That's right. I'm done buying stocks, at least for now, at least for a short time, because I'm trying out a new cash management strategy. It's nothing too complex, but in this episode I'll be going over my thoughts on accumulating and holding cash. Now we have a lot of news today starting off the day. We have Lulu up 4% on the day because of their earnings report. We have the earnings report. We're going to go through it and see how this company's doing so well when other companies are
struggling. Now as Lulu's doing well, we have Disney on the other end, which is struggling. Disney's had such a rough time this year and they seem to be running into more trouble. They're down nearly 3% on the day because they're having a big Tossel with Charter Communication. Charter is a cable Internet provider and cable TV provider. And right now, Charter has literally taken off ABC and ESPN off of their cable network because of this spat with Disney.
And Charter, for lack of a better term, is talking a lot of crap about Disney. They're basically saying that they don't need Disney. They in fact, could be better off without Disney. So this has become a bitter spat between the two companies. We're going to be looking at the
details here now. I also have an announcement that I finally opened up a retirement account, a Roth IRA, and I want to go through the details of how I open this up, what brokerage I used, what a Roth IRA even is, and what investment I hold inside this Roth IRA. So we'll be going over all the details of my retirement account. And then as we know, it's Friday, which means we looked at TikTok to get our best financial advice and life advice in
general. And this individual on TikTok has explained how we can cover one of our most expensive costs, which is food for free. So as always, we have a lot to get into. Let's go ahead and jump right in. Before we get into why I'm done buying stocks, I want to first do a quick shout out for the sponsor of this video. The sponsor is qualtrum.com, the stock analysis tool I've built from the ground up with developers that I used to work with at my day job.
This is a project I've been working on for years and it's part of the Patreon membership. When you type in a ticker symbol to Qualtrum Insights, it gives you all the fundamentals of a company. You have the valuations, the cash flow, the margins of the company, the balance sheet and the dividends, all in a summary at the very top.
So it's very easy to see. And then we have every financial statement of the company portrayed in a visual way, so you can see it over time and study the history of how these companies look. This helps you gauge the cyclicality. We have a longterm history of the dividends of a company and the earnings per share. Most websites only go back to a maximum of 10 years. Qualterm goes back 25 years plus.
So in longer term companies, ones like Apple, you can see revenues going way back to 1985. We also have a list of other features we're continually building out. We have a watch list here where you can add as many watch lists as you want. You can see something called the dip Finder, which is a technical term to show you which of your companies are in a dip or a price surge.
The watch list shows you all the upcoming earnings in order and the relevant news for just those companies that you've selected. And then we also have a portfolio management tool that shows you all different stats about your portfolio, the sector breakdown, your dividend income over time, your upcoming dividends with different charts tracking all different things and of course your holdings table showing you how things are trading. And I have big future plans for
this as well. The next thing that we're building I think is going to be a pretty significant tool. Now the way that you can join Qualtrum and try this out for free with a month long free trial is by going to patreon.com/joseph Carlson and hitting Become a patron. It's a simple $10 a month and you get a one month free trial. I've taken the route that being like Costco having a satisfaction guarantee. If you end up not liking Qualtrim and you're not fully satisfied with it, you get your
money back. You don't pay a dime. So try it out Now you have nothing to lose. I'll throw a link to it in the comments below. Now let's first start off jumping into the reasons that I'm not buying stocks right now. I'm trying to adapt my cash management strategy. Right now I only have $4000 in cash, which don't get me wrong, $4000 is a lot of money. You can do a lot with that money. So I'm not trying to downplay the amount that $4000 is.
But in comparison to my overall portfolio value, which has reached a high of 508 thousand, $4000 is less than 1%. So I'm basically 99% plus invested with this portfolio. Almost 100% invested means I have very little wiggle room of anything I can do if any of my companies have substantial sell offs. For example, on Qualtrim, I'm always looking at the dip Finder, which is a technical analysis way of looking at what companies in a dip or which
company is in a price surge. Right now with the rest of the market, My Portfolio overwhelmingly is in a price surge. All of these companies are going up dramatically into it being the biggest leader right now. This company's really, really taken off and right now it's 25% above it's 200 day moving average. That simply means that Intuit is just going to the moon. This company is making substantial gains. I only put $35,000 into this company and I'm already up
$9200. I've almost surpassed my gains in Microsoft with Intuit in a single year, and I've owned Microsoft for years. So this company is in a price surge that is reflected by this big green bar hair showing how much it's going up. And you can see the same thing with the rest of my holdings. Most of my companies are going up like crazy following the market. Even the ones that are doing poorly this year, Texas Roadhouse and Vici, they're really not doing all that bad.
Texas Roadhouse is down 1% below the 200 day moving average, which basically means it's just flat this year. It has no momentum really going upwards or downwards. Vici's the only one that's in a slight dip. The company's gone down. But keep in mind the dip Finder tracks price movement. It doesn't track the dividend. So if you factor in the dividend, Vici's actually flat this year too. In fact, it's given almost 0% gains or losses this year, entirely flat overall.
The picture that this paints is that My Portfolio is going up. Every single holding is either flat or going up. Now that seems great and it's fun to look back on all the gains and see all the wealth being created And we can sit back here and feel great about what we've accomplished, but that's not really what we should be doing as investors. When I look back and see all these companies making record highs and making gains, what I think is that I need to be a
little bit more cautious. Anytime the market gets a little bit exuberant and it starts to ignore realistic concerns like the economy slowing down, student loan repayments resuming, companies having lots of debt and so on and so forth, It becomes a time where I get a little bit more concerned, a bit more cautious. I don't like to celebrate when other investors are celebrating. I'm trying to remain cold and
calculated. When I look at the situation right now, I think it's a situation that requires prudence and caution. So I've been revisiting my capital deployment strategy and my cash balance strategy right now being 99% invested is incredibly bullish positioning. I basically have every bit of free capital that I have invested in this portfolio. And I think that as the markets going up, I should become slightly more conservative.
When I look at the strategies that other great investors do, most of them do hold a little bit of cash. Warren Buffett, for example, says that he's a believer in cash. He likes cash. In fact, Berkshire had a record cash pile. When we look at the amount of cash that Berkshire had, it was somewhere in the range of $130 billion. It ebbs and flows overtime, but if you position that cash pile against their actual assets, that is a 14% cash pile.
Now to put that in context, if I carried the same amount of cash that Warren Buffett does 14%, that means that I would have roughly $71,000 in cash right now. So that is the cash positioning of Berkshire compared to My Portfolio 4000 compared to 71,000. We are worlds apart in our cash management. Now Berkshire does have extra reasons to hold cash. They have a much bigger complex company.
They have a lot more liabilities with potential insurance payouts, but still other great investors have cash balances as well. One of the things that we notice is that on the 13 F filings, it does not say their cash position, but most investors like Bill Ackman with Pershing Square Capital, he holds a bit of cash, usually 5 to 10% at least. Other great investors like Valley Forge Capital typically hold at a minimum 5% cash
balance. So it's not uncommon at all for great investors throughout all periods of growing their fund to hold a cash balance in case opportunity arises. And it's especially not uncommon for them to hold greater amounts of cash as the market races upwards like it's doing this year. So what I plan to do is not to hold 14% cash. I think that that's really high. That would be me saving up $71,000 in cash and I think that's a bit aggressive. Where I want to be is around 5%
cash, which is around $25,000. So I need to save up an additional $21,000 in cash either through the accumulation of dividends and deposits. It's going to take a while to get there, but that's the goal. And I'll be holding on to this cash until I see something that's incredibly attractively valued within My Portfolio or on my watch list.
If I find something that I think is so good that I can't pass it up, I will spring and use that cash balance just like I did with Intuit. But that's the plan. As of now, I've been trying to find ways to improve my investing strategy throughout all different parts of it. And I think improving my cash management and capital deployment strategy is another way that I can improve and hopefully this will help improve returns over time.
Now moving on, I quickly want to look at Lululemon's earnings report because there was a couple of things I thought were really exceptional about what this company's doing. First of all, the company is doing really well, while a lot of others are struggling. We've seen Nike sell off like crazy and Lululemon's really not having that issue. Let's go ahead and take a look at how their performance was this most recent quarter and this report was just released
today. So we have right here the first thing is that the net revenue, which is just the overall revenue, increased by 18% or 20% on a constant dollar basis. 20% revenue gain is substantial. So Lululemon is growing quickly. Here's what this looks like. Visualized, very consistent, steady revenue growth. The only time that it's dipped in recent history is from COVID. Comparable seam store sales were up 9% on a constant currency basis.
Direct to consumer which is the online was up 17% on a constant dollar basis. Lulu's a company that right now is doing great. They're growing their revenue, they're growing their cash flows. Overtime, we see very strong growth across every segment of their business. Right now. Lululemon's growing substantially faster than Nike, but it's priced at a lower valuation. So as long as this company continues with this level of growth, lululemon will substantially outperform Nike.
But the biggest reason that investors price companies like Lululemon at a lower multiple than Nike, despite it having faster growth and faster fundamental growth, is because Nike has the longterm proven brand value that is the big distinction. When I look at the problem with clothing companies like this, in my opinion, they're very unpredictable. Most of them have their day in the sun where everything seems to be going as good as possible for these companies. And we're seeing this happen
right now with lululemon. It's firing on all cylinders. Everything's going as good as possible. But we've seen this type of thing before. Remember the company called VF Corporation? You probably don't know the parent company, but you might recognize some of the brands they have, brands like Vans, The North Face, Timberland, Dickies. You see all of these brands in
malls all the time. You have Jansport, Supreme, Smart World, Kipling. This company's a conglomerate of once incredibly attractive brands that seem to have the Lulu type of growth. But now we look at it. The company's down 27% year to date. We zoom out in the past year, it's down 50%. The past five years it's down 78%. So the majority of the market cap has completely evaporated for this company that owns all of these great brands. And in the past ten years, it's given -57% returns.
Sure, if you time the company correctly, buying it before its rise and then selling it when it's at the top, you made a lot of money. So maybe investors in Lululemon will be able to accurately time this company, but history has proven that that's very difficult to do. In most cases, investors buy at inopportune times and they end up doing poorly. Another company that once had premium brand value and clothing category was Under Armour.
Under Armour is in constant competition with Nike as being one of the premium athletic wear brands. They try to sponsor athletes and half their stores have the same level of pricing power as Nike. And the company had a very similar story. It's down 22% year to date, down 5.8% over the past year. In the past five years, it's down 62% with a tremendous amount of volatility. And in the past decade, Under Armour has given returns of -57%. And this is a clothing company
that once had great brand value. So even though a company like Lulu has everything going well for it right now, it makes me a little concerned when I view the history of other similar companies. For that reason, this is going to be one that I don't own. Now moving on, we have some breaking news that Charter is having a dispute with Disney. Now that's the euphemism. A dispute or the other
euphemism, which is negotiation. But the true way of describing this is they're having a bitter disagreement. And I'm not going to sit back and pretend like I don't enjoy seeing two giant companies go after each other. I think it's just nice to see two companies battle to the bitter end. And that's what we're seeing with Charter Communication and Disney. Let's look at some of the details here. NFL season is kicking off this Sunday.
So right now NFL season is starting and as that's starting we have ABC and ESPN and FX, all Disney owned content being booted off of Charter. So right now these channels are gone. They're not accessible on Charter. ABC, ESPN, FX, all gone. The most important one is probably ESPN. Having this channel booted off right as football season is starting is really something that puts pressure on Disney.
Now Charter Spectrum TV service has roughly 14.7 million customers across 41 states with some of its top TV markets being New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Fort Worth, TX and Atlanta. So they're dealing with 14 and a half million customers that have lost access to Disney content. This Friday, the Charter executives called the pay TV ecosystem quote broken.
They said that they push for a revamp deal with Disney that would see Charter cable customers receive access to Disney's ad supported streaming services like Disney Plus and ESPN Plus at no additional cost. So basically Charters trying to rewrite the deal and what they believe is updating it for
modern times. Disney's trying to stick to the old times of charging high fees for having their content on cable TV. Basically Disney's wanting to preserve the old cable economics and Charter saying no you're not, this isn't going to fly anymore. Charter believes that Disney has offered a traditional longterm deal and has not seriously engaged on charters transformational partnership proposal insisting on high penetration payment minimums despite its own a la carte
offerings. Forcing Disney channels into packages where they are not included today against customers will. So basically Charter saying that Disney wants Charter to force their content on every customer and charge every customer more for their content even the ones that have no interest in the ESPN or ABC or FX. They want to force them to have that content anyway. A lot of people complain that streaming is expensive, but All in all, at least you get to choose and pick what you pay
for. You can pay for Netflix and you can pay for Max. You can pay for Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV Plus, or you can mix and match any of them. That is the streaming way, where you can segment and pay for the specific streaming services you want. With cable TV, you have to buy everything all at once, all the time. There's no picking and choosing what you want. Charters trying to update their offering to make it so you can pick and choose what you want.
Disney does not want them to do that. They say Disney's traditional approach would result in a dramatic increase in cost to customers, many of whom don't view, want or even subscribe to Disney and ESPN content. Charter has also offered a shorter extension of the current contract to further discuss the benefits of Charter's proposal, which Disney declined. Now, that last one's surprising.
Basically, Charter just said that they want to extend the contract temporarily while they're in negotiations so they don't disrupt their customers. And then the big take away here is that Charter seems done with Disney, they say. In summary, while we believe content is valuable and Disney is an excellent content creator, we have already reached the
point of economic indifference. With the current model, Disney and Charter will either create value for the video consumer or we will pivot to an alternative video solutions. Charter is done with Disney's tactics. Disney's trying to strong arm Charter and Charter saying that they don't care. Now you might ask who's going to win and who's going to lose in this situation, and the truth is, is that both of them are losing. That's why both of their stock prices are lower.
Disney's down 2.2%, Charter's down 2.8%, and when it comes down to it, what they're trying to do is fight over the economics of an ever shrinking pie. Less and less people watching cable TV every single year, Charter knows that, so they're not too concerned about it. They provide Internet as well. But Disney seems to be set in the past. They want to have the same type of relationship, the same type of distribution, and the same type of arrangements and agreements that they had ten
years ago. And it doesn't seem like that's going to work now. Moving on, I've had a lot of requests of people wanting to know about my retirement account and I've recently just started a retirement account this year, so I want to go over all the details right now. First of all, I decided to start what's called a Roth IRAA. Roth IRA is an individual retirement account where the contributions, what you put in, that's from taxable income.
But when you pull the money out later in retirement, you can pull that money out and any of the gains taxfree. So it is a tax advantage account, and it's an individual account that's not linked to your employer. Now, it does have all sorts of limitations and cash contribution limitations based on your income and your marriage status and all of that stuff. In my case, I was above the income contribution limit, which means that I had to do something
extra. I had to do what's called a backdoor Roth IRA, which means that I had to create two accounts, a Traditional IRA and a Roth IRA. And then I had to 1st put the money in the Traditional IRA and then I had to do an account transfer where I move the assets from the traditional into the Roth. That is a backdoor Roth IRA. Now, why does the government force you to do this extra step if you're above a certain level
of income? There's really no rhyme or reason to it. The end is the exact same, but it's just one additional step you have to do if you make a certain amount of money. Now as you can see, this isn't on M1 Finance. It looks a little bit different. That's because this is on a brokerage called Schwab, one of the big ones, along with Fidelity and Vanguard.
The reason that I chose to do this on Schwab instead of M1 Finance was simply because I have almost all of my finances on M1 Finance. I currently have over $650,000 in value on M1 Finance, and I thought it might be good just to have a bit of diversification and have one retirement account on a different brokerage. So I'm not really concerned about M1 Finance. I have no reason to be concerned about it, but I thought it's good practice to have more than
one brokerage. Now as you may also notice, I only have one position in this portfolio. I made it very simple. I just purchased an ETF called SCHG. That's it. I put $6500 into the account. That's the most I can do This year I bought 87 shares of SCHG. It's gone up to $150.00 already. So it's around $6750 so far, which is less than 1% of my total investments if you added up all of my portfolios.
So this still is a very small amount of money compared to what I have going into my other portfolios, but I've decided to put all of that money into SCHG and I want to go over that ETF for a second. First of all, the age at which you can start withdrawing money from your Roth RA is 59 1/2, meaning that as a 33 year old, I have 26.5 years until I'll be able to touch this money. 26 1/2 years of time for this, the compound before I even start to do a single cell, a single
withdraw. So that's a lot of time. Now when I was thinking about that amount of time and the amount of compounding that can happen over that amount of time, I wanted to focus on companies that I think will move a great distance between now and then growth companies. So I looked over a lot of different funds. There are ones like QQQ, which has done phenomenally well, but there's things that I didn't like about the QQQ. The thing that I really didn't like about the QQQ is it's based
upon the NASDAQ. Meaning every company that the QQQ holds has to be listed on the NASDAQ. Otherwise it simply doesn't hold that company. For example, we can look at MasterCard. MasterCard is not listed on the NASDAQ, it's listed on the New York Stock Exchange. So MasterCard, despite being an incredibly powerful company, one that's growing tremendously fast, it's not listed on the QQQ.
QQQ doesn't hold MasterCard. The QQQ doesn't hold visas well because it's listed on the New York Stock Exchange. So both of these companies are in the SP500, but they're not on the QQQ simply because the QQQ is biased towards its own exchange, which is the NASDAQ. That's its selection criteria. And I believe that that artificial boundary of only picking between an exchange is not good portfolio construction.
Now schg is different. It is Schwab's US Large Cap Growth ETF and its selection criteria is far less biased than the QQQ and it's far more logical. Here's a description from FactSet of how SCHG works. SCHG is a diverse ETF for large cap growth exposure. It selects growth companies from the 750 largest companies by capitalization based on 6 fundamental factors, which include projected earnings growth as well as trailing
revenue and earnings growth. Because it's drawing from a larger selection universe than our benchmark, SCHG has a significant mid cap tilt. Nevertheless, it provides similar exposure across broader set of holdings. The index rebalances quarterly and undergoes an annual reconstitution in September. So when we look at the amount of holdings in SCG, it's around 240 holdings and the names in this portfolio are really fast growing names.
We have Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, Google, Tesla, Meta, United Health Group, which is also not in the QQQ, but that's a fast growing company. We have Eli, Lilly. We have Visa, Broadcom, MasterCard, Adobe, Costco, Salesforce, Thermo, Fisher, Scientific, Netflix, so on and so forth. As you go down this list, you have many recognizable growth companies. So what I plan on doing with this Roth RA is pretty simple.
Every year I'm going to put $6500 in it, I'm going to buy more schg and that's it. There's going to be nothing else I do with this portfolio, and if I do things correctly, I'll literally never concern myself or look at this account. I want it to silently be building in the background. So even though I have my primary investment portfolios, I think it's good to have a retirement account working in the
background as well. The way that I think about it is I'm trying my best with this portfolio. I'm putting my best behind the research with these companies, trying to find the best investments possible, and I do think I'll have really good performance. But if I screw things up or things don't go well with this portfolio, then I have my retirement account working in
the background. So even if things go dramatically wrong with my individual investments, I'll still have a retirement with my Roth IRA. Now moving on, you know what day it is? It's Friday. Every Friday we look to TikTok to get the best financial advice. And this individual has some input on how to save money on food. Let's go ahead and hear his strategy. Your biggest expense in New York City is going to be food, and I got away. You could eat for free the best food.
You got love it what you do, you stand in front of a nice building, people that work at nice buildings eat food, they order delivery guys and you act like you're on your phone. You, you know, hey, you save a bunch of big numbers. You know, I want the compound interest, dividends. And when you see these delivery guys pull up, you give them that sign and interest on it. Now that's brilliant.
You just stand in front of a building, pretend like you're one of the workers there, and then you flag down one of the delivery people. They hand you the food. Now, I might be critical of this and you might think that this is a joke, but this type of thing has actually been happening a
lot. In fact, when I was doing my research on Chipotle and looking into that company before making the purchase, one of the things I came across was a lot of people mentioning that the mobile pickup shelves that they have in every store, well, a lot of people are just going in and grabbing random meals and leaving ones that they that weren't theirs and ones that they didn't pay for. They weren't even pretending like it was theirs.
But people walking away with other people's orders is so commonplace now among Chipotle pickup that a lot of the locations are putting the meals behind the counter and you have to give them your name to confirm you're the one who paid for it. So this tip seems accurate. If you want some free food, stand in front of a building like this and pretend that you order DoorDash. That's all for this episode. I'll see you in the next one.