Stocks and Finance

“Gravity's obviously, we're all we know no different. It's like talking to a fish about water. Gravity is all around us, but one of the things gravity does is it creates defects. And so easiest example is fiber optic cable that we just talked about. If you extrude fiber optic cable and you do it here on Earth, you will have inclusions. You'll have defects. Those defects affect the ability for the fiber optic cable to transmit data, light specifically. And there's really no way around that. If you remove gravity, then those inclusions and defects are minimized, and you get literally a thousand x benefit in transmission. But that's true of any manufacturing process where defects impact quality.”

“Chemical rockets are terribly inefficient. Medium term, twenty, twenty five years, thirty years, I think we would be going to deep space with nuclear. Just to give you an idea, Kirk, of how inefficient chemical rockets are, the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, If you were to take a spacecraft the size of the space shuttle and use chemical propulsion and you gave yourself a thousand years to get there, the amount of fuel it would take to get to Alpha Centauri in a thousand years would be more mass than the entire universe. Okay? That's how inefficient chemical rock is. So the point is, if you're talking about interstellar travel, chemical rockets are not possible unless you were gonna take a hundred thousand years to get there.”

“There's gonna have to be some consolidation in the industry. Probably one analogy would be the railroads. If you look at the railroad system in The US, you had all these little micro railroads that would connect to little spurs of different towns. Everyone kinda working on their patch. And then when you had the InterContinental Railroad, that was all joined. Then some of those spurs became relevant because they were tied to the InterContinental Railroad, and others became completely irrelevant. So over time, you had a lot of boom and busts. You had a lot of consolidation. You had people who bet on the wrong patch of land, if you will. But, ultimately, everyone knew what the end state was. The end state was that you were gonna have coast to coast rail.”

“When you talk about the moon, a lot of people don't realize this, but fusion, which, you know, the joke about fusion is it's ten years away and always has been. I do think, realistically, we're coming in for landing on fusion. I do think fusion will happen in the twenty twenties. I really do. We've already sort of demonstrated the feasibility. Now it's about scale up. But one of the things that's important for fusion is Helium three. The Earth, believe it or not, is running out of Helium three. The moon has a ton, literally and figuratively, of Helium three. And just to give you a sense, a teacup of Helium three with a next generation fusion reactor could power Los Angeles for a year. So you don't need a lot of it, but you need access to it.”

“And so there was a book called The Gorilla Game written by Jeffrey Moore. And in the book, he talked about the idea of investing in a basket. And the idea was, there's a lot of companies doing this and, like, as we've been talking, I just checked to see what public companies are. And there's a whole host of public companies. I know SpaceX is supposed to go public, but there are public companies in this space. You can think about investing it with a basket approach because there is so much speculation here. We don't know which company is gonna be the one that emerges. And the whole principle that was brought up in the Gorilla game was the idea that you invest in a basket, figuring that as long as your basket includes the one or two companies that really are the winners, assuming that there is a winner because we can't say for sure there's going to be because it's may still be too nascent from an investing perspective or a business perspective. But if you can include that one or two winners in your basket, whatever they do in terms of how they perform is gonna more than offset whatever losses you have from the ones that you invest in that don't make anything.”

“I mean, to me, back to the technology is interesting, what's over the hill is interesting, the future is interesting. But I also you know, people forget it was Apollo eight that took the Earthrise photo, changed the world. Everyone saw the blue marble for the first time. It changed our perspective on how we see each other. I've had the privilege of being up there on a suborbital flight, as I mentioned, in December 21. That changed my life. Seeing the Earth from space is something you can't unfill and unsee. So just think of space not only as a tool for transformation, but we go to space to benefit Earth and to benefit humans.”

“The market always climbs a wall of worry. There's always something going on. There's always a very good reason to sell down and walk away. And yet and yet, you know, here we are with with all of the craziness that's happened in the last ten years. We're essentially record highs.”

“Particularly in finance and economics, it behooves you to to consider certain things with a skeptical eye. If for no other reason than history shows you that actually experts are wrong all the time in this space. More often than not, they're off, and more often than not, they're off by a lot.”

“What always strikes me, like, it slaps you across the face whenever you might be googling, you know, a company or you wanna wanna find out some information. You find an old article like an AFR or Australian business from five or ten years ago. And the thing that you always notice is the most urgent, oh gosh. This is happening kind of screaming headline. How irrelevant it is. Like, we all know this.”

“I said, we should have another term. When the market is up 10%, we should call it an upreaction, which just sounds so wrong. I mean, my 16 year old boy just giggling. Like, it sounds wrong. But I'm not sure why, Andrew.”

“RBA projection numbers suggest by 2027, we'll be at 2011 levels. We've had a lost seventeen years. That is just an indictment.”

“I would say that the the only test of economic progress is that we, on average, as a society, are getting more stuff for less work. Or better stuff, or the same stuff but working less for it. If that is not true, what's the bloody point?”

“In fact, the the most rate sensitive of the big four banks. Now over the past six months, stocks kind of been all over the place. It's been climbing since March, then had a pretty steep drop off in March. What really has been driving that? Well, a lot of it has been what's been driving the overall banking sector. They have recently had upgrades from an analyst perspective. And out of earnings, they have been performing pretty decently because every segment has grown revenue, grown earnings, deposits have grown, loans, all growing in q one. They had 9,300,000,000 in capital return to shareholders in a single quarter. But at the same time, they're also the most levered of the big four. Each 25 basis point Fed cut reduces Bank of America's NII by an estimated $225,000,000.”

“The bottom line, the nineteen seventy three oil shock planted the seed for the renewable energy industry. The twenty twenty two Russia Ukraine shock, we out watered it. The twenty twenty six Iran war may be the event that forces it to grow. On the next Invest Talk, we'll look into this story, China's calculated play, how Beijing is turning the Iran war into an economic advantage.”

“Business investment surged 10.4%, the strongest growth in nearly three years, driven almost entirely by AI spending on equipment and intellectual property. One common economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics estimated that AI investment accounted for roughly half of overall GDP growth in the first quarter. Think about that. One category of spending is responsible for an entire percentage point of economic growth. That is how dominant the AI build out has become as an economic engine.”

“As of March 31, US publicly held debt reached 31,265,000,000,000, while GDP over the preceding year was 31,216,000,000,000. For those of you math buffs out there, that puts the debt to GDP ratio at 100.2%. The US hasn't finished a fiscal year with debt above 100% of GDP since 1946. It briefly crossed the threshold during the pandemic in 2020 when GDP temporarily shrank and the government borrowed massively, but the ratio fell back to below that as the stimulus ended as growth resumed and as inflation boosted nominal GDP. This time, the drivers are structural.”

“Lululemon is a couple things. It is, first and foremost, a premium athletic apparel brand, so your yoga pants, your run to train apparel, your footwear, your accessories. They have 811 stores with 65% of the revenue from The Americas and growing business in China and international markets. But they're also a brand in crisis story. They have a leadership vacuum. They have a proxy fight with their founder, margin collapse, and they're seeing North American deterioration all happening simultaneously. And that's why since May, these companies fallen dramatically. I think that a lot of the things that have benefited Lulu of the early days of athleisure was the fact that in a lot of ways, they were the only game in town. A lot of that's changed. For that reason, for now at least, I would stay away.”

“The independence of the Fed is critically important, not just here in The US, but in other parts of the country. And when you think about just the way our our governing system works, you know, it's different than a place like China where there's long term management, long term goals, high coordination across all the different areas of government. You know, here we have, you know, a political infrastructure that turns over, which has points of views, and we have a more long term structure in place at the Fed.”

“Yeah. I think right now there's pretty clear consensus that it would be the wrong thing to do. Until the, Iran conflict is clear what the end is in sight, there's there's real risk out there. I mean, I think as you hear voting committee members talk about it, there's a high degree of consistency, including, I think, from, treasury secretary in terms of, you know, waiting to see how this all plays out.”

“Right now, from everything that we see, the economy is still extremely strong. We just we all just reported our first quarter results in the banking space. Loan demand is decent. Delinquencies on the consumer side, are extremely well controlled. Consumer spend is growing on a year over year basis. They're spending more money on gas, but making adjustments in some of the other categories. Businesses have gone into this in strong financial shape. So those are all the good things, but then when you ask them how they feel, everyone's nervous.”

“No. I don't think private credit's about to crumble. I mean, when you look at private credit, when you just look at the size of private credit, it's not big enough to be a systemic risk broadly the way we think about systemic risks, that have existed in the past. But it's credit. And there's been a huge amount of money that's flown into these products, both institutional and retail, and we've all seen this in the past when there's just when there's a lot of money that needs to get invested because that's the only way that these firms get paid is to actually invest, it doesn't always work out well.”

“Wanna know the the the the truth? Yes. I get to Wells, and first thing I wanna do is get a Wells Fargo credit card, and so I get the new card, and I was out to dinner with some good friends who run some big companies, and I pull out my card and it got denied.”

“Johns Hopkins. I wanted to be a research chemist. Really? And it's I loved science in in high school. I loved math and I loved science. My parents were always encouraging of learning broad things and trying to find what you wanted, and both my brother and I were both very much math and science people, and I go to Hopkins, and I, first semester I take organic chemistry, where you're in with all the Hopkins premeds, which was probably the worst experience of my life.”

“It's very, very hard. So there are things you can't do, and there are things you can do. You've got to be, first of all, very selective in looking at your balance sheet and saying, okay, it's not the worst thing in the world to say we need to become more efficient on our balance sheet, what's less efficient, where do we make less money, how do we reallocate that balance sheet usage. You then turn to certain things and say, we're just not going to be active about soliciting loans, we're not going to be active about soliciting deposits. We were very careful not to throttle consumer deposits, because you tell a consumer to please bring your deposit elsewhere, you've lost that relationship.”

“I think it's incredibly important, and I really dislike when people talk about lobbying like it's some awful, horrible thing. Showing up and trying to convince a senator or a congressperson at the last minute that what I think is right, when it's clear that it's just gonna benefit me, goes nowhere. What really matters is over a period of time, building a relationship with members and their staffs where you're where you're honest about about what works, what doesn't work, what the risks are, and so that when they need to actually have a position on something, they're more educated.”

“It's been a bull market for a long time. There's a huge amount of liquidity in the system. There's this underlying current that things are gonna be fine for a long period of time. There are a lot of people in the financial services space, in banks and outside of banks, that have never been through cycles, like a real cycle in terms of what that means, and there's a point in which that's gonna turn, and that's gonna have a whole bunch of impacts that I'm not sure we all really understand.”

“You know, I didn't know because when we sold the company and my husband said the deal is done, however, they want you to sign a twenty five year non compete. I was around 34 years old, and I'd never heard of a non compete, let alone thought about a twenty five year one. But I thought to myself, well, it's not a problem because I'm not gonna wanna work when I'm in my sixties.”

“Well, I sold the rights to Bobby Brown, to Estee Lauder when we sold the company, so I couldn't use it again. And why would I wanna do something that I've done before? So we needed a name because I wanted to launch Jones Road the day my twenty five year non compete was up. It was in 2020, a week before the presidential elections, and so I needed a name and I didn't have one. And I was driving to the Hamptons with my husband, my head was down on ways, and I looked down, I saw Jones Road.”

“And then one day, we're at a party, and I said, you know, thank the hostess for inviting us. I had never met her before, and she said she was a fan of mine. I'm like, oh, you know who I am? That's so nice. I said, what do you do? She said, oh, I'm a cosmetics buyer at Bergdorf Goodman. I said, oh, I sell these cosmetics out of my house. And she, agreed to take them and sell them at Bergdorf.”

“And at the end of the year, I told my mom I was gonna drop out, and she said, you can't. You have to go to college. She never did. Mom, it's so boring. And she said, forget about anything. Forget what you wanna do. If today's your birthday, you could do anything you wanna do. What would you wanna do? And I said, I don't know. Maybe go to Marshall Field's and play with makeup. She said, that's it. Why don't you be a makeup artist?”

“Because there was a lot of angst in the year or so before I left. And it's all in in my biography, so or in my memoir, so it's all out there. It was tough. I mean, Leonard wasn't as involved in when you know, in the company, and there was a new, you know, CEO and a new you know, a lot of new things were happening, and it was not a good time at all. And so, it was it was it was honestly really tough, and it's the best thing that ever happened to me getting fired, if you wanna know the truth.”

“Well, first of all, there's nothing easy in life in general. But if you're a kid that is just coming out of college or even business school, I'd say go work for someone for a year. You know, go really, like, learn what you can before you start something, and and maybe start ideating and thinking what your company would be before you decide to do it. Don't start with a deck and investment. Like, people make that mistake. Start with a product.”

“You know, I hope my legacy will be that I was there to help people feel good about themselves and teach people how to be confident because I've figured out the secret of confidence. All it is is feeling comfortable in your skin.”

“Jones Road has been following a different playbook. We are direct to consumer. Probably 85% of our business is direct to consumers through our own site, just online. And now we have 10 or 11 retail stores. We're in one, account department store, Liberty in London.”

“And the World Health Organization's Climate Committee says that by 2050, we could have one to 2,000,000,000 climate migrants crossing international borders. A few million coming from, the Eastern Mediterranean with the climate drought there led to Viktor Orban and Brexit and authoritarian friendly governments that have have emerged. It's hard to imagine what a billion climate migrants would do to our capacity for self governance.”

“We are now trapping as much heat with this pollution every day as would be released by 750,000 Hiroshima class bomb atomic bombs exploding every twenty four hours.”

“I was raised in two places. My father was in the Congress House and Senate, so I spent a lot of time in DC as a child. But every summer and Christmas and my spiritual home was in Carthage, Tennessee, and that's where my draft board was. And I couldn't imagine walking down the street and seeing a family whose son had died in Vietnam and them knowing that I had used some connections to get out of it.”

“I had in, my last year in college a a course under a man now recognized as one of the greatest climate scientists of all time, Roger Revelle. And he opened my eyes to the issue, and educated me, and it was like a window opening onto the future. And everything that he said at the time has come true, unfortunately. He designed the first experiment to measure c o two in the Earth's atmosphere.”

“In April 1989, one of my children had a very, very serious, accident. My son almost lost his life, and the recovery was, quite lengthy, and the stress and strain on the family, of course, was. He was hit by a car. It went to your beloved Orioles, in Baltimore. And after the game, I hate to tell you I was rooting for the Red Sox in that game, but but, afterwards, he was hit by a car. It was a it was a devastating, experience in so many ways. I was worried when I got to him that he had died.”

“And I learned that my secret to success in business is to get great partners. And David Blood, my cofounder, The old joke is, I've worn it out really, I wanted to name the firm Blood and Gore, but the other the other partners wouldn't wouldn't agree to it.”

“If I ask you, it's not a trick question, but if you look at all of the new electricity generation installed worldwide last year, I often ask people what percentage of it was renewable? And people say, you know, they they're looking for a high number, say maybe 30%, 35%. Correct answer is 93%, because it is taking over the electricity generation industry.”

“Well, yes. But what I really did was what Winston Churchill said about the American people. They generally do the right thing after first exhausting every available alternative. And I did, exhaust every available alternative, save one that the outcome of which would have been certain. There is a a very little known provision in the constitution that if you get to a complete deadlock in the electoral college, then it goes to the house of representatives and it's a strange mechanism where each state has one vote. The Republican party completely dominated that election.”

“So what has been happening and why you you continue to hear from the farm community about the squeeze, if you look at prices, right, we sent you some price charts. I'm sure you'll be able to put those in. We basically since 2016, the futures prices have not changed. So imagine a business since 2016 where your output has prices have not changed. Then on the flip side, when you look at, let's call it inflation, land prices, I don't have these exacts, have probably doubled.”

“So the other thing that you need to understand that has driven land rent, and I think you alluded to it around small farms, is federal crop insurance. You may have heard about this. Right? But it's highly subsidized. And if you think about when you look go out, you spend a thousand dollars an acre to grow a crop. Right? It would be seem to be quite risky. But if you can now, particularly with some additional subsidies, you can ensure most of the loss away through federal crop insurance, which is highly subsidized. One thing's your I do farm at scale in my post, Cargill life, so very involved in this. And think of it as a call option where all of a sudden you've been able to hedge off the downside, but you continue to run the upside for yourself.”

“And in fact, you've seen some of these various government payments that have been pushed through. A lot of those are going straight through the system. So you think about the farmer. Right? He's using that money, he or she actually, I should say, to pay off various pay the land rent or make the payment on equipment or things like that. That money is getting passed through. That's why sometimes you hear the farmers, you say they complain all the time. Like, I don't even get the benefit of this, you know, bridge payment or whatever the latest name is. It's because it's passing straight through the system.”

“And the other thing I have a very concern about in that is as we've worked through it, we have sold they the Chinese have bought just enough US beans to keep the Brazilian honest. That's it. So what they do is because the Brazilian say, hey, you're not gonna buy any US beans period. Right? Their prices just keep going higher and higher and higher. Well, all of a sudden, I think the day that they did finally buy a few Brazilian cargos, I think the Brazilian beans probably lost a dollar a bushel.”

“The other concern I have with this is, and trying not to be political is back when we embargoed the Russians it sent a signal to the worlds the world community that we were not a stable supplier. So when that happened, right, that caused a flood of capital to pour in to Brazil and Argentina. Particularly, the Japanese, which were the large buyer global buyer in the global trade back then, but others poured money into infrastructure to get a an alternative. And you would do the same thing. Right? If you were you had one grocery store that was supplied, and you and all of a sudden, they said, either do what I want or you'd go find a secondary supplier. And that is absolutely happening.”

“I, was prepping for this, and the University of Illinois puts out a really good series of reports, I believe, under FarmDocsDaily, I believe it's called. And the figure they threw out, at least the one I saw, what I believe was around 75% of fertilizer has already been purchased.”

“Yeah. In our farm management practice, which is a part of this business, we see a lot. So let's be first off, you gotta dig deeper in those numbers. I would venture to guess that the dairy numbers are in there. And we have a structural change in dairy to these mega dairy efficiencies that have that business model has taken over. So it's put intense pressure on even the midsize dairy farm. We don't see it in the grain side. A lot of it has to do with the payments. Right? It's been tight, and you're watching working capital.”

“As you folks probably very well know, crude and corn are incredibly correlated. I think they have an R squared north of 95. With some of our very tight relationships, we're having producers sit in their easy chair on Sunday nights when the overnights open after a weekend of crazy news and everyone's doomscrolling and if crude's up 20 and corn's up 20 following it, maybe if you've only have a little bit hedged for next year, go into your account and hedge a little more. So we've been taking advantage of some of these wild market swings often at weird times.”

“We always one of the first things we say is that you wanna make a jump as a producer, you become a risk manager to the farm instead of a speculator. And that's how the biggest companies, right, they have risk managers. Whether they're commodity companies or people who use a lot of commodities, right, they have people that risk manage, and they focus on margin. And so we've really tried to bring that discipline through our classes and through our one on one relationships out to the farm, which never had access to this type of education.”

“But there are all kinds of actors. Michael, I think, might wanna comment here, but we often hear they say you're not gonna make any more land. And I really don't we get into this thing. I don't that's not really true. Right? The Brazilians are adding 2,000,000 acres a year, maybe more. The Indonesians and can add palm plantations at a tremendous rate. There obviously, there's lots of potential in Africa still to be unlocked. And then the technology and efficiency per acre has just exploded.”

“But this war, this attack was interpreted by Iran as a threat to its survival, a threat to the regime's survival, and it responded in a way that it has been saying it would respond for a long time. So I have been shocked, but if I were a better Iran and energy analyst, maybe I shouldn't have been.”

“But the collective understanding of the war initially was that it was going to be a short war because The United States and because president Donald Trump didn't want a long war. So there was this belief that, okay, things are bad. Iran has been attacked. It's being heavily bombed by The US and Israel. It's closing the Strait Of Hormuz. But Trump is gonna deescalate and it's gonna end. That's part of the reason why oil prices didn't really respond as aggressively initially as I think they've responded since.”

“I think it comes down to in this context, he is maybe more conscious of looking weak than taking the taco and taking the the the short term win and seeing the economic indicators, the financial indicators swing back in his favor. If he does back down right now, it feeds directly into the Iranians' narrative of victory. This sense that Iran is tougher, more resilient, more able to withstand pain, and that eventually they will outlast not only The United States, but more specifically The US president.”

“Going into this, there was a belief in the administration and perhaps a belief from the president himself that there was an opportunity in Iran to replicate the experience in Venezuela. That there was a way to kill Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, and that in the wake of his death, a group of Iranian leaders would come to the fore and would pursue policies that aligned with US interests. Now the problem, which they encountered immediately, was that the individuals they expected to lead that political shift inside Iran were also killed alongside Ali Khamenei in the opening hours of the war.”

“There's overwhelming evidence to suggest that most Iranians don't support most of the policies that the regime pursues. The other aspect of this and, you know, this is it's not a uniquely Iranian story. Decades of repression and, you know, monitoring, political dissent, restricting the political environment. What that means is that there's really no organized political opposition inside Iran. There's no, you know, opposition candidate or opposition leader who's, you know, fighting the good fight.”

“The Iranians are trying to show the GCC states and particularly The UAE your model of economic development, this idea that you can turn The Gulf into an island of stability with tourism, with finance, with tech, with hotels, all of that will go away if we keep being attacked. The second reason they're doing this is they are indicating to the GCC that their relationship with The United States is untenable. That so long as they allow The US to have bases in the region, so long as they allow The US to support their security, that from the point of view of Iran, they are US allies, they are US instruments, and that makes them legitimate targets.”

“The Americans, I think, assume or perhaps elements of the Trump administration assume, oh, if we take Karg, then they have to do what we say because they're gonna wanna export oil again. I think that misunderstands the, let's let's say, psychological characteristics of not only the Islamic Republic but also of the Iranian state. They will respond extremely negatively to US soldiers on Iranian soil. They would rather live under greater financial pressure and an inability to export oil in volume than to capitulate to a US pressure campaign that involves the invasion of Iranian territory.”

“I mean, Joe, you mentioned the damage done to the the Qatar facility last night. That was, I believe, one missile that got through and caused enough damage that they'll have to keep the facility off for a long time and has now cut production for years to some extent. And so that's that's one missile. And they could I think they could do more if they wanted.”

“How little the Iranians have needed to do to Hormuz to keep it shut. They've struck about a dozen tankers. They haven't sunk any as far as I know. They haven't laid more than a few mines as far as anyone is aware. Activity at Hormuz has been pretty quiet because as soon as the war began and as soon as the Iranians said Strait Of Hormuz is now closed, all the shippers stopped. Nothing was moving. The threat was enough to keep it closed, which I thought was surprising.”

“I think seeing oil prices fall below $75 a barrel by the end of the year is pretty unlikely, even if this conflict wraps up very quickly. When we entered 2026, there was this broad expectation that this was gonna be a pretty soft market, that there was going to be an imbalance in supply over demand. That has all changed now. The size of the physical disruption that we've seen so far is gonna create constraints on supply going through the next twelve months.”

“Citadel Securities, one of the most powerful trading firms in the world with 65,000,000,000 with a b, assets under management. It is publicly exploring prediction markets. The president, Jim Esposito, said last week that event event contracts are interesting to us and that there's sound industrial logic for institutional clients to use these contracts to hedge against various risks. He said if the market ramps and scales, Citadel will certainly consider getting involved. This is a landmark signal. When a firm like Citadel starts talking about a market this way, it usually means the opportunity is real and it's not just hype.”

“I think that in the long term, people are underestimating the benefits of TurboTax, for example. Right? The benefit is not that they're preparing your taxes. That's easy. The benefit is audit defense. The benefit is the lines of expertise in case you get audited. That is not something that is automated away. And so in the long run, I think a lot of these software companies that are beaten down have been beaten down to an extent that is unjustified.”

“And so, yes, having an allocation to gold, which frankly, I think having a 10% or more allocation to gold is really important in times such such as this with dollar debasement, with the lack of, demand for US dollar denominated assets and what that's done for dollar assets. Having an allocation, albeit small, to cryptocurrency, having an allocation to traditional alternative investments. The benefits of that are not just about returns, but our overall risk level as well.”

“The University of Michigan consumer sentiment index dropped to 49.8 in April. That is the lowest reading in the seventy plus years the university has been regularly pulling American consumers lower than during the February, lower than the COVID pandemic, lower than when inflation peaked after Russia invaded the Ukraine. And the decline, it hit every demographic, all ages, all incomes, all education levels, all political affiliations. So here's the paradox. The hard data says the economy is nowhere close to recession. Retail sales were solid in March even after adjusting for higher gas prices. Jobless claims are low at 207,000.”

“One thing to note, they actually have earnings coming up pretty soon. And anytime you have earnings within the next two weeks, it is just a bad idea to enter a position in a company. Why? You're paying a volatility premium that kinda drifts away from the fundamentals of the company.”

“Lueck's concern is that when you deploy these black box models at scale, managing billions of dollars of client capital and you can't explain why the model is taking a position, you've introduced a risk that is very difficult to manage. In a drawdown, you don't know whether the model is wrong because the market has changed or right because the market is temporarily irrational. The distinction is everything. It determines whether you should add to a position or cut it. The danger isn't using AI in investing. It's outsourcing the thinking to AI.”

“IS is kinda one of those boring businesses. Right? It's a blue chip travel compounder. They have a dominant global global market share. They have massive massive free cash flow. It's supposed to be 10,000,000,000 this year. And they're trading about 20% off their peak heading into a pivotal Monday print. Now the data breach, the softening consumer data, those are all near term watch items, but there's a lot of events coming up pretty soon. FIFA World Cup, people starting to plan for the Los Angeles Olympics, and the shift to this new model away from the traditional, agent model they had, Very compelling at 15.7 times price to forward looking earnings?”

“The national vacancy rate is up to 8.6%. That's the highest level since post financial crisis. The average approximate historical average is 6.9%. Now we're at 8.6. Why is this? Because nearly 1,800,000 units were delivered in just the past three years.”

“Annual net deliveries peaked at 690,000 units in 2024, a forty year high. But last year, it decelerated to only 523,000 units, down 25. This year, expected to contract another 36%, only 333,000 units. The lowest annually annual delivery total since 2014. So you can see the industry adjusts.”

“Austin was the poster child. It it had the was the first to really see rents drop, has a vacancy rate of 13.7%. The steepest rent decline nationally right now at 4.8%. Denver down 3.6. Phoenix down 2.9. Tampa down 2.8.”

“Now both of these are about a speculative and a I don't even call investment. The these are the some of the most speculative stocks in the market. Why? Because it's all about the hopes and dreams of quantum computing and them mastering it, mastering the technology and being a winner. Remember, names like Alphabet, Google, they're putting a lot of money into quantum computing as well. So they have very deep pockets, able to pay the smartest and best engineers.”

“And he had a comment there about new verticals. And a lot of people would get excited about that. But usually when I see that, after a long period of growth, what I sniff out is a bit of management desperation. But they can't They're already the biggest, right? It's them in Lyft, kind of dualopoly there, and there's not much room to grow elsewhere. And so they're looking to maximize their platform by going to different verticals. Now it may work, but usually it spreads the focus and doesn't ultimately produce a great business.”

“But was what was a surprise was that three of the Fed members, they supported holding rates steady, but they opposed what they said is an easing bias in the policy statement. Clearly setting up to fact that they shouldn't be leaning one way or the other versus the policy statement that was leaning a bit dovish. And the market has kinda priced out because those dissenters, they priced out any rate cuts between now and year end. In fact, there's now a better chance of a rate increase by year end as opposed to one rate cut.”

“So there are rules around you can't day trade in retirement accounts, like IRAs, Roth IRAs. So you're don't use that. Basically, what what happened is you traded unsettled shares, meaning you bought it, but they actually settle the next day, and you sold it before it actually settled. Now if you wanna day trade, that's what he said, open up a brokerage account. So yes, you should open a brokerage account, but also don't use Vanguard. We use Schwab and now Fidelity. Vanguard is not for trading. It doesn't have good technology, does not have good customer service.”

“Now, if you're looking for the most juice to the upside, meaning copper continues to go up in price, prices take off, the delta in the change of their financial situation is gonna be much larger than a company that's already producing profits within the space. So to me, that's the only argument of owning this is, I want the most juice for the upside of copper prices, and this might be the one. But it's gonna be extremely volatile, extremely volatile.”