¶ Intro
Welcome back, everybody. Thanks for joining. In this episode. We have a lot to go over. Like always first of all, there's over 400 companies reporting earnings this week. It's going to shape a lot of the market. We've had this huge run-up in prices of companies, the markets gone up a lot and we're going to see why there are a lot of this is Justified. So these companies are going to report earnings if they're not where they should be. I think that we're going to see
a little bit of a pullback. These companies don't have perfect earnings. I think we're going to see a bit of a pullback because we saw what And to Netflix, Netflix had an awesome quarter, they gained 10 million subscribers and they still had a huge pull back because their earnings weren't precisely what estimates had the mat. So if this is the case, if these companies they can do well but they just can't do perfect. And the stock price will drop
five or six percent. I think that that's not a good sign for the market but we're going to see a lot of these companies are reporting every day of the week. We have companies like Microsoft American Express, Twitter, so on and so forth, so we'll see what happens outside.
¶ Portfolio Overview
App. We have my portfolio. Is that a value of a hundred and five thousand dollars. The gains are 4700. They've been struggling lately over the past week. I've gained about half of that about 1.9 percent, which is two thousand dollars, but, overall, my portfolio has suffered from being mostly value. Stocks, mostly dividend growth value stocks. And most of the attention has been on Tech.
That's where everybody's wanted to be is intact because this is a little bit of an eye-opening thing mostly. When you look, At growth stocks and these high P/E ratio stocks, you're thinking risk, you're thinking these companies have a high amount of risk, but what we found with the coronavirus is that the companies that have been growing, a lot seem to have the least amount of risk as well companies, like Amazon, and apple, and Microsoft, these ones with these huge balance sheets.
They're doing fine during this this crazy time. They're doing just fine. Meanwhile, the companies with the low P/E ratios, the ones with high amount of cash flow, low P/E ratio, like real estate. Nobody wants to own. That that's been trading down like crazy. Nobody wants real estate. Nobody wants to be touching finances right now. They don't want Banks. Those are scary. They're highly leveraged, even utilities, which is mostly a safe play has not done as great
as it usually does. People don't want to own Telecom. People don't want to own Industrials, people certainly don't want yucky energy companies. So this is what we're seeing all these Dow Jones value stocks have not done. Well, this year, the Dow Jones is down about 7 percent year-to-date. Date while the NASDAQ is up 15 percent year-to-date, which is mostly tech companies. So what I've been doing with my portfolio is I've been trying to
balance things out a bit. I'm trying to expand Tech while finding the best value in Tech. The ones that have the best opportunity for the future as well as the lowest multiples. The ones that I think are the best value within that I've made a heavy bet on Apple, not everybody agrees with this.
In fact, I received an email shortly after my last episode saying the In valuation of Apple, that was a subject line of it. Their argument is that apple is not worth one point seven trillion dollars. So we're going to be looking at this email. I think it's a good argument. He makes you pretty much Compares Apple to every other leading company in that industry and he tries to compare the value between the two. So we'll look at this and see if apples at an insane valuation.
But other than Apple, I have Microsoft. I have visa and I included, MasterCard. I like these companies Visa Mastercard because I think they're mostly tech companies and Secondarily finance companies. They don't run like Banks. They're not traditional finance companies that lend out money. I think they're mostly tech companies now visa and MasterCard for my duopoly and I think it's a game where they
always win. I don't see scenarios where Visa, Mastercard, don't win whether PayPal and venmo wins or Square and cash app. Either way, at the end of the day, MasterCard. And Visa are going to do really well. So this is the growth of my tech portion of my portfolio. I'm going to continue to grow this out. It has a lower. Dividend payment. But I'm sacrificing that to have a better defensive portfolio. I want to have more balance
right now. If I look over all about 70% of my portfolios and value about 30% is in growth. And what I want to do is shift it to where it's more 50/50 so that whether the NASDAQ is doing well or whether the Dow Jones is doing well, in either case, my portfolio does well because I have the best companies of each different index. So, that's the goal. That's the direction. I've been going. I've been selecting what I think are the best companies out there in these days.
Different sectors. The best growth companies in the best. Value companies, for instance, in finance. I'm doing a heavy bet on JP Morgan. I'm probably going to be selling out of some of these companies to put more money into JPMorgan because because I listened to their earnings report this last week and they were fine. They were profitable, they put a lot of money aside for future losses and case that happens. So even if the economy goes south, I think JP Morgan will
continue to go through this. Okay, they won't destroy Book value. They won't have to sell off valuable assets. I think. Bank will come out very strong. So I'm going to be putting more money into JP Morgan. This is more of a risky bet but I think this company will come out strong and eventually be trading back at 130, 140 dollars a share where it was previous to this year. So, so that's been the overall direction. I've been taking my portfolio.
I'm keeping the value. I have a lot of money in value right now, but I'm trying to build out the growth portion of it to make it more balanced. So that'll be something I continue to do in the future building out these growth Holdings, building out the tech Holdings. These really E large defensive tech companies that have the really big cash on hand, like apple that has 200 billion dollars in cash. I'm trying to buy more of those companies because I think that we have seen in 2020.
They seem to be the defensive companies. They seem to be the ones that people go to during a downturn. So I still have a lot of value. If value does return, if the Dow Jones does have some kind of surge upwards, you're going to see these gains go up. So I still have a lot of exposure to Value but now I have some exposure to growth as well. And I think this will be over. All a better portfolio. I also point out if you haven't noticed, I don't have any more
bonds. I sold out of bonds completely. I put a lot of that money into the tech sector and I did. So for a couple reasons, one of them, I'll go to Ray dalio an interview here and he can explain part of the reason why I don't own bonds anymore. Think of it this way. You don't want cash. Because and and I don't think you want bonds because you you get no interest rate, you get a negative real rates. So you get taxed at that - real rate and then so from a holding point of view.
It's got no return. And then the central bank's go to print, plenty more of it and produce it. Apply. So there's a move to what is a store? Hold of wealth, you know, think about it, you know, like all of us. What is a good store? Hold of wealth. And if you look at history through times, it's basically almost the reciprocal of the value of money. And we see that from financing then it's equities. It's gold. Its, it is. What is the thing that is the reciprocal of the value of money
that you have to hold? Hold, you know, your wealth in. And so that's what we're seeing. He's basically saying that the return of Hans is negative because of inflation they pay out less than interest than inflation. Is likely going to be and He suggests putting your money in equities which have better tools to deal with inflation. And that's exactly what I'm doing. My portfolio is now 100% equities. I don't have any bonds. It'll be interesting to see what
happens. This will make it more volatile. If you want to hold bonds, that will certainly make your portfolio a little bit more stable, but I have a longer Runway. I have decades that I'm going to be investing. So I'm okay doing 100% Equity. If we have another big downturn. If the market drops, another 30%, I can make it through it. Now. There's an updated Link in the description of this video.
If U, want to see all the Holdings that I've been buying and selling out of, I have every single holding in that link.
¶ Twitter was hacked
Now, moving on to some news. We have to talk about Twitter being hacked. Here's a clip from CNN Joe Biden. Today, assured his supporters. He'll never asked them to send him Bitcoin, cryptocurrency for donations, that comes after Biden's verified Twitter account. And those of many other famous people were compromised by hackers.
A devastating attack. They got to the accounts of former President Obama. Bill Gates, Elon Musk other celebrities like Kim Kardashian West, and Kanye West and companies like apple and Uber, and they did it. Twitter says, by doing what's called social engineering. Now, this is actually crazy, Twitter had one of their admin accounts, one of their employees had access to manipulate and tweet out basically every single Twitter account. He got hacked and he got hacked through.
What's called social? Engineering, which is a fancy term for saying that he was tricked. He was manipulated into giving up his credentials and to hackers. Once they got it. They either used some way of admin dashboard, to tweet things out or they use password resets, or something like that, the gain access to all these high-profile accounts, Bill Gates, and Kanye West, and Elon musk's. And they use that to tweet out a Bitcoin scam. Here is a screenshot of what
they tweeted out. It says, this one's from Elon Musk, but a lot of it was the same from all these accounts. Grateful doubling all payments sent to my Bitcoin address. You spend $1000. I send back, two thousand dollars only doing this for the next 30 minutes and then he linked to bitcoin address that you could send it to. I have that part blocked out just because I don't want to be sharing a scammers Bitcoin address, but you might think
this raises some red flags. When I first saw this, I thought this raises some red flags. That looks a lot like Elon musk's account was hacked and then you actually see the replies and many people sending him money. Here's one from Will. Saying sent and he has a screen shot of him sending one thousand dollars worth of bitcoin to that address. It's crazy.
But a lot of people did this. They received hundreds of people sending it. In fact, it was over a hundred and forty thousand dollars worth of bitcoin sent to this address. Here's a screen shot that I took. When it was only 135 transactions. It was Thirty one thousand dollars received. And then it went on for a while 178 transactions, 4.5 Bitcoin received which was like 40 or 50 thousand dollars. It went up all the way to Hundred and forty thousand
dollars. That's how many people fell victim to this scan and Twitter can consider themselves lucky. They can consider themselves lucky that all these hackers wanted to do was make a little money. That's all they wanted to do. And they weren't financially sophisticated because if they wanted, they could have made a lot more money and they could have caused a lot more damage.
What I wanted to do was go through some of these accounts and pretend for a minute that we have access to them where hackers and we want to make a lot of money. Money and we want to stir up a lot of trouble. So let's just go through and make up some pretend tweets. These are all completely fake. But let's just pretend for a second that were hackers. And this is what we tweet out. How do you think people would respond?
The first one is from Elon Musk? And again, this is completely fictional Ilan, didn't tweet this. This is somewhat, the hackers tweeted. This is just something. I think that they could have tweeted out that would have caused a lot more drama from Elon musk's account. They could have tweeted. I'm stepping down from Tesla effective immediately. What do you think that would have caused with Tesla's share price? It would have caused it to tank.
They could have opened up a short position on Tesla and said that Elon Musk is stepping down. Now, imagine this on Brock Obama's account. They could have tweeted out. I'm changing my support to President Trump. Trump 2020 Maga for Joe Biden's. Imagine them tweeting out. I have tested positive for Coronavirus for Kanye West's. I actually did try to think of a crazy tweet for Kanye West, it could cause a lot of problems. And I honestly couldn't come up
with anything. He tweets out so many crazy things. Anyways that everything I thought of, I thought, well, I mean he's tweeted out crazier things in that. So Kanye West I really could not think of anything that they could have done to cause too many issues. And then for Jeff Bezos I did think of on I thought is pretty good. They could have tweeted out on Jeff.
Bezos is account. Thank you for your continued support of Amazon. I'm really excited to hit a net worth of over 200 billion dollars. Now, I joke around, it's funny to think of what if these tweets were sent out, what would happen? But in Ality, this is a significant security concern. These hackers could have tweeted out all these hypothetical tweets. That could have been reality. Luckily. They didn't, luckily, they just wanted some Bitcoin money and they didn't do this, but that
was the possibility. This is a big enough deal that not only to Twitter, open their own internal investigation, but the FBI is also investigating this. They consider it a national security concern. They have these type of high-profile accounts, be hacked, and people able to send any type of message. Is a little bit scary because Twitter is often used to State policy or major events. So the FBI is looking into it. Hopefully, they catch the scammers.
There's not much that I hate worse than scammer. So hopefully they catch them. But the FBI is investigating it. The stock price really hasn't been affected that much. Twitter released a statement saying were embarrassed. We're disappointed and more than anything. We're sorry. Okay.
¶ Tesla proving people wrong
Now before moving on to emails, I want to touch on one subject, which is Tesla. This is a company. I talked about in the previous episode. I think the company has had a Good. Run up. I think it's priced pretty high. I think it's kind of expensive right now. It's worth about 280 billion dollars which is worth a lot more than Toyota. So it's expensive but it's a great company. So you're balancing those two things with each other. Now, Tesla has its earnings report. This Wednesday.
That's an important day. If it's in the green, if the company is profitable and it has another profitable quarter, it could mean a lot for the company. The people that are Advocates of it that are behind this company are going to be very excited. I could see the share price race up even more and it could get up to two thousand dollars a share with how quickly this company moves. I could see that happening. So there's a lot of
make-or-break with this company. What I wanted to do was just highlight how consistently wrong analysts and people have been around Tesla in the previous episode. I shared a clip from someone named as W Amador in this is a valuation expert. This is what he does is he values companies and in this clip he talks about how he wouldn't buy Tesla at fifteen hundred dollars a share. I'll play the quick. /. I would not buy Tesla at at 1400
1450 wherever its trading. It's like a moving Target, but I would not call somebody advice test like crazy. He says that he wouldn't buy it at fifteen hundred dollars a share, but he wouldn't say the people that are buying are crazy. He just doesn't buy into the narrative at esli. He doesn't think the story has a really solid chance of playing out the way people expect.
Now. He says that he wouldn't buy at fifteen hundred dollars a share, but let's rewind a little bit and look at his thoughts on Tesla at the beginning of the year. Here. He is. February 13th of 2020. We have Tesla brought up again. And as with gives his current thoughts on the valuation of Tesla, which at the time, the share price was 781 dollars. A share. So roughly half of what it currently trades at, listen to his thoughts. And keep in mind. This is half. The current price.
Tesla currently trades at that said, though, for this dog to justify the price. You need to tell a really, really big story. The way I've described it is, you need to give it Volkswagen. Revenue 300 billion about 10 years. You need to give it margins like apple and you need to have a company that invests like no other manufacturing company has before. He says that the story is possible but implausible that they would need the revenue of Volkswagen and the margins of
Apple that was early this year. So this wasn't too long ago. When Tesla was seven hundred eighty one dollars a share. Now. Let's go back, even further. Let's go all the way back to 2017. This is May 5th of 2017. This is as W, giving. His opinion on the valuation of Tesla during that time. And whether he would buy the stock, let's listen to this audio. There's a value game and I'm going to surprise you while I wouldn't buy Tesla at 295 at 300. There are plausible ways of
getting there. I mean, it's not a slam dunk over valuation from that perspective but to get there it's going to take some work. I mean, here's what they have to do. They have to deliver about a hundred billion dollars in revenues in a decade. They've got to be able to do that while delivering tech company margins and investing like a tech company. Can they pull it off? Well, some people seem to believe they can. I am skeptical, but I think there is a way to get to that that valuation.
So even back in 2017 as with was basically saying the same thing that Tesla had to have all of these remarkable things happen in order to justify its value. And that's when it was currently two hundred ninety, six dollars a share. That'd be a complete still right now with it being fifteen,
hundred dollars a share. Now. The reason that I bring this up is not to pick on as with there's plenty of people like him that are Smart people that have been skeptical of Tesla over the past couple years. What I want to point out is that Tesla has consistently proven people wrong. This is a stock that people have been skeptical of and it's just continued to perform really well. So, I hope that continues. I don't own the stock, but I hope it the best.
I hope this Wednesday that they blow away their earnings report and the stock goes up to two thousand dollars. It would be pretty incredible to see. Okay. Let's get into some emails and
¶ The insane valuation of Apple
Joseph at Joseph Carlson show.com., That's the email address Joseph. At Joseph, Carlson show.com. If you want to email in and ask different questions or bring up different subjects or stocks will talk about it here. Now. The first one is from Jack. He writes in with the subject line, the insane valuation of apple. He says, in your last episode episode 103 you stated. The Apple was worth one point. Seven trillion dollar market cap because it is not only a
hardware company. It is a Healthcare Company. It is a finance company. It's a movie production company. It's a wearables and activewear company and it's a phone company. That's correct. That's part of my argument for apple, is that I see them as somewhat of a Healthcare Company because they have the Apple watch. They monitor your health, a lot of people justify, buying the Apple watch specifically for
their health. They're going to be doing sleep tracking and different things like that, that I think people will really value. They also are a finance company because they're going into online payments. They have the Apple card, you know, there are movie production company because they have Apple TV, plus their wearables and activewear company because they have the are pods and the Apple watch. And of course, there are phone company. So that was my main argument.
I'm saying apples more than just a phone company. They control a lot of different segments. Now it goes on with this email and he says the market cap of the top companies in each of these industries. So he takes the biggest company in each of the industries. I listed and lists off their market cap. Intel has a point to four trillion dollar market. Cap. J&J has a .38, JPMorgan has a point two nine. Disney has a point to Spotify
has a point zero. 05 Lululemon has a point zero four and Samsung has a point three and he says, so if Apple was a conglomerate made up of all the leaders in each of these spaces, you defined by combined Book value. It would be only worth 1 Point 5 3 trillion dollars. He says, what's even more absurd about this valuation is when you compare post tax profits of this year, 2019 with apples post, tax profits of the same year, which was 55 billion.
The post tax profits of the companies was until was 21 billion. J&J was sixteen billion. JP Morgan was 36 billion. Disney was seven billion. Spotify was .15, Lululemon was point 64 and he doesn't have any data for Samsung. He says so let's say you have one point seven trillion dollars laying around and you wanted to buy either apple or these seven separate companies.
You would earn fifty five billion a year by buying apple and you would earn over a billion dollars a year by buying the seven companies with Samsung making no money. It says sorry I couldn't. Find the data for Samsung. My question. How in the name of God? Satan and Zeus everything. That is Holy Unholy and in between. Can you justify the valuation of Apple at one point seven trillion dollars, sincerely in the name of your loyal fan Jack. Well Jack, this is a good email.
So I appreciate you writing in and I appreciate you being a loyal fan. So I'll try to give you a good answer. Basically, when I compare Apple to the different companies, you listed off like Intel and J&J and JP Morgan. I think that those are all great companies, but I don't think that they have the Team moat that Apple has Apple has this enormous moat a lot of people that I know their decision when they're buying a new phone is not what new phone. Am I going to get?
That's not their decision. Their decision is what new iPhone am I going to get? That's really their question is what new iPhone am I going to buy most of the people that I know that own an iPhone have literally zero interest in moving over to Android no interest at all. Android could come out with almost anything and they will stay with the eye. IPhone, because the iPhones been consistent. They already have the ecosystem. They have the apps. They're familiar with the tools.
They like the customer support. They like everything about it. So they end up staying and iPhone can just continue to iterate a little bit of a better version with a better camera with a better screen and so on and people continue to buy them. So I think that's a big part of it. Is Apple has this enormous brand loyalty that keeps people in its ecosystem. Compare that to Intel this Intel have this enormous. Note this enormous fan loyalty of their products. I don't think so.
There might be some tech junkies that really like Intel for some reason but I think for the most part people, just buy whatever processor is the best. So I don't think Intel has nearly the same type of loyalty or moat that Apple does. And you could say the same for Jay and Jay, Jay Jay is a great company. I have it in my portfolio, but I don't see anybody saying I have to by J&J health care products and nothing else. They have some brand loyalty.
They have some brand awareness, but I don't see everybody's saying they only need J&J products. They don't get wrapped into an ecosystem of J&J. The same thing for JPMorgan. It's a great bank. It's well Diversified. As a lot of different parts to it, that make money is definitely not going to be making 36 billion dollars over the next year. That was 2019. Just their quarterly earnings
was cut in half. So, the volatility of banks is a lot more than Apple, but even so if they did make 36 billion dollars, JP Morgan, I still don't think has the same type of Customer Loyalty that Apple has. There's not as many people. I see that say they just love JPMorgan and they have to have every product they come out with.
I don't see that at all and I see that all the time with Apple. So again, huge differences there with Disney. This is one company where I actually do, see the same level of brand loyalty as Apple. There are a lot of people that have to see everything that Disney comes out with. So I think that is one where they have comparable brand loyalty, but Disney's operating, A business right now. That's really struggling. So, that companies going through a lot Spotify.
I think, is a good comparison to Apple music. I think Spotify is worth more than the Apple music segment of their business. So that's what I think is a fair comparison Lululemon. I don't even think is closed. That's an active wear company but apples making watches in are pods, which I don't really see comparable to Lululemon. So to answer your main question, if I had one point seven trillion dollars just laying around and I wanted to buy either apple or all these individual companies.
What would I buy? That would really be a difficult question? I don't know. What I would do in that situation. I might want to own Apple though. I just think that it has an enormous amount more so than companies like like JPM or J&J or Intel. I think apple has a better moment than those companies. It still makes a lot of money. 55 billion dollars is a lot of money and it has 200 billion dollars in cash. It's in Tech, which is a good sector to be in right now.
So I would feel fine owning Apple, but I'm glad I don't have to be in that situation. That'd be a tough choice. I think diversification is a good thing. I do. Hold a lot of these companies. I hold J&J. I hold JP Morgan and I hold Disney. So I like being able to have my exposure to all these companies and not have all my wealth in one place. Jeremy says, hi Joseph.
¶ Is Apple becoming more of a software company
I really love your show and the work that you do. I was surprised to hear that you work in software development. I recently graduated at 31 with my degree in computer, science after working as an electrician for a few years. Congratulations on graduating. Since firstly, my wife and I have Recently started investing in M1 and following the same style of investment strategy that you espouse.
We are both in our early 30s and I find it kind of frustrating to know that none or very little of this information that you and others provide online isn't part of the standard education. Curriculum and the public school system that makes you and me both Jeremy. He says we routinely talk about how much better off our finances would be right now. Had there been mandatory classes in high school specifically geared towards personal finance. We live in a capitalist Society.
So to us, it stands to reason that the public education system in that Society should teach the basics of how to operate financially within the confines of such a society. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this idea. Secondly, in your previous episode. You mentioned. That apple is transitioning from being a hardware company to being a software company. The my eyes, they aren't transitioning at all.
Given the fact that they just announced that they're moving all of their Max to their own silicone over the next two years, which will mean, almost all their Hardware is specifically designed by them. I'm not sure that's a signal that they're transitioning to software. Did you mean that they're transitioning? Their largest source of income towards software? Can you explain? And clarify this point? Well Jeremy as far as your first point goes, I agree 100%, It is
frustrating. If you look back and you didn't have the proper knowledge and you make huge mistakes because of that. And you talk about the public school system, not teaching enough about Finance. Think about people as well, many times the cases is that kids that are 18 years old. Old, they go to college, they take out the biggest loans, they can because they have no concept of high interest loans. They have no concept of
compounding interest. So they take out these high-interest loans from banks that give them the money. They don't do any verification, what they're actually studying is going to make any money. So in many cases, these students have a huge amount of debt that they can't bankrupt out of them. And then they go to school and they get a job, that makes an okay wage, not really enough to pay back their loan. They had no concept of how Called it was going to be to pay
back. They have no concept of compounding interest. None of this was taught. So I feel like we're setting up a lot of people for failure. Letting them go into college taking out, huge amounts of debt, that they're going to be strapped with for the next 10 years. So there's a lot of things I would change. I would teach a lot more Finance in high school to prepare people for college to say.
Hey, as you're going to college, take out, a modest amount of debt only take out a lot of debt if you're going into extremely high paying Fields. So yeah, there's a lot of things out. Change with that. Now, as far as your second question, you say that you don't think that apple is transitioning to software and services because they decided to make their own silicone. I don't think that that's a big deal.
I think apples doing what they have done previously, which is they're going to design this and they're going to push the market to use it. The same type of thing. When they decided they're not going to use Adobe Flash. They just said they're not going to do that. And the rest of the market adapted around them. This is the power of Apple. They can decide to do something and the rest of the market. We'll work around it. They will migrate over to whatever Apple decides to do.
So that's what they've done before. I think they're doing the same thing. Now. I actually think this is a good thing for Apple. They don't have to rely on until they can do all of this in house. They don't have to rely on Intel for deadlines or anything or for Innovation. They can do all of it themselves. So I think this will make it a little bit more controlled for them. They're really good at designing Hardware.
So I don't think it will be any different for this and as far as the growth of their software and services, This is what I'm talking about and 2014, Apple had 4.4 billion dollars in quarterly revenue from their services in 2019. They had thirteen point three five billion. So they've been growing this overtime at a pretty good Pace. They've been growing their services at about 13 percent year over year. So I think it will become a bigger and bigger portion of their company.
Okay. Well, I'm going to go ahead and end this episode there. I appreciate all of you for listening for sharing the channel, thumbs up, and the videos and subscribing. All of that good stuff. Thanks for everybody. That does that if you want to chat between now and the next episode, I'm on the Discord basically every day. So you can check that out. There's a link in the description. Otherwise, I will see you guys next time.