CPI reactions, Nvidia, what's next for Tesla: Market Domination

US equities (^GSPC, ^DJI, ^IXIC) posted gains as investors cheered the Consumer Price Index (CPI) reading for April. Tech powerhouse Nvidia (NVDA) also rose as Keybanc noted there was little potential for a slowdown in demand for their products. Financial Analyst Kevin Paffrath joined the show to discuss Tesla (TSLA) voicing his concerns over the future of the company and claimed it has a "massive cash problem."

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here

Video transcript

Hello and welcome to market domination.

I'm Julie High and that Josh left in live from our New York City headquarters.

We are giving you the ultimate investing playbook to help tune out the noise and make the right moves for your money.

And here's your headline blitz.

Getting up to speed one hour for the closing bell rings on Wall Street.

Inflation is moving in the right direction.

We had this softer than expected headline CP I print core was in line with expectations.

If you look at the underlying inflationary dynamics, they still point towards this inflation.

It's a little bit slower than we had anticipated at the start of the year.

But that momentum is still in place.

I think it's very much kind of a goldilocks kick the can type of print for the Fed.

But I think the retail sales, the softness we saw there certainly a bit of relief for the Fed.

And I think it's what markets wanted to see to kind of continue this very, very modest rally that we've seen over the last week, the meme stock trades tend to only occur at extremes and sentiment.

And so to me, this is yet another um mood indicator that the markets are reaching a point where we should expect some sort of a meaningful pull back.

Because, you know, if we look at the relationship between, you know, stocks like gamestop and, and the broader markets, this coincidental euphoria seems to be repeating over and over.

We have got one hour to go until the market closed.

So let's take a look at the major averages sponsored by Tasty Trade.

We are on track for a record close for some of the major averages.

At least right now, the dow is not among them.

It's up about 272 points, about two thirds of 1%.

As we did get that consumer price index measuring inflation coming in a little bit better, a little bit cooler than expected today.

So we are seeing uh still some hope for eternal that will get a rate cut this year.

The S and P 500 is on track for a record close today.

It's up by 1%.

The number to beat there is 5254.

We're well above it right now.

And in fact, we got a street high target for the year end for the S and P 500 today from Brian Belski over at BMO.

He's looking for 5600 by year end.

And then the NASDAQ is also on track for a record close any gain today.

In fact, a record close because it closed at a record yesterday.

So those uh that index is up 1.3% all of this as we see a pretty significant pull back in yields today.

On the back of that CP I report down eight basis points right now to about 4.36%.

How is that being expressed amongst the different groups in the S and P 500?

It is not an entirely broad rally, right?

We are seeing some groups in the red, including energy and materials, but very slightly in the red.

It is tech, real estate utilities, health care that are helping lead the games and then the gains.

And then since we were just talking about meme stocks wanted to get a quick check on that and I'm going to equal weight it here.

So we get a better look at what is up and down so many more stocks down today including the likes of gamestop, which is now pulling back by 22%.

Although if you look at the three day chart here, you still see a pretty big gain.

We're going to delve once once again into the breach.

If you will, once again, we'll be talking about meme stocks later in the show.

Josh.

That's right.

Julie stocks moving higher today, the S and P 500 NASDAQ in record territory after soft reading on inflation, the consumer price index rising 0.3% in April over the previous month.

And 3.4% from a year ago.

We also saw retail sales coming in flat as the consumer showing signs of slowing last month joining us now to break it all down.

We've got Jose Torres Interactive Brokers, senior economist, as well as Edward Jones, senior investment strategist, Angelo Kirkus.

Uh Jose, let's start with you here.

Um and we'll start Jose with that CP I print.

What did you make of it, Jose and importantly, what do you think Jay Powell made of it?

Thanks for having me, Josh.

Well, I think that it was a cool reading and the markets loving it.

I think that that is liking it too, but an important consideration is that most components actually inflected higher, really got bailed out by new and used automobiles within this print.

Now, the good news is that commodity prices are down big this month and we're probably going to get the first favorable inflation report for the year, next month.

However, from January through April so far, every single inflation print has been quite above the fed's annualized 2% target and the standard there is roughly 17 bits month over month.

I'm concerned that services disinflation hasn't occurred all of last year or this year.

I think goods and commodities are starting to work their way lower but services remain the problem.

So if services remain the problem, then Angelo and I, as I mentioned, we are seeing the market start to still price in maybe some interest rate cuts by the end of the year.

You know, obviously that number has been swinging quite a lot as we've gotten each new economic data point.

But do you think it's likely given this latest information?

Yes, we think 1 to 2 rate cuts are realistic.

I think today was the combo of FED friendly data looking at both the CP I and retail sales that validate the fed's stance of not considering further rate hikes from here.

But signaling patience if the market that the number was not, didn't deviate very much from expectations.

I think markets are breathing a sigh of relief that this inflation continues.

The trend remains lower even though we are walking down a bumpy path if you will.

Uh Jose let me bring you back here because Angelo did mention retail sales.

I want your take on that as well.

April retail sales uh unchanged, weaker than consensus.

Uh The team at Pantheon Economics, Jose saying uh this was in their words, a clear signal of weakening consumption.

Is that how you saw it, Jose?

Well, Josh, since 2022 we've seen consumer spending in some months really fall off a cliff only to recover quite strongly consumer erratic.

This has been part of the cycle since for the last 2.5 years, roughly so I'm not ready to call the consumer quits just yet.

They might come back quite strongly the next month.

Uh however, savings are really depleted sentiment is down.

Consumers are not only concerned over higher prices and lost the interest rates.

They're also now fearing their job stability as well.

So I do think that there's elevated caution that's warranted this time around.

However, we have to remember the consumer and as that the chart there shows that we've seen these declines in previous months, clear last December only to see the consumer rebound really strong.

Finally GDP in the fourth quarter to the first quarter of this year really slowed down significantly down to 1.6%.

Now, if the consumer doesn't pick up steam this month or next and inflation keeps rising, then we are in, we could be in a situation where we get a negative GDP print for the second quarter and that's what I'm concerned about, Angelo.

Are you concerned about that at all?

I mean, something else in addition to some of the consumer stuff that uh Jose was just talking about?

I was look looking at those household debt figures that we got uh earlier this week from the New York fed showing a record high in household debt, credit card debt ticking up, right?

So is that another sign that the consumer might be on a little bit of delicate footing here?

I think if we learn something over the last couple of years, uh is not to underestimate the US consumer, no doubt.

Uh indicators point to a softening in consumption.

And yes, we might have different paths for low to medium income consumers versus the high income consumers.

But at the same time, we spent more than a decade with households deleveraging after the financial crisis.

So the starting point is not one of weakness, but the incremental rate of change is likely softer as this is happening.

However, we are seeing other parts of the economy that were under pressure last year, for example, manufacturing and housing are starting to stabilize and potentially recover.

So we see the economic expansion continuing not at the same pace as we have seen it, but that is likely welcomed by the FED.

We are in this interesting part of the interest rate cycle where good economic data or OK, data might be better than great be because the market is interpreting that through the lens of what it means for the FED, Jose.

Another topic I wanna get your two cents on.

Uh President Biden spoke with Yahoo finance yesterday uh about these new tariffs on Chinese imports, Jose just as an economist.

I'm curious how you're thinking about that.

What you think the potential impact is on the macro in terms of growth and inflation, Jose.

Absolutely, Josh, it was a great interview with Brian.

I enjoyed it myself.

But the problem is that that's one of the important factors that's driving inflation structurally higher is to shift from globalization to regionalization.

Today.

The top importer for the United States happens to be Mexico no longer China, whether President Biden becomes re elected or his predecessor wins the election in November.

I think that the rhetoric and the actions towards the Chinese will remain quite tense and that's going to keep inflation higher, a few percentage of a few basis points overall and make the path down to 2% for the fed, particularly troublesome from the good side.

And like my fellow panelists just mentioned, we are seeing this manufacture and recovery.

We're seeing copper prices start to rally quite strongly up to around five, close to $5.

You know, and that's really going to threaten the goods disinflation and the commodity disinflation that we really benefited from last year.

However, geopolitical tensions are simmering and that's quite positive for the disinflationary story.

Um So Angelo, you might have heard me mention at the top of the show that we now have a street high target for the S and P 556 100 from bo capital markets, given everything that we're talking about is that realistic here that we continue?

I mean, even if we see some bumpiness in between now and the end of the year, is it realistic to imagine we could get there?

Yeah, I I think this rally is not built on sand.

There's a good reason that the uptrend in equities continues.

We have rising corporate profits.

We have an economic expansion that continues and it's not threatened at this point.

And then we do have the potential for a major pivot in the fed with more likely downside in yields than upside from here.

And all of that supports an ongoing bull market.

But I do think that the opportunities might lie beneath the surface, meaning that over the last 12 months gains have been concentrated in this mega cap technology companies.

But we might see more broadening of market leadership.

And over the last three months, we have started to see hints of that guys.

Thank you so much, really interesting stuff in perspective on the numbers today and where we go from here, Jose and Angela.

Thank you.

We're just getting started here on market domination coming up.

Games stop and A MC R tank.

And today we'll check in on the latest me madness moves as the trend begins to fade.

Plus CCO set to report earnings after the Bell will be joined by an analyst to break down those numbers once they cross and it's the latest edition of our series.

Goodbye or goodbye.

We'll take a deep dive into two stocks, help you make the best choices for your portfolio.

Stay tuned more market domination after this time.

Now, for some of the day, trending tickers looking at shares of NVIDIA, the stock getting a boost as key bank capital markets sees limited signs of a demand pause for that company.

This comes ahead of Nvidia's first quarter results next week.

So Nvidia's Q one earnings.

They are on deck May 22nd and the previews uh from the street are coming in Julie including our man John Vin from Key Bank out with a note says he expects Q one results and Q two guides to come in meaningfully above expectations sees that upside driven.

He says by improving supply of H 100 GP us lead times, he says they have normalized and strong demand.

He says for those China compliant chips as well, right?

And one of the concerns, I guess that's been raised is that ahead of the introduction of the Blackwell GP US in the second half of the year that there might be that demand pauses, people are waiting for the product to cut out, come out.

But as he says, there's all these other products that people are still buying and that are on back order, et cetera.

The other thing that really stood out to me is he is looking out to 2025 and he says in 2025 that Blackwell and some of their other products could drive over $200 billion in data center revenues for for next year.

Now, just to put that in perspective last year, those data center revenues were $47.5 billion.

Therefore, that would represent a 321% gain in data center revenues alone.

That's not the whole company's revenues from 2020 3 to 2025 if he is correct.

Yeah.

And I think it dovetails with kind of his bottom line Julie where he says NVIDIA remains uniquely positioned to benefit from A I and machine learning data center growth within the industry.

He says we see limited competitive risks, they may be trying other companies, but he doesn't see it expect NVIDIA to continue to dominate one of the fastest growing workloads in cloud and enterprise.

We'll see.

Speaking of A I plays that brings us perfectly to our next trend ticker, which is Dell, not necessarily when you think of when you think A I and all the names we've talked about, but the stock is jumping to a record high.

Morgan Stanley reiterating its buy rating on the stock and raising the price target to $152 which I believe is the highest on the street.

In a note today saying that this stock is the best way to play the A I server momentum.

So that part of the game here um and Eric Woodring and his team over there talking about that.

They, they've been channel checks here on those A I servers and they say that it shows Dell gaining momentum in enterprise infrastructure, which is interesting here.

And they also say that there's an improving PC market that should help the company.

They see a number of different tail winds.

So it is A I servers, talks about PC market as a tailwind as well.

You know, this stock Julie has just enjoyed as we talked about on the show.

It is a remarkable run about 90% already this year.

It's about two 120% over the past 12 months.

So, I mean, investors have been looking ways to play the A I the, besides NVIDIA, they have found it in Dell, in Dell.

Despite that run by the way, Morgan Stanley still says valuation looks attractive.

Yeah, it's, and again, it's not one that I ne necessarily would have sprung to my mind, but obviously investors have been buying it.

So they've been playing on this finally, Chinese Electric Car company, Neo revealing the first vehicle in its newer lower priced brand.

You know, our JP Morgan lifts its rating on the stock.

So that was a new thing.

Neo introduces its kind of new mass market ev it's called on B apparently delivered and launched uh in September is what we're looking for.

Um the CEO, by the way, uh going right after Elon Musk and Tesla telling reporters his new model here calls it longer wider roomier than the model.

Why, but look for deliveries, I guess starting as soon as September is what we're looking for.

So, you know why the stock is down?

I don't know, we don't know, we can't figure it out.

You know, I I did put in some emails to some analysts to try and figure out many of them who covered, the stock are based um in, in Asia and East Asia.

So we didn't get any answers to what is going on here.

If you look at how this thing is gonna be priced, the L 61 it's cheaper than the model Y in China.

So what about margins?

And Bloomberg did point out, by the way, you know, Neo has had its challenges post an annual loss last year, didn't actually meet its own sales target deliveries fell in the first three months of 2024.

Now, we know of course, China, this is a cut throat market, intense competition, price, price cuts on top of obviously broader trends, ev growth just is not what it was.

Maybe there's concern that, you know, especially when you look at the pricing here, maybe that it's gonna be another another money losing kind of proposition perhaps.

All right, well, coming up, it's the latest edition of our series.

Goodbye or goodbye.

We're gonna take a deep dive into the two stocks to help you make the best choices for your portfolio.

Stay tuned, more market domination after this.

It's a big noisy universe of stocks out there.

Welcome to, goodbye or goodbye.

Our goal to help cut through that noise to navigate the best moves for your portfolio.

Today, we're examining the foundation of two giants in the home improvement sector.

Joining me here to discuss Brian Mulberry that investment management, client portfolio manager.

Good to see you again.

Thanks for coming back to.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

Absolutely.

And we're talking about the home retail, home improvement retail market specifically here.

And let's start with the stock.

You like one that we just heard from?

And that is Home Depot, the shares have done pretty well over the past year or so.

So let's get to the reasons why you like it.

First of all, there's what you call their integrated retail strategy that they deployed after COVID, what does that entail?

And how is it helping them?

What they really did is enhance their digital footprint?

So it's increased a lot of web traffic from consumers and the return on that investment is data.

And so what that does is it allows Home Depot to actually capture more wallet share from consumers because they know more about what consumers are interested in.

So that investment has proven to be very profitable, help them control costs and stay ahead of trends.

And then also perhaps it's helped them if they're better understanding what customers need.

One of the things that customers need is contractors to do the projects that they want to do and hopefully buy the stuff at Home Depot precisely.

So inventory management has been a critical part of their cost controls.

And so knowing where consumers are trending and what projects are popular has helped them maintain better margins by having the right inventory in stock to you know, complete projects.

So also joining customers with contractors to get that work done has proven to be a very valuable strategy for the stock as well.

Yeah, and that kind of brings us to the third part of what you're looking at, which is the pro market, right?

And that has been a really interesting, uh, growth driver for them.

It really has and they've made a couple of key acquisitions recently where they actually now have access to very customizable finishing products, whether it's landscaping or interior design.

They now have a wider selection of products that help contractors that not just get the nuts and bolts done, but also complete design and that has increased margins and, and a backlog of projects.

Now that shows durability in the earnings for the next couple of quarters.

A quick step backwards here as we're talking about Home Depot and we're going to get to your other one in just a second.

There's only one other big one.

So, but we don't wanna give away, you know, how does, uh Home Depot and what's happening right now kind of fit in with what's going on in the housing market, right, where we are seeing kind of a freeze in some areas because of where we're seeing rates.

Well, no question.

I mean, a few years ago, a lot of people were able to refinance their mortgage at 3% or maybe even a little bit less that's anchoring those homeowners to those properties.

They're gonna stay there a lot longer because they have such a low risk on their mortgage at this point.

So they're looking to really spruce up, take advantage of some of the equity increases that they've had in that house and then make it more livable or maybe even completely new because they know they're gonna be there for a lot longer than they may have already originally planned.

So, let's talk about the risk then potentially for Home Depot.

And that's what we're seeing some weakness creep into big ticket discretionary sales, durable goods, for example, fridges and yeah, absolutely.

Appliances TV.

S things of that nature and that has, you know, a crept in a little bit into Home Depot's life where they've seen a little bit slower sales in those big ticket discretionary areas.

If that were to continue, then it could be a worrying trend for the stock over the next couple of quarters, retail sales coming out this morning.

Flat.

Not bad.

But you're definitely starting to see customers be a little bit more thrifty in what they're buying.

If there is an uptick in home sales, what does that mean for Home Depot?

I think it's good either way as people buy properties, they want to tend to make them their own.

And so you'll see, I think that's pretty level set in terms of orders and order flow and Home Depot tends to benefit either way, even if there is greater turnover in the housing market, any position in Home Depot.

Yes, we have it in several different of our portfolios.

Ze CPR ETF.

It's one of the principal holdings in there because of the consistency of the set of returns that we see from this point going forward, obviously year to date, it's relatively flat.

But what we're talking about is what are you buying now and looking at the future, your price structures of this particular stock over the next three years, we see earnings growth in the mid twenties.

We would expect the stock price to probably follow as well.

All right.

So let's get to the flip side of that.

And that is lows for people who have not guessed.

Of course, it's the big competitor here.

Stock price looks pretty chart looks pretty similar.

But whereas that is a potential risk, why is it this pull back a discretionary, spend more of a risk for Lowe's because it's already happening and we'll see more in their earning report next week when they come out.

But we're already seeing in their sales estimate revisions, big ticket items are coming in much lower.

So it's already a measurable change to the downside on lows.

And so we're seeing that change in behavior happen there, but it's been more durable to the good side for Home Depot.

Interesting.

And then as we see all of that happen, high margin items in particular are taking a hit.

Yeah, absolutely.

Those bigger appliances tend to carry a lot more profit per unit for them.

But they're also having inventory control problems of their own where their cost of inventory has not been as sharp as Home Depots.

And so they're losing margin even in some smaller items as well.

And you also pointed out to us that they've been spending on their garden center.

What do we expect on the seasonal side with the sales of those kinds of items?

Yeah.

So there's a bit of a lag because we had, you know, really a late start to spring and that has lagged sales from the garden center.

There's been a big investment from Lowe's to make those garden centers larger with more options and we're seeing a delayed start to the planting season as a result of weather patterns again.

Just an area of weakness on the balance sheet might not be durable or long lasting, but it definitely is something that's showing up here in the northeast.

It's raining like every weekend.

I wish it would stop.

Ok. And then there's also the debt position of lows versus Home Depot.

Yeah.

I mean, really what all this comes down to is if interest rates are going to be higher for longer and they certainly are compared to what we were thinking early in the year with maybe as much as four, five or six rate cuts.

Now, only one or two, the level of debt on the balance sheet for Lowe's has to now be serviced or repriced at a much higher interest rate, that's going to be an immediate headwind to their profitability going forward.

So just puts them again down a peg immediately compared to the pier of Home Depot.

And then quickly, one thing that could go right for Home Depot is that you could see the them benefiting from that contract.

Absolutely.

There's no question again.

That same demand from homeowners to get projects done is benefiting as well and to be perfectly candid some of the backlog of orders at Home Depot is benefiting lows as well where contractors are going, where they can actually still get first priority in terms of placement and getting jobs done.

It's benefiting lows as well.

And do you have any position in Lowe's or just smaller than in Home Depot?

We do not have a position in it.

All right, Brian, thank you.

Let's summarize what you're telling folks here.

You recommend buying Home Depot.

It sees benefits from its integrated retail strategy, the ability to add on margins and making strides in capturing the professional contractor market.

On the other side, you say avoid lows because consumers are pulling back on larger discretionary items that's hurting them more.

The loss of sales in those high margin items is then hitting earnings and it also has a bigger debt burden on its balance sheet than does Home Depot.

Thanks so much for being here, Brian.

Good to see you again and thank you.

For watching.

Goodbye or goodbye.

We will be bringing new episodes three times a week at 3:30 p.m. Eastern with mortgage rates averaging above 7% homebuilder confidence taking a hit in May the National Association of Home Builders noting that a lack of progress on inflation is a drag on builders sentiment.

Yahoo Finance's Danny Romero is here with more.

Danny Josh homebuilders are not feeling too great about the housing market right now, especially that mortgage rates have stayed above 7%.

The index that tracks homebuilder confidence came in at 45 points.

That's six points lower than April's figure.

The National Association of Homebuilders reported.

So what does this really mean?

It really highlights that builders, it's been a difficult time for builders uh especially that material costs have gone up, labor costs have gone up.

So that means that the price of homes also has gone up and that is also squeezing and pinching some of these builders.

Another thing to point out from this survey is really that 25% of builders reported that they have cut home prices to help boost sales.

Another thing that 59% of builders reported that they also had to use some form of incentive to really move the marker there, especially when it came to moving inventory and sales.

While this is really a pessimistic report, there is some signs that uh the housing cost is moderating.

If we take a look at the April's inflation report that we got out this morning shelter, the component of CP I on an annual basis has come down to a from its peak of 8.2% a year ago to 5.5% in April on an annual basis.

So that's really the moderation in these results is really giving some optimism in the market.

That rate cuts could be happening sooner rather than later.

And we're seeing homebuilder stocks really uh move a lot in that uh ex expectation.

We like Dr Horton is up about 5% right now, Josh um Danny, I, is there any?

So looking forward, what are you hearing in terms of whether we're gonna continue to maybe see moderation in some of those shelter costs?

Yes.

Uh It like one expert has told me shelter is shelter, excuse me, shelter disinflation is on track.

Uh Julie and that is something that we have been consistently hearing that.

Yes, it's been a while since we've actually seen market rate rents actually reflect the inflation data.

Of course, there's a lag about a six month lag there.

But we are these results that we did see this morning are really proving to show that it is softening, especially in the rent side of this CP I report and also on the owner's equivalent rent.

Remember that is uh the rent that a homeowner would pay for the same property and that came in um unchanged at 4.0 0.4% on a monthly basis.

But that moderation is really encouraging right now.

And like I said, shelter disinflation is on track when we'll see that.

Hopefully some people are saying that well, we could see shelter bottom out as early as next year.

Julie Danny.

I'll take it.

Thank you so much.

Appreciate it.

Campbell's Soup and General Mills getting upgrades today over from Bernstein.

They go from underperform to market perform.

So why the move Julie to a whole not bullish but I guess less pessimistic.

Uh Well, the analysts talk about volume improvements in the back half of the year also does highlight notify valuation as recent stock under performance has led to 20 plus year low valuations for both companies.

In other words, they look cheap.

Her target on General Mills is 70 for Campbell's Soup 46.

Yeah.

And you know, she talks about this inflection in the latter half of the year in volume growth specifically because we've been having this whole debate over the past year about volume versus price.

Many of these consumer staples companies had seen increases overall sales because of price increases, not because they are moving more product out the door.

And there's been a lot of uh waiting on the part of analysts and ambassadors for that to happen.

So it's interesting, Alexia Howard here says that that is indeed going to start to happen.

She says we're going to lap price declines in single ingredient, food categories, more associated with cooking from scratch.

She says that all of that lead to an improvement in stock performance in the second half.

So more positive, not enough to go full bullish, but at least moving to the sideline, it's not an under perform anymore.

All right, wolf research downgrading Sun Power from pure perform to underperform today.

Those shares are down very sharply ahead of the close.

Look at that almost 29%.

Well, Sun Power has already had a number of challenges this year.

And Steve Fleischman, the analyst kind of sums them up here when he says no 10-K 10-Q earnings call or CEO.

The company basically has been sort of revising some of its accounting here.

It's gone through rounds of historical financial restatements he says, and they've negatively impacted historial gross historic gross margin and earnings still hasn't filed its 10-K.

It's delaying its 10-Q.

they announced that they were getting rid of their CEO but they haven't yet announced a new CEO.

So uh kind of he's putting all of it together in that note.

Yeah, price target $2 says it is the most extreme example of the kind of mean stock resurgent uh among clean energy stocks and challenges ahead.

You pointed out some of them, uh Julie, but company could ne need, could need more funding.

Um Kind also talks about an uncertain outlook for the market in California in general.

Says it has more exposure in that state than, than some of its rivals and says a recent earnings results across the space actually have only made investors more cautious and careful on the pace of sort of recovery here.

Yeah, California has recently been cutting the amount of, of payments that folks can collect from solar power so it's hurt the market.

Yeah, for sure.

Moving on the meme stock rally already showing signs of fizzling out here.

Shares of both gamestop and A MC coming under pressure after two days of big gains and joining us now is Kevin Path Rath financial analyst and youtuber behind meet Kevin.

Uh Kevin always good to have you on the show.

Let's just start right there.

You know, we were talking a lot, of course, this week as a lot of people were the meme stocks, Gamestop A MC Blackberry kind of fizzling out today.

But start there, Kevin.

What, what did you make of the, the moves we saw there?

Yeah, absolutely.

First of all, it's incredible.

It feels like we're back at the beginning of 2021 and I'm just waiting for Vlad from Robin Hood to start coming out and making announcements again.

It's wild.

Uh So it's quite entertaining.

But uh one of the things to know is even back in 2021 we had these down days, we're really only on the third day of this momentum rally again.

I like to replace the word meme stock with momentum stock.

That's really what this is, more momentum you get, the more they go up.

Uh, it's not really a fundamental move.

Right.

It's all in volume and how many people are into it.

Now these off days can oftentimes lead to violent new rallies.

So we'll see usually what people are doing and I just pulled mine up is they're just making a list of the highest short interest and then they're going down that and buying it.

That seems to be the only fundamentals that are going into this and it's really entertaining to watch.

Um, are you participating in it?

I participated in the, uh, there was a, this company, Faraday, Faraday Futures.

And so yesterday I was looking at it going, this is like a tiny little company and it was up 300%.

And usually what happens is the news coverage hits after the market closes and then it goes up even more the next day.

And so today it's up another 150%.

I don't think I'm gonna play again for tomorrow.

But I, I, when I have small little trades on the side that I want to have some entertainment with when it comes to the momentum stocks.

That's what I do.

But I go in knowing that if I'm going to lose 100% of my money on those, that's ok.

In fact, we started this thing in the office where instead of betting each other 20 bucks, we make the other person buy a meme stock option so that if it really rallies, it really upsets the person who lost the bet.

More.

Amazing.

And by the way, Faraday future happens to be the second highest trending ticker on Yahoo Finance.

So obviously you are not alone in noticing that one and, and that it does continue rally and there's a whole crop of other sort of mem names that still seem to be going up today, even though, you know, gamestop and A MC are down.

Um When you talk about the sustainability of this, I mean, one other big difference between now and 2021 as we have talked about on the program is that the volume in these names is much lower.

You, you know, when you talked about how volume has to be there for it to keep going there, it's definitely higher than it was, you know, a week ago or two weeks ago, but it's much, much lower than it was in 2021.

So what does that tell us about whether this can keep going?

Yeah, that's definitely going to put some upside limit on where we can go.

What we have to think about for January of 2021 is we came off basically nine months of the stock market going straight up.

Uh And that was, you know, Larry Kudlow, we're gonna have a V shaped recovery.

Jerome Powell's running the money, printer, they're sending stimulus checks.

People are taking their stimulus checks and throwing them into, uh, into the momentum stocks.

Today, wallets are tighter.

We haven't seen stimulus in years.

Uh, you're not going to for a while.

Credit card rates are higher.

Grocery prices are higher.

The dollar menu is now $3 at mcdonald's.

It's a lot harder to come around extra cash and less people are playing the stock market than they were.

Uh, after 20 twenty's madness.

That's for sure.

Kevin, I'm just interested too to get your take and, and granted, you know, need to speculate here.

But I'm, I'm just curious when, when you think about why people were kind of moving into these names.

Gamestop A MC Blackberry.

What do you think Kevin was sort of, um, kind of motivating them?

Do, do you think it was, listen, it just, maybe it's just fun.

It's entertainment.

You get to play along with Dave Portnoy or, or is it, you know, is it greed?

Is it, is it anger, you know, Wall Street and the hedge, maybe, maybe it's all three Kevin.

Yeah.

I mean, to some extent it's all of those, the biggest motivation is to make money.

Right.

Everybody wants to go in and buy a 10 cent zero day option or, you know, a weekly call option and have it turn into five bucks and the one time that happens out of 20 trades just kind of keeps everybody coming back because there, it's sort of like playing the lottery.

Uh, it's really fun.

Uh, of course, the argument that, hey, it's to get the shorts or, hey, why are they halting the stock?

I did a whole video breaking down.

Why they halt the stocks, the limit up, limit down.

And that people don't generally care about the mechanics behind it.

They just want to make money and I don't blame that because times are tough and I'm all for it.

So, hey, if, if folks can make money on, on the momentum, great, just know once it really consistently bleeds, it does bleed.

Good news is the companies like a MC.

Uh They're starting to issue shares a couple days ago.

A MC raised $250 million that covers a quarter of their negative cash flow.

So they basically got three months of free operating expenses to pay for their employees and their theaters.

It's actually really good for the companies and a good opportunity for them to stabilize their balance sheets or at least to buy themselves a little more time.

Um In the case of some of these guys, right, Kevin, you're talking about momentum, you're talking about when the, when the momentum turns against you and there's bleeding and it tends to continue looking at a chart of Tesla right now, Kevin.

Um You know, because when you talk about momentum stock, that's a momentum stock right there.

Not a me not usually called a meme stock, right?

But it has some Memeish characteristics.

Um how you feeling about Tesla these days.

Boy Tessell has been a tough one.

I think the way I look at it is uh my rule of thumb this year is patience for 2024 hopefully.

Uh hope and bullishness for 2025.

The reason I say that is the, we're right in the midst of an election year and that shouldn't have anything to do with Tesla.

But at the same time as you're in an election year, you've got Elon on X, you know, he's got a very sort of one sided political point of view.

He doesn't hide that.

That upsets a lot of folks who are usually your ev supporters and climate change supporters, you know, Elon kind of remarks.

Oh, why would climate change activists attack Giga Berlin in, in Germany?

Well, because of his politics, right.

So I'd like to get past not only the election because then I think we're going to see politics.

Cool a little bit from the Elon point of view, but we'll also have gotten past the shareholder vote.

We'll have gotten past the Robo Taxi event.

We'll see how much uh adoption we actually get for full self driving with the adoption rates are and most importantly, how much cash are they actually going to have at the end of the year.

I'm worried that they're going to have to do a pretty large fundraise and that's why they're cutting 14 to 15% of the staff firing the entire supercharger team.

It, it feels rash but I think it's because they have to running a little low on cash.

So hope for 2025.

But patience for 2024 is my take Kevin.

That's really interesting.

The idea that Tesla needs to shore up the balance sheet.

How, what do you think is the most likely way they would do that?

Oh, they just issue shares.

I mean, not only do they need the share price to stay up so that Elon doesn't get margin called on his loan uh against well secured by Tesla shares over at X.

But uh they, they would just issue shares is, is my expectation.

And the reason for that is you look at the balance sheet, they've got payables uh of that, well, over $20 billion they've got maybe 3 to $4 billion of free cash available.

And what's remarkable is their free cash flow in the first quarter was negative $2.5 billion.

Then Elon suggested they would spend $10 billion this year on A I for their FSD.

And I'm thinking to myself, where's the money coming from?

It's certainly not coming from increasing deliveries.

So that's why we're seeing the cuts right now.

We're seeing the cuts on employees, we're seeing the cuts on expanding the business.

Uh for example, two big things that I really enjoyed about Tesla years ago was the idea that we were going to build custom batteries.

The 46 eighties.

Now, those are really just a hedge.

That's a word they use, they only use them for the cyber truck.

Uh, the dojo software infrastructure, they were building out the server infrastructure.

That's a quote long shot for Elon Musk.

These were things that were really, really great and full of hope a couple of years ago that are now hedges and long shots.

And I think again, it's because they have to, they don't have the money to keep throwing into these.

If they did Xa I Elon's A I play would have hired Tesla to do a server stack build out Tesla could pay for that if they had the extra cash.

Uh and they would get the contract as opposed to oracle.

So I, I think there's definitely a massive cash problem and that's why I'm just saying patience this year, but I do love the company.

I love the people.

I love the cars and full self driving is amazing.

So it pains me to say that obviously, you spent a lot of time uh looking into and examining Tesla.

Interesting stuff, an interesting perspective.

Good to talk to you, Kevin.

Thanks, thanks for having me coming up.

We're taking a look at the best ways to play the energy sector in today's investor playbook.

Stay tuned, more market domination on the other side.

President Biden, raising tariff rates on strategic sectors such as evs and solar are the latest bid to keep China from undercutting us companies is coming as the Biden administration has already catalyzed billions in business investments towards industries like clean energy.

We're looking at how to navigate the big picture with the Yahoo finance playbook.

And joining us now here in studio to discuss is Tyler Rosen Licht Cohen and steer's portfolio manager for global listed Infrastructure along with he Mande Mizuho America's Director of Clean Energy Equity Research, guys.

Welcome to the show, both of you.

Thank you and Tyler, maybe I'll start with you, you know, uh President by spoke with Ya Finance yesterday talked us through sort of the reasons behind these new tariffs on China.

I'm interested.

Tyler just get your general big picture thoughts on those new tariffs and, and what does it mean Tyler for the sectors, the companies you cover?

Yeah.

Well, thanks for having me, I guess, you know, we think the tariff thumbs, elves are important, but it's more the symbology and the symbolism of what they mean.

You know, we think the global demand for energy is gonna rise a lot in the next few decades.

Um There is a voracious appetite to satisfy demand needs from urbanization, from the rising middle class globally, from A I data centers and so forth.

And now people are realizing to satisfy this demand, we need to be able to produce A lot of energy.

We need to produce traditional forms of energy and we need to make sure we have all the tools in place to satisfy growth in solar and wind and so forth.

And so for us, it's about, we don't want to rely on trade partners that we don't trust or that we don't necessarily feel confident that we'll be able to get what we need into the future.

So let's make sure that we support our domestic industry.

We need all of the energy we can possibly muster.

And let's make sure we have the manufacturing base and the resource base to satisfy that demand growth because um there's huge objection with A I and so forth and we need to make sure that we can power it all.

I want to ask you specifically about the solar industry when it comes to these tariffs.

Is it too little too late in terms of giving a leg up to the domestic solar industry because they have already been undercut by cheaper Chinese solar panels?

Absolutely.

That's a great question.

And I think the section 301 which Biden administration announced that's probably more directed towards China.

We already have 5070 80% tariffs on Chinese solar products.

So I think most of the companies have moved to Southeast Asia and what some of the domestic manufacturers have done, they have petitioned to impose tariffs on Southeast Asian imports now.

So I think any imports definitely, so any tariffs definitely help sustain the domestic manufacturing industry.

It's been almost two years since we had the Inflation reduction Act.

We saw a lot of announcements of new capacity.

We gonna add it over here.

We haven't seen them fully built yet.

And part of the reason is all this over supply.

So we definitely need some of these and many of the stocks have done terribly what has been, I mean, if they're getting this leg up, what's been going on?

That's a great question.

And I would say we can probably separate the companies who already had manufacturing capacity here, who did not have any China content.

So first of all, as a good example, they have done phenomenally.

Well, in the last two years, the rest of the space has somewhat got delay, I guess in the sense that all the ira benefits haven't yet trickled down into actual legalese from the treasury.

There was a delay in understanding those the law which was written in within a few weeks.

So that's an issue and then you have higher interest and some supply chain issues which has been impacting the industry.

And Tyler, I want to bring you back and it's that same kind of big picture question, that question of, you know, you think about these new tariffs too little, too late.

How, how do you think about that?

You know, um I think the reality is a lot of people have talked about this energy transition.

And they've said, hey, we're gonna get rid of old forms of energy and replace it with new.

And we think we're in this energy edition world and we're gonna need to rely on traditional forms of energy for a really long time.

They provide great baseload power.

We have the infrastructure in place and it's gonna be a huge growth opportunity to, to build solar, build alternatives, build wind, build nuclear, but it's gonna take a really long time.

And so um maybe the starting point is a little bit late, but this is not like a two or a three year thing.

You know, we are talking about energy demand into the next few decades and um maybe our starting point is a little behind where we want to be, but let's get ourselves there and let's make sure that we have the domestic capabilities to do.

So, Tyler, it sounds like you've been talking to some of the oil companies because I mean, you know, I went to Sarah week this year, which is the big oil and gas conference and that has been their line, which is sort of a new sort of fight back line from them that we're going to need those traditional energy sources for quite some time.

Yeah, I I'll just give you some very high level numbers which to us we think are really um interesting.

So if you assume that energy demand globally increases about 1% a year for the next 20 years, which we think is very realistic and you just displace half of current coal consumption.

You need to uh generate 45,000 terawatt hours of new energy in the next 20 years.

So again, some new demand and reduce coal, that is the equivalent of the entire global crude oil industry today.

So in the next 20 years, just to get to this world um that we're laying out of energy transition by market share.

Um We need to recreate the entire energy industry, the oil uh that's been here for over 100 years.

So the magnitude of demand growth is huge and the desire to make it clean is great.

But we will need to rely on traditional forms of energy for a really long time because the grid is unstable.

You know, we don't have infrastructure to satisfy a purely renewables grid today and we're going to need to utilize it for a long time.

Maybe let's um let's give viewers some ways to invest with this team.

One name, next tracker.

I know you like why, explain to us why is that name a buy here?

Sure.

Uh So next tracker makes solar trackers, they basically put the panel on a tracker and it tracks the sun.

It's as simple as that, but it is uh something which increases the production and you can, you know, charge a premium for that uh technology.

And so as solar and renewables grow.

I think these guys also grow with that.

And on top of that, the track of penetration rates has been pretty low internationally.

In the US, almost 90% of projects have a tracker internationally.

It's only 30%.

So you have growth rate on top of that increased penetration.

So you have a massive time opportunity for these guys.

On top of that, the management team has done pretty well since they went public last year.

After the spin off from Flex, they have pretty much beat all the expectations in every quarter since then.

And even yesterday did it for the same thing for the last quarter and the street likes them for that reason.

They have a lot of cash.

They don't have any debt is less than one time that so it's kind of like checks all the boxes for investors in this space would want to stay away from rate exposure and want to look at valuation still attractive.

I'm still attractive.

Tyler, thank you guys both for joining today.

Appreciate it.

Thank you.

While we're wrapping up today's market domination.

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