Prof G Markets: Is Breaking Up Intel The Right Move? + The New Gold Rush

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Speaker 18 Welcome to Prof G Markets. So Scott is still away.
He's still on the slopes.

Speaker 18 We're beginning to think he's quiet quitting, but we're not too worried about that because today we have one of our favorite guests on the show. You've heard him before.

Speaker 18 We have in the studio the one and only downtown Josh Brown.

Speaker 18 Josh, thank you so much for joining me.

Speaker 19 I will be doing my best Scott impression. You'll tell me after how it went.

Speaker 18 I can't wait to see it. Where are you? You're not in your usual studio.

Speaker 19 I am in Naples, Florida, which is Chicago's version of, I guess,

Speaker 19 southeastern Florida. So this is Gulf Coast, Western Florida, and I love it here.
I've never been before. We're seeing wealth management clients and colleagues.

Speaker 19 And we're doing a live version of our podcast tonight in town. So it's exciting.
Very exciting.

Speaker 18 And we should plug your podcast, The Compound. I know you don't like doing a promotion.
Last time I asked you where our fans could go follow you, and you said, don't follow me.

Speaker 18 So I'm just going to tell the fans straight up,

Speaker 18 go check out the compound. Let's just get into the show.
We've got a lot to get through. So let's start off with the market vitals.

Speaker 18 The S ⁇ P 500 hit a record high. The dollar declined, Bitcoin was flat, and the yield on 10-year treasuries fell.
Shifting to the headlines. U.S.

Speaker 18 housing starts slowed in January, with with new residential construction falling 9.8%.

Speaker 18 Builders scaled back construction due to harsh winter weather, while also grappling with challenges from high mortgage rates, tariffs, and inventory shortages.

Speaker 18 Elon Musk's ex is in talks for a funding round at a $44 billion valuation. That's the same price Musk paid for it over two years ago.

Speaker 18 The funds would be used to support new initiatives, including video products, and to help pay down some of the company's debt.

Speaker 18 And finally, Michael Saylor's move to transform MicroStrategy into a Bitcoin treasury company has inspired a string of copycats.

Speaker 18 At least 78 public companies have followed suit, including a meal delivery service and a coal mining firm. Also, GameStop shares jumped 20% after revealing it was considering a Bitcoin investment.

Speaker 18 So, Josh, we'll just start with this housing starts data. I will say right off the bat, this is extremely disappointing to me.

Speaker 18 Just given all of the conversations we've had around the cost of housing in America, the median home price today is $420,000 in America. The median age of a home buyer is 56.

Speaker 18 And, you know, Scott and I have talked about this before. Our view is pretty simple.
The way we solve this is we build more homes. And so I see this data, housing construction actually going down.

Speaker 18 And just as a young person who at some point would like to buy a home, I hope,

Speaker 18 it makes me a little depressed. So let's just get your reactions to this housing start state.
Perhaps any thoughts on why this is happening?

Speaker 19 I think the obvious answer in this case is the right answer. You had freezing temperatures affecting residential construction.

Speaker 19 And if you've got companies in that environment that want to pause or delay a groundbreaking by a week or two, I don't think it's going to have a substantial longer-term impact.

Speaker 19 And if you actually seasonally adjust that number, January was really down 8.4%, which again is not great, but not as bad as the nominal headline.

Speaker 19 And I'd like to share with you that home building was actually up 24.9%

Speaker 19 in the western region of America, which obviously is not being affected by freezes. And

Speaker 19 so it's the headline sounds worse than the reality.

Speaker 19 And I think the bigger issue that we have is the cost of labor to build new homes is high and rising, and not necessarily in step with the disinflation that we've had in other parts of the economy.

Speaker 19 And it's sticky, and it'll be stickier still as the ICE raids and some of the things that are going to happen with immigration become more and more front of mind.

Speaker 19 So, if you're worried about anything, that's really the thing that you should be most worried about.

Speaker 19 And the home building stocks, just if you're watching those for SignalEd, the XHB is up 1% so far this year.

Speaker 19 Within the XHB, which is the ETF that owns all the home building stocks, 17% of those companies are above their 50-day moving average. 23% are above the 200-day moving average.
And

Speaker 19 about

Speaker 19 59%

Speaker 19 of all companies in the S ⁇ P 500 are above the 50, 61% are above the 200. So those stocks are all well behind where the overall market is.
And

Speaker 19 I do think that there's room, if you're an investor in the space, for there to be a little bit of a catch-up trade.

Speaker 19 Mortgage rates fall a little bit more in the second half of the year, and we get a bounce back after the weather.

Speaker 19 You could all of a sudden be reading really good headlines, I guess, is what I'm trying to tell you.

Speaker 18 To what extent do you think tariffs are going to play a role in this? It's good to hear that there's a positive read on this.

Speaker 18 I think, Scott, and I have a tendency to just see the negative in everything.

Speaker 18 But,

Speaker 18 you know, we've got 30% of softwood lumber coming from abroad, 32% of appliances coming from abroad.

Speaker 18 There was also this new data from the National Association of Home Builders, and they found that home builder confidence had its biggest drop since COVID. It fell 13 points.

Speaker 18 And I think a lot of that we could probably assume is a response to the possibility that tariffs are about to be slapped on all of these materials and suddenly the cost of constructing homes is going to go up.

Speaker 18 Now, I don't want to just blast Trump immediately at the top of the show.

Speaker 19 Yes, you do.

Speaker 19 I listen to the show. You forget I listen to the show.

Speaker 19 And it's a really good point. Like

Speaker 19 the home builders are people too, and they are susceptible to the media. And they're hearing about nonstop tariff stuff.
A lot of the things that we think might be tariffed won't.

Speaker 19 We know that this is part of the negotiating tactic of the administration. We know it because, number one, we had a full term of this.
And then, number two,

Speaker 19 we already, we have people in the administration winking at us, just talking about this stuff. Like, yeah, it's a tariff, but

Speaker 19 so like that'll run its course. And the reality is that if you're in the business of home building, your job is to make money on the homes that you build.

Speaker 19 It's not to race in and try to fill the void of, oh my God, we're 1.5 million homes short what we need to be for the millennials and blah, blah, blah. They don't care about that.

Speaker 19 They're in business and business finds a way. So if they have to replace foreign suppliers with U.S.
suppliers and U.S.

Speaker 19 suppliers are there to meet the demand at a reasonable price, that's what's going to happen. In the end, they want to build homes and make a profit on the homes.
That's what they're really here for.

Speaker 19 So I think you have to have some faith that commerce and

Speaker 19 American-style capitalism will find a way, regardless of what roadblocks get thrown up by international trade wars or whatever.

Speaker 19 And one of the things I want to say to you and to your listeners and viewers, it's really easy to buy into worst-case scenarios. Train yourself to think about what could go right.

Speaker 19 And sometimes it doesn't work out. But if you look at these things and you say,

Speaker 19 okay, but what could go right?

Speaker 19 You're immediately one step ahead from most first-level thinkers who read a negative article, process it as negative, and then embed that negative expectation in their minds.

Speaker 19 Like, what, okay, but what could go right? So, here's an example. What could go right?

Speaker 19 Now, you have confidence really low amongst home builders because they think there are going to be all these monkey wrenches. Let's say those monkey wrenches are not thrown into the works.

Speaker 19 All of a sudden, that confidence returns. And so, and we see a pattern of this happening all the time.

Speaker 19 Trump or no Trump. This is a mindset shift that I think investors need to make.
Yes.

Speaker 18 Let's move on to the X valuation, this funding round that's going to value X at $44 billion,

Speaker 18 the same amount Elon paid for Twitter.

Speaker 19 How many shares can I put you down for?

Speaker 18 It's going to be none for me. How about you?

Speaker 18 Would you invest in this?

Speaker 19 No. Well, so here's the thing.
It's an advertising business. Are there any shortages of ways for public market investors to bet on advertising? Not really.
If you really want to be invested

Speaker 19 in ads, you can be invested in ads in a myriad amount of ways, none of which involve all of the volatility and potential risk and the mercuriousness of the CEO of this project.

Speaker 19 Like you can skip all of that and just invest in ad-based businesses, and there are plenty to choose from. So, for my dollar, the answer is no.

Speaker 18 The other big question here is: how did they land on this number as the valuation? We basically have no signal into what this thing is actually worth.

Speaker 18 And this is the big question that we've been asking. And it's very hard to know because we don't see the financials anymore ever since it went private.

Speaker 18 But the best signal that we got was from Fidelity, which owns a stake in X. And they valued the company at $10 billion.

Speaker 18 And that was just in December. So I guess the thing that I can't really wrap my head around is

Speaker 18 how could these new investors, whoever they may be, justify a new valuation of $44 billion when just a few months ago it was valued at less than a quarter of that?

Speaker 18 I wonder if this might be due to Elon's association with Trump. Maybe having that connection makes people more excited and more bullish on the company.

Speaker 18 Maybe it also has to do with XAI, Elon's new AI startup, which is reportedly raising in a $75 billion valuation.

Speaker 18 Maybe they think that X, the social media platform, can capture some of the value of the AI company, or maybe they've just quadrupled their revenues overnight, but I highly doubt that.

Speaker 18 So what do you think, Josh? What do you think these investors in this potential round for X are seeing that the guys over at Fidelity two months ago didn't see?

Speaker 19 I think it's the halo effect of Elon Musk. He has a ton of momentum in terms of the zeitgeist of the country moving in the direction of what he's done with free speech on the platform.

Speaker 19 And you could absolutely hate the stuff that you come across on the platform, and that's fine.

Speaker 19 But a lot of people just like the fact that it exists and they see Meta kind of following Elon into this, which is when was the last time Meta or Facebook ever followed Twitter into anything?

Speaker 19 So they kind of see that,

Speaker 19 you know, the vibe shift in the country, especially amongst young people, but really in places that surprised people, among African-American voters, among voters living in border towns in Texas.

Speaker 19 Like none of these people were supposed to have

Speaker 19 heard that rhetoric from Trump and Elon Musk and had that resonate with them, and yet they did.

Speaker 19 And so I think advertisers feel a little bit more emboldened about, you know, being willing to place ads on the X platform where six months ago they would not have.

Speaker 19 I think some of that is being reflected in the valuation. I also think the valuation is made up to begin with.
The $44 billion is what he paid for it. So this is him saying,

Speaker 19 hey, I didn't destroy any value here. Things are better than ever.
So there's some of that.

Speaker 19 I also think there are people willing to buy a stake in this just because it gets them, you know, in the room. It's like, yeah, I invested in your X platform.

Speaker 19 Now allow me to talk to you about this other aspect of my business. And so a really cheap way for

Speaker 19 a big investor to buy in, so to speak, is to buy some equity at X and

Speaker 19 rub elbows with the people that are perceived to have a lot of momentum.

Speaker 18 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we certainly saw all of these blue chip advertisers fleeing the platform.

Speaker 18 And it feels like what might be happening now is they're starting to come back, especially after the election. Do you think we might see that? that swing back?

Speaker 19 Yeah, because it's not just happening on X.

Speaker 19 Google is pulling out out all these,

Speaker 19 you know, Black History Month and Women's History Month. They're pulling all that stuff off the calendars.

Speaker 19 You are not going to see the Pride Month displays at Target and elsewhere that you've seen in previous years. All that stuff's going to be downplayed.

Speaker 19 Corporate America is recognizing that they were pushed to go way further in one direction than

Speaker 19 the average person in this country really wanted to follow. And so now they're tacking all the way back in the other direction.
And maybe, of course, that'll go too far too.

Speaker 19 But like X is uniquely positioned to get back to the original question.

Speaker 19 If you want to demonstrate that you're about profits and making money and satisfying the customer, a really easy way to do that is to be back in business with Elon and with X and just to say, like, look,

Speaker 19 here's where our customers are. This is where they are emotionally and spiritually, and we're there too.
It's a really easy signal flare to fire in the air.

Speaker 19 And you're going to see, I think, you're going to see advertisers back.

Speaker 18 Let's move on to MicroStrategy. Multiple companies now copying the playbook where you

Speaker 18 just basically buy up a bunch of Bitcoin. I look at these companies, and the common thread I see among all of them is that they're all shitty companies is what I would say.

Speaker 18 And I think back to what Michael Saylor said on this podcast, which is that before he got into Bitcoin, MicroStrategy was struggling too.

Speaker 18 So I'm seeing this Bitcoin strategy, it kind of looks like the get out of jail free card for shitty, struggling businesses. Do I have that wrong or do you think that's sort of what's happening here?

Speaker 19 Now, you know that, and we've seen versions of this before.

Speaker 19 In 2017, there was a wave of small and micro-cap companies adding the word blockchain to their official corporate name, like literally changing the corporate name to something blockchain and immediately getting a boost in their valuation because Bitcoin rallied up to 18,000 that year from like 9,000 and it just became the zeitgeist and dead end companies that didn't have much going on.

Speaker 19 It was like an overnight way to add market cap. Of course, it failed spectacularly in 2018 when the price of Bitcoin crashed.
So none of this is surprising.

Speaker 19 And I think the interesting thing that happens here, in the short term, it actually bolsters strategy because you have a lot more entities that are buying up Bitcoin.

Speaker 19 And, you know, as the scarcity of Bitcoin becomes

Speaker 19 more of a widespread idea, obviously companies that own a lot of Bitcoin will benefit.

Speaker 19 Over the longer term, though, or the intermediate term, if this continues and grows, I think you'll lose the premium that strategy has

Speaker 19 to its value of Bitcoin. So right now it trades at a premium to the amount of Bitcoin it owns because people believe in not just the value of the Bitcoins, but the strategy of accumulating more.

Speaker 19 So it's selling at a premium to, if this were a closed-end fund, we would say a premium to NAV or net asset value.

Speaker 19 The premium will shrink if there are five of these companies, if there are 10 of them that attain any kind of size.

Speaker 19 So that's one interesting thing that could happen where all of a sudden the company strategy starts to trade at closer to just the value of its Bitcoin because it loses that scarcity premium because there are so many imitators out there in the market.

Speaker 18 I'd love to get your thoughts on Michael Saylor's strategy in general. I look at what he's doing.
I'm very skeptical of it.

Speaker 18 You know, you described the premium to NAV there, and a lot of why why that's happening is because

Speaker 18 he's basically securitizing the value of Bitcoin to issue bonds and then using the bond proceeds to buy even more Bitcoin and just levering and levering and levering.

Speaker 18 And to me, at a certain point, it starts to look more like a Ponzi scheme than anything else.

Speaker 18 The whole thing feels extremely unstable, especially when you bring up those historical comparisons of adding blockchain to these companies. It feels very similar to that.

Speaker 18 And then add on top of that, the fact that the Nasdaq has now decided to include this company in the Nasdaq 100.

Speaker 18 This adds a whole new dimension of concern for me because now you have millions of people in pension funds and people's retirement accounts holding this thing that arguably doesn't have much value or at least that isn't generating real cash flows in a normal, regular way that another company would.

Speaker 18 Perhaps I'm being too negative.

Speaker 19 Does this make sense to you? It works and it makes sense so long as the price of Bitcoin goes higher.

Speaker 19 I'm sorry, but that's the reality.

Speaker 18 You're not comforting me.

Speaker 19 He owns 2.28%

Speaker 19 of all of the 21 million Bitcoin that will be available. So available now and available in the future.
That's impressive if you think that Bitcoin is going substantially higher.

Speaker 19 He's got a $31,000 cost basis on that Bitcoin. That cost basis will will rise as he continues to buy.

Speaker 19 But the bet is the demand for all of the other Bitcoin available will grow more quickly than the new supply coming on net of whatever he's buying.

Speaker 19 And these other companies that are aping the strategy are way more ridiculous. So here are a couple.
Semilar scientific. This is a quote-unquote chronic disease detection company.

Speaker 19 You could see why they'd want to buy digital assets. Makes perfect sense.
They bought 871 Bitcoin for $88.5 million.

Speaker 19 They used a convertible bond that they issued in January. Its stock price is up 120%

Speaker 19 since

Speaker 19 buying this crypto, and they're calling it their primary treasury asset. Here's another one.
Meta Planet, based in Japan. They're calling themselves Asia's strategy.

Speaker 19 Last year, they switched from developing hotels into becoming a Bitcoin treasury company. The stock price has gained more than 2,000%.

Speaker 18 My God.

Speaker 19 So, I guess what I'm trying to tell you is

Speaker 19 don't get mad at strategy.

Speaker 19 If you really want to hate something,

Speaker 19 hate the Japanese hotel company, Meta Planet. Like, there are way worse versions of this.
If Bitcoin craters to $50,000,

Speaker 19 strategy share price will implode. Of course, it will.
The way you made money in Bitcoin, and I made some, I should have made more.

Speaker 19 The way that you made money in Bitcoin was to ask yourself the following question. And I heard this put by Bill Miller, who's one of the greatest stock market mutual fund managers of all time.

Speaker 19 He had an unsurpassed record. He beat the market 15 consecutive years.

Speaker 19 Nobody else has ever done that. He got very heavily interested in Bitcoin way early.
And the question that he posed and then answered is

Speaker 19 the supply of Bitcoin is only going to grow 2% a year. Supply.

Speaker 19 Ask yourself this. Will the demand grow faster or slower?

Speaker 19 If you answer the question faster, then de facto, you had to be bullish on Bitcoin. If you answered it slower, well, you were wrong.

Speaker 19 Because the demand outstripped the supply, which is why the price has gone from $50 of Bitcoin to $80,000 to $90,000 $90,000 to $110,000.

Speaker 19 So that was the right way to answer that question.

Speaker 19 So if you believe that the demand will continue to rise faster than the supply, then you're probably bullish on strategy and you probably own it in addition to regular Bitcoin that you also hold.

Speaker 19 It's easy to be skeptical that the demand will stay, but so far that's been the case. And people who have shorted this thing have train tracks across their backs to prove it.

Speaker 18 We'll be right back after the break with a look at Intel. If you're enjoying the show so far, be sure to give ProfGMarkets a follow wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 18 We're back with Profit Markets. Intel could be headed for a breakup with the help of TSMC and Broadcom.

Speaker 18 TSMC is exploring taking control of Intel's US factories, while Broadcom is in talks to acquire Intel's chip design and marketing business.

Speaker 18 Intel's stock surged 16% on that news, marking its biggest rally since 2020.

Speaker 18 So, Josh, this feels quite important symbolically. I mean, just going back through history, in the year 2000, Intel was the sixth largest company by market cap in the world.

Speaker 18 It hit a peak of half a trillion dollars in market value. And since then, it's shed almost 80%.

Speaker 18 We've seen this AI explosion. Its competitors have exploded in value.
Chip makers like TSMC, AMD, Broadcom, Nvidia. And now Intel is not even among the top 10 most valuable chip makers in the world.

Speaker 18 And it appears as though it's going to be split up into two and acquired by the two companies it was specifically trying to compete with, which are Broadcom and TSMC.

Speaker 18 What went wrong for Intel?

Speaker 19 DEI.

Speaker 19 Isn't that what we do now? That's the problem. It's actually, it's not that far off.
Me Too is sort of what went.

Speaker 19 I wouldn't blame the Me Too movement for this but um that's where intel's problem started in 2018 they had a ceo who had to step down i don't have all the details but he had a relationship with somebody who was working at intel it came to light and uh the board asked for his resignation which of course that's how that ends so um please if you're running a publicly traded company try to control yourself around your employees keep it in your pants yeah anyway that's 2018 and what comes out of that is a succession of bad leadership/slash bad decision-making.

Speaker 19 Intel decides in that moment of succession, they have a new incoming CEO, and they decide what they're going to do is they're going to go full bore

Speaker 19 into the foundry business. They have this manufacturing advantage.

Speaker 19 They're one of the highest throughput manufacturers of chips in the world, and they're better at it than other American chip companies.

Speaker 19 And they look at the success of Taiwan Semi, which has effectively become like the outsourced manufacturer to all of the chip design companies all over the world. And Intel says we could do that too.

Speaker 19 And that's going to be a big part of the future of our business. And that was a horrible, in hindsight, strategic decision.
I think Wall Street hated it in real time.

Speaker 19 And keep in mind, this is during a time, the rise of NVIDIA, but it's pre-AI. It's 2018, 2019.

Speaker 19 At that time, NVIDIA, it's very well known that NVIDIA is going to be a big player in next generation technologies like AR, augmented reality, VR, virtual reality, machine learning, AGI.

Speaker 19 What NVIDIA is doing is parallel processing. They're taking this technology that they initially developed for video game development.

Speaker 19 and they're pivoting it to these other technologies where linear processing is not the right answer. So Intel is the linear processing king, the CPU king.

Speaker 19 Linear processing, it's we do this operation, then we do that one, then we do that one. Parallel processing is multiple things at once.

Speaker 19 And if you're going to do autonomous driving, for example, you can't wait for a progression of

Speaker 19 linear compute. It's got to be parallel.
So, NVIDIA is kind of in pole position for the GPU era, and Intel is not even there at all.

Speaker 19 And as a result, they go into Foundry, and Foundry is just a terrible smokestack industrial kind of business.

Speaker 19 And you're never going to get the same stock multiple that you'll get as if you're a chip designer, Asset Lite.

Speaker 19 We create the front end of this and we pay somebody else to do the dirty work. And so they've been stumbling.
This is going on for a long time. It well predates the launch of ChatGPT and the AI era.

Speaker 19 But of course, that only made the disparity between Intel and NVIDIA even worse. Companies like ASML, Overseas, and other chip companies, ARM Holdings, they all got the memo and Intel didn't.

Speaker 19 And as a result, this is why this company is now a shell of its former self. It's $100 billion market cap in a land of trillion-dollar companies like Broadcom and NVIDIA.

Speaker 19 In the last eight quarters or two years, Intel has been profitable on an operating basis in only three of those quarters.

Speaker 19 On a net income basis, Intel has lost money four quarters in a row through the last quarterly report. It's just an absolutely horrendous fall from Grace.
And maybe the right answer is to

Speaker 19 put a nail in the coffin, separate out the chip design from the foundry business, have somebody else take those things over and say goodbye to Intel.

Speaker 19 And maybe that might be the better outcome for current shareholders than trying to continue to slog it out

Speaker 19 given the market realities of today where Intel is in no man's land.

Speaker 18 Just going back to the decision to get into Foundry, and just to clarify for Elysis, Foundry is basically getting into the actual manufacturing of these chips.

Speaker 18 Most of the big companies we're talking about, Nvidia, NVIDIA is probably the best example, Broadcom.

Speaker 18 They're designing chips, which is just a better business, and then they pay someone else to produce it for them.

Speaker 18 And Intel decided they wanted to try to get into the business of actually producing these chips for other companies like Qualcomm. This is the business that TSMC is in.

Speaker 18 And so they made that decision to go into foundry. And I think everyone would agree with you,

Speaker 18 that was a bad decision. They got caught completely flat-footed.
This AI boom took off. And then suddenly everyone has these GPUs and Intel's operating with a kind of shitty CPU business.

Speaker 18 And then also they're investing huge amounts of capital into building out this foundry business. I guess from sort of like a management perspective,

Speaker 18 what could they have done differently? Should they just not have invested in foundry to begin with? Should they have invested more maybe in RD trying to predict AI?

Speaker 18 I mean, I feel it feels very easy to say, oh, what a terrible decision.

Speaker 19 It's the wrong people running the company. In this day and age,

Speaker 19 if you're going to be at the helm of a chip giant, you have to have a visionary streak that enables you to see around corners and predict. You cannot be a bean counter.

Speaker 19 You cannot be just like an operations guru, but not have a vision of where the tech is going. I mean, you can get away with that for a few years, but ultimately it catches up to you.

Speaker 19 It's not a surprise that Broadcom got to a trillion-dollar valuation. It's run by Hak Tan, who is a visionary.

Speaker 19 He's like a 40-year veteran of the chip industry, and he's been there at the birth of so many milestones in the tech landscape. Jensen Wang,

Speaker 19 Lisa Su, who runs AMD. These people are running circles around Pat Gelsinger at Intel, who I think has already stepped down.

Speaker 19 It's a management. It's not just one

Speaker 19 decision. This is this cumulative decision-making process.
And you either get it or you don't. And if you don't,

Speaker 19 you miss where the market's heading. That's one.
Two, a friend of mine, Jason Shu, who's a Reliant Global Advisors. He had been at Research Affiliates.

Speaker 19 He's a Chinese-born investment manager here in the United States, brilliant guy. And Jason, I asked him last year, shortly after the CHIPS Act,

Speaker 19 I had a conversation with him, and there was this whole push to like start the onshoring and the semiconductor shortages of COVID for the automobiles, and we can't let that happen again.

Speaker 19 And Intel is going to spearhead this effort to start building chips here in the United States, in Arizona and elsewhere.

Speaker 19 And that we're going to build our own fabs, and the government is going to underwrite it, and it's going to be great. And Jason kind of said, not so fast.

Speaker 19 What you have to understand is if you are a highly technically skilled person in Taiwan, you dream of being in an underground white room for Taiwan Semi, working in a laboratory all day in a hazmat suit.

Speaker 19 That's like, that's your dream.

Speaker 19 Your counterpart in America does not have that same dream, does not want to work in a clean room 11 hours a day for Intel in in Arizona. It's just not what.

Speaker 19 So our most talented, most brilliant scientists and technically savvy engineers in America do not want what that same person would want growing up in Taiwan.

Speaker 19 And so Jason said the idea of us having our best and our brightest living in Glendale.

Speaker 18 What's wrong with Glendale?

Speaker 19 It's not going to go that way. There's a reason for Taiwan's ascension to the top of the heap in terms of

Speaker 19 chip manufacturing around the world. There's a reason it's there and it's not in Connecticut.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 18 Just looking ahead now. So we've got Broadcom, which is eyeing the chip design business.
And then TSMC is looking at... purchasing the foundry business.

Speaker 18 There are a lot of questions over how viable any of this really is.

Speaker 18 I've seen some analyst notes pointing out that TSMC has very different equipment to Intel. So maybe you won't have those synergies that people were expecting.

Speaker 18 Maybe it doesn't actually make sense for them. I think the biggest question mark, though, is the regulatory approval for this.

Speaker 18 Because if this deal were to go through, at least for TSMC, you will need sign-off from the US government. So just from a regulatory perspective, how do you think this goes down, Josh?

Speaker 18 Do you think Trump and the government would ever let this go through?

Speaker 19 I would just comment. If Taiwan Semi really wants it, if Broadcom really wants it, I would just say, gentlemen, prepare to golf.
You are going to be spending a lot of time at Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 19 Prepare to tweet positive things about Trump and prepare to golf because

Speaker 19 this ain't going to go through the courts. This is 2025.
If you want this deal done, it's got to look like a win for Trump.

Speaker 19 If the headline is Trump successfully sells Intel to two of the most successful companies in the world to create new jobs for American workers in red states, you got a shot.

Speaker 19 If the headlines are going to look more like American failure while Trump was in office,

Speaker 19 this ain't going to fly. This is going to be looked at from an optics standpoint more so than a strategic standpoint.
I will say

Speaker 19 Taiwan Semi is a foreign company, but if they're going to commit to making a go of this kind of semi-manufacturing on American soil, and we say that

Speaker 19 that's not a bad outcome, that's a good thing, then maybe it'll, maybe it could happen.

Speaker 19 But I don't have any edge on whether or not they'll approve it.

Speaker 18 Have you been working on your swing, Josh?

Speaker 19 Not nearly enough. Thank God I'm not trying to buy Intel.

Speaker 18 All right. We'll be right back after the break with a look at the new gold rush.
If you're enjoying the show so far, hit follow and leave us a review on property markets.

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Speaker 18 We're back with Profit Markets. Gold is hitting record highs up more than 10%

Speaker 18 year to date as investors seek out safe havens amid geopolitical uncertainty.

Speaker 18 President Trump's tariff threats paired with fears of resurgent inflation and higher for longer interest rates have pushed the price of the commodity to nearly $3,000 per troy ounce.

Speaker 18 Josh, this asset has had its best month in 13 years. I never really understand gold or I really struggle with gold as an asset.
What is going on with gold right now from your view?

Speaker 18 And why are investors so obsessed with it in this moment?

Speaker 19 The best way to understand gold is just take whatever the price is doing and then take whatever the headlines are and concoct a story that enables you to say A plus B equals C, like truthfully.

Speaker 19 If gold goes up, concurrent to there being inflation, oh, it's very simple. People are buying gold because they're worried about inflation.
If inflation is rising, but gold is not rising.

Speaker 19 Oh, it's very simple. Gold already rallied, and now the inflation is happening.
Therefore, the people that bought gold before the rally anticipated the inflation.

Speaker 19 It's honestly, it's a fucking joke, and nobody knows why. Nobody knows why anything does anything, but they definitely can't explain a gold rally other than ex post facto.

Speaker 19 So here, I will tell you why gold is rallying. Gold started to rally in the winter of 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine.
And that is, to this day, the predominant reason for why gold is rising.

Speaker 19 Central banks looked at the way Russia was kicked out of the Swift banking system. They looked at the way Russia was sort of deplatformed from the global economy.
And

Speaker 19 they said to themselves, maybe we need to diversify away from the dollar.

Speaker 19 Because if we get kicked out of the global banking system, we're going to have have to have a way to transact and we're going to have to diversify our currency reserves.

Speaker 19 So, once you reach that conclusion, you realize there aren't really that many other assets that make a lot of sense.

Speaker 19 Gold is, as a result, being bought by central banks around the world, especially in countries where they might be concerned about this sort of thing, like China, like Iran, like Russia.

Speaker 19 And so, the demand for gold is truly a geopolitical phenomenon. So fine.

Speaker 19 We'll say the reason for gold's rise is geopolitics. Okay.
I can point to historical examples where gold sold off during geopolitical tensions flaring, but fine.

Speaker 19 That seems to be the story that most people have accepted. But then the other thing that happens that is

Speaker 19 the trading mentality shifts and all of a sudden that story becomes so popular that people in their investment accounts start to accumulate gold on the theory that that sort of thing will continue.

Speaker 19 And so people start to extrapolate the recent past. And that's where you get the momentum.

Speaker 19 So now gold is up 9% annualized over the past 15 years in nominal terms, 8.8% annualized over the past 10 years. But over the last three years, it's been rising faster.
15%

Speaker 19 annualized return over the last three years. Over the last one year, it's up 45%.

Speaker 19 And it's up 12% since the year started. So

Speaker 19 if you think about gold over the long term, it does not do better than stocks. But I can show you these five and 10-year periods of time where it far outperforms the stock market.

Speaker 19 And so people are looking at the momentum there and they're saying, okay, this is a gold bull market. I don't know when it ends, but I need to be there for it.
So that kind of feeds on itself.

Speaker 19 And I think that's where we find ourselves today.

Speaker 18 I'd love to get your view on gold as an investment in general. I mean, you as a wealth manager,

Speaker 18 do you think that this is a worthwhile investment? And I'll just put it out there. I don't really see the value of gold when you can invest in companies that pay dividends and generate cash flows and

Speaker 18 provide actual value into the world. And then meanwhile, just gold, gold just sort of sits there and does nothing.

Speaker 19 Here's a long-term reality. Go back to 1928.
So we have 86 years worth of data. Stocks have done 11.8%.
This is nominal, not adjusted for inflation. Stocks have done 11.8% over the last 100 years.

Speaker 19 Gold has done 6.6.

Speaker 19 High-quality bonds, U.S. Treasuries have done 4.8.
Real estate, 4.4%.

Speaker 19 Cash 3.4.

Speaker 19 So gold has done well, has not done well as well as stocks.

Speaker 19 And I have to tell you, the chasm between 11.8 and 6.6 is absolutely massive when you remind yourself that we're talking about compound annual returns. We're not just talking about one year.

Speaker 19 We're saying like a 30-year investment time horizon. It's not just 50% better.
It's substantially better the returns of stocks.

Speaker 19 And I think that will probably always be the case over really long periods of time.

Speaker 19 But there are periods of time where gold beats stocks, and there are specific years and three-year and five-year and 10-year periods. So

Speaker 19 people use it as a diversifier in portfolios. Some people don't.
We do not. There's no reason to own commodities at all individually.

Speaker 19 And if there is a commodity boom, it'll show up in the stock market. And if you own stocks, you'll get the benefit of that.
So we own oil equities. We don't buy barrels of oil.

Speaker 19 If you have an S ⁇ P 500 exposure, you have gold equities.

Speaker 19 And if there's a huge boom in gold, Those gold equities in market cap terms will become larger proportionally to the rest of of the stock market. So you will see some of the benefit of that.

Speaker 19 But we don't own commodities outright individually. We own stocks and we will get the reflection of those booms and busts via our exposure to the stock market.

Speaker 18 In the reporting on this, you know, we hear a lot about the spot price of gold and then we hear a lot about the futures price, gold futures price.

Speaker 18 Could you just break down for us briefly what that difference actually is

Speaker 18 and why that difference matters, if it does at all.

Speaker 19 It doesn't really matter unless you're in the jewelry business. The spot price of gold is literally what you're taking.

Speaker 19 When you're taking physical delivery of gold bullion,

Speaker 19 that's what that price is about. And of course, most people who are trading, they're taking delivery of nothing.
They're in ETFs. They own GLD.
The futures market is what producers and

Speaker 19 what they call commercials

Speaker 19 use to hedge the volatility of future prices.

Speaker 19 So as a, for instance, if you're in the business of buying a certain amount of gold over the course of the year as a commercial player in the market, let's say you're a jewelry manufacturer, okay.

Speaker 19 The big risk for you is that the gold that you have to buy six months from now will rise significantly in price. So you would use the gold futures market as a way to hedge that risk.

Speaker 19 You would put on certain trades or collars or whatever your strategy is to try to mitigate the disastrous impact of the price of gold rising 30%,

Speaker 19 which could wreck the economics of the business that you're engaged in. And vice versa.

Speaker 19 If you know, if you're a gold miner and you know that you need to sell a certain amount of tons of gold a year from now and you're worried the price price might be lower.

Speaker 19 You could lock in using the futures market, you could lock in the price that you'll be selling gold at.

Speaker 19 So, think of the spot market as being more relevant to companies that are physically engaged in the gold market, buying and selling, or banks that are stockpiling gold, central banks.

Speaker 19 And think of the futures market as more of a tool to either hedge or speculate on the price three months from now, nine months from now.

Speaker 18 I bring it up because we're just seeing this very interesting dynamic in that difference, where right now you have gold futures trading at record highs in New York, but over in London, the spot price is significantly lower.

Speaker 18 And that's where the Bank of England holds all of that physical gold that you're talking about. And because of that spread, it's just a very interesting story that we're seeing.

Speaker 18 You have JP Morgan and HSBC and all these other banks who, as we speak, are literally flying gold across the ocean from London to New York.

Speaker 18 And what we've seen is that they have these concerns over these tariffs. And so they need to get gold out of London and into America as quickly as possible.

Speaker 18 I'm not sure how important it is in global markets, but it's certainly an interesting visual. Could you just explain

Speaker 18 how this strategy is playing out and why it is important that the banks do this?

Speaker 19 Yeah, it's chaotic and it won't, it won't last. It won't last a long time.
That's that type of frenzy, that type of activity. There are historical examples of that.

Speaker 19 One of the causes of huge market dislocations throughout history has historically been the movement of gold from one country to another or from

Speaker 19 the rest of the country back to New York.

Speaker 19 We've had instances where they closed the New York Stock Exchange heading heading into World War I.

Speaker 19 And one of the main concerns is all of the gold was about to be sucked out of the banks in New York and sent to England to finance the prosecution of that war against Germany.

Speaker 19 And they wanted to preempt the chaos that that kind of thing had historically caused.

Speaker 19 And you have these situations that have arisen in the past where just this seasonal pattern in the springtime, America 100 years ago is very agrarian economy.

Speaker 19 Everything was about agriculture and farming.

Speaker 19 So you'd have all the gold leave the banks in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and it would head to the Midwest and it would be dispersed amongst the farmers who had to, it would show up in the banks in rural America.

Speaker 19 The farmers would then be able to fund the costs of seed and equipment and hiring farmhands and people who would help them plant. And then the summer would go by.

Speaker 19 There would be speculative, the gold would return back to New York. All that gold would lead to there being excess capital.

Speaker 19 That excess capital would lead to these huge booms in the stock market and people speculating with the money while it was there.

Speaker 19 And then all of a sudden the banks in rural America would call that gold back because it was time to bring in the harvest.

Speaker 19 And you would have this seasonal pattern that resulted in us saying things like sell in May, go away.

Speaker 19 Or you would see like October being this month where all of a sudden all hell would break loose on Wall Street because the gold would leave these financial centers where all this trading and you would have this literal dearth of liquidity and you would like you would have this drop off in money and in capital and it kind of became ingrained in the patterns of stock markets and business and commerce.

Speaker 19 We've been able to neutralize that over time as society has become less agrarian. And we don't really have that every October the market crashes because the farmers need their gold back.

Speaker 19 Like, that's not the way the economy runs now. So it is interesting when you see something like this.

Speaker 19 All of a sudden, people are flying their gold across the Atlantic to get it from one country to another. It's chaotic activity.

Speaker 19 It's kind of a throwback to the way the economy used to function when everything was on a gold standard. And it's weird.

Speaker 19 And I guess I would tell you not as an investor to react to that type of thing because it's not likely to be a long-lived phenomenon.

Speaker 18 Yeah, it certainly feels very apocalyptic and it's very interesting that gold has this association with geopolitics and

Speaker 18 inflation, but really just panic. It's like when the world starts to look like it's crumbling, suddenly people start to be interested in gold.

Speaker 19 Emotional volatility. Exactly.

Speaker 18 And I would just like to get your final reaction to this because we had Ray Dalio on the podcast.

Speaker 18 And it was very interesting because, you know, he was very concerned about the world from a geopolitical perspective. And I think a lot of people are very concerned about the world geopolitically.

Speaker 18 I mean, I think back to what Jamie Diamond said in the most recent earnings call, where he said that we are in the most unstable geopolitical time since World War II.

Speaker 18 And Ray Dalio basically told us, you know, if I were to put my money into anything, it would be gold. And my reaction, I think, is similar to yours, which is,

Speaker 18 is this really worth the panic? And

Speaker 18 if we are to panic to the extent that these people say we should, what is buying gold going to do for us? Is that really going to solve our problems?

Speaker 18 So I guess I'd be interested to get your view on gold from a geopolitical perspective. You know, does Ray Dalio's view make sense to you?

Speaker 19 I think gold probably can get to 5,000 just purely on momentum alone, because a lot of people are worried and there are a lot of reasons to be worried. It's not completely invalid.

Speaker 19 I think during the course of the Trump administration, if you told me this all ends with some major geopolitical conflagration and gold runs up to 5,000, I would say

Speaker 19 that's completely within the realm of things that could be expected. So

Speaker 19 I don't disagree with Ray Dalio, except in the utility of it. So we have World War III.
We're going to fight China over Taiwan and Russia over Western Europe simultaneously.

Speaker 19 The fuck are you going to do with your gold ETF?

Speaker 18 I'd rather own a farm and food. Yeah.

Speaker 19 Bullets, motherfucker.

Speaker 19 What are you going to? Oh, but

Speaker 19 look, I'm long gold miners.

Speaker 19 Don't shoot. The only currency in these worst case scenarios will be like the back-breaking labor that you have the muscle tone to accomplish on behalf of whomever is enslaving you.

Speaker 19 And it won't be Bitcoin? You want me to spare you? Don't tell me about what's in your Roth IRA. Remember what I told you at the start of this.
Think about what could go right.

Speaker 19 And worst case scenarios very rarely play out. And if they do, in this case, think about the things that we're talking about.

Speaker 19 We're talking about like multiple nuclear powers potentially like being goaded into a conflict here. Like it's,

Speaker 19 nothing you do in your portfolio is going to help you. Okay.

Speaker 19 So don't bet on the, don't bet, even if you bet on the worst case scenario, if it comes to pass, who are you going to collect from?

Speaker 19 Who's paying out on that debt? If we're all squatting around a fire eating a squirrel. So

Speaker 19 I view my role in this is to understand the risks and try to help people process them and try to give people the context that

Speaker 19 risk is omnipresent, ever-present. It's always a thing that exists.
We feel it more acutely in some moments than in others.

Speaker 19 But honestly, it's usually in those moments where everything feels great that the big risks are really about to arrive.

Speaker 19 And it's rarely the thing that we're all worried about that actually ends up going wrong.

Speaker 18 Let's take a look at the week ahead. We'll see data on the personal consumption expenditures index for January.

Speaker 18 We'll also see earnings from Salesforce, Dell, Berkshire Hathaway, and NVIDIA, which will be a huge one. Josh, this is a part of the show where I ask Scott for a prediction.

Speaker 18 No pressure, but do you have any predictions or is there anything that you're thinking about in the next couple of months or so that you think that our listeners might want to keep an eye on in the markets?

Speaker 19 I think NVIDIA reports and hits a new all-time high. Yeah, there's a lot of skepticism going into this earnings report.
There has been for a while on NVIDIA.

Speaker 19 The stock doesn't always rally after they report earnings. Sometimes it rallies into the earnings.
In this case, it's kind of been stagnant for a while.

Speaker 19 I think the conversation is starting to pivot from large language models and it's starting to go more toward physical AI,

Speaker 19 automation, and robots. And I think NVIDIA's got the most compelling case for why they will be at the forefront of all of these things than any other company in existence.

Speaker 19 And I think that'll come through in the remarks Jensen Wang makes. I'm a long-term shareholder here in NVIDIA.
I've owned the stock since 2015.

Speaker 19 So, of course, I'm biased. I would also point that everyone owns NVIDIA at this point.
It's the number one or two largest waiting in the SP 500.

Speaker 19 If you have a pension, if you have a 401k, if you...

Speaker 18 2015 is early.

Speaker 19 I was extremely early to the story and

Speaker 19 very publicly so, talking about the stock on television every week for 10 years. It has been a once-in-a-lifetime stock.
It's up 10,000% in that period period of time.

Speaker 19 If I lived another 100 years, I'd probably never see anything like it again. And I don't think it can continue to rise at the rate that it has.

Speaker 19 But the reality is it's just not that expensive of a stock because as much as the share price has gone up, the earnings have gone up as much, if not more. So

Speaker 19 I think it'll be a good conference call. I'm hoping to get a positive reaction after.
My prediction is that we will, but who knows? Anything can happen.

Speaker 18 Josh Brown is is the co-founder and CEO of Rit Holtz Wealth Management, a New York City-based investment advisory firm managing more than $5 billion in assets for individuals, corporate retirement plans, and foundations.

Speaker 18 Josh, just an absolute pleasure as always. Thank you so much for coming on.

Speaker 19 Thank you so much for having me, Ed. Appreciate it.

Speaker 18 This episode was produced by Claire Miller and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our associate producer is Alison Weiss.
Mia Silverio is our research lead. Isabella Kinsell is our research associate.

Speaker 18 Drew Burroughs is our technical director. and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer.
Thank you for listening to Prof Dew Markets from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Speaker 18 Join us on Thursday for our conversation with Mike Moffat, only on Prof Dew Markets.

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