# April 2026 Random Ramblings

Yet Another Value Podcast · 2026-04-16 · 33 min · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icde0ypwyC0

## Transcript

Andrew Walker

All right, hello and welcome to the another value podcast. I'm your host Andrew Walker. You're about to listen to my monthly ramblings for the month of April. I ramble about five different things. I'm going to ramble a lot about SAS, which is on everyone's mind. I'm going to ramble about hedging for AI. I'm going to ramble about pattern recognition. When is it lazy? When is it experience? When are you getting better? When are you getting worse? I'm going to ramble about AI and pattern recognition and LLMs and good for investors, bad for investors, will the meta game adopt in search of any down the AI's throat? And then finally, I'm going to rant about some frustration I've had and I'm going to have you be my therapist as I just rant and ramble about a frustrating situation I had last month where I missed what could have been a four-bagger or a 20-bagger depending on how you would have played it. So, I will end with that rant. We'll get there in 1 second, but first two disclaimers. First disclaimer, yeah. Disclaimer, nothing on this podcast is investing advice. I say it all the time, but I just love to remind everyone that. So, full disclaimer at the end of the podcast and in the show notes. And second, I lead into and with this, but I just say this on the ramblings. I love the podcast, I love the blog. Ratings, ratings, reviews, subscriptions, all that means so much. Helps the podcast go further, spins the podcast flywheel. So, if you could take a second and wherever you're watching or listening, rate, review, all that sort of stuff, subscribe, all that sort of stuff, would mean the world. We're going to get there in 1 second. We're going to get to my ramblings in 1 second. But first, we're going to hear from our sponsors. Today's podcast is sponsored by fiscal.ai. Fiscal.ai offers a first-of-its-kind real-time fundamental API tracker. Look, why do I mention that? Because I'll admit, I'm a biased source. Fiscal.ai is a sponsor, but I mention it because I've been using it myself and not because they gave it to me. I went, signed up, I used it, paid for it off my own free will and money. And I got to tell you, I am using it for homebrew up to all of these crazy quack code tools and I feel like I've taken the Limitless drugs cuz I can just look at so many stocks and I've got so many trackers and all of this new data coming in. And at the top of every at the top of every tracker, at the top of every tool I'm building, it's got a little, "Hey, enter your fiscal.ai API code here." And right in there, my fiscal.ai API code goes there. It's got lots of fundamentals, real-time stock prices, all sorts of stuff. So, look, I I will quit rambling, but you've heard it before. If you are are looking into these tools, you need to go look at an API key. And if you're not, if you're just looking for, you know, the kind of standard fundamental tools, charting, all that sort of stuff, guess what? Just go to fiscal.ai and they've got a great product there, too. So, whether you're looking for the API tools to go build your own stuff or you're just looking for the kind of standard stuff, fiscal.ai has you covered. Go to fiscal.ai/yav. There'll be a link in the show notes and to see fiscal.ai for yourself. And if you talk to them, go ahead and tell them I sent you. All right, hello and welcome to the another value podcast. I am your host Andrew Walker. It is Monday, April 13th. The stock market just closed. I am here for my monthly random ramblings, where I just hop on, start recording, and talk for about 30 minutes. I ramble about the things I’m thinking about in this closet-size office, where I sit and think for 50 or 60 hours a week.

First, a disclaimer to remind everyone that nothing on this podcast is investing advice. You should always remember that, but it’s particularly true when this guy, locked in this tiny little closet, is rambling for about 30 minutes. Just remember: don’t listen to me about anything. There’s a full disclaimer at the end of the podcast and a link in the show notes. Second, I do this monthly on my monthly reminder. Try not to flood every podcast with it, but it would mean so much if you could rate, subscribe, review, wherever you're watching or listening to this. You know, more more ratings, more more ratings results in more subscribers and more subscribers just creates the flywheel that gets this podcast going. You know, more subscribers means better guests want to come on cuz there are more people listening to it. It means better advertisers, so I can afford to get, you know, like reach out to better guests. Maybe I'll upgrade from a closet-size office to a bigger one so that I don't have this echo. I don't know, but it would really mean a lot to me if you enjoy this podcast if you do that. Okay. Now out of the way, again, April 13th.

I’ve got 4 or 5 things I want to ramble about. First, I’m going to start with some random thoughts on software as a service. Everybody’s talking about it, so we’ll get to that in a second. I want to talk about hedges for AI domination. I’ll then talk about pattern recognition and some thoughts I’ve had on its upsides and downsides. Then I’ll tie pattern recognition back into AI and why I wonder if AI is going to have trouble replacing humans, or maybe why it’s going to crush us all.

I do have a fifth topic: a little frustrating thing, if I have time. I have to go pick up my daughter in 30 minutes, so we are on a timeline. Time is a factor. Let’s hop into it.

Look, I want to start with SaaS. I have written several things on SaaS in the SaaS-y Popular series lately, and I think I talked about it in the last rambling. SaaS is something that anyone you talk to right now wants to hear about. The reason is simple: all the SaaS companies have been brutalized.

SaaS stands for software as a service, for those of you who don’t know. I’m guessing if you listen to this podcast, you know. The average software index is down about 20% so far this year, and you can find names that are down much, much further than that.

Whenever you talk to an investor, they say, “Hey, what do you think about SaaS?” They want to talk about SaaS, and I’ve written a ton on it, so I’m certainly contributing to that. But my answer so far has been that I don’t think they’re that cheap, to be honest.

I love being the person running into the fire. I’ve used this analogy before: there’s a panic, and my instinct is to go into the panic and buy. I think there’s an opportunity in a dislocation. I’m not having that instinct with software as a service.

First, I don’t think they’re that cheap. Everyone debates stock compensation, but stock compensation is real. For these companies, many of which have fallen so far, I think stock compensation is going to be an issue.

You can see this pretty easily. If you’re a billion-dollar company and you spend $100 million per year in stock compensation, that’s 10% annualized dilution. That’s a lot, but it’s doable if the company is growing and all that sort of stuff.

But all of a sudden, your stock falls—let’s just say 90%. Now you’re a $100 million company paying out $100 million per year in stock compensation. That’s undoable. You can’t dilute your shareholders 50% per year.

By the way, all those employees who got stock compensation last year are now 90% underwater. It’s undoable and untenable on so many different levels. Your employees say, “Why? We’re mid-level employees. We don’t control the stock price. Why should we be underwater on all those grants from the years before? Why should we take a pay cut going forward because of this?”

It’s untenable for the employees, and it’s untenable for the investors because they’re going to get diluted like crazy. It just puts the whole company in a difficult position. They’re not that cheap to me. The stock compensation is real, and it’s going to create other issues going forward.

You’ve heard me say all this, and you’ve heard other people say all this. I’m not breaking new ground here. The other thing is that they don’t look that cheap to me. The only way they look cheap is if you say, “Hey, they were trading for 100 last year, and they’re trading for 40 now.” It looks cheap on a chart, but it doesn’t look that cheap to me fundamentally.

I don’t know about the terminal value, either. I keep saying this, and you’re starting to hear more and more people say it: the tools that you are using with AI right now are the worst that they will ever be. These tools are improving at an exponential rate.

The thing that really drove it home for me was a company I was looking at and, unfortunately, was invested in. When I started looking at it in, let’s say, October, I talked to a few of its customers. They said, “Hey, AI is great for this company. We’re using this company’s offerings more and more. AI is an accelerant for their product. It makes us want their product more.”

Then the investment went way against me, and I caught up with the same people. They said, “Oh, yeah, AI has gotten so much better. We don’t even use that company anymore. We use the AI tools.”

That’s something that’s really ingrained in my brain. The terminal value of software, because it’s all code and contracts, is zero. If the business goes away, there are no hard assets left that you can use. If you have an office building, the terminal value might not be zero because you can convert it to residential or whatever.

Not the case with software. The terminal value is zero; it’s actually probably negative because you have to break the leases, fire everyone, and deal with all that sort of stuff. I don’t think I’m breaking ground there. I don’t think I’m breaking ground on the terminal value. That’s just why I passed, but I very rarely read the comments on podcasts, to be honest with you.

The podcast can be a scary place, and I find it’s a lot more negative than positive. People want to get at me, they can always slide into my DMs or email me. But there was one comment that popped into my feed. Somebody was commenting on an episode about a payment stock that I’d recently recorded, and they said, “Look, this sounds really interesting, but this is a 7-foot bar. Why would I try to step over a 7-foot bar? Let’s just go find something easier.”

I thought that was so astute. That’s kind of how I feel about software. All of us can go break our brains trying to find all these companies, and there are going to be some huge winners in software. I guarantee you there are some software stocks that are down 70% over the past year right now that are going to be 5-baggers over the next 5 years. I also guarantee you there are some software stocks that are going to zero.

Chegg was an online business where college students could ask questions and get answers. That was a compounder business, and AI zeroed it out in about 2 years, right? Near zero rounds to zero. There are going to be a lot of SaaS companies that I think AI zeros out.

To me, software is a 7-foot bar. There are going to be some winners, but I think there are going to be a heck of a lot of losers. Unless you tell me you have really specialized expertise or specialized insight, most of the people I talk to are generic value investors. I mean that with all the love in the world—they’re generalists. Unless you have really deep insight, you’ve talked to all these customers, and you have a real, unique reason why AI will not displace these companies, despite the fact that AI is getting exponentially better, I just think there are better opportunities elsewhere.

So, I will fall into the “Hey, let’s discuss this software” camp. I just don’t think it’s worth it for your generic $1 billion-to-$3 billion or $500 million-market-cap software company unless you’ve got a real edge there. I also don’t think your edge is, “Hey, all the other ones trade at 1x; once you add in stock compensation, they trade at 50p. This is one that actually trades at 6x P/E. All the other comps trade at 3x revenue, and this one trades at 1x revenue.”

I don’t think valuations like that are your edge because, again, the terminal value is zero. I think your edge is really, “Hey, all the other comps are going to get displaced, but here are X, Y, and Z reasons why this specific software company will not be displaced by AI,” or something along those lines.

Look, I’m going to do more SaaS conversations because I can train to get smarter. SaaS might be getting blown up, but there might be something one town over that’s getting killed as well and is interesting. So, I’m going to keep studying it. I want to be ready. There can be events. There will be events.

I find increasingly that a lot of investing is about being ready. One of the reasons the podcast works for me is that you do work on companies, right? These are companies smart investors pick, and I’ll tell you, most of the companies are things that I’m not going to invest in. They’re just not in my wheelhouse. They’re not in what I consider my skill set.

A lot of times, I’ll do work on a company, and then 18 months later, the company will run into some issue, or it will have an interesting merger or an interesting event. I can say, “Hey, I’m starting with a big backlog of notes. I can just go relisten to the podcast that I did to get up to speed, review all my notes, and I’ve read about it.” I’m trying to do the work and be ready, even if I’m telling you I’m probably not buying any SaaS stocks right now.

I want to do work on the tangential things. I want to do work on SaaS companies. I want to be ready if and when something falls into my lap.

Speaking of a transition to AI, one thing I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is that, as you can probably tell, my portfolio does not really have a lot of AI exposure. One thing I worry about as an investor, and as somebody who would love to get paid, is that I am the most handsome finance podcast host in the world. I realize what an oxymoron that is. I’d love to get paid for my looks. I’d love to get paid for my stunning personality.

Unfortunately, as an investor, I largely get paid for using my brain. That is why AI is so scary, right? AI is the first time ever where you’re looking and saying, “Hey, this is a tool that displaces people’s brains.”

Go ask a lawyer how many juniors they’re hiring. They’ll say, “Hey, we’re still hiring some juniors,” if they work at a big firm, “but we don’t need as many because AI is like the ultimate junior.” If AI is starting at the bottom by replacing juniors, eventually it’s going to replace seniors.

AI is very scary for me on 2 levels. It’s scary for my portfolio because I don’t have a lot of exposure to it—perhaps to my chagrin in 2024 and 2025, perhaps to my benefit if AI ever slows down. It’s also scary for me on a personal level because I am very worried about AI replacing fundamental investors at some point.

Quantitative systems have already replaced a lot of quantitative investors, and indexing has pushed out active investors. I’m worried that in 3 to 5 years—I want to say years, but maybe it’s a month away; it’s accelerating—all of the alpha will be captured by AI. We can talk about ways that would happen, but I’ve been thinking, “Should either your portfolio or you personally have a hedge for AI?”

I don’t really run a PA. I invest through my portfolio, but I’m just throwing things out there. I’m not making investment advice. Should everyone have a hedge for AI?

I think the hedge for AI would be to go out and buy LEAPS. I specifically thought you’d put a small percentage of your portfolio in LEAPS in Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Google. I’ll tell you the reason I chose those in a second.

One of the reasons I was thinking about it was that I just did this post on Meta. Let’s make the numbers easy: The stock is trading at 600, and they gave all of their staff stock options, with the lowest strike price being, let’s just call it, 1,200 to make the math easy. That says the stock will double in 5 years for the stock options to vest. These are options, not PSUs.

If your stock goes to 1,201 in 5 years, that’s a very nice return for the stock. A double in 5 years is a pretty nice return—not legendary, but quite good. It sucks if you’re an option holder. The option is basically worth zero, right?

If you say, “Hey, the option is struck at 1,200 for 5 years from now,” you’re saying the option is going to be worth much, much more. The highest-end options, again, these options expire in 5 years, are 3,000. So, that’s saying the stock has to 5x just for the options to be in the money, right? Which is saying we see a path to the stock being 4,000 or 5,000—a $10 trillion-plus market cap.

I was thinking about the LEAPS in connection to that Meta thing, right? You buy the LEAPS, and I think the AI acceleration is almost upon us. If those Meta options start playing out, then you’re going to see the acceleration start happening. I think the furthest-out Meta LEAPS you can get are December 2028.

Unfortunately, we can’t buy LEAPS out to January 2031 to match when the Meta options would expire. But if you think the acceleration would start happening and get reflected in the next 18 months, then 2.5-year options, which are the furthest out Meta options, kind of capture that.

Anyway, back to the hedging. The Meta thing is why I thought about it, because the LEAPS let you recreate that. I think you would do Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Google.

The reason I chose Microsoft is that it has the investment in OpenAI, and its stock has come down quite a bit with the SaaS thing. So, you almost get 2 ways to win, right? If AI takes over, Microsoft has Azure, OpenAI, and a bunch of smart engineers. If AI doesn’t take over, maybe you get a little bit of SaaS back.

I chose Meta because you align with those Meta options that were just granted, and they just rolled out their AI tool, which appears to be a competitor. I chose Amazon because it has AWS, and the company has been talking up its competitor to NVIDIA, its custom chips, and all that. I chose Google because it has the AI play. I believe it has an investment in Anthropic—I can’t remember that for sure—but Google has some AI exposure itself, plus GCP.

You choose those 4, put a small piece of your portfolio in LEAPS, and say, “Hey, if AI goes to the moon and bankrupts everything else, I’ve got that hedge there. If AI kills off fundamental investing, I’ve got that hedge there.” I don’t know about it, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about and toying with.

Again, this is not investment advice, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about. I’ll probably write an article on it at some point, just to try to get a little firmer in my thoughts.

But I think people listen to this and want to think about random things, and this is my most random rambling. I have a feeling it's the thing people are going to respond to the most. I wanted to throw it out there as an interesting thought, interesting hedge, interesting trade, all that sort of stuff.

The last thing I'll say is that one of the things you love about LEAPS—and for those who don't know, LEAPS are long-dated call options—is that they give you leverage on the upside, as any options do. Most people like LEAPS with low volatility. Think about GameStop at the height of meme mania: the options were insanely expensive. Volatility increases the expense of the option, while low volatility would be something like your local utility company, which is going to have very low volatility.

Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon have options with volatility in the high 30s if you look at the LEAPS, I believe. I looked at them over the weekend, which is not low. But I would say it's probably not that high for things that have exposure to AI, where there is a chance you tip into a winner-take-all or five-winners-take-most situation.

When Meta is making bets that say, “We're going to pay our execs if the stock, at minimum, doubles,” and we're kind of underwriting more than that, when the volatility is at 40 and you've got this kind of world-changing-event potential in an investment that all of these are exposed to in one way, shape, or form, it actually feels too low to me, to be honest with you. Just another thought.

Let's jump to my next thing. I'm going to tie this back to AI at the end, but this is something I've been meaning to talk about for a while: pattern recognition. I think one reason investors get better as they get older, allegedly—quote unquote; I hope that's happening with me—is that they build up a bunch of patterns.

You see a company announce good earnings, and the stock goes up less than you think. When you're young, you might say, “This is a buying opportunity.” When you're older, you might say, “Maybe I need to look at the 10-Q a little bit more. Maybe there's something in the cash flow statement that was wrong.”

You see a company make a big merger and put out big synergy targets. When you're younger, you say, “This is a buy. This is incredible. This is the merger for the ages.” When you're older, you say, “Mergers can be scary. Let me dig into this.”

We talk about patterns all the time. You see a spin-off that gets puked up, and when you're older, you say, “I've seen spin-offs get puked up 2 or 3 times before. That's a buy signal.” You see more and more of them.

I think one reason you get better as an investor when you get older is that you have this pattern recognition to build on, and you can apply it to macro as well. It's one thing to say, “I like to buy stocks when they're down.” It's another thing to go through a real panic, feel what it's like to manage a portfolio through it, trade through it, and deal with all that sort of stuff. That's one reason investors get better over time.

On the contrary, my least favorite investors to talk to are older investors, let's say, who probably have just a few more gray hairs than me. I talked to one investor who had been doing this for 25 or 30 years, and we talked about 2 stocks.

With the first stock, he said, “This stock reminds me a lot of my experience investing in—let me anonymize it so no one can pick up on it—Procter & Gamble back in 2001. They led their category, growth had stalled, and they had these great brands, all this sort of stuff. Everybody was obsessed with tech companies, and then the tech companies fell. Procter & Gamble had a great dividend, great brands, all this sort of stuff, and you could break it up. It was trading for a fraction of breakup value, and we made a killing on that.”

I thought, “Okay, that makes sense.” Let's say we were talking about a homebuilder. He mentioned Procter & Gamble, and I was like, “That feels a little bit weird, but okay, I see what you're saying. It's a sum-of-the-parts story; nobody cares.” Homebuilders would actually be weird if you were talking about good brands, but that sort of stuff.

Then we switched and talked about a software-as-a-service company. We talked a little bit, and he said, “This software-as-a-service company reminds me of investing in Procter & Gamble back in 2001.” I was like, “Okay, this guy is a man with a hammer, and everything is a nail to him. He's living in the past. Everything is a 20-year-old investment.”

The one thing I've been thinking about is when pattern recognition is helpful. You see something and say, “I've seen something like this before. This triggers something for me. It's great.” When is it hurtful? When are you not learning anymore? When are you not evolving?

When are you this guy who, 25 years ago, had this successful investment and is going to compare everything to that investment? When is pattern recognition good, and when is it bad? When are you using it to identify opportunity and risk, versus when are you being lazy and using it as a crutch?

I can't remember if I ever wrote this post, but I was going to write a post at one time about how pattern recognition is what makes you better as an investor. In the past couple of months, I've talked to so many investors who come with these patterns, and I'm like, “Man, that's not pattern recognition.” Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm being too dismissive of their patterns. It's just something I've been thinking about: where's the line between laziness and experience in using pattern recognition?

Let's apply this to AI. If you think about using LEAPS on Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Google—options are risky, and this is not investing advice—the reason I'm worried about that is that every time a new technology has come along, more and more active investors have been pushed out. I think the markets have gotten more difficult, and it's been harder to generate alpha.

I know there are disputes about that, but we've talked about this before, and we can talk about it again. AI—an LLM, or large language model; I can't remember exactly—but what it does is predict. How does it predict? It uses past patterns to predict.

So I am wondering if AI is going to replace investors because it's so good at pattern recognition. You could imagine that. Or, if the market is a competitive place, companies and investors respond to how other investors and companies are acting.

I'll give you an example. In the 2010s, companies got very good at giving investors what they wanted. Companies realized that investors were indiscriminately buying spin-offs, and in my opinion, companies started spinning off the crappiest businesses they had. They were spinning these things off and getting great bids and great multiples on them.

I think they were actually doing their shareholders a real service by spinning these businesses off and giving their investors a chance to dump their bags on event-driven investors before the businesses collapsed, or at multiples that were kind of unbelievable. You can look at the late '60s, when conglomerates were popular. Every investor wanted to bid up growth in conglomerates, and issuing stock to buy companies and create earnings growth got bid up.

In 2025, DATs were another example. MicroStrategy used to trade at around 2.5 times net asset value. The first couple of DATs came out and traded for huge premiums. So what does the market do? It starts pumping DATs until it kills the whole DAT game.

I can imagine a world where, as LLMs start investing and using pattern recognition, companies and investors stuff patterns down their throats. LLMs say, “Hey, historically...” You can imagine all sorts of ways this could happen.

I know quants don't just say, “We buy momentum.” I know they use thousands of factors. But I could certainly imagine that, as AI gets more and more involved in investing—especially as it starts taking over and kicking humans out—companies start saying, “If we increase our dividend, we get a much bigger bid than we used to.”

Companies, even companies in distress, start playing dividend games. They're paying out dividends because their stocks get bid up with dividend growth. They can issue equity into that demand, and they're trading way above fundamental value because AIs have pattern recognition with dividend growth.

You could imagine a lot more ways that could happen. But I wonder if AIs will replace investors precisely because they're such good pattern recognizers, and companies and investors start stuffing patterns down their throats. Maybe I'm telling myself a story.

I mean, AI is really good. Maybe it’s so deep and so sophisticated in its pattern recognition that applying my lazy investor pattern-recognition logic to AI is just silly, right?

The second way that AI could miss—I’ve mentioned this before, but I do think the future of fundamental investing requires stuff outside of filings. Whether that means going to conferences and doing checks and saying, “Oh, my God, when I talk to people on a call, it’s one thing, but when you see it at a conference, that’s something that’s very difficult for AI to do.” Or you could just imagine the old, “Hey, I met the CEO. I shook his hand. He has a firm handshake, and he looks you in the eye when you talk to him. This is the type of guy who wouldn’t screw me.”

So AI says the company is 50/50 on whether it’s a fraud, and then there are investors who say, “Oh, well, I met this guy. I met his wife. They’re living in a shack. They have no money. People think it’s a fraud because he’s stealing from his customers, and there’s just no way that’s true because the man lives so frugally. So this is a buy: 90% it’s not fraud, 10% it’s fraud.”

Those are 2 ways I can see AI not killing everyone. Number 1, it’s so good at pattern recognition that people stuff patterns down its throat, and it actually ends up underperforming, and investors pick up on that quicker. Or, number 2, there’s still lots of alpha to be generated outside the filings and in things that AI still can’t do.

Let me say this: I spend an increasing amount of time—I love anybody who’s got AI tips and tools. I’ve been spending so much time this year, so much more time, on AI and using it for summaries. I was very scared, right? I’ve been very hesitant to use it to summarize this earnings call, summarize this meeting, summarize this transcript, summarize this tender offer, or summarize this 10-K. In my core names, I’m still not really doing that with it.

But increasingly, I’m trying to get better at saying, “Hey, this isn’t a company in my core coverage, but this is a company that’s a competitor, or this is a company that’s a supplier or a noncritical supplier, whatever it is. It’s kind of the tertiary company. Summarize everything that it’s doing and tell me about it.” Then, if there’s something I need, I’ll go read it myself. So I’m trying to do that.

Once you get comfortable doing it, there is some risk: do you get too comfortable, right? But once you get comfortable doing it, I feel like a man on the Limitless drug. All of a sudden, your day—you’re reviewing so much more stuff and ingesting so much more information.

So I’m not an AI skeptic by any means. I’m using it like crazy. The tools I’m building for identifying the types of setups I like—it’s just crazy. So I’m not saying AI is worthless. I think it’s so, so good. I’m just thinking about it from an investing perspective. Once it starts getting into a metagame where people adapt and change and payoff structures change, I wonder if studying enough historical trends actually gets stuffed down its throat.

We’re almost at 30 minutes. I’m going to have to go pick up my daughter in a second, but I will mention one last thing because it’s been on my mind. These ramblings are supposed to be therapy for me, so you are my therapist, and I thank you for that.

One thing that is difficult as an investor is dealing with frustration: the frustration of selling a stock at $10 and having it run to $30; the frustration of thinking you should sell a stock at $10, holding it, and having it run to $2; or the frustration of looking at a stock and saying, “This looks really interesting. I think it’s going to work,” passing on it, and having it go from $10 to $30. It’s really effing hard, man. It messes with you, and it causes you to lose sleep.

One that I personally have been losing sleep over—I’m looking into it now—I did a post on March 16. So that was less than a month ago, right? I said, “Hey, Avis—this is CAR. I’m reading the post right now. It’s had this really aggressive buying from Pentwater, whom I really respect. This seems really interesting. The stock has been trading at $95. It seems really interesting, but I’ve gotten burned in rental cars before. Rental cars are a really difficult business,” blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, as we’re talking about it, let’s just do this in real time. April 13, market closed: Avis’s stock is $371 per share. So that’s a four-bagger in less than a month from when I said, “Hey, this looks interesting,” and I missed.

I even said, if you looked, “Hey, Pentwater has been buying. Between Pentwater and CAR’s largest shareholder, 60% of the stock is locked up. 50% of CAR’s free float is sold short. There’s the potential for a short squeeze here.” Guess what you got when you go from $95 to $360, $370, whatever it is? Probably a little bit of a short squeeze going on.

It’s just—I shouldn’t be spending any mental time on it, but investing is a frustrating game. And I will tell you what: a four-bagger inside of a month, even if you’re going to do it with a small position, will boost anyone’s portfolio, right?

When I start throwing out, “Hey, I think this could be a short squeeze,” guess how I would have played it? Shoulda, woulda, shoulda, coulda. And again, these are risky. I would have played it with options, right? You would have, should have, could have played it with options and said, “Hey, I think there’s a short squeeze. There’s a potential short squeeze, but we’re playing with options.”

So guess what? It probably wouldn’t have been a four-bagger. It probably would have been a 20-bagger. And just saying it, I keep thinking, on one hand, “Andrew, you didn’t really have it. You had a gut feeling and a hunch, and you didn’t—you can’t just speculate on things, right?”

I keep telling myself, “You need to give yourself the grace to forgive yourself. I look at tons of stuff. I can’t swing at everything.” I need to give myself the grace to forgive myself for that. But on the other hand, I’m like, “Damn, you know what? I would have liked a 20-bagger over the past month.”

Anybody who would not have liked a 20-bagger over the past month can stop listening. They can send me their information. I won’t invest if they wouldn’t have wanted a 20-bagger over the past month.

So, yeah, look, I have no answers. I don’t even know where I’m going with this. This is my monthly rambling, and it is the type of thing that, when you invest, it’s such a mental game.

Sometimes, when I’ve lost that and tried to turn myself into a robot, that’s actually probably when I’ve performed the worst. You have to accept it. You have to deal with it, and you obviously can’t tear yourself up, but you have to think about these things.

I think if you turn yourself into a robot and ignore them, then you don’t start thinking deeply about this stuff. That’s just been my experience. There’s this fine line to tread where you’re upset, you’re trying to learn, but you’re also letting it tear you apart. and now I have no clue where I'm going with this anyway This has been my monthly I'm ending it there we're just doing a fast end on me just rambling about my psychology I'm ending it there this has been my monthly ramblings for the month of April again if you subscribe follow rate review five stars only please it would just mean so much to me cuz I love this podcast I love my blog they they're some things they give me life I think they make me a better investor I enjoy them so much but the way I can do them more I can focus on them more get more out of them and if I get more out of them you will get more of them you will get more out of them is more subscribers more followers more readers all that sort of stuff so you rating subscribe reviewing really helps with that I appreciate you listening to my ramblings I will be back in May with another random rambling and we have some I I say this every month but we have some great great podcast guests and really interesting ideas I'm really excited for them coming up so I think you'll enjoy those and I look forward to talking to you then A quick disclaimer nothing on this podcast should be considered investment advice guests or the host may have positions in any of the stocks mentioned during this podcast please do your own work and consult a financial advisor thanks