduced to an AI explanation. There's a magic that I bring to these conversations that's spontaneous. To show the audience how powerful some of this AI is.
Starting point is 00:48:13 There's a contemporaneousness to the dialogue. It can't be scripted in advance and it can't be distilled into. All right, stop with this fake aggression. Nobody is suggesting. No, it's like an offensive. It's like, oh, I didn't listen distilled into. All right, stop with this fake aggression. Nobody is suggesting. No, it's like an offensive saying, oh, I didn't listen to your podcast.
Starting point is 00:48:28 I listened to a fake podcast created by AI that tells me what was in your podcast. My response is, what are you, moron? Like, what else were you doing that you didn't have time to listen to me directly, but you had time to listen to that? There is not a single person on planet Earth that is doing that. I was demonstrating how powerful AI is.
Starting point is 00:48:50 But I was the power. It's clever. It's clever that they trained a large language model to take in an audio file and spit back out a distilled audio file with fake hosts. It's clever. How is that powerful? I mean, tomatoes, tomatoes. I am not suggesting-
Starting point is 00:49:14 What power does it have? I have the power here. All right, asshole. Next topic. Don't I? Next topic. Don't you have the power with your words and your bearing and your delivery? Next topic. The fake podcast hosts have the power with your words and your bearing and your delivery.
Starting point is 00:49:26 The fake podcast hosts have no power. No one's going to be a fan of that. It's not about the fake podcast. Stop it. When we started the show, it was about the music, man. Not all this corporate. All right. Walmart picked a fight with the White House and I knew it was coming.
Starting point is 00:49:44 When did they do this? This is over the weekend. All right, so here's the progression. Put up my LinkedIn post. I knew this was coming, dude. So I saw, I think Brian Sazi at Yahoo Finance or somebody at Yahoo Finance had the CFO of Walmart do a hit on Yahoo Finance had the CFO of Walmart, like do a hit on Yahoo Finance. And I said, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Starting point is 00:50:09 This is not a thing that happens. Like the CFO of the largest retailer in America doesn't just start randomly dipping in on Yahoo Finance to do hits. Clearly they had something that they wanted to get out there. And this is what it is. I'm going to quote what he said. Low prices is what we stand for, but we're going to keep prices as low as we can, as long as we can.
Starting point is 00:50:29 But when you look at the magnitude of some of the cost increases on certain categories of items that are imported, it's more than what retailers can bear more than what suppliers can bear. So we'll work hard to keep prices low, but it's unavoidable. You're going to see prices go, but it's unavoidable. You're going to see prices go up. If you've got a 30% tariff on something, you're likely going to see double digits in price increases.
Starting point is 00:50:53 This is what the guy said. And I said, yeah, this is not going to go well. And sure enough, very quickly, here's the White House response. This is a truth social from Donald Trump. Walmart should stop trying to blame tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made billions of dollars last year, far more than expected. I don't know what that means.
Starting point is 00:51:19 Between Walmart and China, they should, as is said, eat the tariffs, all caps, and not charge valued customers, anything. I'll be watching and so will your customers. Three exclamation points. I won't stop watching. If I told you a politician said that, but not Donald Trump, you might have guessed Elizabeth Warren.
Starting point is 00:51:40 Correct. Correct. I spoke with Ben today. That's not a Republican. It's unbelievable. That's not a Republican point of view that Walmart made too much money. More than expected. When Elizabeth Warren says this shit, we cackle and we laugh at how dumb it is.
Starting point is 00:51:56 Yeah. The fact that a Republican is saying it is mind bending. I think that Trumpism is mercantilism. It's not capitalism. I think that, I think that Trump ism is mercantilism. It's not capitalism. What does that word mean? Hold on. Let me ask my AI. I got you.
Starting point is 00:52:14 Mercantilism is an economic system that dominated Europe. And it's basically it's companies exist in order to serve the state. It's, it's not a Republican principle. It's not a libertarian. It serve the state. It's not a republican principle, it's not a libertarian. It's the opposite. So in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, the dawn of corporations, these corporations were willed into existence as a means of fixing the financial problems of these countries that had spent hundreds of years at war with each other. All the kings were bankrupt.
Starting point is 00:52:45 All the parliaments were looking for a solution. So they would grant these like monopolies to the Dutch East India Company and the South Seas Corp. And they would say, you have the exclusive right to murder anything that moves in South America and bring the gold back here. And that was mercantilism. And the primary goal was, again, to solve the state's problems by means of corporate
Starting point is 00:53:11 activity that investors could invest in. And this idea that Walmart exists to please the White House with the way it's charging customers and how much profit it has. How dare they raise their prices because their inputs prices are going up. I'm just saying it sounds like an AOC drop. And also their margins are 2.7%. I mean, what? The lone phoenix says it's an STFU statement from the White House.
Starting point is 00:53:37 I agree. Walmart said, I bet if we come out publicly, other companies will do the same. And nobody had their back. Nobody else said shit. And then the White House is like, I dare you to keep telling us tariffs are the reason that you're raising prices. Well, their customers don't care about the tweet or the truth and neither does the stock market.
Starting point is 00:54:00 It's nonsense. The typical Walmart customer does not care. They care about the price. They don't care what caused it because we know. As a matter of fact, I listened to the earnings call and they said, yes, for areas that are impacted by tariffs, we will be forced to raise prices. We're not going to do it across the board. They're specifically not being greedy. They are going to do it for food that is imported from Latin American countries, bananas, for examples. Where their prices are increasing, they will increase their prices.
Starting point is 00:54:30 This was my response. Not that anyone's listening to me. In 2024, Walmart's net profit margin was 2.9%. Like it's not in a high margin business. They imported about $50 billion worth of goods from China at a 30% tariff rate. You're talking about like a $15, $18 billion hit. People have pointed out that's just their raw costs. You don't know what the price they sell the item for. Okay, correct. I'm estimating. I'm not an auditor from Pricewaterhouse.
Starting point is 00:55:04 Here are your choices. Negative second half earnings at the largest retailer in America. Eat the tariffs. Meaning they eat the tariffs. Two, higher costs to the consumer. That won't be popular. Or three, another beautiful deal exempting Walmart and everything they sell. It has to be one of those three.
Starting point is 00:55:23 There's no fourth way. There's no fourth option. So either Walmart says we will shut up if you exempt these 500 skews that are the bulk of our profit margins or I don't know, or some combination of eating the cost and passing on the cost, but it's not good, no matter what, for the end consumer. It's just it's not. Wait, Walmart has a subscription service too, doesn't it? Yeah, well, of course, like Amazon Prime-y kind of thing.
Starting point is 00:55:58 All right, look, I don't know where this is going. Maybe this is one off, or maybe another CEO or CFO is gonna pop on Yahoo Finance and FAFO. We'll find out. But it's interesting. What is FAFO? F around and find out. So, all right. Venture capital hangover. We could spend a total of 30 seconds on this. I just thought it was a cool chart. Dan Pramak at Axios was writing about the most recent report from Carta, which if you're in this world is worth downloading. This is showing startups raised $21 billion in the first quarter of this year, which is
Starting point is 00:56:38 down 3% from the first quarter of last year. And I thought this was the most interesting thing. 46% of all seed deals, and Michael, I know you're a big seed level investor, were bridge rounds in Q1 2024. So half of all the financing for seed stage companies is bridge financing, which means it's not a new valuation or anything like that. It's just like, we need some more money while we wait for our next legitimate round. Half.
Starting point is 00:57:12 That's the highest bridge rate for any stage of investing since Carta began tracking this data. For context, last year it was 39% and the year before was 31%. So now, half the seed stage startups are taking bridge capital, which requires them, I think, getting up some equity. And it's not a great position to be in where that's the only financing you could obtain. Soterios Lopetis I think we might be near bottom, at least anecdotally from what I'm saying. Riegel Reis In venture. Soterios Lopetis I don't know, at least in our small corner of the venture universe,
Starting point is 00:57:46 we have a bunch of companies that are raising at higher valuations. Well, you're getting IPOs and venture follows the stock market like in the end. If there were exits and there's liquidity, people are willing to invest in more things. That's like always how it's been. So maybe that's true. Series A deal count fell 79% between the first quarter of 2022 and this quarter. So over three years, an 80% drop off in Series A rounds. That sounds like a bottom.
Starting point is 00:58:17 That sounds as bad as it gets. I think we're close. Okay. I thought that was interesting. Shout out to Dan. All right, we're on the IPO front. I asked John for this. 76 IPOs priced this year.
Starting point is 00:58:32 That's up 33% from the same period last year. So it may not feel like the IPO window is fully reopened, but that's pretty good. Total proceeds were $11.1 billion, down 20% year over year, smaller deals. So more deals, but not as big as some of the big guys from last year. 92 IPOs have been filed for so far this year. That's up 19.5%. So here you see it by month.
Starting point is 00:59:00 Pretty steady. Well, the big one that we've been talking about, I think Corrie price at what 40 bucks down from wherever it was supposed to go out. And now it's at 90. Now it's at 90. So all right. All right. You're up. Make the case. I'm going to make the case for a stock that has burned me in the past. I lost money on it and then I got back in and I've been in for a minute now and it's treated me well. So I'm going to flag it again. It's Dollar Tree. Sean on please. It's treated me well, so I'm going to flag it again. It's Dollar Tree. Sean, on please.
Starting point is 00:59:26 Holy shit, it's a stock filling some gaps. You know I love me some gap fills. What's going on with this? I'll tell you. Next chart, Dollar General. Obviously a similar space. Ooh, confirmation. I'm mad.
Starting point is 00:59:38 Look at this gap. I wanted to buy this. I just never pulled the trigger on it. So we have earnings for these companies in two weeks and we will find out. So part of the story of Dollar Tree is getting rid of Family Dollar, which is a horrendous acquisition. They paid $9 billion for it. How are they getting rid of it? They're just changing the names on the stores to... They're selling it for a billion dollars. So they took a bath on that. I don't know all of the ins and outs. I followed
Starting point is 01:00:05 Alex Morrison to this on the Science of Hitting. He writes some great stuff on it. They seem to be turning it around and the stock seems to be front running. Hopefully some good news in two weeks. Stig Brodersen I don't invest in shit like this. Alex Morgan I know you don't. You invest in- the last time I brought this up, you said I only buy LVMH and then the stock lost 60% of its value. Well, I don't own that either. But I don't invest in retailers trying to make a penny. You are such a goddamn snob.
Starting point is 01:00:31 It's unbelievable. I'm salt of the earth, but I just don't want to buy low margin. So don't buy it. I'm not talking to you. No, I'm just saying that I like the technicals. I like the recovery. What would keep me on the sideline is I'm salted the earth, but I'm not that salted the earth.
Starting point is 01:00:47 You are not salty at all. Have you ever been in one of those stores? I have multiple times. There's one upstate by my cabin because I'm a lot of people. Upstate. Way upstate. Not the way upstate. Yeah, I got that.
Starting point is 01:00:59 I got that. Say no more. All right. Mystery chart. Are you ready? I can't wait. my favorite game of the week This is a how it's Bitcoin just kidding kind of looks like it though. So the JC special what is this? Give me some clues. Okay, so this is a sector
Starting point is 01:01:21 ETF that's been around since the late 90s. It's one of the grand daddies of ETFs Yeah, so I'm narrowing this down to you one out of 11. No, no, can't be SMH. It's a sector ETF. So it's not XLK. I got excited. So I'm giving you I'm pulling out. You've got 10 S&P sectors to choose from. And this is a Steve Straz a chart.
Starting point is 01:01:41 Shout to Straz at All Star charts. And I'm going to give you some of his commentary once we get into the post reveal on why this thing is interesting to take a look at. Yeah, I think I know what it is. Well we're all waiting on you, sir. Okay, well I already had three guesses. But based on the absolute plunge in 2020, is this energy? Look at you.
Starting point is 01:02:07 You did it. Actually, that was a good way to reason your way through this. That was pretty good. Thank you. All right. Why does he like it? Here's what all... So this is the energy sector for those who are listening and not watching.
Starting point is 01:02:24 Resistance here is like 95 to 100. That was resistance in 07. It was resistance in 2014. And it's been resistant since the post pandemic period. Every time it gets to that level, it backs off, but it's backing off less and less. And I guess from a technical standpoint, ultimately, it's probably trying to punch through and eventually will. It just looks so shitty.
Starting point is 01:02:46 This is the rationale. It's a raging bull market for stocks around the world being led by offense, but the internals continue to improve. Like any bull cycle, as time passes and the market grinds higher, it drags a growing list of non-performers higher with it. Some call that rotation, but it's really just a broadening of participation over longer timeframes and he thinks that this group is next to join the party. He points to international stocks, which already have Southeast Asia, South America, they're
Starting point is 01:03:16 all working. Gold eventually broke out. You look at old laggards like transport, speculative growth, they're working too. Why not energy is the question. I'll show you one more chart. This is equal weight energy versus equal weight S&P 500 sitting right on this very solid support line that dates back to 2022. Sit on it, Minetti.
Starting point is 01:03:41 Well, look, this is where the buyers come in to the equal weight energy relative to equal weight everything else. And I don't know if you find me to need these equal weight charts. There's nothing here. I bought some Chevron recently. It was a 6% yield and I just said, I'm not afraid of this thing. I'm buying it. All right.
Starting point is 01:04:01 So you won't buy dollar stores, but you'll buy shitty Chevron. No, Chevron's not shitty. I'm going to tell you that Sean and I took a look at the best stocks in the market, energy sector. There's only four of them right now. They all look amazing. Tell me what are the names. We're going to write these up later in the week for CNBC. Give me one. Okay. Here's a dividend one WMB. This is Williams Brothers. It's a pipeline world High dividend yield used to be an MLP shit. How good this outlook brought see this I can get excited This I get behind. Here's another one EXE
Starting point is 01:04:40 Come on dude and energy corporate, I mean this come on dude. It's look at it. I mean, this- Come on, dude. Look at it. It's too late. You left the station. I haven't told you the fundamental reason why it's not. But anyway, we're going to write these up later this week. I thought it was interesting that even though the sector sucks, there are some energy names on my best stocks list, and that's why we keep the list. So all right, guys, that's it from us.
Starting point is 01:05:02 We're going to say thank you to everyone who joined us for the live. We love all your comments. You crack us up. We appreciate you. For those of you listening out in podcast land, Spotify, Apple, make sure we get a rating and review goes a long way. And we love it so much. Tomorrow morning is an all new edition of Animal Spirit starring Michael and Ben. We'll be up on both podcasts.
Starting point is 01:05:26 Look at this little boy. It's a baby bat, Nick. All right. We'll be up on all podcast platforms first thing in the morning and on YouTube. So if you love Michael and Ben, tomorrow you get an all new edition of that. We'll have animals ask the compound later this week and an all new compound and friends with a very special guest. Thank you guys so much for watching and listening. We'll see animals ask the compound later this week and an all new compound and friends with a very special guest Thank you guys so much for watching and listening. We'll see soon
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