In this week's episode of The Capitalist Investor, Derek, Tony, and Luke are back with lively discussions about the ever-changing landscape of investment and the world of business. The trio jumps into topics ranging from the latest news on Nancy Pelosi's stock moves, Apple's decision to shift away from their electric car project, to reflections on the future of car technology and personal preferences for vehicle types. Alongside these engaging conversations, they touch on the evolving ways people shop, from virtual reality and augmented reality shopping experiences to the nostalgia of traditional brick-and-mortar store visits.
Nancy Pelosi's Stock Trades:
The hosts dived into the controversial stock trades made by Nancy Pelosi, a prominent figure in American politics. They analyzed the unprecedented reaction to Pelosi's stock moves, shedding light on the intricacies of call options and the potential insider advantages known figures may possess. The conversation raised questions about the ethics and regulations surrounding stock trading for public officials.
Shifts in Retail and Shopping Behavior:
The discussion delved into the shifting landscape of retail and shopping behaviors. The hosts highlighted the impact of digital transformation, the rise of online shopping, and the emergence of the metaverse. They pondered on the psychological shift in consumer behavior, referencing examples like Macy's store closures and the evolving shopping experiences with augmented reality and virtual reality technologies.
Apple's Electric Car Project:
The hosts dissected Apple's decision to scrap its electric car project, emphasizing the challenges and economics of entering the automotive industry. They contemplated the future of electric vehicles (EVs) and the feasibility of mass adoption, pointing out the complexities of scaling and consumer preferences. The conversation also touched upon the postponed EV mandates of major automobile manufacturers like Mercedes and Audi.
Evolving Personal Consumer Choices:
The hosts' dialogue extended to their personal consumer choices, sharing anecdotes from their experiences at the recent car show and their aspirations for different vehicle types. From hybrid cars to SUVs and EVs, the conversation mirrored the diverse considerations of everyday consumers and offered insights into the ever-evolving landscape of personal transportation preferences.
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Tease:
The episode concluded with an allusion to the controversial and often polarizing world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. The hosts playfully referenced the ongoing debate around Bitcoin, inviting input from their audience on the potential for a dedicated episode on the topic. This teaser left the door open for future discussions on the volatile and rapidly evolving cryptocurrency market.
#AppleCar #ElectricVehicles #TechNews
In this week's episode of The Capitalist Investor, Derek, Tony, and Luke are back with lively discussions about the ever-changing landscape of investment and the world of business. The trio jumps into topics ranging from the latest news on Nancy Pelosi's stock moves, Apple's decision to shift away from their electric car project, to reflections on the future of car technology and personal preferences for vehicle types. Alongside these engaging conversations, they touch on the evolving ways people shop, from virtual reality and augmented reality shopping experiences to the nostalgia of traditional brick-and-mortar store visits.
Nancy Pelosi's Stock Trades:
The hosts dived into the controversial stock trades made by Nancy Pelosi, a prominent figure in American politics. They analyzed the unprecedented reaction to Pelosi's stock moves, shedding light on the intricacies of call options and the potential insider advantages known figures may possess. The conversation raised questions about the ethics and regulations surrounding stock trading for public officials.
Shifts in Retail and Shopping Behavior:
The discussion delved into the shifting landscape of retail and shopping behaviors. The hosts highlighted the impact of digital transformation, the rise of online shopping, and the emergence of the metaverse. They pondered on the psychological shift in consumer behavior, referencing examples like Macy's store closures and the evolving shopping experiences with augmented reality and virtual reality technologies.
Apple's Electric Car Project:
The hosts dissected Apple's decision to scrap its electric car project, emphasizing the challenges and economics of entering the automotive industry. They contemplated the future of electric vehicles (EVs) and the feasibility of mass adoption, pointing out the complexities of scaling and consumer preferences. The conversation also touched upon the postponed EV mandates of major automobile manufacturers like Mercedes and Audi.
Evolving Personal Consumer Choices:
The hosts' dialogue extended to their personal consumer choices, sharing anecdotes from their experiences at the recent car show and their aspirations for different vehicle types. From hybrid cars to SUVs and EVs, the conversation mirrored the diverse considerations of everyday consumers and offered insights into the ever-evolving landscape of personal transportation preferences.
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Tease:
The episode concluded with an allusion to the controversial and often polarizing world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. The hosts playfully referenced the ongoing debate around Bitcoin, inviting input from their audience on the potential for a dedicated episode on the topic. This teaser left the door open for future discussions on the volatile and rapidly evolving cryptocurrency market.
#AppleCar #ElectricVehicles #TechNews
Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Capitalist Investor. We got the dream team back, better than ever. So cool hand Luke, Tony the tiger. What's up, guys? How we doing? Hey, man, I'm here. You are here, that is for sure. Before we were talking, before the show started, we were talking about bitcoin. We're not going to talk about it today. Well, we're talking about it right now. You're like, hey, let's log into our Coinbase account, man. I have the shiba. You have Shiba. I still have Shiba. I have 5 million shares of it. Is it worth .1 cents? I got $60 in it. I was going to say I thought I had about 20 million at one point. All right, moving on. It'll be worth a million here soon. Well, speaking of changing, America is changing pretty drastically. That's pretty obvious. But we saw some pretty big names restructuring how they're going to do business. We could not avoid talking about it any longer. Nancy Pelosi, basically the greatest trader of all time. So we'll get into that. And canceled some pretty big news yesterday. They sure were talking about it quite a bit. But we'll talk about Apple and their. Electric car project, Audis and Mercedes, and everyone else will look at, too. Yeah. All at once. I'm a big fan of history and our country's history and nostalgia and all that. So basically, the headlines from this Fox Business article, Macy's to close 150 stores by 2026 and basically open a new Bloomingdale's, which is going to be kind of more like boutique location in each location. No? Okay. Far fewer. Got it. Yeah, makes sense. All right, moving on. Great. Look, at the end of the day, how does the psychology of people change, too, like the way they shop? And that's been the big debate over the past 20 years with online shopping, physical locations, and one of the new topics that people don't really talk about, or are starting to talk about, per se, is that the whole metaverse, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, whatever you want to call it, is going to provide a new way to shop as well, where you can basically ask chat GBT to go buy you whatever it be and does it all for you. Or you can go into your metaverse through these glasses like the Apple Vision Pro, and basically try on clothes that you can kind of see how it look on you or watches how it look on your wrist. There's all kinds of ways. This augmented reality, virtual reality type of world we're heading into, if you can afford it, I mean, $4,000 for an apple vision Pro. Going to be buying a$4,000 apple vision Pro. But this is going to provide you no way to shop. Right? So these retailers are going to have to adapt to that. Yeah, for sure. The way I view this is like, yeah, there's different ways we're going to learn how to shop. And I'm already doing that. I buy most of my stuff on Amazon one item at a time. I'm single handedly trying to wreck Amazon one item at a time. But anyway, so another big store, Derek, one of our friends, shared with us the other day that h and M, like a low cost kind of younger person, maybe under 30, would go there and shop and get cheap t shirts, cheap pants. It's a low cost provider for trendy clothes. H and M was cool. You walk in and I feel like I'm in a dance party. I know that. But they're closing a 55,000 square foot shop in Vegas in the forum at the Caesar. That's a lot of square footage, right? I also read a few weeks ago about how everyone has quote unquote money. Everything's costing more, but people are spending. And now these vendors, like a Macy's is like, why don't I just open a Bloomingdale and give them the same clothes, but just charge more money for it? They're trying to increase their margins by slapping bloomingdales above where Macy's used to be on the building. And now I get to charge $80 for those pair of jeans rather than 45. And then when they go on sale for 60, they're still making money. In my view, that's what's happening now. The brick and mortar is going away. I understand that. But there's still nostalgia of going in and trying on a pair of pants because every time I buy them online, they don't fit right. And it irritates the hell out of me. It is definitely not a perfect system. In some situations, it can take more time. I'll give you an example. So my glasses broke last week. Basically just the stem just fell off right in the middle of the day. So I'm wearing my old glasses now. But anyway, so I didn't feel like going to the mall, having to do another eye exam, paying a high price at Lenscrafter. So I went online because I bought glasses online before, but it was a new tool. I had not seen this. Basically, if you were in front of your computer, it basically took a 3d rendering of your head and you could try the actual glasses on, like while you were looking in your webcam and you can move your head from side to side. It was really cool. Wow. It really was. Now, just because, listen, I'm going on two and a half years dating Anna. I looked online, I'm like, okay, let's take a look at rings. No, if I do or don't, I don't know, I haven't made the decision. And she knows that. She knows where I stand. She listen to this podcast? Probably not. I hope not. But I went on and looked at whatever diamonds dragged and they have the same things with rings too. Like you can literally upload a picture of your hand, essentially, and it puts the ring would look like on your finger. I could say that I looked for myself a ring. I've actually seen a watch app as well. Yes, I like that. But Derek. So now here's my cheap ass. What I did because my glasses broke and I didn't want to go to the thing and know, blah, blah, blah. Long story short, I bought on Amazon a little toolkit to put the screws back in. And I fixed my own glasses. I fixed mine with superglue. But what happened to mine? It didn't snap off the stem getting held into the frame, it just came apart. Good thing. Thank God I can see things excellent within about 3ft of my face. Because, man, those screws that go into an eyeglass are small and so is the wrench. While I was in New York, we went to the speakeasy and went downstairs and had a little cocktail. And next thing you know, I start talking to this optometrist next to me and I tell her how I've been feeling with my eyes. She's basically said, luke, you're screwed. You're going to need glasses very soon. So I'll be there with you guys. Very right. So, all right, well, that's my take. My take on them closing all these Macy's and stuff is that they're going to put a quote unquote higher end label on the store, charge more money. Even on sale, they're going to make more money. That's how I look at it. But here's the cheat code of ordering online. I figured it out. Maybe find a shirt you like. So I'll buy like five different brands of a work shirt and from there I will try all five on. And once I find the one that fits the best, I send four of them back and then order that one brand, that same type of shirt, and I'll order different. You guys do it. Absolutely. Everyone does it wrong. The way you truly do it is you wear the same clothes almost every single day, all right? That way you only have like one or two outfits. It's simple. Keep it simple. When I go out on the weekends, for example, I always wear my black shirt, my black pants, and I have, like, my little chain on and I have my nice jacket that I wear. And people, they know who I am when I walk. But do you have different black shirts or is it always the same? No, it's different black shirts. Like, you have two or three. You have two or three, you cycle through and then you don't have to. Worry about clothes that could have gone in two different directions. That question now it's loaded, all right? But it's like, my friends know when I wear the all black that they know I wear all black. So I say, well, they know who I am because they know I wear all black. It's just Luke. All right, Danny DeVito. All right, let's go slimming to. All right, Pelosi. Yeah, Nancy Pelosi. So she basically made it to the front page of the news with her Nvidia calls shows, basically making big bets that Nvidia was going to do well. And then earnings came out and it blew up and she made a ridiculous amount of money. Yeah. The headline I keep on seeing is like, hey, what is her net worth? Like $90 million? 9100 million dollars? How did she make that when she has been a congresswoman for her whole life making 200 grand? How did that happen? You make sweet stock moves like this. So that is crazy to me. The stock moves that they are making are actually very sophisticated moves. Call options, futures. That's not your run. Like, hey, I'm just going to buy Nvidia stock and hope for the best. These are short term, kind of like in the know kind of items. You're putting that kind of money into a call option. Like, holy cow, like a million dollars into a call option. And playing with derivatives, you either win or you lose. And when you lose, you lose 50% to 80% of your money. Right. Like quickly, within weeks. This isn't a child's playing game, right? Yeah. So she hit big on that one. And then it came out basically, if you remember, around February 10, twelveth, somewhere in there, there was this mystery, like giant national security threat from Russia. And about four or five days later, we find out right after that, Nancy Pelosi bought the cybersecurity company Palo Alto. And when it came out that she made that move, it moved the whole entire market. So I think it went up 8% that day. Well, actually, I think what happened is that news came out, and Palo Alto, they went down 35%. So what you're saying is that as soon as it hit that 35%, that's when she bought. She bought the dip from that dip. I think the stock is up 10%. In, like, a week or two, you bought an option. That option has to be up at least 100%, is what I would guess, maybe more. Could be. I have two thoughts on this. Number one is, listen, at the end of the day, if you are in circles of going to clubs, going out to nice high end restaurants, and you overhear people talking, you're exposed to probably information that you might not. The key is to not take action on the information you hear. Because no matter if you're at this level of the high end level of CEO level or you're the level of Nancy Pelosi in Congress, you're going to be surrounded with people and asking people questions and going out to dinner with people that probably going to expose you to information doesn't mean you have to act on that. If you're literally in Congress deciding the next energy bill, what the tech sector regulation is or non regulation is, obviously you're gonna hear things whether or not you vote for it or not. You can hear things that you can take advantage of in your stock portfolio. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that there's some insider stuff going on. The problem is nobody seems to truly care. We talk about it, we say we care, but at the end of the day, what are we going to do to try to go after it? Right? Unless someone at the top starts to really question and ask questions, then things aren't going to change. Well, second thing is, she's at the point where now people understand what she's doing, so people are going into trades with her, which is pumping up the stocks. So she basically is like now the Elon musk of stock trading. Everyone wants to own everything Elon Musk touches because everyone thinks it's going to be successful. Same thing now with Nancy Pelosi. So they're actually helping. Everyone's helping Nancy Pelosi out by buying the same stock positions that she's buying. She has a parody account. Yes, right. On Twitter or x whatever you. We keep on saying Twitter, x whatever. She has a parody account that follows her trades. And, I mean, there's over 200, 300,000 followers. You can watch it now. I believe they have, what, 45 days to ring in their trades. I don't know. It's a little bit of a delay, the fact that you have to disclose it within 45 days. In our industry, in the financial planning industry, you have to get approved and then you get to buy. Exactly. Right. Yeah, but there's no oversight for Congress because they make the rules. Right. And I believe Nancy Pelosi tried to come to Congress saying, hey, we should not let people trade stocks yet. She's the biggest culprit. And is that really, is it her. Or even her husband? I've heard that it's not even her. It's her husband. That's like behind the scenes probably listening to these dinners and making the trades. He used to be private equity guy. I'm pretty sure. I would say that if he was a private equity guy, he can connect a lot of dots very quickly. And then if she just says, like, hey, this is what they talked about in that meeting. I'm sure if he connects dinner with her to whoever she's talking to, next thing you know, he's just listening in here. His mind, he's around the same circle she's running around. Sounds must be nice to know people. Seriously, I know you guys and make the rules. That was the first time that I can remember, and I'm sure there probably were other times, but I've never seen such a reaction just on the news that these trades were placed. Are you guys buying Palo Alto? No, we missed it. Yeah, she ran it up. No, real question is, do you buy bitcoin? But that's for another episode. All right, moving on. All right, one more. Tony's like, Luke, don't say a freaking word. Tony wants to talk bitcoin. No, I don't. We'll talk next week. We'll see what happens the next week. All right, how about our viewers tell. Us they want to listen to hear bitcoin take. Let us know. Send us an email or social media take if you want to hear bitcoin. All right, so canceled. So apple made headlines yesterday. They are scrapping their electric car project, and I believe they're going to be focusing more on Apple vision pros. I mean, the Apple vision pros do look pretty sweet. Did you see that picture of a guy, like, sitting on the toilet? Yeah. There's a guy that sat on the toilet with the apple vision pro. I think it was fake because it looked too real. But then he put him on, and the next thing you know, you have a perspective of what he would be seeing, and he's like, sitting on top of a mountain with the ocean and the sound of waves and air. And it looks like he's just in the most peaceful environment to take a go to the bathroom. Sounds like a great $4,000 meditation device. Anyway, Apple, this was expected. Who really thought this was going to come true? I don't think that Apple was ever going to designate billions of dollars to R D, even though they have the cash to something that probably isn't going to turn profitable because car market is a very tough market to get into. They make phones, and then you're going to make cars tomorrow. And then the margins are very bad, too. Then you have to make an affordable scale to the point where it's affordable from a scalability standpoint for the average person. Right. Which is why most EV companies are going to go under, except like Tesla and maybe one or two. So in China, there's BYD. They make as many cars and sell as many cars as Tesla here in the US. So you're going to have two major players in the EV game because you have. And maybe Toyota. Toyota is developing a lot of money. They're worldwide brand. They have the scalability. They have the scalability where us companies like Ford and Chevy and, you know, stick to the fossil fuel cars, they're obviously burning up money trying to figure out the EV game. And then you got a company like, yeah, we're going to make a really, like, I understand the tech. Have somebody else build you the car and you put your technology in it. Or put your name brand on it. Yeah, have somebody else know, or go and buy a company with a jam. Or Toyota or Tesla. Or Tesla. Elon probably wouldn't let Apple stuff in his car. Remember, didn't they try to sell? Didn't Apple try to buy Tesla? Or Elon offered for them to buy. It and he declined. Now he's like, fu. Probably, if Apple wanted to make a car, why don't you go buy a company like lucid or Neo, a very small ev? But they have the infrastructure of knowing something. They have some research and development into that technology. But at the end of the day, I just think there's just not as big of an appetite for. There's the mandate, right? Biden said everyone's got to drive an EV by 2050 or something. So here's my quick thoughts. I was at the car show here in Cleveland last past weekend with my family, with my parent, my dad, my brother. It was good. It was a little smaller than it usually was, but one of the announcements we heard right around that car show was that Mercedes and Audi are both pushing back now. Their mandates from 2026 all basically evs and majority being evs now 2030 or beyond. So now they're, like, basically doing away with the whole ev side because people are realizing there's just not much demand for it. Now, real quick, off topic. At some of the cars I saw, I'm like, now I'm starting to get my little Honda Civic that I have. I'm like, maybe when my lease comes up in November, maybe I should just take a little bit, look at something a little bit better than a Honda Civic. But now I'm getting the itch. Maybe you should talk me out of it. But I bought a car. Yeah, we should talk about. You know, I had an explorer st. It was very sporty, suspension very rough. So I just went into a different suv. I bought a Volkswagen. Nice. I like it. Nice. I like it. So far, so good. I think I might go suv next, actually, because I was sitting in some of the cars. Yeah. And my dad, I don't know why he was commenting. He's like, the Honda Civic, just those more smaller cars. I'm kind of not a small guy. He's just like, you kind of just look a little big, and it's not you. He's like the suv. If you get a nice little trim that's more your style, like, you kind of look good in that. So I'm thinking suv. Maybe it's the next car. Yeah. I mean, maybe you'll get a hybrid. Who knows? Maybe you'll get an ev. I will not go there. My wife's hybrid is nice. Is it? Yeah, it's really good. Probably average, like 50 miles to the gallon. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it works. The battery lasts for, like, 20 miles, essentially, so it kind of switches between gas and electric. Really good. But won't be getting any full electric apple cars. But let me ask you guys, this is. Our ev is going to be ever truly canceled. Are we just going to stop? You think this whole ev, like, ten years down the road, do you think we'll still be in gas cars? Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Okay. I think it's too. The average length of having a car is like ten years. The average used car is 1013 years as old. If you bought a gas powered car right now, you're at least ten years from getting another car on average. So 2035 at least is when you'd have to change that mandate. And if you just do some simple math like that, I guess, yes. I think we got a lot more convincing to do. All right, everyone, well, thanks for listening this week. Excellent show. Thanks for listening. As always. If you have any questions, comments, show ideas, send us a quick email at info@swpconnect.com and we'll talk to you next week. The opinions expressed in the podcast are for general informational purposes only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any investment, legal, financial or tax strategy. It is only intended to provide education about the financial industry. Please consult a qualified professional about your individual needs.