 Okay, welcome to episode 50 of the Market Maker podcast series. So, yeah, hard to believe we're at the 50 market peers, but here we are. And living up to what we committed to in our last episode, we put out to the community, people to email me in terms of their favorite episode. And yeah, the inbox lit up. There were tons of really great responses actually from people all over the world, which is just, you know, truly amazing when you get people messaging you from like Argentina, South Africa, India, as well as obviously in the UK, where we are, where the majority of people are. So shout out to Punnett, who is in India. He agrees with us about Tesla, doesn't like it. Also a shout out to Praveen, who actually reconsidered his Facebook strategy after you pretty much decimated them, I think in episode 47 about where they're heading, but he likes, he likes to Google play. And then Declan, Declan pretty much wrote me a thesis about all the different things you liked, which was, which was great. He actually really enjoyed episode 27 going all the way back when actually I did a conversation about trading crypto. And so obviously with Tim, yeah, our senior, our senior trader. So yeah, he said he got a lot of great advice out of that. So if you trade crypto, go back, episode 27, there's some really useful nuggets in there that will be really useful because I always think it's either complete novice or you're so that far down the crypto wormhole. It's hard to have a conversation with people, but Tim did a great job at giving an even-handed approach. But the person who I chose is on the call is Carti. So Carti, how are you doing? I'm doing great. I'm doing great this morning. How are you guys doing? Yeah, yeah, fantastic. And, you know, I chose you just to give this a bit of a stage here is that I remember you from when we, when we as the company were working with Credit Suisse, I think you were a summer analyst last year at the time. And I remember it was during the break. I was delivering a macro lecture. Everyone turned their cameras off. You left yours on during the break and I could see you beavering away on your laptop during the break. And I said, Hey, Carti, what are you looking at? And you said, Oh, I was just looking at you mentioned about the, the your curve inversion. I'm just seeing like what, what that is and how it works and when it's happened before and what the, and I was just like, well, this guy is serious. Like he's, he's really committed. And I remember you were always very, very much engaging when we were having conversations. So I thought that was great. And then, you know, you gave the shout out for the 10 year investment episode that we did where we gave a stock pitch, which was your favourite. But yeah, maybe then the purpose of this was to really give you a platform. So tell us a little about yourself and where you're from and where you study and we'll go from there. Yeah, no, I really enjoyed the Fridays we had at Credit Suisse. It's definitely like a highlight of my week to be able to trade using fake money as it were. But the bit about me. So I'm a PPE student, which is Politics, Philosophy and Economics at the University of Nottingham. And I chose PPE because I initially came from the International Baccalaureate, which is not so well known in the UK. But you just do six subjects with philosophy on top. And so it gave me a bit of a broader outlook on my surroundings. And then bit about me in my free time, I do loads of sports. I do rugby, karate, badminton and I do chess. I don't know if that counts as a sport, but we'll introduce it nonetheless. Yeah, the biggest one of them is definitely karate. I got my black belt when I was 15, but now chess is definitely taking a predominant role in the nationally ranked chess player now. So we're going on strong. And then, yeah, I started off just doing banking from internships. I got interested because my brother was talking to me about private equity. Something called a poison pill was the first thing that got me. Or a Pacman defense. So, yeah, I've watched the podcast a bit religiously when I'm just out for a walk or going to do some shopping. So it's great to be on it. Oh, that's that's incredible going from karate to and chess national rank. That's awesome. That that for me appears in about you. If I was interviewing someone that came up. Yeah, that's the guy. I think my position on this podcast, I feel threatened. I'm not here to take your position, Piers. So where's where's actually home for you? Are you you in not are you from Nottingham or? Yes, so currently right now I'm in my Nottingham studio, but I live in South East London in Lewisham. Yeah, so that's home and I'm from Jamaica and Ghana. OK, yeah, cool. I now know why one of the reasons why you've picked and was a uni in Nottingham, right? Oh, yeah. You just missed him, though, because he graduated about 71 years ago. And I and I used to live in Southeast London. So, yeah, there's nothing like keeping it keeping it within your tribe. You know, most of the most impressed about Karthi, tell them what what you're doing. You've managed to sandwich us in between interviews with tell us. You've just literally just stepped off an interview, right? Yes, so I'm currently at an assessment centre. I won't say who, but it's a pretty big firm. So I really hope that, you know, I know who it is. And yeah, it's definitely a big firm. Yeah. So I had my break was at 10. They overrun to 10 past 10 and I'm back on that at half past. But I just figured I'd do this quick introduction. I'll get my blood flowing and then I'll go back and tell them why I love IBD so much. I tell you what, you're an absolute champion for for for taking the time out, given the the stress that most people feel in the middle of an AC, you're jumping out onto a podcast. That's just, yeah, that's unbelievable. But look, what I'm going to do is I won't I won't take any more of your time. But I'm going to put your LinkedIn, your LinkedIn address. I'm going to drop it in the bio of this podcast. Someone Spotify, Apple are going to share it on LinkedIn. Give you a shout out specifically. So to live up to the promise, I want you to get some visibility. So everyone, you must connect with Karthi, go out there and do it. Build a network, guys. It's definitely worth a look. Check him out. Yeah, forget IBD. It's the karate chess future that we're heading for. All right, Karthi, well, look, fantastic to have you on and stay in touch and all the best for the rest of the assessment center. Yeah, good luck. Thank you, guys. Appreciate you having me on. All right, take care. Bye. All right. So usual plan of action then for for the rest of the episode and Piers, just before we begin. I mean, I couldn't. I definitely wouldn't even consider taking on. I'm just going to jump out of an AC, jump on a podcast and cool as that. Balls of steel, I mean, I'd hire him just for that. I won't actually forget about it. Just just stop stop the assessment center. That man's hired. Yeah. Oh, what a what a star. But but yeah, look, it took going back to the to the pod then. Let's let's move things forward and get and get and get back on track. And yeah, the episode 50, one thing that I did see and I wanted to mention because I know we obviously have quite a few recurring lists as anyone needs to the channel. But Spotify, I found out just the other week at the end of 2021 have added now a rating feature on the app. Now, finally, finally, they've woken up. And that I've read is going to be one of the calculations that will feed in, as we know, these secret algorithms that help promote the pod and so on. So, you know where I'm heading? We we did the Apple push, but now it's the Spotify push. And I know certainly a big portion of our community is UK based. And I think most UK people use Spotify rather than Apple. That's from what I talk to many people. And so all you need to do is go on to the main market maker channel page. And there should be a star rating. You literally it's way easier than Apple, actually. You just hit it, give the star done. Five, please, not one. And yeah, that will massively help us. At the moment, before I even noticed it was there, it's already on 40, which is which is fantastic. So thank you for those 40 people. I'm going to set a stall, though, and a marker I want to hit two hundred and fifty. By the end of Q1. OK, two fifty. It's much easier. It's much easier to do super quick, takes two seconds. It helps us out massively, spreads the the words. So yeah, I just be thankful if you could do that. All right, so we can rate ourselves, right? I'm just going on and rating, rating ourselves. All right, so let's let's move on. So I'm going to give a bit of a wrap of the week. Feel free, as ever, appears to interject if you feel it's needed. And then we'll talk about the main topics, which we're definitely going to discuss Microsoft, the acquisition of Activision, Blizzard, and then also what that means in the race for positioning in the metaverse. And we're also going to talk about some of the kind of classic stay at home trades, which got hammering last night, which was Netflix and Peloton down around 20, 25 percent each, respectively. So they're going to be the main talking points, but give you a bit of a flavor and a wrap up of the week. So beginning of the week and actually they've gone twice now. The Chinese Central Bank have been cutting their benchmark lending rates. We have seen GDP there, continues to slow down, obviously, just in the wake of the pandemic. So the economic slowdown in the world's second largest economy resulting in their central bank taking action this week. We've also had in the region, North Korea tested two tactical guided missiles on Monday, and it is now the biggest string of missile launches since August of 2019 at this point in time. Before anyone gets too nervous about that type of headline, it is relative commonplace, certainly during the 2018 period, I remember, and during the Trump period, it was definitely something that was happening by weekly, essentially. You always remember Rocket Man and what was it? Trump was saying fire and his famous fire and fury. Oh, yeah. And that was when I remember that, because when he said the statement fire and fury, and obviously the S&P got whacked on the back of that because people thought, oh, my God, this is like escalation to the next level. You know where he said that comment, the context? Well, where was he? What? Yeah. Where do you what do you think he was doing when he made that comment? Probably eating a burger in bed. He was he was he was just come off the golf course in the clubhouse. Of course. So hard at work. Yeah. Working there, you know, the back nine. So so other things this week, we've had Biden and on the theme of kind of North Korea, China, he said he's not ready to lift tariffs, his predecessor, imposed on Chinese imports, despite course, when you as business businesses to relieve the duties. That's totally unexpected. We talked about this many times before. He hasn't changed the direction of that. And he's very unlikely to do so going into the midterms. Then, of course, lots to talk about Russia preparing to invade Ukraine. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is meeting his Russian counterpart today, in fact, of hopes of lowering the temperature a little bit after recent diplomatic efforts in Geneva were deemed a failure by Moscow. And there's not too much of a unified front in NATO either at the moment. So any feelings on that? And I know Macron's being fairly vocal. I mean, this is it. I think it's quite interesting. I mean, Putin loving this, right? Kind of perfect for him in that he's being strongman, you know, massing troops on the border. Yeah, I'm not intending to invade his kind of pretence, but he's he's being the strongman. And he's his rivals are kind of that are not unified, right? So it's the perfect situation for him. And this has kind of been definitely a strategy for his for years. And he's definitely in a you know, what he will feel is a positive period. And now, yeah, you saw that with Biden in, you know, when you throw Biden and he made that bit of a gaffe in his conference, which just again, I think you probably I think my views on Biden have been fairly consistently clear on what I think about Biden on this podcast, but just again, another example where I just don't think he's he's cut out for for this. But yeah, I think there's a there is a lack of unity, but there'll be nothing like an invasion to concentrate the minds of the allies, shall we call them? I think until I yeah, I think we're on the back foot. I think we just wait. I think the West just wait for Putin to do something and then go, oh, my God, we better act. So Putin's always on the front foot, which is where he wants to be, of course. Yeah, and what timing is also optimal, given the kind of wholesale gas situation at the moment as well. Yeah, and I guess hard one with that Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which massive expense, you know, Russia connecting to Europe. It's not open yet. Right. And, you know, that is that is leverage on the West's side. If you want to think about it like that, because we don't have to open that pipeline, right? So, you know, from a sanctions point of view, you know, there's been plenty of financial sanctions in the past which have hit hard in Russia, by the way, those financial sanctions. It's absolutely a form of warfare in my opinion and creates a huge amount of economic disruption, which then creates a lot of hardship, right? And I think, you know, in the last time Russia invaded Ukraine or Crimea, you know, the sanctions got slapped on hard and that definitely hurt. So, you know, they are effective. It's just they're not visible. So, you know, there's nothing like a show of strength and a massing troops on the border. Obviously, that's a picture in that image is, you know, it delivers a much bigger punch to kind of the population. But yeah, and to add a few more kind of layers to how complex the geopolitics gets. As I said, the US Secretary of State is meeting this Russian counterpart today. But what is also happening today that's really interesting is there's joint military drills happening. China, Russia and Iran. Is that right? I didn't know that. I mean, how divisive is this world we're living in right now? I mean, yeah, I mean, that says it all right. That this is a this is the kind of confrontations and the what Biden needs to deal with is there's also China as well as Russia. And so it makes strategic sense if I was China or Russia. Yeah, to somewhat align with themselves because, yes, Russia wants to Nord Stream, but also China wants to deliver the Silk Road kind of ambitions over the long term, which requires Russian territory. Yeah. And, you know, I think if you listen to the radales of this world, you know, very much it's kind of the front and center of his thesis is these massive super long cycles and that were due were due a conflict, right? I think we've gone the longest. Is it the longest ever where we haven't had some kind of peace? Yeah, the longest ever peace. I'm sorry, you know, in his eyes, it's inevitable that we return to some kind of global war. I know it sounds just sounds weird to say it, our generations where we haven't ever been directly exposed to anything like that. It just feels like such a parallel universe that could never happen, right? But yeah, he's got a great chart that he always shares, Ray Dalio, which is the it's like a it's like a 500 year chart and it looks at civilization change. And it's got at the moment, the descent of America, which obviously hammered the British Empire. Back in what the 19th century or so. And then looking at it now, the acceleration of China and how that's what's really underlying the current state of play. Yeah. And it's the change in superpower and it's the change in the global reserve currency. And it's a period where you've got a lot of the rich poor divide gap widens, which creates a lot of diverse bipolar political climates. And then you get more extreme political parties getting into office, which then leads to more extreme policies. And then the divisiveness rises. I mean, I think even Ray Dalio, I think he puts the chances of an American civil war, I think it's up to 35 percent chance in his eyes. I mean, and look, that sounds just so sensationalist. But, you know, then we did just go through the anniversary of storming the Capitol. So it's kind of on the one hand, you might say it's a fair assessment. But I think this is something for investors, right? It's it's always been for my whole life. It's always been a risk, you know, of some kind of conflict. And when Putin starts rising up and getting a little bit more aggressive, you know, it's always on the agenda. But it never happens. That's been the default for our generation. The risks are there, but it never happens. And I think we always kind of live on that level. But yeah, it's got to be something, obviously, to monitor, because, you know, if anything did escalate dramatically, then obviously it's a complete game changer and all cards are off the table. And it's just an entirely unique event for our generations. And so I think investors are less carry on regardless and obviously monitor those risks, but but for now, not take them too seriously. I think, right. So the important take home point here is that as much as there are always multiple macro kind of topics or themes concurrently ongoing, it's about forming a hierarchy of of what's going to be the influential factors over your investment period, yeah, I guess. And then assigning appropriate probability to the risks of those materialising. That was kind of the thing about the whole I remember, whenever North Korea would fire one of their intercontinental ballistic missiles said to also have mastered miniaturization of a nuclear warhead device strapped on the top, you'd think, oh, my God, this is the end of days. And yet the S&P would bump down a percent and everyone would load up and buy into it and it by the end of the day would be two percent above where we were before the dip. And that would happen every time. It was just an opportunity to get long in this ever rising market. Yeah. And that's not to say that these things don't go without risk because one miscalculation and certainly when you're relying on technology and things to make assessments on direction and travel of things of missiles to counteract things, things could go wrong pretty quickly and escalate. But yeah, these are all assigned probabilities, I guess is the key thing. But OK, other other things we've had are Brent crude oil moved to its highest level since October 2014 this week. So kind of, I guess, diminishing kind of impact of Omicron, or at least the belief that people have as we go further forward supplies tightening as well. We've had outages in Libya to North America. We had the drone attack on all facilities in the UAE. That was actually this week on Monday. Duplical tensions. We just mentioned the kind of simmering at this moment in time. So there's a couple of things that play there. Goldman Sachs, they raised their Brent forecasts through 2022 to 2023. They were obviously listening to you and they said, we predict $100 in the third quarter. So thanks, GS, for listening to the pod. But one thing I would say is you did get called out and I do want to address this. Someone said you said 100 bucks, but you didn't say when specifically. Well, I said, didn't I? I said in 2022, but yeah, maybe this person wants. What's more accurate? You've got year quarter month. Well, it's going to be how far you want to take it. We on the 14th of it's going to be 1131 a.m. No, hold on, run your run your model. And then I'd say second half of the year. OK, OK, OK, so so I said to you the year the quarter or the month and you went, yeah, I'm going to throw in a fourth element here. OK, well, I'll let you off the second half of the page. Well, quarter three, quarter three. OK, so you're in line with the GS, the GS for you or they're in line with I think they're in line with whoever you want to see it. OK, they're in line with me. Yeah, so it's just talking of talking of Goldman Sachs and their shares were down about 8 percent earlier in the week. We have earning season. It's really going to pick up actually next week in terms of volume of companies reporting now GS just from memory. I think they had record investment banking, asset management, wealth management, net revenues, but this is a really, you know, just to make the point. Record breaking numbers there, the stock fell 8 percent because don't forget that markets are forward looking. A lot of this stuff is well known given the deal activity we've had over the previous period that these numbers were going to be sensational. The problem that they had was weaker trading revenues and just rising expenses. I mean, I don't know if you've read some of the headlines, Pierce, I wrote about it one of our newsletters. Like they are paying out some serious dough to their employees to stop them going elsewhere at the moment. Yeah, bonuses of bonuses have been good this year. Right. And then for the senior folk that I think the partners, they were not only getting uplifts on their pay, increased sizeable bonuses. They're also getting one time additional million dollar type on top of one off one time sweetener. Just given how competitive the space is at the moment to retain talent. Yeah. So the other thing then is Morgan Stanley, and I wanted to give them a shout out because they posted better than expected force quarter profits on strong equities trading revenue and they've kind of held the line a bit more on the compensation costs. And I guess investors just liking that because one thing I would say, generally speaking, the downside is that, right, I don't want this person to leave this company. So I'm going to throw some money at them. The problem is now you're not going to have record breaking advisory fees growing year after year after year after year. It's quite really worked like that. But now you've thrown a couple of million bucks my way. Yeah. What do you know when my expectation now is well, you paid me X now I want X plus Y going forward. Right. And how are you going to do that? And that's why the stock's down eight percent. Yeah, I mean, it's yeah, I think it's a tough one. Obviously, keeping workforce happy, retention is obviously key. But ultimately, is it is a sustainable model? I'm not sure. Anyway, elsewhere to wrap up the week, crypto and talking about it the best time, actually, because it's just kind of thrashed out new lows. Bitcoin down about eight percent in the last 24 hours that we're recording this on a Friday, Ethel also down nearly 10 other layer one, such as Solana, Cardano down as well. Generally, the theme here being the crypto markets just freaking out over higher yields like everything else is there's tech and growth oriented at the moment. But look, let's let's get on to the first. The first conversation piece, which is that of Microsoft. Nearing its deal to buy Activision Blizzard, which would be the biggest tech deal in history, topping the Dell EMC merger of 2016. So I mean, it's an absolute giant transaction. One thing we did earlier in the week is when this news broke, Eddie and I jumped on. We discussed the deal and its terms more, more there. So if you just go back one episode, you can check that out. A couple of things I want to say, I don't want to pivot this to more a conversation about the rationale and the kind of strategy for the betting on the metaverse, which I guess ultimately fundamentally is what this is. So a couple of things I was reading about Activision. And in 2006, they bought Guitar Hero. Did you remember Guitar Hero? Guitar, actually, I do. Yes, I do. I do really remember that. Yeah. Oh, this is when this is when the air guitar. This is when they had like a little miniature guitar that you'd play and you could play like Metallica, things like that. And you would just press you do you do the keys on the actual guitar. But it means I mean, I heard the news. So yeah, our IP, but yeah. In 2006, I think was when I moved in with my brother and we were sharing a flat, me and my older brother. And he's a big, he's a big metal head. And so he went out and bought Guitar Hero when it first came out. I remember this. And you know what we did? We went out, we bought the we bought the guitar. We bought the drum kit and what we would do would go out. And then when we used to come home, we would put it on full volume. I'd have the drums. You'd have to jam it up to be jamming till like five a.m. in the morning, much to our kind of neighbor's delight. But yeah, so in 2006, Activision bought Guitar Hero and they bought it for a hundred million dollars from a company called Red Octane, a hundred million. That game actually would later make the top ten best selling lists of all time. Right. So a hundred million, they paid for that. That was an incredible acquisition. This is Activision. Then two years later, Activision merged with Blizzard, the studio behind the PC hit Warcraft, which was then owned by Vivendi and that transaction was just under 20 billion. And then they gobbled up Candy Crush from the Sega Maker King for just under six billion in 2015 to tap into the fast growing mobile market. Remember, this was 2015. I know we all use our smartphones. You know, we probably spend too much time on our smartphones 2022. But this was 2015. So those three acquisitions gave them gaming for mobile, console and PC. Yeah. So quite quite an interesting backstory, actually. So how they perform, there's a lot of negative stuff as well that's been going on more recently, an interesting character. Cotic, the main guy there. But look, the timing of the deal is what's interesting. There's so much conversation about the buzzword that's metaverse and Web 3 and so forth. Gaming is seen as kind of the key to really strategically moved in that direction because of the existing online communities there. But I know you've got some some stats and some thoughts about that. Well, it's obviously when you get a big you get a big deal like this. And don't forget, it's not happened yet. And there's definitely some possible barriers in the way. And I don't know what the regulators might say. But anyway, when you get a big big big numbers and it's like, wow, you know, massive move, especially if it's one of the big tech firms that kind of grabs all the headlines. What I would say is that, yeah, it's obviously gaming slash kind of metaverse. It kind of goes hand in hand. There's a big race for this that I'd say if you kind of step back. These big if you think about the big five tech firms, then they're obviously they're all kind of rivaling each other. Big five, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft. And essentially what they're trying to do, obviously, in the last decade, they've absolutely smashed it and they have become the absolute giants of global companies. And I think where they're at now, right now, is that there's kind of a bit of a crossroads where now it's like, OK, well, what next? Because, you know, history is littered with absolute giant organizations that then actually a few years later or a decade plus later. And actually they've kind of disappeared. There's quite a few examples of these stuff like Fairchild Semiconductor, you ever heard of them? No, the biggest company in the world in the 1950s. Not anymore. IBM in 1983 was America's most profitable firm. Eight years later, it was losing money. Nokia is probably what I was going to say more recent in most people will know about. But actually, that was like 20 years ago now where kind of Nokia got smashed off its perch or perhaps not quite 20 years ago. But you get my point, right? So I guess what all these tech firms are right now thinking is, right, what they want to do is they want to make and own the future. And I guess the issue is we don't quite know what that future is because we're at this point, this crossroads between Web 2 and Web 3, let's say. And that whole Web 3 environment was we we think, hang on, there's this metaverse idea and there's this blockchain and there's DeFi and there's right, there's there's AI and there's VR and AR and they're throwing all the money under the sun, all of these. But actually, we're still at that point where we're not quite sure in 10 years time, what will we all be doing? You know, as people, how will we be interacting with each other? How will we be consuming products and services? How will we be how will we be spending our time? And they're all they're throwing money at it. And this Microsoft deal is definitely another example of how aggressive they're being. I mean, when I say aggressive in the last year, just thinking about we are in the last year, right, 280 billion has those five have spent 280 billion in the last year on like R&D projects. That's nine percent of the entire American business investment. Nine percent of the entire country's investment is from those five companies. And if you go back five years, their proportion of investment was four percent. So they've gone from four percent to nine percent in terms of their proportion of company investment. Obviously, a function of that is their growth, of course. And there's a great chart. Actually, if anybody has the Economist subscription, they've actually done a pretty good article on this. But when you're looking at the stats in terms of how their investment has changed, it's interesting on the one hand, if you look at it from a percentage of revenue point of view, then for some companies, it's actually relatively stable. Like Microsoft actually this year, Microsoft have invested less than they did in the previous two years. I talked about 2021 here, sorry, rather than this year. They've invested less even though that from a percentage of revenue point of view, but because their revenues gone up so dramatically, the amount of cash that is, the amount of cash is way, way more than ever before, right? So you've got this wall of cash as these big five in terms of how they invest in R&D, they do it as a percentage of their revenue. And they're always trying to innovate. And as revenues grow or then these cash, the cash that gets thrown at this stuff is quite extraordinary. So actually, their R&D and capital expenditure was at 53 percent of cash flows this in 2021, which is up from 32 percent from the year before. And obviously, they're throwing it at what we call frontier technologies, which is right. What's next? What does that future look like in 10 years? What are consumers going to do? And the frontier technologies have kind of been split into a few different areas, the metaverse, obviously, but then there's stuff like autonomous vehicles. And we've spoken about this with all these big tech firms throwing huge amounts of money at autonomous vehicles. But then stuff like health care is really important. And again, something that they're investing in hugely. You know, the side projects like space, you know, robotics, fintech, crypto, quantum computing is a big one because if you want your metaverse, then the computing power that you need to enable that to happen, we can't do it yet. So they're investing a huge amount into these cool new chips that can make this kind of computing power go forward. But in terms of research, the big five companies just themselves have published 16,000 scientific papers in the last five years. So it's definitely the race to win to create and win the future. And obviously what they're trying to do is not go extinct like the, you know, the graveyard of these giant companies of the past, they're trying to avoid that. And, you know, I think it's a really it's going to be a really interesting decade. And we've spoken about this on previous pods where I think both of us were kind of leaning towards Google as perhaps being kind of best place to maybe win that race. But I think, yeah, in terms of in terms of what happens next, you know, they're all big movers. This Microsoft deal is just one of many, many, many. And, you know, I think they've bought 110 companies in the last five years. These five these five tech firms have bought 110 companies. With all these numbers that like that volume and the cash number. I mean, there's a regulator knocking on my door here. Right. So this is right. This is right. This is a really good point. Historically, all those companies that kind of got nailed and died actually, most cases, it wasn't the regulator. Right. Even though you might think, right, these massive companies, OK, they're going to have to get taken down a peg. It actually isn't the it's normally not the regulator. It's normally they just they just don't evolve on to the next thing. You know, Nokia is such a good example. They just completely screwed up the transition to the smartphone. And so this is what they're desperately trying to avoid, which is why they're throwing money at everything. Even though a lot of it's going to be entirely wasted, you know, you could argue Apple's attempt to an electric vehicle could argue is an entire waste of money. But they're just throwing money at the wall and seeing what sticks. They're so afraid of not being in the right space. So I want to hear more philosophical approach of R&D, let's say. You have these small, more agile teams that create these new innovative products or services or games in a lot of this conversation. I was reading about the kind of culture Activision Blizzard and, yeah, as much as there's like sexual discrimination and lots of other things going on. The other thing was apparently they had a work culture that was just, you know, really squeezing their employees. It was a lot of pressure to develop. There was so I guess one thing is then you go into this kind of it's weird. I kind of have this perception of like the Microsoft being like they give you this big handbook and it's like this is how a Microsoft employee or or acquired company must behave. And it's the Microsoft code. But at what point then do you not allow these smaller companies to have the the room to manoeuvre to fulfill the potential of these ideas and execute on those plans before they then get into that more rigid structure where because they're so large, the innovation speed will decrease. But then if I just start buying up all these innovative companies, not only am I capping the rate of innovation, but surely that also increases the regulatory risk because I'm just buying everyone. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. The ability for a giant organisation to innovate. It's a lot harder than a start up almost kind of by definition. And I think that's what has been the failure of these gigantic institutions over the kind of centuries. And yeah, it's hard, isn't it? Because you buy and of course the more companies you buy and they're buying a lot of companies, then it just becomes harder to have that. Yeah, how's that one sense of like that one mission, that one, what do we do? I know at a top level, what does Amazon do? Well, they're a distribution company for products and getting products to the doorstep as quickly as possible. And OK, you might say, well, hang on, they're also AWS cloud, most but then they're also, well, hang on, they own 20% of Rivian. But you might say, well, hang on, that's because that's playing into their core business because they want to make that distribution cheaper from a cost point of view because they don't want to have to pay drivers. And but then, you know, when you get, you know, when you get these these giant tangents, Microsoft, for example, in April, they agreed a deal for nuance communications. That's a health care focused cloud and software provider. And it's like, wow, OK, well, that's then that's way off pieced from their kind of core business, isn't it? And that's just because they're trying to cover that base because the other tech firms are all in amongst that health care side. You know, if you think about, you know, Google bought Fitbit, for example, for a couple of for a couple of billion, whenever that was a couple of years ago, right? And so it's so hang on, if Google buying Fitbit, hang on, Apple are all over the health care with their watch and stuff. So Microsoft, they're forced to have to cover that base just in case that becomes the kind of booming one. They don't want to they don't want to be left behind if any one of these big elements is the real, you know, the one that really takes off. So but it's so far away from their core sort of strategy, just then becomes more it's more messy from from a kind of a message. But obviously they've got enough cash that it's worth a punt. And I think a lot of the time some of these are just punts. Is it not I mean, forgive my naivety, but would it not be better to break up the companies into their own segments so they can be more focused on the the priority and objectives of that one singular department within within, I don't know, a group organization sense but listed on its own, and then you satisfy regulatory threat and I guess to play devil's advocate here, can you really claim that this goes against stuff I've said in the past on this podcast, but can are they have they got too much market share I mean just think about this Microsoft deal right with Activision, even if that went through they don't have they'd have like only they'd have like 10 to 15 percent market share. So that I mean that's not from a regulators point of view that's not like wow dangerous in any way right so if you look at like the electric vehicle market, of course, they haven't got massive market shares even though they're buying electric vehicle companies left right and center not no no one of them has a market share that is anywhere near kind of getting under regulatory scrutiny but then you think about AI and I think here's the problem like AI is such an important thing, but now it's not a single thing. AI really now goes into everything right but had you be good at artificial intelligence, well you need data to learn from and who's got all the data or the big tech firms so it's a really difficult one for the regulator they've got all the data they're much better positioned to be absolutely at the forefront of the AI revolution but then what's that a monopoly on? You know so and anyway there's five of them so if they're all in each other's space and I think actually we're up to a record amount now I think now 40 percent of the big fives business activities now overlap right I think it was like 25 percent 10 years ago it's now up to 40 percent right so they're overlapping and they're competing so because there's five of them does anyone have a monopoly anywhere and so I think from a regulator's point of view it's going to be hard but it does destroy innovation and that's proven time and time again and if they're not careful they will be victims not all of them but I think of those five you know in a decade or two decades time you're not going to have all five of them at the top table anymore which one survived obviously is the big debate? Yeah you've seen those infographics there's only one company that survives long term yeah Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft always always there always a bankable podium finish maybe not number one but always right there in contention all right well let's uh let's move it over to Netflix because they beat top and bottom line last night so how much did they go up they went down 20 percent they went down 20 after hours that's the lowest levels now since June 2020 main thing slowing subscriber growth so they added just eight just I say they added just 18.2 million customers in 2021 so it sounds like a lot but actually that's 50 down from the record year obviously that they had now I do find this a little bit challenging as the way the market reacts in I think a slightly irrational way because of it's been probably caught up with this whole exit of the pandemic with the whole yield move and the growth stocks getting hit but of course we were going to come off the boil after the meteoric subscriptions that came on the back of the fact that you know when we say lockdown that's not strictly true because there's a degree of severity to the restrictions that get implemented and if you think about 2020 it was literally peeking out the front door can I leave or the Gestapo gonna like shoot me down like because I don't know what the deal is like am I going to catch this virus and the police going to come and arrest me like cast your mind back to March April you didn't really know what the deal was like how do I catch this thing what actually are the rules whereas now it's kind of part of life right and thankfully touch wood for now we're heading in the right direction in the sense that yes transmitted transmissibility is high but obviously symptomatically it's lower so the point being is I don't I'm not that shocked by this but hence is management of expectations from a listed company's perspective and so by numbers their global paid net subscriber additions were 8.28 million and that was versus 8.19 million expected but that's fewer than essentially eight and a half million they added in the prior quarter the biggest point arguably was their outlook as is always the case with particularly gross names and they expected to add two and a half million subscribers during the first quarter of this year that is below the four million it added the same quarter last year and analysts what analysts were expecting bearing in mind they came out saying they're going to add two and a half million analysts were expecting seven million what so check that out for an outlook I mean that by any stretch is a disaster of an outlook that they put out yeah but you know why they do that though right to avoid exactly what's just happened yeah so it's like well let's not keep making the same mistake let's now low ball our forecast so that actually we can start beating it and then our share price will go up and everyone will go wow we're amazing yeah and so yeah short-term pain long-term gain because I mentioned to you just before we came on yeah you know need I remind everyone that Netflix is up 6 000% in 10 years so a little bit of you know 20% off the top in order for then managing the share price thereafter doesn't seem like such a big deal but that's share price spike that the peak we're just shy 700 bucks wasn't it and I think you peaked in quarter three four last year but you know that's overbought I mean that's like that's bubble you know and obviously then layer on the inflation problem and of course a lot like a lot of these tech firms that future kind of profit needs to start getting discounted because of higher inflation expectations and so I think when you look at the share price wow down it's down down down down down it's that you've got to realise probably it wasn't justified being up there in the first place and so it's kind of correcting back lower yeah and we're trading we're set to open around 400 bucks yeah you know where we were trading before the pandemic hit 400 bucks so so basically we're exactly where we were it just sounds sensational because we've gone so far essentially so yeah a couple of other interesting things obviously Netflix related this week they did mention on their call post earnings about the increasing competition part of the rationale for the slowdown apple disney so on having material impact on their growth yeah the other thing as well that some analysts were noting is the slate of shows for the current quarter apparently isn't as strong and those big titles that are in the pipeline are not going to actually debut until q2 and so they've got a bit of a dearth of like new content coming at this point in time they raised prices in matured markets this week so US Canada this is I guess the struggle here is raising prices is one way to counteract this slowing growth situation short term but that's fine in matured markets but they've that's fairly saturated anyway where they need growth to come from are the asian markets and you cannot raise prices there because you need to start a lower the lowest possible price it's kind of like netflix back when I used to get the cds delivered to my flat you know it was cheap because no one used it and so you've got to get that that's it you got to build that up so that's problematic but then also as well as the whole move to gaming I know we talked about netflix a few episodes ago we were talking about there we were contemplating going into gaming and maybe we're thinking about yeah r&d or acquisitions but as we've just discussed that is a as you said before a fierce space to compete in right now especially when you especially when you've got the big five who are you know you can't compete with that even netflix I know you know it's a they're nowhere near the big five right even though they've been in this fang thing but they're nowhere near them so they can't compete in terms of checkbook size so yeah it's tricky come on what what are you watching on netflix right now um I've I've just finished watching um I can't remember the name of it it's got eddie isard in it I can't remember go on what are you watching uh so I started watching last last night um about the time square serial killer in the late 70s 80s in New York I don't know if I mean I my mind always gets blown when I hear about what New York was like not that long ago yeah and obviously they had like the crack problem in the 80s and they this was prior to that time square was a cd place back in the 70s it was where they had the boom of like the peep show and you know just just you know really an interesting time and place and yeah there was this guy and you got to watch it I don't know people listening I'm sure they have but there was basically this flap they got set on fire in time square and they went in there to put out the fire and there was two decapitated bodies with their hands cut off right in the room and actually then it was followed up with subsequent copycat thing and it's just like oh my god this happened in New York in like not that long check it out I'm sure some people are already watching it um well it depends what you're into but is it cool it's pretty fascinating the time time square killer I think it's cool all right yeah yeah pretty gruesome but um compelling watching I guess but yeah anyhow moving back to the conversation of some of the the big movers Peloton yes so two pieces of news here one is they basically came out in a cmbc exclusive last night and they said they're going to temporarily halt production of bikes and treadmills essentially because demand is waning earlier in the week I read reports as well that Peloton executives and insiders had sold 500 million dollars worth of their own stock as well according to an sec filing um so basically they've just been like what you're kind of saying with Netflix being overbought they they've got in and uh the selling started when their share surge passed 80 bucks in the fall of 2020 and the sales have just been gaining more and more as the stock got towards an above 100 but yeah shares down 25 percent yesterday actually I think they went down about 27 at the bottom yeah I mean no I think they're definitely different this is definitely a different story to Netflix it's not I mean whilst they are a pandemic stock for sure there's definitely differences between these two stories I mean I think that I mean Peloton have had a few issues along the way maybe they've certainly had they've certainly suffered from the supply chain constraints for sure so you know customers shelling out for thousands okay because it's such an expensive product right so it's a slightly different ball game so if you're if you're spending a couple of thousand dollars on a bike and then it doesn't show up then you're like well you know where's my f-ing bike right I want my money back in terms of customer how the customer feels about that of course Netflix A it's a super cheap product relatively and B it isn't physical so you know you're not having the same issues in terms of delivering the product now so that's the nuance I mean I think with Peloton once you've got the product then fine it becomes a bit more Netflix-y in terms of being a monthly subscription and you know you're you're subscribing to these workouts and you can find then I mean so Peloton's on the one hand the same as Netflix monthly subscriptions but they've got this massive barrier in the way where it's a massively expensive physical product that's got to be delivered and because it's a physical product as well they've had issues with I don't know if you remember when they launched their treadmill unfortunately a child died in an accident on the treadmill and then the way they dealt with that was horribly bad they just didn't do anything they didn't deal with it and then then there were more injuries and then finally they said all right fine we're going to recall optional recall of all treadmills and of course this was a disaster but yeah I mean I think that like Netflix though they've got a lot of competition more competition now than when the kind of pandemic started here's a few for you I don't know if you've heard of any of these tonal, hydra, mirror actually I know you were talking about the mirror you've got a mirror I'm on my hydro looking at in the mirror tempo, climber so these are the ones that have kind of just come out well I haven't heard of the last two yeah nor have I but they are you know so you know there's plenty of competition and look they're suffering from new user growth decline of course so very much like Netflix they're coming off that pandemic just you know one off peak that will never be repeated hopefully and so they're suffering from a few angles but where is worse for Peloton I mean yeah mentioning the kind of directors selling their own shares clearly that's never a good sign but also they have now called in McKinsey and they are doing things like halting production calling in McKinsey so that they can look at opportunities where they can cut costs I mean this now starts to sound actually wow this sounds potentially incredibly bad rather than just all we've just got a slight decline in user growth numbers you know this suddenly starts to feel a bit more hang on we need to restructure here yeah I mean I'm not saying it's going to be fatal but I think they haven't managed the maybe they could have managed the pandemic better it's never easy when you just get a tidal wave of demand it's obviously incredibly hard to manage that and I think perhaps they could have managed it better and because of their failings in management they're probably now suffering and then without some major change then fine it might be fatal but I think they're doing they're probably doing the right thing even though the share price is getting hammered and may well continue to do so it's probably right let's reset now before it's too late and I think that's what's happening they are raising prices as well like Netflix apart from their bike plus product which is their it's the better version that's more expensive so all prices are going up apart from their bike plus I think what they're trying to do is make that bike plus product feel better value even though the price isn't changing so they're trying to play a clever trick there I think well no I think the you know being a peloton customer yourself I think you should email your representative to whoever you deal with you should say to them look we have this podcast we talk about different types of things peloton comes up from time to time I can sound super bullish I can help you guys out just kick me back some of that peloton plus for a 12 month period to be honest I'm still in my four week trial period so now the news overnight I'm tempted to send it back get a refund sit that's it late hit the man when he's down let's do this cool all right well look we'll wrap it up there obviously a huge thanks to to Carti for joining us at the beginning of the of the podcast and remember to check out his profile connect with him you know your network is super important for any student regardless of whether you're going to finance or any profession and you never know when those connections might give you value in the future so yeah connect with us and connect with him I'll drop his his link for LinkedIn in the the bio description and yeah don't forget to rate if you're if you're listening on Spotify I'd be much appreciated and thank you peers and thank you everyone we'll see you next week yeah