The Compound and Friends - “Unrealized” Capital Gains Tax is Economic Suicide

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

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Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:12 Guess who's back to Boy, downtown Josh Brown. So excited to see everybody. Welcome to what are your thoughts. One of, one of, I think maybe the second longest running show in the network after Animal Spirits. Is that possible? All right. Way back in the air, remember you guys filming it in your offices. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:00:36 But that Animal Spirits was a audio podcast from like 2017, which predates the YouTube channel period. Yeah, this was the YouTube original, right? This was, yeah. So, all right. Hey, guys, great to see everyone, as you can hear for yourself, if you're out there listening on Spotify or Apple. Or if you're watching on YouTube, this is my friend, my colleague, Mr. Ben Carlson.
Starting point is 00:01:01 You probably know Ben from Animal Spirits with Michael Batnick. And Ben will be playing the role of Michael Batnick tonight. Or, nah, not really. I don't do accents, though. No long I don't know. accent, sorry. You'll be playing yourself. Guys, Ben is the author of a wealth of common sense in addition to animal spirits.
Starting point is 00:01:21 He's also the head of institutional asset management at Redholt's wealth. And we are so lucky to have Ben filling in for Michael, who's on an actual vacation this week. Are you talking to him every 10 minutes now instead of every five minutes? We get our phone conversation out of the way in the morning and then we leave each other alone. All right. I'm happy for everybody involved. I want to see some shoutouts to.
Starting point is 00:01:42 some people in the chat, people who are joining us live, and then we'll get to our sponsor. I'm seeing, where's this guy? Shazan Ali 7195, shout me out, Josh, long-time listener. Well, there you have it. Rachel is here, Georgie D, the Baron 97, Chris Hayes, Jackie Jim. Hello, everyone. Hope Josh and Mike talk about corporate ties to Epstein.
Starting point is 00:02:07 No, I don't think so. Mike maybe would have gone there. but Mike's not with us tonight. Let me do a couple more. Jack Rosenfield is here. Bob Rice, Dr. Horton. Who else is here? Ian RYT.
Starting point is 00:02:23 What's up, J.B. and Michael. Close enough. Close enough. All right. We have a sponsor tonight, and it's a great sponsor, guys. Today's show is brought to you by public. The investing platform for those who take it seriously. On public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options,
Starting point is 00:02:40 crypto and now generated assets, which allows you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt from renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers, growing revenue over 20% year over year. Just come up with something, put it in the prompt, and let the AI go to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you back-tested against the S&P 500. Later in the show, I have an idea for this, but we'll get there. You can invest in a few clicks, generated assets for like ETFs, but with infinite possibilities,
Starting point is 00:03:18 completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com slash W-A-Y-T, earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio, paid for by public investing, full disclosure in podcast description. All right, how are you feeling tonight? Ready to do this? I'm doing good. It's bomber jacket season. Let me say, do you have one on?
Starting point is 00:03:40 Yeah, you do. It's spring here almost. Oh, remember the ones that had the fluorescent orange on the inside? Oh, yeah. They were black and the inside was orange. I don't know how to pull that off. I used to rock that one. That was one of my favorite jackets I've ever owned.
Starting point is 00:03:54 I don't know if I could pull it off anymore either. All right, earning season, I wanted to talk about this because lost in a lot of the tumult in the market over the last couple of weeks and all the AI disruption stuff and all the AI CAPX. concern, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, we really are having yet again an amazing quarter of earnings growth and earning surprises and it's broad and it's strong and, you know, it's just like par for the course at this point and people just get used to it. But when you look at these numbers, if I blindfolded you and just read you the numbers and said, what's the stock market doing? You'd probably guess it's doing pretty well. What do your thoughts on earning season so far before we get into the stats.
Starting point is 00:04:40 We had a conversation with a client a couple weeks ago or a prospect, and they were saying, I'm worried about geopolitics and they're naming all this stuff they're worried about it. And they said, what does that mean for the stock market? And I said, listen, corporations are the last vestige here. Like that, they are the thing. They know how to make money. Think about what they've been through this decade and how much money we're still making.
Starting point is 00:04:59 Profit margins continue to rise. Profits continue to rise. Like, they've gone through everything and they've come out just fine on the other side. Like, the stock market's got you. That was my point. It's like a litany of things that we've just seen these companies and their leadership go through. Not in the last 20 years. Like in the last five to 10 years.
Starting point is 00:05:17 Supply chains, high inflation, COVID, all this stuff, remote work, AI now, tariffs. They've gone through everything. And profit margins just keep going up. Inverted yield curve. Right. All the things that weren't supposed to survive. It's a really good point. Let me give you some data from FACSET.
Starting point is 00:05:36 And this is as a Friday. So I know there were some numbers today, but things have not changed that much. 74% of S&P 500 companies already have their earnings in. So we've seen like three quarters of what we're going to see. And the blended earnings per share growth for Q4 2025 is 13.2% year over year. Ben, that would be the fifth consecutive quarter of double digit growth. Blended revenue growth up 9% year over year, which is the highest blended. blended. So when I say blended, that's the 74% of companies that have reported already,
Starting point is 00:06:13 plus the estimates for the last 26, right? Blended revenue growth of 9% would be the best since Q3, 2022, and the 21st consecutive quarter of growth, period. And it's not just good numbers in absolute terms. It's good numbers versus what the expectations were as recently as December 31st. So that earnings number, I told you, of 13.2% is versus the 8.3% Wall Street was expecting. And on the revenue, they were looking for 7.8 and we did 9. And the thing about revenue growth, it's not, you can't play games with stock buybacks and stock-based compensation and, you know, play hide the expense off balance sheet. If you're going to show revenue growth, the only way to do it is that you actually grew revenue. And I think that's underrated as a metric.
Starting point is 00:07:10 Your comparison to 2022, that was almost like the only way you can game the revenue system is inflation was way higher. So of course the revenue is going to be higher because prices rose. But inflation is settled down and we're still getting revenue growth. That's a positive. It's a good point. Like inflation shows up in top line revenue because it's literally what companies are charging. Yeah. Right.
Starting point is 00:07:30 So you don't have that benefit. You don't have that benefit right now. forward estimates for full calendar year 2026. We'll run through these real quick. So the quarter that we're in right now, the street is looking for 11.1% and revenue growth of 8.7. Following quarter, it's like 15% earnings growth,
Starting point is 00:07:53 unbelievable, and then another 7.9% in revenue. For Q3, the street now expects 15.6% earnings growth and 7.3% revenue. And for the final quarter of the year, the street is at 15% earnings growth and 7.5% revenue growth. And that would give you a full year. Hang on.
Starting point is 00:08:14 We got a chart for this one. All right, let's put it up. There is. All right. So walk us through the chart. The full year number is really, I think, the most salient point for our purposes. So with this, here's my question to you.
Starting point is 00:08:29 How are we still getting 15% earnings growth, essentially, and they're just spending all their money on KAPS. Like the biggest players are spending so much money. How is this still happening? Well, the companies that are using AI, presumably in their operations, are saving money, maybe not hiring as many people, and productivity is exploding. At least that would be the bulk case. So the AI boom in 24 and 25 was accruing.
Starting point is 00:09:01 mostly to semiconductors and the hyperscalers. And now that's broadening out. So like companies that have literally nothing to do with AI are able to report higher profits because of their use of AI. And if that's actually what ends up happening and we start hearing companies on these Q1 calls talking about cost savings or efficiencies from AI, I think we get to all live happily ever after. Like, won't that be good?
Starting point is 00:09:31 won't that be good enough? It's like, all right, they spent a trillion dollars in CAPEX and now here's what we have to show for it, double digit earnings growth as far as I can see for the S&P 493. I think most people would say that's a happy ending for everybody. Right. That's like what stops this train of profit margin growth or just profits being kept higher with this tool coming down like one of the greatest productivity enhancers we've seen? Like what stops the train? I don't see anything. Dude, when you listen to the hyperbolls on AI, they're talking about like 10, 20% GDP growth because of because of AI, like just the biggest productivity explosion any of us have ever seen.
Starting point is 00:10:15 I mean, that's great, but you can't have 20% GDP growth when you lay off half of white-collar workers or something, right? Like, the economy is still 70% consumption. Like, well, we just give them a dividend. Listen, if we went from 2% growth to 3% growth, that'd be amazing, right? Get out of here with 10 or 20%. 20%? I know. 20% GDP growth and 50% of the population gets to stay home all day.
Starting point is 00:10:43 Right. Right. Yeah. Who's spending all the money? I guess just the top 5%. The top 5% will spend 80% of the money in the economy. That's how it'll... Every plane will just be first class.
Starting point is 00:10:55 Like the whole cabin. every hotel will be luxury suites. The whole airport is just a Delta lounge now. Everyone's a lounge. Yes. And like the bottom 80% of the income distribution doesn't have to... Elon Musk said they don't have to worry about money anymore. So they could like just...
Starting point is 00:11:13 They could spend 100% of their time protesting. I feel like everyone's happy in that situation, no? Doesn't that work out? All right. No Goldilocks. Earnings growth by sector for Q4. 30.7% in tech. Jeez.
Starting point is 00:11:31 So you could yell and scream tech bubble, tech bubble, but I'm just saying, like, it's not make-believe, like the fundamentals are there. This is my favorite part, though. Industrial's 26%. Holy cow. Holy cow.
Starting point is 00:11:46 So who are the companies driving that? This is your earth movers. This is your metals companies. Like, not the metals and mining, but like literally the, GE and John Deere and yeah, heavy equipment and building data centers and, you know, building more capacity at the utility scale energy projects that are now necessary. It's, I think it's it's, it's agriculture too. It's now home builders are joining the party.
Starting point is 00:12:20 I don't know if you've been watching. But like, it genuinely is a big movement in for, for industrial. companies, those stocks are not just re-rating higher. They all have a lot of positive stuff to say. So I think that's a big part of the story. And then look, communication services plus 13.6%. So that's meta, meta, alphabet, Netflix. Financials plus 9%.
Starting point is 00:12:47 And they were the first to report. Materials plus 7.6. We know the story. Utilities plus 4.4. We know that story too. In fact, the only group, not reporting earnings growth this quarter, I guess three of them.
Starting point is 00:13:03 Healthcare flat, consumer discretionary, negative 1%, energy flat. And ironically- Energy stocks are going nuts. Yeah. Well, the market's looking forward. The market's looking forward toward either high oil prices or increased demand for electricity
Starting point is 00:13:19 or some combination of the two, and those stocks all re-rated. No fundamental benefit whatsoever. or multiple, but those stocks are ripping. Energy is the best performing sector in the year so far. Beat rates are average, Ben, 74% beating. The five-year average is 78%. The 10-year average is 76. It's always right there in the mid-70s. It is kind of funny. They just like, they love having a good beat rate like that. Yeah. It just, I don't know how it always turns out that way. You're never going to see that number at 85. You're never going to see it at 55. It just doesn't do that.
Starting point is 00:13:57 It's just in a normal environment, it's always right there. Revenue is 73% beat rate. The surprise magnitude is interesting because stocks move on surprises, positive and negative. The revenue surprise magnitude is 1.6% better than the estimates, slightly below the five-year average of 2, just above the 10-year average of 1.4. And then the market reaction, positive earning surprises plus 0.9%. 9%, which is right about in line. So it's a very normal environment.
Starting point is 00:14:32 The thing that makes it abnormal is the freak show happening with software stocks. Away from that, it's very normal in terms of like how we're reacting to earnings, the beat rates, et cetera. Give me the beat revenue in earnings per share beat rates by sector. Real estate has the lowest earnings and revenues in revenue beat. Sort of makes sense to me. the highest energy
Starting point is 00:14:59 100% of energy reporters beat on revenue. How are the expectations not been taken up in tech yet? If 92% of their beating, it's crazy to me that expectations haven't been ratcheted up every single quarter for the last 10 years.
Starting point is 00:15:13 They're just so good at finding, they're just so good at finding more levers to pull. And, you know, the street's been behind the whole time. Give us this source of earnings growth and profit margins. What's going on here? Yeah, this is good. This is from JPMorgan's Guide to the Markets.
Starting point is 00:15:29 The one of the right is what we were talking about before is just the margins that just keep going up and up and up no matter what. And the fact that we've been able to raise them in the 2020s, but like the highest inflation in 40 years, I think is the craziest thing. But yeah, they break it down by margin, revenue, share count. And that's the thing that's dropping off is the buybacks because so much of the money is going to KepX now that the buyback piece is falling off and stocks are still going up. And the EPS is still going up, right? Yeah. 14% profit. margin. Unbelievable.
Starting point is 00:15:58 Yeah, that's a big thing. Remember for years it was buybacks are propping up the market. The buybacks have fallen off a cliff because they're spending so much money and the stock market is still going up. So it's like productive uses of capital. We'll see how productive it is. So this is the turn of the punch wall. So I had Matt, chart kid Matt, make this for me. John, do me a chart on of the returns versus earnings growth. So the red dot there. What a charming phrase that is, by the way. Let me just, if I could just point that out. Go ahead. So the red dot on this chart is earnings growth per year.
Starting point is 00:16:25 The blue line is the stock market return. And it's interesting is that sometimes, like, they're in line with each other. I think it's like half of these years going back to the 1930s. Stocks are up and earnings are up. But there have been the other half of the time, there's like 24 of these years where earnings are down and stocks are up and almost 20 years where earnings are up and stocks are down. So like... It could be anything.
Starting point is 00:16:48 Yes. So I mean... Anything can happen. Yeah. So you can do chart off. We could do... We could have a year of really strong earnings growth and the stock market still finishes down because expectations were too high.
Starting point is 00:16:58 We might be headed in that direction right now. Yeah, that'd be, that actually be a, that wouldn't be completely out of the realm of possibilities based on history. I sort of wouldn't hate that setup for 27. Right. Like, like, because you're starting at a lower starting valuation. When was the last time we've been able to say that? It's been a minute.
Starting point is 00:17:18 Yeah. So. Yeah, you're right. That wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. Um, all right. Can we move on now? Topic two. You're the host here.
Starting point is 00:17:26 I'm just here for the ride. Yeah, let's do the rotation. Let's show people what this looks like. So I want to talk about how real the rotation is. All right, let's do chart on here. I shared this in our Slack channel the other day. This shows the equal weight at S&P, that's RSP, is up almost 6%. This was coming into the day today.
Starting point is 00:17:41 That's orange. Yep, coming into the day to day, every single Mag 7 stock was down. And in the video is that like 2%. Only a couple more down double digits. Amazon and Microsoft both down double digits. But it's just interesting to see that all these Mag 7 stocks have kind of rolled over this year, and the equal weight is doing really, really well. Do the next one.
Starting point is 00:18:03 This is from Chartkin Matt at Exhibit A. So this shows the Mag 7 down over 6% this year. The 493 is up almost 4%. So this has got to be the widest divergence in a long time. You can do chart off. That the rest of the market, and it's not just like, you know, international stocks and small caps. Like within the S&P, there's starting to be a divergence. between what it's been working forever.
Starting point is 00:18:26 Yeah. So the question is, is this actually real this time? Or is this just a little blip and tech stocks are going to come back? It'll be fine. I almost don't know what's better for the investor class. Because I could come up with a scenario where this does not change. And the MAG 7 just has a red year because people are like getting used to this new business model where they're not asset light.
Starting point is 00:18:55 Now they're like big spenders, like bigger than anyone ever imagined. And it takes a while for that ROI to pay off. And they just sit this year out and you put the chart back on and you see this dark blue line be the beneficiary. Nope, the next one. And you see this dark blue line, which is the S&P 493, be the beneficiary. Because investors, like we know this. Investors don't wait.
Starting point is 00:19:22 They don't sit around in stocks that aren't working, especially if there are hundreds of stocks that are working. Yeah, do the next one, next chart. So this shows small caps doing well this year, value stocks. This one kind of blew my mind. The dividend aristocrats, that's just SDI.Y, is up 11% this year. Boring. That's the best factor.
Starting point is 00:19:45 Shareholder yield is the best factor of the year so far this year. Yeah, dividends, mid-caps, you're right. So if it's just a blip, you're right. People are easy to look past that. But if this spread continues, people are going to go, no, I'm not waiting around for this. It's time to me to diversify. And then the flows start happening because you've seen that in international stocks and emerging markets. Tons of money is pouring in there.
Starting point is 00:20:06 And if that happens with the rest of the market like this, that's the thing that takes these things to the next level. So I want to, hang on. So I want to share this thing from Mike Wilson at Morgan Stanley. So I coined this term, not this weekend, the weekend before Halo, which I think is like sort of the best, fastest way to explain what stocks are going up this year and which ones are going down. And Halo is heavy assets, low obsolescence. So like companies where like what they do can't be disrupted by a chat bot. Like you can't type a prompt into a box and replicate what these companies make and sell. And that is the easiest, like to me, yes, value is outperforming, but not because it's value.
Starting point is 00:20:56 It's outperforming because so many of these halo type companies dominate the value indices. By definition, like we've spent 15 years fetishizing software companies because they had this sort of SaaS magic, you know, 20% growth every year, 40% margins, right? It had this rule of 40 thing going on, and they had no assets, which meant they could return a ton of cash to shareholders and their profit margins were insane. And that was the way to outperform the market for the last 15 years. So we've gone from intangible back to tangible. Back to tangible. And tangible is mostly undisruptible, at least not until the robots come.
Starting point is 00:21:41 So here's what Mike Wilson wrote, Halo more than meets the eye. Mike Wilson is the chief, one of their strategists at Morgan Stanley. There has been a lot of focus on hard, heavy asset, halo areas of the market recently, as these stocks have been seen as relatively insulated from AI disruption. While these cohorts have indeed outperformed over the last couple of weeks, their relative strength is not new. For example, multi-industry and materials metals have outperformed for months. As we have illustrated in recent notes, the high cap-ex to sales factor has outperformed
Starting point is 00:22:14 across the market since the middle of last year supporting this theme. Right. So it's not just a re-rate. There is something happening here with CAPEX that's leading to higher revenue, especially for industrial companies. And almost all of those companies are Halo. Like by definition, there's a lot of iron and steel involved in what they do. And that's the same thing going on overseas too, right?
Starting point is 00:22:39 Yes. You're right. It's not just value stocks. It's because those are the kind of stocks that are in Europe, in Asia. 100%. Yes. And we're going to get to the Europe stuff and we're going to get to the international versus U.S. in a moment.
Starting point is 00:22:53 We'll put a pin in that. Would it shock you? Would it shock you if what's gone on in the first six weeks just continues throughout the, you know, with a few rotations, people get excited about Apple, et cetera. But like, would it shock you if the year ended and we just had this revenge of the 493? and people were least excited about their Mag 7
Starting point is 00:23:15 and most excited about the most obscure things in their portfolio, I don't think it would shock me at all. This is the first time that's really felt real. And I don't know if it's hilarious. Maybe I don't know if Alainis Morissette would include this in a song, but the fact that the tech industry has, like, disrupted itself in a lot of ways, they might disrupt their stocks, they might disrupt software, they might disrupt jobs of themselves, right?
Starting point is 00:23:36 Yeah. Like everything they're doing is like disrupting their own industry first. Yes, Microsoft is both a hyperscaler benefiting from the AI theme and a disruptee because they are the seller of things that are being disrupted on the software side of the business. It's 100% the case. But they all realize, like, this is a blood oath. If one of us goes into this trade, this cap-x trade, we're all doing it. Like, they had no choice.
Starting point is 00:24:03 They have no choice. And I was on TV today talking about this. you know, I think like a lot of people on CNBC and Bloomberg come at this story from a very New York centric perspective. And on Wall Street, we think in terms of like, well, what are you going to earn this quarter? Like, are you going to make the number this quarter? What have you done for me lately? Like, what's the earnings number?
Starting point is 00:24:29 What's the revenue number? What's the profit margin? And that's fine. That's our job. We, you know, we're asset management. We're buying stocks. and we're trying to own stocks that are going to beat their numbers.
Starting point is 00:24:40 That's the game that we play. On the other side of the country, I think these people have been steeped in this history of, like, Motorola and Nokia and Netscape and AOL and all of these, like, companies that at one point were the largest version of themselves in the whole world and, like, literally disappeared off the face of the earth.
Starting point is 00:25:03 Like, Clayton Christensen has been beaten to their skull for the last 30 years. You don't want to get disrupted. So you're right. They said, no, we're going to try to lead the charge for the next thing, even if we have to spend all of our money. Yeah, I don't right. I don't think the mentality on the West Coast is what are we going to beat the number this quarter? It's like, holy fucking shit, we might end up like Blackberry if we don't make the turn to whatever the next thing is.
Starting point is 00:25:29 Like, I really think that that's like the bigger risk in their minds is like obsolescence and being irrelevant. and it can happen in a month. It can happen in a week if the narrative changes around your company, like it's crazy, but it's true. And so I think to them, risk is not spending $200 billion a year in CAPEX. Risk is not spending it. Right. And someone else does.
Starting point is 00:25:55 I'd rather go too big than too small. They all said that. They all said that. And I think that's a, it's just like it's a mentality that. So when you watch Bloomberg and you watch CNBC and everyone's like, like pulling their hair out of their head. Oh my God. Did you see how much they're spending?
Starting point is 00:26:09 I'm not saying the spending will be right. I'm just telling you it's a different mentality. They're not thinking about making the number this year. They're thinking about surviving for three years from now and still being relevant. And they can do that because they own all the shares or they have like the voting right so that no one's going to tell them no. Let's talk. That's right.
Starting point is 00:26:31 Let's talk. And by the way, a lot of these companies are architected in such a way. the shareholders' votes don't actually matter. Yeah, exactly. They can't tell Zuckerberg what to do. No. Alphabet, meta, these companies, very wisely, a long, long time ago, organized themselves in such a way where, sure, you can have a shareholder vote,
Starting point is 00:26:53 but in the end, the founders are still in control. And I think a lot of shareholders understood that deal, and they were fine with it. And they could sell any time. They don't have to stay fine with it. but they've been fine with it so far. I want to talk about the capital gains tax in the Netherlands. So they announced this last year and then in the last week they started to ratchet it up. And some of it took effect already for this year.
Starting point is 00:27:21 And then there's going to be a study period where they want to do even more of it. But the idea is that we've got this huge wealth cap. It's not a Dutch phenomenon or American phenomenon. It's all over the world. and people who own shares in businesses and own real estate are rapidly advancing versus everyone who's not an owner of anything and is just on a regular salary paying their bills and trying to get by. And the chasm, because of the massive rally in the stock market globally,
Starting point is 00:27:56 has grown to the point where politicians are now winning with sort of socialist messaging and punitive tax rates and sticking it to the billionaires. That's now like a very popular message more so than it was, even a couple years ago. I agree. AI is going to make inequality way worse. So I have a thought on this.
Starting point is 00:28:23 I actually think this is great news because they think it's very stupid. and it'll, it'll, it'll give the rest of the world a sneak preview for what happens when you try to solve a real problem with something that's only going to create a bigger problem. I think the capital flight and the flight of the creative class and asset movement, like the one thing we know about the super rich is that their money is more portable than ever. Yeah, and they know how to, they know how to avoid taxes too. They're not going to sit there and be like, oh, I owe you 36% of my asset increase this year.
Starting point is 00:29:03 No problem. Like, it's never going to happen. So let me explain to people how it's going to work. Capital gains, again, not realized capital gains. Unrealized. Like the year ends and they assess the gains of your investments that you're holding. financial assets will be taxed at 10%. So if, for example, you have a million euro portfolio and you live in, you live in Amsterdam,
Starting point is 00:29:41 and you make 20% return, you're going to, oh, you're going to have to either come up with cash or sell down some of those assets in order to pay 10% percent. of that 20% gain, which on a million euros would be 200,000 euros. You would owe 20,000 euros. Now, to somebody who's struggling and looking around at all these glass and steel skyscrapers going up and all these luxury accoutrement of the investor class, they're probably like, yeah, pay the 20,000. Tough shit. The problem with that attitude is the knock-on effects or a lot of unintended consequences.
Starting point is 00:30:24 Small business owners. Yeah. Starting with... Smaller investors. Starting with the people who own these companies are now disincentivized from investing and looking to leave whatever domicile they're in to get away from that tax and go somewhere else. So it kills stock markets. It kills jobs.
Starting point is 00:30:46 It sort of has a perverse impact on the profit motive. And it leads to just people. picking up and saying, forget it, I'm not staying here. There's the guy who owns the grasshopper. Is that going to leave? Remember the grasshopper in Amsterdam? It's like senior frogs, but with pot? Yes.
Starting point is 00:31:05 I may have gone there in college. There's going to be a lot of money laundering for the Red Light District possibly. I have the solution to this. How to solve the tax, the billionaire, tax the rich. Just we know working in wealth management, I think some people don't realize this, how much wealthy people utilize borrowing against their shares, against their portfolio.
Starting point is 00:31:23 it's a taxable event anytime you borrow against your portfolio of your shares. I think Elon borrowed against Tesla to buy Twitter. If you want to do that, that's a taxable event. Is that not the simple way people could agree to raise revenue from the wealthy? Anything that makes way more sense? It's almost like a consumption tax on debt,
Starting point is 00:31:42 which makes more sense than... Because otherwise, you'd have to sell your shares to do that and pay taxes. Right. Don't we want to incentivize people to make long-term investments? Why? So this is punishing people who buy and hold. Right.
Starting point is 00:31:57 There's a, there's a $10,000 or $10,000 annual exemption per person. Those numbers are not meaningful, like, to what we're talking about. And then they're going to reset the assets on December 31st for the new cost basis. The brokerage firms are the ones that are going to do this 10% tax withholding. or you'll be able to opt out and declare those gains yourself if you're doing your own filing. It just seems, it seems really strange, and it seems unlikely that very wealthy people in the Netherlands are going to stay.
Starting point is 00:32:38 You're right. And then go anywhere. It's going to be an absolute mess. We're sort of trying to go the opposite way here with the Trump accounts. Not that it's going to help anybody in the next 10 years. But you got to start somewhere. Rather than penalizing people in the investing class, we're trying to create more investors. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:32:57 Keeping more people in the stock market is a great thing. Yeah. So if only we had done that 20 years ago, I would argue, like, people would have people, young people who are 18, 19, 20 years old today and becoming susceptible to all this, like, pro-socialism content on TikTok, they might not have gone that in that direction because they might think of themselves as being part of the ownership class. But we didn't do it.
Starting point is 00:33:25 We waited till this year. I guess better late than never, but it's not going to help. We have an entire generation of people who look at unaffordable homes, salaries that don't pay their bills. And you introduce this idea, hey, let's take money from that guy.
Starting point is 00:33:42 They love it. Makes perfect sense that, yeah, take it from him. He has two Rolls Royces. Why does he need a third? So I get the mentality. I just think in practice, there are a lot of unintended consequences and people are not going to like what they see. Why do you think AI makes all this worse?
Starting point is 00:34:03 Inequality, I just, I think it's just going to make the spread between the winners and the losers so much bigger. I think it's just going to leave people behind who don't utilize it or it's not done their company. Like, you know, there's plenty of people who have no idea what's going on right now with this. And if it makes, if it makes, I don't know.
Starting point is 00:34:20 I don't know what the number is going to be that they say of jobs that are going to be taken away. And there's going to be a nasty period where certain jobs, I don't even know what those jobs are going to be disrupted. And you're going to be left behind for a few years while we try to fix that and figure out new jobs or whatever it is. And even if there's just a period where it's not like mass unemployment, but it's just there's going to be a transition period.
Starting point is 00:34:39 So this happened in the Roaring 20s. You're a big history guy. And in Roaring 20s, when we went from the agricultural to the assembly line, all these farmers were out of luck. It was like a depression for farmers. in the 1920s, as all these people turned into manufacturing employees, and they got just, like, they were selling assets and they were selling land and they were going out of business, and they were going bankrupt, all while the economy was booming.
Starting point is 00:35:02 That, to me, will probably happen. I don't know what the industries are. It's probably pretty easy for people to guess, but I think that's what could happen. You get up a booming economy, but a handful of groups of people are just getting decimated because their line of work. You know, it's so funny, like your generation, like our, you and I, our generation, we read books about that period in high school. They made us read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.
Starting point is 00:35:29 And coincidentally, you could see my hand along the screen, which was just about like all these immigrants and farm community people being like pulled into the city because there was work. Chicago, the meatpacking, and just like the horrors of that, like new industrial lifestyle. They made us all read Grapes of Wrath,
Starting point is 00:35:54 which is about that farming depression, the Dust Bowl, and Tom Jode and these families that were like in Oklahoma and they're just like, there was no agricultural, anything to do. And like,
Starting point is 00:36:09 and then they would, I don't think it was on purpose, but the other book from the, like, that took place in the 20s, they made us read was the contra, it was great Gatsby. And all of those books take place in the same era. And like the, the worlds that those characters inhabit could not have been more different, right?
Starting point is 00:36:30 Like, you go from the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma, Steinbeck, to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Great Gatsby, which is the Gold Coast where I'm from, Long Island. And it's like, it's like night and day, but that's the same period of time. So to your point, there are going to be like whole groups of people or industries or whatever where the inequality just gets worse and worse and worse regardless of how well the economy is doing. And then there are going to be groups carrying on like they're in West Egg, like they're in the jazz age with the Gatsby's. And I agree.
Starting point is 00:37:08 I can't see a scenario where things get equalized by this technology. It feels like it could only get exacerbated. I'm not going to lie. I didn't read any of the signed books in high school. I was a bad student in terms of reading. I never read a book. Do you have the cliff notes? I scanned it.
Starting point is 00:37:22 I like skimmed them. You know what I did? I pretended that I was mad that we had to read all these books, and I secretly loved them. Okay. So you were ahead of the game. I just started reading until after college. I was one of those people. I'd be like, oh, man, we have to read this book, and then I'd go home and read the whole thing in one night.
Starting point is 00:37:39 So, and then... But I wanted to be cool. So I had to tell everyone how much I hated it. Pretended it didn't do it? Yeah. Put up the chart. Growing wealth and inequality. Yeah, what's going on here? Allison Trigger to this today.
Starting point is 00:37:52 Just shows that it's like the middle is being hollowed out because more people are going into the upper class and fewer people in the lower class. So it's interesting that like the middle is shrinking, but only because more people are getting wealthy. And I think this makes it even, this is another reason why people are like, I'm wealthy, but there's people way wealthy than me. Let's tax them. Yeah. Right. And guess what? Oh, the gray is people making 150,000 or more.
Starting point is 00:38:16 and it's getting bigger. Right. Right. That's the thing with the stock market. It's all relative. Yes, that's the thing. All right. Let's talk about the X-U-S trade.
Starting point is 00:38:27 All right. Okay, chart had made this one for us based on a Golden Sacks chart. He recreated it. He stole it. But ours is better. Yeah, so this shows the spread between S&P and MSEI World X-U.S. Since 1995. And the spread means that U.S. is underperforming.
Starting point is 00:38:45 International is outperforming. play a huge margin to start the year. Do the next chart. This is since the beginning of 2025. So this is European stocks. Pacific stocks, that's like, that's Asia plus Australia, I think, that VPL, and then emerging markets and are just smoking the S&P. We're talking 30% outperformance, almost 40% outperformance for some of these, like, since this is, this is a real thing now that, like, this trend is taking hold. And I know there's a lot of people who decided, I don't want international stocks anymore. I'm done with that.
Starting point is 00:39:18 It didn't work for 12 years. Fine. Screw it. I'm all U.S. And I think those people are going to have to be pulled in kicking and screaming to this trade. I mean, they're going to buy these country stock markets after they've doubled and tripled. Like, that's what they're going to do now. It's unbelievable.
Starting point is 00:39:36 What, if you had to guess, what percentage of regular investors, not professionals, put the first chart back up? So this is shot. We are looking at the worst start to the year for U.S. stocks versus MSCI world since 1995. The spread is negative 8.3%. Ben, what percent of regular investors are even aware that this is how the year began? I'm going to say like, I'm going to say like three out of 10 maximum. Yeah, that's probably about right. I don't even think they even look at it.
Starting point is 00:40:13 I don't even think they know where a regular investor even go to look to see what the MSCI world is doing. They don't know the ETF. Yeah, I guess the 401K investor probably looks at like three and five-year charts. And over that period, we're still doing okay. Although, do my next chart here, guys, chart on. This shows over. So a lot of people will say, well, zoom out a little. This is the last five years.
Starting point is 00:40:36 And this shows that MSCI Japan and then international small cap value, of which we use for clients. I own personally. Full disclosure. Yeah, full disclosure. Over five years now, this is not just like a last 12 months thing. Japanese stocks and international small cap value is beating the S&P over five years now. Nobody knows that. No.
Starting point is 00:41:00 They think U.S. stocks, bubble, mag seven, AI, they have no idea that international small caps are beating the shit out of the S&P. It's crazy. There's no way they know. I know they don't know. Can you name any company in the international small cap index CTF? I can't. No way. Not a chance.
Starting point is 00:41:22 These things are trading eight times earnings, too. They probably had like 4% dividend. Because they pay more dividends overseas, you know? I'm sure that it was, yeah, I know I couldn't name one of the stocks. All right. Do you think financial advisors by and large, do you think for the most part financial advisors have kept wealth management clients in these allocations? Maybe they've trimmed them in response to 23 or 24, but just in general, I sort of think
Starting point is 00:41:50 our industry has done a good job not giving in and forcing people to stay. I know a handful of people who go, who went all U.S., and were fine with that decision. But, yeah, a handful. Advisors? Yeah. Advisors I've talked to. But I'd say it's probably, yeah, most advisors, the average would be like 80-20 U.S. international, I'm guessing. That's like anecdotal, don't you think something like that?
Starting point is 00:42:13 that. It's not six, it's not, right. And by the way, that, like, sort of makes sense, because if you're waiting it by the market cap of the world, that's how much bigger the S&P got since you and I got into the business. It really ballooned to be a much bigger piece of the global five. I think it got to be 70-30. Now it's like 65-35-ish since international is outperforming. So it's still a huge amount in the U.S. But you're right. I think most, I think a lot of advisors have been just preaching to people. And and then this is finally this happens, and they can say, see, this is why I told you this.
Starting point is 00:42:45 This is why I've been preaching it. We have some comments in the chat. Ben Kush says, as soon as I buy them, the international stocks will stop working. All right. I know the feeling, dude. So maybe hold off
Starting point is 00:42:59 because we're enjoying this. Let me see who else. Harold Stiles says Japan has a huge demographic problem and is doomed to fail. I don't know, dude. 2005 called. They want their thesis back. Guess what the solution to that is? Population problems.
Starting point is 00:43:16 Robots. AI. Japan is the global capital of robots. John Carlos Giano has a guess and an international small cap. Genco olive oil. Do you get the reference? I don't know. That's a joke or not. No. No, what is that? That was the Godfather's olive oil company. In Godfather, too.
Starting point is 00:43:37 He was in the import, export business or whatever. All right. All right. That's a deep. I'm doing a much. Congrats on that. Anyway, it's been pretty amazing to see this entire part of the investment opportunity spring back to life. So how much do you attribute this to the dollar?
Starting point is 00:43:56 I mean, that's obviously a big reason for it. I know we've got some charts in here about the weak dollar. I think that set it off initially, the dollar crashing. That was the thing that got it going. Well, the thing is, what I want to say, though, before we do that is what I want to say is like, there was no nobody fired the starting gun for these stocks to start working
Starting point is 00:44:16 like there was no advanced warning they underperformed underperformed underperformed underperformed underperformed and then they start and then they there was a turn now you and I can go back in hindsight and say oh look the dollar peaked
Starting point is 00:44:32 we could say I've talked about this a lot where some of the countries started putting through pro-capital markets reforms. Japan is a really notable example of that. I've talked about that ad nausea on the show. So we could do that in hindsight,
Starting point is 00:44:48 but like in the moment, there was no way to know. No one rang about all here. No way, dude. And that's one of the hardest parts about investing. And this is, I think, one of the lessons that we hammer home. All right, let's go to this chart.
Starting point is 00:45:03 This is performance year-to-date by country. Yeah, this is through last week. The Wall Street Journal did this. So this is taking away the dollar in most of these. So Korean stocks are going bonkers this year, which it's a handful of stocks that make it up, right? But then Japan.
Starting point is 00:45:16 So this is, a lot of them takes away the dollar on this, that just all these indices, even in the home currency, are beating the S&P 500. Now Korea is a strong, now Korea is an outlier. Korea has two companies, Samsung and Hynix.
Starting point is 00:45:33 They make up like 50% of the index, right? It's half the stock market, and they are in memory, memory chips. So similar to what you're seeing happen here with Micron and Sandisk. Imagine a whole stock market dominated by those stocks. If you think the U.S. is overly concentrated, all these other countries are way worse. Yes.
Starting point is 00:45:53 Way more. Their top 10 makes up way more than ours does. Taiwan, I think it's obvious what's going on there. The chip foundries. So, like, you could glance at these and sort of, like, get an idea of what's driving it. But it doesn't matter. That's another important point.
Starting point is 00:46:08 In the end, there were cheaper stocks in these countries, and people decided I'm buying them. And then other people watched that and said, I'm going to buy them too. And it just happens. And if you're not allocated, you're going to watch and wave. And you ain't going to be there. And that's just part of how it works. There is a weak dollar story here, though, when the dollar underperforms typically, you'll see international stocks outperform, not always.
Starting point is 00:46:37 but like that's a fairly well-understood phenomenon. I did this. I had Matt make this one for me too. Go to the next one. So this is like dollar up or dollar down. Foreign stocks do way better. Gold does awesome when the dollar is down. Don't you get the sense that this is what Trump and Wars,
Starting point is 00:46:53 they wanted weak dollar kind of, right? Isn't that their whole thing? Yeah. A lot of politicians want weak dollar but can't say week dollar. That's at least what their hand is showing that they're pushing for a weak dollar. And that would be the thing that could, keep this going, I think. Yes, the weak dollar enables a company like Coca-Cola or Caterpillar or IBM
Starting point is 00:47:15 or a multi-natt that's doing 70% of its revenue overseas to continually surprise on earnings to the upside. And another side effect of that, unintentional, is that international stocks do really well, too. But like, that is an accepted phenomenon. Is a strategist at Deutsche who's saying interestingly, AI risk in the U.S. is a reason for why a falling dollar or is it's sort of like not causing the falling dollar, but it's like why the dollar is falling kind of thing.
Starting point is 00:47:55 It's like just a global reassessment of Trump and the AI thing and the dollar not acting like a safe haven anymore. So like you see, right, so you're seeing like tech stocks sell off and you would expect, okay, the dollar should be higher because people flee to the safety of the dollar in a risk off market and they're not. And that's a really interesting phenomenon that we haven't seen in the while either.
Starting point is 00:48:20 Let me just sit with the go. When the source of negative equity news in the U.S. and the rest of the world is doing better, it is entirely possible for the dollar to fall as equities are going down, just like in the 2002.com period, Saravellos explained. That's the currency strategist at Deutsche Bank.
Starting point is 00:48:39 The less attractive the dollar as a portfolio hedge, the more incentive there is to reduce dollar exposure. So, and they call it to sell America trade, and I won't go any deeper into that. But I thought that was interesting. Well, and the dollar was strong for like 15 years straight. These things are cyclical. Even if it's not like the end of the dollar is here
Starting point is 00:48:57 and people are, you know, giving up on the U.S. and sell in America, the dollar can be weak for cyclical reasons. And it has in the past many times. This happens. Edward Denny wrote about some of the stuff Europe is doing to get more serious. And I think that's also a big part of the story, why people are allocating and why you have, like, big defense stocks across northern Europe in particular, doing really well in the stock market this year. Germany finally is saying we're giving up on austerity. We're going to actually spend money.
Starting point is 00:49:29 Yes. There was a European Union last week in a Belgian castle. and they were talking about how to get rid of... I thought you're kidding, but you're... Honestly, that's true. Yes. And they were... A Belgian...
Starting point is 00:49:44 Of course they were. See, the only thing that would have been funnier is if the meeting was in a bakery. Right. Like a waffle... A waffle house. All right. They were talking about bureaucracy
Starting point is 00:50:00 and excessive regulation and how to get rid of it. so that people and how to integrate their own capital markets because every country in Europe has its own adorable little stock market. And maybe that's not helping. And Mario Draghi spoke, and he is the guy telling everyone, quote, move faster. Emmanuel Macron from France stood up and said there are no taboos.
Starting point is 00:50:27 The European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said, you have until June to agree on a union of financial markets. We might get a pan-European bond in stock market this year. Think about what a massive catalyst that could be. So this is Yardinney. From all the lofty talk, something remarkable emerged. EU officials finally admitted that has taken too long to get all 27 member countries to agree on a plan for greater economic efficiency.
Starting point is 00:50:56 if the EU makes insufficient progress by June, smaller groups, as small as nine members, could move ahead on enhanced cooperation to accelerate these reforms. And so he just kind of like walks through, what do they need to do? One, lower administrative hurdles. It's too annoying to do anything.
Starting point is 00:51:19 They have this thing called the Sunset Clause that automatically expires all regulations and agreements and forces them to, to renew them over and over and over again. Enough of that. Two, integrating markets. Create a single integrated market for capital across EU member states.
Starting point is 00:51:37 Three, create a single energy market. One EU energy market with cross-border grids is vital at a time of Russian aggression. And then all the things they have to get rid of. The Germany-France rift is a big one. disagreements on tariffs and doing business with China, et cetera. Lack of investment incentive, okay? Well, maybe unrealized capital gains tax is not the right.
Starting point is 00:52:07 Right. Yeah. Anyway, it's interesting. And I think we're going to see something happen. And that could be a catalyst for further gains in Europe. And 100% an investment story, not a political story. It's an investment story. People should watch.
Starting point is 00:52:22 All right. Did you notice that it feels like everybody on the internet is now an expert on disruption? Now is the time to shoot your shot. If you work for a startup or an AI company and you publish like a 5,000 word scribe on Twitter about SaaS or AI and it's like it's very scary. Like it's going to get some traction. This kid that wrote something big is happening, great headline. he like went he like went like a nuclear viral I think like 30 million people read this shit and it was like the only thing people were talking about for a week I haven't seen a blog post do that in a really what can you even think of the last time like a market or financial or technology related post from our world did anything like that
Starting point is 00:53:19 That it is funny because the AI people are saying like no one's talking enough about what's coming. Like this stuff is coming and people aren't like aren't prepared enough. But it seems like people are waking up to this. I don't know, man. Everyone's prepared but nobody knows what's going to happen. Well, no one knows what to do I guess. What do you do about it? That's a good question.
Starting point is 00:53:41 But yes, you're right. These things are going mega viral because it's like, listen, I'm working on this stuff on a daily basis. And it's changing my life. and it's like, I'm, I'm disrupting myself out of a job. What is it? That's what, that's what's going to happen to you too. Just wait. That's what everyone's saying.
Starting point is 00:53:54 I said on one of my smart-ass social media accounts, the only responsible thing to do is just resign now. Like, be respectful of the AI. Don't make it come find you. Just, you bowed out into it like, like you're a Game of Thrones night and you just bow and yeah. Just, just fall on your sword. Take my sword.
Starting point is 00:54:13 Yeah. Bend the knee today. It's like, you can't disrupt me because I've, fucking quit. Like, it's the only responsible way to go about. The software stocks are ground zero for this. And Goldman Sachs
Starting point is 00:54:29 created a software basket of, it's like a long, short basket of disrupted software names versus non. And I didn't bother pulling the chart up, but I just thought this bit was interesting. Goldman Sachs shows the valuation of the software industry has undergone a sharp
Starting point is 00:54:47 correction, PE topped out a year ago at 51 times earnings and now it's 27. It was the most expensive sector going into this. Shows what investors know. And now it's cheaper than media, automotive, semiconductors, and capital goods. Not the cheapest sector, but way cheaper than it's ever been before in our lifetimes. And I don't know. it feels like it's really easy to write some sort of like disruption piece, just taking that as a premise. And you could either say the worst is yet to come or is a guy Nicholas Bustamante who wrote something that went viral this week.
Starting point is 00:55:31 This is a guy with a startup called FinTool. And he basically took like every type of, every type of SaaS company or vertical market software company. and explain which ones will live, which ones will die. Did you eat this thing? Yes. The way that he laid everything out was good. And he talked all about the financial data stuff in here, which is, you know, that's important for us.
Starting point is 00:55:54 You and do it our hearts. Yeah, so that's the stuff that made the most sense to me. Like, basically, do you have something proprietary? Is it just a tool? Because I've been doing more and more financial analysis on AI, obviously. It's so much easier. It's so easy. Yeah, his point was like if you're aggregating public data,
Starting point is 00:56:11 nobody needs you to do that anymore. that's not a business. You can't sell that really in real life. So you either need like proprietary data, which will still have value because by definition, it doesn't exist for the LLMs, or something where you are the system of record for corporations and you're not easily ripped out regardless of how much it costs.
Starting point is 00:56:36 Like there's a lot going on there. Rachel Finthwood says, guy stuff, totally. this is like this is like the the millennials equivalent of guys in their 50s talking about World War II like 100%
Starting point is 00:56:53 or guys in their 40s talking about the Roman Empire We're going to be over and underreacting to this stuff for the next 10 years at least So Bill Gurley had something He talked about how he said Some people are shocked at Walmart and Costco have higher multiples in software companies When so much value is in terminal value
Starting point is 00:57:07 The haunting question is will this company be around 30 years? He says that's an easy thing answer for Walmart and Costco, which, by the way, I got his new book. Pretty good. New career book. But the thing is, the undisruptible companies are going to get taken too far, too. There's going to be an overreaction there as well. There already is.
Starting point is 00:57:25 Costco is trading for 54 times earnings. Walmart's trading for 45 times earnings. Yeah, we get those companies to be around, but they can still be too expensive, too. The staple stocks are stupid. Coke and Pepsi had 85 RSIs last week. like momentum that's off the charts and nothing fundamental has changed and I could show you 50 of those put this chart up this pincers move is the the risk so the vertical software companies these are companies that built something special for one industry and they like something for law firms or for dentists or for mechanics or for construction companies like they own this vertical and this is
Starting point is 00:58:10 the pincor move. From above, you have Anthropic dropping these plugins that literally they know an industry cold and you get everything for free that you used to pay somebody specialized for. And then from below, you have all these AI native startups for every vertical. People, like the cost of inventing something is so much cheaper. So they're saying like small teams, frontier models, 80% capability at 20% of the price. So if you're stuck in that middle, box and he has Bloomberg, fax set, Lexus, Nexus, S&P Global, that's not a good place to be.
Starting point is 00:58:47 Because now you're fighting with a million startups and anthropic. I've heard that Bloomberg is going to be disrupted for 20 years, though. That, to me, is the one that, for whatever reason, it's like the real estate market, like realtors. You can't disrupt realtors. They're in their 6% commission. I feel like Bloomberg is undisruptible. So if it doesn't happen now, it's never going to happen.
Starting point is 00:59:04 So Bustamante addresses that. And there's a couple of things with, like, hospital software companies, pharmaceuticals, Wall Street. There's a regulatory component to this where like there's like
Starting point is 00:59:18 you need software where there's like HIPAA compliant FDA compliance stuff built in on Wall Street it would be SEC regulatory.
Starting point is 00:59:27 Like there is a higher responsibility in certain verticals where you can't just be like oh that's cheaper let's use that. Like there's audit trail. There's things that are built in
Starting point is 00:59:39 where they're less disruptible. I think I would put Bloomberg in that category. The other thing is Bloomberg has network effects. Yeah, the people love to message each other on it. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, that's harder, not impossible, way harder, to replicate with LLMs, to create like a million people around the world
Starting point is 00:59:59 who are able to chat and trade with each other. I don't know that you can really do that. We wanted to, we could finish with this. I wanted to show you Apple as it. example of a company that did not go all in on AI CAPX. Their CAPX actually this year is going down. This is the best chart of the year so far. This chart is nuts, right?
Starting point is 01:00:20 Nuts. So they didn't play the game. So do you think that the Apple said, you know what, people aren't going to have two pieces of harp around them? They're not going to have a phone and a little AI device. It's all going to go through the phone. So what do we care? It's going to come through us anyway. We'll just partner with someone and we don't have to spend the money. Open AI is working.
Starting point is 01:00:40 furiously on a device, supposedly two. One of them is a desktop and one of them is an amulet you wear around your neck. I could look like an asshole in a year. I don't see it. People are going to want to have multiple devices. I mean, I get that people have an Apple watch
Starting point is 01:00:58 and AirPods and stuff, but that's a thing. Apple is already ingrained in us. You're going to add a new thing? I don't know about that. Meadow would tell you, meta would tell you the goggles were wrong. It's about the glasses. And that's, they think the form factor for AI and augmented reality, et cetera, is going to be worn on your face, not carried in your pocket because you'll be AI all the time.
Starting point is 01:01:22 Those glasses creep me out. I think they're creepy. It's, yeah, maybe it's, maybe it's for a different generation. I don't love the idea of having somebody walk up to me with, with a camera in my face. It's not appealing to me. And I don't want to do it to anyone else. Anyway, I did want to share with the audience. I think Apple could be the stock. the year. It's not cheap. It's 30 times earnings. But if we're going to pay 53 for Costco, then pay attention to what I'm about to tell you. Apple is going to own consumer AI. They are going to launch a Gentic Siri this year. They're two years late. Everybody gets it. And the stock is only in a 10% drawdown from its high. It actually looks better than the other six Mag7 names on that metric.
Starting point is 01:02:06 They have a March event, a May event, and a September event on the calendar. The March event is not a live stream, so they're probably not launching something big. The May event absolutely could be Agenic Siri, and if it's not, the September event will be. And they're partnered with Google, and they were on search, and I think Gemini is going to power Agenic Siri. And what Agenic Siri means, guys, it's not another chatbot, although there will be chatbot-like features built in. Agentic Siri is telling Siri to go into the hundreds of apps on your phone and do things
Starting point is 01:02:45 across those apps. We cannot currently do that with chat GPT or Claude. Telling Siri, move $100,000 from my fidelity account into my bank account because I'm about to buy a house. And by the way, I need two tickets on Delta. for our vacation, and also make me a reservation. And then Siri, because this is all happening in their iOS environment, so all of these apps have to play nice with Apple,
Starting point is 01:03:18 and they have to be interoperable. Siri all of a sudden is on your OpenTable app. It's on the Delta app. It's in your Fidelity app. It's talking to your bank. It's moving money. It's making reservations. It's booking travel.
Starting point is 01:03:32 It's alerting you as these things get booked. you're having a two-way conversation with it all day. The seats that you normally like to book are not available. Here are three other options. Agentic Siri is a fucking grand slam. And they're going to do it. And Apple is never first. And they're very rarely the inventor of a category.
Starting point is 01:03:52 What actually happens is they let everybody blow themselves up. And then they come in and they say, let me step aside. Let me show you how it's done. And once they do that, it's like, lights out. And we all already have the device. There are two billion Apple devices on planet Earth. It's a user base that spends money, continues to stay in the ecosystem. All they have to do is drop a energetic Siri into this AI trade. And all of a sudden, people are going to throw themselves out of windows. I hope it works because Siri sucks. Sucks. And they know it. It's so bad. They know it.
Starting point is 01:04:30 It's because it doesn't do any, it's useless. Yeah. You can't ask a follow-up question. question. Like, like, it's, it's completely useless. They get it. A janetic theory is not going to suck. They've had, they're not going to release something that doesn't work on this. Yeah. We, we are not in a world yet where people, we are not yet in a world where people can imagine Apple's AI being the Jesus AI. They just can't picture it because Apple has not been in this LLM race and they're not in the KAPX hyperscaler race. but in the end, they are the closest to the customer. So that's how Gemini wins too, then.
Starting point is 01:05:10 Yeah. Now, people say, well, what happens to Claude? What happens to chat GPT? What happens to perplexity? Unfortunately, if the scenario that I'm envisioning plays out, like every other iteration of technology, they become plugins. They become features. It's Apple's world, and Apple has the pricing power,
Starting point is 01:05:32 and they have to pay Apple to, be in the app store, and they just become like, Apple will tell them what they're worth to be included in that ecosystem. You don't think Claude could still just be the one at the office? Claude's at the office. Siri is for personally use. Sure. Anthropic has made more enroads into the enterprise than anyone else besides Microsoft.
Starting point is 01:05:55 And absolutely, it could, we have that now. Microsoft Teams is still the most widely used platform for communications. amongst people working at corporations. I had a call with a Fortune 500 company today. I didn't have to guess what the call was going to be. I knew it would be teams. So that Microsoft Apple dichotomy currently exists. I'm Microsoft at work.
Starting point is 01:06:21 I'm Apple at home. That 100% could be the case. If you're the guy coming along with the eighth LLM, good fucking luck. You know what I mean? Claude in the streets, Siri in the sheets. I don't know.
Starting point is 01:06:34 Apple in the street. Siri on the phone. Still spitball on that one. All right. We'll figure that one out. Anyway, we're going to use Apple as I make the case because we're already out of time. And I had this whole other thing that I wanted to do. But we're going to hold off on that.
Starting point is 01:06:53 Ben, I understand you have a mystery chart for us. I do. Bless us with that mystery chart. All right. So this is from the bottom of the Liberation Day lows. Okay. How many hints do you need here? This is in percentage terms?
Starting point is 01:07:09 Yeah, so this is off the lows. I'll give you a hint. One of them is a sector. One of them we've been talking about the whole show. Okay. Both U.S. based. U.S.-based. Two stocks?
Starting point is 01:07:25 These are sectors. These are ETFs. Oh, these are ETFs. All right. Okay. I think I know it. I'm going to say purple is SPY and orange is
Starting point is 01:07:37 Vanguard Europe? Close enough. So purple is Mag 7. Okay. Orange is actually XLI. It's the industrials. The industrials are right alongside
Starting point is 01:07:51 the S&P since the low on liberation aid. That's crazy, right? What was the narrative around Liberation Day for the industrials? These are the most screwed companies in the world.
Starting point is 01:08:01 Done. They will never make money again overseas, blah, blah, blah, blah. Good call. All credit to research guys Sean on that one. He came up with that one for me. All right. Ben, the Jeff on on the show tonight? That was awesome. Good stuff. We loved having you. Chad was blowing up there.
Starting point is 01:08:15 Chad is blowing up. Thank you guys so much for coming for the live. I want to let you know. Do you guys have animal spirits tomorrow? We do. Michael called in from the Bahamas. It's a good thing he wasn't on here today because his internet was terrible. Okay. All right. So we will have animal spirits tomorrow with Michael and Ben. You guys haven't asked the compound this week too? We do. Yeah. Duncan's taken off to Japan. So he's got to tell you. us what's going on to the Japanese stock market. All right. All right. And then we'll do an all new compounded friends at the end of the week.
Starting point is 01:08:43 Thank you guys so much for watching. Keep it locked. We'll see you soon. Ridholt's wealth management is a registered investment advisor. Advisory services are only offered to clients or prospective clients where Ridthold's wealth management and its representatives are properly licensed or exempt from licensure. Nothing on this podcast should be construed as and may not be used in connection with an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy or hold an interest in any security or investment product. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing involves risk and possible loss of principal capital.
Starting point is 01:09:24 No advice may be rendered by Ridholt's wealth management unless a client service agreement is in place.

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