$135B in Tariff Refunds, Trump's $1,000 Retirement Match, & Hindenburg Omens

where every Friday morning, we're coming at you with the biggest headlines impacting you

“and your money. This episode is brought to you by VCX, the public ticker for private tech.”

My name is Austin Hankwitz. I'm joined by my co-host Robert Croke and the three things sitting at the top of our Rich Habit Radar this week include the 1800 companies that are currently

suing the United States government to get their tariff money back, met as $100 billion deal with

AMD and Trump announcing a $1,000 retirement account match courtesy of the United States government and be sure to stick around to the end where we talk about the S&P 500 flashing the Hindenburg Omen for the sixth time this month and what that could mean for the markets. So Robert, let's dig into our first story. Yes, definitely I'm excited. 1800 companies are suing the US government for 130 billion with a B in tariff refunds. Last Friday the Supreme Court ruled 63

that Trump's use of the emergency powers law to impose sweeping tariffs was illegal. The story

“that's unfolding right now is the aftermath and it is definitely chaos. Yeah more than 1,800 companies”

have now filed lawsuits against the government seeking refunds on tariff that were just declared unconstitutional. From the Wall Street Journal's analysis we're talking about about $132,175

billion in tariffs that were collected over the last 10 months or so money that the Supreme Court

essentially just said should have not been taken from these companies in the first place. Costco filed before the ruling even came down trying to get in the front of the line. Just saw FedEx filed on Monday and is seeking a full refund but that's not all of it. We've got GoPro, Good Year, Toyota, Revlon, Barnes and Noble bumblebee foods all of these companies are in on these lawsuits. Trade lawyers are calling this as best-if level litigation. There's no clear

refund process. The Supreme Court struck down the tariff but didn't say anything about how the money gets returned. Justice Kavanaugh warned in his dissent that the refund process would be a mess and Trump himself set it up press conference that companies will end up being in court for the next five years which is crazy to me. Yeah there's also like a secondary market that's sprung up around these refunds before the Supreme Court ruling companies were selling the

refund rights to hedge funds for about $20 on the dollar but now those refund rights are worth $0.40 on the dollar. So twice as much which tells you the market thinks that money could be coming back eventually but no one really knows when. Yeah and here's the real kicker for regular people. You paid for these tariffs too. In research from Harvard Business School found the consumers covered about a quarter of the tariff costs through higher prices. The tax

foundation estimated tariffs added about $1,000 per household last year alone. So where's your refund? Almost certainly not coming. The refunds go to the importer of record like Costco, Walmart, Target, the companies that actually paid the tariff bill to customs. Whether those companies pass any savings along to you is entirely up to them and treasury secretary Bessent basically said don't count on it. So Austin what does this mean for you and your money? Well it means a few

“things. Watch the companies following these lawsuits. I think that's the most obvious right”

companies like FedEx for example. FedEx gets back even a portion of the billion dollars that they

paid in tariffs. That billion dollars that they get refunded goes straight to their bottom line boosting earnings per share profits. Things like that. Same deal with Costco, Toyota and all other companies that we had mentioned as well as the other 1795 that we did not mention. These refunds are essentially that one time earnings boost for all these businesses and that could. Big emphasis on code because we have no idea but that could impact their stock prices. Yeah Goldman Sachs put out

a note this week saying consumers are probably stuck with higher prices even with the ruling because companies already baked tariff costs into their current pricing. So even if Costco does get their tariff money back your grocery bill probably isn't going to come down anytime soon. Tariff policy creates uncertainty and uncertainty is the enemy of both businesses and investors. State diversified, stay patient and don't try to trade these headlines.

Jesus Louise 1800 companies that's going to be a mess Robert. That is just going to flood the the courts and it's wow what a mess. Well, let's now move on to our second headline. Nothing messy about this one. Meta's $100 billion chip deal with AMD. On Tuesday, Meta and AMD announced what might be the biggest hardware deal in the history of computing. Meta is committing to purchase up to six gigawatts of AMD's instinct GPUs across multiple generations and some analysts on Wallstreet

are estimating that the deal could be worth up to $100 billion over five years. To put that

to run a small city and Meta again is buying six of these so that they can power their AI computing needs all from AMD advanced micro devices. AMD CEO Lisa Sue called it one of the most transformational deals in the company's history. And AMD's stock jumped 9% on the news, which we expected. Here's the twist as part of the deal. AMD issued Meta a performance-based

warrant for up to 160 million shares of AMD stock. That's roughly a 10% stake in the company,

but it only fully vests if AMD's stock hits $600 per share and it closed around $200 and $4 as of this filming. So Meta is essentially betting this deal will triple their stock price over time.

“Well, as you guys might remember, that's the exact structure AMD used with open AI back in October.”

We talked about this one on the show as well. 160 million shares performance-based warrants tied to shipment milestones and stock price targets. It's becoming AMD's playbook, if you will, right? Give your biggest customers some skin to the game. But here's the actual interesting call out. In my opinion, just two weeks ago, Meta signed a separate multi-year deal within video for millions of their chips too, which tells me that Meta is just spending tons and tons

and tons of money on CapEx. They don't care who it's going to. They just want some of these

chips. Some data says 135 billion is going to be spent in 2026 alone in capital expenditures

all for that AI infrastructure. Yeah, I kind of feel like Meta is saying, all right, we're opening the war chest and we're going to write all the checks it takes for us to get back to the top of the

“heap here in this AI infrastructure race. And they're not picking sides between the video and AMD.”

They're buying everything from everyone because they literally can't get enough compute. So here's what this means for you and your money. This deal, in my opinion, validates the AI build out in a major way. For months, investors have been nervous about whether the hyper scalars are overspending on AI, and they're expected to collectively spend about $650 billion on AI infrastructure alone in

2026. But when you see Meta signed a $100 billion deal with AMD just two weeks after signing a

massive deal with the video, that tells you that a man for AI compute is real. It's growing and these companies see it as existential. They're not slowing down by any stretch of the imagination. And for those AMD investors listing right now, I'm an AMD investor. I got me a ton of AMD stock. This is validation, right? AMD has been stuck in Nvidia's shadow. They control less than 10% of the AI chip market. Nvidia's got about the other 90% give or take. But this deal combined

with the open AI partnership from October now positions advanced micro devices as the clear number two. Lisa Sue, the CEO of AMD, described it as a win-win for shareholders. The warrant structure means that AMD only gives up equity if the deal is wildly successful. AKA the stock price essentially triples, which listen, Lisa. Let me talk to you, girl. If you got my money triple and you do whatever you want with these warrants. Yeah, that's for sure. We both have been in an AMD

for a very long time. And to hear them betting that it's going to triple in the next three, four or five years, I like those odds. So let's get into our next point, Trump's $1,000 retirement match for 56 million Americans. During Trump's state of the union address on Tuesday night, Trump made an announcement that we think flew under the radar for a lot of people. He said as administration is creating a new retirement account for roughly 56 million Americans

who don't currently have access to a 401k or any kind of employer sponsored retirement plan. So it's pretty cool news. Let's dig into it. Yeah, he said in a quote, half of all working Americans still do not have access to a retirement plan with matching contributions from an employer. To remedy this gross disparity, my administration will give these often forgotten American workers access to the same type of retirement plans offered to

every federal worker. We will match your contribution with up to $1,000 each year. That sounds pretty cool. It does. And it's modeled after the thrift savings plan, which is what federal employees and military members use. The TSP is known for its low fees and simple index fund options. It's basically the gold standard of retirement plans. And under Trump's proposal, workers with out of 401k would get access to a very similar account. And the government would match

“their contributions up to $1,000 per year. That's a key factor here. Yeah, I think that $1,000”

matches awesome rubber. But the funny part is this is not entirely new. Back in 2022,

which was a provision where the government would provide a 50% match on up to $2,000 in annual retirement contributions for eligible workers. That was already set to kick in throughout 2027. Trump's proposal is essentially accelerating that timeline and maybe repackaging it a little bit. Yeah, Chuck Schumer was quick to point out that Trump is stealing Biden's playbook and accomplishments,

“but honestly, whether it's new or repackage, the policy itself is something both sides should”

get behind because it helps so many people. So, Austin, break it down. What does this mean for you and

your money? Well, yeah, this is a huge deal. If you're one of those 56 million workers,

you know, we got a cool episode coming out on Monday talking about what to do with your first $1,000. And you kind of talked about like, you know, do the match in the 401k, but what happens? If you're one of the 56 million people in America where you don't get the match in the 401k, like, what, what, what for you? So, the typical American worker has less than $1,000 save for a time it right now. And the data is clear, people are dramatically more likely to save for retirement

when they have access to a workplace plan that provides a match. So, if you're one of these 56 million Americans that does not get a match from your employer, now you might be getting one, which is exciting. And we hope you're already saving for a time. But if you're not, this is a really, really good incentive to start. Yes, if you're 25 years old and you contribute $1,000 a year with a government matching, another thousand, and you invest that in a simple S&P 500 index fund,

“averaging around 10% annually by the time you're 65 years old, you would have over $500,000. That's why”

we're always telling you, no matter what you can start with, just get started and stay consistent.

That's just from $1,000 a year. That's the power of compound interest and exactly why we talk about starting early and often on this show. Now, there's still a ton of big questions. Who's going to be funding this? Well, Congress actually pass it. Who knows, right? The White House does say some details can be implemented without Congress through the existing secure 2.0 framework, but all the experts that we've read online blurbs about are pretty skeptical.

TD Collins says they don't see a viable path to enact this plan, but here's what I'd say. Don't wait. If you don't have a 401k at work, you can open a Roth IRA today and get started right now.

Right now on your phone apps like public.com, fidelity or Schwab let you do any of this in minutes.

Start putting even $50 a month into a low cost index fund and don't wait for the government to give you permission to build wealth and just get started. 100%. Now, before we jump to our little breakdown into ETF Central.com, the best performing ETFs this week, the worst performing ETFs this week, got to give a shout out to VCX, the public ticker for private tech. Totally Austin support for the show comes from VCX. That's the public ticker for private tech. For generations,

American companies move the world forward through their ingenuity and determination. And for generations, every day Americans could be part of that journey through perhaps the greatest innovation of all, and that is the US stock market. It didn't matter whether you were a factory worker in Detroit or a farmer in Omaha. Anyone could owe the peace of these great American companies. But now that is changed, today our most innovative companies are staying privately held

longer, rather than going public. The results is that everyday Americans are excluded from investing and getting left further and further behind while a select few reap all of the benefits until now.

“That's why we're excited to share and introduce VCX. The public ticker for private tech, VCX by”

fund rise gives everyone the opportunity to invest in the next generation of innovation, including the companies leading the AI revolution, space exploration, defense tech, and many, many more. Visit gitvcx.com for more information that is gitvcx.com for more information. And carefully consider the investment materials before investing, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. This and other information can be found in the funds prospectus

at gitvcx.com. This is a paid sponsorship. Gitvcx.com super excited about this one Robert. It's going to unlock a lot of cool innovation for a lot of people who just couldn't get in early. It's kind of funny, right? It's like you look around and you're like, man, why was an iron early investor in some of these open AI names or anthropic? You know, I'm not saying that VCX is a part of that this is very much me rambling now, but it's kind of frustrating when you look around and you're like,

stuff with so cool about VCX in our opinion. Again, we're just kind of talking here is that they are

“really beginning to open up this asset class. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I love all of the tools”

we talk about here on the show because I feel like all of these companies are working towards leveling the playing field. So the everyday investor can get involved, get in there and get a piece of the action that was once reserved just for the big funds and the wealthy people. So I love tools like this. All right, Robert. Let's now move the show along. We're headed over to ETFcentral.com. One of our favorite platforms to do more research as it relates to the underlying holdings,

performance and fun flows of thematic ETFs listed all around the world with so cool about ETF central. Specifically, this little callout section is we try and give you guys the who's who, if you will, and who's moving and shaking best performers, worse performers for the week,

coming in third place for the best performing thematic ETF this week is multi commodity up

four and a half percent second place alternative energy up about five percent. And here we go, best performing thematic ETF this week are precious metals excluding gold coming up in 19 to point three percent. Yeah, and the three worst performers this week are EM awakening. So I'm guessing that that sector means emerging markets down three and a half percent cloud computing coming in at number two is down three and a half percent. And the number one worst performer this week is

cybersecurity down six percent. So Austin, what do you think about these for this week when we

“dig into these and really do the research? You know, just kind of looking at this right now, I think”

something that people need to keep an eye on here is that alternative energy. You know, we see a little bit of turmoil happening in the Middle East right now. We're seeing a lot of a rotation. If you go look at Wall Street Favorites.com and you look at the best performing sectors, you'll just pull it up for everyone right now. So you guys can see what I'm talking about. If you go to Wall Street Favorites.com and you click on sector radar, you can see what sectors of the S&P 500 have performed

best year to date energy here coming in at the second best behind basic materials. But we've got

energy up 15 and a half percent year to date six month momentum up 22 and a half percent with the average upside per stock that's listed as an energy company in the S&P 500 with about 8% here. But it's interesting, right? Because like as you think about the different sectors that are performing well, not performing well energy for me right now in Q1 is just really interesting. If you're part of the Rich Habits Network, you know, I've been talking about MLPI, the Neo's MLPI and

Condits and energy ETF. But I just think energy is really interesting right now. XLE is just gone on run. Exxon mobile has been going crazy. VDE is a Vanguard's energy sector there. So it's just just interesting to see that, you know, one, if you're inside the Rich Habits Network, we've been talking about this for about a month and so you've been able to appreciate this upside. But two, who knows if it's going to slow down? Yeah, you were definitely really ahead of this calling out the

energy sector. We've been in it for a while, but you were really adamant about you've got to get more eyes on the energy sector. So kudos to that for all of our listeners and people in the Rich Habits Network and all of you that follow the podcast because there has been just so much

“upside because it's no secret with all of this manufacturing data center and AI boom. Energy is the”

the most thing that people are afraid of that we won't have enough of to be able to meet the demands. So Austin, great job on that call out. Yeah, and finally I'll call out this cloud computing sector segment theme, whatever you want to call it here, you're to date performance down 17%. Right, that's because of what we've seen with artificial intelligence and these agents and being able to build applications in a moment's time versus having to, you know, subscribe to a sales force or

a Monday.com or Nessana. A lot of these cloud computing names, these SaaS companies that were really sexy and fun even just two years ago. They are now just getting beaten and maybe they're oversold hard to tell. None of you here are going to make any judgments or any of some callouts. But I just think this cloud computing, you to date performance is also a really interesting story if you know what's going on behind the scenes. Speaking of stories, Robert, it is that time. We are

going to be sharing our own favorite stories other week. I'll let you go first. Whoa, okay, you've caught me off guard. I will definitely go first. Let me get down to mine. So I have something to review. My number one call out and I'm going to call, I'm going to call bull on this one is state farm

announced a $5 billion dividend back to customers. So what does that mean? They claim is that

they are rewarding their customer base because of better than expected underwriting performance.

50% since 2020 and I believe they got their hand caught in the cookie jar and through pressure,

“state farm decided you know what? Let's give all this money back and give everyone a little”

bit of a break here during these volatile times. So state farm customers can expect roughly about a hundred dollar refund coming their way. So if you're a state farm customer, keep an eye out. I know it's not a lot of money, but it can buy you a dinner out or maybe a little bit of grocery.

So that's my number one call out. Number two for me is Amazon's $50 billion bet on open AI,

but there's a catch. The information reported that Amazon and talks to invest up to $50 billion in open AI, which would make it the single largest investor in the company's current funding round, but here's the catch. Only 15 billion would go in upfront the remaining 35 billion is conditional. Amazon only writes the check if open AI either goes public with an IPO or hits with their calling an artificial general intelligence milestone, basically saying AI that can reason

“at a human level across any task. So if you own Amazon stock, I think this is definitely worth”

paying attention to. Amazon just isn't writing a check. They're tying themselves into open AI using Amazon's own training chips through AWS, which means this investment also drives revenue

back to Amazon's cloud business. And my third point today is global markets react to the Trump's

new 15% import tariff announced just the other day. This headline definitely has the stock market spooked as fear of increased goods, retaliation, and the disruption of supply chains has investors worried about further uncertainty in the markets, and heat gave Trump gave 150 day window, which will definitely cause a wait and see situation for the markets, and will likely create longer term uncertainty, which we already have a lot of in the markets as we can see right now

with everything that's going on. Appreciate those call outs. Yeah, we got a lot of Trump stuff going

“on right now. I guess just you know the the tariff stuff, the stated the union, and I've got”

another thing that he talked about around this state of the union stuff in my own call outs here.

So let me jump into mine. The three things I'm talking about is the S&P 500 flashing its sixth Hindenburg Omen in a single month, Trump ordering tech giants to power their own AI data centers, and the AI chip maker cerebrus filing for an IPO. So let's talk about this Hindenburg Omen. The S&P 500 has triggered its sixth Hindenburg Omen signal in the past month, which is bringing back some flashbacks from February of 2020. We all know what happened to the stock market in March

of 2020. When a cluster of these signals proceeded that COVID driven sell off, the Hindenburg Omen Austin, what is this you're talking about it? Should I care about it? It's a technical indicator. So think about nothing to do with the fundamentals, the profits, it's all about price action. This indicator attempts to flag internal weakness in the stock market. How does it identify internal weakness? It identifies internal weakness as a point in time when a significant number of

stocks trading on the New York Stock Exchange are simultaneously experiencing new 52 week highs and new 52 week lows. So you got a bunch of stocks trading at all time highs, a bunch of stocks trading at 52 week lows, and that divergence is what is considered weakness, a fractured week market. Right? So historically, when a bunch of these Omen's come together, kind of like what we're seeing right now, draws a lot of attention from traders and it's something to keep an eye on.

It's been talked about though since October. We've been having a couple of these instances for a while. I'm not going to say it's, you know, put more weight. So my gosh run for the hills because of course we're long-term investors. We don't care about this stuff. But just thought y'all should know, came across my radar. Next thing I want to talk about is Trump ordering these tech giants to power their own AI data centers, which listen man, I'm here for this y'all got hundreds of billions of

dollars go. Don't, don't make my electricity more expensive. We'll find your own electricity. So Donald Trump has said that major tech companies that are developing AI data centers will have to cover their own electricity needs under what he is called a newly negotiated rate protection pledge. He did not specifically name companies involved or provide details on how the plan would be implemented or enforced. But Reuters reported that the White House is expected to host all these different

AI companies in early March to formalize the deals. Last month we saw Microsoft unveil a plan to ensure that their data centers don't increase consumer electricity prices and they're minimizing their water use and replenishing more water than they use. Wedbush, which is a investment bank on Wall Street, has said that they are expecting other big tech organizations to follow suit very soon,

concerns with these large scale data center buildouts. Now finally Robert to wrap up my radar

“points. We got this little Surrey Briss IPO pretty exciting artificial intelligence chipmakers”

Surrey Briss competing with Nvidia and AMD of course has filed for an initial public offering. The company has been meeting with potential investors and a listing could take place as soon as April. Last month Surrey Briss signed a multi year multi-billion dollar deal with open AI to provide them with 750 megawatts of computing power. Surrey Briss has also reported to be in discussions

to raise about a billion dollars out of $22 billion valuation. Surrey Briss feel like guys never

heard of this one saying it's kind of popped up out of nowhere but they were founded in 2015. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, they've got the WSE3 chip and their CS3 system and these broke benchmark records in AI inference in training when they were released last year. Current customers include meta and AstraZeneca. So keep an eye out on the Surrey Briss IPO could be happening as early as April. I love your radar points here and about Hindenburg. You just think of all these crazy things and then

“the Trump ordering these tech giants to provide their own power. I think that's great news”

if they can pull it off because it's not fair to us why all these companies are making hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars that our power goes up. So love these radar points today and just such a great episode. Well before we sign off Robert, we got to give a shout out to our friends over at Blossom. You guys know we've been talking about this tool for so long now.

They have an incredible, incredible platform that's going to help you take your investing to the next

level. If you're not yet using Blossom, this one is genuinely different from their competitors. At its core, it's a beautiful portfolio tracker. You'll link your brokerage account from public, Robin Hood or Schwab or Fidelity, everything sinks in automatically. You get those clean visuals, the clear performance, the dividends tracked all of this stuff beautifully here on your desktop or your mobile device. Yeah, the UI alone is worth it. It's one of the few investing apps that

actually makes you want to check your portfolio. Not in a stressful way, but in a while, this is really clean. I love this interface. So definitely want to check it out. Yeah, here's the part that sold us. It's not just your portfolio, but you can follow other investors and see their real verified holdings. Yeah, exactly. They're not just screenshots or the trust me bro portfolios. Their broker linked and verified. You can literally see when someone adds a position, trims or holds,

including myself and Austin. In the best part is it's a community of long-term investors, just like us. We're not the rich traders. We're not trading options. We're not doing the 4x. You start to understand how these long-term investors actually behave, what they buy, what they ignore. The transparency is something you just don't see on other platforms. Yeah, we're both on there. Our portfolio is around there and people can follow along in real time.

It's definitely transparency done right. So search up blossom in the app store. Click the link in the show notes below or just simply visit blossomsocial.com on your computer. Robert, major shout out to blossom, major shout out to VCX, the public ticker for private tech, and major shout out to wallstreet favorites.com. If you know, you know, all right, Robert, let's wrap up the episode. Everybody, thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of The Rich Habits Radar. Our Friday

episode of The Rich Habits podcast, where every Friday we're coming at you with the biggest headlines, impacting you and your money, moving that little green or red in your portfolio, trying to help you guys make sense of it all. If you want more context, time, analysis, perspective, any of that stuff, join The Rich Habits Network. This is our community for our biggest fans, every Tuesday night at 830 p.m. Eastern time, Robert and I hop on a zoom call with 200 something

a y'all, and we just open up the playbook, talk about the headlines, talk about our portfolios, the trades we've made, the changes we've made, you know, I just talked about alluded to this energy thing. I made these updates a month ago. If you've been following me over there, you know, the energy has been doing well. So be sure to check out The Rich Habits Network for still running that seven day free trial. Yeah, blows my mind that this episode of The Rich Habits

podcast is going to get tens and tens of thousands of people watching and listening.

“Yet, what do you do in sitting on the sideline and not checking out The Rich Habits Network?”

It's amazing. It's life changing for people. We have so many cool tools, so many cool people

in this network, and you can join for seven days, you know, check out All the Course Work, join alive, and just meet all these other people that are on the same path as you are to build wealth and financial freedom. And you can join it for free for seven days. What are you waiting for? Yeah, and if you hate it, cool. See you later. No hard feelings. Thanks for listening to the show.

everybody. Thanks so much, and we'll see you on Monday. (upbeat music)