What Professional Investors Are Doing Right Now with Kevin Simpson

Speaker 1 Here's one piece of advice that I've given for years: build an emergency fund. Aim to stash away enough to cover at least three months of expenses in case your income suddenly drops.

Speaker 1 Sounds simple, right? But let's be honest, it's not. Saving even one month's worth of living costs can feel impossible.

Speaker 1 Just when you're making progress, that check engine light blinks on and derails your plans. Life already throws enough curveballs.
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That's chime.com/slash MNN. Chime feels like progress.

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Speaker 1 Here's one piece of advice that I've given for years. Build an emergency fund.
Aim to stash away enough to cover at least three months of expenses in case your income suddenly drops.

Speaker 1 Sounds simple, right? But let's be honest, it's not. Saving even one month's worth of living costs can feel impossible.

Speaker 1 Just when you're making progress, that check engine light blinks on and derails your plans. Life already throws enough curveballs.
You don't need your bank adding to the chaos.

Speaker 1 That's why it's so important to choose one that makes savings easy and doesn't nibble away at your hard-earned money with ridiculous fees. QIIME understands that every dollar counts.

Speaker 1 That's why when you set up direct deposit through QIIME, you get access to fee-free features like free overdraft coverage, getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit, and more.

Speaker 1 With qualifying direct deposits, you're eligible for free overdraft up to $200 on debit card purchases and cash withdrawals. To date, QIIME has spotted members over $30 billion.

Speaker 1 Work on your financial goals through QIIME today. Open an account in just two minutes at chime.com slash MNN.
That's chime.com slash MNN. Chime feels like progress.

Speaker 2 Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services and debit card provided by the Bank Corporate Bank NA or Stripe Bank NA, members of FDIC.

Speaker 2 Spot me eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply. Timing depends on submission of payment file.
Fees apply at Out of Network ATMs, bank ranking, and number of ATMs, according to U.S.

Speaker 2 News and World Report 2023. Chime, checking account required.

Speaker 3 I live in LA now, but lately I have been craving the seasons. Snow, hot cocoa, the whole thing.

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Speaker 5 I'm Nicole Lapin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand.

Speaker 4 It's time for some money rehab.

Speaker 3 As you heard on the pod earlier this month, the stock market had its worst day in years and has struggled really for months now to keep up the momentum we saw right after the election.

Speaker 3 So So is this the beginning of a recession that we've been bracing for?

Speaker 3 That's just part of what I cover today with Kevin Simpson, the founder and chief executive officer of Capital Wealth Planning, an investment advisory firm with $10 billion of assets under management.

Speaker 3 A lot of money, he's a big deal. Kevin and I talk about what pro investors do during stock market crashes and where he's seeing opportunities right now.

Speaker 3 And Kevin plays bullish or bearish with me, my favorite, and he gives us his take on the stocks that are causing the biggest stir on the street right now. Here's Kevin.

Speaker 4 Kevin Simpson, welcome back to my rehab.

Speaker 6 Thanks for having me, Nicole. Great to see you.

Speaker 4 Are you okay?

Speaker 4 I just feel like it's been a wild few weeks. How are you holding up?

Speaker 6 It's so much about emotions, and that's the problem. For better or for worse, I've been in this industry for over three decades.
And in the old days, we would experience

Speaker 6 one or two 10% pullbacks, almost like clockwork. And it seemed like every other year, we'd have a 20% pullback.

Speaker 6 Very often it wouldn't be in the Gregarian calendar where you'd have it start to finish, peak to trough, 20% downturn. But throughout the course of a year, it was very commonplace.

Speaker 6 So I feel like today, maybe we've been spoiled because the past two years were so good. But I think investors are freaking out a little bit.
But we're only down, you know, maybe 10%, if that.

Speaker 6 Some stocks, certainly more so than others. But on a grander scale, I mean, I think things are okay.

Speaker 4 So you're saying historically it's gone down more gradually, and now it just feels like more whiplash. We need volume looking at the market.

Speaker 6 No, no, we had the same type of whiplash. What we didn't have was 24-hour social media.
So we didn't know what was happening all the time.

Speaker 6 I mean, even from a Fed perspective, if the Fed cut rates or they would hike rates, you know, we didn't know about it for a couple of days, maybe a week until we read it in the Wall Street Journal.

Speaker 6 The problem when we have volatility today is that we just feel it so intensely because we can't escape it. And that's fine.
It's okay.

Speaker 6 It's just how do we mentally overcome markets when they turn down and and what do we do about it to make successful investment decisions you mentioned the correction 10 that's not a recession to be clear no no and and you you're going to hear words like recession and stagflation and very very scary things out there but the resiliency of the labor market makes me a lot less concerned about a recession someday we'll have them it's a part of a normal economic cycle but when you look at the economy right now we still have a gdp that's expanding even though it's not expanding rapidly again the labor market is what I'm hanging my hat on as being something that's super resilient.

Speaker 6 We have CPI and PPI that didn't really freak anyone out from an inflation standpoint.

Speaker 6 And you have a Fed that last week was saying that they're there to step in with rate cuts if necessary, looking at both the labor market, inflation, and the broader economy. So you have a Fed put.

Speaker 6 Problem is you don't have a Fed put here at these levels. It could be another 10% down before they kind of step in with the white horses.
So

Speaker 6 we're not through the end of this yet because there's so much uncertainty. But I'm not overly concerned just yet about any of the real brand long-term grind out bear markets.

Speaker 4 So the white horses being rate cuts, of course. Do you think we're in this as a blip or are there going to be more bad days ahead? Have we hit the bottom yet?

Speaker 4 I think that's what a lot of people want to know.

Speaker 6 No, I don't think we've hit the bottom, but I don't necessarily care from the perspective of thinking about it like this way. Maybe we're halfway done.

Speaker 6 So if you have a 20% drawdown and then you have a bear market like pullback, which again isn't the end of the world considering how much things have gone up, if we're halfway through it, you can start to invest a little bit now and continue to do so over the course of the next year, thinking that dollar cost averaging will allow you to kind of lean into that volatility.

Speaker 6 And if we're wrong and this is the bottom, well, great, we've put some money to work here.

Speaker 6 The biggest mistake that any investor can make, even us as professionals, is to start thinking that we can time the market that we want to be so clever that we want to kind of maybe get out now and and try to call a bottom because it's very very difficult to do that and i i i'm certainly not going to try okay you're way more chill than i was expecting you to be so

Speaker 4 you didn't panic it sounds like a lot of people did panic especially in the really really bad day on march 10th what did you do Did you buy more? I know you buy more dividend stocks.

Speaker 6 We did. I mean, we bought JP Morgan, which was,

Speaker 6 again kind of thinking that we're talking here on Monday and it's a week or so removed, but JP Morgan was down 17%. I mean, we bought more from a really good company.

Speaker 6 We actually bought some of the Q's.

Speaker 6 Now, that's not part of our dividend strategy, but really looking at things that had come down so much that you could write covered calls on, really good opportunity there.

Speaker 4 Wait, wait, wait, hold on. So, when you say bought some of the Qs, you mean QQQ or?

Speaker 6 Yes. So, we have a

Speaker 6 you know

Speaker 6 of us in our like flagship dividend strategy. We write covered calls, very boring, you know, never one for volatility or risk.

Speaker 6 We recently launched in August a more aggressive growth strategy. The symbol of the ETF is QDVO.
And within that growth strategy, we actually bought some of the QQQ.

Speaker 6 We actually bought the NASDAQ, just thinking that it's a pure bounce from technical, so from a technical standpoint, you know, you've got a pure bounce there. Plus, we can write calls against it.

Speaker 6 I still have a lot of cash. So if I'm early, we can continue to put things to work.

Speaker 6 But we're buyers at these levels across the board where there's good reason to be profits, solid valuations, and projected growth.

Speaker 4 So when you say covered calls, not to get too technical, but if somebody is like, what are you talking about? Basically, it's like insurance that you're creating for yourself.

Speaker 6 Very, very modest hedging. Yeah, I don't want to overstate it as being something that's going to really protect the downside, but it does a little bit and it helps to smooth out the ride.

Speaker 6 And maybe in the next month or two, we can just dedicate a show and talking about what covered call writing is because let's play, like let's play out the volatility and say, okay, well, we have a new administration.

Speaker 6 Things were kind of calm for two years. Now all of a sudden we have a constant overload of information that's causing this volatility.
Maybe that continues for the next couple of years.

Speaker 6 In a range-bound market, covered calls can be a really helpful way to buffer some of that volatility and also generate a little cash flow.

Speaker 4 I mean, that's the cool part about this, right? If you did have cash on the sidelines and some people are like, okay, I had cash on the sidelines. Now there's a dip.
Now I have no more cash. So

Speaker 4 we can't, we can't buy more. But dividend stocks are now having a moment.

Speaker 4 There's so much more discussion about dividend stocks. I think in any market downturn, people want to get a dividend, which is basically a little present from a company in the form of cash.

Speaker 4 Or if you are in a drip program, it's reinvested into the stock. Are you having an I told you so moment? Because you have been talking about this, whether it's a downturn or not.
This is your thing.

Speaker 6 No, I had my I Told You So moment on dividend paying stocks in like the year 2000 and the early 2000s. I'll tell you a very brief, funny story.

Speaker 6 But first, the idea that you're mentioning dividends and dividend reinvestment and the power of compounding, that's true wealth creation. I mean, that's how we become

Speaker 6 really, really rich over time. But I remember in 1998, I was fired by someone.
This was during the dot-com bubble.

Speaker 6 It was a really sweet, like, like nice lady that said she wouldn't refer me to her worst enemy. And I was like, that's pretty harsh.
and

Speaker 6 and the reason was i bought merck mrk like i put her in an investment that i thought was a quality dividend payer in 1998 merck

Speaker 6 and uh she wanted to own lucent technologies which was a much more high-flying tech stock very similar to some of the meme or dot-com stocks that went by the wayside in fact this was one that that did just that but it was like a hundred dollar stock they didn't really make any money and you know i thought that it was a little bit outside of her risk profile and maybe the stock was around a hundred dollars a hundred and five dollars And within a year, I think it went down to like 65

Speaker 6 cents.

Speaker 6 And I felt very much like that was my aha moment in those early times. But yeah, dividend stocks never really go out of favor.
They just become less popular when NVIDIA doubles every day. And then

Speaker 6 all of a sudden, value plays a little bit more of an important role in people's portfolio.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And if you want to take advantage of that compound effect, if you are buying a share of something, you can typically just just right there on an app, just click reinvest dividends or not.

Speaker 4 And so that's what a drip program essentially is. When you were on the show in August, Kevin, we had a particularly bad day then.

Speaker 4 I feel like we always meet in these not so pleasant times, but you were talking about the idea that Warren Buffett was stockpiling cash. You mentioned that you were buying JP Morgan.

Speaker 4 I know Jamie Diamond cashed out recently when his stock was at more of a high. Do you think that Jamie Dimon, Warren Buffett knew something we didn't know?

Speaker 4 Or do you think this type of opportunity, this March 10th big dip was the buying opportunity they were waiting for?

Speaker 6 Well, I think they both know more than we do. So I'll be too humble to

Speaker 6 compare myself to either one. But certainly Jamie Dimon has an inside track on JP Morgan, but it seems like he's always telling us not to buy it.

Speaker 6 And the stock always seems to go higher for the most part. So if I was buying it in August, here I am buying it again in March.
We've owned it for 13 years. I really like the position.

Speaker 6 The cash stockpile that warren buffett has within berkshire is very interesting is that a macro call and we'll see a sell-off and and then they'll look like geniuses once again i mean that possibility certainly exists it's also very possible that they're making acquisitions and purchasing shares now on this pullback that we'll find out about in their next filing.

Speaker 6 So I think it's always great to have cash on the sideline. It's easy for us as professionals to do that because we're always generating cash.
We're trimming things.

Speaker 6 We're bringing in call premiums, we're collecting dividends. And to your point, that's not always the position that the retail investor is in.

Speaker 6 As we're building portfolios, when we're newer to investing, we don't have that luxury all the time.

Speaker 6 So, I think that the lesson of dividend reinvestment and securing a drip is something that I've literally practiced for over 30 years.

Speaker 6 There's nothing really that I would own that wouldn't give me that dividend reinvestment ability for my investment portfolio. And I will give you a statistic.

Speaker 6 I know no one likes to hear stats, but since 1926,

Speaker 6 so for almost 100 years, the SP 500 has generated 10.2% per year, which is a great return. That's why we invest.

Speaker 6 That's why you teach people so wonderfully in the way that you do to get them motivated to start investing. 10.2% a year is really, really powerful.

Speaker 6 Of that return for almost 100 years, 39% of it, almost 40% comes from dividends and distributions reinvesting. If the market's up 30%, we feel like geniuses.

Speaker 6 If it's down 30%, you and I are probably talking. I want to jump off a bridge or at least we feel like we might want to.

Speaker 6 But overall, it's that power of dollar cost averaging, compounding a dividend reinvestment that is the secret to investing.

Speaker 4 I mean, it definitely helps increase what you have in the market. And we know that time in the market is better than time being the market.

Speaker 4 Although we do feel like, you know, we might miss a blip because in theory, we know buy low, sell high, obviously. But when it's low, we get scared.
Like, is it ever going to end?

Speaker 4 And when you have cash on the sidelines, you also think, well, is it just going to keep going up? And so now I need to put my money to work.

Speaker 4 These are the plights of the retail investor, which is, I think, a euphemism for just folks like us that don't have all the Bloomberg terminals and other fancy technicals that you guys have.

Speaker 6 Don't be fooled by our multiple screens. You know, it's very, very hard to separate that emotion from it.
I mean, we have to think of everything as a math equation.

Speaker 6 We look for companies that are profitable businesses.

Speaker 6 And if they can earn more money next year than they did this year, in all likelihood, their share price will trend in the right direction over time. Investing is really easy.

Speaker 6 But the application of trading, knowing when to buy, when to sell, when to move in, when to kind of dial back a little bit, that part can be just incredibly emotional. And

Speaker 6 if you let the emotions bleed into the decisions, that's when you're more apt to make a mistake. So for us, it's always thinking like, well, if it's down 10%, we'll put some money to work.

Speaker 6 If it's down 20, we'll put a lot more to work. And that's a hard thing to separate the emotion from it.

Speaker 4 For sure.

Speaker 5 Hold on to your wallets. Money rehab will be right back.

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Speaker 5 And now for some more money rehab.

Speaker 4 Let's play a game to kind of get a sense of where your head's at for different stocks. If you could let me know if you're bullish or bearish right now, how about Meta?

Speaker 6 It's my favorite stock. I mean, I'm absolutely bullish.
It had a 20-day run where it just seemed like it couldn't go down. And it definitely got higher than the valuation deserved and warranted.

Speaker 6 Now that it's pulled back, it's absolutely a buy. The reason it's pulled back is because investors are fearful of advertising pullbacks, which would affect Meta's profitability.

Speaker 6 But from a Mag 7 valuation standpoint, maybe NVIDIA is close, but this is very, very reasonably priced. They pay a dividend now, which is why we like it.

Speaker 6 They just had a modest dividend increase recently. For the past three years, they've been buying back shares, so they've reduced the float.

Speaker 6 This is also a stock that's getting into hardware to compete with Apple. I wear the Meta Ray-Bands and I swear by them.
So not that that's a reason to buy a stai, but they're super cool.

Speaker 4 Okay. I didn't know that people were actually wearing them, but good to know.
How about NVIDIA?

Speaker 6 So NVIDIA, also a pretty good buying opportunity here. The problem is everyone already owns it.
And you think like, gee, it was just 150, now it's 110 or so. Should we buy more? Can it go to 90?

Speaker 6 Can it go to 80? It could. It could.

Speaker 6 So the thought process there is, again, you're just trying to continue to buy it at valuations that make a lot more sense because looking at their earnings, people get freaked out because it's not 200% growth.

Speaker 6 But 30 to 60% growth is really, really good. You know, Apple's growth is maybe 9%.

Speaker 6 NVIDIA's growth is probably 20% to 30% when you kind of take away some of the hype. And this is a CEO that has this pulse on what's happening with the future.
I wish they paid more of a dividend.

Speaker 6 They do pay one penny a quarter. To me, that's a rounding error down to zero.
But for anyone on the planet besides me that doesn't own it, you can certainly start buying shares here at this level.

Speaker 7 Why the heck do they even give a penny a quarter?

Speaker 6 Because dividend managers can then say it pays a dividend. They can put it in their strategy.
I think that's cheating.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that doesn't seem right. Oh, last time you were on, you were very bullish on NVIDIA.
And that was before all this DeepSeek stuff came out.

Speaker 4 Of course, the Chinese AI company saying that they spent so much less than OpenAI to build their software. Would you say you're still bullish at the valuation we are now?

Speaker 6 Yeah, even more so. It's like the DeepSeek is like in Iron Man 1 when Tony Stark built his suit of armor out of a box of scraps in a cave.

Speaker 6 That was a movie. DeepSeek didn't build their Iron Man suit in a cave with a box of scraps.
They took open source material and they probably have NVIDIA servers in other countries.

Speaker 6 So I don't think that the $6 million price tag was as accurate now in hindsight as maybe it was the day the news came out.

Speaker 4 I know. It was such a good headline, but it was totally bogus.

Speaker 4 So tell me about OpenAI. Obviously, it's a private company.
You can't trade it, but let's pretend we could invest.

Speaker 6 Would you be pleased?

Speaker 6 It's hard to pretend because you don't know what the financials look like. So I want to see profitability.
And I know that at this point, they're not profitable, at least to

Speaker 6 what they tell us. But if you look at their user base, to what they do report, I mean, it's amazing the exponential users that are out there.
I use ChatGPT.

Speaker 6 I find it to be pretty helpful in consolidating a lot of the things that I'm thinking about. It makes it a little bit more concise.

Speaker 6 Some of my team members use Gronk and some use perplexity, but for us, we're able to really use artificial intelligence in our work to simplify. I'll give you a great example.

Speaker 6 So in the old days, maybe like six months ago, I would have to listen to an earnings call. And maybe that would take 45 minutes of my time for all these companies.

Speaker 6 Now we can have the AI listen to the call, give us a complete transcript, and then a four to seven minute read of a synopsis to which we can then cite the data that we want to see.

Speaker 6 So rather than spending 45 minutes somewhat zoning off at times or dozing off at least with some boring calls, we can get that information and be a lot more efficient. So

Speaker 6 I think that there's tremendous opportunities with AI. And for those people that own open AI and the private sector, I think that there's lots of, lots of upside down the road.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's not all pretend. There is a secondary market.
My husband, I think, put some money into Perplexity at a bajillion dollar valuation. I mean,

Speaker 4 their valuations on the secondary market for these private companies are ridiculous.

Speaker 6 On Friday, Perplexity had a report that they were doing another fundraise, which was going to be 6x of what it was last year. So congratulations to your honor.
Oh.

Speaker 4 Thanks, Kevin. Are you hiring? Okay, what about Super Micro?

Speaker 4 Is there room for other AI companies other than NVIDIA?

Speaker 6 I think that we have to see if the accounting irregularities are really something that was...

Speaker 6 not as horrific as maybe initially thought. When you see an auditor quit, that's a really bad sign.
Now, I know they have another accounting firm that's in there.

Speaker 6 I know they're reporting and trying to get all of their listing and filings up to speed and up to date. Certainly there's room.
I mean, absolutely there is.

Speaker 6 I'm not sure if that is the one, but from an investment thesis,

Speaker 6 I would not be an investor until we see what the actual accounting numbers look like. So a little bit sketchy there, but sometimes the...

Speaker 6 um the the higher risk can be the highest reward so that if things are all kosher on the other side then then those investors who took that risk will be well rewarded.

Speaker 4 I know that's how it works. Higher risk, higher reward, lower risk.

Speaker 6 I don't take risk.

Speaker 6 But I'm wealthy because I do it slowly.

Speaker 4 Tesla is a really, really interesting one. And some people use it as a proxy for Grok too, which, you know, of course, Elon and Sam Altman hate each other.

Speaker 4 There's like sharks and jets of the AI world. What do you think about Tesla right now?

Speaker 6 Well, there's no valuation stamp, like there's no valuation case for it.

Speaker 6 It is not a fundamental story in which you would invest in a car company that trades at that multiple so they're they're at a crossroads either the company is going to pivot into a multi-factor to your point ai autonomous driving energy company that warrants that multiple and isn't dependent upon car sales exclusively if not then you're you own a car company with an insanely high multiple and then that would not last so i like the thought process of owning tesla because i i think that those things are just so awesome and neat down the road And if you do own Supermicro or you do own Tesla,

Speaker 6 you can write calls against it and generate massive, massive premiums.

Speaker 6 So I don't know exactly what the future holds from the standpoint of the car company, but very, very excited about what the future holds for the other aspects of those companies.

Speaker 4 Yeah, we'll have to double click on. all things calls in another call for us.
But I think right now, just looking at Tesla on its own, it's down 35%

Speaker 4 from the beginning of the year. I think Elon just came out and said to employees, don't panic sell your stock.
It's coming back.

Speaker 4 But just as we were, you know, logging on for this interview, nearly all Cybertrucks were recalled.

Speaker 6 What do you think? There's not that many cyber trucks. Yeah.
I don't know that that's really a reason to buy. I don't think Cybertrucks are a reason to buy or sell the stock.
So

Speaker 6 if that's the headline concern, I wouldn't let that weigh on your thesis.

Speaker 4 And do you think of it as a proxy for SpaceX and other, is it like Elon stock?

Speaker 6 I think people that are really into Elon are really into the Elon ecostructure, much like you had, and we talked a second ago about OpenAI in the private markets. You can invest in X, XAI.

Speaker 6 Certainly SpaceX might be the most highly valued of privately held companies.

Speaker 6 So there are, there's a lot of incestuous relationships, I guess, between these companies and how it all plays out down the road, I'm not certain of it.

Speaker 6 But I think the people that believe in Elon have been rewarded so far.

Speaker 6 and i know that right now there's a lot of headline political things that go on and can be very very divisive but at the at the end of the day you want to look at the companies and the company's profitability and he's had tremendous success as a business person

Speaker 6 how about apple last time we talked you were so excited about apple are you still loving it So we talked in August and I was excited about Apple because of the Apple intelligence that was going to come out.

Speaker 6 And I saw all the cool commercials and all the hype around it. I sold my Apple in December at $247

Speaker 6 because it never came out there was no super cycle for the 16.

Speaker 6 there was no artificial intelligence and then very recently it's been pushed back again probably till next year which took the stock down from 250 to 210.

Speaker 6 so we're buyers again here at the 213 214 level i do think that there's going to be a little bit of a period of uh kind of range bound trading and then some volatility based on the disappointment of the fact that series never worked and now it still won't but i i believe in the company down the road.

Speaker 6 I know how the software business model for the services is a cash machine. They make $110 billion a year, not on iPhone sales, just from services.

Speaker 6 And they take that $110 billion and they buy their shares back to reduce the float.

Speaker 6 So if you don't own Apple or you're worried about it down at the $200 level, I'm a buyer here and I was a seller at $250 in December. So

Speaker 6 I'm less enthusiastic than I was in April, but I'm buying the stock now.

Speaker 4 But just as a reminder, if you you do own an S ⁇ P 500 index fund or if you own the NASDAQ through an index fund, you do own quite a bit of Apple.

Speaker 6 Yeah, it's probably a beneficiary of those passive flows also. Every time we contribute to our 401ks in an index fund, we're buying shares of Apple in a big way.
It's a great point.

Speaker 4 One we didn't talk about last time was FedEx. The company just cut full year results because of uncertainty in the economy and also shipping because of tariff concerns.
What do you think about FedEx?

Speaker 6 If you wanted to roll the dice and you want to be a speculator that on April 2nd, when we have the big tariff reciprocal day and we find out that we were, haha, just kidding, then you're going to see a big bounce in FedEx and probably UPS because

Speaker 6 why wouldn't you?

Speaker 6 If you believe that there will be some type of tariffs, maybe not as massive as the headlines are suggesting, but you're still concerned about tariffs as a reality, you may want to hold off on FedEx.

Speaker 6 We used to own UPS. We haven't owned it in about two years, and I probably haven't owned FedEx in about six or seven years, although it did really, really well for a stretch recently.

Speaker 6 I think I would probably stay away from it until we get a little bit more clarity next month on tariffs.

Speaker 4 I don't know. My thought process around it is that it's a negotiating tactic that President Trump can't just come out and say, Just kidding, psych, no tariffs.
He's going to lose his bargaining power.

Speaker 4 What do you think?

Speaker 6 I agree with you.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 4 And you're not saying that because you want to go back and get it.

Speaker 6 I mean, I just think about 2018. We had a little bit of a peek into the playbook.

Speaker 6 You know, you have a reasonable negotiating stance when you put a big tariff out there and all you can do is negotiate down. You can't start at zero and negotiate up.

Speaker 6 In 2018, there were lots of things with the tariffs that were exceptions or exemptions and things could really flow through.

Speaker 6 I think the Apple iPhone was probably probably one of them back in 2018, but there was a 20% pulldown in the stock market at that point. The Fed was actually in a rate hiking cycle at that moment.

Speaker 6 We're in much better shape here, I think, than we were from an economic standpoint than we were in 2018.

Speaker 6 So when you think of tariffs, and again, like anything politically, just like one side or the other.

Speaker 6 There's no agreement ever, except for the fact that if you look at what other countries put tariffs on the U.S.

Speaker 6 and what some of those levels look like, you might think, well, maybe things should be a little bit more fair. Maybe that's something where we can all kind of come together and agree on.

Speaker 4 Was there a stock that I didn't mention that you're bullish on?

Speaker 6 Well, I think we talked about the cues, which was kind of a weird thing for me to talk about. But the fact that it has tremendous volatility is something that I like down here.

Speaker 6 But if you want a single ticker name, this is risky. This is not a dividend payer.
This is not for people in my conservative tilt of investing.

Speaker 6 But for your viewers, knowing that they're hip, young, and cool, everything I'm not, I would look at Robinhood at these levels down here because I think this is a company that at one point was treated as a meme stock and is just doing so many things to educate investors on the proper way of investing it's not just gamification but it's investing they've acquired an ria that i think is going to help for generational transfer of wealth down the road and if you're looking for a stock that i think is a diamond in the rough that you can also write calls against but it is not a dividend payer i think robinhood's a real neat company to take a look at down here so in the meantime before we do a deep dive into calls and covered calls and all the things that you're such an expert in, can you leave our listeners with one tip that they can take straight to the bank?

Speaker 4 Maybe if they're freaking out that we're going into a recession right now and really concerned about all these headlines.

Speaker 6 We're not going into a recession. Don't sell anything.
If you have a little bit of money, put it to work. If the stock market goes down another 10%,

Speaker 6 put more money to work. Absolutely do not sell.
You're young. You have a long period of time.
You own great investments. And I've seen so many 20% pullbacks.

Speaker 6 And I just wish I would have had money to put to work at those points in time when I was younger. But the greatest mistake that I didn't make was trying to be smart enough to time it.

Speaker 6 I was not smart enough 32 years ago when I started. I am not smart enough now.
But take these opportunities to put money to work and don't freak out.

Speaker 5 Money Rehab is a production of Money News Network. I'm your host, Nicole Lappin.
Money Rehab's executive producer is Morgan Lavoie. Our researcher is Emily Holmes.
Do you need some money rehab?

Speaker 5 And let's be honest, we all do.

Speaker 5 So email us your money questions, moneyrehab at moneynewsnetwork.com, to potentially have your questions answered on the show or even have a one-on-one intervention with me.

Speaker 5 And follow us on Instagram at MoneyNews and TikTok at Money News Network for exclusive video content. And lastly, thank you.
No, seriously, thank you.

Speaker 5 Thank you for listening and for investing in yourself, which is the most important investment you can make.