Buy Hold Rant - Stocks and Investing
Buy Hold Rant is a fast paced investing podcast that cuts through the noise of the markets. Each episode dives into stocks, company earnings, and the market moves that actually matter.
Hosted by Hamid Shojaee and Dustin Alper, the show breaks down their latest investments, the thinking behind every buy and sell, and the surprises that shake markets in real time. Insightful, opinionated, and refreshingly honest, Buy Hold Rant is where real investors talk markets without the fluff.
Buy Hold Rant - Stocks and Investing
Ep 58: $MU Q4 Earnings, $META Connect, OpenAI Dots vs Muse, $HOOD Summit
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Hamid and Dustin are back from vacation (and it's Hamid's birthday!). They break down Micron's blowout Q4 and why the "memory is cyclical" argument keeps missing. They also cover Meta Connect's new glasses and VR hardware, how OpenAI's new Dots stacks up against Meta's Muse, Robinhood's 2026 Summit, and the launch of their new product, Portaris.
📊 In this episode:
🧠 Micron Q4: $54B revenue vs. $51B expected, a raised guide, and 26 long-term agreements
🔁 Why the "Micron is cyclical" bear case looks backward, not forward
🕶️ Meta Connect: audio-only glasses, $1,299 VR glasses, holograms, and the Muse Charm
🤖 OpenAI Dots vs. Muse vs. Grokbot: is everyone playing for second place?
🔍 Google vs. Meta: does founder-led focus beat resources?
📱 Robinhood Summit: 24/7 trading, Robinhood Agents, and Agent Apps
🚀 Portaris demo: net worth tracking, a catalyst feed, and AI daily reports
❓ Listener Q&A: Rivian R2 and deliveries, VW Scout, Micron pricing, and Rocket Lab
💬 Would you pay for an AI assistant like Dots when Muse is free? Let us know in the comments, and hit like for Hamid's birthday!
⚠️ Disclaimer: This content is for informational and entertainment purposes only and is not financial advice. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.
🎁 Try Portaris free for 14 days. Use code BUYHOLDRANT for 75% off your first year.
Don't forget to check out:
New! Potaris: https://portaris.com/
The Best (and Free) Earnings Calendar: https://earningshub.com/
Hamid's Savvy Trader Portfolio: https://savvytrader.com/Hamid/my-actual-portfolio
Dustin's Savvy Trader Portfolio: https://savvytrader.com/dustin/rvr
#micron #mu #meta #metaconnect #openai #robinhood #rivian #rivianr2 #rocketlab #google #ai #vr #investing #stockmarket #buyholdrant
⏱️ Chapters:
0:00 Intro & Hamid's birthday
1:25 Episode rundown
1:55 Micron Q4 earnings
13:00 Meta Connect recap
27:10 OpenAI Dots vs. Meta Muse
32:20 Google vs. Meta: the founder-led advantage
43:20 Robinhood 2026 Summit
48:55 Introducing Portaris + live demo
1:01:20 Listener Q&A
1:03:35 Rivian R2, delivery estimates & VW Scout
1:10:00 Portaris vs. Savvy Trader & Earnings Hub
1:11:11 Is the market pricing in Micron's decline?
1:13:20 Rocket Lab: overpriced?
1:15:50 Wrap-up
And we're back, Dustin. We're back after a little vacation. I missed you so much. And you you know what? Today is a very special day. You thought I forgot. I didn't forget. What is it? What is it? Your birthday. How do you even know that? I know everything. It's my job. Oh what? And you know what? I got you a little something. Oh everyone watching the video right now, they are going to hit the like button for your birthday.
SPEAKER_04You're welcome. Oh, thank you. How's that gift? Uh honestly, I didn't even think that you would know that. And from I don't, I don't know how you how you know that.
SPEAKER_02But we talked about it at dinner once, how I think you don't actually know your real birthday, if I remember correctly.
SPEAKER_03Well, no, today is my real birthday, but uh the official documentation of my birthday is September 21st because that's what I was I was born in another country and they did things a little bit differently there. So um and and I'm told today is my real birthday. So, you know, but so I celebrate it on right.
SPEAKER_02So you're not a hundred percent certain.
SPEAKER_04Well, I mean, as certain as you know, like uh my parents as certain as I guess I am, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, but that's funny. Anyway, but yeah, happy birthday. Thank you, thank you. I I do celebrate on October 1st, and we we got a lot of stuff to talk about today. We can't be talking about me.
SPEAKER_02So yeah, we have Micron Earnings, obviously. Uh that was released yesterday. We missed Metaconnect last week, so we're gonna go over that. OpenAI announced their new dots platform. Uh Robinhood had a their summit event and announced some new features. We have an announcement, and then we have listener questions at the end of the show. So let's jump in to Micron earnings. I mean Micron earnings.
SPEAKER_03What are your thoughts? Well, it the the numbers just absolutely crushed it. Micron was expected to do something like $51 billion in revenue. Um, that was up 10 billion quarter over quarter, which the previous quarter was already a record at 41 billion, and they were expected to do an extra 10 billion this this quarter. Uh instead of doing an extra 10, they did an extra 13 billion. So they came in at $54 billion. Uh, and then they also crushed it on um earnings per share. Uh, they they are basically killing it in every financial sense of the word, killing it. And then they raised the guidance for this quarter that we're now in or their next quarter that they're going to report. Um, but more importantly, this is the part that sort of like gets me because um I'll go into my rent in just a minute. But more importantly, they said that 2027 is going to have tighter supply and even more demand uh than 2026. And it appears like it's going to be that way for 2028 and possibly beyond. They have zero visibility into when things might ease up. Because once we go into 2027 and 2028, that's when uh robo taxis or self-driving cars, which also need a ton of memory, uh, and also robots start to come online, and the production ramp of on those things is going to start to go into the millions of units uh at some point down the road. Uh, and that's not even considering like AI and data center uh needs for memory. So the future for memory demand just looks like it's going to be off the charts, and there is no letting up on uh the demand for what Micron makes, which is you know, all the stuff that these products need in order to both store in flash memory uh as well as to uh do quick access and random access memory uh or DRAM. So uh Micron just continues to be a phenomenal uh buy from my perspective, and that's why it continues to be such a huge portion of my portfolio. So let me pause there for your commentary on it because I know you're watching it as well, and then uh and then I have some rents.
SPEAKER_02So I mean, it I would say we didn't really learn too much new to add to the thesis that just reconfirmed the thesis, right? Um I you know, overall with MiaCron, you have these five-year contracts that they're signing, they're most likely going to do buybacks, which they hinted at um in the call. Uh, I think they're allowed to start doing that after December 9th. Uh and like you mentioned, you have a they're saying there's going to be a worse memory shortage for 2027 and 2028. I have the quote here from the deck. I pull it up. Uh, this last bullet. Uh, as strong as fiscal 2026 was, we expect fiscal 2027 to be even better. Industry demand has strengthened since our last earnings call, and we expect memory and storage supply demand conditions to be much tighter in fiscal 2027 and 2028 than they were in 2026.
SPEAKER_03I mean, basically, you cannot get better uh quote than that, right? Like never in its cyclical history has that statement ever been true. Yet the market continues to sort of the bears on micron essentially just continue to iterate this, reiterate this whole memory is cyclical, micron cyclical. The the uh peak is when they have peak um margins and when they have the uh you know the lowest PE, that's when you're supposed to sell, as if like uh history always repeats in exactly the same way. Well, we already know it's not repeating in the exact same way because for the past five quarters, everyone who's been on this sort of cyclical bandwagon has been saying microns, profits, and margins and uh PE has peaked literally for the past five quarters, but they just continue to peak again and again and again. Um, so it's just uh pretty phenomenal. That that argument doesn't hold much water for me. But uh but the best one, which is you know, the irony in the in the argument is lost, is that the markets are forward looking, right? And uh, and therefore they're predicting what's going to happen with micron in the future, and because the future will mean there's an abundance of memory and prices are going to collapse, micron, you know, because micron is cyclical or memory is cyclical, that's the reason that micron only deserves a forward PE of six or seven, right? Uh, and that argument that the market looks to the future, it it's uh the the irony there is that the in order to sort of make that argument, you have to be looking at the past and saying that the micron has been cyclical or memory is cyclical historically, and therefore it's going to continue to be in the future. So the the irony is that it's not looking into the future, it's actually looking into the past to try to project what's going to happen in the future. Uh, and in this case, it's been wrong for at least five quarters. Management is telling you it's going to be wrong for at least two more years, with no visibility of it like letting up. Uh, but yet this is what the market is doing. Now, the question becomes okay, like when is uh the performance on Micron's stock going to sort of uh uh reach where it should be based on its financial performance? And you know, it's hard to answer those kind of questions, but sometimes the market changes its mind and changes its position on something, and it does it very quickly, as we started to see with Meta, for example, after the introduction of Muse. Um, but uh certainly I would think the moment that uh buybacks start, especially at such a large volume, since Micron is going to be generating more than $100 billion of cash per year going forward, more than that, uh, what are they gonna do with that cash? The one of the best ways to spend it is to spend it in or invest it in their own stock and take a significant chunk of it off the market, especially if the price continues to be suppressed like this. So that's when things really I expect them to fly. Um, but um, but between now and then anything can happen. We saw like today it started out uh being down, but it ended the day up 3%. So um who knows? The market changes its mind quickly. Remember, the market is bipolar. So one day you could think that micron is cyclical and terrible, and the next day could think it's the best thing, it's the critical to AI, and the future is all AI, and suddenly Micron starts getting a forward PE of 20. You never know. So um but absolutely I continue to be very, very excited about it and uh expect to hold on to my shares, and the management is executing perfectly. Uh, I love the numbers, I couldn't be happier about this hold. So yeah.
SPEAKER_02And in terms of the the market rebalancing the price of micron or re-recognizing the price of micron, I mean, if you look at this is the five-year chart for for micron's price, it makes sense to me that there's some sort of cool-off happening right now. Like, I'm not worried by any means. And I know we we get a lot of questions about like, you know, is it time to cut micron? Like, you're patients running thin or whatever. And it's like, I have all the patience in the world. Like, right, and especially for us, we both got in within the last year. Um, so for long-term investors, that's that's a relatively new investment. Um, but there's plenty of time for for micron to uh you know go up from here and uh take in all this new or not so new information.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's exactly right. And even if you look at 2026, just that portion to the um before it sort of like skyrockets there from the year chart. Yeah, do do yeah, right there. So you can see that it was like flat from um uh towards the left side of the chart. Where is that? Like, yeah, from what February to end of uh March, April uh time frame. Uh it's flattish to slightly down, uh, and then it just spikes up, right? It almost um 3x'd in a matter of two months, and then like it has been flattish for the past three months again, right? So uh these um these flat periods can be frustrating because the stock doesn't feel like it's performing to its financial performance that it's putting out. Um, but then like it corrects itself very quickly, suddenly, and suddenly, by the way, like it it corrected itself in May uh in a matter of 30 days, right? It almost doubled or tripled in a matter of 30 days. So uh things happen very quickly. You're absolutely right. As a long-term investor, I'm not looking at it to always be exactly where it should be, or like having the market think that things should be exactly where I think it should be at any given moment. So um, but yeah, I I I am very pleased with their performance. And as a shareholder, I just want to continue to hold at this price, right? That's the way I look at it. In fact, if it wasn't already 34% of my portfolio, I might be adding more to my position. But because it's such a large position, it's it doesn't make sense anymore for me.
SPEAKER_02One other thing to note about being a long-term investor and buying again within the last year, like it has already exceeded my expectations of how quickly it would move. Because often we'll buy a stock and it doesn't move for years. Like, you know, Caribbean's a great example where it's just ranging and you just have to have the continued confidence as the business gets better and better that eventually the stock price will reflect that. With Micron, the stock price is already reflecting it. We just think it needs to reflect it more. Um that's right. That's that's like very good. This is a big win in my eyes.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, no, I 100% agree. Yeah. Um, okay, but yeah, so a lot of goodness for Micron. Um, I mean, basically, uh, I couldn't have asked for a better quarter. I couldn't ask for a better guide. They they also like uh increased their number of signed uh long-term agreements. Uh they added another 10 customers from like 16 to 26 or something like that. So yeah, it's just looking so good. And they're they're sort of like their long-term contracts with these customers are starting to be five-year agreements going into 2031 time frame. So um they're taking a lot of the cyclicality of the past away from it.
SPEAKER_02So all right, let's move on to Meta Connect. I thought they had a very strong presentation this year, and it really wasn't even about Muse. Like, yeah, they talked about Muse, but it was a lot of hardware announcements um that I thought were very exciting. And I'm also I'm I'm a fan of the VR space, so I'm a little biased here. Um, I know not everyone is on board yet. Um, so things that they announced, they uh are adding a mode for Muse where you could video chat with your agent, which by itself I think is okay. But what I think will be more interesting, and they kind of showed this in one of their VR demos, is your agent could just kind of be hanging on the side and you could like talk to it and it'll animate. And I think the same thing will eventually come to the phone, where you'll have the agent kind of in the corner and it makes it a little bit more personable, and you could talk to it and as it does stuff on your phone, as opposed to it taking up the entire screen and it just being a video chat. But I I think that's a step in the right direction.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_02Then they announced uh audio only glasses, so they're getting rid of the cameras. They still have the camera models, but it's just another option. Uh that's that's going through it. Yeah, it's it's a big deal because the the battery's gonna be a lot better and the the it's gonna be a lot slimmer and it reduces a lot of privacy concerns as well.
SPEAKER_03Right, right. Uh I want to come back to that, but uh finish the announcements and then we'll keep going into the device.
SPEAKER_02We'll circle back. Um keeping on glasses, they announced their meta VR glasses, which I think are really interesting. Um, it's almost it's very similar to the Vision Pro in the sense that it's uh it's not even a headset, it's glasses connected to a brick, but you don't have the full view that the Vision Pro gives you or that a meta quest would give you. So that's what you're kind of giving up. But the the the weight of them is like one fifth of the quest three. I don't even know what the difference is between the Vision Pro, but it has to be insane. Um, the cost is $12.99, where the Vision Pro is $36.99. So it's almost a third of the price of the Vision Pro. Um while they were demoing it, they also showed off their new full body holograms, which looked really good. It's their fancy way of saying you could like do your video chat while in VR. Um, but it looked like the person was there, at least in the demos. Obviously, I I need to kind of see it for myself. Um, but that was very compelling. Uh and then you they announced at the end, like within the last minute, uh, their Muse Charm product, which kind of seemed like an afterthought from the team. Um, but it's it's a cool little like keychain that your Muse avatar can be on if you if you don't want to carry around glasses or if you don't want to use your phone. So I don't know how hot of a product that will be. Pricing will definitely play a big role. Um, they want to release that for the holidays. So those are all the announcements. What are your thoughts?
SPEAKER_03Okay. I I did get a chance to finally watch the uh the full events. And um I had some opinions beforehand. One of those opinions changed, and I'll tell you. Um, but let's go through each of the four devices. So uh, or four major announcements. The first being this sort of like talking to Muse and then having a character that's animated and talks back uh with an animated character. I think that's a hit. That was sort of like an obvious, everyone's gonna go and do that. Um, Muse is just gonna continue to get better. It's crystal clear to me that Muse is gonna be a massive success. And they will probably eventually have a billion users for Muse. And uh, I couldn't be more excited for the Muse product, sort of like really putting Meta on the forefront of AI. So that is extremely exciting to me. Uh, then the uh the glasses that are audio only with longer battery life and uh uh basically all day and much more comfortable because they're lighter, less technical technical uh issues, and less privacy issues. That too, to me is a pretty big deal because essentially what you have is a headset, you know, that is instead of it being totally visible, uh, it's on your glasses. Uh and all of a sudden you can talk to it, you can talk to Muse, essentially, their perfect AI agent, which I think is already going to be a slam dunk success. Uh, and uh, and then you're gonna have a seamless way to talk to it as opposed to bringing out your phone every time. So you could be doing it while you're driving, you could do it while you're jogging. I mean, like there's all kinds of scenarios, or going into a meeting and say, hey, listen and summarize everything in this meeting. Um, there's lots of potential use cases for it where um the camera-based glasses might be a little bit more of a privacy intrusion, or it feels a little bit more nerdy that people might want to avoid. So I'm actually quite excited about that.
SPEAKER_02From a fashion standpoint, like I think a lot of people are looking at that and they're like, I don't want to wear a camera on my face. And that's just they're not uh it kills the sale immediately.
SPEAKER_03Exactly, exactly. And and uh with the headsets, you're already wearing all of the same things as the glasses on your uh ears. So you're essentially doing the same thing if you're wearing headsets ever, but the glasses is like less intrusive in a way. So uh super excited about that. I think that's gonna be a major hit. Um then moving on to uh the VR glasses. When I first saw that that announcement at $12.99, and uh it doesn't have this sort of strap where it sort of like uh wraps around your head. Right, it's literally glasses. Yeah, my immediate reaction was that this is too much for it to be just glasses that are sort of like thick and heavier, essentially. Uh and because it doesn't strap around the back of your head, for gaming it's not ideal because you know, like you're gonna be moving your head quickly and you want glasses not to fall off or whatever. So my immediate reaction was that it's probably not going to be a hit, uh, especially at $1,300. It's an additive device, meaning you can't like it doesn't replace anything for you, right? Like, but then when I saw the demos, then I was like, okay, I could see this actually having some utility. I don't think it's gonna be a huge success. It's not gonna like make or break it for meta. But the the use cases that were super interesting was that um, first of all, they've integrated Muse into the uh operating system. So now you just talk to it for doing whatever you want to do. Um, then they had sort of uh James Cameron and even um uh who's the original quest creator? Uh Palmer Lucky. Palmer Lucky was one of the users, and he was like wowed by it. And then they talked about how it only weighs 100 grams, which is, like you said, a fifth of the weight of the quest. I was like, all right, like when you combine all of these things, and then you get this amazing 5k display that is sort of like very immersive, and if it has the right experience, being able to sort of like sit on your couch and talk to Muse and having it pull up a show for you or browse the internet and you know, like all of a sudden interacting with voice to your computer, and you don't need a separate computer to do all of this, could be a game changer. Um, so I think it might be a great little sort of entry device into this world that, you know, like uh if you remember when uh Apple uh introduced the uh Vision Pro, they talked about how I forget what their terminology was, but it's like a new way of computing. Um do you remember what they called it? Spatial computing. Yeah, spatial. So this might be the right device for spatial computing because when you combine it with AI, a great AI character that controls the operating system and can do everything inside the product. Uh, and the price is not ridiculous, it's not 3600, it's 1300. It's pretty high, but it's not, you know, if you don't buy it. It's cheaper than an iPhone duo.
SPEAKER_04Duo, yeah, that's what I was gonna say. If you buy a regular phone and you could still buy this device in addition to a regular phone, it's like a duo. So so you, you know, this could be a hit. I mean, I I don't expect them to sell 10 million devices in the first year, but like a million or two million devices is is a possibility.
SPEAKER_03But um it's definitely a step in the right direction. And uh 100 grams, that's that's pretty huge. One other thing that they did differently than uh than the Vision Pro is that they put the computer. Computing CPU and all of that stuff also in the battery puck. So none of that compute is on your face, which is why it's so much lighter. Which seems like a no-brainer.
SPEAKER_02And I'm surprised Apple didn't do that.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_03That must be another one. If you're going to require a battery on a puck anyway, you should be putting the compute there. That just makes the most amount of sense.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And you know, Meta has to be very excited about their VR products because that's the only place where their Muse can really fully control the operating system, have full access. Right. Everywhere else, they're going to be blocked, you know, by whoever the gatekeeper of the platform is. Yeah. So we'll really be able to see what it could do there.
SPEAKER_03So some but by the way, my my muse, I call my muse Jarvis, and and uh you know, inspired obviously by uh Iron Man. And in inside of the VR glasses, Jarvis will be exactly like the way Iron Man, you know, it'll like be doing stuff on your screen for you.
SPEAKER_04It'll pull up apps and do, you know, so it it's as close to Jarvis as you can get when you combine it with the glasses.
SPEAKER_02Um, but what what were you gonna say before we move on to the little puck or uh I was gonna say for the VR glasses, I mean my two big use cases in VR, at least in theory, because I have the I have the Quest Pro, as you know. Uh I I love to work out in VR, which I'm sure you could tell by my physique. I'm not going to a gym. Um so I love to work out in VR.
SPEAKER_04Your head looks amazingly in shape. Do you see my muscles?
SPEAKER_02Um and then the the spatial spatial computing, like having as many monitors as you want with a keyboard mouse, being able to talk to an AI. Um, Quest Pro is not good at that because the resolution is too blurry to use. Vision Pro, I haven't really tried um that because I've only done the demo in store. That's definitely a better product. I'd be curious how this would be. But then my other question is like, if I wanted to box using the glasses, like there's definitely pros and cons. Like, yeah, they can maybe fall off. You're also tethered to the the brick, but you also don't have this like heavy thing on your face, and it's more breathable. So, like, I don't know what set of pros and cons are better or worse, but I'm very intrigued by this product.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I am as well. I am as well. Um, okay, then there's the puck, which is a surprise because like I don't know the use cases for this puck. If you're gonna pull something out of your pocket or off of your keychain, the easiest thing to pull out of your pocket is your phone. So why would you why would you need this puck? Um you know, and would you spend an extra, let's say, a couple hundred dollars, even if it's that cheap, uh, on something else to carry in addition to your phone. I don't think that would be the case for for most men, for women, because you know, like uh their uh phones and their purse, maybe. I mean, I I don't know. Like I don't know if it would be a different scenario for women, uh, but I just don't see that device being a huge success. Um unless it could be a phone replacement.
SPEAKER_02Right. If it's a phone replacement and it could be maybe like targeted for kids, which I know meta and kids maybe isn't the best thing right now, but like that's definitely a use case where kids right now are using an Apple Watch. Um or I could in different markets, like internationally, um I could see it being more popular than uh in America. But what I like what Meta's doing here is even if this is a failure, at least they're trying to create a new generation of products that are AI first, which we know all these other companies are trying to do, like Johnny Ive is working with OpenAI. Um and there's already been like some products, like the that uh AI pin that was released a couple of years ago. That's right. And nothing has really also failed, by the way. Right. So I think we're gonna see a lot of failures in general before we see something succeed. Um, and that's no fault of Meta's, it's just building and exploring new categories.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. This uh has the potential to go in the right direction, especially if it could be a replacement of your phone. So you you you know, as as AI does more things for you to where you need apps less and less, uh, right? Like it could, if it could just do all the things for you, and then this becomes the conduit into your virtual machine that's in the cloud, uh, and it already has built-in cell service or whatever, and it could make phone calls. Now all of a sudden, you know, like you got your glasses, you got your headset, you know, you have your device that uh is making the phone call. It could be a very interesting combination if you if you could eliminate the phone out of the picture. So um yeah, I I don't I don't see the first version of this doing that, but but if it eventually did that, that could be super interesting.
SPEAKER_02And it seems like that's where this is inevitably going, right? Like eventually it they'll they'll put an antenna in it. Yeah. Um, okay, sticking to the Muse train, OpenAI announced their competitor, dots. Um, this is very similar to Meta Muse. This is very similar to Grockbot. Um, what are your initial thoughts on dots and how this could affect the competition for SpaceX and for Meta?
SPEAKER_03So I didn't see the launch event, but I have read a lot about it online. It sounds like it was a disaster based on you know, like a lot of things going wrong. Uh, and it seems like it was more of a copy of Grok, uh uh Grokbot as opposed to Muse, where again, like you have multiple dots essentially for different purposes, uh, as opposed to a single sort of like AI uh assistant, and then they only put it into their $200 a month pro plan. Is that is that am I understanding?
SPEAKER_02At least at least for now, but that's also how like grokbot was initially released, where they like started on the higher plans and then eventually they brought it down to lower plans, and now you could access it for I think 20 bucks a month. But meta obviously released initially for free, and you can't beat that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and you know what's funny is that I use Muse all the time. I was just traveling in Europe and I was using it to like arrange stuff and do all kinds of things for me and like look out for various different things, look out, look out for my flight information, my gate information, my the where's there a lounge in the terminal that I'm gonna be flying out of. Um but it's just unbelievably good. And I have not run into a paywall yet, which blows me away. Like the the amount of stuff that uh is included in Muse for free. Yeah I mean, basically everybody else, in my opinion, right now, is playing for second place. Um, it's become crystal clear that Muse is going to be number one. There's no question in my mind now. Uh as a personal assistant, now, not necessarily uh beating uh ChatGPT in terms of usage. The chat GPT, I think, has something like uh 1.2 billion monthly active users, so uh that's pretty incredible in terms of consumer usage on chat GPT. But um, as a personal assistant, I think Muse is already the one to beat. So I'm I'm not that excited about open AI dots.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so for dots, the only thing that was interesting to me was the default characters, and I know this is preference. I thought they had the strongest set of AI avatars compared to the Grockbot and like the MetaMuse, I think his name's Jolly character. Um, and I do think that's really important because if right now everyone switches AIs, and by everyone I mean, I guess people who are paying attention, some people just pick uh you know ChatGPT and have stuck with it. Uh, but if you're switching AIs, it's because you have one that's more intelligent over the other as they keep kind of fine fighting for that first place. But now you have this new angle of like the human side of things, human side of things, where you have the these avatars that you're kind of connected to, right? So, like if you're jiving with Jarvis and all of a sudden uh dots or open AI comes out with this killer product and it's like way better, not way better, but like decently better than Muse, you might just stick with Muse because you don't want to leave Jarvis because you love them. Right, you know, right, right. So I do think it is critical or it's a it's a big differentiator if you can get those avatars right. And I think I've maybe said this on another pod, but if one of these um AI labs partners with an animation studio, I think that would be absolutely killer, right? Like if I'm not saying to partner with Pixar or to use like Pixar characters, create new characters, right? But you need to give them like real emotion because right now it and it's gonna all these AI characters are gonna look silly a year from now, guaranteed. Right. Like it's just gonna get immensely better.
SPEAKER_03For sure. But by the way, did you know the muse one can be changed to whatever you want?
SPEAKER_02I've a custom I have a custom muse. Are you kidding me? That was the first thing I did. And and from that, right? So like the default characters, dots are better in terms of like how you could customize them. Muse is better by far. Um because not only do you can you customize it, but it's also animated.
SPEAKER_03Like, yeah, which which blew me away. I I didn't even know you could do that until like literally I was like, wait a second, can I can edit his picture? And I discovered that today for oh that's fine. Why is other people's muse looking different? But but yeah, it it yeah, and and at first it puts a sort of uh still image, and then I was like, Oh, I lost the um the uh animations, but then it was creating the animations in the background, and then animations came in uh after like a few minutes, and I was like, Wow, this it just continues to wow me. This product is like super impressive.
SPEAKER_02So, and then going back to your comment of like Meta is the one to beat. I agree if uh Grockbot and Muse and or and uh dots and whatever Anthropic comes up with, if they can't offer a free product, then it's gonna be really hard to beat Muse. But you know who can offer a free product, you know who I'm gonna say, Google. And I I really think if Google can execute, they are going to absolutely kill it because you're already connected to Gmail, to Google Calendar, to Google Photos. Yes, they have everything. It's just a question of if they could execute.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I've been saying this for a long time that like uh Google is in the absolute best position to have already destroyed OpenAI and Anthropic, in my opinion. The only reason I believe they haven't is because lack of focus and leadership. And you know, I'll uh I'll die on that hill because uh I think Mark Zuckerberg running Google, he would have already had the talent as opposed to having to build the talent from in-house over the past year. So he like kind of started from scratch again a year ago and has already caught up. Uh, if they had their Mark Zuckerberg, uh they would they would be all over this. And and they they would have already released it, they would already be number one. OpenAI might not even exist. Uh yeah, Google is still, it's not too late for them, but they're just moving too slow. And I just don't see them executing as fast as Meta. The other disadvantage that now they have that it's going to just, it's like death by a thousand cuts, right? Because, like, you know, let's say they come out with something as good as Muse or maybe even better than Muse, and they uh they start to sort of like it becomes a two-horse race between Meta and uh Google. Well, the hardware advantages are gonna start to kick in next year or the year after, right? Like where uh now Meta is way ahead on glasses. This this is their third version of their smart glasses that they have, and they've already sort of hashed out so many little things. They've realized that how important looks is. They have a hundred different models of glasses that you can choose from, right? So when Google starts to offer the hardware, it's gonna be like, all right, they're experimenting, they're starting from scratch again, and they're just so far behind on so many different things for them to catch up on all of those things at the same time. So, you know, Google definitely has the muscle, the cash, the um uh the talent to be able to execute. What they don't have is the leadership and focus to be able to execute. Um, that was my reason for switching from selling all of my Google last, or I forget if it was early this year or uh late last year, from and then I switched it from Google to Meta.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I agree, but I do think that is a short-term problem. And what I mean by short term, I don't know. I don't know how many years that is, right? But I think in the long term it's inevitable Google's going to catch up and I think destroy everything.
SPEAKER_03I think I I I no, I see that as uh you think Google will never catch up on hardware? It's not that they can't catch up, they have the talent to be able to do it. I think what what uh what we're missing in the in the argument is that my argument is that a founder-led company will remain ahead of a non-founder-led company, given all other things equal. Meaning both of them have enormous resources, both of them have huge reach, both of them have the talent now. Meta didn't a year ago, but now it has. Um, that what both of them don't have is founder-led. And what happens when you don't have the founder led is that it's way more difficult for just the uh teams to have focus and less politics and unified direction. Whereas like what Mark Zuckerberg did is like AI is our number one focus. By the way, we're gonna start freaking working in my office from now on, and he's got his core team literally working out of his office in a war room style because this is so important, right? So, like the whole team at Meta is working from Mark's office, and the the level of clarity that that provides when your decisions can go all the way to the top in a split second because the person who you need to ask is right there in the room uh is just enormous. And that gives a massive advantage long term.
SPEAKER_02So again, I I agree that's an advantage, but if you look at history between these two companies, it's not that like Meta has been absolutely demolishing Google.
SPEAKER_03Oh, yeah, it did actually. Like look at Google Plus. Uh, Google Plus was uh their sort of attempt to get into the social network and meta crushed them. I mean, like anything that Google has tried to compete with Meta on, they have crushed them. What about the phone? Well, uh by the time okay, so the phone would have been, in my opinion, an obvious like it's gonna not work because by the time that you know you're on the right side of the S curve on the phone, you release a phone when everybody already has Android or uh or um whatchamacallit.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so that's my same argument about Google Plus. All the social networks are already out.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that that's true. So yeah, you know, I'm saying like it's not over in terms of like Google has a shot for AI, like right? I mean, there's no question. They have the talent, they have a shot. The S-Curve were we very beginning, uh early stages of it, but the founder-led advantage is is enormous. So it'll be interesting to watch. I mean, I I would almost think that Elon has a better chance at uh at it because of it being founder-led as opposed to uh Google. Yeah, I I think but but SpaceX doesn't have the resources that Google has. Uh that that would be the main difference.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, resources, distribution, uh data. Like I I know Google doesn't check every single box, but I think they check very significant boxes. And it's not like they're a floundering company.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, fundamentally, I agree with you. If if let's say Larry Page came back and started running Google again, I'd be like, okay, that now this changes everything. Right, totally, totally. No, um to be fair, Sergei is uh very actively and uh involved in the day-to-day of their AI uh build out. And and by the way, he's the reason they caught up again. So the founder came back and has sort of is like running a group, but it's not at a higher level where like the direction is set. They're making all sorts of little mistakes, in my opinion. It's like, come on, and and also a perfect example of that is that they still don't own Gemini.com, by the way. You know, like just the simplest things. Imagine like uh meta releasing Muse.muse, but not owning Muse.com, right?
SPEAKER_02Like it's it's just it just seems weird. Um, one other thing I just want to point out is even though I think Google will beat Meta in this case, I do own way more meta shares just because I think from a stock perspective, meta is the better opportunity, right? So it's right it's because it's not a winner-take all game.
SPEAKER_03By the way, I misspoke Muse.ai. They own Muse.ai, they don't own Muse.com. So just to correct that little Okay, I'm glad you corrected it.
SPEAKER_02I I almost corrected you because I thought they didn't own it, but I wasn't positive. Yeah, um okay, one more question on this, and then we'll move we'll move on. Um so going back to dots, open AI has an advantage where they already have an AI relationship with a lot of users, where Facebook or Meta has a relationship with a ton of users as well, obviously, with uh Instagram and WhatsApp, but it's not that AI relationship. Do you think there are going to be a significant number of users where they're like, oh, I already trust Chat GPT from an AI perspective, so I'm willing to pay to use dots just so I could stay in that world? Or is the free uh price tag gonna drive majority of the people over to uh Muse?
SPEAKER_03Well, the the they would have to have a free offering in order to have a shot at it. Um yes, or anybody basically, in order to have a shot at being number one, they would have to have a free offering if there's a great free offering out there, right? Um and the the question is how much does this free offering cost? You know, and if the cost of this free offering is $100 billion of compute that they need to put behind it, or maybe and by the way, add to it another $100 billion next year and another $100 billion next year, uh, the following year, the cost runs up very, very quickly. And Meta can take a long-term approach to this thing and say, like, we want to, you know, force out everybody else uh that that can't afford to make that investment, and then we'll start charging after we have the mass the major market share. Um, whereas in OpenAI's case, they have to figure this out while they're trying to get money for funding this whole thing, right? Um which is a way tougher position to be. That doesn't make it impossible, but it's just that you need a lot more investment uh as a result. And coming up with that investment just becomes harder and harder, which is why they're releasing it under their professional plan. They're going after the enterprise first, they're going after business customers, kind of like Anthropic did, right? Where they kind of made that mistake. They're now choosing to purposely go after businesses first and then figure out what to do on the consumer side later, so that hopefully the business money can actually uh subsidize the consumer, um, consumer side. I think it's a good strategy if you don't have access to hundreds of billions of dollars of uh of capital. But uh in Meta's case, they have access to a huge amount of money. So uh it makes sense for them to take the approach that they're doing. And by the way, Meta just um hired MongoDB's CEO, which is mind-blown, right?
SPEAKER_04Like the CEO of a public company just resigns to go to Meta the next day, right? Like it's it's kind of unprecedented level. You don't see that every day.
SPEAKER_03Things happening, yeah. And they're going after the enterprise. So that also positions Meta pretty well for the enterprise side of things, which is to come.
SPEAKER_02Okay, we get we got to keep moving because we're we're running late. Um, Robin Hood had their 2026 summit event. Uh, I think it was earlier this week. It's hard to keep track of all these events. Um, they announced a bunch of different stuff. A lot of it was to uh benefit traders. They announced uh 24-7 trading coming to uh the US. Right now they have 24 5 trading. Um the biggest announcement was their uh uh Robinhood agents uh announcement, which is they they already have the their agent agentic platform, which they announced like a couple months ago, but that was Is limited to, I believe, like a terminal or API. This is a consumer-facing product. So you can go into your Robinhood app and set up an agent to trade for you. So it's a lot easier.
SPEAKER_03So you don't have to connect it to an outside uh like the because before you had to connect it to Claude or you still have to, but for up until December or the end of the year, I think you get free usage.
SPEAKER_02Uh or free usage for the chat GPT models. There's like a selector, and you could choose your model within um the Robinhood app. But before you had to link a model and use like Robinhood's API terminal. Again, I'm not exactly familiar with what the interface was, but now they're just bringing that to the app. Um interesting. Another big announcement, which I think is interesting from our perspective, is they announced agent apps, which is just basically their branding of a user being able to buy a subscription to a data source to feed their agent. So they have uh limited partnerships right now. So an example is they partnered with unusual whales. So if you want options data, uh you could spend, I don't know what the dollar amount is, but let's just say you could spend $10 a month to get unusual whales data. And you could down or set up as many of these apps as they're available. Um and and so what I think is interesting here is one, you don't have to have an unusual whales subscription. This is all done through Robinhood just to get the data feed into your agent. So it's really clean and simple. Um, and I think it provides a new opportunity for businesses like ours, where if we wanted to provide a data feed instead of doing just an MCP like on a pro plan, we could work with Robinhood directly and uh people could access whatever it is, earning sub data, savvy trader data, or Taurus data, um, you know, directly within Robinhood without having to set up a separate subscription. Um so I thought that I I just thought that was interesting. I don't know if it's gonna catch on or not. Um they they're not opening it up, I believe, to the public or like sort of public developers yet, but it seems like that's where they're going is they want to have an entire app store of different feeds.
SPEAKER_03That is interesting. Huh. Yeah. Okay. Uh keep keep going, sorry.
SPEAKER_02Well, no, that that's really it. I mean, Robinhood continues to be like firing on all cylinders. I will say, and I think I said this last time they had an event, they make it very theatrical, which I like, but they also I think do it because while they're announcing a lot, like it's all like just software demos. So they it's not like a hardware demo where it's uh you know it's not as exciting. So there's a little bit of like smoke and mirrors uh in that sense, where I think it would benefit them not to delay these announcements necessarily, but to space out and like really add a lot of big announcements in um one presentation.
SPEAKER_03Right. Um, but it does seem like they're doing a lot of little little stuff. Yes.
SPEAKER_02And and some of them catch on, but a lot of them sort of like fizzle off, and it's kind of um and a lot of them is for very like advanced users, it's not for the everyday person, at least the latest batch of uh announcements from like this uh event and maybe like the last one or two events as well. Yeah. Um but I know you've been selling your Robinhood. Um, how are you how are you feeling about them overall?
SPEAKER_03I I think they're a great company and continue to execute well, but um the excitement around it doesn't match the excitement right now that I have around Meta and Micron. Um, and let's say Rivian as well. So uh, you know, those feel like more exciting. Even Rocket Lab is more exciting a little bit than uh even Rocket Lab. Well, Rocket Lab, it's a very exciting business. Okay, so Rocket Lab is not cheap. Uh this is sort of like the caveat, right? Like for me, the combination of the company has to be exciting, but also the price has to be exciting for me for to actually be excited about it. And and uh with respect to um, you know, like Meta, I feel like the company is exciting, price is very exciting, micron company is exciting, price is extremely exciting, right? Like so the combination of these two things is uh less exciting for me for Robin.
SPEAKER_02Um okay, let's move on to our last topic before listener questions. Um Hamid, why don't why don't you announce this? Because you're the CEO.
SPEAKER_03So so we've been working on a product, uh, and we try to not make this show about like promoting our own products, but you know, it's kind of weird not to talk about a product that we've been working on for for quite some time. But um uh we uh get a lot of people who say that uh I I love the way in which um you can see like my portfolio on Savvy Trader with you know these uh the the visuals on a portfolio in Savvy Trader are beautiful and like the analytics are beautiful. And uh by the way, uh it would be great to know when my companies are reporting earnings or you know, there's an SEC filing where the CEO or somebody is selling, uh selling their shares or whatever. So we have a lot of this information in our systems, and we have obviously you know, with Dustin being the visual designer that he is, he's uh created these uh pretty what I consider phenomenal uh interfaces in into our for for our products, both uh on the um earnings hub side as well as uh the savvy trader side. Uh, what if we could offer these things combined for anyone to access for their portfolios? So uh we came up with a product, it's called Portaris. And the idea behind this product is that it shows you your net worth, it's you add all of your accounts, you just connect your uh Fidelity, your Robinhood, your uh you know, whatever brokerage accounts and banking accounts. You can even connect your um home loan or whatever, and these are all read-only, and it goes through um uh why am I drawing it blank? Uh, the the uh the connector is through uh dust ad.
SPEAKER_02Sorry, I was I was I was admiring our user interface.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. The connector is through plaid. So it it relies on the same security systems that uh all of the other connectors, like your bank probably uses plaid to you know connect different things. So uh it's secured through plaid. Uh we do we do this uh pool of all of your brokerage and banking information, your loan information, and then we can present you with net worth data, uh your assets, your liabilities, your holdings. We can uh show you when your holdings are reporting earnings, um, when there's SEC filings around them, the news, and we can give you a daily report on what's going on with your uh net worth and so on. So uh so that's the idea behind the product. And uh and then Dustin, why don't you demo it? So hopefully that that captured a little bit of what what we're uh doing. Yeah, I think that I think that was great. It's are you able to move the window a little bit so that they can see the top left side?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we gotta do it live. Hold on.
unknownUh to do.
SPEAKER_02But there you go. Oh, there, oh, there you go. Look at that. Um, okay. So basically, like Amit said, it's it's it's like we took the best functionality from Savvy Trader and the best functionality from Earnings Hub and combined it and connected plaid so you could automatically uh uh uh link all of your assets together and just get a very personalized view um for what matters most to you. Uh so the default tab is the portfolio tab. This is very much an uh investment first product, even though it does track your entire net worth and we'll have more functionality around that uh in the future. Uh so you get the allocation heat map, which if you follow Hamid's portfolio, you'll be very familiar with this widget. So you could either see uh how your stocks did today or total. Um, this is just a dummy account, so don't get too excited. Uh then we have, I'll just stick to the left-hand side here, your investment performance, your positions, again, similar to Savvy Trader, you can view this in like a detailed table or in a simplified grid. Um, your monthly returns. So this is a another good call out is let's say you sign up for PortAris and you're like, where are all these cool visualizations? Some of them you need to have a little bit of data before uh you're gonna see like uh, you know, a calendar like this. And then it starts from when you sign up, basically. Right. Yes. And if you notice, there's this little uh widget hanging out in the bottom, and that is the Port Taurus AI. So you could ask it questions about your portfolio and it'll it can answer them. Um and you can fully customize this as well with its own like memory, how you like to invest, uh, and it could be as aggressive or uh not aggressive or conservative as you want. Going over to the right-hand side, we have the your overall net worth broken down by either uh the type of account or it could be broken down by the specific like brokerages or institutions. Then we have standard news, the catalyst widget is probably my favorite new widget. This is something that is not in any of our products. It combines like all the big uh events, so SEC filings, earnings events, analyst uh ratings, and dividends all into one widget.
SPEAKER_03Uh upcoming events. The catalyst of what is causing one of your uh holdings to move, essentially. Okay, right.
SPEAKER_02And in theory, these events would cause them to move, you know. Right. Uh and then upcoming events. So this is only applicable for earnings and dividends, things that like we know that are coming but haven't happened yet. Uh and then we did split out insider activity to be its own widget. So those are SEC filing uh form fours. Uh and with with SEC filings, we have like these nice little AI one-liners of what actually happened. And then you could always click in and read the actual uh form four or a longer AI description if you wanted to. Uh okay, I'm gonna keep moving at a higher level now. So we have the analytics widget, which again, if you're familiar with Savvy Trader, it's very similar to that, where it's just additional views of your portfolio. We'll be adding more to this over time. Um, so like some call-outs, the return statistics widget to have a better understanding of like how often do you have green days versus red days, or what's your biggest win streak versus lose loss streak? Uh, like these are the type of things that are going to help you hopefully become a better investor, right? Because it's it's putting this mirror in front of you. And you know, you might think you're doing well, and then you kind of look into the statistics and it's like, well, actually, maybe I have less control over my portfolio than I think. Um, and this is the type of stuff where I wish brokerages were just doing this in their own platforms, like Fidelity should be doing this, Vanguard shouldn't be doing this, but they're not, so we're gonna do it. Um same thing with like the correlation matrix, seeing how your investments are correlated. Like, should you be uh selling uh a stock where they're basically moving hand in hand, right? Um and then the net worth tab, this is right now very similar to the portfolio tab. It's just at the net worth level. So, right, like instead of these being stocks, these are your either account types or your actual accounts.
SPEAKER_03Um, those like real estate and other assets. So if you happen to own like a million dollars of art, that your art assets would list be listed here under net worth, whereas it's not in the portfolio where it's like daily uh price updates on the portfolio tab.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. Yeah, so you could add pretty much anything as a manual asset or liability. So even if it's a stock, right? Like maybe there it's a stock that uh you for whatever reason doesn't connect through plaid, you could always add it manually if you wanted to. Um wealth over time, which is basically performance. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Well, I was gonna say let's quickly show AI and then like one quick example of a report, just for interest of time. Um, but because there's a lot here that that we're not doing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I don't I don't think I can show the AI in this dummy view. But I can show you, gotcha. I could show um one thing about about the AI.
SPEAKER_03No, you the you don't have to show it. Uh but well, this is all dummy stuff. Okay, but one thing I'll I'll talk about the uh AI is that we're basically feeding the portfolio uh read-only information that we have, as well as all the other data that we have access to from our earnings hub, uh earnings-related information, just uh news about every single holding that you have, et cetera, et cetera. We make all of that accessible to the top-tier models. Uh I think currently we're using Opus, um, one of the latest Opus models, uh, but we're committed to always using state-of-the-art AI, basically, that we're giving you access to. Uh, and then it'll answer any questions about your portfolio and it'll make it very customizable. And then just to give you an example of that, on a daily basis, we use AI to give you a daily report. So if you could show one quick example of the daily report. Yes, thank you for reminding me. And then so, like this is an email that you might get. Uh, can you zoom in on that a little bit? Or I could try. Yeah, there we go. So you, you know, you can kind of see like, and if you want the numbers hidden uh in the email, you can actually turn that option on so that like your email doesn't necessarily show the exact net worth. But if you want the net worth, it can show it to you. Otherwise, they'll show you like your net worth was up 1.2% today or whatever. Um, but more importantly, it'll go down to each one of your holdings and talk about Moo and what was the micron or meta or what are were the important things that happened in the last day. Uh, and then if you scroll down further, some additional news about each of your holdings, uh, as well as the uh the SEC filing, similar to the catalyst actually showing. So really cool stuff. We encourage you to check it out. So I don't want to dwell too much on this thing, but we're excited for this product.
SPEAKER_02Uh and we did set up a special discount code if you you know tuned in for the for that rant. Uh, you can use the code BIHDRANT, one word, for 75% off uh your first year of Portaris. That brings the price down to like under 50 bucks for the entire year. So um, and there's a 14-day free trial. So you could try it out for 14 days. You don't even have to use the coupon code uh or put in any bank information. So uh try it out. We just released it. So definitely give us feedback um as you use it. We love to hear it.
SPEAKER_03By the way, that yeah, the one one other thing, the team here uh and uh Dustin, myself, and the guys behind the scenes, um uh they're we're all software people. We've taken a lot of time to sort of like do uh safety checks, encryption on the back end, the data is stored in this in such a way that's super encrypted. Uh, we're using Plat for like the integrations. Even we don't have access to uh or or even we don't see the information the way we have stored it for each of our users. And this was super important to every single one of us because we don't want our own portfolios to be sort of visible to even each other, right? So um so you know, we we have taken and put in a lot of uh measures to make this product amazing and and um and trustworthy and uh uh just awesome. So give us feedback by the way about things that it might be missing or things that you'd like to see. Um but with that said, let's move on. Um, buy hold grant is the promo code to use for 75% off. But let's go to QA. All right.
SPEAKER_01Show today. Happy birthday, Hamid. I didn't know it was your birthday.
SPEAKER_02Oh, thank you. Um, we didn't bring it up before the show because I wanted to surprise him. I wanted him to surprise it. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, um, you should read through the chat. There's a lot of people wishing you happy birthday.
SPEAKER_03So very cool. That's that's very sweet.
SPEAKER_01So just before we move on to other topics, this person's asking when will it be possible to import or connect the savvy trader portfolio? I cannot connect to my Italian bank accounts.
SPEAKER_03Oh, that that was not expected. Um, currently it is uh US-based. So we weren't thinking that anybody would want to connect it to the savvy trader, but that's that's an interesting um request. We'll we'll definitely take that into consideration. Totally.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Let's go back to this one.
SPEAKER_02But also, sorry, what one other thing. If you wanted to recreate your Savvy Trader portfolio in PortAris and we didn't have the connection, it should be pretty pretty quick to just manually add all of your holdings, just like you did in Savvy Trader. So you could always try again, there's a 14-day free trial. You could always try doing it that way. If you don't like it, you know, don't sign up. If you do like it, sign up.
SPEAKER_03What's cool is that you can also add your other assets besides your uh stock holdings too. You can add your house, you can and manually add a car and you know, like what whatever else you want. But for assets that are like stock-based, it'll look up live real-time pricing for them. All right, let's move on.
SPEAKER_04Yes, you can. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. No, there's a collectible section. Absolutely. We take we take Pokemon very seriously around here. There's a Pikachu behind me. Oh, that's right.
SPEAKER_01You guys again are such nerds.
SPEAKER_02You want to hear how nerdy I am? It's in the trunk of my R1 because it's powering the the electorate is uh uh electricity is powering the R1.
SPEAKER_01So oh boy.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's hilarious.
SPEAKER_01All right. Speaking of R1 and R2, what R2 delivery automotive margin and cash burn targets validate Hamid's Rivian S-curve and what would falsify the thesis?
SPEAKER_03So the the S-curve has it is irrespective to Ribian, right? The S-curve is just the way the market is going to grow. The EV market is gonna grow. It's currently at you know like seven or eight percent penetration, so it's like close to the bottom of the S-curve, it's accelerating fairly quickly. In some countries, the S-curve has already played out. So, for example, in Norway, their their S-curve is on the top side. It's like more than 80, 90% of uh new vehicles sold in uh certain countries are already electric. So I think that S-curve is gonna play out in every country and the future is gonna be all EVs. Um, but in terms of what I would like to see for uh Ribbian is just for them to hit the projected estimates that they have provided. Uh and um uh, you know, there's gonna still continue to be pretty substantial cash burn, but if they are showing significant growth and improved margins, I think that um that should be enough to convince some people at least that the uh the company is on the right direction and it will eventually make it out of uh out of this um negative cash burn. So uh there should be some good news there. Hopefully in the next day, we'll we'll know what their delivery numbers are, and then when they report, I think they report in early November. We'll we'll get some more picture on that.
SPEAKER_01Okay, someone is asking about the what you think about the delivery numbers for tomorrow. What do you think?
SPEAKER_03So um I've seen estimates be, I think the official estimates are in the 1850s range, 18,500 range, which is a pretty substantial increase from previous quarters. It'll be a record quarter for them. Um, there's a good chance they'll beat that, but how much they beat that by is kind of anyone's guess. Um I have no idea. I'm hoping that they get closer to 20,000. I mean, that would be pretty awesome, but that might be a stretch.
SPEAKER_01Okay, we've gotten a lot of questions about ribbing, so let's move to this one. What do you think about the VW release of the Scout Traveler SUV in 2027? Could it be a threat to a VNR2?
SPEAKER_03It's unlikely. There's always going to be some other options in terms of EVs, but you know, it's kind of like saying, is the um, you know, Toyota Thundra truck a um threat to the Ford F-150. The market is so large that multiple vehicles can thrive. Um, most of what the way I see sort of like the future playing out is EVs eventually replacing all gas-based vehicles. So the more models and options that are available, the better it is, the faster that S-curve is going to uh come to fruition. Um, but in order for companies to be able to build EVs profitably and build the technologies and everything that's needed for them, they needed to have started a long time ago. And uh a lot of the EV options are being sold at um uh at negative margins, essentially, which is what Rivian has been doing too. But they're about to come out of that as they scale up their volumes. And everybody else who's trying to get into an EV market is still got to go through that uh ramp curve of pain, essentially, that they haven't uh done yet. So um yeah. What what are your thoughts on the scout, Dustin? Have you have you checked this out?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I agree. I think in the car space, there's bound to be competition, but I rather have competition from VW, who is a client of Rivian's or partner of Rivian's, as opposed to um, I don't know, Toyota, your example, uh coming out with a similar product, and there's just no upside for Rivian. Right. But this is just this is this is what you know I would expect to happen that you're gonna have more electric cars come out over time. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Okay, adding one more time to the Rivian conversation, Hamid, RJ talks about plant being ready and supplier constraints. Do you remember Elon talking like this when Tesla was in its growth phase? Seems like it's ammunition for shorts and deflating for longs.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I mean, Elon talked a lot about the sort of uh growing pains of trying to um ramp up production and you know the the famous stories of him sleeping on the factory floor. Based on the numbers that uh R2 uh estimates have you know, like there's a lot of people who are like watching how many R2 VIN numbers are getting assigned and the delivery VIN numbers, and they're trying to calculate like where things are. Uh, based on some of those analyses of other people's, not mine, uh, it does seem like R2's ramp is uh is coming out better than the Model 3 ramp has. Uh now, are they gonna also have trouble as they ramp and they're gonna have growing pains? Yeah, of course. I think that's part of growing pains. Um so I'm not too worried about it. I think that as long as they show that there is a huge amount of demand from the customer side, that the vehicles are being received well, and that they uh they're they're great vehicles, that's what's important because the moment you have a great product and lots of demand, there'll be capital and people who'll who are going to fund those dreams come true. And if you can show that that is happening on a quarter by quarter basis, which they have the money to do for at least the next year, uh longer than a year, their uh money ramp is significantly longer, cash ramp, I should say, um, then uh then there will be additional money available for them to access to make sure that they get there. Uh but what would be troubling is if the demand died or if the vehicle was getting poor reviews, those things would be what uh what would be concerning me. But those things are not happening. So I'm I'm not concerned.
SPEAKER_01All right. Going back really quick, get this question answered. If we have Portaris, Savian Earnings Hub will eventually become irrelevant, or do you want to keep them all?
SPEAKER_02So um don't let me take that. Yeah. So from a from a company perspective, we are fully committed to all three of these products. From a user perspective, if you're asking which ones should you subscribe to and does Portaris eat into uh Savvy Trader and Earnings Hub, Savvy Trader is meant for sharing portfolios. So if you are using Savvy Trader to recreate your own portfolio and you're not sharing it, yeah, you should probably move over to PortAuris. Um, but if you're following other portfolios or you're sharing it with your friends and family or just people, you know, online like we do, uh then Savvy Trader very much has a use case there. For Earnings Hub, it's kind of similar where if you're only following earnings for your own portfolio, then you could probably just use PortAuris. But if you're following earnings for a lot of different companies, earnings hub is still the best place to uh do that. Exactly. Yeah, perfect, perfectly put.
SPEAKER_03Thank you.
SPEAKER_01Okay. This person, what if the market is pricing in the ultimate decline in the growth and margins, even if that is in a decade? I'm thinking they're talking about like AI.
SPEAKER_02They brought this up during micron.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, specifically sorry.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, you're good.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, no, that that's okay. So so they are specifically uh talking about micron. And um, yeah, there's no question the market is pricing in the ultimate decline in growth and margins, uh, because micron is priced at a PE that's unjustifiable unless it was the market was doing exactly that, uh, right. But the question is, is the market correct in its uh estimation of the decline in growth and margins, and when that might happen? And when it happens, what is the expected revenue and profitability of Micron at that point in time? Because there was some level of uh revenue and profitability even before this AI uh boom started, right? So you know, if the if the cycles continue, but the cycle uh is 10 times larger in the future, uh, you know, the the the uh the valley is 10 times larger uh in the future than its previous peaks were, well, where should the stock price be in that scenario? Uh and these are the things that I think is so difficult to predict that I think the market is just getting it wrong, in my opinion. And um my view is that nobody is able to predict that. Uh and in the meantime, I'm going to go with the company that is generating cash and profits and has visibility into their future for the next two years to generate even more cash and more profits, uh, at least for 2027 and 2028, um, and possibly possibly well beyond that. Uh, nobody's revenues are guaranteed. No companies' revenues are guaranteed, but these guys have better visibility into their revenues than almost anybody else at this point. So that's what excites me about Micron.
SPEAKER_01All right, let's move on to Rocket Lab. Do you think Rocket Lab is overpriced since the price of Rocket Lab stock has dropped significantly? Do you have any intention to add more to your portfolio?
SPEAKER_03So uh I I am a huge so it's like very difficult for me to talk about Rocket Lab because on one hand, I'm such a huge fan of the company and the CEO. Uh on the other, I recognize that it for its current revenue and performance, financial performance, that it's that it's not a cheap stock, right? Uh and then when you add to that the fact that Neutron is almost definitively running late, meaning it's not going to have its first launch by the end of this year, as was uh uh hoped. Uh, then there's not confirmed yet though, right? No, it's not confirmed. But it is almost likely. Yeah, it's almost certainly. I mean, we're we're basically in October right now, and you know, they have less than three months to do their first launch. And um, the way in which Pete Peter Beck started talking about their first launch is that that launch is not as important as their 10th launch, and he wants to make sure that they're better pre prepared. And as we know, the market is very bipolar when it comes to these types of news, right? It's not going to receive that news well when it becomes confirmed that they're not going to have their first launch of Neutron this year, if that happens. Um, you know, and if that happens, there's a good chance the stock will go lower. And you know, it's anyone's guess as to whether or not it actually does, but or where it goes to. You know, so in the meantime, I'm just going to hold on to the position that I have. I'm very comfortable with the position. Even if it goes down, I'm okay with that. If it goes up, I'm not selling any at this time. Um, but if it goes down substantially, I might, I might start to add.
SPEAKER_02I'm in a similar boat. I I sold a bit before the SpaceX IPO. Um and it's it's gone down significantly. I think it hit like a top of 150, if I remember correctly. But even after this correction, it is still technically overvalued. So there is room to go lower, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it didn't, you know.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Um so fortunately, I was trimming pretty heavily between 100 and 150. So um I I'm happy about those trims and I feel comfortable about the current position. Okay.
SPEAKER_02With that, we will end episode 58. If we didn't get to any of your listener questions, you could always send us a message in our Savvy Trader communities. Um, we're both very active there. Uh Hamid, happy birthday again. Thank you. Thank you. All the listeners, don't forget to like the video for Hamid's birthday. He's counting on you. And we'll we'll be back to all of you. And we'll be back on Wednesday next week, back to our regular schedule next week. So thank you all for tuning in on Thursday. Bye, everyone. Thank you.