MM # 289: Emotional Investor Lesson: Best Crypto Stock, AI Investments & Business Blueprint w/ Derrick Hayes

Summary

Market Mondays Ep. 289 — Emotional Investor Lessons, Top Crypto/AI Stocks, and Business Blueprint with Derrick Hayes

Podcast: Market Mondays (EYL Network)
Hosts: Rashad Bilal, Troy Millings, Ian Dunlap
Guest: Derrick Hayes (Big Dave’s Cheesesteaks)
Air Date: December 16, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode delivers a packed exploration of investment strategy, the realities of entrepreneurship, and the importance of emotional discipline in building wealth. The trio—Rashad, Troy, and Ian—dive deep into mistakes new investors make, the best crypto/AI stock plays right now, and insights from superstar entrepreneur Derrick Hayes, founder of Big Dave’s Cheesesteaks, on creating and scaling a fast-casual franchise.

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1. Emotional Lessons for Investors & Building Wealth (07:51–17:32)

Key Takeaways

• Get Rich Slow: The hosts discuss the perennial allure of “fast wins” and meme stocks versus the proven strength of long-term, disciplined investing.
• Discipline and Research: Chasing “the next big thing” or FOMO plays erodes discipline—consistent, focused investing in fundamentally strong companies wins.
• Self-reliance: “You shouldn’t have to rely on somebody else for entries and exits if you’ve already planned where to exit properly.” – Ian Dunlap (16:07)
• Notable Quote:
  “Warren Buffett said, ‘My philosophy is to get rich slow. And nobody wants to get rich slow.’” – Rashad Bilal (16:31)

“Chasing a fast win ends up usually leading to decay.” — Ian Dunlap (12:53)

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2. Futures & Derivative Markets: Tools and Tips (08:35–10:51)

• Trading Tip: “You have to give your trades room to breathe...use your big targets on big days.” – Ian Dunlap (08:41)
• On Predictive Markets: Robinhood integrating sports wagering was equated to trading futures. The key takeaway: All derivative trading involves risk and understanding the tools/platform matters.

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3. Ranking Crypto Stocks: COIN, MicroStrategy, IBIT (18:14–25:49)

• Criteria: Risk profile, business fundamentals, and direct exposure to Bitcoin’s price movement.
• Initial Rankings:
  • Ian: 1. Coinbase, 2. IBIT, 3. MicroStrategy
  • Rashad/Troy: 1. IBIT, 2. Coinbase, 3. MicroStrategy
• Notable Debate:
  “If you really believe in Bitcoin, I think you gotta invest in Bitcoin. I like Coinbase, but…IBIT’s backed by BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the history of civilization.” – Rashad Bilal (21:05)

“Michael Saylor's risk at MicroStrategy puts them last until that’s resolved.” — Ian Dunlap (19:33)

• On ICOs/Altcoins: The group largely favors Bitcoin and Ethereum, skeptical about others like XRP. “XRP has not done anything in the last decade...Why would you hope and pray for big gains 25 years from now?” — Rashad Bilal (24:47)

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4. Investing Discipline in Tech: Tesla, Oracle, & AI Memory (29:58–49:34)

Tesla & Elon Musk (29:58–33:53)

• Tesla Recovery: Stock rebounding near 52-week highs; focus on long-term growth in tech and autonomous vehicles.
• Notable Quote:
  “Do I like all his political leanings? No. But you have to give [Elon] credit—Tesla is here to stay.” – Ian Dunlap (30:55)

Oracle & The Cloud Debate (34:13–44:26)

• Is Oracle a Buy? Wait for more decline (around $160 preferred entry).
  “Cloud profitability is future-dated—building takes time, and margins are thin during investments.” – Troy Millings (36:05)
• Political Connections: Oracle’s rise is partly attributed to government contracts and Trump administration ties. “Would people be so pro-Oracle if he didn’t have Trump?” – Ian Dunlap (40:50)

Memory is the New AI Bottleneck (45:56–49:34)

• Broadcom Pullback: Investors spooked by margin warnings due to outsourcing some data center components.
• Key Sectors: Memory (Micron, Seagate, Western Digital) up 200% this year; memory bottlenecks may drive further gains in AI infrastructure.
• Big Advice: “You only need four stocks to get rich.” — Ian Dunlap (49:34)

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5. Stock Picking and Brand Investing (53:31–58:24)

• Legacy Brands: Ralph Lauren’s stock point—understanding consumer loyalty and brand’s cultural staying power can inform investment outside tech.
• Retail as Ownership: “If you go to Ralph Lauren to buy clothes, you might want to be an owner too.” – Rashad Bilal (57:36)

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6. Tax Planning and Year-End Money Moves for Entrepreneurs (58:27–60:51)

• Deduct now, benefit later: Pay invoices before year-end for tax advantages. “If you know you’re going to pay these people, it’s probably beneficial to pay them now…to get the tax deduction.” – Rashad Bilal (58:27)
• Offset gains with losses: “If you have a loss, you can carry that over for three years to offset gains.” – Troy Millings (59:29)

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7. Leverage ETFs: Useful Tool or Portfolio Destroyer? (61:14–65:24)

• Explanation: Leveraged ETFs (e.g., NVDL, AMDL) multiply gains and losses (2x/3x exposure).
• Caution: Not for the undisciplined—timing and strong risk management required. “You don’t need to start off doing triple levered—it’s about timing.” – Ian Dunlap (62:59)
• Strategy: Only after building a solid base of quality stocks, consider leverage sparingly.

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8. Quantum Computing: Best Investment Angle (66:00–69:52)

• Winners: Stick with giants—IBM, Google, Microsoft.
  “I like IONQ, but it’s not going to beat Google or Microsoft in quantum.” – Ian Dunlap (66:15)
• Google as Hedge Fund:
  “Google might have the greatest investing record ever—over decades, they’ve turned every early bet into multi-billion returns.” – Troy Millings (67:49)
  • Android: $50M → $200B
  • YouTube: $1.65B → $300B
  • DeepMind: $500M → $100B
  • Stripe, SpaceX…etc.

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9. Interview with Derrick Hayes — Building a Franchise Empire (72:15–108:52)

Derrick Hayes — Big Dave’s Cheesesteaks Founder

9.1. Scaling a Franchise: Systems & Lessons (74:08–76:13)

• Systems Are Everything:
  “Not me, it’s we. I started first, but if you don’t do these things you’ll just be a repeated business…SOP manuals, hiring the right people, and getting out of your own way.” – [74:08]
• Bottom Line Discipline: Focus on cash flow/profitability beyond just top-line revenue.
• Hiring C-Suite: “First thing I’d do if I started over? Hire the right C-suites because it’s the introduction, the quality, and the brand that matter.” – Derek Hayes (78:56)

9.2. Building Franchisees: The Process (82:03–84:23)

• Selection: Favor operators with experience. Money alone doesn’t guarantee success.
• Training: Discovery Day, systems walkthrough, and ongoing support.
• Multi-location Push: Buying one store isn’t enough for franchisee success; aim for clusters to improve buying power and operational efficiency.
• Cost: $45K for a franchise, with pack discounts for multiple locations.

9.3. Why Franchise? Wealth, Legacy, & The Playbook (76:13–88:35)

• Chess, Not Checkers: Franchising allows scaling wealth and providing opportunities for others, especially within the Black community.
• Repeatable Culture: Customer experience, SOPs, and profit margins all drive long-term value.
• On Ownership: “Entrepreneurship is the only thing that can make you be the coach… Otherwise, you’re just playing the game.” – Derek Hayes (88:35)

9.4. Cash Flow, Scaling, & Emotional Discipline (90:49–94:27)

• Profit > Revenue: “Revenue is loud and cash flow is honest” (90:49)
• Avoiding Ego Traps: Don’t live through the business or drain it for appearances.
• Expansion: All about systems, quality, and scaling globally, not just in the U.S.

9.5. Culture & Legacy: Beyond the Food (95:22–100:58)

• Halal Move: “I’m not thinking just the USA—I’m thinking Middle East, global.”
• Community Impact: “I want to break generational curses; it’s not just about being the player, but the coach, the leader.”

Notable Quotes

“Vulnerability is the weakest point in business…In business, emotions kill you when you’re scaling.” — Derek Hayes (78:56)

“If it don’t weigh 6,700 pounds, you already lost anyway because you can’t write it off.” — Derek Hayes on business car deductions (106:11)

“Don’t raise capital when you need money, raise capital when you don’t.” — Derek Hayes (107:31)

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10. Closing Notes & Rapid-fire Topics

• SPAC Craze’s Demise: Loopholes used to go public, most faded fast. “A lot of companies failed immediately after.” – Rashad (114:27)
• Nike & Micron Earnings Coming Up (113:02)
• Financial Reality: $250K annual income barely “enough” in many U.S. cities—necessitating continuous investment and wealth building.

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Memorable Moments

• Derek Hayes’ humility and candor about the struggles and real systems needed for sustainable business.
• The team’s playful but data-driven debate about “best crypto stock.”
• Insightful breakdown by Troy of why memory (Micron, Seagate, etc.) is the AI bottleneck few are watching.
• Ian’s reminders to keep focused: “You only need FOUR stocks to get rich.”
• “Investor Die!” – Ian’s recurring call to action (112:24)

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Useful Timestamps

| Segment | Timestamp | |-------------------------------------------------|-------------| | Emotional investor lessons | 07:51–17:32 | | Futures/derivatives trading insights | 08:35–10:51 | | Crypto stocks debate (COIN/IBIT/MSTR) | 18:14–25:49 | | Tesla/Oracle/AI memory insights | 29:58–49:34 | | Brand investing & retail talk | 53:31–58:24 | | Year-end tax and money moves | 58:27–60:51 | | Leveraged ETFs explained (NVDL/AMDL) | 61:14–65:24 | | Quantum computing investment play | 66:00–69:52 | | Google’s investment record | 67:49–69:52 | | Interview: Derrick Hayes (Big Dave’s Cheesesteaks) | 72:15–108:52 | | SPAC/IPOs discussion & rapid-fire close | 114:12–end |

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Tone & Style

The episode is energetic, direct, and occasionally playful—all while being brutally honest with the audience about the realities of investing, entrepreneurship, and wealth-building. The hosts and guest offer both technical knowledge and real-world, lived wisdom.

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Bottom Line

This episode delivers a must-hear blend of investing reality checks, sector analysis, and business-building principles for anyone seeking wealth that lasts—especially those eager to avoid the hype and build on discipline, emotional intelligence, and legacy. Derrick Hayes’s segment, in particular, offers an authentic blueprint for scaling a franchise the right way.

Transcript

[Rashad Bilal]

For me, entrepreneurship has always been the way.

[Ian Dunlap]

Investing is important because it's the only way you are going to be able to get rich and wealthy for your family. We can close the wealth gap by working together.

[Rashad Bilal]

Market Monday is the biggest investment show ever.

[Derek Hayes]

My life has literally changed since watching eyl.

[Ian Dunlap]

When you can make people money and.

[Troy Millings]

You can add value, they're going to be forever indebted to you.

[Ian Dunlap]

And I promise you, this year, I'm going to make you all even more money. Happy Monday. We back.

[Rashad Bilal]

Deal.

[Troy Millings]

And showtime. I was muted. What's up? What's up?

[Ian Dunlap]

How you feeling?

[Troy Millings]

Anything good? How you feeling, man?

[Ian Dunlap]

Good. The intro make me want to go to Hammerstein. Radio City. Huh?

[Troy Millings]

Shout out to the T dot, too, man. That was a T dot for sure.

[Ian Dunlap]

Ms. Y'. All.

[Troy Millings]

I got something for you. Success.

[Ian Dunlap]

What up?

[Troy Millings]

Shout out to everybody in the chat. Oh, they went side angle on you, Ian.

[Rashad Bilal]

They switched.

[Troy Millings]

They just switched the camera angle.

[Rashad Bilal]

Well.

[Troy Millings]

Oh, man, you're starting early. Happy to be back. It is. It is frosty.

[Rashad Bilal]

That.

[Troy Millings]

That is the word that it is. Here in New York, we got some snow. I was out there. You know, your driveways, you know, is great until you actually have to figure out how this is going to get taken care of and treated. I didn't have a company for this one, but I will for the next one.

[Ian Dunlap]

Got you.

[Troy Millings]

Shout out to everybody out there that was shoveling out snow yesterday in the East Coast. But we are back, man. Happy to be back. Everybody's healthy. How y' all feeling?

[Ian Dunlap]

Amazing.

[Rashad Bilal]

Sorry.

[Ian Dunlap]

How you feeling?

[Rashad Bilal]

Good. Good, man. You know, it is what it is, man.

[Ian Dunlap]

What you mean?

[Rashad Bilal]

It is what it is.

[Troy Millings]

Shout out to. Shout out to D.C. we was in the D.C. area.

[Ian Dunlap]

Oh, man.

[Troy Millings]

Shout out to text. Giving a dope event, man, Thanksgiving was dope. Saw a lot of young talent out there. Ran into our winner of our pitch competition at Invest Fest. He was at. At the. The event. It was dope, man. To see youth come together to put something together about investing inside the world of tech, I thought was dope, man. It was a pleasure to be there. Salute to y'.

[Ian Dunlap]

All.

[Rashad Bilal]

Sure. So, yeah, we got a lot. We got a lot going on, but, man, this episode, we got. We got a guest coming on a little later. Derek Hayes, superstar entrepreneur. This. This Wednesday, we got blackout. We got 19. Keys is going to be joining us for Blackout.

[Troy Millings]

He's on tour with it for sure.

[Rashad Bilal]

Anytime. Keys. Come on. That's going to be a. That's going to be an interesting conversation to say the least. And then Thursday, six o' clock we got Squire, the CEOs of Squire, David and so. Okay, and you know, squire, 700 million dollar valuation, as far as if you're not familiar with Squire is, it's an app that was created for Barbers for scheduling and amongst other things. But that's what it started. And like I said, now their, their, their valuation is, is $700 million. So they, they gonna come on and talk about, you know, all things entrepreneurship, raising money, know how to scale a business, different things of that nature. So shout out to them, shout out to the bros. So we got a jam packed, we got a jam packed week, man. And we're gonna, we're gonna be giving some information about the, the market Monday's deal in a couple minutes later on in the show. So we got a lot, man, I don't want to waste too much time, but I will say this too, man. Man, make sure you tap in this next week is the last week of programming for Market Mondays Blackout. Earn your leisure. After that, we're gonna take the last week of the year off and then we'll be back in January. So we got this Market Mondays and we got next week's Market Monday. So it's only a few, it's only a few weeks left. Make sure that you, you know, that you get it right. And then salute to the city of brother Jim Jones, man. Capo that's on the show. A lot of those clips went viral, man. Salute to Jim. I will say this man, because you know Jim, unintentionally, he got a lot of negative comments. Jim is an ally. He's a friend of ours and he's actually an ally. He's somebody that supported early whether it was 19 keys coming on Market Mondays. Earn your leisure. Invest Fest, the first Invest Fest ever sort of vision performed at our Apollo show. So he's, he's a, he's a complicated guy.

[Troy Millings]

The VIP night, he's a very.

[Rashad Bilal]

But I do want to say he's not, he's not, he's not ignorant and he, he has been a very strong ally when a lot of other people.

[Ian Dunlap]

Have it intentionally and watch all the shows for sure.

[Rashad Bilal]

So shout out to Jim.

[Troy Millings]

Watch all say nothing.

[Ian Dunlap]

Wait, is it coming off as if he's not?

[Rashad Bilal]

Well, I just seen a lot of people in the comments just like, yo, you know, it was just, I think it was the it. You know, it's. I think Jim just has a reputation, right? But as somebody that actually knows him, I can say that he's a He's a good guy, and he's actually an ally. Everything that we. That we've championed since the beginning stages, so.

[Ian Dunlap]

And a wave setter, like, yeah, I.

[Troy Millings]

I think the most important thing is just that the conversation is happening.

[Rashad Bilal]

Right?

[Troy Millings]

Like, it could have went a bunch of other ways, but he was open and receptive to the conversation. He actually invited us to have the conversation where most people might have been afraid to do that. So, like, he. I like to think of him as a genius, man. I think he's super intelligent, man. And that's one of the things I always talk to him about, is like, yo, you got to just let people. People see this side. And he was like, nah, nah, in due time. But, yeah, he. He. I'm glad you said the word ally, because he is that, and it's thought provoking. I saw some of the comments. They weren't as kind to Jim, but he is an ally in this space. And again, conversations like this need to be happening, not just from us, but from a bunch of people inside the industry. We was looking in the comments, and I didn't see too many people in the music industry comment because I'd be interested to see what they have to say and how we're holding each other accountable. Because, yeah, we grew up in a different time of music, but this is today's music. So. So what are we going to do about it?

[Rashad Bilal]

Yeah, sure. And Blackout. We got a lot to talk about. We're gonna talk about a lot. We're gonna talk about Trump on Blackout, man.

[Troy Millings]

I'm not even saying, bro.

[Rashad Bilal]

It's a lot to talk about.

[Troy Millings]

Yeah.

[Rashad Bilal]

I don't waste too much time. Ian, any announcements?

[Ian Dunlap]

Nope. Mid roll.

[Rashad Bilal]

They keep switching your angle. Is that on purpose?

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah, I think. Yep.

[Rashad Bilal]

Okay.

[Troy Millings]

No, no, no. At first I was like, no, I think that they do that quick birthday. Shout out happy birthday to Amy, our attorney. It is her birthday.

[Ian Dunlap]

She's out. Happy birthday.

[Troy Millings]

I think she's out the country right now, man. Shout out to her. She's traveling all over the continent doing her thing. Wanted to wish a happy birthday and safe travels back. Every time I call her, I feel like she's in a different time zone. So happy birthday. It's probably not your birthday anymore, but it was yesterday, so Happy birthday, Amy.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah.

[Troy Millings]

Y' all know how this works, man. Do your own research. That research. Looking strong out there. Shout out to everybody that's doing it. Our content is intended to be used and must be used for informational purposes only. It is very important to do your own analysis. Before making any investment based on your own personal circumstances, you should take independent financial advice from a professional in connection with or independently research and verify any information that you find on our show and wish to rely upon whether for the purpose of making an investment decision or otherwise continue to do the research, share the research, Build wealth. Let's build community. Let's build our brokerage accounts. Yes, let's do this together.

[Ian Dunlap]

Let's build.

[Rashad Bilal]

Oh.

[Ian Dunlap]

Stock Club Tuesday, 9pm Central. Last call of the year. And also too, we cannot skip over the Vlad interview. Sometimes you need an indication of how well the company is going to do this year and next. Look so calm, so relaxed. Informative.

[Rashad Bilal]

Salute. Salute to Vlad 10F. Man, if you haven't watched that interview, please watch it, man.

[Ian Dunlap]

Just watch for like let alone information temperament. He looks so happy and calm and.

[Troy Millings]

Chill and a really intelligent dude.

[Derek Hayes]

100.

[Troy Millings]

Yeah.

[Rashad Bilal]

So let's start it off with trading question Futures trading tip of the week.

[Ian Dunlap]

After. Well, the trading tournament just in ended this week.

[Troy Millings]

Oh man. Talk to us.

[Derek Hayes]

Talk to us.

[Ian Dunlap]

I'm proud of y' all for who made the top 25. The live trading tournament will start January 5th. So I want the volume to pick back up and that winner would get $50,000. But my trading tip of the week is that you have to give your trades room to breathe. Now, some people in the tournament hated the fact that some people were just going long and they were adjusting their stops. But please write this down. You need to use your big targets on big days. If that boy Powell speaks, usually the market is going to move one way or another and sometimes you're going to be able to hit a monthly goal inside of a day time your trades, right? To be able to take advantage of those and use your long targets on days in which rate cuts could happen or non farm payroll or certain report days. So weaponize and use your long targets when the market is going to move in your favor.

[Rashad Bilal]

Okay.

[Ian Dunlap]

And you can also use Poly Market to understand where something could go.

[Troy Millings]

That was an interesting insight, right? Like using that predictive market to actually go inside of derivative markets and use that as an additional tool.

[Ian Dunlap]

So because Robin Hood is going to weaponize it next year, I mean you.

[Troy Millings]

Can do all in one place for sure. Yeah. Legend.

[Rashad Bilal]

Okay. And I thought it was interesting too when he talked, when Vlad talked about the sports wagering that they have on their platform and he said a lot of futures traders and other traders, but he's like future traders are getting into it. And for anybody that did not Watch the interview. You know, that's one of the features that Robin Hood has on their platform is sports wagering, which is essentially like, it's like trading contracts in the middle of a sports game in real time. You could trade this a little bit more advanced in sports gambling. And I was just saying, like, you know, as far as gambling, you know, he was saying like, well, if you really look at the futures market, what does somebody in Cleveland, Ohio really have to do with corn future prices or.

[Ian Dunlap]

The S P or wheat palladium?

[Rashad Bilal]

True. Yeah.

[Troy Millings]

Little to no impact.

[Rashad Bilal]

So he drew, he drew a very, he drew like a comparison from futures trading to the sports wagering that they have now. So it's, it's interesting as far as markets, but you said a lot of people, a lot of traders from the futures market and other markets are coming into the sports wagering market.

[Ian Dunlap]

Did you get any insight if they're going to have different charting than poly market?

[Troy Millings]

Can't speak on that just yet. A few other things we can't speak on just yet.

[Ian Dunlap]

Tax.

[Troy Millings]

Yes. Yeah, but Robin Hood, and we talked about it being him being the CEO of the year last year is one of those companies that's had an amazing year. And from the things that we heard, I think growth is still on the horizon for them. Sure, that's fair to say.

[Rashad Bilal]

Okay, what's one of the biggest mistakes young investors make when they chase fast wins instead of building wealth over time?

[Ian Dunlap]

Giving up wealth. I want to be very clear. I know it's funnier to chase meme stocks and potential quantum stocks like Ionq, no shade to them, but you're giving up your future, literally. If we go back since the inception of the show, or back to 2021 or the 2022 drop generational wealth, we. I know the term gets thrown around so much, but those were chances to actually build it. And I think chasing a fast win builds bad habits. And even if you do win, I know people that have made 2, 300, 000 off of, let's say, GameStop and they think because they had that one win and GameStop is going to apply to every other meme stock. Rashad, you make the post about NFTs. Everyone killed me a few years ago and I'm like, NFTs are garbage. And here we are, they're worth virtually nothing. So I think a lot of the things we want, wealth, we say that we want, but we aren't willing to build them slowly. And if you don't, that is a huge mistake. So chasing a fast Win ends up usually leading to decay.

[Troy Millings]

I, I sum that up, I just put just being undisciplined and not respecting the market or money. Yeah, I think those, those two things people forget because they, they feel like the word fast money. But I always thought with speed can come error.

[Ian Dunlap]

Right?

[Troy Millings]

Because you're doing things in a haste and you're trying to have this immediate outcome and you, you tend to make mistakes in that. And I'm speaking from experience because I've done that. I've been in a space where it's like, oh, I got to do this, I got to do this. Oh, I made a mistake. I put sell to open, not sell to cl. Little things. Little like I, I forgot especially in opposing. Oh, I didn't mean to click market. I meant to put my limit and now I got the market price and now when I bought it, I'm down 5%. It's the little things that you do when you're doing things fast and you're trying to get these calls in or get your future traders in, right. These pips, you'll make mistakes. And so with speed comes error. You lose discipline when you do things like that. So that, that would be the thing that I see most and I see it now, especially when the market is up, people are chasing, they're losing discipline. Shout out to Mike. I spoke to Mike earlier in his trading journey and before we got here he told me he has a new strategy. I'm like, oh, I'm glad you're here.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah, right.

[Troy Millings]

Like I say, like, what, what is the exit before you enter it position? He now has that. I'm like, perfect. I'm glad. It took a lot a while for us to get here, but now we're here, staying disciplined, having that plan and respecting the market and respecting money. Those, those are important things.

[Ian Dunlap]

And it was funny. Can I go real quick? I saw a lot of people criticizing the Michigan coach and we'll talk about that on blackout on Wednesday. But a lot of you are making the same mistake that he's making. But in your trading life, you're making risky ass bets that are going to cost your financial future. The market just hasn't blown you up yet. So for the people that are trading with too much leverage, too much size, or you've gotten away with three or four investments that are risky and you thought was going to be the new Nvidia or the new AMD and then they're falling apart. Like, don't criticize someone's mistake because yours hasn't been Exposed yet. But I'm telling you, over the next year, you're going to have to double down on companies that are incredibly solid with high profit margins, that are going to move the gdp. Like that era of betting on risk or being risk on. Yeah, that's going to go away in January. It's over with.

[Troy Millings]

I think that there's something to that. It's like we've seen a lot of times people will just invest by hearsay. That also goes to being undisciplined, right? Like, I'm just doing it because I saw that stock go up 17 or I saw it go up 30. Not having a firm understanding of what that stock is, what the sector is, what the company actually does. None of the things that we always talk about, right, like who's the seat. We don't know anything. We just know that the price went up. And if the price went up, it'll probably go up tomorrow or maybe in a month it will. Or I keep hearing people talk about it, so it must be a good stock. And just investing off a hair saying that goes into the lack of discipline. We also at least understand what you're invested in. I can't say there's a company that I invested in that I don't know what they do, who the CEO is and what their purpose is inside of the market.

[Ian Dunlap]

Or at least know your exit. Like, I got a lot of messages today when the market was pulling back. And what about IonQ? You shouldn't have to rely on somebody else for entries and exits if you've already planned where to exit properly. Like, I want to be clear. The hospital year are done. They're in. There's no Christmas rally this year. You should have got your games from post April.

[Rashad Bilal]

Yeah, for sure. All about profit. Well, we never had any land in the metaverse, but there is something that I saw Jeff Bezos say that he spoke to Warren Buffett and he asked him, he said, look, your, your investment philosophy is not extremely complicated. Why don't you think more people don't just follow and copy exactly what you do as far as investing? Because it's pretty much open source. Said because my philosophy is to get rich slow. And he said, nobody wants to get rich slow. So that's why a lot of people, nobody really copies what I do. I think that that was. That's insightful. As far as, you know, everybody's always going to want to try to get rich quick and cut corners. And, you know, nobody wants to take the long road in life. So that's never going to change. That's never going to change. It's going to be the same to the end of the world.

[Ian Dunlap]

But for those of you who are willing to get rich slow oh my God. Life will be amazing for you.

[Rashad Bilal]

Yeah, it's a slow grind. Slow grind story y. That's what it is. And I will be opening my PO box soon. We I'll talk about it on on Blackout. I'm ready to receive new merch. I've gotten some increase. I had to shut it down for a minute because I just had too much clothes. But if you're interested, I will be opening my PO box if they send.

[Ian Dunlap]

My merch to your inbox and I get it my brother.

[Rashad Bilal]

100.

[Ian Dunlap]

I'll pay the swords fee. Always got to bring something to the.

[Rashad Bilal]

Table at all times. Let's talk about yo crypto currency.

[Troy Millings]

No no. This dude put slow cook equals.

[Ian Dunlap]

You're doing too much my boy. But I appreciate you. Thank you.

[Troy Millings]

That's crazy Larry.

[Rashad Bilal]

The best crypto related stocks, right? If you had to rank it from Coinbase, MicroStrategy and IBIT. Right. Strongest to weakest. And these are all crypto related but they're kind of unrelated in a sense where obviously IBIT is made to track the price of Bitcoin ETF. MicroStrategy is like Bitcoin on steroids. Yeah. Bitcoin adjacent to have over stretched gains or losses that mimic the size of Bitcoin because it's a bitcoin treasury at this point it's a bitcoin holding company. And then Coinbase obviously is a platform that you buy cryptocurrency on. So they're all part of the ecosystem but they're also all publicly traded investments that you can that you can buy on the stock market if. If or in a company to cryptocurrency holdings. So talk about each one of those and talk about the rankings from each one.

[Ian Dunlap]

If all things were fair, my list would be in a different order. But when you're doing a SWOT analysis the threat is until Michael Saylor is clear of the attack that he's under I have to put them last. Ordinarily in a normal market if he's not being attacked I probably will put him first. So microstrategy would be last I bid is through EYE shares. I like our shares shout out to y' all but they're not Vanguard, they're not BlackRock, they're not Invesco. So they would be second and then Coinbase because would be first because the, the CEO is great, but I'm looking at risk. I don't think the risk is as great there. Coinbase has had a, a very interesting year to say the least. Last year they hit that high of last quarter. Excuse me, 4,44. They're currently at 2,50,42. I think all the entire sector is going to have a little bit of an issue. But when I look at the risk, my, the risk tolerance is too high for Micro strategy. If they didn't have that threat on the table, MicroStrategy will be first, but Coinbase I bit second and micro strategy third. For the time being, until that threat is going away as my lineup.

[Troy Millings]

I agree with one, I disagree with two.

[Rashad Bilal]

Well, let me just say something. I think that IBIZ should be number one.

[Troy Millings]

Okay.

[Rashad Bilal]

Respectfully, of course, backed by BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the history of human civilization. So the strongest, they got the strongest backing possible. And if you really believe in bitcoin, I think you gotta invest in Bitcoin. I like Coinbase, but Coinbase is a platform and like any platforms platform.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah.

[Rashad Bilal]

It's a brokerage platform and it has, it can go up and down. It has more variables involved where the Ibid is just a one for one. As Bitcoin goes up, Ibid goes up, as Bitcoin goes down. Theoretically Bitcoin can go up and Coinbase can go down. Right. They miss their numbers, they have some bad quarters, whatever like that there. They are related to Bitcoin. But Bitcoin can have a blowout year and theoretically it doesn't necessarily correlate with the same as.

[Ian Dunlap]

Are we talking, Chris, Cryptocurrency in general or bitcoin exposure? Only because I thought we were leading with cryptocurrency exposure.

[Rashad Bilal]

Well, well, what's the best crypto stock? But Bitcoin is, Bitcoin is the, is Band Aid. So I don't really believe in any crypto outside of bitcoin, to be completely honest with you about it. Ethereum. Ethereum for sure. Xrp. I've shared my thoughts on XRP for a very long period of time. Yeah, Solana is still, still yet to be proven. So I don't, I don't, I wouldn't, I would not put my life on the line for any cryptocurrency in the.

[Ian Dunlap]

World other than, other than bitcoin. Does that change? Okay, I got you. No, go ahead.

[Troy Millings]

I'm gonna agree with him. I'm going with shouting on this one. I think we, we're seeing this the same way and that's why I said I agree with one of them, which is I believe that Michael Strategy would be third in this.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah.

[Troy Millings]

For some of the reasons that he just alluded to. When you're talking about ibit, you're talking about. And a lot of people think if I invest in Ibid, I invest in Bitcoin. Not really. Right. You're investing in a fund and a trust that owns Bitcoin and so that direct access to it. But there's no balance sheets on this. Right. There's not as many leverages that you got hurdles you got to get over. When you're talking about Coinbase, you're talking about, like you said, a brokerage. But they don't make their money from just housing those things. They make their money from the transaction fees and subscription fees. And that can be something that is cyclical. And we've. We've seen that as we've seen it during the pandemic rise, and we've seen it pull back to where it's at today. So that's why I would have them number two. Ibit would be number one. And then MicroStrategy, for all the reasons that we've talked about for the past month or so, would be third in this. So I'm going Ibit. I don't think he's doing the same. Ibit, Coinbase, MicroStrategy. All in favor?

[Rashad Bilal]

Okay. All right.

[Ian Dunlap]

Xrp, One of your favorite investments, Rashad.

[Rashad Bilal]

XRP Army.

[Ian Dunlap]

Dark Horse territory.

[Rashad Bilal]

XRP Army. I just don't. I don't know.

[Ian Dunlap]

Come on, bro. I want to join in December. You got to see some value in it down the line. Not a primary investment. Right.

[Rashad Bilal]

Go after what pays. Learned at a young age. Go. Lil Wayne said that. Learned at a young age. Go after what pays.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah.

[Rashad Bilal]

Look, about the rate, the market, if you're talking about money, now we talking. XRP has not done anything in the last decade. If you really look at it, I think it's high. As high was when I first got into crypto.

[Troy Millings]

Did it get there? It got up close.

[Rashad Bilal]

It got close to that, but it didn't surpass it.

[Troy Millings]

I don't think it passed.

[Rashad Bilal]

So it's been a U shape, like the Usher chain.

[Troy Millings]

Oh, no, it passed. It got to as high in July, but I mean, it's not.

[Rashad Bilal]

It's a U chain. So why would you want to invest in something that you gotta hope and pray in 25 years from now that you're gonna see significant returns when you can actually make money in real Time right now. I'm not saying that it has no value and that it will never be valuable, but you waiting like the ghost who sold Christmas on an invisible bag. That's not coming.

[Ian Dunlap]

Because you can probably accumulate more of those than you can other cryptocurrencies. If you want to make the alternative argument for it, I'm just taking the other side of the coin, no pun intended. Based off the last segment.

[Troy Millings]

The question. What is the question is, do we invest it? Are we looking to invest in it? Every.

[Ian Dunlap]

Every asset. I'll set this in stock and telegram essay for stock club. Every investment that you make, whether it's a currency or company, is all based on price. So it depends on the price, on what you got it. If you believe in it, holding it, hold it for 10 years. Should it be a primary investment? No. Should it be an investment on the totem pole? Yes.

[Rashad Bilal]

And just for a record, I do personally own xrp. Just because anything can happen and you don't want to be that guy.

[Ian Dunlap]

It's a great lesson too. Totem pole matters. Hierarchy on the totem pole means a lot. Own everything.

[Troy Millings]

Yeah, we're still in that. I'm still in the investment since 2017. So like yeah, I've been in that. I still have my Tron coin. Like we were deep into research in that. Deep in the woods, staying up all night trying to figure out this whole thing. Not sleeping.

[Ian Dunlap]

One litecoin was a thing.

[Troy Millings]

Finding out like how to transfer money and then learn all that before we even knew what a ledger was. We was doing that. So yeah, still have that and some exposures to some other coins as well that probably worth nothing now. Ethereum classic. Like we was really.

[Ian Dunlap]

Oh my God, that's. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Troy Millings]

Bitcoin classic. All those, all those things, man, who's really in that?

[Ian Dunlap]

And the greatest lesson is whether you believe in something or not is to be a holder of it. But sometimes, even with me earlier this year, the criticism that you heard from me regarding the executives at Apple were based on a performance. So Rashad can also hold XRP and be critical of it because he's seen other things go up in a precipitous way that XRP may have not. But the other side of it is just whole for 10 years and it all panned out.

[Troy Millings]

Yeah, I'm looking at it right now. It's nasty Z classic.

[Rashad Bilal]

XRP Blanco on the check in. To name yourself after a coin, you got to really believe in it. I hope this works out for you, my brother.

[Ian Dunlap]

Tell them Blanco sent you.

[Rashad Bilal]

Tell them Blanco sent you. Well, we'll see.

[Troy Millings]

Be careful out there, y'.

[Rashad Bilal]

All. Yeah, we'll see.

[Troy Millings]

Safety.

[Rashad Bilal]

We'll see. Okay, anybody that took advantage of the market, Monday's deal. So Nvidia, we have two. We had to split the groups up into two groups. Says this is going to be very intimate. We have two groups going to Nvidia. Group A will be getting the information tomorrow. You will be getting an email tomorrow saying the date, the time. Once you RSVP to it, then we will send you the exact location and everything like that. This is like going to the White House. If you can't. You will be given two options to say I can make it. Click the I can make it button, fill out your name. Yeah. Your email address and all that. Or if you cannot make it, you, you could, you'll hit the button that says I can't make it. But please send me the video because we will record it. If you know you're not going to make it, don't hit the RSVP because.

[Ian Dunlap]

Gonna take somebody's spot.

[Rashad Bilal]

Yeah, we just got to register the names. It's a whole process. The next group will get your email next week. So this is very important. Half of the group will get emails tomorrow. When you get your email reply.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yep.

[Rashad Bilal]

If you did not get an email tomorrow, you'll get an email next week. When you get your email next week, reply to the email please. Then the DC information will be emailed probably next week also. Everybody, everybody will get the DC email. Okay.

[Ian Dunlap]

Amen.

[Rashad Bilal]

All right, let's talk about Elon Musk and Tesla. Tesla stock is on a rampage. Elon Musk, as a result became the first person to reach 600 billion dollar net worth on paper. So Tesla's at 700 $475. Close to 52 week high.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah, close to it.

[Rashad Bilal]

It's Re is. Re is. Re is, is rallied. It's rallied. It was down to 21452 week low. $214. 52 week high is $488. Right now it's at $475. So it was up $16 today. To the Tesla mafia out there, what does this mean? How far can it go? Are we seeing, are we going to see a pullback soon? Are you still encouraged about the stock?

[Ian Dunlap]

Absolutely. Once again, I hate to keep bragging about this point. Well, first point, go back for the last 10 years and see what month has the most drops and most opportunities for Tesla. Secondly, that April run, Tesla's remained in stock club, I said they would get back to this close to this all time high. I think next year they should probably be in the 569.84 range range. As one of the few tech stocks that are still beloved. Even though Elon is polarizing, he is the driver of the inventory there and driver of the stock price. And with him being more focused after him and Trump went through their kerfuffle and breakup, it's not a stock or person that you really want to bet against. Do I like all of his political leanings and all of his talking points? No. But you have to give him credit that he has gotten back focused, seems more health inspired, I'll say that. And is doing what he needs to do for the company to be able to thrive. It's another great lesson and not selling off on your positions just on a two or three month dip. And what is happening in the macro or micro environment. I think Tesla is of course here to stay. We can talk about SpaceX later if we want to and when he'll leave Tesla to run that ship. No pun intended. But no one should be surprised that Tesla recovered this well after he left dc.

[Troy Millings]

Yeah, I think it's part of the story. I think that the SpaceX piece is part of it. When we're talking about momentum, like, you know, they, they usually say momentum trades. This is like a momentum CEO and the momentum is moving in his favor right now. And when you got the board approval, which happened last month, obviously the SpaceX valuation has shot up, all pun intended, anywhere between 1.5 trillion at the highest I saw, with 800 million being the lowest, which is incredible for a company. It'll be the largest IPO in history. And then you had news of the driverless robo taxi that is now in Austin and how well it was received. So you can see again, this is not an evidence situation. This is a purely a tech play here. When we talk about robotics, when we talk about autonomous driving. 2026 is going to be a big year for Tesla. We've been pushing this back. It was supposed to happen in June and we were supposed to see these taxis hit the road. Then it was the fall. And now 2026 looks like the year that is actually going to happen. The first test went out, like I said, they've moved the factories to Texas to, to ramp up the, the inventory on it. The rally is pulled back a little bit here after hours, but it's strong signals around the momentum around Elon Musk specifically. And then subsidy obviously his companies have benefited from it as well.

[Ian Dunlap]

Will it pull back? Stock pulls back every month. If so, I'll tell you guys the price to get in. But if it gets anywhere then they're like that 3 70, 369 range. I like it as an entry point if you don't have one already. Behold for the long term and can we be Putin is worth more?

[Rashad Bilal]

Well, that's why I said publicly. Okay, so, okay, so talking about a stock pullback, let's talk about Oracle. We talked about it a little bit last week, but Oracle still, you know, fighting his way out of his it's pullback. Is now the time to buy Oracle?

[Ian Dunlap]

I don't think so. Stock club put in chat. If I can put in one of the prices I, I think you definitely need to wait to 1 at least 160 before you are willing to pull the trigger. If you look at the Fibonacci from the all time high over the last five years is underneath that 50 mark which 202 73. That's usually not a good sign. But there is a place where it's sitting where there is some signs, I'm sure. I don't know if you want to queue it up but there is a, a place that I do like to start to look to buy an asset. One thing I will say though, we have to stop looking for companies to give Nvidia like returns that are not Nvidia because then even Nvidia aren't gonna be gone gonna be able to give those returns that they've had since 2021. It's a different market, it's a different climate. The truth about the economy is coming out a lot faster. People are starting to brace for a recession and risk is off for most hedge funds. So if you like it, you have to like it at the right price. But if it's really at its fair value price for where it should be. But I would definitely wait for like that 160 area to start to acquire equities in this company.

[Troy Millings]

Yeah, I'll start by saying this and this is important to know. Cloud profitability is future dated.

[Ian Dunlap]

Right.

[Troy Millings]

So if you're writing notes, write that down in your notes. Cloud profitability is future dated, meaning that there's going to be profits down the road, but it takes time. And so what happened to Oracle? Yes, we've talked about the investment that they've made and the idea is if you build it, they will come. The reality is that you have to build it. And the problem that people are seeing Is that the cost that it's going to take to build is really strenuous on its capex, which is interesting because that feels like a natural thing. If we're going to spend more to make more that we need that time period to do it. The problem is that their cloud service in the immediate standpoint was growing. And so what did I say? I wanted to see, I wanted to see if the cloud business was continuing to grow, to continue to grow. And it did, right? They added new customers. The crowd business went From I think 32% up to 39% or 40%. That's a good sign. So I start studying who else in the cloud service business has had this type of run. Right? So we got to go back to the pioneer of all this, right? When we talk about cloud service, it starts with AWS in 2006. In 2006, people were not talking about cloud. In fact, they weren't even worrying about the profitability because that was not the core focus of Amazon's business. Right. This was an E commerce thing. They add this as a derivative to their portfolio 10 years down the line. Now AWS is the thing that we know it and it's profitable. 2008, Amazon sees not. Google sees the same thing, right? They watch what Amazon did, they create a Google cloud same thing, right? We had the pioneer with aws, we got the technology and they led into adaption into the Google space. Now that becomes a revenue for them six years down the line. So now we're talking 2016, we're starting to see profitability. Oracle just turned over to a cloud business in 2018. So we're right in that, that frame here of where are we going to see profitability from it. It just so happens that it's coming at the same time as a capex spin. I'm going to give you another company and I'm going to tell you what the report said inside the cloud space. This company, the cloud business was growing fast, but it wasn't yet dominant. We already know that Oracle is number four in the space, right? We talked about the other, other three. This company, they said that they had a heavy cloud capex depressing their margins, right? So the amount of money they were spending, the margins were getting thinner. How are we going to pay for this? They said their software still was the core profit engine, very similar to Oracle. They also said that their market was unsure if the company could really pivot from being a software to a cloud service. Know what that company's name was?

[Ian Dunlap]

Which one?

[Troy Millings]

Azure by Microsoft. Now if we look at it today, it's number three in the cloud space. And so when I'm telling you that profitability takes time and it's future dated, that's what we're seeing here. The issue here is obviously AI is in the mix of all of this, right? And so now when we look at Oracle, it's like, hey, they've reinvented themselves a few times already. They started out as enterprise software, they went from enterprise software to subscriptions. Now they're going from subscriptions right in that AI software to now cloud service. And obviously everything comes in AI. It's going to take time. Are they at the prime place? Well, there's this guy I listen to every Monday, his name is Ian Dunlap, he talks about this moving average, was the 400 day moving average in Oracle is sitting at 183.82. That is representation of what.

[Ian Dunlap]

Let me give him my levels, I don't mark him on it is currently.

[Troy Millings]

Sitting at its 400 day EMA, which is a sign and I'll leave it at that. If you know, you know. But Oracle is not going anywhere. The cloud space is, is going to be a space that they're going to play a part in. Obviously they're number four in the United States, five globally. But I think with what's happened is now you're, you're starting to see the sentiment change. The same way we talked about the positive sediment when we're talking about Tesla and Elon Musk. You're seeing negative sentiment around Oracle. You're seeing credit default swaps. I mean the credit default swaps, which is crazy, have spiked through the roof. Meaning people are saying, look, we're going to bet that if they can't pay it right, we need to make money off of it.

[Ian Dunlap]

We're betting on them, not on the downside.

[Troy Millings]

They're betting on them not being able to pay this off. I think that's interesting. And people are making money off that. In the short term, I think this is, Oracle will be here to stay. You're talking about the, the third or fourth wealth building wealthiest person in the world when we're talking about Larry Ellison. Obviously he has government backing on his side. This will, this will turn around. But it's an interesting point right now that it's at.

[Ian Dunlap]

Can I play devil's advocate real quick? Will people be so pro Oracle if he didn't have Trump in his back pocket? Because prior to him getting in. Yeah, most people weren't not looking at Larry in The way that he should be revered. But the stock was not a tech darling.

[Troy Millings]

You're right. And I think yes, I'm going to say yes and I'm not saying because of this administration. Right. I'm thinking when he was president the last time. So when he was 45, the tea leaves were there. Right. When we're talking about who's getting cloud contracts from the government, who's making the tick tock fiasco, who's going to be the cloud server for them, that's worked in his favor. Obviously. Now when we're talking about open AI and Stargate, that's worked in his favor. So is he a huge donor of that campaign? A thousand percent. Is he. Have we seen a clear pattern of how he makes sure that the people that are closest to him and take care of him are being taken care of? 100%.

[Ian Dunlap]

My final thought is you got to be careful. When a company is a steady gain, it becomes like I think one day they went up 89 bucks. Something like when a tech stock has too much of a breakout, a lot of people are going to play their reversion to the mean. And also just keep your eyes on how close him and Trump are because it's only a certain amount of deal flow that is going to go through him, his son and his partners. I think Wall street may know something that is going on but I think the fair price, like you said, it's sitting on the 400. They kind of drove the price back down to the mean, which tells me there's something else going on with him and the administration that's not been been talked about yet. Right.

[Troy Millings]

And then obviously the open AI deal that's part of it. That 300 billion dollar investment that open AI said that they're going to use with Oracle, they've added more customer acquisitions. Nvidia was part of the earnings call as well this, this past week. So Oracle is going to be here. I think it's going to be.

[Ian Dunlap]

All right.

[Rashad Bilal]

Well, we'll see.

[Ian Dunlap]

Shouting what you think. I saw you making faces.

[Troy Millings]

What's up?

[Rashad Bilal]

I mean from a. No, from a political, from a political situation. I mean you gotta like it. But you brought up a good point as far as nobody was talking about Oracle for a long time before that. But you know, from, from a purely. And that's important to have friends in high places and you know, Trump is somebody that definitely and move the needle. And that actually goes back to a question that somebody had an audience and they said are we going to see something similar to an April crash anytime soon.

[Ian Dunlap]

We're seeing a mini one right now.

[Rashad Bilal]

Well, no, no, but not like it. Not like it was in April.

[Ian Dunlap]

No. Like they may rhyme, but they won't be the exact same. You're gonna have to wait to next year for. But depending on what you're looking at, and even with Oracle, I will say this, with Oracle, Broadcom, smci, those are the canary and the coal mine that are telling you what's to come. There are some quality companies that are pulling back, which makes me afraid because even in, if you look at the 20, 22 drop, the COVID drop, it wasn't the quality companies that fell first, it was the ones that were a little bit weaker or B or C class. Keep your eyes on those for how quickly they fall. But as far as like the same April drop, we're not there yet. We'll probably get it next year. We're definitely not gonna get it to this month, though.

[Rashad Bilal]

Well, I also, I also say, I mean, the one variable is that Trump is liable to do anything at any given moment. And that's a wild card. Probably, like you said, highly unlikely. But Trump, Trump is definitely somebody that. Because that's what, that's why that happened, because of the whole tariff thing. And him, it was a kind of an impulsive decision without fully thinking it through. So he's definitely somebody that's an impulsive person and willing to just do things on the fly that could potentially hurt it. But another thing is too, is that like, you know, they always said, like, it's happy hour somewhere. It's always happy hour somewhere.

[Ian Dunlap]

Hello.

[Rashad Bilal]

There's always a crash somewhere.

[Ian Dunlap]

You have to go hunt and look for it.

[Rashad Bilal]

Right. So it's like even we just talked about Bitcoin. I mean, bitcoin is down 30 from his eye. So, you know, not necessarily a crash in the term of cryptocurrency, but it's concerned. But it's still, it's. When you look at a 30 drawdown. Right. That's something that.

[Ian Dunlap]

It's a nice correction.

[Troy Millings]

Yeah.

[Rashad Bilal]

So there's always. It might be a company, it might be a sector, it might be a set industry commodity, but there's always, there's always pullbacks and many crashes and big crashes that happen even when you don't really think about it because it's like the whole entire market might not crash. But one particular thing that, that is, you know, still a good investment over the course of time could potentially crash.

[Troy Millings]

Let me, can I add something to this?

[Ian Dunlap]

Go ahead.

[Troy Millings]

I'm Gonna get this one away. This is, this is pretty interesting. I'm glad you brought that up because yes, when we see Nvidia pullback is down at 176 or we saw Broadcom pull back. When you listen to the Broadcom report last week when they reported earnings, it was interesting. We watched it shoot up to 4:20 and then around 6:00 it was like, wait, how did this thing drop to under 389? And then what happened was the CEO spoke and Hock Tan is the, is the CEO of, of Broadcom. And he said something very interesting that investors kind of took away. It reminded me of when we, we listened to Zuckerberg speak and he was talking about, I'm going to spend and you know, going to do this, I'd rather overspend and understand. And people like, wait, he's being frivolous. And the stock fell. He said we're going to be passing through more components that are not ours. Right. So those costs will be passing through more cost of the rack. So when he's talking about racks, he's talking about the actual racks that go inside of data centers, which is a whole thing inside of a rack. You got compute, you got memory, you got networking, and you got power and cooling. When he said that, my brain started thinking, I'm like, wait, he's saying that they're not going to be doing all these things. Right. They're going to actually pass off this work. And when they pass off that work, that means the margins that they once thought they were going to have are now smaller, are gone.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yep.

[Troy Millings]

Right. So if we thought that they were going to have high margins because wait, they're completing all the TPUs for Google. Well, they're telling Google, hey, we are not going to do all these components. We're going to actually hire somebody outside to do part of it. But we'll still give you the wrap. Then you find out that they might not be doing all of Google's GPUs. I mean TPUs. And so now you're starting to see the, the stock fall down here. But inside that if they're going to tell us straight up that they're going to be using other people to build the components, well, then I got to find out who are the people that they're using for their components. And the most important component that they're going to need is, like I said in the diagram a few weeks ago, is the brain of that operation. So if now Broadcom is the heart available, the memory has to be the ring of it. And when you just said that part of the, hey, there's, there's going to be a correction somewhere but somebody's going to benefit somewhere else. If you look at that memory sector, if you look at Western digital, if you look at Seagate, if you look at Micron, they are all up 200% individually, right? Some I think Seagate probably higher. They've all gone over 200 this year. That tells you the level of importance of the memory sector. So we can talk GPUs, but we have to talk about the brain operation. That memory piece is the reason why we keep talking about Micron. I know they're going to be reporting this Wednesday. That sector inside of technology has had an amazing year in 2026. SK Hynix, which is the leader globally, right? That's the South Korean company. Samsung is the other leader South Korean company and they're saying that hey, there's a bottleneck here and it starts with us, right? If we don't have enough compute to put inside these chips, the memory to put inside, there's going to be another supply chain demand that, that I don't know if anybody's really ready to deal with. And so I'm watching that, that memory sector very intently because what happens when there's a supply demand issue? Number one, they could say hey, we're going to up the prices on these. And the hyperscalers have no, it's either you have it or you don't have your, your gpu. It has to come with it. And so that sector now looks like it's primed to have a, it had a great year this year but I think that run continues into 2026 also.

[Ian Dunlap]

Really quickly, you only need four if you're new, you only need four stocks to get rich off of and you're good. Second, if you're looking for a crash, like Rashad said, look across everything. The Japanese Jin Carry trade is over. Therefore the Japanese yen is not doing well. The bond market has been in freefall for five years since we started to show easy one to trade to the downside, especially if you're in the futures market. SMCI has been in freefall and IONQ is starting to have some pressure definitely off of that high. So there's always a crash somewhere. But please remember you only need four and you don't need to always find something that is in crash territory to then buy. You may be better off buying an asset that is going to continue to go up that is crash proof. So do what you want. But the Exposure to too many stocks is going to lead you to a rabbit hole of nothingness.

[Troy Millings]

You think Super Michael's dead.

[Ian Dunlap]

I never thought Super Micro was and I love the guys over there. So no slight to y' all shout to executive management. They never were a tier. I don't want to talk about the stepped on companies. None. No, they had a great moment but that moment came off like remember when HOV made the blueprint and everybody was like doing the soul samples and trying to. And it sounded like him until Blueprint two came out. That's Nvidia. It's a lot of companies who benefited from the rise of AI and they. Everyone's doing all this exorbitant spending and now we're about to hit a global bottleneck and those numbers don't look the same. Be careful.

[Troy Millings]

I'm with you. I'm with you. They're not a tier and I don't want people, I want people to take that away from it. In a sense that all semiconductors and all semiconductor companies, they're not created equal and all of them have different responsibilities. That's why I think it's so important to educate yourself on what they actually do. So obviously when we're talking about COMPUTE and gpus, Nvidia does that. Super Micro does something very different, right? They help in the infrastructure of the rack for Nvidia and they partner with some of its competitors. Well, so they do partner with Cisco, they partner with Dell, but they're part of the Nvidia ecosystem. So if we see.

[Ian Dunlap]

But just because they're in the ecosystem, not to cut you, doesn't mean I'm just.

[Troy Millings]

I want people to understand because they might think like, hey, Super Micro. Oh, that's like amd. No it's not. Oh, that's like broke out. No, it's not. It's not.

[Ian Dunlap]

Right?

[Troy Millings]

It's not. It's just, it's, it's not what they do.

[Rashad Bilal]

Right.

[Troy Millings]

They're part of the ecosystem. And so if we, when we see Nvidia pull back, right. It's almost like when we see. We saw Bitcoin pull back, the rest of the cryptocurrency space takes a hit and it doesn't fall at the same relative speed. Right. They had some issues internally, right. They almost got delisted this year. Thankfully they didn't. But they're part of that ecosystem. And so if we believe in Nvidia and these are their partners the same way when we, we thought about Horweave and we thought about these other Companies and we've seen the benefits. Right. Dell was one of those companies that we talked about inside their racks. They'll be there until they're not a partner anymore. If they're not a partner, then that's not a conversation. But the fact that they're part of the ecosystem, the fact that they strategically partnered with them tells me that they're, they'll, they're not dead, but they are struggling.

[Ian Dunlap]

No, I'm not gonna say they're dead, but they are struggling. And just because a king maker choose to do business with you, that doesn't make you a king. No.

[Troy Millings]

And then I don't think they're supposed.

[Ian Dunlap]

To be, but people were treating it.

[Troy Millings]

As if it was because of that run up.

[Ian Dunlap]

Right.

[Troy Millings]

We saw the cup. Wait, this company was at 400. Is that a thousand dollars? Oh, I better buy. Yeah, but do you even know what they do?

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah, yeah.

[Rashad Bilal]

Oh, one life, one love. It can only be one king for real. It's interesting because this shout out to the brother just put in chat and yeah. Even the stuff that, you know, we, we patronize all the time. And anybody that knows me knows that, you know, I'm obviously a low head, but Ralph Lauren stock.

[Ian Dunlap]

Low. Keeping cooking.

[Rashad Bilal]

Ralph Lauren stock is at $371. Two years ago was at $143.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yep.

[Rashad Bilal]

Ralph Lauren stock. If you look at the chart of Ralph Lauren stock in a time when a lot of retail and clothing brands.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yep.

[Rashad Bilal]

Especially high end luxury brands have, have, you know, really suffered. Right. They're like that middle low in luxury. They're like, they're like in the middle like, you know, right above like Nike but below Gucci.

[Ian Dunlap]

Are they entry level luxury?

[Troy Millings]

Purple label for sure. No.

[Rashad Bilal]

Well, purple label, Purple label. But he's, I think you just talking about just the brand in general brand overall.

[Troy Millings]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean he's, that's a. Yeah. Legacy brand.

[Rashad Bilal]

Yeah. I would say every day. Every, every day.

[Ian Dunlap]

Okay.

[Rashad Bilal]

Every day. You know, it's, it's. Yeah. But man, their stock is on, is on fire right now, so.

[Troy Millings]

It ain't Ralph though. That's a fact.

[Ian Dunlap]

But that's funny.

[Troy Millings]

So that's. Would it be a company that you invest in though? Just, I mean the stock has run up. I, I haven't done the research on them, so I wouldn't know. But is that like a company that you would feel comfortable investing in?

[Rashad Bilal]

Well, without fully understanding the, the technicals and everything. I understand the brand. Ralph Lauren has weathered the storm and has stood the test of Time. Ralph Lauren's a time, Polo's, Polo's time 100. So I would feel comfortable investing in it because I feel like me as a consumer. I, I feel comfortable if I come back 10 years from now, I'm gonna be able to wear the same thing ten years from now. And it's not going to be looked at any crazy. It's not going to like because we wore the same thing 20 years ago in high school we was wearing it, we was wearing polo. 25 years ago we was wearing Polo. And it, it never, it never had a phase where it was like oh nah, throw it in the garbage. So you gotta those type of brands. I think it says a lot about the nostalgic feel that it, that is bring. So as far as the stock is concerned, I would feel comfortable from that standpoint as far as understanding the brand and, and knowing that the brand is here to stay.

[Ian Dunlap]

Really quick. 7.57 in revenue. 7.57 billion in revenue. Gross margin is 69.2%. Net margin is 11.2% for this category. You said the profit margin was 11 for this category. Not bad. And then also too they haven't if you look on a quarter over quarter basis. I think they had a little issue in 15 and 16 but ever since 2017 they've been studying to the upside like little drawdown. One of the things you have to look at when you're deciding if you're going to invest in a stock is how far it can go down. So it really doesn't matter if a stock can go up 150. If it's drawdown is 58% they have relatively low drawdown as well. Not a stock I would particularly like want to invest in. But if it was outside of like my normal tech weighted bag, this is one that will give you few nightmares if you invested in it. Like solid stock through and through. Like even if you go decade over decade, the highest 190, the lowest it usually gets to is like 78 or some change. If you buy anytime in that 78 to 85 range is tremendous upside. So like you said, a legacy company that is running incredibly well.

[Troy Millings]

Definitely legacy company. I don't have any exposure to retail, consumer retail. I just feel like the cynical nature of it. Yeah, but I mean, yeah, I understand. Definitely a legacy brand that has stood the test of time. And in an era, in a time where retail is not doing well at.

[Rashad Bilal]

All and in a time where the consumer is so fickle, it's hard for sure for 50 years and maintain relevance. But shout out to you in the, in the comment section for putting that in because that's a good thing to just. I wasn't thinking about that, but I'm glad that you said that because it does relate back to the stocks and it makes it a conversation that we can have as far as, you know, buying things that you could relate to by understanding. And even when we talk to kids, a lot of times we, we. That's the entry level as far as like Apple, Nike, different things like that just say like you can own stock in those companies that you actually are patronizing. If you're going, if you are going to support the brand and buy the brand, then you might want to think about being an owner in the brand also. Like I said, that's kind of like an entry level conversation to somebody that's never purchased stock before. But a lot of people, a lot of people might not even know that Polo was something that you could even purchase on the stock.

[Ian Dunlap]

For sure.

[Troy Millings]

Probably not for sure.

[Rashad Bilal]

If you are paying anybody, make sure you get your invoices out before the end of the year, please. If you want to pay somebody for 2026, because you can get the tax deduction now as opposed to waiting to 2026. So if you, if you, if you're a business owner and you need tax deductions and if you are a business owner, you're always going to need tax deductions. You might want to consider that if you have some, some, some cash over and above what you need right now, look to see who you're going to pay in the first quarter or even the first half of 2026. If you know that, if you know you're going to pay these people, it, it's probably beneficial to pay them now. Have the contract ready. You know, make sure that, you know, okay, upon agreed upon work date, you know, work has to start on this day. But I'm gonna pay you now because it's going to be a tax deduction for you in 2025. Even though the work doesn't start until 2026.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah.

[Troy Millings]

And do that inside your brokerage account as well. I think that's something that people kind of like gloss over and don't look at the gains and losses. Sometimes I think you can carry over your losses for to up to three years. So if 2023 was, or 2022 was a, was a terrible year for you and you have some losses, but you've seen some incredible gains, you can use that to offset because that will be Taxable that that income that you made. And I'm happy that you made the money. Yes, I'm happy that you made it and hopefully it was long term capital gains. I'm happy that you made it. But just be mindful that that money that you just received from having those a thousand percent option calls or how many ticks you did if you that's taxable. So be mindful of that. We're getting to that season.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah.

[Rashad Bilal]

Oh, and Invest Fest, the Street continues. We're going to be talking about Invest Fest soon. Don't worry about it. But first billionaire has been confirmed. So we have a streak going for five years consecutively of a billionaire, at least one billionaire coming to Invest Fest. And happy to announce that the first billionaire for 2026 has been confirmed. So the streak continues. We will have a billionaire, at least one billionaire, but probably multiple again perhaps this year. The streak continues.

[Troy Millings]

Do not take that lightly.

[Rashad Bilal]

The streak continues.

[Ian Dunlap]

Great job. Job well done.

[Rashad Bilal]

Appreciate it.

[Ian Dunlap]

Job well done.

[Rashad Bilal]

Appreciate it.

[Ian Dunlap]

It's out here working year round job. I know y' all go in the summer year round job.

[Troy Millings]

Oh, you got some means already, man.

[Rashad Bilal]

100. Don't stop the work. Don't stop. Okay, let's talk about, let's talk about leverage ETFs.

[Ian Dunlap]

Oh yes.

[Rashad Bilal]

NVDL, AMDL. Are they sophisticated tools for investors or long term portfolio destroyers and you want to just kind of give reference point on what leverage ETF is.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah. So it gives you, it moves a lot faster. So NVDL is two times long. Nvidia. Okay. And then amdl of course put in chat. What do you think AMDL is a leverage asset for? It's right there should, you should know. But it's for Nvidia. That's two times long as well.

[Rashad Bilal]

And nothing not to cut you off but I want to just add some because I saw Charlie Kirk, you see that when he talked about how he, he invested in trip triple leverage. Qqq.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yep.

[Rashad Bilal]

And in I think it was like 20. It might have been. It was throwing up. It was either this April or it was during COVID But it was one of the, it was one of the major market drawdowns.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah. I think it was on Covet.

[Rashad Bilal]

He talked about how he invested in the, in the leverage and he gave that whole thing. So that was kind of interesting because I, I just saw that randomly on my timeline.

[Troy Millings]

I admittedly I thought and you know, because I know I want you to, to go into depth of this but sophisticated. Yes. And I, I did this in April, exactly. When the market had pulled down in xoxl, that was triple leverage.

[Ian Dunlap]

Right.

[Troy Millings]

So that followed the semiconductor ETF at a triple leverage. That one is, I think, I think that's probably the largest gain right now in the portfolio. I think that's probably like 800% a good time. Obviously, when you see something like, you know, Liberation Day, kill the market. If you believe in that sector, it's an opportunity. But yeah, I'm, I'm writing notes now. I'm listening.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah. Usually I would say no. Well, for AMDL and nvdl, no, now is not the time because I'm not going to say that the Nvidia trade is over because. Because it's not. But the timing of when to have a double or triple leverage etf, now is not the time to do so. For years, one of my favorites, same triple lever tco, which is a triple bull market ETF I loved a lot. The only part that sucks though is when it draws down a lot. You have to be very careful, but the timing of it isn't important. I think you need to do this after you have your base of your first four stocks and then you at least have 100 shares in each. You don't need to start off doing triple lever or double levered. But the nvdl, I don't love amdl, I don't love their other assets that can get you the same kind of return without you having all that risk on the table. And the volume is low. And people have asked me about Kathy's Arc venture fund too. It's the same thought. Like I get the idea of it, but now is not the time to be risk on. When all hedge funds, not all, but majority of hedge funds are risk off.

[Troy Millings]

And it's not timing of it matters. The timing definitely matters, which is why a situation like April makes a lot of sense. But it's not for the undisciplined. I'll be honest with you. When you're going up 3% or triple at every day, you also have that same triple way when it goes down. So you know, you have a few days of, of negative pullbacks. That's times three. And so most people don't have the stomach to say like wait, I'm drawing down, this is ridiculous. It's not ridiculous and just give up on the position. So I like what you said though. I think that's important, right? Number one, do you have your table set right? Rather than having a triple leverage ETF, do you even have the ETF in your portfolio analyst. 100 shares and 100 shares. And if, if it's the ETF that you don't have, do you have 100 shares of the companies inside that ETF? So if it's XOXL, is it Nvidia, is it Broadcom, is it AMD, is it Texas Instruments, all of those are inside that etf. Do you own shares in those companies? Right, like that would tell me. All right, if you, you've done that, can this be a way to have some positive gains? Absolutely. But first have stability. I like what you, you said though.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah. Somebody put in chat mstu. I mean it was at 315. It's currently at 976. Like if you don't know what the threats are because at one point MicroStrategy looked like a sure bet. But then if you go leveraged and don't get out at the right time thinking that you're going to get out of it, you have to know when an asset class is going to turn around. You have to be very careful. Y'. All.

[Troy Millings]

MST, what's. Oh, it's 2x on that.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yep.

[Troy Millings]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're interesting. They're interested to say the least.

[Rashad Bilal]

Quantum. It's quantum computing. In quantum computing, what stands out the most right now?

[Ian Dunlap]

IBM and Google, to be clear, I don't want to give it away, but. Okay, I want to say this too, like very clearly, not only do you have to invest in the companies that move to GDP of America, you guys know that you have to invest in the companies that already have hedge fund like ecosystems inside of them. So if you look at Microsoft, since 1987, they've acquired like 200 and off the record, maybe like 270, 280 companies. Right. That's a hedge fund and index fund in one. And that's why I say like I like the premise of iomq. But IOMQ is not going to beat Google.

[Troy Millings]

No.

[Ian Dunlap]

Or Microsoft or some others. And I won't put Apple in that race because Apple isn't going to win a quantum race. But if you, even if you look at IBM, it's a legacy company that is incredibly boring. But if we're talking about artificial intelligence and quantum, they were working on that in 2010. They had the little robot on Jeopardy. Google has been working on this since 2012. So I know everyone keeps asking, what's the next thing? I keep always saying though, the company with the most money is going to buy the thing that is next. Microsoft did it open AI and Google Already has a great formation. So while I like the premise of some of the up and coming quantum companies, they're not going to be Google or Microsoft.

[Troy Millings]

Can I take Google for like I said, yes. All right, let's talk about Google because I like what you said there about a hedge fund. There was this post I saw, I thought it was really interesting. It said Google might have the greatest investing record ever, turning early bets into massive wins. I'm gonna run down a few. Android, they invested 50 million, right? That turned into 200 billion. Would it be. They invested in YouTube at 1.65 billion. That has turned into a 300 billion dollar return. They invested in DeepMind, which is pretty much at the core of everything we're talking about in AI. You don't have open AI, you don't have anthropic. You have any of this without open mind. I mean deep mind. They invested 500 million in that. That has turned into a hundred billion dollar return. They invested in Stripe, a little under 100 million. That has turned into a 70 billion dollar investment. They invested in 2015 when people had no idea why they were doing it. 12 billion into SpaceX. SpaceX valuation, that has now turned into a 1.5 trillion dollar return. So over the course of 20 years, they've delivered between 25x to 4,000 extra turns across tech AI platforms and space, space, the keyword, that's a whole nother episode that we're going to do. But in terms of Google again creating the ecosystem that they control, when we thought about AI, right, we talk about it, we talk about these chat box, we took any pick one, what do they do best? They comb the Internet. Who is the Internet? Who has more data than anyone? Google. I saw this stat. This is going to blow your mind. They said Google has unlimited, unparalleled and privileged amount of access to the Internet. In terms of pages seen, they see 3.2 more pages than open AI. They see 4.2 more pages times pages than Microsoft, five times out of Meta and Anthropic. So they're seeing everything. These other renditions are seeing some of it. They're controlling it.

[Rashad Bilal]

And they have the two larger search.

[Troy Millings]

Engines and they have two largest versions and they did something very unique. They said, you know what? Rather than having its own platform, Gemini is going to be incorporated into your search. So you can search and it's going to give you Gemini anyway. Now they've incorporated the Internet with their AI chatbot. What do you do?

[Rashad Bilal]

Yeah, they have a monopoly, allegedly. Well, and before we Bring our guest on for the question for the audience. The two biggest search engines. What do you think the two biggest search engines are? Jeopardy.

[Troy Millings]

Are we answering this or they answer.

[Rashad Bilal]

Google and Gemini, Google GPT, Google, Microsoft Chat and Google. So the two biggest search engines gave you the clue. Google, Google and YouTube. But the reason why I asked that question is that people don't look at YouTube as a search engine. But just think about it. Just today I had. I'm looking at lights from my house and I said, LED lights. I want to see what the visually looks like. So I go on YouTube and I search it. YouTube is the second biggest search engine. Google is the first biggest search engine. But Google owns YouTube.

[Ian Dunlap]

Now.

[Troy Millings]

This. This is true. There was a time. I'm not gonna say both of you, but you thought chat GBT would come for it. Do you still feel that way?

[Rashad Bilal]

It's not over yet.

[Ian Dunlap]

No, but. But what I will say, too, Sam made the mistake in his arrogance of telling some allegedly y'. All.

[Troy Millings]

Yes, please.

[Ian Dunlap]

That Google Gemini would never surpass chat GPT. And they said it. Let's just put it on Search engine. We'll kill you that way. Sometimes you can tell people what to do to beat you with your own arrogance. So at the time when I said that, they were two separate standalone things that were not integrated into one as a transformer.

[Troy Millings]

Here's the part, though. Do you think Google looked at it and said, you know that where you're getting your information from.

[Ian Dunlap]

Where it's from us.

[Troy Millings]

We're the source.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah. Along with Reddit, which. Right. Reddit stock. My Lord.

[Troy Millings]

Oh, God.

[Ian Dunlap]

Talk about selling your IP too early by not letting them leverage your ip. That's a mistake.

[Rashad Bilal]

But we got a guest. Let's bring our guest up.

[Troy Millings]

Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it.

[Rashad Bilal]

Let's get into it. What's going on? My brother.

[Ian Dunlap]

My God. My brother was popping.

[Derek Hayes]

What's up with y'?

[Ian Dunlap]

All?

[Derek Hayes]

I was just locked into what y'. All. I'm sitting here learning, man. Just locked into y' all conversation.

[Rashad Bilal]

Appreciate it. Appreciate that.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah.

[Troy Millings]

Can we turn you up a little bit?

[Rashad Bilal]

Turn your volume up.

[Derek Hayes]

Y' all hear me? Better.

[Troy Millings]

It's getting better.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah, it's getting better now.

[Derek Hayes]

Better.

[Rashad Bilal]

Yeah, yeah. All right. Derek Hayes, superstar entrepreneur. I don't think we really even need the full introduction. I mean, you've been on the program several different times. Earn your leisure and market Mondays and invest fest. But, you know, we look at Big Dave Cheesesteak and it's A staple in our community and has. I think it's one of the fastest growing franchises, I believe. And. And yeah, man, you've made history several different times. So, man, first and foremost, congratulations on everything and welcome back to the program.

[Derek Hayes]

Thank you, man. Thank y' all for having me. I appreciate this platform that y' all got, man. Cause y' all giving people opportunities and resources to tell their story and showcase their businesses. So thank y' all for that.

[Rashad Bilal]

Can you just go a little bit louder? Go whatever the loudest. Whatever the loudest is that it can go.

[Derek Hayes]

Hey, Z, come here for a second.

[Rashad Bilal]

All right. Yeah. We good? That's good. Yeah.

[Derek Hayes]

All right.

[Rashad Bilal]

All right. So, yeah, like I said, let's. Let's get right into it, man. Let's get right into the information. So you. You now have 12 locations. You have 12 locations open, and you have 12 in development with over 100 franchise units signed. Right. So my question is, what systems had to be in place before you felt comfortable scaling at that speed?

[Derek Hayes]

Just not doing it myself. I had to realize that it's not me, it's we. And I started first, but I was looking at, you know, revenue is loud, cash. You know, a lot of people don't understand that. You know, you can make a bunch of money, but when you aren't profiting what you need to profit, you start to understand that you need better systems, you need better people. And every level that you get to in fast casual, it teaches you, you know, a lesson that if you don't do these things, you're just going to be a repeated business or you're going to be a mom and pop brand. I wanted to scale, so that's me getting on my own way. That's me putting systems in place, SOP manuals. That's me hiring the right people. I'm so happy about this. This hire that I got coming in for Q1 a COO, I got a big announcement coming for that. But it's just. That's how I was able to do it. I was able to put systems in place, procedures, and just get out the way and don't think that I know everything. Even though I built the brand, the brand can outgrow you if you don't learn it, especially in fast casual, into a system that I didn't understand, you know, in the beginning, man.

[Troy Millings]

I want to applaud you because being. Having a franchise is an incredible feat. Being a. A black male doing it, it. It makes it even more incredible. I think there's a statistic, I think 8% of, of franchises. It's lower.

[Derek Hayes]

Yeah, it's, you know, it's like 5 to 6%, you know, 700,000 people right now franchise businesses and only 44,000 people are African Americans.

[Troy Millings]

So less, less than 5%, let's say, let's just call that number, which makes you, what you're doing, absolutely phenomenal. I know you were in top seven, top six. We got to get that up to number one this year. I'm sure that you will. In terms of fast, fast casual, we're gonna make sure it happens. I want to know what, what transition shift led you to say, you know what? Franchising is going to be my wealth building strategy. We talk about investing in the stocks, we talk about investing in the market, we talk about real estate, other ventures. You looked at franchise and said, this is going to be the wealth building strategy. Why'd you do that? What made you come to that conclusion?

[Derek Hayes]

I decided to do that because when I started, it was just, you know, me wanting to, you know, just have a famous brand. But then I started doing a lot of philanthropy. I started, you know, uplifting communities. And I'm like, you know, I could really help people change their trajectory and their household incomes and their family futures. But then when I started franchising, I started to understand that you got to deal with sophisticated operators. Because if you franchise something, somebody don't understand the business just have money. That's the surest way to go out of business. Even if the systems are in place, if they aren't following the systems and understand what they're doing, you want to hold their hand. So for me, I just knew that not raising capital at the time, you know, you got 600, $700,000, you know, store build outs, the best way to do it is to use other people to be able to grow the brand and then you collect the 6% revenue. You helping them, they helping you, and you able to scale. When you look at the McDonald's story, you know, he was able to pity systems in place because he knew that it would take him probably 20, 30 years or even more to be able to have hundreds and hundreds of locations. So it's like, you know, you're looking at the stock market, you know, you know, you got some people that go IPO at a certain point, or you got some people that, you know, decide to go franchise route, or you got people that do like Chipotle did and have corporate owned stores and you gotta have deep pockets that way. And being an African American, you know, with limited Resources coming in this game. I was trying to, you know, I was playing chess with that, wanted to play, play with the big dogs. And the way you do that is you got to be systematic. So the one thing in fast casual I want people to understand is it's not just about food, you know, it's about your, your customer understanding that your system's in place, that you can repeat the same quality and culture every time they walk through that door. That's one thing. Secondly is now when you got the top line revenue, you're looking at AUVs, right? So in fast casual right now, you, you look, you can look at from 1.5 to 3 million to 3 and a half million that now going into the unicorn stage. But what really matters is the bottom line, your profitability. Are you sitting at 20 in profitability? Are you sitting under 60 in your cogs? Are you sitting at, I mean your prime costs? Are you sitting at 30% of your cost? Are you sitting under 25 in labor? Those are the things that's going to make you a repeatable business to be able to scale. And when I was able to do those things, I knew that I had a system that will work if I gave it to the right person.

[Ian Dunlap]

I heard you talk a lot about systems when you killed it on the Vespa stage. A lot of pressure going somewhere, my lord, and tonight. But how do you know what systems to build for entrepreneurs that are looking to scale? And if you can do it all over again, what systems would you start with to build the business right the first time?

[Derek Hayes]

Well, if I was to start right now and do it all over again, it was a fresh brand. The first thing I would do is hire the right people that I need, the right C suites. Because, you know, in fast casual, in any business, you know, it's the certain rooms you walk in, the certain introductions, the certain quality of brand that you have to have or you'll just be looked upon as everybody else. As I just said, it's less than 8% of us that actually own franchises. So when we walk in and we actually got to know what we doing or we just got lucky. No, I was just getting lucky for a long time in other people's eyes. When I was really studying the brand and understanding what I wanted to do, my book I got coming out right now called the Underdog Must Win. I felt like sometimes being an underdog is always the best way to be, to be the top dog. Because while everybody's underestimating you, you are polishing your systems. Up and making things better. You know, I started in the Shell gas station in 2014. My first business was Dave's Philly Water Ice. And then in 2016, I switched it to Big Dave Cheesesteaks because nobody knew what water ice was. So the actual name of your business is important. And I would tell people, you got A, B, C, D sites. You want to find what is the best site that works for you because you pick wrong. You can have a good brand, but if the traffic isn't there, if the want is not in that community, you, you won't grow. So I started in a little place where I had to actually build the traffic. I had people come in 40 minutes outside the city to come see what I was doing. But at that time, I was just practicing and polishing something that wasn't scalable because you got different cooks putting different amounts of, you know, meat on sandwiches. You got people, you know, trying to create their own way of putting cheese on. Right now my systems are so systematic. Is that the. From the, from the cashier to the grill cook to the fry cook to the person in the back of the house, they all can do the same systems. And it makes it easy for everybody to do so. Is your business systematic or is it problematic? And a lot of us got a lot of noise. That's problematic businesses because it feels good to us. But when you go in those investment rooms, you know, you could tell your story and you could be, you know, sorry, sorrow if you went until you come from the hood and all these places, but nobody cares. They care about numbers. You know, vulnerability is the weakest point in business, you know, and I had to learn that. We be thinking, you know, sometimes we go into me and we'd be like, we killed it. We did good. That person felt me, understood my story. But yeah, you, you are a great person with emotions. And in business, emotions kill you when you scaling something because you need to know what's going on. When an investor say, hey, why your bottom lines look like this? What is the routine? How are we going to fix this? These procedures has to be be in place. And for me, I had to go out and start hiring things that I didn't know because it teaches me as well. So if I'm the student while I'm building something, I could be the best CEO I can be because I don't know it all. I'm going to go get what I need to know.

[Rashad Bilal]

That's a lot of game. So. So let me ask you this. As far as if, if somebody Wants to buy a franchise. What's the process? Can they buy one location? Do they have to buy multiple locations? Do you have to approve the location? What's the training that they have to go through? Like what, what's. What's the process?

[Derek Hayes]

Yeah. So first we do scouting. So my team, you know, we'll reach out to a franchise application that look appealing, and we'll see where they stand as far as if they have experience in the restaurant industry or they just have, you know, money. I've met a lot of people just have money, and that's the surest way to fail, because people with money don't seem like they could do anything wrong, and they don't want to follow systems. So we, if you make it past that, then we have something called Discovery Day. You come down to Atlanta, my flagship location. We walk you through all the procedures of the business, the handbooks, what we expect, what we looking for. We find out where you know, your site selection, all of these places where you, you know, where you plan to go. But I tell people, if you franchise a business, I don't want to just franchise you one store because I'm not really setting you up for success, because your buying power is only start going in when you have two and three. So it's like right now, if I'm getting a certain amount of food costs on my, on my corporate stores because I have multiple. If now you have one unit and now you got a GM sitting on your salary, you might have a person, like a district person getting ready, you know, to open up more stores. But as you wait and it's going to be growing pain. So I suggest when the person is franchising, they got one open and then maybe five or six months, you know, have the other one right behind it, because that's the best way to go to in the procedure. Now, from a scaling standpoint, with Big Dave's, what we do is we find out exactly what the culture is in your own self. Like, I always ask this question at Discovery Day, what can you do without your money? Because I'm a young brand, like, what resources can you bring to the table? And I think that's important because you want your franchisees to be able to grow what you scale with you, to be able to have insight on the company right with you, because they have experience. Most of the franchisees that I'm talking to right now today have a lot more experience than I have in fast casual. But now my C suites have a lot more experience than they have in fast Casual. Like my franchise advisor, he had multiple different streams of restaurants. You have Dunkin Donuts. Just different things. But these are the things that I was able to do over the last five years of just polishing my business. And, and now in 2026, people are going to understand what it's like to be the underdog and turn into the top dog. Because I will be the first African American to scale that billion dollar company.

[Rashad Bilal]

Let me, let me, let me just say this, let me ask, follow up. How much is it?

[Derek Hayes]

Oh, I'm sorry, 45,000. So, so it's 45, 000. And then if you buy a five pack, it goes, it goes down. So like at your second one, it might be 35 to 25. It goes down after that. But if you. Yeah, I read a set of five packs in the 10 pack.

[Troy Millings]

We learned that early. Look, fast casual. It's interesting. And when we look at publicly traded fast casual companies, Kava, the sweet greens of the world, even Chipotle, to a certain extent, they've had a rough year. But I'm watching you climb and have success. And I know there's another Dave that is ahead, but we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna bump them out the number one spot. What are you doing right, that they're not getting correct? Right. Because it's been a tough year for those fast cash flow companies. You're growing and you're scaling. Those margins you talked about were impressive. What are you guys getting right?

[Derek Hayes]

Well, for one, I think everybody is so top line driven, they're not worried about the profitability. And I think that's what I started to like chokehold on, you know, when you look at subways, their auvs I think is like, it could be anywhere from like 850 to a million two or something like that or even less sometimes. But they might got two people running those stores, you know, so you got to think about labor's low. So like I'm going to just make this example. Say if you got a store that's doing $2 million, right. But it take you six people to run that store. And then you got a gm, right? That store is not more profitable than a store doing a million dollars with two people in one G because it's less labor to pay out, your numbers look better. So it's something called a trade off, right? So I just now took me a long time to get these egg rolls now manufactured now, right? So now my egg rolls about to go everywhere. All in the stadiums, all over Right. But I was able to cut out a whole prep kitchen that cost me anywhere between 100 to $150,000 on a build out, right? So now it might cost me more to make those egg rolls, but it's gonna cost me less in labor. And now I'm able to swap out and bring that there so I don't lose that profit ability. Fast casual is literally every single day is a real game of you can be up one day and be down. Because right now your GM could do the wrong, order in the order 5 or 6 cases of too much anything and hurt your profits, right? So we really systemize everything, and that's what's important. Like, you know, like, I don't know, like, when it comes to, like, fine dining. But fast casual is so niche that a penny can hurt you if it ain't, if it ain't put in, Right? Like, I just was able to bring my state costs all the way down so that I can be able to make franchisees happy. Because if I'm just making the money in the corporate stores and the franchisees is not reciprocating what I'm doing, I'm not setting them up for success. So what I was able to do, Troy, over the last few years is I've been able to fight the vendors. I've been able to lock in on bottom line a lot more. Understand, like paper towels, a bag can hurt you. Like a paper bag versus a plastic bag can hurt you. In fast casual, you might be paying 10 cents on one and 3 cents on the other. And if you order in a couple million bags a year, you do the math, you might be saving additional $75,000, you know, in savings where you could have brought in, whether two hires or you could have brought in a district person that could have helped you scale the brand. So that's the way I look at it all the way around the block taught me everything. This is no different. I want people to understand that. Like, we need to understand that. We've been hustlers, but it's time to translate it into actually making it work versus making it look good. We want to look good. Us as like to look good. The people who win is the people who are patient that struggle and strive for the real things out of the business, and that's pulling the profit out. I just said this to my guy earlier. You look at Jay Z, you look at Master P, you look at any of these guys that was in the industry, the only way they was able to create their fortune is they Stopped being a player and became the coach. We were born to be the the player. It's time to be the coach. Entrepreneurship is the only thing that can make you be the coach. Otherwise you're gonna be making a lot of money just playing the game, never having ownership to anything that you're doing.

[Rashad Bilal]

That's like, I don't know if you know Derek Falcon out of Baltimore, but he got up saying he was like, when you get over the good look, you can, you could get some good money.

[Derek Hayes]

Not for real. Think about it, Rashad, right now. Think about this. What I'm about to say. You, you got nice things. You didn't bought nice things, but after you buy these things, it's just a nice thing. What turns you on now is actually business. Educating yourself, going to the next level year over year. Listen, I got OGs that, that challenges me when I walk in a room from last quarter. What you do this quarter got new coming. Like, you know. So the thing is, is that now what I understand is that while everybody's out there partying and wasting time, I'm already 38 years old. They said an African American male lives to the 72. I already live 47% of my life to play around. So now I'm looking at it like, yeah, I like nice things, but I want my kids to be able to reap the benefits later on even better than what I like right now. And that's me taking my time, hiring the right people, being systematic and not just following trends. We see everything on Instagram every day. And that's how a lot of businesses are going out of business business. Because you got to stop living through the business. It's not your money. It's the business money you are taking. It's like, like this. You got people that maybe taking too much payroll. Being the owner, right? Because you're the owner. You think you could take a 350000 salary, you're only bringing in 1 5. How you taking 350 from the business?

[Ian Dunlap]

You suffocating the business so that you.

[Derek Hayes]

Can keep up with the Joneses and look good. That's something that I always, always had discipline on. I've never touched the dime of my business money. I. I had my business for almost a decade. I never lived through my company.

[Ian Dunlap]

Talk about it.

[Derek Hayes]

Tried to. And I could have been, listen, I could have looked. I got a lot more living through the business. But I know how to scale. And to scale, you got to be systematic. And how you do that is you hire people and get out the way and do what you do best at and not thinking that you could do everything and you learn from what's around you and then you could be a better you next year. It's stuff that I know this year that I didn't know last year, and it's stuff that I'm going to learn in 2026 that I didn't know in 2025, because the level I'm going to right now is only 1% that's there.

[Ian Dunlap]

What are some of those lessons that you learned this year that you didn't know last year that you can share with the audience to help them scale?

[Derek Hayes]

Man, I like, man, revenue is loud and cash flow is honest. I mean, that's just the best thing, is the best thing I could tell you because just because the top line is there, you got to know where your bottom line at. You got to know where your cash burns is. You got to know how many employees it takes to run these locations. You know, I look at a lot of stuff on social media and I'll be wanting to lean up to help people, but a lot of people are so ego in an ego, you know, thinking that you're trying to slow that growth down. When you see I see people right now, you know, sometimes open the store at the store and I'll be like, ah, that's not good. Because I know you don't got your systems in place. I can tell anybody that really know the restaurant industry knows when you're making money. I could walk in a restaurant right now and I could see too many people on the line and like, damn, it's like hot. Like, I just know, just like y' all with the stock market, you know when somebody's making a bad move. And I know. So the thing is, it took me years of just listening. Like I said, I got a really strong advisor. I can call him and he gonna give me the game. There's no gatekeeping right now in my system. So that's why I said, you know, me being a billion dollar brand is not for just the bragging rights of the income of money is because it's never been done before. We get right there and we sell every single time. You know, the first time you get offered $50 million, you know, it's easy to say, man, I'm going to go get the hundred million. But if you ever got offer 50, can you say no to it? You know, those are the things that we got to be disciplined on right now. Somebody literally can come at me right now and Say, I'll give you 200 million for big days right now, I promise you I won't flinch. I know what I got. It's only going to take me to 20, 30 to have a billion dollar exit. And the reason why I say that is because my year over year, I'm following systems and I'm following placements. Like, if I'm not on my quota, I'm trying to figure out how do I now get there, how do I pivot now to stay on my trajectory track? And when you're not doing that, you got to take a step back and you got to pause for a second, let everybody else keep going and keep, you know, looking like they're scaling. Because the only ones that last in this business, the ones that systematic. That's all. That's the best thing I could tell you.

[Troy Millings]

You brought up a key term. I'm sorry. Because I just wanted. You said cash burns. And if they've been watching the news, they've been hearing that with Oracle, they've been hearing that with, with Broadcom. Can you just break down what cash burns are?

[Derek Hayes]

Yeah. So cash burns is when you. When you operate in the red, you ain't in the black, you know, so basically, your bottom lines is ugly. Your top lines could look like you're making money and you can't figure out where you burning cash at, Right? And then when you do find out if you won't make those changes. Like right now, if you got too many employees on your own company, you got to let go. That's why you see a lot of these big companies letting go a lot of employees first before they even get rid of the inventory. Inventory is more important to an employee when it comes to a big organization because that's their profits. They can easily replace you. So now I'm looking at it like this. So if I'm going to look at a bad cash burn, I'm looking at how can I systematically change this for next quarter? You know, you gotta ride through that quarter, but next quarter got to be better. And the way you do that is your P. L Gotta match your balance sheet. You know, a lot of people don't understand, like, if you raising money right now and your deck look like you got a perfect company, then your P L come out. They like, damn, it don't match. It's like that's on two different directions. You know, like, that's why you got sophisticated investors that say, we don't care about your debt.

[Ian Dunlap]

Let me see the P L. Get right to the Numbers that looked pretty well.

[Derek Hayes]

Let me see what your profit and loss look like. Let me see where you're sitting at. Because I think in tech right now, I think, you know, you guys, y' all can pull 45 to 50%, you know, in profitability, fast, casual, we got 15 to 20 profit margins. How you got time to play around with that? You know what I'm saying?

[Ian Dunlap]

Like, no cushion for failure. Yep.

[Rashad Bilal]

Yeah.

[Derek Hayes]

And it hurt. The bigger you get, it hurt more because it's like. Like today I went in one of my stores today. I was at my flagship store, store, and my guy Mo, my director of operations, and he said to me, he said. He said, you know why I'm cooking today? I was like, I'm trying to figure out why you want to grill, what's going on. He said, because I need my soldiers to understand I still get dirty when I don't like the way it's going. And it gave me the chills. Because any leader that you got running your company, if they're never too good to still jump into operationally to show people what it looks like, if you put too much cheese on there, you're not putting enough meat on the sound, you're doing these things, then it's something about it to rectify that situation. That's what you want. You don't want people to think because they have these high titles, they won't get dirty. I still, right now will go in. In the kitchen right now and get dirty and some Gucci sneaks and everything. Whatever I got on, it don't matter. Because the materialized of what I'm wearing don't operate with my infrastructure. Me building my company, that's just the first Persona of an image. But what I really want to do at the end of the day is I want to grow my brand. I want to scale my company. Before my dad died, I promised him, I said, listen, I was going to stay out the streets, and I was going to break our generational curses. And he told me, he said, listen, you don't want. I know that's going to do it. And I raise you to stay 10 toes down. Every time my life got hard or I went through any obstacle, I think about that. You know what I'm saying? I think about. It's not supposed to be easy. Think about it. Neither one of y' all would be right here on these microphones. If y' all listen to people that say that y' all couldn't do it or y' all can't do it, it. I Took no for an answer and showed people that it was. It was. It was education that was needed in our communities right now that people weren't paying attention to. And look how many people y' all bring out and invest fest every year. I watch it because it's in Atlanta, you know, and y' all always let me be a part of it. But those are the things that help you scale. You're not just scaling the brand, you're scaling the culture. You got people right now that. That never went to school, never paid attention to the stock market right now, like, hey, we got to get some stocks.

[Rashad Bilal]

You know, we got.

[Derek Hayes]

These are the things that change stuff. So now when I'm looking at fast casual, it ain't that I want to be the guy holding the crown and say, yo, he the goat that did it. I want you to know that the discipline got me here. The not partying got me here. Not buying dumb stuff got me here because I did all that in the beginning, and it get me nowhere. And now I'm scaling in a bad economy right now because I'm disciplined.

[Rashad Bilal]

And also you're not. You still keeping quality. I know you got. You said all the beef is halal.

[Derek Hayes]

Hello, man. Hello. Listen. Hello. Chicken, Halal beef. And I'm gonna tell you why I did that. Because everything about me, Rashad, is a chess move, right? I'm not just thinking about the United States. I'm thinking Middle east, you know, they don't. They. They are. They eat halal, you know, and then me coming from Philadelphia, 95 of my friends was Islamic, so I already knew about the culture of halal, and I knew about the. The big game changer would make. You could look at a brand right now called Dave's Hot Chicken, right? Everybody want to know how did this brain scale, how to get a billion dollar exit and all of that, right? Because it went to a community that was needed and that was hot food, spicy food. It didn't need to be super good. It needed to be spicy. That was a community that they. That was waiting for it to be like, somebody's waiting to help me. I've been waiting for this so long. When you look at the cheesesteak sector, right, you got Charlie's Cheesesteaks, and you got a bunch of mom and pops, right? Nobody outside of the tri state has ever scaled a cheesesteak ever in history but me right now. I got people cheesesteak egg rolls, cheese steaks, and all they concepts, and they watch me to do it right now. I don't know if y' all paying attention, but I influenced everybody on Instagram right now to sell cheesesteaks.

[Ian Dunlap]

Everybody who has a cheese, it's a hot commodity.

[Derek Hayes]

And if they tell you that, they telling a lot. He wasn't even thinking about doing it. But I'm humble enough to say carry the blessing and grow your brand, because I know I didn't build this just for myself.

[Ian Dunlap]

How do you scale the way you are, especially thinking about international without killing culture or the thing that made the flagship store super special?

[Derek Hayes]

Because the companies I deal with are already, already global. They already can ship global, and that's what you need to deal with. You got to make sure that company ship global, just not in the U.S. you got, okay, all my partners that I deal with right now, from Amoroso to my state company, all of them can ship global, same quality. And right now, my brain is so systematic and in place right now is that you don't have to be an expert chef to make a cheesesteak. You know, it's all going to taste the same when you use the same ingredients we use and the same quality and the procedures we tell you how to make it. And to be honest, I've had franchise teams train stores in less than a week and a half. It's against the law for me to give out the revenue, but they doing just better than me, if not better. And we never had to go back and train at that store again. And once your franchisees, you know, especially if they're experienced operators, once they have one or two, you know, you never really got a whole hands on them to keep opening up more stores because they know the systems just as well.

[Troy Millings]

As you do there. I. I've been around you a lot, man. The energy you on tonight, bro, you.

[Derek Hayes]

Cooking.

[Troy Millings]

You different tonight, my boy.

[Derek Hayes]

Look, I feel good. You know why, Troy? I'm gonna tell you why I feel good, man. Because, listen, I ain't gonna lie. I used to be that one. Like, you know, why not me? I'm doing all these things. You know, what's going on, what I'm not doing differently on. See, you know, it's my dress, what's going on? And you know what, man? One day I was driving in my car and I said, if everything was given to me that I want right now, would I still be the person that I am trying to teach people and scale these things, right? Sometimes if it's all given to you, you don't appreciate it. You know, right now, I went through five back operations, right? My first lump Sum of money came from me when I built my business right. I went through pain to get that money right? But I ain't work for it. You know, when you work for it, it's different. You know, when you see something different. I actually remember me on that three foot grill in that gas station waiting for customers. Now they talking about I'm the fastest growing business in the country, you know, and fast casual, you know, those are the things that I gotta, you know, look back and say, damn, you know, I did it, but I ain't make it yet. You know, that's what we got to remember. We make it. We did, we did make it.

[Rashad Bilal]

Yet.

[Derek Hayes]

Until you feel like you made it, I don't feel like I made it yet. Because until I see Big Davis on all these blue exes, on these exit signs, on these expressways, I ain't make it.

[Troy Millings]

I was just saying what. Because I could feel the energy and I know you're gonna get there. What does expansion look like in 2026 and beyond?

[Derek Hayes]

Oh, man, 2026 is a. It's going to be a bunch of announcements, a lot of franchise signups. But you know what I'm proud of the most? Just not opening the franchises. I'm proud that I got a team that believe in me, man. Like, like I'm talking about, I got some real ghost that's respected in the industry that believe in me, the mission and the, in the brand. And now, you know, when I'm walking in rooms, it ain't just me gotta introduce myself. My team is already respected and I think that's what I work towards. You got to get a team that want to be a part of what you're building at a high level. Think about this right now. I might have started small, but I had to get the big dog's attention. But to get the big dogs and say, I want to work with you and help you, that's a different story. You know, a lot of people have lunch with you and give you a couple dollars to scale your brand. But to be a part of your brand and go all the way through, you have to have something special. So for me, I just want to show us as a culture that you can go outside and you can hire what you need to be able to scale and you can make it. The reason why we don't get there is because we think that we could do it with our cousins, our uncles and our aunties. And I hate to say it, Tyler Perry gave me the best game on Dennis Kings. Sometimes you got to Leave them in the sand. And that's no disrespect to nobody. If I love you enough, I' ma take you to the beach. But you can't get in the water with me.

[Rashad Bilal]

You can.

[Derek Hayes]

You can get in the sand, you can see it. But until you're ready to swim and get on that boat and paddle with me, then you just got to watch the ocean. But I'll let you get the good weather. That's where I'm at right now.

[Rashad Bilal]

That's a fact.

[Ian Dunlap]

Speaking of which, how you tell people no around holidays time when you about to have an exit, $4 billion in a few years. I don't got you this Christmas. God, walk me through that, brother.

[Derek Hayes]

So. So I got a big heart. And that was hard for me over, over the years. But I said to myself in 2026, is knowing there's no explanation behind it, you know, because at the end of the day, you'll sit there and beat yourself up like you did something wrong. Look, Oprah said this, man, I'll never forget this, man. I was backstage, her and TD Jakes, man. I never forget this. She told a story, she said, listen, she said one day she was at somebody house, I think it was in 1996 and 97 when she first got our first check, right? And she seen these trees in the backyard. And she said, man, those some nice trees. I like those trees. And let me tell you, probably a decade or less later, get her. And Gail was somewhere and Oprah said, man, this, this is some nice trees. A lot of trees. You know what Gail said to her? These your trees. You own the whole forest. Sometimes you could want what somebody else got. But if you just study longer, you'll get what they never could get. You will get past that. So like, I use people that's further than me now, and I study them and where they made their mistakes at so that I can perfect them and do better. And it ain't easy because you know when you start making money and you. And you know, you want to do these interviews, you want to talk about how much you're making. But the best thing for me that happened to me was franchise of business. Because I can't talk about the money.

[Ian Dunlap]

So smart.

[Derek Hayes]

Can't talk about the money, talk about systems. So right now, if I talk about systems, you know what's going on. Because if I talk about money, I get sued inside the FDD on item 19. I need everybody to understand this Franchise disclosure document, item 19 is very important. If you lie about a penny on that paper, if you speak outside of that, you are putting yourself in harm's way to fail in the company. And, you know, I can't do projections. I can't be like, oh, I'm about to make this mountain a year. I'm on my way to do this. But what I can tell you is I'm opening up this many locations, and I got this many signups, and right now, I got some big operators coming on in 2026. I can't wait to make the announcements on. And I got a hell of a team that's coming on in 2026. And y' all about to see this brand scale more than it ever scaled in 26 is about to be my takeoff year.

[Rashad Bilal]

Yeah, you definitely took the cheesesteak beyond Philly, you know, because I remember people used to actually drive to Philly, or at least Atlantic City.

[Derek Hayes]

No more. I'm under. I'm under LOI Atlantic City right now.

[Rashad Bilal]

So, you know, you're in Atlantic City.

[Derek Hayes]

I mean, I'm in the loi right now.

[Rashad Bilal]

Okay. Yeah. No, but I'm saying it's like, you know, it's just they had to go to that region where they had to go to that region to actually. Like, people from New York used to drive two hours just to get a cheesesteak. Like, it wasn't. Even though it was a popular thing, it wasn't something that was like a.

[Derek Hayes]

National all over or a pizza. Right? It wasn't. You know, and the thing is, like, when you just. Like you said, rashad, we talk about cheesesteak, it was Tri State, right? I came down here, and I started seeing people say they making Phillies, and I'm like, hold up. It's a cheesesteak. So I feel like I gave people history and culture on the actual mission of a cheese stick. And now, you know, everybody is now doing it. But I still see them doing it the wrong way, though. I just be like, yo, there's no way you're making money paying three pounds of meat on a sandwich. I got buying power, and I can't do that. So it's like, you know, I look at these things, and I'm like, yeah, you're gonna get a lot of comments. You're going to get a lot of shares, but you ain't making no money.

[Ian Dunlap]

Yeah, the margin's terrible.

[Derek Hayes]

Yes. Your bottom lines are they're unattractive, you know, and that's what I care about, you know, so when I tell people, like, you know, a lot of people hit me up for Consulting, like, hey, can you help me? You know, can you do these things? And then I get a peek at what's going on, and I realize you living through the business. You got your Bentley through the business. Look, if it don't weigh 6,700 pounds, you already lost anyway because you can't write it off.

[Troy Millings]

Six thousand, six thousand, six thousand pounds.

[Derek Hayes]

You can't write it off. So it's like what, a new Bentley, you can the new speed, the hybrid. I just got it. You can write that, But that's just what it is. And I just want to be great, man. You know, I want to make my dad proud. I want to make my kids proud. I want to make entrepreneurs around the world understand that not because of the resources are limited. We understand that it's hard raising money. I'm raising money right now. The economy is. But when you got good numbers and you got a good brand, you can, you can hold off a little bit payroll off of your own business. And when your business is taking care of, so what you want to rush for? I tell people all the time, when your payroll comes around and when you got to buy food, if the cash flow is taking care of those things, then you got time to burn. When you don't got those things going on, then you and you know, you in panic mode and don't raise capital when you need money, raise capital when you don't.

[Ian Dunlap]

Say that again and tell them why.

[Derek Hayes]

That'S incredibly important when you need money, because I promise you, you're going to do a desperate move to get the money. And ownership is real. You might think that, oh Yeah, I got 100 in the company. Well, if you just gave somebody 20 of your company for $5 million and you look at two years later, you took a 20 discount on a bad evaluation.

[Rashad Bilal]

Well, Dave, man, always a pleasure.

[Ian Dunlap]

I imagine going on stage after him.

[Rashad Bilal]

Are you before you leave. So all right, tell everybody. Are you writing a book? Where can they patronize the stores? Are you still in a Mercedes Benz stadium? Do all of the promotion that you.

[Derek Hayes]

Need to do stadium years in a row. But I am scaling. I'm waiting for the. I'm waiting for the next quarter to come in so I can make a bunch of announcements. You know, if you're looking to. To find me on, you know, Instagram is at Big Dave Cheesesteaks. My personal page is official D. Hayes. But most of all, if I can just give anybody any game before I get off here, life is attract me. It's not a. It's a Marathon. It's how you run your race. Don't look at everybody else race, because I promise you, they capping. There's a lot of cap going on out here. Things that win. It's stuff that's not shiny. When you walk into any big dog room, you don't see no diamonds. You might see some dog sneaks in a nice watch. That's the most you're gonna see. But I just need y' all to understand showing it ain't saving it, growing it.

[Troy Millings]

Yeah. Any.

[Ian Dunlap]

Your father?

[Troy Millings]

I had the kids in the background.

[Ian Dunlap]

Absolutely.

[Troy Millings]

And a loving husband, man, we can. We salute you.

[Derek Hayes]

Door. The whole time, on me, I'm like, yo, don't come here. But listen, I got five kids, man, so it's hard to do those things, but it keep me motivated. And listen, man, I appreciate y' all for always giving me the platform to speak and tell my story and had a glory, because I'm gonna remember these days when. When I look back and I say, who helped me, you know, grow in the culture and tell my story, man, it's always going to be y'. All. I just did a Fortune interview the other day, and I just told him that y' all my favorite podcast, so.

[Troy Millings]

No, I mean, appreciate that.

[Ian Dunlap]

Appreciate you.

[Rashad Bilal]

Appreciate it, man. Derek, always. Always a pleasure. And. And. And we didn't even talk about that aspect. But, you know, from a family standpoint, that's also a good story to tell, because for anybody that doesn't know, Pinky Cole is. Is Derek's wife, and she's a superstar in her own right. As far as the slutty vegan, to.

[Derek Hayes]

Be honest, like, I'm gonna just go ahead and say that before I go off. Like, if it wasn't for Pinky Skelling before me and doing the things in front of my face, I wouldn't even understand what to do at this point. So sometimes, you know, your other half is your school or the person that you're watching. I just got lucky that my wife is a superstar entrepreneur, and I was able to do things that, you know, I seen how I could perfect what she did, and now that I'm franchising, she able to learn off of me. So we're helping each other.

[Troy Millings]

Amen.

[Ian Dunlap]

It's beautiful, y'.

[Rashad Bilal]

All.

[Troy Millings]

Amen.

[Rashad Bilal]

I. My brother. Thank you, man. Appreciate it.

[Ian Dunlap]

I did. Amazing segment. Kudos to you.

[Troy Millings]

Yeah, man. Powerful, man.

[Ian Dunlap]

A lot of heavy boss talking that segment.

[Troy Millings]

A lot, a lot, man. His energy is infectious, man. I like to see where he's at right now. He's talking that business. He's speaking business fluently. I love it. I love it.

[Ian Dunlap]

Sacrifice.

[Troy Millings]

They got one in New York yet?

[Rashad Bilal]

I don't think so.

[Troy Millings]

Make a few calls, man.

[Rashad Bilal]

And they have the salmon too. Because I don't eat beef.

[Troy Millings]

Salmon cheesesteak.

[Rashad Bilal]

That's a salmon cheesesteak. Last time I was in Atlanta.

[Troy Millings]

Are you gonna let go the L you're gonna keep carrying out?

[Rashad Bilal]

It is what it is. It is what you call.

[Ian Dunlap]

I ain't connecting my brother. I got you.

[Troy Millings]

Nice. I never thought about it, but it's fire. It's fire. Philly has great cheesesteaks. Big days. Make sure y' all go check that out. That's a fact. We. I've tried a few Ishka bibbles. Who else we got out there? We got the other one. But he's made that a national thing, man. So shout out to him.

[Ian Dunlap]

And a lot of the traits that he talked about in a CEO, you want to see them reflected in the companies that you own publicly too. When they talk about an executive willing to get his hands dirty on every. It made me think of Steve Jobs back in the day and Jensen now constantly reinvesting into the business. Outside the little alligator jacket. You ain't seen each other. But I mean if your company worth a couple trillion, you can go get you a little 7,000. Yeah. No slight, you know, a little time for it won't hurt you every once in a while.

[Derek Hayes]

A little slight work.

[Rashad Bilal]

Yeah.

[Ian Dunlap]

You know.

[Rashad Bilal]

Okay. Before we wrap any. Anything else.

[Derek Hayes]

What we got?

[Ian Dunlap]

Let's see. Investor die. I'm gonna say this every week.

[Troy Millings]

That's always important.

[Ian Dunlap]

Investor die. Inflation is going to creep up and be so heavy over these next five years. And the funny part like shout out to Caleb who was on last week when you know the clip got posted at 250000 the tri state. I had a bunch of people from midwestern states telling me I make 250 and that's not enough here. So it's not just a trustee issue. And think about that.

[Rashad Bilal]

Especially west coast like you said. West Coast. I mean anywhere that you know that type of you know says a lot about the times that we in.

[Ian Dunlap]

That's insane.

[Rashad Bilal]

It's a lot earnings. Any earnings?

[Troy Millings]

Yeah, we got Micron this week. I think Nike's reporting this week as well. But Micron is definitely the star on my. On my board right now on Wednesday report after hours. So to see how they. They perform. I think they'll have another. A great quarter. So very, very Interested in that?

[Ian Dunlap]

I wish I could have got credit default swaps on Nike, Under Armour and stuff.

[Troy Millings]

Oh, the credit default swap thing is crazy.

[Ian Dunlap]

Big bag needed though.

[Troy Millings]

Yeah, they just start like the metal one has. Let's start to tick a little bit, which is nothing really outrageous, but the, the Oracle one is just completely going crazy. Yeah.

[Ian Dunlap]

Inside information helps.

[Rashad Bilal]

Yeah, for sure.

[Derek Hayes]

Well.

[Ian Dunlap]

Oh, and back home real quick, I want to say rest in peace to my guy, Jason Williams. Prayers to your family. Oh my God. One of the most stand up people back home lost his life last week. So I'd be remiss if I wouldn't give my love to him and the family. To everybody back home, I love you dearly. This is my dog.

[Troy Millings]

Condolences.

[Rashad Bilal]

Condolences, Condolences. Somebody said IPO via Spec Thoughts, which one? Just like the idea of the whole spec thing, I think that kind of died down.

[Ian Dunlap]

I don't care how they repackage it.

[Rashad Bilal]

That was a loophole just to go public on the, on the back end without having to go through all of the regulations and financial scrutiny. So they found, they found like a loophole to kind of do that and a lot of companies went public and a lot of companies failed.

[Troy Millings]

Yeah.

[Rashad Bilal]

As a result. Shortly after that.

[Ian Dunlap]

Remember when Virgin Galactic was a thing and everybody thought, yeah.

[Rashad Bilal]

What happened with the Phase Clan?

[Ian Dunlap]

I don't know. Xander followed.

[Troy Millings]

A couple of boys happened. That's what happened. Clover Boys. Shout out to them.

[Rashad Bilal]

No, the streamers. That's what happened. Yeah, well, not just Clover Boy because they were the first stream. The gamers. That's his crew who's about Faze Clay.

[Troy Millings]

Yeah, I'm saying the Clover Boys is Kai Screw. Yeah, they, they ran that. They ran them out.

[Ian Dunlap]

It was a good idea.

[Rashad Bilal]

The gamers were the first streamers.

[Troy Millings]

I would have been a game of streamer in another life for sure.

[Rashad Bilal]

For sure. All right, guys, it's, it's been, it's been real. We'll see you guys on Wednesday. Blackout. We got 19 keys coming on. Yeah, we'll see you on Thursday. We got another superstar entrepreneur. We got Song and, and Dave from Squire app. 700 million dollar valuation. Don't sleep on it. And once again, if you, if you took part of the Market Mondays deal, tomorrow the first group, Group A, you will be getting your email. So please read the email, respond to the email, click. You have to actually click the link. If you can make it, if you can't make it. And then we'll send you all of the information and then the next group will be you'll be getting your email for Nvidia next week so keep your keep your your eyes open for email. Check your junk mail and and yeah.

[Troy Millings]

Yeah Eylu my class is this Thursday. Make sure y' all pull up I know a lot of people part of that the deal got that access to that if it's your first class you.

[Ian Dunlap]

In for a treat.

[Troy Millings]

We're gonna do our 2025 year in review and what we're looking at for 2026 so make sure y' all are there. I got a few special and very dear guests that'll be joining me. It's gonna it's gonna be one of the ones but make sure y' all.

[Ian Dunlap]

Tap in Red Panda stock club call tomorrow Tuesday 9pm Central. If I made you money please put yes in chat in 2026. I'm gonna tell you listen the first time.

[Rashad Bilal]

All right guys.

[Troy Millings]

Been real Love it love peace peace.

[Ian Dunlap]

I ran trouble trouble.

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