Don’t Waste This Opportunity

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.