Why Initial Jobless Claims Could Blow Up the Stock Market

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Compound and Friends – "Why Initial Jobless Claims Could Blow Up the Stock Market"

Release Date: May 30, 2025

Hosts: Downtown Josh Brown, Michael Batnick
Guest: Jens Nordvig, Founder and CEO of Ex Ante Data & Market Reader

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1. Introduction and Guest Background

The episode kicks off with the hosts briefly introducing Jens Nordvig, a seasoned financial expert with a rich background including roles at Goldman Sachs, Bridgewater, and Nomura Securities. Jens is the founder and CEO of Ex Ante Data, a company specializing in data analytics and market insights for institutional investors, and co-founder of Market Reader, an AI-driven tool for real-time market analysis.

Notable Quote:

Josh Brown [11:26]: "Previously, Jens was a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, a Senior Investment Associate at Bridgewater, and head of fixed income Research and Global Currency Strategy at Nomura Securities before founding EX Anti Data in 2016."

2. Tariff Rulings and Legal Challenges

A significant portion of the discussion centers on recent developments in U.S. tariff policies, particularly the legal battles surrounding tariffs imposed on China. The hosts and Jens delve into how these tariffs, initially perceived as a potential boon for the stock market, have encountered judicial pushback, leading to policy uncertainty.

Notable Quotes:

Jens Nordvig [03:00]: "We can't have a situation where China is having the same tariffs as the United Kingdom. That doesn't make sense."

Michael Batnick [06:05]: "Now, when you say makes sense, what does that have to do with anything?"

3. Market Reactions to Tariffs and Initial Jobless Claims

The conversation shifts to the immediate market reactions following tariff announcements and subsequent legal rulings. The hosts express surprise at the Dow's performance and discuss how initial jobless claims have become a critical indicator that could significantly impact the stock market. Jens emphasizes the sensitivity of the market to these claims, highlighting their role as an early warning sign for economic shifts.

Notable Quotes:

Jens Nordvig [23:19]: "The market is getting totally desensitized to these moves we've seen in relation to Mexico as well."

Josh Brown [24:01]: "So if we go to 255, like just 15,000 more next week, so it looks like on the initial or initial."

4. Labor Market and Consumer Spending

Jens provides an in-depth analysis of the labor market, linking rising jobless claims to potential declines in consumer spending. He outlines how tariffs contribute to reduced purchasing power, which in turn affects GDP growth. The hosts discuss real-world examples, such as declining sales at major retailers like Best Buy, to illustrate the tangible impacts of increased tariffs on consumer behavior.

Notable Quotes:

Jens Nordvig [18:05]: "Most of it is going to be something that essentially limits the purchasing power of the consumer. So real consumption is going to go down."

Josh Brown [19:55]: "The target, like how could someone say this is not going to be a consumer problem?"

5. Capital Flows and Reserve Currency Status

A pivotal segment explores the status of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency. Jens discusses emerging trends indicating a gradual shift in international capital flows away from the dollar, driven by geopolitical tensions and changing trade policies. He highlights the complexities of this transition, noting that while the dollar remains dominant, structural challenges could erode its supremacy over time.

Notable Quotes:

Jens Nordvig [48:08]: "So what we have seen happening in the last couple of months has questioned the safety of the long bond in the United States in a way that I don't believe we've seen before."

Josh Brown [57:39]: "Don't really think about it as a binary thing. It's not, oh, it's the reserve currency or it's not the reserve currency."

6. Jens Nordvig's Insights and Tools

Jens introduces Ex Ante Data and Market Reader, elaborating on how his companies leverage vast datasets and AI to provide actionable market insights. He emphasizes the importance of filtering through massive amounts of data to extract meaningful narratives that aid investment decisions. Market Reader, in particular, is highlighted as a tool that synthesizes real-time market movements and news to deliver concise explanations, enhancing the decision-making process for investors.

Notable Quotes:

Jens Nordvig [72:22]: "So Margarita is a piece of software that extracts, explains in real time what is happening in the market. Like why is Meta down? Why is Google up?"

Michael Batnick [73:20]: "That's awesome. So we would encourage people, of course, check out Ex Ante if you are a professional investor and if you're not a professional investor but you want to inform yourself. Market Reader is a pretty cool tool."

7. Conclusion and Future Outlook

As the podcast nears its end, the hosts and Jens reflect on the critical economic indicators to watch in the coming months, particularly focusing on employment data and its repercussions on the stock market. They also touch upon Jens’s personal aspirations for achieving a better work-life balance amidst his professional commitments.

Notable Quotes:

Jens Nordvig [68:27]: "So I think we have to be hyper focused on what's happening with the real data in the next two months."

Jens Nordvig [76:10]: "My goal for the future is to really have proper downtime and that could be downtime for my family and so forth."

Key Takeaways

• Initial Jobless Claims as a Bellwether: Rising initial jobless claims serve as a critical indicator of economic health, potentially signaling downturns in consumer spending and stock market performance.

• Tariff Policy Uncertainty: Ongoing legal disputes over tariffs, especially those targeting China, contribute to market volatility and investor uncertainty.

• Shift in Global Capital Flows: There is a noticeable trend of international investors gradually diversifying away from the U.S. dollar, influenced by geopolitical tensions and evolving trade policies.

• Data-Driven Investment Tools: Innovations like Ex Ante Data and Market Reader are pivotal in navigating the complex and data-saturated investment landscape, providing investors with real-time, actionable insights.

• Economic Resilience vs. Consumer Confidence: While the labor market shows signs of resilience, declining consumer confidence and spending pose significant risks to economic stability and growth.

Final Thoughts

Jens Nordvig provides a comprehensive analysis of the interconnectedness between labor market indicators, tariff policies, and global capital flows, underscoring the delicate balance that influences the stock market. His expertise and the advanced tools developed by his companies offer valuable resources for investors seeking to navigate these turbulent times.

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For more insights and detailed analysis, visit Ex Ante Data and Market Reader.

Transcript

[Josh Brown]

What's the dog's name?

[Michael Batnick]

Rue.

[Josh Brown]

Rue. Is that short for roulette?

[Michael Batnick]

Sure. I hate roulette.

[Josh Brown]

Is that short for Rubenstein? What's the name? What's the name? Where did the name come from?

[Michael Batnick]

Somebody said, hey, what about Roo? I said, yeah, I like that name.

[Josh Brown]

Really?

[Michael Batnick]

We couldn't think of a name.

[Josh Brown]

I could have helped you with that.

[Michael Batnick]

I'm sure you could have.

[Josh Brown]

Rue is not bad. Does the dog respond?

[Michael Batnick]

Yeah.

[Josh Brown]

All right. You, dog, guy, cat.

[Jens Nordvig]

My daughter's begging for a dog.

[Josh Brown]

You're gonna have. Yeah, you're gonna have to give it.

[Michael Batnick]

How old?

[Jens Nordvig]

She's eight.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah.

[Michael Batnick]

Yeah. It's time.

[Josh Brown]

You're gonna lose.

[Michael Batnick]

Do it.

[Josh Brown]

I saw. You know whose dog I love? Justin Robbins. What are they? Burmese mountain dog mixed with a poodle.

[Michael Batnick]

Oh, those are great dogs.

[Josh Brown]

Burma Doodle.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah. That's Bernadoodle.

[Josh Brown]

Bernadoodle.

[Michael Batnick]

Adorable.

[Josh Brown]

It looks like a stuffed animal.

[Michael Batnick]

Yeah.

[Josh Brown]

As one of the cutest dogs I've ever seen, Baxters. It's a good name, right?

[Michael Batnick]

Oh, that's. That's Ron Burgundy's dog.

[Josh Brown]

Oh, really?

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah.

[Josh Brown]

You think they did that on purpose? Of course. Okay.

[Michael Batnick]

I don't believe in coincidences.

[Josh Brown]

All right, so, yes, Michael got dressed up for this. That is his best Knicks. That is his best Knicks outfit. So.

[Michael Batnick]

Well, I was trying to think what Knicks gear have had good outcomes this year. I wore this. I wore this to Memphis when OG had a game winning shot.

[Jens Nordvig]

I wore my Knicks hat then. Next time.

[Josh Brown]

Next time.

[Michael Batnick]

You a basketball fan?

[Jens Nordvig]

It's nice to see them, I have to say. Yeah, that's a good venue.

[Michael Batnick]

Great venue. All right, so what else is going on?

[Jens Nordvig]

There's a little bit going on in the market every day. It was pretty busy on our client chat last night, I can tell you that.

[Michael Batnick]

Oh, yeah.

[Josh Brown]

What was your.

[Michael Batnick]

I think I got what happened.

[Jens Nordvig]

I think I got 100 questions. Maybe.

[Josh Brown]

What was, like, what was everyone's reaction? Because I thought the Dow was gonna have a plus 500 point day.

[Michael Batnick]

Could you believe this guy still talks in daos.

[Josh Brown]

In points?

[Jens Nordvig]

Not really.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah, well, I saw the Dow futures last night, up 550 after that news. And I assumed that maybe a little bit of it is Nvidia, but I assume most of it was, oh, the tariffs are done. And then this morning, people woke up and said, that's not actually how it works. Yeah, okay. Was that how you were answering people's questions last night?

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah, kind of. Like, to be honest, what we've seen with these tariffs is that they've done some stuff that any kind of attorney thought. Okay. That's not really possible, what they've done.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah.

[Jens Nordvig]

So they're actually going back to what we thought was gonna be the path in January. Right. That they're gonna use some other legal maneuvers. Right. To fill the gaps from what they lost last night.

[Josh Brown]

Right.

[Jens Nordvig]

If you want the numbers, we can do that. 122, 230.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah, yeah. So they basically said all of this is national security. Is that. And then the court said, no, not really.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah.

[Josh Brown]

Okay.

[Jens Nordvig]

And there's a whole legal battle about like, okay, how much presidential power do we have relative. Right. So some pushback against the Supreme Court might have a different take on that.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah.

[Jens Nordvig]

But I think the bottom line is that we can't have a situation where China is having same tariffs as United Kingdom. That doesn't make sense. That the best deal that is after the United Kingdom, suddenly other like China has the same deal. Right. So they will need to adjust that.

[Michael Batnick]

Now, when you say makes sense, what does that have to do with anything?

[Jens Nordvig]

Well, I think where there was most consensus in terms of like how should we use tariff policy was around China. Right. You can ask Marco Rubio, you can ask Scott Besson, you can ask JD Vance, you can ask Navarro. Everybody would agree, okay. We should have significant tariffs on China, national security, big picture politics and so forth. Right. So from that perspective, I think the threat as seen by most people as mainly from China. Right. So we had the highest chance. We had 145% not that long ago. Right. So there was a reason for that. So having that go to zero doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense.

[Josh Brown]

Then zero is not going to be where this falls out.

[Jens Nordvig]

No, of course not. Certainly not. Versus China. If China has zero, then it doesn't make any sense to have tariffs on anybody else.

[Josh Brown]

Nicole, let's get the headphones and let's get the microphone. Make sure we get everything Jens has to say.

[Michael Batnick]

Is it a stretch to say that the market was right, that it we knew that it was all bullshit and not going to be enforced and not going to last?

[Jens Nordvig]

Which part of it? Tariffs in general?

[Michael Batnick]

Because I guess maybe a week or two into the bounce, I was saying, I don't get it. You're telling me that things are as good through the lens of the stock market as they were two weeks ago before the shit show started. And it turns out that maybe in fact it's looking like the market did get it right.

[Josh Brown]

The market said the stock market got it right, not the Bond market, the stock market. The stock market has been more right about the tariffs than the bond market is one way of thinking about it. Do you agree with that or not really.

[Jens Nordvig]

So I think the way I think about it, and this is what we've done in our research as well, we try to think, okay, where are we going to end up in three months instead of trying to say, okay, what headline is going to come out tomorrow? What is really a sustainable steady state we're going to end up with. 145% on China is definitely not sustainable. There's lots of stuff we get only from China. Lots of small businesses rely on only on stuff from China. They'll be done. So 145 was not sustainable. So that was relatively easy to predict. Right?

[Josh Brown]

Yeah.

[Jens Nordvig]

So I think where we're going to end up is a situation where we probably have that 10% minimum put in place through another legal route. We probably have a workable tariff on China. 30, 40%, something like that.

[Josh Brown]

Above and beyond the 10 or in incorporating the 10.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah, I say 30 to 40. So that you can take.

[Josh Brown]

Right.

[Jens Nordvig]

And then we're going to have these sectoral tariffs. Right. Autos we have already. Right. Metals we have already. We're going to have some pharma coming soon and some semiconductor stuff and it's gonna add up to something significant, but it's just gonna be a little bit more complicated to get it done because it's gonna be done through the normal processes that actually take a little bit more time. But in relation to China, they already have done these investigations. That is part of the process. Okay. You need to have the reason you're doing the tariffs and they've already done those investigations. So now there's actually no further delay. Now they can do it tomorrow if they wanted to.

[Josh Brown]

Right. And so then it just becomes like, how well is the dialogue going between the two countries? Do they need to shock the market again and say things are not progressing, or do they want to come out and say we're getting closer? That's what the market will react to.

[Jens Nordvig]

To be honest, I think about it a little bit differently.

[Josh Brown]

Okay.

[Jens Nordvig]

Like they made a mistake on April 2. A certain group of advisors who you don't see anymore, don't see much anymore. Right. Came up with this poster.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah.

[Jens Nordvig]

With some numbers that really were quite shocking and people didn't expect. Right. And now the poster is effectively canceled. First they cancel them themselves. Right. They said, okay, let's put on hold. And now the court has canceled the poster. So the poster has been canceled.

[Josh Brown]

All those numbers on that poster are out the window now.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah, out of the window. So it's almost like we're starting from scratch. I think we started from scratch, right. And we have a new team. Scott Besson is doing all the Asia deals, right. So he's like when he did the Geneva meeting, right, Even the President said, okay, Scott is going to decide.

[Josh Brown]

He said, up to Scott. That's what he tweeted.

[Michael Batnick]

What a waste of time and energy.

[Jens Nordvig]

This all was before that. I think it's fair to say it's a mistake, but I'm glad Scott has taken the lead. I think it's going to be in a little approach. I've known Scott for many years. He was one of my very first clients when I launched Exante Data. Right. And like, everybody has their own political opinions, but I think it's fair to say that there will be a sound analytical process behind what is happening now. And they're going to get to a sustainable level of tariffs pretty soon. Obviously now they have to navigate this legal hiccup they had overnight. But I think we're not going to get to 45, 145% again. Right, but we're also not going to have. They cannot allow the tariff on China to go to zero even in the short term, because if it goes to zero in the short term, we're going to have all this front loading, crazy amount of imports coming in and they will lose all the negotiating leverage because the inventories are stocked up and it will only bite.

[Josh Brown]

They'll have a pull forward that negates the whole point of the tariffs.

[Jens Nordvig]

That's right.

[Josh Brown]

Okay, we're going to start the show. You ready?

[Jens Nordvig]

Three claps.

[Josh Brown]

All right, thank you, Nicole.

[Jens Nordvig]

Ladies and.

[Josh Brown]

Gentlemen, Nicole S.

[Michael Batnick]

Long Beach Zone.

[Josh Brown]

All right, Long Beach Zone. Nicole S. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

[Michael Batnick]

Stop the clock. Here's a word from our sponsor. Today's show is sponsored by Public. On that platform, you can invest in almost everything. Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, ETFs, whatever you want. You know what's great, John? It's been a while that we've had these juicy yields in our cash, and they're still here at Public. You can get 4.1% in their cash account. 4.1% liquid is the ocean. So leave your clunky, outdated platform behind. Public was designed in the 22nd century. That's how far ahead they are. The experience is clean, intuitive, modern design. What else do you need? Find out [e-mail] compound that's public.com compound paid for by Public Investing Full Disclosures and Podcast Description.

[Josh Brown]

Welcome to the Compound and friends. All opinions expressed by Josh Brown, Michael Batnik and their castmates are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions.

[Jens Nordvig]

Clients of Ritholtz Wealth Management may maintain.

[Josh Brown]

Positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Those of you who are coming to the Live in Chicago next week, we'll get to meet Nicole, John, Daniel, you coming? All right, Daniel Duncan, whole gang. All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the very best investing podcast in America. Some would say North America even. We have a very special guest. It's his first time here. We're super excited to talk with him. His name is Jens Nordvig and Jens is the founder and CEO of X Antidata, a financial services company specializing in data analytics and market insights for institutional investors. Are you mystified by the sounds and what's going on here?

[Jens Nordvig]

This is a little bit new.

[Michael Batnick]

That's not for us.

[Jens Nordvig]

Different from Bloomberg?

[Josh Brown]

Yeah, it's not Bloomberg. Although. Although huge fan of Tom Keene's I'll tell you right now. Previously, Jens was a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, a Senior Investment associate at Bridgewater, and head of fixed income Research and Global Currency Strategy at Nomura securities before founding EX Anti Data in 2016. Jens is also the co founder and CEO of Market Reader. We're going to talk about both Ex Ante and Market Reader, but before we, before we go down that road, I just want to on, on the on the tariff ruling because just because we're in the middle of this conversation, my friend Neil Dutta said in an email missive this morning. With all caps, of course after these days, tariffs are not are a dialogue. They're not an on and off switch. Because a lot of people I think read those headlines or a lot of, let's say a lot of trading algorithms read those headlines and they said, oh no, Tariffs. Not how it works. Neil says if you think the judiciary gets to be the one to turn the knob, seek help. He also said, I am not a trade lawyer, but the ruling allows the president to pursue his tariff agenda through other means. We're trading a decline in the effective tariff rate, which is good for a prolonged bout of policy uncertainty, which is bad. This will weigh on business investment and hiring more uncertainty. Great. At the margin this puts some pressure back on the Fed. I'd argue this puts less emphasis on the near term inflation Data and more weight on employment. When I read that, I said, that's exactly what I think about this. I almost think it would be better to have a slightly higher than hoped for tariff and just have that be the end of the conversation. A lot of now what's gonna happen with courts and rulings and tweets? It seems like we're in a worse place than we were a week ago. What do you think about that idea?

[Jens Nordvig]

I think we have to look through all the noise, all the court mumbo jumbo, all the different threats that are coming through and just think about, okay, what's the sustainable level of tariffs that we we're going to be reaching in a couple of months that achieves some of the policy goals that the Trump administration has, the advisors are having and what the economy can take.

[Josh Brown]

What are the policy goals, do you think? Fentanyl?

[Jens Nordvig]

No, I don't think so.

[Josh Brown]

I don't either.

[Jens Nordvig]

I think the key policy goals has to do. We want to protect certain industries. There's certain industries. We want to make sure we have domestic supply chain, certainly stuff that's related to the military. But beyond that as well, national security also depends on AI so we need to make sure those supply chains are protected. So that's sort of the insuring aspect of it. And then there's the second aspect that has to do with revenue, like the budget is in trouble. Right. We've just had a big budget debate. The numbers came out last week and it looks like 6 to 7% of GDP deficits forever. Right. So if we can get some revenue in from the tariffs, that maybe can get that to be on a slight, what, you know, slightly declining deficit path would be a lot better than widening deficits.

[Josh Brown]

So that's the second $30 billion in tariff revenue last month.

[Michael Batnick]

Is that the number that's pissing into the ocean?

[Josh Brown]

It sounds like a joke, I think. How do we get to a trillion dollars?

[Jens Nordvig]

It changes every day, right? Because we have this table that we put in front of clients where we add up all the different t tariffs before the announcement yesterday that the sort of tax effect was in the reading, $650 billion per year. So like call it 2% of GDP. And then if we read the headlines without looking through the noise, but believed the headlines, right. We'd be down to 200 billion. Right. So it was a huge change. Right. In the end, we're going to end up in a situation where they're going to fill the gap. That is, they're going to find other legal ways to get something similar done, 10% minimum on pretty much all countries and something that's aimed at China. So I think we're going to get close to the 2% of GDP tax effect again and that will have some meaningful impact on the budget. They need it. They need it for the budget. Right.

[Josh Brown]

Do you think we've seen the worst of the market reaction to tariffs at this point? Yeah, we might have a bumpy road as developments happen, but probably not the level of shock that we live through in April. That's right.

[Jens Nordvig]

How did it feel around April 2nd?

[Josh Brown]

Not great.

[Jens Nordvig]

Not fantastic. Right. It was pretty wild time. So I have this one chart that I've been staring at where I say, okay, what happens to the yield curve when the equity market is down a lot? So normally the yield curve, when the equity market's down a lot, you just have all yields going down. That's normal. Sometimes you have a situation like in 2022, right, when it's actually the yield curve shifting higher, that takes the equity market down. So that can also happen. But the combination we had in April never happens with equities going down, the front end yields going down, and the long end yields going up.

[Josh Brown]

That was scary shit.

[Michael Batnick]

And dollars falling. That was a weird environment. But we said earlier that the stock market got it right. Actually the bond market got it right too. Spec credit spreads, they went up a little bit in early April, but kind of nothing with nothing. So they saw through it too.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah, I think the market is getting a lot smarter looking through the headlines. And I think that the price action we've had around this court ruling is the same. Right. The dollar move for a couple of hours gave back essentially the whole move. And yeah, Euro dollar is now up, gold is up. Right. So market is getting totally desensitized to these moves we've seen in relation to Mexico as well. If the market believed at any point through this that Mexico was going to have, you know, big tariffs, the peso would have been dusted totally toast.

[Josh Brown]

Right.

[Jens Nordvig]

And it never happened.

[Josh Brown]

I agree.

[Michael Batnick]

Avocado toast, am I right? Hey, you mentioned the sustainable levels a few times for the economy. What economy are you talking about?

[Jens Nordvig]

So I think about, like, obviously there's a kind of political debate about what the tariffs are going to do. Right. But mostly for me, it's like consumption tax. Right. The consumer is going to eat most of it.

[Michael Batnick]

Don't say that.

[Jens Nordvig]

That's just El Salvador.

[Josh Brown]

You know, this is going to be public, right. People are going to hear this.

[Jens Nordvig]

So if you have a big tax effect. Right. Most of it is going to be something that essentially limits the purchasing power of the consumer. So real consumption is going to go down. And we can already see the GDP numbers that we had to revise GDP numbers today. So now we're close to 1% consumption growth in Q1. Right. So how much more damage to real spending power can we take? Not that much.

[Josh Brown]

We heard from Best Buy today, which is the largest electronics retailer in America, pretty, like I would say a pretty representative kind of consumer brand where it's almost, it's the whole gamut. It's vacuum cleaners and toasters, but it's also computers and cell phones and you know, flat screen TVs. And stock got pancaked today. They came out and said straight up pricing related to tariffs resulted in, I guess, lower demand from the consumer. And I don't know how much of that is cyclical. Like the consumer might have done all they're buying for Christmas and they're just not in the stores this spring and they're blaming it on tariffs or the prices that people are encountering when they walk into Best Buy are stopping them from buying as much as they used to buy. And it's not even political. You either believe that that's happening or you don't. And if you don't, well, what's your story to explain why Ross stores just had a horrible outlook, why Walmart is so afraid that they're going to like start publishing the, the tariff impact so consumers can see it's not their fault. Like you kind of have to believe that this is already a problem.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah. I think for it's when you analyze.

[Josh Brown]

The target, like how could, like how could somebody, how could somebody say this is not going to be a consumer problem? All of the biggest companies that interface with consumers are saying, no, it is and it's right now it's not next year.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah, I think you can see it on a lot of different things. The hard part when you crunch data, which is what I do for a living, is that you have these front loading effects as well. Right. So you have, for example, car purchases were actually very strong in March when people were looking forward to fearing the tariffs in April. So it's hard to look at the data. So what we're trying to do is to try to look at the pieces of consumption where you don't have the front loading kind of contaminating the data. So I think services consumption is actually where you look at the trend.

[Josh Brown]

Oh, people don't front load services.

[Jens Nordvig]

No, it's like the stuff that have tariffs on it. Right. Could have the front loading effect. But like for example, the domestic services, like holidays and so forth shouldn't have any front loading.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah.

[Jens Nordvig]

And I think that is, that has been weak as well. You can see it in some of the airlines. You can see it in. Yeah. Like bookings and so forth.

[Michael Batnick]

So the data is so noisy.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah.

[Michael Batnick]

Like for every Best Buy and this bad service, I can give you Disney World, which just said that they expect 7% growth in Q3 and Q4 to the parks. I was like, really?

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah.

[Michael Batnick]

Like that surprised the hell out of me.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah, it's. I have. This week one of our main focuses has been to just crunch all the real time data we can get our hands on.

[Michael Batnick]

What's it telling you?

[Jens Nordvig]

It's just a mixed picture, to be honest.

[Josh Brown]

If only there were this clear cut narrative, but it just isn't.

[Jens Nordvig]

No, it's not. And I think it's also us Consumers are famous for being very resilient buyers.

[Michael Batnick]

We don't stop.

[Jens Nordvig]

They certainly don't collapse from one day to the other. And we saw that all the way back in 2007. Right. It takes a long time before any kind of credit constraint starts to bite. I think credit is flashing yellow, orange. Like there's consumer credit. Looks like it's getting stretched. But if people are in the period where people are maxing out, it can still sustain the consumption. So that tipping point is important. And obviously the labor market is really important.

[Josh Brown]

So I was gonna ask you, I was gonna ask you about exactly that. What if we just ignore the consumer data entirely and just ask this question every week. Can people get a job or not? Are more or less people working this month versus last month? That seems to be the most obvious way. I don't know about predicting a shift, but to know for a fact that a shift is taking place in consumers, they will not stop spending until they literally don't have a job.

[Michael Batnick]

You're right. Just look at initial claims. That's it. There's nothing there.

[Jens Nordvig]

You can see how sensitive the market is to initial claims. So one of the questions I got on Institutional chat was how come the market has so much beta to the initial claims? Well, it makes a lot of sense. We're all searching for whether the economy is about to flip. And claims historically is one of the earliest thing to flip. Right. So we had 240 today. If we have two.

[Josh Brown]

Hold on for the listener. So we hit 242,000 initial jobless claims.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yep.

[Josh Brown]

So that's for last month.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah.

[Josh Brown]

It's a week last week.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah.

[Josh Brown]

So. So 242,000 people over the last week have filed for unemployment. Those are newly laid off or fired people or people who've quit a job.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yep.

[Josh Brown]

Okay. But the continuing claims is ticking higher.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah.

[Josh Brown]

And that. And that's indicative of they're not getting a new job as quickly as they were even six months ago.

[Jens Nordvig]

That's right.

[Josh Brown]

Okay, so which of those is more important to follow or are you looking at both and trying to discern, like, if there's a real trend there?

[Jens Nordvig]

I think the, the continuing claims is less noisy. Like it's accumulation. Right. So that one moving out of the range. It's a weekly series. Right. So it's going to be more noisy than a monthly series. There's always like holiday effects. We had Memorial Day. Some of those have an impact. But I'll tell you this. If we go to 255, like just 15,000 more next week, so it looks like on.

[Josh Brown]

On initial or initial. Okay.

[Jens Nordvig]

The market will go bananas. So I remember take so little and this inflection point.

[Josh Brown]

Wait, wait, wait. Bananas up or down?

[Michael Batnick]

Down.

[Jens Nordvig]

It will start to really worry about growth resetting lower. The Fed will have to cut, like. And the Fed will cut. If initial claims are shifting up. We will very quickly.

[Josh Brown]

You and I agree there.

[Jens Nordvig]

We will very quickly get to a point where, you know, a July cut is back on the table and yesterday was totally priced out.

[Michael Batnick]

Last fall we were on the show and I remember, I think it was with Sam Rowe, we were like, when did the market ever care about initial claims this much? It was an event every week because last October we ticked up to 259,000 and it looked like there was a breakout coming. If you could use technical analysis on.

[Josh Brown]

Weekly claims, I don't recommend it.

[Michael Batnick]

Well, you said. Yeah, you said. Hang on. Josh said once claims start leading higher, they normally don't slow down.

[Josh Brown]

And they did.

[Michael Batnick]

And they did.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah.

[Michael Batnick]

So we also have to talk about which part of the job market, which part of the economy, because this is a very bifurcated consumer. And Josh and I were talking about this on Tuesday. Savita has this great stat where she said the US Has a higher proportion of low income consumers than almost every other OECD nation. However, its contribution to total consumption is low and its contribution to S&P 500 earnings has declined to an estimated 2 percentage points. That's wild. Only 2%.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah. So, like, I'm a kind of data nerd. Right. So when I look at the labor market, we have a tool that aggregates literally all data we can get our hands on into one kind of index of what's the strength of the labor market. Last summer when the Fed was cutting rates, it was a bit puzzling why they were cutting rates because the NFP numbers, the payroll numbers were weak for a couple of months, but everything else was looking better. And maybe claims was weak for a couple of weeks. Right. But the overall labor market data was never really that weak. Now it's a bit different because there are a bunch of labor market indicators that look softer. There's the government side where we know there's quite a few layoffs going on in the government sector, in the people who have research grants, NGOs and so forth. So there's some weakness there. We know also there's new stuff going on with immigration. So all the hiring that was related to that is probably different. So I think it makes sense to be hypersensitive to the claims. That's what the market is doing. Right.

[Josh Brown]

The rolling four week average, I think on initial is more like 225, which is not bad.

[Michael Batnick]

Nothing.

[Jens Nordvig]

That's okay. Still.

[Josh Brown]

Okay. All right. But you think one aberrant weekly print above 250 is going to get everyone's attention?

[Jens Nordvig]

If we have 255 next week, the yield curve is going to move a lot.

[Josh Brown]

Okay.

[Jens Nordvig]

And the equity market's probably going to move.

[Michael Batnick]

How often does it happen? You get just like, I don't know, like, whoa, that was high.

[Jens Nordvig]

We have high frequency indicators that we use to forecast claims for exact that reason that you would want to be ahead of it.

[Michael Batnick]

All right, cover the mic. What's it look like next week?

[Josh Brown]

Yeah, no. Have you been, have you been closed this year on forecasts for claims?

[Jens Nordvig]

We don't get every single one.

[Josh Brown]

Nobody does.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yes. But yeah, we want to get a. It doesn't matter whether we write every single one, but if there's a big spike, that's when we want to get it right.

[Josh Brown]

Okay, I want to back up a little bit for people who are familiar with you. For the most part, they probably know you. You had this position at Goldman Sachs where you the head of currency strategy and there were some pretty big events during your tenure there and you made some pretty big calls. And I want to just kind of give people an idea of how you ended up in that post as the currency strategist at Goldman. And then we'll talk about some of those calls because I remember like trading equities through some of these Events. And I remember reading your, you know, headlines where your calls are in those headlines.

[Jens Nordvig]

That's impressive.

[Josh Brown]

I know.

[Jens Nordvig]

You have a good memory.

[Josh Brown]

No, I do. I know zero about currencies. Like. Like, if people ask me questions like, what do you think of the dollar? I don't know. What do you think? That's literally my answer. So this is. But this is, I think, becoming more important for investors to understand, even if they're not acting on it. So you go to Goldman Sachs in 2004. Not a native New Yorker. I don't think you're from Jersey originally. Tell us how you landed there.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah, so I was working at Goldman in London. I got a job there that I applied for in the Economist newspaper.

[Josh Brown]

Okay.

[Jens Nordvig]

And then a couple of years in, there was a guy called Jim o' Neill.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah, him. We know that.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah, he invented this. Brics.

[Josh Brown]

That's right.

[Jens Nordvig]

So he's a pretty famous guy. Brics. He actually invented a research concept that is a thing now. It's pretty rare.

[Josh Brown]

Turns out, terrible investing strategy.

[Jens Nordvig]

Politically. Pretty amazing. So he came over and he. He tapped my shoulder one day in 2004, and he said, do you want to go to New York? He said, I have a job for you. And that was. They call it death strategies, the strategy set together with the traders. And it's actually a job he used to have. It's a job that John Hutches, who is still Gomer, used to have. And he said, why don't you think about it for a couple weeks? And then I looked at him. I don't need to think about it.

[Josh Brown]

Let's just do it. You were ready to give it a shot?

[Jens Nordvig]

I was ready, yeah. I always loved New York, so it was like a dream come true.

[Josh Brown]

And that's 21 years ago. You're still here.

[Jens Nordvig]

Still here, yeah. It was supposed to be a couple of years, but it extended.

[Josh Brown]

So the desk strategist is the guy or girl who sits on the end of the trading desk. And when something is moving, the traders could say, yo, Jens, why is, I don't know, the German Bund doing what it's doing? And then you have to give them something that they.

[Jens Nordvig]

The world has changed a little bit.

[Josh Brown]

So I understand.

[Jens Nordvig]

So in 2004, it used to be the case that we had the turret system. Right. And when you're the death strategist, when there's important numbers coming out, you have to shout into the turret whether you thought it was good or bad. So you have to look at all the numbers as a human. Right. And conclude whether it was good or bad. And the traders would just trade it, try to be like one millisecond quicker than anybody else.

[Josh Brown]

They would just take your reaction as gospel and trade most of the time.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah.

[Josh Brown]

Wow. Okay, what was it like if you called one wrong?

[Michael Batnick]

You say, just kidding.

[Jens Nordvig]

I remember there was a.

[Josh Brown]

You say they misheard you.

[Jens Nordvig]

One of the head of rates trading, she was, she was very famous for. She would often ask Lyn a question on the turret that everybody on the training floor would hear and then you had to answer immediately. And it was often like a kind of math question. So if you got the math wrong, you are in trouble.

[Josh Brown]

But, but that's very Goldman.

[Jens Nordvig]

You have to be focused because if you couldn't get the math for her question lines, you'll be very disappointed. Okay, so. But we don't do that anymore. Right. Because we have high frequency traders that essentially do that. So that part of the job doesn't exist. I'm not on a trading floor anymore where like it's a long time ago since we did that. It's only a high frequency.

[Josh Brown]

Was it fun?

[Jens Nordvig]

That was fun, yeah. I love, I love being on the trading floor there.

[Josh Brown]

Okay, here are some of the things that. Here are some of the things that I think were highlights of like just the currency era that you were the strategist for the euro crisis. So I think probably a lot of the people who were sitting in your seat were Americans at the other firms. And you're a European. Do you think that gave you an added perspective that maybe the other strategist didn't necessarily have?

[Jens Nordvig]

I think so. I think so. It was funny, I was at a meeting, a client meeting last week where a guy I have not seen for more than a decade, he said, yeah, still remember your paper about the future of the euro? Right. So sometimes when you write something, people really remember it forever if it's unique. So I wrote this paper, like a kind of semi academic paper about how you actually. How would you go about breaking up the euro if you had to break it into pieces? And it's complicated.

[Josh Brown]

You call that redenomination risk? So all of these European countries have to adopt their own currencies again. Okay. And that was an influential thing.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah, like it was actually a little bit scary because I'm kind of. I'm supportive of the EU myself. Right. So it got adopted by all these different political movements that wanted to break the EU apart as well. France, Italy and so forth.

[Josh Brown]

Oh, they said, look, according to this guy Jens, we could do it.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah, exactly.

[Josh Brown]

Okay, Got it.

[Jens Nordvig]

But that's okay. It was a. It was again, it was a political piece of work. Could be used different ways. It's better to be prepared analytically than just going into these things without any thought put into.

[Josh Brown]

Are you surprised that the euro has managed to hold together?

[Jens Nordvig]

Not really. I wrote a book about it that was published in 2013, which I still stand by. Right. So the euro is a political project. I agree a little bit with our president. The euro was created to avoid war in Europe, mostly. And if there's a political will to keep it together, it'll be together.

[Josh Brown]

You've been credited with giving the early warning to the investor community about the yuan and Chinese outflows. I think you were talking about the yuan depreciation risks. And then that actually ended up being a really big moment for. I know you referenced this a lot.

[Michael Batnick]

That was you, you son of a bitch.

[Josh Brown]

No, he didn't do it. We had a 20% S&P correction in six weeks. I remember that fact over the yuan devaluation. And I think you were early to that.

[Michael Batnick]

You know what? I was at lunch with Jason Zweig and Barry and I couldn't get off my phone. I was like, guys, we're really eating left right now. I gotta go right.

[Josh Brown]

How are you able to see that coming? Or do you get too much credit for that?

[Jens Nordvig]

So I've always been very focused on capital movements. So when there's something happening with capital movement, this is kind of what I've been doing through my career. And sometimes when there's capital moving in unusual new ways, the correlations in the market break. So if you analyze the capital flow and the correlation breaks together, that often gives you conviction. So I think that's what we started to see in China when we launched Exante data in 16. Literally, the first quant tool we had was a daily intervention indicator for China. Like, told you how much were they spending on essentially propping up their currency? So we had a nice daily estimate of that and it was a fantastic business. We could just sell that model and we can sit on the couch and do nothing until China had imposed capital controls and they didn't have to do anything. And the model was dead. Then we had to get back to work again.

[Josh Brown]

Okay, and then you built a Covid mobility tracker in 2020, and I think.

[Michael Batnick]

That was yours too. This guy's everywhere. I remember that.

[Josh Brown]

He didn't start Covid, to be clear, he built the. That turned out to be a big thing.

[Jens Nordvig]

It was an incredible Thing I remember I got a call from one of our clients in Hedge fund client. Yeah. In the middle of January.

[Josh Brown]

Okay.

[Jens Nordvig]

And he asked me, was it Bill Ackman? I'm not going to give names.

[Josh Brown]

So. Yes.

[Michael Batnick]

Oh, my God, it was.

[Jens Nordvig]

But.

[Josh Brown]

Okay, say more.

[Jens Nordvig]

But he said, like, how come these. How come these stocks are moving so much in China?

[Michael Batnick]

Because hell is coming.

[Jens Nordvig]

Have you seen what's happening in Wuhan? And I have not. And Milan, that was in the middle of. That was in the middle of January.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah.

[Jens Nordvig]

And then I remember we had a client call a couple of days later when we kind of figured out what was happening, where we said, okay, this is a big thing. It's probably gonna be moving the market the whole year. And we had half of the team did Covid forecasting From, I think January 20th was when the first time we did Covid forecasting. And we're not doctors or anything like that.

[Josh Brown]

You're data people.

[Jens Nordvig]

The amazing thing was it was actually extremely easy to forecast, like, compared to economics, it was very easy to forecast the spread. The spread and the peaks.

[Josh Brown]

Okay, so tell us about that. What were the inputs for you to figure out the spread, the degree of the spread, the speed where it was going? Like, how.

[Jens Nordvig]

Did you mention Milan?

[Josh Brown]

Right, I mentioned who.

[Jens Nordvig]

Milan, Italy. Right. So they had a horrible outbreak in Milan. Right. There's the first strain.

[Josh Brown]

The ski resorts. Right.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah.

[Josh Brown]

Okay.

[Jens Nordvig]

And then so we just got data down to each municipality in Italy from the government. And then you figured out, okay, what was the municipality where they had the first case? And then you can look at the trajectory in that specific little county. Right. And you could see, okay, it's actually already over here. It's going to be over in Milan and the rest of the country within a certain number of weeks. So if you just broke down the data into the little atoms, like. And it was actually pretty easy. If you analyzed at a country, there was too many things going on, but at the micro level, it was very easy. We always moved in the same curve.

[Josh Brown]

And then you had news agencies calling you. I remember it becoming like a. I.

[Jens Nordvig]

Was pretty busy back in those days.

[Josh Brown]

But I don't think most people know that that was you that created that. I didn't know were health officials using it to try to get ahead of.

[Jens Nordvig]

There was a Imperial College in London published some academic papers where they used the data we had collected to. To look at the spread and then how the mobility. Right. So they used it for advising whether you could safely reopen.

[Josh Brown]

All right, So I was so I was using Governor Cuomo data, so I didn't do as well as you did. He had a chalkboard, I don't know if you remember. And every day he would update the chalkboard on. On television at 2 o' clock in the afternoon. All right. That was a really big deal though. Like, that was.

[Jens Nordvig]

I'll. I'll tell you a secret. So we wrote a paper at the end of February.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah.

[Jens Nordvig]

Where we analyzed how many hospital beds we had in New York. And it's one of the few papers that I've written that we ended up not publishing.

[Michael Batnick]

Why is this scary?

[Jens Nordvig]

I didn't want to scare people because.

[Josh Brown]

You, because you would have. You would have shown that we could never handle without all the, you know.

[Jens Nordvig]

Expanded capacity and so forth. There wasn't enough beds in New York.

[Michael Batnick]

That was a.

[Josh Brown]

That actually could have caused. In that moment. That could have caused the hysteria.

[Jens Nordvig]

We didn't publish it.

[Josh Brown]

Okay. You just.

[Michael Batnick]

Thank you.

[Josh Brown]

You just like sat on it and said, nobody needs to hear this right now. Yeah, okay. I like that you did that.

[Michael Batnick]

All right. Unless. Darkness after the gfc, the global macro traders were like the kings of the world. Right. If you could see that coming. And you got that call. Right. And then they spent the next decade, they. In general, it was just. It just became really difficult. Borderline impossible.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yep.

[Michael Batnick]

Is it. Because, I mean, a conflict. I'm sure it's a million different things. Do we have too much data? Is. Is it. The ZURP environment screwed everything up. Like, what was it that made it impossible to accurately assess where markets.

[Josh Brown]

To your point, I think global macro is the worst category of hedge fund over the last like 15 years, by the way.

[Michael Batnick]

I think intuitively makes sense. How should anyone be able to. It's 19 dimensional. It just seems too hard. It seems ridiculous.

[Jens Nordvig]

I think it has a lot to do with what asset classes actually provide any opportunities. So. Exactly like you said, we had many years with effectively zero interest rates in most countries. We got to two and a half in the US in the 18 move, but we effectively had zero interest rates in the whole world. The asset class that macro traders typically take the most risk in is interest rates, and they were gone. So I think from that perspective, it makes a lot of sense that there was no good macro returns. And guess what? When interest rates started to move 22, they killed. There were a lot of funds that had 50%, 60% because they were short bonds on leverage. Short bonds in those years. Right. And it was pretty easy. Like we created this simple thing where we call It a hiking pressure scorecard. Like, where do the central banks need to do a lot? Right? And we were looking at all these places where the hiking pressure was something we never, ever saw. And the central banks were still saying, oh, we're going to be on hold for two years, three years, they were.

[Michael Batnick]

Saying that with 8% CPIs, just nuts. So that must have been easy for you guys. Like, you must have been licking your chops.

[Jens Nordvig]

That was one of the times where you could just put on the trades that were in the model because they were so asymmetric. The rates were already zero. How much lower are they going to go? Yeah, that was incredible.

[Josh Brown]

So I think there are two other explanations for the. I'm a macro tourist. Okay. So I'm stating that now. But as an outsider looking at that world, it strikes me that when you make a huge call and you have a huge windfall trade or a series of trades in a, in a moment like the 2008-2012 period, of course you want that to happen again. But you don't always get a strike right down the middle. You have to wait for your pitch. And you could become impatient because when you're the hero that was buying the credit default swaps and shorting stocks and shorting the banks, and you're the person that pulled off the quote, unquote, greatest trade ever, which a lot of these guys did, you want that feeling again two years later. You don't want to wait 20 years. So you start pivoting, you start saying, oh, for my next trick, I think the municipal bond market is about to collapse. And then that doesn't work. Okay, here's my new trick. Here's a bubble basket.

[Jens Nordvig]

I remember that one.

[Josh Brown]

Okay, here. Here's the 50 best stocks in America. They're all a bubble. It's my next trick. Yeah, I mean, we watched this play out. You had bond managers making stock market calls. Sure. So I think there's a restlessness when you've had a huge home run.

[Jens Nordvig]

Sure.

[Josh Brown]

Now you have endless money. So it's no longer about money. You want to have fun.

[Jens Nordvig]

There's a famous hedge fund quote that says that the hardest thing to do is to do nothing. I forgot who said, I think it's.

[Josh Brown]

A Buffett or a Munger.

[Jens Nordvig]

It's important because if you feel like you have to do some big trade every month, it's not going to happen. And I think also there's a lot of the successful. And this goes back to the yield curve again. It's a lot easier to deliver 10% plus returns if your T bills are 5 and you just have to get 5% extra as opposed to generating 10% from nothing.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah, right.

[Jens Nordvig]

A lot of these guys trade on leverage, right. And they can get the 5% carry in the portfolio without doing anything. And then they just have to use the leverage to get the next five. Right. So having some interest rates like really makes everything a lot easier for.

[Michael Batnick]

But what about also the idea of too much data, too much competition. This is a plug for you. I remember, I don't know what year it was. When did the. Oh, they have, they have satellites looking at foot traffic in the malls. Like that was like novel in 2014 or whatever.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah.

[Michael Batnick]

How granular, like how much forward looking data is available these days and people are paying out the S for it for obvious reasons.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah. To be honest, this is a part of the challenge we have in our business. So we have like a data platform, right, that has, you know, 400,000 time series on it. I remember I was, I was out in California and I met this old contact that I have, there's a PM now, this big, big fund in California and said, yeah, like it's fantastic. We have all this data. I think we have, have like several hundred thousand data series on a platform who said, Jens, I'm not interested at all when you have so much data, like and it's on the one hand, obviously I disagree, but on the other hand it is really important in our business that when we generate value from the data, it comes from us having access to a lot of data and.

[Josh Brown]

Insights and then how to interpret it.

[Jens Nordvig]

And then like zooming in on what really matters. Right. There's no way you can get insights from all 400,000 time series at the same time. You're just going to end up with nothing. Right. But if we can have a system where we use technology to weirdly zoom in on when there's interesting things going on and then communicate that narrative. Because most money is managed with by humans still. Like how much is managed by AI quant. That's very small. So we need to essentially put the conclusions in front of people. And that's also what we see in our business. Right. We will send the conclusions to the cio, right. And there might be an analyst that crunches the numbers, double checks and so forth. But the CIO wants the conclusions.

[Josh Brown]

You made two fairly high profile tactical calls on the dollar recent years and we'll, we'll, we'll use this as a segue to get back to now. You were Bullish on the dollar in 2022 based on the tightening that I guess seemed obvious to you for most of the market, that cycle was a shock. I don't, I don't think people thought we would have to get to five and a half percent fed funds to see inflation finally break.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah, people were just continually surprised at how high we went.

[Josh Brown]

And you also saw like fragility, just generally. I don't know if the wars played into that at all. But then you shifted neutral to bearish in 2023 on the dollar and I think that's played out well for you. Took a while, but you got it. What do you think? What are you telling people now who are trying to get a handle on? Does the dollar get significantly weaker going forward? Have we seen the worst of the drop there? I think for corporate earnings, a gradually declining dollar is really good, might be the thing that saves us actually. But what do you think's happening?

[Jens Nordvig]

So I think the big picture is the following, right. If you look at how the dollar has been behaving over the last 20 years, you can capture a lot of what's happened with the dollar with two variables. I'm simplifying a little bit, but I want 700,000. So the two variables that are the most important is what's happening with the cycle of global growth. When global growth is strong tends to be the period where the dollar doesn't do so well because people push into global growth assets. Most obvious example of that was before the global financial crisis when global equities did very well.

[Josh Brown]

The BRICS era.

[Jens Nordvig]

BRICS era, yeah. True. The reason I'm here, investors wanted to.

[Josh Brown]

Invest anywhere but the United States, Chinese.

[Jens Nordvig]

Stocks, Indian stocks, so forth.

[Josh Brown]

That's right.

[Jens Nordvig]

The other variable has to do with monetary policy. The Fed. Right. So if the Fed is very tight, dollars get support from that. That framework needs to be expanded this year, I think, because now there's something going on with portfolio flows, asset allocation that is, I think, unprecedented.

[Josh Brown]

What is that?

[Jens Nordvig]

So what we have seen happening in the last couple of months has questioned the safety of the long bond in the United States in a way that I don't believe we've seen before.

[Josh Brown]

Okay.

[Jens Nordvig]

And we can see in our data, we can start to see some new trends which I think is separate from global growth, separate from what the Fed is doing. And really what's happening is that after essentially a 10 year bull run for the dollar and people being loaded with US equities, loaded with US fixed income, international investors are scaling back. It doesn't mean that they abandoning the dollar doesn't want to have any exposure. But I think it is a structural theme that they want to get exposure reduced. And this is new because people were extremely comfortable with the dollar being the dominant currency and it has many elements. So obviously the tariff situation has shocked people. And who has it shocked the most? People always say, oh, is China selling Treasuries? I don't think that's the key thing. The key thing is that the closest allies of the United States have been shocked by what's happening with tariffs.

[Josh Brown]

Canadians, Canadians and Europeans, UK Europe and.

[Jens Nordvig]

By the way, the Canadians and the Europeans hold way more bonds than China does.

[Josh Brown]

That's right.

[Jens Nordvig]

Way more. Right. So they're much more important. China hasn't really been buying any US bonds since 2014. The crisis we spoke about earlier, where.

[Michael Batnick]

Is that money going?

[Josh Brown]

If it were to leave the US long bond, for example, they selling 20 year treasuries, they buy a 20 equivalent yield or equivalent maturity in Germany.

[Jens Nordvig]

So what we saw in April was that bond fund flow in US Instruments got very negative in the middle of April and it stayed quite positive in European bond funds. There was a switch there. But this is something that's hard to see in data because the portfolios we're talking about are very big portfolios. And think about if somebody has a credit portfolio where they have 100 billion in US credit, can you get rid of 100 billion in US credit?

[Josh Brown]

Slow leak. You can't sell it all.

[Jens Nordvig]

No. So what they do first is that they do some currency hedging because you can do 20 billion of currency hedge in a day if you wanted to. Right.

[Josh Brown]

How would you currency hedge a portfolio with a lot of U.S. treasuries, you buy the basket versus the dollar or no.

[Jens Nordvig]

So if you're a European investor, Right. You're just going to sell your dollars forward. FX forwards incredibly liquid. Right. So maybe do 10 billion of that, 20 billion of that. If you're a Canadian investor, you will sell dollars forward. Buy Canadian dollars forward. And I think we speak to a lot of chief investment officers from pension funds, insurance companies and so forth around the world. Our clients and our network. Right. And we're getting a pretty consistent message that there's been a bunch of that FX hedging. That's very hard to see in the data. Right. It doesn't really get reported very well. But I think it's also clear that the FX hedging comes first and then the underlying assets shifts later. So I think we're in that process now.

[Josh Brown]

So. But it's a long. Rebecca Patterson was here three weeks ago.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah, no, Rebecca.

[Josh Brown]

And she was saying much the same that you're saying. She said it's not a bang, a big bang. It's not an explosion. It looks more like a drought, but it's so slow that it's imperceptible.

[Jens Nordvig]

I'll just, I'll give an example from last week. So what kind of stuff that I had in my calendar. So I had. I was speaking to some executives from a private bank in Singapore. They're worried about their dollar exposure. Right. I spoke to a central bank governor, I'm not going to say from which country. Right. They're worried about what's happening with the dollar, could be relevant for their FX reserves as well. And it's just a very broad theme and different players move at different rates. It's very tempting to say our citadel moved already and they can shift their portfolio in a couple of days or quicker maybe. But there's this long tail of real money investors that have investment committee meetings only quarterly and they don't like to change their asset location. There's the wealth managers where you are in that business. Right. But you have different clients. You have to go through maybe different ones. I know your structure is a bit special. Right. But for a lot of them, they have to go through. They're not used to taking in the US People are not used to taking any foreign currency risk at all.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah. Why would they?

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah. But like the dollar has been on a bull run for a long time. Right. And yields have been higher. I'll give you One stat. There's 1.7 trillion of fixed income ETFs issued in the U.S. 95% of them have only U.S. securities in them.

[Josh Brown]

I would have guessed that.

[Jens Nordvig]

If you, if you look at who actually has, you know, open currency exposure, actually have some non dollar assets, it's less than 1%.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah.

[Jens Nordvig]

We effectively have, with rounding, 100% home buyers in U.S. fixed income ETFs. Right.

[Michael Batnick]

Yeah.

[Jens Nordvig]

So. So there's no tradition for taking that risk. So in order for those, all those portfolios to actually have some other exposures, it's going to take a while.

[Michael Batnick]

So what's the. So what though?

[Josh Brown]

I want to, I want to. Before we move off this, this is so fascinating to me. So I want to ask you, if so do you agree that international portfolio managers, once they decide to do something, they don't do it right away, but they don't change course two weeks later. And what are they more nervous about? Is it the spontaneity of the things Trump is doing on international trade and the chaos and the unpredictability, or is it just the overall level of indebtedness and deficit, or is it some combination? Like if I ask you, why did the 30 year treasury yield break above 5% last week for the first time in 17 years? Give me a percentage breakdown of what the reason for that was. Is it 60% trade, 40% debt, or do I have that reversed?

[Jens Nordvig]

Or it's kind of like an accumulation of forces. Right.

[Josh Brown]

Okay.

[Jens Nordvig]

The allies don't like.

[Josh Brown]

You can't disentangle them from each other.

[Jens Nordvig]

I think it's all of them together. Like the allies don't like to be treated like non allies. They feel, okay, the rules are out of the window, we have to prepare differently. They don't like there's a fight between the White House and the Supreme Court.

[Josh Brown]

Okay.

[Jens Nordvig]

They don't like that. There's talk about taxing foreign capital.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah.

[Jens Nordvig]

And it used to be a working paper that Steve Mirand wrote that people were concerned about and don't believe it should have been written. But now there's actually something in the budget called Section 899 that talks about taxes on foreigners. Right. So now it's getting pretty concrete. Investors don't like that.

[Josh Brown]

Okay.

[Jens Nordvig]

There's a lot of things that are happening that are kind of real break from history that global investors don't like. And the natural response is to get a bit more cautious.

[Josh Brown]

Does Scott Bessen understand this as well as you're laying it out? He must.

[Jens Nordvig]

I think Scott Besson is extremely well positioned to take a balanced approach to these issues. But he's facing a tough situation. He has a lot of conflicting goals. He's not the president. And then the last bit of the accumulation has to do just with the budget constraints. Right. We've been running, I think it's so interesting. Right. We've been running for so long and operating in an environment where fiscal stimulus actually was bullish for risk assets, bullish for the dollar. And it feels like we've reached this turning point where if the Senate comes out and say we want to have more stimulus in the budget than the House, the market is not going to be loving it.

[Josh Brown]

We don't want that.

[Jens Nordvig]

No.

[Josh Brown]

All right. I'm sorry. I just wanted to make sure we nailed that on the last question.

[Michael Batnick]

You covered it.

[Josh Brown]

Okay. What, what do you make of the reserve currency debate happening these days? And just for people that aren't fully aware what's his tweet? This is an actual Besom quote or this.

[Michael Batnick]

I mean, this is tough. He said other countries currencies are rising, the dollar isn't falling.

[Josh Brown]

That's a tautology, is it not?

[Jens Nordvig]

Maybe I won't comment on that one. But let me put it this way.

[Josh Brown]

Are you worried about the dollar losing its reserve currency status within our lifetime?

[Jens Nordvig]

Don't really think about it as a binary thing. It's not, oh, it's the reserve currency or it's not the reserve currency. The question is whether it's getting any competition. So we had a long period of time where we had some yield in the United States. Not much. We had some yield and we had nothing anywhere else. So that was the period including before COVID Right. And the dollar just didn't have any competition really. And China has capital controls. Right. A lot of people are still very uncomfortable investing in China. You don't, whether you get your money out, you don't know where the equity market's controlled. You don't know whether you can pay yourself dividends and so forth. Right. So China is not a real competition.

[Josh Brown]

The renminbi is not going to be a reserve currency for.

[Jens Nordvig]

Not in a traditional sense. Not in a traditional sense.

[Josh Brown]

Okay.

[Michael Batnick]

But yeah, you speak to a lot of important people, policymakers and such. Is anybody even mentioning bitcoin as an alternative?

[Jens Nordvig]

So I think from from a US investor perspective, we just talked about this thing that for regulatory reasons, there's no tradition of currency trading in United States and the fixed income picture has no foreign currency element to it. Right. So if people want to be anti dollar in the United States, they really have two options, gold or crypto, both.

[Josh Brown]

Of which are mooning.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah, okay, it changes from week to week. Which one is mooning the most? But it's definitely on the move.

[Michael Batnick]

But has it entered your conversations?

[Jens Nordvig]

I think if you look at all institutional clients that I have, the majority of them trade crypto now in some form.

[Michael Batnick]

It's a huge change.

[Jens Nordvig]

It's a huge change compared to just two years ago. Massive, massive change.

[Josh Brown]

Why do you think the administration is so pro crypto if one of the singular stated goals from the outset from the satoshi paper is to replace the dollar. What like it seems like it's rhetorically crazy to be the president of the United States and be full throated supporter of something that was invented to supplant the dollar and to almost accelerate the pace of that supplanting if it were to happen? It just seems so incongruous do we believe in a strong dollar and America having this benefit of being the reserve currency, or do we want to destroy it? And if so, why? What's the prize? What do we get?

[Jens Nordvig]

We have. We have a lot of examples of conflicting goals. We talked about it in connection with trade policy, and we have it in connection with crypto as well. Right. So on the one hand, if you wanted to just protect the dollar, you wouldn't want to be supporting crypto. But we had different elements to the election campaign, and one of them was being pro. Crypto is one way to get support from a certain constituency. And I think it's just a matter of living up to that election promise. I don't think it's more complicated than that.

[Josh Brown]

Okay, so they don't have a plan where. Oh, no, wait, actually, this is good for 10% of the transactions in the economy to run through Bitcoin?

[Jens Nordvig]

I don't think so.

[Josh Brown]

Okay.

[Michael Batnick]

I mean, Bitcoin can be bigger and not an existential threat to the dollar. I mean, gold's not a threat to the dollar.

[Josh Brown]

It's.

[Michael Batnick]

Nobody's saying gold is a reserve currency.

[Jens Nordvig]

No, I think, I think the main, the main thing people look at globally is whether China is going to really be a threat. And China's doing interesting things right now in terms of being a new type of competition to the United States, for example, in terms of the exchanges they have.

[Michael Batnick]

I thought you were going to say dumplings. They're wonderful.

[Josh Brown]

What do you mean by exchanges?

[Jens Nordvig]

So the Shanghai gold exchange is getting to be very important. It's brand new. They're putting a lot of effort into global financial market participants getting comfortable taking.

[Michael Batnick]

Their risk in China.

[Jens Nordvig]

This is literally about. Think about the following. If China wants to do their trade in renminbi, which they want, and more and more countries are executing trade in China in Chinese currency, then it's helpful if China offers a kind of financial market where, okay, once you've accumulated those CNY balances, you can maybe move some of them into gold that is held in China. Right. So if China offers more and more alternatives to trading, engaging in fund management that doesn't touch the dollar at all, it becomes more and more of a competition, even if it doesn't have the typical capital mobility.

[Josh Brown]

Well, there are a couple of countries where there's an urgency to this. I think Russia and Iran would love the ability to hold their FX reserves in Chinese denominations and do financial market activities in Chinese yuan terms.

[Jens Nordvig]

Russia doesn't have any dollar reserves anymore.

[Josh Brown]

Right, Right. So, okay, but you don't think that that's something that's like on the front burner for people to worry about? Like, we're going to all of a sudden lose this overnight. We'll wake up one day and they're going to announce, hey, it turns out.

[Michael Batnick]

The dollar stripe is going public in China.

[Jens Nordvig]

No, I don't think the dollar is going to lose its reserve currency status instantly. But we can't be chilled out here. Right? The debt dynamics in the United States are out of control. I believe the reason Scott Bessen took the job as Treasury Secretary is that he wants to have a positive influence on the debt trajectory. That is problematic. There's another dude called Elon Musk, right. That been talk about the same thing?

[Josh Brown]

No, he retired today, but he tried.

[Jens Nordvig]

For a couple of weeks.

[Josh Brown]

They're gonna hang his jersey up, though. I'll tell you, he put up some big numbers.

[Jens Nordvig]

So the question marks around the dollar getting bigger doesn't mean it's gonna collapse from one day to the other. But the question marks are real, have to be taken seriously. And that's another reason why this idea of, of not being all in on the dollar, that a lot of global investors were increasingly over a decade. That's what's retracing.

[Josh Brown]

Would it surprise you if I told you foreign tourism to the United States has been dropping precipitously since the inauguration? Wouldn't be shocked. Here this is that. Spending from foreign visitors to the US is poised to fall by 8.5 billion this year as negative perceptions tied to trade and immigration policy lead overseas tourists to look elsewhere. That's Oxford economics. They say international arrivals to the US are expected to fall 9% this year. And one more number, the World Travel and Tourism Council said this month it expects the U.S. economy to lose a staggering 12.5 billion in spending from international visitors in 2025. Quote, A direct blow to the U.S. economy overall, impacting communities, jobs and businesses from coast to coast. When you hear that, doesn't it sound like it rhymes? Like what we're talking about with international capital flows.

[Jens Nordvig]

I think those numbers are too low.

[Josh Brown]

You think they're low?

[Michael Batnick]

I said, you know better than they do. What are the numbers?

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah, I think tourism is a tricky thing because it's like what we normally think about tourists that are running down on Fifth Avenue, but it's also Florida tourists. The students that are spending in the US Also in the stats often get recorded as sort of tourism spending.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah.

[Jens Nordvig]

And it's both.

[Josh Brown]

And they're trying to. And they're Trying to ban international students right now.

[Jens Nordvig]

Absolutely. So like, even if it's like a couple of tenths of GDP, which would be like 60 billion, that, that will be more on the ballpark thing.

[Josh Brown]

Okay, so this. Do you think that this ties into the lack of interest in owning US assets amongst global portfolio managers? It's like. Yeah, it's another symptom of the same thing.

[Jens Nordvig]

Right. Where there was a certain regime where students, tourists were always comfortable going to the United States, never had any concerns. Like a lot of countries rightly or wrongly have kind of travel warning. So there's stuff going on this year that we've never seen before and it's changing behavior and that's going to have an impact on the capital flow. We discussed that in detail. But it's also going to have a GDP impact. Right, because the tariffs are going to have an impact, the tourism is going to have an impact. The investment uncertainty that you started out was going to have an impact. So if you add up all those.

[Josh Brown]

Shocks, S and P down 3% from the all time high. Yeah, that's not about right.

[Jens Nordvig]

But that's.

[Josh Brown]

Is that the craziest part of this whole thing?

[Jens Nordvig]

It is, it is. But let's say the S and P is flat this year, right?

[Josh Brown]

Yeah.

[Jens Nordvig]

Which would be a good outcome relative to what we.

[Michael Batnick]

Great outcome.

[Josh Brown]

We'll take it.

[Jens Nordvig]

But even that would actually be less of a wealth effect boost of what it's been used to in 23 and 24 where actually that wealth generated some extra consumption that we may not get this year.

[Michael Batnick]

It's enough with the extra consumption.

[Josh Brown]

We're not getting that. Robert Frank at CNBC put out a report this morning about rentals in Nantucket and the Hamptons. And I know this affects 0.001% of the population, but it's emblematic of not having that wealth effect from stocks. They said Hampton's rentals are down 30% versus the same time last summer. And now they're all hoping for like a last minute wave of, of rentals. Otherwise you're gonna have a lot of properties just sitting there. And that's I think a direct effect of tariffs, uncertainty in the stock market not doing what it did over the last couple of years.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah, makes sense.

[Josh Brown]

What haven't we. Before we get into ex ante and we'll finish with asking you about ex ante and market reader, what haven't we asked you about that you think is important for investors going into the second half of this year?

[Jens Nordvig]

Well, I think really it comes down to what we talked about in the labor market. Right. We've had this debate where, okay, the confidence was bad and then the real data was okay. So I think we have to be hyper focused on what's happening with the real data in the next two months.

[Josh Brown]

Is that the most important economic data point to follow? Anything related to employment?

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah, anything that is giving a pulse on the underlying trend in the economy could be services consumption, it could be the labor market or maybe credit itself.

[Michael Batnick]

Do any of your models incorporate sentiment analysis or you just done with it? Just so noisy.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah, we don't do a lot of sentiment analysis. Like sometimes we use that as a kind of complement to positioning indicators. Right. It's just another way to kind of capture positioning. But we wouldn't use it as a fundamental read.

[Josh Brown]

If you did these days, you'd be trading every two days. I've never seen sentiment swing the way that it does from the absolute lows to the absolute highs. The report we got this week, highest jump in conference board future expectations component in four years.

[Jens Nordvig]

What the.

[Josh Brown]

I thought a week before everybody thought the world was about to end. I mean, from my perspective, not that I ever use sentiment. Well, I don't really know how to do that, but it just seems impossible now.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah. Well, like if you're using as a tradable indicator, like once a lot of people start to trade a certain indicator, like it becomes useless. Right. So we probably have that. But if you look at that consumer confidence level, sentiment. Right. We had an incredible drop.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah.

[Jens Nordvig]

Once the tariff concern was the most intense and now we had this incredible bounce. The level is still low even after the incredible bounce. Right.

[Josh Brown]

So the overall consumer sentiment is low.

[Jens Nordvig]

It was. It fell off a cliff in April. Right. So even after the bounce we had in the latest reading, the level is not a good level.

[Josh Brown]

Okay.

[Jens Nordvig]

So. But in the end it's going to depend on what the real, real activity is showing. And it will be strange if we don't have a substantially weaker year for consumption. It'll be strange.

[Josh Brown]

That's my expectation. And so I'm not looking at data obviously to the extent you are, but I'm paying a lot of attention to commentary from CEOs.

[Jens Nordvig]

Sure.

[Josh Brown]

That's kind of like the way I do sentiment. And it's totally anecdotal. I'm not collecting any data on it. But it's one company after another saying almost the same thing now. And it wasn't like that during the last earnings season.

[Jens Nordvig]

No.

[Josh Brown]

Now it seems more uniform.

[Michael Batnick]

How do your clients work with you? Are you one on one with them or do you have reports or that you put out dashboards? What is, what is the experience like of ex anti client?

[Jens Nordvig]

Well, so we have a, we have a global team. So we're about 20 people on my team. Right. So a bunch of those people are writing research reports or we have a chat system. Right. Where we chat with our clients when there's something important going on and then we have some people who code. Right. So we have a data platform where we essentially put our forecasting tools on the data platform so people can access them. So it's sort of a holistic risk management service that we provide.

[Michael Batnick]

I'm guessing not a lot of retail clients, given the.

[Jens Nordvig]

We don't have retail clients for this service.

[Josh Brown]

Are more of your institutional clients? Are more of them looking to use your tools or are more of them saying, okay, skip all that, just give me the answer. Or is it kind of a mix of both?

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah, kind of. When we service an institution, we want to make sure we have multiple touch points. Right. And the chief investment officer wants something different from the first year analyst. Right.

[Josh Brown]

Oh, okay, that's interesting.

[Jens Nordvig]

So the chief investment officers typically get the, the sort of big picture conclusions from our research. And if you have a strategist or an analyst that engages with our service, they would engage at the sort of number crunching level.

[Josh Brown]

Tell us about. You told me about. So tell, tell Michael in the audience about Market Reader. Yeah, I was going to try to explain it.

[Jens Nordvig]

I made a mistake. I run two companies. But that's.

[Josh Brown]

I want you to check this thing out. It sounds awesome.

[Jens Nordvig]

So, so Margarita is a piece of software that extracts, explains in real time what is happening in the market. Like why is meta down? Why is Google up?

[Josh Brown]

Sounds like a desk analyst.

[Jens Nordvig]

Actually it kind of is. It's kind of trying to replicate what was happening with humans on a hedge fund desk and looking at flows, looking at the calendar, looking at the price action, all markets together, obviously news. And then synthesizing that, using AI to give like a brief, precise explanation of what's happening in real time.

[Michael Batnick]

I love that.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah. So that's more.

[Jens Nordvig]

You should be buying it. I strongly recommend that you buy it here at Ritz Hall. So that would be my.

[Josh Brown]

So that's more of a retail wealth management driven product offering.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah.

[Josh Brown]

The people that they're not running a hedge fund but they have to be up to speed on what's going on.

[Michael Batnick]

And for that they go to like Yahoo Finance and you might get nothing or an AI generated Bullshit article.

[Jens Nordvig]

That's right. Even if you go to a lot of people try to Google what's happening. Right. And all the results are now contaminated by some SEO. Low, low quality AI generation.

[Michael Batnick]

I love this. When did you start it?

[Jens Nordvig]

So we launched this company three years ago and we've been sort of really delivering. It's quite difficult to build. So it took two years to build and we've been when engaging customers for long.

[Josh Brown]

So the customers that are using it, are they logging in each day for like a summary? Here's what's moving the markets this morning. Or like that's also.

[Jens Nordvig]

That's how I use it. Right. So I can absorb more information by like looking like. So for example, when Silicon Valley bank was cracking. Right?

[Josh Brown]

Yeah.

[Jens Nordvig]

Then I just had a screen with all the regional banks and I'll get all the actual moving parts in the regional banks world that I don't know any of those names. Right. But it will tell me what is important.

[Josh Brown]

Like so you don't even know which tickers to put into a Yahoo.

[Jens Nordvig]

It will tell you what is moving the most. So it will like tell you the epicenter of what's going on and tell you those stories. So I think for me it allows me to absorb more information. But it could also be like if there's a portfolio manager that want to inform their clients about what's going on in the portfolio, it could be a very succinct way of doing that.

[Josh Brown]

I like it for that. Which LLM is it built on?

[Jens Nordvig]

It's mostly based on OpenAI structure.

[Josh Brown]

Okay.

[Jens Nordvig]

Yeah.

[Josh Brown]

And it's pretty lightweight for you to run and provide to people. Like it's.

[Jens Nordvig]

It's going to look lightweight to the people who get the results, but there's quite a bit of compute going on.

[Josh Brown]

There's a lot happening there. Yeah. All right. That's awesome. So we would encourage people, of course check out ex ante if you are a professional investor and if you're not a professional investor but you want to inform yourself. Market Reader is pretty cool tool. So I'm gonna start incorporating this into my day. We'll see what the ways in which I use it.

[Jens Nordvig]

I appreciate that.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah. I'm using generic ChatGPT, like just the $20 a month thing and I have it doing this custom thing for me each day when I log in. So it knows what I do for a living now. It knows how I use information. I've talked to it enough that it knows what to serve me. Still sort of dissatisfied because I could tell that it's not built to do this by market people.

[Jens Nordvig]

It's not real time.

[Josh Brown]

And then it shows me the sources and I see the source and I'm like, oh, I don't go to that site.

[Jens Nordvig]

Sure.

[Josh Brown]

That's where you're getting data from. So anyway, that's the whole thing, but we'll check it out. Did you have fun on the show today?

[Jens Nordvig]

Absolutely. The clapping and the funny noises are definitely different from Bloomberg or cnbc. So good to do something new.

[Josh Brown]

So we always end the show by asking people what their most most excited for in the future or what they're most looking forward to. So we know for you initial jobless claims is a big thing. What are you really in real life most looking forward to?

[Jens Nordvig]

I think when you buying a dog, when you're, when you're involved with, with markets, it can be kind of all consuming.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah.

[Jens Nordvig]

So like I think my, my goal for the future is to really have proper downtime and that could be, could be downtime for my family and so forth. But it could also be downtime in the sense that you have blocks in your week where you can meditate, really think about longer term issues as opposed to dealing with this kind of tactical stream that's going on. So I think being more organized about actually inserting these meditative.

[Josh Brown]

You're going to try to do that this summer.

[Jens Nordvig]

It should not be for a period. It should be a thing where you have a shift where it gets just a part of the normal way of operating your week that you have those periods.

[Josh Brown]

If you figure out how to do that without. Because you run two companies now. I run one company. I can't figure if you figure out how to way to put a block in and then not violate it. When somebody asks you to jump on a call or do a thing to actually be able to say no. This is my block where I'm thinking and breathing. If you figure out how to do that, tell me because I need to do the same thing.

[Jens Nordvig]

I'll write you a letter about it because I don't want to interrupt the meditation.

[Josh Brown]

Michael, what are you looking forward to? You got game five on tap?

[Michael Batnick]

I have game five on tap.

[Josh Brown]

Okay.

[Michael Batnick]

I'm looking forward to Chicago. We're going to Chicago next week. We have our second HQ grand opening. We're bringing 50 employees out there.

[Jens Nordvig]

Good.

[Josh Brown]

And we have 58 Redholtz employees. It's the largest gathering of all of our people.

[Michael Batnick]

We have more employees.

[Josh Brown]

We have 74 overall. 58 of them will be together for the first time since, like, we've never had that many of us.

[Jens Nordvig]

Fun to see the growth. Right.

[Josh Brown]

It's crazy, actually, but we've never had that many of us all in one place.

[Jens Nordvig]

Gotta memorize the names before I know everybody's name.

[Josh Brown]

Good. I don't know the. I don't know all the spouse names and all the pet names and the kid names. I don't know. At this size, I don't even know if that's possible.

[Jens Nordvig]

The dogs are probably gonna be less offended than the humans.

[Josh Brown]

Yeah. Do you like Chicago?

[Jens Nordvig]

I think Chicago's a great city.

[Josh Brown]

That's one of my favorite cities in the country. So we're gonna be out there next week. We're doing a live version of this podcast. Our guest is Kunal Kapoor, CEO of Morningstar. So you must have run into Morningstar, and you're in the data game now. Okay. Anyway, we're super excited about that. I wanna say thank you so much for joining us today, Jens. We really appreciate it. I know you don't do a lot of podcasts, you don't do a ton of interviews, so this is really meaningful for us to have you here, and we hope to have you back again sometime. Sound good?

[Jens Nordvig]

Forward to it very much.

[Josh Brown]

You want to come back next week?

[Jens Nordvig]

No.

[Josh Brown]

All right. Ladies and gentlemen, Jens Nordvig. And check him out at Ex Ante and market reader. Great job this week on the show. All the compound crew. We appreciate you guys so much. Too many of you to name, but, you know, we love you guys. Thanks for listening. Please leave us a rating and review. We'll be back soon. Thanks again. Have a great weekend. All right, that was the warm up. I just wanted you to get a feel for how we do. No, use that one.