A (3:02)

Yeah, I mean, I think you laid it out perfectly. This is, to me, there was all these structural concerns that were popping up, but there was really not a lot, a lot of there there. And so, you know, this was a sentiment correction we needed. Sentiment had gotten stretched over the summer. I mean, one of the things we pointed out to our clients was like since the last jobs report, which we just got the first jobs report since the government reopened this morning as well, since the last jobs report released on September 5th, that was the August jobs report we, we've seen AI, our AI basket was up 20% over consumer cyclicals. So this had become an AI driven market. I mean it has been, it is by definition since we, we started this, this move in 2023. But I mean it was just on steroids for the last, for the last couple months. Sentiment got ahead of itself and so people got nervous and whenever that happens you get a wobble in the market. And you know, but I think that's, this is like par for the course. Nvidia reports, they calm nerves, you know, in the market. We've studied this since the 2023 really explosion of AI onto the scene. And it's not groundbreaking stuff, but the market takes its cues from Nvidia following the earnings report. And so, you know, we saw like a, a negative reaction back in February and the market was kind of already in a downtrend, but Nvidia led the way there. And that's the only other time, most of these times you, you end up with Nvidia calming nerves, rallying, especially when you have a drawdown going into earnings like this. So I think it sets up for a nice move for the end of the year.

B (4:33)

Mike, what do you think?

C (4:35)

Yeah, I completely agree with Warren. Sentiment had gotten so stretched. The charts had gotten so stretched. Oracle's 35% move off of the announcement, that huge gap had to get filled as they do. But it was, it was too far, too fast. And I think that had Nvidia been in a sideways range, which it did in the past, remember it got months sideways if it was in that type of market environment and the doubt about the useful life of GPUs came up, whether it was six years or four years, that nobody would have Given a shit, it would have just been like whatever. I think the stocks would have sold off 2, 3%. But because they went up so much, it was. Well, wait a minute. That. On top of the Sam Altman interview, it was just, it was a very natural, normal give back. And Jensen and the team reiterated crazy numbers. They're talking about $500 billion in revenue between fiscal 25 and 26. Just in terms of Blackwell and Rubin, if that's on track. $500 billion in revenue. Game on. Blue skies ahead. It was an incredible quarter.

B (5:41)

Yeah, I think like the calming nerves thing, it's not just Jensen coming on and talking about robots. The numbers themselves were a palliative in this case. So net income 32 billion. That's a 21% sequential jump. Sequential like versus last quarter. So you say. You said like Nvidia's 4 trillion. Yeah. Because look like what we have. No, we have no parallel to this from history. No company has ever been able to do this. Those numbers were up 65% year over year. That's net income Data center was up 66% year over year.

C (6:18)

And this is without China. There's like nothing going on in China.

B (6:21)

Yeah, Q4 revenue guidance was one of the most important metrics that everyone was hanging on. And he upticked it. 65 billion. That would be 14% sequential growth. Ish. And this is a great quote. This is Jensen Wang on the call. Blackwell sales are off the charts. Cloud GPUs are sold out. Compute demand keeps accelerating and compounding across training and inference, each growing exponentially. We've entered the virtuous cycle of AI and you're bearish. I mean, is Warren, do you think the bearishness was about valuation or do you think the bearishness was about execution? Like all this capex, somebody's about to stumble and, and have to start restating earnings or going back on their account the way they accounted for the capex. Like what do you think was the, the thing that people were most worried about?

A (7:19)

I think it's a little bit of both. I think valuations are always hanging out back there. It's a little bit of this law of large numbers and how far can you grow and you know, how big of a portion of the market that Nvidia is. And so just there's just natural nervousness. I do think there's execution risk too and concerns around that. I think you brought up the, the useful life arguments. Been getting a lot of play here for the last couple months. And it's like, what Is the what. Where does all the spend lead to? Is it, you know, what's the roi? I mean, there are still a lot of skeptics here. And so that's something that, you know, Fernando, who I work with, you've had him on the show before. This is his space. So everything I talk about when it comes to AI GPUs, Nvidia, I'm just kind of recapitulating in a really kind of like a redneck way, Fernando's research, you know, but I mean, he's dug into it. He's, he's. That was something we did for our clients. It's, it's something we, we let him through the deep seek saga because of his, because of his expertise. And then we're leading him through this concern as well. We just don't see this, this useful life argument. And then I think Jensen alluded to some of his arguments, like, hey, the A1 hundreds are still out there. We track on a daily basis availability, or Fernando tracks availability of GPUs. And this is something like, we have the largest tech funds in the world, who they pay just to get the series from us. And so we track this every day. And you can see that there's still a lot of demand for the older vintage chips even. And so the, this idea that they all burn out and are gone or that they don't have an economically useful life beyond two years, like we were able to dismiss that pretty, pretty easily for our clients. So I think it's a, I love seeing fears like that crop up because what that tells me is it's, it's a sentiment, it's not fundamental, it's not something that's really concerning. I mean, if you're going to be. I, I think my concerns as a macro guy who's not an AI tech specialist, whenever I press Fernando, is, you know, how can we track AI adoption in general as a theme? And then what's going to happen if these models take a leg up in efficiency and what does that mean for the hardware in particular? And do we just always go back to this Jevons paradox thing where you just have more and more spend, even if the models get more efficient? So we go through that a lot and trying to come up with ways to track it, but those are bigger picture concerns and this useful life accounting execution stuff at this phase, the Sam Altman interview, you can just feel people kind of grasping at straws. You can feel the fear that, hey, the market is so dependent on this theme. And it is, there is, we're going to live or die by AI for the stock market. So, you know, all the generalists, it brings forward all those concerns and fears, you know, naturally. But yeah, it was from what we saw out there. They're really not even like, you know, the fact Nick Fernando is responding to Jim Chanos on X and telling them like weeks ago this useful life stuff is a, is a dead end.

C (10:11)

They addressed that on the call.

A (10:13)

Exactly. Yeah, he did. Yes.

C (10:15)

She said in the, in the prepared remarks as to say like don't ask me about, I'm going to tell you up front. The CFO said most accelerators without Cuda and Nvidia's time tested and versatile architecture become obsolete within a few years as model technologies evolve. Now here's the money shot. Thanks to CUDA, the A100 GPUs we shipped six years ago are still running at full utilization today.

B (10:41)

Right. So Cuda is the software platform that is part of Nvidia's offering and it's what keeps these chips like productive and worthwhile long after they've shipped and been implemented. And that's, I think they're drawing a distinction between our GPUs don't go out of style. Other people's might. It's like, it sounds like it's a little bit of a warren. How much, how much of the pessimism over the last two weeks do you think is just wishcasting? A lot of people have been left behind by, by the nvidias and the AMDs and the Broadcoms and the Microns. Like there, I don't know, there's probably 50 to 100 of these types of stocks that are not obscure but like large cap stocks. I'm thinking of the lamb researches, the AMATs. There are so many of them that people just feel like they. I missed that, I missed that. I missed.

C (11:37)

But Josh, it's also, it's been so long. Like people felt like they missed the fang trade in 2018. Like it felt unfair back then. And then fast forward, it's like wait, seven years later there's like a new thing that we missed. Like it feels up.

A (11:51)

Yeah, yeah.

B (11:52)

Like how much do you think the pessimism is coming from that, that idea? Like people subconsciously just they wanted to blow up because they're sick of answering for not having participated in it.

A (12:04)

That's a huge, huge part of it. I think here's massive, just to put a few stats on that. So if we go back on a trailing three year basis, we're at the point Right now we have the fewest stocks beating the index over a trailing three year basis ever. We surpassed the height of the tech bubble. It's like, it's very painful. There's only 20 think it's 23 or 4% of S&P 500 stocks are beating the index on a trailing three year basis.

B (12:31)

That's wild.

A (12:32)

If you, if you look at it from just this year, we're, we're third or fourth depending on the day of the, that you track it here it is the third, the third narrowest year year to date. And so you can see the worst was actually 2023 when AI kind of came into the public's consciousness. And, and I remember 2023, I, I remember speaking to some advisor clients and at the end of that year some of them were almost in tears to be honest. Like it was a really hard year despite the fact that the market was.

B (13:04)

Up 20% in tears. Why? Because they owned so many stocks that were lagging the index itself that they looked like they weren't even in the asset class.

A (13:13)

And 23 was especially hard because everybody was looking for a recession that year. And then, and then big tech and tech in general had underperformed so badly in 2022. And I remember even in late 2022 pitching to one of the bigger pod shops out there. One of the pods that is a client was a client at the time I thought that Big Tech made sense even given the concerns around the macro. And he was like you're going to recommend big tech in the face of a recession? You know, like he was, he was livid. And this was before the AI thing really popped off. So yeah, it was a rough year. 23 was the worst on record from that. And then if you go back this year just to kind of round it all off, we have more stocks trailing the index by 20% than that are beating the index by any amount. And so it's crazy.

C (13:59)

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B (15:22)

Have a view on sort of like a kernel of an idea that I've had recently and I'm sure other people have, other people have more eloquently described this situation. But for a really long time, our largest technology companies looked miraculous because they were asset light. Like for the most part, asset light. They always had data centers, they always had actual assets. But like gross margins in the 30s, 40s, 70s, the companies like defied comparison to prior eras of large cap stocks. I don't really think that's the case anymore. Number one, they are taking on a lot of debt comfortably. They have strong balance sheets. They have like, they have the cash flows. It's not, it's not a dangerous amount of debt, but they're heavily indebted. Like, let's not say that they're not. The dollar amounts are huge and then they're not asset light anymore either. Like these companies, the capex spending de facto makes them some of the most asset heavy corporations we've ever seen. Now they're not building copper smelting facilities, right. They're not digging for iron ore or anything like that. But like they're not, it's not the same narrative now, like, oh, they're asset light. It's all ip, it's software margins. It's, it's just, it's different. I'm not saying it's worse, but like, do you guys hear that argument from people that basically these are technology companies that have turned themselves into heavy industrials?

A (16:56)

Yeah, I mean, I think we hear those arguments. That's part of it. And we're In a risky spot here. The real story is, is AI going to deliver? You know, is it going to deliver? What does it look like? What does the future look like? There's so much. There's nervousness from every angle. There's macro nervousness, but there's nervousness like, hey, if this doesn't work out, these things are. This is going to be a, a really rough forward period of returns for not just these big tech companies, but for the market in general, because they are the market at this point. So, yeah, there's a lot of that. Go ahead, Mike.

C (17:27)

I, I think that's a great point. Like, people could look to the valuation and say, where's the bubble? So, for example, if their earnings increase 15% a quarter for the next four quarters now they've, they've done. They did 20 this quarter. So it's not like outlandish. But if they do 15% for the next four quarters, then based on where the, based on where the stock closed yesterday. I'm sorry, at the time video. So at a 5. At a $5 trillion market cap, it's 27 times earnings. Okay, so you could say that's not a bubble. How is that? It's, it's a market multiple plus. Like, how is that a bubble? But to your point, the unknown, it might be an earnings bubble. If they can't continue this and, and I can't deliver. And these numbers that are so gigantic, if those go down, it's like, hey, dumbass, it was actually trading at 150 times 2027 earnings. It looked cheap, but it wasn't.

B (18:22)

Well, when people say if this doesn't work out, what that means in reality is if all of the spend doesn't have an ROI attached to it, not right away, but at some point down the road. And like, that's the. And then you will absolutely see things like order cancellations, etc. But none of that is happening.

C (18:42)

Yeah. So Warren, what do you think about the fact that this might be trading cheap on 26 numbers, but super expensive on 28, 29, 30, something like that?

A (18:50)

You mean Nvidia in particular?

C (18:52)

Nvidia, yeah.

A (18:53)

Yeah. Well, I think that's, that's, that's concerning a little bit. I mean, like, that's part of, like why I, when. With the deep sea thing was. And this is something that Fernando and I, I think this is. So there, like I said, there are two concerns with this AI thing. When I look at it as a macro person, AI adoption, we kind of dismiss that concern. Like we are Adopting it in our business and we can talk about that. Like I've seen it firsthand, so I know this is going to be a big deal and I know it's going to be adopted in, in mass. And so I don't think that existential risk is going to come to pass. But I see more like what if the models, what if we do get a step higher in efficiency that decreases the spend within video where this is like. And that would probably play out as more of like an earnings bubble like you said, Mike. So we've talked a little bit about that. Like what is the, what does that look like? What would the handoff look like in some ways if, if that, if they're, if these hyperscalers are spending less within video, then they would be doing better. So within the market could you have that handoff where you have like hardware semis Nvidia which is 17 to 20% of the market. Can they, can those stocks come down while like the, the Capex spenders have their margins increase and have their, you know, have in that. I don't think it's really possible. Yeah, I don't think that's really, that's not really feasible. And so I am, I, I do worry about it. But at the same time like all you can do is track the data, listen to the earnings calls. Like we track the data daily and, and, and right now I don't see just. You can't project that. You know, it's tech guys, but the.

B (20:27)

Tech guys tell you impossible because there's no such thing as too much compute. And if there, if, if you all of a sudden free up all of this compute because the next gen models and then the gen after that are more efficient and it's less tokens and it's less and it's less computer. We just use that compute somewhere else and we invent even more unbelievable things that no one could have pictured. That's the Jevons paradox idea that you make this stuff cheaper and people, other people come along and do even bigger things with it. And that actually has been the history in the, in the Internet. But there have been air pockets along the way. So that's the thing that people worry about.

A (21:13)

That's exactly what we said. Like hey, we had that earlier this year and we kind of looked through all that in the Jevons Paradox. Yes, that all makes sense. And like just get, you're just going to spend, you're just going to spend, have more compute. Just the spending stays continues on its 45 degree angle up or whatever. But like that maybe one day that's not the case and that's the, so that's the concern. But it's not something that it, that animates us at this moment.

B (21:36)

I want to, I want to put a pin in this, but I want to ask you guys, do you think we're done with the Capex debate between now and the end of the year? Do you think that that calms down and the market kind of focuses elsewhere? Or you think like people are like, oh great, Nvidia beat again. I don't care. It's still a bubble. What do you guys think is going to happen?

C (21:56)

It depends on what happens to the price. If the prices continue to go up, the stocks, nobody's going to talk about it. If the price struggles, like let's say Nvidia gives up all the gains today and closes red, then boom, the focus is going to be right back on that. So I think it's, I think it's stock market dependent.

B (22:10)

Warren, what do you think?

A (22:11)

I totally, totally agree. I mean we invent the narrative to follow the price. Ultimately nothing's going to change fundamentally between now and into the year. But like I think the important thing, because like I was on CNBC this, I guess it was last week, late last week they asked me the same thing, like, what do you think about the market near term? I said I think the sentiments worked off. I want to see not what Nvidia says. I want to see how the market treats Nvidia. I knew Nvidia was, we, we tracked this stuff daily. We tracked the, the pricing and availability stuff daily. We knew they were going to blow the quarter away. It was just more of a, about how's the market react. And I still want to see that. Looks like we're going to be fine. But I want to see how we close this week off in, in particular how we print on Friday at close. And you know that's going to dictate the narrative going to the end of the year. I expect it to be good and I expect it to be bullish though.

C (23:00)

So let's talk about the rest of the market because Warren, you're right, it has been, the leadership has narrowed just, just continues to like a couple of weeks ago we were talking about the rubber band between equal weight divided by cap weight was already stretched and then it just snapped and like crash low. Now that was a local top but it's just, it just continues to happen. So you mentioned this earlier in the show. John, throw these charts on so half of the index, half of the constituents in The S&P 500 chart three trail the, the index by 10% or more, which is not quite off the charts, but we're getting there. And then you also mentioned that more S and P constituents trail the index by 20% than are beating it. What do you take away from this?

A (23:49)

I think it's, this is the, the, this is what we're talking about. Like if you, if you look at the equal weight, another chart we don't have in this, but you look at the equal weight, the start of all these bull markets. So like it leads, usually equal weight is off the bottom. We set a bottom equal weight leads, small caps lead, low quality, high beta leads. This has been a straight grind lower in the equal weight. It's been a straight grind lower in small caps relative to the S&P 500. I mean this is a brutal, this is a brutal market because in order to beat the market you can, you can be at your benchmark, but in order to beat the market you have to allocate and overweight to these tech positions nobody wants. You already feel overweight, like it's 50% of the market at this point in time. So yeah, that's what I take away from all that.

B (24:34)

You know why nobody wants to do that? Number one, they don't actually think it'll work. They think my luck, I'm going to get overweight. Nvidia and Apple and Microsoft right at the top. And then it's, you can't answer for it. Like in other words, if you, if you build a diversified, diversified. If you build a portfolio with like 60 positions, right, which is pretty diversified for like a long only especially for a hedge fund. Like you're not going to live or die based on any of them. You're definitely not going to beat the market. But you'll, you won't have to apologize. If you come into Jan.26 and you're 3, 400 basis points ahead of the index on some of the largest stocks in the country and those stocks have a start the year off badly, then you're apologizing. You're an index fund on steroids. That's what I'm paying you. 2 in 24. So there's two reasons nobody wants to do it. And the first is they don't think it'll work. And that second reason is even worse. I can't even explain this if it goes wrong. There's a lot you could explain a 60 position portfolio that trails the benchmark because of Course it does. Right. You can't explain being overweight. The top five market caps. And like, what were you, what were you thinking?

C (25:59)

Don't you think that's what's sort of prolonging this warrant? Like there is, it's hard to say that there's so much underinvestment in these names because Nvidia's a $5 trillion market cap. But Josh's point is so important for market psychology.

A (26:10)

Yeah, I mean, well, we have looked at this. So the pattern of this bull market, you hear this, it's just replete. We, we. I don't know if I put a chart in there and I think I did actually. It's, it's chart. If you skip all the way just out of, just to give you something to reference if you're watching. If you skip. Well, I guess I didn't put it in. Sorry. Anyways, there's been a consistent pattern where the mega cap leads. The rest of the market falls apart and you get a wobble in the market, just like we had here recently. You get a wobble in the market and then everyone comes on TV and everyone expects, well, hey, we're going to get a broadening. We're going to get this broadening. Equal weight's going to take the baton. The cap weight is going to give up. But we get a yes, we do get a bit of a broadening because the bull market continues. But it's never a leadership shift. The leadership has maintained each one of those little cycles. It maintains in these large caps. It maintains in the tech, in the tech sectors like Comm Services tech, Amazon, those stocks. That's the pattern is you get a little bit of a broadening, but never the baton actually being taken by that. The other, the other 400.

B (27:14)

Well, they're not big enough. Well, they're really not big enough. Like there are health care companies that are 3 and $400 billion. There's a couple of energy stocks that are a few hundred billion dollars, but like they're just not. Was last week we had this amazing rotation into energy and health care. And a lot of people played it. A lot of people made money because some of these stocks went up huge. Like the AMGENS. The ABVs saw some, saw some nice moves in the refinery stocks, but they're just not big enough to become the new leaders. And they definitely, they definitely are not going to be telling stories about 20% year over year revenue growth as far as the eye can see. They just, they can't do it. There is a physical constraint to how much those companies can grow.

A (28:00)

And those were just, I think those are the new era defensive because like utilities are now part of the, they've got sucked into this AI trade. So it's not a defensive anymore. So you have healthcare and you have energy. We've been making the case for a long time energy is your best diversifier in the market. Not that you want to be overweight. We're bearish on oil, been bearish on oil all year. But it's, it's don't, it's doing things that nothing else is doing. So I think that rotation healthcare had been so beaten up until that move and you could just see this coordinated like shift inflows over to health care, over to energy. And, and it's kind of this where we're at with like the pods and everything.

B (28:34)

Yeah, they're just not trillion, they're just not $2 trillion. Companies like Eli Lilly is gigantic by health care standards, not by stock market standards.

C (28:45)

Warren, I want to ask you about one of the reasons why you're one of my favorite thinkers writers is you take a broad, you're able to zoom out and then zoom in. So you do the market, you do the labor market, you do construction, like you really, you do Fed stuff. You take a really holistic view. Josh and I were talking about this yesterday. So one of your recent reports on the K shaped economy and the K shaped market, it's really confusing because there's no doubt that the bottom 10, 20% are still under pressure as they always are. But especially now with inflation, the cumulative toll of inflation, there's no give back, prices don't go lower, everything's expensive. It takes a toll. Of course it does. But also I think what's confusing is you hear from so many different companies that are taking cover, in my estimation, that are taking cover under this narrative and using this as an excuse to say why it's not that we're not executing, it's our consumers are under pressure. So you hear this from Kava and all of the bull companies and Chipotle and you hear this from like Target and companies like this. But then you look at Walmart who serves a similar clientele and then you look at Sofi who also serves a young demographic goods. And there's companies that are executing really well despite the pressures and despite the headwinds and there are companies that are just not executing and are using this as blame and I think fueling the flames. And it's not to say that it's not a story, but it's really what is the story.

A (30:14)

So sometimes you have a narrative. It's not like, I think that's what you're asking is basically is this narrative real or is this just like BS that the companies are using to excuse away their, their problems? And I think it is real. You know, I, I think that the, the, what we went through after the pandemic has really impacted as it's, it's, it. I, when I went back and listened to myself on the podcast like a year ago, I used the word bifurcated economy probably like a dozen times. It's like, you know, the K shape sounds a little better, but the bifurcated real thing and the pandemic just really set fire to that, to that division between the two, the haves and the have nots, the asset owners and those who don't own assets. And so to me, when I look at it, I think the lower part of the K is best represented and it's not everything but by the housing market and housing affordability. You know, if you gave me one chart to kind of set the table and explain the dynamic like market at all time high, housing at all time high, gold at all time high, Bitcoin at all time high. All these things are doing well. Yields pretty have been okay. You know, bond's been good this year. But what's the one thing, one chart that could explain this, this lower K? It's this housing chart that I have, it's page or chart number 14. We're showing the amount of the percentile of household income needed to buy the median home in the United States.

B (31:35)

Oh my God.

A (31:36)

And so the bottom line is before the pandemic, it was the 40th percentile was the average household income needed to buy or the household income needed to buy a median home in the United States. You can just see it just leveled up post pandemic. Interest rates, housing costs going up, everything. It's now 60th percentile. So the bottom line on this is that middle class, the middle of the economy, 40th to 60th percentile of income has been priced out of the housing market. And I think that yes, there are many other things going on. I know groceries, I know insurance, I know cars. And there are, there's a lot of things going on. Yeah, medical mean my medical costs, my medical insurance cost went for my family of five went up to 66,000 a year this year. So I know there's more things going on than this, but. But yes, this is the 1 chart in my mind, that explains why there's so much consternation in that bottom K and why the Fed is ultimately going to have to address it. Because you're starting to see political pressures rise up. I mean, this is where you get the election of Mom D and the, the other lady in Seattle. You see so much anger out there and it will manifest as political pressure. You see it from the Trump administration. I mean, Trump is putting political pressure on, on the Fed. He's going to stack the, the Fed with his own kind of yes men. And so to me, these are the manifestations of what is a real phenomenon. So yes, if some companies use it as an excuse, but I think it's real. I think the K shape is real and we should pay attention.

B (33:10)

So you said in a K shaped economy, policymakers will cater to the lower K. So that's that bottom, let's say bottom 20 or 30% of the wealth distribution that are really struggling the most and vocally so. And you said that that translates to an easing bias, at least if policymakers are listening to that segment. Obviously housing is, is the thing that's making people scream. They, it's unbelievable to not be able to afford to live in, in, in the country. If you have a job, your spouse has a job, there are families where both spouses have multiple jobs. And it's just like the thing that makes people say, I am going to vote for the most extreme candidate at this point because they're the only people that are listening to what I'm saying. But then you're saying, because I want to translate this into a market outlook, then you're saying, despite that easing bias, like ordinarily you would go to small caps and you would say, okay, if the Fed's going to have this easing bias, small cap should do well. And actually there are lots of charts floating around showing that small caps next year are expected to have higher earnings growth than large caps for the first time in a long time. But you don't seem to believe in that. You think it's a bad bet. So yeah, why won't the small caps work given the outsized earnings growth expectations and the easing bias? Fed?

A (34:34)

Well, number one, I don't know that the Fed's easing bias and cutting rates is going to cure the problem that we have. Just because we have a problem and there's political pressure and the Fed's going to, has a, a hammer. Every problem looks like a nail. So they're going to use that hammer. And the hammer is interest rate cuts. I Don't think that number one when it comes to small caps and earnings. We had the same chart last year at this time. It's funny, we printed it last year. They were expected to grow earnings by 30% this year and they ended up having flat earnings. So you know, the estimates on small caps is, is, is sketchy to say the least. But yeah, I, I don't think that the key on small caps is you need to buy them at the right part of the cycle. Early cycle. You get a washout, you have a recession or something. The Fed comes in and eases a lot. Not in just drips and drabs of cuts through the year like they're doing right now. They need to have like a washout where rates go down and then you, they and those stocks get hit too in that process and then you buy them early cycle. I.

B (35:31)

So this is not that moment. This is, we're not in that moment. No.

A (35:35)

And I think that this will be a broadening in my view. But the broadening you want to buy. Like we just talk about the AI trade to validate and ratify all the capex, you need to start seeing companies utilize AI. So you bring up like Walmart and things like that. Like that next sliver of companies still big cap, high quality companies, they're most likely to first adopt AI and show benefits of AI. Talk about headcount steady and things like that. This is going to be a while before that filters into the small cap universe in my opinion, where it shows.

B (36:05)

Up in the form of increased earnings like making these companies more profitable. I don't know that the Fed only has a hammer and everything looks like a nail right at this moment because Bessant seems really creative and he's at Treasury. But I'm sure there are conversations like why is the housing market making people so angry? What's the solution? And so now you're hearing them float ideas like a 50 year mortgage, which just sounds like being a lifelong renter. But fine, it's an idea. I don't think it's a good one. But the next thing you heard was Trump. Trump wants to explore portable mortgages. So this would be the thing that would answer the problem of people holding onto their houses too long. There's not enough liquidity in the housing market because nobody wants to sell a house with a 3% mortgage, buy a new house with a 6% mortgage. Do you view any of this as being constructive or. These things are not going to be a big deal. Maybe they'll help a little at the margin or maybe they won't do anything at all.

A (37:07)

I actually think that like the 50 year mortgage, if you gave me the option, I might take the 50 year mortgage. You can always prepay, you know, and then turn your, you can basically get, if you get your, as your life circumstances change, you can prepay your, your principal and actually reduce the term of the mortgage that way on your own, on your own terms. But it's not going to change this. You know, ultimately that's at the edges. Like you said, the portable mortgage is the same thing. It's, it'll, it will help at the edges. But the problem is there's a medicine that in my opinion needs to be taken, which is we need to have modestly and contract the deficit. We've been running a wartime recessionary deficits during this expansion. It does, it is real money being put into the economy and printed every year, 7 to 8% of the GDP. You know, the tariffs, I don't think you can criticize a lot about the tariffs, but they were bringing in revenue and they were set to contract the deficit down to about 6%. Now we're talking about, and the economy is slowing a bit because of that. That's a contraction like that will be medicine that you have to take. If you take the deficit down from 7 to 6 or 5 and a half percent, the economy will slow. It will feel like a slight contraction because that fiscal impulse is coming down. But you have to do that in order to lower these interest rates on a more structural level, to give the bond market confidence, to let the rates come down and allow borrowing costs to be more normal. But now you're seeing like just this week, Josh Hawley and Trump saying, no, we're going to take those tariff, that tariff money and spend it out as a, as a $2,000, you know, check to working class households. It's like we can't take the medicine as a, as a, the government and policymakers in the political cycle won't allow us to take the medicine that's, you know, that would just make things worse.

B (39:00)

And so that's where I want to send checks out. Put them in an envelope with Donald Trump's face on it. And the problem is you might as well just deposit that right at Robinhood. Just, just, just let people know. All right, your stimulus is ready. It's in your brokerage account.

A (39:17)

Yeah. So the depth, it goes to 8%. The deficit goes to 8% of GDP. And we go through another one of these things where you, you get a sugar Rush in the economy. How did that feel coming out of COVID Did that solve all the problems? You know? No, I don't, I don't.

B (39:30)

It.

A (39:31)

Right.

B (39:31)

It, it, it was needed at the time and like most things, it went too far and it went on for too long. And we know what.

A (39:39)

And I'm not a deficit, like anti. I don't think you need to close the deficit to zero. I'm not sitting here saying that the deficits are inherently bad. It's a policy choice. A deficit is a policy choice. When you run a, a big deficit, it's a policy choice. There are trade offs, you know, and I think at this point the trade offs have swung in the direction of. We should be addressing it somewhat. We should be trying to have some, a little bit, a little bit of austerity. I'm not saying go crazy a little bit.

C (40:04)

Yeah, that's, that's not, that's not politically palatable for this administration or really any like who's going to want to do that? But, but let's just, let's just say that that would happen, that we were to take our medicine and the deficit would shrink, the economy would contract a little bit, interest rates would come down naturally. That still doesn't fix the, one of the big problems of how do you come up with a down payment? Unless you're also suggesting that in that scenario housing prices would come down meaningfully as well.

A (40:30)

Yeah, no, you need a supply side solution as well. Like there needs to be, there needs to be a realization that we haven't built enough housing. We need to, we need to. At the local level. I don't know how you, from the federal, some of the things the federal government can do and some of they can't do, but there, there needs to be a realization like there's too much nimbyism. There needs to be more yimbyism when it comes to housing. Like yes, there's, there's fiscal and there's macro and those conditions need to be adjusted, like I said. But when it comes to housing, like before I was in this business, I was a, I was a land use attorney, so I was doing approvals for real estate developers, for phosphate miners, things like that. It's like the process has really gotten difficult to approve housing in this country and I think there are too many people trying to get their pound of flesh out of it. And, and so we need something that opens up supply. I mean that's not, it's, it's above my page.

B (41:20)

Well, there's a Lot more. There's a lot of other. There are a lot of other societal things. Like people don't necessarily want to move to where the housing is because now you have cities with apartment gluts like we're. Michael and I are in Austin right now. I think most real estate people would say, okay, we might have went overboard with. But the jobs. The jobs in Austin aren't necessarily the jobs that the people who are struggling to get housing can even get. So it doesn't matter if there's an apartment glut here or in Nashville or in Charlotte. So that's one of the issues. And that's a forever issue. I wanted to pivot to this. It's November 20th, so of course this morning we got September jobs numbers. I don't know if anyone still cares about this number, but I wanted to get your take on it. US added 119,000 jobs in September, which was a stronger than expected number. Although digging in, the gains were concentrated in health care, food and drinking establishments. That checks with my experience recently what I've seen. And social assistance, manufacturing sector somehow shed 6,000 jobs. Six thousand jobs is not that important one way or the other. But just notable, we think we're in this capex boom and it's not necessarily translating into the areas of the labor market that you would have thought. Transportation and warehousing saw 25,000 job losses. So that's the September number. Are we like moving past where this stuff even really matters that much?

A (42:57)

I think in the very near term we are. It's getting stale, but it's re. It's confirming like some of the alt day that we saw during the government shutdown. So like, you know, the alt data is saying the labor market is, is weakening. You know, I think that's. And that goes back to the.

B (43:11)

The whole.

A (43:12)

There has been some contraction brought on by the tariffs. You know, tariffs are a tax. That's how. That's what they are. It's ultimately a tax. And those revenues are coming in. So we increase taxes via tariffs. And you're seeing that contraction and it's playing out in the labor market. If we were to stay on this course, if the Supreme Court doesn't overrule the tariffs, we don't send out these rebate checks. I think we're on this glide path to higher unemployment. The unemployment rate did tick up this morning to 4.4%. That's what you would expect. You know, we look at things like when we haven't had this data, we look at Challenger net hiring so this is announced intentions to. And you can see this on chart 11. You see announced intentions to hire versus announced intentions for layoffs. We're at. In 2025 this year. We're, we're negative. We're. We're deeply negative.

B (43:58)

Wait, what is, what is this, what is this red line that, that we're. It doesn't look like a good line.

A (44:04)

Yeah, that's 20. That's this year, year to date through October. And it's taking the, it's netting out the difference between challenger private sector announcements for hires or not just private sectors, entire economy hires and layoffs. And so yes, but announcements or actual intentions? They're doing intentions. They measure intentions in the survey. And so this is the most negative we've been since 2009. If we, this doesn't include 2009, but in recent years, definitely the weakest. But since 2009 we haven't been this negative. We've only been negative 2011, 2009. Every other year is positive. You have more hiring than layoffs. That's what, that's the story. Then you have. If you go to the next chart conference board which is just, it's a consumer survey and they ask, you know, our jobs more plentiful or more hard to get. And we're comparing this to the unemployment rate because this is one of those things where, hey, we didn't have the data. What can we see to track where this data is heading? The, the, the blue line is the unemployment rate. The purple line, you can't really tell so well from this chart, but it's shifted forward because we had more data. Here is the, the difference between people saying jobs are plentiful and jobs are hard to get. And we invert that. So when it's going up, it's based to track the unemployment rate. It's basically saying jobs are harder to find versus plentiful. And that's been increasing. So we're seeing these things. What I would call alt data confirm the, the weakening in the labor market. So this goes back to like when you say, how are you going to take this K shape framing and turn it into some kind of market? Thoughts? I think that the Fed is going to have to address the labor market. The labor market that's a part of the lower K. They're going to try to address the housing market. That's, that's the, the best representation of the lower K. So what that means though is that all these other things that happened like, so there's a group out there that wants The Fed to get really tight and induce a recession to crash the stock market, bring down the upper K. There's like a, you know, just this desire to bring down the upper kids. That's unrealistic. That's not going to happen. Because if they do that, they sacrifice everyone in the lower K who's already in pain. What they're going to do is respond to the lower K and allow that upper K to continue to rise. And so in our world, how do you translate our world, you translate that to the bull market continues, the Fed is supporting it, the Fed has our back. And so to me that's where you take this kind of big picture frame and bring it into the market. The Fed is not going to try to teach the upper K a lesson here. There is no real like they can't stop the AI train. They can't stop what's coming. It's coming. The die is cast. They can only kind of add a little bit of an accelerant on it with rate cuts, which is what they're going to do because they have to address what's happening in the lower K.

B (46:43)

Let's do the sentiment correcting. But you're still expecting a year end rally.

A (46:49)

So this is what we've been waiting for. Like we said, we came through the summer, you, everyone has said, hey, seasonally, you expect a sell off here at some point in the summer. And we didn't get it. Sentiment was sky high. This goes back to that whole AI. The, the, the first AI discussion is like what was going on? Was there anything real fundamental happening that was causing, you know, this, this recent AI pain? I'd say no, you just get too many people on one side of the boat and that you need to correct that sentiment. That's the process of bull markets. So our model, this is, this is just basically, you know, we take things like positioning, we take leveraged ETFs, we take the polls that everyone looks at and we, we spit out. What's our sentiment reading? We've been above 70, which is extremely optimistic sentiment for, you know, a pretty long time. You can see. And we finally started to break down and we're this morning, we're down to 44.8. 40 is like excessive pessimism. You would love to see that as a setup. You can see this, the trading stats on the bottom part here. But the bottom line is this is a, we're getting this right at the time when seasonals converge, the most positive part of the year. The other chart that we have in here that we can look at is buybacks seasonally come back in December. That's been. Yeah, here we go. So this is the seasonal pattern of buybacks.

B (48:05)

And look at that.

A (48:07)

And it's been huge. It's been a huge factor this year. Like you can see back in May when we had April, May when we had the initial Liberation day sell off, corporates were up to as much as 8% of daily trading volume, which is insane. So they were in there with retail setting the bottom. That's been a huge factor. You can see the purple line, that's this year, the blue line. That's the average going back to 2014, 2014 and 2024. You can see we've surpassed it. So corporates have been a big part of this market in a flow. So the bottom line is we have sentiment that was excessively optimistic has now gotten close to pessimism. And seasonally we, we know the calendar is favorable, but the flows are favorable because the, because corporations are coming back and start doing their buying.

B (48:50)

So, so they had, they had to go through earnings. So during earnings they're not engaging in buyback activity. And then now that they're in the clear, we've gotten all the earnings. These companies have buyback authorizations. And if there. You just mentioned how many stocks in the S and p are in 20% drawdowns. Let's go like have at it. This is your, this is your opportunity. So I like that setup going into, into year end also. I think, I think it's a, it's a good place to be.

A (49:21)

The one thing I would would say is everyone looks, we've studied these periods where you have this very narrow market going into this part of the year. And like you said, people want to buy the laggards, but it's usually the leaders. It's the leaders that end up getting the flows coming into year end because people want a window dress and they want to buy. They want to own the stuff that's been working and they sell the. For tax loss and things like that, they're selling out of the laggards. So when you study it historically, more than likely, as much as it's unsatisfying for the average market participant, we think that the leadership will stay where it's been. Come in.

C (49:57)

So what it. That's, that's a really good point about taking advantage of tax harvesting which wealthy people are increasingly doing. There's one notable group of laggards in the market, which is the software names, particularly the mega caps. I'm talking About Salesforce and Adobe and a little bit lower down, down the market cap spectrum at Leijian. These particular stocks are like on life support. They are right at multi year support like on death's door. Do you think that there is a catchup trade in that group to year end or are these names really truly effed?

A (50:32)

You know, because I don't have any like domain specific knowledge. I would go by my framework which is that if you know my default hypothesis is that the laggards, the deep laggards like that are going to get sold here at the year end of the year. And the. Especially with the setup where you had this nice little pullback in names like Nvidia and some of that other hyperscalers who are, who are still positive year to date and some of the hardware names that were positive year to date but just had a nice bulldoze. I wouldn't bet on software catching up. I would bet on this divergence growing.

C (51:00)

All right, so this Josh JC would love this. Like these things are going to get crushed into year end have a false breakdown and you buy the snot out of them in January.

B (51:08)

Like what the 20, the bottom quintile.

C (51:12)

Like CRM, Adobe Team. Like those names that are sitting on false breakdown watch like they might have a breakdown into year end as people say get rid of that. Like just take losses and then have just some sort of rubber band on the other side of the year.

B (51:26)

I don't know. So I don't know if this is always true and I just don't realize it but this year it feels like the laggards, that list, it's just littered with like really big name, big brand companies and it's expanding right? But it's like it's like Nike and Chipotle, Starbucks, Salesforce and Adobe Starbucks. Maybe it's on that list. It just, it feels like there are some large market cap target. So many widely owned target. Great, great example. It's just, it's kind of weird to have like a regular bull market year which we had with one pretty big correction in the middle right in, in. In April and. But it's like a standard bull market year for the S and P but so many names are left out of it.

C (52:22)

Warren, we had a chart earlier from you talking about like there's more names that are down 20% that are beautiful index or something like that. We, we looked at this recently. I can't remember if we charted or not but the number of stocks that are down 30% with the S&P within 5% of an all time high. It's very unusual. There's a lot of really funky things happening under the surface.

B (52:41)

But that's what I'm noticing as a setup.

C (52:43)

I love that. I love there. I think there's opportunity, not for the first time, that's ridiculous. But like there is substantial opportunity I think with a lot of these names that have just been completely discarded. It sounds like you don't agree but that's where.

A (52:57)

Well no, I mean I'm talking very short term tactical towards the end of the year, I mean but I think that in order to get this, like I said, in order to ratify the AI bull market at some point you are going to need to have that, this, this broadening. That's a more serious broadening than what we've seen through the last three years, let's call it, you know, and that's going to be the AI's adopted and shows up in the results. And it only has to be a handful of these companies because as soon as like a handful of the companies come out and say we've adopted it, headcount's done X, you know, or whatever it is that they're. However that's going to express itself or margins have expanded by 2550 basis points because of this. You're going to get the market find. There's going to be a massive search that takes place to find the next and that's going to spread out underneath the, the next layer. Underneath the. The AI winners of the last three years.

B (53:47)

Yeah, I think you, I think you will get that. So I agree with you and I think it'll happen.

A (53:53)

Yeah, it's probably a story for next year, but not at the end of this year.

C (53:57)

Warren, you have a chart that shows the S&P 500 net profit margin with analysts expectations. I'd be curious to know how right the analysts are. Like if you look backwards, how much does this do actual deviate from expected but to the actual point if we see margin expansion in the 493 like that is one of the biggest questions. Do ultimately we see results from AI and if we do and margins go up then the market is going higher. Like period.

A (54:29)

Exactly. So first question, do, do these analyst estimates come true? The bottom line answer to that is if you. Because we've studied that no recession, then they're very accurate recession, they're not so accurate. You know, they're not good bottoms.

B (54:45)

Recession bottoms.

A (54:46)

So that's why we do macro. If you're going to do macro, that's why you have to answer the question first. Is the Fed tightening? No. Is there going to be a recession?

D (54:54)

No.

A (54:55)

And everything else is kind of all clear from there. So they are pretty accurate given the fact that we don't have a recession on our radar. So what we have baked in through 2027 is 250 basis points of margin expansion to an all time high. And to me, and this is, goes back one year ago, maybe more than one year ago, Fernando and I were with you guys in New York and we presented that research where we said Look, S&P 500 is going to go to 7,000 by some point in 2026 and still not be overvalued because of. And we went through this whole. The way the market has changed, the way the composition of the market has changed and how that new composition interacts with margins. So as margins expand with non cyclical, less cyclical businesses like the mature tech stocks that are in there right now, multiples go up. And we did a whole bunch of work on that. And that's just a, that's a phenomenon you see consistently through markets. So that's what the chart you're referencing is that when you get margin expansion, it's very rare to see multiples contract in those calendar years. So I don't think if this number comes through, if we get 250 basis points of margin expansion, this valuation concern is a great concern to fade. That's not going to, that's.

B (56:07)

Let's put that last, let's put that last chart up. So this is price to sales versus change in margin. And what you're showing is that. I'm sorry, the next one. I don't. Yeah, so what you're showing is like if these comp, if these companies can continue to grow margins, then you're not going to have to worry about valuations like price, like a price sales standing in as a proxy for margins contracting or expanding. It's very rare to have that margin growth. And people say I want to pay less for these stocks, not more.

A (56:39)

Correct. 2007, 2005 or two years where we saw that that was a highly cyclical market composition. That was energy, that was financials. It's a different interaction. When those are your market, that's where your market mass is. Then you had 2000 and 2018. Those were fed tightening years. Those, that's not happening either. So like those are the things you have to think about but the, the bottom line and there's, we have a much more detailed studies in this but it's A good perspective. The bottom line is if margins do what the analysts think they're going to do, the market is not expensive.

B (57:12)

And they, and they are like, and they are like, like Walmart. Walmart is up as we're recording 6% on the day. They beat earnings. They raise guidance. They, they raised. On the earnings side, they're doing things more profitably. It's. You're going to tell me Walmart's not battling with tariff issues. They sell everything under the sun to everyone, but they're finding ways to do it. And that's the thing that continues to serve as this like underlying trend of upside surprise. The best companies, the Walmarts, they just continue to battle and find margin and investors continue to reward these stocks with higher multiples. It's not forever, but it's definitely right.

A (57:57)

Now 100% and they're holding headcount constant for five years. For the next five years is what they're saying, is what my understanding is.

B (58:04)

So what else Funny, they said they want to be on the nasdaq. Did you hear that?

A (58:07)

I did hear that. The NYSE to NASDAQ shift. Yes, yes. I don't know.

B (58:12)

Very interesting. I don't think that's a cost saving measure because I, from what I'm told, it's about equal which exchange you're going to list on. I don't think they compete on the cost of listing. So I wonder if that's just like, hey, we're cool. Like we're, we do technology too. We do.

A (58:30)

AI Robots are coming in Walmart. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

B (58:34)

All right, dude, that's a great place to leave it. We, we, we love having you on, Warren. And I know our audience appreciates the 30,000 foot view and then translating that into a market posture and I think you do it better than anyone we know. So thank you so much. What are you looking forward to? What's next for you? Anything on the, Anything on the radar?

A (58:54)

Yeah, man. The thing I'm looking forward to is we just, we've had an internal AI agent that builds charts for you on the fly and that's been spin the thing that's leveled up our efficiency agency and we are in 2026, we're going to start allowing some outsiders to have access and so we put some demos out on social media. I'd say check it out. We're very excited for that. I think it's going to be, it's. You'll just have to see the demos. I could go on and on, but watch the demos you'll be impressed.

B (59:19)

Are you telling Michael and I that 314research has gone agentic?

A (59:24)

We've been agentic. I mean, that's why we don't have. Our headcount has been constant. Josh. It's. That's what I'm talking about. You know, this is why we're believers.

B (59:32)

So Warren helping to cause more of that K shaped economy and we appreciate it. All right guys, thank you so much for listening. I want to send you to Warren's site and make sure you check it out. What's the best. What's the URL for people to go to? They want to learn more about you and Fernando.

A (59:49)

The number three that spell out 14 research calm. And if you're interested, fill out the form and we'll get back to you.

B (59:56)

All right. Check out Warren and Fernando's stuff. They're always great. Guys, thank you so much for watching. Thank you for listening. We appreciate you. We wish you a great weekend and the compound shall return. See you soon.

A (60:30)

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