Yet Another Value Podcast - June 2026 Random Ramblings

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

SpaceX is buying Cursor for ~$60B, and one of the early backers was SBF. So was a convicted fraudster also the greatest VC of all time? That's where June's random ramblings start. From there: why I've flipped from AI doom toward AI as a force multiplier, whether deep subject-matter expertise gets MORE valuable as the world fills with AI slop, why legacy brands (KPMG, CBS, People) might actually gain power in an AI world, why "my edge is a long time horizon" is usually a tell for underperformance, and the cracks showing up in Polymarket and prediction markets.This episode is sponsored by my upcoming AI webinar with AlphaSense. The AI landscape has never been more crowded or more confusing. Everyone's telling you to adopt AI, but almost nobody's asking the harder question: which tools actually give you an edge?I'm sitting down with Dave Wang of Wall Street Prompt and Ben Collins of AlphaSense to break down the modern AI stack for investors, from horizontal platforms like OpenAI and Claude to agentic workflows and finance-specific intelligence tools, and where each one actually fits in a real research process. If you're trying to build an AI-enabled workflow that sharpens your judgment rather than replacing it, you won't want to miss this.Join us on June 25th - register now: https://www.alpha-sense.com/resources/webinars/choosing-your-ai-stack-a-framework-for-institutional-investors/?utm_source=pt_YAVP&utm_medium=sponsored&utm_campaign=SWB_DG_06-25-26_IMP-GENAI_CORPFS_YAVP-AI-SolutionsChapters:00:00 What's on the menu this month02:05 Sponsor: my AI webinar with AlphaSense03:22 Was SBF the greatest VC of all time? (Cursor, SpaceX, Anthropic)09:48 Do any frauds or blowups hide assets this valuable? (GGP, Enron, EOG)11:42 Why I flipped from AI doom toward AI as a force multiplier13:41 Why AI rewards the creative, and the top 0.1% problem16:18 AI slop and the rising return on deep expertise (Knicks, ABVX)20:12 KPMG's hallucinated AI report and secondhand hallucinations21:57 Does brand get MORE valuable in an AI world? (CBS, People, TMZ, ChatGPT licensing)25:14 Why "my edge is a long time horizon" is usually a lie28:50 Forced selling, diamond hands, and the seven-years-of-underperformance letter32:02 My three-year rule32:53 Polymarket, MicroStrategy, and the limits of the rulebook35:00 Prediction markets are reflexive: why nobody's waging "Polymarket wars" yet37:36 WrapLinks:Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.comSee our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimerProduction and editing by The Podcast Consultant - https://thepodcastconsultant.com/

All right, hello, and welcome to the yet another value podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Walker. You are here today for my monthly random ramblings for the month of June. We're going to get there in one second, but I'll start with the way I start every podcast. Disclaimer, nothing on this podcast investing device. There's a full disclaimer at the end of this podcast. And the show notes, remember, that's always true. But I'm just rambling like a madman in my little tiny closet of an office right here.

So that's my disclaimer. Today, I've got five topics I'm going to talk to you about. We're going to start with my thoughts on SBF's cursory. your investment and it was he the greatest BC of all time. How did we marry that with the, you know, I can say it, the convicted fraud that he committed fraud Ponzi scheme. I'm not sure what it's called. Then I'm going to move into some thoughts on AI, some thoughts on the KPMG report that hallucinated AI and some thoughts on the power of brand going forward to AI. And again, I'm just rambling. These aren't guaranteed thoughts. I'm just kind of thinking out loud, but I think they're

very interesting. Going to end with the thought on time horizon arbitrage. You know, every investor says, I've got a long-term time horizon and that's my edge. And I'm going to be honest, 10 years ago, I probably would have said the same thing. And I have just gotten very, very skeptical of that thought process. That's not to say you need to say I'll perform every second of every day of every year. But, you know, I just have seen one too many people say, I've got a long-term time horizon and I will outperform and say that as they underperform for, you know, 20 years in a row. So some thoughts on time horizon.

And then I wrap up, I say I'm going long. I say I can't do it. But I wrap up the polymarket change. changing rules story. There's been a lot there where, you know, Polymarket, if there's a market in question, they've got ways to resolve them. There was this thing where MicroSrotity filed an 8K on June 1st that said, hey, we sold our Bitcoin on the week of May 31st. There was a polymarket question that said, will Micro Strategy sell Bitcoins on by May 31st? It resolved no, even that they filed the 8K. And I just thought that was fascinating. And prediction markets are

fascinating. They can be reflexive. They can have real impacts in the world. So I end with thought there. I'm rambling in my intro. Let's go to the random ramblings, but first, a word from our sponsors. This podcast is sponsored by Alpha Sense, and more specifically, my upcoming AI webinar with AlphaSense. Look, the AI landscape is crazy if you're a investor. It's crowded, it's confusing. Everyone's telling you to adopt AI, but nobody is telling you what tools to use. How do you adopt AI? Should you be focused on using this as a superpower? Google, should you be building your own tools? How do you get used to it? All of this sort of stuff. I personally find it's a lot of experimentation. It's a lot of fun, but it's really confusing and it's really scary.

So anyway, I told Alpha Sense about my problems and they organized a webinar to try to help out. I'll be sitting down with Dave Wang of Wall Street prompts and Ben Collins of AlphaSense to break down the modern AI stack for investors. What horizontal platforms like Open AI and Claude and Agentsic workflows and finding specific intelligence tools, where each one can actually fit and help in a real research process. So if you're trying to get better at AI, improve, develop AI-enabled workflows. You're not going to want to miss this webinar. Join us on, we're going to record it next week,

middle of June 18th, and it'll be going live June 25th. So there'll be a link to register in the show notes. And please, feel free. Lobbin any questions you have on using AI, whether it's general tools or AI-specific tools like AlphaSense. So thanks, Alphacinzance, and I'll see you for the webinar soon. Let's dive into it. So I'm going to lead off with some thoughts on,

look, if you've been online, You've seen a lot about, you know, SpaceX, SpaceX IPO, obviously, but SpaceX this week announced they were buying Cursor for about $60 billion. And there are lots of articles on, you know who was invested in Cursor early on, SBF and FTF and FTX were invested in Cursor. And I think they had like 5% of them. So if that had worked out, it would have been like $2 billion or something. And Sv also had early invested.

in Anthropic. I think he had an investment in SpaceX. He had some in Robin Hood. Like, he had all these great investments. And people were saying, oh, my God, like he's in jail. He sold, he sold his investment in Cursor back to Cursor at cost. And not he sold it. The FtX bankruptcy court sold it and all this sort of stuff. And you're kind of look at this and you say, hey, was SBF the greatest, was SBF the greatest venture capital investor of all time? And I've just been thinking about that a lot. You know, because, look, he belongs in jail. He ran a fraud.

We can say it. He convicted. He's in jail. Ran a fraud, you know, all this sort of stuff. But you look at it and you say, okay, someone who is running a literal fraud, a lot, Ponzi scheme fraud, whatever you want to call, right? They're running that. And on the side, they're doing this VC investment firm. And it's literally, it's the greatest VC investment firm of all time.

First, you kind of say, hey, man, why were you running the fraud? You're running the greatest VC investment firm on Earth? Like, you would have made quite a good bit of money if you're doing that. and you've got real talent. So you look at it and say, hey, was there a talent? Was there some unbelievable genius? All this sort of stuff?

I don't know. You know, actually, I've just been thinking about it. I'm going to be honest with you. This is going to blow you away. I've never made an investment close to as good as buying 5% of cursor at whatever the valuation was and then having a, you know, rocket ship off to get taken out by SpaceX for $60 billion in inside of a couple

years. I've never made an investment that good. So I don't know. But if you just look at that, you know, VCs would give, the whole venture model is you hit one or two grand slam, and a grand slam in VC is a thousand X, not four X, right? He hit three. He had SpaceX.

He had a cursor. He had Anthropic. I think he had one or two more in there. So on one hand, you're like, okay, this guy was a super talented VC. Is he just like so top 1%? But on the other hand, I have been thinking, like, venture capital is this game. It is this business. And a lot of it is the network and everything, right?

A lot of VC is being plugged in. I will have friends who come to me into like, hey, we're launching a VC firm to, not friends, because I try to always support friends where they ask for investment stuff. But loose acquaintance, you know, people I haven't talked to in 10 years and they email me up, like, hey, I'm starting a VC firm. Can you help on the phone? I'm like, oh, my God, I know where this is going. They, hey, can you want to write a check in it?

I'm like, man, your background is in marketing. You think you're going to go invest into AI firms? Like, you're really facing a real selection bias problem here, right? anyone who will take your check in the AI area has been turned down by all the top VC firms. So the top VC firms have said, hey, something about this person or the plan isn't worth us backing. And then what you get turned down by the top BC ones, like, you know, if somebody came to me and was like, hey, I've got, Kleiner Perkins will buy 10% of my company for a million dollars. Or Andrew, you'll buy 10% of my company for $1.1 million. And it's a startup.

I would honestly tell them, you should go take the Kleiner Perkins deal or the top BC firms deal. Why is that? Because, A, there's a branding thing, right? When you go to employees, customers, and stuff, and you say, hey, this top VC firm backed me, that's a branding thing. And that's going to help you bring in employees where, you know, as great as I think I am, if you say, hey, Andrew Walker backed me, employees, customers, they're not going to know that. You're not going to get that. So you're going to get access to better deals, better talent, all that sort of stuff. So the VC firms do have, like, a real network effect, a real brand effect. We're going to talk about brands later on this ramble, but they do have that. And I wonder, because SBF got so much money so quickly and so much buzz. And people are saying he's the future of crypto. And he was willing because this is what happens with all frauds. And a few years ago, I read the book on all the frauds and oh my God, when you read them, it is so stressful reading about frauds. But just imagining being there, running fraud has to be insanely stressful.

But when you read them, one of the common characteristics of all people who are running frauds and Ponzi stuff is they're just willing to spray money around. because it's not their money. So maybe there's like a little piece in the back of the mind that said, it's not my money. I should just give it away. You know, like one MDB is just spraying money around, just giving it out to everyone.

Enron, they're spending things on crazy stuff, like investing into all sorts of stuff. It's a common thing through frauds. And so SBF is running this big fraud. He's getting lots of buzzes, the future of crypto, the best exchange, all this sort of stuff. And he's willing to spray money to anything, right? And I wonder if that like bootstraps the VC now.

network effect on steroids. And maybe there's something interesting there, right? Like you kind of frauded your way into the VC network effect. Well, could a really rich person just create a VC network effect like that? I think rich people would argue yes, but, you know, have they done it to the SPF on steroids level? I don't think so. I mean, Masa over at SoftBank would kind of be the only other one I can think of where, you know, huge highs and huge lows and he's known for being willing to just invest in just about

anything. But because he sprays so much and he has so much money, he does get access to all the deals. And I mean, the returns are very lumpy, but he's hit so many grand slams. And, you know, every time soft banks done and every time they're down and you think they count them out, I mean, the AI stuff ends up working out for them. Yeah, we work didn't, but the we work, you know, the valley and then the unigrard slides, it actually worked out quite well for them. So look, I don't know where I'm going with this, but it's really interesting to think about because you look at multiple grand slams that any VC fund, it would be like among the best investments they've ever made,

being made by the same guy in a very short period of time while he's running a fraud. Is there learnings there? I don't know the answer, but it's something really interesting. And I will be honest, I'm pretty negative on, look, I'm going to give a really hot take. I'm pretty negative on someone who committed a massive fraud.

So I'm a little skeptical, but it does have me questioning things. One other thing while I'm here, I mentioned I read the great fraud books, and I was kind of thinking, okay, SBF, and one of the tough things with, you run a fraud and you get liquidated or you run something with leverage is you can't hold on to the end, right? But SBF, if they had been able to held on to the end and had this cursor investment, this anthropic invests with the SpaceX investment, a few others, I mean, they would have made so much money, right? I was trying to think big frauds or big bankruptcies that had really valuable assets inside of them. And a lot of bankruptcies do have assets inside of them, right? GCP is one of the biggest special situations home runs of the global financial crisis, very valuable malls, very valuable real estate.

They vowed for bankruptcy just because there's a liquidity problem. And there are companies that have gone bankrupt to have valuable assets. But I couldn't think of any that had assets like, and yes, it's parabolic VC investment stuff, but I couldn't find any frauds that had frauds or big blowups that had investments this valuable inside of them. I mean, Enron had some pipelines, and famously, I believe Kinder Morgan was like, you know, they had the plan for pipelines,

and Enron was too busy committing fraud, so Kinder left and just built the business, and that's hugely valuable. So Enron had some pipelines, and they did have some power plants, but nothing that, like, would have returned the entire equity. Humorously, Enron, I did not realize this, but I found it while I was looking up.

EOG resources, giant, giant, like 75 billion EV oil and gas company. You can go look them up. EOG stands for Enron oil and gas. They spun out of Enron like two or three years before the bankruptcy. But, you know, it's hard to say a 25 year later, 75 billion EV company that's done mergers along the way. It's hard to say that. But I really couldn't think of anything else.

I mean, a lot of the telecoms that go bankrupt, the telecom infrastructure is still valuable. It's still there. But it's such, such a unique case. And I've been thinking about it a lot recently. Let's go next to let's stick with SVF, Curser, Anthropics. Let's stick with that being. And let's go to my ongoing fascination with AI. You know, if you've been following the blog or the podcast, you know I've been thinking a lot about

AI. I go back and forth between my valley of despair. I'm like, oh, my God, it's getting so fast. You know, as I keep saying everyone, you can't just think of AI as it is right now. You know, if you go and put AI and you say, how many R's are in strawberry? And it tells you there's eight and I think there's three in strawberry. I'm trying to picture the word in my head as I do this. on the spot, but it tells you there's eight.

Hey, guess what? AI is getting better and better. You know, I have trouble believing that the AI five years from now is going to be failing the strawberry test, as we'll call it. So I keep saying, I'm not just worried about the AI as is, even though it's getting so good. I'm worried about AI that's improving exponentially and thinking about three years from now what's AI doing. So I will say sometimes I will have like these valleys of being just concerned, hey, you know,

the AI apocalypse of it's going to take all of our jobs. I'll have those worries. But I've been getting more and more hopeful recently. And there's two things. One of my worries was, I'm not a coder. I don't know how to code. So I'd always been worried, you know, Claude code and all these skills and stuff.

If you don't know how to code, are you going to get replaced by someone who knows how to code and just can replace you in the job? And they learn all the data and then, okay, thanks. See you later. I just coded you. You know, I'm getting a lot more comfortable with, why do you need to learn to code to AI?

Why can't AI do the coding and something like co-worker or something? I do think a lot of AI interactions. I don't think it's going to be done by coding. I think it's going to be done by humans saying, hey, I, here's my dream, help me build it. And that's kind of exciting and that's made me excited. And that dies nicely into my next thing. Increasingly, I was worried that AI was going to kill us all or not kill us all. There are those scenarios, but I was worried AI was going to take our jobs or just place a lot of knowledge work.

And increasingly, I just think, like, AI is going to be a force multiplier. And in the same way, if you were the best singer in a European village in the 1500s, you could probably make a job as a singer. But, you know, if in the 2000s, you have to be the best in the world, right? There's 10 people who can do that or something. Or you have to have other talents. And, you know, you look at the big singers today.

They're singers. They can do everything, right? And you didn't need that if you were a singer in the 1500s to be the best in your little tiny village. In a similar way, I do think, like, AI, if you, you are really smart, you're really talented, you're really creative, you're really hardworking, I think AI is going to just be a force amplifier for that. So all of us have egos, right? I like to think I'm really smart, I'm really talented, I'm really hard working. And by the way, really humble, really good looking, all that type of stuff. But I increasingly think AI, just because it opens up

so much of the world, if you've got vision, you've got creativity, I think AI is really going to reward that. I'll give small examples. All these videos that are, going viral. There was one a few weeks ago of somebody just inserted himself, use the eye, inserted himself into a bunch of Game of Thrones scenes, like the most dramatic scenes. And, you know, when Ned Stark in season one spoiler is about to get his head chopped off, he comes in and he slaps Jophrie and he saves Ned Stark. And he does that on all like kind of the bad scenes in Game of Thrones. That video goes crazy viral, right? He could have never created that video on his own as recently as 12 months ago. I think those types of videos, that type of creativity,

I think it's going to be really rewarded. Now, that's one very small area, right? That's like kind of mean media. But I think every business idea you have is going to be able to be started. Every way you can analyze data. I just, I think it's going to be, if you're creative, I think it's going to have huge rewards for you. Now, there is the worry of, hey, what if you are not top 1% creativity? What if you're top 5%?

Like, you know, if you were top 5% singing in the 1500s, I've argued, there's probably a job from you. some village or maybe a small traveling tour being a singer. If you're top 5% singing today, there's nothing for you. You're not a singer, right? You have to be top point, point, point, point, point, point one percent. It's interesting, like everyone below the top 1%, but I kind of think like there's just so much human creativity, everybody's going to be able to carve a niche out for themselves. I'm getting more bullish on that, and I think it's just really interesting.

But I don't know. You know, the other thing I've been thinking, and I don't know how any of what I said it applies to investing is just applies to life, and I think about life, too. The one thing I do have that applies to investing, you know, I read a lot of substacks. Obviously, I write a substack. I read a lot of subsect. I read a lot of books. You are seeing the rise of AI slop, right? I even create it. I call it one idea per day. You can go look at that subsec. That is just an AI generated subsec, right? I only look at it if it hits my inbox and it's an idea I want to look at or I think it's interesting or I never heard it before. You're seeing a lot of AI slot get written.

and, you know, one worry you've heard people say is, hey, as more and more AI slop gets written, the AI gets trained on the AI slop, and it kind of law of averages everything down, right? AI slop can be a lot of average, a lot of hallucinations, and law of averages everything down. One thing I have been thinking of, do, in an AI world where everything is AI slop, and look, you could be a college student and write a pretty decent research report on any company with 30 minutes and AI, right? I'll be kind of basic. An expert would look at it and say,

hey, I think you're repeating a lot of facts, this, this, and this wrong. But a lay person would read it, be like, this is really effing good. I have been wondering if as the world gets more AI sloped, as everyone leans more and more on AI, is there a reward for being more of an expert in your field, right? And everyone is kind of outsourcing their thinking

and saying, I use AI for this. And you are just such a deep subject expertise. You know all the nooks, all the crannies. You can kind of, you know, when I see a lot, sometimes when I see an AI slot in something I know, I can immediately identify it. I wonder if there's something to that. You know, in sports, the NICs just won the NBA finals, go next. And one of the things if you listen to experts say, they'll talk about how the NICs are the best a challenge. So, you know, Ruff calls a foul on CAT, NBA teams have a limited amount of challenges they can do.

And people will talk about how the NICs are the best challenge team in the league. And those points of places where, like, the Knicks knew they would have won a challenge, but because you can only challenge two calls in total in an NBA game, one, and then if you get that right, you get one more. And you're limited by timeouts and stuff. The Knicks are the best team at passing on challenges that they know they should have done or using their challenges saying, hey, if we don't challenge here, like, we lose our challenge, so we might as well take I'll marry.

Or this is a much bigger high leverage play. And that's the type of thing, like AI, I think if, let's use my example. a foul is called on Kat in the first quarter, meaningless play, or even choose a lesser role player. An AI might immediately say, challenge it. You will win. You're 98% to win in this challenge. Whereas a subject expert might say,

hey, let's move it from Kat to Jose Alvarado, who is a bench player for the Knicks. Hey, this is not your star player who's going to determine the game. This is the first quarter. This foul, if you use it, you'll lose it. A subject matter expertise might be able to quickly process all that, whereas AI would just say you're 98% to win. So that's one weird sports example,

but I have been thinking of, you know, as we get more AI, as the world gets more and more AI, maybe there is something to the guy who goes and locks himself in a room and reads and studies something really deeply, the world will present him a lot of opportunities. And, you know, one more example, I'll point to.

I don't know if it's going to work right and they're wrong. Disclosure, I have a position in ABVX, but listen to the podcast with Adam A that I did on ABVX. And ABVX comes and they report blowout efficacy results, but there are some safety signals in the drug that they report. And listen to, if you just fed that into AI or a lot of generalists looked at that and said, oh my God, this is the disaster, black box warning, boom. And maybe Adam's right.

Maybe Adam's wrong. I don't know. But Adam has subject matter expertise and was instantly able to look and say, hey, look at the sample sizes, look at the base rates, look at the time. You know, that's the type of thing where AI, maybe it gets there because, again, we We're looking for where the puck's going, and AI is going to continue getting better. But it's the type of thing I think computers and headlines might have missed where subject matter expertise could pick up on. Speaking of subject matter expertise, one thing I have been thinking of with investing is there was this report in the FT on KPMG.

And KPMG, humorously, publishes a big report on AI use and business. I think they were published in October, but it just got picked up. And it turns out that a lot of it was hallucinated, right? They point to a lot of big companies. I think Shell was one of them. a lot of big companies, they talk about how they're using AI and it's completely hallucinated, right? That's a funny story and KPMG kind of gets caught with their pants down and you hear lots of examples of this happening in law too where a lawyer submits a brief and it turns out

the brief was written by AI and AI hallucinated a lot of the citations and that is no Bueno for a lawyer, right? But there wasn't a line in, there was a line in the article. I'm trying to find exactly where it is, but the line is something along the lines of, look, as we get more and more into an AI world, here it is exactly, big consultancies such as KPMG and EY are viewed as highly credible, so their reliance on false information increases the risk of secondhand hallucinations. And I have been wondering, as we get more and more into this AI world where a lot of things are written by AI and there's a lot of AI information out there, you know, there's a lot of, you think about Twitter, you've got all these bots and stuff,

And one of the reasons the Elon Musk taking over Twitter was so, I don't want to say bad or good, it just changed so much, was anyone could buy the checkmark. And before the checkmark is the verification, and if you saw someone with a checkmark behind them, you knew that was a verified, that was the source. And when anyone can buy the checkmark, you know, you had all these things where people would change their need to Eli Lilly and tweet out, we're making all of our insulin free, right? And because they had a checkmark behind him, you thought that was Eli Lilly announcing that. And do you have those issues? I have been wondering as we get more and more into an AI world, and people worry more and more about hallucinations or scams, what have you, all this sort of stuff,

how brands can cut through this, right? And if you gave me a report and said, hey, Andrew Walker made it, right? I'd be like, well, I don't know who Andrew Walker is. I know who Andrew Walker is. So you someone else, Paul Walker, my friend Mason, whoever. Like, or not even my friend because I can trust my friend, hopefully. But, you know, just a random guy off the street. hey, here's this consultancy report.

I don't know how much I can lean on it, right? Because I don't know how much is AI generated. I don't know their background. But if you give me a report and you say, let's just stick with KPMG, KPMG produced this report, I'd say, oh, that's a brand, 100 year history, lots of smart people there. I'm sure they checked and double-checked that, right? I would pay for this report.

I can rely on this report. And I have been thinking more and more about, is there value in these legacy brands and stuff where, as the world goes more and more towards AI and continues to fragmentation that started with, you know, the big three media networks getting broken up by the cable bundle and the cable bundle getting broken up by the infinite layer of the internet. But, you know, the best brand in the 80s and 70s, the best news brand was, let's just say it was CBS News, right? And that power has diminished as you've had all these competing brands as CNN comes along,

it's as Fox News comes along, as all the podcasts from along and stuff. I do wonder if in the world going forward, there is brand value in, and, and, and, you know, And the brands start actually sucking up back up more equity in, hey, this was reported by CBS News. I know what they're saying actually happened here. And that sounds silly, but I wonder if you play out the AI world three years going forward if there's value in that and people are willing to pay a premium for that. And there come other stuff from that. There's nothing completely unique there.

Like people have always said, hey, there's power in the brands. But I'm wondering if the power actually increases going forward in the AI world. And I will tell you that. And also, I wonder how far. can you apply that, right? Like, let me give an example. CBS News. You might want a trusted source for news and that type of stock.

KPMG, you might want a trusted source of consultancy, business data, whatever it is. People Magazine. Do you need a trusted source for celebrity gossip? I don't know the answer to that. But if we got into a world where, you know, as the world gets crazier and you'll hear crazy rumors about celebrity, could People Magazine's brand and maybe a TMZ brand, could those actually get more valuable because people want, hey, if I hear Taylor and Kelsey are having a baby, I want to know it's true.

I want to know what I can trust. Does that get more valuable? Does that have sources? Do, you know, take it a step further? Do chat GPT and all those start paying to have access to, I mean, already you see lawsuits where these people see Google and stuff saying, hey, you should have paid for access? But do chat GPT and stuff start paying to say, hey, you know, somebody, chat GPT something, we will pay people to let us report, People magazine says X, X, X. I can see a world,

right? Because chat ChpD wants people to use them, wants people to trust the sources. I can see that world. I don't know, but I have been thinking about the power of brand there. Let me hard cut. And I was having dinner with a few investor friends last night, and I had a few things I want to talk about, but I'm rambling long, man. I always ramble along. So I had thoughts on polymarket, too. I want to skip to. But let's stick with the dinner time. I got in this debate. with a few people. And, you know, one person said, hey, my edge is time horizon, right? I'm willing to look longer.

And I feel like the me of 10 years ago probably would have said, my edge is time horizon too, right? I'm willing to buy and the stock goes up and down, whatever. I'm willing to say, I'm buying for 10, and I think the stock is worth 20. And I don't care if it goes to 5 in the meantime. I can hold. And I will get that 20 in like my iron stomach, my ability, my diamond hands are the reason I can get off of it. And I've just come to view that is silly, to be honest with you. And I'll

tell you why, because I'm rambling. So that's my job of telling you why. Look, there are two ways you can say you have a time horizon advantage. Way number one is you say, hey, all the pod pros are playing for the next quarter or all the investment funds are playing on a six-month-to-one-year time horizon. I look further. You know, if everyone is playing six months to one year, I'm playing for things that work over three years. If everyone's playing over three years, I look over five years. And I've just really come,

I'm just incredibly skeptical of that argument. You know, hey, I can drag. That's literally saying, hey, I drag my Excel file over, you know, a column or two. The columns go 2025, 2025, 2006. My competitors ended at 2007, and I go 2028, 2009. I'm really skeptical of that thing.

And, you know, you'll hear people say, my edge is everybody wants the catalyst. in six months, but I look further out. I've just gotten really skeptical of that. I mean, maybe, maybe that's the case. Maybe I'm being too cavalier. Maybe I'm being too cute with it. But I'm skeptical that there are so many people who, smart people who are looking around trying to outperform the market and say, look, if I could just, if I could just buy stuff that, you know, would work over an 18-month time frame instead of a 12-month time frame, I could make reams of money, but I'm just constrained by my boss, my employer, my investors, my fund,

whatever it is. I just can't do that. It has to work in 12 months. I'm really skeptical that you can just look a little further and do that. Again, I could be wrong. It could be wrong, but I'm very skeptical of that. The other way you could say, I have a long time horizon, and from that is what I referred to earlier. I can buy at 10. And if it's a 65, I will have diamond hands and nobody else can. So because I can have diamond hands on the way down, I can buy stuff that's more volatile than my peers do. And this has some roots and Warren Buffett's. We'd rather buy a lumpy 15% return than a smooth 12%.

Now, I get all of that underlying thesis, but I understand what they're saying. But I've never really heard someone say, hey, this stock is going to be volatile, but I think it's going to work really, really well. So I can't own it, right? And so again, I'm skeptical of this argument. And if you've got great skill, why do you need the big drawdown? You know, why do you need to? And I get it, you're willing to, but you're basically presupposing that the stock is

going to go from 10 to 5. And if that's the pre-sum, why do you need to buy it 10 and go to 5? Like, couldn't you buy it 5? I don't know the answer. I understand, like, again, there's volatility markets move up and down. But I just, I've never talked to an investor who said, hey, I bought this at 10. It went to 5, and I had to get out of it at 5 for X, Y, Z. reasons. I mean, if you look over time, actually, the reasons for for selling. Now,

for selling is a lot rarer than I think people think, but force selling generally happens. I mean, the one I love and people know this, a few lists the podcast is drug trial fails. It's from, you know, it's valued at $10 billion. It's got a billion of cash and people are just getting out. And some of that's rational, right? You want the tax loss and all that sort of stuff. And some of that is irrational. And I've talked to these people, it's not irrational because they're not here to play for, hey, the company's got a business. billion of cash. It's trading at $750 million. We're going to get that cash. They're here to play for literally the next cure for cancer. Here's a VC bet. So they're kind of handing it off

to more natural. But that is for selling. A lot of the foreselling, though, is, you know, dividend cuts. I don't see that big of drawdowns from dividend cuts unless it is a massive surprise these days. Index kicks. You don't see huge moves from index kicks. And by the way, if you're coming to me and you're saying, hey, my edge is that when a company gets, is when a company I own cuts their dividend and the stock goes down, I can hold onto it. Well, you know, companies that cut their dividend generally, things ain't great over there, right? So my edge is I can hold a company that gets kicked out of the index when I hold it. Well, you know, companies generally get kicked into the index because the stock ain't working.

So I just, you know, I can hold when everyone else can sell or I can dime enhance this thing. Again, I'm skeptical. And one of the reasons I'm skeptical is because a lot of the time I hear somebody, most of the time, when I hear someone say, I have a longer time horizon, I can hold things that are volatile, I hear it when they're saying the dot, dot, dot is, I've underperformed for the past three years. I've underperformed for the past five years. But, you know, I'm convinced there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And investing is a, you know, it is a bet on yourself game, right? You're saying, I'm going to beat the market. That's why I'm investing. And that is saying,

I differentiate from the base rates. There is some arrogance there. So there is this crazy thing of, when you underperform the market, you say, hey, the market's going to come around. I am skilled. I am special. It's going to come around to me. But, you know, I just, I can't tell you how many times I've seen a letter that says, we've underperformed the market seven years in a row. We are convinced the market's in a bubble.

Our stocks are going to work. And we're just going to stick to it. We've got long-term edge. We've got diamond hands. We've got this long-term time. I mean, seven years of underperformance is a long, long time. And how much are you going to outperform in the eighth year to just, to justify those seven years.

I just, I, again, I hear the argument. We have a long-term time horizon. We'll take stuff lumpy. But the dot, dot, dot I generally see is we are underperforming. We think we're going to underperforming. We're setting ourselves up so that if the market's race and we don't, we can tell you what we're saying.

I just don't know. Investing hard. There's no easy answer. And I'm not saying everybody needs to outperform the market every day, every minute, every second of the day. But you know, there is something to, hey, if you underperformed, let's say, in a year, when is it time to look yourself in the mirror? Is it after three, three months, six months, a year, two years, five years, like, when is it

time to look in the mirror and say, what am I doing wrong? What is the market seeing that I'm missing? And this is, you know, I used it as a portfolio as a whole. I can't tell you, I've created this three-year rule, right? If I buy a stock and for three years, it's done nothing, it's really time for me to look in the mirror and say, hey, is the market seeing something that I'm missing? And yes, every now and then it's caused me to miss a huge winner that would have just done great in year four. But a lot of times it's caused me to miss to get out of stocks that would be flat for another three years or that have deteriorated even further.

So, you know, I just can't tell you how many times I've seen someone write up a company say, hey, you know, we made our investment. The investment didn't work last year, but all the factors are there. And then I go back and read the letters like they've been in the stock since 2019. team. And they've been saying the whole time, it's going to work, it's going to work, it's going to work. Now we're in 2006. You can say I have a long time horizon, but it feels like that's a busted thesis and you're just not willing to admit it to yourself. Okay, look, I've been rambling for 30 minutes. I've got great stuff. I really wanted to talk about the polymarket. I'm sure a lot of you have seen this, but there was a polymarket thing where micro strategy sold Bitcoin on May 31st,

I believe it was, and they filed that in 8K on June 1st. And there was a student who, bet a bunch of money on the poly market, will micro strategy sell Bitcoin by May 31st? He bet a lot, yes, and the market resolved no. And polymarkets rules are, hey, it has to be disclosed by the end of May 31st. It wasn't disclosed. And I find that fascinating. And I get why polymarkets doing it, right? You would hate to say, markets resolve, you know, is Andrew Walker going to have a diet

Dr. Pepper today? You should bet, yes, I've got my diet, Dr. Pepper right here. but you would hate to have that market resolve no. And then 20 years later, in my memoir, I said, I had a diet, Dr. Pepper that day. And the market can switch to yes, 20 years later. So you do want markets to resolve timely. And that's what I would say about my construction. I think experts have pointed that up.

Hey, it was disclosed the next day. If you understand how these rules work, they're not trying to be the pure arbiters of truth. You have to have disclosure. I understand it because it was a few hours later, you say, oh, I got robbed. But what if it had been, you know, instead of filing that on June 1st, What if Micro Strategy had filed that on August 15th when they reported earnings two and a half months later? Could we have kept the market open two and a half months? Like, I get their technical, but I do think these markets are having issues where they can be gained, right?

And they're dealing with areas where there is a lot of gray, right? Will the U.S. and Iran war resolve? Was it resolved last week when Donald Trump tweeted out, we're going to sign a memorandum on Friday? Was it resolved on Friday when they signed the memorandum of understanding? will it be resolved 30 days from now when the memory and when the straight of like I don't know these are gray areas and they're not going to define and because the world evolves even if you try to define things up front a lot of times the way that the things play out won't be you won't be able to find and I do wonder if that's a big issue for prediction markets

long term and the last thing I'll mention on prediction markets is you know these are I don't think people realize how serious people take these prediction markets I hear from people all the time oh, you know, Polly Market says 60%, and I trust Polly Market because Polly Market's been better at analyzing markets. And what I think they mean is people say, hey, if Polly Market is 55%, it predicted the winner at 55%. Remember, 55%, if these markets are really functioning, it should mean there's a 45%. It's almost a coin flip that the candidate loses. And people are taking these things verbatim.

And, you know, if it's 50-50, they say it's a coin flip. The reason I mentioned all that is, you know, a lot of these markets are very thin. And I keep thinking, I'm surprised, I think there are people doing it, but I'm surprised there's not more. If you're running for office, you could go slam a polymarket. Andrew Walker is running for New York Congressman. I could slam a polymarket market with $5,000 worth of bet yes. And I would really drive my odds up. And then I could start emailing around and saying, I am the polymarket favorite for running for this office, right?

You should support me. And momentum can but get momentum. And I have seen these thin things where someone jams it and they start getting some momentum. I'm really surprised that you're not seeing like polymarket wars being waged, especially in these really thin markets to shape the narrative. Or, you know, even in bigger elections, like when you go back to the 2024 election, people are talking about the polymarket data all the time. And it was not that, it was not that big a market.

I kind of thought Elon Musk, instead of spending an incremental $5 million in, Ohio are wherever it was. I kind of thought he should have just gone and spent $5 million betting yes on Donald Trump and taking the market from 60 to 80, maybe two weeks before the election, demoralizing the opponents, right? Getting that last push, hey, if you were a swing donor, why would you donate to Kamala Harris? She's clearly going to lose. Look at the market. Donates Donald Trump, get in his good graces, have him owe you a favor for putting him over the finish line when he's in office. I'm really surprised by that. So, you know, polymarkets can be, in prediction markets, they can be very, very reflexive.

with the real world. And that is scary. And the way these things are, the ambiguity and these things resolving combined with the reflexity of them impacting the world, it's a pretty big risk to the business model, in my opinion. And I don't know, I don't know what the answer is, but it's something I've been thinking about because the other thing I've been thinking, if I was a 20 year old, oh my God, I would have spent all day on polymarket, just looking at these weird markets and making bets and talking to my friends and, you know, it would have been $5 bets all the time. Every night we would have loved it. Anyway, that is my ramblings.

I've been rambling for over 30 minutes, which I think makes this my longest rambling, but this is my random rambling for the month of June. We've got some great podcasts coming up in the next couple weeks. So looking forward to hearing you for the podcast. I'll be writing on the blog. So looking forward to talking to your other blog, and I will see you in July. A quick disclaimer. Nothing on this podcast should be considered an investment advice.

Guests or the hosts may have positions in any of the stocks mentioned during this podcast. Please do your own work and consult a podcast. financial advisor. Thanks.