AVOID RETAIL

“I'm giving MNTN a thumbs up if it can gather a little more momentum and break above this hundred day moving average, which it's trading right at right now. If it does hit those earnings numbers, then it looks cheap. If you can break above a dollar—or sorry, $11.75, $12 in that range, then I think this has more upside.”

“If a typical retailer could halve their hidden food waste costs, it could grow their profit margins by more than 20%. That's without raising prices, without cutting staff. That's just straight to the bottom line. So it's about getting smarter about what they order in the first place, and that's what AI is helping with.”

“I do think over time, AI will probably overtake that to some degree. It's pretty clear that AI is a transformational force within the software space. And probably the majority of names in the space today will experience major issues over the coming decade or so.”

“Rates are going higher and the dollar is starting to go lower. And that shows you that money is fleeing out of US markets, out of US assets and into foreign markets, which means higher interest rates, downward pressure on equities. The internals of the market are showing you what's happening.”

“Sure, part of their strategy should be to diversify, but part of it should be to hold on to that stock long-term and think about how to maybe even monetize the volatility. So we've built some options programs and things like that for people here to monetize these stocks are volatile by nature. And so you can monetize that volatility without necessarily exerting the stocks.”

“They have you can either make housing and mortgages more affordable by getting bond yields lower and therefore mortgage rates lower, but you can't do that at the same time as having stock markets higher because you need disinflation. You need to get a handle on inflation, which means some sort of hawkish reaction function, which means lower stock prices to get those lower mortgage rates. So you have to decide. And he you know, we don't wanna see housing prices go lower. So that doesn't matter as much. So they decide to pump the stock market instead.”

“You're going from in the thirty, forty, 60% range over the past few years of earnings growth down to eight next year. That usually creates some sort of earnings multiple compression. I would be very patient to pick this up because of that growth slowing, which is creating multiple compression, which means probably lower prices.”

“The other challenge I found is that family offices have real trouble retaining the talent because, you know, you hire someone, they're ambitious, they have a career path. The principle of the family is signing up really to be a manager of an asset management company. I don't think many of them actually realize that's what they're signing up for. And I don't think they want to do that.”

“The market's just a giant derivatives trade. It's what happens when everything gets so centralized and everyone everyone's asset management looks the same. If you have, you know, this beta neutral book, that's generally a lot of hedge funds. That's that's the guys moving the books around. And it's it's a lot of, like, you know, they they they do things in unison as much as they think they're original thinkers.”

“Customer service dipped during COVID. It's over now. Yeah, well, we told them they're heroes. Yeah, they called them all front line workers and stuff. And a lot of them were not heroes. I don't—I mean, some of them were, I guess.”

“The real opportunities are in the companies that are applying AI effectively to make their businesses more efficient. And I think those that run on small margins already have the most room to grow because small changes in their cost structure can make a massive impact on their total profit.”

“The flat fee arrangement means that people do not invest in building out these alternative teams. There's a lot of work, it's a lot of effort, it's a lot of expense. If you make the same 40, 50, 60 bips doing that or just buying stocks and bonds, you're going to buy stocks and bonds. So by and large, that industry I think is not teed up for a sophisticated portfolio.”

“I'm giving MNTN a thumbs up if it can gather a little more momentum and break above this hundred day moving average, which it's trading right at right now. If it does hit those earnings numbers, then it looks cheap. If you can break above a dollar—or sorry, $11.75, $12 in that range, then I think this has more upside.”

“I did it for a while and it's just like, yeah, your back gets fucked up and you're like, then at the end of it too, it's like, I could just get a gun. Like, you know, it's like you could just defend yourself. It's a lot better to choke a guy out in front of everyone than just like shoot him in the face.”

“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.”

“Probably one of the worst things the Trump admin has done is just, you know, kinda disintegrated the integrity of capital markets in in The US and basically allowed white collar crime to be legal insider trading everything to to just an extreme extent. I mean, it's just not good for because short people shorting the markets and people long in the markets both do a do a deed by, you know, steering efficient allocation of capital.”

“Allbirds, which basically went bankrupt, just decided to execute a $50,000,000 convertible financing facility to pivot from direct to consumer freaking shoes to becoming an I AI compute infrastructure company. Look. I've been I've been hitting the whole we need more compute thing and talking about, like, bidding the stuff that that is a tailwind to that. But, oh my god. Like, when I saw this this morning, I was like, this is, I mean, you know, the the the crypto crew knows all about this because back in 2019 or whatever it was, we started to see, like, you know, Kodak was gonna be a a crypto company.”

“Rates are going higher and the dollar is starting to go lower. And that shows you that money is fleeing out of US markets, out of US assets and into foreign markets, which means higher interest rates, downward pressure on equities. The internals of the market are showing you what's happening.”

“They don't know shit at Best Buy. I'll ask a couple of times when I went to Best Buy to ask about like cords and shit, and they're just like, I don't really know, man. I'm like, all right, dude, what the fuck? What's the point of this place?”

“I'll see someone with their very first liquidity. They take it, and instead of doing something a little bit safe, in case there's a rainy day, they turn around, and you go put in a bunch of very early stage startups. You just sort of sit there, and you're like, listen, if you're going to do venture, at least try to do it in a systematic way. Do not take 80% of what you just got, and hand it to your three friends.”

“This is the put to call ratio. A lot of people have been calling calling this out. So, like, now everyone went balls along, puts previously at the Lowe's. This is what giving retail these products, it's really it's good in some ways, but it exacerbates things because they always you know, they push things in both directions. But now they went balls long puts, and now they unwind it. And now they're going long calls.”

“And professional investor is a very specific definition in my mind. It's someone who at some point in their career was paid purely based on the performance of their investments, right? Your investments were up 20% this year. Here's your money. Thank you very much, right? If you have those kinds of people on your team, you now can underwrite your investments yourself.”

“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.”

“The real opportunities are in the companies that are applying AI effectively to make their businesses more efficient. And I think those that run on small margins already have the most room to grow because small changes in their cost structure can make a massive impact on their total profit.”

“This is a really good one from the Fed a Fed research paper that came out last week, which answers the question that we've all been wondering, which is how much of tariffs is causing inflation, namely in core goods because that's mostly where you would see it. And so they came out with this one that just shows, like, before the Iran war, we were seeing core goods inflation accelerate pretty significantly. If we didn't have the tariffs, we would have had deflation in core goods. Instead, we have two and a half percent core PC core goods inflation.”

“Any cash you're gonna need in the first in the next probably two, three months, I'd probably wanna be in money market or something like an escrow. And then anything beyond the three months, then you could probably park in something like this—between three months and a year, year and a half, two years max.”

“I actually I've come around. I shit on planes now. No, you have to, because otherwise you're going to fart like a coward and stink the whole plane up. So now I do the valiant thing. I like walk by everyone. I sit down there for like 15 minutes and they all know.”

“If a typical retailer could halve their hidden food waste costs, it could grow their profit margins by more than 20%. That's without raising prices, without cutting staff. That's just straight to the bottom line. So it's about getting smarter about what they order in the first place, and that's what AI is helping with.”

“Obviously, the cost that we just talked about is inflation, but, like, who who cares about inflation if the stock market's going up? Right? The policy is pump stock market. That's what it is. And, like, every time they try to actually, like, target another pocket of the social, like, strata, that derails the stock market.”

“And if you're an individual, you're paying, especially in this state, you're paying 50 plus percent tax. So the easiest alpha to use an investment term to get is a tax alpha. And they are not these institutional asset managers because most of their clients are non-taxable. They're not even attempting to optimize after-tax return.”

“Banks themselves don't train people to be professional investors. These people are trained to be service providers. They're trained to be responsive, helpful. But actual investment acumen, when you're at a large bank, sits in a separate group. You're rewarded as a wealth manager by how much you grow your book of business. You're never trained to be an investment person, per se.”

“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.”

“Negative negative real we're living in a negative real yield world now, which is, like, global flows talks about this too. But, like, this is the most important thing to realize is, like, if inflation's really at, you know, 5% and yields are at 3%, you should lever up and buy whatever is growing faster than that. And that's that's pretty much how they're gonna grow their way out of this.”

“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.”

“I do think over time, AI will probably overtake that to some degree. It's pretty clear that AI is a transformational force within the software space. And probably the majority of names in the space today will experience major issues over the coming decade or so.”

“I wonder if that'd be a good business if you had another business that also at the same time was a steam room. Get your hair cut and just sweat. Double businesses are a good idea. It's time for dog grooming and maybe sporting goods or whatever.”

“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.”

“The entire banking system and taxation system was built around real assets. When banks and law and all these laws were built in the 20s, 30s, 40s, all there was was real assets, right? People weren't, there were no internet companies, they were buying buildings, factories. So the tax code is very beneficial to real assets. And you can therefore get a solid teens return.”

“Any cash you're gonna need in the first in the next probably two, three months, I'd probably wanna be in money market or something like an escrow. And then anything beyond the three months, then you could probably park in something like this—between three months and a year, year and a half, two years max.”

“You're going from in the thirty, forty, 60% range over the past few years of earnings growth down to eight next year. That usually creates some sort of earnings multiple compression. I would be very patient to pick this up because of that growth slowing, which is creating multiple compression, which means probably lower prices.”