Why So Bullish? Markets Cling to Iran Hopes

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Welcome to ProfiMarkets. I'm Edelson. It is April 2nd. Let's check in on yesterday's market

vitals. The major indices extended their rally for a second day in a row. Brent crew prices

briefly slipped below $100 per barrel. Treasury yields were flat on the day and the dollar continued its slide. Okay, what's happening? Stocks are still rallying on hopes that war with Iran is winding down. President Trump said the president of Iran has asked for a ceasefire, but the U.S. will only consider when the straight of Hormuz is "free open" and "clear". That comes a day after Trump told Aids he'd be open to ending the war even if the straight of Hormuz remains closed.

The S&B 500 surged nearly 3% and the Nasdaq was up nearly 4% on Tuesday and all three major

indices continued their rise yesterday. So here to discuss the market's movement, we're speaking

with John Mowery, chief investment officer, portfolio manager, and equity strategist at NFJ investment group. So John, we keep on getting all of these announcements and to be clear, we are recording this before Trump makes his 9 PM announcement. He said he's going to deliver this address to the nation. When people listen to this, he'll have made that address, unfortunately, we cannot analyse it. We're recording it before. However, markets appear to be quite optimistic right

now. They are optimistic on Tuesday, optimistic on Wednesday as well. What do you make of the market's reaction to what might be an end to this war? Maybe not. What do you think? So I think that when you look at the multiple compression that is occurred off of what has gone on in the Middle East,

“you have to be somewhat optimistic. Technology stocks which make up the largest sector in the S&P 500,”

they're now trading below 20 times earnings with accelerating earnings growth. That's actually the lowest multiple since back in 22. You've now gotten past the liberation day multiple. So I think you have to be optimistic as a long-term equity investor here. What I would say about what's going

on the oil market, the oil sector was extremely strong in the first quarter. I think it was the

second best quarter since 1989. Energy stocks had two distinctive advantages going into the year. The first is that they were historically cheap and then you had the exogenous shock that occurred with the oil spike. So I think that when you look at what's going on, you definitely have to be optimistic as you look at more cyclical areas, technology, financials have really been beaten up. Even though the broader markets are only down, you know, 67%, the multiple has compressed

“far below what I think investors might expect given, you know, kind of a more small pullback”

on a total return basis. Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned the tech sector there because, yes, those multiple's have been compressed. A lot of the biggest names in tech have just gotten crushed this quarter, like big, big drawdowns. And I guess what's hard to understand is how much of that even has to do with what's happening in the Middle East. I mean, on Monday as an example, we saw there was a little bit of a rally and it coincided with some maybe piece talks, or at

least some announcements that made it seem like maybe the war was coming to an end. You saw this rally, but it was mostly in the tech sector, at which point I'm kind of thinking, why are these even related? I mean, maybe it's the helium that goes through the straight-of-home moves, it goes into the semiconductor, but is that really the problem here? Like, what is the connection between

“those two? Is there any connection at all? And what does that leave you to do as an investor?”

Yeah, there's a lot of pieces swirling around. You know, you have the concerns around private credit,

So you have concern that the Fed may not be able to cut as much as it folks thought. So I think that,

you know, those are two obvious concerns. And then you have, you know, the exogenous shocks of how long does this conflict in the Middle East drag out? This looks like a bit more complicated situation relative to Venezuela. So I couldn't agree more ed, you know, when you look at what's going on in technology, that was selling off well before this news came out. And that really is around concerns around can these technology companies hold their margins? Is that going to be possible

to do with the advances in AI? It's really ironic that in video, the largest stock in the SP500 is disrupting its own siblings to some degree in the software space. No one really expected that.

What's fascinating though, when I was looking at this today, there has not been any change

to earnings and margins for the large software names yet. So either the market just wants to reprise in anticipation of earnings cuts or it's just a market recalibrating and kind of a broadening out trade. We've talked about cause and trade leadership in the market for some time. So this may be the market just reshuffling, digesting, and compressing some of those multiples as we, you know, kind of march forward because the earnings in technology stocks have not

not changed. It's just been a multiple compression story. So you have a lot of information, you know,

“with private credit, as I mentioned, that's been another concern. I think that that”

parlays into, you know, is the Fed, and I have a harder time reacting if you have hotter inflation numbers coming out to what could be a brewing problem and credit. And a lot of that private credit has funded a lot of the areas in software. So all these are connected, whether it's credit interest rates and how that impacts the CPI readings coming out of you know, the result of the oil shock. Yeah, credit interest rates. And then, of course,

AI, and I guess maybe the AI story is kind of hard of the private credit story as well, because the private credit concerns are based on the holding software, which is based on the holdings and AI or what AI could do to that economy. Yes. It seems as though, and I don't know if you agree with this, but it seems as though investors right now, and the market's right now, are especially unankered or especially, or maybe the better way to put it is, seem to have

very low levels of conviction, at least relative to what they had in previous years. I mean, what we saw with Satrini research as an example, where a blog post goes out that's related to AI and suddenly everyone starts selling. We saw it recently with the memory chip market, which we were discussing on our show yesterday, where Google comes out with some algorithm that this is going to change the way the membership market works, and then everyone sells, and then

burnstein comes out with research and says, no, it's not going to be a problem. Everyone buys. I don't know what your reading is, but I get the sense that investors are just so confused right now, that they're not really down to go with any position that kind of going wherever the win blows.

“I think you at the nail in the head, I mean, I just pull that micron, because I wanted to get”

it the exactly right, micron is growing for earnings at 739% and trades at five times earnings. So that is the market telling you it doesn't know what to do with the earnings profile. The earnings growth is so egregious to the upside. The market does not know what to do, so the multiple roles being pushed down, even though the stock has gone up, because the earnings have accelerated so dramatically. The same things are occurring with Nvidia. Nvidia is growing at 80 and it's

trained with 20 times earnings. That's, you know, at a parity almost with the S&P 500. So I couldn't agree more. I don't think it folks know quite what to do with this. I think that it's really going to come down to CapEx spend from the hyperscalers. We'll get a read on that as we roll into quarterly earnings, but I will say this is one risk that you know is out there to the extent that you know Microsoft had a really tough quarter to the extent that, you know, the Mag 7 continues

to struggle in the equity markets. That is going to put pressure on management's ability to continue funding CapEx. You know, historically I've done it from free cash flow. Now they're

“having to tap the debt markets. So the market will only tolerate that so far. So I think that”

you know what, what plays out here with the worn around and the CPI continuing to come in

is going to be really critical because if the equities prices stay weak for the Mag 7,

be tougher for them to continue the CapEx cycle. So we're going to have to see how those earnings

shake out, but I will tell you as I sit here today and I look at where valuations are. I look at where earnings are and I look at the sectors that did well. Some of the more defensive

“sectors, energy utilities, reads, I'm optimistic that we could push through this and I think that”

the current administration really does not want to warn their hands. The midterms are coming up. I think that there's going to be a lot of pressure to resolve this relatively quickly. And move out and particularly with, you know, the administration saying they want lower rates, it's going to make it way harder if you continue to push oil prices because the straight stays closed. And you know, that's 20% of the of the world's oil supplies about going through there.

So what one more that I will make that is fascinating. I've heard anyone talk about this.

It relates to oil. So in 2022, you had two real bad things going on, right? You had interest rate hiking cycle. And then you had the Ukraine, you know, Ukraine was invaded by Russia and you saw oil oil prices shoot up. And that was a really tough period for the market because you had the fed raising rates to the old inflation from COVID and supply chain disruptions. And on top of that, you know, you had a war going on. So it was really tough. And what occurred was you saw the

baker here's a rig count really ramp up oil production to compensate for the high oil prices. That is not happened yet. The baker here's a rig count has not moved higher. We're going to get a reading tomorrow on that. But that's also interesting. You know, that would need to move up, I think, to kind of release some constraint. If that doesn't, you actually could have a scenario where the goal for foreigners and the energy stocks maybe continue to participate in the market.

But you see technology financials and other cyclicals kind of play a catch-up trade as well. So it could be a bullish setup. Right. Yeah. It seems as though you all, you would buy the dip or maybe you have already bought the dip. Are there any names or any sectors that you feel particularly bullish on right now? I get the sense that that is your position. Yeah. So I'll tell you that we have taken some energy profits. We were overweight energy. And that was not a call

based on anything in the Middle East. It was a bottom-up call in valuation. So we were fortunately positioned the right way. So we'll take it. What I would say is that we've been adding to some of the more single areas like financials, like industrials. Financials have went through a really tough time, particularly the regional banks back in 2023 with the failure of Silicon Valley

and First Republic. You know, you're getting a lot of multiple dislocation price to books or

attractive there. And the yield curve is steep and now we'll see what happens here with the fed. You know, if they don't cut, that's going to put a little bit pressure on the yield curve.

“But my expectation that you should have a steep yield curve. That's a healthy sign for the economy.”

I don't think you want the 10-year apparently with the Fed funds rate, which is basically where we are today. So if that steep ends, banks should fly. They've got great balance sheets. They're not exposed to private credit. I like financials here. And then, you know, as I mentioned, you know, some of the industrials in the capital good space industrial machinery. These names are attractive. And, you know, I think the market is trying to recalibrate. It doesn't want to

pay for longer duration assets, meaning the software trade or is more interested in cash flow generative hard assets. And I think the market is recognizing that actually the AI trade needs hard assets. And so maybe it's overly discounted. These areas relative to the technology trade. So I think that you could see a compression there. You're already seeing it. So yeah, I'm optimistic. You know, we could see a like lower. I would not be surprised if that happens.

“But that being said, I think that you should be adding to equities here, given that you're,”

you know, you're, you're getting the S&P, you know, it was in our 20 times yesterday. Right. Just before we let you go here, we'll see what Trump says. But you mentioned that this administration probably doesn't want to have a war on its hands. Probably doesn't want to be dealing with even higher oil prices. Midtowns are coming up. I agree conceptually with all of that. However, it's also, that's also what I thought at the

beginning of the year. And it's also what I thought last year. And then they did start a war. And they did close town, the straightive homo's. Yes. And they went ahead with all of this. So that leaves me in a slightly difficult position. I agree theoretically. Probably they want to end this thing. But then I look at what they do. And I'm like, well,

and predict what's going to happen. I guess my question to you is, let's say this continues. Let's say the speech is a nothing bugger or he says, actually, I'm doubling down.

“Would that change your position at all? And if so, how you know, I think the playbook is what”

happened with the tariffs. He drew a hard line and the market ultimately forced his hand. It's not

unlike when Mark Zuckerberg said, you know, we're going to rename the company meta. We're going to do the metaverse and then the market took the stock down, 67% and he said, it's the year of efficiency. Yeah. So the market ultimately dictates how leadership has to respond. So they can draw hard lines. But Trump is he does seem to be very aware of what's going on the equity markets and to be honest. I don't know if that's not improper. I think that a leader of the country should be focused on

what the largest companies in the world are doing. Great. So I actually think that if he comes out with a more negative stance and the market reacts very negatively, my expectation is that that will be pressuring him because again, to the extent the market's staying negative, that starts to put pressure on the capex cycle. Yep. That puts pressure on the AI build out. That puts pressure on tensions with China and they're build out. So there's all this geopolitical

“chest that occurs with a weak equity market. I think for America to be in the best position,”

we need a strong equity market. And I think that that's going to ultimately deliver that the he uses to or that he's going to be considering when he thinks about how he deals with the running capex. And I think that my personal opinion is it's already proved to be more complex than you anticipate. Yeah. I think that's right. John Marry Chief Investment Officer will further manage an equity strategist at an FJ investment group. John, appreciate your time. Thank you.

Off to the break. Open AI makes history again. And if you're enjoying the show, please follow our new Prophetic Markets YouTube channel. It's daunting next week. That is where you'll find our content on YouTube. The link is in the description. Subscribe now. So we're running a promo for this show. On a video about Roblox or something, no offense to our gen alpha listeners, but that would be a waste of anyone's ad budget. So when you want to reach

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should be more than just transport. It is part of the adventure. It's a version of Atlantic.com to learn more. Tickets in lounge access provided by Virgin Atlantic. We're back with Prophecy Markets. Open AI just closed the largest funding round in startup history.

The round brought in $122 billion of committed capital up from the $110 billion the company announced

in February. Softbank co-led alongside Andrews and Horowitz and Deeshaw Adventures, Amazon, NVIDIA and Microsoft also participated. The company is now valued at $852 billion, but it's generating $2 billion in revenue per month. It is still not profitable and it is still burning cash. So here to help us break down the largest funding round in history. We're speaking with Alex Heath, author of these sources and newsletters and co-hosts of the access podcast. So Alex, $852 billion valuation,

that makes it the most valuable private company ever neck and neck with SpaceX, which as we know is going public soon. I guess let's just start with your headline reactions. I mean, these are sounding numbers. We may have $3 trillion plus AI, IPOs this year. So open AI, SpaceX obviously,

“and Anthropic. It's a race between open AI and Anthropic now to get out next, I think.”

They're sounding numbers. I mean, the growth rates are the story. The growth rates of an open AI's case, the API business codecs, which will be, I think, more central to the company's story this year than even CHATGPT. And then they continued, you know, I've been CHATGPT growth has definitely slowed, but still winning consumer and very early on the ads piece there, but starting to move into that quickly. So a sounding number, I think proving that Sam Alman is

one his already kind of de facto title is the greatest fundraiser in Silicon Valley history,

this definitely cemented that. Someone should do the math. He's raised gosh, whatever, 200 billion

for the company at this point. And it'll last like three years. So the last time we were all talking about this kind of fundraising talent was Travis Calenik and Uber way back in the day. And that was,

“you know, I think 60 or 70 billion. So not even the total sum of this one round.”

Yeah, it is, it is astounding. One thing it's a little interesting to me. 852 billion dollar valuation. I mean, that tells you a story of just demand going absolutely through the roof. The fact that he's able to raise this amount of money and at this valuation, it would make it the 13th most valuable company of all companies in the world, which is just astounding. But then there was also this report from Bloomberg. They were saying that opening

I shares on the secondary markets, the demand for those shares has been plummeting. They were saying

that there are there are people who have been trying to sell their shares, $600 million worth of

shares that were trying to get that an investment was trying to sell. And he couldn't find any buyers. And so that was quite interesting to me. It feels as though maybe there are two different worlds here. There's, I guess, the private markets going and getting these shares directly from the company. And then I guess the secondary markets were maybe there's a different story. Just be curious to get your reaction to that story.

Open AI pushed back on that story pretty quickly, which I thought was interesting. They, they are not a fan as are most companies that are private of the secondary transactions. Because you lose touch with the company. You're not a direct shareholder. There's usually layers and layers of management fees and past-through things that make it very

“risky, honestly. And I wouldn't look at like a 600 million chunk of secondary is not moving as like”

any indication of frankly anything when you look at a hundred and twenty-two billion dollar round of primary capital that just closed. Again, I think a large chunk though of that capital is the strategic, right? It's Amazon and soft bank. And there's probably a bit of a bit of circular motion there. Like I'm sure a significant chunk of Amazon's investment is contingent on using

read too much in the secondary piece. I mean, I think in general, you're going to see a crack down

and a realization that these secondarys are for the most part, like legally problematic.

“Yeah. And I think a lot of people are going to get hosts in the space X IPO. I've been seeing”

things about, you know, multiple layers of SPVs trying to like trade secondary chunks where the companies just not, they're not obligated to recognize that. They're not obligated to say like here are your shares, you know, because they're not really yours at that point. And so proceed with your own caution. You said don't read into it. I'm just going to read into it. One once more. I wonder as these companies, you mentioned, trillions of dollars worth of startups are

looking to go public soon. You've got SpaceX going to be the most valuable, the largest IPO in history. You've got open AI eventually. You've got anthropic eventually. I mean, when these companies go public, it's going to be like just a banana in the public markets. But I wonder how those companies will perform in the public markets. And I wonder if the dynamics are different. And I wonder if the secondary markets might be, I don't know, a signal of what may be to come because as you mentioned,

the valuations for these companies have been primarily driven by the institutions here and perhaps by some of the circular motion that you talk about where it's these giant corporations, companies like Amazon, Nvidia, et cetera, investing huge amounts of money into these companies, they're the ones who are driving those valuations up. And I wonder if when it gets to the public markets, maybe it would be something of a different story. I guess my question being, how do you

think a company like Open AI would perform in the public markets, say it goes public next year,

“out of more than trillion dollar valuation, what do you think would happen? I have no idea. I think”

if I knew that I wouldn't be on a podcast, frankly, I'd know insult to you. I think that it's going to be incredibly hard for these companies to do quarterly earnings. Andthropic added like

six billion in ARR and February. And that's unprecedented and was based on new product

traction with cloud code, right, in the models. We can see multiple step function shifts like that this year because Open AI is getting ready to release their next large model spot as it's called internally, which they are very much typing behind the scenes. Andthropic, there was a big leak about anthropic preparing its own suite of large models that are apparently so capable that they're showing them first to cyber security companies to try to get them ready for when they're deployed.

“This is all happening before these companies go out. And then you've got the super op that Open AI is doing”

and when I talk to like I talked to the head of code X at Open AI last week. And he told me

what is happening in coding they expect to branch out into basically every domain of knowledge work

in the next six to nine months given the model capability and where the products are headed in this more cloud code work you're coding but you don't really know it like AI coding for normies. That really saturating and extending into all kinds of knowledge work domains in the same way that it's revolutionized engineering already so quickly. That's incredibly profound at scale and to try to navigate that again against quarterly earnings and the whims of

the public markets as a public company I just they need to do it because they need the capital and they need liquidity but it's going to be very tough and these companies are also like we've talked about this before like a bit of a governance disaster and so that's another messy part of it. So there's a lot of things that don't make these like clear cut like even if with the Elonists of all of it and how many crazy reverse mergers have happened like SpaceX looks like a

very normal company next to Open AI and Anthropica and that's a really wild statement but it's true and so I just don't think the markets have seen anything like this and if you believe with these companies are saying that AI and super intelligence are right around the corner or in the case of what I was saying that had a codex told me that you know the coding phenomenon is going to generalize all of knowledge work this year. How do you tell that in a quarterly story you know I'm not really

sure it could be spiky as I said I don't know if that's the official investor term but to stock go up and stock go down rapidly. It's my prediction. I think that's a better way to put it as

It is a great point. Alex Heath author of the sources newsletter goes of the Access podcast. Alex, thank you. Thank you. In other news, Trump's ballroom plans might be coming to an end. A US federal judge just ordered

Trump to stop building his $400 million white house ballroom until he gets approval from Congress.

District court judge Richard Leon wrote that Trump is quote not the owner of the White House and cited with the plaintiff's motion that argued that quote no statute comes close to giving the

“president the authority he claims to have. So the ballroom is on hold. Will it ever get built?”

I guess we'll see. In the meantime though, the East Wing remains in ruins. As you may remember, Trump had the 123-year-old structure demolished back in October. He did so without any review, without any approval. He just went ahead and did it. And as of today, the East Wing remains destroyed except now there is no plan or approved plan to rebuild it. And he could say that that's the judges' fault. You could say it's not the judges' fault. I don't really care where you stand.

Either way, that is the situation we're in. The building is destroyed and it will continue to be. Now, why am I talking about a ballroom on a show where we talk about markets? Well, I've mentioned this on the show before, but the ballroom is quite significant because the ballroom is a great metaphor for our entire economic policy under this president. In fact, most of the big decisions Trump has made for our economy have looked a lot like the ballroom

where his first action is to demolish what already existed. Then promise to replace it with something better, a new plan. Until he realizes he doesn't actually have the way with all or even the constitutional ability to come up with an alternative. At which point he says, screw it, he moves on to the next thing. And then as we look back on what happened, we realized, all this guy did was break the thing he said he was going to replace. And then he didn't even

replace it. I'm calling this strategy, BNFL, break now, fix later. And we have seen this many, many times and I'm now going to go through a few examples. The first example would be Iran.

“Now, it's not totally clear why we invaded Iran, but I think we can agree that general idea was to”

remove this threat of a regime that was either building nuclear weapons, maybe, or had some

interest in harming America. That is the generous reading. So what did we do? We spent $25 billion

on bombing Iran. We caused four and a half thousand deaths. We roiled the markets around the globe. Only for the previous regime to remain intact. Only now it's run not by the guy we killed, obviously, but by his son. And do we think the son of the murdered Iotola has positive feelings about America, personally, I doubt it. And yet Trump is now talking about ceasefire talks. He's now talking a little bit of signaling about getting out of the region. So again, we have the same dynamic.

We broke the thing, but then when it came to fixing the thing, we said, yeah, we'll deal that later. Another example would be tariffs. We impose sweeping tariffs on every nation around the world. We cause one of the greatest drawdowns in stock market history. We increase inflation by a full percentage point, essentially taxing every US household more than a thousand dollars. And then we realize, oh, wait, this isn't even constitutionally legal. The Supreme Court strikes it down.

And now we're going to have to figure out a way to give everyone refunds, except the refunds will only apply to businesses, not consumers. So the consumer gets screwed again. Yes, we broke it, but whatever, we'll fix it later. Doge is another good example. We create an agency that

vies 300,000 federal workers. The agency shuts down USAID, which leads to nearly 10 million additional

deaths that would have been prevented. People kind of cheer only for Doge to then be quietly dissolved. Meanwhile, that same administration decides to increase our deficit by roughly $4 trillion. Thus reversing any efficiencies that were supposed to be implemented in this government.

“So did we break things? Yes, we did. We broke a lot of things. Did we fix anything?”

No, we didn't. Most of Trump's big policies fit this rubric. And I do encourage you to go back and look through them and realize that for yourself. They break the thing. They dismantle whatever work was done over generations like the ballroom. They promised to change it or replace it or build something bigger and better and more beautiful in its place. But then they just don't.

Then it is to build things. This is the pattern. We see it over and over and over again.

“Now, who knows how this Iran war will actually turn out? But if we are going off of the pattern,”

if we're going off of Trump's track record, if we're going off of the ballroom,

well, then the conclusion is quite obvious. Lots will be destroyed. Buildings, systems,

“markets, even lives. And at the end of the day, when it's time to build something in its place,”

Trump will probably just move on to the next thing. And we will be left with nothing.

Okay, that's it for today. This episode is produced by Claire Miller and Alice Weiss,

“edited by Joel Passen and engineered by Benchman Spencer. Our video editor is Brad Williams.”

Our research team is Dashalan. It's about a canceled crisp, no don't of you. And mere Solverio, and our social producer is Jake McPherson. Thank you for listening to property markets and property media. If you like what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Alson, tune in tomorrow for our conversation with the acclaimed divorce lawyer James Sexton.