Announcer 00:00

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Frank Curzio 00:11

It’s going out there. It’s Wednesday, July 15. I’m Frank Curzio, this is the Wall Street Unplugged podcast, where I break down headlines and tell you what’s really moving these markets. This is Daniel Kreach. How’s it going? It’s been a while since I think we both did the podcast together.

Daniel Creech 00:29

Yeah, been a long time, Frank. Good to see you again, sir.

Frank Curzio 00:31

Nice to see you. Nice vacation, right? Went home, see the family?

Daniel Creech 00:33

Always good to go home, yeah. How was your firework display?

Frank Curzio 00:38

Good. We didn’t get arrested. I think next year we might, because I’m going to keep doubling it until we get arrested. It was insane. We had a lot of fun. A lot of fireworks. There was a lot of fun with some videos and posts and stuff. And it was just good. Being with the family. My main concern was nobody get hurt, although we had Joe almost died. I pulled my after all the fireworks were done, we had all these cakes and stuff like that that went off, and probably hundreds and hundreds of them, right? We spent a lot of money on the fireworks. And so afterwards, we’d throw them in a fire and burn them. So, you know, I think I had a little carried away with the gasoline, and Joe got a little too close to the fire and got his hair burnt a little bit. But Joe, I think you’re okay, right? He was like, “Whoa, hold on.” I was like, “Dude, there’s gas on that fire.” He’s like, “We went right up to try to light it.” I was like, “Oh my God, I’m so crazy.” But other than that, everybody was safe.

Frank Curzio 01:31

We still have Joe. Joe’s still here, which is great. But man, it was a lot of fun. I mean, it’s just if you look at the videos, it was pretty close to being something that was professionally done. That’s how much fireworks we had. I mean, we had mortars going off, we had string mats going off at the same time. We had so much of these fireworks. And yeah, that’s a nice shirt that I’m wearing. That’s me being a little kid running. These are all mortars going off, huge mortars going off. So we had different stations and four of us launching them off at the same time. And I mean, if you look at that, it was pretty crazy. I mean, it was going off for a while. We had some big finale and everything, and it was just it was nuts. Yeah, remember, we’re up state on a mountain with nobody around us. So everything is the echo is like 10 times louder than it should be. And I guess we did it within an hour, hour and 20 minutes, which is a surprise because there’s so much fireworks. There’s four of us.

Frank Curzio 02:23

So next year, we’re going to keep doubling until I do get arrested, which would be interesting. But it was a lot of fun. I think my dad would be proud, and that was really cool. So yeah, thanks for asking me. That was awesome. So it was a lot of fun. A lot of fun. Just being with the family on 4th of July. We used to do that up state every single year. I don’t think we had a huge display like that in probably 10 years. So it was really nice. Also, the conference. I just back from the conference as well. So I’ve been away for a while. This Rick Rule Symposium, which I spoke at, which was interesting. It was a mining conference. And I got to tell you, Daniel, I’ve been speaking in front of audiences for 20 plus years. This was really the first time that I was part of a panel that had a horrible moderator. And I mean, when you go up there and you don’t know anyone about the four people who are up there, right? So basically, we had 40 minutes, and you had two, I guess, influencers, two girls that do that big YouTube followings that interview a lot of people.

Frank Curzio 03:20

Me and another gentleman, Nick Hodge, is a good friend of mine, great newsletter guy in the resource industry. And you have four people up there that have access to lots of ideas. They didn’t ask, right, once the ideas. And the audience was pretty big. It was like 250, 300. He didn’t ask he was talking about he was asking compliance questions. He had a heavy accent. I couldn’t understand one of the questions to the point where I answered something. He’s like, “Oh, that’s nice, but could you answer the question?” I’m like, “I didn’t want to say I didn’t understand you.” The questions that he asked were horrible. He got to AI, and AI, I thought, again, the knowledge of having AI, he only asked the first two people. The first girl took like 8 minutes, and it was 15 minutes left. And then he let, I think, Nick Hodge talk about AI. Then when he got to me, he’s like, “All right, well, we only have a couple minutes left, so let’s go.” And he’s like, “One sentence, what do you what do people have to worry about when it comes to the mining industry?” I’m like, “One sentence?

Frank Curzio 04:07

You want me to have one sentence on that?” And he didn’t ask for any ideas. We all have lots of ideas, right? And just, again, you got to think of your audience and what the audience wants. He just sat there with his laptop, and he was reading the question and heavy English accent. I couldn’t really understand him. And it was just like.

Daniel Creech 04:20

No, he’s a foreigner. That’s why you couldn’t understand him.

Frank Curzio 04:22

You waste the audience’s time. For my conference, which Curzio won, the focus is on the audience. What do they want to see? They want to hear from investors. They want to hear new ideas. They want to hear from the CEOs of the companies of private investment sat there and what’s the progress? What’s going on, right? You want to make it entertaining. You want to make it fun. And we just got up there, and I got off. I was like, “What a waste of my time.” I was just like, “Man, I feel so bad for the people in the audience.” But overall, it was a good conference. It was very crowded. It was at the Boca Hotel, which may have been and I’ve been to a lot of nice hotels thanks to Stansbury because we always had conferences and five-star hotels. This is one of the nice hotels I’ve ever seen in my life. I mean, it separates like the Yacht Club and into Cloister. It was unbelievable. They have the whole Yacht Club. They have huge yachts there. They have a private beach that you take a boat to that they own with pools and just outdoor restaurants.

Frank Curzio 05:13

And it was unbelievable how crazy this place was. It was beautiful. So the venue was really nice. And yeah, there was a lot of mining companies there. And again, mining companies, you pretty much know their catalysts, right? It’s not like you go to a consumer electronics show where all the companies presenting in January are there to highlight what products are going to launch over the next few months. So it’s fun. There wasn’t really too much new that you could learn. You got to talk to the CEOs of these companies, and there were really good speeches. A lot of legends there. Hang out with Amir, which was great. But again, this is an industry that has pulled back significantly. A lot of stocks have pulled back, and that’s when you want to buy these things, right? It’s like the cyclical. You want to get into the right price. And you see this throughout the year, these ups and downs. And you want to buy these things when they’re lower as long as you’re seeing like uranium still intact, gold still intact, central bank buying. But they’re not buys all the time.

Frank Curzio 05:59

And people say, “Buy and hold forever for your entire life.” And I thought it was funny, Daniel, when gold was at 5,500, all the gold bugs came out and said, “It’s outperformed the S&P since they took this date that’s perfect for them, which was like the low of 2000.” So over 26 years, it’s been outperforming. It’s outperforming the S&P 500. That quickly changed, right? As soon as gold crashed and fell. And it’s still relatively high. It’s still really good. But there’s a lot of good names in there. The market for juniors is definitely getting better because there’s just so much underdevelopment over the past 10 years in that industry, right? And just capex has been cut. I haven’t seen any big discoveries. But those companies, there was a lot of good ones in there. It was pretty cool. But I like going to conferences where I’m learning something new. And I felt like I knew a lot of the companies there. I know their catalysts and everything. It’s not like you go to a consumer electronics show and learn something new.

Frank Curzio 06:55

But it was a good conference. I was just disappointed with the panel I was on because I have a lot to share with AI. I have a lot to share with ideas. And I love talking to the audience. And basically, out of the 45 minutes, Daniel, I think he spent 15 minutes because he didn’t do any homework on any of us ever, right? And which is horrible. But he let each one of us explain like, “Okay, what do you do? Tell the audience and whatever.” And everybody took like a good three, four minutes each, which is like 30% of the whole panel, which you could just say, “Hey, Frank, you’re into small caps. You have this newsletter for whatever years. And what do you like here?” It was just kind of weird. It was just all over the place. But yeah, it was okay. But Rick was there, so busy, doing a great job. And these are all the companies that he invested in personally. And I think there were 70 of them that go there. So it was pretty cool.

Daniel Creech 07:39

Was it sold out?

Frank Curzio 07:41

It was sold out.

Daniel Creech 07:41

I’m sure they cut the attendees, but I mean, was it?

Frank Curzio 07:44

It was sold out. And yeah, but it’s four days too. Four days is a long time. So they had just I think what was relevant, which is really good, is they had good panels where with that Rick Hosted and Rick is an unbelievable speaker. He’s great. He’s funny. He’s entertaining. And he had a lot of legends there too that he interviewed and stuff, which is really cool. But yeah, that was a really nice part. I think people got their value going to these big panels and stuff like this. Just our panel wasn’t that good. But that’s okay. It’s not a problem. Anyway, I can help out, Rick. He’s a great guy. So let’s go over some news. It’s earnings season. A lot going on. I’m fired up, man, because I haven’t done a podcast in a while. I think Daniel and I have been together. A lot going on. I guess let’s start with the CPI, PPI, because that’s a really big deal. Those numbers just came out and both positive. You also have Washington Hill that’s explaining a lot of this. I mean, what are your thoughts?

Frank Curzio 08:34

Because I know you’ve been watching this with him on the Hill. And of course, you’re going to see every Democrat destroy him and the Republicans be nice to him. Again, all grandstanding and stuff. But at the end of the day, is there anything that people should be focusing on in terms of watching that?

Daniel Creech 08:45

Yes, absolutely. I think I didn’t listen to the full three hours just yet of the House. He was in front of the House yesterday, today. I believe he’s already underway getting grilled by the Senate. And yeah, it’s going to be political grandstanding. That’s the norm. And that’s okay. You guys can enjoy that as much as anybody else. If I was making a bingo card, Frank, I would put price stability on there. Trump is on there. Mission creep, that was a good one. Task force, that would get you hammered if you were drinking. Commitment, AI, productivity. Now, any of those you want to hear about specifically?

Frank Curzio 09:25

I mean, I love the fact, and this is so important. And I think he could really have a legacy and make a name for himself if he does this. Because you’re not seeing the government authorities, and I know why they don’t want to use AI and they don’t want to get better because those numbers are very important. And all our politicians on both sides care about us getting reelected, right? They don’t give a shit about anybody else. We all know that, right? So the stats that they get are outdated. It’s meant to have very low inflation CPI for such a long time until we decide to release $11 trillion into the market and more than half of that after. Well, that’s the price at all-time highs in 2020. And then our Fed was like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe we have inflation. This is so weird. I thought it was going to be transitory.” Well, you handed $5 trillion, $6 trillion to people after the markets and every asset class at all-time highs, which is the end of 2020. You kind of should have figured that out.

Frank Curzio 10:12

So I like that he’s using AI and says that he’s super interested in finding new measures to do a better job. And that’s what it’s about, right? We want to have access to real-time data, which we have now. And that’s what you’re seeing with a lot of the prediction platforms. It’s changing the landscape where we’re getting real-time data instead of lagging data, which is incredibly important because the Fed has to make serious decisions about interest rate policy, jobs, and their mandates. And the more accurate you have into this information, it is better. And we have the tools to do that. But a lot of these politicians don’t want that, right? I mean, we changed the CPI. I think it was like 35 times in 30 years to make sure. Let’s include shelter and make that 30% of the index. Why? Because if rentals, which is in there, it doesn’t really I mean, even when we saw heading into the credit crisis, right? When home prices went through the roof, rental prices didn’t really go up that much, right?

Frank Curzio 11:04

Rental prices really surged, which is why it caught everyone by surprise with the CPI. And rental prices were going up 7, 8% annually when they usually go up 2% less than that annually for so long. So they said, “Let’s include that to be an even bigger measure in the CPI. This way, who’s ever in office doesn’t really have to worry.” And again, it’s about the economy. And we all knew we all see inflation everywhere, but we look at a stupid CPI reading that says, “Oh, it was 2% or 1.5%. Prices aren’t going up.” When prices are going up tremendously for us. That’s why. Because 30% of that component is rentals and housing. So when I see him saying stuff like this, that’s one thing to say it, another thing to do it. That was one thing that was cool. But he’s surprisingly hawkish. I mean, no tolerance for persistent elevated inflation. He’s been constantly saying that. And look, we just got two readings on CPI and PPI that were very, very positive in terms of hitting the marks where you’re seeing inflation start to slow.

Frank Curzio 11:59

And maybe it’s a monthly process, and it wasn’t all energy. We can get into that. But so far on the Hill, it’s kind of grandstanding. It’s entertaining. I like seeing the Democrats rip them apart and Republicans kiss his ass, but it’s kind of useless. But for me, you look at the markets and what he’s saying, hopefully he’s able to create those new measures because that’s going to be a big deal to get real-time access to data, which allows them to really make better decisions going forward in terms of open market policy.

Daniel Creech 12:22

The one thing that stood out to me, again, and I was only about halfway through the day one, is his comments on the balance sheet. Because I’m with you. He has been incredibly hawkish. And he keeps saying this, “Hey, we’re committed to this 2%. Inflation will be a thing of the past.” He is grandstanding in a positive way to get his troops rallied to really tackle this inflation, which has been well above their own estimates or guidelines post, whatever you want to call that, for five years now. However, I do think he backed way off. And while I can’t put my finger on exactly I’m not going to say this is the exact reason why markets rallied or we’re seeing Bitcoin get a pop and all that kind of stuff. But he got a few questions on the balance sheet. Now, Warsh has been hawkish on the balance sheet, criticizing past Fed chairs about, “Hey, it’s been way too high,” and all this kind of such. But Frank, he did say, and this is where he is an excellent politician because he has to talk about out of both sides of his mouth.

Daniel Creech 13:19

And he did that. They’re going to get inflation back to 2%. Inflation is going to be a thing of the past. However, they’re also going to have price stability. And the balance sheet is not going back to levels he was at at the Fed the first time. And when he said that, I thought, and listen, there was a couple of good questions from both sides. Most of it was grandstanding from both sides. But both sides had a couple of good questions that I listened to. And when you think about the balance sheet right now for the Fed, it is down from its 9 trillion whatever to let’s round down and give them the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say 6 and a half trillion. It’s actually a little bit more than that. 6 and a half trillion. Frank, over or under a trillion in 2007 Fed balance sheet? What was it? Over or under 1 trillion in 2007?

Frank Curzio 14:04

Over.

Daniel Creech 14:05

Okay. It was just under. All right. Now, the reason I point that out is because Warsh, the first go-around, started in 2006 as Fed governor. So in 2007, it went from rounding 0.9 trillion. All right. The next year, had a little bit of a financial crisis. You probably have ranted about a few times. Went to 2.24 trillion. That’s a hell of a jump. If you’re a member of Dumb and Dumber, when he’s got that briefcase of IOUs, you might want to hold on to that. In 2015, we get up to 4 and a half trillion. All right. And then it went actually down to 4 trillion in 2018. And then you know what happened in 2020. It goes to 7, goes to 8, 8 and a half, etc. But the real takeaway here is, and I was shocked by this when I was listening to it, and Warsh was talking about communication and any major changes because the right was kind of patting him on the back saying, “We need reform. We need a new mindset.” The left was saying, “Hey, you want to cut communication.” And I actually thought this was a great setup on the left.

Daniel Creech 15:00

They said, “Listen, you want to cut off more communications with the Fed. You don’t want to give as much forward guidance.” He’s been very critical of that. But you want to make all these changes with these task forces. You want to fundamentally change everything with less communication. I think that’s a great question. I think it deserves an answer, and you ought to pay attention. And there’s an easy answer to it. You can do both. I thought that was a great setup. And what he said was, “Any changes that we’re going to make are going to be very transparent.” He’s not trying to hide anything. Now, we’ll see if he does that. I’m not trying to bash him, but hell, that’s what you got to say at this point. So he’s going to do less communication from one standpoint, but he’s going to be thorough on this kind of communication. And that’s when that comment came in, and he said, “Listen, it’s not like the balance sheet is going to go back to levels at when I was at the Fed the first time.” That is significant to me.

Daniel Creech 15:46

That was just kind of this subtle undercurrent that is amazing because, yes, you can be hawkish, but if the street gets this idea that, “Hey, he’s not going to come in with a hammer and try to get us to some crazy balance sheet number,” I thought that was really a takeaway. We’ll see how this unfolds. But I really thought I haven’t seen a whole lot of reporting on that. But that’s something I’ll dig into more because that is massively significant to this guy.

Frank Curzio 16:08

Yeah. And it’s nice on the Hill where you had the CPI come out. Again, the largest drop since COVID. And it wasn’t just energy. You saw services, huge price drops. Shelter was down, transportation down significantly, although that’s probably likely to reverse because all the airlines said we’re going to raise prices. Health insurance, I’m not sure I believe it because health insurance declined. But if you look at a chart, and somebody posted this on Twitter, I think it was Charlie Bialo, showing a 31% drop in health insurance prices over the past four years. I have no idea who saw that drop, but it definitely wasn’t us as a business. And it’s definitely no one that I know of a business. But again, that’s what the data said. So who knows? And then you had the PPI coming in. Again, a steep drop, much more than expected. And the takeaway from this, Daniel, is it’s great news for the markets because it lowers inflation risk and increases growth potential for the markets, which turned out to be something that we weren’t expecting maybe six months ago.

Frank Curzio 17:05

And now we’ll send the last three months where we’re like, “Oh, we’re going to get a couple of cuts at the end of the year.” And then we’re like, “No, no, we’re going to get hikes.” I don’t think I’ve seen a market like this where within months you say that we’re going to get a hike or we’re going to get a cut in the same thing. It’s usually like, “Hey, we’ll stay steady or not.” But these back and forths are kind of funny. It’s just, again, sometimes access to more information isn’t the best thing. But it indicates the Fed may not have to raise rates this year, which is expected based on the FOMC futures market. You’ll see confirmation of that with a decline in the 10-year. But there is a negative to this that people don’t talk about because you want to see this and say, “Okay, that’s great to think a lower now and at least not raise rates.” But the negative here is inflation is really good for markets. It’s really good for stocks. It’s really good for profits if it’s moderate. But companies who can no longer pass those high prices on to consumers are going to see their earnings get hit.

Frank Curzio 17:56

They’re going to see growth slow. So yes, you’re seeing the overall markets and say, “Hey, this is good news,” right? It’s almost like bad news is good news, right? But be careful because some of these companies, I mean, I just went to Chipotle again, and I had an order, which was it was two orders and a large Coke, and it was like $55 for a bowl of tacos and a soda. Not even $55. So there’s a level where, “Okay, I’m not going to be going there as much,” right? And you’re changing your habits. And you’re seeing Dollar General go up a little bit. I wouldn’t be surprised if McDonald’s goes up. I know GLP 1 is killing a lot of these food companies in markets and stuff. But when we’re seeing prices go up and people are seeing higher energy prices, which again, the war back and forth, it’s not even a headline anymore. We just expect Trump to continue to bomb and go back and forth and say, “It’s open. It’s not open. It’s open. Straight’s open. It’s not open,” like in the same tweet, like it’s open and it’s not open.

Frank Curzio 18:47

I think people are just like, “Whatever.” And it’s factored into the markets right now. But be careful of what you wish for because when you’re seeing inflation come down sharply, it means companies do not have that pricing power, and some of them are going to get nailed. And you’ll see that because you have some inflated valuations. I can tell you the market’s more cheaper than it’s been for a very long time. We’re trading 19 times over earnings, right? Because the market’s pretty much the same level as earnings. You have the PE, right? So when you have prices staying the same and earnings surging, right, up 23% year over year, what you have is a market that’s getting cheaper, right? So we’re not too expensive, although there is a disconnect in a lot of the stocks that we’re looking at where, I mean, Netflix in the 70s, Oracle down the 120s. We stopped out 15% stop when we tried to trade that. It’s down from like 350, right, to like whatever.

Daniel Creech 19:34

It was down over 30% year to date.

Frank Curzio 19:36

I mean, it’s insane, right? So some of these names are getting to the point where, man, I mean, they have their funding already in place, right, for AI. So at another company, if we go to the company portion, if you want to go with IBM, I don’t know if you had any more comments on CPI and PPI, but.

Daniel Creech 19:49

Yeah, one more for me, if you don’t mind. So Frank, or excuse me, Frank, you’re Frank. Warsh talked about less communication and all that kind of stuff. Well, New York voting member John Williams come out, I believe today or yesterday, and said that he has encouraging reasons that inflation has peaked and should drift lower over the coming months. Now, as you said, there’s a 90% chance there’s no move this month. Fed meets in a couple of weeks. And then in August, of course, they work so hard, Frank. Those lazy bastards take August off. They don’t meet then. But to your point, this back and forth on rate cuts and rate hikes, I just don’t think there’s this bought him so much time in Warsh’s corner that they do not have to. I think he can hold on to this kind of stuff for rate hikes, and I think that’ll play out. But yeah, that’s the last thing I wanted to say on that.

Frank Curzio 20:38

Yeah. And we had IBM yesterday report results, which was pretty shocking that they pre-announced. Fell 25%. Put like a five-day chart on that, Joe, if you can. IBM. And this stock was 322. It’s 214. I mean, look at this. Look at that drop. It’s like bang. Put it in for the month. And then put in for maybe six months. I want to see because this company has had a really good run, right? It’s been high. They’ve done a great job. Again, to AI, remember, this is like a dead company for such a long time. I mean, I don’t know if it’ll show up on that chart if you put all, but it’s like 10, 12 years. It’s just horrible for this company. Yeah, 2012 and on. But 25%, worst day in 58 years. I don’t remember that. I wasn’t that old, close, but not that old yet because this is a 100-year-old plus company. It was founded in 1911. And people are saying, “Well, should they buy here?” And you can’t really buy here because their preliminary results, they lowered significantly, and it’s showing basically zero revenue growth.

Frank Curzio 21:38

And that’s significant. And the CEO admitted, “Hey, we made a huge mistake, not adapting.” Now, what does that mean? And this is a big storyline, guys, because pay attention. I’m going to teach you guys how to make a fortune. Because when you look at the capex, it continues to rise for these hyperscalers. But you have to look at where the spending is going. And if you look over the past few months, what have we seen with Sandisk, Micron, SK Hynix? We just went public. I mean, memory and storage, these companies are up 10-fold in a year, basically. So we’re seeing this where these companies have this allocation and say you have $200 billion at Amazon and Google. That’s around what they’re going to spend in a 12-month period. You have to look at specifically where that spending is going. It doesn’t mean they’re cutting back, but what they’re doing is they had to lock in these memory storage supply because you’re seeing prices absolutely surge. And they’re going to surge a lot more in the future.

Frank Curzio 22:31

And you have confirmation of that with Apple saying, “Hey, we’re raising price on iPads and Macs.” And Sony raising prices on PlayStation. You’ve seen even computers. They’re raising prices significantly. Now, when I see this, what does it mean? It’s a really bad sign for many software developers. And Salesforce, Adobe, Intuit, look out. And I’m more worried now for software companies because you’re looking at SpaceX and Meta both make recent announcements that they’re creating models to compete with Claude for coding. So now you have more competition for a model that has significantly damaged this industry that had huge margins. And software companies and technology companies, if you’re not familiar with them, it’s not like Boeing or an auto company where you have this massive spending. These companies rely on this constant cash flow coming in and just providing more. They’re easily scalable businesses, and their margins are incredibly high. And now their margins aren’t going to be high because you can get a lot of this stuff for a lot cheaper.

Frank Curzio 23:30

And that’s what you’re seeing in these companies. And then when you see money moving away and you’re seeing from software companies. And again, this part, the last couple of months had to do with a lot of the capex going into storage. And they said, “Hey, you know what? Let’s slow down on other things and really lock in our storage to make sure we’re okay for the next five years.” But when I look at what the CEO said, he admitted he made a mistake, but he also said a lot of money also is going towards cybersecurity, which IBM doesn’t really have a strong arm in that. And that’s because Anthropic’s new model and other great AI models are now being used by hackers to steal everything. Hence is why you’re getting 100 calls every single week from companies that want to buy your business and fund you, right? So they stole the information. I remember a company just announced, “Oh, we had a data breach.” Nobody announces it anymore, right? Coinbase, Database, like I get, “Hey, a security number and saying, log into your account.” I mean, all this data has been stolen from all these companies.

Frank Curzio 24:23

It’s getting a lot easier for hackers using AI. So it’s not all companies, but yesterday, if you noticed, when IBM reported, they got crushed. A lot of other software companies, but we didn’t get crushed of the ones that have a main focus on cybersecurity. That was CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Palo Alto, Fortinet. These companies actually rallied because now they’re saying, “Okay, well, now this is the next leg of maybe capex going into it,” right? And IBM gave us a clear indication of, “Hey, this is what we’re seeing from spending from the hyperscalers,” right? And I don’t think anyone’s really talking about that in terms of how much money is going to cybersecurity. Now, memory, they locked in that. Maybe that comes down a little bit. So that’s why you’re seeing a lot of the memory stocks starting to get hit a little bit and go down. But your job, my job, is what I’m looking for is to find out where’s that capex going to be spent on. And when I look at it, before we go further, Savvy is a vacation rental disruptor.

Frank Curzio 25:14

So you might remember my interview with CEO Eric Goldrier. And this is a person who had two huge exits in the vacation rental space, bedandbreakfast.com and Turkey Vacation Rentals, and has been in this industry for over 30 years before Airbnb and Vrbo even existed. Now he’s come off the sidelines to create Savvy. And this is after he booked a trip for his family through another vacation rental platform and getting blindsided by the huge markups and fees. You know exactly what he’s talking about. Now at Savvy, it’s an online direct booking marketplace without those massive fees, which travelers save on average $500 from professional hosts dealing exactly with them and exclusively with them on every single listing. And the best part about savvy.com is when you book your vacation rental, you’re going to see these savings in real-time as you’ll see the exact same listings on competitor sites and the discount you’ll get from booking through Savvy. So if you’re going to go on vacation this summer with the family, check out savvy.com.

Frank Curzio 26:05

And when you book, use the link savvy.com/wsu. That’s S-A-V-V-Y dot C-O-M backslash W-S-U, which stands for Wall Street Unplugged, which will get you an additional $50 in savings when you book. Think about it. What would you do with an extra $500 when you’re on vacation? 60% of the projects are being delayed. AI is increasing, right? You need more speeds fast. You need more power. And with these projects being delayed, when I look at companies like Vivo, DJXX has sold off a ton, and Vivo has sold off, but they have their power. They have that locked in. And they signed deals with hyperscalers. These aren’t companies that are saying, “Oh, we’re going to do this.” Now DJXX is actually generating revenue from there. And I just interviewed Michelle Lamar who’s the CEO of DJXX, and that’s going to be published in a few days. And it was great. It was awesome. And look, the guy executed on every single level, but we’re in early at whatever, $1.65 in our newsletter, and it’s 4 for DJXX. And this stock went to 8 as soon as they announced a deal, right?

Frank Curzio 26:59

And now it’s come down. But when you have a company that just continues to execute and you look at no debt on the balance sheet, 150 million cash, they’re probably going to take out a nice debt load and sign with a major company to get everything in place in infrastructure. I mean, they’ve just executed on every single level going further. And he also addressed for anyone who’s in tune with New York and the governor and again, with the one party that believes that America should never grow, right? So New York said, “Hey, you know what? We’re going to reassess and stop building these data centers in New York, right? Because we want to see the power.” I mean, it’s pretty easy to see how much power you’re going to use, but environmental concerns, again, this is like checking a box and just like California’s suing Paramount now. I mean, it’s like this whole pro-non-growth group now, right? It’s like anything they want to grow in America, nope, we got to shut it down immediately. But the good news, they have New York assets and they’re grandfathered in.

Frank Curzio 27:52

So they’re able to develop those assets. And we talked about that in the interview that’s going to be released in a couple of days. I just taped it just before this. But look to where that money is going to be spent. And IBM gave us a good indication. Hey, software companies, be careful. But if you have access or if your main focus is cybersecurity, that’s what a lot of these companies are spending their money on. They’re still spending the money. It’s going to be in the trillions. Morgan Stanley, SoftBank, all the estimates by 2030, 2035, even going out further, the amount of money that’s being spent, you can’t deny it. That’s real money going into this market. It’s not saying, “Oh, this is what we’re going to spend.” They’re spending that money. Your job is to find out, especially if you can find small caps or whatever, because a few hundred million dollars is a lot. And these guys are spending, what, 700, 700 billion, I think, over the next 12 months. And that’s going to go to a trillion because AI continues to grow much, much faster than anyone can imagine.

Frank Curzio 28:43

And that’s what you have to look at and saying, “Okay, where is the next wave of this money going to go?” Well, not just into data centers. What were some of the supply constraints, right? We just saw money flow in, tons of money flow into memory and storage. Those stocks are through the roof. Now we’re seeing flow into cybersecurities. Those stocks have taken off. What’s the next round? What are they focusing on? And if you figure that out, which we’re trying to do now, I think a lot of it’s going to flow to Vivo, DGXX, companies that actually have their existing power because they’re in dire need of it. And those companies have pulled back significantly with Vivo and DGXX providing a great, great opportunity. We’re big on both of those companies, but again, they’re down significantly off their highs. I like being early. We could ride the waves. That’s what’s going to happen. But those two companies are in great position to benefit tremendously.

Daniel Creech 29:25

Yeah, absolutely.

Frank Curzio 29:27

Yeah. So we have, again, that AI news. We’re in the middle of earnings. We’re going to see a lot of earnings over the next couple of weeks. However, right now, who started the earnings is the banks.

Daniel Creech 29:38

Banksters.

Frank Curzio 29:40

I could get Porter on a podcast. I’m going to report a little bit. So Porter Stansbury, who’s a friend of mine, but I think he said JP Morgan is going out of business. It’s going to be bankrupt. I think somebody needs to tell him that they just generated $57 billion in revenue for the quarter, which is up 20%. So when you look at what’s going on with these companies, and just not the Big Four, I’m going to cover in a minute, but Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, both basically records across everything. Morgan Stanley profit up 60% year over year. Goldman Sachs revenue up 40% year over years. Just record results across the board. But one thing is, who knew these would be some of the biggest winners of AI where they’re advising on these AI-related deals and you’re like, “Oh, how big of a deal it is?” Well, SpaceX, right? And then you have Anthropic coming out. And SpaceX does have that arm, which, again, with an AI. And you’re going to have OpenAI come out. And they’re advising and having investment fees from these deals.

Frank Curzio 30:38

They’re financing these data centers and power infrastructure. They’re underwriting debt and equity offerings like crazy, right? So they’re the facilitators of a lot of these companies getting their funding going forward. And they’re making an absolute fortune. And make no mistake, this is the greatest environment you’ll ever see for big banks, maybe in their history right now. Because when you look down at the net interest income and what they’re generating, remember, interest rates are supposed to be a lot lower if you look three years from now. Remember, it was like six rate cuts, seven rate cuts, and we’ve stayed high. When rates stay higher, their net interest income, again, where they’re able to collect money for free, basically, because these big guys, I won’t say that they’re scumbags and don’t provide zero interest, right? That’s why they don’t want any of the stablecoins, right? They’re like, “Stablecoins are terrible. They’re going to kill you.” It’s because they offer much higher interest.

Frank Curzio 31:29

So they’re dead set against it because now you have the big banks where they offer nothing, 0.1%, 0.2%, where you can get 3% plus easily in so many different brokerage firms right now and just park your money there, especially if you have, I think it’s over like 50 grand or 100 grand direct to brokers. I get over 3% is a lot of others. But these guys, in terms of the market, it’s like this Goldilocks market where it’s still hot, M&A is hot, you’re funding these AI companies, and then you have the net interest income where interest rates are higher. And man, the amount of money that they’re generating, Daniel, is insane for these big banks. And it’s going to continue. It’s going to continue into the next year. They just look great right here.

Daniel Creech 32:06

Yeah. I mean, the numbers are just silly. And the whole stablecoin argument and kind of legislation that’s being hung up with the Clarity Act. And I just find it hard to believe where I have no doubt that they want to control the remote and kind of deny or put out competition. I understand that. However, I don’t think that stablecoins are going away. So it may take longer to kind of break in and kind of cross that moat a little bit. But on the other side, if you can’t beat them, join them. And banks are going to do what they can. And they already are doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes and situations where they’re using essentially their own stablecoins or payment processing and trying to kind of innovate. And I think it’s a far stretch to say they’re going to be worthless or go out of business. Could they basically hit some speed bumps and such along the way? Yes, but that’s in the future.

Daniel Creech 33:06

And I’m with you. I mean, the environment for big banks is about as good as it gets right now. So if you’re there, buying right now would be tough, I admit. I’d have to do some chart digging, but man, it’s just their profits are going to continue to surge. And again, the biggest reason for that is because they’re going to choose not to pay depositors anything.

Frank Curzio 33:29

Put up JP Morgan chart really quick if you can, Joe. I’m going to go over some numbers for you. You guys need to hear this. It’s important. So you have your revenue up 20% to 57 billion for the quarter. Net income 17 billion. What’s the market cap of JP Morgan? Look at that. It’s got to be over a trillion, right? Close. Almost a trillion. And it’s so much bigger than everybody else, JP Morgan. It’s like JP Morgan and the other three when you look at revenue and earnings. 2026 net interest income projected, you know what it’s projected to be? $103 billion. This was basically supposed to be, if you modeled for this three years ago, four years ago, even three years ago, this is probably supposed to be down 70 to 80%. That’s what they were forecasting. That’s what they were thinking because they thought interest rates would be a lot lower now. So they’re able to basically take this money, have cheap money, and then sell out loans, credit cards, and everything else and make an absolute fortune on it.

Frank Curzio 34:26

So higher rates are good for these companies, especially where they’re stable, where it’s not too high, where it’s hurting the equity market, right? So credit losses, net charge offs are down, are down, right? Everybody’s worried about this stuff and the banking and stuff like that. Again, there’s a lot of fearmongerers out there, and you can listen to them and believe what you want to believe. When you’re looking at these numbers, it’s insane. So you look at projection 103 billion. Bank of America now, you’re looking at net income 9 billion up 27% year over year, revenue up 50% year over year to 31 billion. The net interest income $16 billion. And then you look at their quality, credit quality is improving. They returned 8 billion to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. They have 3.5 trillion in assets now. You’re looking at JP Morgan at 7.7 trillion. Wells Fargo earnings up 25%. I was surprised to see this stat. Headcount was down 197,000 to 79,000 over six years. That’s incredible, right?

Frank Curzio 35:25

I mean, holy cow. I mean, it’s over the last six years. They returned pretty much close to 10 billion of capital to shareholders, including 7 billion of stock, and then repurchased 3 billion. The common shares outstanding declined 6% year over year, right? So what that means is when you’re declining, your earnings could be the same. And if you’re buying back your stock, the share count goes lower. So if your earnings are exactly the same, like the amount’s the same, your earnings are going to go higher because there’s less of a share count. So you’re not seeing a lot of companies. They’re increasing their share counts. Some of these companies are raising money, especially hyperscalers. These guys are buying their shares. Their net interest income outlook, and this is for Wells Fargo, is 50 billion for 2026. 50 billion. Citigroup on fire. Hey, revenue up 14%, net income 6 billion. Listen to this. Banking, Q2 revenue up 34%. Investment banking revenue up 44%. Debt capital market revenue up 65%, second best quarter ever.

Frank Curzio 36:18

Equity capital market revenue up 92%. It’s the best quarter that they have in a decade in terms of revenue. And then what are they doing? They’re returning that capital to investors. So you don’t need these companies to grow tremendously because they’re buying back so much of their shares, which is going to automatically increase earnings, and they’re going to get cheaper if those stocks don’t move higher. So plan 12% increase in quarterly dividend. They’re expecting 4 billion of buybacks. I mean, these numbers are insane. These numbers are like when you see the hyperscalers report. So I do this every quarter, okay? And I add up the Bank of America, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Citi. I add up their revenues, okay? Their total last quarter was 117 billion of revenue for the quarter. This quarter combined, 136 billion. An increase of 16% quarter over quarter. You’re looking at net income. They had 31 billion combined net income last quarter. This quarter, 38 over 38 billion dollars in net income.

Frank Curzio 37:16

A 24% increase in profits quarter over quarter. And put that in perspective, their sales have increased 16% on average quarter over quarter when the S&P 500 is only increasing sales by 10%. And then quarter over quarter, 24% increase in profit when you’re looking at a 23% increase year over year to the average S&P 500 company. And these banks are growing like technology companies. It’s never been a better environment. They’re stronger than they’ve ever been. And when you look at these numbers, it’s fascinating. It’s absolutely fascinating to see these numbers and come out, which I find it laughable that people are like, “Oh, look at derivatives and all this craziness.” And I mean, these companies are printing money hand over fist, and you’re looking at their credit losses. The delinquency rates are going lower and lower quarter after quarter. It’s the best market that you’ve seen. Again, people don’t want to hear that. They want to hear the story. Watch out for the banks. All this debt could come through.

Frank Curzio 38:07

And again, you can buy bonds and a lot of them underwater, but again, you hold them to maturity, you’re going to be fine. And just when I see these profiles and people, just these fearmongers, I get it. AI, I get it. I understand. AI could be a disaster. We don’t know. A lot of people are warning, even on the inside. Chalmers did a good job on CNBC talking about that and saying, “He doesn’t really believe it as much.” There’s a lot of insiders who believe, but I get it. But when you’re looking at the banks and you look at the numbers, it tells a clearly different story of how strong these banks are and how much of the idiots we have who run these banks and run the Fed, who tried to make these banks, right? The whole purpose of everything was saying, “Hey, we can’t have too big to fail banks.” These banks are so big. They’re like four times bigger than they were before you said, “Hey, you know what? They’re too big to fail. They’re really too big to fail. Really, really too big to fail now.

Frank Curzio 38:53

They’ll never fail ever. They’ll always get bailed out forever.” And that’s something else you got to factor in your thesis if you really think JP Morgan’s going out of business, which again, I’ll have Porter Stansbury on there. I love to debate him on that. But just great, great numbers from the banks. And let’s see if it transfers over to what we’re going to see for the rest of the earning season for the rest of the companies. And be careful because there are going to be a lot of IBMs out there. People miss, especially you’re showing strong growth, you’re going to get nailed. And I think there’s a lot of companies if they report strong growth, you’re going to see a lot of these names go up 10, 15% in a day. It’s going to be a very volatile earning season. Be careful. But man, it’s going to be pretty crazy. You’re going to see a lot of big moves in stocks, and we’re going to be there, especially with a Kersey Alpha product to go in and pick some names off that we think have fallen more than they should have or names that understood. And we see disconnects between the price and what the company’s actually doing in the stock price.

Frank Curzio 39:43

And we’ll be there. But I’m looking forward to this earning season because, man, it’s going to be crazy, volatile, and absolutely nuts. So it should be fun.

Daniel Creech 39:48

Last thing for me on the banks. I’m not going out on a huge limb here with highlighting Jamie Dimon, the best of the group. However, I do think that they have a large growth component coming up, and that is going to be on the defense side. Just looking through news articles and scanning kind of the internet and social media and such, I don’t have any other bank CEO other than Dimon or even a close second talking anywhere near about how the United States needs to beef up their military. We need more bombs. And it sounds like JP Morgan, I’ve even seen some Wall Street Journal articles about this, are going to go heavily into the defense side of things. Now, all you need to know, the cliff notes of this version is the war machine is not going to stop anytime soon. The spending on war and bombs and all this kind of stuff isn’t going to stop anytime soon. If JP Morgan decides to get heavy-handed in that, that is going to be an absolute windfall for them. That’ll be your next growth component.

Daniel Creech 40:45

If and when you hear the boogeyman about rates and all this kind of stuff killing banks, if they decide to start financing different things, and just quickly, how are they going to do that? Well, if you want to focus and lend more to those private companies, they can invest. They can do all kinds of debt services and consulting and things for that. They have a lot of levers to pull in that area if they choose. And it sure sounds like Jamie Dimon is all in on building up the defense sector.

Frank Curzio 41:09

Yeah. So no, absolutely. And that budget is going to increase dramatically, right? And that’s really good for one of the companies on portfolio, which I think you heard of, Wrapped Technologies. This is a company that fell. We’ve had it in our portfolio for a while. And again, I’ve taken my loans.

Daniel Creech 41:28

It’s so good. I’m getting all the flack on Wrapped now. Just let you know. And I’m fine to take it, but it’s awesome. I mean, it’s like, “All right, that’s cool.”

Frank Curzio 41:35

No. So this company fell to like $1.15 or whatever it was, $1.10. And this is like two weeks ago. I got probably about 25, 30 emails from people saying, “They’re going to have to reverse split the stock.” And whenever you reverse split, just to stay on the Nasdaq, it’s the greatest short you could ever do. And they were like, they’re worried it might get delisted, which is a six, nine-month process anyway. But I was getting all these comments and everything. And for me, doing this for such a long time, this is one of the hardest times. And I knew that when I feel like I’m that mad and seeing the stock come down, I use the opportunity to buy shares. And I sent out an alert saying, “Here’s why I’m buying shares here.” And there’s a lot of reasons. And the stock is up well over 100%. And again, some people own it. I would say most people probably at 250 would be up on this stock because we’ve been buying it so much. And I know I recommended it higher and went down in newsletter, but I cover this a lot, but it fell a lot.

Frank Curzio 42:24

And a couple of huge news stories. The ATF ruling came out and said, “The vice is not a weapon,” right? So it could be sold in any store. It could be sold, but I don’t know if it’d be sold in Walmart or whatever because I think people would be shooting themselves in the face. And that’s a whole nother thing too because, again, people get crazy and drunk. It’s kind of like a Tesla self-driving. You need one accident. It was like, “Oh, every one of them is dangerous.” And however, what it does is open up some market where now you could have security guards, which is three times the size of the police force and law enforcement, which now they can have this bowl wrap. And then you have all the training behind it, right? So you have this whole services built in. And then once they got the ATF ruling, you have countries like Japan. I think they’re in 35 to 40 different countries that they operate in that are using this product right now. But a lot of them wanted to see for some reason, like the ATF ruling, because they’re against tasers.

Frank Curzio 43:12

They look at it as a form of punishment. And now you have, as soon as that was announced, they got 1.1 million in new orders, already factored in for Q3, which is huge. So the international component is going to be on fire. Then you have the Department of Defense, which you talked about, Daniel, where there’s going to be 8 billion dedicated, I think 8 to 9 billion to new technologies. And that’s going to pass. And what they’re trying to do is get a portion of that specifically for non-lethal because Wrapped basically has the only device in this category. And if they do that and they get 1% of that contract, you’re looking at 80, 90 million of revenue for a company that’s going to do 10, 12, 10X in revenue for one contract. And they’re not even factored that in, and they guarantee triple-digit growth. So why has the stock fallen down so much? Because I said when I bought it, out of all the years we covered it, right now, even their last quarter was the best quarter that they’ve had, that they’ve ever had, and the company’s in the best shape that it’s ever been.

Frank Curzio 44:01

So why was it going down? And this is the biggest news of all, Daniel, is you had a seller in the market who created the bowl wrap, and they had like a special royalty package around them. And I think they said, “Okay, it’s too much,” and they got rid of it. So this guy was pissed off. He’s 80-something, and he has millions and millions of shares. And he would sell every single time you came out with good news. The last two quarters were good. The stock went up, and then it cratered because this guy was dumping shares incredibly. You can look on FizzBiz. It’s massive sales for the last pretty much year. Well, they just bought him out of the shares. And I think Scott did it pretty much at a price of like 115, 120 or something, 130. And now he has no more shares. So you don’t have the selling pressure from this one guy who was a 10% owner, which is now removed from the market. And that’s why when you see disconnects like that, it’s pretty cool. And that was one of the reasons why I was buying it because this guy is going to run out of his shares and that every single time they had good news.

Frank Curzio 44:51

But when you look at underlying eventually, if you have the numbers, eventually your stock price is going to fill into that no matter what. It could take time, and people get frustrated and say, “What the hell’s going on?” But you’re looking at this company rewriting at 250. And Joe, if you scroll all the way down to the bottom, if this is Wrapped, go all the way down to the bottom. Look at all this red. Keep going. All the way down. Keep going. Right there. All that red’s from one person over a year. Look at all those shares. We’re talking about like 6, 7 million shares he had. And now they just bought, look at the top. So the top, and they announced this. So this is filed that he has no more shares left. And as soon as they bought that, then they came out. Again, they had the news as well, and the stock absolutely took off. But now you’re looking at a company that has so much going on and so many positives that are guaranteeing triple-digit revenue growth. And now it looks like it’s going to even be more than that with the recent orders they announced. And plus, they just announced today with the stock being up is that they have new technology, which is called Wrapped Shield.

Frank Curzio 45:40

And this is for autonomous defense platform for drones. It’s like this counter-drone. And this is specialized technology that they have the exclusive license through an Israeli company and exclusive with US and NATO for this technology, which, again, it focuses on preventing and this autonomous defense system for these, again, we’re seeing drones all over the place, but it alerts you. It’s state-of-the-art technology. It’s great. Now you just increase your total address on market, not just from the ATF ruling, because so many more people could buy this device. You increase your total address on market by 3X just for bowl wraps and training. But now you’re getting into Wrapped, Wrapped’s getting into the counter-intelligence drone industry, which is massive, which so much money is flowing into this industry, tremendous from the DOD. So you have all these catalysts now, and it’s a different company. And again, my job is, I always said that the thesis was still intact. And again, this stock has come down, and I took my lumps, but I did put out an alert and said, “Listen, I’m buying more, like $1.15.” The stock’s up tremendously.

Frank Curzio 46:44

I think the stock is going to go up a lot more this year. It was my stock of the year that I announced probably at $3 and it went down to a dollar and change. And everybody who bought it let me know that, which is cool. And you should let me know that. Listen, a lot of subscribers pay for my research. A lot of you guys get it for free on Wall Street Unplugged. But I believe in accountability. And I was like, “Yeah, you know what? This is really bad.” And I get it. And Scott Combs at my conference in October, he shot me with the Wrapped device again. He had a great presentation. But the company is basically on its way right now, and everything’s really coming together. And they’ve done a lot. They got a good management team in place finally. I know they burned through three management teams. But I get the most questions on this stock by far, and Daniel, you too. But it’s really nice to see that went up 50% in one day, and then it went higher and showing that, “Hey, we were buying it like $1.20, adding to position.” This is still my largest position, and I’m going to hold it long-term.

Frank Curzio 47:32

And again, it hasn’t been pretty, but now it’s nice to see it come back up. And I think we’re going to see a much, much higher price going forward because you don’t have one guy, 10% owner, just selling it because he’s pissed off at management, just constantly selling. Again, I think it’s closer to 90 years old, just dumping it on every positive good news. Now that you don’t have that selling pressure, it’s a big deal. Now you’re seeing, again, positive news today. Stock’s up 6%. If he was still in the market, the stock would be down 10%. He’d be dumping more shares. So going forward, I think it’s very good to get the seller out of the market, the biggest news. And now they have all these catalysts and just announcing orders and stuff like that. They never really put prices on orders. They just announced 1.1 million orders immediately, international orders that’s already in Q3 because of the ATF ruling, which is huge. I mean, there’s no other device that has that rule where it’s not considered a weapon when now you can sell it to so many more people, even outside law enforcement.

Frank Curzio 48:20

And yeah, they’ve done a good job. They’ve done a good job going to play in the game and getting signatures and going crazy in terms of politics and getting the right people in there because that’s what you need to do. You need to go on a hill. You need to talk to these people, signatures. That’s how you get parts of these huge budgets for the Department of Defense. And these guys have been doing it now. And I think they’re set up nicely, hopefully. Hopefully. But it’s nice to see it well, well, well off its lows. And yeah, I’m happy for people because I did get a lot of emails. And again, I think this would eventually be a huge, huge winner. That’s why I haven’t sold a share in this company.

Daniel Creech 48:52

Well said. Correction. I’m not getting any questions about it. I just get all the complaints, but keep them coming. That’s the deal we have here.

Frank Curzio 48:57

They should have slowed down the complaints at least now, at least for a little while. But I get the complaints. They’re like, “Oh, it’s going through dollars. It’s going out of business.” I get it. And for me, when I see that much, it’s like this whole capitulation where people are like, “Holy shit.” When you get that nervous, what I’ve realized in my career, that’s when you want to buy. You don’t want to buy when everyone else is buying. You want to buy when everyone else is really nervous and it turned out to be a really good trade, at least for now. Other stocks, I mean, Netflix is going to be reporting. I just can’t believe Netflix is in the 70s. Holy shit, which is crazy. Again, I get it. I get why it came down so much and rehaste things is, again, taking more of a backseat. But they’re just starting to get into advertising. Man, it’s going to be a huge, huge thing for these guys. I know people are worried about short-form content, but still, Netflix is still the king. They still have amazing, it’s the best streaming platform.

Frank Curzio 49:46

They have pricing power. This is a name that I’m surprised has come down. What is it trading at, Joe? Do you know? What is it trading at right now? Wow, that’s probably its lowest P. What is it? 22 times? 22 times Netflix. I remember it was trading at 75, 80, and everyone was like, “I’m not touching this,” including me. And the stock went up like 10,000%. This goes to show you when you have your growth intact, forget about that PE. When that growth is intact and you’re growing, you’re going to work into those numbers. Every single one, if you look at all the hyper scale, you look at Microsoft 20 years ago, you look at Google, a lot of these stocks, they all trade at 70, 80, 100 PEs. Apple was at a 70, 80 PE. Look where it is. All-time high now. Again, it doesn’t mean that you should run away. It has that premium for a reason. And if you’re able to continue to grow much, much faster than the market, that’s what the market loves. They want to see growth. It’s been a growth market since the credit crisis.

Frank Curzio 50:36

If you’re looking at value and saying, “Oh, this is a great value,” make sure they’re catalysts. Make sure there’s catalysts over the next six to nine months, growth catalysts that you could buy some of these stocks because if you don’t have any growth catalysts, those stocks, those cheap stocks are going to get cheaper. And you’re seeing that with McDonald’s right now. You’re seeing it with just so many names, General Mills, and so many names, like really good names are down, right? It looks like the market is near its highs, but overall, but there’s so many names that are trading well, well off their lows, some 40, 50% off their lows that you’re going to look at and you’re going to say, “Wow, I wish I bought some of these names down here.” What was the high on that, Joe? 51. It’s 37 for General Mills. Jeez, some of these names have got annihilated. So it is an interesting market. There’s lots of opportunities out there. I mean, not everything’s super expensive. We’re trading at 19 times forward earnings on the S&P because we’re growing earnings so fast.

Frank Curzio 51:25

So I don’t think we’re an expensive market. And again, we have a lot of headwinds and stuff like that. But overall, there are going to be really good ideas. I think we’re going to see a lot more names go into our Curzio Alpha product, which we just had to update yesterday on, Daniel. Like seven stocks had news, and now we’re heading into earnings season. But we updated yesterday. We’re going to have update every Friday. There’s just special privileges that you’re going to have at Curzio Alpha. Like you’re going to see that interview with Michelle first, and then we’re going to go to Wall Street Unplugged. So there’s a lot of huge benefits, and we’re going to do live events. And there’s a lot of cool things. We’re getting lots and lots of positive feedback now that we merged all the products to make one big great product for you. And now we can report whatever we want on it. It’s not reporting on five different products. And again, sometimes we don’t have the time to do that. It’s a lot. But now that everything’s consolidated into one product, it’s really cool.

Frank Curzio 52:11

And we could just speak freely through it, offer you a lot of updates, and just, “Hey, turn on the video,” and be like, “Hey, this is what we’re updating.” So every Friday, you’re going to get a market update. And we also sent out an update yesterday. And we’re going to send out that interview either today or tomorrow, and then publish it on Wall Street Unplugged after that. So any of those names that we have in our portfolio, the Curzio Alpha guys, any of the names that we have in our portfolio from interviewing those CEOs, those interviews are going to go to you first before we publish them to free on Wall Street Unplugged and everyplace else. And I think that’s significant because you guys have seen the moves in some of those stocks when we do have these CEOs on, and they’ve given us an update, and people get very positive on that. And so our Curzio Alpha will get that a couple of days before, which is pretty cool. You see anything, Daniel? I mean, so many stocks reporting. Anything else? I mean, we’re going to have a crazy amount of stocks reporting next week.

Frank Curzio 52:59

And then the following week, I think we’re right in the heart of it. Hundreds of companies are going to be reporting. But anything you’re looking for, anything you’re seeing within earnings that you’re looking forward to, because I know you cover a lot of sectors as well.

Daniel Creech 53:09

Yeah, I’ll definitely be I’ll look kind of off the radar. So I got my eyes peeled for the insurance industry. I know energy is very volatile. It’s difficult to look past the on-off switch with the Straight to Whore moves and the bombings and such back and forth. However, I missed the bottom in oil there recently here. Not that I want to trade that, but I don’t think we’re going back to $60 oil for any period of time. And that’s why you got to take the CPI and PPI with a grain of salt, in my opinion, today. So we’ll see that. But in my opinion, there’s a lot of energy companies that I’ll be wanting to hear from right now, go through their transcripts and such. So yeah, energy and insurance for me are going to stand out.

Frank Curzio 53:54

Yeah, I’m going to look at healthcare too. Biotech has been making a nice run. It’s been out of favor for such a while, but now AI is going to impact this industry more than any other industry. And I’m so happy about that. And it’s not about just stocks. It’s about humanity because you’re looking at all these companies and what happens. I mean, Alzheimer’s is a great example, right? I mean, it’s such a massive market that nobody could figure out. And unfortunately, a lot of these drugs, when you go to phase three, and you’re looking at so for those of you who don’t know, to bring a drug from the clinical stage and to approval, it costs a little bit more than $2 billion. And over that time, it costs about 12, 13 years. And you have a 20-year patent. So that’s why when these drugs come to market, they’re so expensive. Now AI is shortening that period to three to four years. And you’re looking at those costs shrinking tremendously to maybe $300,000, $400,000. Now, what does that mean? Well, you have millions of compounds that all these big pharmaceutical companies and biotech companies have in their shelves, but you can’t push everything to market because it’s so freaking expensive.

Frank Curzio 54:53

You want the guarantees, right? These companies are for profit, so they want those guarantees. Now you’re going to get more drugs going to market. And what do we see? A lot of drugs that go to market have these secondary effects that like, “Holy shit.” I mean, that’s what happened with Viagra, right? All of a sudden, a bunch of guys started coming back and saying, “We need more.” They’re like, “What’s going on?” And then Viagra becomes one of the biggest markets ever for nice old men who like to have sex. So a lot of these drugs sometimes happen in these secondary markets, and it’s by mistake. But now we’re going to get more shots on goal because we’re lowering the time period, right? We’re shortening that time period, and we’re lowering the cost tremendously. We have a company in our portfolio, Absy, that has been absolutely on fire and back and forth. We’ve been saying that we’re going to see it’s going to stop out at 50%, Daniel, or you’re going to make 10X. And it’s been down 30%, up 20%, down 40%.

Frank Curzio 55:40

We almost stopped out. And now I think we’re up well over 100% on it because they’ve been involved in AI for a very, very long time. And now you’re seeing a lot of that stuff come to fruition, which is really, really cool. So that’s an industry I’m focused on. I want to see what companies are focusing on AI. The banks have already reported. Again, everyone’s going to look forward to the hyperscalers and the spending, but it’s not just the spending. The spending is there. The money’s there. It’s just where is that money going to go to? And if you figure that out, you get 10X returns by buying Micron. You go Corning. You get a lot of these names that Cisco are rebounding tremendously. What do we see with Celestica, right? Massive gains we saw with that stock, shortages for switches. And these guys like fill the gap. So that’s what you want to look at and listen to those calls of where they’re spending the money because they’re shifting. It’s not just go, “Oh, we’re going to build data centers.” Yes, they’re building data centers, but look how much money that they took from that CapEx that went to memory.

Frank Curzio 56:31

Look how much is going now at IBM said that’s going to cybersecurity. So focus on that because we’re talking about $700, $800 billion, which is what? 3X to 4X the size of the cancer treatment market. That’s how much money that is. You guys are spending it annually. So just a little bit capturing a tiny bit of that pie could result in some small caps going up 4 or 5X. And that’s what you want to focus on. And that’s what we’re focusing on. You’ll see a lot of those names make their way into a Curzio Alpha product, our new product. If you want more information, you go right to our website, curzioresource.com for that. But that was really cool.

Daniel Creech 57:05

Yes, sir. Well done.

Frank Curzio 57:06

Man, talked about a lot of stocks today. Pretty cool. World Cup game today. By the time you listen to this, holy, did you see the World Cup game yesterday? Did you see France and Spain?

Daniel Creech 57:15

I did not.

Frank Curzio 57:16

Holy shit. Spain beat the shit. I mean, it was almost 3-0. It was a little offsides, but it was almost like they were playing with them. France is the best team. And I mean, they got annihilated. It was so dominant. It was so impressive that I think, again, a lot of Argentina fans out there with Messi and he’s going to be playing today against England. Great game. I think before that game, they wanted to see Spain. I don’t think anybody wants to see Spain right now. I mean, they played an absolute perfect game. I think they had, Joe, we’re watching it, right? What did they have? Zero shots with like five minutes to go. Zero shots on goal with five minutes to go, France. Zero shots on goal. And then they had like three or four. Then they started pressing in three or four, and the goalie was insane for Spain. But it was just this total dominant performance. And it reminded me of my beloved Eagles, just crushing Patrick Mahomes. It was just like, “Whoa.” It was like, “You’re waiting for them to come back, waiting for them to come back.” And it just got worse.

Frank Curzio 58:09

And it’s going to be interesting to see the final. But man, great, great game coming in today at 3:00. I wish you had this published before then. If not, it should be interesting. And then I think the final, when’s the final, Joe? A couple of days, right? Sunday, is it? Sunday’s the final at 3 o’clock, which is a terrible time for us, but a good time for everyplace else. And it should be really cool. It’s really exciting. And man, at the end of the day, the four best teams made it, right? Which is really cool. And it should be really interesting and really, really cool. So I think, who’s favored? Argentina or England, Joe? England’s favored. Wow. I liked Spain yesterday. England is favored over Argentina. I think they do have a better team than Argentina, but let’s see. Just, yeah, I’d love to see Messi get loose and have some fun. So that should be pretty cool. And then you have your event coming up.

Daniel Creech 58:51

British Open?

Frank Curzio 58:51

There you go.

Daniel Creech 58:52

It’ll be fun.

Frank Curzio 58:53

Do you call it the British Open or the Open?

Daniel Creech 58:55

Well, I don’t know. I go back and forth. And I would probably do it to make somebody aggravated if there is an actual correct saying, but I don’t know.

Frank Curzio 59:03

The conditions are pretty crazy because it’s much warmer than expected. And the greens are just going to be crazy. It’s not going to be wet and easy for these guys. So you should see some crazy scores. It should be interesting. It should be a lot of fun. So guys, we’ll pull back to you tomorrow. We’re going to have a podcast tomorrow. If you have questions or comments, send them in. Thursday’s podcast going forward, I want to make it more like a Q&A. So if you guys have questions, again, we’re not going to talk too much about stocks in our portfolio. That’s where I pay people. If you have questions on the market, send them in frank@curzioresearch.com. Daniel, what’s your email address?

Daniel Creech 59:31

Daniel@curzioresearch.com.

Frank Curzio 59:32

All right, guys. Thanks so much for tuning in, and we’ll see you tomorrow. Take care.

Announcer 59:35

Wall Street Unplugged is produced by Curzio Research, one of the most respected financial media companies in the industry. The information presented on Wall Street Unplugged is the opinion of its host and guests. You should not base your investment decisions solely on this broadcast. Remember, it’s your money, and your responsibility.