The COUGRs Trade Takes Wall Street, America Downgraded by Moodys, Walmart vs Trump

28:41We'll continue to hire and invest in high certainty areas, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, AI. I have a friend that works in the private bank at JP Morgan. He said every day he's watching them train their employees how to train their machines to eventually do the jobs of those employees. And the employees almost like don't even know. He said it's like – That's dystopian. It's like watching cattle be marched into a slaughterhouse. They have no idea where they're headed. they're training their software to do what they do but better it's not just one firm this is like a microcosm for the way I think most large companies are going to start thinking

29:31bullish? Not really not for humanity I don't think so I don't know it's not black or white obviously there will be societal benefits but yeah, there's some bad shit out of town. Yeah, everybody can be a playwright now. All right, I want to introduce the Cougars. This is the hottest trade of the year and I invented this term so nobody knows what it is yet.

29:57That was so you. So on, Brent. All right, this is a trend that I've observed and I think others will observe it later. Wall Street has fallen in love with the stickiest subscription and app-based business models that consumers will not likely unsubscribe or discontinue their use of unless things get really bad. And I call these stocks the Cougars, which is an acronym, stands for canceled only under great recession. Is that good? There's no E. There's no E. canceled only under great recession. Think of the services that you use that you wouldn't cancel unless it's like 2008. And then even in that case, you might have a hard time doing so.

30:52So there are a lot of things that I could have included in here, but I didn't. Like I could have included cybersecurity. I think these are the most recession resilient of the enterprise software plays. Look at CrowdStrike. It's about to make a new all-time high. They just announced a huge deal with NVIDIA. They're going to be the standard cybersecurity in NVIDIA's AI, whatever, blah, blah, blah. But I kept stuff like that out. And I just wanted to focus mostly on consumer apps and subscriptions that people are going to keep doing no matter what. Wait, apps and subscriptions. Those are not the same thing.

31:25Correct. Activities. Okay. Activities that are app based or subscription based. So like OnlyFans is both. um so the crowd is saying like um apple music and amazon prime yeah both of those things but um i don't have them in here because they're so obvious here's what i have um robin hood no one's gonna stop we we already know from 2022 we know from the crypto crash nobody's gonna stop doing what they're doing on robin hood it so it's they do have a subscription product called Robinhood gold. And I think they've converted a lot of their users over to it. Their power users doing really well. I'm going to tell you right now, this, this company, I don't know about the stock won't go down in a, in a recession.

32:11I know it's gotta be a really bad recession for the business to take a really big hit. Oh, to be clear, the stock will get pummeled in a recession, just like every other stuff. Fine, fine. But if that's in a bad recession in a slowdown, I don't know if that's a, that's a negative for Robinhood. People seem to be trading more when the market gets rocky. Yeah, I think the business will be just fine, but the stock will get hit. Keep going. All right, here's the point. The stock is up 88 % since April 8th. Wow. Okay. It's up 72 % year to date. I have a company called Sezzle in here. I don't know what the hell this is.

32:45It's a buy now, pay later. The stock is up 230 % since April 8th. It's up 125 % year to date. It's a$100 stock with a$3 billion market cap. S-E-Z-L. And if I show you this thing over the last six months, you'll fall out of your chair. I think it's up a thousand percent in six months. Oh, Sezzle, I forgot I own this. I'm just kidding. Yeah. So one of the things that I did in my research here is I took note of the number of users or accounts or subscribers. Sezzle has 658 ,000 people subscribed to their buy now, pay later service. Again, is anyone canceling their buy now, pay later because they're worried about the economy?

33:29No, that might make more people use it. Well, you just don't pay and then the losses go up. They haven't seen that yet. They haven't seen that. So Duolingo, look at this stock. it's a$520 stock. It's up 60 % this year. It's up 77 % from the lows in April 8th. 74 million monthly active users, 5 million paying subscribers. Wait, what are those numbers one more time? Up 77 % from April 8th. No, the users, the users. 74 million. Did you know that? Holy smokes. Holy shit. Wait, did you see Google's announcement today? You could do Google Meet translate language like real time? Yeah. Why does anybody, no offense, why does anybody - People want to learn the language.

34:16They don't want the cheat code. I guess. All right. All right. Listen to me. 5 million paying subscribers, 74 million monthly actives. Nobody talks about this stock. It's up incredibly from the lows in April. Impressive. Hims and hers, 140 % return from the low on April 8th. 2.4 million subscribers, people that are regularly getting penis pills and bald stuff and I'm not a doctor. I don't know if you could tell, but this is like highly unlikely. The medical term is boner pill, sir. That's right. Highly unlikely for these people that are using the service or paying a subscription fee to go away.

34:58Oh, that's a staple. You're not going to not take a boner pill. No, of course not. Yeah. I mean, you got to live. Netflix is the best example on here. Yeah. Up 30 % from the lows on April 8th, up 33 % year to date. one of the best names in the S &P, 300 million subscribers. Nobody cancels. They might downgrade. Okay. Spotify is on my list. So good. Spotify is up 30 % from the low. It has 678 million monthly actives, 268 million subscribers. Those people are not leaving. That's why the, that's this theme, this, this cougar theme. Spotify is a cougar. Uber up 42%, 170 million MAU. 30 million Uber one subscribers.

35:45You could say people might order less food from Uber because of how expensive it is. And we're saying, all right, I'll give you that. But more people are willing to drive for them, driving down their costs. And I think that's why this is the third best performing stock in the S &P year to date. By the way, I don't know if you know that. Uber is the third best S &P 500 stock year to date, up 52%. What's number one and two? Who cares? It's my highest conviction position. How do you like me now? App Lovin' is up 60 % off the lows. I don't know their user base. I just know that this is online games, and their ad business is interwoven with online games.

36:27And my God, what a name. DraftKings, 2 million monthly active users. These people are going nowhere, precisely nowhere, especially if they get laid off. Then what else are you doing? Match group, online dating, 16 million subscribers. Stock is up 50 % on the year. Bumble, same thing. Stock is up 55 % this year, 56 % from the low on April 8th, 42 million monthly active users on Bumble. Peloton, if you were going to cancel, you probably already have. This stock is up 27 % from the April 8th low, 6.7 million members. Let me see what else I got. All right, so the point, let me wrap this up. Peloton smells like a me stock.

37:21I hate that I like it. Give me my table. I put the top 10 on here. These are your cougars. And yes, there are other big publicly traded companies making a lot of money from subscriptions, Costco, Amazon, those are the obvious ones. This is like maybe the next tier down that people wouldn't necessarily associate with this theme. But again, this is canceled only under Great Recession. I don't know what the S stands for, savings. Here's some individual charts. Look at this Sezzle piece of shit, whatever this is. Could you imagine? Look where this came from. I think it was under$10 this time last year.

38:04It's$100 stock, folks. Is that Berkshire accumulating? Yeah. Here's Netflix. Bye. Wow. Gone. Spotify. What do you think is about to happen? Hire. Do you have to be a professional technician to understand what's in the works here? DraftKings. this is interesting only in so far as you think about it from the low um this is not sideways sideways for a year not interesting all right match next yeah not big recovery of the low all right here's hymns this is becoming a meme stock i mean you can't trade this look at this wild shit wild shit this is a meme stock and it's uh i i hear it's a really popular stock on robin hood and it's um it's a roller coaster dude this thing was uh 25 bucks it's back at 60 like blink of an eye this is for lunatics only i mean this is the ozempic this is the ozempic trade basically um they're doing this these compounding these compounded versions of all the fat loss shots and and they're delivering it right to your house and they're making money hand over fist Anyway, so this is the Cougars theme.

39:22I stole this from, we're going to talk to Rich Bernstein about this, but one of the other things Assemblist said, tech and interactive media stocks now account for 35 % of market wide earnings versus 19 % a decade ago. This is what I was trying to explain to John Authors and Chris Davis on the Compound and friends last week. A huge percentage of the S &P's market cap is now comprised of companies that have made themselves recession resilient and almost, you could call them borderline defensive because they don't require you to do a transaction with them. They're getting subscription revenue because you already agreed that you're a user.

40:06Nobody cancels because of inertia and things just don't get that bad. And that's what makes up the market cap of the S &P now. So they're not like classically defensive. They're defensive in the way that they charge their users. They've subscriptionized businesses that used to be transactional. And this is not just publicly traded app companies. You know how I pay my exterminator? He's a subscription. Stable coins? No. We agree at the beginning of the year. This is the annual rate. I'll come this many times. Who the hell is canceling the exterminator? You know what I mean? So this is, I think, something that people have overlooked about the resilience of the S &P 500 and arguably maybe the whole economy.

40:55I think you're 100 % right. And again, just to reiterate from Semblist, tech and interactive media stocks account for 35 % of market-wide earnings versus 19 % a decade ago. And Josh, the point that you just made about these now being defensive, not in the classic sense. So when you thought about defensive names previously, you would think of something like Procter & Gamble. Yeah. Right? Like in a recession. Everybody needs toothpaste. Everybody's got to have toilet paper. Well, guess what? Procter & Gamble had a margin of, I don't know, 14 % on making that up. Apple's got a gross margin of what, 45 %?

41:36Like these are, it's pun intended, apples and oranges. And that's why the market looks so much different than it used to. Yeah. Because these companies have, they don't rely on you walking into a store and buying an iPhone to make their numbers. And they're growing mid-teens. Maybe not Apple, but like, it's just, come on, what are we doing here? All right. Great point, Josh. Okay. Sticking with this theme and sticking with Sembalist. So in his recent post, he was talking about the push and pull of tariffs pulling the market down and AI spend pushing the market forward. So he says, US companies spent a lot more time talking about AI than tariffs in the first quarter earnings calls.

42:16This is according to empirical research. The market cap of AI plays, and this is really important, the market capitalization of AI plays is 2.6 times larger than their, quote, tariff victim category. So it's not that tariffs don't matter. Of course they do. But the size of the AI plays is 2.6 times them. So Michael says, in other words, what can make the argument that AI is at least as important as tariffs to equity investors, if not more so? I want to spend a second talking about, again, using Michael's research, the advancement that we're seeing in AI. So try it on, please. So there's a lot of dots here.

42:56This is a bit confusing for listeners and for people that are even looking at this. But what we're doing here is we're going from June 2023, shortly after OpenAI was launched, through today. And what you're looking at is PhD level science questions on the left versus US math Olympiad selection exam on the right. And all that you need to know is that the proficiency of these models, whether it's Google, Anthropic, DeepSeek, OpenAI, XAI, or Meta AI, it's going up and to the right. and the level at which these things are getting better every day is exponentially growing. And not surprisingly, next chart, John, please.

43:34Not surprisingly, the adoption is increasing big time. So they asked people in October, 2023, what the adoption rate was in various companies or various categories, whether it's marketing or knowledge workers or core product enhancement versus December, 2024. And it looks like it's doubled across the board. Yeah. And then they asked in August of 2024 and May 2025 and just recently, what do you expect to be doing the next six months in terms of your AI adoption? And it's here big time. Yeah. On the left side, so the adoption rate by, I guess, profession for AI, October 2023 versus December 2024.

44:18So that's a 14-month period. And just as an example for people, if you worked in marketing in October of 2023, it was a 35 % adoption rate of AI, and now it's 55%. And not stopping. And look at all these categories, sales, operations, customer onboarding, finance, legal, non-software R &D. Human resources doubled the use of AI. So look, I don't know how much people are just saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're using AI. But I just think about our business. Everything we're considering doing with every vendor we talk to and every company that approaches us has an AI bent to it. One of the things I thought was funny is all the future-proof retreat was in Colorado.

45:12You were there. Chris was there. Anna, Barry, Jay. and everybody there was talking about data lakes. Like this is the whole thing is like controlling all of your client data in one place and cleaning it up and making sure that it's - I am the Michael Phelps of data lakes. Yeah, making sure it's useful for what? For AI purposes so that you can turn AI loose on that data and learn shit about your business. And then I go on LinkedIn two days after the Future Proof event and every CTO of every financial advisory firm is making data lake announcements. So data lake is going to be the term of the summer for our industry.

45:53I brought our own AI little thing here. So I want to play a clip. Just bear with us for a second. It's at one and a half times speed. So forgive me. I just didn't want you to sit around here for two minutes. So John, clip on, please. Welcome to the deep dive. Today, we're really digging into the current market, looking at it through the eyes of Richard Bernstein. He's the CEO and CIO of Richard Bernstein Advisors RBA, you know, and he used to be the chief investment strategist over at Merrill Lynch. Yeah, and for this deep dive, we're mainly drawing on a conversation he had recently. it was on the Compound channel, the episode called The Magnificent Seven is a Bubble.

46:19Exactly. So our mission here is to really get into the scan of Bernstein's argument about these Magnificent Seven tech stocks. We want to understand, you know, how does this market stack up against history? Bubbles, booms, busts. And maybe find some potential investment ideas that are getting sort of lost in all the noise. Okay. So right off the bat, Bernstein isn't exactly subtle. He flat out says The Magnificent Seven is a bubble. That's pretty bold compared to many of his peers. What's his reasoning there? Well, it's interesting. It's not just a gut feeling. His firm, RBA, they actually did some internal studies.

46:42They asked, you know, are these seven companies really the only places with real growth globally. And surprisingly, a lot of the Magnificent Seven, they don't even pass basic growth screens when you compare them to everything out there. Really? Yeah. I mean, they do this global growth ranking, right? So - Was that Scarlett Johansson? So that's Notebook LM. And I uploaded our podcast. And it gives you a 15-minute podcast from these two hosts. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. The AI made a fake podcast based on our real podcast it's about one eighth of the time so it's like it's like uh 12 15 minutes so is that good for us or bad for us no it's not much did i get paid for that my my point is like look what it can do today it's a listenable it sounds like a real conversation so what i did i said because we have rich bernstein on this thursday i said what are the four most important things that richard said on the show and it pulled out four dope quotes that i'm going to reference like it's So this is a boomer question.

47:38Why does it have to be in the form of a fake podcast? Why can't it just be somebody? It doesn't have to be. Why can't the AI just say, these are the five things that Richard Bernstein said in case you don't have time to listen to the whole hour and a half? That's an option too. You could do that. I mean, that sounds f***ing dumb to get a machine to create fake babble. That's not the point. My point is that this is what - I can't be what I do on the show can't be reduced to an AI explanation. There's a magic that I bring to these conversations that's spontaneous. I was trying to show the audience how powerful some of this AI is.

48:13There's a contemporaneousness to the dialogue. It can't be scripted in advance and it can't be distilled into - All right, stop with this fake aggression. Nobody is suggesting - No, it's like offensive. It's like, oh, I didn't listen to your podcast. I listened to a fake podcast created by AI that tells me what was in your podcast. My response is, what are you, moron? Like, what else were you doing that you didn't have time to listen to me directly, but you had time to listen to that? There was not a single person on planet Earth that is doing that. I was demonstrating how powerful AI is. But what's the power?

48:52It's clever. that they trained a large language model to take in an audio file and spit back out a distilled audio file with fake hosts. It's clever. How is that powerful? I mean, tomatoes, tomatoes. What power does it have? I have the power here. Alright, asshole, next topic. Don't I? Don't you have the power with your words and your bearing? and your delivery. Next topic. The fake podcast hosts have no power. No one's going to be a fan of that. It's not about the fake podcast. Stop it. When we started the show, it was about the music, man. Not all this corporate. All right. Walmart picked a fight with the White House and I knew it was coming.

49:44When did they do this? This is over the weekend. All right. So here's the progression. Put up my LinkedIn post. I knew this was coming, dude. So I saw, I think Brian Sazi at Yahoo Finance or somebody at Yahoo Finance had the CFO of Walmart like do a hit on Yahoo Finance. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is not a thing that happens. Like the CFO of the largest retailer in America doesn't just start randomly dipping in on Yahoo Finance to do hits. Clearly they had something that they wanted to get out there. And this is what it is. I'm going to quote what he said. Low prices is what we stand for, but we're going to keep prices as low as we can, as long as we can.

50:29But when you look at the magnitude of some of the cost increases on certain categories of items that are imported, it's more than what retailers can bear, more than what suppliers can bear. So we'll work hard to keep prices low, but it's unavoidable. You're going to see prices go up. If you've got a 30 % tariff on something, you're likely going to see double digits. in price increases. This is what the guy said. And I said, yeah, this is not going to go well. And sure enough, very quickly, here's the White House response. This is a truth social from Donald Trump. Walmart should stop trying to blame tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain.

51:13Walmart made billions of dollars last year, far more than expected. I don't know what that means. Between Walmart and China, They should, as is said, eat the tariffs, all caps, and not charge valued customers anything. I'll be watching and so will your customers. Three exclamation points. I won't stop watching. If I told you a politician said that, but not Donald Trump, you might have guessed Elizabeth Warren. Correct. Correct. I spoke with Ben today. That's not a Republican. It's unbelievable. That's not a Republican point of view that Walmart made too much money. More than expected? When Elizabeth Warren says this shit, we cackle and we laugh at how dumb it is.

51:56Yeah. The fact that a Republican is saying it is mind-bending. I think that Trumpism is mercantilism. It's not capitalism. What does that word mean? Hold on. Let me ask my AI. I got you. Mercantilism is an economic system that dominated Europe. basically it's companies exist in order to serve the state. It's not a Republican principle. It's not a libertarian. It's the opposite. So in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, the dawn of corporations, these corporations were willed into existence as a means of fixing the financial problems of these countries that had spent hundreds of years at war with each other.

52:43All the kings were bankrupt. All the parliaments were looking for a solution. So they would grant these monopolies to the Dutch East India Company and the South Seas Corp. And they would say, you have the exclusive right to murder anything that moves in South America and bring the gold back here. And that was mercantilism. And the primary goal was, again, to solve the state's problems by means of corporate activity that investors could invest in. And that this idea that like Walmart exists to please the White House with it, with the way it's charging customers. How dare they raise their prices because their inputs prices are going up.

53:25I'm just saying it sounds like it sounds like an AOC drop. And also their margins are 2.7%. I mean, what? The Lone Phoenix says it's an STFU statement from the White House. I agree. Walmart said, I bet if we come out publicly, other companies will do the same. and nobody had their back. Nobody else said shit. And then the White House is like, I dare you. I dare you to keep telling us tariffs are the reason that you're raising prices. Well, their customers don't care about the tweet or the truth and neither does the stock market. It's nonsense. The typical Walmart customer does not care. They care about the price.

54:04They don't care what caused it because we know. Matter of fact, I listened to the earnings call and they said, yes, for areas that are impacted by tariffs, we will be forced to raise prices. We're not going to do it across the board. They're specifically not being greedy. They are going to do it for food that is imported from Latin American countries, bananas, for example. Like where their prices are increasing, they will increase their prices. This was my response. Not that anyone's listening to me. In 2024, Walmart's net profit margin was 2.9%. Like it's not in a high margin business. They imported about$50 billion worth of goods from China at a 30 % tariff rate.

54:48You're talking about like a$15,$18 billion hit. People have pointed out that's just their raw costs. You don't know what the price they sell the item for. Okay, correct. I'm estimating. I'm not an auditor from Pricewaterhouse. Here are your choices. negative second half earnings at the largest retailer in America. Eat the tariffs! Meaning they eat the tariffs. Two, higher costs to the consumer. That won't be popular. Or three, another beautiful deal exempting Walmart and everything they sell. It has to be one of those three. There's no fourth way. There's no fourth option. So either Walmart says, we will shut up if you exempt these 500 SKUs that are the bulk of our profit margins.

55:39Or, I don't know, or some combination of eating the cost and passing on the cost. But it's not good, no matter what, for the end consumer. It's just, it's not. Wait, Walmart has a subscription service too, doesn't it? Yeah, well, of course. Like an Amazon Prime-y kind of thing. All right, look, I don't know where this is going. Maybe this is one-off or maybe another CEO or CFO is going to pop on Yahoo Finance and FAFO. We'll find out, but it's interesting. What is FAFO? F around and find out. All right. Venture capital hangover. We could spend a total of 30 seconds on this. I just thought it was a cool chart.

56:24Dan Primack at Axios was writing about the most recent report from Carta, which if you're in this world is worth downloading. This is showing startups raised 21 billion in the first quarter of this year, which is down 3 % from the first quarter of last year. And I thought this was the most interesting thing. 46 % of all seed deals, and Michael, I know you're a big seed level investor, were bridge rounds in Q1 2024. So half of all the financing for seed stage companies is bridge financing, which means it's not a new valuation or anything like that. It's just like we need some more money while we wait for our next legitimate round.

57:10Half. That's the highest bridge rate for any stage of investing since Carta began tracking this data. For context, last year it was 39 % and the year before it was 31%. So now, like, half the seed stage startups are taking bridge capital, which requires them, I think, getting up some equity. And it's, like, not a great position to be in where that's the only financing you could obtain. I think we might be near bottom, at least anecdotally from what I'm saying. In venture. I don't know, at least in our small corner of the venture universe, we have a bunch of companies that are raising at higher valuations.

57:48Well, you're getting IPOs, and venture follows the stock market, like, in the end. if there are exits and there's liquidity, people are willing to invest in more things. That's like always how it's been. So maybe that's true. Series A deal count fell 79 % between the first quarter of 2022 and this quarter. So over three years, an 80 % drop-off in Series A rounds. That sounds like a bottom. That sounds as bad as it gets. Yeah, I think we're close. Okay. I thought that was interesting. Shout out to Dan. All right. We're, oh, on the IPO front, I asked Sean for this. 76 IPOs priced this year. That's up 33 % from the same period last year.

58:35So it may not feel like the IPO window is fully reopened, but that's pretty good. Total proceeds were$11.1 billion, down 20 % year over year. Smaller deals. so more deals but not as big as some of the big guys from last year. 92 IPOs have been filed for so far this year. That's up 19.5%. So here you see it by month. Pretty steady. Well, the big one that we've been talking about, I think Corey priced at, what,$40 down from wherever it was supposed to go out, and now it's at$90. Now it's at$90. All right. All right. You're up. Make the case. I'm going to make the case for a stock that has burned me in the past.

59:16I lost money on it. Then I got back in. I've been in for a minute now. It's treated me well. I'm going to flag it again. It's Dollar Tree. Churn out, please. Holy shit. Is this stock filling some gaps? I love me some gap fills. What's going on with this? I'll tell you. Next chart, Dollar General. Obviously, a similar space. Confirmation. I'm mad. Look at this gap. I wanted to buy this. I just never pulled the trigger on it. We have earnings for these companies in two weeks. We will find out. So part of the story of Dollar Tree is getting rid of Family Dollar, which is a horrendous acquisition.

59:52They paid$9 billion for it. How are they getting rid of it? They're just changing the names on the stores to - They're selling it. They're selling it for a billion dollars. So they took a bath on that. I don't know all of the ins and outs. I followed Alex Morrison to this on The Science of Hitting. He writes some great stuff on it. They seem to be turning it around and the stock seems to be front running. Hopefully some good news in two weeks. I don't invest in shit like this. I know you don't. You invest in – the last time I brought this up, you said I only buy LVMH and then the stock lost 60 % of its value.

1:00:24Well, I don't own that either. But I don't invest in retailers trying to make a penny. You are such a goddamn snob. It's unbelievable. I'm soft to the earth, but I just don't – It's unbelievable. I don't want to buy like low margin business. So don't buy it. I'm not talking to you. No, I'm just saying that would keep – I like the technicals. I like the recovery. what would keep me on the sideline is I'm salt of the earth, but I'm not that salt of the earth. You are not salty at all. Have you ever been in one of those stores? I have, multiple times. There's one upstate by my cabin. Because I'm a man of the people.

1:00:55Upstate. Way upstate. Not the way upstate. Yeah, that I got. Say no more. All right. Mystery chart. Are you ready? I can't wait. My favorite game of the week. Oh, it's Bitcoin. Just kidding. Kind of looks like it, though. Is this a JC special? What is this? All right, give me some clues. Okay. So this is a sector ETF that's been around since the late 90s. It's one of the granddaddies of ETFs. So I'm narrowing this down to you. One out of 11. No, no, it can't be SMH. It's a sector ETF. So it's not XLK. I got excited. So I'm giving you, I'm pulling out, you've got 10 S &P sectors to choose from.

1:01:37And this is a Steve Straza chart. Shout to Straza at All-Star Charts. And I'm going to give you some of his commentary once we get into the post reveal on why this thing is interesting to take a look at. Yeah, I think I know what it is. Well, we're all waiting on you, sir. Well, I already have three guesses. But based on the absolute plunge in 2020? Is this energy? Look at you. You did it. Actually, that was a good way to reason your way through this. That was pretty good. Thank you. All right. Why does he like it? Here's what all. So this is the energy sector. For those who are listening and not watching, resistance here is like 95 to 100.

1:02:26That was resistance in 07. It was resistance in 2014. and it's been resistant since the post-pandemic period. Every time it gets to that level, it backs off, but it's backing off less and less. And I guess from a technical standpoint, ultimately, it's probably trying to punch through and eventually will. It just looks so shitty. This is the rationale. It's a raging bull market for stocks around the world being led by offense, but the internals continue to improve. Like any bull cycle, as time passes and the market grinds higher, It drags a growing list of non-performers higher with it. Some call that rotation, but it's really just a broadening of participation over longer timeframes.

1:03:07And he thinks that this group is next to join the party. He points to international stocks, which already have Southeast Asia, South America. They're all working. Gold eventually broke out. You look at old laggards like transport, speculative growth. They're working too. Why not energy is the question. and I'll show you one more chart. This is equal weight energy versus equal weight S &P 500 sitting right on this very solid support line that dates back to 2022. Sit on it, Minetti. Well, look, this is where the buyers come in to the equal weight energy relative to equal weight everything else. And I don't know if you're going to meet in these equal weight charts.

1:03:52I don't know, man. There's nothing here. I bought some Chevron recently. It was a 6 % yield, and I just said, I'm not afraid of this thing. I'm buying it. All right. So you won't buy dollar stores, but you'll buy shitty Chevron. No, Chevron's not shitty. I'm going to tell you that Sean and I took a look at the best stocks in the market, energy sector. There's only four of them right now. They all look amazing. Tell me. What are the names? We're going to write these up later in the week for CNBC. Give me one. Okay. Here's a dividend one. WMB. This is Williams Brothers. It's a pipeline world. High dividend yield used to be an MLP.

1:04:31Oh, shit. How good does that look? All right. So this I can get excited. This I get behind. All right. Here's another one. EXE. Come on, dude. Expand Energy Corporation. I mean, this. Come on, dude. It's too late. It's too late. You left the station. I haven't told you the fundamental reason why it's not. But anyway, we're going to we're going to write these up later this week. I thought it was interesting that even though the sector sucks, there are some energy names on my best stocks list, and that's why we keep the list. So, all right, guys, that's it from us. We're going to say thank you to everyone who joined us for the live.

1:05:04We love all your comments. You crack us up. We appreciate you. For those of you listening out in podcast land, Spotify, Apple, make sure we get a rating and review. It goes a long way, and we love it so much. tomorrow morning is an all new edition of Animal Spirits starring Michael and Ben we'll be up on both podcasts look at this little boy it's a baby batnik alright we'll be up on all podcast platforms first thing in the morning and on YouTube so if you love Michael and Ben tomorrow you get an all new edition of that we'll have animals ask the compound later this week and an all new compound and friends with a very special guest.

1:05:46Thank you guys so much for watching and listening. We'll see you soon.

1:06:16Make sure to leave a rating and review on your favorite podcasting app. If you love investing podcasts, check out Michael and Ben every Wednesday morning on Animal Spirits. Thanks for listening.