Welcome back everyone. Today on the Joseph Carlson
Show. We're getting close to the end
of 2025. We're getting through it.
And as investors, I believe it's time that we should take a step
back and look at what's happened.
We can look at our portfolios, we can assess the gains and
losses, the winners, the losers are different strategies and
compare and contrast them. I have two portfolios.
One of them is a little over 900,001 of them is a bit over
400,000. It's $1.3 million invested in
the stock market, give or take. Now, over the past six years,
I've made around $550,000 of gains purely from stocks and
I've been able. To talk to. 10s of thousands of
investors. Here are lots of strategies,
lots of thoughts and opinions. And seeing all of that and
considering where we are today has made me convinced right now
is the best day to be an investor.
There are specific reasons that right now is better for
investors than it's ever been before, and I want to go over
them. So in this episode, we'll be
taking a step back, looking at our investing strategies and
looking what I believe is the most profitable path going
forward from the end of 2025. Now, of course, we have a lot of
other news to get to. For example, we have a news
article from the Wall Street Journal that Visa MasterCard
reaches settlement with merchants to lower fees.
This is news that as investors, you may read and think is
bearish on Visa MasterCard. After all, how could lowering
fees be good for those companies?
To the contrary, this news is actually good for Visa
MasterCard. We'll be going over why it's a
benefit to them. We have the news that Trump is
once again considering the 2000 dollar tariff stimulus.
We'll be going over why a $2000 stimulus would directly benefit
shareholders and investors more than anyone else.
Gene Munster recently made a call that Apple is going to be
the best performing stock over the next six months.
We'll go over why he's so bullish on Apple and why I
believe he's wrong. Wedbush's Dan Ives calls Meta a
table pounder. We'll be looking at his thesis
for Meta today after its recent sell off.
And one of my favorite analysts, Mark Mahaney, gives commentary
on all of these stocks that are selling off, the Doordashes,
Duolingos, Pinterests, the stocks that investors seem to
not want to deal with anymore. He has some thoughts on that and
gives investors A broader context of what's going on.
And then finally, we're starting off early on the week.
We have the fail of the week, which in this case is a bunch of
employees from a union that are upset about layoffs barraging
the HR director filming him and trying to harass him into giving
them answers. We'll be looking at all the
footage at the end of this episode.
So we have a ton to get to in this episode, a lot to go over.
And before we jump in, as always, I just have to mention a
quick shout out to Qualtrim Com Qualtrim is the best stock
analysis platform. I know that because I've built
it. Try it out.
It will turn you into a super investor.
Although the price is remaining the same at dirt cheap, 10 bucks
a month, you can try it out with a free trial.
The suite of tools underneath that is growing and growing.
Of course, you have the insights page with KPIs and revenue by
segment. You also have discounted cash
flow calculators that's super easy to use.
You have an earnings call transcript summary where you can
see the bullet points of what happened.
You have the earnings calendar for the week that's updated
every single week. You have so many tools under one
single umbrella. Try it out.
I think you'll love it. Join the over 11,000 investors
using it today. You can join at qualtrim.com.
Now we start off today by going over a subject that I've wanted
to talk about for some time and that is that I believe that
you're basically being lied to. Now, you probably know this
because a lot of what you see online, you know it's not
reality, but I believe the extent of which we're all being
deceived is pretty extreme. And that's due to a lot of
factors between social media and the news.
Social media companies are based off of algorithms and feeds.
They almost never just give you the the feed in a linear format
by date time posted. All of it's driven by what the
social media company believes will be the most engaging, which
will keep you around the longest on their platform.
We know this. We know these companies are
engagement driven. Part of getting engagement means
that you keep people's attention.
You first get their attention and then you keep it.
And as humans, we're naturally more inclined to listen to
things and to be alerted to things that we consider
threatening. Things that are shocking, things
that are that seem like they could be devastating, or even
things that seem very negative things that we should be
concerned about. Those drive engagement to more
than positive things. So social media companies
naturally tilt towards displaying more shocking,
controversial, argumentative negative things online.
And again, I assume most people understand this.
But while we're pointing the finger, we also can't just blame
social media companies. After all, it's all driven by
humans as well. For example, if I was to
hypothetically create two different video titles and test
them AB, one of them says things are really bad and one of them
says things are really good. The one that says things are
really bad will get more clicks. It'll get more watch time.
More people go out of their way to look at that video than the
one that says things are really good.
Now both of them will get clicks, both of them will get
engagement. But if one of them gets 30% more
clicks than the other, if it just has a marginal more
interest in engagement than the other, that tells me as a
content creator make more of that, make less of this.
And that's in A1 video AB test. Now imagine a platform where
that's the same type of test that you can do across the
entire platform, across millions and millions of content creators
of all different categories in politics and finance and news.
If all of it. Gets a bit more engagement when
it's tilted negative instead of neutral or positive.
You can see the ongoing impacts of it.
This leads to a vicious cycle where the news gets more and
more negative, where it becomes more engagement hungry.
The algorithms feed this negativity.
It rewards content creators by posting negative things over
positive things. And it does this to a huge
extent when it's compounded over years and years.
And I've seen that happen for some time period.
Right now, I believe that young people, in particular, people my
age and younger, are seeing more negative news than they've ever
seen or humanity's ever seen at scale than any other, any other
demographic, any other generation.
We are seeing an enormous amount of negativity in the world.
We're seeing bitter arguments and feuds, and everything that
can be negative is being inundated in people's feeds.
If you're not careful, if you're not extremely selective and
filtering, if you're not on top of this stuff yourself, you'll
notice it in your feeds as well. There's always something wrong.
There's always something big and disastrous happening.
There's always some problem to complain about.
You can see it just in the way that people look at finance.
There are some real concerns that I'm sympathetic about.
For example, people being priced out of homes.
That's a real problem. People losing jobs, unemployment
sticking up, that's a real problem as well.
I am sympathetic about people that are impacted by this.
Those are real issues, but there's also a lot of good, a
lot of good that I don't believe is accurately highlighted and I
don't believe. It's just being optimistic.
I believe that this good is rational, it's real.
And I want to highlight some of the things that I believe put us
in a better situation today that you as an investor, even if
you're just starting out, even if you don't have really any
assets that you as an investor today have it better.
You have bigger opportunities, you have more opportunity to
create wealth today. Than anybody else throughout any
time throughout human history. In fact, today is the best time
in existence to be an investor. And there's a number of reasons
why. One of them is that the the way
that we used to create wealth. Think about it, 50 years ago,
just the boomer generation, the way that you are limited in
creating wealth was primarily through buying real estate.
In most cases it was buying a home, you could get a mortgage
and homes were affordable. So that was one thing that they
had that we don't have now. Homes are unaffordable. 50 years
ago, homes were affordable. That's a big win because land
and homes are very valuable over time, especially if you're in a
high population area that has a growing population and low
crime. You'll have land go up like
crazy when you have that circumstance.
But while that was a benefit, there is many negatives and
drawbacks that they had to deal with during those time periods.
For one, owning the land is difficult to do.
It's not global. People from different countries,
people from different states can't always buy land in the
best places. It's very geographically
limited. Unless you happen to live in
those specific places where buying land was a great deal,
you were just left out of it. There wasn't that much of an
opportunity. The other option was to invest
in stocks. Now, thinking about it now,
investing in stocks is very easy.
But 50 years ago, investing in stocks was an entirely different
ball game. Free trades were not a thing.
Trades were expensive. Going back far enough, it cost
up to $150.00 to execute a trade, and that was $150.00 back
then, which would be even more expensive because of inflation.
So buying individual stocks had a high barrier to entry.
Every single trade had fees associated with it.
Every single one. On top of that, there wasn't
really ETFs. Those didn't exist.
They weren't popularized at that point.
The thing that people invested in were mutual funds, Mutual
funds that had high expense ratios.
In most cases, the mutual funds had 2% fees associated with
them. So your only investment at the
time was either to buy individual stocks with $150.00
trades or mutual funds with 2% fees or even mutual funds that
had those fees plus the trading fees, overall making it very
difficult. And on top of that, there was
also a lack of education. People did not know enough about
the stock market 30 to 50 years ago.
And I know this because my dad talks about it.
My dad is 40 years older than me.
During his career, he talks about how when he grew up, there
was no YouTube, there was no online education freely
available about learning about stocks.
He had no concept of what stocks were.
In his mind, they were just highly risky ticker symbols that
nobody could figure out, that you really didn't know what was
going on. They're basically just akin to
gambling. That's all it was.
You're gambling if you're putting your money in the stock
market. And there wasn't a lot of
education material, content, videos, podcast to be able to
explain how stocks work or what they did.
There also wasn't that many freely available or cheap
websites like qualtrim.com that could make it so you could learn
about a company after a couple minutes, that you could look
closely at the financials, that you could see the company's
history visually illustrated. The lack of education made it
incredibly difficult for investors to actually understand
the stock market. Only very few of them did at the
time. Now we live in a time that's
much better. First of all, we no longer have
to deal with mutual funds. Now we have ETFs with 0 fees,
they're essentially 0. Some of them have .08% but it's
de minimis, it's non impactful to your future.
So you can go ahead and buy any ETF at any point and when you
buy it you also have no trading fees.
Most standard brokerages now, in fact globally, the majority of
them do not charge fees for trades.
You can go in and buy these companies at any point with 0
trading fees. They found out different ways to
monetize, but it does not cost you money.
And that is why today, I believe we are at the best point
throughout human history to be an investor and we have the most
opportunities to generate wealth on an ongoing basis with the
least amount of work required than we've ever had before.
And I believe there's a lot of things that play into this.
First of all, the stock market or the public equity market is
by far the best wealth generation machine ever created
by human history. It just is.
We have the tool, the vehicle to generate wealth that's better
than anything else. It's better than real estate.
It's better than buying land. It's better than all these
different various investments, buying fine painting or signs,
whatever that may be, having a public equity market where you
can buy compounding machines, the best companies in the world
that generate cash on an ongoing basis on a predictable and
growing manner. These are world class companies
that have public oversight. They have audits on a quarterly
basis. They are regulated.
This is the best opportunity that we have and it's very good.
We also live in a time period where we have multiple massive
points of innovation. We've already gone through the
Internet boom, but that's still playing out.
The Internet is still a massive opportunity to generate wealth,
but then you layer upon that Internet, now we have artificial
intelligence, LLMS, we have tools creating massive amounts
of efficiencies. Then on top of that, you're
going to have robotics as the next wave.
We have a compounding effect of long term catalyst driving this
market higher, making it so that the publicly traded companies,
the vehicles in which we can invest can generate higher
margins, better earnings and faster revenue growth.
And on top of that they also grow with inflation.
So we have the best investment vehicles in the world that
should continue to grow for the next 5 to 10 years at a massive
rate. We even have another point that
you could add in, which is taxes.
Right now, the economy is geared towards growth.
It's geared towards business friendly regulations and taxes
that will spur earnings growth, will spur revenue growth over
time. It'll make it so companies can
do more share buybacks, they can invest more, they can build out
more infrastructure like a lot of them are doing and grow their
earnings, returning it back to the shareholder.
Every single thing that we look at is extremely advantageous for
the time period that we live in. We have an opportunity here to
either complain about things and again, many of those complaints
are valid home prices. You know, the job market goes
through periods where it's really good and really stronger,
a little bit weaker, it's a bit weaker today.
We could complain about those, which again, those are valid
complaints, or we could look at the opportunity today.
If you're able to hold down a job, which I hope you are at
some point, if you're able to hold down a job, you should look
at today as the best opportunity in your lifetime to invest.
You should be looking for every opportunity to save some cash
and put it in the stock market. Invest in the best companies in
the world, build half your portfolios and ETF, build it in
the S&P 500 or whatever cheap fund that you want, and then the
other half, pick a portfolio of concentrated positions and high
quality compounding machines, asset light businesses with
incredibly predictable earnings with secular growth trends.
Buy a portfolio of these companies.
In most cases, you're going to make a lot of money.
We can see this across my portfolios.
You can look at My Portfolio, and one of them here is the
passive income portfolio. It's now a $914,000 portfolio,
351,000 of that being gains. What I've done with My Portfolio
is I've simply invested in companies that I believe have
characteristics that are very strong.
They're companies that have really good economics.
They're super profitable. They're very also steady and
predictable. And they're companies that I
believe have very wide moats. They're difficult to compete
with. And in Qualtrim, I can easily
identify these companies. So I build concentrated
positions in them and then I just wait.
Patience and time is a big part of investing in the stock
market. But you'd also have patience if
you invested in real estate. You wouldn't expect to have a
significant return in real estate after only three months
of owning it or six months of owning it.
You would buy a piece of real estate or rental property to
make money for the next 10 years.
And that's the way that I look at my positions.
When I look across My Portfolio, the majority of companies and
investments have done incredibly well.
Most of them have made significant gains because again,
I've kept to a very simple philosophy, investing in
incredibly high quality companies.
Some of them, however, still don't work out.
Out of the 15 or so companies that I own today, around two to
three of them have been subpar. And that's normal.
That's how investing works. Even if you were to invest in
the S&P 500 index, not every company does well.
Most of them do OK. A a lot of them make gains, but
your gains are primarily driven by a smaller number of companies
within your portfolio. I've been fortunate with a lot
of big winners in this portfolio.
You don't have to reinvent the wheel or invest in something
super unique. I've invested in many of what I
consider to be the best companies in the world, Amazon,
Netflix, Google, Microsoft, and S&P Global.
The one company today that's struggling is Duolingo.
We don't know how this is going to turn out, so the story is a
little bit untold, but the fundamentals still remain very
strong. Even with Duolingo.
This portfolio is up $65,000 year to date.
Those gains and that money will continue to compound even more.
My goal is to virtually double the value of these portfolios
every five years. So in another five years I'd
like this one to be roughly $900,000.
By the end of five years I'd like this one to be almost
$2,000,000. And to accomplish that, my goal
is to at an intrinsic return of 15% per year, a 15% return per
year gives you about a double every five years.
So while we look at our portfolios, whatever stage of
growth you're in, however long you've been investing, even if
your portfolio's $5000 or $10,000 or $10 million, the
message should be the same as you're scrolling through your
feeds, as you're going through the Instagram Reels or the
TikTok or the Twitter, whatever it may be, you should look at
the news and understand that it's going to always be tilted
to the negative. There's always gonna be
something to complain about. There's always something around
the corner that looks really bad.
And that's the nature of humans. It's just a game that we're
never gonna fix. It's, it's the way everything's
going to be. But don't be fooled by it.
Today is the best day to invest. Wealth creation is incredibly
possible and probable if you take the steps to do it, if you
take responsibility to do it yourself.
Don't wait for anybody else. Don't wait for permission from
someone else to do it. Just start.
Start today. Put money in your portfolios,
invest in quality companies at reasonable valuations, invest in
ETFs, invest in high quality companies, whatever it may be,
But get things going. And if you already have it
going, put on the gas. Every single day we have the
opportunity to log into our brokerage and to buy shares of
the best companies in the world, ran by the best founders in the
world. People like Mark Zuckerberg with
Meta stock selling off today, we have Uber with Dara leading this
massive network. We have Sundar Pichai with
Google, which is still at a a good deal.
We have so many great opportunities every single day
to create wealth and get further ahead in life.
So it's time to get invested, align yourself with these great
founders, with these great executives that are growing
wealth for their shareholders. Get invested, stay invested.
Don't listen to the naysayers. If the stock market drops, it's
a buying opportunity, not a time to panic.
Now let's go to move on to some news.
We have here the first news of the day, which is a story from
the Wall Street Journal that says Visa and MasterCard reached
settlement with merchants to lower fees.
Now, if we look at how Visa and MasterCard are reacting, we can
just take a look at the stock here.
We'll bring it up here on Qualtrim.
We have Visa right here. Visa's in the red, while the
rest of the market's in the green.
Visa's in the red. We have MasterCard here.
We'll take a look at that. Mastercard's also in the red.
And then we have AXP, which is American Express.
American Express is also in the red.
So with the rest of the market going up, with people getting
excited about the government shutdown potentially stopping,
we have the market going up. But all of these companies are
in the red. This is because when you first
look at this news story, it's difficult to interpret it other
than negative news. But this is positive news.
First of all, the Wall Street Journal says that under the
agreement, the payment companies will lower credit card
interchange fees or fees that stores paid to swipe cards by an
average of .1%. So right there we have the first
actual point of data from this change.
They settled with the merchants to lower fees.
How could that be good for Visa and MasterCard?
These interchange fees do not go back to Visa and MasterCard.
They go directly to the banks, so the banks are actually the
loser in this situation. The merchants are the winner and
Visa MasterCard dodge a bullet. They don't really get hit by
this at all. They weren't making this money
that was mostly directed towards the bank.
So they're not really losing out on any money here.
Then we look at the next part of the story.
Merchants will also have more surcharge options as well as be
able to decide which categories of US credit cards they will
accept. Now this seems a little dicey.
They basically agreed to say, hey merchants, you now have more
control over which type of cards you can accept.
For example, you could accept only debit cards because they
have a lower fee. And you can say I'm not going to
accept this type of Visa card or I'm going to accept a Visa and
MasterCard, but I'm not going to accept American Express or any
of the the cards that have the really high fees associated with
them. Now merchants have total.
Flexibility and control. And while it may feel good that
they have control, they really don't have much control here and
they really don't have a lot of options.
Almost every single merchant invariably will accept the
higher end cars even if they have higher fees.
And the reason why is it makes business sense.
It makes business sense to such an extent that it's not even a
really debatable subject. For example, if you were to
break down which type of customer pays with debit and
which type of customer pays with credit, you can almost put them
in two different buckets. And the people that pay with
credit make more money. They are a higher income
consumer. They have higher salary jobs,
they have more stability in their work and they're higher
spenders. So if you were to say I want to
save on processing fees and I only want to accept the debit
cards or these lower fee cards and I don't want to accept
credit cards as a business, you would be saying all the wealthy
people, all the people that have stability jobs, high salaries
and consume a lot. I don't want your business.
I just want the lower end consumer, the consumer that has
less stability and less spending power.
That would be the decision the business is making.
Also, this type of thing where you only accept a certain
segment of cards is also going to frustrate your shoppers.
Imagine a different scenario where shopper comes into a
grocery store or retail location, they fill their entire
cart with merchandise they go to check out.
But then you say that you don't accept credit cards and they and
they look at their cart just full of $100 worth of stuff and
they go, OK, I guess I'm just going to have to put this stuff
back on the shelf. What do you think that business
owner would immediately do after seeing a customer put all that
merchandise back on the shelf because you're not accepting a
payment method that is widely available elsewhere?
These type of changes cause enormous frustration to the
consumer. It adds friction on the point of
sale, which is the last place that you want to add friction.
No retailers going to tell their best shoppers to take a hike.
The high spend consumers, the ones with the most money that
they don't want their business. And if they do, that's going to
be at their own detriment. The third reason why American
Express, MasterCard and Visa should actually be in the green
after this news, not in the red, is because not only did they not
lose in this case, they're not going to be hurt by it, but it's
also uncertainty that's now taken off the table.
They finally settled an agreement and that agreement
could have gone much worse than this.
There could have been outcomes that actually damage these
companies, but the implemented solution here, the remedy really
won't affect these companies. So I believe American Express,
Visa, MasterCard should be in the green after this news, not
in the red. Now moving on, we also get to
news that Trump is once again floating around an idea of
giving $2000 to most Americans a dividend of at least $2000 a
person, not including high income people.
Out of the group that will benefit the most from a $2000
per person stimulus, the group that's not given the stimulus
will be the one that benefits the most.
They'll be the biggest gainers from the stimulus.
So even though it specifically says not including high income
people, those are the people that own assets and own stocks.
They're going to be the ones that make the most money from a
$2000 stimulus. And the reasons behind this is
rather simple. When people are given without
any work or any effort, a $2000 deposit into their checking
account, it doesn't stay there for long.
It will inevitably get spent on either goods or services.
People eat at restaurants, people go on vacation, people
buy products. They'll sign up for Netflix
subscriptions or YouTube TV. They'll maybe buy YouTube
Premium. There's all different things
that people do when they're given money.
A lot of it is just spending it at different stores, retail
locations, goods and services that work its way back into the
stock market almost immediately. A huge portion of this money,
potentially 10s if not hundreds of billions of dollars, would be
given to people and then within months work its way into the
earnings results of companies. The net income, all that money
would be absorbed and soaked back into the economy, back into
companies, and then back into shareholders pockets within an
order of months. And that's the same type of
dynamic we saw with the COVID stimulus checks.
At first it seemed like they're just given as necessity.
But of course, when any broad range stimulus is given, many
people use it to spend on goods and services they wouldn't
otherwise buy, boosting companies earnings to record
highs. So this is another thing that I
believe will benefit the stock market.
Another way this will benefit the stock market is even if
these people take the $2000 and choose to invest, they'll buy
many of the stocks that shareholders already own,
further bumping up the price. We saw the same thing again
during COVID. Many people look at their
stimulus check as an opportunity to buy more stocks to bump up
their portfolio, which always works in the favor of existing
investors, ones that already have their stakes where these
new buyers are buying at higher prices.
If this does happen, the people that already own stocks, the
people that already have portfolios will be the biggest
beneficiaries of it by far. Now moving on, we get to some
news that Gene Munster went on the CNBC and he has a a rare
call here, or at least one that I don't see a lot of people
making. There's not that many people in
my feeds or around my circle of, of the people that I communicate
with that are going out on a limb and saying that Apple's the
Best Buy now. That was something that I was
doing a couple years ago, a few years ago.
Apple is at a much lower valuation.
They're growing a lot faster. I thought Apple is a fantastic
company and it was previously one of the biggest positions in
My Portfolio. But now I've largely trimmed out
of my Apple position. I don't hold much of it anymore
because it trades at a high valuation and the growth has
been a little bit subpar. But here we have Gene Munster as
someone that continues to pound the table for Apple.
He's so bullish on this company. Let's go ahead and hear him out
of why he thinks this is the Best Buy over the next six
months. This I think is going to be the
the top performing Mag 7 for the next three months.
It's it's a total sleeper here, but effectively the bar is low
for AI. There's no question about that.
If you look at the cadence of what's going on with the iPhone,
the numbers still need to come up for fiscal 26.
And most importantly is what's going to happen probably in
March, April time frame with this new Siri.
If Apple makes good and they have a history of making good on
high quality products, if they make good on what they have very
clearly described about their vision of the next series,
something that is AI powered and personal and contextual.
If they deliver that, I think that that's going to expand the
multiple. And so I'm in the camp.
There's a solid 20% upside to Apple shares over the next three
to six months. So there's his case for Apple,
if they truly make good on their promises and they deliver an AI
phone and AI products, they're going to expand the multiple.
Now, when I look at Apple today, this is a company that I love.
Again, I've I've had this one as a huge holding in My Portfolio.
I've made a lot of gains with Apple.
It's one that I don't really hold right now because there's a
couple things that I think Gene is leaving out.
First of all, expanding the multiple.
Right now it has a 33 forward multiple.
So having the thesis be reliant on multiple expansion, it means
that you believe it's going to go to a 35A36 multiple.
You're hoping that it's going to go to the mid to high 30s Ford
PE ratio. That's quite the multiple
expansion. When we look at Apple, we also
have a company where the revenue has stayed mostly flat for the
past couple of years. It's grown 4 or 5% / a
three-year period. I believe out of the Max 7, the
two stocks that will do the best over the next three months is
going to be Google and Amazon. Those companies I think are
better positioned. They have better multiples to
grow into and they have far better revenue growth and
earnings per share growth potential.
Now, another stock we could look at is Meta.
This is one that Dan Ives has frequently talked about here.
He's on CNBC saying that this is a table pounder.
Let's go ahead and listen to Dan Ives thoughts on meta.
I think Meta is a bit of an outlier just because, you know,
obviously how dramatically more they're going to spend on CapEx
and what happened to numbers going to next year.
But in my opinion, Meta is a table pounder here and I think
below 600 because it's my view they're transforming this
business over the coming years. Zuckerberg right now, wartime
Ceoi get, you know, fretting about everything that's
happening here, but this is an AI arms race.
But I continue to view it as you want to see them spend because
you're talking about the the earnings growth over the coming
years is going to be massive. That's why they're spent.
The markets not pricing in massive EPS growth for Meta over
the next couple of years. In fact, next year 2026 Wall
Street estimates are that Meta is going to grow earnings
between 12 to 14%, which would be a huge deceleration.
So that's part of the reason the stock is going down as they're
pricing in less growth, more expenses, more amortizing, all
this CapEx spend and a CapEx spend that's less predictable
than Google Cloud, Azure or AWS because Meta is a bit more of a
long shot. I agree.
Right now Meta is at a buy. I think the company is at an
attractive price. I think Meta is going to have
some issues and short term losses with their CapEx spend,
but that demand is going to be filled over time.
Now moving on, we get to another interview.
This time it's from Mark Mahaney, where he's asked about
Uber, he's asked about Duolingo, he's asked about these companies
where the stock price is dropping like a rock.
It's going down because investors aren't happy about the
investments that they're making. For example, DoorDash just
dropped because they announced they're making significant
investments in a VS. They're trying to build out more
autonomous driving delivery. They're trying to invest in that
part of the company because DoorDash believes that's where
things are headed and they want to be in front of it.
Duolingo investors had very similar concerns.
The stock has sold down ever since their earnings after the
company basically said that they're focusing less on
immediate profits and revenue growth than they are the global
opportunity of a education platform.
They're focusing on teaching quality, the content quality, as
well as keeping people engaged and growing the users over short
term conversions. From the free tear to the paid
tear, both of these have caused these stocks to go down, and
here's Mark Mahaney's take on it.
You know, I, I, I'd spend it another way or similar to what
you just did, John. Investors don't like investment
cycles. So I think that's the case with
Meta, Dash, Duolingo, Uber. I think there's a few other
names in there too, maybe Pinterest, you know, all those
companies that went into it out of this earnings cycle and sort
of negatively surprised the market by saying we really want
to lean into investments first. And I think DoorDash is, you
know, to me, it's kind of like you just can't be that
surprised. They just closed the deal with
Deliveroo. They bought the asset to invest
in, to regrow it, and yet the market didn't like it and sold
off the stock aggressively. The good news though, on.
So that's that to me is kind of the common theme here.
The good news is investors, yeah, you don't want to buy a
stock before they announce the investment cycle.
But if you believe that it's a good investment cycle, this is
your clearing event. This is your chance to get in on
a stock. The DoorDash hasn't been one of
my top long since it's been a long for us, hasn't been a top
long. But you know, it's something I
got to seriously consider. Now you've got the bad news out
of the way and what's happened, You know, there's been some
reports about the consumer flagging.
You're not seeing it from DoorDash.
You're not seeing and by the way, in the travel names either
Airbnb, I mean the demand was better than expected and
intrinsically strong across all the travel names that I look at
and for DoorDash too. So I like DoorDash here.
I understand the investment cycle risk, but guess what?
That's behind us now. So he feels that there's a
reason all these companies are going down, whether it's Meta,
Duolingo, DoorDash or Uber, all of them announced increase
investments into the future growth of their business.
Those investments, of course, slow down near term
profitability growth. When investors hear that, they
run for the exits. They don't want companies that
are pouring money into investments that may or may work
out in the future. They want companies leaning into
profits today. So investors are leaving these
companies. They're going into different
holdings. But he says that this is a
clearing event. It's a way for you to get into
these stocks or if you're already in them, to increase
your positions at better prices. That is because there's one big
concern already being priced into the companies today.
They already know about the investments.
They already know about this cycle.
Now is the time to buy. In the past, when this has
happened, when companies have said that they're going to
invest a lot, that's like what happened to Amazon in 2022.
All throughout 2022 and 2023 and 2024, Amazon stock price just
went up over and over again because the investment cycle
worked its way through. If you don't buy in during the
investment cycle, during these opportunities that the market
hands you, you may miss out on it.
Now moving on, we get to our fail of the week.
We start things off with a fail of the week early on a Monday
and we have here a group of people, they're gathered around
here, an HR executive, so that's the the head of HR of the
company. Then you have all these
employees gathered around. One of them is filming them
while a couple others are berating them.
Let's go ahead and just take a look here.
Congregate. Look how Skygate I'm.
Sorry, what's your definition of congregate?
So everyone you know, we'd appreciate if you would, you
would go back to the workplace where.
You're Is there a place that you would be able to speak to us?
Not today. We have other things going on.
Do you think we're not worth speaking to Sam?
Does your words not mine but. They might be your beliefs.
They're not my beliefs. OK, so you do think we're worth
speaking, Sam? Everyone should.
OK, so right off the bat, we already have a lot of hostility
in this video, if you didn't catch that.
This employee that's talking to the HR person says something at
the very beginning, which is totally reasonable.
He says he wants them to go back to their workplace.
And this employee here asks, well, do you have time to talk
with us? Totally reasonable that that's
the right there. That was something completely
fine appropriate to say, but then it's what immediately
followed after that where it went into hostility.
We. Go back to the workplace where
you're. Is there a place that you would
be able to speak to us? Not today.
We have other things going on. Do you think we're not worth
speaking to Sam? Do you think we're not worth
speaking to Sam? These are the loaded questions.
Right after that first sentence, which was reasonable, he gave an
answer saying not today. Instead of following up and
saying can we schedule a time, a time set in stone where you can
speak to us? Instead of saying that this
employee says, are we not worth speaking to Sam?
Just a loaded hostile question right at the beginning.
Says your words, not mine, but. But this answer is great.
Those are your words, not mine. Just throwing it right back to
the employee saying, look, I'm not buying into your loaded
question. You're saying that that doesn't
reflect how I feel. And then this employee pushes
back even harder, becoming more hostile.
They. Might be your beliefs.
They're not my beliefs. Those might be your beliefs,
saying it might be your beliefs now.
Now the employee's reading the mind of the HR person.
Oh, even though you say that those are my words, not yours,
I'm going to just say that those are your beliefs.
I know what you believe. Can you imagine if the HR person
did that? Started asking loaded questions
and inferring people's beliefs. OK, So you do think we're we're
sticking this out? Everyone should go back to your
workplace. I work.
I work here. You dismissed us and said talk
to us. You told us that we had to come
work in person here four days a week.
This is our work here. Like our hot microdeo, which is
my father. Yeah.
Are you running away from us? No, I'm doing.
So then the employees are told, can you, can you please go back
to your work areas? And then they say, I work here,
I work here. Well, you don't work in the
hallway. That's not what they, that's not
what he means. You're not working in that
hallway surrounding someone's desk.
Obviously he means to get back to your desks and do what you're
getting paid to do voluntarily. You're showing up to work to get
paid to do something, go to your desks and work.
And then instead of doing that, well, some of them do, granted,
a number of them do, they're like, OK, this is over, I'm
going to go back. But then a handful of them
choose to get out the cameras. You have multiple cameras there.
There's another one here on screen.
They get out the cameras and follow the guy down the hallway,
filming him in a private workplace, which if you're ever
following someone around filming them, that right there is just
one of the most obnoxious things you could ever do to a person.
Following around and filming someone that doesn't want to be
filmed is not only just wrong, but it's incredibly obnoxious.
You're almost always the bad guy if you do that.
If. You could just go this way, you
guys, will you come this way with us?
No, no. I'm in a meeting.
I'm. Working.
OK. Well, we have some quick
questions. You answer them.
I'd be happy to go back to our desks.
All right. We thank you.
Thank you. You don't want to answer any
questions. I've directed you back to your.
Workplace. Is that is that a good answer,
guys? Absolutely not.
Come on, Stan. Really good answer, Stan.
Stan, these are here. Our colleagues, we're concerned
about our company. You're disengaging with the
employees who work here. Did you like the OFD and vote
these political agents? What are you going to do to?
Stand up. Now these employees are upset
because there's layoffs at the company and that is unfortunate.
I sympathize with that. I want everybody to be working
and making a lot of money, but this is not the way to respond
to layoffs and it's not a way to get ahead in life and get higher
pay and better jobs and better treatment.
The way to do that, If you really want to twist the wrists
of your manager, if you really want to hold them to task, just
interview for different positions at different
companies. Get offer letters that are more
than what you're currently making.
Send those offer letters to your boss and say that you would like
them to reconsider their salary here because you have
opportunities where you're going to be making more money.
In almost every case, they'll want to keep the employee the
other companies value more. If those other companies that
are competitors are saying they'll pay this much, this
company will bump up their pay. I've done it many times with my
own job. You interview for other
positions, you get job offers, and you leverage them for higher
pay. The company's not willing to pay
you more. You simply bounce.
You need to have no loyalty to companies.
You don't need to like them. You don't need to care about
them. You can bounce, but in the
process, you should always, always end on a good note.
Never burn bridges in the workplace.
Jobs aren't unlimited, and most people, when they're hiring
employees, have very long memories.
They'll remember working with you, they'll remember if you
burned a bridge, and you may run into them in the future because
you're all working in the same industry, typically in the same
location. Out of all the people that just
actually harmed, it harmed these four employees the most.
For that reason, it is the fail of the week that's going to be
for this episode. Hope you enjoyed seeing the next
one.