Welcome back to the Joseph, Carlson show. That is correct. I did make a large sale. I sold 15,000 dollars of one of my favorite companies ever, which is VG. And in this episode. I'll be explaining why. Now? We also have some other news will be getting to Target. For example, just this morning, slashed guidance again the second time in three weeks. So, if you recall Target, just a month ago, / guidance and they were down, Twenty Eight percent in one day. Just one day, they felt 28%.
Now this morning, they Slashed guidance. Again, they started the day down 6%, They're starting to recover a little bit companies, so far have not had earnings revisions downwards. But this is starting to happen. Target is now saying that their margins, their operating margins are going from a 5% to a two percent. That is a huge move in projected margins which hurts the profitability of the company. So we'll be jumping into this news, the Market's reaction, and what this means for other
companies in your portfolio. Now, I also have some apple news. Apple is still my largest holding in my portfolio. We have some About their VR headset, surprise surprise. It's going to be heavily integrated into the Apple ecosystem. And I think more integrated Than People realize. So, we'll go over some of those Integrations that Apple's going to be doing. And then, of course, we had the worldwide developer conference. This is something that a lot of Apple Fanboys and apple enthusiasts.
Look forward to where they announced a lot of the software Focus Features like being able to edit and completely remove text messages or iMessages. So now you'll be able to actually undo an iMessage. They also Announced a new version of their MacBook Air, which is their best selling MacBook. So, this is an important update and overall. It looks pretty good. So we have all of that. Apple news.
We have the target news and retailers and we have why I sold v g. So we have a lot to get to in this episode. I think you're going to enjoy it. Let's go ahead and Jump Right In now. Let's start off with the Vici sale. I want to go ahead and explain this. So, in my passive income portfolio, I invest in dividend growth companies. And one of them that I've been the most excited about in the most enthusiastic about Past year and a half is a real estate
investment. Trust, a fancy way of just saying a publicly traded real estate stock. They have certain rules that other companies don't have, but it's basically all it is. It's a real estate company that you invest, in, you buy shares of. And then you get the rent that they get from their tenants. Whenever they get paid rent. They have to pay out 90% of that rent as dividends to you the shareholder and in exchange for that these companies get very favorable tax treatment from the
government. So, in whole these companies Don't pay a lot in taxes. That's a real estate investment trust. Now, among these different Real Estate Investment Trust. There's ones that are in tried-and-true. Categories have been around for a very long time. The one that most dividend investors initially go to his realty, income Corp. This company's been around for a very long time. It's beaten the market since its IPO year-over-year.
It pays a dividend every single month and that is what this company does. It's done monthly dividend paying company. Now I held realty, income Corp for some time and I later sold the company in favor of EG.
I saw better opportunity there another company that I held at the same time was store Capital. This is a little bit younger of a company started by Christopher Volk who was later removed a CEO and at one time even Warren Buffett was invested in this company, but he sent sold his stake store Capital, had a different investment thesis, rather than focusing on high quality. They focused on high yield and rather than focusing on a Mote, they focused on diversification.
Now, this company's great. It has its merits, but I saw better opportunity with Vici the way that I found out about vici. By visiting Vegas. I went in the summer of 2021 and at the time it was just so busy. There are so many people there and this is when people were supposed to be scared of covid. So this is kind of in the midst of it and I thought, wow,
there's a lot of demand here. And when I looked at the various investment opportunities between the different casinos, I came up with their real estate owner that seem to be buying up all over the Vegas Strip and was this company called Vici.
They already own Caesars Palace and they were under agreement, the by the Venetian, which is one of the most Quality places on the Vegas Strip and that's when I started to research this company and the more I researched it, the more I liked it, come August 8th of 2021. I came up with a video highlighting my entire Bowl thesis on VG.
The reason that I'm buying the company and I went through a number of catalysts, a number of things that I think would cause the fundamentals to improve and the company's stock price to move up. One of them is that they're growing they're a FF 0 which is like a company growing their earnings, right? It's almost their free cash flow year-over-year and H-he's a ffo was growing at a time that every other real estate companies was shrinking.
Every other company was having a difficult time simply collecting rent, VG was collecting 100 percent of rent and growing their a ffo by 12% per year. That is substantial most Roots, grow their ffo somewhere in the range of 2 to 4 percent per year. So 12% is rapid VG. Was diversifying their Tena base at the time. Just last year, VG was heavily concentrated into Caesars Caesars made up like 80% Of their rents, so they had a problem. Anytime.
You have one customer one tenant, making up that big of a portion of your revenue and your income. That's problematic because you're heavily reliant on how that customer does is a business, but they were diversifying away from Caesars. They're buying MGM which would diversify almost their rents in half. So 40 percent came from MGM 40, percent came from Caesars and then they're doing all different deals outside of that after these catalysts would increase their cash flow to 500 million
in cash. After Ping. The dividends Avicii would be, well, positioned to continue doing a creative deals. And another thing that virtue is trying to improve at this time. Just last year is that they had a sub investment-grade balance sheet, which means that they're not as credit, worthy as other REITs, and they have a higher cost of capital getting loans was more expensive. So that was something else that they're trying to improve was getting that investment-grade balance sheet.
And then the final Catalyst, the final goal for VG and what this all culminated to was getting positioned for SP inclusion. This is I outlined right there as I think the final goal of all of this. So this is my thesis in 2021. Summarized VG was a high quality company that possessed a large moat because of the uniqueness of their buildings, VG has a high quality competent management team. I even got the opportunity to speak with the CEO.
I asked him not softballs. I asked him Hardball questions. Specific questions about risks and concerns, and valuation and all different things with the company and you had extremely competent answers for A single question, I threw out them. I also found Vici to be undervalued in absolute terms and relative to its peers. So I found it be a wide moat company undervalued, high quality management, and this big list of catalyst future catalysts to help this stock move up. And overall.
I thought the company was a buy at a high amount of upside. A low amount of downside. Now, what happened after buying this company? Well, of course, the stock price drifted down words, more and more and more into the red. And I kept buying this company, even though it was drifting downwards and that's it. A cool thing to do as a YouTuber because if you buy a stock and your public about it, and the price goes down at all. After purchase, you will inevitably get a lot of criticism.
That's just part of the deal. I received a number of negative comments after VG, started to trade in the red VG was a mistake. Glad I didn't get a board Joseph's hype train. He's been bending over backwards for months to try and justify his bullish stance on the company. The entire Market is up and Vici is down and that km at the time one year ago was correct. The entire Market was up and virtuous down but over the past year, a lot of the fundamentals were changing with Vici.
If we go through the list of catalysts and just outline them look at which ones have been done, the acquisition of the Venetian. This was something that was up in the air and you can put a check mark next to that. It's done Vici. Now completely owns the Venetian, we have the acquisition of MGM growth. This is a massive deal and Vici completed this deal. It's done. They own MGM growth. The business model being recognized by competitors.
And Other institutions, this is part of the original thesis. Well, we have examples that this has already happened realty, income corpse saw the Merit in VG's business model and they're starting to follow suit. They purchased the Boston Harbor, which is a huge Casino real estate property for one point seven billion dollars. Then we have the investment-grade balance sheet. This was a big part of each.
He's goal because once you get to that investment grade balance sheet, you get that lower cost of capital. They now have the investment grade balance sheet rating. Then we have the inclusion of VG into the air. S&P 500, and they did it because they Diversified their revenue stream and their tenant base. They got their balance sheet to investment-grade. They were considered and
included in the S&P. 500 along with a couple other companies, and it caused a stock price to jump over 5%. In one day. The final thing that I looked at was the valuation of the company because as great as youichi is and is great. As a futurist for the company, we still have to pay attention evaluations and the valuation gap between Vici and it's pairs closed.
Meaning the Delta between Queen the to was no longer there Vici was not selling at a substantial discount compared to its pairs. So the thesis on this company has really played out perfectly, the stock price did kind of air downwards for a while, but year-to-date. It's actually doing quite well. It's up six and a half percent year-to-date and it's up 19%
from it slows. That's not factoring in dividends, which would add another 3% to this performance because this is a high yielding dividend-paying company. And this is at the same time period, that the S&P 500 is down 14% And The EQ is down 23% And with that great performance in the veggie stock price moving up. It's no longer trading at a discount relative to its pairs or the rest of the market. In fact, Vici. Now trades at a price to funds from operation of 17.
That's in kind of the premium range among streets realty income Corp, which is considered one of the most high quality REITs. In the industry is trading at a cheaper price, a 16.7 and that is simply why I decided to trim my position yesterday and take fifteen thousand dollars in gains. So, June 6 at Market open I see. Fifteen thousand dollars worth of Vici at a price of around $33. So, right now I have twelve thousand dollars sitting in cash.
I've already spent three thousand dollars of the sale on other things that I'll talk about in a minute, but I want to go over more of why I'm selling a little bit of vgy. I'm trimming some of my position, and for reference this sale brought my position size down from forty two thousand dollars to twenty five thousand dollars. So I still have a meaningful amount invested in. Fiji. I'm still bullish on the
company. I still see a bright future ahead of him, but I thought it would be prudent to take some Gains, while things have moved so much into the positive and this is difficult to do. Because the truth is, I have a very difficult time selling. I have a very easy time buying, I love doing research on companies, finding undervalued companies and buying companies when other people don't want to
buy them. And I think that's the heart of a value investor, but I think that one thing, a lot of value, investor struggle with is selling when to know when to sell her, trim a position. And this comes because of the advice of major value investors like Warren Buffett. We often hear The advice repeated over and over again from Warren Buffett of why you should just buy and hold simply. Just buy and hold. Never worry about selling. You want to hold companies for life.
That's the advice that we get over and over again from Warren Buffett. Well, that's the advice that we hear from Warren Buffett and it is true that he holds some companies for a very long period of time. He sought Coca-Cola for decades, but what I think doesn't get shared as much about Warren Buffett is that he buys and sells all the time, quite frequently. He's constantly buying companies trimming. Missions and selling entirely out of positions.
And if you ever look at a 13f filing from Berkshire, Hathaway, literally every single quarter, he's selling out a different companies. Just last quarter. He reduced or Capital by 40%, You reduced royalty Pharma by 82%, You sold entirely out of its Verizon stake. AbbVie. Bristol-Myers, Squibb and Wells, Fargo, this you don't hear about that often. That Warren Buffett is selling different stocks. But Warren Buffett is a value. Investor.
He buys companies that are undervalued, when Other people don't want anything to do with them and he sells them when they're overvalued and everyone else loves a companies and quarter after quarter. He's done the same. He's bought companies. He's held onto companies, but he's also continually making sales every single quarter. He is making sales. So I think even with the poster child of buy and hold it should be noted that he does make sales when his company's move up to premium prices.
No matter how high quality the company is. He even sold out a Costco because of earns about valuation Warren Buffett. Again, is a value investor. He buys companies, when other people don't want them. He sells them when other people do want them. And that's what I'm trying to improve on with my portfolio. I'm trying to buy in a pessimism when other people don't want the
stocks. When other people are mocking you for buying it saying that it's a horrible purchase and then selling it, when everybody's on board agreeing that, it's a great company and there's no price too high to pay. I can look at an example of a company that I didn't do this with, it was Disney, Disney was a Company that I bought at the right time. I really did buy this company at a great time. I did the research. I had a thesis on it.
I had the thesis, even play out exactly how I said it would, but then I didn't take advantage of it. I didn't take any gains off the table. We can look at the big mistake. I made with Disney on this price chart. This is the price chart of Disney and it shows when I bought the company right here. I have circled that I'm buying the company, right? I'm praying. I'm hoping that the price is going to go up because I've done my fundamental analysis on it.
I've made my entire investment. Thesis on the company. I put a lot of money in the company. I was buying it in the range of 80 to 120 dollars, a share, which was well below the price that was trading at pre covid. And I thought that over time with the rapid growth of Disney plus with the Mandalorian and these key series being put on it, that investors would soon turn bullish on the company,
will guess what they did. They did soon turn bullish on the company and the stock price rocketed up from a hundred and twenty dollars a share up to almost $200 a share. Guess what? I did. I said I'm a Buy and Hold investor. I'm not going to take any profits at all. And at the time I felt great but I was ignoring something important at this time Disney was trading at a premium valuation at a pretty high valuation.
Plus, investor mood was very high on the company sentiment and enthusiasm was at an all-time high. I had the perfect combination to sell to an enthusiastic crowd of investors at very high prices and make around ten thousand dollars of gains in In the process, but what I did was I just held on to my shares all those paper gains vanished away over the coming months and now Disney's trading at next to a hundred dollars, a share anywhere from 100 to 110.
It's below my cost basis. So now I'm stuck back into this hoping category that Disney will once again have investors turn bullish and get enthusiastic, and I can take advantage of that enthusiasm once again, but this opportunity here is gone, add the perfect opportunity to take some off the table to lock in a lot of gains off of a That my thesis originally played out in and I didn't do that. See, the truth is selling is
difficult. It's easy to buy companies in the look for companies that are undervalued, but knowing when to sell them is difficult. And for now on, when I see a company, even a high quality company trade at a premium valuation and my thesis plays out on the company. I'll be looking at either selling or trimming the position to take some gains. One of the phrases. We hear about frequently as investors is.
It's not a loss until you sell, if the company moves down in price and you're in the red, Ed, you really haven't lost any money until you realize it. By selling the company, I have companies that are new Investments that I'm in the red right now that I don't really consider them a loss because I haven't sold them. I still hold these companies. The same thing applies to gains. You really don't have a gain
until you sell the stock price. Moving up is one thing but it can move down if you don't take any of those gains. So in summary, that's why I trim my VG position by fifteen thousand dollars, even though the company has a bright future in the fundamentals are as great as ever the valuation Gap. The undervalued Miss of Company is gone, that Gap is closed. And it now trades at a bit of a premium. And for me personally, I think that's a good time to take some gains. When I look at this trade.
This is what it looks like. Overall. Since purchase. The Dow Jones is down, four point four six percent. The S&P 500 is down three point eight percent. The NASDAQ is down 12.8% and VG between its dividends capital appreciation and the acquisition of MGM growth, which I also own is up a combined 27.3%. That is a total gain of the time. Of sale of eight thousand, two hundred dollars. Now. What am I doing with the fifteen thousand dollars from the sale will let me go over that real
quick? Anytime. I don't have an immediate place to put money. I'll build up. My SC HD holding. This is kind of like a cash position. I can just sit money hair. It diversifies it automatically into 100 high-quality dividend-paying companies and I'll continue to build up this position any time that I don't have an active bet that I want to put a lot of money into.
So this way, I don't feel pressured to dump my money from one sail into a different company, but I also Some companies that I am bullish on right now. A few of them are in the restaurant category and these are companies that nobody wants anything to do with this is buying into pessimism Starbucks. Has unitization. They have problems with China that problems with their leadership and their CEO. They have all sorts of problems that have driven down investor sentiment to all-time lows.
The stock price. For Starbucks is down 29 percent year-to-date. And over the past five years. It's only up 27% It trades right now at $79 and it's all time highs around. And 120. So this is another instance that feels familiar. I'm trying to buy from pessimism with Starbucks. And while we have all these negative things going on all this negative stuff in the news, people lose track of the fact that Starbucks is still a high quality brand.
People love the company. They go, They're routinely every single day. They serve a product that's never going out of style. It still has secular growth and a great balance sheet and it produces massive amount of free cash flows and it pays almost a 3% dividend yield. This is a high quality company trading at a historically low valuation. And I'm okay holding this company through the red for a long period of time.
Continuing to dollar cost average in it, because I think that one day again, investors will turn bullish on the company sentiment will improve and the mood of the investors will push the price up to new all-time highs. And in the meantime, I'll continue to dollar cost average and patiently wait for that to happen.
So I'll keep you updated on what I do with this cash, but I am going to be spending it over the next month or so, now, if you want to see more of this type of stuff in the future, if you want to see what I'm doing with my portfolios, I'm one of the A few people on YouTube in content creation. That shares, my portfolios. Every single week, completely transparently the progress of it, the gains and losses. The traits that I'm doing in the research, all for free every
single week. All you have to do is subscribe to the channel. Now, let's go ahead and move on to the Target news and the struggle with retailers, before we jump into that. I do have some exciting news. We have a new sponsor of the Joseph Carlson show, which is FTX u.s. Now, I know this is shocking. I've done this show for nearly three years. Years, and I've really done almost no sponsorships over that
time. And I finally decided to take on a sponsorship because I actually trust them and I think that their platforms pretty amazing. So let me tell you about the platform a little bit and what I plan on doing with it. This is FTX us which is one of the world's largest US regulated crypto exchanges. Millions of people every day use FTX to buy and sell top cryptocurrencies and n f keys with no fees. Now.
Another thing. I like about FTX in the reason that I had them sponsor, the channel is because they're well back. This is a stable company. They have huge brand Partnerships with people like Tom Brady Kevin O'Leary Steph Curry. They even have Tom Brady investing in the company and the founder of the company seems like a decent guy and he is incredibly Rich. His name sandbanks been freed. He has a reported eleven point six billion dollar net worth as
of right now. He said that he's going to give away 99% of it to charity and he's already started foundations. And the incredible thing here is that he's 30 years old. So this is a young guy. He's younger than me and he's worth eleven point six billion dollars. Just pretty incredible. Now, you might be saying, all right, FTX is a great platform. It has Financial backing as well liked by Traders and cryptocurrency. But Joseph, you're not a cryptocurrency guy. You don't own this type of
stuff. And that's true. I've never really been big into cryptocurrencies. But what most people aren't aware of right now is that FTX is expanding Beyond cryptocurrencies, they're going into stocks and that's what caught my attention now. F DX is most known for their crypto currency exchange and all their cryptocurrency tools. But what they're doing is they're moving into stocks. And this is What I find interesting. Now. This is currently in beta. So if you sign up right now, it
will have beta access. They currently have hundreds of people testing it and they're going to be releasing it more widely soon. Now, I got beta access to this and it's pretty cool. It's buy and sell any time. There's no commissions. They're not accepting any payment for order flow, which I think is all good things. But what I plan on doing is something very specific on this stock trading portion of FDX. You can see that I have three shares of Amazon. I'm going to slowly be buying
more and more Amazon shares. Till I get to 100 shares of Amazon. So it'll take some time to get there. But the reason that I'm looking to get to 100 shares of Amazon, is because 100 shares is where it unlocks, the ability to run options. And what I plan on doing with Amazon is turning this non dividend paying stock into an income-generating stock, and I'm going to be doing that by selling covered call options. So, I've never done that before. I've never done any type of
options. I've never sold any covered calls before, but I'm going to learn how to do it. So, If you want to follow along with this sign up for a count yourself, I put a link in the description of this video as well as in the pin comment. It's completely free. There's no strings attached. It took me literally, two minutes to sign up and you can follow along with this. Once I get to a hundred shares and FTX builds out their
options, portion. I'm going to be learning how to do covered, call options and turn Amazon into an income-generating asset where I earn income every single month. Now, the majority of this is going to be on the Joseph Carlson after-hours channel. So if you want to follow along, This whole process in more detail and you're interested in learning how to do covered. Call options.
Make sure you subscribe to the drills of Carlson after-hours Channel because that's where I'll have most of that content, but I'm excited to be doing this because I've been told by many people for a long period of time that I should be selling covered calls on my stocks and this will allow me to finally do it. Now, in terms of my current portfolio and strategy, nothing
is changing with this. So I'm going to be learning how to sell covered call options on the FTX platform, but nothing's going to be changing with my passive income portfolio. All right. Now moving on. Let's jump. Into some news. We have the headline news today that Target is warning of weaker profits as it faces overstuffed, oversupplied stores with the stuff. They no longer need. So basically Target forecasted their demand and the items that need in their stores incorrectly.
What they purchased for. Their customers was a bunch of hard Goods. Things like patio furniture outdoor stuff, right? As the customer was transitioning more to soft goods, things like clothing and grow trees and soon-to-be school supplies. Target purchased a bunch of the wrong stuff for their customer at the wrong time. That creates a huge problem.
They say that big retailers like Target benefited over the past two years from the pandemic rush to buy patio furniture laptops, home decor and Shoppers were buoyed by Savings of the government stimulus checks. Now many of those same Shoppers are grappling with the Swift reversal of buying Behavior, with consumer spending Less on Goods, in favors of services and Necessities such as food and fuel. So people are now going on vacation there. Going to travel, they're going to restaurants.
They're not going to Target quite as much Target. And other retailers are seeing a lot less traffic than they did. Last year and targets for casting. On this subject, has been terrible, just two weeks after reporting, lower than expected. Profits. Target said Tuesday, which is today, it will further reduce some of its profit estimates for the year because it will more quickly unload. The excess inventory in the
current quarter. So they could have tried to keep their margins high and they just sell these items more slowly. The problem with that is that targets have limited space for warehouse. And in order to get their space filled for all their back-to-school Goods. They need to get rid of the current Goods they have in there to get rid of them quicker. They have to discount them when they discount them that lowers their operating margins and they're expected to have their operating margins.
Go down from five percent down to 2%. This is something that I literally warned about just a week ago in my past episode. I said the market will fall another 20% and granted. This is a little bit of a clickbait titles. Title, the purpose of this video is not a prediction that the market would fall 20% but it was rather. What is priced into the market right. Now. The market is pricing in that companies will not have earnings
revisions lower. And I said that if companies have lowered earnings revisions for 2022, that could potentially drop the market, another 20%. So this isn't a prediction as much as what is priced in and what isn't priced in right now, companies are not priced into have their earnings revised lower and that is precisely What's happening with Target their earnings per share revisions upwards r0? No, analyst is revising their earnings upwards, but 21 have
revised our earnings downward. So every single analyst has done another earnings revision, downward for Target saying the company is going to be less profitable this year. You can see this play out visually right here, all the EPS projections are going down and like we learned what the previous episode, the price to earnings basis. On a Ford. Multiple. The E part of that is the forward earnings. If that gets revised. Onwards, it makes the company
more expensive. So typically the price will follow downwards. Now, there's some companies that have avoided this Salesforce for instance has said that they're actually going to be more profitable. So they're a business to business company. They're not trying to juggle consumer Behavior. So they might have an easier time, gauging demand. But Salesforce is increasing their earnings estimates Target and other retailers are likely to lower. There's and amongst retail companies.
This isn't a problem that just Target is facing trying to predict the future behavior of consumers is very difficult. For investors and Executives of these companies at Walmart's annual shareholder meeting last week. The executive said that around, 20% of the elevated inventory, consists of items, a company wishes. They didn't have So 20% of their stuff in inventory. They're just saying, well, darn, we don't need this.
We're not able to sell it. So it's literally going to sit here and take up valuable space for the rest of the year as we try to slowly, get rid of it. And they're saying that it's going to take around at least the next couple of quarters to get. Back to where they want to be. So right now, these retailers are trying to juggle this varying demand and this radical consumer shift in behavior of what they're purchasing and it's been really difficult to do.
Target has struggled with it. Walmart has Amazon has to a big degree as well. I think the one that's handled at best is probably Costco. So, this is the second time in three weeks that Target has tried to take down the rest of the stock market. And this time investors are kind of brushing it off. They're just saying, alright, target has these issues, maybe retailers do. But other than that, we're not really.
About it. So I think investors are kind of getting over the short-term problems with these companies. And in terms of my holding of Target. I'm still in the green only because I've held this company for like three years. I initially invested just a thousand dollars into it and it's done really well over that period of time, but it has given up a lot of its gains. So even though I'm heavily in the green on this company, I'm not going to be selling it right now.
Target has traded both at a very enthusiastic P/E ratio of above 20, which was probably the optimal time to take some gains in this company. Now, down to the very pessimistic, PE ratio of a 11. So I'm not going to be selling it right now. Now, moving on we have some big news out of apple. We know that Apple has been working on a VR headset for some time. It's always been something that we're just hearing rumors and
leaks from. But we know this project is real and apples getting closer and closer to releasing it. And we just got another set of leaks about this project. This illustrates how heavily integrated this project is going to be meaning that Apple never builds, one separate device that kind of just operates on its own every single device. They have is heavily integrated into their ecosystem. That is the Apple moat and even though Morningstar thinks that
Apple has an arrow mode. I think it has one of the widest Motes in the market. And I think that's the reason that Warren Buffett likes the company. The moat is massive. I don't see anyone competing with their mode and this new VR headset. I really think only expands that mode. They say the apple is aiming to make user interface elements like body. Tracking hand tracking gestures, hand based typing and steri access automatically.
Added inside third-party apps just like the iPhone elements such as a keyboard that get automatically integrated into IOS app. So there you hear the integration word twice. They're integrating Siri into this platform and further on we see more talk about integration. They say that while third-party apps are key ingredient for this project. Apple is also planning a slew of its own apps that includes a VR version of FaceTime. So they're making a virtual reality version of face time.
That can replicate your faces. In emoji format, then they have a new VR version of maps and our OS variant of the core apps like notes and calendars. Also, in the works is a way for the headset to extend a Max display bringing it into 3D. So they're making a VR version of basically every other tool and app and platform that they currently have. And then their integration doesn't stop there.
They say moreover. The company is leveraging, its entertainment, arm and Acquisitions like next VR to build 3D versions of its content. Don't be surprised to eventually see virtual reality, iterations of Apple TV, Plus shows, and Fitness Plus workouts apples increased foray into sports is also not a coincidence, and I'd expect that to tie in nicely as well. So apple is not planning on having this VR headset be a standalone device. That is unlinked from their
ecosystem. Every single aspect of this will be linked to their ecosystem, just as the iPad, the MacBook and the iPhone is, and that has been my long-term, both thesis for Apple, every single feature. And Like the VR headset, the Apple car or even new little features on your iPhone are all carefully calculated to further. Lock you into their ecosystem. Widing, the remote over time. Now, they also introduced a lot of features like the ability to edit and remove text messages.
This feature alone, the ability to undo send on iMessage. I think we'll end up saving quite a few relationships. They also introduced another MacBook Air. This is one of their bigger products that actually makes up the majority of their MacBook sales and I see why Why? It's basically a very powerful ultra-thin MacBook, that has almost the same specs as the MacBook Pro and it's on a very small frame. It's very light easy to use. So it doesn't surprise me that this makes up for the most
sales. Now after they announced a bunch of different features from notification grouping to iMessages to mail. The also announced. I think one of the biggest features, which is Apple finally, stepping in to buy now pay later and this is something that I've been predicting for a long time. When people ask me, What is your favorite fin tech company?
My answer by default is Apple. I think it is the most powerful fin tech company, and people think that's a koi response, or they think I'm joking a little bit, but I'm not. Apple has the ability to turn entire companies into a future and Apple's latest fintech move. Is this buy. Now pay later feature. Basically, all they're doing is breaking this down into four payments instead of one. So you pay it off over six weeks, every two weeks with the first payment at the time of purchase.
So you have the first 25 % do today then every two weeks you have another 25% do and that's also with no interest assuming you pay on time. Now, I haven't invested in a lot of other fintech companies specifically because I think most of them compete with apple and I think that's a very difficult company to compete with. You have the example of a firm. This is basically a buy. Now pay later company is down 75% just year to date. And this news from Apple is not great at all for a firm.
Apple pay is widely popular already being used by millions of people. And if giving the choice of paying, Her with a firm or a separate service or just using Apple pay, I have to assume the vast majority of people would pick Apple pay. So this shows the power of them leveraging. Their current ecosystem to continue to grow into other businesses. Apple has a knack for turning other startup, companies into simply small features of the Apple ecosystem.
And then at this development conference, probably the biggest feature, the Apple announced was the additional improvements on the M1 chip into the M2 Chip. So they came out with another iteration of their already incredibly. Phil chip call the M2 Chip and you can see it pictured there. It's a little bit bigger. Now, you can dive into this in more detail on the tech channels, but it's basically just a better chip all around. It has better efficiency cores
and it's more powerful. It has a 35 percent faster GPU and 50% more memory bandwidth. And this is another thing that I think it's discounted in Apple stock. They are Leaps and Bounds ahead of their competitors, which hip making. So, as of right now, my thoughts really haven't changed on Apple. I'm in the green by around 15,000 dollars on this holding Apple currently. It's at a hundred and forty, seven dollars a share. They have their earnings report later this month.
And I'm just going to continue to hold this company because add a 22 PE ratio. I don't think you're paying much of a premium to hold an incredibly premium company. So, as of right now, Apple in my opinion is not a cell or a by, I'm simply holding. So that's all for this episode. I'll have more updates out this week. So if you haven't already, subscribe to the channel and I'll catch you in the next one.