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“Rough numbers, numbers suck on podcasts, and audio formats in general, but 67 odd bucks a barrel before the war. It gets to about 117. Now, yesterday it was down to 95 odd bucks. Today, West Texas Intermediate Crude down to $91 a barrel. Now, still meaningfully more than it was, obviously, before the war. But more than half the gain, well, the increase has been given back.”

“CSL is a great example of what happens when the story stops being made. Because CSL has been stupidly expensive for its entire well, over the last ten years. Stupidly expensive on any not not not as a share price, not as a price per share, but as a multiple of the company's earnings. And the argument always was, well, it's a quality company and people are are paying up for quality. And so every time you said I said someone said, if CSL, I'm not paying 100 times to say something. That's crazy. And for years, we were wrong. Until the the kind of generally accepted common health view breaks. The shares have fallen from 311 down to a $139.”

“When you remember what a bank is and it just it is inherently leveraged by nature. Literally, it's a fractional reserve system. There are two things that you do not like, outside of banking, no one will will blink at what what I'm saying. But if you're worried about a recession or something like that, you don't want highly leveraged companies that are very cyclical in nature. What is a bank? A highly leveraged company that is very cyclical in nature.”

“Coinbase in the S&P means everybody's going to be exposed to Bitcoin, whether they like it or not. That's a big, big, big deal. And so passive investors associated with ETFs and the like, the vanguards of the world and others are going to have some small connection to Bitcoin based on the fact that Coinbase is going to be in the S&P 500.”

“Dick Smith and Vegemite. So, you know, Australia. And so was it Kraft who took over Vegemite? And then every everyone got upset because, oh, that's a Vegemite. That's Australian. It can't be owned by her. And so Dicky set up Aussiemite. And it officially closed in 2019. And and like, you think, well, wait a second. That's Australia. But, Milton, we don't care, Dick. We just don't care.”

“I always start whenever I look at any company. I've said it to you a million times. Like, first question is, are they still around in ten years? And are they earning more than they are today? I don't even quantify. Because if the answer is not I mean, not not that you can't do well if the answer is no because maybe you can pay a low enough price and you can be super clever about things. But I'm not a I'm not a smart I'm Forrest Gump.”

“Markets are a evolution. They're a process of discovery. What do people want? I don't know. The only way to know is to test. And that's what entrepreneurs do. It's what businesses do. Someone woke up the other day and said, I'll do it. Because they reckon they can make you go of it in that location. Could be the worst decision because the person who owned it before didn't think it would they found out the hard way it wasn't right because it closed down.”

“It means literally every American and every American institution will have exposure to the largest crypto exchange. That's a meaningful thing. I'm at a TradFi conference today, and I trialed this as a talking point. It mattered to people. It seemed to suggest to people that this industry has grown up.”

“If Bitcoin, which it will, goes down 30, 40%, whatever, and some of these guys start to panic and do want to make people whole or want to have a company that exists, they're going to sell the Bitcoin and that's how you get the liquidation cascading, you know, sell, panic, sell, panic, sell, panic, sell.”

“Sentiment is everything in the short run. Well, I'd actually say no, sentiment is everything, full stop, period, right? It's just like sometimes that sentiment is more objectively informed and more centered, more fundamental kind of factors, but it's vibes all the way down, right? At the end of the day, that's all the market is, is some people that have a thing, and there's other people that want the thing, and then they bid and offer prices until consensus is reached.”

“Qantas comes out on, I think it was Tuesday, and said, hi. We're gonna have to spend extra $800,000,000 on fuel this year. By the way, we're also increasing fares, unsurprisingly, and we're cutting a whole lot of flights. The very next day Virgin comes out says, yeah. Yeah. We got fuel prices prop yeah. We got fuel issues too, and we're gonna cut flights to put fares up as well. When you got a duopoly and and perfect mutual self interest and game theory is a thing, of course, they're going to.”

“We should really do an app on frequent flyer points or loyalty programs at some point because they are faster. It is effectively money printing. It's like we have the ability to print our own money. Counterfeit. It's great. It was, like, just the most genius thing that anyone ever sort of came up with. It's like, well, if we print Australian dollars, that's counterfeiting. We'll go to jail. But but we can make up our own money. We'll call it frequent flyer points, and you can only spend it with us.”

“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.”

“But for now, it's absolutely true that companies are buying more than 100% of the supply of Bitcoin, right? And that is a good thing for price. That's one of the reasons we're up so much. And I suspect that that's going to continue, right? We think companies will buy 300 to 500,000 Bitcoin this year.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Sentiment is everything in the short run. And, well, I'd actually say no. Sentiment is everything, full stop, period. Right? It's just like sometimes that sentiment is more objectively informed and more centered, you know, or on on more fundamental kind of factors, but it still just vibe it's vibes all the way down, right, at the end of the day. That's all a market is, is is some people that have a thing, and there's other people that want the thing, and then they they, you know, bid and offer prices until consensus is reached, and then trade happens.”

“The ASX is almost back to its pre war highs, Pre war war this is. And you're saying The US market is already back to there and and above that level. Yeah. And it's kinda I think there's I think it's both justifiable and hard to justify at the same time. We'll we'll unpack that. But the the reality of the what Iran that is locking up 20% of the world's oil either by Iranian threat or US blockade or both, that threatens to create the the circumstances that may well, would absolutely to a recession if it continues long enough.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“You can't take out 20 percent of the ability to create commerce through oil and not have a recession. If it stopped, if it stopped now, and not restarted, we end up in recession. And that's just kind of, the power is kind of mathematically factual as you get. You can't make and do the things we do without having a decline in economic growth from a couple of percent to something less than zero.”

“I've always thought the risk. People have tried to pin risk on micro strategy. They're very sophisticated about their sort of debt to their Bitcoin holdings. The risk has always been somebody trying to outdo micro strategy. And I do worry that we're moving up that escalator of people who want to stick their neck out above Michael Saylor.”

“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.”

“That's the risk when it comes to thinking about companies you own with high margins. Jeff Bezos famously said your margin is my opportunity. If high margins are are defensible, they're wonderful. But kinda, you know, you you have painted a target on your back, and it's really big, and it's really red and white, and you're just asking for everybody out there to go, I'd like some of that.”

“There is something to be remarked on with the apparently, I read this morning or yesterday, the ASX is almost back to its pre-war highs, pre-Ram war this is. And you're saying the US market is already back to there and above that level. And it's kinda, I think it's both justifiable and hard to justify at the same time.”

“The concept of TINA, you know, which is there, another acronym for there is no alternative. There's a lot of capital in the world, you know, you got to park it somewhere, you know, and particularly in a world where, despite inflationary concerns and the rest of it, you know, most governments are spending drunken sailors, that money's being pumped in, like, where does it go? Right?”