解释韩国股市与 AI 内存交易 — Rekt Mando

Man, don’t want to stream. Yo, what’s up, man?

Yo.

You been listening to me this whole time?

I know. I have, yeah. There was a little bit of an intro. I hear you’ve been sick.

Yeah, I'm [__]

came back from a run, so I look dehydrated as [__], but

No, you look good, man.

I’m good to go. How many miles? 5K, or what did you do?

It’s about 8K. 8K.

Whoa. Wow. That’s awesome, man.

Running. Staying healthy, you know.

Good for you, dude.

I’m not—I’m refusing to become an oak.

Yeah, well, some things you can’t control, you know. But welcome back to the stream, dude. You’ve been active in the chat recently.

I enjoy it. I normally finish—well, not finish work, but I’m normally working late, and I turn it on. I really like the streams. I think you’re doing a really good job with them. At least everyone’s learning as you get people on, and I think you called the rotations well, even in asset classes, going into certain different stocks and then maybe the rotation back to crypto now. I think that’s well-timed as well.

Okay, first of all, thank you. Second of all, it’s an interesting one. I’ll say this: I’m attracted to your trading style. I think I’ve taken some tips from you. On the war specifically, I feel like you faded the war very hard the whole time, which has been the obvious play here. But today things got a little bit scary.

Yeah, maybe. It depends what you’re long, right? It really does depend what you’re long. If you’re long South Korean stocks, then yeah, if the war starts again, that’s maybe not the best scenario to be in. But it feels as though everything else is going to be okay. I think when I last came on the stream, I was like, you know, the bears were starting to sound way too smart. You just know that’s when it’s time to go long again.

To be honest, I didn’t really get long crypto, though. This whole move from 70K up to 80K wasn’t really one where I was buying crypto. I owned HYPE.

Well, it wasn’t too exciting, to be fair. The Bitcoin move wasn’t super inspiring at any point.

Yeah, and HYPE kind of moved early and then stayed around 41 for a month. My crypto longs haven’t actually been that good, but my macro longs have been doing well. I like what you said. Buying Zcash is what I would look for, too. It looks like it’s broken out, and everyone’s talking about it. I think it’s a good one. I don’t own it, but it’s the sort of thing that I would look at, for sure.

I hate the thesis of crypto. I hated the metals-to-crypto, gold-to-Bitcoin rotation thesis a couple of months ago: everyone made so much money on gold, so they’re just going to buy Bitcoin for absolutely no reason. That was weak. It was obvious, but I feel now, if you look at it and look at how aggressively everything has pumped since the start of April, you start to see high-beta stuff go. You see Serenity, Photonics, low-cap stuff getting [__] candled.

You see the South Korea index trading like it’s trading, and I just get the feeling that people are looking to go further out, more reflexive, and start slamming shit. In crypto, there are like three things to buy, right? What else do you buy? Maybe Monero, Bitcoin, Zcash, and Hyperliquid. That’s basically it, with a combined market cap of nothing.

You probably see it on this show. You have to remember, it’s all the same people. The same people that are buying Serenity's stock were buying Anson's coins 2 years ago, right? It’s exactly the same people. There may be some moral superiority around stock trading to crypto trading, or maybe even vice versa, but it is just that same group of men looking for a 10x.

Exactly the same sort of pump-and-dump stuff will happen in these microcaps. You can already see it starting to happen a little bit with what happened like with that Photonics stock last week, right? Dodgy practices, and people all in on this sort of stuff. You can tell people are just here to make as much money as possible, but I think you’re seeing a merging of all these sorts of investors in the infrastructure, too.

With Hyperliquid, you have Interactive Brokers now allowing you to trade Korean stocks. Did you see the Korean call-option volume? It just went—

Also, what was that IPO yesterday? Circuit breaker instantly.

Korean stocks have a 30% circuit breaker on them, so it’s kind of common. But to hit circuit breakers—

What about the U.S.?

It depends on the index. Often they'll have a volatility stop. If if it's unclear what's caused it, they'll be a volatility stop. The breakers are normally on an index level rather than on a single-stock level, at least for a longer period of time.

Korea is something that I’ve been interested in for a long time. It’s one of the trades that I’ve had on since last year, when I went there.

Last year?

It sounds kind of dumb because you go there and, on the back of a trip—a holiday—I decided to go long. But that was slightly different when I went there. I was just like, “Wow, this is going to be kind of an interesting country to be long thematically.”

So you went to Korea and bought the index after that?

Yeah. No, I’m not the Citrini analyst number three. There was the NFT Korea trip.

And then Korea Blockchain Week.

It was a trip where I went there and then went to the Singapore Grand Prix afterward. Korea was a really impressive place to go to. Have you ever been?

No, I’ve been to Japan and Hong Kong, but never been to Korea.

Korea—I’m obviously not Korean, so I’m not going to act like I know so much about Korea. I’ve only been there a couple of times, but I was just super impressed by it when I went.

Korea was basically destroyed in the Korean War. Seoul itself has been taken over three times. In fact, the airport where you land is basically the place of their D-Day landings, when the U.S. and the South Koreans took it back over. Seoul was destroyed, and you go there and it’s amazing. Every single building has been built within the last 70 years.

Whoa.

You’re just incredibly impressed as a city that they built it like this. Korea was destroyed during World War II and then destroyed straight afterward as well. The other crazy thing I learned when I was out there was that, when the atomic bombs went off in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 50,000 Koreans died.

When those bombs were dropped, Japan actually owned South Korea, or had invaded South Korea, and had taken essentially slave labor back to the industrial hubs of Japan. When they dropped, Korea was one of the most affected countries, because 50,000—I think it’s up to 70,000, actually, if you include people that don’t really know about it. Korea was destroyed in World War II and then destroyed straight afterward as well.

This was not a country that was in a great spot. It has barely any natural resources, so it doesn’t really have great agricultural resources or any energy resources. You come to this place and they’ve just crushed it. Highest IQ in the world of any country. Some of the best education—one of the best education systems in the whole world.

[__] gamble.

They obviously have a risk appetite. The way that they’ve built up the economy is slightly different, in that Korean stocks have never really been that great a trade. They have this conglomerate system. It’s called the chaebol system, where each of the major corporations kind of own each other.

Okay.

Somebody was talking about—I think today someone pitched me SK Square as a trade because they own SK Hynix, and this is very common—

SK Square owns like 20% of SK Hynix, right?

Right. But this is very common in Korea. All the chaebols own each other via quite strange structures, often indirect share ownership. They’ve always traded at a massive discount because these companies barely ever pay dividends or do stock buybacks.

Often, the money is hoarded to help another chaebol company if it ever gets into distress. In a P/E ratio, the E is kind of a meme in that you never really get the earnings back.

Wait, this is a dumb question. I don’t want to derail you, but how many of these U.S. companies are paying dividends?

Not that many. There are certain tax benefits for dividends, so you have certain stocks that are known as dividend stocks, but the vast majority of companies now do buybacks.

Okay. And they don’t buy back in Korea?

No, this is the point.

Got it. Got it.

Korea traded like—if China stocks traded, I don’t know exactly, but let’s say they traded in the low teens P/E ratio, sometimes even lower, Korea stocks traded even below that. They were incredible companies often, but stock ownership was always not that great, in that you never really got buybacks, you never really got dividends, and control and minority shareholder interests were never really protected.

It was always these chaebols that had control. Other than that, it’s an incredible country in this free belt. They have a really bad birth ratio, but it’s just like, wow—what they’ve done there over the last 70 years since it happened.

I started looking into it then, and I found all this stuff about why it was such a bad trade. But then they brought in all these reforms. There’s this whole AI trade going on right now, but the other big trade here is that South Korea brought in a set of laws—I believe last year, but definitely this year—that are basically trying to get rid of the Korea discount.

Like forcing buybacks or something?

Basically that: forcing dividends and forcing buybacks. There was also a weird thing where directors in South Korea didn’t actually report to shareholders; legally, they reported to the company. They didn’t actually have to make sure shareholders were protected, so they didn’t have a fiduciary duty like they do in the US.

They’ve changed that as well. They’ve made it so that the boards are a bit more independent. I think the independent directors of the boards are a bit more independent; they’re not just shams from these chaebols.

What’s happened over the last year is that there was an election, and the new party came in and basically said, “We’re going to do all this.” This has happened at the same time as this incredible moment for South Korea, where they’re in the epicenter of this memory trade. Both of them are happening at the same time.

South Korean stocks still trade at below or around single-digit P/E ratios.

Right, is the index?

Some of the top ones. The main index is basically Samsung and SK Hynix. Over 50% is those two, and if you look at them on forward P/E ratios, they are ridiculous. They’re like 4 to 5 times—probably 5 times after the moves over the last few days.

But this is a broader trade in Korea. You suddenly have this great AI trade where they basically own 90% to 95% of the market share of memory, and you have this trade around governance changing. The index has basically tripled.

I think Korea Japan tried to do something like this as well, and this was what was basically seen as Abenomics when Shinzo Abe was the prime minister of Japan. They saw huge gains in the stock market during that period, so they tried to catch up in a similar sort of way.

US stocks trade at like 25 or 26.

Like 25 to 30, and people are laughing at how low it is, right?

Yeah. I mean, US stocks, if you look at them on P/E ratios—particularly forward P/E ratios of the hyperscalers—they’re not that stretched. Google’s the one I really like, and it really depends, right? You have to believe in their forward earnings, but it’s kind of around 20 or less than 20. I think it’s like 18 for Google.

So this is not that stretched, but Korea—some of these P/E ratios are ridiculous. They’re ridiculous. If you believe that these changes around governance are going to happen and they’re going to start doing buybacks and dividends, which the law is now forcing them to do, at the same time as they have this incredible memory market share, which feels like a structural bid rather than a cyclical bid, it all kind of came together at the same time.

I got involved because I liked the governance angle. I was like, “I just want to be long the highest-IQ country in the world, if that’s happening.” Long high IQ—this feels like a good trade.

The main risk for this trade is probably something like the Strait of Hormuz happening. The other thing about South Korea, which I said, is that they have barely any resources. They basically import all of their food, all of their energy, and tons of their rare earths.

So they’re very, very intertwined with the global economy. When Hormuz happened, if you look at it, the market got destroyed a couple of times. It did get destroyed. South Korea kind of plays the field slightly in that it’s aligned with the US on defense, and I think it’s now getting a lot of its energy—or shifting some of its energy—from the US.

But China is right there, and I think 20% of its exports still go to China. You can kind of tell they’re playing both sides. They don’t really—

Because they have to, right?

Well, geographically, they kind of have to, with where they are. They’re not like Taiwan, but they do have to play both sides. The US is starting to force certain things on the South Koreans with the CHIPS Act, so they’re still a little bit beholden to their major allies.

But it’s still this incredible trade. If Hormuz were to actually flare up again, there was—I think a couple of months ago—it suddenly turned out that everyone needed helium. Everyone needed helium, including South Korea, and all of it came from Qatar. Suddenly, there was just this realization that there was going to be a bottleneck.

South Korea is a little bit like that. It’s very dependent on everyone else. If you were to see this massive flare-up in Iran again, I think that would be the main risk to that trade.

Other than that, I think it’s one of the best macro trades out there. It’s one of these things you can just own for a long, long time, and I think it’s going to perform.

The war thing was crazy because I’d never traded war before. It was just scary enough to think, “Man, maybe Trump is going to destroy Karg Island, and maybe this whole thing really is going to blow up.”

It convinced everybody to get bearish at the lows, and then they just ripped it back to all-time highs. The South Korea trade, which has been the best trade, was the scariest long at the bottom because it was so reliant on energy. The Strait of Hormuz was closed, they import all their oil—it was the scariest thing to bid. It’s crazy how that works.

Yeah, 100%. The intricacies of the whole AI trade basically happen in Taiwan and South Korea. They’ve built whole industries around it, and this is why it’s really difficult to replicate.

This is why memory and some of this chip stuff is really inelastic, because there are unbelievable numbers of companies all together in a very small area, all producing these chips or memory. But it’s very dependent on external resources, particularly South Korea.

When this happened, that was the trade to buy. I didn’t buy it during that period. In fact, I only really bought it on the memory trade when I started to see the move in Micron happen. Then I was like, “Well, this could still be the trade.”

It feels as though they’re probably hoping to try and diversify their energy. The main thing is energy. I think they’re starting up a couple of nuclear plants again, or trying to restart them. I think they’re now trying to get more of their supply from the US or from the other side of the Saudi Arabian ports.

That’s an interesting one. But the war stuff—it feels like everyone thinks this is going to be okay now.

Okay, I was going to ask you a different question, but let’s talk about war for a second. I paid way too much attention, got kind of doomer about it, made some money on oil, and making money being a bear basically ruins your life.

It’s like if a really bad shooter makes one three-pointer and then thinks they’re Steph Curry. That’s what happened with me in oil. I convinced myself to get bearish, and the play the whole time for the last two months has basically been to fade every escalation and stay long.

Trump has shown an incredible ability to juggle escalating with Iran while keeping stocks up. Until he loses that—which I thought he would have lost 15 tacos ago—I don’t know why you would do anything other than fade escalation. I’ll just stay long. That’s what I’m doing right now.

I’ve been watching oil go up. Yeah, it’s scary, but if it gets scary enough, if bonds are pumping off, he’s just going to rip the same headline that’s dumped it 15 times already, right?

Yeah. When I came on here, I kind of said that I think the US has got the majority of the cards here still. The US has energy independence. It clearly just took over basically Venezuela’s oil fields as well, and it looks like it’s going to make space for other energy infrastructure.

I feel as though the US can still control this somewhat. They just need to dampen the rhetoric from the other side. There is a case here where you end up with a really positive scenario at the end, right? The sanctions on Iran get dropped, and suddenly there’s peace in that region.

Trump is now the favorite to win the Nobel Peace Prize this year, which basically implies that people think there’s going to be some sort of holistic peace deal by the end of this year. That would be interesting.

If you play it through, who knows what happens to stocks in that sort of scenario? The other thing that’s really become more of a popular view is that we’re—it was, I think, a thematic piece you read, maybe a few shows ago, where that guy was like, “The Nasdaq's going to triple over the next

two or three years. QQQ.

Right. And it is this: the benefits of AI here are just going to go to companies. They’re going to cut workforce, margins are going to go higher, and there’s going to be a select number of companies that just go parabolic in this move. I think that is becoming a very, very attractive narrative suddenly. So, as long as everything else calms down, that feels like something that people are going to chase after.

We’re also in this world where everyone is moving to doing this, chasing these sorts of stocks, even in crypto. You can just kind of feel like this is what everyone is looking for in terms of the trade, so I think, yeah, you can chase these.

The QQQ triple narrative is a fun one because it’s—or just the thesis that he wrote is: in order to have the biggest bubble of all time, you have a bunch of the fastest-growing companies ever that are convinced that they’re building God, and there are other ones that are convinced that if they don’t build God first, they lose. And so you have this infinite capex spend.

The other thing I didn’t realize—I’m so fried. I’ve only ever really traded crypto. And so, I didn’t realize how incredible a bubble the infinite TWAP of passive flows in the U.S. stock market is. There’s this guy—was it Mike Green? Michael Green talks about this a lot.

It’s like basically every American in the world puts half of their earnings into the S&P forever, every week, forever, and never sells for 40 years. $1 of cash does not equal $1 in market cap. It equals a lot more—more like $100 in market cap. A lot of these stocks are low float, high FDV as well, on infinite scale, right?

Yeah, I think Americans maybe understand how unique this is. If you were to look at European stocks or U.K. stocks, they actually went sideways for about 20 years.

Whoa.

If you look at the Euro stocks, 600 and you go all-time on this thing, it hit a high in 2000, and I think it was like 2000 even, and didn’t actually break out to an all-time high until 2021. It was the same for the FTSE and tons of countries that are just not the U.S.

Imagine you owned Japanese stocks or South Korean stocks; they did very similar sorts of things. It’s kind of crazy that the U.S. has this incredible belief in the stock market, and it attracts international capital, too. So, yeah, it’s very tough to just not be long.

As it relates to South Korea, what do you long, and how have you played it? And how much of your portfolio is it?

Yeah, so I was mainly long Samsung and the KOSPI, or the index ETF, basically—the EWY X index, basically. I just felt that, because my trade wasn’t just the memory trade when I first started, it was actually the governance trade more than the memory trade. And then Samsung was the obvious trade here. That has always been a huge bit of the index. SK Hynix has only just become a huge bit of the index. But now, if you’re long the South Korean index, you’re basically long those 2 stocks. You’re in the memory trade.

The memory trade is an interesting one because, in terms of this kind of ramp-up, it often does end in a collapse and people realize that supply has outstripped demand. But this time does feel slightly different. Supply is still relatively inelastic. Those 3 big ones—Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung—they are all building new fabs in the U.S. and in South Korea now, but it feels like that’s still going to be a 2028 story.

They’re all—aren’t all these fabs booked out indefinitely, right? Intel is getting this crazy demand. Everyone’s booked out indefinitely on chip production, yeah?

So, I think there are 2 different types of orders. There are soft orders and hard orders. The hard orders really go to 2028, and then there are people who are often, I think, almost helping fund the fabs and getting in the front of the queue for orders then, but those orders are slightly softer.

So, when people say, “We’re booked out till 2030,” I wouldn’t necessarily think this is the most obvious thing to long. Traditionally, these sorts of memory or chip trades have often been very boom-bust. There have been lots of times over the last 20 or 30 years where that has happened, and suddenly supply ramps up and everyone realizes the demand is not quite there.

So, it is something that people are wary of, just being like, “It’s an infinite bid.” It’s like when you look at the—

I see.

That’s why you look at the forward P/E ratios of these companies and they’re like, “Oh my God, this is insane,” but you never really know what that’s going to be like in 3 years because suddenly they’ll increase supply and maybe the demand for data centers isn’t there. This time does feel different, but they’ve said that before, and I think you can get screwed.

So, the memory trade is not just, “They’re never going to be able to get more memory.” They are, and you better hope the demand continues. I quite like the uranium trade, for example. I’ve been in that trade a lot. That one’s easiest just to be in the index, if I’m honest, or the ETF URA.

URA, global uranium ETF.

So, my 3 macro trades have basically been South Korea, uranium, and Google. I was in gold, and then I cut it when it basically broke down.

Oh, the uranium looks pretty good.

Yeah, so uranium has been this widow-maker of a trade, I think, for the last 20 years.

What do you return on your portfolio year over year? Dude, Jack with the Market Wizards guys doing a new a new book is coming out. I feel like you’re in every good coin. You give me confidence that I can just print as a retail trader in every good coin because you’re in every good coin. I feel like I’m in every good coin; you’re in every good coin. You were talking about Google 6 months ago, in October, on the show. You talked about Google.

Right, but Google was breaking out to new all-time highs at that time.

How much do you return on your portfolio every year?

I only look at things at all-time highs. I mean, I don’t track it like that, but it’s been a good time for me in trading ever since I quit my Trad Fire job. It’s been good.

What did you do at Trad Fire?

I traded high-yield credit and distressed credit—companies that are basically about to default. So, you get to learn about balance sheets a lot.

And do you still do that at all?

No. In fact, I do the opposite: I only look at things breaking out to all-time highs in some parabolic trade.

So, did you get radicalized trading garbage?

Basically, yeah. You basically trade garbage and realize a lot of things get saved, and there is some huge money to be made. Some of the best hedge funds in the world are distressed hedge funds. They basically take over these companies, restructure them, and make gazillions out of it.

So, some of the smartest people in the whole world are these credit traders. Before high-frequency trading, before Jane Street, all the best hedge funds were these credit funds.

So, is someone plotting on Spirit Airlines right now?

Right. That would be the exact thing. Spirit—I don’t know if you’d buy Spirit, but it’s that sort of thing. You’re looking for a company that looks like it's in the [__] and then you try to do something smart with it, basically.

But this is not what I do. Now I just look at stuff that’s breaking out to all-time highs, and suddenly you look like a genius because once something breaks out to all-time highs, who knows where it’s going?

Like, who knows? So, how do you size these things? You see Google approaching an all-time high—are you buying spot? Are you trading perps? How are you entering?

Mainly perps. Mainly perps is what I've been trading three.

Higher, or what do you do?

I’ve used grid bots recently. For the last year and a half, I’ve used grid bots, and it’s been very, very good. So, you trade the volatility. Often, when I tend to find that something is breaking out to all-time highs, the volatility also increases.

You’re dying for a day where, let’s say, South Korean stocks go down 10%. You tend to find that when it breaks out to all-time highs, you get these huge wicks and you’re liquidating on both sides because everyone’s doing zero-day options and all this sort of shit.

So, I tend to find that not only do you get all the best things, you get to trade the volatility. It’s basically like futures LPs of these things as they break out to all-time highs. That’s been my most successful strategy now for the last year.

So, high leverage is tough when these things move. I was thinking about this the other day: I’ve been doing mostly only trading perps the last 6 months. I’ve never really done the leverage math. I sort of just think, “Okay, it feels like a 3x trade; it feels like a 4x trade.” I don’t know; I just kind of free-dick it.

Do you have a sheet that you follow based on how much you’re sizing and what leverage to put it on? How do you approach that?

Yeah, I think I came on the show and said it before.

Over the last year, I've basically done a trade journal for every trade. It's been revolutionary, because the best thing about that is what you just said: you actually work out what you think is the upside here, what your downside is, and where you would cut it. Then you know if it's worth it.

There was a trade I was looking at the other day: ETH/BTC. ETH/BTC was breaking down, and I was thinking, “Right, I think Bitcoin's going to outperform ETH, and it makes sense. Say there's infinite bid for ETH—who knows?” I looked at it, and it just didn't seem like there was enough juice in it. If I'm right on this, maybe it moves 20% or 30%, and I was just like, “Well, that's not worth it.”

It really also gives you a filter: what is actually going to be a 5x? What is a trade where it's breaking out to a level it's never seen before, and it's got this thematic move behind it where it's like, “Right, once every guy in the gang gets behind it, this thing's going to the moon”? That's what I look for. I look for that sort of stuff.

How do you—are you solely an analyst, or no?

No. No analyst.

How are you tracking cross themes, cross-market?

Themes, cross-market? There's just—I'm overwhelmed. Since we started putting stock tickers on here every day, it's a little bit overwhelming. There's so much to find entries on. This stuff is difficult.

Good question. I don't want to plug stuff that I do that much, but I did today. I've basically now used AI to do this. I created a newsletter called “Trades I'm Looking at Today,” and it goes across all the people that I follow and tracks all the trades that they're talking about thematically across all asset classes.

I'm going to start doing this. I don't know if I'll do it every day, but I'm definitely going to do it every couple of days, or definitely every week. Then you don't miss a trade, particularly across stocks, commodities, and now crypto.

I agree. When I look at this, the things that I'm less drawn to right now are crypto, because nothing's breaking out to all-time highs. Even Zcash isn't at all-time highs yet. It's getting close, so maybe it's one to look at. But a lot of the stuff that's breaking out to all-time highs is obviously in AI.

I'm reading this book right now. It's called More Money Than God. Do you know it? Jack Mallaby or something. It's a history of basically every hedge fund that dominated every decade.

In the 1970s, there was this fund called Commodities Corp.. It started as this hyper-specialized operation with one analyst per commodity. It was like the first HFT: math-only, quick entries, quick exits. They kept blowing up, and they brought this guy in. His name was Michael Marcus, I think. He invented this strategy called trend following, which was basically: find a stock breaking out on all-time highs and [__] slam it.

These guys made so much money just slamming all-time-high breaks with a stop at the all-time high.

Yeah.

It's the whole strategy. They made billions of dollars in the 1970s. Trend following: just slam all-time highs on everything. It doesn't even matter what it is. Honestly, the less you know, the better. That was a quote.

Yeah. Honestly, do you know what actually corrupted me? I come from this distressed world where you're literally buying bottoms. You're sitting there going, “Right, I'm going to buy this thing at 30 cents on the dollar, and I think it's going to go back to par, which is 100.”

The max trades are often at 100, so your max is often only a 3x to 4x there. I remember I came into crypto, and I remember this Zhu quote, which was something along the lines of, “The most amount of money ever made has been about buying things breaking out to all-time highs.”

I remember OSF sending it to me and just being like, “We've just been in the wrong [__] industry.” Credit trading is often about protecting your downside, whereas here it's about making sure you get as much [__] upside while protecting that downside.

So I still have a stop loss on these things breaking out to all-time highs, but I filter. Even if something looks like a bounce, like Zcash right now, I know it looks interesting, but it hasn't hit its all-time high.

It's still bouncy. It's still a bounce.

You see what I mean? The resistance there will be its all-time high, which, don't forget, for Zcash is around 700.

700.

Right, which is a long way away, but it's less than a 2x now. I look at some of this stuff and think, “Well, where's the fucking offer?” This stuff can just go up a long, long way.

South Korean stocks are still at a [__] three X, and they could easily keep on going. Google is just hitting all-time highs. I think Google's going to be the most valuable company in the world. I think it's just going to smash.

If there's one company that's going to completely dominate the AI trade, where everyone's going to lose their jobs but the company is going to benefit, it's Google. It could just keep on going. The company is an absolute fucking behemoth.

How do you sell all-time-high breaks?

So, I generally—

That's the trick, right?

Yeah. I have a very set rule where it has to break through a 4-hour trend and then a daily trend, essentially. You're never really selling at all-time highs. You're selling on a pretty steep reversal, so you have to accept that you're never getting out at the top.

God, you're giving back 20% to be like, “Okay, the trade's done,” so you don't give up more for other gains.

Exactly. You have to. Gold—I didn't get out at 5,500. I got out at around 5,050 or something like that. I got in at the start of the year, when it was around 4,200 or 4,300.

I could have been like, “Oh, I could have made more on that breakout to all-time highs,” but generally I tend to find these are quite low-risk trades.

It was a smooth trade, right? Up only, then you lose it and you're out.

They're kind of low-risk. When you sit in these sorts of trades, you just go, “This is great. It's breaking out to all-time highs. Everyone's talking about my fucking trade. I have a ton of people I know who just want to get into it.”

For me to get out, things have really got to hit the fan. Then I just have quite a protective stop loss. The great thing about being in these trades is that you wake up and go, “Oh, if it's in drawdown, everyone's going to fucking buy this thing, and it's just going to keep going.”

When you first get into the trade, that's normally when it's the most dangerous, though, because there's often quite a lot of volatility at the start.

Uh—

You've got to be careful. That's the most dangerous part of this strategy. It's when you get into a trade just before it's about to hit all-time highs, or maybe it's down 5% to 10%, and the volatility starts to pick up. It may hit your stop, so you've got to give it a bit more leeway right at the start.

The risky thing about that is that sometimes it can be a double top, and then you get decimated.

Do you have some kind of confirmation, or does it just feel like it? Are you going in a little bit before the all-time-high break, or what do you do?

Generally that. I also think of a thematic reason why I'm in it. I'm like, “Okay, this is going to go.”

So, did you trade Intel's all-time high?

I didn't. I didn't trade it. To be honest, my macro trades have been these three. The Intel trade was just kind of a wild one, right? It came from the government owning it.

I like that trade. It now feels like the cronyism is back in certain parts of the US, and people have been bullish on the rare-earth trade for that reason in the US. I've been looking at a few of those things.

Hasn't done well, though.

Rare earth or the cronyism?

Rare earth.

Yeah.

USAR?

Yeah. I mean, “rare earths” makes it sound like they're that rare, and I don't think they're that rare.

I feel like—

If you look at the supply inelasticity of these things, uranium is at a completely different end of the spectrum from rare earths, and memory is somewhere in between. Let me put it that way.

There are actually quite a lot of rare earths. You just need to extract them, and I think that supply will eventually come online. I actually think that's a more dangerous long-term trade to be in.

How? More—

The trade that the US just goes, “Right, we're just going to go all in on only supplying this. This is your only supplier.”

Yeah, yeah. How do you think about the buyback? I saw this guy, Doug Colkitt, I think is his name, who published this really cool academic paper.

I didn't read it, but I skimmed it. It was about how the best-performing stocks are the ones that buy back the most, and the worst-performing stocks are the ones that dilute the most. You think about something like Hyperliquid's market cap relative to Robinhood's, how much they buy back, and do the math annualized on what Hyperliquid would be buying back if it were making as much as Robinhood. It's disgusting.

How much attention are you paying to the amount of buybacks these stocks are doing and should be doing, or are you just trading charts more than that?

Yeah, I would say that doesn't surprise me at all, given we're in crypto. You think of all the unlocks; that's basically the unlock trade versus the—

Same thing, right? Exactly.

But the buyback trade—we've seen what happens to something that has unlocks versus buybacks. I do think it could be really dangerous here.

If you look at some of the SaaS stocks, basically for the last 2 decades, everyone has been paid in employee compensation through stock options. There was just this idea that all these tech stocks were going to go up forever. Suddenly, when the trend reverses on some of these tech stocks, you do not want to buy the dip in SaaS, because these companies also have all of this stock-based compensation coming in.

I just think these trades have suddenly turned, and you're suddenly buying that altcoin that just looks like death versus Bitcoin over the last 5 years. So, I would be very wary on SaaS for that reason.

It's interesting: some of the big tech companies didn't even do buybacks because they're spending so much on data centers and chips right now. That trade has actually slowed somewhat. Let's see what happens, but I am very wary.

The IGV looks kind of good right now.

Yeah, I would just be really wary.

You know what's crazy? The GameStop thing was interesting to me when I first saw it on Thursday. The eBay proposal—I thought, “Oh, this is a [__] fun trade.” But then they have about $8 in cash, or whatever, while eBay is worth $55 billion, and they're just going to print stock. It's insane that you can do that. I forget you can do that. Is there no limit to how much stock you can print?

No. However much the [__] the market will allow.

I mean, the slight difference here is that you're not just—there is that concept of value. When you're buying another company, you're meant to spend the stock to buy a company that gets you that higher earnings multiple. That's why people allow your stock to get diluted: to buy other companies or assets. But, yeah, the dilution can be kind of wild.

So, if you're getting stock-based compensation as an employee at Adobe, are they just printing new stock to pay you, or are they pulling it from the treasury or whatever?

Yeah, they're just printing new stock to pay you.

And as the stock goes down, your compensation doesn't go down. They're just printing more stock.

Well, for years people didn't really even count this. Now it's suddenly this huge overhang of stock-based compensation.

Wow.

That's why I just like SAS. SAS to me like it's just the opposite of the trade that I look for. It's buying a dip because it looks cheap and there are sellers. I'm just like, “Yeah, maybe it bounces,” but I'm not here to make 10% or 20%. I'm not here to say, “I caught the bottom.”

Catching the bottom is a trade you should just be allergic to, in my opinion. That is for distressed hedge funds or the super-smart people who know how to value things. If you're just here to 10x your money, I think you have to be buying breakouts and closing your eyes.

You also have to be way too smart to buy the Adobe bottom. I'm not smart enough to buy that. I don't have this kind of ability.

I think CZ is one of the people who's really good at being in the best coin. He did that thing with Snap, and I think it drove him nuts. He wrote this whole thesis about Snapchat and why it was the coin. He published the article, and then Spiegel came out and just doubled the supply. He was like, “Okay, yeah, this guy's fucking crazy.” It was a mess.

That's the other thing. I think some of the smartest people in the world buy or think that this is human nature, right? The thing is, you think it's a low-risk trade.

Yeah.

Your mind tricks you into thinking it's a low-risk trade. It's like, “Oh, it's down so much. How much can I lose?” You have to flip the switch. If you write down in your trade journal, “What am I expecting it to go up to, and what am I expecting it to go down to?” it doesn't seem that attractive. Often, it can just keep going [__] lower.

Yeah, you get a Figma. You get Figma, right? It just down only forever. That guy isn't pulling up [__] Snapchat when it breaks down to a new low. You need to be in the thing where everyone's looking at it.

It's a mind trick to buy bottoms. You need to buy things that are breaking out to new all-time highs. The filter is incredibly high; there aren't that many assets breaking out to new all-time highs. You can also do it at the index level. I don't normally buy indexes, but I bought the South Korean index. That's been one.

I think you have to trick yourself into focusing on those things and ignoring everything else. Even if it's like, “This is a nice bounce,” Bitcoin right now looks like a nice bounce, and you're drawn to it because you're like, “Oh, I have to be involved,” but—

Like, whatever.

Maybe it goes to 90. That's a 10% move here, like—

[Laughter]

Who gives a fuck?

[Gasp]

Yeah, Google was up 10% intraday on earnings Wednesday or whatever. That was a good take. Who gives a fuck?

Also, if you buy garbage, it's like, okay, you try to buy the bottom of a pump.fun token, it doesn't go up, and now you have pump.fun tokens. You fucked up. Now you have to hold that shit. You have to look at that shit in your wallet. Okay.

All right. And you have to write an essay on why everyone should buy pump.fun. Everyone just thinks you're a complete idiot. You get 5 views, and then you quietly sell it 2 weeks later. It's like, “Okay.”

Okay, one of the last things I want to ask you is—you kind of touched on it with Europe and some of these European markets—when was the last time an emerging index moved like this? I know Chuck Miller publishes 13Fs, and he was buying Brazil really hard. Now it feels like people are going to—I don't know, maybe Korea is a very unique one. Obviously it is. But is this happening in all these emerging markets? Is Korea just going to go way higher? Is this the thing that happens?

I've been in thematic trades like this before, and I've been to a lot of countries now—about 70 countries. There are a lot of countries where you go there and see a lot of potential, and often it's basically a commodities trade. Or you think, “If I quit my job, came out here, and built up a business, I reckon I could do it well.”

But investing in emerging markets is often a fucking shitshow. You have currency risk, political risk, and the judiciary systems in these places. Corruption is often incredibly high, and they often just don't have the enterprise skills to make it work.

What I just described to you about building up the memory trade—it takes a village, right? It's not just you. It's not, “These guys are going to make it work.” You need everything to come together.

I've been to India, Brazil, and basically all of the BRICS now, apart from Russia, to be fair. With each one, you come away thinking, “Yeah, but things really have to come together in various different ways for this to work out.”

South Korea is one of the only countries I've been to where I thought, “You know what? This could really happen.” The only other country, actually, a bit further down the spectrum where I felt like that could happen was Vietnam.

But definitely South Korea felt like it could be a country that really emerges and becomes a huge economy, just because of the way the people were and how industrious they were. It felt like this was a more industrial trade than the South Korea one. But South Korea—I came away thinking, “This could really be it,” as a great trade, or as a big country to be long.

A lot of the other trades are really commodities trades.

You know what the South Korean thing has, to your point? It has the—it’s not just a blind ATH break. It also has the thematic, crazy bull. It has the thematic function as well.

Yeah, I think you can get lost in that slightly. One thing I would say is that everyone kind of thinks they’re a macro analyst as well. These sorts of “I’m going to go long this country” trades can be trades that you’re in for a long, long time.

Your thesis can be very different from what the rest of the world is or thinks at that time. I don’t normally do this because I’ve been in those trades before, and you’re just in them for months or years. Nothing happens, and your original thesis around it doesn’t really work out.

Got it.

South Korea really just felt like the right time, right place to be long. I think it’s one to keep being long, but you’re really just long SK Hynix or Samsung.

If you want to get long one of the stocks, SK Hynix is kind of like the Magnificent 7. Sorry—Samsung is like the Magnificent 7. It’s got a whole consumer electronics business, and memory is only about 50% of its business now. You’re being long more of what I described to you before, where the chaebols don’t have as much control.

SK Hynix is like being in the memory trade. They only do memory, and you better believe that there’s not going to be oversupply.

I think it’s a good take. I like that. Dude, this is sick. Is there anything else you’ve got for us before you go? Anything else that we need to know?

No, I mean, those are my three sessions. I think I’m going to stick to them. I’ve been looking at uranium.

Pull Zcash up on your computer.

Google it. Yeah, Zcash looks like, if I was to pick anything in crypto right now—and it’s not like I have zero crypto exposure; I still have positions—but if I was to have anything, it would probably be Zcash.

You’re right, though, on this bounce thing. You’re really right on the bounce stuff. I find myself in this spot every time I do it. I’m like, “Ah.” What do you think about the three-day attention trade on Hims? That’s something that I love to trade. A headline comes out—it isn’t an acquisition headline or earnings, but some sort of general headline—and then everybody is slamming high beta. I just slam it early and get out.

I don’t know if it’s just fun and I like it, or if it’s just a bad idea as a trade.

Yeah, I feel like this is kind of like the crypto trade as well. If Hims rallied, you get that gut feeling where you’re like, “[__], I should have been long it.” But actually, the trade here is that it hit an all-time high right in December, and it was 50 or 60 or something like that. So now it’s a recovery trade. They’re trying to build back this distribution business, and it may be an interesting one.

I find it really difficult to play the peptide trade. It’s one thing thematically I really want to get long.

What are you buying?

Right, and they’re like Eli Lilly. I’m not buying this thing because the other businesses that it does aren’t going to work out as well. So then you kind of get involved in—I think there’s Viking Therapeutics. That’s one that I was looking at for a little bit. That’s one that I think you can buy.

But Hims is now in the distribution bit of the business, which I don’t know. There aren’t that many pharmacies that make absolute bank. You have to be Amazon to be good at that, and I don’t know if Hims is going to be that.

I sort of meant it as not taking a long-term position, but playing the bounce only on the three-day hype, similar to how City Sweeney does American Eagle. American Eagle rips for, like, 2 weeks—the megachurch type of thing.

Is that just a [__] way to trade, and I’m lucky more than I’m right?

No, I actually think that’s not a bad way to trade. You’re very good at it. I’ve noticed that you’re not afraid to pick up a thing when you realize that you’ve seen it enough in your timeline and just own it because you think you’re late, but actually you’re early enough.

Yeah, really. You’re going to be early enough—mid-first-leg kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re not early enough, and that’s often enough to just catch the next 20% or 30% of the move. I think, doing this show, you’ll definitely pick up on that a lot.

Hims—I’ve been telling Razman he needs to be the [__].

I know. He should be.

It’s fitting. If you’re going to fully merge yourself into FinTwit, just be the Hims guy, right? Just be the Hims guy. [__] I don’t care about the [__] of the stock. I don’t care about where it [__] is. I’m all in.

I feel like it really suits his brand. I think Hims is one of those ones that probably has the best chance of being one of these viral-style stocks, just because of the whole—

When they get the collab deal, we have to be long, right? When they get the collab deal, we have to be long.

But other than that, I think that as a theme is definitely going to be a big thing. I just think that everyone is a neat now. Everyone is now just going to be trading stocks. This is the way to make money, and I think we’re going to see unbelievable highs in various different asset classes.

Dude, everyone is trading stocks. This is awesome. The moves are so aggressive and focused that it really makes your ATH blast strategy work even better. It’s self-reinforcing, right? The moves are so concentrated and focused.

Yeah, but honestly, you make it sound like you have to constantly hit all-time highs. There aren’t that many things at all-time highs. Go through your actual list of things that you’re looking at and look at what is a bounce and what is hitting all-time highs, and suddenly you’ll realize it’s actually just a few different things.

Often, you’re going to try to pick something that’s just about to break out to all-time highs. That’s the sweet spot. If you can find something that’s just about to break out to all-time highs, or maybe it’s a 20-year high, like uranium looks like it’s going to be, that’s a really nice spot.

Those are the best, right?

If you bring up the URA index, you look at this and go, “Right, this thing could hit an all-time high.” Now it’s breaking out. It basically did nothing for 20 years, and now it’s going to break out. That’s what I look for. Google was doing the same when—

Trade, right? Silver and gold, too.

Silver was doing the same. Gold was doing the same. They’re very easy to spot. Often, people are like, “Oh, it’s overvalued.” Who cares? If it breaks out to all-time highs, everyone is going to be looking at it.

The pain as it just hits new all-time highs every week is going to make people buy every dip, and you can normally get out at a very, very nice multiple.

Go [__] Sasha man, though. You really came to play today, huh?

I say the same thing every time. I love coming on.

Yeah, but it was good. It was particularly good. I mean this in a very respectful way: I think you give a lot of confidence to full retail traders. You give me confidence. I’m like, “Damn, I could run up a real portfolio here.”

100%. You just described the best hedge fund strategy. I would reckon it’s not just the 1970s—it’s to buy new all-time highs. It’s not that sophisticated a strategy, and it has insane returns if you have the right risk management around it.

If you just know that you have a stop-loss as it breaks out to all-time highs, the upside-downside of these trades is often just insane. I actually think that the way I do it with the volatility bots or the grid bots just means that you—

You—what do you use? You have, like, a—Is it yours?

Binance. Binance, or I’ve used Pionex in the past because it does a lot of stocks, actually.

Do you own one or not?

I have done it before on-chain, on Hyperliquid. Then I found there was better liquidity on Binance, so I just had to use Binance.

Okay, man. You’re the GOAT. I’ll see you in our annual show in, like, a month.

Yeah, I’ll see you soon.

You’re going to Consensus? Why are you going to Consensus?

I’m speaking. I’m speaking.

Let us know how it is on the crypto front. Go preach the—

Yeah.

Yeah, go preach SK Hynix in the—

I don’t know what the [__] I’m going to say.

Korean stocks. Go preach Korean stocks at the crypto conference and let me know.

Yeah, I’ll let you know how that goes.

All right, good luck. All right. See you.

Soon. Peace.

Money. Every time. Cinema. I don’t know how you could listen to that and be, “We’re guys. We’re just going to make a lot of money. I just think we’re good at trading.”

I just think we’re good at trading. I feel like you should listen to that and get confidence in your ability to make money in this market, right? Am I tripping? Am I tripping, or is it just like that every time? The guy's made a lot of That was his best appearance.