The Insanity of the Markets with Ben & Emil

00:00:03
Speaker 1: Media memo.

00:00:06
Speaker 2: We're at Zitron and this is better offline, download a T shirt or subscribe to the newsletter using the links of the profile notes to support the greater Zitron crusades.

00:00:27
Speaker 3: But today I'm joined by two of the finest finance podcasters alive. That's right, We've got better A meal from the Better and a Meal show fellas. Thank you for joining me.

00:00:37
Speaker 1: Wow, thank you so much.

00:00:38
Speaker 4: Having and you can't see how we're both we're both wearing matching gray shirts today.

00:00:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, they've and you can't see this because it's not a video podcast, but they are actually at their studio space with the two desks. These guys have the actual I love Better than E meals set up. They have a real studio. It's clocks and everything. Oh yeah, general, one of those.

00:01:00
Speaker 4: We spend one hundred thousand dollars on this studio and it's just a money pit we keep throwing money at, much like much like people keep throwing money at these memories, stocks, these careers.

00:01:13
Speaker 3: Now, this whole conversation started though with you and me Ben talking about how finance Twitter is this new insane thing, and I've been I'm relatively due to it. I feel like you you douse yourself in it fairly often. But my process when I go on and read finance twitch and I was just seeing how many people are going insane in a particular day and what they're going insane about. Yeah, and it's usually an Axios article about oil.

00:01:44
Speaker 5: Yeah.

00:01:44
Speaker 1: Oil. These days, it doesn't matter anymore. I mean, I am.

00:01:48
Speaker 4: I'm really really dialed in on finance Twitter, and I have been for a long time, and it's become a really, really fascinating place. I was just ruminating on this last night because it used to be, sorry, here comes a rant.

00:02:04
Speaker 1: It used to be disjointed, right.

00:02:06
Speaker 4: It used to be when I first was coming up and trading in two thousand and nine, and all the way through like twenty fifteen, there was finance Twitter, sure, but you still had Yahoo Finance message boards. You had, Oh, there was investors. Investor's Hub was another one, but that was mostly for penny stocks. There are a bunch of other little ones, But now Twitter is the single. It's a hive mind, and it's I was having trouble kind of putting it into words or putting my thoughts together last night, but it really is like you can gauge the sentiment so easily, just on finance Twitter, and yeah, the market was caring. The market just it's like a child with add and it loses its focus. All it takes is a couple of weeks, whereas just a perfect example, a month ago or whenever this whole war invasion started, everybody was hanging on every single word that Trump said and Trump tweeted, and now it's just old news. It just doesn't it's in depending on who you ask, Oh, it's priced in. The market is forward looking, and that's it. Is it a function of people just looking for a story afterward to excuse and explain the fact that the market doesn't care anymore. I don't know, but yeah, it just doesn't seem to care. Yeah, Brent crude is at like last I checked, like one hundred and ten a barrel, and a month ago, that would have spelled disaster for the S and P. But now it just doesn't. It doesn't matter anymore because now the narrative is shifted. Everybody's focused on memory stocks and semiconductors. The socks, the semiconductor ETF has just been on a parabolic run.

00:04:01
Speaker 3: And that's just a group of different for the for the audience, that's just a group of semiconductive stocks that you can buy in the group.

00:04:07
Speaker 4: Yes, effective, yeah, right, And I recently learned over the last forty eight hours, have you seen Korea's stock market index.

00:04:17
Speaker 3: To cost Cosby the Cosby Show? Yeah? Sorry, Yeah, this.

00:04:24
Speaker 1: Thing is it's gone parabolic and it's kind of there. There was a.

00:04:29
Speaker 4: Big thing about Korean traders last year, I believe, when they were going when everybody was chasing quantum stocks and like nuclear names, it was it was people started to learn and figure out that a lot of it was from Korean retail traders just chasing American stocks because it was very liquid. Yeah, and I think what we're seeing right now is the same thing because someone posted that like the top five stocks and ETFs owned by Korean retail Number one is I believe sand Disc. Number two is the socks h. I want to say, Number three is like SMH, which is another semiconductor ETF.

00:05:13
Speaker 1: God damn is it just it's unbelievable.

00:05:16
Speaker 4: It's like not every day and just when you think, oh man, I want to short some sand Disc because it's gone up two thousand percent in the last six months. It just keeps going up every day.

00:05:31
Speaker 3: So how is indicative of the wider world? Is tech Twitter? Is it? Is it a tech investment Twitter? Is it actually like? Is it a fev valuation of the market? Is it something else? Like? Is it just this weird side because it seems like it's somewhat indicative, but also if you followed investment based on what Twitter said, you would lose all your money.

00:05:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that it is.

00:05:58
Speaker 5: Uh, it's also weird that it's broken containment, where like you were talking about how it was siloed off in all those strange places, but now it's with the new algorithm, It's like everyone is getting these things on Twitter.

00:06:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, and yeah, I mean.

00:06:12
Speaker 5: I don't know if you should. It depends who you want to listen to. I mean, I'm sure you see. We talk a lot about the like fear mongering and the guys who are just the permeable be sorry, perma bear, And I mean I see even this week, it's like they'll also way zoom in on the you know s and P five hundred chart and be like I believe.

00:06:34
Speaker 1: Now is a good time to exit.

00:06:36
Speaker 5: And then today we're just like absolutely ripping on a Trump tweet about a potential potential Iran agreement or something.

00:06:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think, which does not exist, like it's it's just axios, it's just axios saying yep. Yeah.

00:06:50
Speaker 4: The key thing here, I think is that I'm trying to remember as a trader is uh, there's an old idiom or axiom whatever you whatever the word is. The trend is your friend. And currently the trend is momentum, and everybody's got their everybody's got their marching orders from from like institutions and hedge funds on down to retail traders, which is, while the getting's good, you better eat because you know, you can stand on the sidelines and scratch your head and wonder why it's going up, or you can. It's like that. It's like that meme of the Bell chart, you know, with the with the.

00:07:31
Speaker 3: With the really smart guy and the idiot yes, and then the kind of middle ground and it's like, no, the stocks, the stocks are over value.

00:07:40
Speaker 4: No right, And I have been that middle guy way too many times to count, And I'm trying to be the guy with the wojack with the hood being like just buy, just buy them, you know.

00:07:51
Speaker 3: And it s to me it's like, the best way to try is just assume what would piss you off the most will happen.

00:07:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:08:01
Speaker 4: Whatever move I've told a meal this too, and our audience is like, especially on the macro side, on just like the S and P, whatever move will piss you off, will piss me off the most tends to be the one that i'm I'm I'm essentially calling it what's what other people refer to as the pain trade, meaning whatever is the most painful move for the most market participants tends to be the one that occurs and follows through. And when you've got like the I don't know why I'm gesturing because nobody can see me. But when you've got like a sharp when you've got a sharp decline like we had a few weeks back, I believe now like six weeks ago, when you've got a sharp decline like that, and then a nice tradable bottom occurs on a lot of volume, meaning there's it's like a lot of people are coming in and there's some capitulation going. Once that bottom is in, everybody who missed shorting is now going, Oh, now's my time to get short. But then when it just keeps going higher. You're pulling out your hair because now you're stuck short and it's still going higher, and you're missing out on that upside. So it's a double edged sword of just like, fuck, I wanted to participate in that downside that I missed, and now that I'm getting into it, I'm missing all this upside that's been me multiple times. And then when it goes on week two of bouncing, which it did, you go, Okay, surely, now it's probably going to pull back again. But then when it doesn't, you're on week three. We are currently on six weeks straight up. So now I believe the move that will piss off the most people, including myself, is just sideways and up for the remainder of the summer. I think that the longer, basically, the higher we go, the higher we go. Is a very simple, simplistic way of putting it.

00:09:54
Speaker 3: And it's first it's says it's setting everyone up for this Austela when the bom falls out. There's actually when you look at the when you look at the actual numbers, as I do obsessively, it doesn't look good. But then there's the smugness off. Well, if it was if it was so bad, why not but go up and it's everything's disc like it. I guess it kind of feels foolish to say this as if it's new, but it feels like everything is disconnected from reality at this point, like every every single part of it.

00:10:26
Speaker 5: It's very it's a very strange feeling because so most of my money is just in index funds and stuff because I can't get into this whole game.

00:10:34
Speaker 3: And Bogel head over here. I mean I am, I am fully in cash. I truly, I don't. I don't touch anything.

00:10:43
Speaker 5: But it's it's a very bizarre feeling because you look at it and it keeps going up, and you're like, but that doesn't feel right, and like this feels like it's setting up for a massive, a massive correction or something. And every day, I mean, you see things, just drive I drive by the gas station by my house every day and I go, wow, it's up to six nineteen.

00:11:05
Speaker 1: That's quite a bit of money.

00:11:06
Speaker 5: And you're like, surely people are going to start feeling this pain and things are going to reverberate through the economy.

00:11:11
Speaker 1: And then you check and you.

00:11:11
Speaker 4: Go, oh, no, people seem to like this I guess yeah, so that there was. There was someone from the administration today who Kevin Hassett, who was like, the consumer is strong.

00:11:21
Speaker 5: The credit card spending is through the roof, and sure that's because they're spending more on gas, but it's also because they just love buying shit right now.

00:11:31
Speaker 1: And it's like, dude, I do not think you have your friends.

00:11:33
Speaker 4: Well buying shit, but I think that that, I mean you, that is certainly true. It is easier than ever to buy things and not feel necessarily like you're actually buying anything because I don't know about you guys, but man, it is just it doesn't feel like I'm buying anything when I when I have to double tap on the phone and yep.

00:11:58
Speaker 3: It's just this is effective. Even if you don't have the money, you can clona yourself silly. Yes, still don't know how those companies could possibly survive, but whatever.

00:12:11
Speaker 4: Yeah, nothing really matters. And I think the there's just so much money out there on the sidelines. There's there's and I'm obviously not the only person to talk about this. It's widely known that there's just this reflexive automatic buying week after week with people's automatic four one K purchases.

00:12:41
Speaker 5: Yeah, people like me who just when it goes down by the dip because I'm like, great, I love a little discount, why not?

00:12:47
Speaker 3: Yeah, so in the yeah, and then the hopes that it doesn't go go down further. Well, this is why I never touched the markets. It's just like I feel, I almost feel like the way the markets function now are is about as anti consumer and investor as it can get, because it's not like regular people have access to any of the signals they'd need to actually well, I guess it's now everyone's doing insider training. It doesn't really matter. But it feels like following one's nose or like actually understanding fundamentals doesn't really matter. Like you've got enough deals that are just completely fake with AMD and broad Common all that that. I'm very much focusing on tech stocs. The market isn't reacting to reality if it ever did, and I'm trying to work out whether this is a remarkable era or just one of many pant shittings for the market.

00:13:44
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, dude, what we're all describing basically is another old phrase that bull markets climb a wall of worry, And it's like the worry is can this be sustained? Is this real? And surely throughout the way up there are companies that are going to have poor earnings or uh suspend dividends or have their CAPEX suddenly skyrocket or whatever, and those companies definitely will get hit. But the way that the way that things are going currently, with the way things are trending, everybody just kind of shifts their focus on on its rotation from sector to sector. And right now the big thing is AI bottlenecks. And there's this person who blew up recently on Twitter this I They're an anonymous account. They're called Serenity something. But this guy, do you know who I'm talking about?

00:14:46
Speaker 3: No, I'm gonna look him up. As we speaking.

00:14:49
Speaker 4: Serenity, this guy started talking about this company. The ticker symbol is a x t I And I'm so pissed because I saw this tweet and I saw people talking about it, and it's like, oh, they they they have the market cornered on some fucking substrate, just some shit that I have no idea, I don't understand it. And they're like this, this company is so pivotal to the entire supply chain and the market cap at the time was like eight hundred million dollars, and my stupid ass was trying to apply logic to it, and I'm like, Okay, if they're that crucial and they're only valued at eight hundred million dollars, why doesn't some other bigger company just come acquire them and boom, Now you own that part of the supply chain. So I was like, this is too good to be true. It's one of those things where you know, it probably is just getting a pump and it'll just flounder.

00:15:48
Speaker 1: And it has gone ten x since then. It is now trading.

00:15:51
Speaker 3: Everybody has twenty three million dollars of quarterly revenue.

00:15:56
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, that's that's the thing, is they But then you have companies like this Poet ticker symbol Poet, where everybody thought that this was going to be the next one because they've got some kind of I don't know, proprietary ip that was gonna they were starting to get contracts or something, and then just like a week ago, the stock collapsed.

00:16:20
Speaker 3: Then I'm sorry, this actually does remind me of something very specific cryptocurrency. This is just chrits. It's the same fucking shit because I didn't invest in it, but I aggressively followed the Twitter campaigns and it would be like this one is gonna be the infrastructure company for web three for this and this one is going to speed up web three. We need to it. You need to buy this token because it's gonna ten x. It's the same, except it's now the stock market. Yeah.

00:16:48
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's funny because we haven't even really touched on that aspect of this particular market, which is that now with it being easier than ever for people to just download robin Hood or public or whichever one's you have these insane online communities. Honestly, it doesn't get enough attention, but they're honestly, sometimes even more rabid and crazy than some of these crypto evangelist guys where you have. We still get like hate mail basically from the AMC type people who whenever like and I.

00:17:18
Speaker 3: Thought it was open, those are the people who were speculating on AMC Cinema stock right exactly.

00:17:22
Speaker 1: And you know, but this has been going on for years.

00:17:24
Speaker 5: Yes, I thought this all dissipated, and we we made some like offhand comments about how crazy the AMC thing is, and for about a week our mentions were.

00:17:37
Speaker 1: Just like, fuck you, you don't understand. AMC is the way.

00:17:41
Speaker 5: And so they're these narratives of people who should have never gotten involved in these stocks, who have gotten wrapped up, have convinced themselves just well, one day it's it's finally gonna hit and I'm gonna be able to I'm gonna be able to get myself out of this hole.

00:17:57
Speaker 1: It's just absolutely insane.

00:17:59
Speaker 4: Not only that, but a lot of these Uh, the crypto thing is huge because as we all know now, not not crypto itself is dead, but definitely the alt coin market that everybody is playing.

00:18:14
Speaker 1: All of those people, you guys are saying, my part coin's not coming back. Part coin is fucking dead. Damn it is.

00:18:19
Speaker 3: God fucking damn it him, God fucking damn it. Falk Coin is pretty much my entire portfolio.

00:18:25
Speaker 4: That brother I owned some which is really pathetic.

00:18:29
Speaker 3: And you're you're a guy, You're a guy who invests in anything like you want to want to find the upside way you can.

00:18:37
Speaker 4: Yeah, I gotta seek that alpha. But a lot of alpha means alpha means like your edge, Like you're looking for any kind of any kind of edge, be it a technical thing or a fundamental thing.

00:18:52
Speaker 1: You find a diamond in the rough.

00:18:56
Speaker 4: But a lot of these, a lot of these crypto guys have now fully embraced trading the AI bottleneck stuff. And now what a lot of them are doing is downloading not robin Hood, but Interactive Brokers is another popular retail trading platform, and they just enabled it so that you can easily trade Korean stocks. So now they'll they're all looking at Korean names that don't have ticker symbols. They have numbers, so it's like five six six or whatever the hell, and they're just these companies that trade at way way lower multiples than American stocks. So all these guys are doing the same thing that they did with crypto a few years ago. They're going, oh my god, this one has the market cornered in Korea. They do this whatever manufacturing process that is absolutely crucial to blah blah blah.

00:19:49
Speaker 1: And you know, there was one sooy Tech or something.

00:19:55
Speaker 4: It went from like you know, it's very illiquid too, and it went from like thirty dollars to share just a month ago and now it's at one hundred and ninety, Like this is just this is.

00:20:05
Speaker 3: Oh my god, it's literally the crypto fuck it is fucking it's the same thing.

00:20:09
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, and it feels like everybody's getting rich except for me.

00:20:24
Speaker 1: I also think it's tapping into a certain.

00:20:27
Speaker 5: Mindset of people right now that makes all this possible, where it's like it was very apparent with the crypto thing, where it's like no one there are very few good jobs available anymore. It's so hard to start a business without just getting absolutely hosed. And you have all these I mean, it's a lot of men who want a way to make money and they're like, okay, well I'm smart, I can, I can, I can yolo my life savings into the right the right stock.

00:20:51
Speaker 1: And some people do hit. And then they hit and you see that.

00:20:55
Speaker 5: Projected out into the world, and everyone's like, damn, that could be me.

00:20:59
Speaker 4: There was a guy I I just saw this article. I forgot his name, but it's a weird fucking some kind of weird European name. It's like slogan Dorfenberg or something. Yeahan slogan Dorphenburg.

00:21:12
Speaker 3: He was.

00:21:13
Speaker 4: He was just a guy, just a normal guy who turned I'm not exaggerating five thousand dollars into one hundred million dollars over the course of twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three, and his high watermark was one hundred million, but then he gave back like sixty of it and it dropped down to like, I don't know, thirty five forty. And yeah, he just talks about how he was playing the trends and just I mean, there, there's there's a guys like that have are blessed because they don't have the experience necessary to be cautious. So they just throw that caution to the wind and they're like, this is the thing that everybody's buying. Whereas I would go, it's already run up like five hundred percent. He's like, hot, diggity, it's up five hundred percent. I got to get in on that. And then it goes up another thousand percent, right, and I'm sitting there thumbing my own butthole taking a whift, going, man, what have I done with my life?

00:22:14
Speaker 1: Well, this guy's like trading is easy.

00:22:16
Speaker 3: Fucking't what the scribing is walking around a casino and being like, why am I not making money? Everyone's cheering. Yeah, it's this is so scary. How much of do you know? How much of the stock market is made up of retail investors, regular people.

00:22:31
Speaker 4: Now, I don't know, but I know it's a substantial amount. I mean, I know that's substantial enough that it legitimately moves markets now, and I think so bad. Yeah, well, it used to be a lot worse because it was all focused on it was all fragmented, and it was all focused on penny stocks and people just going like, oh, you know, the one I like to talk about the most, the most famous one, arguably with sponge tech and sponge tech. It was a revolutionary new type of sponge ed that had the soul built into the sponge, and it was one of the most famous ones because it you know, it went from like ten cents to ten dollars or something like that. But nowadays retail is and I put this in quotes, smarter only in the sense that it's a lot more coordinated and organized and people can share information a lot easier and cleaner, and which.

00:23:29
Speaker 1: Almost has like a negative impact though, because yeah.

00:23:31
Speaker 3: Like, how like being able to share information doesn't make the information as useful or.

00:23:38
Speaker 4: Good, right, And if you're the last one holding the bag, you're not gonna have a good time. And you're gonna end up like one of these AMC guys.

00:23:44
Speaker 5: Right, and they end up starting they end up starting subreddits and they all make themselves insane. And you know, even when it's going, even when it's just like completely dead, you have three guys in there just posting a news article being like, could be good for us.

00:24:00
Speaker 3: I'm going to be honest, I do this with Are you familiar with nebeus? Yeah, Nebbias. They're an AI neo cloud compute thing. Reading Nebbius the stockholders there and just reading like, what would it take nebbeis to get to two thousand dollars a share? It's like one hundred and eighty right now. It's like congratulations to everyone. Like it isn't about pt or AI bubble anymore. It's more than that. And it's just a screenshot of an all caps tweet about Larry Fink saying I actually believe in new asset class will be buying futures of compute.

00:24:34
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I saw that. Good.

00:24:38
Speaker 3: What do you mean? What do you mean the fucking commodities of fucking compute? What are you talking about?

00:24:43
Speaker 4: It sounds a lot like Enron in their early two thousands, when they literally is the end.

00:24:48
Speaker 3: The end game of Enron was that they moved into energy's trading and the last thing they wanted to do was weather trading.

00:24:55
Speaker 1: I remember, which I wish they would remember when it happened, but I remember. Yeah.

00:25:00
Speaker 3: I just I've watched the smartest guys in the room three or four times now. Yeah, and uh no, they literally were trying to move into weather trading, which rules.

00:25:09
Speaker 4: Yep, you can now and their commercials were like, that's what was their slogan? It was like, why not? I think that was their slogan?

00:25:18
Speaker 1: Is like, kind why not?

00:25:20
Speaker 3: I just watched the other guys last night and there's like the massive fraud star played by Steve Coogan in it, and they won't say what they do. It's like we're in everything.

00:25:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, but what I just I just feel like.

00:25:34
Speaker 3: At this point, this market is the most griftable in the world.

00:25:39
Speaker 5: Oh, I mean Trump himself, you know, every the whole thing is a casino shorting.

00:25:44
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, I.

00:25:45
Speaker 5: Mean the truly the leader of the country is the biggest grifter.

00:25:49
Speaker 1: It's uh, every.

00:25:51
Speaker 5: Friday and Monday, he's doing his little narrative, his little narrative truths to manipulate the market.

00:25:57
Speaker 3: I just I get at some point this has to go poorly. I mean, it's probably already getting poorly, going poorly with the amount of fucking money going into these random stocks. But it just feels like it's setting everyone up at wants to get fucked again and again and again.

00:26:14
Speaker 4: A couple things I remember the most frustrated. I was just piggybacking off the nebias shareholders. There was a similar kind of fanfare all around quantum computing stocks last year, and I, my enterprising dumb ass, fought the trend and got short some of them a little, just a couple of weeks too early, right before the final blowoff top, and.

00:26:42
Speaker 1: I was getting I was just getting sitting around again. Oh man, I was getting.

00:26:48
Speaker 3: Coming up with slurs for quantum computers.

00:26:51
Speaker 4: Oh man, Oh yeah, I was. I was getting I was turning racist. I was getting all kinds of anger because I was just getting my ass blown out and then, which.

00:27:00
Speaker 1: Was very funny. I mean, we're looking at these companies probably apps.

00:27:05
Speaker 5: This company is like it sold one computer in twenty twenty five or something, and it's just blasting off.

00:27:11
Speaker 4: It booked like six million dollars in revenues for the whole year in the market cap was like twenty five billion, and they're like, see, you guys, quantum is the future with this one. But then they eventually they eventually petered out and have dropped considerably. But now, yeah, it's funny because now all of the energy guys, the nuclear energy guys are trying to rally the energy sector.

00:27:39
Speaker 1: And they're all tweeting.

00:27:40
Speaker 4: They're all tweeting like uh They're trying to force the meme essentially of being like uh.

00:27:46
Speaker 3: No, see that file in cryptos so many times? Yeah, But I.

00:27:50
Speaker 4: What I to answer you to the other thing, to answer your question of like what's going to happen?

00:27:54
Speaker 1: How is this going to end? You know, people are going to get hurt.

00:27:57
Speaker 4: I think what could be the catalyst is And this goes back to Twitter being like the hive mind and when when we talk about looking for catalysts and reasons. I think the narrative is going to start going toward Koreans again in Korea and these retail traders over there that are just going nuts. I saw a translated Korean tweet the other day that from someone over there who said, you guys, don't understand it's gotten so insane over here, the like old lady who's checking out out the Grandma tweet earlier is looking at stock charts.

00:28:34
Speaker 1: So I think that if and when we.

00:28:37
Speaker 3: See exactly what happened with Enron.

00:28:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the same thing.

00:28:42
Speaker 4: I think that when and if we get a significant pullback on the Korean index on the COSPY, we will see a lot of people talking about contagion, and especially in the in the higher held names that Korean and you know the number one retail ones like socksl and sand Disc and all that stuff. But yeah, there's nothing quite like that pain of just going of thinking why the fuck didn't I just buy and chase and ride the trend. I could be sitting on hundreds of thousands, if not maybe a couple million dollars from a modest position, if I just and they just just when you think I can't chase it, it's at eight hundred dollars a share, I can't chase it. Then it's at a thousand, Then it's at eleven hundred, then it's at fourteen hundred. I think today it hit fifteen hundred dollars a share. This shan is fucking and Micron is just there. They're just going parabolic. And somewhere there's some kid in Korea.

00:29:46
Speaker 1: Just what's he doing? Slipping on bibb and bopa And I'm going, I'm going, is.

00:29:52
Speaker 3: That is that?

00:29:52
Speaker 1: What it is? Bulgogigi?

00:29:56
Speaker 4: He's going like hot, damn, I can take my t my girlfriend out or boyfriend.

00:30:01
Speaker 3: You know, it was uh, we live, we live in the twenty first century.

00:30:06
Speaker 1: That's impressive.

00:30:07
Speaker 4: And I'm over here just going, God damn that Korean guy out there on the other side of this trade because I am short a little bit of sox sulin smh. But and you like bib Bab, I love bimen Bab. I can't can't we have it? Wouldn't that be beautiful? If the Korean boy makes his money on the alongside, and then I the his American counterparty makes us up.

00:30:28
Speaker 1: He gets out in time and it all works out. That's exactly right.

00:30:31
Speaker 4: And I hope everyone gets the Korean grocery vegetable lady out there.

00:30:35
Speaker 1: God, I hope you. That's why I hope the register.

00:30:37
Speaker 4: That's who I hope it's really ringing the red Yeah, but it's the it's the modern day shoe shiner.

00:30:42
Speaker 1: You know it's the Korean vegetable lady.

00:30:45
Speaker 3: It's just such a bad it. Just in the past, I said I bought some sm P five hundred and people got mad at me, and it was like I did it once as a as a bitch for a guest that I just joked about it with. I live in cash for many reasons that what into It's most mostly to do with like just how I grew up, Like stocks have always scared me. It's why I don't trust them. And it's one of the things my dad told It was like, don't bet with fear, like don't like the best thing to do is nothing if you're scared. And I actually think it's a good rule in general. It just doesn't. It feels like the internet has made everything worse. You said it it is better. I don't know if I agree. Like when I first got to America two thousand and eight, I remember there were like investor newsletters. There were like seventy of them. Oh yeah, that was a big Some crusty old man would send you his thoughts every week and you pay him fifteen hundred dollars a month for some reason. And I assume you did well. Wasn't two thousand and eight wasn't really a great year for stocks for some reason. And it's just like now, it's just, however many anonymous or pseudonymous insane people you follow, and which one of them successfully cons enough people into being insane too?

00:32:02
Speaker 4: Yeah, And they used to have a strategy back then where they would say, you had a thousand subscribers to your newsletter, you would send one pick to one hundred people, one to another one hundred people one and you would divvy them up.

00:32:17
Speaker 1: And then the.

00:32:18
Speaker 4: People who got the losers were obviously like, well, fuck this guy. The people who got the winners were like, damn, this guy's awesome, and I'm butchering this. But basically, they would keep focusing on their winner subscribers and build their trust and build their rapport with that group, and they just kind of repeated that multiple times until they had, you know, five thousand people who just trust them and will blindly follow them into any I was one of those people. I remember, God damn it, man, I forgot the name of it.

00:32:54
Speaker 1: It was some stupid name.

00:32:58
Speaker 4: I don't know, but I remember the name of the company, Cinecor and the ticker symbol was SYNC, and I bought it in like twenty ten because they had had some previous winners that went up like two thousand percent, and I thought, man, I slept on that last one. I slept on the one before because I didn't trust this group, but they seemed to be the hot group right now, wouldn't you know it? When I bought the one that they suggested the next one, that was when their their hot streak came to a grinding halt. And I remember being I bought this thing right before earnings with all of my money that I had in my training account, which was like eighteen grand or something, and the stock got cut in half immediately for earnings, and I was like, I was at my I've told this story on the show where I was at my job that I hated, like despised.

00:33:45
Speaker 1: I'd worked there for.

00:33:46
Speaker 4: Nine months, and I saw, oh, basically, just like nine months of my my entire job here has just been erased. I've essentially been working for free. And I went and I sat in the bathroom and I just sat there and I I took out my phone, and I took out the calculator and I did the math on I included gas because I had to commute every day in taxes, and I was like, it's going to take me, I don't know, eight months just to make back what I just lost on that one trade. I fucking and there was no air conditioning in the building and it was always like eighty five degrees in there every day. And I had a coworker who had a chronic uh like throat clearing thing. So I just go back to my desk and this guy's just going like every ten seconds. Oh brother, those would become a smioki.

00:34:36
Speaker 3: Oh I was.

00:34:36
Speaker 4: I was like, I'm the You didn't have it back then, but I wanted to become the joker.

00:34:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're you're joking, but that you did have the joker. Oh yeah, well not like.

00:34:48
Speaker 3: I'm going to be yet to be created.

00:34:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, but that's what's so scary. We're joking.

00:34:52
Speaker 5: But there is now uh basically like hundreds of thousands of these people strown a across society just getting hosed on stocks, losing their hard earned money.

00:35:06
Speaker 4: We're in some case making some In some cases there was someone coming insane. There was a stock that I talked about on our show. It was called bloom It is called Bloom Energy. The ticker symbol is b and ED. I famously owned this in the teens and I sold it and it's now it's christ ma'am. Yeah, you see that chart, it's up to like two hundred and eighty dollars you share.

00:35:33
Speaker 3: Well, what I also see is the receipt I have for how much Oracle is paying them?

00:35:39
Speaker 1: And oh yeah if the Oracle announced.

00:35:41
Speaker 3: Thing, Oh no, I'm looking at the actual receipt. Oh shit, intern Oracle, And let me tell you something. It's only for starga Abilene. So I mean long term, you will be right. But that's the thing. None of this matters. Yeah, like things being bad now doesn't matter what it's because the insane people have led it. This all sounds like Enron plus crypto. It's terrifying to me. One of the reasons I don't engage with stocks is what you're talking about, this sense of like I would go insane if I was looking at these numbers every day and they matted, Like if I was like, I'm gonna lose money because something happened, because the way, I'm not going to make money because I sold it too soon, right, Like all of that sounds horrible to me. It's uh, yeah, it sucks shit sometimes. But what I was gonna say. Someone actually left a comment recently. I forgot where, but they said that they bought that bluem Energy stock when I talked about it, and they're like, I'm up three hundred percent, thanks Ben, Wow, And I'm like, cool, dude, just enjoy yourself, remember to pay yourself and not just let it sit there. Do your listeners get mad at you if you like, do you give stock advice? I know you talk about your own trading good.

00:37:06
Speaker 1: I talk about my own trades.

00:37:08
Speaker 4: But I have been sure to remind people that like none of this, I mean people know by now.

00:37:15
Speaker 5: But and talk about it in like entertainment purposes of like yeah, like never you should buy this or any of that.

00:37:23
Speaker 4: Yeah, I have said I really like this for the following reasons kind of thing.

00:37:28
Speaker 3: Yeah. I get people who email me and message me all the time being like how do I show this? How do I show this? And I always say I don't know. Yeah, Like I just like I don't know. I don't give financial advice. I can't tell you how to do it. Put cashit a box onto your bed.

00:37:44
Speaker 1: I mean but that's the thing.

00:37:46
Speaker 5: You know, if it was that easy, everyone would be millionaires. I think, as we've been talking about this entire time, the irrational the irrationality of all of it is like impossible to account for. Someone like Ben has a lot of experience with it, so he has a better shot. But like you know, I was telling Ben when when all those permeables were calling for a big crash because of all of these, all of these factors, I was like, I believe them.

00:38:13
Speaker 1: I know that they're idiots.

00:38:14
Speaker 4: Because but like idiots, I'm looking at everything going, yeah, how the fuck is everything not just taking a nose dive.

00:38:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's a lot of factors.

00:38:27
Speaker 3: It's it feels like the market doesn't want it to Yeah.

00:38:32
Speaker 1: I think that's a big part of it.

00:38:33
Speaker 5: I think they're gonna do anything they can to keep uh, the ownership class satisfied and keep the market propped up for them and continuing to grow.

00:38:42
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a lot of it's momentum. It's uh, it's just the the passive investing and all that cash that just gets forced into the system week after week, day after day.

00:38:55
Speaker 1: It's a lot of different factors.

00:38:56
Speaker 4: It's like it just it doesn't matter until it suddenly matter matters, and everybody can collectively on Twitter decide why, and then they give it a couple of weeks and they've now processed it, and now it's like, well, now we've whew what used to take What used to take months to uh to process information and to process catalysts now takes weeks, if not days, if not hours sometimes.

00:39:22
Speaker 3: So I think I've been in I'll be the enjoy Right now is everyone's talking about CPUs instead of GPUs.

00:39:28
Speaker 1: You had this, Yeah, CPUs are so bad. The hot right now.

00:39:33
Speaker 3: AD is going to make all this CPU revenue, And it's like they have forgotten that like eight months ago, nine months ago, a MD promised to sell Tempers out of its stock to open AIE. Never happened, broad Com tent cake, what's never happened. Port Com is up now because the market is slightly deciding they kind of don't like a video. It just feel it feels like being tortured looking at this stuff and thinking about it from the perspective of the logical. It doesn't mean that I'm wrong. It just means that, well, I mean I'm not wrong because I'm not investing in the market.

00:40:10
Speaker 5: But it's just like so much logic into this, that's exactly you're thinking too rationally about it. And yeah, I think it's just it's all gonna like get absorbed and pivot like if the if the whole AI thing goes bust. I don't think we're even going to see this like bubble bursting that everyone's expecting.

00:40:29
Speaker 1: Everyone's just gonna start being like robotics.

00:40:32
Speaker 5: Robotics is what that's that's what it all is now, and we're all heavily invested in that.

00:40:37
Speaker 1: The future is that, and we're all just going to keep Robotics is going to be the next theme. I think.

00:40:41
Speaker 3: I think that's why they go off to ry.

00:40:43
Speaker 4: I I think that there's you can you can you can put your ear to the ground.

00:40:48
Speaker 1: With robotics and maybe space and finance.

00:40:50
Speaker 4: Twitter robotics, robotics were was already pretty hot earlier this year and last year, but then it kind of gave way to the memory trade and the bottleneck trade, and now you're going to be seeing, i think, a return to the robotics trade and the physical AI thing, and of course, yeah, you've got you've got the big IPOs coming with fucking SpaceX and.

00:41:15
Speaker 1: He's gonna put a million people on Mars. Don't people on Mars.

00:41:20
Speaker 3: But the thing is, here's the thing with that, with the big IPOs, the anthropics, the open eyes, I don't think those two go public. I don't think I think that there is one's gonna look like a dog's dinner on Thanksgiving and then his asshole on the other way. Because it's the thing is, even in an a logical market, we've yet to see a big I PO showing its dirty business. We've yet to see somebody really showing how bad things are. You'll notice the Xai's IPO, they've hidden that documentation from.

00:41:52
Speaker 4: The world like they don't want now fully absorbed in SpaceX too insane.

00:41:58
Speaker 3: It's so sorry I called it, say I it's SpaceX now, it's SpaceX now yeah, ah.

00:42:04
Speaker 4: Two hundred fifty billion dollar value. It's just like you're borrowing from Peter to pay Elon. You're borrowing from Elon to pay Elon.

00:42:12
Speaker 3: But also the other thing is is the is the thing how is there enough money for this? Because there was like forty seven billion dollars of IPOs and twenty twenty five they want to have fifty billion for Anthropic, fifty billion for SpaceX, fifty billion for for open AI.

00:42:28
Speaker 1: How you just keep back and forth, you know, yees, if I give.

00:42:34
Speaker 3: That money needs to because save stocks.

00:42:37
Speaker 5: SpaceX buys Tesla cyber trucks, and it's all just.

00:42:43
Speaker 3: I just mean the stock themselves anyway.

00:42:46
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, probably what you'll see, ironically, I mean a lot of well a couple of things. Again, a lot of people start to talk about, uh oh, the Anthropic or the SpaceX or the whatever ipo is going to mark the top of the market. But then when you put that out there as a narrative, the more and more you put it out there, the more and more people think the same thing. But then when everybody's thinking that same thing, it ain't gonna fucking happen, because it it pisses me off that it wouldn't happen. So actually it's like it's the fucking Princess Bride poisoned Goblet scene. It's just well, actually, a smart man would think that the market would go down, but the wise man would know that the smart man thinks that it would go down, so actually it would not. But there is a possibility that money comes out of the other momentum stocks like sand Disk, like Micron, like AMD, etc.

00:43:43
Speaker 3: So people would dump them.

00:43:45
Speaker 4: It's possible that we might get a rotation like that. Yeah, but real fast. I saw a tweet last night from a guy who has one hundred and eighty eight thousand followers. I retweeted it, I quote retweeted it because it was too fucking funny. He goes it was something like, boy, I can't wait until Tesla starts sending Optimist robots into space. It's gonna be so good for Tesla. And I'm like, hold on, wait, do you even? And he hosts like a Tesla centric podcast. It's like, my guy, how who who is buying the Optimist robots from Tesla.

00:44:24
Speaker 1: Number one?

00:44:25
Speaker 4: And then why are they being blasted in space? So they're doing what they're being like, boy, Tesla's gonna make a bunch of cars and then blasted.

00:44:34
Speaker 1: They're gonna go build our little Mars civilization. But who's paying for that? Oh my god?

00:44:40
Speaker 4: Buying the fucking robots and then going now send them to Mars. It's gonna be good for Tesla.

00:44:45
Speaker 5: But this is you know, we talked about this all the time too. There's a bunch of people who have The people who have hit on these things then develop their own psychosis, where like you have these tesla people who have made a lot of money and now cannot see cannot see what's really happening.

00:45:00
Speaker 4: Which I understand. Oh, because if I was a guy I am. But if I was a guy who made some of these retail guys truly have made ten twenty million dollars, oh.

00:45:09
Speaker 1: I fully would be a psycho. I'd be a psycho.

00:45:12
Speaker 3: I'd be like, Oh no, I would be I would if I'd made like ten million dollars off of some insane trade I read on Twitter, I would begin to lose my grippone reality, I'll be able, and.

00:45:22
Speaker 5: I think that the CEO was omniscient, and I would follow him to the end of the year.

00:45:28
Speaker 1: You don't get it.

00:45:28
Speaker 4: This whole time he was making outrageous claims and no one believed him, but the market eventually caught up, and he's doing the same thing now and you just don't get it, do you. I love that people are finally kind of I mean, they've done it multiple times, but they're rightfully trying to starting to call out Kathy Wood in the arc.

00:45:47
Speaker 3: Oh you mean the dumb is that that? What's her returns?

00:45:51
Speaker 1: Like?

00:45:52
Speaker 3: Uh?

00:45:53
Speaker 1: Now, not good?

00:45:54
Speaker 3: But yeah, like the whole thing was paying in twenty twenty one, right, yeah, she was.

00:45:59
Speaker 4: She she made one big right call, which was they famously said we think Tesla is undervalued when it was at like I don't know, one hundred billion, ninety billion market cap or something like that, and that was right before it's skyrocketed straight to a trillion. So they made well over ten x on the on their thing, and everybody was like, boy, is Kathy Wood ladies really uh for a for a lady, She's got a she's got a good she's got the Midas touch. And then they were also calling for cyber cabs and autonomous stuff.

00:46:33
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah yeah. Did you hear that that's gonna be a thirty four trillion dollar industry by twenty five?

00:46:38
Speaker 2: Yeah?

00:46:38
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, of course.

00:46:40
Speaker 4: And even though Weimo currently has Tesla completely licked, just you wait because pretty soon I have a feeling that Elon Musk is gonna make millions of these cybercabs and Optimus robots are going to be building that number.

00:46:54
Speaker 1: Can it cost thirty thousand dollars?

00:46:56
Speaker 3: Yeah?

00:46:56
Speaker 1: And get this.

00:46:57
Speaker 4: Elon's gonna blast the cyber cabs into space, which is gonna be good for Tesla stock because they're going to be building all those cars, which is gonna be revenue for them, and then they send them into space on SpaceX rockets, which is good revenue for SpaceX.

00:47:11
Speaker 3: You fucking you think that Musk himself. This is an underrated success that Musk has had, though I don't think he did it with intention in the the Twitter algorithm is evil and like I looked for that, that a x TI stock, and now I've just got four or five different psychopaths being like, that's just a filcher. That's the Bierlisis Delisis will be the biggest stock I've ever seen. Yum.

00:47:41
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah.

00:47:43
Speaker 4: Once you once you click one cash tag as they call them, you are then inundated with with all kinds of pumping uh tweets.

00:47:54
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's how much of that do you think is bots? And how much do you think it is.

00:48:00
Speaker 4: They've gone They've gotten decent at the box. It used to be when you click a cash tag of any kind you would just get spam posts for discord rooms. But I think that they've started to clamp down on that. You know, it's it's frustrating because you'll you'll see what it's musical chairs because me as a momentum trader again, I'm like, I don't want to I'm not here to judge.

00:48:25
Speaker 3: A momentum trader.

00:48:26
Speaker 4: Sorry, just just just riding the trend. Like, okay, if if a correct thing of me to have done but I didn't do, would have been to recognize the momentum is currently focused on memory stocks and just buy the dips on those and get out, buy the dips, get out, And so I try to I try to bring that to my next trades.

00:48:50
Speaker 1: Okay, what I'm not going to judge.

00:48:52
Speaker 4: I'm just gonna be like, Okay, what stocks have momentum, what sectors, what whatever has momentum. I'm just going to try to get in and get out. But my luck, sometimes you buy the one that just doesn't fucking work, and that's scary enough to keep me from getting on that train. It's just a fucking never ending thing that means you just want to fucking die.

00:49:11
Speaker 3: And what is the thing I invest in words? What's that I invest in words? And no one can see what I'm doing, Like a DreamWorks style thing. But my face isn't doing it anymore. Uh, It's just I I feel like this will only end in pain for this cycle and the next, and the next and the next. Because gravity exists. Something will send this to hell. Perhaps it won't be something logical, but it's gonna be something such.

00:49:40
Speaker 1: As way socks software stick.

00:49:42
Speaker 4: I mean, it's kind of a conundrum because it was AI that brought down the software socks. But for the longest time they were untouchable and impossible to defeat, and they were free cash flow printing machines. But they've all been cut by sixty seventy percent. So it's entirely likely, in probably inevitable, that the same fate will meet a lot of these high flyers right now.

00:50:03
Speaker 1: It's just a question of when. Yeah, but I think I was talking about broadly the entire market, right.

00:50:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Like the the just the experience of we have a market that is somewhat dictated by Twitter psychopaths is really bad.

00:50:19
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, it's not good. It's fundamentals are totally out the window. You could make an argument for, well, hey, that's just the new normal now, and and you kind of have to throw caution out the window if you want to try to make money at it, which is not a reassuring thing, and it's not a good thing.

00:50:39
Speaker 1: It just is what it is.

00:50:42
Speaker 4: I'm doing the Alex KRP hands Yeah, fucking yeah.

00:50:48
Speaker 3: Oh geez.

00:50:49
Speaker 4: I remember following that at five Bucks and people were like, you don't understand, and I just was like, I don't know. Fuck, I don't even understand what this company does. Pallenteer, get the fuck out here, fucking gadget.

00:51:01
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:51:01
Speaker 3: I think the future should be mass censorship. I don't think we should have CNBC able to talk about stocks anymore. I don't think just like shut down or like you can't talk about stocks online anymore.

00:51:15
Speaker 1: Now.

00:51:15
Speaker 3: I don't think there's any fixing this other than massive amounts of pain. And the fact they want to move to semi annual earnings is fucking bonkers. That is the.

00:51:26
Speaker 1: Craziest twenty four seventh reading twenty.

00:51:29
Speaker 3: Four to seven trading plus six month earnings is that will actually destroy the markets in ways that I'm not sure people could fully conceptualize, because it would just be like everything will be casino now, except no, that's an insult to my beautiful slot machines which are fair and have real odds, unlike scurrilous markets run by pigs and vagabonds.

00:51:56
Speaker 4: And at least to the slot machines you have, those fun sounds are stimulate late.

00:52:03
Speaker 3: I will fully admit there have been times that being like very like anxious in my life where I've just listened to casino sounds. I found the very relaxing.

00:52:12
Speaker 4: It is very I have the same thing. I remember as a kid going to Harris Casino in Laughlin with my family for vacation and walking through that casino floor. I was like, this sounds so nice and good, but I don't know why. It's just so pleasing, the dinging ning They.

00:52:28
Speaker 1: It's got to be intentional. They of course, yeah, they figured it out. They're pumping in oxygen, so you're feeling.

00:52:34
Speaker 4: Good and it just feels good to hear out the perfect phonic Yeah.

00:52:39
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:52:40
Speaker 4: And I remember loving the bacon that I had at that Hair's breakfast.

00:52:45
Speaker 3: Behold the buffy. The bois in casinos just fucking amazing.

00:52:51
Speaker 4: It's like, Hey, you might kill yourself because you just lost everything, but the least we could do is give you some really top shelf bacon That was back then. I don't know if it's any good now, but.

00:53:01
Speaker 3: It's still good. Thank you. I will not hear vegas slant hip. All right, fellas, I'm gonna wrap it here. Where can people find.

00:53:10
Speaker 4: You Ben in a Meal Show? If you just google the Ben in a Meal Show. You go on YouTube, you go on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Instagram, Twitter, you know benbennmealshow dot com we do. We do our weekly show and then we also do some fun stuff like where we famously took acid and went to the mall, or we took acid and went to a train festival.

00:53:33
Speaker 5: You'll find it all at our YouTube page. Yeah, and Instagram stuff. It's all there.

00:53:37
Speaker 4: We love taking the piss out of this whole this whole racket.

00:53:42
Speaker 3: And I do too. Listeners. You'll have a monologue. I apologized that I missed last week. My life is being crazy, but I really appreciate you being patient with me. Have enough monologue and have some fun guests coming up. Thank you as ever for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.

00:54:04
Speaker 7: The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski.

00:54:08
Speaker 1: You can check out more of his music and audio projects.

00:54:10
Speaker 7: At Matasowski dot com, M A T T O S O W s ki dot com. You can email me at easy at better offline dot com or visit better offline dot com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter.

00:54:24
Speaker 3: I also really recommend you go to chat.

00:54:26
Speaker 7: Dot Where's youreed dot at to visit the discord, and go to our slash Better Offline to check out I'll Reddit.

00:54:32
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for listening.

00:54:35
Speaker 8: Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:55:02
Speaker 1: In the old Spanish schools