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Excess Returns
Semis Gone Parabolic. Fed Credibility Reversal. Can the Rally Survive the Flows?
01:04:37
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A
We are excited to announce the launch of a new podcast, Last Call. While many market rap shows can cover the same ground, we wanted to try something different. We wanted to get away from what the market did in the past month and instead bring in some of our friends who offer truly unique perspectives and data. And we wanted to have some fun along the way. In our latest episode, we talked to Ben Hunt about the big change in Fed narrative, Andy Constant about why there might not be enough pie for the semiconductor stocks, Brent Kachuba about the flows in the market behind the scenes and Eric Pakman about employment data and crack spreads. You can subscribe to Last Call on all major podcast platforms using the links in this episode. Description thank you for listening. We hope you enjoy the show that
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B
future earnings growth is oversubscribed. There's too many people that too many stocks that expect massive earnings growth and there's just not enough pie for all of them to be successful.
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C
This is a wild chart, right? The losing credibility narrative has gone away from this time a year ago and the gaining credibility narrative, the dark blue on this, on this map, it's now positive.
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D
The issue is the rate of change is unsustainable, right? Like how. How much longer can you keep going up in the queues at 2% per day, right? That that is not sustainable. It all gets priced in at some point.
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The crack spread does not lie. It is the truth. It is telling you is the right type of oil making it to the.
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F
This is excess returns. You're watching Last Call. This is the show where we look back over the month that was in an attempt to look forward joined as I'm at Zigler, joined as always by Jack Forehand. Jack, how's it going?
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G
It's going well. My my private jet has pretty much been parked this month, Matt. I've been home working so much. You know the thing we got off into the video but hasn't been happening in reality.
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F
Hasn't been happening in reality and the way reality feels. Did I just introduce that? We're talking about the last quarter. Is that where my brain is right now? The last month was the last quarter of life, right?
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G
It's all the same thing at this point, isn't it? I mean did anything different happen in the last month, in the last quarter? I mean they seem like the same thing.
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F
I'll tell you what happened. I know we're going to get into it in a second here. What happened is a company finally went public that we've been waiting forever to go public and they Basically promised their, their in their S1 that their Tam was space and time. So I'm going to blame the last month, feeling like the last quarter, if not the last quarter century on we finally IPO'd space and time. Is that a, is that a get out of jail card for this?
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G
Yeah, I think so. And you know, now my, my Tam for this is all of YouTube. So like cooking shows and stuff. We're coming for you, Matt. If you're watching YouTube, you want to watch us analyze the markets.
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F
If we are not the Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg of finance, I don't
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A
know what we are.
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G
Alton Brown's got nothing on us, Matt, besides like a better personality and like a much larger audience. But other than that, he's got nothing on us.
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F
He's got some good jokes. He's got some good jokes and some great techniques. I have definitely stolen multiple techniques from him and I unabashedly will, yes, send my love to him. And Kenji, don't forget Kenji. Always, always with the Kenji. Where are we going to go? We got to talk actual market stuff. Are you ready to get into this?
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G
Yeah. We got, we got some awesome guests today. We've got Andy Constant on the macro. We've got Ben Hunt on the narratives, we got Brent Kachuba on the flows behind the scenes. And we've got an interesting look behind the data with Eric Packman. So we got 10 minutes with all of them. We should probably talk less. And let's get this party started.
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F
Let's get this party started. It's a party in the usa. The World cup continues. Let us know who you're rooting for. We'll know by the end of this one if we're still US fans or if our hearts have been broken. And that being said, let's get right into the rear view.
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G
So we almost have to start with SpaceX, right, Matt? I mean, what you mentioned, I mean, SpaceX was the story of the last month. When we talked last time, we were trying to figure out what's going to happen when it actually comes public. Now it actually did come public and all the stuff we talked about in terms of flows behind the scenes, we got to see how it played out
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B
in the real world.
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G
So I think that's where we got to start.
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F
We have to start here. This is the biggest story probably of the year so far. Honestly, outside of, outside of the Strait of Hormuz, this is the most oxygen absorbing thing. So it finally happened. It priced, it opened higher. It then proceeded to go up like bananas. For the next two days and then basically fell like a rock, like a misfired rocket. What's, what's the right analogy here? It's still in the air. Here's the beautiful thing. It's still above where it opened. We haven't as of this recording, you know, on, on the first tier dip below where, where we opened up at. But, you know, it shot way up. I was telling you earlier, the funny thing was right before it IPO'd, I started to talk to people and they started to tell me about index flows. And I was having this horrible feeling of this is the shoeshine boy thing. People are telling me about how index flows work, not because I'm an expert, because I know how little I know about this topic.
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C
Right.
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And I spent way too much time talking to Dave Notting and Adam Butler and Mike Green and people like that about it. And I feel like I know nothing. And now this person is like, well, you know, when the ETF flows hit, I'm going, oh God, oh God, back away.
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G
But then, so it's interesting because the story is the flows and that's kind of what we talked about, is that no one cares about the fundamentals of SpaceX right now. Or at least that's not what's driving it. But also the other point that gets to what you're talking about is you can't predict the flows. Like even the Dave Notting that we talked to will say, we know there's going to be these big flows, but everybody's front running them. Nasdaq's I think adding is July 7th now.
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F
Yeah, we still got days till the Nasdaq VTI. All the weird ones that track space as an index, they mostly bought so far, so far as we know. We don't yet know with a bunch of the private funds, they haven't publicly reported exactly what they did or if they have, it's. Unless you're a shareholder, you don't know exactly what they did yet. So it's, there's all this information and the stuff that bought, bought the teeniest, tiniest portion, which is something that David flagged on our click beta right before.
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G
Yeah, this might be shocking to you, Matt, but the, all these large hedge funds, they know as well that the Nasdaq's going to add it on on July 7 and they may be, if there's anything to be done in terms of making money in front of that, they may be doing it. So are you telling them that the
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F
whole smart money is actually smart sometimes. Is that what you're talking about.
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G
It's not even. It might even be dumb. But the point is, so many people are thinking this through in so many different ways. Like, you hear some stuff now in the media about, like, oh, when the Nasdaq buys, it's gotta go up. Like, people are thinking this through, like, 27 levels beyond that, and it may go up when the Nasdaq buys, but it's not going to go up because the Nasdaq buying it because everybody's been trying to game this thing well before it happens.
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F
So 4D chess isn't a real game. I think that's the lesson here. And we're being reminded this by the giant spike in the price. It's settling in. Who knows? The market cap adjustments are going to happen. The ETF flows are going to happen with their kind of tricky to understand, but very sensible, slow buying patterns over the next however many months, if not years. And we're going to see all these unlocks potentially starting in as soon as what, mid to late August, I think, right?
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C
That's right.
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So we'll see how it plays out. And I will say, Matt, in general, for the world right now, I think there's probably less 4D chess going on than a lot of people think is going on. But we're always talking about, like, we're always thinking about, oh, this person's thinking 27 levels down and stuff. I don't know that necessarily. That's always what's happening.
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F
We're playing chess.
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G
I'm certainly not doing anything myself, by the way. There's no 4D chess going on over here. Like, 1D is probably all I got.
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F
1D, 1D and 4D chess. Excess returns. We got to get a new tagline going. All right, let's. Let's get into some guests. Who we leading off with Andy is Andy, our leadoff hitter.
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G
We're starting off with Andy. Yeah. Andy had a really interesting tweet that I read that got me. Wanted to talk to him about this, and you'll like this. So his. His thesis is Fab 5 Freddy is eating the semis. So for you, Matt, I'm like, I didn't want to tell you in advance that was what it was because I'm like, this is perfect. This is like right in that sweet spot.
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F
I love this. I love this, and I extra Love it. Fat5 Freddy read his own audiobook. So even if you read the actual book, get the audiobook too. That was a discovery of mine. I've been absolutely loving this. It's been with me on walks for the last, you know, on and off for the last month or so. So let's get me into some Fab 5 Freddy. Let's go.
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G
So if you're like me and you're like, what the hell does that even mean? Here's my conversation with Andy, and you'll find out. Andy, welcome back to Last Call.
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B
Thanks, Jack. Good to see you again.
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G
I'm excited to have you. You're doing so much stuff with us these days. I feel like one of these times you're going to say, jack, no more. But until you do, I'm going to get you on as much as I can.
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B
Sounds good.
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G
I want to ask you, you wrote a Tweet that said Fab 5 Freddy is eating the sentence. And I want to get into that and what that. Because I didn't even know what that meant. So I want to get into what that means. But first, I want to lead into it with what you've been talking about in general, because I think that relates to this whole idea you've been talking about, this idea that nominal GDP is kind of a pie. And tech can consume so much of that pie, but it can't. It can't. It can only gray to a certain point. And so I wanted to maybe talk about that pie concept to start at REL as it relates to tech, and then we'll get down to how that pie relates to what's going on inside of AI.
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B
Sure. I mean, at the high level, GDP is what we all make and what we all buy. Those are the end. That's it. And so all the stuff that we buy, some of it's going to be food, some of it's going to be gas, some of it's going to be housing, some of it's going to be clothing, some of it's going to be education, some of it's going to be tokens, some of it's going to be microchips, semiconductors, some of it's going to be laptops, everything. It all goes in there. And so earnings are a portion of gdp, and so the earnings available to
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the world are the world.
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B
If you think of the world as an open, the rest of the whole world is the global gdp. And so the question becomes, what does the GDP depend on? Because things are happening that should grow the GDP more than they normally do. And the reason is GDP depends on real gdp, depends on people and how much they make of stuff. And so people isn't really changing much slow moving what they make. Is changing depending on how productive they are. And so it's possible that the AI boom can generate more tools that can help us make more stuff, which makes more gdp. And so the pie can grow. And it is growing. It's growing pretty rapidly. The other part of the pie is the nominal part, which is inflation, adjusting the real gdp. And obviously that can inflate. Inflation can occur based on monetary policy tools, supply shocks, which are transitory, I hate to use that word. Rarely is there a demand shock where suddenly people can't buy stuff. Maybe the COVID situation was like that. Or demand shock, where they suddenly want to buy stuff. That rarely happens. But mostly inflation becomes a monetary issue. And so the combination of monetary policy and productivity can cause the pie to rot, to grow. Problem is that everybody needs their share of pie or else their stock prices don't go up. And so what my thesis is is that the price of stocks, which is partly their market value and then partly which is based on their expectations of future earnings growth, that future earnings growth is oversubscribed. There's too many people that too many stocks that expect massive earnings growth. And there's just not enough pie for all of them to be successful. Now some of them can really be successful. They can get not only a. The pie can grow and they can get a massive share of that pie, but all the stocks struggle to get a massive share. Usually one company getting a great share takes pie from somebody else. And so that's the basic thesis. I've written a number of damp spring reports. We talked about it on other podcasts. That's the big level idea. But now I think we're in an interesting period of time where we know who's getting the spending. Like it's clear who's spending money on stuff that's causing this tremendous amount of growth. And that is everyone that's building compute. And so who are those people? Well, they're NEO cloud providers that are just trying to get like data centers built. And then there are hyperscalers who have their own clouds that they're trying to build. And they're all trying to build compute. And why are they trying to build compute? Because somebody wants to use compute to use AI. And so that's happening. That compute build is massive. Of course, they don't necessarily make any money on the compute if they give it away. And they've been pretty by and large subsidizing tokens. So it hasn't been a great return on investment for all these companies that
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are
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building all this compute. But they're paying somebody, they're paying memory companies, storage companies, Nvidia, amd, the big chip makers themselves, Intel. And so those guys are just hoovering in pie. As much pie as they want they can eat. Their problem is they simply just don't have the appetite, meaning they don't have the available stuff to sell. There's a bottleneck of stuff they want to sell. And so the winners have been, and you've seen that this year the winners have been the people that are getting the spending because they're able to get a very large share of pie. And the people and those companies that haven't been winning are the ones that have been doing all the spending. Fab 5 Freddie is just the next level of that. So what's a Fab? Well, firstly, Fab 5 Freddie was a great rap star. Yo, MTV Raps was his gig.
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I remember back in the day, it
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was great back in the day. But the Fab five has been used as a variety of things. I'm trying to get it to be the common usage for five companies. And those five companies are everybody that makes the things that can make more chips, which is the wafer, the fabrication company's business. Now who are fabs? The biggest one by far is Taiwan Semiconductor. There are many orders of magnitude less, include Intel. But they don't have enough capacity. They don't have enough. They can't make silicon fast enough for the chip makers to do what they do. So that's the bottleneck. There are other smaller bottlenecks and there's lots of bottlenecks. But the one I'm focused on is the raw chip capacity. And so what you've seen is chip prices going through the roof. All the chip companies have order books that they can't fill, which is great for those companies and they're earning all sorts of money. But what they need is, is more capacity, more chips to be made. And so the Fab 5 companies are the companies that make the stuff that makes the chips. And so those include Tokyo Electric, which is Tokyo Electronics. Electronics electrics which is 8035 on the Nikkei on the topic. Sorry. And four US, well, not really US companies. Four companies, ASML, which makes the big massive machines that make the Clean Room Equipment, KLAC, KLA 10 Core, Applied Materials and Lam Research. And all four of those companies are the ones that are making the stuff that at this point people are buying. But it's nowhere near what they're buying in terms of chips. So these are the companies that. And they've got. And these companies have gotten hot. Their stocks are by far the ones that are most parabolic nowadays. You look at companies like Micron, you think that's parabolic. Then you look at these companies that make the, the equipment that Micron will use to make that, that the foundries will use to make the chips that they will then give to Micron. And you realize that the Fab Five has really been where all of the performance has been lately in the semiconductor indexes. And so to me, I'm now looking at who's getting the pie. We already said that the hyperscalers are not eating pie, they're spending. The chip companies, they've been eating pie. But now, but they're multiple and their earnings growth has been fantastic. But somehow their multiple isn't that high. And I think that's because they're handing their money and they will have to hand their money to this Fab 5 group. And so then the Fab 5 group will be the one that really is where all the retained earnings are. And so I think that's what's happening in markets right now. There's still not enough pie for all of them. But we're right in the midst of a situation where the semis have outperformed the hype. The people that are buying their stuff and now the people that are making the stuff that'll solve the, or address the, the chip supply problem are the ones that are ultimately going to get all the pieces. I think you're starting to see that in stock prices.
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G
So is the idea like if you look at like the microns of the world, the idea is we're seeing like, I don't want to use the word bubble, but like bubble regime, like situations, but more of an earnings type bubble. Right, Because a lot of people get that wrong. You know, when they look at markets, there have been in the past earnings bubbles, which means, you know, this stuff looked relatively cheap, but the earnings were so inflated by some sort of, you know, one time type thing that there actually was still a bubble. Do we have characteristics of that in those types of companies?
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B
I mean ultimately semiconductors. There are some companies that claim they have, and Nvidia is a good example, claim they have a moat. They take the raw silicon and turn it into something special. And I believe that the people that make memory don't have a moat. All they have is the normal boom, bust, Glut vs what is it when you don't have anything? Scarcity vs glut sort of cyclicality. And what happens is, and this has happened every single time. Whenever there's more chip demand than there can be supply, supply rallies. Chip companies earn a ton of money they spend to increase capacity. The increased capacity results in falling prices. Falling prices result in lower profits. And the whole cycle rolls again and again and again. And that's been. They say this time is different, but based on what's happening to Fab 5, I don't think it's different. I just think it's going to take some time for these companies to increase capacity, to meet the bottleneck. And so you have companies like Micron who, who trade at cheap, what appears to be cheap multiples because their earnings have grown 100%, but they're ultimately not retaining that earnings because they're just going to spend it on cap on capex by building their capacity.
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G
Well, Andy, this has been great. I appreciate you taking the time. Have a happy fourth.
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B
You too.
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F
Our next segment is why am I reading this now? That means Ben Hunt is joining the fray. We're going to talk about what's been going on in markets and he has some just really interesting thoughts here on when it gets confusing what you do with your exposure. Let's talk to Ben Hunt. Next up, we've got Ben Hunt. Epsilon theory, Persian. What's good, Ben Hunt, how you doing?
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C
I'm doing great. Matt, how are you doing?
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F
I'm doing fantastic because this chart almost broke my brain this week. We're talking about the Fed trust credibility.
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C
Yep.
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F
Let's get this up on the screen. Tell me what's going on here. I think some people are going to fall out of their chair.
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C
This is a wild chart, right? Because so this is data that they just described why we're just seeing this now. So we've made a lot of improvements in our underlying technology. And so, you know, we read everything in the world and then we track narratives. You know, how present is it in fancy words, semantic density, but how loud is it? How loud is the narrative? And so what we've built now is a way of filtering. So it's not just central banks in general. We're now able to filter down on Fed credibility versus boj, bank of Japan credibility versus ECB credibility. There's a Bank of England credibility. We're able to filter down to these really, we like to call it resolution. We're able to take much higher resolution snapshots of all of this. So now we're able to drill down to specific central banks. And this is the Fed. What we're looking at here is a Picture, just specifically of the Fed. And what's crazy is that this picture of the Fed looks nothing like any other central bank. So it wasn't really getting picked up in our other, oh, what's happening with central banks around the world. This Fed picture, this is unique for all central banks. And what this is showing you is, oh my God, I had no idea how bad the lack of credibility narrative for the Fed was at exactly this time last year. So if you're looking at that, this is, look at that, that bright white line. That's the net, that's the credibility reading minus the losing credibility. Gaining credibility, minus losing credibility. So that white line is really low. This is going back 11 years. I mean it's, this is crazy. But the story that the Fed was losing credibility reached basically all time peaks in that peak of the gray shaded area and the trough of the white line. That's June 30, 2025. And you remember what was happening then. This was at the peak of Trump going after Powell for, you know, you got to resign, we're going to fire you. All this, that the Fed is just going to become a rubber stamp for Trump's area monetary policy, which is, you know, take rates down to zero or whatever it was going to be. That is crazy how bad, how bad that is in terms of the narrative. But now look at what's happened since then. By the way, that, that peak right there, that is also the peak of repatriation of Sell America.
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F
Yeah, all these stories and I want to frame this for the ascent that we've been on from this low. This is repatriation, this is the gold story. This is how we, how we were talking about.
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C
Yeah.
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F
Everything else that the Fed's now back at another type of a pickle with, but the labor market inflation, all of that gets thrown through that tumbler in 2025 when that thing's at its low. So now what's been going on as we're moving out of it.
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C
Well, so you're seeing now. So, so now that line, which again is that white line, the net solidifying credibility versus losing credibility. Well, that, that bow, on balance, the, the Fed is all of a sudden highly credible. And you know, knock me over with a feather, right. Because I listened to the WARSH press conference and the task forces. All this stuff is like, really, dude? Really? But this is why I think what we do is so important because everyone, all of us observers of markets, I'm sure other people on this call, I bet a lot of them felt like I Did like it was, well, this doesn't sound very credible. And you know what's worse? Doing. And that doesn't fill me with confidence. What I'm telling you is both that the, the losing credibility narrative has gone away from this time a year ago, and the gaining credibility narrative, the dark blue on this map, it's now positive. Right. It's now louder than normal. So whatever you think of Warsh and the press conferences, and I personally didn't think much, what this is showing you is that the Warsh appointment, and I'll kind of going back to General Order and Trump not going ballistic against the Fed every chance he gets is having a real impact because markets want to believe in the Fed. They want the Fed to be large and in charge. And I gotta tell you, it's working. This is what's happening here. Very counterintuitive for what I was feeling personally. But these numbers, this is really solid data.
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F
So when we look at this, what's the translation? How do you use this to help explain both what's been going on in a portfolio versus where this puts us now? Because again, and I'm with you, different framing than where my brain was processing what's going on with the Fed.
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C
Yeah. So I'll point to the one thing in particular that's been a puzzler to me, which is why gold has, to use the technical term, sucked, you know, over the last couple of months. Because we got a war, we got inflation worries, we got countries wanting to kind of move away from, you know, the US and its overbearingness, shall we say. The weakness of gold has been a real. It's been a puzzler. The strength of the US dollar has been a puzzler, especially once we got up the MoU and the ceasefire signed. Why is the dollar being so strong?
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B
Well, it's this.
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C
This is why the dollar is being so strong while gold's being so weak. Because the whole idea of de Dollarization, the whole idea of why do you buy gold? Gold is an insurance policy against Fed error. Right. It's the inverse. It's one. My friend Brent Donnelly came up this. The price of gold is one divided by trust. And what we're showing is that trust is going up. So that means the price of gold goes down. That's what this is telling me. And it helped me out a ton because again, regardless of my own personal feelings, what is clear as day is that the narrative that the Fed's losing credibility, that narrative is getting a lot quieter. It was as loud as it's Ever been last summer. And now it's muted. I mean, it's just basically average. And the narrative that the Fed is gaining credibility, that's really climbing sharply here. That's really climbing sharply.
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F
One other point from inside of this, you said it, and I want to call attention to it, previously, you were pulling the data on all central banks, lumping them together. What made you realize how you wanted to parse this out by central bank, by geography?
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C
Oh, it wasn't a realization. We've always wanted to do it. It's just that as we've been able to improve our technology, we're now able to drill down and increase the resolution here. So we've always wanted to do it, now we can. And it's really exciting stuff.
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F
Well, I think that's a pretty good reason. We should remind people they should come check out what's going on at Perseant.
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C
Come check it out, Ben.
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F
Anything else you want to share with the audience? Tell them where to bug you on the Internet.
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C
Well, I'm still Epsilon Theory all over the place and the company's name is Perseant. And anyway, come find me, Check it out. It's worth it.
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F
Come find Ben. Lots, lots, lots more of these charts. Ben, thanks for joining us.
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C
Thanks, Matt.
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G
And what I always love about what we can do on the show, Matt, is we always can take a look. We can talk about the high level, the macro, the market, all that stuff. We always can take a step back and look behind the scenes. And we've got Brent Kachuba talking about what he's seeing in the options market. We talked about SpaceX, we talked about the semis. Here's my conversation with Brent. Brent, welcome to last call.
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D
Thanks, Jack. I'm glad to be back. Surprised I'm invited back, but here I am.
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G
We've invited you every time. So as long as you keep saying yes, they're gonna keep being on here. Eventually you're gonna have enough of me and I'm gonna. I'll have to, like, try to figure this out myself or something. No one wants to see my options analysis.
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D
I'm just riding your coattails. You keep growing, so I keep saying yes. Hopefully that I pick up some of the breadcrumbs that are left behind.
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G
Well, I'm excited to talk to you. We got a lot to do in 10 minutes. I know you've got your core 1M indicator you want to look at. We also want to talk to. I'm interested in just understanding what's going on with semis because we've seen a pullback here after like a massive run. And then I'm also interested in getting your take on SpaceX and what you've been now that options are trading, what you've been seeing behind the scenes.
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C
So.
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G
But first I know we've got this Core one N. So what are we seeing here?
- [31:18]
D
Yeah, and all these things tie together. And I think anybody who's heard our OPEX effect over the last even going all the way back to 2024 would know that when this core 1M metric, which is a CBOE index, it measures what's called correlation. And what this essentially is telling us is that single stock implied vols are very high. What does that mean? People are buying tons of options in all the stocks you just mentioned, the AI trade, semis, chips, SpaceX, all that stuff. Right. And at the same time what they do is they sell Spider, Vol or S and P volume. Right. So you end up with a breakdown and kind of correlation and what that the risk in that is. And this kind of ties to the dispersion trade that that relationship gets out of whack. And when that relationship gets out of whack, we tend to have what I like to refer to as volatility spasms. And so what I found is if you as a general rule look at when Core1M goes below 8, things tend to break. And so just to put this into context, I'm on this chart here. This is part of our founders note this morning to our members. And what you see here is in early June, Core1M went below 8. And then we had one of the biggest one day NASDAQ volatility events ever. We had a giant 7% drawdown over the course of like one or two days. And then that dip got bought very fast, admittedly, but that was a major volatility event. And then you can see we also just recently last week around June 20, we had another similar spasm, right, where the Nasdaq lost 5% in a single day. And now we are back to core 1m being at 5. And so we are heading into a holiday shortened week here. But to me this signals that this trade is about to have another spasm. Now when I post this on X and like that people go, oh Brent, well the dip just gets bought, so this doesn't matter. But at some point I think you have a one of these events that sort of catches and then we have a little bit more of a sustained drawdown than kind of like a one or two day drop.
- [33:18]
A
Right?
- [33:20]
D
And so that is the backdrop. Now what is driving this relationship. As I mentioned before, it's people bidding up these AI names, the same names that we've all been trained, you know, been trading in or trafficking in or pushing higher, et cetera. And that trade is now, I think getting quite milked. And the reason I say it is because we had Micron earnings last week. The earnings were very good. The stock didn't do a whole lot. It was quarter end, you know, yesterday, quarter start today. So a lot of these stocks, AMD intel, names like that were up 7, 8% yesterday. It was really quite a move move. And so I think what we're setting up here now is for a pretty sharp kind of correction or resyncing of a lot of volatility relationships that are kind of busted right now to, to kind of phrase it that way.
- [34:06]
G
And I know you have another chart here where we're going to be able to look at like some of this stuff behind the scenes. And semis have just been, I mean, it's been crazy, the run that Semis had. I'm like, like shooting myself. Like why did you buy Semis, Jack? Like, even though I know nothing about semis or tech or anything, but it's like, I mean, the kinds of runs, you know, even though there's been somewhat of a pullback, like the kind of runs companies like Micron have had is like, it's unfathomable. It's pretty crazy.
- [34:24]
D
It really is. And the earnings, I guess have been justifying that.
- [34:27]
A
Right.
- [34:27]
D
And so I'm not here to say I'm going to stick a fork in some trade. You know, the fundamental story behind, you know, the semis and what happens one, two, three years from now or even six months from now. Right. I'm talking about in the short term what the problems are. And the short term is that the options market and sort of bullish sentiment, right, has in the short term bid some of this stuff up too much. And what you're looking at here is our compass view. And so this displays this relationship very well. Here we have the Q's and look at the difference between the qqqiv and the Spider IV. There's a huge distance on that chart. Qqq has been pricing in or has been experiencing 2% daily moves, which is pretty wild compared to the S and P which has been seeing something like 1% moves. Right. So the relationship between these two indexes is hugely different. The other one is here is Semis, which is obviously leading sector and then the DRAM component If you've been looking at the Korean stocks too, like, you know that market's been going crazy because of the bid into this memory component, right? And so what we're seeing here that is interesting is the overall implied volume is very elevated. This is sort of like crashy high volatility. In this case, it's been crashing up high volatility relationships. But what we're seeing is the names are moving from the upper right on this chart, which is like very rich call prices, to starting to move to the put side a little bit. So what does that actually mean if we're moving to the put side is because people are starting to sell calls into the richness and high implied volume of these sectors of these stocks. And I think that makes sense because the implied volume is so high. So you're starting to see that call skew come in a little bit, which is essentially saying people are starting to monetize the call side a little bit. To me, that's the early sign that, okay, I think we're about to take a little bit of a break here in some of these very rich leading sectors, right? And then this also displays this, this difference or dispersion between the tech stocks and the non tech stocks, right? Or stuff that's not related to the I trade generally. The Qs and the spiders kind of trade in a similar sector or similar space. Same thing with semis and the DRAM, right? All that stuff is these are index type ETFs, equity ETFs, right. These aren't crazy single stocks. These are baskets of stocks. And usually they all sort of trade in implied volume relatively close to each other. Right now they haven't over the last few months. And I think that these things all have to sync up a little bit better. What does that mean? Well, they would all land in the same quadrant, for example. And I think that this is kind of a moment here in the next couple of days where into early next week into mid July, where we're going to see this relationship sort of sync up. And I suspect when we do our July OPEX Jack, that we'll be
- [37:02]
G
seeing
- [37:03]
D
some of these relationships resync. And maybe that marks a little bit of a correction in stocks.
- [37:08]
G
And correct me if I'm wrong, but the interesting part about this is like with DRAM and smh, when you get these melt ups a lot of times what you see is just, it just gets. The implied volatility just gets too high.
- [37:17]
C
Right?
- [37:18]
G
So it's not necessarily even people like making a directional bet on where they're going to go. It's just people saying, like, this can't continue. This is just too expensive. I mean, is that the right look at it?
- [37:26]
D
Yeah, I think what it is is the market keeps pricing in larger and larger moves, right? And that was crazy into April and May. But what happened? The earnings were blowouts, right? I mean, so many of those earnings were beating expectations and the expectations would go up and then, you know, the, the, the semi names would increase their expectations right after earnings. And so like, look at Micron, they had incredible earnings, right? And so they're justifying the price. The issue is the rate of change is unsustainable, right? Like how, how much longer can you keep going up in the queues at 2% per day, right? That, that is not sustainable. It all gets priced in at some point. And now we have a very disjointed market, as you can see here in the volatility space. Another thing I'll note on this point, Jack, I just did a study. I put it on. Over 80% of the QQQ volume now is at expirations that are 5 days to expiration or less. And over 73% of SPX volume is in expirations that are 5 days to expiration or less. So if you're going to sit here and tell me that, hey, Brent, this is all about the AI trade in the future. And you think that these names are continue at this torrid pace and there's so much value there. Why is all the volume in five days to expiration or less Options like, is that how you want to express the, you know, the. That's how you want to express this future is, is. Is going to be in this memory. Names like, doesn't make sense, right? So basically what this is, is the bulls need their hands slapped. If you look back In July of 2024, we had a similar setup, right? We lost 10% in the S and P over the course of about two, three weeks. Ultimately, the market bottomed in that area. And then we kind of ripped into the end of year. And so I even think if you're a bull, you want to see this correction, this consolidation, this sort of reset, a cleaning, you know, clearing of the deck, so to speak. And then once the relationship sort of resync, we're in a better spot to sort of base and then move back higher. I think that, you know, that's kind of how I would expect this all play out over the next couple of weeks.
- [39:16]
G
Just before we wrap up. I want to ask you about SpaceX, because last time we talked SpaceX, there were not options trading on SpaceX and now there are. And you know, I was debating, I know nothing about options. I was like, is this going to be one of the biggest players in the options space? Like, how is this all going to play out? So I'm just wondering what you've seen behind the scenes so far.
- [39:30]
D
There was like a gamma squeeze or huge options longs for like a day. And the implied volume got so silly that what happened is everyone came in, the big boys came in and they sold options like crazy. They sold calls, they sold puts, and that volume came in. The stock went from 130 to 220 back to sort of 150. And now we're seeing that volume kind of get sucked out, right? And now as we're speaking, I think today and into the next couple of days SpaceX is getting added to the NASDAQ. And you and I are joking before is like, you don't see these names move to the NASDAQ or one of these big indices and then continue to go up from there, right? It's like the NASDAQ or the index. You know, pension funds of the world tend to buy these at short term highs because people know it's going to go into the index, right? So I think that SpaceX will kind of continue to consolidate here for a little while. It's blanketed by this positive gamma positioning. So I don't think you're going to see like a 20% drop or anything, you know, kind of crazy like that. I think it's going to be a stock that just sort of cools off a little bit, normalizes some and then, you know, we'll see what happens with Elon. And there's always rumors flying around, right? They're going to buy T Mobile, they're going to merge with Tesla, they're going to, you know, who knows what happens with XAI and all that sort of stuff. So I don't think it's like dead money for the future. I just think in the next couple of weeks there's a lot that has to be digested. With July opex, a lot of this options positioning rolls off and the volume should really continue to sink there, meaning drop. And then I think that kind of allows the, the name to sort of reset, stabilize again, kind of like the overall market and then we'll see what, what happens from there. It, it, it could very well become the ultimate meme stock again and start doing crazy moves. I just Think that there's so much big positioning that was short volume based and getting the flows into these indexes that again, once that flow starts to clear out into July options expiration, maybe after July expiration we'll start to see, you know, silly upside again.
- [41:19]
G
And then how about from an options volume perspective? Like, I assume this is not Tesla or Nvidia yet, but is this like a top 10 stock or is this way further down the list it was doing?
- [41:27]
D
I mean, it did bananas volume. Just absolutely bananas volume. The first couple of days, right, it was outpacing every other stock, single stock. That volume has come down a lot. And so now it's acting much more like a quote unquote normal stock. Like it's certainly a big name in the option space, but as you can see here, I mean, it's early, but this is generally what the ranking looks like, right? SpaceX is top 20, but it's nowhere near a Tesla or Nvidia type volume. And so, you know, at this time, again, that volume has certainly come in. I think there's a lot of people who got long these options in the retail space. They got their hand slapped and so they tend to disappear from that name. But if it starts to meme again, then I think you'd see that volume start to pick back up.
- [42:13]
G
Well, Brent, this is great. It's always good to take a look at what's going on behind the scenes. Thank you for joining us.
- [42:16]
D
Thank you, Jack.
- [42:17]
A
Appreciate it.
- [42:17]
F
When it comes to looking at the numbers behind the data, Eric Pakman writing a data for the people, has been doing some amazing work, especially about if you're trying to think about the Fed, you're trying to think about wars, you're trying to think about what's going on with unemployment and rates right now via inflation. He's the guy you gotta talk to. So here's Eric Pakman. This is behind the data. Next up, we have Eric Pakman, Data for the people. Spoiler tease. I don't know what to call it. Next month in July, I'm having Eric back so he can go do a deep dive on all the new tools they're rolling out. But in the meantime, we're going to talk about what's going on at the Fed. Eric, how's it going, man?
- [42:58]
E
It's great, Matt. Great to be back.
- [43:00]
F
And when I say we're going to talk about what's going on at the Fed, let me be clear. Eric's got the best data on what's going on in both the labor markets and the inflation data sets. When we want to peel back the layers of the onion, Eric's the guy that I go to. Let's, let's start with labor. Let's start with jobs. Let's start with employment. What are you seeing? Talk to me about wages. Talk to me about the upcoming jobs number or that maybe just came out when this episode.
- [43:23]
E
Yeah, yeah. So, so jobs is an interesting situation because obviously it's, it's, you know, been a lot stronger than most people have have expected. We've talked about this before and about like a year and a half ago, maybe even two years ago when I was with Ban Creek, we made an interactive drill down tool where you can kind of explore the different caverns and levels of the BLS's hierarchy within the non farm payroll data that comes out, you know, probably yesterday if this comes out on Friday. And so I've been using that and it's a free tool on bancreek.com and, and you can see exactly what is going on in the job market. And I mean I think everybody knows by now. We were talking about this a year and a half ago, but everybody knows by now it's really all healthcare. But leisure and hospitality has been really strong too. Right. And then we just put out a piece on, on Data for the People which I highly recommend people read because it, there is information in there that you may want to know going into 2027 if you are an investor about like a potential risk to the job market. But the vast majority of job growth within healthcare and social assistance has been in social assistance. And this is a result of the baby boomer retirement. So really Starting at about 2015 you started to see a surge in jobs and services for the elderly and disabled in the home healthcare aid space. And we broke that down by state to actually show how that looked. And so that's what you're seeing right now. I mean when you look at the chart of services for the elderly, it is literally straight up into the right, no bump for Covid, literally recession proof. And that is everything you need to know about the demographic situation of this country. And there's almost nothing that this country can do to stop that. Demographics are gravity, right? So problem is those people make about $35,000 a year. And we created another tool to show you that. So if you go to Data for the People, it was last Friday I believe it's called the wage ledger. And actually my first data fellow created this, so I was really proud of him. He's a high school student that did
- [45:34]
B
this
- [45:36]
E
basically just took the occupational employment wage statistics data and put it in an interactive table. It's a really hard to work with spreadsheet. It crashes Excel. And so it was the simplest thing, but it's really, really helpful. And what I urge people to do is go on data for the people, use the tool, sort everything. You can do it by city, by the way. But if you're looking at the overall country, sort it by total number of jobs from high to low. 4.3 million. Home healthcare aides. Right. $35,000 a year. Restaurant workers, cooks, cashiers. Where do all the people work? They work in jobs that basically maybe cover the poverty level for a family of four.
- [46:17]
F
And so when this isn't just where they work, you were saying this is where the growth is. So when we talk about.
- [46:23]
E
Exactly. So if you go and you look at both of these, pull them up side by side on your screen, you know, you look at them and you're like, where's the growth coming? It's coming from healthcare, social assistance, a little bit of construction, a lot of leisure and hospitality. But drill down and look where in leisure and hospitality and then go look at how much these people get paid. And then you start worrying. You're like, oh, wow, like we are growing jobs and the Fed is overall looking at this number. And they're like, the job market is resilient, but we're creating jobs that pay people $35,000 a year. That's not resilience, that's maybe sustenance and no more than that. And so where's the disposable income? Where's the strength? Where's the growth in the economy? Where are the 150, $200,000 jobs that are being displaced by AI? They're not in professional services anymore. You can look at the dashboard and see that those are going down long term trend going down here for the last couple years. And so this is what I think the Fed is missing, is that they have these crude tools to just look at overall jobs, but they don't have the capacity to do a weighted average to actually say, like, are these jobs actually creating wealth? Are they creating savings? Are they creating any sort of kind of viability to live in America for Americans? And the answer is no. And so if they stick with that and they basically keep saying, well, you know, the job number is strong just because you're looking at the overall count, that's going to put upward pressure on rates. Even though if you dig underneath that, what you'll see Is these are very low pay jobs.
- [47:59]
F
What's fascinating inside, and this is where I want to, I want to shift to inflation from here because as, as Mike Green and Adam Butler were writing about with the Precarity line work, your work diving deeper inside of that, we got to publish some of that on Panoptica as well as data for the people, is these are the jobs that are being created on the lower leg of the K. That growth is not keeping up with costs or providing an affordable lifestyle for the people who are retaining jobs or getting the new jobs. And that sets up a problem with inflation because this costs rise. It drives a lot of pressure onto those. That makes it far more sensitive to this. Take us back for a second. Yeah, I actually want to start with crack spreads. You've been writing a lot about this and what people would expect from you, but you had a prior work experience that gives you, this is a full circle moment that it really is crack spreads again, give that background, then tell me what's going on there in the oil industry and how it follows through.
- [48:54]
E
This literally brings me back to my first job out of college undergrad. So my first job out of college was I worked for ExxonMobil and I modeled refineries. I built refinery simulation models where you took crude oil coming in and we literally had molecular models. This was back in like 2002 and everything. So some pretty cool tech back then, before the days of AI and everything. And you would figure out like you would break crude oil down into its molecular composition. Crude oil is just. And this is what like people in the market do not understand. And if you are participating in the market right now, you better read up on this, otherwise you're dealing with a lot of risk that you don't understand. Crude oil represents a class like fruit is a class of different types of fruit inside of that. But crude oil is even more complex. So think about it. When we at ExxonMobil would define crude oil, it would become a set of thousands of molecules, different types of hydrocarbons. Two carbons, three carbon, four carbon, five carbon, six carbon. Is it, you know, what type of chain is it? A straight chain? You know, did it have sulfur locked inside of it? Like, what type of sulfur was it? Was there nitrogen in it? Like where, what type of molecule was it? Like, that's how I defined crude oil. So I have a very, very good understanding for that. Crude oil is not a fungible concept and modeled that through refineries so I could actually see how it behaved. And if you made Slight change. The slightest changes to the crude oil, like even the type of sulfur it could be in the parts per million level you made. The slightest change, it would blow the specs on the other side and blow the economics of the refinery because they'd have to blend it down in order to make spec and ultimately sell it on the market. So throw into that now that you understand refining and how complex it is and that refineries are not just machines that built that processed crude oil. They are purpose built, specially tuned for specific types of molecular slates, right. That we call crude oil. Now close down the choke point where 11% of the world's, world's oil goes through. Most of it is the type of oil that the world's refineries are built to process. It's the medium and heavy oil which actually creates a lot of the heavier products. Jet fuel, diesel, those kind of things, right? Close that down, wait for like several months, open it and then let everybody reshuffle all the flows. So think about this as a complex. I mean you could, you know, you could even look at maps like there's, there are tankers problem, very, very complex logistics problem. Everything is going to the wrong place. All refinery optim, refinery economics are suboptimal. Everybody's just trying to get oil right so they can get it, refine it, you get turned into gas. They don't care about the economics. Open it back up. The market says, you know, celebrates. China doesn't need as much oil. We got new Iranian oil on the market is awash in oil. Well what's the crack spread doing? The crack spread does not lie. It is the truth. It is telling you is the right type of oil making it to the right place. And in the US right now, the crack spread as of this morning was $62 per barrel. That is the refiner margin. I take three barrels of crude and I turn it into two barrels of gasoline and one barrel of diesel. That is approaching all time high levels. From 2022 normal crack spreads are between 15 and $20. The alarm bells are ringing, the sirens are going off and everybody is ignoring it right now. And so look, the powers that be can say we want gas prices to come down as much as they want. But all I'm saying is like even if it goes bump in the road and oil prices go back up to 80 or 90, you will see gas prices at a crack spread of 60 or $70 higher than they have ever been in the past. We don't need oil at 150 anymore. When crack spreads are that high, Gas prices are so far and diesel are so far disconnected from oil. And that's what we ultimately consume. That's what people feel it. People feel it at the pump, they feel it at the grocery store and what transports your groceries, trucks that use diesel that basically pay fuel surcharge and they pass it through to the Krogers of the world and everything. And so all of our prices, the inflation that we feel is really more dependent on the combination of the oil price and the crack spread, not just the oil price. And I really, really think people are missing that. And I don't need to tell you like how this is going or how it's going to end. All I can tell you is that. Study for yourself how refineries work, look up what a crude oil assay is, understand how complex a barrel of crude oil is and how different it can be from one type of crude to the next and how it messes with refinery economics and then just understand that we just disrupted the entire supply chain a la Covid. Some supply chains took years to heal after Covid and we have no precedent for what just happened. We don't know what's going to happen now. Could crack spreads go to 100? Sure, why not? I mean, I don't know, it's never happened before. And so I'm just bracing for the worst as an engineer because I know when something has never happened in history to just stay out of the way of the Mack truck that is coming and then maybe we get lucky and maybe it sorts it out. But I'm going to wait to kind of see how this all sorts out, wait to see those crack spreads come back down to something reasonable like 15 to $20 before saying we dodged the bullet and then study afterwards why that happened. Or we're going to be on the opposite side where everybody is going to know what a crack spread is and that's going to be a little scary.
- [54:52]
F
So if you're worrying or thinking about employment and inflation, this is why we're talking to Eric. Eric, if people want to bug you on the Internet, get more of this information. Where should we send them data for
- [55:02]
E
the people.com Number four, just like this. I am largely off social media, so if you want to hear from me, I write five days a week and I publish like this level of granular work. This week we're publishing four brand new data visualization. So AI has quadrupled my productivity or more. So if you want to drill deep into topics that impact the American public, especially The I'd call it the Silent American Public. Then go to Data for the People. Explore our research. It's all free. And then please sign up for the distribution list and tell a friend, anyone that really cares about understanding how this really works, like all of our growth is organic. Word of mouth right now.
- [55:48]
F
All right, friends, I'm telling you that. And watch. Eric's coming back sometime in July. We're going to do a deep dive on a bunch of these new series and tools that he's rolled out. Thanks, Eric.
- [55:57]
E
Thank you.
- [55:57]
G
So, Matt, we've taken a look back. We've talked to some great guests. Now we got to take a look forward. And I think I don't know what you're thinking about as we head in the next month. I'm thinking more about like where the value is going to accrue in AI. Like everything's kind of been going up now. People are starting to think about this a little bit more. You've seen this a little bit in the semis with Citrini. He's been talking about this idea and I'll put up the tweet. He was responding to somebody who's been talking about this idea that there might be a significant breakthrough coming through in like the architecture. But what he was, the point he was really making is when the price of something is so high, like, like what's happened with Dram, there's a lot of knock on effects that go on and there's a lot of incentives for people to try to figure out how to use it more efficiently. So he ended his tweet with, you need to be an extremely firm believer in Jevons Paradox as it applies to memory to remain long the OEMs here. Otherwise it is essentially a bet that's short innovation out of necessity. So that just made me think a lot about, we're going to think a lot more now about what's going on behind the scenes. All the knock on effects like this is not just going to be an everything goes up thing. It's going to be like, let's think about what's actually happening.
- [57:01]
F
It takes money to buy these chips. It takes money to expand your memory, your capacity and whatever you're agreeing to do. So we're seeing equity issuance, we're seeing debt issuance, we're seeing money get raised by corporations to go and continue spending in this space. And we'll likely see some of that continue for at least the very short term. The bigger question though is just how long can it continue where the Demand just stays there at this level. Semis are, and they've been for my entire career comment if you feel otherwise about this. It's a cyclical industry. It's like when we talk about, at least, yeah, we gotta talk about it the same way we talk about oil and gas and we talk about miners and we talk about these other typically cyclical industries where they go through these waves. And we're just at a really interesting point right now where we've seen a run up in demand that has rightfully pushed the share prices of these companies much, much, much higher than we've seen yet to date. But it still moves in cycles. And as investors, we have to be aware of what those cycles look like. That doesn't mean you have to wait for them to drop 30 or 50 or whatever percent you think is due in a cyclical rollover. It just means be aware of if you think we've exited the cyclical nature of these names and if you do think they're cyclical, which I think is what the Citrini piece is arguing here, be mindful of that right now.
- [58:24]
G
It's also interesting, like the different levels of demand. So you've got your and my demand, that's consumer demand. But I don't know about you, but I don't have any dram in the house. Like I do, but it's not, I'm not actually doing anything with it. Like I'm actually typing into a keyboard and getting a response. And so like the demand of the people that are actually buying the dram. And this is the thing, like Jeremy Grantham said this thing when he was on about like there's going to be blood in the streets with AI. And his point was a lot of these big companies have kind of had their own like islands for a long time. Like I had my, you know, area here, you're not competing with me here. And like he was arguing that they were monopolies. Whether that's true or not, they kind of had their own islands and now they're competing with each other. And so this idea that everybody's going to squeeze every dollar that they can out of this system right now. So if the price of dram is very, very high, everybody's going to be figuring out everything they can around how do I use it more efficiently? Maybe someone else will figure out how I can make something better than somebody else is making. Like that's what's going to happen now is the blood in the streets idea. Everybody's going to get every dime they can. Like, I think that's the way this is going to work. And it just changes. It's not an everything goes up together type of thing. It's like you have to understand behind the scenes what's going on, which I don't do since I'm not a tech analyst. But I love listening to. Listening to it and playing one on tv.
- [59:31]
F
These things evolve over time. That's the most important part here, I think, to remember is that this evolves in real time. I'm going to make one other tortured World cup thing, which is we're watching these teams. You're starting to see the really good teams play the mediocre to we just got through to the knockout level teams and you're going to see a lot of this low block or park the bus strategy. I'm sure you're familiar with all these terms, Jack, all your.
- [59:54]
G
Some of them maybe, okay, park the
- [59:56]
F
bus sounds just like it is. Usually you're the less good team. You're either less fast or less capable than who your opponent is. So what you do is you park the bus, meaning you literally put as much of your team packed in front of the goal in a way as possible and just hope you get lucky on a counterattack. And the thing about that strategy is for an attacking team, if it works, the more time that the game goes on, the more frustrated the attacking the better team gets and the more confident the parked bus team gets. And there's this interesting dramatic tension that unfolds over the course of a full match where the park the bus team, if they are successful in doing that, that confidence will build. And somewhere towards the back portion of the game, you're going to see them all of a sudden going like, all right, well, we haven't run that much and now we can actually cause some real trouble to this far better team who now is just miserable over how they can't crack this thing. When we see these efficiency moves in markets, they play out over time, they play it over quarters, in some cases years, and we start to see we want to get the best use out of the most efficient areas and be very conscientious of these costs because they flow through to the bottom line of these companies. It feels like we're at the part of the AI cycle for that to start happening. And maybe we could put a laundry list of Jeremy Grantham blood in the streets calls all in the list, and we can laugh at that or whatever, but the guy's pointing at something very legitimate here that this competition is about. To change its stripes in 2026 before the end of this year. And that's going to be fascinating to watch.
- [61:29]
G
Well, before I let you take us home, I'll just say two things on Stalker. First of all, Mbappe, that's, that's ridiculous. Like, I was just watching that France game the other day. It's like, it's like they're literally just toying with people. They can just do whatever they want. Like, they don't even have to run that hard. Like, it's just like perfect passing. He does whatever he wants. It's like you look at it, you're like, how is anybody beating that Olize
- [61:46]
F
Ballondor in the next couple of years? That guy is otherworldly. He takes Mbappe, who is already incredible and deserves all the credit that he's getting for it. But that Olize, his passes before those goals are just alien, inhuman. And had Mbappe scored that bicycle kick thing, that would have gone down in. We would have been watching that clip forever. Forever. That would have been the flagship of this World Cup. That was. The man is just crazy. I'm, I'm claiming my, my brother's French spouse's family, like those one step remove in laws. I'm like, I just want to be French for this tournament because, you know, let's face it, hopefully the, the US is advancing, but when it comes down to it, I think France takes us.
- [62:32]
G
The other thing that I think is interesting and it applies to everything is this idea that, like, the more you know the game, the less you work. So like, you watch, you watch grants, like, they don't even have to run that hard. Like they're putting the ball in the right spot. I think people criticize Messi for this at times because, but he's so good that he like, knows exactly the position to put himself in. And like, in a lot of ways, like, less work is more. If you know that.
- [62:53]
F
The best part about Messi is they built the team around that awareness as opposed to, say, a Portugal who puts Cristiano right on top. So it's. They tuck Messi in just a little bit. So he's not the frontmost player and he's not even the backmost midfielder. So he can literally just kind of stand around for most of the game and then go, oh, I see that. And be incredibly impactful. That's smart strategy as you're getting older. And it's, yeah, it's, it's worth noticing how that plays out in lots of different things. I think there's, there's a beautiful metaphor in that.
- [63:25]
G
So now that people have figured out you don't want to put me and you on play by playing color for the soccer matches, it might be time for you to bring us home.
- [63:31]
F
Hey man, we can. We can do at least as good as Alexi Laos. We can talk the whole time.
- [63:35]
G
I just don't know if we'd say anything insightful.
- [63:36]
F
I will make as many Janet Jackson references as Alexi Laos, maybe even more, because I won't keep milk in the what have you done for me lately? Joke. Although I love it every time he says it and it gets stuck in my head. And that's my favorite thing about him and my keychain that I have somewhere back there of Alexi Laos from 1994, which is a deep point of pride for me. So Go To Excess Returns on Substack Check out We have a whole page just for this episode and all the other episodes we do, including our five lessons. Get on that substack. Please, please, please. And wherever you're listening, like Comment subscribe all the things below.
- [64:10]
B
We're out.
- [64:10]
A
Thank you for tuning in to this episode. If you found this discussion interesting and valuable, please subscribe on your favorite audio platform or on YouTube. You can also follow all the podcasts in the Excess Returns network at Excess Returns. If you have any feedback or questions, you can contact us@excess returnspodmail.com no information
- [64:30]
F
on this podcast should be construed as investment advice. Securities discussed in the podcast may be holdings of the firms of the hosts or their clients.