Will M&A pick up in 2024? Will this year mark the return of IPOs? Listen to Strategic Alternatives, a podcast from RBC Capital Markets to get fresh insights on the trends and market forces impacting deal flow across sectors and find out how companies and investors are preparing for a potential surge in
in deal activity and what signals to watch for this year. Listen and subscribe to Strategic Alternatives, the RBC Capital Markets podcast today, wherever you get your podcasts. - To be invested with Betterment is to believe in better. Whether it's saving for today or building wealth for tomorrow, they help people and small businesses put their money to work. They automate to make savings simpler. They optimize to make investing smarter. They build innovative technology backed by financial experts
For anyone who's ever said, I think I can do better. So be invested in yourself. Be invested in your business. Be invested in better with Betterment. Get started at Betterment.com.
I would like to think that every Risk Reversal podcast is a special podcast. Yeah. However, for many reasons, this one we're about to do, Dan Nathan, is extraordinarily special. And why is that? Danny Moses, the host of the On The Tape podcast, returns. Front stage. I'm back. Thanks for having me back, fellas. So I've missed that. Now, people are saying, well, what happened?
Because we try to explain it, but let's try to give people an understanding as to where our thought process was. Yeah, no doubt. I mean, one of the things that we wanted to do is streamline the brand of Risk Reversal Media. We wanted to make it the Risk Reversal Pod. We were also going to extend it to five days a week. We're trying to be very actionable, but really kind of hitting a lot of the day-to-day headlines. But, you know, the way we thought
about the On the Tape podcast. Danny loves to have great conversations, longer form, being less reactive to the markets. And he had one that dropped yesterday. With Michael Lewis, who is a famed author. And you've got to go to the On the Tape podcast and listen to that. But the point is, sometimes people outkick their coverage. And that's what Danny basically did with us. He's like, I don't need you granular...
S&P monkeys. I can do my own thing. And he's absolutely right. So Danny, welcome back. It's great to be back. And you guys are doing continue to a great job. And I enjoy listening to you now. And yes, you guys are more day to day markets, things that are reactive, helping people how they can think about the markets and trade. And I like to take a long form. Yes. Maybe help them over a
the long, long term with the background of a theme that may keep repeating itself and the ways to kind of trade around it. So together, I think it's a great combination. And that's, and yes, the Michael Lewis conversation is a good indication of that. We got to do, so Michael Lewis, okay, every single one of us, except Guy was probably in the markets already, you know, the first thing that you were told to read was Liar's Poker, which was his first. And I told him that on the podcast. Which is epic, okay. Then there was Flash Boys, which didn't. No. Oh, no, it wasn't? Big Short? It was a couple between that. No, we had Blindside before.
No, I mean the ones that are marketed. Oh, sorry. Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry. So Flash Boys, which is about algo trading and all that sort of thing. New thing. Yeah. He also wrote. New thing. Yeah. And then the Big Short. And then Flash Boys. That's when you met him. Oh, and then Flash Boys. Yes. All right. Give us like a little. I'll give you the quick review. Yeah. So the name of the podcast, which we'll say it all, is Going Infinite and Beyond Our Big Short Journey with Mike Lewis. Because infinite.
Infinite was the Sam Bankman Freed story, which he talks about, by the way, and owns how he wrote about his character and doesn't really care about the criticism and is honest during the whole thing. We met, obviously, through Meredith Whitney. We talked about that and how he was in our office in 2008. He wrote an article in the end of 2008.
didn't know it was going to be a book. Kept talking and kept coming and speaking with Vinnie Porter and myself and Greg Littman from Deutsche Bank. Next thing you know, it's a book. March 2010. Flash crash May 6, 2010. Literally six weeks later. Which, by the way, nobody's been able to explain since. Right. But he did. Called him and said, here's your next book. He says, no one tells me what to write a book. And in the podcast, he gives me credit for
leading him to that, whatever. And then we talk about a bunch of things. So his focus, he's been doing this Pushkin podcast called Against the Rules. He just finished season five and it's about sports gambling. So you know that's another area near and dear to my heart. We're on different sides of that. We go through that. And then we talk about Walter Isaacson's book on Elon Musk because he interviewed him at 92nd Street Y. And then we talk about his next book, right, which is coming up, which is really from a timing perspective is about the civil service to his government. Now,
well, I won't make this too long winded, but in 2018, he wrote a book called "The Fifth Risk."
First Trump administration came in. He was waiting at the Department of Energy, Department of Commerce. No one showed up from the transition teams. Okay, nobody. And so he asked the head of the Department of Energy, he goes, what are the risks here from this? He goes, well, we could lose a nuclear weapon. Iran could fire one. North Korea could fire one. The grid could go down. He goes, what's the fifth one? He goes, bad product management. Bad project management. And he said, well, that's the fifth risk. So now I asked Michael to explain, now there is no project management.
And so he was already writing this book about civil service. So he has stories that he wrote and focusing on a bunch of people. So that's coming out of mid-March. So you're going to see him everywhere in the next few weeks about this. So really interesting take he had on Doge and all this other stuff. And you're extraordinarily well suited to do those types of podcasts, which was the thought process behind it. So that's great. We're excited. On the Tape podcast with Danny Moses.
With that said, here we are on the Risk Reversal Podcast. Yes. And we get a little market wonky at times, but it's been a while since the three of us have talked about the market. A lot has happened. A week and a half, two weeks ago, the S&P 500 made an all-time high. We've backed off a little bit since.
We've seen moves in bond yields. We've seen moves in commodities. And we've seen moves in currencies. And oh, by the way, the VIX, which was a non-story the last time we spoke, is becoming one. By the way, I've talked about this as well, something that you, Porter, and Vinny had a discussion about in July of last year, how making volatility great again. And you reemphasized that at the iConnections conference yesterday.
a few months ago. So let's talk about all those things, Danny Moses. Yeah, you've been right to point out vol. And this is, you know, we've had these spikes in volatility and then they relent. This one's not relenting. We have a clear elevation that looks like it's here to stay. And people forget. Now they're focusing on tariffs. Okay, as we're sitting here, the auto tariffs are now delayed a month. That just came across my screen. Okay, so it's hard...
It's hard to be an auto company. It's hard to be an investor. It's hard to be a consumer or business that makes auto parts, whatever it might be. But beyond the tariffs, there's other issues going on, right? The world order has changed. The economic order has changed. The impact of federal workers on U.S. GDP has changed. You know, Torsten Slocke wrote a great piece last week for Apollo. He is the chief strategist there. And he wrote about how if it's 300,000 jobs in the federal government, multiply that
effectively times another two, you're looking at a million jobs potentially. So a lot going on here, but volatility is here to stay because when tariffs go away or get resolved, we're looking at something that's right behind. All right. So we've talked about this, I think only a few times over the last 10 years that this actually preceded equity market
downward volatility. And that is the volatility in almost every other asset class other than stocks. So right now we're seeing it in commodities. We're seeing it in currencies. We're seeing it in fixed income and yields, obviously. And we're also seeing a new one, which is kind of crypto where like 10 years ago, crypto didn't matter. Even in 2017, it didn't really matter. But right now, because it's such a focus by a large group within the new administration, right? And all these kind of talks about, um,
you know, a strategic reserve and that sort of thing. I mean, I think that could be weighing on the dollar a little bit. So talk to us a little bit about the macro, Dave. Most of the macro is telling you that people think the economy is going to slow, whether it's a result of tariffs or whatever it might be. Oil prices coming in. That's a little bit of policy, obviously, with Russian oil potentially coming on the market, all that stuff. Dollar weakening here a little bit and rates coming in for the wrong reasons, by the way. Bitcoin is interesting. In hindsight, the easiest trade in the last year
a little more than a year ago, was when the ETFs were approved as a way for institutions to feel safe about basically expressing a trade in Bitcoin through an ETF via BlackRock. We don't have to worry about where's my coins, what's going on, how do I get it in the key? Can you imagine a guy trying to find that or me trying to find that? That was, in hindsight, a very easy trade. However, with that comes volatility. And so we've seen, I think, kind of a tail. And there's a bit of, we'll just stick with Bitcoin because the other crypto stuff's not doing great.
you're seeing that in real time. So the tail, the kind of retail whip that comes around when the market sells off, when VIX goes up, Bitcoin's going down. It's not performing like it should. Gold, however, is. And gold has begun to separate from Bitcoin here over the last several weeks. So that's my thought on crypto. And listen, there's, again, there's so much noise here you have to pay attention to. We have forgotten all the other important things like
yen, which Guy and I love to make people go to sleep on. So let's talk about this. Again, the enthusiasm about the stock market from November 6th, basically right up until January, obviously the S&P was making new highs. And Guy and I were talking about with Liz Young-Thomas earlier of SoFi, that if you look at the RSP, the equal weight S&P, if you look at the Russell 2000, they've round-tripped the whole move. For all intents and purposes, we had Bitcoin that
almost did. We had a lot of like, you know, the stuff that energy stocks had, you know, so guy like talk to us a little bit about the psychology of the round tripping of most of those other asset classes. So the growth, you know, the pro growth agenda, you know, seem to be discounted right now. And then the last part of this is like this huge,
huge component to the performance of the S&P 500. This generative AI trade has also rolled and they're happening at the same time. Yeah, there's lots on wrap there, but I'll say this. A lot of what
took off into the election, so in October of last year, has now round-tripped the move. So whether it's Bitcoin, whether it's some of these industrial names, whether it's some of these technology names, the fact that they've all traded higher in a meaningful way and then a round-trip, I think it's problematic. By the way, the S&P 500 falls into that category. We obviously saw that huge ramp and we're effectively backsliding
back down to where we were in November of last year. So now you have sort of this benchmark. Are we going to hold these levels and re-accelerate or are we going to violate these levels? And I think that's what the market's struggling with. But to Danny's point and the point we've been making, it's going to be very hard to figure it out with an
elevated volatility index because you're going to see intraday moves both to the upside and downside that don't make a lot of sense. All right, Danny, do you buy this thing? And I keep hearing this narrative that the Trump administration, again, this is like less than 24 hours since that joint session of Congress, all the headlines that, you know, they're sticking to their policy in multiple different facets. Right.
Do you buy it that they're trying to tank the economy early? And I don't mean tank the economy. They don't care about the stock market. They want yields lower. They like a lower dollar, that sort of thing. Do you buy that or is this just as hectic as it appears to be to me? There is some stuff that should be so obvious that will cause a recession that they're doing that anyone that would look at it, any...
CEO of a top company would never run how this is being run, right? That's the key. Yet they're pretty quiet during all of this. So the answer is there is something else going on, whether it's nefarious or whether they're like playing chess. I won't give them credit for playing chess. So
You could argue that you've watched Fed Fund Futures. Obviously, we're getting closer to potentially a rate cut, not this meeting, but the next one, odds of that going up, is that really what they want? Are they convinced that inflation is actually coming down? They're sticking to one data point, talking about PCE. You guys talk about it all the time. Inflation is sticky here. So do you want an excuse for the Fed to cut? I don't think so. But I want to go back to one thing that Guy just talked about. Last year, we were doing this
obviously put every week and strategists we know how they operate well let's take the top 19 strategists beginning of last year most of the numbers were 5400 5600 you have to if you're not going to downgrade your sets in the market you chase you chase you chase we came in when the last podcast we did together we talked about this every single strategist had an up market for the S&P in 2025 25 I get it okay home prices never go down I get it but you think about it now
We were trading at the peak around a 24-time forward S&P number in this environment because why? Regulatory stuff was going to get easier. We're going to peel back, so we need more business friendly, all that stuff. So the reason we've round tripped is we priced in the regulatory changes that
are being now completely overrun by all these other issues that are going to come. So I just think when you say that the market's down, it's a buying opportunity, not you guys. I'm saying, where is the right price? And with vol where it is, you cannot justify a 22 and a half times forward S&P multiple. It's just that simple. I'm just not trying to make a market call per se. So sorry to answer your question in a very long-winded way.
which is why you gave me my own podcast. - That was a long-winded question. - But my point is that, is it intentional? There has to be some method to this madness somewhere because it just doesn't make sense to annihilate agencies all in one shot, which are gonna have an impact on the economy. - Yeah, austerity is not good for economic growth. But Guy, when you think about this, and we were talking about this all through 2024, that 13 and a half, 14% expected S&P 500 EPS growth. Our main man, John Butters at FactSet had recently written an earnings insight report talking about how
estimates have actually come down over the course of Q1 more than they normally do because they didn't budge in 2024. Yet what Danny just mentioned, all the strategists, I think the average price coming in on the year was like 6,600, 6,600. So they were calling for like 8% or 9% S&P 500 price, you know what I mean, appreciation. But yet, you know, why would that be the case if you're going to have 13%, 14% S&P 500 earnings growth?
I think the earnings growth that we've talked about was wildly optimistic. And I think people are coming to that realization, especially when you see what's going on with bond yields and especially when you see what's going on with some of these GDP expectations.
Listen and subscribe to Strategic Alternatives, the RBC Capital Markets podcast today, wherever you get your podcasts.
Imagining a better future is the first step. Investing that future with Betterment Advisor Solutions is the next. Whether you're launching your own practice, looking to streamline client onboarding, or just searching for efficient ways to scale your firm, Betterment is here to help. They automate to make tax optimization simpler. They provide support to make administrative tasks easier. At
Something that Danny has talked about for the last couple of years, and he is
I think you've been prescient in saying this. Be wary of a market where yields are going down and the market's going down. And we've seen that happening over the last couple of weeks when you've seen the 10-year yield go from 480-ish down to 411. And obviously, the stock market acting in kind, going lower from the levels that we talked about, that recent all-time high, all the way down to 5,700 and change all
over the last couple of days. So speak to that, Danny, because it's manifesting itself right before our eyes. - Yeah, people thought that the Fed would be cutting rates this year. The reason for people being optimistic on the numbers, because inflation was coming down, not because the economy would potentially be slowing. So that's been a little bit of change in that mix. And I think when you see moves like today, the market up a little bit, rates back up a little bit, we've talked about this absolute level of rates where things will start to slow, which is towards 5% on the 10 year. And every time we get up there, we don't tend to bust or we tend to come back.
But when you have those big down moves in rates, it tells you a couple of things. One is it's flight to safety. If you think that it's safe, we'll just go with it. It's still a flight to safety. And it's not because inflation is necessarily coming down. But at some point, that neutral rate, again, without getting too wonky, it can only go so low if inflation is still where it is. So you're dealing with a lot of different factors here. But yes, for the most part, we have not seen in a while. You get a relief rally when you feel like, right, the
inflation numbers are coming down and 480 goes to 450 in the big market rally. 450 to 4% in the 10-year is normally not in that camp. Well, and we're seeing it play out. Now, what's going to be really interesting to me is what happens with yields from here. You know where I stand. I've been very clear. I think yields are going higher. I looked like a genius for a while, which rarely happens.
I don't look that smart right now as they've come in. But there are a number of different reasons why I think, regardless of what your view on this economy slowing, not re-accelerating, there's a real argument here to see yields go up. And it comes down to supply and demand. And by the way, it comes down to who's out there that's going to buy our debt. Not that they're going to walk away from buying our debt, but they're going to demand a higher rate of interest to do it, Danny. And if you look at the move index, actually, I haven't even looked at it recently. Maybe Dan can bring it up. Yeah.
You know, the big thing to me is wherever treasury yields go, the bigger point is credit spreads because that's the driver of everything. Private credit, securitizations, all this stuff that we see, it is the true oil in the engine, so to speak. And so credit spreads, we had yields drop from, you know, 480 in the 10-year to 415 or 410. Credit spreads obviously didn't go down that amount. They went down, but they widened out dramatically on a relative basis. So maybe the move index is what people need to be watching potentially. Again, wonkiness coming into the forefront here.
but yes i think we're going to have this again push and pull at the end of the day what do earnings going to look like on the s p as a result of all the stuff that's happening and that's really what matters yeah i think probably at best you're going to get high single digits year-over-year eps growth obviously i'm not a strategist but if you think about just um you know how high they are relative to what we're seeing
in many parts of the market that aren't mega cap tech and we're going to see a deceleration. That was one of the reasons why, and maybe we can kind of pivot to this a little bit, why we saw Google from its all-time highs sell off almost 20% over the last few weeks
from its earnings report. Amazon had a 15% sell-off. It was also trading at all-time highs. Microsoft hasn't sniffed a new high since last summer. It's a bit of a disaster, a huge underperformer. Obviously, Nvidia is down about 25% from its recent highs. Apple hasn't made a new high in a while. You know, if those...
stocks are signaling a meaningful deceleration in their growth. The rest of this stuff is just not going to pick up the slack. Well, I'm glad you brought up Microsoft. And we've talked about this now for a while. Microsoft made its all-time high, I want to say 468 and change in July of last year. By the way, that was off a run from April of that year when it was trading about 385, 390. Look at where we just traded down to. We basically round-tripped
the entire movement. We did it over the course of a year, if you think about it. Here we are in March, and that move was from April, which is, to me, fascinating, given an S&P that's basically done nothing but go higher. If Microsoft is one of the five most important companies in the world, one would think that that's a sort of a barometer of what's going on. So we'll see. With that said, Microsoft maybe has gotten self-interesting again, but you mentioned some of these other names, Google's another one. So
individual name volatility underperformance, Nvidia being one, you want to throw semiconductors in that mix, which also made their all-time high last summer. That speaks to something entirely different as to what we're looking at through the lens of the broader market. So Danny, if you think about the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been basically spent to build these data centers, to train these models, right? You need to see a return on investment. Now, there's a handful of companies, we've been talking about it. Obviously,
Meta has really done a really nice job using their own technology. They built a open source, large language model, which is Lama. It's helped them serve better ads. They've been very, very profitable. But Microsoft has not demonstrated that using that technology
open AI technology that they spent $13 billion to have access to that they've seen a lot of uptake in Copilot, not internally or externally, you know. So there's a bunch of other examples. Obviously, we could get to Google and the like. So, you know, when you think about that, I mean, there's also earmarked another 300 and something billion dollars over the next year or two in CapEx from all those major hyperscalers. Have we seen this before? Yeah, we've seen this before. And I'll make I'll get to that in a second. We'll comment on
Microsoft, I'm the last person to talk about tech, but if I remember correctly last year, it was the margins in their cloud business is lower. Are you going to stop spending X amount of money? Can you achieve some economies of scale? That was part of it.
Again, I've talked about this before on the pod. So July of 2000, there was a company called JDS Uniphase. They were a fiber optic company. They were in the center of the growth of the internet, the great secular macro trade, which it turned out to be. But the amount of fiber that was being talked about that was going to be leased and we're going to put it in the data hostings things and all this stuff.
could have wrapped around the earth like 10 or 12 times. So we knew the numbers didn't make sense. They reported on July 26, 2000, I remember this vividly, beat in a raise. Stock went up four to five bucks. It happened to be about the same percentage as Nvidia by there was like $140 stock or something like that, and then proceeded to sell off. It actually was the high the stock ever saw again. And it was a different story. It was a roll up story. But point is this, AI is a tremendous secular trade, right? The company's in it.
Nvidia, the biggest thing might take on that quarter was the margins. And he is saying that they're going to go back up. Right. You guys have harped on this. Back half loaded. Back half loaded. Another one. The benefit of the doubt in the market in general and with some of these names, I think is out the window. So the deep seek day, which just kind of woke people up and shook them whether it turns out to be a big deal or not, was the technical level that Nvidia actually traded right back down to yesterday. So I don't want to throw Carter worth technicals in here. But point is this.
It is now, I think the proof has moved, like I mentioned before. The proof was to the Bears to prove their story. I now feel like we've shifted to the Bulls. I agree with that. And the technical setups has happened three times now in video over the last year or so where you've seen this engulfing patterns. The last one we saw was in January of this year where you made an all-time high, Dan, of 153 and change. Closed on the lows, and we've really never sniffed that level again. And here we are having traded down to 110-ish.
in the mid-one teens or so. But I think your point is well taken. He, being Jensen Wong, did I say that properly? Wong, yeah. Has teed himself up in terms of the promises for re-acceleration of margins because if he doesn't get it,
Katie barred the door. Promises, promises. Sorry, I had to do it. We have a minute. I'm going to hang up forever. Sorry, go ahead. There is another way to view this is that if you think about the typical cycles here, and maybe they've all been accelerated. If you want to go back and use some of the cycles from the late 90s into the early 2000s and what we saw, that trough of disillusionment, and it just kept on going and going. We keep seeing this, that the cycles, whether they're business cycles, whether they're tech cycles, they've been sped up.
pretty dramatically. And there is an argument to be made that a stock like Nvidia can still work even with a six handle on their gross margins. If they maintain market share, they don't have the competition. We see a next leg of this trade, which is actually
made possible by use cases evolving, right? So if you're going to, so like to me, I think that this company was wildly overvalued, you know, before it had this drop off, the rate of the beats, right? And raises have been coming down. We knew that was going to happen, the law of large numbers, but if they were ever to reaccelerate because the end markets shrunk
start to demonstrate the use cases for this technology, well, then that's another way to think about it, especially as long as they don't have meaningful competition. Guy, why are you smiling at me like that? Because I was just thinking, no, you're spot on. And your point about it can still work, yeah, it can still work. But one of the things that I've been saying in terms of NVIDIA is they're out
earning their revenue. And what does that mean? With 77% margins, there's a reason why price to sales is so expensive, but price to earnings is not. And if those margins come down, the price to earnings, which seemingly is inexpensive now, will get very expensive very quickly. The reason why I'm smiling is this, Danny Moses.
Stay with me here. All right. Remember the movie War Games? Of course. How about a nice game of chess? Right. Do you want to play? Can you do that? You do that very well. Greetings, Professor Falcon. Yeah. Do you want to play a game? Do you want to play a game with me real quick? Of course. Global Thermonuclear War. In July of last year, it was a Thursday, a CPI print came out, which was cool. Dollar Yen on that day was trading about 161.30-ish.
Over the course of the next 15 minutes from 8.30 until let's call it 9 o'clock, we saw dollar-yen go from 161 and change down to 157. And over the next couple of months, it cascaded lower, crescendoing basically in August when it traded down to about 145. That coincided with a move in the equity market like we haven't seen in a while. We saw the volatility next trade north of 65. By the way, dollar-yen proceeded to go down to about 130-ish today.
over the, well, 139 and change-ish over the next couple of weeks. With that said, dollar-yen recovered. But over the last couple of weeks, Danny, dollar-yen has gone from about, I don't know, I want to say 158. And here we are at 149. Are we setting up for a similar move in the dollar over the next couple of months? The only way to win is not to play. Not to play. That's probably what it is. But you remember the last scene in War Games where they think the...
nuclear warheads are launching everywhere and they're like, you got a report? We're still here. We're here. The guy in Colorado was still here. To answer your question, that was in Alaska. Right. But to answer your question, does it matter? Will it matter? Does it matter? These are the things that are now kind of gone to the background that may end up coming to foreground to your point. And so there's growth and there's inflation. In Japan, we know that when the yen strengthens, it can unwind what we call kind of the carry trade and kind of increase volatility across the board. It's not a coincidence. It's happening right now as quote,
a flight to safety. So something to watch for sure. Does it mean anything? I feel like there's been so many other overriding factors. And we've been to your point, the 140 to the 170, which by the way, is a massive move in currencies. And you guys just talked about volatility. It's not just in US things. You mentioned before it's everywhere. It is everywhere. So we were in the new norm where you have to be able to react to if it does go to 140, is that going to cause something or what caused it to go to 140? So
Loaded question you gave me, Guy. I wish I could give you an answer, but yes, it's something to watch, and it's not being watched enough. Most underrated actor, in my opinion, of the 1980s was Dabney Coleman. Oh, so he just passed away? Come on. He passed away this year. He was in the movie with Dolly Parton. Mr. Mom, 9 to 5. 9 to 5. And Mr. Mom. Wasn't he Mr. Mom? Yeah. Amazing. Amazing.
It's a great name, Dabney. You don't hear that that often anymore. We had a little funny spot here, but I want to get real about something. Here we go. So when we think about, no, this is kind of stuck in my craw. We were in this phase, I want to say it was about a year ago. There was some guy on the internet who kept on bringing up this company called CoreWeave. Do you remember this? And they were, you know, NVIDIA was a big supplier of this. And this is a company that pivoted, you ready for this? It's not a hair replacement company. From crypto.
Crypto mining to generative AI data centers. In 2022, they had $16 million in revenue.
Last year, they had $1.9 billion in revenue. Okay, so here's the deal. This is going to be the first IPO of a generative AI stock. It is basically trying to raise $4 billion at a $35 billion market cap. You can do that price-to-sales guy thing.
You want to do it? Well, I mean, a $35 billion market cap company on a billion dollars of sales is? Two billion. Okay, two billion. It's 17 and a half. You think that's a bit rich? Historically, it's very rich. Now, they're obviously growing sales pretty dramatically. They are losing so much money. Their expenses are growing far better than that growth rate as it relates to revenues. But here's the deal with this thing, okay? They have basically $8 billion of debt right now
Okay, so they're building out these data centers. Microsoft is 62% of the revenues. There's an unnamed other customer that's another 15%, all right? So when you think about that concentration, it's a little nuts. You remember about a week and a half ago, there was TD Cowan reported that Microsoft was canceling leases for some of their data centers. Where do you think they're doing that at?
right? And so they're also very dependent on NVIDIA. Here's a couple other things that if you are thinking about buying this IPO, and this is Goldman Morgan and JP Morgan, okay, they're circling the wagons around this. They need the IPO market to reopen. This is probably not the one you want to do. You know why? They held two large secondaries in 2023 and 2024, a combined 1.3
billion for existing shareholders to sell. Those shareholders, Fidelity, BlackRock, KOTU, you know, those three firms are usually buyers on IPOs. They're not sellers. The other thing is usually there's lockup for existing shareholders, like founders, like employees, they can only sell a certain amount of days after the IPO. Well, the three founders of this company,
sold nearly a half a billion dollar stock recently, two months before the IPO. So you think about all this in the macro backdrop, we just talked about Nvidia selling off 25%, all of Nvidia's major customers selling off precipitously, declining revenue growth rates for those hyperscalers while CapEx keeps going higher, the public markets don't like it, and the private markets we see OpenAI, Anthropic, the list goes on and on and on of those valuations skipping higher.
So they want to bring this stock to market, yet the natural buyers are actually sellers. And if you were a retail investor, and you like to look out for the retail investor, you'd have to have your fucking head checked if you were going to buy this stock. Is that fair? Dan, I am so proud. I'm in tears right now, proud. This is why you don't need me here anymore. Oh, stop.
That was amazing. Yes, you are 100% right. And by the way, we've been down this road. We've been in the markets before where the bankers are like, guys, get this thing out. Let me get this thing done. They might have missed their window, to your point. I'm looking at the description of the company. They have all the keywords that you want that you would have come up, which is cloud computing, startup specializing and providing cloud-based graphics processing unit infrastructure to artificial intelligence developers. I mean, it's really amazing.
You had me at hello when you said change their business and what they did and use the same stock symbol.
Guy, do you remember all the gold companies in Canada in the 90s that changed their businesses to be like fiber optic companies or telecom companies? Exact same time. People should become gold companies now. Wait, GLW. Let's just talk about Corning. This was Corning Glassworks that became one of the biggest fiber optics companies. It was just you find your new way. So, yes, let's not change our listing. Let's use it. But anyway, so, yes, when you change your business. Well, you're a great story. Really? I love stories. So this goes back to the year 2001.
And listen, I was a hedge fund guy, so this is going to make a little sense to you. Hedge fund douche? Yeah, definitely. This is a douchey story, by the way. Sarah, me, a few friends. Can you put a best one? We are in Saint-Tropez. It is July. Oh, my God. It's getting worse. It is the south of France. Oh, my God. We are sitting in the harbor on one of these amazing cafes. We're probably sipping champagne for all we know. El douche? Yeah. And we hear these American friends.
We hear these American voices behind us and we turn around and we say, hey, how are you? Where are you from? And they said, Corning, New York. And I said, oh, that's cool. I'm from Syracuse. It's about an hour away. What are you guys doing here? They're like, we are taking the vacation of a lifetime. And I was like, okay, what gives here? And they were like, well, my husband's worked at Corning at the factory for 30 years and the stock has gone up a thousand percent.
And we are taking the trip of a lifetime. I mean, that was like, if you didn't know to sell everything right then, Danny, I mean, no, there you look for science. That's a good one. I mean, just for, for recollection, Glassworks was a $10 stock in 1998. It subsequently traded North. I think Dan of a hundred dollars a share in 2000 or so right around the time of your trip, by the way, a stock that had done nothing for decades prior. And it,
It gave the entire thing back over the next couple of years. Wasn't Kodak during the pandemic? Weren't they changing something in their lives? Came a meme stock. Eastman, Eastman, Kodak. Yeah, they were doing something different. I mean, this is not unprecedented. Always be aware of those things. People. Right. Have at it, people. Yeah, have at it. See, I'm now Dan and Dan's not me. I don't get to tell those stories. But by the way, can I tell another story? Oh, please do. So J.D., you can say. Is it equally douchey?
- Well, JDSU, I already told this. I know, but I have my own story. So I'm on this desk at a hedge fund, same hedge fund, 1999. And we had a guy, I think I've told this story before. He was an engineer for years. He worked at Qualcomm, he worked at all these companies. And he was like, knew these things.
dead cold he wasn't a markets guy he was you know helping us kind of you know make some headway or you know figure out these stories and at one point when jds uniphase was skipping up like fifty dollars a week do you remember that day like yeah stands up this guy and i'm not gonna say it in his broken english and he goes the market will never go down again and we said that for like another three years it was like the top man oh man i'll end you got a good story
Well, yeah, it's not as douchey, but it's... I was at Freedmen Billings of Ramsey, and they were bringing all these subprime mortgage companies public. And we have like an off-site retreat. So this is mid-2000s. This is like 2004. Okay. You already knew that things were going to go haywire. Well, you knew. They had the banker. They took him in a chair like it was a bar mitzvah or a wedding where you hold him up in the chair in the hora and do the whole thing. On a chair going around the room, I go, who is it? He goes...
that's the banker for Saxon. It was like a mortgage. I'm like, we're done. You had Michael Lewis on the horn right away. I kind of was a foreshadowing. Well, we've gotten close to that with some of the things that people are doing around some of these AI stocks without question. So,
You know, strap in people because as Danny said earlier, as Danny and Porter and Vinny said in July of last year, make volatility great again. It is becoming great right before our eyes. The On The Tape podcast is going to drop, I think, weekly. I might be mistaken. Yeah, it's every Wednesday morning. It came out today. And by the way, go follow it in the podcast store. Danny started a new feed. We are going to promote it here. He's had already a bunch of great guests. You had Vinny and Porter.
I did. I had Peter Bookvar. Give us a sense of some of the other guests you have lined up over the next few weeks. I got James Aiken coming on. I got Luke Groman coming on. I got Ivy Zellman at Carter Worth is going to do a bourbon in charts, like with Porter Vinnie, myself never did that at four o'clock. We're going to do after market hours. We're going to do one after where we bring up, we talk about the markets. Well,
What we used to do with Carter was this, which I think we've talked about before. We had our list of names, long and short. We didn't tell him if we were long or short. We'd take him in a room and we would randomize. We'd pick one out of a hat. Like, okay, Carter, what do you think of that? When he goes, ah, bearish and bullish. Or we'd go bearish and bullish. And I'd be the one having my book that was short. I'd go, Carter, really? So it's an objective way to look. So Vinnie Porter is going to go through some of their names and they're not going to give it to Carter. And then Carter's going to do it. That's going to be fun. Things like that. A bunch of other people. What was the first guy you said?
Who? James Aiken. James Aiken. He's a macro. Do it, guys. No, he's the nice. He's notes from a small island. He was at UBS, worked at AIG Financial Product. One of the most thoughtful macro people you will find. He's very connected. So be very careful. I want you to hold your opinion until after the episode. I was just going to say you might have wanted to have Clay Aiken on the aftermath.
This is a cooler Aiken. He was one of the original American idols. Oh, I remember him. I don't think he won. This is a Wall Street idol. With, by the way, a great accent too. You're going to love it. He's from down under. Luke Roman has been a great guest too. Luke Roman's been a great guest. All right, so two things. Go follow the On The Tape podcast in your favorite podcast store. And YouTube. All right, so it's also got a YouTube page. Because you have 106,000 subscribers. 107. So follow. 107. Yeah, we're popping off.
And I have like six. Go follow. Yes. Follow Danny's. I just don't launch it today. But follow Danny's. If you haven't already, follow ours. We are at Risk Reversal Media. And Danny, what are you at? On the Tape. On the Tape podcast. All right. On the Tape podcast. A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. There you go. Will you guys come on to the On the Tape podcast? 100%.
That would be fun. I would love that. No, of course. All right. Well, love you guys. Thank you. Danny, you know we love you. We can't wait to see your success with this. We love having you on Fast Money. You were on earlier this week. I thought that was fantastic. So we wish you obviously the best of luck. All our love to the On The Tape podcast and everything you're going to achieve going forward. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Danny.