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Rob Isbitts talks to analysts Julia Ostian, Jack Bowman, and Kenio Fontes (0:30). Overheated market, Amazon bullishness (15:35). Buffett and value investing (23:40). Fed creating money out of thin air (25:15). China in focus (28:00). Nu Holdings’ disruption (32:50). Mega caps eat the world (38:55).
Transcript
Rob Isbitts: Welcome back to Seeking Alpha’s Investing Experts Podcast. I’m Rob Isbitts, and my work at Seeking Alpha is under the profile, Sungarden Investment Publishing.
I also lead the investing group, Sungarden Investors Club, where we focus on teaching our club members to embrace the flexibility of modern markets. Our club prioritizes risk management, technical analysis, and using options to protect and enhance assets.
Just a few weeks ago, I was in the guest chair, and Rena Sherbill, Seeking Alpha’s excellent director of content programming interviewed me, as we’ve done before. And the title was It All Starts With Risk Management, so check that out.
Today, really excited about this. I am hosting, and I really wanna thank Rena and the crew at Seeking Alpha for saying yes to this idea. So here’s what we’re doing today. I really do believe that the investing business has a shortage of great young analysts. For me, it’s the only industry I’ve ever been in going back to 1986 when I walked into the World Trade Center in New York to start my career as a portfolio assistant, a lowly portfolio assistant. Thirty nine years later, as they say in golf, I’m on the back nine of my career. And when I sold my advisory practice five years ago and went to semi retirement, I wanted to identify some of these upwardly mobile next generation investment pros.
And I’ve introduced dozens of them to Seeking Alpha over the years. And today, you’re gonna hear from three of the best: Julia Ostian, Jack Bowman, and Kenio Fontes. I’m gonna introduce them in a moment one by one. They will briefly describe their backgrounds, and then we’ll move right into their research and talk about what they are really seeing and what’s most important in their worlds right now.
And so I will start off by simply saying, what are three things that I think are driving my own research in Sungarden Investors Club. First one is the bubble in very large US stocks, Mag 7, etc. I managed money through the dotcom bubble, and that makes me respect these strong returns, but I am always on guard for sudden and swift reversals.
Eventually, one of those reversals is gonna stick and it’s gonna last a while, and I just don’t think that many investors are prepared for it.
Second thing is that, how investors can prepare. I think they should learn more about using options, specifically something I write about a lot. It’s called the collar strategy, and that puts guardrails around socks and ETFs and allows me to define what my worst case scenario will be before it’s too late.
And the third thing, it all kinda ties into this and why I like technical analysis so much. The post pandemic market is different. Stocks are different. Bonds are different. And I think that means our skill set has to adjust. I’ve been a technician since the nineteen eighties, and I think the markets follow the chart patterns now a lot more than they ever have. And so I think that people either learn how technicals work or they stay in denial and they take their chances. So those are my three things off the the top of the brain.
Let’s now go and introduce you to three of the best young thinkers on the Seeking Alpha platform. And let’s start with Julia Ostian. Julia, first of all, what should people know about your background, personally and professionally?
Julia Ostian: Hey, Rob. Thanks for having me, first of all, for Seeking Alpha. I am very happy to be part of this next gen podcast, and I truly appreciate this opportunity.
So the first thing, I guess, the readers should know about me before reading any of my analysis is the fact that I am fascinated by businesses. And it will be important to say that I grew up in a family of business owners. I never had a role model of a person going to a regular job, if it makes sense.
I never saw any way anyone do anything besides of having and building something of their own. So I guess since my childhood, I’ve been a part of this building, managing, selling even for process. So I guess this is why I’m here, and this is why I’m so interested breaking down the companies.
The investment part of the whole process comes for me personally after the business part. And probably this is the reason why, for example, I find a hard time investing in unprofitable business. For me, business is a way to make money.
Business should earn, and we’re here not to do charity or not to be fascinated by the innovation, although we can be. But in my opinion, business is the way to live and to make you rich. So that’s about my view.
And the favorite part of the investing process is again, I will come back to the money because, I like the fact that when you have an opinion or when you decided on something, you can actually put your money on it. And this is kind of a deal that I’ve made with myself.
I am not slapping a buy rating on something that I’m not ready to buy, and I am actually going and buying many of the securities that I have a buy rating or especially a strong buy rating on.
And this is basically a checkup of of how true you are to yourself. Are you ready to put your hard earned money on what you are talking about, on your research, on your outlook? And about the things that I have a total confidence will happen in many of my analysis, I often say that I’m kind of bearish on the whole macro situation right now.
And I must say, I’m trying to stay as objective as I can, but I often say, I’m not sure I am because I was born and raised in Ukraine, and Ukraine currently is the war. I’ve been living in Israel for the past eight years. Probably all of the listeners know the situation in the Middle East right now.
So I guess it only makes sense that I would be bearish. I don’t see how with all of the volatility and with all of the geopolitical situation in the world, we can have the highest market ever.
So for me, it doesn’t make sense. But, again, I might be biased because of the places I’m living in.
RI: I’m sitting here wondering, maybe we should skip the conversation, go right to the book you’re gonna write about everything that you’ve seen geopolitically the last few years. We’ll certainly be coming back to that and talking about some of the things that you like and don’t like right now from your writing.
Jack Bowman, what should people know about you professionally and personally?
Jack Bowman: Yeah. Thanks, Rob. So, hey, everyone. This is my first time on Investing Experts. That’s exciting. Things to know about me. I’m a former teacher, so I spent about five years in the k-twelve education system teaching high school economics, which means that I have a need to explain everything, and I wanna make sure that you get it in my articles.
So if you get through an article and you get to a point where I’m explaining something you think might be trivial or you should just know this, keep going because it does get deeper, but there’s scaffolding built into my articles. I’m aiming to teach, with a lot of my writing on Seeking Alpha, and that’s just part of my my ethos.
Other than that, I’m a registered investment adviser. And so I also aim to write with an asset allocation focus, with a risk management focus of you can make money on anything, but you can lose money on everything.
My favorite part of the investing process is the research for sure, as a writer. I love getting into this stuff. I love being able to deploy it and, of course, I love making money.
I think most people do, but my real joy has been in finding the information, digging through the masses and masses of the digital world that we have now. We have so much information and data at our fingertips to find. And all we gotta do is figure out what story they’re telling.
And the three things I have a high degree of confidence on, that’s hard because I don’t often have a high degree of confidence about much.
I am very willing to admit that I cannot know the future. And even predicting is so very hard, especially with our current administration being more unpredictable than the last, and I’ll leave that there politically.
And so if I had to pick three things, I think, rates do come down this year, maybe probably at the end of the year. The asset bubble is not gonna pop any time soon. It seems to me that macro forces, congress and whoever, are doing everything they can to keep the asset bubble going.
So I think regardless of all the doom and gloom you may hear, the bearish takes, the party will still go on for some time, no matter how little sense it may make from a valuation perspective or what have you.
And my last one is, the line’s gonna keep going to the right, no matter what, it does next. It’ll keep going on. And that’s the thing we gotta remember is, whether it’s up or down, we still got more time. We will always have more time.
RI: You could add up probably any two of your ages, and I’d still be older. So I don’t know about the time thing, but it’s all relative. And I love the scaffolding comment. I’m kinda built the same way having been an adviser for many years till I sold the practice five years ago.
Kenio Fontes, this is pretty cool because we are all from different parts of the globe. Just getting the four of us on together was a battle not of availability, but of availability in a reasonable time of day so that somebody wasn’t doing this in the middle of the night.
Kenio, tell us what should we know about you personally, professionally? And then we’ll we’ll move on to some of your current work, highlights, and then then we’ll go back to everybody and talk about it.
Kenio Fontes: Hi everyone. Thanks for having me here. So as you were saying, the first thing I’m going to say is that I’m Brazilian.
And, actually, I started analyzing stocks in the Brazilian market about five years ago, and that shaped a lot of my thinking because it forced me to pay attention to some risks, like macro risks, currency impacts, and mainly management and corporate governance.
And over time, I expand my research globally trying to be as much, pragmatic and holistic as possible.
I believe everything in markets is dynamic. So a stock that looked overpriced yesterday might become attractive tomorrow depending on narrative execution and valuation resets.
I focus more often on tech, but I look at all sectors all sectors when the opportunity is clear enough. My favorite part of the investment proxies is understanding the business itself.
The long term strategy, the interest in the industry dynamics, how the company really makes money, and how it can unlock more in the future, either by expanding sales or adding a new segment or expanding margins.
Valuation and balance sheets, of course, it’s very, very important, but they come after I understand the fundamentals of the business.
Just giving a a quick example. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN). I find it fascinating how their massive CapEx today, whether logistics or cloud will translate into revenue growth and margin.
Three things that I have more conviction on today is probably that AI will drive not only revenue, but also expanding margins in a lot of sectors.
The second one is about Alphabet or Google (GOOG) (GOOGL). I think it probably will outperform the market of their next three or four years in the mid to long term, due to strong execution and attractive valuation.
And the third one is Meta (META). I think Meta is likely to see revenue growth normalize, and then it will rotate leading it to a modest multiple contraction.
So I’m a little bit more bearish on Meta.
RI: I’m taking some notes here about what everybody’s talked about.
Already a couple of you have mentioned Amazon. I’m sure we all have our own opinion on it. Mine’s more technically based. Jack’s maybe a little bit more macro driven. Julia has already mentioned it as an individual stock and so has Kenio.
And I feel like maybe this is what I said before, the stock market has become very crowded at the top. It’s almost like we’re getting to the point where outside of maybe fifteen, twenty public companies, most of which are in the US, if you’re trying to track an index, not sure you need to go much beyond that.
A lot of stuff is getting simpler simply from an investor standpoint because so many stocks don’t matter. And, look, it’s all about generating alpha. So let’s talk about that. Julia, I wanna go back to you. You are pretty stingy on strong buy ratings, and you’re probably not the only one in this group that is.
But you do have two that did stand out to you. One, the aforementioned Amazon, and, the other is a little car company, although maybe they’re not just a car company. That’s what they say about the other car company, Tesla (TSLA). But that’s Uber (UBER).
So Amazon and Uber, they stand out, and you have a much higher conviction level on those than you do. If you can weave that into, let’s say, the broader market view that you have because I think that’s that’s an indicator right there. That if you only have a couple strong buys, maybe it says something about your broader outlook.
JO: Yeah. That’s true. So, first of all, I wanted to say that I really connected to Jack’s point about the market being overheated right now and that there is a strong possibility of that’s not happening anytime soon.
It’s not changing anytime soon, I mean, because well, when the government has the strongest goal to keep it up, right, I guess, they will be successful in doing so.
But, yeah, basically, I am not strong around strong buys because of that, because in my opinion, especially US market right now, is overheated. And, well, I have no idea when it will change. I actually had an idea of going out, selling everything and keeping cash, but I realized that I will be just missing on every opportunity possible, so I decided not to do so.
It connects to everything I mentioned before about the business. For these two companies, for Uber and Amazon, I currently see a mix of perfect timing, for example, long term dominance, which is really important to me.
Both of these companies are the best in their spaces, and they make a lot of money. I really like it when businesses make a lot of money.
It’s really important for me. And I see a misunderstood opportunity there as well. I mean, for Uber, I started buying it back when it was $60 per share, so I guess it kind of went up from there a little.
But still, right now, I see this company adding the stock of this company adding few dozens of bucks easily in some near future.
And for Amazon, for example, first of all, it has very strong advertising power. I am fascinated by this business. I am fascinated by the AWS and how it took over basically, like, everything.
I live in Israel, so we’re a high-tech nation, and I hear about AWS from everywhere. Basically, if you want to have a work in engineering, you must learn AWS. This is a standard.
RI: Have you ever experienced Amazon as a consumer where you live?
JO: Only retail. I haven’t used AWS services.
RI: Unlike, I would imagine Jack and me, I’m guessing that, Kenio and Julia have not had the pleasure, multiple times a day, of an Amazon truck showing up and delivering to you what you forgot you ordered yesterday?
JB: This is something I think a lot of people kinda miss about the Amazon story is that when you look at their revenue breakdown. They make more money from AWS, like we’re talking about, than they do from Amazon Prime.
Amazon Prime is a big money loser. But it built brand. It built name recognition and all these things that allowed them to build AWS.
But most Americans interact with Prime, not AWS. So our vision of Amazon is this big shipping company even though most of their money comes from the cloud and software development.
RI: Was part of that the idea that the market allowed them to get away with that for the longest time? Again, here comes my advantage or disadvantage of age, relatively speaking. I remember when the biggest complaint about Amazon year after year was, well, they never make any money, and a lot of it was because they kept throwing all the profits back into the business.
So, Julia, you were gonna say?
JO: Yeah. I was gonna say that, basically, with the retail, I was not aware. I actually saw that they are making money from the retail inside of the US, but I saw that they just turned profitable, I guess last quarter from the retail in the world.
And I mean, it’s kind of crazy. We are all using Amazon all the time. I have this app installed on my phone. It’s in use forever, and I could never have guessed that they are not making money from this.
But, this is actually it was another great point from Jack that this is such a strong marketing effort, that this whole thing, this whole narrative that they were able to build around this company, I know for sure that in Israel, for example, once again, we’re a startup nation or that’s how they call us. People do learn AWS because of the actual Amazon. I am pretty sure it’s like that.
And I never had a chance to use AWS, but my husband actually has. And he says there is nothing even close to quality to this product. So that was my point, why I think Amazon is still a great, amazing buy.
And although people are concerned about the valuation of Amazon, I am pretty convinced of the growth and the future opportunities.
For example, I wrote an article on some about project Kuiper. And this future opportunity, in my opinion, is simply amazing. People are looking to invest in satellites. And in my opinion, there is no better play right now than Amazon in this space.
And, Kenio, before before we turn this in the Amazon hour, because as far as I know, they’re not a sponsor. Please, your two cents on Amazon, and then we’ll move on to a lot of other topics.
KF: Perfect. I must say, in Brazil, we are experienced, like I think it’s almost near what Americans are experienced too. So, we can order, buy a product and receive it in one day. Mainly in capitals. So the international expansion is is working.
RI: Let’s stick with you, Kenio. You’re a big admirer of Warren Buffett. I don’t know anybody in this business who doesn’t at least admire and respect what he’s done and, of course, his late great partner, Charlie Munger. But, what does that do for your work at Seeking Alpha?
And in fact, I know that you even had a chance to attend the Berkshire conference this year. That must have been quite an event because you showed up and he retired.
KF: It was an amazing, awesome experience. Buffett is a value investor. Which means he cares about valuation and margin of safety. But early on, I was very focused on valuation, chasing cheap stocks.
But over time, I realized that without good management, execution, or a solid industry, cheap can stay cheap forever or even get worse. And Buffett taught me that quality doesn’t only matter, but it’s the foundation.
So today’s valuation is still very important to me, but it’s like the cherry on the top. It only matters if the business is worth owning in the first place.
He also influenced me how I think about optionality. So going back to Amazon, AWS was almost just a small side project, but now it’s almost the main pillar of the business. That kind of long term thinking really stuck with me.
RI: Jack, you mentioned before you used to be a teacher. I think you very much still are one, reading your work as I do frequently. Talk to us about a subject you’ve written about quite a bit, which is the Federal Reserve, but explain it to me like I’m a high school student.
JB: I used to teach the Fed, as part of my econ course in high school. I used to love the lesson I got to teach on monetary rehypothecation. I’m like, this is the smartest word you’re ever gonna learn in my classroom. You’re gonna impress the hell out of your parents when you go home and tell them about how the Fed creates money out of thin air.
And so the way that I would explain what’s going on with the Fed today just to readers, and I know that you’re not in high school or some of you might be, unlikely with the seeking out audience.
But, essentially, we have a an independent from the government arm of the of the banking system that is designed to keep the banking system in check, designed to keep, inflation down, and and designed to keep employment up.
And to do so, they employ basically a a couple tools. They can buy and sell, like mortgages and securities and treasuries, which we we call their balance sheet. They can change interest rates, which call which we call monetary policy and is the main focus of a lot of people watching the Fed is on interest rates because those interest rates control how fast or slow our economy moves.
And because the US dollar (DXY) is so powerful, it controls also how fast or slow a lot of the, rest of the world moves because their financial systems are contingent on the speed and velocity of the US financial system.
So following them becomes very important if you wanna understand where the financial system’s moving, or the cracks may be.
I just talked about the Fed getting involved in the repo markets, which is where banks needing extra collateral to make their balance sheets healthy. They needed more money last week than they did at any point since 2019.
It was about $11 billion they needed to just have injected into the banks. And the Fed provides this liquidity and keeps the system churning, and paves over a lot of the potholes that we may see in the banks. And so it’s important to follow them for those reasons and and to understand where the economy is moving.
RI: So open question for all of you. How is this allowed to go on and what changes it? Because we’ve all talked about how, well, the party keeps going until it stops. And look, I mean, I’ve thought at times that it could be just a matter of, okay, if anybody from China, Asia, Europe gets tough on trade and says, okay, don’t need the US market, at least for a while.
We’ll make do without it. That might upset the whole world order. I’m kinda re replaying what we were dealing with in March and April. So I’m wondering what breaks the logjam between glorious equity returns at the top end and something else where we actually get a true bear market that lasts a while? Jack first, and then I know Julia wants to comment on this.
JB: So I won’t get too into this because this isn’t this isn’t the Jack-China show. But China is the main focus for me macro wise of what could stop the music right now.
Either that’s on the trade deal that’s currently being worked out as a short term torpedo to markets, or and this is the big tail that we don’t know about.
President Xi, the current president of China, has said ad and I tend to not try and speculate on this. I believe people, when they tell me who they are, he said that by 2027 or during 2027, he will invade Taiwan.
That’ll be a huge catalyst that would give them what we’ve been calling the Russia treatment, where you get delisted from SWIFT, you get taken out of the monetary system, Americans can’t buy and sell your stocks anymore.
That would be a huge hit to the market because of how conjoined our economies are, and how intertwined things are. Now that is a huge catalyst that may never happen.
Xi has said it’s gonna happen, but politicians say all kinds of things, all the time. And he was saying this to his own people, who have limited access to the Internet and so may not be able to challenge what he says. And I’ll leave all that to political discussion, but that would be the thing is in my focus is what China does.
Not necessarily what what we do with or to China, but what they do to us or to our allies.
JO: Actually, to add to this point, I’ve just recently came back from Indonesia. We’ve had just a regular holiday trip to Bali. And I have to say, I have never expected to see that China has such a strong influence on Southeast Asian countries as it does.
And I was genuinely concerned about what it seems like the US government or in general, western people do not realize what China can do with this later on when the time comes.
What I’m referring to, it looks like they’ve been putting all kind of strings all over different countries. Here, even in the Middle East, investing lots of money in different countries in Africa, Middle East, Southeast Asia, basically, is completely loaded with Chinese money.
And I’m kind of afraid when the time comes, they will put those strings altogether, and the US simply won’t understand where it came from. The impact of this can be huge for the worldwide economic situation in general.
So that’s that. That’s my take on China. I see it as a very strong rival to the US in general. If they will invade Taiwan, I’m sure it will be maybe even better for the US because China will close for themselves so many trading deals with developed countries.
But if China continues to play it smart as it does right now and quiet and smart, I guess it can become much stronger over the next couple of years.
RI: This is far from my area of expertise. I’m just a lonely technician out here. But it seems to me that as far as what’s gonna break or or move or change first, you’ve got the Southeast Asian economies, which can kinda buddy up with China, and that becomes a powerful force that can tip the world order.
You could also have that between the US and our northern and southern neighbors, not just Canada and Mexico, but all the way down to Brazil, Chile, etc, Kenio’s neighborhood.
But it doesn’t seem like that’s moving along too well. I don’t know. Maybe if you include Greenland in it. Kenio, any thoughts from down there as somebody who is a local in South America and how US policy, and Chinese policy, how it’s perceived there, and if you have any opinions yourself?
KF: I must say, here in Brazil, we have some great companies that are expanding globally. I think Nu Holdings (NU) is my best example. It’s not not spending to US right now, but it is expanding to Colombia, Mexico, and they’re doing a great job as a disruptor.
So it’s a digital bank, and it aims to go everywhere. They reached 100,000,000 customers here in Brazil. They disrupted the banking industry. I must say that we have some competitive players too, and this affected the global industry, of course.
JO: Actually, another point, Kenio just mentioned Nu Holdings. And it’s actually another stock that I own, and I like it because of the way it expands and captures new markets over time.
And that’s actually another point I forgot to mention before that currently, I am not sitting out this market in cash. My outlook is pretty bearish. Although, I started transferring my holdings into other countries, I’m buying stocks and companies from outside the US.
And right now, I’m not sure what what you’re you guys are thinking about this, but for me, it kind of feels safer. I bought after right after the Indonesia, I bought Grab (GRAB). It’s like Uber over there. I really like the service.
I did not expect it to be so great. And a little after that, I bought Nu Holdings and some others from the UK. Actually, I have a couple of stocks, which I really like. So, yeah, this is my way of protecting myself.
Of course, I’m still holding Amazon and Uber and stocks that I just mentioned before, but I am trying to diversify away from the US.
RI: Have you have you written about all the ones that you just mentioned?
JO: Yes. I did.
RI: And I have to say, thank you. You accidentally, without realizing it, made my prime case for option collars.
Because to me, I’ll try to save them from the mute button, but I’m a chicken blank investor. I write it and say it all the time. But I think I started to realize after a while that, just like Jack and everybody else here has kinda said, that, when you don’t know when when the music’s gonna stop and, long bull market at the top is gonna end. And so why not try to enjoy the extension of it but with some solid risk management?
And that’s what collaring stocks, particularly the put option part, does. Kenio, and then I think Jack had something to add too.
KF: Yeah. I think another way to defend yourself is the stock picking.
Because for me, a bear market could be cause it to the narrative break. So say Apple (AAPL) stops innovating or growth stores, we could see valuation mode post contract even without, collapse in earnings.
So the narrative is very important. So if you suck picking, like, avoid Apple, avoid, I don’t know, maybe Tesla (TSLA), and go for Google, which is an American company, you could also defend yourself.
RI: I think there’s also a case to be made. I’ve written about this a little bit, but I’ll be doing plenty more. So if I said to you, the stock market over the last four years, basically as of today, here we are in early July 2025.
So if I said to you the stock market is up 4% a year for the last four years, you would say, Rob, you’re not looking in the right place. I’d say, no, absolutely, I am because I’m looking at the broader market, the ETF, and I don’t have an opinion on the ETF per se, but it’s (EQAL). It’s the top thousand US stocks equally weighted.
That’s very different than the twelve, fifteen, 20% that people are clocking away at, even accounting for the declines that we had in 2022.
The average stock’s kinda gone nowhere. And to me, that might be the greatest bullish case going, sort of an extended pause that refreshes, if you will, and maybe that evens things up.
However, that would, I would think, go against what a lot of us have been saying, which is because these are not as profitable companies, or if they are, they’re kinda dinosaurs, etc. Jack, is it something you wanted to chip in here?
JB:Yeah. The this theme has been playing out for a long time now, and and I I’ve been calling it mega caps eat the world.
We are now at a point where the S&P (SP500) is about 20% Microsoft (MSFT), Nvidia (NVDA), Apple, and Amazon. That’s it. Those four companies make up about 20% of the entire S&P 500, and they’re driving a lot of the returns.
And that’s why they’ve become such a large part of it is that’s what goes up, and everything else has been flat for for years now. And it’s unclear whether this is going to unwind at some point, and the rest of the world is gonna catch up to mega caps, or if the dominance will just continue and this is the new normal.
The emergence of these companies in foreign countries that are taking up huge market share, that had traditionally been reserved for American tech companies going into foreign nations.
The fact that they have their own domestic industries now replacing Uber and replacing a lot of these other big tech companies is potentially indicative of this churn back, where a lot of these mid cap and small cap companies are gonna be able to make some of those returns back where the mega caps had eaten them up for years.
That may also be me being hopeful. I like rooting for underdogs.
RI: That was a bit of the dotcom bubble. What people forget about this and, here goes the old guy talking again, but, I did live through it and monitor it very closely. What people forget is you had three down years in a row.
2000 was down a year. ’01 was down a year. ’02 was down a year. And the first nine weeks of 2003 were also some of the worst of it. So you went just about thirty six months and the market fell and it was cut in half.
However, for the first half of those thirty six months, outside of tech and particularly in sectors like REITs, utilities, things like that, staples, they actually did okay. They made money. And so that brings together a little bit of everything we talked about. It’s like, yeah, it may look very binary right now. Everything goes up or everything goes down.
But if you look underneath, you realize that isn’t the case. And I think if there’s a argument for somebody ponying up the modest amount for a Seeking Alpha annual subscription, that’s it right there.
Because, what happens if the same handful of names stop working?
We are getting close to a close here. Back in my advisory days, I used to always end client meetings by thinking to myself, okay, what didn’t I tell them that I wanted to? So here’s your chance. Start with Julia. Give me up to sixty seconds on, one other point you wanna make sure you made.
JO: I just wanted to thank you again for the opportunity. I don’t know how it will be afterwards for our readers, but I definitely had a very interesting conversation. I enjoyed talking to you guys. I had some very nice insights I’ll take with myself after we finish this one. Thank you so much.
RI: The miracle of crowdsourced research, ladies and gentlemen. Kenio.
KF: I think my main point to leave here is today we have more access to information than ever. But that’s both a gift and a trap. With so many opinions on the Internet and everywhere like HEX, it’s easy to starting chase hype or forget the basics. But compounding the quality, real long term compounding, is still one of the underrated forces in investing. So to benefit from it, you need quality and resilience. Thanks for the opportunity.
RI: Great point. I always like to say we’ve never had more information available to us, and we’ve never used less of it. And that, I think, is one of the reasons why folks seek out this type of intelligence. Jack.
JB: I think my my final point here is I’ve done a lot of talking today about when the music’s gonna stop, and how it’s not gonna stop any time soon, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not gonna see more volatility.
I think the best thing people can do right now, especially at all time highs, is prepare for volatility, be that up or down volatility.
The party may keep going on, but it may stop for all these reasons we’ve talked about today and maybe just for some stocks and not others. So it is important to position yourself, more than it is important about which securities you may select.
RI: One of my favorite mantras is play offense and defense at the same time. That’s how you avoid big loss. And over time, except in a straight upward ripping stock market, you probably make better total returns over time because you don’t spend years trying to catch up.
This was phenomenal having all of you here. I really have wanted to do this for a for a long time. I wanna finish with the classic, when I was your age, I didn’t know anything. But you guys do.
And, if you look at some of the commenters, maybe I still don’t know anything, but you guys do. And, for that reason, I think that everybody should be following Julia Ostian, Jack Bowman, Kenio Fontes.
I’m Rob Isbitts from Sungarden Investment Publishing and Sungarden Investors Club. And thanks again to Seeking Alpha. We’ll see you next time, on one side of the mic or the other, on the Seeking Alpha Investing Experts podcast.
Editor’s Note: This article covers one or more microcap stocks. Please be aware of the risks associated with these stocks.