Why Your Politics Shouldn’t Drive Your Portfolio

Once a month I sit down on Click Beta with Matt Zeigler (Wealth Advisor from Sunpointe) and Cameron Dawson (CIO of NewEdge) to try and talk about what's going on in the market like normal people.

But life is short, you might want to just chill to some new tunes and get the vibe.  So here are the big ideas from the podcast in playlist form.  Or, if you scroll all the way down, there's a full transcript you can cut and paste into your favorite LLM.

Fade the Noise

“If you can't come up with a logical reason as to why something will impact S&P 500 corporate earnings, then it likely is something that should be faded.” — Cameron

🎶 Fontaines D.C. — “It’s Amazing to Be Young”

It feels very easy to get distracted by all the things falling apart.  And yet – these markets actually FEEL young, and as Cameron points out, the froth isn't froth if it doesn't hit the bottom line. And Fontaines DC remains my most-wanted-to-see-live act.  

AI’s Endgame

“What happens if it turns out that after spending all this money in a year, say from now, it's not that AI isn't amazing, and it's not that AI isn't transforming the global economy, it's just that it's impossible to contain and that all of the spend gets done.” — Dave

🎶 Dry Cleaning — “Hit My Head All Day”

Everyone's calling for the AI bubble, and the weird circular CapEx cycle is hard to just ignore.  Yes, AI is amazing. Yes, there are gonna be some bubbles, and yes, predicting exactly who the winners are going to be is a fools errand.  The latest Dry Cleaning tune sums it up: Hitting my head, all day, in different places.

Shutdown Reversion

“Pretty much every single government shutdown has been flat, round trip, 20-ish days, no return. Some market gyrations along the way, which basically says don't panic, but don't freak out or do anything too aggressive either.” — Matt

History suggests overreaction is more dangerous than inaction.  So, to some extent it's a kind of "sit it out" market.  I'm finding it very hard to keep my personal chill, so this extremely upbeat bop from Peel Dream Magazine might help.  

🎶 Peel Dream Magazine — “Venus in Nadir” 

Earnings Mirage

“Bubbles can happen in earnings. When we think and conceptualize a bubble, we'll often talk about valuations... But what people don't talk about is the over-earning or the bubble that happened in the earnings of the CapEx infrastructure players.” — Cameron

🎶 Waxahatchee — “Mud”

Cam is echoing the idea here that so much is unknowable, and that it's actually possible to "run hot" for a while, and have that itself be the bubble.  The trick then becomes understanding when the game has shifted.   "Mud" from southern gothic masters Waxahatchee summarizes the lack of clarity well.

No Wounded Gains

“I have no interest in profiting off the American wound.” — Dave

🎶 Bar Italia — “Rooster”

I stole this line from my favorite episode of the Emerald (a phenomenal podcast on meaning). I have, for years, been resistant to tossing my own personal money into things that I see largely "going up at someone's expense."  That's incredibly naive, I know, and probably why I don't have any fancy cars in the garage. But it's not a moral imperative that each investor maximize their wealth at any cost – there are other people in the world, and their suffering also matters.  

I ain't telling anyone else what to do about it.  I'm just saying, the still small voice of Jiminy Cricket in your head is sometimes worth listening to. Profit should follow insight, not exploit brokenness.  What does this have to do with this killer new Bar Italia track that's really just a slinky love song?  "You can't forget about the target you missed..." keeps rolling over and over in my head about this very issue: the NOT investing in something for non-financial reasons.  

Idea ≠ Execution

“You can have the greatest idea in talking to people where you might wanna express something. But does that actually align with what you're trying to accomplish?” — Matt

🎶 Tame Impala — “Loser”

The disconnect between vision and delivery is where most failure hides, and in this modern world of "FAFO" and "People Just Do Things" I think it's even more true.  I get, without exaggeration, at least one person a month who reaches out cold having invented the best investment process in the world. I have mountains of model backtests that all crush. 

Does. Not. Matter.  Unless you get it out into peoples hands AND scream it from the rooftops, your great idea means nothing.  As an idea person, that mostly makes me nervous and sad, but it feels true. What better way to drive the point home with than Tame Impala's not-Beck song, "Loser."  

Early Is Wrong

“Being early is the equivalent of being wrong.” — Cameron

🎶 Viagra Boys — “Man Made of Meat”

Timing often beats conviction, and this quote has been kicking around Wall St. since I was a kid.  The real challenge in the current environment, to me, is that it feels "different."  "This time it's different" is always a weird thing to feel, and is another Wall St. saying that's been around forever. But this line from the Viagra Boys captured my sense of "what is even going on in the modern world."

"If it was 1970
I'd have a job at a factory.
I'm a man that's made of meat.
You're on the internet, looking at feet."

Demand Better

“You can do better... I think is actually really important for anybody in the creative process.” — Dave

🎶 The Beths — “The Straight Line was a Lie”

I've been thinking about the creative drive a lot lately (and not just because Rick Rubin's "The Creative Act" has become a kind of Lectio Divina. ETF.com is in a liminal space – we're in between what we've been, going all the way back to the pre-GFC days when I was just writing articles about market structure – and where we're headed: the hub of a community of investors, all trying to make sense of markets and the tools we use to access them.  

But also, we've got a lot to build.  We're going to be trying lots of new things, and that can be a little scary changing from one thing to another.  So have this great new track from The Beths.  The straight line is always a lie.

🎧 Click Beta 7: The Playlist

Full Transcript

Cameron: [00:00:00] If you can't come up with a logical reason as to why something will impact S&P 500 corporate earnings, then it likely is something that should be faded. If you have to get to some wildly extreme scenario for something to actually impact earnings, that means that the impact to markets is literally just a sentiment hit.

Dave: What happens if it turns out that after spending all this money in a year, say from now, it's not that AI isn't amazing, and it's not that AI isn't transforming the global economy, it's just that it's impossible to contain and that all of the spend gets done. And then it turns out it's kind of like the internet in the sense that it becomes ubiquitous. It becomes part of everything everybody's doing, but it doesn't accrue to any individual player enough to actually create those over the top winners.

Matt: Pretty much every single government shutdown has been flat, round trip, 20 ish [00:01:00] days, no return. Some market gyrations along the way, which basically says don't panic, but don't freak out or do anything too aggressive either.

Introduction

Matt: Those other finance podcasts, they are clickbait, but this, this is Click Beta right here on Excess Returns. Ground rules: One, before we start, the group of us have agreed on a pre-discussed topic. Two, while we're live, nobody googles nothing. And three, we each bring a surprise topic to the table. 

The mission is simple. If we as professionals have to talk every day about this stuff in the real world, shouldn't we share how we talk to each other behind the scenes? Probably not, but we're gonna do it anyway because as Op Ivy taught us, all I know is that I don't know nothing. And we proudly concur. Let's click some beta.

Who's with me today? Is it just my camera because he doesn't look synthetic? Could it be that AI actor slash heartthrob slash future indie movie Blockbuster Darling and part-time denim cowboy, big Willie Norwood. Is that you with us? Oh no, my [00:02:00] bad. But you must get that all the time these days. It's ETF.com's, Dave.

Dave: I'm, I'm stuck on the denim thing. I just, it's like, I never know in one of your intros what I'm gonna get hung up on. That I miss the next line because I'm like, "wait, what?"

Cameron: I stopped at denim too. You had me at denim.

Dave: You had me at denim.

Matt: I had to crowbar that in there. But I like this big Willie Norwood character. And who else is with us today? Let's wake her up because September is officially over and maybe not so surprisingly, September had more green days than red days, so let's rethink that one. Welcome to paradise, sassafras roots. Maybe Russell 2000 light years away. I'm full of dookie. Luckily she's not – NewEdge Wealth's Cameron Dawson.

Cameron: I'm just taking [00:03:00] the long view man. Taking the long view.

Dave: Nice. Nicely done.

Government Shutdown and Politics in Investing

Matt: Alright, so we're talking about the big topic, our government. They've shut down. And if you can't start a fire without a government contracted spark, what does it mean to be dancing in the dark with no data? We got permanent job cuts on the table, data blackouts for the Fed, payroll revision, panicking, and labor market Titanic-ing. "I'll never let go Jack forehand. I'll never let go." Cameron, I'm gonna ask you what you're thinking about in just a second. Dave, I'm starting with you. Politics. Should I put politics in my investing at all? When somebody calls you and they're like, politics are telling me what to do. Do you have an answer?

Dave: Yeah, mostly, mostly you shouldn't. I think that's the answer I hear most often from advisors. It's the one I nod at. It's the one that if somebody asks me the question, I'll say, no, you should be investing based on your risk tolerance, your needs, a general assessment of marketing, blah, blah. All the stuff that we all say to everybody. Boy, that's hard to do as an individual though. The [00:04:00] behavioral desire to do something when there's big news out there is really tough.

So I think it's worth putting in context. Now that we have a government shutdown, which we've had a couple of before, we all know sort of what the game is here. To ask the question like, okay, historically, should you have done anything during a shutdown? The good answer is that, you know, across the last however many we've had, the answer is pretty much no. I looked at all the shutdowns I could get in my hands on back to 87, and pretty much the market never does anything except during the 2013 when the market went up.

So it seems like a fool's errand to try to game whether the market is gonna want to be pro or con, whatever shenanigans are gonna happen during the shutdown. We all know the shutdown will end eventually. And if it doesn't, we have way bigger problems than listening to podcasts. So it seems silly to put your politics into your investing. But [00:05:00] yet it is so hard not to. And, Matt, I wanted to turn this right around on you. Like you're in the space. You got clients showing up at the door. They have opinions about what's going on politically. How do you guide them about like, well, you know, should you be shorting Tesla and long that simply because you have emotional context for it? 

Matt: For that conversation? It's "what's the long view that you have here and what are you trying to express?" Because you can have the greatest idea in talking to people where it's, you might wanna express something. But does that actually align with what you're trying to accomplish? And do you have any edge in expressing that in this moment? On average, to that point you said, pretty much every single government shutdown has been flat, round trip, 20ish days, no return. Some market gyrations along the way, which basically says "don't panic, but don't freak out or do anything too aggressive either."

And if that's the general take and with politics in general too, it's like check your beliefs at the door and ask, does this [00:06:00] line with my long-term views. And that might be some things you might feel a certain way about the administration, good or bad. And that might shape your views, but at the same time, it may or may not. And you may look at it and go, well, I kind of believe this with or without who's in power, or I kind of believe this with or without in my asset allocation framework or what sectors I'm particularly fond of. And we try to steer people back to those core beliefs. Cameron, I'm kicking this to you. Like, does the government shutdown, what does it even mean to you when you look at this?

Cameron: I mean, I think that if we were to take it from a really granular perspective, is there potential for this particular government shutdown to have a more lasting impact on GDP growth than prior shutdowns? The answer is yes, because they're talking about permanent firings versus just furloughs. And the thing about shutdowns remember, is that typically you furlough workers, they come back, they get back pay. And so yes, there's some lost activity that happens when the government is shut down just because it's sort of non repeatable kinds of events that happen.

But [00:07:00] the point is that this time you could maybe, maybe see more lasting impact. Is that enough for you to have an investment thesis about? I don't think so, because one of the things that we like to show clients around any kind of election is put in front of them the chart that shows effectively that no matter which combination you have of Republican House, Republican Senate, Republican president, democratic, all the way down, whatever mixture you have of those, they all end up having the same effective average return over time within equity markets, meaning that the S&P 500 doesn't really care who's in power. It's gonna keep doing what it's doing.

Now, I think it's a very fascinating discussion to have of effectively saying, as we see more power get concentrated in the executive branch, which is something that has been going on for pretty much the last 30 years in a more rapid fashion than it did in the prior 30 years. What's [00:08:00] it called? The unitary...

Dave: The unitary executive theory.

Cameron: Yeah, the unitary executive theory. Like this idea of, you're seeing more of it pushed into the executive branch. I think you might be able to argue that the gridlock kind of capabilities that keep Washington out of markets maybe are getting dulled, which might mean that our assertion that politics don't matter for portfolios maybe actually starting to decay a bit since you have this concentration because in theory the executive branch could push through more changes that could be either beneficial or detrimental to markets.

I don't think we're at that state yet. Washington is still working its way through. You know, the shutdown is a function of the gridlock, but I think it is a very fascinating discussion to debate of if we fast forward 20 years from now, could we be in an environment where [00:09:00] we actually have politics mattering more for outcomes for businesses?

Dave: Yeah. And we do seem to be remarkably disconnected. I mean, the number of conversations I've had that go, like some version of, golly, "everything's so awful. Why is the market up?" Right? And people's awful can be personal or social or like literal, their personal business is doing terribly, whatever it is.

But there does feel like there's this disconnect between how markets are reacting to political news and what's actually going on in economics. Is there a point at which things turn around and bite us in the you-know-what? And I suspect that this shutdown will be around 12 or 13 days. That's what the Kalshi over under line is right now on it is 12 or 13 days. So I'm not expecting, to your point, Cameron, that this is when [00:10:00] the unitary executive shows up and all of a sudden whole divisions of the government get shut down forever and things like that. But we're getting closer to that. What is it do you think would cross a line? Is there a line? Is there a line that if it got crossed that the market would start saying, yes, this is a problem?

The Earnings Test for Market Impact

Cameron: My general rule in all of this is, this is like the smell test rule for does it matter or does it not matter? Is will it impact earnings? Like if you can't come up with a logical reason as to why something will impact S&P 500 corporate earnings, then it likely is something that should be faded. If you have to get to some wildly extreme scenario for something to actually impact earnings, that means that the impact to markets is literally just a sentiment hit, which tends to be temporary and can reverse as soon as other things are reversed.

So here's the example. Everybody's seen that chart of whenever a geopolitical event happens, somebody will publish on X or Twitter [00:11:00] here's the average market experience after a geopolitical event. And the conclusion always is they don't matter. Well, that's not quite right. Right? So they do matter. Certain ones do and the majority of them don't. And what's interesting is that the certain, in switching to geopolitical events, like the certain ones that do matter are the ones that impact oil prices.

Dave: Yeah, I was about to say it's gotta be oil, right?

Cameron: And because that actually does have an impact on earnings, it might help the energy companies, but it really hurts the consumer where oil energy prices act as effectively a tax. So when we think about like why was the Russian invasion of Ukraine more impactful to markets? Well, because it impacted oil prices in a more meaningful way. So I think that that's a great way to gut check yourself of saying – and it's easy to doom loop to find ways that it could impact earnings. That's easy to do. But I think if you take it from a rational perspective of will this actually impact the earnings power of these businesses? And if the answer is maybe yes, maybe it has larger impacts, you know, if we're talking about things like [00:12:00] tax hikes on corporate taxes, like of course that would have a negative impact on earnings, and of course that would be seen as a bad thing by market. So I think that that's maybe a helpful tool of kind of gut checking.

Matt: Yeah. And can you, I want, Cameron, for you specifically on this, because I think the stat was every week of a shutdown we lose like 0.1% of GDP or something like that. And, okay. And I take it to this point that you made earlier about you're gonna furlough workers. How do we know who's coming back? So obviously there's some hit. Unemployment potentially that's in the mix of this one. These all feel relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. I'm with you. It doesn't connect 0.1% of GDP for two weeks, 0.2%.

Cameron: I'm with you. Sorry. Yes.

Matt: Thank you. If she's not a robot, but maybe she's the original AI bot for artistry, one of my favorite conspiracy theories. I'm just saying.

Cameron: See you later, boy. So whatever.

Matt: So long you don't spell it that way. 

Dave: I [00:13:00] think it is worth noting that for people who are in the finance business, there are specific things in finance that get affected by a shutdown. Again, they may not impact corporate earnings. They're not gonna make you wanna sell the S&P 500, but you know, product approvals, right? In the ETF world, you know, we're launching three products a day. That's been the rough run so far this year. A lot of that comes to a grinding halt because most of the SEC staff goes home, so they're not gonna respond to anything.

So we were expecting, for instance, a giant raft of new mutual fund share class ETF share class spokes coming in. We were expecting a whole raft of Bitcoin related, or, sorry, I should say spot crypto related ETFs that were gonna come do, and it'll get probably kicked out by however many weeks this shutdown goes. Again, that matters a lot if you're one of those people trying to issue those products and get 'em out the door first. I don't think it really matters to most investors.

That's really the big one. The other thing that I worry about, because I'm a worrier about market structure stuff is most of the [00:14:00] SEC market monitoring staff disappears in a shutdown every time. So if ever anybody was gonna try to be getting away with anything, it would be now literally today away. 

Matt: So it was a Batman movie, basically.

Labor Market Concerns

Matt: Alright, so is there anything that's non-oil related inside of some of the quirks of this shutdown that are on your radar? Because this is what my brain is kind of going where Dave's going with this question too, and I feel like, am I missing anything? Is there something else I should be looking at?

Cameron: So I think one thing, maybe just to flag, because this is probably the ultimate question for anybody kind of tracking and watching the economy, is we've been in what's, you know, well known as a little higher little fire labor market, and meaning that you're not seeing people at a bunch of jobs, but you're also not seeing big job losses. So you're in an environment where the unemployment rate has stayed fairly stable even though you're not adding many jobs because the labor force [00:15:00] supply has slowed so much.

Now, where we have been adding jobs is in the public sector now. A lot of those are coming from local and state government, so not necessarily just federal government, which wouldn't be impacted necessarily by the shutdown. Though you're seeing things like, you know, saying, hey, we're going to take a hundred billion dollars of infrastructure funding out of New York as like kind of a bargaining chip for, you know, during the shutdown. So there could be some state and local impact.

But the point is to say is that, you know, we've been on this kind of teetering point with the labor market for quite some time, and Neil Dutta will talk about the non-linearity of labor market weakness, meaning a little weakness turns into a lot of weakness. Kind of very much like Claudia Sahm saying like, hey, once you get to a certain threshold of labor market weakening, you typically get a lot more. So this is where your countercyclical measures should start to kick in.

So the question would be is that, let's say we get these permanent firings. Let's say we get weakness in certain pockets of [00:16:00] the economy. Does that become something that builds on itself, where effectively you cross over a point where there's been enough weakening in the labor market that more firms look around and go, oh wait, I, you know, sales are weaker. Let's pull in a little bit. You haven't seen that yet, and I don't, I'm not making that call, but I do wonder if like that's, if you're talking about unintended consequences or potential broader impacts, could this be something that impacts the labor market in that non-linear way? Maybe.

Dave: It's funny you mention the sort of whole, like the, when it shows up into being a problem is when the weakening labor market starts turning into weakening demand and weakening consumer spending, and that means more firing. And so you get into a bit of that doom loop. But then I tease apart like the last GDP print and I, you know, as a non-economist, I looked at it and I was like, okay, so the entire economy is hanging on the back of AI CapEx and rich people spending. That's what it looked like to me, and I [00:17:00] don't see either—

Matt: God bless, America, Dave.

Dave: God bless, America. I don't, none. Neither one of those seems like it changes during a shutdown in any way. Like the CapEx is still gonna be CapEx done. All the rich people are still gonna buy all their vacations and diamonds and watches. So that doesn't impact it at all. So if all the impacts might be on this sort of downstream people who are doing the local projects that they're gonna stop funding with the federal dollars. The healthcare workers, people at the bottom end of the economy, the below 50% line, well, they already don't matter to GDP prints right now because we've seen the GDP has shifted into a different direction. So even if we saw that, would it impact the market? I can't even see make that case.

Interest Rate Cuts and High-Income Consumers

Cameron: Here's the scenario, and this is gonna be sacrilegious and offensive to anybody who has ever studied classical economics. But roll with me here. 
Matt: This is, this is what clickbait is for. This is what this is for. Sacrilege. 

Cameron: Sacrilege. [00:18:00] Let's say a scenario where this shutdown results in a little more labor market weakness, and that gives the fed the green light (Lorde) to go and cut rates. It's a Lorde song. Nobody responded. Green light.

Matt: We're gonna take it, we're gonna look it up later and catch themselves up.

Cameron: So it gives the fed the green light to deliver more rate cuts. Now, the important thing to remember about that high income consumer, that 10% of the consumer that generates 50% of consumption up top 10%, 50% of consumption – that is also the consumer that has been very much enjoying high rates. They've been clipping coupons on that huge money market balances that are very substantial income to this cohort of consumers. And what we can see is that that growth and interest income to consumers has slowed from a peak in 2023 of about 22% year over year to just 1% today.

So if you [00:19:00] start cutting rates, let's say we get a hundred basis points of rate cuts over the course of the next six months, maybe even more, maybe 150, let's roll with it. All of a sudden you're actually starting to cut the incomes to high income consumers and that, you know, everything happens at the margin. And so, you know, these consumers are much more sensitive to the wealth effect. Danielle DiMartino Booth will argue that the wealth effect is far more powerful for consumers with their cash interest income than it is from stocks. Like the propensity to consume is higher.

So at the margin holding all else equal, their incomes growth, at least is decelerating. So if you wanted something that said like, hey, you know, like what, like how could this play out? I think that the Fed cutting interest rates this cycle, this specific cycle, not all cycles, but this specific cycle could actually have more of a cooling effect for those high income consumers, simply because they're going to see their cash interest income fall faster than they're going to see their cash interest expense fall because they don't roll their credit card [00:20:00] balances, and they don't, they have termed out mortgages, so they're not gonna get a stimulus boost from lower interest rates.

Of course, there's like the trickle down effect from more, maybe more profits in other places, small firms do better, whatever it is. But I think from a personal household side of things, you could actually see it have an unintended consequence.

Matt: The discretionary spend part of that is one where it's like, it feels impossible to tease out, but that's maybe the most compelling case that I've seen, especially in an aggressive decline. 'Cause that's one of the other weird things that we saw happen this week is like the shutdown happened and the odds for the next rate cut went to like a hundred percent immediately. Am I seeing that right?

Cameron: Yeah.

Matt: And now they increased the odds for December. So it's like, alright, we're like officially in this rate cutting cycle. We have a data dependent Fed who [00:21:00] maybe has some of the data to look out, maybe doesn't, because...

Dave: let's get into that. We did the last one on "what do we trust?" Now we have nothing. 

Matt: So we've officially canceled trust. We're ruled it out. A data dependent Fed, like are they reading the ADP? Like where are they getting the labor data from? Where are they getting the inflation data from?

Alternative Economic Data

Cameron: Bloomberg is amazing. And they have, it's, it was great. Mike McKee at Bloomberg was like, hey, well, just in case, if you're looking for other data, they have a worksheet. And it's like the function is like worksheet ALTE, alternative economic data. And so they have this compilation of all the stuff that gets released that is not normal economic data. So one of the ones that he quoted today was that, hey, people searching and going to the COBRA website. So when you lose your job and you're worried about your health insurance, you go get COBRA coverage as you're looking for a new job. So that has ticked up in the last week. This is the world we live in.

Dave: Pretty soon it's just gonna be a Kalshi bet and it's just gonna be however people bet on it in Kalshi is what the Fed decides to do. "Well, we got 75% thinks the labor [00:22:00] market's crap, so we're gonna cut."

Matt: And maybe it's just because I'm like extra aware of, because I'm interested in Kalshi and like the prediction markets and whatever else. But I heard at like at least three news sources in my email and in other places in the last week, cite those numbers, like prediction markets, have the odds of the Fed, the shutdown, whatever else, and spouting it like it's a BLS survey. 

Dave: It's the new normal. People are really paying attention to it. It's been really normalized.

Cameron: This is why there's already a South Park episode about it.

Matt: Yeah, exactly. 

Dave: Well, but the thing that's surprising to me is like I've only just started poking around Kalshi and the prediction markets because they've become so viable for so many investors. And Caleb Silver at Investopedia is like leaning in hard on the "every investor is also going to be a sports gambler and a prediction market player." So I'm trying to learn more about that. Like the numbers are huge. Like last time I looked, there were several million dollars betting on the specific number of days in the shutdown. I mean, it's the amount of money getting tossed at wild [00:23:00] prop bets is crazy.

Cameron: Casino capitalism.

Dave: Yeah. Really.

Matt: Or degeneracy, but maybe some of each. Do you, so we had separate, this was an offline sidebar conversation between us and prepping for this episode, but it feels like a weird thing as a professional. Like I don't, I wouldn't feel good about putting a bet on, for whatever reason about the government shutdown, like the days that it's out, it seems— Something about it feels off. 

Dave: The phrase that I stole from one of my favorite podcasts in The Emerald, "I have no interest in profiting off the American wound." And that's what it feels like.

Cameron: I mean, okay, so you know the whole concept of like, you're like betting for a team, like your team is, and you really are emotional. I don't watch sports so I'm gonna try really hard at—

Matt: Phillies, Red October. I understand I'm wearing it all on my sleeve right now. I get it, yeah.

Cameron: Means nothing to me. But yes. 

Matt: It's ok. I'm emotionally [00:24:00] invested in something ...

Cameron: You're emotionally invested in something too. You're gonna take a bet against yourself, so at least you're not not totally crushed. 

Dave: To be happy either way. 

Cameron: And so, you know, maybe there's an aspect of this. This feels very nihilistic. 

Dave: I mean, it's basically no different than like buying suicide puts when the market's roaring up and you're just like, "I just need to buy something on the other side because this feels too much."

Matt: Some insurance must be cheap somewhere. Yeah. And maybe it's emotional insurance. Maybe that's all it is. Do you, so I'm not, I'm not betting in the prediction markets in any way, shape or form as of yet. Not saying I won't, not saying I'm not tempted. Not saying I didn't look at the Phillies odds when I was parsing the Fed cuts and all the other crap today and went like, oh really? They got the bye week so that their numbers aren't gonna move in LA 'cause they got, you know, lucky against poor Cincinnati is shooting up as like odds. So I'm looking at these things, but I haven't done it yet. Dave, have you wagered any bet in this space?

Dave: No, I have not. I mean, I don't mind gambling and I love playing poker, so it's not like I don't have like a moral objection to the idea of making a bet. Right. 

Matt: Cameron, are you?

Cameron: If you wanna add a fun fact? The [00:25:00] way that you, that Dave wins poker is by being fueled by great eighties goth rock.

Dave: Yes. 

Matt: That's the poker strategy?

Cameron:  That's the poker strategy Yeah. No, it triggers something in his brain and that's what makes him, it's called—

Dave: It's called autism. You can say the word out loud.

Matt: I mean, that's a poker strategy. If I could get behind a poker strategy, it might be that. Cameron, are you betting in any of these markets? Are you playing with any of this stuff?

Cameron: No. But my grandmother is a really big Phillies fan, so there you go. She's a huge Phillies fan. I like, I think I could make the argument that she, between the Phillies and the Eagles, she's probably one of the oldest and most ardent Philly sports supporters. I should write a letter or something. She's incredible. She never misses a game. 

Dave: Amazing.

Matt: Fantastic. I love it. I hope she was there. They just did the like the Phillies versus Phillies night that they don't like advertise or broadcast the other night. And I really wish I would've [00:26:00] known exactly since they had the bye week. So basically like the main team plays the reserve team to just stay active when they're on the bye. So it's like $10 tickets, you know, cheap hotdog or whatever. That's really fun. You get to watch practice, pure fan service. Yeah, you get to go watch a live practice in the stadium. I love stuff like that. We will have your grandmother on for one of the other shows. That sounds like a great time.

Cameron: She'd love that.

Earnings and Market Concentration

Matt: So is there anything else with this, like keep your politics outta your investing. We're in the middle of a shutdown, basically, don't freak out because corporate earnings aren't freaking out. I know you've been writing about this a lot, Cameron, but that's, that feels like the theme coming into the end of 2025. Earnings haven't slowed down. Shut up. Go do your thing. So what if the Mag Seven or no, the, what is the top 10, like 38% of the S&P now. It just keeps on getting higher. Just ignore all those things 'cause earnings are okay. Is that where we are?

Cameron: Well, and how Michael Cembalest put out a piece, you called it "the data center blob", how the AI related names have contributed 80% of the earnings [00:27:00] growth over the last three years. 80%. So, and one of the things that we've been flagging is that, you know, you've seen this really sharp underperformance at the average stock. Breadth still remains kind of anemic in markets and saying it's because if you look at the S&P 500 benefiting from that top 10 stocks, its earnings estimates are getting revised higher.

But if you look at the equal weight, which is, you know, normalizing everything, its earnings estimates are getting revised lower. Which, you know, one of the things we're doing our outlook on October 8th, I believe it is, and the whole theme of the outlook is this idea, is that it's a very common trope that the market is not the economy. And so I'll say, okay, don't you know, this is why we have this divergence. The market's not the economy.

But what we actually are seeing now is that because the market has been so strong, it has actually become the economy. Whether it's looking at the concentration from GDP growth that we're getting from AI, [00:28:00] but as well as just how much that high income consumer is reliant on this equity market still doing well to kind of fund and fuel optimism and consumption. And so where yes, they are different, they have merged in a way because growth has become so narrow, not just in capital returns from the market, not just in earnings, but now also GDP.

Surprise Topic: The AI Bubble Question

Matt: All right. I'm ready for surprise topics.

Dave: I can I go first 'cause it picks up right off where we just left off. 

Matt: So this is gonna be Depeche Mode and Poker. Like, where are we going? 

Dave: Nope. We were just talking, you were just talking about the AI cap spend, right? Perfect. So I've noticed in the last week a huge narrative shift. Today it was a big article by Derek Thompson, but there was a Wall Street Journal article. There were a bunch of stories earlier this week. All sort of talking about how the AI bubble will burst and like, that's an [00:29:00] inevitable story anytime we have a run in any part of the economy.

But here's the part I hadn't thought about that one of these articles framed for me, and I apologize for not having the reference. If in fact this is a bit of a bubble and just all this CapEx, trillion dollars of CapEx gets dumped into these data centers and the build out of the models and the AI companies themselves. And what happens if it turns out that after spending all this money in a year, say from now, it's not that AI isn't amazing, and it's not that AI isn't transforming the global economy, it's just that it's impossible to contain and that all of the spend gets done?

And then it turns out it's kind of like the internet in the sense that it becomes ubiquitous. It becomes part of everything everybody's doing, but it doesn't accrue to any individual player enough to actually create those over the top winners. Right? So the railroad story is a great example for this one because at the peak there were, what, 2000 railroad companies, none of them ended up actually being great long-term [00:30:00] investments. A few robber barons got rich. Most investors from that period got wiped. So enormous amount of capital destruction actually happened.

Same thing happened with wavelength division multiplexing and fiber, which is the other example everybody uses, is like an enormous amount of capital actually just got wiped and that really acted as a kind of wealth redistribution. So is it possible that the AI bubble bursting might in fact be one of the most progressive wealth redistributions of the 20th century? 

Matt: That's a take. I will plug Derek Thompson did the railroad guy, like one of the railroad historians on one of the episodes of Plain English. That was really great. I had a weird fascination with railroad history.

Dave: Yeah, no, I was really—me too. So like, I think we're reading the same thing. So anyway, what's your take?

Matt: I mean, we know who the robber barons are in this scenario, so we don't have to think about that. We know who's getting rich.

Cameron: Except they're not building libraries.

Matt: They're not building libraries yet. 

Cameron: Or [00:31:00] museums or beautiful universities?

Matt: Yet. They'll put their name on something, but maybe not of the same posterity that you know, the museums have. I think this is really interesting and I think it's really interesting that we're talking about the end of this bubble. I feel like I don't know that there was another case where we were so actively not cheering for the end of a bubble, but describing the end of a bubble and what the ramifications are.

Dave: Oh dude, I don't know. Didn't you live through 98 to 2001? It feels like the same three year window all over again. Everybody wanted it all to go down.

Matt: I was too, like I was not plugged into this world when I was, because of the age I was and because of that, like that's high school into college and it was just not enough on my radar. So I ask this question, market historian, Dave Nadig. You're telling me people were just endlessly rooting for it.

Cameron: You just "ok Boomer"ed him. 

Dave: I just remember like literally like 1999 standing on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange listening to Cramer talk about how "all these internet stocks were a fad!" Like [00:32:00] hitting the button and stuff like—yeah, it was exact, it felt exactly like this. What we're thinking about AI stocks. The only biggest difference is that most of the stuff that is in a bubble right now is probably private, right? Like OpenAI's valuation's probably the thing that's the biggest bubble, but none of us are playing in that.

Bubbles in Earnings, Not Just Valuations

Cameron: So one of the things that I wrote about last week was this idea that bubbles can happen in earnings. When we think and conceptualize a bubble, we'll often talk about valuations. And yes, like bubbles happened in valuations coming out of the pandemic where you saw Zoom trading at like 50 times sales or something dumb. Right? Like that was clearly a bubble in valuation. And of course, bubbles happen in valuations of the low quality stocks that were part of the tech bubble, right? So if you didn't have earnings or you only had a little bit of earnings, of course your soaring stock resulted in a big high valuation.

But what people don't talk about is the over-earning or the bubble that happened in the earnings of the CapEx infrastructure players in these areas. And this is [00:33:00] what you're talking about. This idea is that right now we're clearly in the CapEx phase of this cycle where you're building out the infrastructure and what's interesting is a lot of this CapEx is all kind of being sold to each other and there's a very circular reference aspect of it and kind of winds its way up.

But what we learned from the internet is that those that benefited from the CapEx build out and the over earning that happened from that were very different than those that benefited from the ultimate application. And that the early application folks that saw their big, huge valuations on little tiny earnings also saw their prices decay materially during the unwind of the two thousands bubble. Some of them, of course, emerged and became big players like an Amazon, but some of them went away like Pets.com. Right?

So, you know, I think that knowing that a bubble can happen through the earnings line and over-earning is a really important [00:34:00] caveat in how we navigate this. Because as soon as that, the second derivative has already slowed in the growth for the CapEx-oriented side of these things, but as soon as that starts to taper off and turn more sideways, potentially that growth rate slows even further. You know, you're going to have, I think probably some kind of awakening to go, "oh, yes, okay. We probably aren't gonna be selling as much to each other as we did in the past."

The problem is, when does that happen? Because we keep coming back to this idea of like, being early is the equivalent of being wrong. You bet against this today, you could have actually made the same argument at the beginning of this year or at this time last year. And so how do you make sure that you know, you're still dancing while the music is playing, and not being caught, you know, flatfooted, you know, standing and tapping your foot on the sidelines, you know, saying all these, oh, you know, all these dumb people doing the jive. You have no idea what you're doing. So, I don't know. I think that knowing that [00:35:00] the spoils and the benefits of the technology may not accrue to the obvious players today.

Dave: I lost so much money on this so that I feel like I can say that with authority because I made all of those mistakes in the nineties. Like, I mean, I was loaded up on, in my portfolio as a fund manager, like publicly traded Lucent, JDS Uniphase, MCI UUnet, Wintel. Like all these names, nobody knows anymore because they all either went bankrupt or got bought. That was my portfolio and it went up 190% in 1999 and then went all the way to zero in 2000. Like, how does it not feel exactly like that? Right? These are companies that made a lot of money on the build out and then had nothing left to do.

Matt: So is it with the largest of the large companies, so those top tech players where it's just, even if the baseline earnings growth isn't as strong from this point forward, do we look at companies like that and just go, great, your valuation's gonna come back in. [00:36:00] Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft are all gonna have these baseline like earnings. They're not gonna be zeroed by this, right? Probably a bunch of private players get zeroed. Back to the wealth effect, all the people who have the private capital wrapped up in these private deals doing these build outs. Yeah, maybe those are the ones who get hosed.

Dave: Yeah. Small data centers, things like that. I mean, a lot of this is happening in private, you know, private placements. A lot of it's happening in private credit, like a lot of the funding for this is happening through Apollo. I mean, you start looking at the stuff they're sticking in the ETFs. It's like Intel's data center in Ireland and stuff like that. That's what it's all funding.

So again, maybe those guys get wiped out and it just acts as wealth redistribution. 'Cause we all get the benefit of AI in our businesses, but we underpaid for it. I mean, look, I know I'm massively underpaying for my AI use right now. The amount of value I get outta my $20 subscriptions is insane, and that's being paid for by somebody.

Cameron: But there's so much competition. Why would you start paying full price? 

Dave: Right? 

Cameron: Like [00:37:00] because everybody is competing in order to get to this ultimate goal of AGI or super intelligence. I don't know if you get to a place where people are ever fully paying for the full power that the AI is providing to them.

Dave: Well, but the money has to come from somewhere.

Cameron: Well, yes. 

Dave: So it's coming from VC.

Cameron: Yes, but meaning that the way I would put it is that all of the legacy businesses that are spending all this money are effectively each have their own near monopolies and now they're investing money in something that's far more competitive. And so that tells you that the returns on that investment are likely lower than when you were investing only a little bit in order to generate, I mean, look at a name like Google, right? So what's fascinating is if you look at Google's earnings, its earnings have grown substantially over the course of the last few years, and its free cash flow is down.

Matt: Right. [00:38:00] And we see this over and over again. Like you look at a bunch of names across this space and you're gonna see a version of this story. 'Cause it's just a hard business environment.

Dave: I mean, and if you look at where a lot of this funding is coming from, you know, and this isn't a new observation, like people are just showing up with cash to buy Nvidia chips top to bottom right. Except for Oracle, which is actually gonna have to go out and raise money to play in the game. But to date, like when Apple needs to spend a billion dollars on some stuff, they don't have to flow to secondary. They've been sitting on this cash forever. Right? So does this flush some of that out back to the rest of us? I don't know. It was just a dumb idea.

Cameron: Oh, well, I mean, but I think it's also kind of peculiar that now you are starting to see them spend less of their own cash and more of other people's cash. That's different, right? Like Meta going shift out being like ,"Hey, Blue Owl, let's [00:39:00] build a data center together." And I go like, "why do you need mine? Why? Why do you need my money? Right? I thought you had lots of money. I thought you were a cashflow generating machine." And, look, weighted average cost of capital, it might be the right thing to do, but I think it's an interesting change. Does it, is it the harbinger of an imminent end to this? No. But will it eventually likely, you know, come back and bite returns? Probably.

Matt: All right. It'll be good for the investment bankers and the corporate attorneys. Like it always is everybody else. Like it always is a tale as old as time. 

Cameron: Beauty and the beast! I figured I had to announce it since all my other references... 

Matt: Just flying right past.

Surprise Topic: Dancing in the Dark and Going Back to the Well

Dave: I just, the gear switching between thinking about music and trying to make sure I'm paying attention. Who's got the next one? Who's got the next surprise question?

Cameron: Matt, you go next.

Matt: Alright. All right. I got one, and this was in the, I think Cameron, I think it was you in the conversation before this, I think you made the dancing in the dark reference. So can I give you credit for this? Do you guys know the story of [00:40:00] that song? Like where that song comes from, which is fantastic.

So you basically have, he's making Born in the USA, John Landau, whoever the producer is, is like we don't have a single, the classic like eighties rockstar story. We don't have a single, he's all dejected. Bruce goes back to the hotel room that night, shows up the next day with Dancing in the Dark, and the rest is history.

So here's not to torture the question into something else, but like that this isn't good enough. Go back to the well and then you produce gold thing. The obvious investor problem, and the thing that I worry about with clients all the time is it's like they have a good thing going on and markets are doing good and they're like, I'm just gonna go back and write my hit. Like I don't have my hit song yet. Doing really good. I got Born in the USA in the bag. This is all coming together, but now I'm gonna go out and find a hit. That's tempting and dangerous thinking. But then in regular life too, like, do either of you have a story where kind of like, you're like, it's not good enough yet. You went back home and then you came back with your best thing overnight in the middle of a project. [00:41:00] Either those ideas resonate?

Dave: It resonates for me personally, but I don't think I have an investor angle for it. 

Matt: I don't need one. 

Dave: As somebody who does a lot of writing, it took me a long time to do this, but when I was younger, I would write something, here's my 3000 words, and it was as if God had come down and delivered tablets on the ground, and if some editor came back and said, you know, the first 300 words are a little long. It's a lot of throat clearing there. Can you tighten that up? I would be like, "are you insane? Do you not know that I am an artist?" Right. It was insane.

As I've gotten older and I've had a couple of really great editors, particularly, I'll highlight Laura Crigger, who's no longer working in finance, but was an amazing managing editor for years at ETF.com. She would finally, 'cause we've known each other forever. About eight or nine years ago, I would submit stuff and it would be garbage, and she would send it back to me and be like, "you can do better." Like just a quiet little pat on the head. "You're a good writer. You're a great writer, Dave. You can do better." [00:42:00] And like those, I got a couple of those from her and it totally changed my process for writing. Where now I am much more deliberate about, like, I write a thing. I put it away for three or four days, I come back and I read it and I can always do better, but I never used to be that way. So like that whole, like you can do better thing, I think is actually really important for anybody in the creative process.

Matt: I like that. 

Cameron: I have two responses please. One, LCD Sound System has a great song about this called You Wanted a Hit. 

Matt: LCD, good call out. 

Cameron: Absolute banger live. And yeah, "we won't be your babies anymore."

Number two, I will never forget. I was so excited. It was my first piece that was going to be published more broadly when I was at Bank of America, kind of to our whole client set. And I had written this piece about the industrial sector and I had all these different references in it. There was a Shakespeare reference, there was a [00:43:00] Dolly Parton reference, there was—

Dave: I'm not surprised by any of this so far. 

Matt: All the key touch points are in there.

Cameron: And I was so proud of this. And I handed it to my professor, Dr. Singleton, from business school. And I said, hey, would you read this? And he said, he looked at me and he goes, do you want me to read it or do you want me to read it? And I was like, no, like, you know, gimme your notes. And when I tell you he redlined my baby to an extent that I never expected and I was so crestfallen, but he was right.

And what I realized is that that one act alone, him taking the time to edit something, I've hopefully never made those same mistakes in a piece ever again. And I always write with his voice in the back of my head of like, you're burying the lead. You're doing this. Like how do you structure something? So that way it just [00:44:00] is easy and like enjoyable to read. So anyway, I'm so grateful because it didn't take much on his part to like open my eyes to how crappy I had been approaching it, even though it's putting in my full effort. So yeah, sometimes you gotta go back to the drawing board.

Dave: I feel like it's actually now harder to do the other side of it. Like I get handed a lot of other people's work and people ask me to read something. I have a bunch of people I sort of mentee in their twenties and stuff. And I used to try to be a little bit more like delicate. I mean, Cameron, you know this, you've asked me to read a thing or two of yours. Now I just crap all over whatever anybody sends me. Does not matter who wrote it, it could be freaking Jason Zweig anonymously, and I would just rip it apart, good or bad. Because I've learned from the other side of that, that God, my work always gets so much better when somebody's willing to take even 15 minutes to find everything I did wrong or not as well as it could be done. So I just think there's huge value in it.

Cameron: I [00:45:00] couldn't have done it without you. Just for, for the sake of the audience, Dave helped me immensely with a commencement address that I gave earlier this year, and I gave him a draft of it. And it was redlined and it completely changed. I could not have done it without Dave, and I needed it. Because when sometimes when you're stepping into something that feels so weighty and you feel this pressure as if it needs to be perfect, that pressure can make you freeze and overthink things. And get wedded to one idea that may not be the right way, or not right or wrong, but the best way to be able to approach something. So I couldn't have done it without you.

Surprise Topic: Yoga, Silence, and Being a Shusher

Dave: Very sweet. What do you got? What's your special?

Cameron: So, okay. This is not investing related, but maybe, maybe there is an angle here, which is I practice a lot of yoga. I [00:46:00] love my yoga. And my favorite thing about my yoga studio is that it's a silent room. So as soon as you walk in there, there's no phones, no talking, no chitchatting. The teacher obviously talks through the class, but it's sort of this sacred space and it's a very funny dynamic because occasionally there are people who do not respect the silent sacred space. And there's this piercing, even the slightest whisper, it just pierces through everything.

And it's one of those things that will immediately get me out of any kind of like a flow state that I was in. I'm like, "is this sort of the challenge? This is what we're having to learn to zoom everything out?" But it made me think about, you know, are there different things that normally you wouldn't mind somebody whispering, but because it's in the context of something that's forbidden, you're not supposed to do this, or it's in like this kind of pristine no speaking kind [00:47:00] of zone that a little whisper can become that much more just annoying. So, I don't know. I was thinking about it 'cause I was trying to say like, should I be the person who shushes?

Dave: Are you a shusher or you a shushee?

Cameron: And the thing is, I'm not a shusher. I don't wanna be a shusher because if somebody is, if it's their first time, I want them to know the rules. I want them to respect the rules, but I don't think it's my place to be a shusher. So, I don't know. I almost shushed somebody over the weekend and I was so tempted to do it.

Dave: You need a professional shusher, it's gotta be somebody's job. 

Cameron: I kind of feel like, I don't wanna step into that role. That's not who I am. You know, I'm like, "live and let live, man." I don't know, but I guess I'm wondering if I should shush.

Matt: I mean, I'm pro, I'm pro at at least one shush to set the tone of "this is the setting we are in."

Cameron: I do a cough with eye contact.

Matt: That's acceptable. That's, that's an alt shush. Yeah, that's, there's [00:48:00] nothing wrong with, I think the cough with shush.

Dave: Yeah. The alt shush. I was gonna say the, my direct experience of this is sitting in a Zen monastery. 

Matt: So you do the silent retreats., you have to tell us. 

Dave: And the odd thing about a, particularly a Zen silent retreat is it's very rarely silent because there's bells and there's people. Like, there's always something going on, and then there's maybe 10 or 15 minutes where it's totally actually a hundred people in complete silence. And then somebody hits a bell or this giant wooden block called the han, which makes all this noise.

In that environment, I have found myself losing my goddamn mind over the person sitting next to me breathing too loud. So, yes, I know exactly your experience because I have sat there for days going, "if I have to listen to this person go one more time, I'm going to lose my shit and I'm gonna run out of this dojo and [00:49:00] and never come back." So, yes, the smallest thing that is a violation of a supposedly sacred space, I lose my damn mind. I've gotten better at it, but the first couple times I was just like, if he sneezes, I'm out.

Matt: I'm also with you on this because I think it's really hard to find spaces like that. And I like, I cherish mine on a trail, like go out for the hike or whatever else. And I have different trails where I know I'll run into less people. And a week ago I'm doing one of my favorite trails here in Northeastern Pennsylvania, not far from me. It's like painfully close something that every time I do it, I'm like, I could technically be here every day. It's that close. And as I'm going through part of it, I'm, you know, it's that time of year where stuff is starting to grow in or whatever. I'm going, I'm totally gonna get a tick on this walk. Is this really worth it? 'Cause the grass is overtaking parts of this trail and whatever else.

And then I'm like, there's no one here. It is just me. And this is so special. And by 10 minutes into that walk every time, [00:50:00] it's the best therapy I can do for myself. And then once in a while, you come up on somebody and they've got their cell phone out and they're playing, you know, Creedence, while they're on the trail. 

Dave: Oh God, I hate that. 

Matt: And that's, that's literally where it's, can I sneak up on them and just slap the phone outta their hands?

Cameron: Now, if they were playing Creed while on the trail, completely acceptable.

Matt: And murder, imagine murder is, imagine being—

Cameron: In forest singing One Last Breath.

Dave: Can I Take you Higher or whatever?

Cameron: My sacrifice, With Arms Wide Open? 

Dave: I have to reject your attempt here. There is no excuse for playing music out loud in public unless it's a very specific event everybody has headphones now. 

Cameron: Or Creed. 

Matt: Or Creed. Yeah.  I have an offline funny Creed story for you. It'll be an offline story. 

Dave: But you need a professional shusher in those situations. And the need to be though, there's a person whose job it is to yell at people.

Matt: Somebody has to preserve that because that is the value of the space and the value of the space that you are receiving by being there, and that's, [00:51:00] if that's not respected, then what is it anymore?

Cameron: One of the most bonkers things when I go back to Florida is I'll go and practice yoga at my favorite studio. But it just, it's amazing to me. They don't have a no talking rule. So you're in this really peaceful room and you'll hear people talking about what they ate for breakfast and as you're trying to kind of like start the classroom presentation. It's the wildest thing.

Matt: It sounds kind of fun though. It sounds kind of fun.

Cameron: It's not fun. It's not fun. No, it's the only thing I would change about that studio. Only thing.

Dave:  I mean, I'm kind of anti-small talk anyway. 

Matt: Kind of anti small talk? I dunno. I like eavesdropping on like really bizarre small talk though. I wanna sit in the diner. And I wanna hear like—

Dave: Oh, for sure. Overhearing the people next to me all day.

Matt: Yeah. Overhearing people saying crazy stuff. That's a guilty pleasure. I do enjoy that. So I think we solved the problems of the world. Right? Did we reopen the—yeah, sure. The government's gonna reopen after they listen to this. 

Dave: We got the shushing down. 

Cameron: It doesn't matter if it does or it doesn't. We're good. [00:52:00]

Closing

Matt: One last, the Voice Norway. Did you ever hear that version of Dancing in the Dark of like the kid in a shirt that I swear I had when I was in high school? 

Dave: No. The Voice. How do you end up watching The Voice Norway? 

Matt: Because I tell somebody about Dancing in the Dark and they're like, I have the greatest cover version of the song ever. And I go, that's a bold claim. And then I listen to it and go, I think I'm crying. It's a solo acoustic, very quiet. It would play well in like a whisper only setting. It's extremely delicately done. And it changed my, I hear the song differently and I want to hear that song every time. If I think about the original.

Cameron: Lucy Dacus has a great, has a great cover.

Dave: Oh, I'll totally, I'm huge fan. 

Matt: She's phenomenal. Yeah, we need a new Boygenius record. Can we just love that? We do. We do.

Dave: Totally need a new Boygenius. 

Matt: We're due. We're due for a new Boygenius. 

Dave: Although I think they had a falling out. I thought Phoebe Bridgers had a falling out with one of the other ones.

Matt: There was, there was some weird stuff in the videos for the last [00:53:00] album. It's like "this took a turn. Really wasn't planning on this guys." Alright. The boys grew up, I guess. Fair enough. I could still use another one. Dave. Hey ETF.com. I mean, congratulations. I don't know if that was was official last time we were recording.

Dave: People could find my stuff. Dave Nadig all the socials ETF.com for the real stuff.

Matt: Fantastic. Cameron. They wanna bug you online. Ask about what goth bands to play when they're playing Dave and poker or just shush you or shush you or should they look you up online?

Cameron: I'm not a shusher now. I'm not. For the record, everybody, don't... I'm not a shusher.

Matt: Alt shushing approved. Cameron Dawson, if they should bug you on the internet, where should they look you up these days?

Cameron: LinkedIn. I am kind of on X, but not as much anymore. But you can also go to the New Edge Wealth website and sign up for our newsletters.

Matt: Make sure you get those weekly newsletters. They are well, well worth your time from you and all your co contributors. Lots of great stuff there and lots of great music references. Did we close the loop on when September ends in Green Day? Was there any [00:54:00] closure to that, that arc from you?

Cameron: No. No, because as we discussed offline, Green Day is a manufactured... 

Dave: Also, also it's now October.

Cameron: It's also October.

Matt: Alright. We're taking the long view. This is Click Beta. We'll be back in a month. You guys are the best. We are out.

Thank you for tuning into this episode. If you found this discussion interesting and valuable, please subscribe on your favorite audio platform or on YouTube. You can also follow all the podcasts in the Excess Returns network at excessreturnspod.com. If you have any feedback or questions, you can contact us at [email protected].

No information on this podcast should be construed as investment advice. Securities discussed in the podcast may be holdings of the firms of the hosts or their clients.