Welcome back everyone today on the Joseph Carlson Show.
Remember the company that supposedly a monopoly, the one
that we're told makes machines that are so sophisticated, so
expensive, so complex that no one else can replicate them?
They're called EUV machines, extreme ultraviolet light
lithography machines. They're so complex and
sophisticated that they cost hundreds of millions of dollars
to make, and even the second closest competitors are nearly
10 years behind. This company has had a share
price. It's traded flat most of the
year until now. All of a sudden, ASML share
price is spiking upwards. It's going parabolic.
Look at the chart. It's up 27% in the past 30 days
alone. Now it's up nearly 40% over the
trailing year. What is going on with ASML?
Why is the share price now suddenly spiking upwards?
Have investors and analysts suddenly realized?
Have they suddenly come to the conclusion that ASML is a
monopoly? What has changed?
In fact, ASML stock price just two months ago with their most
recent earnings report was $750. Now it's climbing up to $1000
per share. Why did this happen?
And more importantly, how can you anticipate these type of
moves in the future? After all, just two months ago I
said that I was bullish on ASML and I bought $15,000 of the
stock at $750 per share. My total gains in the company
now are above $20,000 in only a short amount of time.
So we're going to be discussing what's going on with the FML,
why the sudden surge in stock price, and how you can
anticipate these type of moves in the future and buy a head
like I did in this case. Now, of course, we have a lot of
other news to get to. For example, NVIDIA just
announced a $100 billion investment into Open AI.
The CEO, Jensen, went on to TV to share his excitement along
with Sam Altman about this investment and explained it a
little. We're going to be looking at
that. We also have news of a proposed
policy change by President Trump over the H1B visas.
These are foreign nationals that work within the United States.
There are lots of arguments revolving around this and also
is a concerning topic to Big tech and many of the companies
that we invest in that employ many H1B visa workers.
We'll be taking a look at the stats, which of these big tech
companies employ the most and what are at the most risk with
this policy changing. We also have Meta doing a new
demo, showing off some incredible technology, but also
having a few blunders. This is a live demo and Mark
Zuckerberg had one part of it where it just didn't work.
The the technology didn't work and you get to see his reaction.
We're going to take a look. And then finally, regrettably,
unfortunately, we have my fail of the week early this week.
And this one hits home. It is a day in the life of a
Netflix employee. That's right.
We've seen this before. We've seen the day in the life
of and we're going to be taking a look at this one specifically
with Netflix. So we have a ton to get to in
this episode. And we kick things off with
ASML, the big monopolistic EUV maker.
Now this is a company where I know we hear a lot of talk about
like Google and how well Google has done over the past month,
But I just want to emphasize a point here.
ASML has outperformed Google over the past 30 days.
The rise in stock price has actually been pretty incredible.
You have a company here where if you look at the the stock price,
it's been mostly the same trading around this point, 750,
a little below 750 for most of the year and then suddenly it's
just taken off in a 30 day period, it's up nearly 30%,
which is pretty remarkable, bringing the total return of the
the past year to 37%. Now to show you how big this
company is in My Portfolio, we can take a look at the passive
income account. We can go into the tech category
here. I'll try to zoom in so you can
see it a little bit better. And here we have all the
different companies. This is just the tech category.
If we look at this, ASML has now gone from basically a flat
position in My Portfolio to just in the past month or so a
$20,700 gain. So we're up a big amount in this
stock now. It's now a huge winner in the
portfolio. It's now right there with Google
in the passive income portfolio. Now I own Google as well in the
story fund. So I have this one in both, both
places. My, my overall Google games
around $50,000. But regardless, we have right
here, ASML is now a big winner right there with Microsoft, with
Apple catching up to Google. It's now an $83,000 position.
Now I was interested in what is causing the stock price to go up
so much because in most cases, you have some big news that
causes a stock to go up. For example, most of these type
of changes happen after earnings, but ASML is not that
case. In fact, it's most recent
earnings report just two months ago was a big disappointment.
They gave this big critical warning of tariffs on their
earnings report. The CEO of ASML said that they
might not grow in 2026. Investors are really bearish.
They sold the stock down 10% after earnings to a price of
$747. So the most recent earnings
report was a big disappointment. And here we are from that
earnings report of $750 now to nearly $1000.
What is going on? Well, to get to the bottom of
this question of what's going on in this case, I went through a
timeline of events for ASML after the earnings reports and
the disappointing comments from the CEOA lot has happened over
just the past two months. For example, in late August,
ASML had a report that it's set to deliver another year of solid
growth with this extreme ultraviolet EUV sales
anticipated to increase by about 30% in 2025.
This optimistic expectation is driven by chip makers expanding
production for advanced logic and memory chips used in
artificial intelligence and high performance computing.
We know that all the time we're getting announcements of new
computing capacity, more and more data centers, and ASML has
to make every single one of those high end chips.
Not a single one gets made without ASML.
From late August to early September, we have more reports
that are bullish for ASML. We have UBS upgrading the price
target from 660 euros to 750. Citing improved visibility
beyond 2026 and 2027 market concerns.
The firm emphasized Asml's potential as a quality
compounder, projecting 20% earnings per share Hager from
2026 to 2030. So they believe now UBS is
saying just earlier this month, this company is going to grow
earnings per share by 20% for the next five years.
This is supported by 26.4% revenue growth in the last 12
months and 52.5% gross margins. So we have reports late last
month that ASML is growing their earnings by 30% this year.
We have reports early this month that UBS and other analyst firms
are raising their price targets, causing the stock to go up even
further. And the good news just continues
on September 9th, 2025, only days later than that UBS
upgrade, we have news that ASML Holding has announced a long
term partnership of €1.3 billion with Mistral AI.
This is a chat TPT like company but in France it secured
approximately 11% stake and a seat on Mistral AI strategic
committee. Investors believe that ASML
making this commitment with an AI specific company will give
them a lot of synergies and be able to learn from them.
Not only do they have an interest in the company that
they can easily afford, but this will benefit the company long
term. It raised the bullishness of
investors on ASML and it didn't stop there.
September 12th, 2025, ASML stock surged 6.56% to close at $867
per share after receiving an upgrade from the sell side
analyst ARIT Research. The upgrade is driven by an
increased spending by the TSM manufacturing company and the
anticipated strong demand for Asml's EUV lithography machines
in 2027. Now that the stock was $870,
analysts are getting more and more bullish.
From $870, the stock price is raised up now to $960, up
another 3% today as NVIDIA announces $100 billion
investment into Open AI. So now we have a timeline of
exactly what's happened to 'cause this stock to surge over
just the past two months in between earnings reports.
And the next question is even more difficult.
How do we anticipate these type of events in advance?
How do we know to buy the stock in advance?
After all, I bought $15,000 worth of ASML stock at $750 per
share and two separate purchases.
Now when I look at why we can just look back in history, I
have an episode with my immediate reaction to ASML's
last earnings report where the stock dropped 10% after
earnings. We'll go ahead and watch just a
few seconds of this. ASML just reported earnings and
the stock is down 10% on the day.
It went from $800 to 743. And we have some of the early
news reports reading into this earnings report, one of them
from fast companies saying that ASML stock price is dropping
today after the semiconductor giant issued a critical warning
about 2026. A critical warning that sounds
really bad. What critical warning did they
issue? We have Baron saying the ASML
stock tumbles after growth warnings and earnings report
tariffs are biting. Before this drop, I was publicly
bullish on ASML. I'd said it's one of my
investments and it's easy after an event like this happens,
become really discouraged. That's the challenge with
investing is letting big price changes like this change your
sentiment on a company. But we can look here further at
my reaction after the stock price dropped.
Start things off by talking about this huge drop in ASML.
The stock is currently down 10% from where it was just
yesterday, and that is a notable drop for a stock that already
seems like it's at a decent valuation.
It's also a very high quality company.
This isn't some meme coin. FML is not some small cap,
highly speculative company. This is, after all, one of the
companies creating the backbone of innovation on the front of
creating AI chips. So ASML is a highly profitable,
dominant company with a very wide Moat.
It has technological supremacy over its peers.
And yet it's down 10% today. And these news headlines make it
seem like things aren't so good, like we have something to be
concerned about here. Now, I must start off by saying,
even before we go into some of the details, that I am a proud
shareholder of ASML. That was my immediate reaction.
It wasn't distress or discouragement.
I talk about Asml's continuing to be a dominant company, that
the news doesn't really reflect my feelings on what's going on.
And the share price did not determine my sentiment on the
company. I say in this that I'm a proud
shareholder of ASML proudly owning the stock that's going
down 10% now. I also reacted to the concerns
that investors had at the time, specifically the concern of
tariff that the CEO of ASML outlined.
He said there's a chance to ASML could not see any revenue growth
next year because the outlook's very murky.
It's uncertain with all this tariff news and I believe
strongly at the time that the tariffs would not prevent ASML
from growing, that the United States was investing heavily in
these high end chips and they would need ASML.
Here's my closing remarks to my ASML segment.
When I look into what's going to happen over the next couple of
years, I do not believe that the US is going to hamper growth,
especially in AI with enormous taxes.
I think that this will get resolved a lot lower, allowing
companies like ASML to continue growing.
Now, the CEO of ASML is correct and he's being prudent in
looking at these headlines, looking at the threats being
given and showing how it could impact the company's long term
profits. But the probability of these
impacts actually being felt is really low.
For this reason, I believe that SML is still good value today.
I think the company is going to grow next year.
And although like the CEO, there's no guarantees in
investing, there never was. Selling the company based on
this report, I believe is a mistake.
So I'm still holding all my shares.
So after that immediate reaction of me saying that the stock
doesn't deserve to be down 10%, that it's still a great company,
I'm buying more of it. How was I able to determine or
how did I know that all this stuff would happen, that all
these analysts price targets, the RE rating of the stock, the
new bullishness of it? And how did I know the stock
would go up 27% in only 30 days? Well, the truth is I didn't.
I didn't have a clue any of that would happen.
I didn't know which analyst would give price target raises.
I didn't know there'd be such a re rating of it in such a time.
What I did know at the time was that ASML was a monopolistic,
high quality company with very predictable earnings for the
long term that was trading at a very low price.
That's basically all I knew. That's how investing works.
You don't need to know exactly how things will turn out.
You make decisions based on the facts that you have.
Currently as investors, we don't know when a stock is going to go
up. We don't know why it's going to
go up. We don't know which analysts are
going to raise their price targets first.
We don't know which bullish catalyst is going to happen or
new headlines going to happen. What we do know is it over time,
if you buy a handful of high quality companies and you buy
them at reasonable and undervalued prices, they will
eventually go up. It's just a matter of time,
exactly like what we're seeing with ASML.
In the words of Michael Bury, who early on in his career
trounced the market even before the Big Short, he said that
share outrageous value is the best catalyst.
Meaning when you're looking at a stock and the reasons it may go
up, just buying a good stock that's undervalued is a catalyst
enough in and of itself. You don't have to worry about
the details. You don't have to worry about
the specific nuances of what may cause the rise.
Buying quality companies buying them at reasonable or better yet
low prices is the goal. So I take no credit in
predicting this crazy stock rise in ASML.
I literally could not have ever predicted that.
Neither do I do for any of my companies.
You don't know when it's going to happen, but eventually will.
Now that's the story of ASML. Let's go ahead and move on to
some news. Now.
First of all, we have some breaking news.
Just today, Jensen Wong from NVIDIA met up with Sam Altman
from Open AI and they discussed another major investment.
Let's go ahead and jump right into this one.
We can take a look. This is from the broadcast just
earlier today and we have Jensen here.
The biggest AI infrastructure project in history.
This is the largest computing project in history.
Well, the reason for that is because computing demand is
going through the roof for open AI.
You know, ChatGPT is a the, the single most revolutionary AI
project in history. It's being used everywhere,
every industry, every country, every person practically that I
know uses ChatGPT. The computing demand is going
through the roof. And so this partnership is about
building an AI infrastructure that enables AI to go from the
labs into the world. This is about the AI industrial
revolution arriving. It's a very big deal.
A lot of people when they're viewing this through the lens of
a user of ChatGPT, they basically view this as another
investment in just more chat bots.
Like we don't have enough chat bots.
We have Gemini, we have ChatGPT, we have Grok, we have so many of
them. Do we need more investment in
chat bots? Probably not.
What Jensen is highlighting here is that this is a lot more than
just chat bots. Where every single word, every
single interaction, every single image, video that we experience
on, you know, and through computers will somehow have been
reasoned through or referenced by or generated by AI.
It's going to be touched by AI somehow.
So all of our computing experiences throughout the day,
everywhere in every industry will be powered by AI.
This first, this is the first 10 gigawatts.
It's surely, it sounds like an enormous, an enormous
undertaking, but there's no question that AI is
transformational for every industry.
But the important thing is the AI infrastructure will be
everywhere and willpower computing experiences for
everyone, every day, and it's going to be just everywhere.
Jensen and Sam are both trying to expand people's horizons on
AI, to look at it more holistically, that this isn't
just chat bots. These are going to be agents
that work for you overnight. They're going to organize your
schedule, they're going to get things ready.
They're going to help you out with your job.
You're going to be more of an administrator role in anything
you that you do. And this isn't just digital
technology. It's going to power robots and
thinking and autonomous vehicles and everything else that we use
on a daily basis. It's the infrastructure for the
modern world. Now in this deal in particular,
we have NVIDIA stock up 3.7% on the day.
This is again $100 billion to help build at least 10 gigawatts
of NVIDIA powered AI data centers.
The first capacity target is coming online the second-half of
2026, suggesting a multi year demand visibility for NVIDIA
data center GPUs and networking rather than immediate revenue
impact. So this isn't going to be
something next quarter, this is going to be over the next couple
of years. This will help NVIDIA grow.
So another huge day for NVIDIA, further justifying the company's
current valuation and a big day for any company along that
assembly line, including ASML. Now we also have big news
rattling a lot of the tech industry and a lot of the
employees. The administration proposed a
new policy, which is that H1B visa holders, at least new ones,
will have to pay $100,000 per year.
And this has spurred a ton of debate.
A new $100,000 annual fee for H1B visa applicants is intended
to crack down on a system the Trump administration says has
been used by tech companies to avoid hiring American workers.
Currently, applicants for H1B visas must pay a small fee to
enter into a lottery system, and the winners of that lottery pay
a larger fee to submit their full applications for vetting.
And that's the major contention from the administration, that by
allowing foreign workers to come in and work within the United
States without any fees, it allows big companies to pay them
slightly less than American workers.
And then American workers miss out on good jobs.
But there's a big counter argument to this.
Many economists believe that H1B visas are good for the overall
economy, and they spur more job growth.
Quote, H1B visas cause innovation.
They cause entrepreneurship. They cause more R&D and
investment. They cause higher productivity
and the whole U.S. economy which generates job opportunities and
higher earnings for Native workers across the skill
spectrum. Strong argument that by having
more qualified people taking these jobs, they also create
more jobs in the future and grow the economy overall.
But again, there's a lot of people that disagree with this
quote. The typical H1B visa employee
working for the typical for profit company that's hired them
is doing work for whom otherwise available workers exist.
So there are economists on both sides of this issue, some that
believe that it's a benefit that grows the economy overall, and
there's other ones pointing out that many of the jobs being
taken by H1B visa workers are being taken from people that
could otherwise do the same job. This has stirred a massive
debate online, with all sorts of different personalities coming
out on different sides. Many of the tech leaders love
H1B visa because it allows for talent to come into the United
States that in many cases is far less expensive than native born
American workers. So there's a lot of different
incentives at play. Elon Musk for example is an
advocate of H1B visa. We have people like Reed
Hastings, the Co founder of Netflix that said in a tweet,
I've worked on H1B politics for 30 years.
Trump's 100K per year tax is a great solution.
It will mean H1B is used just for very high value jobs, which
will mean no lottery needed and more certainty for those jobs.
Now, keep in mind that Reed Hastings is no fan of President
Trump. He voted for Kamala Harris.
He raised money for Kamala Harris.
So this isn't coming from a position of someone that just
supports his politics. In the mix of this debate, we
also see a lot of news about which companies this affects the
most. For example, Bloomberg showed
this chart here. And this is making the circles
on the interwebs. It's gone viral.
It shows how many big tech companies benefit from H1B visa
workers. We have right here at the top,
Amazon. Amazon employs over 10,000 H-1B
workers, 10,000. That's a lot of workers.
We have Tata Consultancy Service Limited.
I actually haven't heard of that company, but that's 5500.
Then we have Microsoft, that's 5100.
Meta, we have over 5000. Apple, we have 4200.
Google, we have 4000, and so on and so forth.
We have Walmart, JP Morgan, and Deloitte making this chart.
But by far the biggest one right here is Amazon.
That's the one that sticks out. Now, this chart is a bit
misleading, and in fact, I think that Bloomberg did a disservice
by showing this particular chart.
There's a much better way to look at this, which is.
Out of the amount of employees that these companies employ,
which percentage of them are H1B visa workers?
And when we look at these numbers in terms of total
percentage of the employees, it's far different.
Amazon is actually the last on the list.
It employs the least amount of H1B workers, 10,000 employees
out of 1.5 million. That's only .65%.
Now even if we adjust these numbers even further to make
them a bit more fair and let's say that we get rid of all the
delivery employees and all the logistics and the ones working
in the warehouses, Amazon is still at 2% of their total
workforce for only their in office employees.
So Amazon is actually not a big hire of H1B employees when you
look at it in total. Of their employee base, the one
that's the highest by far is Meta.
Meta has a total of 75,000 employees, 5000 of which are H1B
workers, which is roughly 6.7% of their employee base.
Nearly 7 out of 100 employees working at Meta are H1B workers,
meaning that if there is a dramatic shift in policy, that
company will be the most affected by it.
Now, the good news for Meta is that this is unlikely to impact
these current employees. Ones that are already here
aren't impacted by this new rule.
It's only new hiring of new H1B visas, so this isn't
retroactively impacted. But overall, you can see here
which companies are at most risk of a policy change right now.
The one that benefits the most from H1B is Meta.
Now, Speaking of Meta, we get some other news that happened
over the weekend. We have Mark Zuckerberg showing
off his new glasses. These are the glasses that
display things on the screen. They're pretty remarkable.
In fact, I think the technology is incredible.
But Mark Zuckerberg decided to do a live demonstration of this
and it did not go as planned. Let's go ahead and just look at
this live demo and see how things fall apart.
Pause. WhatsApp video call.
There we go. Uh oh.
Well, I, well, let's see what happened there.
That's too bad. I don't know what happened.
OK, there's the, the actual video call.
All right, I'm just going to pick that up with my, with my
neural band. This is, you know, it happens.
Yeah, let's. What do you think?
Let's just go ahead and. Now this this video clip
actually skipped over some of it.
This goes on for like a couple minutes.
He's up there just just dying on stage as this isn't working and
it it's so you just fill for him.
He's trying to get this tech to work.
They've obviously tested it a million times.
They even made a lot of specific things to make it work.
And as they often do, things went wrong in a live demo.
And here you see him just trying to come to terms with that tap
video call. All right, try it again.
I keep on messing this up. And if not, then we'll go for
the less fun option. OK, I don't know what to tell
you guys. All right.
He doesn't know what to tell you guys, he just moves on to the
next thing. Now later on, Meta released a
report of exactly what happened and the specific things that
they did to ensure that this wouldn't happen are specifically
what caused this to happen. They basically had a unique
wireless endpoint just for his headset and then a bunch of
other wireless headsets hooked up to it causing his to be
blocked out. It was one of those unfortunate
events on a live stage, but it's not a big deal Many companies
like this that have these live demos fail end up doing
incredibly well with that same product.
Now moving on. Regrettably, we get to the fail
of the week already on a Monday. It came early this day because
it's another one of those in the life of videos.
You know, the ones where they post about all the work they
didn't do and how fun it is working at their company, the
one that makes it look like they're a a daycare for adults.
Well, that's the case here. And unfortunately for this one,
it's of a company that's one of my favorite investments,
Netflix. Let's go ahead and take a look
at the new day in the life of video.
We start things off here and of course it's in the the vertical
TikTok aspect ratio. We have here come to the office
with me and it's Netflix pull up at 9:45.
We're starting the day late like we're getting in the office at
10 AM. What what has gone on?
When are you waking up in the morning?
If you're getting into work at 10 AM, bad traffic, maybe you
travelled a lot. I mean, what's going on to start
work near 10? OK, so she's starting work at
10:00, not because she had to eat breakfast at her home and
then come to work, but she she's starting to get breakfast while
arriving at 9:50. We're already off to a a
terrible start. This is already gone terribly
and we're not even like a a minute into this.
We're getting through breakfast and then we have work 10:50 AM.
There's no way that breakfast took an hour.
I I don't believe that who eats breakfast for a full hour after
arriving at 10 that yeah, OK, there we go. 10:30 and she's in
meeting. OK, so we, we've skipped through
the meetings and the work from about 10:00 to now 1232 1/2
hours of work done halfway through the day.
Let's go ahead and take a look at lunch.
I think it's because you won't apologize.
She's discussing recent news at 105.
They're like a stalemate. Yeah.
I like. Mixes drink lemon dessert.
And by the way, they do have a cool office.
If this is just a show off the office, Netflix has an awesome
office place, really high end. It looks like a great place to
work. They have lots of theme stuff
like they have AK pop, Demon Hunter, K Care, pretty cool
stuff. Now it's 110 and we're back to
work. Let's go ahead and see how long
the work is. I know it's like humid.
Outside, OK, so an hour and 45 minutes or an hour and 35
minutes rather amount of work. So after lunch she worked for an
hour and a half and then decided it's time to get ready to go
home. More snacks, more treats, and
then driving her Mercedes home. OK, there's so many problems
with these type of videos and I can't stress this enough.
If anybody's working at one of these big tech companies, which
I know we have lots of viewers working at them, what you
shouldn't do is post a video of you arriving at 10 AM and then
leaving before three with breaks all throughout and lunch breaks
and how obsessed you are with grabbing all the snacks and food
in between. That's not the right approach
here. It makes you look terrible.
It makes the company look terrible and I know that there's
work being done. She was in meetings.
She could not even without explaining the secrets of her
job or revealing any work secrets, she could have
explained what she does, how it's helping the company, what
type of problems she's solving, Explain kind of overall what her
work includes and how it's of value to the company.
That could be part of the day in the life of of these of these
videos, but we don't get that. What we get is a focus on lunch
breaks, food, the office theming, and very little work
being done and it just looks awful.
Now, if you're an employee at some company that you don't work
that hard and you're just trying to get through the day while
doing minimal amounts of work, in most cases, you're trying to
hide that. You're trying to be minimal,
you're trying to be hidden and unnoticed.
You're just trying to get your paycheck, do just enough and get
through the day. And while I don't advocate for
that, I think it sounds at least rational that you don't want to
be noticed in doing the minimal amount of work.
The weird phenomenon going on right now is that the people
doing the minimal amount of work are also the ones broadcasting
it to the world. They're showing the whole world
how little work they're doing and that I can't make sense of.
Why are they broadcasting that? They're doing only a few hours
of work during the day? They spend most of the time
leisurely strolling around the office collecting food.
What is the purpose of that? And we've seen it again and
again and again. This isn't the only example.
If you're doing the minimal amount of work, then don't
broadcast it. If you're doing a lot of work,
then make a day in the life of video.
But what we're seeing is the exact opposite.
Seemingly the people doing the least amount of work are the
ones that are also the most willing to broadcast the day in
the life of videos showing off to the world how much work they
don't do. And also, I believe damages the
reputation and the culture of these companies broadcasting to
the world that Netflix is a place of leisure and comfort,
not a place of discipline and high amounts of work.
Netflix has always advertised its culture as being a list
players, ones that are the best of the best, the highest paid
above market. And now it seems like that isn't
the case. And that is why this is the fail
of the week. That's all for this time.
See you in the next one.