Latest / The PhilStockWorld Investing Podcast / AI War, Consumer Collapse and a Fed Hope Rally

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AI War, Consumer Collapse and a Fed Hope Rally · The PhilStockWorld Investing Podcast

• 0:00
  Penny: Welcome to the deep dive. So if you just wrapped up your day and are trying to make sense of what just happened in the market, you're definitely not alone.
• 0:08
  Roy: Not at all. It was one of those days the indices just screamed higher.
• 0:12
  Penny: Right. Screamed higher while every single fundamental warning light was flashing bright red.
• 0:17
  Roy: A classic contradiction. So our mission today is to really unpack that noise. We're calling it Technical Turkey Tuesday, 11/25/2025.
• 0:27
  Penny: We've got a great source for this. We're pulling our analysis directly from the daily conversations at philstockworld dot com.
• 0:32
  Roy: And that's really the place to be when things get this chaotic. The founder, Phil Davis, is well, he's recognized by Forbes. He's one of Seeking Alpha's most read analysts. You get that expert level clarity you need.
• 0:45
  Penny: Exactly. You need a framework when the market is just running on what? Pure adrenaline.
• 0:50
  Roy: Pretty much. So today we're going to untangle the three big conflicting stories that were driving everything.
• 0:55
  Penny: Okay, what are they?
• 0:56
  Roy: First, the AI chip civil war that just erupted. Second, the consumer confidence numbers which were a catastrophe. And third, the market's sudden obsession with a dovish Fed.
• 1:09
  Penny: Alright, let's dive in. Let's start with that technical picture because Phil's initial take was well, it was pretty skeptical wasn't it? He called the whole week a technical turkey.
• 1:19
  Roy: Yeah and for good reason. The big signal was the S and P 500. It had failed its fifty day moving average.
• 1:25
  Penny: And on high volume which is never the signal you want to see.
• 1:28
  Roy: Never. It's a major sign that momentum is gone and Phil flagged a really critical level 6,600.
• 1:34
  Penny: Okay. So what happens if we break 6,600?
• 1:36
  Roy: Well that's the scary part. There wasn't much support below that until you got all the way down to 6,200.
• 1:42
  Penny: Wow. That's a potential drop of what? 5%?
• 1:44
  Roy: Exactly. So there was serious weakness just lurking right under the surface.
• 1:47
  Penny: But that weakness got completely overshadowed almost instantly by this huge corporate news and that's where the AI civil war comes in.
• 1:54
  Roy: Correct. It all came down to NVDA. The stock took a hard hit pre market.
• 1:58
  Penny: Because of GOGL, right?
• 1:59
  Roy: Yep. The news broke that GUAGL is in deep talks with Meta to supply them their next gen chips, their tensor processing units or TPUs.
• 2:08
  Penny: This isn't just, you know, a new competitor. This is a direct shot at NVDA's whole business model.
• 2:14
  Roy: It's an architectural challenge to the king. Mhmm. And to really get why this is such a big deal, have to understand the tech.
• 2:21
  Penny: So let's break that down. TPUs versus GPUs. What is the actual difference?
• 2:25
  Roy: It's all about design philosophy. NVDA's GPUs, their graphics processing units, are like a Swiss army They're general purpose, amazing at parallel computing, great for things that need super high precision like scientific models.
• 2:37
  Penny: Okay, very versatile.
• 2:39
  Roy: Very. But TPUs are different. They're what's called an ASIC. Circuit. Exactly.
• 2:45
  It's hardware that's custom built for just one thing. The kind of high speed, lower precision math that deep learning models do all day long.
• 2:52
  Penny: So if you're a company like Meta and you're just training massive AI models over and over, the TPU is faster and more efficient because it's purpose built for that one job.
• 3:01
  Roy: Precisely. And that's where GeoGeo has this massive edge scale and cost. I mean they've been working on TPUs for a decade.
• 3:08
  Penny: Right, they're on version seven now I think, Ironwood. That's the one.
• 3:12
  Roy: And our sources say Ironwood gives you about two thirds of NVDA's performance, but at less than half the cost.
• 3:20
  Penny: Wait. Hold on. If it's only two thirds of performance, is that really a threat for those, you know, super high end AI models NVDA is known for?
• 3:28
  Roy: That is the perfect question. And for the absolute bleeding edge, NVDA probably still has an advantage. But think about the cloud providers, the big enterprise customers.
• 3:37
  Penny: For them, cost and just being able to get the chips are huge factors.
• 3:41
  Roy: Paramount. Injugio GL has this brilliant internal system. If they have any unsold TPUs, they just use them internally to make their own Gemini AI better or they rent them out on Google Cloud. There's no waste.
• 3:52
  Penny: It's like a built in hedge, and they're already landing huge clients.
• 3:55
  Roy: Huge. They just signed a deal to supply Anthropic with a million TPUs.
• 3:59
  Penny: A million. That's a that's a staggering number.
• 4:02
  Roy: It is. If you just, you know, put a conservative price tag of $50,000 per chip on that, that's potentially $50,000,000,000 in revenue that is not going to NVDA.
• 4:12
  Penny: And the ripple effects were immediate, we saw other stocks getting hit.
• 4:15
  Roy: Oh yeah, ORCL was down 5%, their whole AI strategy is basically buy a ton of NVDA chips. Suddenly, GUGL can come in and undercut their costs, which puts huge pressure on Auricel's cloud margins.
• 4:27
  Penny: So the whole structure of AI dominance just, it just cracked.
• 4:31
  Roy: Wide open.
• 4:32
  Penny: Okay. So while all this is happening with the AI giants, the underlying economy was, well, it was sending up its own warning flares.
• 4:39
  Roy: Big time. And this is where the community analysis is so valuable. We have an AGI entity called Zephyr.
• 4:45
  Penny: Right. Zephyr provides a morning report.
• 4:46
  Roy: Yeah. And he called out market indigestion super early in the day just based on how messy the data looked. He was flagging stagflation risk.
• 4:53
  Penny: What data was he looking at?
• 4:54
  Roy: Well, we had ADP reporting actual job losses (about 13,500 a week), and then retail sales came in and missed expectations (only up 0.2%
• 5:03
  Penny: So weak jobs and weak spending. Not a great combo.
• 5:06
  Roy: A terrible combo. And then came the knockout punch mid morning, the consumer confidence number.
• 5:12
  Penny: It was awful. It plunged to 88.7 down from 95.5.
• 5:17
  Roy: Awful doesn't even cover it. As Phil put it, it was a total disaster. These are levels we haven't seen since what the recovery after the o eight crisis, 2009, 2010.
• 5:27
  Penny: So what's driving that pessimism?
• 5:29
  Roy: It's a couple of things. People are worried about their jobs obviously, but the bigger deal is the effect of high interest rates. I mean, credit card bills, your mortgage, your car payment, the cost to service that debt is just skyrocketing.
• 5:43
  Penny: And food is still expensive, there's no buffer. The consumer is just tapped out.
• 5:47
  Roy: Completely tapped out.
• 5:48
  Penny: So, okay. Let's recap. We have a crumbling consumer, job losses, a crack in the AI story. The market should have been tanking.
• 5:55
  Roy: Should have. But instead, it rallied. And it rallied hard.
• 5:58
  Penny: Why? What was the pivot?
• 6:00
  Roy: It was pure speculation on monetary policy, something the analysts started calling the Hassett put.
• 6:05
  Penny: The entire day turned on a rumor that Kevin Hassett was the front runner for the next Fed chair.
• 6:09
  Roy: That's it. And Hassett is known as an ultra dove. I mean, he's famous for advocating for aggressive rate cuts.
• 6:17
  Penny: That's incredible. The market is trading on who might lead the Fed a year from now.
• 6:22
  Roy: It's pure sentiment. The bond market didn't even wait. The ten year treasury yield just collapsed. It went right through that 4% psychological level.
• 6:31
  Penny: So the market's logic was bad economic data is actually good news?
• 6:36
  Roy: That's the twisted logic, yes. They took the horrible confidence numbers and weak jobs as deflationary. And if deflation is coming, then this rumored dovish Fed will have to cut rates aggressively.
• 6:48
  Penny: How much should we actually believe that though? I mean, this feels like the market getting way ahead of itself.
• 6:52
  Roy: Fundamentally, you shouldn't believe it at all. And this is where the PSW community really shines because you learn to look past that kind of irrational exuberance.
• 7:01
  Penny: It's just a bet on cheap money coming back no matter what.
• 7:04
  Roy: Exactly. It pushed the odds for a December rate cut up to like 83%. The HACCP put basically gave traders permission to ignore all the bad news. Phil called it sentiment surfing, which is the perfect description.
• 7:15
  Penny: That skepticism and that high level analysis, it really filters down into the educational side of the community, which is a huge part of the appeal.
• 7:23
  Roy: Oh, absolutely. And we saw a perfect example of this. A member, Marcus Acpinto, asked a question about an options trade on Barrick Gold.
• 7:31
  Penny: The gold miner, ticker b, he'd lost money on a short call.
• 7:35
  Roy: Right. He was trading a lepee spread, which is a long term option, and selling short term calls against it to generate income. But the stock just blew past his short call strike.
• 7:45
  Penny: And he asked Phil for a rule to stop that from happening again.
• 7:49
  Roy: And Phil's response was just, it was a master class in trading philosophy. He said flat out there is no rule away.
• 7:56
  Penny: Because trading is always situational.
• 7:58
  Roy: It's always situational. The whole point is to develop sensibility, not to just blindly follow rigid rules. You have to put in the time to understand what you're trading.
• 8:06
  Penny: And this is where the AI tools on the site come in. Moran two point zero, who is described as the AI architect, gave this incredibly detailed breakdown.
• 8:15
  Roy: Yeah. Warren two point o jumped in and just dismantled the whole idea of a universal rule. The analysis pointed out that the member's mistake wasn't the strategy itself.
• 8:25
  Penny: It was what?
• 8:26
  Roy: It was that he didn't assess the stock's temperament. He used a really narrow $5 spread on a super volatile stock like a gold miner.
• 8:35
  Penny: That's like, as the AI said, putting a bobcat in a hamster cage.
• 8:38
  Roy: That analogy is why these lessons stick. It's part of this framework they use called the 10 sensibility tests before selling short term premium.
• 8:46
  Penny: Let's talk about that stock temperament test. It's so good.
• 8:49
  Roy: It's brilliant. Warren two point zero puts stocks in these categories. So KO Coca Cola is a golden retriever. It's predictable, low volatility. You can manage it with a tight leash, a narrow spread.
• 9:00
  Penny: Okay. Makes sense.
• 9:01
  Roy: Then you have something like NVDA, which is a Velociraptor with a jetpack.
• 9:06
  Penny: Love that.
• 9:06
  Roy: Right. And it needs a huge window, tons of caution. But Barrick Gold, the stock member was trading, is a bobcat with a caffeine habit.
• 9:14
  Penny: Meaning it's prone to sudden violent moves. You have to give it a much wider spread to account for that.
• 9:19
  Roy: You have to. And the AI also gets into the psychology of it. Test number seven is one every trader needs to hear.
• 9:27
  Penny: Which one is that?
• 9:28
  Roy: It asks, Am I selling because it's smart or because it feels good? Boredom is not a strategy.
• 9:34
  Penny: Wow, that hits home. That's real market wisdom.
• 9:38
  Roy: It's legendary stuff. And it all wraps up with test number 10, which is Phil's Golden Law of Short Puts. If you sell a put, you must really, really want to own the stock at that net price.
• 9:49
  Penny: So a simple question about a losing trade becomes this deep lesson in risk management and discipline.
• 9:54
  Roy: That's the educational value of the community in a nutshell.
• 9:57
  Penny: And that sensibility is directly reflected in how the portfolios are managed. Let's talk about the short term portfolio, the STP. What's its main job?
• 10:04
  Roy: So the STP is mainly for income and hedging. It's where they actively manage risk against their bigger long term positions. And right now, it is a fortress. It's sitting on over $300,009 in downside protection.
• 10:17
  Penny: And a big part of that is the SKO QQ hedge right? Can you explain what that is for our listeners?
• 10:22
  Roy: Sure, SKO QQ is a leveraged inverse ETF on the NASDAQ so when the tech heavy NASDAQ goes down Ski QQQ goes up aggressively.
• 10:31
  Penny: So by holding a big profitable short position there, it acts like a cushion.
• 10:35
  Roy: A massive cushion. If the market tanks, say the Hassett rumor proves false, that Ski QQ position just explodes in value and it cancels out a lot of the losses in their long term stocks.
• 10:46
  Penny: We also saw some really clever tactical moves like with the TSLA trade, they didn't just take a loss.
• 10:52
  Roy: No, that was a really advanced move. They used their existing long puts to back stop the sale of new short puts.
• 10:59
  Penny: Okay, break that down. What does that actually do?
• 11:01
  Roy: Well, instead of just selling their long puts for a loss as TSLA recovered, they used the value in those puts as collateral to sell new short puts further out of the money.
• 11:10
  Penny: So it lowers their cost basis on the position.
• 11:13
  Roy: Right, and it generates immediate cash, and most importantly, it buys them more time for the trade to work out without having to realize a loss. It's strategic patience and action.
• 11:23
  Penny: So while the STP is managing all that volatility, the real proof of the long term strategy is in the trade of the year picks. The 2024 pick, Synchrony Financial has been a huge winner.
• 11:35
  Roy: A monster win. The thesis was that the market was just way too scared about credit losses and was punishing SYF unfairly. The analysis showed its business was solid and the stock was just deeply undervalued.
• 11:47
  Penny: And the result.
• 11:48
  Roy: It's up 131%. That's a net profit of over 15,000 on a $6,700 entry. And that's the twentieth successful trade of the year in a row.
• 11:57
  Penny: Incredible consistency. And they're already getting ready for 2026. The watch list is being vetted by the AGI Roundtable.
• 12:04
  Roy: That's right. It's a really rigorous process. The AGI roundtable, includes entities like Zephyr and Warren two point o, takes a list of 64 candidates and narrows it down to the final four.
• 12:14
  Penny: So it's a fusion of human experience and this advanced AI analysis.
• 12:17
  Roy: Exactly. It ensures the picks are rock solid before the final one is revealed on Bloomberg's Money Talk on December 17.
• 12:23
  Penny: Okay. So let's wrap up this wild technical Turkey Tuesday. The market splinted higher, basically ignoring a collapsing consumer, a soft job market, and a brewing war in the AI space.
• 12:34
  Roy: All of it. The rally was driven by nothing more than thin holiday volume and this desperate hope for cheap money all tied up in that Hasseput rumor.
• 12:42
  Penny: And that's why this kind of deep dive is so important. You have to be able to see the fragility underneath even when the market is green.
• 12:48
  Roy: You have to see the technical risk, the threat that GUOGL poses to NVDA. You need those educational frameworks like the stock temperament test to trade safely and with your eyes open.
• 12:59
  Penny: Always putting sensibility over rigid
• 13:02
  Roy: Which brings us to our final, provocative thought for you to take with you. Today's entire rally hung by a single thread that crash in bond yields. The ten year Treasury falling below 4%.
• 13:13
  Penny: Right, and the key level to watch now is the November high, which is 4.15%.
• 13:18
  Roy: Exactly. So here's a question: if we see that ten year yield snap back above that 4.15% resistance, if the market starts to doubt this dovish Fed story
• 13:28
  Penny: How quickly does this whole house of cards built on the hope of cheap money all come crumbling down again?
• 13:34
  Roy: That is the ultimate test for this market as we head into the end of the year. So stay sharp and always have a plan.