BABAF - Portfolio Offense And Defense; Trade Based On What You See With Rob Isbitts And Matthew Tuttle

2023-07-27 08:00:00 ET

Summary

• Rob Isbitts and Matthew Tuttle discuss their investment strategies and the current market climate.
• Business trends, Elon Musk's influence, and the market rally.
• SPY, DIA, QQQ, potential market range, and the importance of treasury bonds.

Listen below or on the go via Apple Podcasts or Spotify .

Rob Isbitts and Matthew Tuttle return to discuss letting go of the reopening trade (3:00), whether Elon Musk is worthy of our attention (5:30) (SPY), (QQQ) and (DIA) - trade based on what you see, not on what you think (11:00) tech earnings, ETFs and treasury yields - portfolio offense and defense (27:00) and what they're buying and why (32:30).

Transcript

Rob Isbitts: So, welcome back. This is Seeking Alpha's Investing Experts Podcast and I'm Rob Isbitts. And I'm pleased to introduce my co-host, one of the sharpest, sharpest witted investors I know, my friend Matthew Tuttle of Tuttle Tactical Management. He is not only a Seeking Alpha contributor, he's in the industry, what we call that guy.

Well, he's that guy who took on Cathie Wood’s ARK ETF ( ARKK ) by creating an ETF called ( SARK ), which I happen to own personally right now, one of my inverse positions. And he's also that guy, that guy who created the Inverse Cramer, long Cramer ETFs. See, Matthew wouldn't want to talk about this because he doesn't like to brag about what he's done, but I can, I can brag on him.

And look, I know he has a lot more up his sleeve. I strongly encourage you to follow his work on Seeking Alpha and elsewhere, so you can see who he's going to call to task next.

As investors, we all need some myth-busters and folks who speak truth to the hype. And that's what I’ve tried to do, and that's certainly why I like doing this with Matthew. Matthew, how are you, man?

Matthew Tuttle: Doing great. How are you?

RI: I'm doing pretty good, pretty good. And I am, again, Rob Isbitts . I'm a Seeking Alpha contributor. Quick alert important name change announcement to make on Seeking Alpha. A few thousand of you, thank you, have gotten to know us as Modern Income Investor . The Seeking Alpha page, formerly known as Modern Income Investor is about to have a name change. We're going back to our roots, Sungarden Investment Publishing.

Sungarden has been the brand name of my firm since 2010. It signifies that our investment approach is about more than just me. And if you're wondering why Sungarden? Sun is for the Sunshine State, Florida, where I've lived for 19 – since 1997. Garden is for the Garden State of New Jersey, where I was born and raised. And so, I hope you'll consider following Sungarden Investment Publishing on Seeking Alpha.

We're going to do our best impersonation of the Fed. By that I mean, we're going to just keep poking at the bear until something breaks, okay? That's right up your alley. You ready to break something today?

MT: I'm ready to break a lot of things.

RI: Good. I'm going to quickly tell you three things going on in today's markets that I do not care about and then discuss each one with you to see if there's a reason that I should.

And then I'm going to tell you three things about today's market climate that I do care about and why and we'll debate that as well. And then, of course, we will finish up by naming names, which tickers we're following most closely, what we're buying and selling. And then we'll look ahead to our next podcast, which will be next week. Deal?

MT: Deal.

RI: Okay, good. All right. So three things I don't care about. First, CEOs pumping their business trends based on the so-called reopening trade. It's earnings season, right? So, the end of the pandemic is like supposedly unleashing all this pent-up demand for entertainment, travel, other forms of fun.

At what point do we let go of this? Is this going to go on for two decades? Like, oh, well, it's the reopening trade, okay? So, to me, this has just been another opening for, well, I should say less well-healed consumers to borrow and spend and borrow and spend.

So now, we had this consumer balance sheet debacle for so many years. They were given a lot of free money during the pandemic. The balance sheets for flush for the consumers and probably for some corporations, and then they spent through it again. What do you think of all this? Because to me, it's one of those things, every single day I see the headlines and I want to scream.

MT: Yeah. So, Cramer calls this his life is too short theme. And if you look at all the travel and leisure stocks, they look like AI stocks in the way that they've moved. And if you're asking when does this end? Maybe that's today. We're sitting here it's Tuesday and the airlines are starting to sell off.

I believe there was earnings from somebody, maybe Alaska Air ( ALK ). And I've been watching Airbnb ( ABNB ) as a possible short for a while. I think that's still doing well. But I personally shorted one of the cruise lines this morning in sympathy to the airlines, because again, I don't see why these stocks are trading like AI stocks.

The Fed is still going to raise rates. I don't think that's good for the consumer. Oil prices are starting to go up again. So, the answer to your question might be, today, we start to see the end of that.

RI: Okay, terrific. Number two, what do I not care about? I don't care what Elon Musk is doing or saying, in my opinion, and I stole this from a fellow named Ben Carlson. He and a guy named Michael Batnick do a terrific podcast called Animal Spirits, which is one of my favorites. So, shout out to those guys. And he started saying, this a long time ago, Elon Musk is the biggest online troll in the world, egomaniac.

And based on his moderating profit margins, when somebody says, wow, who do you think Elon Musk is? Is he changing the world? Hey, you never know. Maybe he will, and he already has in some ways. But is he going to change the world a million ways? I don't know. To me, at the end of the day, he's the CEO of a car company, not the future of everything, and he's got this little annoyance called X , which we used to know is Twitter.

And so, I guess, like to me, at the end of the day, I'm just looking for stuff that goes up and I'm trying to either short or avoid things that are going down and find things in the middle that I call too tough and move on from those quickly to focus on the buys and the sells of the shorts. What do you think? You are known for, let's say not being afraid to put your finger in the face of big, powerful, influential people that influence stock prices and market behavior.

MT: Yeah. And we're trying to get a 2x long and a 2x short Tesla ETF out. So, I mean, I think Elon Musk is awesome from the standpoint of - he makes this fun. He's a totally, completely different CEO , and I think that translates into Tesla's stock price.

And as a trader myself, Tesla ( TSLA ) is a stock I love to trade, and you compare it with ( GM ) or Ford ( F ) or Rivian ( RIVN ) or Lucid ( LCID ), it's just a much better stock to trade. And a lot of that has to do with Elon, and I would not be shocked if this whole X thing isn't a joke. And within the next couple of days, he says, just kidding and we go back to Twitter and the bird. And whether it is or it isn’t, I mean, he's a character, and I think you need that.

RI: By the way, I will say this, okay? Brilliant? Yes. Am I entertained by him at times? Yes. But at the end of the day, it's kind of like, can we stop with the noise and just like, let us do business here. But you're absolutely right.

With the volatility and uncertainty, I mean, look, that stock is not trading on fundamentals, right? And as long as it's not trading on fundamentals, it's probably going to be a lot more fun, isn't it?

MT: Oh, yeah, without a doubt. And now I think the Tesla bulls when it's going up and the Tesla bears when it's going down, would argue it does trade on fundamentals. They just don't agree on what those fundamentals are, which in and of itself is a lot of fun because you've got a group of Perma Tesla bulls and a group of Perma Tesla bears, and watching them fight it out, because sometimes I love trading, I love watching markets.

RI: Same.

MT: But sometimes during the day, stuff just flatlines and you need a little bit of a distraction. So, watching Tesla Perma-bulls and Perma-bears fight it out, that's better than any reality show.

RI: Yeah. Do you have to set your clock like your stopwatch? Like, hey, I can do this for three minutes, and after that I have to sound my own alarm or I'm going to really sap my productivity for the day.

MT: No, I mean, these guys going at each other are fun. I mean, I won't name names, but you've been on some of those Spaces, you know what I’m talking about.

RI: Yes. The Spaces that would otherwise draw a couple thousand people, like my hometown Miami Marlins do for a home game in baseball, but instead they draw a Yankee Stadium like crowd whenever Tesla is the subject.

MT: Yup.

RI: Okay great. Let me just – like you think back, okay, we both went through dot-com bubble and financial crisis and all that. What's the closest thing you've seen to let's call the aura of Tesla and Tesla stock going back?

MT: I mean, I can't really think of anything. I can't think of a CEO that has been this colorful and it's not a good example, but like, Jack Welch to GE, who was not this colorful, but certainly was the face of a company or Lee Iacocca from Chrysler, again, not as colorful, but the face of a company. I mean off the top of my head, those are the closest things I can come up with.

RI: Okay. All right, good. All right. So here's my third and final thing I don't care about. I don't care that the market's rallying and I'm talking S&P 500 here is supposed to stop. I'm a technician for 43 years. You are somewhere in that neighborhood. You're a little younger than me, okay, and so much better looking.

I see a shift going on right now. I've been tracking this shift on Seeking Alpha. If you want, I mean, look, I've written 160, 170 articles since like November or something, and the ones that I would say, I am most proud of are tracking this ( QQQ ) versus ( DIA ). I'm an ETF wonk, okay?

So, the Q’s and the DIA and, to me, this is what is helping the SPY continue to drift higher because just when the Q’s stop running straight up like a firework on July 4, okay, and then it crests. Well, and for a lot of reasons, my guess is, this probably has a lot more to do with hedge fund managers and pension managers playing catch up from what they didn't get the first part of the year because they were underweight Nasdaq and probably had their money in like solid cash flow, somewhat reasonably valued companies like a lot of the ones in the Dow.

But as far as I'm concerned, look, as a technician, yeah, the rally, it's so long in the two. There's so many sentiment and other things that would tell you yield curve inversion, so many signs that this thing should turn around. And at the end of the day, I do not care about any of that. If we go all the way up to the old highs at 4,800 and now we have a trading range between 4,800 and 3,600 from the lows last year, well, then that's what it is.

But I kind of feel like a lot of my fellow technicians are barking a lot about, oh, this is supposed to end. Well, it'll end when it ends. And I think you can identify with this, Matthew, that you can't tell the market what to do or you're going to have your hat handed to you.

MT: Yeah, I mean, there's a saying that I really love and I may have heard it somewhere, I may have made it up. So, for the sake of this podcast, let's assume I made it up. And that is trade based on what you see, not based on what you think. So what I don't like either is, well, every time this has happened, this has happened. And when the market does this, then it does this. And again, I'm looking at what I see. What I see at the moment is bullish. And I think if you are going to be a Perma anything, at some point, you are going to get your head handed to you.

And right now, I spend a lot of time on Twitter and there are a group of Perma-bears who are just getting savaged. And some of them have disappeared completely. And I really hope that those guys didn't blow themselves up, because another thing that I always found interesting and I know I didn't make this up, but the bears sound smart, but the bulls make money.

So, I love the Perma-bears, and well, the S&P is going to go down because of this, this, and this. I mean, it's great analysis. It hasn't happened. But again, I hope those guys are okay. But to me, you've got to be agnostic between long and short. You don't need to understand why the market is going up, but I think you do need a sense of the rotations, where money is going. You've talked about the QQQ versus the Dow.

And up until today where it's flipped, you've seen money going to the Dow lately. Whereas earlier in the year, it was going to the QQQ. We go down even to the sector level, where is money going? Because money moves around. It's not just these hedge funds, these money managers aren't just buying the S&P, they're buying everything else. So, yeah.

RI: Yeah. Well, so, I would say this, the one thing that I think is pretty good to be Perma in investing, and this is really about the only thing, I like being a Perma-realist.

MT: Sure. I think that makes sense.

RI: Yes. Okay, so let's move on. There are three things that I really do care about right now, okay, and I'd love your reaction to this. So, first is the Dow Jones Industrial Average, okay? So, I think you'll get a kick out of this one is will a lot of the Seeking Alpha audience.

So, I heard some younger investors chatting the other day. I can't remember exactly where, but they were lamenting that the market was down 2% that day and they had lost a lot of money in their trading account. So, I looked at my phone and I'm like, what are these guys talking about? 2%?

Okay. I looked at the S&P 500. I looked at the Dow. They were down like two-thirds of a percent, then I realized what they meant. They were talking about the Nasdaq. The Nasdaq was the “market” and then it hit me. You and I are old enough. We're both in our 50s. I'm almost not in my 50s. You got plenty of run left in your 50s. Congratulations. We are old enough to remember when the Dow was called the market, okay? And everything else outside those 30 stocks in the Dow was called the secondaries, remember that?

MT: I do.

RI: They were the non-blue chips, okay? So, for me, not much of that thinking has changed. It doesn't mean I discount the other stuff, but you could take the Dow 30 and throw on maybe another 20 stocks, some of the glamour stuff and some of the others. And I mean, not trying to make another NIFTY 50. But basically, look, I just don't think a lot has changed.

And again, going back to this DIA versus QQQ thing, there are times when the Q’s are flying, great. There are other times where you want to run the heck away from them and we'll get into that historical swing back and forth. Probably another episode coming up along with the inverted yield curve. I got two follow-ups for us for future episodes because I think they really could drill down questions for next time.

MT: Can't wait.

RI: Anyway, I kind of feel like I'm in the minority. What do you think here? And then I'll kind of give you my bottom line about what I think the Dow is, but I want to get your initial input here first.

MT: Yeah. I mean, all the indices, I think, are stupid. You look at the concentration in the S&P and the Nasdaq. I mean, yeah, it's 500 stocks in the Nasdaq. I mean, most people, I think, look at the 100 because that's what the Q’s are, but it's dominated by the Magnificent Seven . And then the Dow, the way it's weighted, I mean UNH is up 1% and the Dow is up like, 500 points.

And you're like, oh, my God, the market rallied today. The Dow is up, as everyone know. It’s just ( UNH ) had a good day, and that's the highest price stock in the index. So, I think they're all poorly designed. I think you ought to be watching them, but I think you get a much better sense of what's going on, looking at the equal weighted…

RI: For sure.

MT: …and looking at breath measures…

RI: And that's what I was going to say, okay? I'm thinking more in terms of, well, there's two ways to think of it. One is, lists. They're just lists, okay? 100 Nasdaq stocks although most of them don't count unless you're buying ( QQQE ), which is the equal weighted Nasdaq 100, which I think a lot of people who like Nasdaq investing, but don't like what's happened here.

Look, Nasdaq even had this first ever rebalancing, first ever of its kind rebalancing because some of the stocks got too big and it was starting to make it so that portfolio managers, pension funds, et cetera, would not be able to continue to hold the stocks because they were breaking their own diversification rules. They were undiversified.

So, I mean, I wonder if this is part of that bell they ring at the top, but I guess we'll see. I'm sure we'll come back to that another time. But when I think about the Dow, I'm really thinking about the 30 stocks. I know there’s a quirky weighting and all that, and there is an equal weighted Dow. There is a yield weighted Dow. It's ( EDOW ) and ( DJD ) for those who care. But I guess I'm looking at it as, like what is the stock market, okay?

Today, if you're an investor, and back when I was an advisor, I used to always say, there aren't many investors, at least there weren't at the time, okay? If you had your individual retail, high net worth clients, you're not saying, all right, I'm going to buy 6% of this one and only 2% of this stock for you because that's their cap weighting. You would equal weight or you would have a couple of tiers and that was it.

I think it was really the advent of something that we both hold dear to our heart exchange-traded funds, ETFs that kind of changed that, because now when you did invest in the market, you were automatically getting thrown into the cap waiting, and the more money that went into the cap waiting stuff, it created, if you will, a self-fulfilling prophecy, did it not?

MT: Oh, yeah. And not only that, but now you've got the dollar cost averaging. People do 401(k) contributions every month. So, it just keeps making these stocks bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Now, eventually that could cause a problem, but again, just because that could happen eventually, you don't necessarily need to be trying to trade that now, but certainly that's a scenario that ought to be in the back...

RI: So, I'm going to wrap up this one here, and get through the other two, so we can get to our – what we're buying and selling, okay? I'm going to keep my Dow. Thank you. I'm going to keep my Dow 30. I'm going to keep following them closely. You know why?

The bottom line for me, Matthew, is that the Dow is a great starting point to build around for a portfolio, okay? A lot of people I think I see things in the comments section on Seeking Alpha and it's like, well, the Dow, it's old and old fashioned old thing.

Yeah, but I'm not putting 100% of my money in it, okay? But when I look at it, I can see that I own 30 stocks very specifically and now I can work around it with full transparency, try doing that with a 500 or a 1000, Russell 1000, right? So anyway, I guess, I would summarize it with a food analogy because everything to me is either a sports analogy or food analogy. Dow is kind of like quinoa. It's kind of bland by itself, but it's a great base that you can build from.

MT: All right. I don't eat quinoa and I cannot remember the last time I bought DIA. So, there we go.

RI: And I eat my share of quinoa. It goes with the gluten intolerance. So, there we go. All right. So, next. On things that I do care about. I alluded to this before, so we'll keep it quick here. I'm going to, kind of call this like I see it here, Matthew, okay? The market range looks like it could be 4,800 to 3,600 on the S&P.

I think eventually, we'll see that southern boundary get sliced like it's Boar's Head meat at your local deli. When? Who knows. But the market's recognition there's a lot of consumer debt, student debt, corporate debt, government debt, and this is a hole that I think - logically - I studied economics. We're eventually going to have to climb out of that hole and that's going to weigh on sentiment, earnings, everything else and then we'll have a dotcom bubble style bust.

Until then, just like you and I are doing, grab all the tactical profits you can. Yeah. I might think bearish. I mean I think it's going to end up bearish, but so what? It doesn't stop me from making money right now and next week and two months from now and until it ends and kind of going back to what you were saying before.

And I think ultimately, we are going to have probably a two to three-year period ala the early part of this century where it's difficult to make money on the long side, tactical will always work.

But as far as when all this happens and how long you got to wait for it, I go back to Judge Brandeis from the Supreme Court and what he said about pornography. You'll know it when you see it. You'll know it when it's time. Until then, let's try to make money, however, we can. Thoughts?

MT: Yeah. I mean it sounds like you're reading out of the JPMorgan Playbook. Market's going to go down, I just can't tell you when. Very useful, thank you. But yeah, no, I mean it won't go up in a straight line forever. Again trade based on what you see, we've got a lot of data coming out today, tomorrow. We're in the thick of earnings season. You may get your southern border slicing later on this week. I mean, I don't think so.

RI: That'd be something for my portfolio let me tell you that. Because when you own way out of the money put options, okay, kind of like, hey, I always just say, my number one investment rules avoid big loss. Everybody figures out how much is big for them. Back then, I would set it for clients.

Today, it's a concept. But avoiding big loss is part of it, but the corollary to that is take big shots with small amounts of money, which is why I love way out of the money options. And I'm guessing you do too, either that or do you prefer your levered two, three times stuff?

MT: No. I mean, not even that. I mean, I'll trade options, but – and again, I move, I think, a lot quicker on – I'm more of a trader than you are. So…

RI: I'm swing out to long-term investing.

MT: Okay.

RI: Yeah.

MT: So, like for example, again, we're speaking Tuesday afternoon. Microsoft ( MSFT ) and Google ( GOOG ) earnings are tonight. I am sitting on at the moment, mostly cash, and I will probably raise more cash before the market closes just because I don't want to have a lot of exposure going into Microsoft and Google earnings . And I'll do the same thing on the Fed on Wednesday.

RI: And OMG, Matthew Tuttle what a perfect segue into my last thing that I do care about. What else I care about, Matthew? 4.82%, Okay, it's actually a little higher than that, I think, as we sit here. That's the yield on the two-year treasury closing yesterday, 4.82%. And for those of you who are listening to this who think, okay, well, how do I actually put some of this in a motion, okay?

I've got a thing called a Roar score, which of all my little creations, I think this is the one I enjoy the most because it's helped me make the most money and save the most money. Basically, take a sheet of paper, write two columns. One says offense, the other says a defense.

Let's say you got $100,000. Well, you know that for anything you put on the defensive side, you can probably get close to 5% by putting your money there, whether it's in T-bill out to two-year, even almost three-year oriented ETFs, you can do it with individual T-bills or short-term treasuries. I've never had more interest in the treasury auctions in my life, 37 years of doing this than I do right now. And you let all this malaise and confusion and things that just don't seem right historically and otherwise, let it all settle out, okay?

So, let's say that, again, it's offense and defense. But if the defense is paying you 5%, I mean for gosh sakes, you could put 80% of the money there, theoretically at 5%, and that's a 4% return on your portfolio. And then the other 20% gives you a lot of room to maneuver tactically, buy, hold, whatever. Okay. Why did I use this example? Well, Matthew, it's about broadly speaking, if you look at my whole portfolio, all the different types of accounts that I run for myself, and it's about what it looks like.

So, anyway, I figured I would kind of spec it out that way. Offense, defense, 80/20, at least for now. Ask me, in a month, it could be flipped significantly, 20%, 30% the other way, probably not going to be 100/0. So, this is what I care about, that there is no cost. In fact, there is quite a benefit to saying, I don't blanking. No. Just like you were saying very short-term about those earnings from Microsoft and Google.

MT: All right. I mean, I don't know what Microsoft and Google are going to say, and even if I did, I don't know how the market's going to react. And then we have Powell on Wednesday.

RI: We'll sure know by the time this airs though won’t we?

MT: We will, but I mean Powell same thing. I mean, I know what he's going to do, but I don't know what he's going to say, and I don't know how the market's going to react.

So, me being a short-term, guy, I'm going to go into those binary outcomes with a whole heck of a lot of your defense and not a lot of offense. Now, I will be ready to shift to offense if Microsoft and Google come out and say, “Hey you see what NVIDIA ( NVDA ) said. We're two times better.

And Powell comes out and says, you know what? I'm not in the mood to raise interest rates anymore. We're going to start cutting. Yeah, all right. I'll be ready for offense. But given that I don't know that that's going to happen, we'll go in with some defense first. Defense wins championships.

RI: The age-old expression, my friend, and look, like I said before, I'm everything from swing trading all the way out to long-term investing. And what you just described, we're kind of saying the same thing.

It's just that I'm saying for 80% of my money, okay, semi-retired, but working anyway, I want that base. Because not forever, but because the conditions right now, the long-term conditions, by the way, the roar score, I have a shorter-term, I have a weekly, I have a monthly, and I have a quarterly. So, it's different time frames.

But the longer you look out, the less certainty. And to me, the fact that you can get defense at that price, and let's face it. I don't think either you or I think we're going to have 15% inflation. And by the way, even if we do, there's ( TFLO ), which is a treasury floating rate ETF, which will ride up nicely along with those shorter-term ones if the short rates are going up.

So, anyway, let's use that as a nice way to dovetail on the last little segment here, what we're buying and why.

I don't mind telling people, I own T-bill, I own X-bill, I own O-bill. That is three months. That is six months. That is 12-month treasury bill ETF pays a monthly coupon. So, it smooths it out. You always own the current. There's not a lot of price movement there.

And I own plenty of individual coupon treasuries as well, as long as I can grab a 4% range. My wife loves this because she can count the money and see the money and project the cash flow and we think that's pretty cool.

I did cut my position in half after a nice profit in ( XLG ). Why? Because of what we talked about before. The XLG is an ETF that owns the top 50 out of the S&P 500, which basically is like the whole market cap of the S&P 500. So, earlier in the year, about four months ago, I thought it was a pretty good idea to, sort of crowd at the top. That was the vehicle in which I used to play it.

There are others. There's even one that just focuses on 10 FANG Stocks, ( FNGS ), not the one I own. And so, made a nice gain on that in four months, cut the position in half and made some room for, drumroll, please, no surprise, given what I said before, ( DIA ). I own the Dow now. I also own ( CAF ), which is a small cap ETF.

You have said many disparaging things about small-cap indexes. I agree with every single one of them. Although I did bring this one up, I think, last time, and you kind of gave it a passing grade, as I do, because it has more of an earnings revenue fundamental tilt to it.

I mentioned before, I own a little piece of ( SARK ), which is the ETF that you came out with. That's not why I own it. I own it because I like the idea that SARK as an inverse of Cathie Wood’s ARK Fund gives me effectively a levered bet if the market very suddenly falls apart and I don't have enough time to do other hedging.

And lastly, like I said, I own a lot of out of the money calls and puts on things like the ( SPY ), the Q’s ( QQQ ), the DIA, and that's what I'm buying and why? What would you like to share with our audience in that same respect, Matthew?

MT: Yeah. So and again, your swing to long-term, I'm day trade to swing. So, again, by the time this comes out, it could be different, but I've been doing a lot of stuff in Brazil. So, we own ( EWZ ), which is the Brazil ETF. We own Vale ( VALE ), which is the metals. We own Stone ( STNE ), which is another Brazilian company. Also been buying other industrial metals, Freeport-McMoRan ( FCX ) is one we currently own. Getting into a lot of the value stuff. So, ( BTU ) and coal, ( MOS ) and fertilizers.

Playing around a little on the long side with the regional banks, which is weird for me because I was shorting them most of the year, but we do own a little bit of First Horizons ( FHN ).

Been doing some things in China. So, we've been playing Alibaba ( BABA ). One of the things I like is, when you see a whole bunch of articles come out saying something is about to crash, that's usually a good time to buy. So, right around the time we're seeing all of the major media publications saying China is this, China is that, we started buying Alibaba, and that's been pretty good as well.

And some energy stocks. Exxon ( XOM ) we own, and we own my favorite, which is company ( NOV ), but that's reporting earnings soon. So, I'll be out of that one before earnings and hopefully back in after. So, that's a little bit of a taste and a lot of treasuries. We also own T-Bill. I have a bunch of laddered, kind of three, six, nine all the way out there. And yeah, that's what I'm holding.

RI: Great. Funny, I did not mention, but you mentioned it and reminded me. So, thank you. Added a smidgen of energy exposure this week. Did it through a pair of small positions. One is ( XOP ), the drillers ETF. The other is ( PDBC ), which is a non-K-1. So for those of you who hate filing the K-1 tax form, but I'm not giving tax advice, of course.

MT: Of course.

RI: Of course, whatever, not there's anything wrong with tax advice, but just not from us because we're not tax people. We're going to turn this into a Seinfeld episode before we're done anyway. Okay. Matthew, anything else that you would like to say before we roll out of here?

MT: So to me the biggest thing is going to be Microsoft and Google earnings. A lot of people were focused on Tesla and Netflix ( NFLX ) last week. The problem is, Tesla and Netflix have nothing to do with AI. Microsoft and Google do. This rally that we've seen, the past couple of months, I would argue is AI-driven and it brought Tesla and Netflix along for the ride, but they're not the important stocks that Microsoft and Google are.

So, I do believe their earnings reports are going to be very important along with the Fed, but also realize we've had a lot of weeks this year that you look at it on the outside, you're thinking, wow, this is going to be the most important week of the year, and it turns into a nothingburger. So, we’ll see.

RI: Over and over and over, agreed. One quick question for you on the way out, okay, to follow-up on what you just said, because by the time this episode airs, we'll know the answers to a lot of the stuff you just mentioned. Is there something as you look out to, oh, I don't know, the week of July 31, early August, right? I think NVIDIA is toward the end...

MT: You got NVIDIA coming up. Yeah, you got a lot of earnings coming up.

RI: So, is there another one in that batch that you would say that will not have been released by the time this Pod episode has that you really kind of got circled on the calendar?

MT: I mean, it’s really, it's the biggies. I mean, NVIDIA, Apple ( AAPL ), Amazon ( AMZN ), Google, Microsoft.

RI: Okay.

MT: I think those are going to be the most important.

RI: What some people call, the whole freaking stock market.

MT: Well, if you look at the SPY and the Q’s, it is.

RI: Yeah. All right. Well, thank you, Matthew, and thanks to all of you for listening to the Investing Experts Podcast.

Nothing in this podcast should be taken as investment advice of any sort and at times, myself or Matthew Tuttle, my co-host, may own positions in the securities mentioned. You can follow Matthew Tuttle and me, Rob Isbitts at Seeking Alpha. You'll find transcripts of all the episodes and we invite you to take advantage of Seeking Alpha to become a premium subscriber. Learn more at seekingalpha.com/subscriptions. From Matthew Tuttle, I am Rob Isbitts, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for listening.

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