Welcome back, everyone today on the Joseph Carlson Show.
This is a sell American trade. According to the analysts, it's
time to panic and sell off the best American companies, which
is exactly what the market is doing.
If we look at the S&P 500, the companies that are selling off
the worst are the biggest tech leaders in the United States.
And of course, this sell off is happening because of, well, the
usual suspect. President Trump has rhetoric
that the rest of the world does not like.
He's continually talking about Greenland and how he has plans
for America to run and operate Greenland.
And of course, this has caused a lot of panic in the markets, a
lot of turmoil, a lot of people very upset at Trump, different
world leaders posturing against him causing what could be
another big trade war, and many people to avoid American stocks.
Well, of course, the answer to this is not to sell America.
It is to buy America like it's always been.
We'll be going over this entire story and how I'm positioning My
Portfolio as a response. We also have a ton of other news
to get to today. For example, it's Netflix's
earnings report. We're going to be looking at
that. We have Duolingo, a company
that's down nearly 70%, my biggest loser in My Portfolio by
far, and I just bought more of it, another $5000.
We'll be going over that by we have news that Chris Hohn, the
legend himself, has once again destroyed the S&P 500 by only
owning a handful of stocks. He's made more money than any
hedge fund manager in history in a single year, shattering the
record with $18.9 billion in gains in 2025.
We'll be looking at what is causing this incredible
outperformance from Chris Home. And then finally, we have the
fail of the week, which in this case is a clip from Mr. Beast
Games where a contestant took $1 million to eliminate a bunch of
other contestants on his team, causing betrayal and lack of
trust, but making them also have $1,000,000.
We'll be looking at why this is the fail a week at the end of
this episode. So this is going to be a busy
one. We have a ton to get to in this
episode. And we start things off with the
headline news, which is the fact that the markets are tanking
today, especially the equity markets within the United States
and especially tilting towards the biggest companies.
So you see it across the board, the Dow Jones, the S&P 500 are
selling off, but the Nasdaq's selling off the most, over 1 1/2
percent on the day. The big companies like NVIDIA
are down more than 2%, many cases 3%.
Companies like Amazon are selling off big time.
And this is, again, because of this trade.
This is sell America the US dollar.
Sell it. You have treasury prices tumble
and gold spiking. And we have different analysts
like this one from the global policy and central banking
strategy at Evercore ISI saying this is sell America again, with
a much broader global risk off. Now, why is this becoming a
trade? Why are people and analysts like
the ones from Evercore ISI saying that this is a sell
America trade? You may have heard President
Trump talking about Greenland and his ambitions with it for
some time. Here's the latest from just
today. We have to have it.
They have to have this done. They can't protect it.
Denmark, they're wonderful people.
And I know the leaders, they're very good people, but they, they
don't even go there and, you know, because the boat went
there 500 years ago and then left, That doesn't give you
title to property. NATO's been warning Denmark for
about 20 years now, longer than that, 25 years, they've been
warning Denmark about the Russian threat.
And it's not only Russia, it's also China.
So we'll see what happens. But let's put it this way.
It's going to be a very interesting Davos.
That was Trump's introduction to Davos, talking about one of the
most contested, polarizing things he could, which is his
ambitions with Greenland. This followed escalating
tensions over the territory, with Trump having launched a
series of tariff threats, an effort to pressure Europe to
drop its opposition to the US takeover.
The subject is taking center stage at this week's gathering
of political and business leaders in Davos, Switzerland.
Now we know that Trump likes to make discussions about himself,
or at least things that he's interested in, and he's
accomplished that again. We have all these amazing
business leaders going to Davos. They're going to be discussing
their companies, artificial intelligence, technology, all
the different things that they're doing.
And Trump, of course, wants to talk about the subject he wants
to talk about, which is Greenland, which is tariffs,
which is EU s s ambitions there. And he's made this the center
stage by continuing to build up this rhetoric leading into this
big meeting. So of course, the markets are
looking at this and they're deeply concerned about another
tariff war, about another trade dispute, about tensions rising
and partnerships being broken. Greenland has repeatedly
rejected Trump's request to purchase the Arctic island, with
Prime Minister Jensen Frederick Nelson saying Monday that it
would not be pressured. And, quote, stand firm on
dialogue, on respect and on international law.
European officials have reportedly considered using the
salvo of counter tariffs and other punitive economic measures
against the US in retaliation. European officials are coming up
with ways to hit back at Trump because they know that his
favorite tool is tariffs. This Sell America trade suggests
that global investors will place higher risk premiums on the US
investments. Amid fears that the US is no
longer a reliable trading partner Following Trump's latest
threats, some investors worry that European countries could
dump US assets in a show of power.
Ray Dalio also agrees with this, reiterating the point that right
now US allies are looking to dump US assets, looking for
different trading partners. He's in Davos talking about this
very issue and this global change.
Even allies do not want to hold each others debt, they prefer to
go to a hard currency. This is logical and it's
factual, and it's repeated throughout history.
So Ray Dalio believes that allies of the United States will
be less inclined to buy US assets in debt and more inclined
to buy gold. He continues to be very bullish
on gold with an inflamed situation between the United
States and trading partners. The way that this is being
framed in many cases is that this is going to cause a capital
war. Different countries using
different economic measures to fight between each other to try
to gain leverage. And this is the message that Ray
Dalio is scaring and also scaring a lot of people with
today. So let's just look at the fact
that on the other side of trade deficits and trade wars, there
are capital and capital wars. Now it feels like everything
he's saying is true. All of it seems accurate here,
but it is the same thing that he has been saying for some time.
For example, Ray Dalio back in 2019 had a post on LinkedIn
called The Paradigm Shift, which is almost the exact same thing
he's been saying just today. It's only rephrased in a few
different ways, but Ray Dalio has been outlining this new
global order change for at least six or seven years now.
So what are the effects of this? Well, there's both short term
and long term effects of this global escalation, these trade
tensions that are impacting the markets today and well in the
future. In My Portfolio, the effects
right now are that the portfolio is going down.
If I look at it on the one day, it's down 1.1%.
We have MasterCard, which is down over a percent, S&P
Global's down 2%, Moody's down the same into it, down 1.5,
Equifax down 2.3. So all the global monopolistic
companies, these duopolies, these ones that work on credit
rating, investors are pricing in that there's going to be a fling
of US assets. There's going to be less deals
going forth. That's bad for the markets.
That's being immediately priced in today.
We have big tech holdings, ones like Google.
This one's down 1% today. We have one from the
Netherlands, which is one of my favorite companies, SML, which
is down 1% today. With the rest of the market, we
have Microsoft down 1%. We have Salesforce down just a
bit. The only holdings in My
Portfolio that are in the green on the day are the atypical
ones, which is Costco here. This one's up a half a percent.
And we have Texas Roadhouse, which is up almost a percent
today. Texas Roadhouse has been on a
tear recently. Then we look at the Story Fund,
my secondary portfolio. This one's down a bit today as
well. If we look at the one day, it's
down 1%. We have Amazon being the biggest
loser, down 2.23%. Netflix is actually in the green
today going into earnings. These three are positions that I
have in both portfolios. And then we we have Duolingo,
which is actually in the green today by half a percent.
So overall a decent hit to the portfolio, but this isn't any
huge sell off by any means. It's nothing to panic for.
When I look at the situation today and I read the news, I
read the frustrations with trade, I read the threats and
the tariffs and the disruptions. I read Ray Dalio once again
talking about a new world order and how everything's different
like he has for the past seven years.
I come to the same belief that if the rest of the market is
selling America, I'm going to be buying America.
I'll be buying it every single time.
Nothing has changed in my viewpoint of America being the
place where alpha is going to be generated.
I've said since the beginning of my channel back in 2019 that
America is the place to invest. It is the best country to invest
in by far. I don't even think it's roughly
close to anyone. I don't think there's any close
seconds, if I'm being honest here.
There's a lot of great companies in Europe.
Europe has Spotify, they have FML.
There's great companies in Canada, there's ones like
Brookfield, there's ones like Shopify and many others.
But for every great company there is in a different country,
there's like 10 to 15 to choose from in the United States, 10 to
15 that are going to generate excess returns and greater
earnings despite what the trade wars do.
You can look at Amazon and this is a company that's down big
today because of trade fairs, because tariffs, because higher
prices, but that was the same concern that we had in April of
2025. Remember the big tariff sell
off? Remember what people thought at
the time? People thought that trade was
dead, that relationships were completely severed, that it was
the end of American exceptionalism.
I heard people honestly tell me in April of 2025 that this time
it's different, that American exceptionalism is done.
Why would you want to invest in America when they're clearly
breaking all these relationships, when they're
clearly isolating from the rest of the world, and when clearly
American exceptionalism is on the demise?
Things got so bad in April of 2025 that great investors, many
of them that are exceptional investors, great stock pickers,
they can do fundamental analysis.
They begin to abandon their own thesis.
They looked at the prices of stocks dropping.
They thought that they're not good at picking stocks because
they're going down now they're concerned about the world order,
how how things are going to work out in the future.
Everything felt really bad during that time period.
But ironically, as per usual, looking back, that time of
chaos, that time of doubt was the absolute best time to
invest. The investors that bought
America during the very time we were supposed to be scared of
America, focused on its inevitable demise, was the exact
time where investors earned the best risk adjusted returns in
the future. And the investors that stayed
level headed, that kept their holdings, that stuck to the plan
even though they didn't know exactly how things would turn
out, but they stuck to great companies, were rewarded
handsomely in the end. We saw many investors do that
with Amazon, with Google, with ASML, using all these concerns
in the past as a time to buy. When I see headlines like this,
this is sell America time. This is literally analysts
telling you this is the trade now.
I think these are the type of headlines that you are warned
about specifically to avoid when you start investing.
When you started investing, you're probably warned.
You got to ignore the news. You got to ignore the daily
volatility. You got to look at your
company's, their earnings results, their operating income,
their business models, their products, and ignore the
troubling, fearful news that comes your way.
This is the news that they're talking about.
The best investors in the world are not going to be concerned
about this news. The ones that stick to the plan,
the ones that generate alpha Warren Buffett is not going to
be concerned about this news. Now, Warren Buffett's getting
old, and he's not doing interviews as frequently as he
once was. But I have to believe that if he
was being interviewed today, one of the things he would say is
that he still is buying America, that America is still
exceptional, that this is a great place to invest, and that
he doesn't know what's going to happen over the next two to
three years, but he knows it. In 10 years, the stocks he owns
and the companies that he owns are going to be a lot more
profitable, that the S&P 500 will be a lot higher.
That's a message that he shared during the most bleak times in
2009. He shared to invest in America,
which looks far worse than anything that we're facing right
now. We also have investors that you
can imagine, any of them, Chris Hohn.
We have investors like Dev Cantosaria.
You think that they're panicking and selling their holdings
because of this? I find it very doubtful.
Most of them get their excess return by being concentrated in
the best assets and not letting inherently short term news
dictate their actions. And don't be mistaken, tariffs
are short term news. Threats and trade disputes are
short term news. This type of stuff can go on for
a couple years, but if you even look at Trump and you can say
what you want about Trump, you can feel however you want about
President Trump. You can believe that he's a a
very powerful negotiator that stands by his negotiations.
He doesn't take no for an answer.
He finally stands up to different people and you can
view him in that light or you can view him as a bully that's
threatening different trade relationships and making so
allies are upset at us. Whatever way you view him
doesn't matter. It doesn't matter to Amazon in
the next 20 years. It doesn't matter to Microsoft
in the next 15 years. It's not going to matter to
NVIDIA. None of this will play a crucial
role in the outcome of these companies over the next 15
years. So right now, this is just a
blip in the radar. We have a down day of 1 1/2
percent, but this again could evolve to a big sell off.
We could see another big trade dispute and escalating rhetoric
unfold and we could see the markets react like they usually
do pricing in all of this type of data.
When I look at it, I react the same way that I always have in
these type of situations. Or if the market wants to give
me a entry point on some of the best companies in the world, I'm
going to use it. I'll happily look at companies
that I own trading down because of this type of news.
And I'll look for different positions to add to.
I would love to add to the positions I'm already bullish
on. I've already added so much money
to MasterCard. I'm so bullish on this company.
Google is getting better by the day.
The products that they're releasing are exceptional.
What they've done, implementing Gemini into Gmail is incredibly
powerful, and they're doing the same thing with all different
aspects, making it a true personal assistant that helps
you in different ways. One of the big ones that's hit
today is Amazon. This one I already believe is
underpriced, but because Amazon is one of the primary victims of
any type of tariff or trade dispute, it's looked at as one
of the companies to sell off, which I believe is a mistake.
Overall, people are still going to buy from Amazon.
Amazon offers too much convenience to consumers to
switch to an alternative. So this is another company
that'll be looking at increasing my position if this bleeds into
a larger sell off. As of today, the company that I
bought $5000 more of, I just bought it this morning is
Duolingo. This is one of the few companies
in the red in My Portfolio. It's currently with the $5000
buy today, a $20,000 position with $15,000 in the red.
So it's down roughly 50 to 60% from where I initially bought
it. And anytime a company sells off
like this, I take it seriously. And I look at the reasons the
company's selling off and try to understand what the market
doesn't like about the situation.
And there are things that clearly Wall Street and
investors are concerned about with Duolingo.
The biggest one is the decelerating growth.
If you consider the situation of a Duolingo, Wall Street expected
them to have 27% booking growth, which is the amount of
subscriptions they have that they booked ahead of time
because people pay a year in advance.
So Wall Street expected them to have estimates of 27% booking
growth. Duolingo reported 22% growth, so
5 percentage points down below Wall Street's estimates.
Now any company that comes in below estimates of their future
growth has a sell off. It's a resetting of
expectations. Wall Street expected them to be
up here at 27. They came in here at 22.
That means that the stock needs to re rate, but the stock still
down around 25% after those last earnings just because of 5%
lower bookings expectations. It's a very severe reaction for
Duolingo. It shows that Wall Street is
punishing this company harshly for any slight miss in their
expectations. Wall Street is re rating the
stock. They're putting it from a
premier category of a fast growing company down to now just
a moderate grower, a company that's expected to grow slowly
over the next five years. And I asked the question, is the
sell off in this stock justified?
Is Duolingo really today worth 60% less than the company it was
six months ago? And I continually believe that
that answer is no. I think the Duolingo has reason
to sell off. I think that the stock should be
down, but I don't believe that the stock should be down 60%.
And the fact that it continues to trade down like it has, I
believe is a bit of an over punishment.
But this behavior with Duolingo is nothing unusual.
Stocks routinely trade outside of their fair value range.
There's a lot of different ways to value Duolingo based on their
booking growth, based on their operating margins and what you
believe will happen in the future.
But what I know right now is looking at Qualtrum and looking
at these charts, I can clearly see that Duolingo is still in
great shape. This is the revenue growth
growing 40% as of last quarter. We have subscription revenue
growing 46%. We have the daily active users
growing 35% in the last quarter. They just announced the pre
emptive quarter that grew by another 2 million.
So even during these AI concerns, during all this
disruptive technology from artificial intelligence,
Duolingo's adding on millions of incremental users every three
months, EBITDA is trending upwards over 100% year over
year. We have free cash flow training
up 55% year over year. Even the free cash flow per
share, which factors in dilution is up nearly 50% year over year.
So you can argue over the valuation or the exact best time
to buy the stock, but from what I can see, it's difficult to
argue that Duolingo isn't headed in the right direction.
Fundamentally, every fundamental, every KPI points to
a company that is growing and it's growing quickly, faster
than most companies in the market.
Until that changes, I'll continue to hold the company and
buy more of it when the stock is selling off.
Now moving on, we also get to news today that we have Netflix
reporting earnings aftermarket close on the day.
Now usually this is a big event. Netflix is one of the first big
tech companies to report earnings, bringing in the
earnings season, which will be going over and reviewing all the
companies soon that that are going to report earnings in the
future. And Netflix again is usually one
of the big ones. It's exciting that everybody's
focused on, and it is true Netflix's earnings report is
important. Investors will be paying
attention to it and Netflix will likely do great.
When we look at the numbers, Netflix is a company that people
may have forgotten amidst all the other news with the
acquisition, but Netflix is a company that's actually really
good. It's growing quickly.
The revenue grew 17% year over year last quarter.
We have revenue growing across every region.
We have the total subscriber count that's not factored in
anymore, but it left off at 301 million and they may give a big
landmark update on that. We don't know how many
subscribers they have because they haven't given us any large
updates on it and I doubt they will during this transaction
phase. But we know that they're growing
in the amount of subscribers. We have the content budget,
which has remained mostly flat, while the rest of the company
has continued to grow, meaning their expenses are flat, their
revenues growing, creating enormous operating leverage and
margin expansion. That's why we're getting this
enormous, enormous growth and free cash flow.
You don't see this type of operating leverage unless you
can keep costs flat. So that's what Netflix is doing.
All these metrics look incredible.
Netflix is an incredibly powerful company.
That's why I invested in it. But a lot of this is being
overshadowed, of course, by the big news.
So even though investors are excited about Netflix's earnings
report, it doesn't feel quite as exciting as it normally is.
It doesn't feel quite as meaningful as it normally is.
And that is because everybody is really focused on the big
picture here, which is Netflix buying Warner Bros.
This earnings report doesn't matter quite as much when you
have this large of a transaction that's still in pending mode.
We don't quite know whether or not this will really go through.
Now Netflix is taking actions to further solidify this deal and
they're doing so by changing it from part cash and part equity
to all cash. Now this new all cash
transaction continues to be valued at 2775 per Warner
Brothers Discovery share. And they continue to leave out
Global Discovery Global, which means that they can sell that
business off separately. The reasons that they highlight
they're doing this, they say the All Cash transaction provides
enhanced certainty around the Warner Brothers Discovery
stockholder that they'll receive at closing.
So it simplifies the deal and makes it less reliant on
Netflix's stock. This will eliminate market based
variability. They also say that this will
make it much quicker because this is a more simple deal to
get done. The revised transaction
structure is expected to enable Warner Brothers Discovery
stockholders to vote on the proposed transaction by April
2026. To support this accelerated
timeline, Warner Brothers Discovery has today filed its
preliminary proxy statement with the SEC.
So they say by April of this year, meaning that we're
probably going to have a vote on this thing in March.
So while I'm excited for the Netflix report, I just don't
think this one is that meaningful.
It doesn't matter that much. There's too much riding on this
big deal. It's, it's too much of an over
shadow to what's going on here. I think the most enlightening
thing that we'll get out of this earnings report is probably the
Q&A section when they're asked about the Warner Brothers
Discovery deal. I think we'll get a little bit
more insight into their thought process and hopefully questions
from the analysts create more clarity.
Now. Next we get to this Davos
interview with Andy Jassy. This is just from today, and
he's talking about the impact of AI on jobs.
Specifically. Is it going to create more jobs
or is it going to remove jobs? Now, of course, Andy Jassi is
very careful with how he answers it, but in a roundabout way, he
says a lot of the things that we do are going to be replaced by
AI and better efficiencies. I think what I said was I I've,
you know, in the next couple few years, I could see or having
fewer people than we had before. Some of that, you know, a lot of
that will be just are continuing to allow ourselves to move
quickly as it's important culturally and speed wise.
But I do think that jobs are going to be impacted by what's
happening with AI over time. They're they're not in a
significant way yet, but I think you'll see that if you just
think about how AI and agents will enable you to do coding and
customer service and research and analytics, you know, even
just the idea of doing spreadsheets the way we've done
them in the past, I think those will be pretty different.
And so I don't think that wipes out all those jobs, but I think
we'll still have plenty of people in those roles.
And those people will start their jobs, each task they
pursue at a higher, more advanced starting point.
All the rote work that we used to all have to do before we
could get to actually the thinking work.
A lot of that will be done by AI.
So we'll still have people who will be able to invent quicker
and, and more easily. But I do think that you won't
need as many people in all those jobs that we've thrown humans at
for the last 20 years. That said, I, you know, I do
believe we're going to have, we're going to have a lot, we're
hiring a lot of people now in AI and automation and robotics and
you know, our low Earth orbit satellite that we're building in
healthcare. So we're going to have a lot of
people and other businesses we're pursuing, and they're
going to be brand new jobs that we haven't thought of.
I mean, 15 years ago there weren't jobs like cloud
architect, you know, I mean, those didn't exist.
And whenever you go through any big technology transformation,
you find new jobs. I think the same's going to be
true here medium to long term. This is, of course, the exact
right answer. Everyone knows and can envision
the different types of jobs that AI will disrupt, the ones that
it can do easily. What's more difficult to
envision is it whenever you disrupt jobs by making companies
far more efficient, the companies make far more money.
That money is in freely reinvested into different
businesses, which is exactly like Amazon has always done.
They build 1 business, they make it profitable, and they use the
excess profits of that business to create a new business.
Amazon's always building, refining, making it profitable,
and then using the profits to reinvest attractively into
something else. And AI will speed up that
process. It will make them more inventive
and it'll make it so that they can create new things quicker,
which means that you have more businesses, you have better
profits now. Next, we have Joel Kaplan from
Meta talking once again about Meta's ambitions and super
intelligence. Here's what you had to say about
it. The.
First thing is what we're trying to build.
Our ambition is to build personal super intelligence,
which means putting super intelligence in the hands of
everyone. We've got a platform that serves
3.5 billion people every day. So we have some real advantages
there and we are spending a lot of money to build the the
massive data center and power infrastructure necessary to
bring that vision to tuition. And we're confident that with
the right models and the right products, we're going to be able
to build personal super intelligence and, and.
Empower. So Meta's building personal
super intelligence. Now Google's doing a version of
that with Gemini where they're using all of the different
assets that Google has, all the data they have over you to make
a highly intelligent personalized assistant.
Then of course, we have Apple, which that's their whole selling
point. You have the iPhone and they
want to create a personalized assistant that can work with
you. Use all the data on the iPhone
to help you better. Seems like all the big tech
companies are racing towards the same goal of personalized super
intelligence. But in reality, if they fall
short of this goal, if it doesn't come to fruition, then
they're just going to repurpose this server capacity, all this
computational power towards making their ads run a bit more
efficiently, towards making their AI tools for their users a
bit better, to making it so that they can just use it towards
their own demand. And they already have massive
demand for server capacity, for computation power.
So in Meta's case, the best case scenario is they do accomplish
the personalized super intelligence.
But in the worst case scenario, it's still not bad.
They're just going to repurpose all that computational power to
making their advertisements, their AI generated tools a
little better. Now moving on, I wanted to
highlight this story. I thought it's another
incredible example of this investor Chris Home with TCI,
he's in a league of his own. He really is.
He's right up there with the best of the best and his
performance shows it. He made $18.9 billion last year,
not million billion dollars in 2025.
Now, if we if we look at the actual performance here, the
total number doesn't even do it justice because we have here
that the British investor, TCI Fund Management made 18.9
billion for clients last year, making it the most profitable
hedge fund firm in 2025. That is according to a new
estimate from Swiss investment firm and which compiles the
annual list of the world's top money managers based on their
gains after fees in dollar terms.
So this 18.9 billion is after fees are accounted for.
Hey investors, this is just money that that I've made for
you, I've made for you by selecting the right companies.
PCI's Hall was the biggest annual dollar gain made by hedge
fund firm in Edmund Day Rothschild's records, the report
said, topping the previous 16 billion record by Citadel in
2022. So Chris Holmes even beat out
Citadel. That's how big TCI is.
And a lot of this is from deposits.
It's from people contributing money and investing in his firm.
But a lot of it is from gains. An enormous amount of capital
that he now manages is from his own gains.
It also trounces the reported 15 billion bounty that John Paulson
scored in 2007 wagering against the housing market.
So the these aren't adjusted for inflation, but I think even if
you did, he's still winning. I, I think even if you adjusted
for inflation, he'd still be winning.
Now, how did he make these gains?
Well, it highlights his strategy here.
We've gone over a few time. But for TCI, big long standing
bets on aerospace companies paid off handsomely.
The london-based firm had a large stakes in US jet engine
maker GE Aerospace. That was his best performing 1.
He also hasn't a few holdings in European companies or foreign
companies that aren't recorded in Data Roma and different 13F
filings. For example, the French
aerospace supplier Safran and European playmaker Airbus are
two of his positions, according to people familiar with the
firm's positioning and regulatory disclosures.
All three rallied to last year as investors bet on stocks
expected to benefit from rising military spending.
Now, TCI finished the year with 27.8% gains in its master fund,
according to people familiar with the returns, which crushed
both the indices. He's beating out the QQQ, he's
beating out the S&P 500, he's beating out the Dow Jones.
There's no real benchmark that Chris Hoenn isn't crushing.
He he's just doing an excellent job.
I've never seen a hedge fund like this.
What has led to Chris Hohn's incredible success here?
There's a couple things that we can outline.
First of all, one of them is that he's avoided the AI hype.
So he's actively avoiding the hottest AI stocks.
You don't see him investing in the biggest ones like NVIDIA,
like Palantir. He's not buying those companies,
He's avoiding them while crushing the overall index and
most investors that are headed into those companies.
He also has a very concentrated portfolio.
You don't get these type of excessive returns.
You don't get this type of market being performance.
If you don't have concentration, if you're too broadly
diversified, you'll more closely follow the market.
The more concentrated you are, the more that your performance
can deviate either high or low from the market indices.
That's why concentration in many cases is looked at as risk and
increases your chances of underperformance.
When you're Chris Hoen and you select great companies that have
incredible growth paths, that have very deep monopolistic
market structures, it's very difficult for those companies to
underperform in the long term. And then finally, the big thing
that I notice here in his out performance is he holds
companies for a long period of time.
He really holds these companies for multiple, multiple years.
He lets the story play out. So it's incredible once again to
see Chris Hoen top the list, the most profitable hedge fund, the
one that's making investors the most money, crushing the
markets. It's really incredible
performance. Now, finally, we get to the fail
of the week, which in this case is a 22nd clip from Beast Games.
This is the TV series that Mister Beast started.
I think it's on Amazon Prime. And this is one of the episodes.
Now, admittedly, I've not watched this season.
I need to catch up on it, but I saw this clip as it was spread
everywhere because well, let me just get some background here.
This guy, I, I think his name is Joseph Torres and he's basically
given an option here. He's like the team leader and
the team selected him because they trusted him that he
wouldn't eliminate the rest of the team.
I think that's the situation, but I might be wrong.
But when given the chance, he was offered $1,000,000 to
eliminate his team. So basically, if he breaks the
trust of his team, he's immediately given $1 million.
And those aren't game show dollars.
Those are, that's real money, $1,000,000 in cash deposited
right in your bank account. That's $1,000,000 to him if he
eliminates his team. Now let's go ahead and take a
look at what he does. Guys, come on, if you press that
button I will wire you $1,000,000.
JT you slimy? He didn't even take a he didn't
take a break. Look at what he did here.
In fact, look at the reaction of these these different teams.
He didn't even finish saying $1,000,000.
He was halfway through the word Jimmy was halfway through the
word 1,000,000, and this guy hits the button like he hears
the first syllable of a million and he just hits the button
right away. I will wire you $1,000,000.
JT you slimy? And then the rest of the clip is
his team, of course, being distraught, disappointed.
One of the teammates here is trying to say how his character
is ruined, how he's a slimy person for doing this.
Gave you some money if you was that desperate.
You look real bad in front of God.
In front of your car. Ran on his team.
You look super bad. She says you look bad in front
of God. He took $1,000,000.
Now God is judging him for eliminating this this team, this
group of people on this goofy game show, which is Beast Games.
Now keep in mind, this isn't like some type of business
agreement. They're on a game show on Amazon
Prime and she's saying that he looks bad in front of God.
We don't respect you no more. I don't got nothing to say for
you. Now there's other clips along
with this where the rest of these contestants have tried to
guilt trip this person for taking the money, saying that he
he basically did wrong. By God, he's going to have to
work on himself. That really did he sell out for
the the $1,000,000? And it's just the most
ridiculous take possible. Can anyone honestly look at this
and say that they wouldn't take $1,000,000 guaranteed to
eliminate from a competition 5 people that they're never going
to see again? People that they've known for
four days? JT this guy doesn't know any of
these people. Why does their opinion?
Why? Why should he expect their
opinion to really matter at all? This is a no brainer.
In fact, this is one of the easiest decisions that I think
possibly could be made if anyone's given.
I think my case as well. If anybody's given the option to
get $1,000,000 guaranteed, and the consequence of that is they
have to eliminate 5 people from a game show that they've known
for a day or two, everybody should immediately take the
$1,000,000 without question, without hesitation, exactly like
he did. Not only do I agree with his
actions, I don't think he needs to apologize for anything.
Apologize to God for what? Playing a game show and winning
money? This wasn't some type of
contract agreement with these people.
It wasn't type type of business agreement.
They're in an actual game show. It's the whole purpose of the
show is to create drama, to eliminate people and to try to
get the prize. He did exactly that.
And in fact, even if you put it in the other perspective here,
if I was one of the people on his team and I was one of the
ones that got eliminated, I wouldn't even be angry.
I wouldn't even be frustrated. I would fully expect him or
whoever it is to operate for their own self-interest in a
logical way. I could not even blame him as
the one that would be eliminated as taking the money.
So if I was one of the contestants, I would shrug my
shoulders and go, OK, I mean, why would he not take it?
Like I? We don't have any big
relationship. I haven't known this guy for 20
years. It's not like a some type of
blood bound loyalty between us. Why would he not take it?
While I thought it was interesting and this contestant
obviously did the right thing, I think there needs to be more
interesting questions. Jimmy needs to work up more
interesting moral dilemmas when he's offering people huge
amounts of money because this one had no trade off.
There's only one right answer obviously, and we want to see
more interesting moral dilemmas, really put pressure on people,
really make it difficult for them to accept enormous amounts
of money. That's going to be it for this
episode. Hope you enjoyed.
See you in the next one.