← Market Mondays
Market Mondays
MM #254: Price to Buy NVIDIA, Is Trump Moving the Markets on Purpose?, How to Trade Options in 2025, & Tech
02:19:07
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- [00:00]
Ian Dunlap
Today's episode is sponsored by Smart Travel, a new podcast from NerdWallet. Smart travel doesn't just cover points and miles. They break down all the financial aspects of your trip, whether that's the best.
- [00:11]
Rashad Bilal
Days to book, how to avoid hidden fees, or which fancy travel credit cards pay off and which ones are just an expensive flex. If you want your travel budget to.
- [00:20]
Ian Dunlap
Work harder, then dive into the best deals, products, services and more with Smart Travel from NerdWallet. Wherever you get your podcasts, you worked.
- [00:30]
Troy Millings
Hard to lay the foundation for your contracting business. And when you're with amex Business Platinum, you can keep building it up with a flexible spending limit that adapts with your business. And since you earn 5 times Membership Rewards points on flights and prepaid hotels booked on amextravel.com, you get even more from on site overseeing. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Not all purchases will be approved. Terms apply. Learn more@americanexpress.com AmExBusiness yeah.
- [00:59]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah. Welcome back. Welcome back. It's Monday, y'all know what it is.
- [01:02]
Troy Millings
Top of the top.
- [01:03]
Rashad Bilal
I know what it is.
- [01:04]
Troy Millings
Every day of the week.
- [01:06]
Rashad Bilal
That's a fact, man. We here, we blessed. Happy to be here. Shout out to everybody that's here with us. Another day in the market. Spring break for the kids.
- [01:17]
Ian Dunlap
Wow.
- [01:18]
Rashad Bilal
Shout out to all the parents out there, man. Shout out to all the kids.
- [01:21]
Ian Dunlap
Thank you for an amazing episode last week. Numbers.
- [01:24]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, man. The numbers was running. Market Mondays last week was incredible. Blackout was incredible. Shout out to Tamika Mallory for being a guest on. She's incredible. Her book is incredible. Go pick that up. Episode dropped last week. Shout out to her. That was incredible. Shout out. Yo, man. Shout out to everybody that's been just supporting. I mean, our day ones is our day ones, but we get new people that come aboard every day, so shout out to all y'all. Span the word.
- [01:50]
Ian Dunlap
I know everybody wants to get funding and get capital and angel and vc. Probably the most important episode of this year. If you're entrepreneur, there's a lot of traps you. A lot of. It's a bull trap in the market. It's a lot of bull traps in AI. Angel investing in bc. Please go watch the episode twice. She was fortunate enough to get our company back. What about those who going through that same story and didn't have anyone to rely on, didn't have good legal and it's over with.
- [02:20]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, he lost it.
- [02:21]
Troy Millings
That's a fact. Shout out. Shout out to Pinky. That was a legendary episode. And, man, we back. We cooking up this this week. Blackout. We got Angela Rye. Hey, that's gonna be a good one. And earn your leisure. We might not have. We're not scheduled for episode, but you never know. Trump might do something crazy. We might have to come on emergency. So stay tuned. We'll let you know Thursday. Just keep Thursday open just in case.
- [02:44]
Rashad Bilal
Studio travels.
- [02:45]
Troy Millings
You never know what could happen. But, man, we're gonna get right to it. I will say this. Shout out to everybody that purchased you deserve to be rich. New York Times bestseller. So we doing a leg two of a tour.
- [02:57]
Rashad Bilal
Yep.
- [02:57]
Troy Millings
And we hitting a few. Oh, word.
- [02:59]
Ian Dunlap
Okay.
- [03:00]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We back out. We back on the road.
- [03:02]
Troy Millings
We're gonna hit a few. A few places that we didn't get a chance to hit. So the first two is one of my favorite cities of all time. Detroit.
- [03:11]
Rashad Bilal
What up, though?
- [03:12]
Troy Millings
Shout out to Detroit. Detroit. So thorough, man. Detroit's so thorough. Like, everybody out there is just super solid. I love, you know, every time we go to Detroit, it's great energy. Definitely one of my favorite places, for sure. So much love. Shout out to Ken. Shout out to everybody in Detroit, man. So we'll be in Detroit.
- [03:30]
Rashad Bilal
Mario, what up?
- [03:31]
Troy Millings
April 22nd for. For our stop at the book tour. And then we go into New Haven, Connecticut.
- [03:39]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah. Not far from my home.
- [03:43]
Troy Millings
Yeah. New Haven, May, May 3rd. So we got two more days that's added. April 22nd in Detroit and May 3rd in New Haven, Connecticut. You can go to you deserve to be richbook.com to get your ticket. The price of admission is. Is the purchase of a book. So it's like $30. And if you've seen. We did the last tour. We bring surprises, we bring guests out. It's a whole. It's not just a signing. Like, we talk, we give information. It's a whole vibe. So Detroit, Michigan. April 22, New Haven, Connecticut. May 3. Go to you deserve to be rich book dot. Get your tickets and we're gonna see y'all there, man.
- [04:18]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah. That's not the last stop, so. Yeah. All right, everybody. There's a few other cities we've seen, y'all. Yeah, that. Those the next two, so just. All right. And shout out to everybody in Eylu, man, we had our book club yesterday. The authors of you deserve to be rich with a special guest. Shout out to G, my brother, for hosting it. It was incredible. He's on there for two hours talking about the book, talking about our personal stories, everybody that was tapped in, all the earners it was insightful, man. So shout out to y'all. But yeah, if you don't have the book, if you haven't gifted the book, please do so.
- [04:50]
Troy Millings
And then. And then also April 22nd, we're going April 24th. 24th, yes. We're going to be in Richmond, Virginia. Shout out to Richmond. And that's for the. The Big Dipper Summit. So you can go to big dippersummit.com for that. That's separate from the book tour, but we will be in your area. Richmond, Virginia. Shout out to VA, VA.
- [05:11]
Rashad Bilal
I told you he was coming back. We was just there a few weeks ago. We said we'd be back. And we back two up, two down. Yeah.
- [05:17]
Troy Millings
Okay.
- [05:18]
Ian Dunlap
Ian, any announcements when them days get extended? That's when things are going well. Text if you want to get rich from the market, go to ian.invest.com. prices will be out today. Had an amazing call last week. If you wanted to know where to get in, where to get out, what stocks to stay away from. Three prices for every stock that we have in there, go to ian.invest.com. if I made you money, please put yes in chat. I told you what would happen with tsm. Told you with Nvidia, Told you what Microsoft, told you about Apple. So. And. And Sniper 2 coming soon. Maybe Invest Fest. I may move the date back and do something special. Get your tickets to Invest Fest. Get your tickets to Invest Fest, please.
- [06:07]
Rashad Bilal
That's a fact.
- [06:08]
Troy Millings
Invest fest.com that's cooking up Troy.
- [06:11]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah. On a much more somber note, want to express our extreme condolences to our brother, Jay Goodwin, who lost his mom last week. Spoke to him. He's in good spirits, but prayers to him and his family. He's a good friend of ours. Grew up with him. Lived up down the street from him most of my life. And obviously he's been with us a lot when we on road. So shout out to Jay. And our prayers and thoughts are with you, my brother.
- [06:37]
Troy Millings
Shout out Jay Crew, Love man, somebody. That's super solid. Hold your head. Spoke to him a little while ago, man. Yeah, hold your head, my brother.
- [06:48]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, sure. For sure. All right.
- [06:50]
Ian Dunlap
Y'all know how this works real quick. Gotta cherish this time that we have because we get into the age where we're having to parent. Please don't take your mama with your parents or grandparents for granted. I'm begging you guys.
- [07:03]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, it was. It was. Is a unfortunate man. We were actually. Our parents were in the hospital at the same time and we had seen each other maybe this is like three weeks ago. So when I got the news, I was just like, that's, that's horrific, man. Yeah, close friend of ours, man. But yeah, our prayers with him and if you know him on Instagram, show him some love. But, yeah, you know how this works, man. Do your own research. This is our disclaimer. Our content is must be used for informational purposes only. It's very important to do your own analysis before making any investment based on your own personal circumstances. You should take independent financial advice from a professional in connection with or independently research and verify any information that you find on our show and wish to rely upon whether for the purpose of making an investment decision or otherwise. This is a message brought to you by the good brothers that are your legion. The good brother, Ian Dunlap, the master investor himself. Continue to do the research, share the research, show love. Let's build knowledge, let's build community, let's make some money.
- [07:58]
Ian Dunlap
And shout out to 1919 keys for a dub show in Boston.
- [08:01]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah.
- [08:01]
Ian Dunlap
See you cooking.
- [08:06]
Rashad Bilal
The coffee meetup.
- [08:07]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah.
- [08:08]
Troy Millings
All right, let's, let's, let's get to it. So we're going to talk about, let's talk about Nvidia. Nvidia committed 500. Well, before we talk about Nvidia, let's talk about the Trump tariffs again. So over the weekend, they said that they was gonna give an exemption for smartphones and computer chips and that was very welcomed by the technology sector. They said 90 days. And then yesterday they came out and said that it'll be a special tariff for semiconductors, that this is only temporary. Pretty much dampered the whole party. Yeah. So the market, as a result, it wasn't as bullish today as people thought it might have been if they didn't make that announcement. So for the investors that's wondering how come they didn't wait to make this announcement or how come they didn't make the first announcement on Monday and at least give people an opportunity to exit some positions and then maybe rain on the parade on Wednesday.
- [09:24]
Ian Dunlap
I mean, he's given all of his friends, allegedly inside indicators of what to buy, shout out to all the congress people and politicians who bought calls on Apple and Nvidia as a result. Another question for you, since you go rough office in the next one. Why do you think he keeps changing course so quickly? Like, I'm, I had to go to chat GPT, Claude. I went on madness. Like, what's the reason behind all of this chaos? And I'm not piling on Trump's episode But I don't understand why you put out positive news and then the next day damper it.
- [10:05]
Troy Millings
Yeah, I'm not sure. I don't think anybody really knows. I think it's a very erratic behavior and it's frustrating to like market insiders and hedge fund managers and stuff like that because it's like, you know, Dan, I was extremely happy when they had that announcement. Then he said it's like playing golf and they moving the, the, the t in the ninth in the night.
- [10:30]
Rashad Bilal
Sure.
- [10:31]
Troy Millings
Or the 18th green. So it's just, it's very complicated and, and it's difficult because it's like, you know, we don't know, but we spoke to an executive at a car company during All Star Week and this is before the tariffs thing came out and he said that it's extremely difficult to do business because we don't, we don't know the rules. So you can, you can, once you know the rules and you can play the game, but when the rules keep changing, that becomes extremely difficult to, to play the game. So you know, when you say that there's a pause on terrorists for electronics, smartphones and chips and that's, that's encouraging news for technology. But then when you come out two days later and say that there's going to be a special tariff just for chips, well, that's discouraging news. So within a 48 hours cycle is going in so many different directions and it's, it's up, down. That's why it's a very choppy, very, very choppy market right now. That's why a lot of people just wait on the sidelines because they don't know exactly what to expect. And we all know that the stock market's gonna recover over the course of time. But I mean if we, if we do go into a recession, then you could see another 20 dip in the market. So this is, it's very erratic behavior. I think that he's trying to figure it out on the fly because especially we haven't talked about the ten year treasury, but that's something that was extremely alarming to them. That's what they said. Like that actually made him change his mind more than anything. Not only the stock market, but the Treasury. And when people stop believing in America and stop, you know, holding American bonds, Japan, that's concerning. Yeah, that's concerning for sure. So I think he's trying to balance so much. You see the dollar drop to his lowest level since 2022. I think people are dumping treasury bonds. The stock market is crashing. Then you got world leaders calling you, I'm sure, left and right. So imagine just being in a room with 10,000 things happening simultaneously and it's like, okay, damn, I gotta do this. Okay, let's reverse course. Okay, let's do this, let's do this, let's do that. And it's not like something that I think is already thought out. I think it's end game. I think he's doing the Peyton Manning like Omaha. He's calling audibles on the fly.
- [12:42]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, I think this is the epitome of building a plane while flying it.
- [12:48]
Troy Millings
Right.
- [12:48]
Rashad Bilal
Like we're not sure what we're doing, but we're going to try to piece this together as we go. We're going to make an announcement and then we'll try to figure it out after we do it. It's like, like last week when it was, well, the 3rd of April when the tariffs will go into effect and then we saw how the market reacted to it and then there was a leak that the tariffs were suspended last Monday and oh, it was a leak. That, that's not true. And then by Wednesday it actually was true. Right. And then Saturday it's, hey, we're going to suspend tariffs on semiconductors, computers and technology. Pretty much technology stocks were hopeful, like, this is great. And then by Sunday that changes and who knows what happens tomorrow, right? We, we really don't have a clue of what's happening. From a business standpoint, it's tough because number one, you don't know how much you're going to pay and then you don't know how much you're going to make. And so you don't really know what to tell your shareholders and you don't know what your revenue is going to be. Right. And so the thing that doesn't change for you is the debt for sure. Right? That's the thing that you know for sure is going to happen. Right. If you're having cap expenditures and there's debt that's accumulating that's not going anywhere, how much you're bringing in, how much you're going to pay for that, that is uncertain. So I mean it, the uncertainty in itself is, is extreme. The recession piece, it almost feels like we were headed for a soft landing. I know, but it was like never going to be a soft landing. But we were headed there, we were headed there and now we got the self inflicted wound and now it almost feels like recession is, might be the safest thing. If you hear what Ray Dalio saying, this, the two negative quarters, by definition, that might be the safest play because we've seen that before and we've seen how we've recovered from that before. It could be short, maybe it's extended, but we've seen that before. He's saying that potentially there's something worse ahead, which is a new economic world order, which is kind of what we've been alluding to in a smaller sense, where it's like the, the rising power challenging the emerging power or the existing power. Wouldn't we kind of know who plays in those roles? Verse the value of money versus internal conflict versus international conflict all happening at the same time, which is dangerous, incredibly.
- [15:10]
Ian Dunlap
And for my traders, how Trump is changing his plan day to day, that's how a lot of you are trading right now. Please know what your targets are going in to this market regardless of what he does. So I've always stressed you need one short target to be able to get cash flow, one long target to help change your life. Second thing, I do want to stress, despite how much volatility we have in the market, given because of leadership, it's going to be one of the greatest bond opportunities of this decade. I do not want you to forget that point. I felt like this in 2015. It felt like this during Brexit. It felt like the pain was never going to stop. But even in a recession, on average the last 17 to 19 months, for those of you who are locked in, if you can buy and hold long term, in three or four years, you are going to be elated. We'll talk about it later. There are some companies that are dominating Netflix. One of them, Netflix has moved up my respect level a lot. Visa is what most financial services companies should be. There's still quality out here, despite the BS that's going on with his decision making.
- [16:22]
Rashad Bilal
So, yeah, quality, I mean, business is still happening, especially when we kind of led with it. But you see the amount of money that's being allocated toward AI development even in the midst of all this. Right. It's the reason why they all met with him and they continue to meet with him is yes, part of it is his thought is we've been unfairly treated when it comes to, to tariffs. But the other part of it is onshore manufacturing. And based on a lot of what the, especially the Max 7, they're making a commitment to make sure that at least some of the manufacturing is onshore. Is it too late for a company like Apple? That's going to be tough for a company like Nvidia not too late because they've already. If you looked at the manufacturing, I know that and you kind of alluded to it to start the show. But that, that 500 billion over the course of four years, obviously that makes it 125 billion per year toward data center development. That manufacturing is going to start producing its newer products. So Hopper is still being produced in Taiwan and maybe some of Blackwell. But at this point going forward and we've seen the world out till 2027. Blackwell, Reuben and I forget the, the name of the 2027 product. Those are majority of those will probably be manufactured here based on this, this, this announcement that they had today.
- [17:55]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah. Is the bond market ever gonna recover? We got it. Like we asked, what was the peak of America last week? Great feedback. The bond market has been in trouble since 2020.
- [18:14]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah. This is, this is a case of, of assets over liabilities. And I think when Dalio was speaking he kind of broke that down. It's right. Somebody's loan is, is, is going to be another that debt. Right. Somebody has to pay that debt. And we've been relying pretty much on those bonds because people believe that the US will always pay its debts until the debt amount is becoming almost insurmountable. How do you get, how do you get from under that? Which is kind of the reason that he's looking at ways to say how do we reduce the deficit? This is why you get a doge. This is why you get these tariffs. Who knows what else is coming? Is it in shambles? Will it recover? We better hope.
- [19:01]
Ian Dunlap
The last time the bond market tenure treasury was at this level not to ALARM Anyone, was 2007.
- [19:11]
Troy Millings
Right.
- [19:11]
Ian Dunlap
And if you have a person in office that may allude his debts sometimes to then file bankruptcy, it's not an indictment upon him. I'm just going to macro leadership. If they don't get this dose thing right. And I keep stressing debt to GDP ratio that's just getting higher and higher every day.
- [19:33]
Rashad Bilal
Says 7%. 7%. They said the goal is to get it down to three. Keep an eye on that. Keep it down now.
- [19:47]
Troy Millings
Yeah, see, we'll see. But okay, so that was a lot. Nvidia has committed to $500 billion in US manufacturing. So is this a sign that Trump's tariffs are actually working? How will that affect Nvidia?
- [20:12]
Ian Dunlap
Once again, I want to say the idea that he has with the tariffs is right. The execution is poor. So it's like a team that looks great on paper, like the Lakers with Shaq And Gary Payton and Carl Malone. On paper, fantastic. And actual playoff execution is kind of tough. What I do love though is that Nvidia is stepping up for this decade to be the company that represents America like how Apple did last decade. The great thing about Nvidia as well, they're profit margin is high. So it when I've stressed to invest in companies with high profit margin, any companies that had a 5 to 8% profit margin, the tariffs is tearing that business model apart. So do I think this will benefit them long term? Yes. But going back to American exceptionalism, there are not a lot of companies that represent that in America. I think it's a beacon of hope and it's our brightest company right now in the United States of America. Will it drive the price up of the stock solely based off that? Not solely as a reason, but it definitely will be a, a catalyst for sure.
- [21:20]
Morgan DeBaun
Yeah.
- [21:20]
Ian Dunlap
The problem is gonna be incredible.
- [21:23]
Rashad Bilal
As a result, their profit margin is at 55 which is insane for multi trillion dollar company. Is it working? I think the, the idea of onshoring manufacturing when you have all these companies and the commitments that they made. I'll run them down. Nvidia 500 billion. Apple 500 billion. Amazon 100 million this year. TSM 100 billion not 100 million. Amazon 100 billion this year. TSM 100 billion this year. Microsoft 80 billion this year. Meta 65 billion this year. That's. Those are the commitments for 2025. That tells you that there is something happening inside of the AI space and there's been a commitment and all, all those CEOs pretty much outside, maybe TSM have sat down with the president and I'm sure that that was part of the conversation. But those plants, getting them up are the most important thing. In fact, Jensen said that he they plan to mass produce their supercomputers within 12 to 15 months.
- [22:26]
Ian Dunlap
Yep.
- [22:26]
Rashad Bilal
This time next year they should be up and running and manufact. Obviously they don't manufacture their chips. TSM does. And this is the reason why for the past four years we've been saying tsm, tsm, tsm. Watch what they're doing in Arizona. Look at the commitment that they're making. I know Nvidia is having their plants, some of their data centers being built in Texas. I mean makes a lot of sense. The land, the temperature and obviously no state tax. Doesn't, doesn't hurt at all. It helps actually a lot seeing that the future advancement of AI and their chips happening here is a huge, huge lift. But it also Says something about the geopolitical tension of what could have happened if. If something happened to tsm. That reliance on having that offshore it is slowly dwindling. So is it working short term, the execution of it. Terrible. Long term, if they're able to get these data centers up and running to a high level of efficiency, it'll make sense.
- [23:25]
Ian Dunlap
If I play 65 billion and I got to go to another hearing, I'm calling Nancy Pelosi. I know a couple years ago I was on. On Mark. Yo, he bought a house, and now he got to buy a house in Mar a Lago. Like, come on, man, do we want exceptionalism in our companies or no?
- [23:44]
Rashad Bilal
They gave him what? They gave him three years off. @ one point, he was. He was in front of Congress every three months. And November 20, the stock took a huge hit. And we talk about Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. Their court case started today. They're potentially trying to break up Meta. Almost. Yeah, that's the. Yeah.
- [24:09]
Troy Millings
That just goes to show you, when you cry, when you try hard, that's when you die hard.
- [24:14]
Ian Dunlap
And hey, that's a great point.
- [24:17]
Troy Millings
When he was somebody that had issues with Trump before and did everything he did to make a peace treaty, gave a million dollars, moved to D.C. you know, was that UFC wave the American flag? And it didn't seem to help out in his. In his case still got jammed up at the end, so we'll see how this plays out. But I think It's. It's about WhatsApp and Instagram.
- [24:46]
Rashad Bilal
They're trying to break it up, make them separate companies.
- [24:48]
Troy Millings
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, sometimes in life, you kiss the ring and. And you still get punished. So take that how you want to make enemies.
- [25:01]
Ian Dunlap
Yo, you gotta think about this long term.
- [25:04]
Troy Millings
Take that how you want.
- [25:05]
Rashad Bilal
They said that they haven't seen a corporate breakup, a potential corporate breakup like this since at T's telephone monopoly 40 years ago. For the youngins, there was Atlantic, man. Remember that?
- [25:23]
Troy Millings
It's not good, man. I tell you what, that's not good. That's not good news for Meta for sure.
- [25:27]
Ian Dunlap
But I think they'll make it through. But, yeah, I wouldn't have wanted to have to go through this every quarter. It feels like just when you thought you was clear, I'll come back to court, my boy.
- [25:38]
Troy Millings
That's a fact. That's a fact. And that's why, once again, it's. It's advisable to invest in ETFs.
- [25:46]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah.
- [25:47]
Troy Millings
Because anything can happen with an individual company, even the strongest Companies you got, you might have problems with the government.
- [25:54]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, I mean think about. So the government is saying that the meta. And tell me the company that hasn't done this, Amazon's probably guilty of this as well. Allegedly. Allegedly. The buy and bury strategy, which is, you know, you buy up your competitors or anybody that you seem as a threat and have all the businesses under your umbrella.
- [26:15]
Ian Dunlap
That's the purpose of a parent company. And we can argue when they paid that billion for Instagram, no other tech company wanted to pay that for that company. Yeah, like that was record breaking at that time to pay a billion. First start it was a.15 employees.
- [26:32]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, they, they, I mean they were laughed at. There's this Jon Stewart clip where he's actually, I mean he's a community. Absolutely mocking him for paying a billion dollars for a pitch for a picture app. Right. And now they're using that text saying, I mean there's allegedly a text message thread between, between Mark and some of the execs saying that hey, we gotta buy this competitor because it could be a threat to our Facebook. And they didn't. $1 billion. Now that I think they. What's the valuation? Over 100 billion.
- [26:59]
Ian Dunlap
And Instagram was not profitable at that time. Shout out to Mikhail, shout out to Kevin. System like that. It wasn't a money making machine. How people want to have like revisionist history on it was losing money. That's, that's part of the reason why.
- [27:12]
Troy Millings
They sold when they, so when they sold, when the guy got the COVID of Forbes and it was like, Instagram has never made money. Like what makes this. But he's like, that's not true. We did, we have made money. It's like, when have you made money? He's like, we made a billion. We made a billion doll for sure. That's one of the greatest acquisitions in world history.
- [27:36]
Ian Dunlap
And they got blocks from buying what?
- [27:38]
Troy Millings
Tick tock, tick tock.
- [27:40]
Rashad Bilal
Well, two years later, after they bought so what Instagram, they bought WhatsApp for 19 billion.
- [27:45]
Troy Millings
And if they don't, if they can't buy it, then they just copy. So, and they just, so they, they did it with vine, they didn't buy vine, but they, they literally all forgot about vine because remember vine used to have the 8 second videos, 7 second videos then. And then Instagram comes out with 10 second videos. The filters, the stories, all that comes from Snapchat.
- [28:05]
Rashad Bilal
Snap still has, it's early but that, but that's part of the case is that how many people can now compete in the social Media realm. If Instagram, if Facebook owns Instagram, what's it like? That's the government. That's the government. And that is a foreign entity. Yeah, I mean, they're still here. They didn't van it Vine. We don't wear it doesn't even exist.
- [28:29]
Ian Dunlap
Get a two santo. It's over with.
- [28:32]
Troy Millings
So, okay, hit the like button and share. We're gonna do something that we haven't done in a while because obviously the stock market has been crashing and it's a lot of uncertainty. So people's portfolios are down, but even more so is trading portfolios, options specifically. So people are very antsy, have questions, and they're nervous for not just stocks, but for options. So we're going to do a presentation.
- [29:03]
Rashad Bilal
Oh, yeah.
- [29:04]
Ian Dunlap
You got a present?
- [29:05]
Rashad Bilal
Oh, yeah. You know, every day you guys gotta. Right when in times of uncertainty you got to cook up a little meal.
- [29:12]
Troy Millings
All right, so let's, let's get into it.
- [29:14]
Rashad Bilal
Let's do it. All right, let's do this. I appreciate everybody staying low and firing because that's what you got to do in these environments, man. You don't panic. We understand the ebbs and flows of the game and we understand that there's an opportune time to make some really, really good decisions that are going to benefit us in the future. And so this is the tariff reset edition, man. Shout out to everybody in Eyl University. Shout out to everybody that's here. Market Mondays. Get your pad, get your pens, get ready. We about to dive into this situation. All right, here we go. All right, so let's go with the plan, man. I always tell people, stick to the script, but if you've never been here before, then you may not have the script. And so sticking to the script is vitally important. So here's how the script goes for trading options in these type of environments, right? When we see large pullbacks, where we saw large drawbacks and pull downs and corrections and bear markets, some of the companies hit. We want to stay patient, but we want to have a plan. So the first thing is we gotta look. Has the stock price fallen? Obviously in this environment, most of the companies that we talk about, if not all of them, have fallen. That's important, right? Especially we want to find good buying opportunities. We want to make sure that they've pulled back to a certain threshold. So that's the first question. And obviously it's going to be yes in this environment, but have the call option prices falling as well. So they kind of run hand in hand. When you see an equity price pull down, you're going to see its call option pulled down as well. And the percentages vary. So you got to make sure that you're watching those. Those bidding the ass are very important in these environments to make sure that you have the right play so you can have the most appreciation on the, on the return. All right? So remember, always look for depreciating, ask and bid. That's important. All right, so that's rule number two. Here's number three. Use time as your strategy, please. A lot of people hear me say this. They watch me do it in our classes and then they go off and deviate and do their own thing. I'm telling you this for a reason. Because we can't control certain economic factors, right? We can't control a guy in the White House deciding that he's going to raise tariffs and then he's going to suspend tariffs and then he's going to make sectorial tariffs, and every day is something new and we can't predict that. And so rather than trying to figure out a short term nice appreciation, let's use time as one of the best variables in our favor. Right. And so I always tell people to extend their calls out as further as they can. Now, there are some drawbacks to that. Right. The prices for some of the calls that go out further are going to be a little bit higher, which is true. Right. And you could make a lot of money from the short term calls. But volatility, right? When we saw the VIX shoot up to 50 last week, when we see it's hovering over 40 and just over 35 at one point today, these are the reasons why we want to make sure that we have time as a variable that can help us. Right? So if we pull down 10, 15, sometimes 20, 30%, there's still time for us to get that back. Right? We've seen that happen with a bunch of the companies that we've invested in, whether it's Nvidia, whether it's Microsoft, Apple. We watch Tesla do it at least two or three times since we started the show. And so using time as a strategy is always something I highly adj. Suggest. Suggest. All right, so the next thing, what is the depreciation threshold? Right. And so if you're looking at an equity or company, what is the number you expected or you want it to fall to? I know sometimes we call out prices, and Ian's great at this. He's the master at this. He calls out a price and it might be 40% from where it's at now. And you're like, there's no way it's getting back there. Well, guess what, it's back there, right? And you didn't have a plan, so you didn't execute. And so I put my threshold specifically when it's a stock, I, I want to see a 20 to 30% depreciation. I want to see a fall, right? And so that goes back from a correction to almost in bare territory. Now it sounds like that never happens, but if we look at a company like Nvidia, which we talk about all the time, at one point, Nvidia was down 27%, right? We saw Tesla down over 40%, right? So these companies do pull back. And especially with economic downturn, these things happen and we have no control over it, right? So if the stock falls that far, how far do we want the actual option call to fall? And so I gauge that based on the stock. So if my percentage of my threshold percentage is 20 to 30 for the stock, I want my option to be 30 to 40, right? I highlighted it. That's the teacher in me, right? I got to highlight it so people can see it. Because some people are going to be listening, some people watching, make sure that you have a threshold that you're willing to stick to because that's going to help you, right? The last thing is keep reserves, right? You got to have reserves to opportunities when they present themselves. Certainly over the past three months, we've seen that, hey, if we, if we're starting, if we, you know, looked at our percentage thresholds and we've taken profit and we left 100, we took 100% out when our number passed the threshold of what our gains were. We've had money on the sideline waiting for moments like this to actually implement new strategies to make sure that we make more money so that money doubles. And that's important, right? It's good to see the money. But greed is a real thing. And sometimes just watching the money, sometimes we don't know what to do. It's like, wait, this thing went to a thousand percent, Maybe it can go to 1100%, maybe you can go to 1200. Not realizing that, hey, it's, it's not realized until we sell position, right? So we want to make sure that we have realized gains. Sometimes watching unrealized gains, watching it appreciate, appreciate is great. And then when it depreciates, it's like, oh my gosh, I should have sold. But these are the things you learn in a space that's Why? I always tell people, put your seat belts on. Right. You never want to sell off when it's at a slow. You want to be patient enough to watch it appreciate again. That's why I said use time. Use time, use time as a strategy. Let's keep cooking. All right, so what are we looking for when we're doing these option trades? This goes without saying. What? There's always going to be catalyst events and always talk about uncertainty being the number one catalyst event in this economic times. Yes, there's no way to predict where we're going to move when it's uncertainty. But there's some things that we can see that are going to be pretty consistent. Number one here is earnings call. And as you can see, tsm, a company that I'm huge on, always talk about TSM and how it's important they have their earnings call this week. Asml, another one in that, that supply chain for semiconductors has its earnings call this week. And Netflix, a company that we've been big on over the past three to four months, they will be reporting on Thursday as well. And so this is a big week for the semi space and definitely for Netflix, who I definitely love and we got a newfound respect for them. They're moving up into that Mag 7 territory for me and I know Ian loves them as well. So make sure that you have these earnings reports on your alerts so you can see what's happening with these companies. Analyst revisions, those are important. Sometimes you'll see a pullback because the analyst will say, hey, our, our new price target for a company is less. Right. They, they had their earnings report and their future guidance was off or they didn't provide future guidance. Sometimes that'll dictate where a price action will move. New product announcement, you'll see those things usually around one of some of the max sevens, but even some of the other companies, some of these mid cap companies that have a new product that will help the, the value of the company go up. Example would be kind of like what Apple does every June and every September when they have their calls and they talk about new product releases for the upcoming quarters, legislative, legislative changes. And I mean this affects every company. And as we see, we're living in this right now, these tariffs and this tariff war between us and predominantly China. But at one point, I mean over 90 countries facing tariffs. And so this is part of that uncertainty that we got to kind of live with, but we got to have to navigate it. We have no choice but to try to navigate through it. And then lawsuits, lawsuits. And we saw it today. You know, Zuckerberg's back in front of Congress. You know, they're saying that he's running a monopoly over at Meta and they're going to try to break it up and we'll, we'll see what happens with that. And so there's a lot of cases that are similar to, to Meta. We saw this with Google and YouTube and the list goes on. Microsoft just had one. And so usually these things pan out. They'll pay a fine. And this, this won't, you know, really affect the company for the most part, but we got to make sure that we pay attention to things like that. And the emergence and acquisitions just kind of went under the rug. But TSM and Intel actually announced one during this tariff war announcements and it kind of went under rug, but again that affects the supply chain economy, especially when we're talking about semiconductors. And the big initiative is to bring onshore manufacturing. And so having TSM here in Arizona is important. Intel obviously is American company. So that type of merger, what type of products will they be producing, what will be the nanometers on the, the semiconductors, what will be the wafer size? All these things will be determined from that partnership. And obviously intel is a huge company that just hasn't been as innovative over the past five years and well, more than five, I'm being generous over the past 10 to 15 years. And obviously TSM, Nvidia, all these other semiconductors companies, AMD have kick kicked Intel's door down and said we're coming to take over space. So these are the things that we're looking for. All right, here's some of the companies that we talk about, when we talk about, have they fallen down to that threshold? And here's some of the percentages, your data, as you can see, we got all the Max 7s in there. You can see Tesla with that big pullback at 30, 38%. Even Taiwan Semiconductor, a company that I love, is pulled down into bare territory, down 23% year to date. And so these are opportune times. People always asking when's the time? What's the time when you see pullbacks like this and companies that we know are going to be here in the future and definitely going to be vital to the, the story of the future, which obviously is artificial intelligence. These are opportune times. And so Nvidia down here, almost 20%. I don't. These are the signals, right? When people asking when, when. Here's the win, guys. It's here, we've made it. We saw Apple pull back even more than 15 and then we had that, that, you know, I guess half of announcement that there will be some type of exemption for computers and iPads and, and semis. But we'll see what happens there. We gotta cross our fingers and just hold our breath to see what the type of announcement is going to be made and how we're going to navigate around it. But the interesting thing is that company down at the bottom, right? Even year to date with all the tariffs and all the uncertainty, Netflix is actually up 5% year to date, which is pretty interesting, right? When we talk about tariffs, how will they affect a company like Netflix that has a local presence in international spaces, if that makes sense. Right, like, so they, they, they go to places and they invest in the local economies. And so tariffs will affect them, but not as much as some of our other mega cap companies, certainly not to the effect of like a Tesla who's in automotive, but in the technology space and obviously Microsoft, Nvidia and Meta as well. So Netflix is a great case and one that we're going to study. EYL University, I promise I probably will try my best not to give it all away tonight because we got some things we got to talk about Thursday. But Netflix is definitely on the radar and we're going to give a little bit away as why, as to why we love it. Let's keep calling, let's keep cooking. All right, so in times like this, I always say, look, stay low, keep firing, but sometimes we got to go back to the basics. And so it's cool to invest in individual equities, individual companies, but we saw the drawdown. And so I started thinking, like, we've seen this type of environment before, right? 2020, the pandemic hit March, the market crashes. April, this year, the market crashes. And it wasn't about necessarily investing individual companies. It was about investing in sectors and ETFs and indexes. I'm like, so you know what? In recessionary environments, let's go back to the basics. Let's go back to our table strategy, right? For those who are day ones, they remember the table strategy. It was, hey, build a strong table with ETFs and indexes, and then you can put individual stocks on top of it, right? And so it's important that we do that because, number one, the drawdown is going to be a little bit less, not sometimes a lot, right? When you're dealing with individual equities. But, you know, sometimes the upside isn't as great. So rather than an individual company like Nvidia, we can invest in a semiconductor ETF that has the same type of upside depending on the allocation that Nvidia is inside of there. And so a lot of times people will try to take the item off the aisle in the grocery store. You can either invest in the grocery store itself or you can invest in the entire aisle. And that's how we gotta kind of look at it. And so when we see environments like this, we want to play safe, right? We want to have safety first. So ETFs and indexes are going to be the legs of our investment strategy. So which ETFs and indexes? Right. Don't worry, I got you. Right, because we've seen this happen before.
- [42:25]
Morgan DeBaun
Right?
- [42:26]
Rashad Bilal
I'll come back to that slide. We've seen this happen before. And so Here are the ETFs and indexes that I'm looking at right now. And there's a reason for it, right? If we're talking about leading the world in AI and there's a push to bring oil manufacturing back to this economy, and we talked about the investment that all these Max 7 companies are going to be allocating to that manufacturing, that development, well, we got to invest in that. And so SMH obviously is one of my favorites. And it's been my favorite for years. It's been in my portfolio for over seven years now from option standpoint and from having shares in the ETF. And so it's drawn down 17 year to date. And so when we're talking about opportune times, this is an opportune time. You see a drawdown like that, especially with an ETF which doesn't move with the same amount of volatility as individual equity. You gotta like it at these numbers. And so I did you the favor, right? You can go inside the holders and see what the top 10 holdings are. But I put the top three holdings here so you can see what's inside there. So we're talking about Nvidia as a number one allocation. TSM is number two. And Broadcom has moved up to number three. And I said moved up because that wasn't always the case. As Broadcom has performed and that stock has grown and the use case for, you know, Broadcom Services has improved. The allocation for Broadcom has become greater inside of estimation. So those are three companies definitely that are in the portfolio. But if I don't want to have exposure to them individually, I can invest into a semiconductor ETF like SMH and have exposure. And so SMH is definitely one xlk for sure when we're talking about technology. And I could have put QQQ which kind of tracks similar, but we know technology is pretty much all of the economy, right? They say it's 40%, but we know that every company, if they don't have technology as part of their portfolio, they won't be here much longer. And so there goes the top four inside of their etf. Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Broadcom. Again you're going to start to see a similar theme, right? Why? Because they know that these are the growth companies that scale and have large appreciation, right? These are mega cap companies, a couple of multi trillion dollar companies. And so they're going to lead a lot of these ETFs. And so you've seen Nvidia twice already in the first two communication services. Now this is a new one, right? This is a new one for me in the portfolio. And the reason why is because I wanted to have exposure to that number three company inside of that etf. And so XLC is in the Spider fund, right? So you see xlk, that's another SPIDER fund that the K is the technology sector fund, the communication services to see. So it's top three are Meta, Google and Netflix. Obviously Meta and Google inside the Max 7. Netflix is that new up and comer inside of of this ETF that's performing really well. And so you see the drawdown in that ETF isn't as large as the others, even down to the boo, which I know is part of 2Tech2 index that's drawing down 7 and a half percent. But if you look at Communication Services ETF, XLC is drawn down 5% and largely because of the performance that Netflix has had. And so having exposure to Netflix was key inside the portfolio. And so I said look, let me find the some of the best ETFs that have large allocations for it. So it's top three in XLC. We'll move down to XLY, which is always in the portfolio because of the leader inside the portfolio, which is Amazon, always my favorite Tesla's in there has had a large drawdown. And the third is Home Depot. Home Depot is a solid company. When you look at the others it just feels like, oh man, the tech, tech, tech, tech. Home Depot is a solid one. Like I said, consumer spending is very crucial inside this etf. And so it hasn't performed as well as it has in the past, but we got to keep it in the portfolio just because of the allocation that it has for Amazon and obviously Tesla, which is a growth stop, which we're not giving up on just yet because that tech component, we understand who is the leader of that company, the CEO of that company. And we've seen when he's not paying attention to the company, the ramification that it has even now with the vehicles. There's talks of cybertruck underperforming and they're not even allowing refunds or they're not even allow them to be sold back. So there's some issues over at Tesla, but one thing that we do know is that Elon has a history of figuring this thing out. And so we're gonna, we're gonna keep that one close. Another one that we added to the portfolio as on the watch list is fdn. And this is the first trust Dow Jones Internet etf. Again, I wanted large allocations to Netflix. If I wasn't gonna invest in it directly, I wanted to have ETS that had ETFs that had large exposures. And so FDN, which doesn't move at the same level of XLC because the amount of volume that goes into that, those two ETFs, but the allocation is the largest that you're going to find. I believe it's 9% of the fund is Netflix. Again, Amazon is there, Meta is there. And then Salesforce, a company I always talk about that Ian loves to hate on. But when we talk to large enterprise companies who they're using for their CRM, Salesforce always comes up. And so that's a company that we have to respect and pay attention to here in the next couple years. All right, let's keep rolling, let's keep cooking. All right, so here's what SMH looks like right now. So people like, ah, should I put smh? Well, I've done the work for you. Here is its actual chart and I have its EMAs here and those are my Bollinger bands. And we've talked about that in Eylu. If you didn't go check last week's class, all my mastermind people, you already know what it is. All right, so the ema is the 50 day is at 226. Right? So that's the exponential moving average. So that's the average that has been over the past 50 days. 72 days is at 234. It's 100 day moving average is 236. It's 200 day moving average is actually 241. And the 400, which I don't know why it got cut off, but it's 218, right. And so if we look at where SMH is trading currently, it's at what, 202, 203. And so it's well below all of its moving averages. Which tells you that it's getting to a point now that when we're trying to figure out when should we buy, when should we get involved, it's, it's hitting those metrics, right? So it's peeled under its 400 moving day. So that's very interesting. Those are one of those telltale signs. Like you know what the bottom, if it hasn't come already, it's near and you can see that it actually fell below that 178 which is well below his 400. So we might have, we might have hit a bottom here. We got to keep, keep a close eye on that, right? So once I see that it's under, it's, it's 200, it's 400 day moving average, it's pulled back 17, which is almost in that 20 threshold. Then I go right to my options charts and I circled it in red and I want you to pay attention to that. Look at the time that I'm looking at. I'm not looking at September of 25. I'm not looking at June of 25. I'm not looking At December 25th. Once those option charts go out to 26, 27. That's why I'm interested. I want to have leaps, I want to give myself time. And so I'm here circling at the December 18th of 2026, which is next December. And then I could go all the way to go all the way out to December 17th of 2027, which would be two years from now, which I might do just because I want to give myself time and I want to this obviously everything to settle from the economic downturn that we're trying to going through now, especially with tariffs. And so this is what I go out to guys. Like I'm looking out two years in advance and I'm staying close to the money. So that first circle in red is the months and the time. Then we have the black circle here where I'm looking at near the money. So everything in blue, we've passed that price, right? So that's in the money. I'm near the money at 220. But even at 220, why did I circle that price is because again when I looked at the 50 day, when I looked at the 100 day the 72, 200 and 400. 220 is pretty much below all those. 218 was the 400 day moving average. 220, is that that price right there? So I'm almost looking to myself like, technically I'm in the money. Why did I circle that again? You look at the volume there, right? There's a interest of nearly 2,000. People have open interest in it and the volume. Some these contracts have been purchased, right? Or they're in the process of being purchased. So why would people be out to December 26th and buying contracts at that level? Well, they're thinking the same thing. I'm thinking we're going to wait this thing out, we're going to give ourselves time, we're going to buy in or near the money and we're going to watch this appreciate over time. If semiconductors are going to be the core principle of AI and this is the ETF that has semiconductors. Well, we need to be invested in. And so that's why the volume is important and open interest is important. That tells me that people are thinking on the same wavelength. So we're right in the right spot. Now why did I put this here? Well, when people think leaps, they think, oh man, that's going to take too long for me to make money. It's going to take too long for me to make money. I can't make money. I got to go short term. Well, you can make money short term and you can make a lot of money short term. But there's volatility. And when that volatility hits like we've seen over the past couple of months, it's tough to come back from. And so when I do leaps and we talk about economic downturn, like I said, we saw one in March of 2020. Here's exactly what happened, right? This is my March 2020 investment, right. Actually, I did this in July of 2020. And look at the 2022 return. Right? Those same ETFs that I just told you about. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's what they netted. Right. And those are not just hypothetical like percentages. Those are real percentages and real money. That that was one of those option trades that is life changing. And so will they all net 1500 and 1300%? No, but if they net 500, you take it. And we're getting into those territories where some of these ETFs, especially around the semiconductors and technology have hit a threshold that it's like, all right, we've got an opp, a buying opportunity Here, so you can look on the left where the price paid versus the pipes asked. And obviously this, this was a pretty good return. And I, I'm saying that because this is what leaps can do, right? It's not just the short term plays that can get you those type of signatures. You can be patient and you can pick your right price points and you can see some pretty cool returns. And obviously, you know, I ain't got it, so don't ask. Let's keep cooking. All right, so usually I would say let's execute right now, but, you know, obviously we watch what happened this weekend. You know, the leader in charge of the country as a kind of reverse course is secretary here was talking about tariffs important on semiconductors yesterday. And so that kind of throws a slight wrench into the game. Doesn't change my belief that semiconductors will lead the space. But when you start talking about special sectorial tariffs, I know they're talking about obviously the semis, but who knows what, what, what will be the next sector that they decide that they're going to choose to add additional tariffs to. And so I'll be interested to see what that percentage is and who it will affect. But then, you know, as we lead up to that, we're definitely going to make some moves here on estimation, obviously because of the severity of what type of companies they're holding. Right. So we're going to build a table and then we can invest in the equities. And so we talked about Netflix a lot. Why do we love Netflix? Well, Netflix, again, I call it a big boy heavyweight. And especially in the options game, it's a big boy heavyweight because the price of each contract, but even the shares, right, if you want to buy a share now, it's over almost a thousand dollars. And so most people will say that's too expensive, which is why we told you a couple of ETFs that make sense to have some exposure to it. But here's a couple of reasons why, man, the company is the number one streamer in almost every market where it competes, and it's going to be hard to replace it with local alternatives. Like I said, Netflix actually goes into spaces and invests in local economies, which makes it very unique in that way. So to even try to hit it with tariffs kind of doesn't really pay off because they'll just hike up the price. And when you hike up price, that really goes to the local consumer, which is happening pretty much with all other things that again, tariffs. But, you know, we got to be mindful of that with Netflix, the strategic partnerships. We talked about the wwe, obviously the NFL when they did halftimes this year with obviously with Beyonce and having the Super Bowl. I'm not super bowl having Christmas Day games. They've already signed on for a couple more NFL Christmas Day games for the next season. I could see them starting to get into the playoff realm at some point. Obviously we saw Amazon prime do that, so that's going to be interesting. And then the ufc, potentially Endeavor, obviously owns WWE and ufc. And so seeing them leave ESPN at some point in the near future and go into Netflix sounds like something that definitely could take place. And also, you know, you start going to these UFC events or watching them, and you start looking who's in the crowd. More and more. There's more politicians that are showing up to this. And so I'm interested to see what happens here with, with UFC in the next couple weeks. Other part is economic downturns. The ones like we're in, if we continue this inexpensive entertainment has always, always, it says traditionally, but always has survived and flourished, right? People will cut back on spending, right? And most times they'll stay home. And if they're staying home, most people don't have linear TV anymore. And so Netflix and Chill becomes a real thing, not just a way of life. It becomes life. So going out to sporting events and going out to concerts, that might cut back. And so you see, companies like Live Nation may be affected by that, but people will, will, will keep their Netflix accounts. And then Netflix, they've already spent significant amount of money in local economies from 20 to 2023, they invested nearly 7 billion in Europe. And so they have the exposure to a global landscape. Obviously, we always talk about what they can do in other economies. Africa is huge. And more and more, more billionaires are talking about the investment inside of Africa from a content standpoint, but from a workforce standpoint and an infrastructure and opportunity standpoint. Netflix has a global outreach and it has a global vision for its company. So, you know, that is always going to work as a work in that benefit. And here's their chart. And so, you know, I loved it when it hit it's. It's 200 day over there at 8:14. Would have been great to grab some, some contracts there, but this thing was moving so fast, sometimes it's tough to, to catch it. So we'll see if it pulls back here. They got their earnings report on Thursday. I'm expecting it to, you know, probably push up a little bit. If not, you know, stay steady. Just because of the quarter that it had. And obviously the tariff situation has happened in the second quarter of this year, so we'll be mindful of that. But grabbing shares at this 900 mark, or like I said, if we got it at 814, that have been great. But anywhere between 860 to 880, I would like to start grabbing some option contracts because it is a big boy heavyweight. And when I say big boy heavyweight, this is what I mean. Yeah. Now, I told you, I go out to 27 from some of these other companies. This is out to 2026. This is next January. And when I say big boy heavyweight, I'm talking about the price for per contract. And so if you can see in that bidding X category, we're talking thousands, right? We're not talking a hundred dollars. We're not talking about. We're talking $11,000 here at the 980 call. We're talking about 13 to 14 thousands between 930 and 940. So it's a big boy heavyweight. So if you invest in Netflix, from an option standpoint, this is something that you better make sure that you have some discretionary income, that you have some revenue on the side, that you have some revert, not revenue reserves on the side before you do it, because it's a big boy heavyweight. So grabbing two or three contracts here is something that you got to be very, very calculated about. But it's a company that we do believe in. And so I'm gonna stop there because we got so much more show to go. But tune in this Thursday. We're going to be going over this and so many more option calls and companies that we've been looking at. Core weave will definitely be inside of the class because there's some things that we saw at GTC that I didn't. Oh, hold on. I saved. Not that I didn't give the market money, audience. I just saved for Eylu. So make sure y'all tune in. We cooking up y'all. Love is love.
- [59:10]
Troy Millings
Okay? So there you have it.
- [59:13]
Rashad Bilal
There you have it.
- [59:14]
Ian Dunlap
Come on, man.
- [59:15]
Rashad Bilal
We're gonna forgive you for Pop the Balloon. We're gonna. We're that. Can we put that in the show notes for Wednesday?
- [59:23]
Ian Dunlap
Even white people was mad at that. They're like, yo, y'all took this gentrification too far. Come on.
- [59:32]
Troy Millings
So. So here's the thing. Okay? So, you know, when I started my career as a financial advisor, I started in 2008, really during the Great Recession. So I understand this thing from Two different levels. I understand opportunities that happen when the stock market crashes. But I also understand mistakes that can be generational. Like people liquidating their 401k, people losing 97 on their portfolio. Like a lot of these people still never really got back to that marker. So yeah, in times of uncertainty, education is more important than anything. So I say that to say like a lot of people do options, but a lot of people are not responsible in their teaching and a lot of people don't have the same level of results. So like that's why I think as far as like the leap options and stuff like that, like you got to be in a situation where you're as safe as possible. Right. Because it's a high risk situation. Nothing is guaranteed, but you want to have the most comfort as far as security as possible. That's why you stretch it out longer as opposed to doing daily options, weekly options, things of that nature. So you gotta folk, you should always focus. But when the market is down, you gotta quadruple focus because that's the opportunity to actually really make real gains. Right. So I say that to say, I mean as for as far as dollar cost averaging to investing, you should always be doing that. But if you have something in your, on your, on your watch list, you might want to put more money in and for trading, this is not the time to just be playing around with trading. If you are trying to be a trader, if you're trying to trade options, you need a set strategy. You need from right vision, a community support you. This is more important now than ever. Like I said on the, on the one side of it, if you make the right trade, it can change your life.
- [61:42]
Rashad Bilal
Amen.
- [61:43]
Troy Millings
That just one. It's like baseball. Like you could strike out, you could strike out nine times. If you hit, if you hit a home, if you hit one home run that might, that might win the, the pennant. Right. So one trade can trade can change your life.
- [61:55]
Ian Dunlap
Yep.
- [61:56]
Troy Millings
But you got to get that one trade that's important. So you know, obviously something that I know Troy's been doing and he's like dedicated most of his time. Like you know, every day he's been researching and learning and doing different things in the EY University. That's one of the main jewels inside of EY University is like he has a class this Thursday. He'll talking up every month they do monthly options classes. You need that level of guidance. Like I said, even if you're down, if you got time you can, you can wait it out. But if you don't have time then you're just going to be truly, truly, truly true. So and from in my opinion the option boot camps that we do at EY University and the community that's been cultivated around the trading for the options, this is unparalleled to anything else that I've seen online. That's just a fact. That's just my opinion but that's also my non biased the fact in this situation as well. So with that being said, if you know anything about you all university, you know that Ian's been demanding that we raise the price on this for a long time, forever. And we raised the price in 2025 because less is more but you also got to value your product at a certain point in time. Tremors, times that win very very rocky waters. Troy's options class this Thursday. Yeah might be the most important class that he's ever taught. I'm just saying that now being the economic environment that we're in, being an uncertainty, being the forecast for the future, this might be the most important option class. Yeah ever. This might be the most important option class ever. If you're any if you're in EYO University you cannot afford to miss it. If you're not in Eyo University. 48 hour window to join Eyo University 50 eyluniversity.com Enter code Market Mondays One word Market Mondays at checkout this will grant you not only access to the options class but the whole thing. We have a real estate we have two real estate blueprints that MG put together as far as walks you through how to buy a home and walk you through the re the rebuilding process of a home. We have weekly calls on almost a variety of different topics. We have stuff that we had in the past from taxes to credit, you name it. I do a monthly financial planning call. We have different regional chapters like it's built like an actual physical university. We do meetups this man I'm telling you, like everything and it's very very well run. Extremely efficient app. Magda, she's incredible. Emails, all this stuff. If you're serious about hitting that pitch out the park. Having a community really understanding long term trading options for leaps vitally important now more than ever. Go to eyluniversity.com enter code market Mondays one word 50 off 48 hours only. This is probably the only sale that we're going to do this year.
- [65:15]
Ian Dunlap
Thank God.
- [65:16]
Troy Millings
The most important time to do it.
- [65:20]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah this is where wealth is going to be built and not only do you get access to this Thursday's class, but you get access to every class that we've done for the past year and a half, which has been pretty impressive. But like you said, this one is super important because the market has set a reset and we've seen conditions like this before and, and we executed at a high level and it changed a lot of people's lives.
- [65:41]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah.
- [65:41]
Rashad Bilal
And so you, I would use your word, it would behoove you to be there this Thursday at 7 because we cooking up. And have your notepads ready, have your questions ready, but most importantly, be ready to execute come Friday because we cooking up.
- [65:58]
Troy Millings
Yeah.
- [65:59]
Ian Dunlap
Please learn at a high level. I know some of y'all want to trade hourly options. Please don't, please don't, please don't, please don't. And it's actually a perfect way to stagger because if you have your long term portfolio, then you have your, your leaps, you're making money regardless. Like for those of you who got leaps a year ago, you're not as concerned about what's happening right now. Shout out to all the traders who've been following their plan and they're up.
- [66:24]
Troy Millings
In this market and, and it's how far you're out too. It's like me specifically. I have three Nvidia options. I have one that was expiring this year and then two expiring in 2027. I'm down on the ones that was, I'm down right now on the ones from 2027. I was up 350 on the one that expired this year. So you know what, I just thought about it. I'm like, you know what? Sometimes in life you can't be Greedy. You're up 350, almost 400. So I sold, I sold that one. Right. So now it's like one or two things happen if Nvidia really starts to rally. Well, some people, well, that 350 could have went to 700 potentially. But I also have two other ones that I already have. So I'm going to make money if, if it does rally, like I said, you can't be greedy in life. If it does rally, then I'm already positioned with two other long terms. But I'm also not too concerned about this year because even if, even if this year doesn't work out, I essentially have another 18 months after this year for it to go up. So am I bullish on Nvidia in the course of a three year time frame? 36 months. The odds are in my, the odds are in my favor. Like I said anything can happen, but you got to put yourself in positions to win.
- [67:43]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah.
- [67:43]
Troy Millings
And you got to have eyes. That's in your favor. Yeah.
- [67:46]
Rashad Bilal
That's why you got to have a strategy. You got to have a plan. Even having, you know, multiple contracts, right. So you, once you get to that percentage threshold, you're shaving off some contrast. You're letting the profit run. But like you said, we, we putting these leaps out. The, the leaps that I'm looking at now. Like I got this one here for December of this year. It's with everything that's happened in the market, right? Including today, it's still up 430%. With everything that's happened with the deep sea easy bucket with tariffs, we're still up 430. I got another Nvidia that expires January of 26. That's up 170. Like with, with everything that's happened present day. Like these are current stats and that's why we go further out. So like you said 20, 27. As soon as I look those tariffs came in, I'm looking out to, to December of 27. Great. And what am I doing? I'm playing close to the money. Or like I show people at the mastermind, there's another strategy that we use that the most successful people use. So yeah, these are part of the things that we're going to learn and execute and implement into our plans.
- [68:47]
Troy Millings
And the thing about it is don't, don't be greedy. Okay? Don't be greedy. Don't be greedy. And don't go away from the strategy of top companies for sure. At discounted prices, long term holds. It's the same thing with real estate. This is real estate on the stock market. We're looking to buy in the best neighbor. We met another person from Detroit. He told us something that you, you want to go to the dungeon?
- [69:25]
Ian Dunlap
Hey, shout to y'all. Yo, y'all legendary, baby.
- [69:29]
Troy Millings
You want, you want to go to the best neighborhoods. Facts, because nobody's ever thinking that something's gonna. Bad's gonna happen in the best neighborhoods, right? You go to the projects and there's a high probability that you're going to get yourself in trouble.
- [69:44]
Rashad Bilal
A lot of trouble.
- [69:45]
Troy Millings
Go to the best neighborhoods. Fine. Find the, the, the cheapest house in the, on the best block and wait.
- [69:55]
Ian Dunlap
For the value to go up.
- [69:56]
Rashad Bilal
Now you're gonna go up. That's it.
- [69:58]
Troy Millings
Rehab it. Wait and hold. Ask mg That'll be the strategy, right? Like, it's a very good chance that if you Buy a condo in Chelsea. It's going to quadruple in the next 20, 30 years. That's a very good chance that's going to happen. So too much. Don't go too far. Don't go too far. Awful shout out to my guy, Wayne Penn. We, we grew up together. So he asked me about this stock Atom and so I never really looked into it, but it's in a semiconductor space. If you're looking in the semiconductor space, you gotta look at Nvidia or TSM because they're already discounted. They're already discounted right now.
- [70:44]
Rashad Bilal
Right, Right now it listen, those two companies and we were talking before we, we started this session of market monies but like yo, those are the two most important in terms of. In the AI space like though the manufacturer country and the number one person that's going to lead inside of. Of the the semiconductor space, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence, machine learning. Nvidia. Right. Who manufactures for them? Tsm. Yeah. Who is allocating billions of dollars to development inside of this country. Both of them stay there.
- [71:20]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah. I know that ATLM is cheaper, but it's like basketball. Like the best players get the highest amount of salary per year. There's a reason why this one is at 397. I know the thought is what if it goes to 15 bucks because all the value has been knocked out of Nvidia, quote unquote. But they have some monsters there. Like AMD could buy them right now and not. Not blinking eye.
- [71:47]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah. And Wayne, he'll probably understand this even more. Like I'll the. The NFL draft is coming up, right. And so they always do comparisons. They're like yo, Ken Ward is going to go number one. What's his, what's his comparison in the NFL at his peak? He's like, yeah, he has my home tendencies. Like, well, Mahomes like, like this guy. Somebody who's done things that nobody's ever done in football, right? Somebody could potentially be the great. It's not saying that Cam Ward can't potentially do that, but you'll never hear somebody say like, you know, his comparison is Blake Boroughs, right? It's Jamarcus Russell, right. Like yeah, yeah, everybody's not going to be the greatest player of all time. You already have the greatest company in the history of the semiconductor space right now today that is thriving and has potential to continue to have a run over the next five to at least seven years because they're so far advanced. Go with them.
- [72:44]
Ian Dunlap
And once again they're all Their all time high was it back in 2021 when the chip space is hotter than ever. If you made your Most recent high four years ago. Can't do it.
- [72:56]
Rashad Bilal
I got about 10 that I would put before that.
- [72:58]
Troy Millings
Can't do it.
- [72:59]
Rashad Bilal
So shoot me a text. I'll list 10 that are better than that one.
- [73:03]
Ian Dunlap
AMD, TSM, Micron, Alpha, Intel. Intel's better.
- [73:08]
Rashad Bilal
Qualcomm Applied Material.
- [73:10]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah.
- [73:12]
Rashad Bilal
Lamb Research. Yeah, that's probably 10 right there bro.
- [73:15]
Troy Millings
Yeah, can't do it.
- [73:18]
Rashad Bilal
Or, or I'm surprised. Go get an etf. ETF and go see what the ETF fund has it. Where's that allocation at? Is it even in the top 20?
- [73:29]
Troy Millings
No, no, I can't do it.
- [73:32]
Rashad Bilal
We're going to talk about ETFs.
- [73:33]
Troy Millings
All right. Before we bring our guest on another, another question. My guy Elijah. Shout out to Elijah. He's out and he's out in Dubai. He said okay. He said should I put option puts on a company like LVMH being that you know LVMH right now is, is down. Luxury brands are down across the board right now. In recessions people spend even less money. China's going away from them. They, they, they having manufacturing problems in America. They said that they can't even make the bags correctly.
- [74:10]
Rashad Bilal
They try to, they try to pay us to do them $17 an hour.
- [74:13]
Troy Millings
Is this a, is this a time to put a put on lvmh?
- [74:22]
Ian Dunlap
My, one of my more famous quotes is that the market is permanently red to stay up. So if I told you hypothetically on a lower me, Troy and Rashad owned Dior, Tiffany, Moet, Sephora and Givenchy. Would you want to bet against us long term or what you want to buy lvmh? It's not talked about it like this but it is the luxury ETF Luxury index fund. I know it's went down. The time to maybe have expressed that idea would have been in 2023. It's getting to almost a buy opportunity. Like if it gets to maybe 481.46. I like it long term for LVMHF. If you're looking short sighted maybe. But all the everybody in China is exposing how to make a luxury bag. A lot of that is propaganda now. Is there incredible markup on it? Yes. But I'm not betting against the luxury market and definitely not betting against LVMH given the powerhouse that they are. And we also have to say too stop shorting the market and trying to have puts or short in the futures market, when the bottom is almost here, there isn't much room for it to go to the downside. And I don't want you to get hurt long term. So my answer for sure is no.
- [75:48]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, it's tough to do puts when there's uncertainty. I mean this is, this is so uncharacteristic of any market that I've. I've seen. Right. Like, sure, two weeks ago we were down 2200 points on the Dow and then two days later we were up 2600 on the Dow and yeah, we were down 900. So. And especially when people are doing puts and that's a little bit different than the calls because those are more short term. Right. A call I can put out leaps on. But when you're doing puts, you want to make that short term because you know on the other end of the, the, the probability is that the market is going to appreciate over time. So you make it short term, you make it three to six months. Some people will do it one month. But even in that one month, like something could change, right? Like he. If he doesn't announce yesterday, if there wasn't an announcement that there was going to be semiconductor tariffs, right. Like there was a suspension Saturday and then if that doesn't happen Sunday and you had puts on Apple, you'd have been shot, destroyed and there would have been no recovery from that because it. Marco would have been on a run. Now Wednesday he. Or tomorrow he might, tonight he might say something. Yeah. And that could change again. So the volatility and the uncertainty around doing short term investments, especially in calls and puts, it's tough to do in this type of market. But one thing we know that, that especially America and this is what the world relies on, is that we're consumers.
- [77:15]
Ian Dunlap
And even during the pandemic consumption went through the roof. And if he's in New York, it will behoove you go to the Little Louis store and just try and get lunch. Look like a zoo in there. I wouldn't there I'll say.
- [77:29]
Rashad Bilal
Reservations till 2027, bro.
- [77:33]
Ian Dunlap
Oh, I'm such a big fan of you. I would love to get you in, but come back in three weeks. I'm here now. Can I get a coffee now or. No, not now. No, not now. Nope. Yeah, when they're selling chocolates for 90 bucks in a little box. Profit margin. Crazy. I would not short Louie Versace, which has been misrun for a long time, which is bought for a billion and a half by Prada.
- [77:58]
Rashad Bilal
Yep.
- [77:59]
Ian Dunlap
N now is not the Time we.
- [78:02]
Rashad Bilal
Sat down with the CEO, he said the, the Core four or Core five, those are the ones that matter for the company. The other ones, it's cool if they, they bring up, you know, they do their part, but we need the Core 5 to make sure that they're doing it.
- [78:16]
Ian Dunlap
Yep.
- [78:17]
Rashad Bilal
Shout out to them.
- [78:19]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah, Better to do a call. For sure.
- [78:22]
Troy Millings
Yeah, for sure. Okay. Okay, so Nvidia CEO says that they're weathering the storm for tariffs. So given the landscape, do you believe semiconductors are still the best long term tech bet in this fractured global economy?
- [78:41]
Ian Dunlap
1,000%. 1,000. Okay. I wanna. This is the equivalent of the assembly line when Ford was out. Like there is no more important investment. So much so Apple lied about their intelligence and AI in a commercial. I know hq, you tired of me talking about it, but until you write the ship, I won't. Sorry. But yes, this is the, this is like water to our economy. And I would argue if we didn't have an Nvidia or the semiconductor space, I don't know how bad we would be down in this market. So yes, I don't think anything is better to invest in long term given like the next five or seven years. Because whoever wins this race is really going to win the global war over the next 50 or 60 years so much.
- [79:31]
Rashad Bilal
This, this is the race that we have to win. It's the race that we're in the lead in, in every investment that we just said. I'll run the numbers again. Nvidia 500 billion. Apple 500 billion Amazon 100 billion TSM 100 billion Microsoft 80 billion meta 65 billion. All those numbers on the MAG7 and including TSM tell you that this is the space that you have to win. And all the investment in the capex spend is showing that we want to win. So if they're investing in it, then chances are you should be too.
- [80:00]
Ian Dunlap
Because if we don't get this right, we don't get Quantum, then we don't get all the derivative works going.
- [80:05]
Rashad Bilal
That's when it's really over. Yeah, not really over.
- [80:08]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah.
- [80:09]
Rashad Bilal
All right, well, where would we be without it?
- [80:12]
Troy Millings
Without further ado, we'll bring our guest up. Our esteemed guest we can bring. Hey, how's it going?
- [80:21]
Rashad Bilal
Hey, how you doing?
- [80:22]
Morgan DeBaun
I'm good. I'm over here like, yeah, semiconductors for life.
- [80:26]
Troy Millings
Hello.
- [80:27]
Ian Dunlap
Thank you.
- [80:28]
Troy Millings
I agree, Morgan. Somebody that I don't know when we, when we cross paths, but she's been killing it for a very long time. She actually started a company called Blavity, which you know, amplifies Voices media. And she was early on that space and then changed the game again with Afro Tech. Revolutionary idea to actually have the black community, specifically voices amplified in the world of technology. And works with a lot of different corporations and different things in the nature. But she's also best selling author, a mother, a wife, the whole gambit. So a very accomplished entrepreneur and somebody that has done very, very big things in the world of media and events. So thank you for joining us. Appreciate it.
- [81:23]
Morgan DeBaun
Yeah, thanks for having me.
- [81:25]
Troy Millings
So let's get into it. Okay. I want to start with tech. We just. I finished talking about tech. You, you have, you have Afro Tech, right?
- [81:33]
Morgan DeBaun
Yeah.
- [81:33]
Troy Millings
So Afro Tech is a convention, right, for people that's interested in technology. People that's in technology. Right. Black people. How do you see this landscape changing as far as artificial intelligence and all of these robotics? How is this changing in real time and how is that impacting black people that's in technology and black people that's trying to get into technology?
- [82:07]
Morgan DeBaun
Yeah. So average started 10 years ago. You know, I started my career in Silicon Valley working at Intuit, which is, you know, a company that has huge monopoly on like TurboTax and so many other products, QuickBooks. And what we've seen over time is that these companies are very good at evolving. And a lot of companies fail, right? Like companies take a shot and then they completely fail because they didn't evolve quick enough. The evolution and the speed in which these companies is moving is something we have never seen before. And when it comes to labor and teams and hiring, they are not able to keep up with the pace of hiring that they need to for these technical skills. Because a lot of these skills take 10, 15 years to really learn. So there's this huge gap. And the reason Aphrotech's been so successful and why people continue to need to get into technology is because there is a large gap in the labor market. I mean, it's one of the reasons we're in this trade wars now really. And I think for Afro Tech, you know, we have about 300 clients. These are corporate tech companies. Everyone from, you know, your intel to Lockheed Martin to Nvidia to boring B2B companies that are billion dollar companies you've never heard of, like F5, run by black man, $15 billion plus revenue. Like it's amazing the impact these companies can have. What's happening is that with AI they're all trying to figure out what is the disruption in the industry that's going to happen. And I think that a lot of times people are getting AI wrong. Like, people are like, AI is going to take my job. It's like, AI is going to take your industry. Like, so there's not like, it's not like, oh, it's me against the person using AI. No, the whole industry is gone. What do you do when you're playing that game?
- [84:06]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, I think you said at an interesting seat in this. As an event such as Afrotech gets to see a lot of the entrepreneurs inside the tech space in terms of innovation. We try to stress to people, like, we have to take part in this. We have to be part in the innovation. We have to be a part of the engineering. As you start to see businesses that are coming to the event each year, do people really, and I say people, our community specifically, do they understand the severity of what's ahead of the. Ahead of us over the next two to five years if we don't get this right? Because I know we will get it right. But if.
- [84:40]
Morgan DeBaun
What if we're trying, you know, I think Afro Tech reaches people who are. Have a higher proclivity of being able to say, like, I know that there's something out there that I need to know, you know, and that's why we do events all over the country. We do happy hours all over this country. Got a happy hour tomorrow in Houston, New Orleans. You know, we're trying to bring it to the people, not just have this huge mega thing that happens in Houston, which is in October this year. What I'm seeing is that people know that there's a gap between where they are and where they need to be, but they're not quite sure if they're willing to take the risk to fill that gap. You know, I think it's the same that happens in other industries where people are like 40, 50 years old and they know that these kids grew up with technology. And you kind of have to decide, am I going to try to play their game or am I going to, like, lean on my leadership skills or my soft skills that can only take you so far. And that gap is. Is really, really small with the world of AI.
- [85:37]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah. For those who may hear a statement, like you said earlier, that the AI is going to take over industry, what solutions or advice would you give to those who may be a little bit terrified that are in our community?
- [85:50]
Morgan DeBaun
Oh, you got to get out. I mean, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. You know, it's no different than people who were in the magazine industry. In the newspaper industry. And then digital came along. Of course. Course you're always going to have that, like the stragglers that are going to make it. But you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, the most powerful moguls in our country were media moguls. The people who owned the distribution channels and owned the newspapers. Those were the most powerful people in the city. Now media companies are owned by billionaires as toys, you know, so. And they didn't get rich from the media companies, they got rich from technology. So yeah, I think you can decide to play the game or the game is going to just keep going and then you're going to be, you know, stuck. So I really think it's important that our community understands what's at stake with AI. I mean, you guys talk about this all the time, so I know everybody watching this gets it. The question is like, what actions do you take to get up to speed?
- [86:48]
Troy Millings
Yeah. You know, so what industries? I have a two part question. What industries do you think is going to be eradicated by AI?
- [86:56]
Morgan DeBaun
I mean, you guys see all these graphics, all these illustrations? It's over.
- [87:02]
Ian Dunlap
It's over.
- [87:04]
Morgan DeBaun
It's really been over. I mean that took them what, four months?
- [87:07]
Troy Millings
Yeah, that's the fact.
- [87:09]
Morgan DeBaun
Graphic design, graphic design, editing, gone. I mean even distribution, I mean probably even for this show. There was a time when you guys might have had two, three people responsible for getting the piece of content here and then scraping it, putting over here and putting it over here. All that stuff's about to be automated, you know, so even project managers, coordinators, project coordinators, executive assistants, all those kind of like repetitive administrative functions, gone.
- [87:38]
Troy Millings
And the second part of my, my question is, okay, what industries do you see as like this is to get into? Like, could we talk about cyber security? That's something that's big, right? That's only going to get bigger. Like what? Where's the opportunities?
- [87:54]
Morgan DeBaun
Yeah, it's thinkers, it's people who can do critical thinking. And you know, I think there was a time when we would pay a lot of money for critical thinkers. Right? Like you're a CEO, a CRO, you're at the top of the food chain. You're playing a lot of money because you have all this expertise and all this domain expertise and all this knowledge. So you're supposed to be paid the highest. That actually with AI goes down because now AI has all this historical knowledge the same way that somebody who was, you know, the leader of a company for 5, 10, 15 years. So knowledge becomes a commodity in a Different way. Which means that everybody should have access to be a strategic and critical thinker. So what happens when you start to get the everyday person able to process huge amounts of information and make really smart decisions when before they didn't even have access that information? I think more people become solopreneurs and more people are trading and bartering. I think that more people will be self employed for sure. Even things like fractional CFOs or fractional roles. Those things. Like all those people who used to be employed to be illegal. In house legal. In house legal.
- [89:05]
Ian Dunlap
Or CMOs.
- [89:06]
Morgan DeBaun
Or CMOs.
- [89:07]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah. They're in trouble.
- [89:09]
Morgan DeBaun
Gone. Okay. You need somebody who knows how to work the specific AI product or tool that has that domain expertise built into it to ask that person effective questions and have that AI agent ask effective questions and then give that information back to you.
- [89:25]
Rashad Bilal
Morgan, I appreciate your brutal honesty and.
- [89:28]
Ian Dunlap
I love the candidate.
- [89:32]
Rashad Bilal
You fitted right in with this audience. Right. Like it's over. Like we're not playing no games with these people. I want, as you're saying it, I'm wondering as AI is developing over the and really coming to the forefront over the last two to three years.
- [89:44]
Morgan DeBaun
Yeah.
- [89:44]
Rashad Bilal
How has it changed your business? Right. Because you're in media. Right. Like it feels like you're com like saying these things off the head like yo, I did that, I did that. It. How much of an impact has had on you?
- [89:54]
Morgan DeBaun
Oh, so much. I mean we talk about it every day. My employees are probably sick of me because we run a training every Thursday and AI training that anybody at the company can join, where we go through the tools. I get reports every week on who's using AI at the company, how much, who's our highest users. I'm on it. So you know, to me I'm like whether you stay at Blabbity forever or you don't. It's my responsibility to, especially as a company that employs mostly black and brown people, like, it's my responsibility to make sure you have the tools to decide to participate or not. I'll give you an example. You know, we used to have probably 100 plus writers. You know, we own five brands across different industries. Travel with Travel noir shadow and act entertainment. Afro tech, which is, you know, 10x size of traffic than black enterprise in terms of business, news and education. So we had a lot of experts and it would take people, you know, a week to write 5, 10 articles. People are not able to get to 5, 10 articles in a day because we built an AI tool built on our Thousands of libraries of archives with the voice of our brands. Each library has its own voice. And we built a tool on top of that using ChatGPT's API to then allow you to input your information, input all the research you did, put it into the system, and then it pops out an article that's already SEO optimized, keyword optimized and everything. And the output is like 40% better than if a human wrote it without it being AI supplemented and faster.
- [91:29]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah, yeah.
- [91:30]
Rashad Bilal
And it's our voice, I think that's important.
- [91:33]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah. In your business, what are like the top three or top five AI tools or LLMs that you're using in your business?
- [91:42]
Morgan DeBaun
So we are, we're a Google suite company. So we use Gemini, I think on a day to day. You know, I'm trying to get my team to get more advanced with their prompting. You know, they're using a very basic level. So right now, you know, they use it in their email where it'll make suggestions for your emails. They'll use it for summaries of meetings. We use Google Hangouts. So Jim and I can be in there for notes. I mean, I used to have an EA that just sat in meetings to do notes. We don't need that role. It's gone. Right? Like that's gone. So note taking for everybody. You know what's interesting is that it's actually really helping with truth. You know, there's no he said, she said anymore. Like what happened in that meeting. No, he said, you can't say Suzy said this and Devon said this because it was written in every meeting. Right. So the accountability level is also much higher. We use ChatGPT, the enterprise version, because we have a lot of, you know, private information. So everybody has access to that. And then we use Salesforce. So you know, Salesforce owns Slack. Slack is our digital headquarters. So all of our Salesforce and Slack is integrated. And then we use Asana, which has really good AI tools on top. And then Canva, I mean Canva just changed the game with their drop last week.
- [92:57]
Ian Dunlap
Amazing.
- [92:58]
Morgan DeBaun
Very excited about that.
- [93:01]
Troy Millings
So, okay, let's talk about this. The rollback of dei, the rollback of corporate involvement with black organizations. You are in the crossfires of that because you work with a lot of corporations and you have a black event, right?
- [93:21]
Morgan DeBaun
Yeah.
- [93:22]
Troy Millings
Has that impacted you? What's your thoughts on, on this? Because a lot of times people just hear this, but it, it doesn't really matter if it doesn't impact you personally. So you as somebody that's operating at a high level and have a lot of corporate relationships. What's, what's your thoughts on everything that's been happening?
- [93:41]
Morgan DeBaun
Yeah, you know, our business has over 40 million in revenue. Half of it is Afro tech, half of it is media. So on the media side, revenue is up. Like all these consumer advertisers are completely like capping when it comes to D. And I, like, it's very much a political fodder. But when it comes to their bottom line and their top line, you have to invest in black audiences and consumers like we are. Where growth is, Multicultural is where growth is. They already have the white consumers, so they can't put their foot off the gas and not advertise to us. Now how they advertise, that shifts slightly. But actually the tariffs are having a bigger impact on the media business than the D and I executive orders.
- [94:26]
Troy Millings
How so?
- [94:27]
Morgan DeBaun
Yeah, so the DNI executive order was basically saying, like, you can't have preferential treatment. So all the programs and, you know, these big commitments of we're gonna spend $100 million on blackout media, like, they weren't honoring those anyways. So nothing really changed. Like you were already going to spend what you were going to spend with me regardless of what you said you were going to do. So nothing changed on our end for the tariffs. The tariffs require people to be more risk adverse because they're not quite sure what's going to happen. And Trump is changing his mind constantly. I mean, literally Friday afternoon, like, dude, what are you doing? You know, so there. When people become unstable, they become more risk averse, they become slower. You know, they slower with payment terms, they're slower with, are we going to release this product line? Are we not going to release this product line? Advertising is tied to campaigns and launches. So if things get held up because things are stuck in the ports or whatever, that impacts how much they're willing to spend on advertising those products and services.
- [95:35]
Rashad Bilal
That's interesting. And the other side of it, and we've seen it as well, especially in media, when there's uncertainty, when people are unsure, then they go to trusted sources for news. Have you seen an uptick, obviously, in your space during this? I don't even know this. 100 days. Yeah, right, exactly.
- [95:54]
Morgan DeBaun
Traffic's up. I mean, media companies do well under Trump because it's chaos. You kind of have to, you have to stay involved. And because people know they can't trust mainstream media anymore, they're looking for alternative platforms like y'all. I mean, I'm sure your traffic on your YouTube is probably skyrocketing. I saw Roland Martin.
- [96:12]
Troy Millings
He's good. He's good for business.
- [96:15]
Morgan DeBaun
He's good for business. He's not good for society, but he is good.
- [96:21]
Rashad Bilal
Thank you. Thank you for drawing that line.
- [96:27]
Morgan DeBaun
But I do think, I mean, even Roland Martin, I think, had like 300,000 subscribers in like 90 days. These are crazy numbers. But it's because people are looking for reliable sources of people they trust that they know they're going to get the truth from.
- [96:39]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah, I saw that you began investing into the stock market at the age of 13, which I think is amazing. What lessons from investing so early have you taken into your media empire?
- [96:53]
Morgan DeBaun
Cash is king. You know, the more cash you can sit on, the more you can take advantage when the moment strikes. You know, I've done three acquisitions in the last, you know, five years of black owned businesses. The only reason we'll be able to do that is because we had cash waiting for a moment that made sense for us. And then the other thing is, like, when it comes to investing, you know, I've also raised venture funding, which, you know, you guys have talked about quite a bit. So I raised over $12 million. You got to treat every dollar that you get as your last, and you got to figure out how you're going to flip it. That's the same thing with investing. When you get those moments where you have unreasonable gains, you gotta take some chips off the table for sure. Do not get greedy. Okay? And if we had listened to that, we all would be doing really well right now. If we had sold in November, December, being like, this is looking pretty darn good, and now that money would be worth basically 60, 70% more because the stocks are down. So you sold at the high, plus you're getting everything at a low. That's a double win.
- [98:00]
Troy Millings
So can you walk us through, like, some of your acquisitions that you made? Yeah, for sure. Companies.
- [98:05]
Morgan DeBaun
Yeah. The first one I bought was Travel Noir. So Traveler was an Instagram brand. They had group trips, which was amazing. They did trips in Bahia and Johannesburg and Amalfi coast with little, you know, grandma's cooking pasta and stuff. And they had no media brand. Well, what we know is that black travelers have huge discretionary income and are, like, really growing because millennials and Gen Z, we spend on experiences way more than our parents did. So I was like, all right, how do I build out blavity in a way where we're off of interest groups, not just being black, but, like, what black people are interested in? And travel is One of them. So we bought travel noir. That was like 2017. I talk about it in my book rewriting your rules. And then the other brand that we bought was Shadow and act same, but for entertainment in Hollywood. You know, black people watch more TV than any other demographic in the country, and we just love tv. And we love watching TV as an activity with other people, which is different. So that was the second brand we bought. And then two years ago, I bought a brand called R B house party, which is a traveling party series, so that we could build out Blavity fest, which is our new festival, which will be in Atlanta at the end of May with two chains and Kirk Franklin and all types of programming around black wealth. So just starting out our experiential business on the Blavity side, which is super important for our business.
- [99:34]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, you. You referenced the book. Rewrite your rules. Let's talk about it. You said, master yourself, master your method, master your growth. Break that down for us.
- [99:44]
Morgan DeBaun
Yeah, you know, I. I'm from St. Louis originally, and nobody really told me the game. What they told me was you work hard, you get a good job, you go to school, the best education you can get, and, like, it should all work out. And that's just not true. Like, there are so many people watching this where it's like, you did all the things you, like, had the good job, and you did all the things that did what was right. And we're watching a system more so today than ever before, where the people who are making the rules, they're making them for all of us to follow, but they're not even following them. So what do you do? You know, you have to decide for yourself how you want to interact in that kind of system. So this book is basically a framework to help you figure out, well, if success isn't, like, do all these things and then you get this golden egg at the end. What is my definition of success and how do I get there? What is the strategy and the frameworks that I need to have in order to do it? So it really is a workbook and a playbook for people to be able to do that. You know, leveraging all the ups and downs of Blavity and the things that I've done. But more importantly, like, whether you're a career nine to fiver or an entrepreneur, like, you can do what you want to do, but you have to define it for yourself.
- [100:56]
Ian Dunlap
I think one of the hardest things as an entrepreneur to do is to overcome obstacles. And we've gone through it. Can you talk to us about how you deal with attacks, obstacles that you may face in the business while you're trying to give back to our community.
- [101:12]
Morgan DeBaun
Oh, yeah. I mean, we could attack every day. You guys. Know, I think that, you know, I go back and forth on this. I mean, I was even watching the comments on Pinky's videos on your guys's channel. And I just talked to Pinky in my book tour stop in St. Louis for rewriting your rules. And I think every time I read the feedback and comments, I really actually have a lot of empathy for our community because what happens is like, there's a lot of pylon for systems and infrastructures that they don't get. And then I ask myself, well, how are they supposed to know? Like, how are they supposed to know what private equity is versus venture backable companies? How are they supposed to know? Like, you know, I have a board, I report to the board. You know, it's not just me. I have shareholders. Like, how are they supposed to know this stuff? That's what gives me the motivation to say, well, it's my responsibility to tell them. Right. And it allows me to say, you know what, maybe we should do a video on how this works. Like, maybe we should have somebody, you know, explain how to become a speaker at Afro Tech. Maybe we should have somebody explain what it means to be a venture backable company and why maybe you shouldn't raise venture funding because you're not actually looking for, for capital for equity exchange. You just need cash to grow your business. You need a loan or a line of credit. Like, let me actually take these moments as an opportunity to flip it back.
- [102:38]
Troy Millings
Okay? So being that you have a lot going on, right. Like you run a company, but you also have. You have two. Two children or one.
- [102:47]
Morgan DeBaun
I have one and I'm pregnant.
- [102:49]
Troy Millings
Okay, Congrats.
- [102:50]
Ian Dunlap
Congratulations.
- [102:51]
Morgan DeBaun
So that's why my upper lip is sweating. It's all the hormones.
- [102:55]
Troy Millings
So how is, how is that being two, you know, about to be two young children.
- [103:00]
Morgan DeBaun
Yeah.
- [103:01]
Troy Millings
Family and then running several different companies. How have you. And then, you know, when I ask people this before, some people in the comments, they like, well, you never ask men this question. Well, it's different for men because we don't have to. We don't have the same responsibilities as the woman has. Right.
- [103:17]
Morgan DeBaun
So, yeah, I agree.
- [103:19]
Troy Millings
I have to ask the woman the question because it's different being a mother than being a father. So how, how have you been able to, to manage all of this simultaneously?
- [103:29]
Morgan DeBaun
Yeah. I think there's Just different seasons at different paces. You need to be running fast in different seasons of your life. I, I believe that women can do it all and have it all, but I don't think we can do it all at the same time. And I've had to. I had to renegotiate with myself how fast I was running at work in order to be able to, to prepare for motherhood. And, you know, this is an intense three to five years where everybody is going to need mommy. The hidden trick for most successful women who are able to do this and run their careers is actually their partner and who they pick. I think that's not talked about enough because it's a privilege to pick your partner. And I know so many women, especially black women, don't feel like they're. They have an equal partner, but I was very much, like, unwilling to have kids or get married if this person was not going to be sometimes even 60, 40 them when it came to kids. Knowing the physical and mental adjustments that I was going to have to make for, you know, five, six, seven, eight years while these kids are young. I think that's the one secret people.
- [104:33]
Troy Millings
Don'T really want to talk about. Can you talk about that? Then? Can you say, like, okay, what's important? What was important for you to recognize in your husband with what's important for women of your caliber? Because like you said, it's difficult, right? You're a CEO, you running around, you flying around. What is that? What does that companion look like as far as on the male side?
- [104:51]
Morgan DeBaun
Yeah. I mean, I needed an alpha, and I'm a super alpha. So I needed a mega alpha, somebody who was like, girl, sit down. You know, And I was really comfortable with that. I mean, when I met my husband, he didn't even know what Blavity and Afro Tech was. So, you know, here I am, you know, walking in like, you know, I got, I got a lot going on. And he's like, girl, I don't know what you're talking about. Like, you're just cute with curly hair to me, you know? And, you know, who are you when you don't have all those titles and all that extra stuff on you? It was such a blessing to meet a man in that time of my life who couldn't give a rat's butt about what I did and how much money I made and all the people I was connected to. He liked the fact that I would light candles in my house. You know what I mean? Like, just random girly stuff. And I think that the More, you can find people in your life that like you for you, even when you're a high achieving woman, where your whole life you have been focused on achieving for your career and your value is based off of what you've accomplished at work because that's what you sacrificed for. It's so important that you find a person who doesn't actually care about those accolades because here's the thing, if I stopped working tomorrow, he would love me just the same. In fact, he'd probably be like, thank God she can finally pick up after herself, you know, like, thank God, you know? So I think that's really imperative is like, your relationship cannot be codependent based off of the value you bring to the table from a work perspective. And for a lot of hard, high achieving women, it's hard for us to decouple that because it's how we spent and sacrificed so much to get to where we are.
- [106:41]
Rashad Bilal
Kudos. Kudos to your husband and congrats to y'all on, on the, the new extension to the family. I want to go back into CEO mode for a second in terms of acquisitions because I'm sure there's a lot of people who listen, who have businesses and they're thinking like, oh my gosh, maybe I want to get investors. What are you looking for in terms of the next sector? Like you said, travel and leisure. We found Travel Noir. What's not in the portfolio now that you would like to acquire or looking to acquire somewhere in the next three to five years?
- [107:10]
Morgan DeBaun
Yes. And when people are thinking about acquisitions, this is my general framework. Number one, is it cheaper for me to buy you than it is for me to build it. So it's either got to be cheaper for me to buy you than it is for me to build it, or it's got to be faster, which is actually for all three of my businesses, it was faster. Like, it's really hard to build trust in the black community. It was faster for me to buy a brand that was around for seven years and travel than it was for me to try to build that. It would have taken too long. And I was trying to run fast. A lot of these AI companies that are getting eaten up, it's speed. They're trying to get as big as possible. Right. As fast as possible. Because winner takes all sorts. You got to put yourself in that position. And then the second thing is, can this run without you? Okay, most small businesses in this country, 80% of them have an employee of one. Yeah, I'm not buying anybody that is Fully dependent on that founder. Because the moment that founder decides to chill because they just got a big payday, the business doesn't perform.
- [108:16]
Troy Millings
Yeah.
- [108:17]
Morgan DeBaun
And then we have conflict because now you're not going to get your earn out. And now you're talking about, well, I'm not getting this money. And I said, well, you're not delivering on the goals that we had assumed in our projections. And now we have conflict. I don't want any more conflicts. I got too much going on. Okay. So, you know, in these days, I get acquisition offers often, like, people are like, please buy my company, especially in this kind of market. And right now I'm like, do a joint venture. Let's partner. Let's see how it goes. You know, let's. Let's have some chips in the game and see how we both execute and then see what the return on investment is and then we can talk.
- [108:56]
Ian Dunlap
And under that framework, what makes a good part? Let's say there's someone tonight that may want a joint venture partner with you. What's like a perfect model or framework for them to be able to approach and what are you looking for inside of that business?
- [109:08]
Morgan DeBaun
Yeah, it's got to be something I can't do for myself again, either you got to be doing it cheaper or faster than me. That's where most people mess up. It's really not that hard. Like, somebody's going to email me tonight and be like, you should buy my event company. And I'll be like, I already have an event company. Why do I need another? Right. You should buy my. Recruiting is an area that we're looking at. So because we have hundreds of companies that already recruit through Afro Tech, we don't do it for them. Right. We give them access to the community, but it's on them to make the deal and make that exchange. We've thought about, well, maybe we should do it for you for a price. We should be willing to help both the person looking for a job or the company looking to match. So I've been looking slightly. Now I'm not talking about just a recruiter who was laid off, who wants me to buy them. No, like a recruiting company or agency that specializes in technical roles. You know, that's something that I've had my eye open for.
- [110:05]
Troy Millings
Morgan, we appreciate you. I want you to tell them, tell them about the book. Like in detail. Like, what can they expect from reading the book? What do you want them to get out of the book? The whole gambit.
- [110:19]
Morgan DeBaun
Yeah. So as you can see, I'm Very direct. No sugarcoating. I think there's very few business books that are written for us and that show you the game in terms of how people think things like how Silicon Valley makes decisions, decision making frameworks, thinking about how you move fast so that you can outpace your competitors without burning yourself out. So rewriting your rules is basically, every chapter starts with a little story of how I built something or how I didn't like how I miss payroll or whatever. And then it tells you the framework on how I got out of it or how you could apply this to your life and whatever your goals or dreams are. So you can get it@writeyourles.com and also there's tons of free work perks and. And all types of resources that are online as well.
- [111:07]
Troy Millings
Sure, man. I like your decor. The. The backsplash.
- [111:12]
Morgan DeBaun
Oh, thank you. This is my husband's office because it is more masculine than mine, considering your audience. So I was like.
- [111:24]
Rashad Bilal
I need you.
- [111:24]
Morgan DeBaun
To take the Legos off, but other than that.
- [111:30]
Troy Millings
For sure. And keep up that. Keep up the great work. Keep up the advocacy. Yeah, I know.
- [111:35]
Ian Dunlap
We was.
- [111:35]
Troy Millings
We was texting a lot during the. The pre election. Yeah, yeah, it was a lot going on.
- [111:40]
Morgan DeBaun
Yeah. We got to do a collab. We got to figure out. You guys, let us know in the comments what you want Afrotech and EYL to do.
- [111:45]
Troy Millings
Let's do it. Let's do something. Do something at Invest Fest. Let's figure it out.
- [111:50]
Morgan DeBaun
Yeah, we could do that. All right. Enjoy.
- [111:52]
Rashad Bilal
All right. Appreciate you. Thank you.
- [111:54]
Troy Millings
Thank you, thank you. There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Shout out to Morgan.
- [112:02]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah.
- [112:03]
Troy Millings
Very, very intelligent.
- [112:05]
Ian Dunlap
Yes.
- [112:05]
Troy Millings
Young, young woman.
- [112:08]
Rashad Bilal
Trailblazer.
- [112:09]
Troy Millings
For sure. For sure. I mean, you got Jay. Jay said it's now called Afro Tech. Like, not me. So, you know, whenever you're a trailblazer, you're gonna get arrows in your back for sure.
- [112:21]
Ian Dunlap
Always.
- [112:23]
Troy Millings
Most people that criticize have never done anything.
- [112:25]
Rashad Bilal
This is also true. So just keep going. Just keep going.
- [112:30]
Troy Millings
You know how that go.
- [112:31]
Rashad Bilal
Just keep going.
- [112:31]
Ian Dunlap
And in light of dei, I would not be surprised if there was a concerted effort to send arrows there, because while they're trying to make that gap wider, when you have institutions like Afro Tech and Invest Fest, not everyone's the happiest about us getting included in some of these conversations and strategies and frameworks.
- [112:51]
Rashad Bilal
So that's a fact.
- [112:52]
Troy Millings
That's a fact.
- [112:53]
Rashad Bilal
I think she. She. She alluded to something very important. It's something we've been stressing. It was like the importance of being a part of that AI conversation. Right. From the large language to machine learning. You see what she said? We're taking thousands, hundreds of thousands of data points. We're implementing it into our LLMs, and it's getting back feedback in his Rhinos articles. Now imagine that not happening in every other industry, in every other publication. That's what's at risk here. So it's important that. That we're inside the innovation. I'm glad she said that.
- [113:25]
Troy Millings
So, you know, powerful.
- [113:30]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah. We got to talk about scaling. And that's why I think the conversation you guys had with Pinky was so important. Everyone thinks about the positives of receiving 20 million for your business, but that risk of reward if things don't go right. It's an active strategy for a lot of investors to be activist investors, especially in our brands, because we don't know how this game is played. So I want to commend you guys again for the interview.
- [113:55]
Rashad Bilal
Appreciate you.
- [113:56]
Troy Millings
Thank you. Appreciate it, man.
- [113:57]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, it's important.
- [113:59]
Troy Millings
And once again, it's one of these things where it's like, what was it? You see what she said at the end? Like, let's figure out how to. Everybody that's really moving is collaborating, like always. They're not haters and easy to work with. Yeah. Like, everybody that's actually got some motion is trying to figure out how to actually do things. And let's figure this out. Everybody that's like divisive or hater, that says a lot about the person for sure. More than anything. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, that says a lot.
- [114:35]
Rashad Bilal
Or people. Person or peoples.
- [114:38]
Ian Dunlap
And those who have that same motion, they're easy to work with for sure.
- [114:42]
Troy Millings
And we know all the people with motion, like Pinky Cole, more like these are people that's actually out here acquiring companies, talking about 100 million dollar valuations. Like this is real time. Like it's happening in real time.
- [114:51]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah. And you see him when we said that on the Pinky interviews, we see her in every room we're in. It's because we literally see her in every room that we in. Which tells you like, all right, these are the movers and shakers. So we. Right where we're supposed to be.
- [115:04]
Troy Millings
That's a fact. Okay. With that being said, any tips for people 905 making $60,000 or less that want to start investing?
- [115:15]
Ian Dunlap
I think regardless of income, the strategy has to be the same. Take a percentage of income, whether it's 10, 20%, find that vehicle that you're going to invest in. I like to take to index. Pick four that you're going to invest in and put money in every month and let that be the first bill that you pay. Because regardless of how much money you make now, I'm going to be honest. If you make 60,000, I know people that are making 600,000 a year having the same conversation of I don't have enough. Well, that's because that liability sheet is filling up with all the toys and things that really don't matter in the end. Find what percentage you're going to invest into the market, put the money in every month, do so for five or six years and you'll be okay.
- [116:01]
Troy Millings
What do you think about the fact that she said that black people watch the most television?
- [116:09]
Ian Dunlap
Not at all.
- [116:10]
Rashad Bilal
Disturbing, but not. Were you surprised?
- [116:13]
Ian Dunlap
It's heartbreaking. And because we know it's not positive. Lee reinforced images of us or things. That's why I'm so appreciative for everyone who watches the show. But yeah, we over index on entertainment.
- [116:27]
Rashad Bilal
For sure that you just. I was literally about to say that. Look at the things we over indexing. Yeah, entertainment for sure.
- [116:37]
Ian Dunlap
Consumer then with those eyeballs. This didn't sell to us products, food products that are harmful to, to our health long term.
- [116:46]
Troy Millings
So I just, so I just asked Chad gbt, I said, which race group watches the most tv? African Americans watch more television than any other ethnic group in the United States. According to the 2023 report, African American viewers spend an average of 3.2 hours a day watching TV. This trend has been consistent over the years with earlier studies indicating even higher viewing times. So you know what's crazy is that I don't even really know how to work my television. I don't watch tv, I don't watch streaming. I don't watch none of that stuff. Like very rarely. It'll be like once in a blue. I literally sometimes don't know how to turn my TV on. That's how much I don't watch tv. I'm on my phone a lot. But man, that just says a lot. Like that says a lot about the times that we're in.
- [117:30]
Rashad Bilal
Because the times we've been in, we, we're the lowest.
- [117:33]
Troy Millings
We're the lowest as far as income, we're the lowest as far as property ownership. We're the lowest on the wealth gap scale. So if we're the lowest, if we're, if we're in last place in technology, every single thing. If we're in last place, how are we in first place and watching television by design.
- [117:51]
Ian Dunlap
And the crazy part, the numbers have gotten better over time. Over the last five or six years. In the 90s and 2000s.
- [117:58]
Rashad Bilal
Well, I don't know. Well, like you said, right? Like people maybe not be watching Lanier television, but like you said, you're always on your phone. That is. That is the new tv, right? So how. How many hours are we on our devices?
- [118:11]
Ian Dunlap
That's a great point as well, because.
- [118:16]
Rashad Bilal
It'S more like even sometimes by mistake, like I'll get the weekly report every Sunday. Like you spent eight hours on your phone. I'd be like, eight hours, like, what? That's crazy, right? So imagine somebody who's on it all day, every day. Like think about that number. That doesn't even compare to the three hours of television. But you think the things that we over index on, like entertainment, right? We watch sports, we watch entertain. You watch a sport, you sitting there for three hours. You watch a basketball game, you there for three hours straight up. Now you watch anything else. Now you over index. You see what I'm saying? And those are the things. When we looked at success, especially 80s 90s babies, that's what we were looking at. Like that's success route. How do we do it? We're enamored by it. We're fascinated by it. That's our pathway. And here are the results. And now it's switched from being on a TV box, at least my. My social, social studies teacher used to call it the idiot box. You watch is making you dumber. And now it's become the device. And now it's like you got to put a watch time or you got to put limits on how long you're using these devices, especially for your children. But adults, it's real.
- [119:19]
Ian Dunlap
Speaking of picking that pathway, did you see Jack over the weekend tweet, delete all IP loss, Check who?
- [119:27]
Troy Millings
Dorsey. He said get rid of the IP loss.
- [119:34]
Ian Dunlap
In the midst of all this LLM and AI technology. You want to, my boy, fix square block, whatever. What? What?
- [119:48]
Rashad Bilal
Shout out to Dorsey. It's been quiet for a while.
- [119:53]
Ian Dunlap
Upset the wrong people.
- [119:55]
Rashad Bilal
He knows Satoshi.
- [120:00]
Ian Dunlap
Personally. Look into the mirror, my boy.
- [120:02]
Rashad Bilal
He knows.
- [120:07]
Troy Millings
That's crazy though. You gotta. You gotta take it. You gotta take your education more serious. You gotta. You gotta. You know, like when I do watch television, it's things like 60 Minutes, you know, there's. There's some good programming on television, but it's like you don't have the luxury of wasting time.
- [120:28]
Rashad Bilal
How much of it is escapism though, a lot.
- [120:32]
Ian Dunlap
But you have to realize when you're watching someone on television, you're literally like. It's the equivalent of sitting at somebody's cubicle for five hours and watching them work. That's why Black Mirror is so fascinating. Like, let's go. Episode one of them episodes. Crazy.
- [120:45]
Rashad Bilal
Crazy.
- [120:46]
Ian Dunlap
But it's like you're living your life vicariously through someone else who's never going to pour anything into you.
- [120:57]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, yeah. Some. Yes. Like, okay.
- [121:03]
Ian Dunlap
It's like, I ain't gonna pick on the game. But the dudes, he'll be like, yo, I gotta. I got a game today. I'm like, who you play for her? They like, they take that 2K. Like, they in the league. I'm like, you don't play for the Bulls, my boy. You are not Zach Levine, my boy. Now, if you making money off of it. But some dudes be treating that like it's their life.
- [121:24]
Rashad Bilal
I'm like, 505 League N. It's 515. That's for real.
- [121:29]
Ian Dunlap
What? But you don't have time to learn how to. You don't learn how to get money. All right, cool.
- [121:35]
Rashad Bilal
The my player journey says a lot.
- [121:37]
Troy Millings
About the times that we're in.
- [121:38]
Ian Dunlap
Insane.
- [121:40]
Troy Millings
Wow.
- [121:41]
Rashad Bilal
Make a living.
- [121:42]
Troy Millings
Wow.
- [121:42]
Rashad Bilal
Make a living. Living.
- [121:44]
Troy Millings
Is Nvidia still about 89?
- [121:47]
Ian Dunlap
Yes. For everyone who said it didn't come to that. It's been a week. You should have listened when I told you 94 the last 17 damn times. Okay, give us some time. Trump is going to do something. It's gonna fall back, and at one point we're in year five. At what point will y'all go quick questioning me respectfully and humbly. Right? Because before it was Nvidia's never going to 95. And now you missed out. And it's like, when's 89 gonna hit? Why won't you just invest the levels that I tell you for free? Because we technically put any price I call. We could put that behind a paywall.
- [122:27]
Rashad Bilal
Intraday. Got there. It was there.
- [122:29]
Troy Millings
18, 80.
- [122:31]
Rashad Bilal
86.
- [122:32]
Troy Millings
They got to 86.
- [122:33]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah.
- [122:33]
Rashad Bilal
So I'm saying, like, they did. They missed.
- [122:35]
Troy Millings
Not 86. 8. 96. 96.
- [122:37]
Rashad Bilal
No. Intraday.
- [122:38]
Troy Millings
Intraday. 96. April. April 4th. It got to 93.
- [122:46]
Rashad Bilal
Okay, go to his.
- [122:47]
Ian Dunlap
Go to 86.62. That was a low.
- [122:50]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah.
- [122:50]
Troy Millings
On what. What day?
- [122:52]
Ian Dunlap
The 7th.
- [122:53]
Rashad Bilal
On the 7th. Yeah. So even if you look at the 52 week low this year. Right? So if you go from a year out, look at the 52 week low for it 75. So I'm saying.
- [123:02]
Troy Millings
But that was months ago. That was a long time ago. During this, during this run, during this.
- [123:08]
Rashad Bilal
Market, it got down to 86.
- [123:09]
Troy Millings
I think it's 93.
- [123:11]
Rashad Bilal
That's why it probably closed that. But intraday, I saw it at 86.
- [123:15]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah, 86.62 was a lot.
- [123:19]
Rashad Bilal
So you missed it. So you're gonna ask now. It's 110. A goodbye.
- [123:25]
Ian Dunlap
Listen, the first time. Yeah. And I'm giving it out for free. I'm in the opposite of Craner. Shout to Kramer. He was incredibly kind when I met him, but the opposite of.
- [123:37]
Rashad Bilal
I still so like the move that they made today, even it being at 110. If you look at every analyst, if you look at its target for end of year, that has not moved, it's still at 165 to 170.
- [123:54]
Ian Dunlap
My target above that, my target for Nvidia, 187. I'm just.
- [123:59]
Rashad Bilal
The average. I'm giving you the average.
- [124:00]
Morgan DeBaun
Yeah.
- [124:00]
Rashad Bilal
Some people have gone as high as 200.
- [124:02]
Troy Millings
You got. You gotta. You gotta be bullish. But the thing about the analysts, that they just make up numbers, too. That's the one thing that you learn over the course of time.
- [124:09]
Ian Dunlap
Let's wake it up.
- [124:10]
Rashad Bilal
That's true, but that's why I don't. But see, what you're saying is true. They. And it benefits them to. To do those things. What I'm saying is that out of 40, I'm gonna take that. The average. What's the consensus of that? All right. Yeah, this guy's. Why is he saying 200? Why is this guy saying 130? Let's take a consensus of the average of 60 analysts, right?
- [124:27]
Ian Dunlap
And then, hey, what price the analysts give y'all? It was going to drop to three months prior to.
- [124:31]
Rashad Bilal
But we're not. We. We can go there. But I'm just saying that that hasn't moved also.
- [124:37]
Troy Millings
Yeah, the analysts, they just say anything. But then also what. What's important to understand too. Like I always say, if the economy is down, it doesn't matter. That's. That's the variable that nobody. Technical analysis, fundamental analysis, none of that matters. If Trump decides to put a 30 tariff on all chips, it's going to have a negative impact. And we've seen this. We've seen this. We've seen this in real time.
- [124:58]
Ian Dunlap
Emergency episodes.
- [125:00]
Troy Millings
One person tanked. Tanked the stock market. Not. Not the technicals, not the fundamentals, not anything. One person has a personal vendetta against the world and that alone tanked the stock market. So you got to think long term. So that's numbers. The numbers are one thing, but I just don't want people to get caught up in like thinking like, okay, I'm gonna invest here and then it's going to get to 30 in, in 12 months because just invest at a good price and hold it.
- [125:31]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah. I think that the tar. That's why I said this play, this announcement that they had, it's kind of significant in the sense that. And we've seen Nvidia, when they make announcements, they always say 12 to 15 months, which means they probably are going to be able to do it in 8 to 10. Right. Like they're just going to put that out there. So if they're saying like they can get these data centers up and running in the next eight to 10 months, then a tariff doesn't have the same impact on that company. Right. Because they're saying they're manufacturing their chips here, they're not going to China. Now the, the tariffs will affect other companies, but Nvidia specifically, one we're talking about, it changes things for them. The other part of it is like what we could really lead to is international conflict, which could lead to any type of war. That, that's a global.
- [126:18]
Troy Millings
Says the tariffs is just one thing. Yeah. Economic uncertainty, like Mark Zuckerberg goes to court. If he loses his case, Meta's going to be screwed. So there's variables that go into play for the broader economy that have impacts on stocks that nobody can predict. Nobody can, like nobody could have predicted. So you got, you gotta go.
- [126:48]
Ian Dunlap
You said what I predicted the prices before the tariffs came.
- [126:52]
Troy Millings
I mean for sure. That's why you should be in Stock Club. Ianinvest.com that's my guy.
- [126:59]
Rashad Bilal
Go there.
- [126:59]
Troy Millings
Now the point is that be a long term investor. That's important because even with the options, like I said, like if you have longer, that's helpful because in the short term everything could be perfect and then something happens and it just ruins.
- [127:17]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah.
- [127:17]
Troy Millings
The day that nobody. Nobody planned for.
- [127:20]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, I think you're right. I think we're kind of saying the same thing. It won't be one. It could be one thing or it could be a mixture of a few things.
- [127:27]
Troy Millings
But those analysts, those analysts just say anything and well, they, they, they, the.
- [127:33]
Ian Dunlap
Majority, there are a few.
- [127:36]
Troy Millings
A vast majority of.
- [127:37]
Rashad Bilal
A lot of them underperform.
- [127:39]
Troy Millings
No, a vast majority of hedge fund managers underperform the S P 500. This is a historic fact. They get 20 to underperform the S P 500. What is that? How does that make sense? You became a billionaire from charging people 20 of your gains and you're doing less than if somebody was in VQ s and P500. That's a fact. Another thing is that, yeah, a lot of these guys just aren't saying things for the media and just saying things and then those things don't actually work out at all.
- [128:11]
Rashad Bilal
So I'm just saying that we can't say all of them.
- [128:14]
Troy Millings
A lot of them.
- [128:16]
Ian Dunlap
Right.
- [128:16]
Rashad Bilal
Because not only do they make it, but they just don't throw out the price. They actually give you the, the fundamental breakdown of. You can't say it doesn't matter. It's not always cap.
- [128:28]
Troy Millings
A lot of it is cat. That's a fact. It ain't 2008. What happened?
- [128:32]
Rashad Bilal
It's not all.
- [128:33]
Troy Millings
A lot of it is cap. Because if it wasn't capped, they will be able to navigate these things a lot better.
- [128:40]
Ian Dunlap
And there's only a few.
- [128:42]
Troy Millings
Warren Buffett is able to navigate the situation they've been historically.
- [128:53]
Ian Dunlap
Can we stop saying that that's not true? I proved that for the last 10 years. That's not true. You can predict it. Oh, but when? The prediction is giving us a lot of backlash on when and where reproduce fucking pterodactyls.
- [129:11]
Troy Millings
What do you know?
- [129:12]
Ian Dunlap
Okay, here we are. Direwolf woolly mammoth. Next year they got a no limit rollout with the new, with the new animals. The market is easy to predict if you're looking at what they're investing. I told them bitcoin was going to be taken over by the bencher. You don't know. You're not a crypto expert. You all don't have enough money to be saying this. Should y'all be saying?
- [129:32]
Rashad Bilal
All right, so here, here, here's the, here's the asterisk to that statement. Right. With the person who's leading the country now with the level of uncertainty. This is not. You can't predict this. Right? We don't. Because you don't know tomorrow. Like literally he could put something tonight in a tweet and it changes everything tomorrow, right?
- [129:51]
Ian Dunlap
Over a day to day basis. No. But even in a great exercise in chat GPT, your long term plan. Yeah. If you look at the succession of his deals, how long a company or brand under him has run, you can extract some data points for volatility in this decision making. But it's easier to talk on Instagram than it is to get your ass in their model. There's a few people at the Mastermind to hit me, like, yo, I took some Detroit stuff. I took some of your stuff. I put it together so you can get a framework that's the word of the day.
- [130:24]
Rashad Bilal
There you go.
- [130:25]
Ian Dunlap
You can't predict, but day to day is tough. But framework, you can for sure build.
- [130:32]
Rashad Bilal
That's fair.
- [130:33]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah. When a person called that Moody's was on in 2008, even what, Bernard Madoff, it was a lot of people signaling that there were some things awry in.
- [130:45]
Rashad Bilal
That office Bernie made.
- [130:47]
Ian Dunlap
But did people want to hear it?
- [130:50]
Rashad Bilal
No. Alan Greenspan, all those guys.
- [130:53]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah.
- [130:54]
Troy Millings
That's a fact, though. All right, but what.
- [130:57]
Ian Dunlap
What do we do before we leave?
- [130:58]
Troy Millings
Let's do this. If somebody has $1.2 million to invest right now, should they use a two tech, two index strategy or other stocks to make up their portfolio?
- [131:10]
Ian Dunlap
I'mma be real. I'mma talk like it's just us in the room. I'mma go Visa, V first, Nvidia, TSM. And V all, my boy. Let me get 20. Or whatever you get over the next five years. Okay. Big Eye, Visa, TSM, Nvidia, Voo. You'll be a. Okay. I don't think Visa is talked about enough as a powerhouse in tech. We're talking about this on stock club call. Do people realize the Visa does, like, damn near 81 of all transactions on the globe?
- [131:49]
Rashad Bilal
That was. That was one of my slides, man. I did it.
- [131:52]
Ian Dunlap
I did a whole. I did a whole information right.
- [131:56]
Rashad Bilal
That's a fact.
- [131:57]
Ian Dunlap
They don't get enough credit because they don't have a famous CEO. We have the pleasure of meeting him at a certain location. Oh, man. Things could have been so much different this year. But because they don't have a rockstar CEO like Jensen or Elon, that may hurt them. But in terms of how the business is run, in terms of the financial services space, I don't think there's a company that has been run better.
- [132:23]
Rashad Bilal
Okay. I mean, you. You see it when you travel. You'll. You will hear you. We don't accept American Express.
- [132:32]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah. Do you have. Yeah. And tech. That's a lot talked about. Networking effect. They have mastered the network effect. To a team globally.
- [132:43]
Troy Millings
That's a fact. All right. All right, ladies and gentlemen. Okay, do remember this Thursday, EY University options master class. Vitally important, and for 48 hours, we're running a sale for EY University. 50% off. So our first and last sale of the year go to eyuniversity.com Intercode Market Mondays all one word at checkout. That gives you access to every past recording. That gives you access to the home buyers. Blueprint 1 and 2 walks you through the process of buying a home. Monthly financial planning calls. You get access to the infinity groups inside of your university, the regional groups in person. Experiences that we've done, we've done meetups all over the country. Just so much, so much. But in the course of trading, the safest, I would say the safest trading community online and this is the times where you actually, if you want to take that thing serious, you're gonna actually need to have some level of safety that's important. So eyl university.com code market Mondays upon checkout. See you guys on Thursday.
- [133:59]
Rashad Bilal
That's a fact. As you know, stay low key. Firing. That's the model. Everybody has adopted it. They celebrate their wins and they share what they've learned for some of the losses which is important because we all get to learn together. So shout out to the community, shout out to the investors group. They're incredible as well. So yeah, we're having some fun. I'm looking forward to it. I'm ready to cook up.
- [134:21]
Ian Dunlap
If China and Japan don't want our bonds as the 6040 portfolio did. Yeah, we have a big trouble. Listen, if the tech market was down five years, man, Alex Jones would be running. Singing here right now with breaking news. I've never seen a collapse of a market be so quiet. And I can't get one person to tell me why the bond market is falling this much. 2020. I've asked everybody I can think, everybody we met on, on the floor. They're like, they have a, a thought but it's no conclusive answer. That's scary as hell. If real estate was peaked in 2020 and it was at a decade low, oh my God.
- [135:14]
Rashad Bilal
What will they figure this out? China said they're willing to negotiate.
- [135:21]
Ian Dunlap
They also said if you take it there, we taking it further.
- [135:24]
Rashad Bilal
That's how. Yeah, they did say that. They did say that.
- [135:26]
Ian Dunlap
We're willing to fight to the end.
- [135:29]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah. Yeah.
- [135:31]
Ian Dunlap
If somebody called me and said, bro, we can fight to the to the day we die. I'mma peace treaty. We gotta fight every day.
- [135:42]
Rashad Bilal
Some beef is everlasting that's never gonna end. Know that that's never gonna.
- [135:47]
Troy Millings
Some beef is everlasting.
- [135:49]
Rashad Bilal
They, they, I mean they can just exist in different worlds. The, but the, the beef is never gone.
- [135:59]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah, some crash outs are worth it though. Some crash also work though.
- [136:07]
Rashad Bilal
Shout out to him Shout out to Yo. Shout out to Ja. Pulling out the UNO reverse card on Envy. That was. That was hilarious.
- [136:12]
Ian Dunlap
That. What a great moment. What a great moment. I know his name just Sully, because that was funny.
- [136:22]
Rashad Bilal
The Fire Festival, too, was coming back, and he was asking him, and he was asking about, you know, dealing with business with partners, and you don't know what they have, you know, they're doing behind the scenes. And he was like, envy, I'm happy you asked that. I'm actually happy you asked, because I'm sure you can relate to that now.
- [136:40]
Ian Dunlap
Oh, my God.
- [136:42]
Rashad Bilal
He was like, the crazy thing. He's like, yo, Josh, and you. Plenty of times you never brought this out. You waited for this moment to say that. He's like, I did. I did.
- [136:51]
Ian Dunlap
Well played job.
- [136:53]
Rashad Bilal
And you know, yo, shout out to Godspeed Nick. The entire team. Shout out to y'all. Yo, the care packages has landed. We appreciate you wholeheartedly, my brother. As you can see, it is being worn at a high rate, so we appreciate that.
- [137:09]
Ian Dunlap
We gotta have a conversation about top design in the world right now.
- [137:12]
Rashad Bilal
They killing.
- [137:14]
Ian Dunlap
I have not seen them put out a dud yet.
- [137:17]
Rashad Bilal
The whole team, man, and they're cooking up. Shout out to my song. I gotta take a moment. Shout out to my son. If you didn't go see his freestyle, he did. It was freestyle on Sway, I think last week. Smoked. I think he went for like, five minutes straight. Smoked it, man. Like Lyrical Assassin with it. It was dope. They was comparing it to Black Thoughts, Funk Master flex, freestyle. Really? 11 minutes. It was dope. And I feel like he was. Maybe he wrote some of it, but a lot of it, he was just off his head.
- [137:50]
Troy Millings
Salute my song. It was dope, man.
- [137:54]
Ian Dunlap
Yo, Mark Zuckerberg, hold your head pressure on my boy.
- [138:03]
Rashad Bilal
We can't leave yet. We have to give a huge shout out to Eyl alum Aisha Bo. She went out of space today. We're just gonna. What?
- [138:14]
Troy Millings
Congratulations.
- [138:15]
Rashad Bilal
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [138:17]
Ian Dunlap
Okay. Yeah.
- [138:18]
Rashad Bilal
Went out. Lord, they went out of space, Left the atmosphere, Came back safely.
- [138:23]
Troy Millings
Fact, though, Shout out. She came to my birthday party. You never know the type of people that we know, man.
- [138:27]
Rashad Bilal
That's crazy. She. She. She went live right after it. Like a half hour after she landed. She was on live talking about the experience. Shout out to her. Everybody made it safe. I know they had. Oh, so Oprah. No, they had on the deck. She was in tears. She was so nervous because Gail was on. On the. On the. As well. Katy Perry was up there.
- [138:45]
Troy Millings
Send her into Outer space. I know he wish he could.
- [138:48]
Rashad Bilal
Jeff. Jeff's wife, he. Lauren was on the.
- [138:51]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah, yeah.
- [138:52]
Rashad Bilal
You really sent it out of space. He like, there it goes.
- [139:00]
Ian Dunlap
Different Joe product. I can stand by like Pepsi.
- [139:04]
Rashad Bilal
Yo, y'all be good to each other, man.
- [139:06]
Troy Millings
Deserve to be rich book.
- [139:07]
Rashad Bilal
That's a fact. Com.
- [139:08]
Troy Millings
Get your tickets to Detroit, April 22 and May 3. New Haven, Connecticut, CT. What's the deal? Yeah, all right.
- [139:17]
Ian Dunlap
They didn't argue before she went out.
- [139:19]
Rashad Bilal
Of space, yo, the look on his face was like, I love her. I love her a lot. Hope she make it back, though. Yeah, it was dope, though. I watched a little bit of it. It was pretty interesting. That's. They had like a sonic boom. I was like, yeah, what was that? Everybody. But, no, that's supposed to happen. I'm like, okay, okay, okay. It was crazy.
- [139:40]
Ian Dunlap
All right, y'all put your baby mamas on the next one. SpaceX.
- [139:46]
Rashad Bilal
Why I gotta take it there, man?
- [139:49]
Ian Dunlap
They still gotta be funny. Yo, the baby.
- [139:53]
Rashad Bilal
No, that's the next one. That's the next flight. Baby mom boy.
- [139:56]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah.
- [139:58]
Rashad Bilal
Who's volunteering? Y'all be good. We out.
- [140:06]
Troy Millings
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Rashad Bilal
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