← Market Mondays
Market Mondays
MM #270: Africa Wants You: Trader Tips, Hidden AI Plays, Trump Tax Insights & BlackRock’s Investing Blueprint
02:05:35
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- [00:01]
Rashad Bilal
This episode is brought to you by PNC Bank. A lot of people think podcasts about work are boring. And sure, they definitely can be. But understanding a professional's routine shows us how they achieve their success little by little, day after day. It's like banking with PNC Bank. It might seem boring to save, plan and make calculated decisions with your bank, but keeping your money boring is what helps you live a more happily fulfilled life. PNC bank Brilliantly boring since 1865 Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a service mark of the PNC Financial Service Group, Inc. PNC Bank national association member FDIC Finding great candidates to hire can be like.
- [00:47]
Troy Millings
Well, trying to find a needle in a haystack.
- [00:49]
Rashad Bilal
Sure, you can post your job to some job board, but then all you can do is hope the right person comes along. Which is why you should try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com Zip ZipRecruiter doesn't depend on candidates finding you, it finds them for you. Its powerful technology identifies people with the right experience and actively invites them to apply to your job.
- [01:11]
Jay Jacobs
You get qualified candidates fast.
- [01:14]
Troy Millings
So while other companies might deliver a.
- [01:16]
Rashad Bilal
Lot of hay, ZipRecruiter finds you what you're looking for. The needle in the Haystack. See why 4 out of 5 employers who post a job on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day.
- [01:28]
Ian Dunlap
ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire.
- [01:30]
Rashad Bilal
And right now you can try ZipRecruiter for free. That's right, free at ZipRecruiter.com Zip that. ZipRecruiter.com Zip ZipRecruiter.com Zip Bonjour. Bonjour. Bonjour. Welcome. Bonjour.
- [01:52]
Ian Dunlap
International episode.
- [01:54]
Rashad Bilal
Well, you know, you know how we do.
- [01:56]
Troy Millings
Top of the top. We are in the motherland still. We had a great time in Benin.
- [02:03]
Rashad Bilal
Yes.
- [02:03]
Troy Millings
Shout out to the the team out there. Appreciate everybody. And we are currently in Ivory coast, better known as Cotevar.
- [02:12]
Rashad Bilal
Yes, see that, you heard it. You heard him working on it. You know what I'm saying?
- [02:20]
Troy Millings
It's everything we out here, you know, before invest fest. So yeah, yeah, we out here. We could talk about it later on if you guys are interested. But big week for Eyl. Blackout.
- [02:32]
Rashad Bilal
Yep.
- [02:33]
Troy Millings
Of course you never miss market Mondays. Never miss blackout no matter what. So tune in the blackout. That's going to be a good one. We 10 o' clock Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday and then Thursday at 9 o' clock Eastern Standard Time we got a crypto edition.
- [02:49]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, it's a big one.
- [02:51]
Troy Millings
Yes, sir. That's. That's going drop. Nine o', clock, right? Nine o' clock live. Make sure you check it out. Austin.
- [02:58]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah.
- [02:59]
Troy Millings
Austin Hayes, man, from our crypto division at UL University.
- [03:02]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah. One of the brightest minds in the world of crypto that I've ever encountered. Just somebody who was a student of the game, watched every episode of Market Mondays, transcribed every episode of Market Mondays and really found himself deep inside of research, inside the cryptocurrency space. And so he is a wizard, man. He pays attention to detail and his research is just, just, I mean it's immaculate. He's different now. He's. I do research and then what he does is different. So y' all in for a treat. He's really good at this.
- [03:31]
Troy Millings
Yeah, for sure. So we got a lot to talk about. I mean Invest Fest right now. If you don't got your tickets, you played yourself. But still, it's still three weeks less. Of course. We got Magic Johnson, Jack Dorsey, Charlemagne. God, we got, oh man, AI, we got Ian Dunlap, we got 19 keys gonna be in the building. We're going to be talking about crypto. We got stocks, we got real estate. MG the Mortgage Guy, BlackRock, Fidelity State, Farm Block.
- [04:00]
Rashad Bilal
Invest with Invesco.
- [04:01]
Troy Millings
Invest with Invesco. Q. Q. Q.
- [04:03]
Rashad Bilal
Yes.
- [04:04]
Troy Millings
Great place to network. Great place to entrepreneurs to have vendors, man. We got Food Truck Village. We're going to start on all day Friday. Be there Thursday. Get you get your passes all day Friday. We got activations, we got book signings, man. VIP night. Carlos Miller will be doing a stand up Comedy Show, 85 South Comedy show on Saturday, satellite event.
- [04:30]
Ian Dunlap
How to scale your business.
- [04:33]
Rashad Bilal
And we got, we got some friends, we got some friends that'll be in attendance for Invest Fest. So make sure that y' all there on time every day.
- [04:42]
Troy Millings
Oh, for the, for the NIL panel, we have flawed. J will be on the NIL panel. Somebody that's actually going through it right now made millions of dollars while still in college. So she gonna speak from a first hand experience. And we got a bunch of other people. D. Smith, he used to be the head of the players union. You know, y' all gonna have to try harder with the narratives we got. We got celebrities.
- [05:06]
Ian Dunlap
You'll be like, look, no man, I.
- [05:10]
Rashad Bilal
Got a, a wise lesson from a wise woman this weekend.
- [05:15]
Troy Millings
Shout out to Lauren, just ignore it.
- [05:17]
Rashad Bilal
She said, look, it's like, it's like a sensei, right? If they walk up to your inexperience they know every pain point, so they're going to keep pushing it until you build a defense to where it no longer matters. Either you have a guard for it or it doesn't bother you. And that's how you got to treat life.
- [05:32]
Troy Millings
Shout out to Lauryn Hill, man. Legendary situation. So, yeah, get the ticket to invest fest. Invest.com. ian, any announcements?
- [05:41]
Ian Dunlap
Stock club call will be this Wednesday. Check telegram for the time if I made you money, please put yes in chat when I was important. Troy, to your point, I didn't get to pick up on everything he said. One thing Benito did say when he was coming up, 99 of people counted him out, and he just kept focused on. On executing and catering to his audience. And that's why he is where he is today.
- [06:05]
Rashad Bilal
The mission is bigger than us. Yep. Any further? There's another Leo. The most important Leo of my life.
- [06:12]
Ian Dunlap
My mom.
- [06:13]
Rashad Bilal
Her birthday is tomorrow. Happy birthday. The most selfless, the most beautiful. I mean, just an amazing person and an amazing mother. She's watching right now. Happy birthday, Mom. Don't worry, I will be back with a birthday celebration. Shout out to my mom, man.
- [06:30]
Troy Millings
Happy birthday. Happy birthday.
- [06:32]
Rashad Bilal
Another Leo.
- [06:34]
Troy Millings
All right, here goes this announcement. Did you make an announcement?
- [06:40]
Ian Dunlap
How y' all feeling about investors? Y' all excited? Y' all nervous combination?
- [06:46]
Rashad Bilal
I don't know if nervous is the word anymore. I'm more anticipating the people coming to see it for. I like the first timers. I love the first timers. I love walking into them, seeing them because they're experiencing something that they've never felt before. I love our veterans who come back and say, I saw you last year. I'm like, yo, let's take another picture. Every year. We got a tradition now. Let's just take a picture. I'm excited for the people. I know We've done everything we could to make sure that this is the best year ever. And I just can't wait to deliver.
- [07:12]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah, Rashad, for the psychos, too. Right before. It's like newspaper material, bulletin board material. Okay. It's all bad bunnies. You gotta change the whole show. Gotcha.
- [07:29]
Troy Millings
That's a fact.
- [07:31]
Rashad Bilal
For those people.
- [07:32]
Troy Millings
Queue up. Lauren Hill. We had that, you know, we had to never know.
- [07:37]
Ian Dunlap
You never know. I said two weeks ago, yeah, yeah. Or the new if I rule the world.
- [07:48]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah. Pinch yourself. Like, what? Where am I? Like, where am I? How did this happen? As you're in the moment. But yeah, we'll talk about that, I'm sure, in detail. You know how this works, man. Do your Own research. Our content is intended to be used, it must be used for informational purposes only. It's very important that you 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 continue to research, share the research, give credit when you find a research church show. Love, Spread love. Build community. Let's build our brokerage accounts. Let's build wealth.
- [08:29]
Ian Dunlap
Love. Let's build off.
- [08:31]
Troy Millings
Yeah, so let's talk about it. So let's, let's talk. Let's actually start out with some, some international investing conversations since we are in Africa and we got to thank the good folks of Benin. But this is interesting from a business standpoint. So we actually met with the president of Benin and very gracious with his time and he. Well, we knew this before, but we met with a few different people from the, their administration. They have a program that allows people of African descent to have citizenship. And, and the reason why they're doing that is because they want to attract more foreign investment, specifically black American investment into the country. So, you know, market Monday, this is a show that we talk about stocks and stuff like that a lot. But a lot of times people are interested in, in other forms. So I think it's good to just to kind of keep them abreast of what's going on internationally. And that like I said, that was a high level conversation that we actually had with a president. The first is actually the first president that we've ever met with.
- [09:37]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [09:40]
Troy Millings
So first head of state that we had a conversation with and he was very big on that as far as like, you know, spreading the message saying that, you know, this is something. And then he also said like, okay, like what are the best practices when dealing in the, on the continent? Which we kind of went over before as far as like do your due diligence, have a lawyer, make sure, you know, working with the right people and stuff like that.
- [10:00]
Ian Dunlap
But really quick if they're the right people. Because there's so many people that are going to Africa and acting like they're, they are an advocate for the continent. How do you filter out what's real versus what's fake?
- [10:15]
Troy Millings
Well, for me personally, I always like to see proof of concept. A lot of people say that they do something. That's why even people that we work with, as far as Alvin and Kwame like, we got to see their actual physical office, a physical newspaper that they print. Right. A physical recording studio, a physical. Like, these are things that, you know, to me, I feel like if you are somebody that's portraying yourself as doing something major, you should at least be able to show somebody something tangible as opposed to just ideas. A lot of people would just spin ideas and words, for sure. You know what I'm saying? So it's like that. To me, that's that. And then, of course, you know, as far as I'm old school, really, like, I asked for referrals. That was. That's how I was like, you know, I mean, like, I. Granted, we are in a. We're in a little bit more privileged situation because we have a lot of relationships, so, you know, we have the ability to like. But no matter who you are, you can ask different people and network and, you know, if 10, 10 people have the same story about somebody, then that. That usually. Good or bad, by the way. Good or bad, by the way, right? So that. That, to me is something that I think is. And then also doing your own personal research, that's the good thing. That is a lot of like, okay, for instance, if you want to buy real estate, right, In Nigeria, right. There's a lot of research that you can do yourself on, even chat gbt.
- [11:49]
Ian Dunlap
Asking it in perplexity for sure.
- [11:51]
Troy Millings
What are the real estate laws? What are the property taxes? What's the biggest issues that are faced by real estate investors? Like, you know, I mean, so just like stocks, you know, I mean, you. You have to. You have to educate yourself. But, man, as far as investing for investors, not only is the. I think everybody at this point knows that there's opportunity in Africa, right? That. That's pretty obvious. But they definitely like countries like Benin and other countries, they're making it a main emphasis to target black Americans.
- [12:30]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, I mean, most of you probably saw Sierra Hair or Sierra and Benin. A week ago, you saw Ludacris and Gobone. Even Spike Lee has been named the ambassador to Benin. So you're starting to see the traction. I think everything Shoddy said is 100 spot on. You ask, you ask, you ask, but you also become very observant. One of the things I like to do when we travel to foreign countries is let's just look at signs, right? And if I look at developments, you start to see the same name over and over and over again. Now it's like, all right, well, those people are doing something, right? And if you ask around, you figure out who's doing who's government funded projects and who has private funding for their projects. Then you just start asking to start compiling. You start seeing names. Then you can kind of get a sense of like, who's who. Right. Like that proof of confidence is important. We were just in Benin and as I'm look riding around, I'm seeing a billboard for a stadium. Okay, I saw the name. Okay, Somebody is building an office building. All right, it's the same name. You starting to put the pieces together, see who the movers and shakers inside, inside of the private sector. And then obviously you ask around and luckily for us, we have resources that we can talk to who's in government and what are the projects they're working on. But you got to be observant. A lot of times people get in their Uber, they get in their car service and they're right into their phones and you're missing everything. That's your driver.
- [13:46]
Ian Dunlap
Talk to the driver and get their perspective on what's going on.
- [13:50]
Rashad Bilal
The drivers know because they're going through those routes and they live in the areas. Obviously they know the local governance of things that are happening. You got to be super. Watch everything, right? Watch all the signs, watch all the billboards, because it could be telling you something.
- [14:05]
Troy Millings
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay. So yeah, just wanted to get that little. And then I will say one thing too, that where we're at right now is a little different because there is a language barrier.
- [14:17]
Rashad Bilal
Yes.
- [14:18]
Troy Millings
So you got to be aware of that too. Like, you know, these are the first countries that we went to where they actually speak French as a, as primary language. So in, in Cotev and in Benin and you know, a lot of other countries, they are French. They were former French colonies, so they speak French. So that's something to be aware of. Right? There is a language, there is a language barrier, usually, you know. So knowing that, as opposed to a country like Ghana, which is an English country, in Nigeria is an English country and Kenya is an English country and in Rwanda used to be a French speaking country and they switched over to English. So that's important too. Knowing, knowing where you're going as far as stuff like that is nuanced, but it makes a big difference.
- [15:01]
Ian Dunlap
What you can research in perplexity chat GPT04 if you ask for a thorough breakdown edit because I was looking last night, yo Search for the.
- [15:12]
Rashad Bilal
I said wait, yeah, we, we, we had the conversation about AI in the sense where that language barrier is soon going to be eradicated. Where we're Going to have the agent where we translate on our chest and it's a chip or it's a device and it speaks in our language that, and it converts it or maybe, I'm.
- [15:33]
Ian Dunlap
Not gonna lie, maybe.
- [15:34]
Rashad Bilal
Well, somebody's gonna do it. It's gonna happen in, in the next three to five years. But you can see how easy AI could step into a, a place that was, hey, what do we do here if I don't have a translator, right? I can't. I mean people use Google Translate, but it's still through the phone. When you can actually use your voice and speaking your language and have it converted and it comes back to you, that's going to be a game changer, man. I'm looking forward to that.
- [15:57]
Ian Dunlap
You guys have given a stat before about how young the continent is. Are there any companies that are not publicly traded but you think will be in maybe four or five years or 10 years that you think would be a powerhouse that you've seen so far?
- [16:11]
Troy Millings
Well, one of the biggest countries in, in, in East Africa is called in mpesa and they actually do the mobile phone payment transfer. So they were real big. I think they, they actually came out even before Cash app. So it's a necessity. As far technology in Africa a lot of times is, is a necessity. Meaning if you live in a, in a rural village, right, you might not have access to banks like the banking desert, like we talk about banking deserts in America. Like there's, there might be a 50 mile radius where there's not a physical bank. So that's why it became very important to kind of have that mobile payment processing component. And they actually been going crazy. They, they're all over the continent now. And then there's other companies similar to that I think that are actually the biggest on the continent. But we actually went to their offices, their corporate headquarters when we were in Kenya and they was telling us the story of, of how they got started and stuff like that. But I had heard about them on 60 Minutes years ago. Okay, so that's just one company that you know, like I said, we actually met and, and, but there's, it's a tech, there's opportunities for technology all over the place because man, the world is moving so quick and like you said, the population is so young that obviously the young people is going to be easier. It's easier for them to learn the technology. Right. As opposed to trying to teach a generation that's 80 years old. So they're already open to the technology and they grew up on the Technology as far as their phones and stuff like that. So their way of thinking, even crypto, you know, a lot of countries trying to ban crypto at first. Like I think Nigeria tried to ban it and they started. You can't stop it, you can't. There's nothing you can do to stop it. So crypto is real big on the, on the continent also. You know, you had a lot of people talking about crypto, bitcoin, stuff like that.
- [18:06]
Rashad Bilal
So yeah, I think it's publicly traded. But if you go anywhere in Africa, you're going to see mtn, like in terms of communication, in terms of Internet service, it's everywhere. Right. I'm even looking up right now, it says that they own 58% of the Internet service here in and IV host. They are everywhere. So if we're talking about connectivity. Right. Think of it as your, your Verizon or I don't even your T. Mobile.
- [18:34]
Ian Dunlap
For more than one.
- [18:36]
Rashad Bilal
Every country that we've been in, especially Rwanda, we're now here. We've seen mtn Ghana for sure. You see that yellow MTN everywhere. So that's a company with the expansion of technology throughout. I mean it's a large continent like you said, younger people are using it. They have mobile devices. MTN is one of those ones that's like they're prime position.
- [18:57]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah. And from a legacy standpoint, United bank of Africa, look at them as like a chase ask. The stock has been doing great the last four or five years. So there are some international investments you can look at in Africa. I know we haven't talked about a lot of them or they may not be well known, but there are a few companies there. I think over the next five or six years, as the continent continues to scale in terms of capital that's coming in that I think will be ripe for great growth over the next five or six years.
- [19:27]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah. I saw something interesting. I was, we were on a plane coming here today and I'm sitting next to a gentleman and he has his book out and I looked and it was Rich dad, poor dad. And I was like, wow. Like this is the, those, the beginning seeds of financial education. Like we all don't know that point. When we discovered Rich dad, poor dad. And so think about where we were then. To see a gentleman sitting next to me on the plane. Don't know from anywhere to see that that's the book that he has, he's reading. I was like, this is like the, the, the seeds are being planted here and hopefully, you know, you deserve to be rich to be his next book. But it's happening, it's happening and the population is ready for it.
- [20:07]
Troy Millings
Yes, sir. So, okay, ladies and gentlemen, that's your, that's your dose of international exposure if you're interested for the day. Now let's talk about U. S Equities. Last week when Trump one, okay, the job report came out and it wasn't to his liking and stock market reacted negatively to that, had a pretty sharp pullback for the day.
- [20:32]
Rashad Bilal
That's why he didn't fire you about to lose your job.
- [20:36]
Troy Millings
He fired. What was the official title? Head of labor.
- [20:41]
Rashad Bilal
Labor statistics.
- [20:45]
Troy Millings
It rallied back again today. So. But it's crazy because I saw one person on YouTube, no matter what you do, it's always going to be a critic. Like One person on YouTube was like, don't listen to these guys. Stock market is falling apart as we speak. This was on Friday. And I'm like, at this point, anybody that watches market Mondays knows that when you see days like that, that's the opportunity for you to actually buy. Right. You should actually be grateful for a pullback because that, that actually is a, is a buying opportunity. Right. But I mean man, stock markets, all time highs, you have to have a pullback. It only makes sense. So for investors, I know a lot of investors was looking at that as opportunity to maybe start, you know, deploying some capital.
- [21:29]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah.
- [21:29]
Troy Millings
But is this a long term problem? Like he did fire her. So you know, there's the statistics. Definitely.
- [21:38]
Rashad Bilal
Well he, the, the, the original report came out and the numbers are low. And I think what did the, you know, cause the firing was that they went back and revised June and they went back and revised May and those numbers were completely off, which made it look a little bit more harsh, a little bit more grim from a jobs report standpoint. And so probably the reason that, that she lost her job, not saying that it was the right course of action, but probably the reason I think if you look at the date, Friday's date was August 1st. We've been telling you for the past four weeks the worst month in terms of depreciation inside the stock market is in August. It has performed the worst. Now you can look at that from both sides, right? If it's the worst of the month and there's depreciation, that means that stocks and equities and indexes and ETFs are going to be at prices that are going to be advantageous for you to buy. Right. So for the person who's been in the market and it's long term. Yeah. There's going to be some pullback in August. August 1st happens, he tells that he's going to put the tariffs, tariffs are going to effect. Is this a long term scenario? I don't think so. I don't think so. I think it's part of the natural course. Like you said, when we see markets run to an all time high, each index, the Nasdaq, the S P, the Dow, they all hit all time highs. They need to have a breather. We need to have a breather. Right. The fact that we're having all these technology reportings, right. Microsoft went crazy, Metal went crazy. AMD is up this week. We'll see what they'll do. And we still know we got Nvidia, we got a bunch Lily this week Their, their ex expectations have been met and some of them have been outreached.
- [23:18]
Ian Dunlap
Right.
- [23:18]
Rashad Bilal
When you look at, look at Meta, this was the quarter that we thought based on the tariffs that were implemented 2/4 ago, we were going to see some pullbacks, we're going to see some earnings coming down, we're going to see some guidance being pulled back and we haven't seen any of it.
- [23:30]
Ian Dunlap
Right.
- [23:30]
Rashad Bilal
Trump, again with the tariffs. Things hurt us a little bit but again we rebounded. So I think this is part of the natural course.
- [23:37]
Ian Dunlap
Two things can be true at one time. So even though I don't like the criticism, Rashad, which you guys should focus on the entry points to be give, I sent it earlier but 490 companies in the S P have had no earnings growth since 2022. The Russell is falling apart. My new favorite thing over the last maybe eight months has been to study cities. Las Vegas is in free fall in terms of growth. Wages are down there. So I think the magnificent really 10 have been dragging the stock market up overall. So even though the stock market is doing incredibly well, the economy is suffering. And then of course traveling across the globe and you guys can see it as well, spending is down. Even when I went to Mexico, less people visiting, there was people packed at the Bad Bunny concert. But just in Puerto Rico, the spending is. Celeste, it's a very interesting time where and I was having this conversation with Duvall like he was saying that there is no recession because in Atlanta in certain places that, you know, apartments and condos are being filled. But I'm like that's for a sliver of the population. So does the market normally turn back in August? Yes, but I don't like all this financial engineering that they're doing either like to fire her because the jobs number was low. Opposed to fixing the core issue of why the jobs are not being there and part of it is because of AI and what's. Even if you look at the spending or the capex into data centers that has put the use for office buildings almost out of business. There's like a tower In Denver that's 34 floors that sold for $3 million. That's alarming. So I think we we're benefiting greatly from the companies that are doing incredibly well the the big team. But the Russell is almost uninvestable at this point and majority of the S P is not looking well. So I think two things can be true at one time.
- [25:49]
Rashad Bilal
But stop y' all stop criticizing it brings up the question and I think what you're saying is true, right? That the Core 10 have carried us how sustainable is it and can we move on this way? Right. If you think about those core 10 companies, right based on where the future is headed in terms of technology and pretty much all of them are technology, this looks like that that could be true for a while, right? Like Nvidia can carry us for a while. Microsoft. So do I mean do how do we. How we view that, right? Because in the typical scenario if six companies were leading the market seven years ago you'd be like all right, we're in trouble now. We're looking at 10 companies that are running the market and we're like all right, well we still got room to run.
- [26:36]
Ian Dunlap
The truth is we have no other choice. Like I've never seen so many people I've said it before seeing so many people choose to be expats out of the country across all races. I look at a company like Salesforce so you would. I love Mark Benioff shout out to everyone at Salesforce but you would think they would have benefited greater from this AI revolution and they haven't. Banks are sending on a lot of losses. Like we're just at an interesting time in history where the company like we're having the have and have nots in the stock market. Either you are incredibly exceptional on a path to be in a trillion dollar company or you're there already or you are lackluster. There's no in between. But even if you look at a company like bank of America, they're doing solid but no one wants to invest in bank of America. When you have crypto or Nvidia or super micro like all the value stocks are dying a slow death and no one's talking about It. So as a stock market, we don't have a choice right now. And my fear is if some of these international companies start to get a headwind, like, I know Novo had their run and they're falling apart now.
- [27:58]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [27:59]
Ian Dunlap
But if they get a. If they truly have a deep seek moment that sticks, we are going to be in trouble. We're going to be in trouble. But none of this matters if you hold for 10 years.
- [28:14]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah. If there's no AI component in your business, it feels like it almost become. You're doing it. You're dormant.
- [28:22]
Ian Dunlap
You're done.
- [28:24]
Troy Millings
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, we do have a. You have a few guests today. We have a special guest that's going to join us for a segment. Let's bring her up if we can.
- [28:39]
Rashad Bilal
Oh, wow.
- [28:40]
Troy Millings
What's the deal?
- [28:41]
Ian Dunlap
Hey. Oh, hello.
- [28:43]
Ms. Business
Hey, guys.
- [28:45]
Troy Millings
How's it going?
- [28:47]
Ms. Business
Good. Just preparing for Invest Festival.
- [28:50]
Jay Jacobs
Same.
- [28:56]
Troy Millings
Around the corner. Okay. So, Ms. Business, actually, our first guest that we ever had on Earn your Leisure and somebody that's been at every Invest Fest so far and a variety of other things that we've done. We've done live streams with a Eyo University market Mondays, the whole gambit.
- [29:18]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah. I think everything we've done. You've been involved. Yeah, Yeah, I think so.
- [29:24]
Troy Millings
That's a fact.
- [29:24]
Rashad Bilal
One way or the other, you've been involved.
- [29:26]
Ms. Business
I've been involved. Yes.
- [29:29]
Troy Millings
So. So this year, you. You're taking a major. A major role. And the Vendor Marketplace, which is 400 businesses, everything from small mom and pop T shirt brands to Fortune 5 companies like Fidelity, you will. You are sponsoring the vendor Marketplace. The vendor marketplace will be named after your company.
- [29:54]
Ms. Business
Yes, they will. I have to take it. I have to step it up a notch. Okay.
- [30:01]
Rashad Bilal
What fires in the chat for that last year.
- [30:05]
Troy Millings
Yeah. You had to deserve that.
- [30:07]
Ms. Business
I think I. If it was gonna. If anybody was going to sponsor the vendor marketplace, it had to be me.
- [30:13]
Ian Dunlap
That's smart. I love it.
- [30:15]
Troy Millings
You become synonymous with the vendor marketplace. You've had the best booth for years running, and now. Yeah. You know, you. You. You took over a lot of real estate. That's a major real estate acquisition.
- [30:26]
Rashad Bilal
She said, I'm not a player. I'm not a player to see. I'm running the game.
- [30:30]
Ms. Business
Yeah. I had to go bigger. I had to keep thinking bigger.
- [30:35]
Troy Millings
So I wanna go ahead.
- [30:39]
Ms. Business
No, I was gonna say, it doesn't matter where I go outside of Invest Fest. People say, oh, my God, you're the person with the. With that booth at Invest Fest. So definitely known as, I like to say, the queen of the marketplace.
- [30:54]
Rashad Bilal
I like that. I. I like that. I like that.
- [30:57]
Troy Millings
So I know we got an announcement, but before we, I just wanted to ask you a question. Like, as far for people that's out there from a branding standpoint, can you talk about branding? Because, okay, you've obviously branded yourself from a variety of different angles. But let's just talk about Invest Fest. You, you, you went out on the whim and, and put together extremely elaborate booth and that, that paid dividends for you and you did that and now you went even bigger and took over the whole entire vendor marketplace. So what is your thought process when you are looking at like, I need to brand my, my business, my company.
- [31:34]
Ms. Business
My name, Brandon is so important. So when I'm thinking, so every single year, my goal in the vendor marketplace is how can I stand out, right? And so that's what everyone should be thinking about. How can I stand out? How am I going to get people to come over to my booth? So when I was creating my booth, I never thought, oh, I need to have the best booth. My thought process was, how can I attract people, how can I engage them? And also how can I get them to remember me? So therefore in the future, whether I get that contact at Invest Fest or they remember me in the future in some way, I still take up real estate in their head. Because you can't deny that you've seen this big 20 by 20 booth and we're playing games and we're interacting. And so when it comes to Brandon, I think that is so important. But I think that there's two sides of branding, right? So there's the branding where you, you let people know, hey, this is my brand, this is what I stand for, this is my ethics, this is how I operate, right? And then obviously you're engaging with them and then you get them as a client. Then there's another aspect of branding where you actually have to touch people. And so for me, I, this year, the reason why I decided not to do a booth, because I do feel like I'm the queen of the marketplace. And every single year I have the best booth and said, you know what? How about I take a step back and, and not be competition, but be help. How can I serve the vendors? So every single year people are like, what's your return on investment? How are you doing it? How are you doing these big boosts? Does it make sense for you? You know, what are you doing? How do you think of these concepts? Like, why do you go so big or how did you start out? Because I started out with a 10 by 10. Right.
- [33:25]
Rashad Bilal
First 10.
- [33:27]
Ms. Business
So for me, this year is about giving back and letting vendors like just we are going to be literally boots on the ground, right? It is going to be a, a team of us, an army of us really just there dedicated to helping the vendors. So I, we've hosted webinars. I think I have an upcoming webinar coming up.
- [33:49]
Rashad Bilal
It was fire. I heard it was fire.
- [33:51]
Ms. Business
It was. And my entire presentation is talking to them about not only first, how do you prepare for the vendor marketplace, then how do you actually, how do you, when you're there, how do you grasp the attention, how do you actually create that transaction? And most times people are thinking about how can I make the money? Just today. And it's not about just today, it's about how are you collecting those contacts. So we went over that. We. So basically I'm teaching them how to prepare, how to be present when you're there. And then after, what do you need to do to make sure that you are able to not only leave an impression, but also turn that into dollars? So that has been great. My entire team, we are going to be there. So whether the vendors need help getting content, they need something to eat, they need a break, they need people to come over to their booth. It's going to be amazing. And we're doing like a, a competition, right? You always got to make. You always, always got. So we are making, we are asking the attendees to vote. So we will have different categories, the team will be there. So just figuring out ways to one, bring that energy to the marketplace, but then also showing business owners like, how to make Invest Fest the Most. Like, it's 20,000 people there.
- [35:11]
Rashad Bilal
Where's this webinar?
- [35:15]
Ms. Business
It's actually on the 7th. It's on the 7th at 8:00pm, so.
- [35:19]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, yeah. What? She's referring to the inside of eylu. She's been gracious enough to give her time and her knowledge to, to our community to help them prepare. And.
- [35:29]
Troy Millings
But that's not eyo though. That's for every vendor.
- [35:34]
Ian Dunlap
That's a fact.
- [35:34]
Rashad Bilal
That's a fact. I, I want to start with I'm proud of you. Let's just start there. Like, I'm proud of you. Like, we talk all the time, but I want to tell everybody, let everybody know that we're proud of you. I'm proud of you. We're busy during Invest Fest weekend for obvious reasons, but I think like next to Us, like, you're right on that next level of super busy. Last year you were on both stages. You were in the vendor marketplace, you were networking. How are you preparing this year yourself, right? Like, obviously you have a business and your network. How are you preparing? What guidance, what, you know, toolage would you give to people who are going there for the first time, who are like, wait, I'm doing all these things?
- [36:10]
Ian Dunlap
How do you manage?
- [36:11]
Rashad Bilal
What's the management plan for that?
- [36:14]
Ms. Business
Listen, it's a lot. It is a lot. Yes. Maybe after you guys, I may be, I may be the next busiest person after you all. So this year I'm giving back to the attendees, right? I'm doing the entrepreneurs boardroom. I have a two hour seminar on Friday teaching business owners how to generate profits in their business, how to save on taxes, how to actually use their business to retire rich and build wealth. Because most of us, we're not really thinking about like, okay, we're thinking about, okay, I need this business to help me make money, but not really thinking about how to use it for retirement and to build wealth. The same thing that, you know, wealthy people do when they start businesses. So I do have that workshop on Thursday, but I mean, sorry, on Friday at 1:35, I believe. But for me, when I'm thinking about Invest Fest, I look at you have an opportunity to touch 20,000 people sleep on Monday, right? So for me, I'm consistently. And for those of you who have boobs, my thing always. And I tell everybody, people will forget what you said to them. They will never forget how you made them feel.
- [37:28]
Ian Dunlap
Absolutely.
- [37:29]
Ms. Business
They will never forget how you made them feel. So for me, whether somebody want to take a photo with me, they need to ask me a question. Question. I will literally stop anything that I'm doing to make sure that I'm touching the people. Because seeing someone on, you know, on Instagram or YouTube, it's very different, right? When you actually get to see someone, someone may have wanted to ask you a question or wanted to speak with you. So I do take the time to just touch them. I take time to spend at my booth. I may not be there the entire time, right? My team may be there, but I do take time to speak spend at my booth. This year I'll be all around the marketplace, but I still do designate that time when I'm not on the stage to walk around and speak to people. And sometimes people won't speak to you. Sometimes people are staring at you and I'll just be like, hi. Right? Because people are like staring. And so I just make it my business throughout Invest Fest to touch as many people. And so to any vendor or any attendee or any person, like you have an option, opportunity and you're in a space with amazing people that have decided to invest in themselves as well. Everybody there is a winner. Everybody has taken that step to invest in themselves. So take that opportunity to network, to show up and to just make people feel good. You can't go wrong with that.
- [38:49]
Ian Dunlap
Two parter for you, what are like the three biggest mistakes you see vendors make when they're in a marketplace and how long does it take you? Like, I was incredibly impressed with what you had last year in tournament, but.
- [39:02]
Troy Millings
You ran me out of not one.
- [39:03]
Ian Dunlap
I'm like, wait, like freestyle battles, Jurassic park theme, you got a game still going. I'm like, what? How long does it take to be that? To come up with a plan, execute it, talk about it with the team, and then also get the ROI back from the investment into it? Because those activations are not cheap.
- [39:22]
Ms. Business
Cheap. They are not cheap. So in terms, to be very honest, believe it or not, that activation last year, because I'm so crazy in my thought process, we literally kind of pulled that off within like two weeks, right? It's not ideal. Yeah, but I'm crazy, right? I'm like, I kept trying to think about what am I going to do? And I'm like, oh, the presidential election is there. And then it, I was like, you know what I'm going to do? Ms. Business for the people. Because again, I'm always about just touching people. And so this year I'm keeping the same exact thing, Ms. Business for the people. But I'm just flipping it and it's about the vendors this year in the marketplace. So if I had to give an ideal, I would say about three weeks, right? So like everyone who is a vendor, you need to figure out now and you need to be thinking about how am I? I don't walk into any Invest fest without having targets. I know how many people I once signed up on my email list. I know my funnel, like what do I want them to do? So whether that if you have a free webinar, you need to have made sure that that's set up. If it is, let's say for instance, you're, you may be doing a release, right? For people that have products. Maybe you want to create some sort of hype around a release that is coming afterwards. Because the reality is when you're there, you want to make sure your number one Goal for me is always to make sure that I can keep in contact with these. These people after investing.
- [40:44]
Ian Dunlap
Yep.
- [40:45]
Ms. Business
But I think that a lot of people, to the mistake question that you asked, I think a lot of people are more so concerned about how much T shirts did I sell in this moment, how much product did I sell in this moment, versus how can I really capitalize and get their contact, contact and really add value. So when I walk into Invest Fest, I know how many signups I need. I know how many people I want to engage with. And with that being said, I also think about, okay, what does that mean from an online and offline perspective? Because not everybody one is going to see your booth, but they may see you online. So now they know where to find you. And not only that, there may be people that's not at Invest Fest that still want to be a part of what you're doing. So you have to make sure that you're showcasing that. That. And so when people are thinking about being in the room, sometimes they're not thinking about how to really capitalize holistically off of being in the room. And so that's why I see that. And that's why even when I did the vendor, the first vendor webinar, I asked, I'm like, who's coming here alone? And so many people said, hey, I'm gonna have to come there alone. And I said, listen, that's there. You are going to come there. But that's why myself and my entire team, we're going to be there. So whether you need content to show people or whether you're like, hey, I need help checking out. I may have multiple people at my booth, but I can't really, you know, help them check out. Everyone can't afford to have, like, team people. I mean, have a bunch of people on their team there. That's why we are going to be there, boots on the ground, helping you guys. Just make sure you connect the dots, man.
- [42:26]
Troy Millings
No, that's amazing. You know what? It speaks to the power of relationships. And that's. That's really what everything that we. That we've done has been built on. Whether it's. Ian, that's a relationship that was built just organically yourself. That's a relationship that was just built organically as far as, you know, coming and being the first guest on the show and then a variety of other things, and then watching your business grow, you watching our business grow, and then you pouring into us. Us pouring into you. And I think that it speaks a lot about Your character, that. Okay, it's one thing to sponsor something, but you're actually, like you said, you're doing webinars to educate people. You got boots on the ground to help vendors. You're. You're teaching a class on Friday. You'll be speaking. You'll be speaking on Saturday, but you're teaching a class on Friday. That's why I say Friday, man. It is.
- [43:14]
Ian Dunlap
It is a lot of work.
- [43:16]
Troy Millings
Y' all need to be there on Friday. I can't say that enough, man. There's a lot of education that's happening on Friday. Do not sleep on Friday. Friday is. Is a day that you guys need to be there. But once again, I mean, you know, you never to be outdone. And one thing I like about you, too, is that you're not afraid to spend money.
- [43:40]
Ian Dunlap
That's a fact.
- [43:42]
Troy Millings
That's one thing. I appreciate. That's one thing. Because you need. Because you need to sometimes spend money.
- [43:48]
Ms. Business
You have to spend money to make money. But more importantly, you have to have that. That strategy to understand how you're going to make money. So from. From that, from that, you know, whatever you're investing in. So, yeah, I'm gonna spend some money.
- [44:05]
Troy Millings
So speaking of that, speaking of branding, speaking of spending money, speaking of never being outdone, and speaking of, most importantly, impact. You know, I know you watch Market Mondays just like everybody else watches Market Mondays. You know, you. You. You called and said, look, man, I can't be outdone. So we did something a few weeks ago, and I think you want to kind of tee it up. I'll tee it up for you. You can make the announcement.
- [44:27]
Rashad Bilal
Oh, man.
- [44:28]
Ms. Business
Absolutely. So, listen, as Rashad said, I cannot be outdone. So just because a bigger business. And again, this is inspiration, right, for everyone. Just because of bigger business, you know, did it right. That doesn't mean that smaller businesses also can't take their resources and actually contribute. So I want to sponsor 100 tickets, general admission tickets. 50 off, right? So listen, they did it. I'm doing it, too. I can.
- [44:56]
Ian Dunlap
That's impressive.
- [44:57]
Ms. Business
Done, right? As well as 10 vendor booths. 50 off. You pay 50, I pay 50. Okay? So I want to make sure that. And when you guys see me, say hi to me, right? I pay 50.
- [45:09]
Troy Millings
For real.
- [45:12]
Rashad Bilal
Thank you.
- [45:13]
Troy Millings
That's a fact. But, you know, you said something. You said something that was extremely insightful. You pay. I. You gotta help. Because, like, even somebody, like, I, like, I gave somebody a vendor booth, and I realized, like, no, I don't really want to give them a vendable pay because you got to have some skin in the game.
- [45:28]
Ms. Business
Yes.
- [45:29]
Ian Dunlap
Well, it's not appreciated.
- [45:30]
Troy Millings
Yeah, right. When you give something to somebody and they have no skin in the game at all, then they have. It's really. No, it's not valuable. It doesn't hold any value. So it's like, yeah, you know, for you to do 50 off, I think that that's extremely generous. And yeah, I mean that you put people in a position where it's like, okay, if I'm serious, I really found level up. I'm trying to meet somebody and I might have had some economic challenges or hurdles. This is an opportunity that I'm given. Right. So we want to greatly appreciate it. The code is CPA also. That's easy. Three letters. Cpa.
- [46:10]
Ms. Business
Yes, that is cpa. What I also want to do for anyone that purchased a ticket, because if you're in the building, you want to invest, you're a business owner and most people, right, they are going to. And for those of you who do not know me, I am a cpa. Right. I'm an accountant. And so my main goal all the time is to help you all save on taxes. And why? Because the more money you keep in your pocket, the more money you have to invest in your business, the more money you have to invest in the market, the. The faster you will get to your dream life. Right. And so what I'm also, for the first hundred people, right, that use that code CPA to get that 50 off, I want to give you a training that will help you and educate you on how to use your business to save on taxes. And I'm also going over the tax changes that have that. The big beautiful bill.
- [47:07]
Jay Jacobs
All of the changes, all of the.
- [47:10]
Ms. Business
Changes in the big beautiful bill. So I go over that in the training because obviously you know, what was going to work last year is not going to work this year based on those changes. So you need to know that. And so I want to throw that in there as well.
- [47:26]
Rashad Bilal
Over deliver, over deliver.
- [47:28]
Troy Millings
So let's just, let's just take a moment. Go to invest.com. if you enter code CPA, the first hundred people for general admission tickets, we can't do vip. That's that, that's done. But we could do General admission tickets. 50 off. You enter code CPA and the first 10 vendor booths. If you enter code CPA, you get 50 off. And you also get the video that Ms. Business has spoke about as far as how she's detailing how to Save money business strategies. Going over the Big Beautiful Bill. I mean, especially if you live in the south Atlanta, Georgia area, I think you should definitely take advantage of it. Three weeks left. This is one of the most important, if not the most important, invest fest ever. We talking about artificial intelligence and everything else. And before, before you leave, I just, I gotta ask a question. A tax question from the Big Beautiful Bill was one thing that, that was, you can kind of highlight to be like, okay, this is something that you guys should be aware of.
- [48:24]
Ms. Business
Oh, one thing. It's bonus depreciation. We have one, we have bonus depreciation back at 100. I have been dying for it because bonus appreciation was enacted in 2018. However, if you purchase something September 27, 2017, you were able to, you were able to use bonus depreciation, meaning that you can purchase an asset and instead of writing it off or depreciating it over its asset life, you could now take 100%. Right. So remember we actually did that episode on Market Mondays which have millions of views. Right. Talking about the, the 6,000 pound rule. Now what happened was that started to phase out in 2022. So. It started to phase out in 2022. So every year after that it started to decrease by 20%. So this year we were actually only able to take 40%. Right. Of the asset value. So let's say you purchased a truck for a hundred thousand dollars, you would have only been able to write off 40,000 in that year. Now we're back to 100%. And so that is a major game changer for the Big Beautiful Bill. So I think, I think that is like my, my favorite. I think the tips and the no tax on tips and the no tax on overtime, to me I think they could have done better because you still have to pay state taxes and payroll taxes on that money. So. Yes. You know, and then it's also, it's also cap. So it's not really like my favorite. Will you, you know, will you benefit? Yes, but not, not much.
- [50:19]
Rashad Bilal
So that's, that's, that's a great update. The last time I think we spoke over the summer about how the depreciation was going to change. And so I'm, I'm with you. I'm happy because yeah, the end of the year is coming up and so I, we got to have our annual call.
- [50:33]
Ms. Business
Yes, definitely have to have that tax planning call so that depreciation. And then for those of you in real estate, that's major. Right? Because if you're doing real estate and you're doing call stack. I really feel like we need to have a whole separate class about this. But you know, doing real estate, they also allows you to take more of a depreciation expense. So we definitely have to pay attention to the tax code is necessary. Listen, make sure that you guys are in my class on Friday at Invest Fest at 1:35. We have two hours. So I get to really teach. This isn't a panel. This is me really being able to teach you guys and really hear from you guys and touch you guys. And I'm excited for Invest Fest this year. A very different approach, but I'm excited. I think it's going to be way more impactful. You'll see us, trust me, you guys will see us.
- [51:33]
Rashad Bilal
We appreciate you. We appreciate you wholeheartedly.
- [51:36]
Troy Millings
This business, always a pleasure. Thank you so much. Ian, do you have a tax question?
- [51:40]
Ian Dunlap
Not yet. Well, not publicly, but privately.
- [51:51]
Rashad Bilal
Well, how can we get more depreciating assets?
- [51:53]
Troy Millings
My business is always a of pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much. And yes, definitely be sure to the website and the app. The runner show will be available this week, I think Wednesday. So make sure you plan out your, your trip accordingly. But I would not if I was you. I would. If Ms. Business is teaching for two hours, that's something that you need to be there for for sure about.
- [52:16]
Ian Dunlap
Brandon, we're at the Wards Regal as always. Can you talk about the importance of how that plays into your brand and all the extra giving that you're doing? Because I feel like not only will you outspend, you'll out give. Can you talk about how they all tie in together to keep a customer or client in your ecosystem longer?
- [52:39]
Ms. Business
Absolutely. So I feel like people, people notice what you're doing, they notice what, how you're showing up. And I, I always one that's my biggest thing. I want to be in a room, I want to show up, I want to give back, I want to touch people. So when I'm showing up in any way, whether it's with my peers or with my clients, I just, I just want to be authentic. I want to help. So like for instance, the award show, I sponsored the award show melanin money. I didn't even know I was going to win. I didn't have a speech, I didn't have anything. Thank you. But I sponsored that because you, you have to have brand awareness. And what I always do is I look at bigger companies. Bigger companies are spending money to be in places and I don't try to recreate the will, I don't reinvent it. If bigger companies are saying, listen, I need visibility and they are that big, why do I think that I don't need to go the extra mile to make sure that my company name and my name is in every room and I'm there and I'm networking and I'm collaborating and connecting. It all matters because the reality is relationships are going to make you way more money. Right? It's going to make you way more money. And so I think when people just see me, and that's what people always tell me, like I feel you, like I feel how genuine you, you are. And you can't really, you can't really cheat that. Right? People are watching, they see you. And so I just stay true to my brand. I, I feel like I'm only blessed because I'm a blessing. And so I just stay true to that.
- [54:19]
Troy Millings
And it's a, it's a blessing to be a blessing. And then also somebody else is going to be an investor. As Carter, speaking of melon and money, he posted something actually in regards to the big beautiful bill with the 529 point plans. And you know, 529 plans is something that, when I started as a financial advisor, I was selling a lot of 529 plans. It was very restrictive at that time. But that, that's been loosened up throughout the years and Trump loosens it up even more with. So now you can do $20,000 a year?
- [54:45]
Ms. Business
Apparently, yes.
- [54:47]
Ian Dunlap
Apparently.
- [54:47]
Troy Millings
Is that correct?
- [54:49]
Ms. Business
I believe it's 40, 000 per couple.
- [54:52]
Troy Millings
For couple.
- [54:53]
Ms. Business
Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
- [54:55]
Troy Millings
So in the individual, you can do, you can do 20,000 a year, you can use it for curriculum and tutoring, you can use it for trade certificates and license, you can use the money for special education therapy, you can use the money for online platforms, you can use the money for workforce credentials. So this was, you know, for a long time it was very rigid where you couldn't use 529 for, for homeschool, you couldn't use 529 for.
- [55:22]
Ian Dunlap
A lot.
- [55:22]
Troy Millings
Of things outside of college. I think Biden changed it where you can use it for like K through 12 education, but before that you couldn't, you couldn't even use it for K12 education, secondary education. So it's, it's becoming. But I also think that that speaks a lot about the times that we're in and how people are redefining education. Right. Like college is not the only pathway, it's not the own. So it's like, you know, that's something that's in the, in the big beautiful building I think parents should be aware of as well. It's like you can put more money into 529s and you can use that, especially the special education therapy. I think that that's big. You know, there's a lot of people with autism. There's a lot of kids that have IEPs. That's, that's, that's something that's, that's real, real big. So you know, as far as advocating for your child and making sure they have the right resources so they can be successful in life, you know, doing it in a tax advantaged manner. Right. That's the whole point of the 529 is that you don't have to pay taxes on the growth if you use it for those purposes. That's, that's big for parents to, to fully understand.
- [56:29]
Ms. Business
Yeah, I think that as you said, I think that they are aware that this money is, is there. Right. And so what else can we allow parents to use this money for? And I think, think, and I always say like everyone has to start thinking in taxes. I don't care whether you want to or not. Everyone's highest bill is taxes, right? Whether it's income, payroll, property, sales tax, freaking gift tax, death tax, there's so many different taxes. So we can't ignore it. Right. So we have to start thinking in taxes, what can I do so therefore I can get a tax advantage and still get the benefit? That's how we always need to be thinking. So if, you know, and I get this question from parents or all the time, I need to pay tuition, what can I do now? You can invest in that 529 plan because as you mentioned, it's not as rigid as it was before and they are opening it up why? And we always have to think why, right? Why are they doing this? They're doing this because they want more of our money invested in the market. And if you say hey, I'm going to take some of my money and then invest it in this 529 plan, then guess what? They now have you investing. They now have your money in there. And what does that do? That stimulates the economy. So I always tell everyone when it comes to the tax code, it really is just them saying, hey, how can we get people to do what we want them to do? And that's okay. We look at it and we use it to our advantage. Right? Because they're going to use it to their Advantage.
- [57:58]
Troy Millings
There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. And the runner show is actually live right now on the app and on the website. So the runner show is live right now, but this business. Thank you once again. You can go to investfest.com, enter code CPA at checkout and Ms. Business will be covering the first hundred people, 50 off general admission tickets, and the first 10 vendors general mission tickets. And this, there's actually 21 vendor booths left. 10 by 10. So those are. Those will sell out before Invest Festival.
- [58:26]
Rashad Bilal
Again, tell them the code cpa. Yep.
- [58:28]
Troy Millings
But we will see you in a couple of weeks. Thank you so much. And I'm definitely going to be at the workshop.
- [58:34]
Rashad Bilal
For sure. I will be there. We gotta take our annual, we gotta take our annual picture. We have to do that.
- [58:42]
Ms. Business
Yes. I will see you guys in a few weeks. I am leading up to Invest Fest. I'm gonna be working, so I will see you guys there. Thank you for having me. I look forward to just making the vendor vendor market place like an experience that has never been done before. So that's incredible.
- [59:01]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah.
- [59:01]
Troy Millings
Thank you so much.
- [59:02]
Rashad Bilal
The queen of the marketplace.
- [59:04]
Troy Millings
Yes.
- [59:06]
Rashad Bilal
Have a good one.
- [59:08]
Ms. Business
Thank you.
- [59:09]
Troy Millings
The Brooks alliance vendor marketplace.
- [59:11]
Ian Dunlap
Wow, that's fire.
- [59:13]
Rashad Bilal
Think about that, man. Seven years ago, we were in a dining room sitting down with Ms. Business going over Kanye West. And 77 years later, here we are, she's the queen of the marketplace, sponsoring tickets. This is an incredible journey to watch, man. I'm super proud of it.
- [59:30]
Troy Millings
Well, life's golden rule is you keep it real with a person, that keeps it real with you.
- [59:34]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah.
- [59:35]
Troy Millings
So we have, we had this business as the first guest.
- [59:37]
Rashad Bilal
Absolutely.
- [59:38]
Troy Millings
Earn your leisure. And she helped our platform and we helped her business. And she didn't forget that. And we didn't forget that. And now seven years later, she's coming back as a major sponsor.
- [59:48]
Rashad Bilal
That's crazy.
- [59:48]
Troy Millings
And doing a variety of different things. Right. So that's important. Like relationships matter. You have the relationships matter. And, and as Ian says, the, the biggest return on investment is a long term hold.
- [60:06]
Ian Dunlap
You don't know.
- [60:07]
Troy Millings
You don't even know what the potential.
- [60:09]
Ian Dunlap
Of that relationship is going to be.
- [60:13]
Troy Millings
If you, if you ruin it. Like, let's say, okay, like all jokes.
- [60:17]
Ian Dunlap
Aside, like, if we talk about some of the things Trump has done well in that tech bro circle, they've held on to those relationships for 15 and 20 years and end up benefiting from him being in office. Now, most of the tech initiatives, they didn't even plan to do anything in government, but relationships Took them a long way. And it's to burn a bridge. A is hard to replace a bridge, but a great bridge that works.
- [60:46]
Troy Millings
Mistake facts. So that's, that's.
- [60:48]
Rashad Bilal
Don't reinvent the wheel, man.
- [60:49]
Troy Millings
And I will say this too, as far as 529, here's a, here's a hack for you guys if you're interested. Okay? Now you can use the money for high school education, stuff like that. Here's something to think about in my theory. What if you're trying to especially go to college route. What do colleges look at? They look at your high school transcript, they don't look at your middle school transcript, they don't look at your preschool transcript. They don't look. They look at you. They look at what you did in high school and they look at what high school you went to. So if you're having a kid or you're planning on having a kid, maybe what you might want to do is start a 529 plan from the time that, like the moment that they get born. Start a 529 plan, put as much money into it as you possibly can, send them to public school from preschool all the way up to eighth grade. And then by that time, you should have some money, a nest egg. Now, you can use that to pay for the private school because that's going to be something that's going to be a tremendous financial burden for you if you're trying to send your kids to private school. So it's not like you just, you know, out the blue, I just got to scramble up and scrape together, you know, thousands of dollars to pay for private school. You've already prepared for that because you, you saved money. You didn't put them in private school in kindergarten. I don't think it makes sense to go to private school in kindergarten. You can, but from my purse, I'm speaking from a personal standpoint because I actually went to private school and public school so I could speak from. I could speak on this. Save your money. Go to the best high school that you possibly can, and then they can go to anywhere in the world. They can go to Ivy League school after that, or they could just, you know, be entrepreneur, whatever. But their education that they're learning at in those formidable years from 14 to 18 is vitally important to shape them on their future trajectory for life.
- [62:41]
Ian Dunlap
So private a tutor. There's more options for tutoring once they get home. Please look into investing into some teachers and having them teach your kid after hours. And that in combination like you said with Khaleesi Stone AI, it'll speed them up really quickly.
- [62:58]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah.
- [62:59]
Troy Millings
Facts.
- [62:59]
Rashad Bilal
It's fun. It's playing programming. I was going to say that the AI component helps as well, but you, you help as well. Right. Like wherever you're doing in your career field, what your knowledge base is, you should be pouring into your kid. At least, at least they have information in what you're doing. And two things can happen. They can say, I really love what you're doing, mom or dad or aunt, whoever it is, and I want to see if I can pursue a career in that, in that path. Or you're like, yo, I'm glad you gave me the information. Mean, it's not something I'm interested in. Either way, it's going to be beneficial.
- [63:26]
Ian Dunlap
You don't got to be two hours. It can be ten minutes a day.
- [63:29]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah.
- [63:30]
Ian Dunlap
Very short.
- [63:31]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah. Give them a little bit, little, little doses over time.
- [63:34]
Troy Millings
And then if done correctly, if they really excel in high school, especially if they play sports or whatever, then you might not even have to pay for college.
- [63:41]
Ian Dunlap
It's a great point.
- [63:43]
Troy Millings
So you got to be strategic about these things. Success doesn't happen by accident.
- [63:49]
Ian Dunlap
That's a great point. Even when what you're teaching them, they may take a combination of everything that they learn and apply to something else that may be exactly six or seven years. And they'll be prepared.
- [64:01]
Troy Millings
Facts.
- [64:02]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah, facts.
- [64:05]
Troy Millings
Okay. Okay. What do we think of Core Weave?
- [64:11]
Rashad Bilal
Good old Core Weave.
- [64:13]
Troy Millings
And, and. Well, let's do Corey first.
- [64:16]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, I'm big on core.
- [64:17]
Jay Jacobs
We.
- [64:17]
Rashad Bilal
I've been talking about that for the past six months. It feels like ever since we went to Nvidia's headquarters and saw the role that Corey was going to play. For those who are not familiar with what Corey does, they specialize in cloud platform based on GPU accelerated. So. Right. They create the cloud service for gpus and they rent that to companies. And so why is that important? GPUs are very expensive. In fact, Nvidia's GPU is now $45,000 thousand dollars for Blackwell. Not many people can buy that in bulk. When we're talking about these machines, we're talking about hundreds of GPUs inside of them. And so you're talking millions of dollars. And so what is a way to cut down on that cost? Well, you can rent it, and that's what they do. Nvidia actually has 20 of Corey's company. They provide them with the, with the chips. And so every year that the new chip comes out, the Old one becomes now part of their product rollout and it's, it's been working for them. In fact, you saw them fall back. Obviously they're still in that six month phase since ipoing. They pulled back a little bit and then Microsoft reported and all of a sudden you saw a core we'd run up. Well, if you look at Corby's biggest client, it's Microsoft, right? They have Microsoft, they have OpenAI. Meta is a client, IBM is a client. And so this model is working. Do I like it long term? That I'm not sure about just yet. Because you'll have competition. It becomes that number two theory again, Right. Like there are certain corporations and firms that can afford GPUs at that level. Right. They can afford the cloud service from aws, they can afford Azure. And then you have these mid tier companies that might not be in that price point. Exactly. And now Core and so they have to have an AI component like we said. Are they going to be dormant? Core Weave now steps in this lane as an opportunity for them to still compete not at the highest level. Right. Like they're not going to have the newest ship, but they have chips that they can perform and create on their platform. So I, I like the idea of it long term. I'm interested in seeing if who steps inside that space as well and now also becomes a cloud service that rents to companies because that's not something that they own.
- [66:27]
Ian Dunlap
Right.
- [66:27]
Rashad Bilal
The fact that they have Nvidia is a huge, huge benefit. But what happens when somebody does that with amd? Right. Like you can see that, that, that becoming competitive. But as long as AMD Nvidia is in their corner, it's 20 ownership in it. I mean they, they should be good here in the near future.
- [66:42]
Ian Dunlap
What's a great investment? Yeah, I like Core Weave. I don't know if it's top 12 of things that I would invest in. Good company though. I agree with everything you said. I think they're the, the pullback is reflective of what we talked about, but definitely a good company. I'll put them probably like in a, B or high C tier list of stocks.
- [67:02]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, you know I put them in, they're right. With my HubSpot, they're right. They're in that same category that like, yeah, Salesforce is for the elite and then you got mid tier with HubSpot in terms of CRM and now you have Azure and you have AWS and Google Cloud for certain extent. Oracle's in that space now and then Core Weave that next year.
- [67:25]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah.
- [67:27]
Troy Millings
What about figma?
- [67:29]
Ian Dunlap
I like Figma as a company but my rule is always you have to wait six months to leverage everything, let the dust settle. Hell of a run up IPO that I think 84 went up to 150 but it's back down at 93 and some change. To everyone who invested early, congrats to you but I have to wait six months before I'm willing to look to buy in long term. There's a lot of talk about it being an Adobe killer. I'm not sure about that. But I do think as a result Adobe is going to have to figure out their business model and pricing structure going forward because they have too much competition in terms of them canva just AI in general. I am worried about what Adobe is going to do to restrategize and how to restructure the business with so many, so many competitors coming into the landscape.
- [68:25]
Troy Millings
Okay, and last but not least, what about Terra Wolf?
- [68:33]
Ian Dunlap
I haven't looked into Terror Wolf enough yet to have a great assessment on it. Give me till two weeks from now, then I could do like a thorough breakdown. I know it's caught a lot of interest but for me I've only been focusing on the companies that I know for the next 10 years are going to be dominant or are in that B tier that have probability of creeping in. I think terrible, a little bit too new. But give me about two more weeks and then I'll give you a full assessment on it. But a lot of these problems go away by focusing on quality. The high of them was good but I don't see them being in a. The top tier. I know it's at a cheap price right now, but give me two weeks and I'll give you a full breakdown on it.
- [69:16]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, we should do a B tier of stocks. You know like they got the Division 1 teams, you got Division 2. Yeah. People like well what, what these, these are good company is they're just not a tier yet. Some of them will never get to that level and they're not designed to be at that level.
- [69:33]
Ian Dunlap
Level.
- [69:35]
Rashad Bilal
But that doesn't mean that they're not. They can't be good investments. A Salesforce beats here Salesforce is a tier bottom. Bottom of the A tier. Yeah. Okay, where's AMD for you?
- [69:52]
Ian Dunlap
Well Apple.
- [69:57]
Ms. Business
Sometimes you gotta look when.
- [69:58]
Ian Dunlap
God give you the sign. No AMD. All jokes aside, AMD is not Nvidia but AMD is still 8 here for sure.
- [70:05]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, I think you should that the copy and paste on that it's like, yo, I don't know what they want you to say. You said Nvidia, okay? You said things about AMD, okay, you're not gonna be 100 every time. Get over it.
- [70:17]
Ian Dunlap
But even with that, I'm like, this the part with clip culture in AMD since 2017. Personally, AMD is not a video. I don't give a what y' all say.
- [70:30]
Rashad Bilal
No, hey, that's a plus tier.
- [70:32]
Ian Dunlap
It's nowhere near close. If you go, look, I was talking about AMD on market Mondays in 2021. I know you're all, y' all want to ride the wave. And I'm certain stuff I'm not falling for no more. Whatever you say, you write, you got it.
- [70:46]
Rashad Bilal
You got it. You, you right. What's crazy is during that segment, and I know it was on Blackout, when Trump was talking about, you know, trying to get rid of Nvidia, we used to say that they were 85 of the GPU market. He said that they were 100 of the GPU market. Like, wait, when did this happen? I guess he didn't know. Yeah. But yeah, they're creeping into the 90s now in terms of market share, which is. That's good for Nvidia investors. I'll say that.
- [71:22]
Troy Millings
Let's talk about, well, a few different things. I want to talk about futures, but before that, basswag. I don't know if you got a chance to watch that episode, but that was a really dope episode that we did with base swag. One of the things that he said was that he, when GameStop happened, he had $80,000 to his name and he did an option. Now, he had never invested in stocks, but before, but he heard about what was going on. He put $80,000 into options call and he made 250 off of it. And then he said he told Meek about something similar and Meek made 2 million off of it, but he just still didn't. But he didn't understand what he was doing. So he said eventually he started to lose money. He got a little nervous, took the money out. I don't think he invested in stocks ever since. So what's the advice for somebody that's similar to that? Whereas they might have got in, whether it was crypto stocks and they caught a lick, but they don't really know what they're doing. They took a loss and now they kind of like in that weird thing because they believe it, because they've seen it happen in real time, but they're not educated Enough to really feel confident.
- [72:24]
Ian Dunlap
In like doing it again to tech, to index. Listen to me and watch Market Mondays. And that's why I think it's great for the outreach because we can criticize the artists and say, why don't you take this deal? But I often would ask like, why don't you reach out to the artist and try and help them? So I got to commend you guys for doing that. And invest in the top four for sure. Whether it's crypto, whether it's housing or commercial markets, whether it's stocks, they're going to tell you what the top five are. If you just don't deviate from those, everything will be A. Okay. I think sometimes people want to have foresight to know what is going to turn into the top four top five. And I get that. But if you just invest in the top four in the space, you'll be A. Okay. So vo, vti, qq, Microsoft, Nvidia, even Apple is having this lull. It's still a better investment than sitting in cash.
- [73:25]
Troy Millings
I think that's what's important. It's fault because there's somebody right now that's watching Market Mondays for the first time. So language is important. There's a difference between investing and trading.
- [73:35]
Ian Dunlap
Yep.
- [73:36]
Troy Millings
And I think a lot of times people have the two into confused, intertwined and they feel like they might have hit a liquid in it with a trade. But you don't feel confident trading. Right. So it's like, I don't really feel confident doing this. I'm not gonna do this anymore. That's different from investing. My personal philosophy, you should invest before you trade.
- [74:01]
Ian Dunlap
Absolutely.
- [74:02]
Troy Millings
You should have a full understanding of investing before you start trading. And when you do start trading, you should have a limited amount of your portfolio in trading versus investing.
- [74:18]
Ian Dunlap
But that's something like I said, max for sure. Money should be long term.
- [74:24]
Troy Millings
And a lot of people, as you've watched Market Mondays for a long time, this is an elementary course for you. But like I said, some people, you'd be surprised. They don't know the difference. So, okay, for people that don't know.
- [74:35]
Ian Dunlap
They know the difference, their actions aren't reflective of the portfolio allocation. You may end up trading way more than you know you should. Even if you have the knowledge.
- [74:44]
Rashad Bilal
No, I would even argue even if they know the difference, their portfolio doesn't know the difference. Right. If you, look, if you ask somebody what they're invested in, they'll. They'll tell you, I'm doing futures or I got These date option contracts. And it's like, when do you, when did you learn how to do this? You know, I just watched a video just figuring this thing out. I think I'm gonna let you finish as well. But I think kind of where you ended the first part of the question was the education, right? Like the fact that he had the courage to say, I don't know, the fact to say that it did work.
- [75:18]
Ms. Business
Work.
- [75:18]
Rashad Bilal
The fact after the episode he was like, I want. Can y' all teach me? I think that's. That speaks a lot, especially for somebody in his lane. So shout out to Basswag and go get the album if you haven't got it. He wants to learn and his crew wants to learn, right? So we can make that sustainable because like, yeah, the 250 was great, but what if we would have reinvested half of that from 2021? Where would that have been now? And so when they start looking from a long term perspective and they start to see it like, like, wait, this isn't just something that was something I threw out there and I got lucky because that's what it feels like. I got lucky. And maybe I won't get lucky again. What if you could actually learn strategy and technique and have a full grasp of what you're doing to make sure that that's sustainable. So the 200, 250 turns into a million, that turns into 2 million, right? Then you start looking at life a lot different. It's not like, hey, I gotta sign this bad deal. I'm not relying on this deal. I know I can make money in this base doing this. Right. Once I learned this skill. So shout out to him and for taking the courage because I don't know how many young adults, especially in his position are saying most wouldn't I. I know what I did. I wasn't really educated on it. I made some money. Can you help me make this sustainable?
- [76:28]
Troy Millings
Yeah. But also not even taking the flip into consideration and reinvesting that if you invest, see, the tortoise always wins the race. If you invested 80,000 with no options in Nvidia, you would have made more money than 250000 now, today. So what? This is a microcosm, like I said. I'm just using this as an example. But there's a lot of people, I've seen crypto, especially in crypto, crypto meme stocks where they're thinking short term and they're doing things that they don't fully understand and they, it may actually work but what they don't understand is like they're actually stunting their growth because they're not, they're not planting that seed that a tree, they make that. They're getting plants, they're planting plants, right. And, and they're looking at it like, damn, I got a plant. That's, that's helpful. But you could have had a tree. So that's just something that just take into consideration invest in these companies that we telling you to invest in every single week and hold it for a long period of time. And then if you want to trade, you can do that, right? Options class. We're going to talk about futures, but don't be trying to be like the number one trader in the world before you actually open a brokerage account and put any money in. And it's like, this is my pathway to just become a millionaire is just, you know, do it, do it this way because it can work. But ultimately you probably gonna end up losing.
- [78:06]
Rashad Bilal
How many times will it work? Right. What's the percentage of it working? Right. We always talk about the percentage of people trading options. 95 of the people gonna lose money. But it's interesting and I think the education piece is so important that if you look at what's happened over the past three weeks, even on market Mondays, there's been the meme stocks that are running and we haven't even talked about it, right. Like people are not, I mean people are making money. And obviously I've gotten some DMs about open door and I've watching it. But there's not the craze that There was in 2021. It was bed Bath and Beyond, it was games, it was all these stocks and you're like, wait, you know people are going to lose in the end. You know, people are gonna lose it. It's happened again. What there could mean a sign for the market or maybe not. But the craze is not the same because the education level has been raised to such a level that we understand how this works. We've seen this before.
- [79:00]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah.
- [79:01]
Troy Millings
Well, speaking of, speaking of trading, if somebody wants to start investing, trading in futures, right. What's some beginning advice for people that's afraid?
- [79:09]
Ian Dunlap
We just talked about it. Number one, invest 85 of your money long term. First, the greatest trader of all time, Paul Tudor Jones. The Michael Jordan futures. When he started his fund, it was a long only fund. Pause. The greatest trick I think that's ever been done in investing in trading is having you think the biggest gains are from trading. But when you look at Microsoft's all time return, over a hundred thousand percent. Nvidia since 99 is 22,000%. It's up 5,000% in the last seven years. All the big gains that you see that are life changing wealth developing gains are from investing. I know Soros had the one trade that broke the bank of England in 1983. All of the millionaires that we, we were casually running into people at Nvidia who were millionaires and had been there three years. Just a game of wealth they don't tell you the real secrets are holding for. Okay, when France colonized places, did they do a one year option or are they 100 year holes? Don't listen to me, listen to the queen. She got the Bahamas. Did she do a one year expiration on the water exports out of Bahamas? And it's the part where I get oh shot, I feel you boy. So much I want to say, but I won't, right? Because I'm not going for the BS people convince you that trade. And I started off trading futures in 2015 before anybody black was doing it. But everyone I met who was incredibly wealthy, I've noticed they all had minimum of eight year holes. And whatever the asset was, whether it was trucking, whether it's real estate, whether it was in pharma, whether it's in waterways, whether it was in music, the short term flips are fun because they're easy to talk about. But all the real wealth is held from the long term also too. I got an announcement to make. At some, some point in the future, Sniper 2 will be up. Oh, so we can do that. But first, the thing that helped me with understanding long term trends or, or intraday trends was to know what the real direction of the asset was. Like I know people who are getting killed short in gold and I'm like why are you shorting the gold off the five minute chart when the long term direction of everybody who is buying gold is going long? You got the direction wrong. Yeah, well Cassie told me that, well I had a rainbow butterfly set up that I'm like Dr. Bank of Japan is buying gold long term, so it'll help you know the direction. And I don't think if I don't know any good traders that are not good term long investors first doesn't happen.
- [82:14]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah.
- [82:15]
Ian Dunlap
You guys know anybody who traded any asset media, currencies, oil, you guys in Africa? Does anybody talk to you about a six month or one year maneuver?
- [82:29]
Rashad Bilal
No.
- [82:29]
Ian Dunlap
Even colonizers are like yo, I'll take All the. All the copper out of Africa for 50 years. The Beers didn't do a one year diamond trade.
- [82:40]
Rashad Bilal
See that we. We can go down a rabbit hole in that.
- [82:46]
Ian Dunlap
No Travel through Spain. Don't believe me Go look at historically what nothing is one to two years. As much money as I've made trade. All my long term holds have paid off. Way this relationship's paid off more Red Panda stock club years. Years. You don't think we all they could have sold early. Y' all could have sold Red Panda. No the real money's in the hold. Jensen's been working. I watched the clip the other day. Justin said he worked seven days a week. And the joy on his face when he lit up. I'm like. You can tell he's not lying. He's been working hard on Nvidia every day for decades to then have this problem jobs like moment. What do you do for fun? I find fun in the work. You wonder how he got to this valuation. It's by the culture. And we said it when we went there. Everyone one there is working. No one was playing foosball. There wasn't a basketball game or table tennis. Nothing. They were working. Find something that you love to do and pour your all into that. But my tip for anybody who wants to trade. Invest long term first then use the trading entries to be able to get better entries into the long term. And only maximum 15 of your capital.
- [84:10]
Jay Jacobs
Should go to trade.
- [84:13]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah.
- [84:13]
Rashad Bilal
What do I know the long term perspective isn't. That's it he 20 years ago. If you look at what Jensen's net worth was and what Bill Gates's network was it it wouldn't be fair in comparison. Present day he's passed him by 60 billion.
- [84:34]
Ian Dunlap
Yep.
- [84:37]
Rashad Bilal
Incredible hope for the long term.
- [84:41]
Ian Dunlap
Please do.
- [84:43]
Troy Millings
If you look at for the long.
- [84:44]
Ian Dunlap
Term, 10 years ago was probably 25. 2015 probably 290. Oh boy. Who lost that hard drive in the garage. He finally quit looking after 10 years. Even in the losses to tell you something. Lost billions of Bitcoin.
- [85:06]
Troy Millings
Yeah.
- [85:06]
Rashad Bilal
12 years then man. Yeah. Yeah. Headed to a billion and he's. He get.
- [85:14]
Troy Millings
He's giving up 150 million. Just gonna have to just chalk it up. Chalk it up.
- [85:19]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah. But they said by 2030 it'll be worth 8 billion.
- [85:23]
Troy Millings
I mean don't matter now. It's not. It's not worth nothing.
- [85:27]
Rashad Bilal
It's worth nothing. Yeah.
- [85:28]
Troy Millings
That's a better way to look at it.
- [85:28]
Rashad Bilal
Why do you keep showing the. The landfill that? Why is he thinking he's Just gonna stay there and find it.
- [85:33]
Troy Millings
Never know, man. You never know.
- [85:35]
Rashad Bilal
They got to put a ping device maybe on it, on the new joints, the ledgers, you know, like, you got that, the Apple tracker. You can track your. Your joint. They probably need to put that technology inside the ledgers because this is getting out of control.
- [85:48]
Troy Millings
We'll speak about it later, but we have a guest.
- [85:50]
Ian Dunlap
Okay.
- [85:53]
Troy Millings
Let'S bring our guest up if we can. How's it going?
- [85:57]
Jay Jacobs
You guys hear me?
- [85:59]
Ian Dunlap
Yes. How are you?
- [86:00]
Troy Millings
Yeah, you?
- [86:00]
Rashad Bilal
Perfect. How you doing?
- [86:02]
Jay Jacobs
I'm doing great. I'm doing great.
- [86:05]
Troy Millings
Okay, can you hear us? Good.
- [86:08]
Jay Jacobs
I can hear you. I can see you.
- [86:11]
Troy Millings
Okay, perfect. Okay, that's good. So. Yep. Jay Jacobs is the head of U S. The head of the U. S. Equity ETFs at BlackRock. So we are honored to have you. BlackRock is playing a major part. Invest Fest this year, Coming back workshops. We're going to talk about a few. But first and foremost, thank you for joining us. Appreciate it.
- [86:37]
Jay Jacobs
Yeah, pleasure.
- [86:41]
Troy Millings
Yeah. So let's. Let's talk about the ETF market. We talk about ETFs a lot on this show, on this platform since we started. So my, my first question is, with trends like AI and bitcoin in the shifting geopolitical landscape, how are the markets being restructured in 2025 and even looking forward to 2026?
- [87:06]
Jay Jacobs
Well, I think one of the important things for investors to look at in this year is just how much the market is being moved by themes. You go back to February, you had a huge sell off because of deep seq, which was really a bigger function of artificial intelligence. And the market's trying to understand how valuable is AI and what the value of AI means to the stock market. Now zoom ahead to April. You had Liberation Day. This was really about the theme of tariffs and geopolitical fragmentation. If you go back to basically the end of World War II through the global financial crisis, all you saw was more and more and more globalization around the world, people moving around the world, goods moving around the world, the Internet and finance connecting money and content around the world. And you're starting to see that shift a little bit more regionalization, more internal production of things through reshoring. So in April, you had this big kind of reinvigoration of geopolitics as a theme. We're increasingly seeing crypto as a theme as people look at changing regulations in the US and changing ways to build portfolios using crypto. So I think the big change for 2025 is a lot of people used to look at the world through sectors, through countries. Increasingly people have to look at the world through themes to explain what's going on in the markets and try to capture some of the best opportunities.
- [88:24]
Rashad Bilal
We grew up in an era where people invested in individual equities. That has changed in the the recent events over the past I say three to five years. What have you noticed in terms of ETF purchasing from individual investors?
- [88:39]
Jay Jacobs
Huge growth. So you know, you're absolutely right. If you went back, this isn't that long ago, if you went back like two or three decades and you wanted to get global exposure, you would pick a stock like, I don't know, like Coca Cola or something, just because it's a company that sells product all around the world. Right? But you have so much concentration, risk if you do that, you're buying one company in one segment. If soda sales go down, that's going to be bad for your portfolio, even if you're trying to get kind of global exposure. But what ETS did was they made it so easy with just one click through a brokerage account to literally get exposure to thousands of companies around the world in all kinds of countries in Europe and Asia and emerging markets. And so that growth has just continued with end investors who are looking to build frankly what would have been considered really sophisticated portfolios just a couple of decades ago, but now are just fairly simple multi ticker portfolios where you can get your US exposure through the S&P 500, your international exposure through a ticker like IX, US emerging markets exposure, Bitcoin, etc. You can really build a super diversified portfolio using ETFs because of the ease of access that they provide investors.
- [89:48]
Ian Dunlap
I think we all know AI is here to stay. Crypto is here to stay. Going back to your thematic point, what themes do you think we'll see maybe the next five years or until the 2000-30s that will have an incredible impact on the market that investors tonight should be looking out for.
- [90:03]
Jay Jacobs
So I think it's easy to get lost in the day to day if all this noise and news around what's going on. If you look, you know, longer term, we just continue to have tremendous conviction around artificial intelligence. So what we say right now is we're really in stage one, one of three stages of artificial intelligence. First stage being the build out. You have to build all of this infrastructure around AI to support it. These are data centers, these are, this is power supply, this is semiconductors, this is trillions of dollars being invested to build out this Artificial intelligence revolution takes years. This isn't just something that happens in the cloud mysteriously, it has physical places where artificial intelligence is happening. So that's where we are today. The next stage will be enterprise adoption. This is when companies and governments around the world are embedding AI into how people work at these companies, the types of products they're building at these companies. That takes time as well. It's not like email just took over the world in one day. It took a few years for people to realize that this is a technology that's useful and you start using it in your everyday life. So that's the second stage. And then the third stage will ultimately be what we call the transformation stage, where AI is based on basically ubiquitous. It's in everything we do. It's in driverless cars, it's. It's building entire companies maybe with one person, where, you know, it's. It's AI building the products, doing the legal work, doing the finance work, etc. All of that is going to take maybe a decade to play out. And so if we look five years, 10 years out, we still see a lot of opportunity in artificial intelligence as really one of the biggest tech revolutions we have seen since the invention of the Internet.
- [91:38]
Troy Millings
So, okay, you're the head of equity when it comes to etf, so this might not be in your wheelhouse because it's crypto, but you talk about I shares between my eyes. We got to talk about ibit, right? I believe it's the largest Bitcoin ETF and something that has been a star performer as Bitcoin is going up. So what is your thoughts on IBIT and the criticism that people might have of it as far as that it's not actually owning crypto and you know, the crypto purists look at it a different way. So how do you feel about ibit?
- [92:13]
Jay Jacobs
Well, let me just kind of dispel a myth. What IBIT does is it buys Bitcoin and it uses institutional grade storage to custody it for people. And if you just think about how simple of a concept that is, and yet it solves so many challenges. Challenges for investors. Let's walk through some of those challenges. So one, a lot of investors who want to get exposure to Bitcoin would have to create an account with the Digital Asset Exchange. Now, many people have done that and that's fine, but a lot of people maybe don't want so many financial accounts out there, right? Their bank information, their personal information, maybe they only want a couple of accounts so they haven't gone so far as to open an account with the digital asset exchange. And if that was the case, they really had very few ways to get access to access to Bitcoin. So now with ibit, if they have a just traditional brokerage account now, they can get exposure to Bitcoin through ibit. The second thing is even if you owned an account with a digital asset exchange and you're trying to buy Bitcoin, it can be very expensive to do so. Just the trading in and out can often be 50, 60 basis points each way. For individual investors, it's kind of like going to the airport and trying to get like foreign currency. It's pretty expensive. And how it's to trying charged is not very clear to, to investors. The third thing is if you open the account, you trade it and you bought Bitcoin and you just keep it in a, you know, in a hot wallet online, you still have this cyber security risk that someone could steal your account, get into your wallet, steal your Bitcoin and it's gone forever. So really one of the big innovations of IBID is that it's leveraging really institutional grade custody, which is not holding Bitcoin connected to the Internet that can be hacked, but taking it offline and storing it in cold storage. That's a huge benefit to investors who really want kind of the highest grade custody solutions for Bitcoin. You've seen these stories of people storing Bitcoin on a hard drive and accidentally throwing it out. And there's now millions of dollars on that hard drive. I personally, I've been interested in Bitcoin for a while. I bought a, a hardware wallet for Bitcoin and it was right around the time I was having my first child. So I had all these boxes showing up to my house and I literally just lost that, that hardware wallet for a couple months. It was okay. I didn't have like on it, but it just shows like even in your own house you can lose this stuff and it and you lose all the value. So IBIT is solving a lot of challenges for a lot of investors. I would say the final point is that a lot of investors just want to see Bitcoin in the context of their whole portfolio. They don't want to see it over here on some other account where it's going up and down each day. One of the benefits of Bitcoin is that it's super diversified compared to something like stocks or bonds. So being able to see the ETFs that own stocks, your bonds, your bitcoin, all together in one portfolio is really valuable to investors as well. So that is why IBIT has been so successful, raising over $80 billion in about a year and a half. Half. It's because of all those solutions it's providing investors.
- [95:06]
Rashad Bilal
The ETF market is, I mean, it's a competitive market. There's plenty of firms that offer them specifically iShares. What differentiates you guys from all the other ETF providers?
- [95:17]
Jay Jacobs
I think it's three things. Quality, breadth, and value. So quality. We have more ETFs around the world than anyone over 1300 globally. We have invested so much in building the greatest and best ETFs we possibly can through what we build within BlackRock, through the partners we choose to work with, through how our ETFs trade on the market. We are obsessive over quality, and that shows in the products that we've built. I think going back to ibit, you know, a lot of people just trust, there's a lot of trust that we're going to manage their Bitcoin in the way that they want. The second is in, is in, in breadth. So in the United States alone, we have over 450 ETFs. So if you're looking for dividend stocks, if you're looking for AI companies, if you're looking for Bitcoin, if you're looking for bonds, we have everything. We have virtually everything through those 450 ETFs, really giving people a ton of choice to build the portfolio that they want to build for themselves. And then third, you know, I talked about value. We really like to leverage the scale that we have at Black BlackRock, because we have so many funds, because we manage, you know, trillions of dollars in assets, we can offer ETFs at very low fee points. So, you know, you're getting good value when you buy an iShares ETF as well. So we have the quality, we have a ton of choice, and we offer that at a great price for investors.
- [96:38]
Ian Dunlap
What innovations in the ETF landscape do you guys think are going to come or would you like to see introduced into the ETF market?
- [96:46]
Jay Jacobs
We've just seen so much innovation over the last few years. You know, we talked about crypto being brought out into the ETF space. What we haven't talked about so much is active ETFs. A lot of the first few ETFs that came out, you know, over, you know, ETFs are now almost 30 years old or so. I guess they are 30 years old. Now a lot of them track indexes like the S P500. There's no one deciding what stock they like or don't like. They're just going to buy all 500 stocks in the square. The S P 500 which is diversified, it's tax efficient, it's easy to trade, etc, but you know, it's, it's just a kind of, you know, very kind of simple basket of stocks. What's increasingly become popular in the ETF space is to have actively managed strategies, meaning there's a portfolio manager that is deciding what stocks they like and don't like. For example, we talked about AI a little bit. You know we have an ETF BAI. It's managed by our tech portfolio manager at BlackRock, Tony Kim. He's scouring the world for which AI companies he likes the most. And he's building a basket of about 20 to 40 stocks of those AI companies. He's meeting with these companies on a regular basis, he's speaking with their CEOs at conferences and he is deciding which companies he likes the best for that portfolio. So I think this is a really good innovation for clients and for investors broadly because as we get into some more nuanced corners of the market, whether it's AI, whether it's different option strategies that are generating income for investors, having that active manager being able to pick those allocations can be really helpful for investors.
- [98:20]
Troy Millings
So you spoke about AI a few times so far and BlackRock, you guys are the largest asset manager in the world. Do you see a future where artificial intelligence is exclusively managing money for people? Like there is no advisor, right? There is no strategy person that's actually going to meet with somebody in Saudi Arabia. Everything is done from a non biased AI perspective that's managing trillions of dollars for people and pension funds and all over the world. But it's just, it's not a physical person, it's all AI.
- [98:57]
Jay Jacobs
No, I think the best version of this is going to be a hybrid solution where you still have humans that are managing relationships. We know investing can be emotional, it can be complicated. Having a human that can be behind it, explaining what's going on, helping you understand, coach you through the behavioral aspects of investing is going to be so valuable forever. I think on top of that, AI is a tool. It's like a calculator. A calculator is a tool, it made people better investors. But you don't just turn over your investing to a calculator blindly. You have to know how to use that tool. You know, you have to know what the shortcomings of that tool is. You have to feed new data to that tool and understand which data is valuable and which data isn't valuable. In fact, at BlackRock, we've been using AI in our investing process for over a decade. We have a whole team called BlackRock Systematic Investing, which is a fancy way of saying they're quantitative, they're quants that use a lot of data and have had AI on their, you know, as a tool on their desk for a long time. But it's always going to be this blend between the human portfolio managers and that AI tool that's making them better and better investors. So I, I don't think we'll go full AI. I just think that tool is going to be very valuable and increasingly valuable over time.
- [100:06]
Rashad Bilal
It is the conversation of this generation, for sure. I wonder if there's a trend out there that might be under the radar that you see that most people aren't talking about.
- [100:17]
Jay Jacobs
Yeah, so one of the themes that we're very focused on right now, and maybe it sounds a little bit boring, but I guarantee it impacts every single person listening to this podcast, which is infrastructure. So we drive on roads, we turn on our laptops, our computers, we charge our phones, we drink water from the tap. All of that is infrastructure. And there's a couple of things that's going on in the infrastructure space is one, we've largely underinvested in it in the United States. So there's this firm out there called the American Society of Civil Engineers, and they give a letter grade, like a school grade to our infrastructure every four years. And we got a C minus this year, which is actually one of the best grades we've gotten in decades. And it's still not a very good grade. So a lot of that has to do with the fact that we've had growing populations. We just haven't spent lot of time, a a lot of money to build out the infrastructure we need. I'm sure a lot of people can sympathize with like sitting in traffic, blackouts in the summer, slow Internet. All of that is just underinvestment in infrastructure. If you add on top of that the fact that goals across multiple presidencies now has been to reshore more manufacturing in the United States, which is super power hungry, requires a lot of power to build stuff and super transportation heavy, you have to move all that stuff around the country. Once you build it and you have the growth of artificial intelligence, which is incredibly power hungry, you start to Realize that not only is our infrastructure not that good today, but the demands are only going to increase really quickly going forward. So this is an area that we've just been very focused on from a thematic lens that something's got to shift here. There's got to be more investment, there's got to be improvement improvements. We've got to rethink really what infrastructure looks like in the United States. There's no single bullet solution. It's going to be partly federal money, it's going to be partly state and local money. It's going to be private money. I just like to look around the New York area. So when I get to work every day I take the seven train subway to Hudson Yards. That was paid for mostly by local city money in New York City. If you live on the other side of Manhattan though, you might be taking the Second Avenue train which, which was paid for mostly by federal dollars from the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act. And if you're flying into JFK and the new terminal, Terminal 1, that's largely been paid for by private money. So there's all these different types of ways you interact with infrastructure and different sources of that funding. But that's a theme that we just think is going to be really powerful over the next decade because it's so fundamental to our everyday lives.
- [102:46]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah. On a personal note, giving a time at blackrock, what are like two of the biggest investing lessons that have stuck with you that you may not have shared with anyone before?
- [102:57]
Troy Millings
Wow.
- [102:57]
Jay Jacobs
I've never shared before. I think it's important to continuously evolve your thinking about how you're investing. The markets are never one directional. I know it's easy to zoom out and look at these hundred year charts that make it just look like the markets go up over time. But things are changing, risk is changing. We see these really quick sell offs in the market that can be pretty severe. You know, we've seen this shift from, you know, kind of looking at the world through sectors, through increasingly looking at it through themes. For sure, we've seen the growth of options trading and what that means for how you can change the shape of your investments. What's your upside, what's your downside protection, what's the income you're getting from investments. So you just have to keep thinking about what is your, your goal, how are you going to get to that goal and what are the tools that you have available. I'm just very pleased that we offer a lot of tools to investors to be able to help them achieve those goals. You Know, the second thing that you know that I would focus on is we live in an age where there's so much news and the velocity of that news is so quick and there's so much commentary on that news which may or may not be high quality. So this is maybe sounds a little hypocritical because I just said you always have to evolve how you're thinking about investing. But I would caveat that with saying keep your eye focused on the long term. Don't get too lost in the day to day. If you're getting lost in the day to day, it's tough. It is a very hard world to be investing in a day to day basis. One of the advantages any investor can have over the market is to take a longer term view. So you need to balance that, you know, continue to evolve with taking a long term view of the markets.
- [104:38]
Troy Millings
As far as retirement, what, what role should ETFs play in somebody's retirement?
- [104:44]
Jay Jacobs
You know, ETFs can do so much for so many different investors. You know, think about, if you're a young person right now, your goal might be more to grow your nest egg over time. So, you know, it can be great to contribute money every month. And if you're going to be doing that, you're probably going to take on more risk and really be focused on growth opportunities through stocks. If you're a retiree, you're trying to live off the money you've saved. You want lower risk, you want higher income because those dividend payments can help pay your mortgage or pay for groceries or what have you. But there's ETFs for that as well. So ETFs can really service almost anyone with any financial goal. But the mix of ETFs that you use might look very different for those retirees. Income ETFs. For people that want to grow their portfolio, maybe it's more equity ETFs. We came out with a really cool suite last year or maybe two years ago now called our life path ETFs. And what this does is it really takes that, that kind of judgment out of how you think about those allocations for an investor. So basically what you do is you select the ETF with the target retirement date. That's, that's the closest to when you think you might retire. Unfortunately for me, that's going to be a while from now. But you look at like a 2060 ETF or 2055 ETF and today it's going to be invested mostly in stocks because you want to be able to really grow. As you get closer and closer to that 2055 retirement date, it starts to change that allocation to be more focused on income ETFs. So it really just makes it very simple for investors over the long run to be able to shift their allocation to the. To what it really should be for where they are in that retirement cycle.
- [106:20]
Rashad Bilal
Obviously, I mean, this is your career. I wonder how much time outside of the job you spend around investing in stocks.
- [106:27]
Troy Millings
Right.
- [106:27]
Rashad Bilal
I feel like once you're doing this, everything you read just become. It becomes your life. How much of this is consuming you on a weekly, daily basis.
- [106:37]
Jay Jacobs
It's funny, I was watching that show on hb. What's it called? It's called the Pit or something.
- [106:41]
Troy Millings
Something.
- [106:41]
Jay Jacobs
And it's like ER doctors. And I was asking a doctor and he's like, I'm a doctor all day. I don't want to go home and watch something surgery. I try not to think about it, but it's hard because all of these things are impacting our everyday life. It's like, maybe I'm just a total nerd, but when I'm sitting in traffic, I'm like, yep, our infrastructure store. Terrible. You know, when I'm, when I'm talking with friends, like a lot of friends are just talking about AI and how they're using it. And so it's hard to escape some of these things. On one hand, that's what's made my career so much fun. And why I think investing is just broadening out to so many people is because it is tangible. Now a lot of these things that we're investing in, you really, you know, you're working at these companies. Your friends that work at these companies are using their products. It's not just this, you know, really kind of like distant concept anymore. It's something that's really impacting our everyday lives. So I guess like the ER doctor that watches the show the Pit, I guess I'm kind of the guy that still thinks about these themes a lot in my outside of work hours.
- [107:42]
Rashad Bilal
Can I just ask a follow up really quick? I wonder, over the past, maybe it's definitely for us, over the past five years, has there been more of a concentrated conversation around investing than previous years in, in your career in terms of.
- [107:57]
Jay Jacobs
Just kind of like more people asking about investing than ever before? Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean, we saw in the pandemic something like 40 million accounts opened, which was a lot of investors just opening an account for the first time to Start investing. So that brought people, a lot of people into the investing world. And then on top of that, I do give a lot of credit to ETFs for making investing so much more accessible that people can build a very good portfolio using ETFs and doing that on their own. So it's been in, in just, in my view, it's been growing year after year after year. And then on top of that, you've got media like yourselves, like you know, CNBC and Fox Business and all that, that are talking about these concepts every day. You've got a ton of activity on social media where people are talking about investing as well. So I think the, the, the volume of discussion around investing has grown tremendously in the last five years as well.
- [108:50]
Ian Dunlap
For everyone who thinks they may have missed out on the AI trait, can you explain like how much bigger of a multiple this iteration of tech is in comparison to let's say the dot com boom or maybe like the social media boom of post 2010? Like I know because when I talk to people they're like, well, Nvidia isn't going to give the same gains that it's gotten before or they're looking to pile into amd. But can you kind of give context around how much more growth we still have to go over the next decade for, for the space?
- [109:20]
Jay Jacobs
I mean, we often say we're only in the second or third inning of, of artificial intelligence. But as I was mentioning, there's these different phases, right? So if we're in the build out phase right now, that's why the semiconductor companies are so valuable. It's because it's an arms race. Everyone wants to get their hands on the leading chips. That's what you need when you're building data centers around the world. You need a lot of chips that are super powerful and expensive to be able to build out this digital infrastructure for AI. So semiconductors have been kind of the first big winners of, of, of AI. As we transition to enterprise adoption, more companies using AI in their, in, you know, in, in their, you know, in your day to day. That's when some of these large language model companies I think are going to do really well because they've built these really smart models now. They can charge people a lot of money for them. Right now it's mostly been an expense for these companies. I mean you hear these like numbers of like one company hiring an engineer for $100 million and that's, that's actually not even that expensive compared to the tens of billions they're spending on data centers. But soon they can start monetizing those models through enterprise adoption. And then if we go to that third phase, the transformation stage, we're going to see entire industries being built on AI that we've never even seen before. I. I like to kind of build an analogy to smartphones. So one of the sneakiest technologies that I think changed our lives in ways that is not appreciated was the shift from 3G technology to 4G technology.
- [110:47]
Ian Dunlap
Absolutely.
- [110:48]
Jay Jacobs
3G really only allowed you to text people. It took like five minutes to open a web page. If you tried to send someone a picture on your phone, it was horrible. I mean, this is the flip phone era, right? Yeah. As we move to 4G, there was a reason why screens got so much bigger. Because you can suddenly access the Internet and you're no longer using your phone to text. You're using your phone as a portal to websites to post photos online, post videos online, shop online. All of that was because 4G made it faster to do all of those things. It was really this kind of sneaky infrastructure layer that made everything so much better with a smartphone. But, but what did that mean? That meant that, like, rideshare companies could exist. That meant that online shopping companies could exist on your phone. That meant that you had all these new social media companies popping up. So what does that mean for AI? Well, once you see so much more AI adoption, we'll see companies popping up that we never even thought of that are just using AI as part of their product. Just like these companies. You know, these, these apps on your smartphone were using 4G technology, technology and never would have existed until 4G came around. So I think that's what's super exciting and why we think there's such a long Runway here is because we haven't even seen those companies being built yet that will leverage AI in that way.
- [112:03]
Troy Millings
Well, I know in a few weeks we have a big event called Invest Fest and you guys are coming back for year two iShares. We definitely appreciate you guys coming. So what do you have in store? I know it's a couple of workshops that you're doing, but can you speak on your presence, how you're going to show up at Invest Fest?
- [112:23]
Jay Jacobs
Looking forward to it. We've got two educational workshops on that Friday. So one is going to be focused more on retirement and how you can use ETFs to really kind of build for retirement. Whether you're in that growing your nest egg phase or if you're, you know, already thinking about retirement. And when you can start kind of driving income from your, your, from your portfolio as well. That will be one session, another session. I know we've talked a lot about AI and crypto on this, on this platform already, but we'll be digging into some of those themes that are really changing our everyday lives and what it means for investors. So both of those are on Friday at the event.
- [112:58]
Ian Dunlap
That's amazing. You have it as a quick follow up on the enterprise side. What, which companies, legacy tech companies do you think will benefit the most from AI over the next few years? And which ones do you think maybe, maybe laggards and not adapt quickly enough?
- [113:17]
Jay Jacobs
So there's, there's kind of three ingredients for artificial intelligence. One, you need a ton of money. You just need tens of billions of dollars. It's so expensive or cheap access to money. The second thing is you need really smart engineers to be able to build these models. And the third thing you need is data. Ultimately, data is the fuel that makes these large language models smarter, more capable than ever before. So there's a reason why the Mag 7, you know, the biggest tech companies in the world are the leaders here, is because they have all three of those things. They have a lot of money, they have great engineers, and they have access to tons of data. With that being said, you know, I think there's some companies that still might be more at risk of disruption. So if you don't have your own data, you're gonna have to buy it from someone. And that means building AI is more expensive for you than for someone else. If you, if your entire product is something that could be automated through AI, I think there's a lot of risk as well. A lot of companies just build very simple software that gets embedded in our everyday lives and they get to charge a monthly fee. What if you can build that using AI though? You don't need that software anymore. You know, that could suddenly really change some of these SaaS, companies that have made a lot of money delivering software to enterprises. So I think there'll be a lot of winners, but there's going to be a lot of losers in tech too. And that's why it's, you have to be really kind of thoughtful about how are you getting exposure to AI because you can win and you can also.
- [114:44]
Rashad Bilal
Lose an AI roll with the winners. My last thing is, as you look at AI, obviously the advancements in it, there still needs to be protection. Your thoughts around defense, AI, cybersecurity and its importance in the next few years?
- [114:59]
Jay Jacobs
Well, basically you Know what I was just saying? Basically, the value of data is increasing with artificial intelligence. It's like oil suddenly became really valuable once we had automobiles. So data becomes really valuable when you have artificial intelligence that can monetize that data in a way that it hasn't been done before. So if you suddenly have something that went from like being not that valuable to really valuable, you have to spend the money to protect it. It's like you, I don't know, you bought a house in a neighborhood that wasn't that great, and all of a sudden it totally, it just blew up as a neighborhood and everyone's trying to move in. Maybe that's when you, like, think more about putting a camera on the front door.
- [115:33]
Troy Millings
Right.
- [115:33]
Jay Jacobs
Because you've got a really expensive property now. It's the same thing with data. And we're going to see, I think, a commensurate huge amount of, of investment in cyber security for companies and governments that want to protect that data that's become so valuable.
- [115:49]
Troy Millings
Well, once again, thank you for your time and ending on Invest Fest. What, you know, you being in the space, right. What does an event like that mean as far as giving exposure for retail investors to companies like yourself and others and just having that, that wealth of information. Like, what's your, what's your thoughts on the importance of it?
- [116:06]
Jay Jacobs
I just think it's tremendous to have this opportunity, opportunity to connect with investors. You know, we, we spend a lot of time thinking about how we can deliver education at scale on our website, on Instagram, on X. But being able to be there in the room with people to hear their questions, share our ideas, I just think it's a tremendous way to connect asset managers like ourselves with investors that are using our products.
- [116:30]
Troy Millings
Yeah. Well, we look forward to seeing you in a couple weeks. Thank you for your attention time and I will talk soon. Thank you.
- [116:37]
Jay Jacobs
Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.
- [116:38]
Rashad Bilal
All right, have a good one.
- [116:39]
Troy Millings
Take care. All right.
- [116:44]
Rashad Bilal
That was insightful conversation. Yeah, that was great. It's one of those things where again, when you talk about information, we do it every week here and then you hear somebody from the, the industry that's actually doing it, just reconfirming the things that we've kind of been cementing over the past six, seven years.
- [116:59]
Jay Jacobs
So.
- [116:59]
Rashad Bilal
So, yeah, that was dope, man.
- [117:01]
Troy Millings
Yeah, I think it was insightful. A few things. You know, you talked about target date funds. I've been saying that since the beginning. As far as investing funds.
- [117:09]
Rashad Bilal
Absolutely.
- [117:10]
Troy Millings
I thought that it was very insightful how he broke the AI down into different stages and paraphrasing like chips are winning now.
- [117:19]
Ian Dunlap
Now. But it's going to be an adjustment. Yep.
- [117:21]
Troy Millings
Right. So that's, that's important to just keep in mind, you know, keep your head up and your eyes open because there might be a whole new winners circle in four years or three years, two years, who knows.
- [117:33]
Rashad Bilal
And it, it again just reiterates kind of the theme. Right. We've been calling it, I did a whole segment calling it the data center revolution where yes chips are running it right now. But infrastructure is important. Somebody has to build these data centers, somebody has to build the racks, somebody has to build the wiring for the connectivity to those. So infrastructure. I'm glad he brought that up up is somebody has to power it. Which is why we talk about companies like Vistra and we, we talked about csg. These companies are going to play a role. Who's going to make the energy, who's going to make it efficient. Those are the people that are going to lead. So yes, chips are winning and the leaders will, will still be in the lead but infrastructure is being built around that. We got to invest in those companies as well.
- [118:13]
Ian Dunlap
And if Apple don't acquire Perplexity.
- [118:16]
Rashad Bilal
I saw another report man, I saw.
- [118:18]
Ian Dunlap
A lot of people get on me about that wave when all the work is automated and it's agentic on every platform. Yeah that. I think that's going to be the greatest technology revolution of our lives. We can have an idea and literally build the idea out and deploy it and have the company being ran automatically on enterprise side. It's going to be the biggest revolution I think we've ever seen. I think it destroys or displaces a lot of the job market and that have and have not layer is wider. But in terms of productivity there's going to be nothing like we've ever seen.
- [118:59]
Troy Millings
And, and once again I just gotta hammer this, this home Friday is so vitally important. Like you have a company like BlackRock who is the largest asset manager in the world.
- [119:13]
Ian Dunlap
Yep.
- [119:13]
Rashad Bilal
On the planet.
- [119:14]
Troy Millings
Right. Yeah. Trillions of dollars of assets under management. They're not. They're doing three workshops on Friday. Vitally important. This is not easy to get first hand education from blackrock.
- [119:36]
Ian Dunlap
From the source. You know people say they're the plug. No, they're the source. Blackrock. Right.
- [119:44]
Rashad Bilal
Number one for a reason.
- [119:45]
Ian Dunlap
Yep.
- [119:46]
Rashad Bilal
So.
- [119:46]
Troy Millings
So please if you're going to invest fest take it serious. Friday is a day of all day workshops, panels and education. Ms. Business doing a seminar. Blackrock doing a seminar. Fidelity is doing a seminar. Like I don't understand why you would not be there for Friday. I like, I get it. You might, you know, get off work late. But sometimes in life you gotta make a sacrifice.
- [120:09]
Ian Dunlap
Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry. Like just to give context. I don't know how long they it took for them to work the relationship. But that's like some relationships you can't even pay for. If you offer the money.
- [120:21]
Rashad Bilal
No, you're not getting in the building.
- [120:24]
Ian Dunlap
You can't write a check for 150 and 150 000. Just get them to show up up and tell you. He was even humble on not even mentioning Aladdin. Go Google Black Rock Aladdin. This GPT for the market. Like you do not want to miss those conversations and insights from them directly.
- [120:43]
Troy Millings
And this is coming from the top. I mean he's the head of ETFs at BlackRock. It's not just a random, you know, worker. So I mean he's saying like, you know, it's important for us to connect with the people and you know, this is a great opportun opportunity and stuff like that. And this is what we have prepared. So if the head of ETF that the largest asset manager in the world is talking directly to you, if you miss the opportunity, I mean at some point in time you gotta look internally and just say, you know, I don't, I don't. I'm not serious about my future.
- [121:13]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah. And the schedule was live. Schedule's live plan. Go look at the schedule. Make it your your business to figure out which seminars which you're going to. Right. Treat it like you would be going anywhere else. I know people go to Disney. They plan it out a week ahead, which events and which ride. This is even more important. Plan it out. You see that nine o'.
- [121:33]
Jay Jacobs
Clock.
- [121:33]
Rashad Bilal
I'm making that nine. This ten I make. Plan it out. Make. I don't care. No excuses. Show up. You're gonna see us there. We'll be there. I'm trying to learn.
- [121:42]
Ian Dunlap
Get there early on Friday if they need help setting up a lot of relationships you'll be able to build just by being there early.
- [121:49]
Rashad Bilal
Yep.
- [121:50]
Ian Dunlap
30 minutes that you get to speak even like the, the people who worked at Nvidia we got to cultivate, relate just by being there early. You would be surprised how much that pays off and just helping being there early and asking great questions.
- [122:05]
Troy Millings
Keith Lee is gonna be in Friday. He's going to be speaking in the vendor marketplace on Friday.
- [122:13]
Ian Dunlap
That's crazy.
- [122:15]
Troy Millings
He's Changed people's lives.
- [122:16]
Rashad Bilal
A lot of businesses. A lot of businesses.
- [122:20]
Ian Dunlap
And there's a lot to learn from him. From a Brandon standpoint, how to go viral, management of the success after. Like. Like you said, like success leaves clues. But to be able to replicate something over and over and over again, yeah, there's things. Even if you're not a social media maven or group, there are things that you need to learn from different walks of life to implement into your business. If not, someone else is going to do it and you're going to be upset.
- [122:47]
Troy Millings
Unprecedented access that we have given to our community through the course of Market Mondays only. Legion Invest Fest. Like I said, amazing people that it's not easy to get, you know, billionaires to talk. It's not easy to get head of ETF at BlackRock, you know, but thank you to Black Fox, BlackRock. Good folks in BlackRock. But man, it's. It's something that, you know, should not be taken lightly. I'll say that. So with that being said, shout out to Ms. Business. If you missed it. She's running a promo. She's modeling what block did a hundred first hundred attendees general mission and first ten vendors. She's doing 50 off for the tickets. She's subsidizing 50. All you gotta do is go to investfest.com and enter code CPA. Certified Public Accountant. That's what CPA stands for. If you didn't know CPA at checkout. And everybody that that gets that promo will also get, I think it's an hour video that she did. Going over the big beautiful bill and going over how to save money for taxes for business owners in 2025.
- [123:49]
Rashad Bilal
Yep.
- [123:50]
Troy Millings
All right, ladies and gentlemen, what else can we do?
- [123:53]
Ian Dunlap
Nothing.
- [123:53]
Rashad Bilal
A lot. It's a lot.
- [123:57]
Ian Dunlap
Cute. Hope for 10 years. And if you don't listen to these things, whatever outcome you get, you deserve it. And Red Panda, like, enough talking. Enough back and forth. No more back and forth. They gonna go to Africa. I'mma go with them next time so we can be neighbors too. Ph3. I'm gonna go to Mexico. Hold for the long term.
- [124:22]
Troy Millings
That's a fact.
- [124:23]
Ian Dunlap
All the problems go away. Hold for the long term. 19. What? 30. What?
- [124:29]
Rashad Bilal
30.
- [124:30]
Ian Dunlap
31 or something like, come on. Everything is about the long term hold.
- [124:36]
Rashad Bilal
It's fat big earnings week this week, y'. All. We didn't forget a lot. A lot of the ones in the portfolio will be reporting. Arista Networks will be reporting. Pfizers reporting. AMD is reporting tomorrow. Super Micro is reporting. Uber Shopify Lily. Lily's having an interesting month. McDonald's reporting, WAFERS reporting. It's a big earnings week, so pay attention to it, pay attention to future guidance. This is one of those opportunities. If you see a pullback like we've seen with Lily, it's kind of been trading sideways over the past six months. This might be opportunity, you know, you have future guidance. If you believe the strength there, then this might be an opportunity to get in long term positions. So make sure you check the portfolios and if you have use chat gbt, use Claude. If you don't want to read earners reports, throw it in there, let them summarize it for you.
- [125:29]
Ian Dunlap
10 highlights.
- [125:30]
Rashad Bilal
Tell them the points. That exactly what you want. Earnings per share, whatever it is.
- [125:34]
Ian Dunlap
UnitedHealthcare. I know you guys restructuring because if y' all get to 201 or something, 200, 150. Some of the greatest companies in the history of America die in front of us. Intel is one of them. UnitedHealthcare last year was a 630. Yeah, 239. That is a precipitous decline. And for investors, that's not what you want to hold. And then also too, there's a lot of awakening around the origin of the drugs and what materials are sourced, even for Ozempic and all that. We'll go. Be mindful. A lot of people keep asking me, should you invest in United Healthcare? No. Like it's for me. Maybe 150at a generational price, but even here is still too high. I wouldn't touch it.
- [126:31]
Rashad Bilal
I'm not touching it. Let me talk about last week. Don't. I'm not touching it.
- [126:35]
Troy Millings
All right, y', all, it's been real. We'll see you guys on Wednesday.
- [126:39]
Rashad Bilal
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [126:42]
Troy Millings
Love is love.
- [126:43]
Rashad Bilal
Love is love. Be good to each other. Reach out. Send a text message, a voice note. Man, you never know what one piece of encouragement can do to somebody's life, man.
- [126:53]
Troy Millings
Also, we got The Crypto episode. 9 o' clock on Thursday. Make sure you check that out.
- [126:57]
Ian Dunlap
All right, Y' all want to wrap it up fast? He gonna go meet another king.
- [127:01]
Rashad Bilal
Happy birthday, Mom.
- [127:05]
Troy Millings
Happy birthday.
- [127:05]
Rashad Bilal
Love you.
- [127:07]
Troy Millings
Yeah, yeah.
- [127:08]
Rashad Bilal
We gotta go meet with another dignitary.
- [127:11]
Troy Millings
That's a fact.
- [127:13]
Rashad Bilal
Wednesday. Tap in 10 o'.
- [127:14]
Ian Dunlap
Clock.
- [127:15]
Rashad Bilal
Don't play yourself, reward yourself. Love is love. Peace.
- [127:19]
Jay Jacobs
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Troy Millings
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Ian Dunlap
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Troy Millings
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Ian Dunlap
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Troy Millings
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Ian Dunlap
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Troy Millings
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