The Compound and Friends - Why Nvidia is Going to 10 Trillion Dollars

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

On episode 239 of The Compound and Friends, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Michael Batnick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠...⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Downtown Josh Brown⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ are joined by Adam Parker and Rob Sechan to discuss: software stocks, AI and corporate profitability, searching for value in the current market, and much more! This episode is sponsored by Public and ClearBridge Investments. Learn more at https://public.com/compound Rising geopolitical tensions, continued market uncertainty, stocks backed by can offer more predictable cash flows as volatility increases. To learn more, go to https://www.clearbridge.com/ Sign up for The Compound Newsletter and never miss out: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠thecompoundnews.com/subscribe⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠twitter.com/thecompoundnews⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/company/the-compound-media/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠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

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 You guys are actual friends? Like, Yes. Yeah. Tell us, tell us about it. They go tip to tip me guys. When they hug it out,
Starting point is 00:00:07 they do. There's a story. That's a mutual, that's a mutual friend of ours, but yeah. How long do you guys go back? He told me, wait,
Starting point is 00:00:12 you have a friend named tip to tip to tip? He told me. That's a great nickname. We're not going to say who it is. We cannot say who it is. No, no, no, no, no. I can tell the story if you want it,
Starting point is 00:00:23 John. Yeah, you tell the story. Don't say the name. Don't say the name. So we aren't going to say the name. But it's honestly hysterical. It's really, I met Adam. We have a lot of mutual friends.
Starting point is 00:00:35 He came to meet me in Fort Lauderdale. We're having lunch. We're a client of his firm. And he goes, this guy, you know, I know him well. We're mutual friends, this, that, and that other thing. And he goes, he's a real, he's a real tip-to-tip guy. And I said, what does that mean? What does that mean?
Starting point is 00:00:53 And he goes, he goes, you know how when some people hug you and shake your hand, they kind of lean the shoulder to the same. side, he comes in straight and hugs you. And he said, it is full frontal. I could not stop laughing. I respect you. The entire lunch. Yeah. I know, we both, to be clear, we both really love this
Starting point is 00:01:10 guy. Like, it's not... I would hope so. And he's like the only person I would say, I know that he can get away with it. Like, right, like, it actually... Todd Bradd and works and we... It's a very well-known person. So, so you call Robinson's... We were talking about it and then he called our mutual friend
Starting point is 00:01:26 and was like... Did you laugh historically when you were? I could not, I could not stop. Because it resonated. He's done it to him too. He's tip to hip, tip to tip to tip to. Most people aren't tip to hip to hip. Tip to hip is okay. Tip to hip is a lot. Does this guy also, you can't, you can't.
Starting point is 00:01:43 No, no, no. He's amazing. He's amazing. It's, uh, Michael Jordan. No, no, no. I had a great joke that was not appropriate for their way. Yeah, let's not do that. The equivalent of them.
Starting point is 00:01:53 All right, boys, you ready to rock today? Something tells me this is going to be one of the all-timers. It's just, it's in the, air. I don't know if it's spring. I don't know if it's you guys, maybe a little bit of both. I've been looking forward to this all week. What about you? All month. All month. Where's home base for you? Depends on who's asking, but mostly for. Me? The IRS.
Starting point is 00:02:15 Mostly for now. Oh, yeah. Oh, sorry. Bob, you're very smiling. You're taking edible before you come on? No, this is me, brother. He's pumped. I'm telling you. It's in the air. All right? It really is. wire on the right or the left. Wire on your left.
Starting point is 00:02:33 All right. Is it smashing down my flow? You look great. I had flow back in the day. I was a nice 18-year-old. Had some hair. Not anymore. It's possible again these days.
Starting point is 00:02:46 No, it's not. Josh, is it possible? No. You have to go to Turkey. Then it's possible. It won't be your hair, though. It'll be from a dog. But you can get to...
Starting point is 00:02:54 You have to decide the dog? You can get it. All right. All right. Let's pod. All right. Two seconds. So what else is going on, boys?
Starting point is 00:03:05 Oh, I heard a crazy story about you. You look nervous. You're sweating. You were doing closing bell with Leslie Picker. And right before the segment, you looked up her credentials to make sure that she was up to the level to ask you why you think the market's going up or whatever. She's going to ask you. That's not true.
Starting point is 00:03:29 There's no way. It's not true. I did look up her credentials, but that was only because I was trying to just resonate with something about her background. It wasn't to see if they were up to this. Trying to connect. That's trying to connect. Sounds crazy. You know, the first time Adam was on, he was super duper sweaty.
Starting point is 00:03:43 You remember that? She's not mad about it, but she thought it was funny. Crazy sweating. You know, I really feel bad. She took it that way. No, no, not in a bad way. She's just like, all right, am I good now? No, she was very impressive.
Starting point is 00:03:55 I've been one. Yeah. I've been on with her many, many times before. I just looked her up. That is awkward. Sometimes you're like, oh, you went to UCLA, you know, whatever. I was just trying to connect, you know, and I didn't have, I didn't, I didn't prepare. I was, I was screwing with her on the commercial breaks.
Starting point is 00:04:09 I was looking up, she was up for a Gerald Loeb Award, and I was asking the producers to verify it. Who is that? Can you please verify that Leslie was nominated for this award? That's hilarious. Shout to Leslie Picker. Yeah. All right. All right.
Starting point is 00:04:23 I hope she sees that. She loves you. All of fun. Episode 2.39. Oh, wow. 2.39. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop the clock.
Starting point is 00:04:34 Here's a word from our sponsor. Support for this show comes from public.com. If you're actively involved in your portfolio, you probably catch yourself repeating the same actions. Buying the dip, manually sweeping idle cash, putting on a hedge. On public, you can now create AI agents that handle all of these tasks on your behalf.
Starting point is 00:04:52 Just describe what you want to do in plain English. Like, if the VIX hits 20, by a put option on the S&P 500. Or if my cash balance goes above $20,000, move the excess into my direct index. You approve the workflow and your agent handles the rest. Monitoring the market, watching your conditions and executing your strategies exactly as defined.
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Starting point is 00:05:40 and SIPC, advisory services by public advisors LLC, SEC registered advisor. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. This episode is sponsored by Clearbridge Investments amid rising geopolitical tensions and continued market uncertainty, investors are looking for stability. Even before recent developments in the Middle East, stocks backed by real assets were gaining momentum and can offer more predictable cash flows as volatility increases. Position your investment portfolio for wider equity participation with fundamentally driven Clearbridge active equity strategies. Clearbridge, a Franklin Templeton company, go to clearbridge.com to learn more.
Starting point is 00:06:39 The Compound and Friends, all opinions expressed by Josh Brown, Michael Batnick, and their castmates are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ridholt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ridholt's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Rob, we've done this 239 times so far, or 238, going into 239. And this is my virgin experience. I kind of rank at the bottom. We ran out of people, Bottom of the order. All right, guys.
Starting point is 00:07:14 They didn't trust you to go on solo either. They had to like, I need training wheels. Training wealth. AP is here. We know it's going to be okay. Adam Parker is one of the fan favorites on this show. Let's do your intro first. Adam is the CEO and founder of Trivariate Research.
Starting point is 00:07:31 Prior to Trivariate Research, Adam was the founder and lead portfolio manager of Trivariate Capital and equity long, long, short hedge fund. Adam is also an investment advisor board member for Rob's firm, New Edge Wealth. Did that around? When did you guys first meet? A few years ago. All right, all right.
Starting point is 00:07:52 And making his first appearance on the compounded friends, I'm so excited about this. Rob Sechin is the CEO managing partner and co-founder of New Edge Wealth and co-managing partner of New Edge Capital Group. Rob was an advisor at Morgan Stanley. a director at Lehman Brothers is not his fault. And a director at UBS prior to founding New Edge, he has been recognized by both Barron's and Forbes as a top 100 financial advisor. Give it up for Adam and Rob.
Starting point is 00:08:24 Welcome to the show, guys. All right. Question one. No, I'm kidding. We have to start. Guys, we have to start with software. There was another blow up overnight and into today and service now.
Starting point is 00:08:38 This seems to be like a recurring nightmare where every week it's another or every month, it's one, two, three of these stocks. They're already in 50% drawdowns. And then they report what looked like a good quarter on the surface and they go even lower. Start there. Is there an end in sight? What do you think? Do you want me to go where you want to go?
Starting point is 00:08:58 It's up to you. I'll start. I mean, I'm not ready to call a bottom in the group. But certainly there's a lot of value being created. It's oversold. We own, we've owned a lot of people. positions. As you know, we owned Adobe at one point in time. We keep trying to rotate into the higher quality names, so maybe we can participate if there is a turnaround. But it seems like these
Starting point is 00:09:20 stocks are guilty until proven innocent. And this trend of, you know, short software long semis is going to be in place for as long as is in place. You look at what more capital always says, you know, every now and then, Lewis Bacon, something comes along and knocks you into a different atmosphere, something came along and knocked them into a different atmosphere, and it's not changing. And it may not be changing for a while, but that doesn't mean that value is not unlocked at some point in the future in the form of earnings that sustain. You know, it's a good sign. I want to call Fidelity and ask them if they could hide my software positions from me so that when I log in, I don't have to look at them. I already know they're down.
Starting point is 00:10:05 I have a view on this. Yeah. I assume. You did. And I want to be kind of like, you know, I feel like I start all my meetings recently with like everything I'm saying could be wrong. Well, just because it feels like the uncertainty is more than normal. So like, you know, I feel like I got to bookend my comments. But like, and we've had some pretty bad calls this year, I'd say, at the sector level. I'm just saying I'm pretty self, I'm pretty honest about that. Like, we've had some good calls and bad.
Starting point is 00:10:30 You know, we've recommend any health care that's been crap. Like, I could go through it. But we've been seeing the ball clearly on software. It's a good call we've had. and our call has been when the multiples contract like they have, what comes next is they miss on earnings, and then eventually they miss on sales. And so I'm not surprised on now at all.
Starting point is 00:10:47 It's one of the ones that people love and defend the most. And the reason I think these companies are going to miss on earnings is because the analysts have 80% gross margin and the same net margin every year going forward, 27, 28, 29 in their models. And how are they going to attach all the AI tools that their customers need without some spending? And if you're a J.P. Morgan CTO or Morgan Stanley CTO,
Starting point is 00:11:06 you're going to pressure them on pricing eventually because you're going to realize, wait, guys, we can attach our own tools. We have a massive organization. So there may be value gets a lot, but I think what's going some of the names, but I think what's going on is they miss first on earnings and then eventually they miss on sales. And what the analysts are so used to doing is saying, I'm calling my CTO contacts. They're telling me they're never getting rid of now. I call the IR guy. We think it's a SaaS apocalypse. We cry in our beer together. And none of that's what's going on. It's not about today's fundamentals. It's about the distribution of outcome of 2030 fundamental. So some will work and some
Starting point is 00:11:33 will, but the median software company is going to be bad. So you'll be. You'll be Finally, last week, came out and said it's not the bottom. And here's why we talk to CTOs. And they're all using the same term, cost containment. None of them are going to accept this automatic role. They're going to pressure pricing. But how much of the earnings power of the software group for the last few years has just been like, we are indispensable.
Starting point is 00:11:57 We are the system of record for these customers. They can't get rid of us. We also have the ability to raise prices. And nobody does shit. And now it's not so automatic. I think that's right. And I think the other thing is, like, when it comes to software selection, kind of maybe perversely, the ones you want to buy are the expensive ones. You don't want to buy cheap software.
Starting point is 00:12:14 I heard you saying that. Could you explain what you mean by that? If you take this premise that, like, maybe we all know individuals or idiots, but the market collectively is smart. Right. When you get stocks that get cheap, on average, they're cheap for a reason, which is the probability that are disrupted is higher. Right. So the ones that are more expensive, the security software, uh, cadence and synops. Like, they're more expensive for a reason, which is their technological obsolescence risk is lower.
Starting point is 00:12:40 And so when you go back and study, like, what works in the rebound, it's not the slow-growing ones that are cheaper. It's the fast-growing one. So some of these are going to work. I kind of viewed a little bit like a lot of software is going to turn into like, you know how like a company wants to fire a million people? So they hire McKinsey. And McKinsey says, you should fire a million people. And then they fire a million people. They say, yeah, the experts sold to do it.
Starting point is 00:13:00 But some software is going to turn to that, right? Because imagine you're at Morgan's, you're at New Edge. And you're like, I clod coded some social. security, Rob, let's implement it. Right? And then somehow there's a breach of all the advisors. Like, you're fired, and he's probably fired for being a dipshit for listening to. So you're just going to pay Crowdstrike or Powell out or whatever just because you have to have an expert in case something goes wrong.
Starting point is 00:13:20 Like, you may get some of that happening in software, for sure. But the ones that are more expensive or more expensive for a reason. And that reason is they're less likely to get this robbed. It's got to be hard because I know you're Claude quoting your face off. I know your team is like like my team, like every firm. The people that are involved with tech are going crazy right now at every company in America. It's hard to then look at the board and look at stock prices and be like, I want to fade this. I'm close with a number of his employees.
Starting point is 00:13:50 And one of his guys who's a stock picker comes to a lot of our events. And he won the best stock picker at our main event last year and has crushed it in tech. All technology base. He has questioned. I mean, he really not not. Hope he listens to this. He'll shout out. So Jay is his name.
Starting point is 00:14:05 He's unbelievably talented. But we've leveraged tech throughout the start of our ecosystems. It was a tech-inabled solutions for them. We built New Edge on top of institutional-grade infrastructure. We didn't start it out of a private bank. It wasn't an idea in my basement. It wasn't built upon my practice. It was built on infrastructure, on rails.
Starting point is 00:14:28 And that infrastructure allowed us to bring in technology, plug and play different things, and try them religiously. We rolled out Clawed Enterprise to everybody a month ago. So we're trying to be on the front edge of kind of everything we do. In portfolio management, we have a very quantitative approach. You know, I slept at a holiday in last night when I go on TV because the reality of it is, is we're sometimes reverse engineering the story out of the math that drives the positioning that we're going into.
Starting point is 00:15:00 And you can see a lot of these things, but I am amazed. It's like I have 15 analysts working for me in my fingertips. So when I was a banker back in the days at Morgan Stanley and doing analysis, some MD would come to me that we'd iterate and then I'd go back to him two days later. I am doing that same thing. We're working on an acquisition right now, several. And I'm doing that same thing. And it's instant feedback.
Starting point is 00:15:29 So you can kind of interact. You know, he's making me think of it. He's probably like me where like, I just have too many interns, right? Because I say yes, can my daughter, can my nephew? I know the feeling. The problem is, like, they don't have any skill. It used to be, I'd be like, hey, go tell me all the acquisitions Microsoft made in the last five years and summarize what technologies are buying itself.
Starting point is 00:15:46 Now they do. Two seconds to go back. So I don't know what they're going to do for the other nine days and nine hours and 48. The intern fans the machine. You know what I would tell you. I would tell you that the intern now, the average is going to be good to great. and the great is going to be game-changing for the enterprise. I just can see efficiency happening all over the place.
Starting point is 00:16:12 So while we might not lay anybody off as a result of this, I can tell you our pace of hiring will slowly slow. I'm hearing this everywhere. And then ultimately, profitability is going to explode as a result of productivity. And I think that's endemic in the market. So here's the problem then. So then here's the problem. You have, I don't know what it is.
Starting point is 00:16:33 150, 200 enterprise SaaS companies in the public markets. Forget about pricing because no one's going to be able to pull off a big enough increase. The real problem is most of these companies are selling by headcount. And what we're all saying here is headcount may not shrink, but it ain't going to grow to the extent that it used to anywhere. I would like to know his view on that because the reality of it is, is what does. does that mean for profitability for these companies? If they still have essential kind of infrastructure and tools, doesn't that ultimately make their profitability explode as well? And isn't that a positive thing at some point? And so should we just watch the earnings? Wait, hold on. We have charts
Starting point is 00:17:21 for this. John, so ironically, throw up charge five. So service now reported this morning down 18%. Not bad. They have their headcount by department. It was my final trade two days ago or yesterday. John You can say the earnings? Have you learned nothing from me? I do it all been. So, yeah, we've all been there. Q1, 2025, 26, 6,698 employees. Q1, 2026, 29,732.
Starting point is 00:17:47 John, go to the next chart. Their stock-based comp is exploding. Like, have they not got in the memo at all that the street does not like this? Look at that. So, it's breaking out. SBC didn't matter until it really mattered. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:18:00 Stock-based competition is, now we're going down, like, the twig down. the branch down the tree. But like, it's just a beta factor. So when tech outperforms, the ones with lots of stock pay comp outperform, when underreforms, it's one of the lots of unreformed. So it's just, it's just a beta factor because it's like an RD intensity factor. But, you know, you could have died on that hill. You lost a lot of money on the stock base comp hill over the last 15 years. So I got, you got to manage risk around it. But like, I kind of agree with Ross Point, or big time, I agree with it. Like, it's about productivity. And the question is like, what's in the price?
Starting point is 00:18:28 Look at Walmart, maybe as the ultimate poster child. Like, what would make the market go parabolically higher. One of the things would be Walmart gets on. It says in 2030, we'll have less employees than we have now. Which might actually end up being the case. It might. And there's a reason it trades it, whatever, 38 times forward earnings. It's not because they have three and a half percent net margin or whatever the number is now. It's because you're in the prices, five or six eventually. They're going to nail predicting how many jugs of milk or in every... I think that's too early. Is his point, we are at the tip of the spear for these companies figuring out whether they can make that migration, figuring out the implications for the business, you guys probably are too. We are too. We're learning
Starting point is 00:19:07 as we go and we're learning at a pace that I've never seen before. Gee, I wonder why Wall Street hates, why the country hates Wall Street. You just said, what would make Walmart really go parabolic if they come out and say by 2030, we're going to have less employees. So economists and stock people are, they've never been more incongruous. Like if you, if you, I remember when I was at Morgan Stanley, our economists would say stuff like, I want capital spending and I want hiring. And I'm thinking, if I own a stock and they announce either of those two things, I'm selling it immediately.
Starting point is 00:19:35 Right. Like, there's a giant disconnect between. That doesn't sound good. Right. Right. Like, I don't want hiring at my company. Well, it's more potential customers with higher paychecks. Yeah, that's all bad.
Starting point is 00:19:44 It's one. More health care. You know, more right. Right. But so they, the GDP and the economy are kind of different than picking stocks, right? I mean, look, you had a guest on last week or the week before, a personal friend and favorite of on, Encore. Concord.
Starting point is 00:19:58 Do you know 70,000? people and counting of watch that episode. She is such a star. I know her for really long time. I met her through you. And you skipped a couple things about her in her bio, one of which she has a PhD from Stanford. And the other is she has the number one performing growth fund
Starting point is 00:20:10 in the last 12 months in the entire of all growth managers. All right. But she said her out. We can't be honest. But she said something that is totally awesome. Okay. And I've stolen it from her for the last week, which is people who are like bearish on AI,
Starting point is 00:20:23 don't you don't get it. Like they, if you think like it's a bubble and it's over? She said it's nonsense. Yeah, yeah. And everything sounds smarter when she says it for sure. Right. But like I just feel like, you know, we're on the precipice of it. It's like, you know, the reason there's earning estimates that are 18% for the S&P this year and 17 next year and 43 in tech this year and 25 of next year is because you're just, you're like in the, we might be in the fifth inning of the stocks, but we're in the first inning of like hitting the number.
Starting point is 00:20:51 You think that's why small caps are breaking out. Part of the reason? Maybe something to be. You know that the S&P 493. So, no mag 7. Earnings are supposed to be up 15. Let's call it 16%. There's got to be some AI productivity.
Starting point is 00:21:09 There's got to be. Has to be. Why else would that happen? No, there is. It's not 8% GDP growth, but there is underlying economic strength, right? You can definitely, just if you look at the price action of just about everything, whether it be spreads, it is telling you that there is a miss between positioning and what's happening in the underlying economy. I don't think there's anybody better at reading the tea leaves than Tom Lee.
Starting point is 00:21:38 I think we could all agree that this is the best data guy out there. Tom Lee sees around corners. It's freaking unbelievable. And how does he see around corners? He's watching these cross-asset movements, right? And, you know, one thing that scared me, you might have said it on your show is he kind of thinks there's going to be this like mid-year pullback that scares the shit. If they're going to test the new Fed chair at some point.
Starting point is 00:22:05 Yeah. So and. Meaning if I don't know why I'm missing that the market doesn't expect, there'll be a big overreaction. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, but when he when he's looking at these things and seeing what's happening in, you know,
Starting point is 00:22:20 uh, quality names like, like the semis and what's happening in software, he's listening and many don't right many get sucked up in the headline narrative of what's happening in the war and they start to think second and third derivative effects of what that would could be but what is it yeah today what what is it yeah i mean i think if earning like the way to think about it might be if the street's got 43% earnings for tech and yeah a lot of it's microtovina but let's say it's got 43% growth and let's say the real number's 30 and it's got 25 next year and the room numbers 15. Tech's not going to be 45% cheaper a year because it stayed flat for the entire next 12 to 18 months. Like, unless there's a much bigger growth scare
Starting point is 00:23:05 coming in 28 or 29 or something, like the odds are just the absolute level of growth is high enough that things work. And so I think the market woke up to that a few weeks ago. But like, where could be people be complacent? Like I did a big risk dinner this week with a bunch of risk officers. And like, nobody thinks. Yeah. It's not, it's not exactly. Rob wasn't invited to that. No, okay. Rob. I wasn't. Yeah. Rob, not his, not his crew. But like, annual value at risk, dinner. What people are, like, if you say, what are people complacent about?
Starting point is 00:23:37 It's probably that everybody thinks oil eventually is going to come lower and probably faster. So, like, right now, nobody's taking their numbers down for input costs in industrials or for, you know, select, you know, energy sensitive consumer because they just think, you know, second derivative Hormuz news is positive. If I get bad Hormuz news, markets down 40 bits. If I get good, it's up 150. So, like, you know, whatever.
Starting point is 00:24:04 Nobody wants to look like an asshole again. Right. You called, you called 17 to last zero, like, tariff problems. So I'm not being the Hormuz problem guy, right? So, like, people are a little bit, you know, so I'm not saying that's going to happen, but I just think people are playing for, so, like, on the Fed, like, I'm not sure cutting rates is going to be foolish for multiple
Starting point is 00:24:24 like it was for years. And frankly, how can it even happen? It creates an inflation expectation problem that is going to be pretty dramatic, I think. It's why you have to own some energy in the portfolios. It's kind of like a tail hedge to this. Do you think most market participants would prefer the price of gasoline go back to three in change versus another 25 basis point weight cut? I do.
Starting point is 00:24:49 I do, too. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. No doubt. Well, there's a higher likelihood of that, to Rob's point. But also, like, it depends where you're on the cycle. Like, when it was the end of 2022, and you perfectly covered your Nvidia, Tesla,
Starting point is 00:25:01 and meta shorts, which are all down 65%. And you started buying them max long on Jan 1. Right. You're logic. Actually, it was December. Okay. You got to get a bad. You got to get a bad.
Starting point is 00:25:11 Okay. So then your logic was, well, the Fed's closer to the end of the hiking cycle in the beginning, eventual accommodations coming. The Fed action is going to be super bullish for multiples. Nailed it, right? But the question is now three plus years later, if they get incrementally double, Is that really like all awesome? Or is it because like stuff slowing
Starting point is 00:25:28 and therefore like at some point out of growth. Yeah, it's a little bit different. I'd rather have the gas price come down. Is the semiconductor rally the most out of control thing you've ever seen? No. It's not. I think it's justified too.
Starting point is 00:25:40 Is it the most out of control? I've seen a lot of control stuff in a hole. I think it's so completely out of control the pace of it and the relentlessness. Micron is bigger than Johnson and Johnson. Okay. So look, I'm, I'm a, you know, I used to be a semiconductor analyst. Hold on.
Starting point is 00:25:53 Last 16 days. 35% for the semis, 16 days. It is the best rolling 16 day. I know it's a random number. Best rolling 16 day period in the history of the SMH. Never before. And I understand the reasons. I don't live in a cave.
Starting point is 00:26:14 People will just buy anything semi-related every single day. When you look at semis and you look at tech, you really have to look at it. Like even software, look at software X Microsoft and with Microsoft. When you look at semis, you know, your tech book is going to look like it grows more slowly and is more expensive than the tech index unless you're overweight in Micron because Micron trades at four and a half times next year's earnings and is growing like 100%. Right. So, you know, we know it's cyclical, but you got to see something that comes along and challenges that probability of that outcome. And I don't know of them earning enough. Right.
Starting point is 00:26:51 Right. That is right. As long as earnings kit, it's hard to see right now. But, you know, the pianos don't hit you in the face. They hit you in the back of the head. Invidia has grown earnings substantially in each of the last four quarters. Stock has not gone up. I think the stock will go up and go up a lot.
Starting point is 00:27:08 I know, but I'm saying two things can be true. You can have a stock price that just refuses to go along with incredible fundamental news, which is all we've ever seen from. But Mike runs estimates plus or minus, I know if somebody can, I'm sure somebody we'll comment on this. But, like, there were roughly 50 bucks in earnings per share for next year before they reported, and they're roughly 100 now. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:27:30 It's unbelievable. So the magnitude, one of the things we're doing right now, we're researching is look at all the companies where two years earlier, the analyst estimates were most off, like, ever. Is this high on the list? And those are the best stocks. And this guy, yeah, in both directions, look at the ones where they weigh off too high, too, just to see if there's a pattern. But, like, this is one of the bigger free cash flow estimate misses ever in 25 years in the market.
Starting point is 00:27:51 I want to. So when you say it's crazy. like, yeah, the price action is massive, but it's also one of the crazier fundamental. It's crazy because it's such a huge change and nobody knew it was coming. Like rough order magnitude, people had like a billion and a half in free cash flow for next year. And it was like three and a half billion over two years. And now it's 80 billion over the two. Like the magnitude is like zeros off.
Starting point is 00:28:13 Yeah. I want to do one last thing on software before we leave that. So you talk to a lot of, you have a lot of hedge fund customers. I'm imagining that nobody wants to touch software. although I'm sure there's a lot of dip buyers that got their handburn. But service now, for example, so they report this number, a number of customers with $5 million ACV.
Starting point is 00:28:30 John Chart 3, please. And they went from 434 customers paying $5 million up to $630 in Q1 with a 97% retention ratio. Now, their margins came down, but this is still a good business. 100%. The problem is nobody... It sits on the macro.
Starting point is 00:28:48 I mean, you're going to have to manage all this. But the stock is down 18% today because nobody... Isn't that scary? They did 22% revenue growth. They hit the numbers and the stock still lost 20% of its value after being down 50-something percent. Isn't that scary? So when you talk to your clients, like, are they, what's their view? Is everybody like, I can this, I can this on investable?
Starting point is 00:29:08 How do I, how do I buy this? So the only thing I'd parsing of what you asked me is I think it really depends if you're long only or a hedge fund, right? Most hedge fund money, like they don't have to own any of this stuff. Let's do long old thing. Or they can pair off, right? So it's really more the long only guy who's, you know, is what he is. He's a software analyst.
Starting point is 00:29:26 Like, why does GM make cars? Like, you know, like the software a house, he's got to pick winners losers in the group and identify how to like outperform the software benchmark, right? And the PM's job is to figure out what exposure to the aggregate group should be. So I think most analysts are going to say, I want to own stuff with the revenue is accelerating. And, you know, if you look at a two by two grid of like, you know, beat on revenue, beat on earnings, missed on rev. The worst bucket is what now reported, which is you find on revenue and you,
Starting point is 00:29:51 mis-on earnings because the market doesn't know where the clearing margins are, but you just expose the fact that, like, your margins and the out year are lower. And margins came down. Their guidance from margins came down. So it's not trading 18% lower today. It is, it might be trading 4% lower on 2030. Like, you have to warm yourself up to that idea of like the uncertainty on the margin profile just changed. There are assets, including now, could be one of them. And I'm just not smart enough to know that this could be like a great entry point in a two or three year. But I need to see some price action that we all know are going to shake our head, yes, where a company misses and doesn't go down.
Starting point is 00:30:23 That's it. I've been seen a single, and the stock doesn't move. We're not there. I've been a single penalty for missing that hasn't been harsh. Today was the first day where I thought a couple of beatings were good.
Starting point is 00:30:33 URI, Texas Instruments, up massive. And, you know, but if we track this thing, the penalty for missing versus reward for beating ratio, and not only has been very skewed toward the penalty harsher, but it's like cheap stocks missing or going down more than expensive stocks that are missing.
Starting point is 00:30:47 So what type of market does it happen in? A topy market Like, yeah, I think The good news, I guess, is more companies are beating than missing So that's why the market's fine But like if more companies start missing Like we can't buy stuff Where we don't have any evidence
Starting point is 00:31:05 Like the best thing ever is like, you know, the old days Like Caterpillar misses and it's unch And you're like, all right, game on. Like I mean, missing is unch than I don't be. Missing. Yeah, but we're not seeing it. Missing is annihilated, right? Yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 00:31:16 Put this tech multiple compression chart up this is a thing. What do you guys make? What do you guys make of this? I think it's seven. Here we go. So let me narrate this for the people that are listening. Not watching.
Starting point is 00:31:27 We're starting in 2020. Right around COVID time, we were at 16 times for tech's forward PE ratio. Peek out in the 2021 bubble at 28.7, fall to a low of 18 and a half during the year of efficiency, 2022. Then we rally through 2024. we hit an all-time, not all-time, all-time in this chart, 32 times forward earnings,
Starting point is 00:31:53 drops early 2025 to 21, back to 31 at the end of 2025, one of the best years ever, and now here we sit at 19, huge de-rating on forward earnings. Very quickly. Very fast, very unexpected. I don't remember reading any strategist saying.
Starting point is 00:32:11 Micro's estimates are up 100%. Is that all this is? Is the growth rate growing faster than people can- estimates are for 43% growth in earnings this year, then that, that, you can have multiple being high because the E went down or because the E was notching and the P went up. And in this case, it's more than the E is going up really fast. And pricing is. I'll give you one nugget. If you look at the S&P 500, the whole 500, Q126 versus Q125, Eurovier growth, 45% of the entire SP 500's growth was from Micron and Nvidia. If you believe this, this geopolitical risk leads to
Starting point is 00:32:45 slower economic trajectory, markets are going to pay up for that growth, and you're going to see that go right back up. Because if there are less companies growing, they'll go right back to the old playbook. Or if the E comes in and it's onchon multiple, the stocks would be 40% higher. Or microt will be up on you or whatever. So it's a multivariable world and you just showed one variable or whatever the criticism is. What were you telling client? What did you make of the stair step lower during the war?
Starting point is 00:33:13 the fact that the market just wouldn't puke. What was that telling you? I know it's hindsight now, but... It made me more bullish. Same. Yeah. We didn't have a panic. We went lower.
Starting point is 00:33:26 I came it to the year. So that's actually what kept us invested completely through that. No, we did upgrade quality. Like I said, when you get any volatility, it's a great opportunity to kind of pivot to a higher quality name in the same sector. That's not getting derated as much. or has shown more resilience in their earnings. Oh, because you say, wait a minute, we can now own this.
Starting point is 00:33:49 Yeah, especially if you're, especially if you're a long-only relative investor in a certain class, whether that be dividends, value, growth, and you're kind of managing to a benchmark in a portfolio construct. And you can say, okay, now I can own this. I could never own this. I mean, for so long, we never owned Nvidia until it traded below 30 times earnings. We waited it and we missed a lot in doing that, but boy, did we buy it at the right time? So if you can still employ your discipline and when volatility creates the opportunity to upgrade quality and you can move from X to Y, you do it.
Starting point is 00:34:28 And that leads to a lot of outperformance over time. Volatility, though, to your point, within a reasonable. Within a reasonable ban. Like not a free fall where all of a sudden it's like, wait a minute. That's that whole different atmosphere thing. We didn't get that this year. And you won't get it from geopolitical. You get those from financial issues, right?
Starting point is 00:34:47 So this credit issue that we kind of, I don't really believe, you know, I know a lot of people do, but I've been an ardent defender of the equity that sits beneath it and the economy being strong enough that these private equity firms are not walking away from these businesses and the credit's going to be fine. And the market's kind of telling you a little more, at least. least the more public markets that spreads are remaining contained. And listen, a lot of the credit in private credit sits the highest tier of the capital stack. So you're going to wipe out a lot before they're wiped out, right? Yeah. So from my lens, it is that that is more of a concern
Starting point is 00:35:30 than anything, because that's the liquidity that feeds the ecosystem that we all thrive off. The financial condition. Now, now, I will say that if you cannot raise, money going forward. We talked about this on the other show. The reality of it is, is if your forward ability to raise capital from private investors has been impaired, and that was your growth strategy, right? Toast. And though they're not coming back right away, but the institutions are staying in because they see the value of this. You're to be more discerning because you have to be, because you don't have as much capital. And so the strong are going to get strong. And so the strong, are going to get stronger, they're going to get financed,
Starting point is 00:36:11 in the week are going to require more investment, and some of them will get it. And some of them won't. Maybe buy some KKRR. I've thought about those stocks might be bottomings. Look at us. So Blackstone. Yeah, I know. I mean, maybe. Blackstone, I mean, yeah. I didn't know which one you're going to show. Blackstone today.
Starting point is 00:36:27 I tax loss sold, not me, the team. Taxloss sold Blackstone. I got a lot of shit on it on the show because I was such a champion of these things, but it was just tax loss. So you bought something else? We didn't buy something else in the space, but we would likely go back in to Blackstone. All right. So Blackstone got whacked off today. It's down 6%.
Starting point is 00:36:46 And this is the private credit fundraising on a gross basis by quarter. Okay? Down almost in half, not quite, $3.3.3 billion in the prior quarter, down to $1.9 billion. This is growth, not net. Okay? So I don't think the route flows. So a dramatic, dramatic slowing. But not to zero.
Starting point is 00:37:03 This is the media narrative pausing people who are about to allocate. 100%. Of course. I mean, it's also human nature and advisors, we're advisors, to say, hey, do I want to try to take advantage of this or do and steer into the eye of the storm? Most people don't do that. Most investors, the success that we've had as a company, period, is identifying areas where forward returns are headed higher.
Starting point is 00:37:34 But pricing has not come down. We're not even in the storm. It's a flow storm. That's it. So that's right. But let's use a different example in when we had the tech crisis in venture companies having trouble raising money and it re-rated down and they pivoted to venture debt. There was an enormous opportunity in venture debt because they didn't want to sell equity at those levels. And if you steered into that storm just in a different way, right, what it led to is higher
Starting point is 00:38:03 forward returns. And you see that episodically in markets. So I think one of the, One of the great challenges that advisors have is keeping investors invested and how you do it is by identifying the high optionality within the underlying crisis. They will have a greater probability of success on the other side. But if I read a headline that said six months from now, great news or it would say horrible news, all of these, leveraged loans are now trading 20% cheaper than where they were. The thrust of that article would be written as a way to bash the private credit industry. And you go right in. But then I would say, I love it.
Starting point is 00:38:52 I haven't bought any of this shit yet. This is my opportunity. 100%. I don't think, I agree with you. I don't think most people think that way, number one. And for financial advisors in particular, what do you think most of their clients would say back to them? Hey, let's buy, let's buy some of it. this asset class that the Wall Street Journal
Starting point is 00:39:10 is screaming bloody murder over on the cover in the newspaper. Why would we want to do that? That sounds crazy. And I would say, did you see Blackstone's partners step in to buy, you know, take a gigantic chunk of their own money and buy this? You think they're doing that because they have massive
Starting point is 00:39:27 concerns about the asset class? K. Kare's you just bought 10 million bucks a stock. That's why I mentioned KKR. I didn't know the blacksmith. But I suddenly bought the pushback I got was somebody was like, yeah, well, the guys have got a I'm like, yeah, but people don't like throw $10 million on purpose. Like, you know, the person's signaling.
Starting point is 00:39:44 But right now, right now, the pricing with a few obvious examples, it's not like that leverage loan market is in distress. It isn't. It's not like there are these massive discounts. But the narrative gets sucked in and pushed out so quickly. I think I like the equities better than the products would be my, would be my comment. Oh, for sure. I would like the equities better.
Starting point is 00:40:06 I'd rather be a GP. If I could buy KKR and Blackstone I got like, I got like Piss a year ago from somebody on a private credit product and I was looking at it. It was like, it was like, unlevered 13% private credit return. And I was like, sorry, sorry, I don't want to be like the annoying client, but who's lending to me at 13% unlevered?
Starting point is 00:40:26 Because like how many, I mean, what is this? Is it like nail salons in Orange County? Like who needs 13% for me? Like this math doesn't make sense. So like the stocks are probably, you know, on a two-year review, you know, better. But the stocks are cut in half. The private credit's still training one for one.
Starting point is 00:40:40 That's my point. You're not getting a discount in the underlying. You sure are getting a discount if you come in at the GP level by the stocks. So, all right. You want to do this chart with the high? Yeah. So part of the narrative over the last couple of weeks is, yeah, we're hitting all-time highs, which is awesome. Feels good.
Starting point is 00:40:58 Feels better than being down. But there's not a ton of stocks making 52-week highs. So this chart is from. Jason Gepford, Settlement trader. So he's looking at the S&P 500 return after the first record, it's specific, but whatever, after the first record high in one month, and under 5% of issues are at a 52-week high. That's kind of odd, under 5%.
Starting point is 00:41:21 And it's a mixed bag to down. It's not great. Positive, 33% of the time, one month out, 33% of the time, 2 month out, 42% of the time, 3 month out, I mean, these are not great numbers. And it's not, and it's not like one time. This happened, oh, shit, in 29, all right? 83, 90, 29, 23, 95, 2015, and 20.
Starting point is 00:41:42 Do you want me to shit on this? Yeah, please. Go ahead. Please. Okay. I'll just start by saying, I don't think this kind of stuff is helpful for predicting subsequent return. This is not statistically significant.
Starting point is 00:41:54 The market's way more concentrated different than used to be. You guys are financial advisors. I'm not. But I can empirically show you that any kind of breadth metrics did not effectively help you make money. They're usually volatility gauges. So if I were one of Rob's advisors or Rob, And somebody said, I'd like to time my market entry here.
Starting point is 00:42:10 I would say you will destroy values and this kind of data over your career, whether it's VIX or moving average convergence versus. You don't like probabilistic forward return studies in general. I know this isn't statistically significant. I know it's not a, you know, it's all like how relevant is the 1929 data to 2026. Like all you really said is that there's some big stocks that are up a lot. So not, you know, and not all of them are. Okay. Good.
Starting point is 00:42:34 Good debunk. Let's take a quick look. But it, like, I want to just caveat, like, that could work right now. I'm just saying if you gave me a thousand of these charts over the next few years, I'll take the under on more than $500. I actually don't think anybody invest based on that. I think people use that. You want to be fully invested in equities.
Starting point is 00:42:50 You don't want to make one-month market calls? I think people use stuff like that to justify something that they're already going to do anyway. When it comes time to buy, I promise you, when it comes time to buy, none of your clients are going to want to buy. So if they were super smart and got out in exactly the right. time, they've got to stay in the game. The question is how you're positioning within staying in the game. And I think it's gotten a little tougher because of the index concentration. You have markets. So you can't kind of pick your spots within that in many cases. And so a lot of times
Starting point is 00:43:26 you can use math to marry both technicals and fundamental factors in a way that can, you know, maybe put you in a better position on either side of that move. And you guys know better than me. Like it all is a function of like how rich the person is and how much assets in or one. You know, if you got Mr. Mrs. Rich bags who were 80 with 200 million bucks at Microsoft stock,
Starting point is 00:43:45 like they're solving a different problem than some guy. You know, it's all a function. You know, what's the charity, what's the taxes? Like, so it's really hard to make a blanket statement about that.
Starting point is 00:43:53 But like, I definitely wouldn't be deploying saying, like, let me sell my, my S&P exposure because of some, you know, breath metric from 1929. You might like this.
Starting point is 00:44:01 You might not. Yeah. Tell me if this makes sense to you. John Charttime. Todd Sone shared this. The semiconductor sector is 16% of the market, the S&P. Energy, healthcare, staples, and utilities are 19%. Talk about touching tips. These things are very close. Why isn't that rational? Why isn't that rational? Why isn't that rational? Why is this not rational? Right now. I'm asking you guys. What is the profitability of these states? and utility stocks or...
Starting point is 00:44:35 Okay, I would guess you would know better than me that if you add up the profitability, just earnings, and maybe that's not the right metric, of energy, healthcare, staples, and utilities, especially healthcare in there, it would dwarf semis.
Starting point is 00:44:48 But maybe not because of me video. Well, here's the thing. I'm sorry. No, you did. I love it. I love it. I didn't mean... It is...
Starting point is 00:44:54 What is happening to forward guidance? Is really what is the driver... The prices are following... 2030. What's the 2030 distribution of outcomes? Yeah. And what's the Constitution? The SEPs is a quirky index.
Starting point is 00:45:08 Like, you know, it's 35% the grade eight, you know, Broadcom plus the other seven. It's probably 60% in AIETF, semi-ETF. I mean, if you take like G. Vernova and Vistra and Constellation and... It's all AI. And eaten and... Their derivative beneficiaries,
Starting point is 00:45:25 tons of industrials. Yeah, well, he said, sorry, it's about the forward expectations. Like, that could be wrong. It could modify itself. But like, yeah, what you just said is semis have been better than energy stuff. Yeah, no shit.
Starting point is 00:45:34 So, is there an upward... Hold on. Is there an upward balance? The probability you were going to show a chart that I wasn't going to shit on was incredibly low. Especially from a competitor. Yeah, I don't even know that.
Starting point is 00:45:47 Is there an upward bound to this? Of course. What is it? Six months before, 70s 30%? Proved to be too high. Okay. I have to disclose that we are happy consumers of strategies. Yeah, Trent is a great guy.
Starting point is 00:45:59 And I like, I'm not... There's no, there's no credit. There's a big world. Lots of people doing. stuff. But like, I just think when it comes to, like, statistical significance or this kind of, it's an interesting observation. But like, it kind of makes more sense to be. Like, you asked me a while ago, like, is this the craziest thing you've ever seen? Like, I've seen a lot of crazy stuff. Not really. It's more crazy to me when like zero revenue stuff goes crazy. Or, you know,
Starting point is 00:46:19 like that's a little bit more weird to me than my grind trades at four and a half times next year's earnings. The earnings are 100% higher than you were a few weeks ago. And there's a short as far as I can see in their core product. And you can't produce anything without. How does a price, how does a price find balance? like I know it's when buyers and sellers you know sort of match up but like how should investors think about I can't buy this now
Starting point is 00:46:38 so I sand disk microns like how to how to invest usually this is just the fact of the matter the price movement once it starts until something knocks it off that that trajectory
Starting point is 00:46:52 you say this all the time I do I do and it's absolutely you know what I say all the time and I say this on the show especially people say I took a price I took a profit. Nothing wrong taking a profit.
Starting point is 00:47:06 And then I look at the- Sure there is. You pay taxes. That's a great buy signal. I look at the chart and the chart always looks like this grind higher. And my comment is like,
Starting point is 00:47:16 okay, but why today? Why don't you just trail it? If you're nervous, throw it like a 10-day moving average stop loss, trail it behind the share price and let the market take you out. Why are you deciding that this is over?
Starting point is 00:47:29 Just evaluate the sell ex post and say, did my cell work versus some comparable basket beta adjusted and that destroys value. When you're not even English, I love it. I'm saying like, do real work. Like, do real work. Go evaluate whether that trading decision makes sense.
Starting point is 00:47:41 Like, I'm with, I'm, we're all agreeing. I just, you know, we do this for a living. I get people's portfolio. I'm saying you have a stock that's been going up for three years. I'll say, today's the day you took a problem? I'll say it differently. I'll say it differently. Do you think if you buy stocks that were just up 100% today,
Starting point is 00:47:57 you'll make more money, or should you buy stocks that were just down 50%? 50% the previous. I'm a hundred. For sure. Obviously. To who? Not obvious to everyone.
Starting point is 00:48:06 Who cares what it already did? All you're trying to think about is, what do I do today and what's going to happen the foreseeable future? You care what it already did if it's gone parabolic and you're the last asshole buying it. If it's a grind hire that went, that took time, I can buy that chart. And I do. And I do. Not a stock that doubles in three months.
Starting point is 00:48:26 That's different. It's the rate at which it went off. Actually, I'm not saying I'm surprised. so there's no surprise in my voice, but you actually had a good idea there and we'll study that. We can look at like stocks that have gone up. Oh, I've already done this work. 100%.
Starting point is 00:48:38 I will send you my work on the subject. It's called the best stocks in the market. I will not get bullish on a stock that just went from 30 to 60 in a week. I understand it could go to 90. But if you just don't do those and focus on the stocks that climb, that's institutions. You know what? You can't study that? Because a lot of the stocks that go from 30 to 60 today,
Starting point is 00:48:58 that's the meme shit. And that didn't exist in the back test. Okay, so we can study that. We can study every stock. No, no, no. I'm just saying, don't challenge me. Dude, my point is there was, the Reddit boards were not here in the 80s. Can we do something that you just wrote up, a spin-off playbook?
Starting point is 00:49:16 Yeah. Okay. This is original Adam Parker research. Try a variant. I'm going to quote you to you. And then I'd love for you to, I'd love you to go off. Hopefully this isn't as bad as my health care call. All right.
Starting point is 00:49:30 No, no, no, no, no. You said in 2025, the median spin-off reached a 26-year peak transaction size of $3.3 billion across 11 transactions. So far this year, only one spinoff has been completed. Comcast, spun off Vercent. Right. Okay. Channel you and I both call. That's right.
Starting point is 00:49:51 But two have been announced, MSGS and GPC, which you'll tell us about. Several more are rumored. 20 spinoffs were announced in 2025 that have yet to be. completed, and six of these companies are mid-cap or larger. In today's research, we provide context around the spin-off performance, analyze historical market reactions, and supply our playbook for the future. I want to say one thing before you go. What is a spinoff? I love spinoffs dating back to my time as a retail broker, telling stories begging for money. We pitched the parent companies of spinoffs ritualistically. Almost didn't matter what it was. Because the pitch. The pitch is, you know,
Starting point is 00:50:31 to the people on the other end of the phone was you own three com. Guess what? You're also going to get palm. Like that would be, and people, wait, I get two stuff. People love catalysts. I get two, love a catalyst, and I get two stocks for the price of one. They didn't understand the fact that the price of the parent would adjust on IPO day. They just love the idea.
Starting point is 00:50:52 Remain co. Wait, Rob, Adam, for, for real, I know I can, Rob. Adam, why do people, why do companies spin off companies? Usually, I think the primary. Unlocked share all their value. tax would be a tax reason, right? It's usually a tax reason. So like if you, meaning, meaning like if I'm, we both used to work in mortgage. If I'm mortgage Stanley and I sell Discover because I made a ton of money on it, if I sell it, I, to somebody else, I have to pay taxes
Starting point is 00:51:16 on it. If I spin it, there's a massive tax. So there could be, I would say that's the primary driver, but it could be on lock value. You think there's an underappreciated asset. It could be that there's a new management of the spin code, which would be more focused on that one Capital structure, optimization, disenergy. Like, there's a list. Valuation. But I would say, yeah, I would say taxes are usually the driver. Now, I guess, like, there's a lot of things.
Starting point is 00:51:41 First of all, like, what you used to sell, I would say I can empirically show is not a good idea. The spin code's due better than the main coast. I'll go back to 1998 and apologize to people. The spin code is typically on average, do better than remain codes. But, you know, it's an interesting point you're making. You maybe think it's something really kind of interesting, which is one of the signal that works in Kwan, and it's kind of pesky and it works, is a signal called low price. So we think about how stupid that is.
Starting point is 00:52:08 Like, low price means it's no denominator. Like just generally, like, stocks with a lower price, stocks with the higher price. And you could study that because we tell people like to buy low price stocks. Because they think it's like $2 is better than four independent of like denominator. Yeah, buy low. So you're, you're going to be two stocks instead of one. It's kind of funny and probably used to work. It did work.
Starting point is 00:52:28 Yeah. But recently in the last. decade plus since there's been like computers, you know, the spin codes usually do better because typically when they spin them, they know the numbers and the estimates are pretty achievable for the next couple quarters. They have a path toward margin expansion or something that the market likes. And usually they're spinning something in a different industry. So, you know, there's some rationale. I think, you know, we have a lot of clients that are law firms and boards and management of companies. And I think they're just all looking to unlock value. If you're a 40, 30,
Starting point is 00:52:57 50 billion a market cap company, 20, 30, 40, you're sort of thinking, like, is there a plan I can get, like, big? Can I get to $100 billion someday? How do I do it? How do I unlock value? And so you're just looking at transactions. You're just saying, like, can I buy something? Can I sell something?
Starting point is 00:53:09 Can I do something with my capital structure? And I think, more importantly, if you're a good person, you probably want to be preceded as a good steward of capital over your tenure managing the company. So I think spin coes are topical. So you're saying the spin is better than the parent? Or the parent's better than the parent's better than remain caught. But on average is tricky because some of these are
Starting point is 00:53:27 so specific. Generally, you want to buy the spin cone not to remain. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense to me, just anecdotally, thinking about some of the big winners from spin-offs that I, like, Zoet is coming out of Pfizer. G.
Starting point is 00:53:40 G. G. Vernova. Monster. G. G. GVernove is a monster. Like, some of these, I think, of it, are 10 baggers.
Starting point is 00:53:45 And I remember what they came out of. The original 12-month performance out of the UTX spin where you got, you know, Carrier and Otis and, you know, RETI-I-I-W. Was it a 20-25 spin or a 20-24? Maybe. 22, I think. Yeah, a couple of years. Okay.
Starting point is 00:53:59 I mean, this is... But we just think generally, like, if you're a human being analyzing stocks, like, where can you add value? Machines are going to kill you in a lot of places, but humans are going to add value whenever there's, like a management decision-making, creating or destroying value. So I love analyzing stuff like M&A. Can we show your charts? We show?
Starting point is 00:54:14 We got them. I know he had any. All right. John, let's go through this. You could just narrate for us, like, briefly what each of these... I'm surprised you find this is super interesting. I just... I mean, thanks for any time you throw our work on the screen.
Starting point is 00:54:26 Try it. Trivariate, ladies and gentlemen. I'm all in. Thank you. All right. No, I just, I guess I just think that, like, the law firms and the bankers are pitching management teams on doing stuff. And one of the things that they can point to success for is spinning.
Starting point is 00:54:41 And I just surprised there haven't been more. You can tell on the left, there's been 20, 30 of these things a year. And there's only been a couple recently. And I just feel like there could be a wave of these things going forward. Generally, mid-cap companies do it. Not mega-cap companies. It's kind of the one usual. Look at the returns.
Starting point is 00:54:55 Spin code. is black, remain co as blue. Maybe, I don't know what the next slide is. Can you show me? What else do you download? A couple more, maybe flip ahead. How many did you put, take it? Every single thing that you over there. Keep going. Keep going. I'll show you the written.
Starting point is 00:55:08 Even the ones you didn't publish, I found them. Omar, keep, go see what you have. Keep going. So I think there's like a line chart. Yeah, the one on the right here is the mean industry group relative return. So this is how the stock did versus its industry. Because I didn't want it to be like sand disk was awesome and you're not normalizing for the industry, right? So the black line is the typical spin coal performance and that X-axis is the number of days. So like kind of 250 new trading days in a year.
Starting point is 00:55:30 So two years out, the average spin beats its industry by 10%. And the average remain kind of lags by a couple. So I mean, that is statistically significant. Yeah, it's a real number. And that's robust across sectors. Pretty much. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, okay.
Starting point is 00:55:42 Yeah. Love it. Yeah. Well done. Well done. Now, Rob, would you like to unveil your research on spinoffs? We don't have that in the bag. It's trivarians research.
Starting point is 00:55:53 No, but you know, whatever. Why would we do it twice? I wanted to ask you about some of your favorite stocks this summer. So you and your team gave us a couple of talk about. Let's hear what you're thinking. Hold on. We're skipping spring. Is this like these are only going to work in the summer? Yeah, only for the summer.
Starting point is 00:56:11 I don't buy these until the summer. I don't know if I operate. I don't know if I can operate with that level of precision. However, I think it's a balanced way to think about how you invest at this time in possibly going in the summer. it's a marriage of, you know, putting together the highest conviction names that are at their all-time highs. Right. No question.
Starting point is 00:56:34 Married with some beneficiaries of that in energy, energy specifically, and married with, you know, energy, you know, producers that I think could benefit from further crisis in the Middle East. And then for the sake of Adam, we put in Gilead because we think you got to have a health care name in there. I like it. And so you're putting weight on two different skis and adding something a little different that I think is reasonably attractive. Yeah, Broadcom here. This is from your team. King of Customs, Silicon, Data Center networking infrastructure.
Starting point is 00:57:10 Position to win as hypers, spend more. I mean, this stock has obviously been a huge winner. I know you guys have made a lot of money with it. You still like it here. We do. It's the object in motion stays in motion. They're on track for 60% revenue growth this year. they have industry leading profitability.
Starting point is 00:57:29 They're a leader in both custom silicon data center networking hardware. The market is not stupid. Could you have more? Taking this stock to where it's taking it's taking it? No, not at all. I think where the market was stupid was in April of 23 where you had all the other names doing what they were doing and this one was left behind. And it was trading as a teenager.
Starting point is 00:57:50 Oh my God. I just said it's a trillion. It's two. Yeah, it's unbelievable. LamRsearch. I love this. I love this stock. It's up.
Starting point is 00:58:00 We wrote it up for best stocks to market last August. I think it's up 170% since then. I want to point out we wrote it up at an all-time high. People were angry. Like, now you're saying you like it. It's up however much. It's up another. I always like stocks at higher prices than I used to not like that.
Starting point is 00:58:18 It's up 297% over the last year. I mean, they basically control their entire. quasi monopoly. They're essential in the chip manufacturing equipment. What is NRG? So NRG is a derivative beneficiary of what's happening in AI. Powers the bottleneck. You know, Vistra Energy as well.
Starting point is 00:58:42 We were on Vistra. We had such a move. I think of the number one performing stock. I'm trying to think of the year. VST, that thing was insane. And we bought it in January. At the end of the year, it moved so much that we decided to diversify. because energy was lagging.
Starting point is 00:58:56 So we kept Vistra. We added NRG under the same portfolio theme. It's down from its highs in February. It's down about 20%. It's taking natural gas and getting that into the electricity that the data center needs. They need it. And they're big in this bring your own power deals where they sell directly to the data centers, which is kind of a unique and novel strategy.
Starting point is 00:59:20 And I think it's going to work. And it's traded it 16 times. Right now. APA. APA is more of a... Glass from the past for me. Yeah, just an E&P name. Yeah. It is up 58% year today.
Starting point is 00:59:34 It's off 14% from its recent high. Do you need Iran to stay fucked up to stay long this stock or do you like it either way? You need things to not open quite as quickly. I think this is going to be a beneficiary of America doing what we're doing from a production standpoint. And it's a great combination of, a lot of diversified production across regions, products.
Starting point is 00:59:58 They have a healthy total yield 12% between buybacks and dividends. It trades it seven times. It's crazy. This is an interesting business to us. And then lastly, Gilead, which has... You did that for Adam? Well, yeah. Diversification.
Starting point is 01:00:17 Diversification. No, the stock looks great. It's actually been a strong... In this group, the group has sucked for a while. But this is one of the winners. I think you have to have some exposure in this space. Again, this is the upgrade in the quality. They're dominant in HIV.
Starting point is 01:00:34 They're doing unbelievable things in oncology. They have 50 drugs in various stages of development. They're enormous. And you have to be enormous to be able to do what they're doing. And there's upside in their pipeline based on progress. So we tried to think, I asked the team, this is not me. I'm going to take no credit. This is Jay Peters.
Starting point is 01:00:56 This is Cameron Dawson. This is Brian Nick, our investment team. They're super. And I asked him, I said, I want a balance view where you have option. We can ride the current wave we're riding. You have optionality to the crisis. So three names ride the current wave, right? Power and then the two semis.
Starting point is 01:01:14 You have option to crisis in the Middle East. And then we get some stability where you're not going to have a lot of price performance. We want to health care. Are you surprised that the health care is. stocks aren't getting any credit in advance of being perhaps the biggest beneficiaries of utilizing AI? So look, it's been our... Why aren't people figured...
Starting point is 01:01:36 It's been a terrible call. It's been a terrible call, unlike the soft one. This has been a bad call. And I'm trying to figure out, like, what could untether me from the thesis. I'm trying to be, like, intellectually honest. Like, could anything change my mind? Long term should be no, by the way. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:01:52 And I'm worried about it. I don't want to be the jerk. Is that your thesis that AI is going to be bigger for these companies than most? So what the market's telling me is there's a zero percent chance health care is the best performing sector over the next five years. And I think it's like 30 or 40 percent. I just start with like, I want to arbitrage that difference. I think the whole point of all of this shit is that we live longer and we're more productive while we're alive. So if I take that premise, I don't understand how health care revenue per share is going every year 30s in a row with SB 500.
Starting point is 01:02:21 we have lots of old people that demand services, tool, diagnostics, drugs, managed care, hospitalization, whatever. That's steady. We have tons of businesses with lots of employees, low margin and lots of revenue, meaning as long as I can predict my customer employee behavior, margins should go up. It's a classic AI productivity potential. They do, as he just pointed out, beautifully, have low correlation to AI semis. So you don't want to buy low correlation, meaning like they suck, but there are a bunch of
Starting point is 01:02:45 health care stocks, Lily and others that are up 10% or more in the last six months and are uncorrelated. There's a good stock. So there's some of them could work. I'm very tethered to the thesis and bollish. And I do think... Which names do you like? It should not work. McKesson, Cardinals, Sincora, Quest, LabCorp.
Starting point is 01:03:00 You know, even stuff that blew up recently because, like, you're still young. How about the big? You can't go to the doctor and not end up sending something to LabCora Quest. There's zero chance they won't grow above GDP. And there's still dudes with, like, when we were kids with the glass, microscope, with the thing. Like, their efficiency potential is massive. Yeah. Right.
Starting point is 01:03:17 And I would even say, Managed Care. You and H had a good point this week. Stock was finally up. Like, I run a business. I'm not brave enough. Let me tell you who raises pricing on me 9% every year. And guess who doesn't give me 9% more services? So, like, I think they're going to earn more money in 2030.
Starting point is 01:03:30 And I don't think there's any political will from either side to change the algo. If you tell me that some party's going to come in and implement massive austerity, then I'll change my mind. So it sounds like health care away from big pharma. I think there's still some good big pharma. I mean, I'm not against, you know, Lilly and Merck and other stuff. Lilly's unbelievable. But I'm not in big. betting yet, what I'd like to do is be correct on a five-year view.
Starting point is 01:03:55 And then there's all kinds of like computational chemistry ETFs that retail guys are buying. And I'd like to sell my correct overweight into that euphoria five years from now. But that's, I got a lot of good shit's got to happen before I get to that call. Yeah. I want to ask, I want to ask you, I want to ask you about, about New Edge and founding the firm and Adam, by all means, chime in. Like, when I first met you, you were UBS. You had one of the biggest teams in the firm. You were not talking about going independent,
Starting point is 01:04:28 but I'm sure you were thinking about it, as most people at large firms often do. What have you learned since coming into the RIA space? Obviously, you've built a massive platform, big firm, hired a lot of people, met a lot of people. What are like some of the things that you think you've learned in the last couple of years since doing that? Well, first.
Starting point is 01:04:48 What is it? Four years? ago? Five. Five years. Okay. Five years ago and we've grown from $8 billion to $105 billion in assets. Amazing. It's been a... It's not as good as a micron as a lot of micro as $1. Pretty good. But I think the things that I've learned are one, there's a lot of noise in the ecosystem. Not everybody says it can do what they say they can do. And what that does is it creates a lot of paralysis in this migration that we're seeing from advisors at big firms to advisors at more entrepreneur. I mean, look at what you've done here. I walk into this office and think,
Starting point is 01:05:26 oh, my God, this is great. Yeah. I mean, you're adding value in a different way. And you're adding value by sitting center. And when you're a client of the street versus a competitor of the street, you have a structural advantage that's very meaningful. You don't have one arrow that you can pull out of your quiver. Let's say you were doing a loan for somebody. You're going out to multiple providers. You have tools. So if you're sitting at Goldman Sachs, you're doing that loan through Goldman Sachs.
Starting point is 01:05:56 If you're a customer of Goldman Sachs, give me a quote. Okay, I'm going to go to RBCC, see what they say. You're not with them. Yeah, I agree with that. You're across from them. And yet New Edge is a gigantic client of Goldman, JPMorgan, all the different banks, all the different capital markets groups, all the different asset managers. And I do think size and scale matters.
Starting point is 01:06:17 There's something else that's kind of happened in the industry. And I don't want to mask the good fortune and luck that I had in doing this in 2000, just as this was taking off at the higher end, not 2000, 2020, at the higher end of the market during COVID. It looks easier than it is. Oh, I couldn't agree more. Say more about that. And you need a good partner. So I did not start New Edge.
Starting point is 01:06:44 We did an LBO of a business with a tremendous partner in Parthenon Capital. And that operating business threw off cash flow. Again, it was an infrastructure business, providing institutional-grade infrastructure in the 401k industry, to Fidelity, John Hancock, paychecks, creative planning. And they had a great business, but they wanted to do something else. So we bought the business and we built a wealth business on that same infrastructure that was bulletproof, cheating, starting halfway up the mountain. I didn't have to go in and worry about, did I had a tech team?
Starting point is 01:07:21 I had not only a tech team, but I had profitability to hire the best and brightest. Okay. So the good fortune that came from that simple decision of not worrying about how my computer was going to turn on in the morning. That's why I love these entrepreneurs that do this grass. roots and bootstrap this, unbelievably hard. It's way harder than it loves. And now you have partners that can help you get from A to B.
Starting point is 01:07:46 So when I think about what we do is we have a fully evolved ecosystem where you can join us and use the platform turnkey, here's everything. You got all the support, the compliance, the anything you need. Or we are going to sponsor you in your entrepreneurial endeavor and we have the best business in the world to do that that's run by my partner, Alex Koss. We also had some very fortunate hires and partners in this business. Chuck Warden, who was the founder of the business that we bought, Parthenon, who's the private equity firm,
Starting point is 01:08:17 John Strauss, who ran every major private bank on Wall Street, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, UBS, ran them all. Bob McCann joined us. So we had, UBS and Merrill Lynch. So we had these credentialed folks that when you're looking off the cliff and you're an advisor and you're getting ready to jump, you still can't see the bottom, okay?
Starting point is 01:08:43 And you want to know that there's knowledge, know-how in people down there that are going to help you navigate every decision whether you're starting your own thing on our platform that's run by Alex Scott. To that point, like somebody coming out of an environment like a Bank of America or a Morgan Stanley, there might be things they don't love about
Starting point is 01:09:06 those banks, but the one thing that's undeniable is they have a ton of support. Like, they don't wake up in the morning. That's what was missing. That's what was missing in the marketplace is this fully supported DNA. And so I'm no longer the CEO. You introduced me as the CEO. I am the founder. Okay. So I made a big hire last year. You hired somebody to talk to the, to speak to that CEO role so that you could be Rob Sechin. I can be Rob Sechin. I did the same thing. So it is a great thing. We hired James Jesse. You know him from Morgan Stanley Days, I'm sure.
Starting point is 01:09:41 James Jesse ran Morgan Stanley International, but then he went with DeVesh and helped start iconic. Okay? Wanted to come back East Coast. That was our good fortune. We also, because of the profitability from the business that we bought, were able to hire people like Cameron Dawson, who I think is one of the most fascinating thought leaders in the industry.
Starting point is 01:10:02 So when you marry all those things together and you can create an entrepreneurial environment that is doing the right thing. And trust me, net present value of doing the right thing creates more value than anything. So great technology. They're not rolling out enterprise anthropic, not a single firm yet. They're trying it. We are fully rolled out. They're not using tech the betters price, execution, visibility, and assets.
Starting point is 01:10:31 They're not partnering with Adam. They're not partnering with Tom Lee. They're not working with families. They're not surrounding those families with high-end intellectual capital. And they don't have access to each other's shit. And we have access to everything. And so when you have a better mousetrap, it is undeniable that the migration will happen when there's more confidence and less confusion.
Starting point is 01:10:56 But everybody tries to tell that story, and not everybody can deliver that story. story. And as such, advisors haven't moved in MASH yet. Once a few of the big ones fall, as you know, Josh. You think the, the wirehouse exodus hasn't even really started? It's it. It's here. Wow. Because I, so the corner office. I know like five, I know five guys that were five billion plus dollar teams, duos, just at one firm that have left in the last two years. How many more can there be? That started, that started about two years ago. you can't believe our pipeline.
Starting point is 01:11:32 Yeah. You just can't. And the one thing that I would say is firms that can't address the entrepreneur that wants to have their own CIO, not Cameron, and others that want to have that. Yeah. We have those bookends in a leader that is operated in the wires and in the probably one of the best firms in the independent space and iconic. I think that is confidence inspiring.
Starting point is 01:11:59 and I think, you know, we've become a partner of choice. I mean, it's growing. You care if you have advisors. If you have advisors in your ecosystem, let's say you had... By the way, I just want to say that was like a highlight of this... Great speech. It was just electric. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:12:14 I'm just saying, I'm really passionate about this. No, no, no, I loved it. I just think, like, you... I'm not saying the stock part wasn't great, but I'm just saying, like, the EQ IQ combo that just came out from describing his business was electric. That's why I'd do more of that, man. I mean, you felt there, right? It was all of a sudden a fuse got lit.
Starting point is 01:12:31 He was cooking. It was awesome. If you have an advisor who's a card carrying new edge, like all the way in who comes to you guys and says, you know what, this has been great. But what I really want is to have my firm under its own name, have my own CIO. So now you have a place where that person can go where they don't have to leave. Come in straight. So I think that's powerful.
Starting point is 01:12:51 Right turn, left turn. We have businesses over here that we bought into card carrying businesses. Remember, when we buy you in, you are owning the same stock that we did in the LBO. No difference. Not like some of the firms that had failed in the past. We have the advantage of being the vitamin water versus the Gatorade, right, and all this. Second mover advantage. And, you know, it's been pretty powerful to identify the flaws of our predecessors.
Starting point is 01:13:21 And what ends up happening is if you just do the right thing for the advisors, meet them where they are. I think you're advantaged in this, too, guys. You're a firm that was started by advisors for advisor. That is a huge advantage because why are you going to do something that damages yourself? Now, what I recognized is there could be a better day-to-day nuts and bolts leader than me. I am a champion of the organization. I have one concern. How do those advisors that believed in this field of dreams that we bought and built,
Starting point is 01:13:55 how do we drive value for them both in their practice, in serving their clients, and then ultimately in the equity value that they've taken on in our company. And I take that very seriously. And if it means shooting myself, I don't care. So this is a very, this is a very big thing. It's a very, by the way, very well done. Thank you. This is a very big thing. At a certain point, you have to make the decision. what is my highest value to the firm? Is it sitting in eight meetings a day and micromanaging 50 people?
Starting point is 01:14:32 Or is it being me and bringing in professionals to handle the details? I think no matter what you do, you have to think about that right now. Like, you know, obviously I'm at different business and it's a small scale. But like, we have guys who, like, whenever, I've become very subconscious about this.
Starting point is 01:14:48 When I'm in front of my computer typing and one of the quant guys who works for me is standing behind me, I know they're thinking like, this guy doesn't how to use a computer. Like the best use of trivariates time is not when I touched the keyboard. Not when you are grinding through. If I am doing something, they're like,
Starting point is 01:15:05 don't do that. And so I started realizing like, all right, like we got. And it's like all this AI stuff too. Like it's like we got to be, you know, so I don't know. I mean, that's an honestly, I never. You like, but you like. I never really like heard you articulate that. I'm not surprised at all, but it was awesome listening to that.
Starting point is 01:15:22 You like the entrepreneurial part though of what you're doing. I love it. I totally love it. I don't like, you know. You're not one of these guys that's like, just let me do my research. Like, you actually enjoy building the business. I like thinking about what the enterprise is going to look like. You know, we have this newsletter business that you know about Trivector.
Starting point is 01:15:37 We've got, you know, we'll probably end up doing, you know, some stuff on the asset management side. I'm doing some stuff with investor relations. I do stuff from law firms and boards. I'm joining the board of a public European company next week is when it's official. So, like, I'm just always trying to do new stuff and learn stuff. And I'm like kind of a, I like doing the. The work, and I like to talk to people. To other guys who sit in your old seat as chief strategists on Wall Street come to you and say,
Starting point is 01:16:01 hey, what's it like being independent? It's a little bit like your conversation you were just having, which is like you might have disgruntled issues with the big firm and the bigness disease of the big firm you work at. But you're getting a lot from them. But you're also getting a lot. And so when you go on your own, like, you're going to be washing the dishes and putting the mayo in the sandwiches the first couple of years.
Starting point is 01:16:24 And, like, you've got to decide, like, am I rich enough to take the risk? And if it doesn't work and be, like, you know, or whatever. There's, like, considerations that go into it. Michael and I were literally licking envelopes. Like, in real life. We don't have a dishwasher at Triberet. And, like, all the young kids don't understand
Starting point is 01:16:39 that, like, I'm the one who washes their mugs. And that's, like, today. That's still, like, so, you know, so, like, whatever. Like, you got to, you got to do that. But, like, at the end of the day, for me, it was worth it. I was a point where I wanted to take a shot. And I love it. But, like, I love listening to you.
Starting point is 01:16:54 you guys talk about, you know, the five-year plan. Everybody does it differently. Yeah. But I don't know anybody that would say, anybody, I want to go back. I wish I could go back. I've never heard it. It's like moving to Florida. Does anyone say shit?
Starting point is 01:17:08 This is terrible. You're talking to a guy who's on a 720 tonight. No, I don't. Hey, last thing we wanted to get to. BMNR. You are... Okay, so Tom Lee launched... How do I explain it?
Starting point is 01:17:21 It's an ether treasury company. Yeah. It's like, it's like, uh, my... a strategy before Ether. All right. So Tom Lee launched. You got added shortly after. And they're,
Starting point is 01:17:30 right, that's what they're doing. Right. They're like five set of all standing. The treasury company, I think Ethereum's a bit different than Bitcoin, or Bitcoin, rather.
Starting point is 01:17:39 Ethereum, BMNR is BitMine. You know, when I looked at this, I thought this was a charlatan's game for a long time. I even shit on it on TV. And then you said, let me in.
Starting point is 01:17:51 Well, then I started to do some work. I started listening to Tom and seeing the things they were... You thought micro strategy was bullshit. No, I just did thought the whole ecosystem. The whole thing. Yeah, I was a non-believer. I still think that.
Starting point is 01:18:04 Now I'm an evangelist. Oh, and I'll help change your mind. What I'm seeing is a misunderstanding of what certain parts of the crypto ecosystem are. And I think people think it's crypto is like a coin. It's infrastructure. It's a value-added network that you build apps on. And anytime you drive usage, which is why BMNR bought Mr. Beast, visibility usage to the network, you can profit from the network.
Starting point is 01:18:39 And when you think about what's happening in traditional finance, it's fragmented, it's intermediated, and it's slow, and it doesn't run 24 hours. And every one of them is trying to figure out how do we, get to tokenization, digitization, and they don't know how to do it. And Ethereum flips that. It's the safest of all of them. It's programmable. It's real time.
Starting point is 01:19:06 It's always on. And BMNR is a holder and why they got me involved. It's a huge gap between institutions that have capital. And they need help to translate it, structure it, and make it usable for, for them in traditional finance. And the next phase isn't about speculation. It's about integration of the financial services platforms onto an entirely new architecture.
Starting point is 01:19:40 Okay. And when you start to see what's happening in that community and you start to see how it's being ignored by TradFi is what they call it, D5 being ignored by TradFi. and there's there's a bridge of the gap between the two. I keep hearing this. The New York Stock Exchange just says they want to be the capital of tokenized assets, right? They want to.
Starting point is 01:20:02 They'll build that on Ethereum. They will. So why not if I just buy Ethereum if you're bullish on it? You can't. And that's the beauty of it, right? That's the beauty of it. Because what you're becoming when you buy, let's say, BMNR, and I'm not promoting BMNR, any source of Ethereum.
Starting point is 01:20:18 But that's what I know, because that's the company that I'm the lead independent director on. They are doing things so that you can earn what is called a staking yield. You can make investments into businesses that are going to be beneficiaries. They call it moonshots. They invested in Mr. Beast. Got a lot of credit. You get the benefit if there is one of the investments that the company is making. Yes. It's not just the price of ETH going up. And by the way, when you validate and they have a whole business that they call Maven, which is a very, validator of transactions and you get paid to validate, you are getting a 4% 3, 4% yield.
Starting point is 01:21:02 And so you're earning the gas fee. You're earning the gas fee. As a node. So you're becoming a toll road. And then what you want to do is ensure usage. And that's why I use this is the example. Apps are being developed. So layer zero is kind of the foundational layer.
Starting point is 01:21:19 Security and transactions happen on that. layer, then layer two or apps or daps is what they're called. Sorry, I didn't mean to spit on everybody, are being built to do functional things, specialty nodes on that. And it's going to happen quicker, more safely. So when you think about the threat that AI has to everything in technology, wow, wouldn't it be great to have this immutable safety layer that sits beneath that? And so I'm going to tell you, I believe in this wholeheartedly.
Starting point is 01:21:55 Now, there's others like Salana that are trying to do this more cheaply. But the bulletproof version of this is this. Tom Lease, he's around corners. We already know it. He's seen this years ago. Ethereum as an asset, you can own the token, which will give you that yield to your point, Michael. Adam, how out of you? He's not in yet.
Starting point is 01:22:18 He's not out. I'll go with a crazy pitch of a different kind. What does that mean? I'm going to pitch a stock of a different kind. I think InVidio will be worth $10 trillion market cap by the end of this decade. What is it now? 4.8. Okay.
Starting point is 01:22:34 And I think like it's misunderstood a little bit. I think it's a sector. It's not a stock. I think it's really hard to get off the Kuta. It's a sector. I think it's really hard to get off the Kuda platform. I don't think that like it's, you can do anything kind of. modeling-wise and AI of scale without...
Starting point is 01:22:51 Everyone working in AI is on that platform. They lost money for 15 years coding this CUDA stuff. Like the amount of install base that's there, they're moving full speed ahead. Like, it's just going to be hard to get off it. They're going to grow 15% of here for five years. The revenue is going to double at least. The cash flow is massive.
Starting point is 01:23:06 And anytime you get one of these like 12-month periods where it like pauses out, it's a good time to buy some before it flies higher. I'm not selling any. Yeah. So I just... You and me got on there. I don't see...
Starting point is 01:23:18 Never selling it. Like, my... my view is like, yeah, sure, tactically, I don't like it when they blow out the quarter and the price of sales, it comes in and tax. But like, I just think they're going to grow way fast. They don't have to buy that. Do you think they're going to ever buy that a meaningful amount of stock? It seems like it's the lowest valuation in Viti has traded out in a while. Just keep investing upstream and downstream.
Starting point is 01:23:40 They're going to trade is the power side, right? Like we talked about it earlier, like, so they got to make sure. But like, how can you function and do anything without their infrastructure? So, like, just think of it as a sector. Like, stop telling me it's $4.5 trillion and it's bigger than the energy, healthcare, and you're like, that doesn't matter. What matters is it's a sector that's massively fast growing to the technology that matters. The bear case on Nvidia was all these deals are circular, blah, blah, blah, blah. No one's saying that anymore.
Starting point is 01:24:03 The bear case is now... How about the... All the big companies... The bear case was, I think, one of the bare cases that I don't like is, like, all the Kappex comes from hyper-scalers, and it's like, no, it's like... AWS. Like, Amazon isn't one company. 80 million customers. It's thousands of companies.
Starting point is 01:24:17 So it's not the right way to think about it. The bare case is that TPUs from Google and other competing things will be... They're not on Kuda. It doesn't matter. It's great. Like, you know, look, you, those of us who have followed it, you know, Jensen for 25 years would say, like, sure, there's a lot of, like, bullshit that he spewed in the 25 years. Like, I'm not saying, you know. But, you know, I think there's really somebody, just the installed base of folks who are on this platform and the investors they made up.
Starting point is 01:24:47 downstream. So like, yeah, I don't see how you can be bullish on the S&P 500 in a three to five year view and not be both. I was going to say, if you think Nvidia is 10 trillion, then sure that you think S&P is going on 10,000. Yeah, they're both both, uh, I wrote, uh, I wrote, three years ago, I wrote, I wrote three years ago, 2030, 10,000 to S&P. And I think it's not conservative. It's not even like weird math. It might be conservative. I mean, where, you're talking, uh, 30, 35% in four years. That's like, it's not far away. It's not far away. It's not far away. It's that. Right. All right. It sounds like a headlining number. Guys, do we have fun on the show today or what?
Starting point is 01:25:19 We did. Hey, I heard at the beginning of the show with Tom Lee, you were making a little fun of me with my accent. Probably. Wondering where he was from. He does to get a lot of seat show. Do it, do it, do it. Come on. I heard.
Starting point is 01:25:34 At the beginning of the show with Tom Lee, you were making a little bit of fun of me. Did you get, by the way, did you get? Well, fuck. Yeah, but you're from Pittsburgh. Makes no sense. Why do you talk like your popcorn leghorn if you're from Pittsburgh? I don't even understand what. You know.
Starting point is 01:25:46 We have a guy to see here. That's got to be the title of the... You guys are always looking for a title. I think Foghorn... I think you just got it. So, Ian, what happened is I got very confused. I love you. I'm allowed to do it.
Starting point is 01:25:58 I got very confused. I grew up 26 years in Pittsburgh, and then I moved to Connecticut. And they didn't mesh well. So I was a yinser that kind of de-yensed my... My language. I win our side bet on the number of times he was going to mention Tom Lee on this call.
Starting point is 01:26:15 I had... I had nine. So I get a little big. Can I say one thing to you? This is a true story. And I never told you. You and I have had some of the all-time great brawls on halftime report. All in good nature.
Starting point is 01:26:31 Is that right? Yes. I didn't know that. I know that because I keep track. I write them down each day. You and I've never had one. No, no. You and I are golden.
Starting point is 01:26:41 No, but Rob and I are good too. Is Rob a dick? Is that what you're saying? Is this coming out? No. Is there leading? Sometimes, listen, we're on the show I get body slam.
Starting point is 01:26:48 Yeah, what's going on here? You've been on the show for a long time since we were in Englewood Cliffs. Yeah, 13 years. There was one time where you were saying something and I wasn't even on the fucking show but I was like tweeting
Starting point is 01:27:03 at the judge and the judge text me goes, why don't you come on and you and Rob could have this. I don't know if you remember this. I don't know if you remember this. won't believe me what I'm saying. I was literally in the gym at a hotel. I must have been in
Starting point is 01:27:20 like Arizona or something. So I remember looking outside. It was a sunny day. 12 o'clock in the afternoon. I swear I was working out. I swear to God. I go live on the show. Other people are in this hotel gym looking at me. And I'm like Lulu. And I'm debating you. Anyway, this is the point of the story. Somebody that I'm friends with texted me and said, when you and Rob go at it over a stock, nothing ever besides a stock. He goes, It reminds me of fighting with my brother. You guys are like brothers. I never told you that story.
Starting point is 01:27:51 That's really cool. But I truly, I think you're a brother. I really do. I appreciate it. I love the debates that we have. Me too. It sounds like these days we agree on a lot of things.
Starting point is 01:27:59 I agree with almost everything you said today. And thank you so much for doing this show. I agree with $105 billion and a lot in the pipeline. I agree with that. I very much agree. Do you agree with that? Who can deny the success? Do you agree with that?
Starting point is 01:28:12 I agree. Thank you so much. It was really fun being here with both. Let's do it again. This is a great program. All right, well, we're going to come back from dinner. We're going to do the second half of the show. Guys, we appreciate you.
Starting point is 01:28:25 I want to let everybody know they should follow Adam and check out trivaryate research and trivector research. Who is that for? Trivector research is for advisors and individuals. It's a $1,200 year. We do a lot of like ETF analysis, insights, videos, talk about what we learn for institutions. So I'd love for people to join.
Starting point is 01:28:42 Awesome, dude. And if you want to learn more about New Edge, go to newedge.com. www. www.weth.com. Newedge wealth.com. All right, guys, thank you so much for watching. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Adam Parker.
Starting point is 01:28:55 Love being here. Rob Sechin. Thanks all too soon. Take it easy. Is that good? What a blast.

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