MI239: DEEP DIVE INTO APPLE AND GOOGLE STOCKS
W/ LOGAN KANE
06 December 2022
Rebecca Hotsko chats with Logan Kane. In this episode they discuss why Logan went from being a value investor to more of a quantitative investor, what his quantitative investing strategy looks like and the pros of using a quant strategy, what the “Kelly Criterion” is and how it can be used to manage risk. Logan’s current outlook of the stock market and his price target for the end of 2023, what his long term outlook for the US market is, his analysis of Apple stock and why Logan put a sell rating on Apple, his valuation analysis behind Google, why he thinks Google is the most undervalued tech stock and a buy at current prices, his thoughts on Meta and Amazon at today’s valuations, what’s happening with Bitcoin, where he sees it going in the near term and over the long term, his preferred way to invest in Bitcoin, and much, much more!
Logan is an author and entrepreneur. He is currently a writer for Seeking Alpha and covers macroeconomics trends, portfolio strategy, value investing and behavioral finance.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:
- Why Logan went from being a value investor to a quantitative investor.
- What his quantitative investing strategy looks like and the pros/cons of this strategy.
- What the “Kelly Criterion” is and how it can be used to manage risk.
- Logan’s current outlook of the US stock market and his price target for the end of 2023.
- His long term outlook for the US market, and why he thinks international markets and small cap value sectors of the market will perform the best over the next decade.
- His analysis of Apple stock and why Logan put a sell rating on Apple.
- His valuation analysis behind Google, why he thinks Google is the most undervalued tech stock and a buy.
- His thoughts on Meta, and Amazon at today’s valuations.
- What’s happening with Bitcoin, where he sees it going in the near term and over the long term.
- His preferred way to invest in Bitcoin.
- And much, much more!
TRANSCRIPT
Disclaimer: The transcript that follows has been generated using artificial intelligence. We strive to be as accurate as possible, but minor errors and slightly off timestamps may be present due to platform differences.
[00:00:00] Intro: You’re listening to TIP, and as a result, Apple Stock is probably the most overvalued large cap stock, borrowing Amazon or Tesla. Right now
[00:00:12] Rebecca Hotsko: On today’s episode, I’m joined by Logan Kane, who’s an author and entrepreneur, and currently a writer for Seeking Alpha, where he covers macroeconomic trends, portfolio strategy, value investing, and behavioral finance topic. During this episode, Logan talks about why he went from being a value investor to a quantitative investor, his current outlook for the US stock market, and some of the major risks he sees.
[00:00:38] Rebecca Hotsko: He also shares his analysis on Apple stock and why he put a sell rating on the company along with his valuation analysis behind Google, why he thinks Google is the most undervalued tech stock. He also talks about Bitcoin, where he sees it going over the long term and so much. I really enjoyed this conversation with Logan.
[00:00:59] Rebecca Hotsko: We covered so many great topics and deep dives into stocks. I want to note just one thing before we jump into the episode, and that’s, this was recorded before everything happened with FTX, so I just wanted to add that in because there have been some major developments that would probably change his outlook.
[00:01:17] Rebecca Hotsko: But with that’ll said, I really hope you enjoy today’s episode.
[00:01:23] Intro: You’re listening to Millennial Investing by The Investor Podcast Network, where your hosts Robert Leonard and Rebecca Hotsko, interview successful entrepreneurs, business leaders, and investors to help educate and inspire the millennial generation.
[00:01:46] Rebecca Hotsko: Welcome to the Millennial Investing Podcast. I’m your host, Rebecca Hotsko. And on today’s episode, I am joined by Logan Kane. Logan, welcome to the show.
[00:01:56] Logan Kane: My pleasure. Happy to be here.
[00:02:06] Rebecca Hotsko: I really like your writing style. You include a lot of macro analysis in combination with fundamental deep dives of certain stocks, and so we’re going to get into a few deep dives of tech stocks today. But before we get into all of that, can you tell our listeners a little bit about you, what you write about it Seeking Alpha and how you got to where you are today ?
[00:02:28] Logan Kane: Yeah, so my name is Logan Kane. I was born in Texas, raised in Kansas City. I’m currently doing this interview from the tropical coast of Spain. I always knew that I didn’t want to be behind a cubicle for 50 hours a week. So what I do is I publish research for, mostly for free for investors, and anybody who wants to read it can.
[00:02:48] Logan Kane: And as a result of developed a cult following writing about the economy, using a lot of data and taking some contrarian viewpoints. Not only on the markets, but on kind of the optimal way to live.
[00:03:00] Rebecca Hotsko: Yeah, I’ve really like the way that you write your style and just your kind of holistic articles. You cover a lot of great topics, so I definitely, I link that in the show notes for our listeners so they can go check them all out.
[00:03:12] Rebecca Hotsko: I also heard you talk about on a podcast where you were kind of a value investor turned quant. I’m curious to know, is that still the case and why’d you make the switch from more of a value investing approach to a quant investor?
[00:03:26] Logan Kane: Okay, so something that I think is really helpful for investors here is that on one end of the spectrum we have like Warren Buffet, the ultimate value investor, and then on the other end of the spectrum you have like a computer program that selects stocks based on any number of characteristics.
[00:03:43] Logan Kane: So there’s this thing, it’s called the Fundamental Law of Active Management. To be a good investor, you either need to be able to make a lot of bets at a low percentage. Like if you could win 51% on a thousand bet, Or you could be Warren Buffet and you could win, I don’t know, 80, 90% on 10 bets . There’s really no right way to go about it, like business, like life.
[00:04:04] Logan Kane: There’s multiple ways to do it, and one of the great things about investing in business is there’s literally a million ways you can do it. What I like and what I think is the easiest is to take more of a quantitative approach. You can always do some value investments as they come. But what I like about the quantitative approach is it takes a lot of our biases out of the way.
[00:04:25] Logan Kane: Like we might think Apple’s a great stock, but the computer might look at it and it might say, well, you know, at Apple’s 30, 40 times earnings, people are kind of excited about it, but you know, you don’t really see it. What’s interesting is actually what people might not know about. Funds like theS&P 500 or the S&P 600, as they’re actually brilliantly designed, they’re brilliantly designed to capture some of these quantitative factors in ways that are not at all obvious to just the layperson looking at it.
[00:04:52] Rebecca Hotsko: It’s so interesting because with the quantitative approach, there are a lot of pros, so you kind of take the emotion out of it. It’s more systematic. Now. There’s even funds that kind of implement a quantitative approach for you if you don’t really want to do it yourself. but what are, I guess, some of the pros and cons you think of doing it this way versus being a value investor like Warren Buffet and picking that a few great stocks?
[00:05:16] Logan Kane: Well, if you want to be a value investor or you want to be like buffet there’s a very important trap that a lot of beginning and intermediate and even professional investors fall into. What it’s known as is the disposition effect. So the tendency is if we make a portfolio and we invest in a hundred stocks, So over time, our human tendency is to hold on to the losers and try to get them back to even, and we sell the winners.
[00:05:42] Logan Kane: Now, research shows that this costs investors. I’ve seen 4% a year up to six, sometimes even 7% a year. This one effect has been shown to account for a lot of the mutual fund under performance versus the S&P 500. So the nice thing about these quant funds, like, and a lot of these are just ETFs, is they automatically hold the winners and they automatically dump the losers.
[00:06:07] Logan Kane: Now this can be gamed and you gotta be careful about the ways it can be gamed like with the Russell 2000. But this is a huge advantage. And so like, I think to be a value investor is great, but you have to be very good at being a value investor. But back to the fundamental law of active management, there’s only two ways.
[00:06:25] Logan Kane: To be a better investor, you have to make better forecasts. Or you have to be able to use those forecasts on a wider number of socks and investments. I personally, I mean, I know my own limitations. I mean, I consider myself pretty smart, but I’m not like, I’m not that smart, you know? So it’s a lot easier and it’s a lot more low hanging fruit to increase the diversification rather than to know everything about a handful of stocks and constantly stay on top of.
[00:06:53] Rebecca Hotsko: Yeah, that is such a good point. One of my favorite authors and person that I look up to of all times is Larry Swedroe, and he writes about this a lot where it’s not the fact that you aren’t a great investor, someone can’t be, it’s just that there are so many great investors that you have to be better than so many people.
[00:07:11] Rebecca Hotsko: And that’s so hard when people do this day in and day out, why would you be better than the next person? And so that’s why the systematic approach, I think, So great because you’re spreading your bets and you’re buying so many stocks so that it’s, you’re implementing that same strategy, but it’s with so many stocks instead of a few.
[00:07:33] Logan Kane: Certainly. I mean, it’s you know, there’s different ways to look at investing. Like, is investing like cooking? You know, like is there multiple ways to make a really good dish and different chefs from all over the world? Now, is it a sport where there can only be one Tom Brady? You know, is it a game like chess or poker?
[00:07:50] Logan Kane: And I think game theory can be quite underappreciated in the markets. There’s just different ways to look at it, and that’s part of the intrinsic beauty of the financial markets. [00:08:00] Except there really is no one right way. If you see an opportunity and you believe in it, there’s what you can do is you can imply some of this quantitative stuff.
[00:08:08] Logan Kane: There’s something called the Kelly Criterion. And it’s often misapplied, but it basically tells you how much to bet based on how good of a bet you think it is.
[00:08:17] Rebecca Hotsko: Can you expand on that a little bit? I haven’t heard of that before.
[00:08:20] Logan Kane: Okay, so the Kelly Criterionion was, it was known before, but it’s attributed to John Kelly.
[00:08:26] Logan Kane: He was a brilliant engineer for AT&T. He was also a big sports gambler, so he wrote a paper for AT&T about it was something, but it wasn’t about sports gambling, but it was about sports gambling. Kelly died young, I think he had a heart attack in New York City on a sidewalk, so he never was able to get rich himself.
[00:08:42] Logan Kane: But his theory of the Kelly Criterionion gathered a cult following among blackjack card counter. Among people in the stock market among sports betters. Essentially what the Kelly Criterionion is, if you think you have a 10% edge, you bet 10% of your portfolio. You think you have a 1% edge, you bet 1%. That’s all there is to it, and it’s been mathematically shown that if you bet this based on any payout and given set of odds, it’ll maximize the rate of increase of your capital.
[00:09:10] Logan Kane: It’s the problem in the stock market is you don’t always know exactly what your rate of return expected is. So what a lot of people do is they’ll do quarter Kelly, they’ll do half Kelly. But the key insight of Kelly is that it teaches us to manage risk. A lot of people think about risk as something that you should avoid, but the key distinction here is that risk management as we choose how much risk it take.
[00:09:33] Logan Kane: Because risk applies to like games and stuff, dangerous. We always want to minimize dangerous, like you wear your seatbelt, you like, you know, you look when you cross the street you know, subject to reasonable constraints, but risk. Is if you take too much risk, you’ll have less money. But if you don’t take enough risk, you’ll also have less money.
[00:09:51] Logan Kane: So the idea is to push yourself to take the right amount of risk over the medium and long term, and that allows you to get to where you want to be in life. One thing that, one kind of risk that I kind of have struggled with on and off in my life is like maximizing opportunities. Like, you know, talking to people like if you.
[00:10:09] Logan Kane: At, I don’t know, like a coffee shop or a bar or something. There’s really not any danger in talking to people generally. I mean, you gotta read the situation, but that is risk. And I think the people who are the most outgoing in life can inadvertently take the most risk and they can get better life outcomes through that.
[00:10:28] Logan Kane: You know, same with like business and stuff, do you like, how do you choose the right person to marry? Should you start a business? Should you work a corporate job? All of life is these little risks and I think learning how to manage it is like incredibly powerful.
[00:10:42] Rebecca Hotsko: Yeah, that is so true. That’s really interesting that you pointed out with the risks, and that’s a really good analogy.
[00:10:49] Rebecca Hotsko: But I also want to ask you one more thing about the quantitative investing strategy, just because I have talked to a couple other guests on the show about quant strategies, but they’ve all been institutional investors. So they’ve been talking about alternative data and then factor investing, but they are, yeah, doing this on an institutional level.
[00:11:08] Rebecca Hotsko: So I’m just wondering how are you doing this on a retail level? Like how many stocks are actually in your portfolio at one time, and are you just kind of systematically doing this yourself?
[00:11:20] Logan Kane: So the beauty of this is that there’s, if you can think of an idea, somebody probably has thought of it before you, and they’ve created an ETF or a mutual fund to execute that idea.
[00:11:28] Logan Kane: So the real thing here is how do you put together futures, ETFs and mutual funds to create the best opportunities and to essentially maximize the amount of return you get for the amount of risk you take? You know, modern portfolio theory it’s very abuse, it’s very malign. But it’s a great starting point in finance.
[00:11:47] Logan Kane: You want to maximize the amount of return you get for the amount of risk you take .
[00:11:52] Rebecca Hotsko: Yeah, I think that, like you said, there’s probably someone who’s already had this idea and created an ETF and there’s so many [00:12:00] ETFs that implement quant strategies. because as we talk about all a quant strategy is a systematic way of investing.
[00:12:06] Rebecca Hotsko: And so lots of them are factor ETFs, which I’ve talked about on my show a lot. So those are some examples for the listeners. But now I kind of want to move to your fundamental analysis because you do still write. Some maybe more traditional value investing topics because you do deep dives on stocks. And one article I really liked on Seeking Alpha was you talking about the US market and your view going forward for 2023 and whether you think it’s bottomed out or not.
[00:12:38] Rebecca Hotsko: Can you talk a bit about your outlook on this and your thinking behind this?
[00:12:43] Logan Kane: So just a question I would pose to you and your listeners. If you can earn 5% for just parking your money in cash and not taking any risk, how much stocks do you want to own? You want to go out and pay 50 times earnings for Amazon, 96 times earnings for Tesla?
[00:12:58] Logan Kane: Mean you can, but I think there’s a rebuttable presumption here that if. Cash is paying 5% because the government wants to slow down the economy. You might want to listen. And thus stocks are a bit mispriced here. I think they’re actually probably 20 to 25% mispriced as being overvalued. Right now, I have a target for the S&P of 3,300 in the medium term.
[00:13:22] Logan Kane: The reason why I have that target is just the back of the envelope calculation on how much money the government borrowed and handed. To people. I’m speaking mostly for the US here, but it was done in other countries to varying extents. So I basically just kind of ballpark the earnings for 2023 at 190 on the S&P.
[00:13:41] Logan Kane: If the average person made $60,000 working and they got 10,000 in stimulus and the people don’t understand how much stimulus people actually got, it’s it’s quite crazy.
[00:13:52] Rebecca Hotsko: Yeah, I had a guest on Louis gov who his episode will be released a little bit before yours, and he talks about how he thinks the biggest risk to the market going forward is that earnings.
[00:14:06] Rebecca Hotsko: He thinks that earnings can be further downgraded, and he said in the range of 20 to 30%. If we. Actually get into a recession by, like, we know that we’ve contracted for quarters, but if they announce it in the data and it shows that we’re in a recession, that we could see further earnings revised down because we really haven’t seen that.
[00:14:25] Rebecca Hotsko: We’ve seen multiples contract and we’ve seen prices come down, but earnings really haven’t been revised down yet. So that could be the risk where we see markets going down further. Is that kind of a view you share?
[00:14:38] Logan Kane: That’s essentially it. I mean, if you take earnings of, I don’t know, 190 on the S&P, we did about 209 in 2021, and it was the best year ever by far.
[00:14:47] Logan Kane: And I think we’ll beat it by a bit this year. But if you apply a 15 multiple on Earnings. So about 190, it’s pretty ugly. For the S&P, it’s around, it’s under 3000 on the S&P. If you apply 17 and a half multiple, it’s around 3,300. I don’t know. I mean, a lot of the stock market going up has been driven by interest rates going down and taxes being cut, and that will not be a driver going forward cause interest rates are not going to go down anymore and tax rates are certainly not going to go down at least compared to where they were in 2020 and 2021.
[00:15:20] Rebecca Hotsko: Yeah. And then you also did an article on kind of the future of the stock market, or where will it be in 10 years? I think it was titled, and I think as long term investors, we maybe don’t care as much. Like it hurts and it’s painful to see these corrections, but I think a lot of our listeners. Know that these times come and we’re looking longer term.
[00:15:42] Rebecca Hotsko: And so there’s a, I guess, two thoughts where it’s never say that this time is different. So there’s optimism that we’re going to rebound and the market will be higher in 10 years. That’s a likely scenario. But then there’s a, I guess another camp of people that are saying, well, no, like we’re in a completely different situation.
[00:16:02] Rebecca Hotsko: Things are a bit different this time with debt loads and other just macro factors. And so I guess, what’s your thoughts on that? Are there any downward pressures that could make this time maybe a little bit different or hurt the long term expectations for the US stock market?
[00:16:19] Logan Kane: So just to clarify here, I’m not a perma bear on US stocks.
[00:16:23] Logan Kane: I think the last time I modeled it, I had around 5% returns for the S&P. I think the outlook is better actually for international stocks and developed markets, and I think it’s better for small caps in the US, which would be S&P 500 i J R is the ticker on the ETF and midcaps as well. I think a lot of the overvaluation is in these like mega cap tech names.
[00:16:44] Logan Kane: And we’ll get into it later. I think there’s a couple good ones, and I think there’s a lot of bad ones in mega cap tech. I mean, I think what we could say is there’s some structural issues with the US and to some extent the global economy right now. And those issues are not going to get solved in one year or two years or three years.
[00:17:01] Logan Kane: If we do really good work, they might be solved in five to 10 years. And you know, I’m talking about things like demographics, like debt loads, things like that. It’s not enough to make the market go down, but what it will do, I think we talked about, I mean at one point the S&P was up like 15% annually over the last 10 years.
[00:17:19] Logan Kane: That’s not going to happen. Going forward, I think you might get five and that’s counting dividends and you know, that has implications if you’re near retirement and you know, this is millennial investing. So I think for people like us, we have a long runway for the sea even out, but it introduces a lot of path dependency for people who are older looking to retire the worst of all.
[00:17:41] Logan Kane: I think Bloomberg said there were 3 million people who retired early in 2021, because they just looked at their account balances and this was in the US loan and they just were done working. We have 2 million, 3 million whatever on 401k were done. And all of these people are going to have to sell. Their stocks every month to pay their expenses than they were adding before.
[00:18:01] Logan Kane: So it’s just a lot of stuff that puts downward pressure on the market and it makes you think that we’re not looking at a 20 multiple going forward. We might not be looking at, you know, record earnings every year. I think earnings can grow 50% over the next 10 years, but that’s not a very high rate. When you annualize it in over 10 years, it’s like, I don’t know, maybe 4%.
[00:18:20] Logan Kane: Yeah, maybe a bit less.
[00:18:22] Rebecca Hotsko: But you made a really good point earlier where just because the total stock market might not grow at the same pace as historically, there are pockets of the market that will likely outperform and maybe perform better than they did the last decade. Like small cap value or sum.
[00:18:40] Rebecca Hotsko: Because we’re seeing that the valuation difference between value and growth is bigger than ever, which suggests that, yeah, growth stocks. More overpriced than ever in value is more underpriced than ever. And then if I were to bet on something, it’s small cap value going forward.
[00:18:59] Logan Kane: I would tend to agree. The trouble with some of the small cap value ETFs is that they can’t filter out the junk.
[00:19:05] Logan Kane: So what you need to be able to do when you invest in these small cap companies, you need to be able to filter out the ones that are actually lose money on an operating basis. And if you’re able to do that, the research shows that you will crush the S&P, I mean, the degree about performance, the last time we were in a similar situation in 2000 and 2001 was staggering for small caps.
[00:19:25] Logan Kane: It’s, you know, history repeats, you know, we. A similar market this time is different tech. Big tech is the only thing you want to own forever, and Big Tech was not the only thing you wanted to own forever. Big Tech actually got you in a lot of trouble in 2000 and 2001, and again in 2002, and I’d have to look at my back test, but as far as I know, I think small caps actually went up during that period.
[00:19:49] Rebecca Hotsko: You made a really good point of those small cap value because I am a big fan of holding ETFs in that space just because historically it’s beaten the market and you just buy one etf. And so a couple that I hold are vbr, and then there’s also IJs and A V U V that I’ve been looking into recently because I’ve done some research and apparently those ones are better.
[00:20:11] Rebecca Hotsko: And like you mentioned, filtering for. Profitability in addition to small cap in value. So I’m wondering, do you have any preference on certain ETFs that you like for that?
[00:20:22] Logan Kane: So I’m not familiar with that etf, but I’d like to look at it. What I do, and for listeners who are doing this, I like to test things. I use software called Portfolio Visualizer.
[00:20:33] Logan Kane: It’s free. You got a portfolio visualizer.com compare tickers. So you say, this fund did this, but this fund did that. And then you form a hypothesis. You say, okay, why did this fund beat this fund by 2% per year? Does it own better stocks? Did it get lucky? And what I found is when you cross reference these with like well known anomalies and pricing assets, you can find some really good stuff that can accumulate you a lot more money over time.
[00:21:01] Rebecca Hotsko: Portfolio visualizer is so powerful. You can do everything from there. From back testing your entire portfolio to Montecarlo simulations. Like it’s, you can do everything. So for our listeners, if you haven’t checked that out, you need to kind of put your portfolio in there. You can get so much cool data from that.
[00:21:20] Logan Kane: Yeah, it’s a pretty great tool. I’m glad we talked
[00:21:22] Rebecca Hotsko: about. Yeah, I’ve been wanting to bring that up. I do want to move on to the tech stocks now, cause we kind of talked about, and briefly, it seems like their growth has been slowing. We’ve seen a lot of, I guess, earnings come out from the big tech companies and then.
[00:21:39] Rebecca Hotsko: I know that you’ve written some articles on Apple and Google, and I want to get into them today because Apple has held up a lot better than its big tech peers over the last month. And I read an article that said it’s now worth more than Google, Amazon, and Facebook combined, which is pretty crazy. And. I’m just wondering if you can go over kind of your view on Apple, because despite this, despite it kind of seeming like maybe the best out of the bad bunch right now, you put a sell rating on Apple.
[00:22:12] Rebecca Hotsko: So can you just walk us through your analysis on the company and why you think Apple is a sell?
[00:22:19] Logan Kane: So I’ll start our discussion of Apple. A couple of anomalies on the financial markets. The first is the disposition effect, which has historically kept Apple cheap. What would happen is Apple would go up, but it would always remain cheap.
[00:22:32] Logan Kane: The stock, pretty much, anytime from 2010 to 2018, the stock was always cheap, but it had gone up in excess of 20% a year. I mean, depending on the time period, 30 plus percent per year. That’s because you know, people, they get a million dollars from investing in Apple and they go buy a boat or they buy a. And it, it keeps the sock down and it creates momentum.
[00:22:52] Logan Kane: The disposition effect creates momentum on socks, which is another good anomaly to know about socks that go. Tend to keep going up. Socks that go down, they tend to keep going down. It’s an old like it’s old folk wisdom on Wall Street, but it’s absolutely true. But what happened with Apple? Something changed around, I don’t know, maybe the summer of 2019 and this changed for a lot of socks and for the market at large.
[00:23:18] Logan Kane: And is that the Fed and the Treasury kind? Coordinated to juice the economy and this massive asset price bubble started really wasn’t that bad in 2019. But like for reference, like Christmas Eve 2018, when the market bottoms, I think it was Christmas Eve, I think Apple was like 10 or 12 times earnings on a forward basis, incredibly cheap.
[00:23:41] Logan Kane: And by the peak in a fourth quarter of 2021, it was like 40 times earnings. I mean, that’s just like, that’s obs scene. How can the same company, their net income was basically flat over. I mean, you know, they bought back shares, so the EPS went up. The business was the same, but the stock was worth four times as much.
[00:24:00] Logan Kane: So if that is an evidence of some craziness in the market, inefficiency, if you will, then I don’t know what is. So basically with Apple is, Profit from the business has stayed roughly flat and grown a little. This wasn’t until the pandemic and then with the stimulus. A lot of customer or a lot of consumers got all this money and they couldn’t go travel.
[00:24:22] Logan Kane: They couldn’t do live entertainment, so they just slammed Apple with orders for iPhones and Apples profits like skyrocketed. But this is not sustainable going forward. It’s not sustainable to put a very high multiple. Going forward, and as a result, Apple Stock is probably the most overvalued large cap stock or borrowing Amazon or Tesla right now.
[00:24:42] Logan Kane: I think if you just close your eyes, block out the stock price with Apple and say, what would a company making this amount of money be worth? I think per share, I think you would get a price of somewhere between 75 and $95 a share. It was trading for almost 180 earlier this year, which kind of brings me to the second bias that I think people should know about, and that’s popular.
[00:25:02] Logan Kane: So research will show that if you take the top 10 stocks by market capitalization out of the market, you’ll do better. Research will show that if you take the world’s largest company out of you go back a hundred years, you take the world’s largest company by market cap. If you take that out of the market, you do better.
[00:25:19] Logan Kane: And that’s because it’s a thing. And statistics it’s like considered noise and signal. So the very fact that a company is the most highly valued in the world means that it might be overvalued. If we were to get 200 people together and we were to try to guess what the high temperature in New York City would be tomorrow, the highest guess is probably wrong.
[00:25:38] Logan Kane: Similarly, in the market, like the highest valued stock is probably overvalued. And the lowest valued stock might be pretty cheap if it doesn’t go bankrupt. That is, so this kind of happened in Apple. I mean, bubbles don’t really need a reason, but I very much view it as a bubble. We have really good financial statements for Seeking Alpha.
[00:25:55] Logan Kane: It’s actually one of the better things about our platform is you can get analyst earning assessments going forward. You can get financials going back. And you can really dig into companies, and I don’t think a lot of people do this. I think it’s kind of a popularity contest, which is okay. I mean you can play hot potato with socks, sun momentum.
[00:26:11] Logan Kane: There’s nothing inherently wrong with it. It’s actually an okay strategy, but it’s really important to know if you buy those kind of socks, like whether they’re worth, like what they’re trading for or not, it really affects like how you, it really affects like how quick of a trigger you have in getting rid of them when they start to sell.
[00:26:27] Logan Kane: And that’s what’s happening with Apple. I mean, we went from 180 to 135 and you got people buying the dip, like it’s cheap and it’s not cheap. Apple, I mean, I think in my Apple article we talked about Apple’s. Basically what’s the highest is the market capitalization, and you have the earnings per share, which is driven by buybacks, and you have net income.
[00:26:46] Logan Kane: Which is benefiting from tax cuts and interest rates. Listeners will want to go to the article, cause I lay it out pretty well. This is a pretty common theme actually with stocks in general, is that their market caps have grown faster than their earnings and which have grown faster than their actual, like earnings before interest in taxes and which in turn has grown faster than their sales.
[00:27:05] Logan Kane: So profit margins are pretty high. They come down, the math is pretty ugly for a lot of these, a lot of these darling socks in the market.
[00:27:14] Rebecca Hotsko: Yeah, I wrote down that piece from your article where you say Apple’s share price is up 5.9 times more than 10 years ago. While EPS is up 3.8 times over the last 10 years, while net income is up 2.4 times.
[00:27:30] Rebecca Hotsko: So just on that, the comparison between how Apples share price is up by more than. Earnings per share, which is up by more than its net income. Is that kind of a warning sign then when that happens for companies?
[00:27:45] Logan Kane: Well, it can be. I mean, in Apple’s case, they bought back a lot of shares very cheaply, which was a very good thing.
[00:27:52] Logan Kane: But now they’re buying back a lot of shares at a very expensive price, and they’re actually buying back shares quicker than they’re earning money now. So they’re not [00:28:00] just supplying demand means they’re not going to be able to put as much upward pressure on the stock price when the pace of the buyback slows.
[00:28:06] Logan Kane: It’s not like Apple is bad, this is kind of symptomatic. A lot of companies in corporate America, broadly for the market cap is up faster than eps, which is up faster than net income, which is up faster than earnings before interest in taxes. It’s kind of a warning sign. I mean, what it means is that a lot of the return of Apple has come from the PE multiple, expanding from a shrinking share count, which is neither here nor there on that one.
[00:28:31] Logan Kane: And then from. Lower interest costs and lower taxes. So I mean, let’s think about the next five to 10 years. PE multiples are probably not going up. I mean, the buybacks will still be there. Interest rates are probably not going to go down any lower than they were when Apple issued bonds in 2020 and taxes are certainly not going down with debt.
[00:28:49] Logan Kane: GDP over 120%, the US and another developed economies. If businesses are going to succeed now, it’s not going to be because they’re getting help from the government or from the Fed. They’re going to have to be successful on their own. That’s the difference in the paradigm. You can’t just go lose a hundred million dollars a quarter to gain customers right now.
[00:29:07] Logan Kane: You have to make money and you have to have cash flow because if you don’t, it’s going to get increasingly expensive to finance in the end. Apple’s okay. Stock. I mean, I think you might get four to 5% a year if you buy Apple at you. Surprise. It’s not going to lose you a lot of money, but over the long run it might lose you a lot of money over the short run.
[00:29:24] Logan Kane: But I mean, there’s worse companies you can buy. It’s just overvalued. This is pretty typical for some of these blue chip companies to be a bit overvalued, especially in a bull market. It’s also somewhat typical at the bottom of the bear market for them to be rather undervalued.
[00:29:39] Rebecca Hotsko: And I think those are good points to make.
[00:29:41] Rebecca Hotsko: I’ll just put on my other kind of bull case hat, I’ll play the other side of the argument. And I think Warren Buffet purchased a bunch of Apple stock recently, so he loaded up on it. And then I guess maybe the one argument from Apple lovers would be that it is a cash flowing machine. They. Such a strong brand, no one will ever become an Apple, so why won’t they maintain their growth going forward?
[00:30:05] Rebecca Hotsko: Or is that the point that their growth has kind of peaked and now it’s just going to slow going
[00:30:10] Logan Kane: forward. So I’m glad you brought that up. I’ll actually make two points here. So the first point is that if you buy Berkshire Hathaway stock, you actually get the Apple more or less for free. Brookshire’s a conglomerate, a lot of their value at last I looked, it was like 40% of their value was Apple.
[00:30:26] Logan Kane: They’re independent markets. So if you buy Berkshire, you get the Apple, and if Apple appreciates in value, it should, it’s correlated If you buy Apple, Apple could go up or down, but you can get Apple’s business, which is what you want by buying Berkshire Hathaway stock. I don’t know, like. About them buying Apple.
[00:30:44] Logan Kane: I don’t know about them buying accidental petroleum. I mean, Berkshire has a good long term track record. I don’t think I would put them on a pedestal. They’ve done a lot of good things over the years. I mean, they don’t bat a thousand, you know, like if I wouldn’t like go out in short stocks that Berkshire owns, but I don’t know if I would be one of the people who just looks at their like quarterly filings and copies all the stocks that they own.
[00:31:06] Logan Kane: You want to think for yourself, like Warren Buffet or Charlie Munger, or these guys liking a stock is a good thing. If you don’t do your own homework, you’re not going to, you’re not going to know, like if you’re getting the best deal or not.
[00:31:19] Rebecca Hotsko: I do think that it can be misguided to just copy their purchases or think they’re good investments, because there’s always nuances behind it.
[00:31:27] Rebecca Hotsko: So I just think that was a good point that you made there. Did you have anything else that you kind of wanted to share on Apple before we switch over to Google?
[00:31:36] Logan Kane: I think we’ve pretty thoroughly covered Apple. I feel that it’s fairly overvalued. I personally wouldn’t buy the stock. I mean, you don’t get much dividend from it.
[00:31:45] Logan Kane: You don’t get much in the way of earnings. I don’t think there’s going to be a whole lot of growth. Yeah. I mean, you could do worse, but you can do better, which is why we’ll go to Google.
[00:31:53] Rebecca Hotsko: Okay, so let’s move on to Google because that is one that you actually like outta the tech stocks, and I [00:32:00] think you had a buy reading on that, or just a very optimistic article.
[00:32:05] Rebecca Hotsko: So can you kind of walk us through why you like Google and what’s kind of your outlook and analysis behind this stock?
[00:32:12] Logan Kane: Okay, so for Google, I like Google. I don’t like Apple. And the reason why I like Google is because Google is projected to have double digit rates of growth for the next 5, 7, 10 years. And the reason why I feel that is just the structural advantages that Google has with search, with the internet, with just the way as the world develops.
[00:32:33] Logan Kane: Google is like, it’s like a toll booth in a lot of ways and Apple is too. But when you look at. Consensus Analyst estimates for growth. I mean, Google’s around 15% a year for the next three years. The, their earnings are coming down this year, off of last year because no covid boom ad advertising dependent. But Google is cheaper than Apple.
[00:32:53] Logan Kane: From a price to earnings perspective, but the growth is projected to be two to three times as much. [00:33:00] Moreover, Google spends a lot of money on r and d, not that Apple doesn’t, but Google spends so much money on r and d that it makes the company look less profitable than it is. So what you really get with Google is just a cash machine.
[00:33:11] Logan Kane: Google is really at the cash machine that Apple would like to. It’s so much less visible, and you can see this looking at the returns over time, like Google has always been like more steady. I’ll put it this way, if I write an article on Apple, it’ll get two or 300 comments. If I write an article on Google, it might get 30.
[00:33:28] Logan Kane: That’s what you want in the stock. You want stocks that are less popular, but they’re better performers with the business and they often are. If there’s no drama companies that don’t face the consumer as much, Google’s money comes from business. Even though everybody uses the product, their money comes from businesses.
[00:33:44] Logan Kane: Apple’s money comes from consumers. You go to the Apple store and be like, how? How busy is the Apple store? Like maybe we should buy some Apple stock. So people have a tendency to invest in consumer discretionary stocks at a disproportionate rate. I saw one chart that said like, Auto stocks and like consumer discretionary is what’s like 75% of all the retail investments made, like since Covid, I think crypto was the rest, which we’ll talk about crypto in a second.
[00:34:09] Logan Kane: Now, there’s nothing wrong per se with that, especially if you’re very cognizant of the momentum. But if you get away from these really popular companies, and I think in life too, if you can get away from the super popular stuff that everybody else is trying to do, I think you can find peace, happiness, better results in business, in life, just away from the limelight and the drama and the news, you know?
[00:34:33] Logan Kane: So I’ll go into more of why I like Google and I’ll share a little concrete tip for your listeners. So Google has two share classes. Go. Google. Historically, there’s no difference between these. Google is a little bit better with the L because it has voting rights. Now that’s probably not important to you or me, but to some institutional investors might be important, so they’re more likely to want to buy the Google.
[00:34:56] Logan Kane: Now, over the past couple of years, it’s traded at a discount, the Google stockhouse to the go. There’s no reason for this. You can buy the same business one to 2% cheaper, so buy the Google, not the go. What else? Yeah, so this is a nice tool for like software. So I have software that’ll tell me what is cheaper.
[00:35:14] Logan Kane: These two are equivalent. We just buy the cheaper one. If you look at a portfolio manager and a mutual fund and they own the wrong Google, you might question their investment process.
[00:35:24] Rebecca Hotsko: I do want to play devil’s advocate again because one thing about Google is when I was looking them up for this interview, they have missed earnings I earnings targets, I guess for, I think it was three quarters in a row.
[00:35:38] Rebecca Hotsko: Now does that kind of worry your outlook that they’re going to keep missing their targets or what was kind of just behind that? The slow economy businesses not spending as much on ads.
[00:35:49] Logan Kane: So Google and companies like it are kind of an early warning sign for a slowing economy. Google is not a recession proof stock.
[00:35:58] Logan Kane: If I have a business [00:36:00] and I think a recession is coming, advertising is one of the first things I’m going to cut. That’s just how it is. So Google right now is they’re going to see their earnings decline. So when I wrote my article on Google, I gave the earnings instruments a haircut. I said, I don’t think these are going to hit in year one, but I think they’re going to be better than you think in year two, year three year.
[00:36:18] Logan Kane: And that’s just because the economy’s going to slow down, and at some point it’s going to bottom out and it’s going to come back up. It’s cyclical. But if you look over the cycle at the earnings power of Google, I find it’s far superior to Apple. Another question is compensation. Almost all businesses have their problems, but if I can buy a stock for 10 times earnings or 15 times earnings, Those problems aren’t so bad.
[00:36:39] Logan Kane: If I’m paying 80 times earnings for a stock, a very small problem for the business is a very big problem for the stock. Think of it this way, I don’t know if a lot of your listeners should bet on sports. But if you have Alabama playing, I don’t know, some pod team from nowhere and they’re 50 point favorites, obviously Alabama’s going to beat them, but you might like the team.
[00:36:59] Logan Kane: You might like the underdog plus the 50 points. The stock market’s like that too. It’s reflexive. You need second order thinking. To do well on the stock market. It’s not, if it were only a matter of saying give me the best businesses and just buy ’em, it’d be really easy. You’d just go out, you say, Hey, this store’s really busy.
[00:37:14] Logan Kane: I’m going to invest in this stock. But the valuation is like a point spread in this way. Because the, those earning can be paid out as dividends to investors. They can be reinvested in the business. They can be used to buy back stock In a lot of companies, case they do all three. So I think if you gave me a pick of a business, like do you want Google or do you want Apple?
[00:37:32] Logan Kane: I think I would still choose Google regardless of value. Like if the valuations were equal, I think I would still choose Google. But if the valuation for Apple were cheaper, I would like Apple. Does that make sense? Cause the valuation for Apple was a lot cheaper like five to 10 years ago, and Apple was the better performing stock.
[00:37:49] Rebecca Hotsko: What price would you be a buyer for Apple ?
[00:37:51] Logan Kane: I would be all over Apple. If it was under like, I don’t know, 85, $80 a share, I’d be all over it. Were you asking me about what price I’d buy Google at? I think if you buy now, I think you get sufficient compensation for owning the stock over a five year period.
[00:38:05] Logan Kane: And I define sufficient compensation as 10%. Annual returns are greater. If you can get it cheaper. I mean, anything under 90 is pretty good. Anything under 80 I think would be an absolute steal.
[00:38:16] Rebecca Hotsko: Yeah, I was going to ask you that, cause that’s exactly what you wrote in your article and I was wondering if your views had changed at all or if that was still kind of your thoughts around that.
[00:38:26] Logan Kane: The thing with Google, and they’re already doing this and Meta’s doing this too, like I don’t particularly like meta as a stock, but it is cheap. So what companies like Google can do is they can reduce their head count, they can reduce the amount that they’re spending on non-essential r and. And they have a cushion with the earnings, so their revenue may come down a little bit, but if they’re not spending 30 billion or whatever on trying to make a self-driving car or rockets or anything like that, they can hit their earnings estimates that way.
[00:38:56] Logan Kane: And that’s, I think, underappreciated about Google is just how profitable the business is. I mean, this is anecdotal, but like the amount of money that people who work for Google make. Is just supports the talent that goes there. Amazon historically only paid 160,000 a year no matter who you were in the company, and then the rest was given in bonus.
[00:39:16] Logan Kane: Now the problem here is if they have a culture of laying people off before the stuff vests, it creates a constant like churn and cycle. So as long as the stock price went up and as long as enough people were happy, then it was. But Amazon was recently forced to change this during the pandemic. Cause people were like, Hey, you need to give us a higher based salary.
[00:39:35] Logan Kane: The labor market was good, so they relented. And now I think you’re seeing Amazon’s profit margins come in. I mean, the stock imploded in their last quarterly earnings. Google has always paid people Well, I mean when the company ipo, I dug up an old story, like the massage therapist of the company like made like tens of millions of dollars or something.
[00:39:53] Logan Kane: They just took care of people in a way that other tech companies didn’t, because the business was inherently more profitable and it made it really easy to do so. And I think that combination of talent plus like cushion and their amount of profit plus like the long term growth potential that they can. I think mix it pretty compelling.
[00:40:09] Logan Kane: I think Google’s going to be the biggest market cap company in the world five to 10 years from now. I think Apple’s Apple won’t be, Apple will still be up there, but I think Google’s going to be number one.
[00:40:19] Rebecca Hotsko: And then I guess, what about Amazon? We don’t have to go into great detail, but what are your thoughts on this?
[00:40:24] Rebecca Hotsko: This was just such a beloved stock up until, well, maybe it still is for a lot of people, but the PE is still very high. And what are your thoughts on Amazon? Or have they peaked in terms of growth or what’s your outlook for them?
[00:40:39] Logan Kane: So I think the idea is that Amazon Web Services, AWS is going to bail out that multiple to some extent.
[00:40:46] Logan Kane: Depend how fast it grows, will depend on how much it’ll bail it out. But I would not pay 80 times earnings for any business right now. And I think, I mean there’s, if you just like. Just do math [00:41:00] on Amazon on valuation and growth assumptions. If they come in short, I mean, the downside is astronomical. I mean, 50% or more downside is possible if they can’t maintain their level of growth that they have.
[00:41:12] Logan Kane: And like if Microsoft takes market share from them, that’s possible. I mean, that’s not a foreground conclusion that Microsoft will take market share and cloud from. But I mean, I don’t know. I mean somebody’s gotta win and somebody’s gotta lose with these cloud players it is a growing market.
[00:41:27] Logan Kane: It’s not a zero sum game. But it kind of is a zero sum game and you trade for 80 times earnings.
[00:41:34] Rebecca Hotsko: Yeah, it’s an interesting one because it just seemed like for a while their vision mattered more than anything like where they were going to be in 10, 20 years. And then I think things started to change a bit this year.
[00:41:46] Rebecca Hotsko: Just how every company, every big tech company got put under pressure and. People are a bit more scared of the high valuations and how, I guess aggressive they’ve been. And so I am wondering, while I have you here, we might as well touch on meta to Facebook. It still Meta feels weird talk saying meta, but is meta dead?
[00:42:07] Rebecca Hotsko: They have been beaten to the ground recently,
[00:42:10] Logan Kane: Net is very cheap as it relates to their earnings. It’s very cheap. They announced today that they’re laying off 11,000 people to try to rip the ship. That’s a lot of people. I bet the average person they lay off makes $250,000 a year. They’re not going to be laying off their like accounting staff or finance or legal.
[00:42:26] Logan Kane: My guess is those are engineers and highly paid ones. The, so they’re spending all this money on the metaverse. I don’t really get the metaverse. I think it’s. It doesn’t make much sense to me. A lot of, like, they put out these press releases to people in the media and the media just kind of, the media just kind of ate what they were given, and I kind of questioned I think a minority of the media kind of questioned it. I get asked about, met a lot. The essential question here is, do you want to pay 10 or 12 times earnings for a business that might run itself into the ground? If you do and they don’t, you’ll make a lot of money. Like you might make more than you, you could make by investing in Google.
[00:43:03] Logan Kane: But your downside is more historically, like companies like this are vulnerable to activism. So if I have a poorly run company with a lot of cash flow potential, I might be Carl Icon. We talked about viewing and investing as a sport like. Icon views investing as a sport. Like they’re like, right, we have a badly run company.
[00:43:21] Logan Kane: We’re going to take it over and we’re going to install better management and then we’re going to sell it and we’re going to make a lot of money. I mean, he made over 30% a year for like 30 years I think he did at his fund. You can’t do that with some of these tech companies because they have these dual class share structures that keep control with the founders.
[00:43:40] Logan Kane: So if the founder goes completely crazy and spends all the company’s money on a metaverse, There’s nothing you can really do to stop it. People might quit or they might get mad, or, but I mean, at the end of the day, you gotta trust Mark Zuckerberg to make money from this or stop investing money or stop throwing good money after.
[00:43:57] Logan Kane: Dad. I don’t have any particularly strong insight on this. It’s a cheap sock. I think you could take a small position and if it works, but it doesn’t. I think you might have a slide edge if you bought meta, but I don’t have any particularly strong insight.
[00:44:12] Rebecca Hotsko: It is an interesting one because I looked today and the PE is 9.3, so it extremely, we’re at nine now.
[00:44:20] Rebecca Hotsko: Nine. Yeah, it is crazy. So it’s extremely cheap. 73% down from the peak. So you would hope there isn’t a ton more downside
[00:44:30] Logan Kane: I guess at this point if it’s truly that cheap, it’s a call option. So you would treat it like you would treat buying a call option on something. And typically with call options, we don’t invest a lot of money unless.
[00:44:41] Logan Kane: Unless we really like to gamble . Yeah. If you’re listening to this and you look at MES financials and you want to buy some meta, I say go for it. But don’t bet the farm.
[00:44:50] Rebecca Hotsko: I want to talk with you about Bitcoin now because there’s kind of, I mean, it’s been stagnant for quite some time now, and I look today this morning for our interview and it is down about 8% actually.
[00:45:04] Rebecca Hotsko: So I kind of want to get your views on Bitcoin short term, what’s going to happen over the next few months into 2023. And then are you a long term Bitcoin bull?
[00:45:16] Logan Kane: So I am a long term Bitcoin bull. There’s some big news in the crypto world today. I actually covered it at seeking Alpha FTX. 32 billion Crypto exchange is teetering on the brink of insolvency.
[00:45:27] Logan Kane: Now, there is a bailout in the works by their largest competitor, which is Binance. It’s a developing situation. I don’t have any particularly strong insight on. Other than questioning how 32 billion can disappear so quickly, I mean, you know, I don’t want to like speak too soon. I mean, we don’t have any evidence.
[00:45:46] Logan Kane: Right now I have anything criminal going on, but I mean, I’m, I kind of question how 32 billion can just vanish like that. It’s not Bitcoin’s fault. I think Bitcoin is one of the most brilliant things ever invented to have money that’s not controlled by a central bank. But like a lot of things in this world, when there’s something good people get attracted to it.
[00:46:06] Logan Kane: And I think people want to coattail success. People want to, a lot of scammers will move into industries like this. Whatever’s hot, they’ll come. So you have all these alt coins that popped up. You have all of these stable coins and I think I can tell you with a fair amount of certainty that most of these alt coins are going to zero, and I think a lot of the stable coins are going to zero as well.
[00:46:29] Logan Kane: There are more shoes to drop. A lot of these people own Bitcoin and they’re going to liquidate it In the short term, I think you can buy a little Bitcoin. Now I, I can’t really argue strongly enough for dollar cost averaging here, because it’s going to be very rocky. With forced liquidations ongoing for the next months, next few months, and the long term though, I mean, it’s just Bitcoin’s incredibly valuable to have a currency that’s not controlled by a central government.
[00:46:53] Logan Kane: I mean, I read a story today on CNBC about people in Lebanon. Who are mining Bitcoin using hydropower, solar panels, diesel fuel with generators, and they’re making like, I don’t know, $20,000 a month. So what Bitcoin in this case is really a tool of freedom and a lot of the adoption is coming from countries that are in the third world.
[00:47:14] Logan Kane: Now I want to own it too, you know, being in the US or as I speak now in Europe, I want to own it too. But that’s the real bull case for Bitcoin is all these people who have been oppressed by their central banks around the world. You know, as obnoxious as the Fed policies have been, they are trying, a lot of these central banks and third world countries are not trying, what they’re trying to do is actually, they’re actually trying to ex appropriate wealth from people who work in their countries and take it for themselves.
[00:47:39] Logan Kane: And that is more common than not, but with crypto, anybody can put their money in this and they are. And you see just waves of adoption coming in. The third world, I think like something like 17 of the top 20 countries were lower or middle income countries. In terms of adoption, it’s also the remittance industry is really interesting cause it’s [00:48:00] kind of a monopoly that a few companies have on.
[00:48:03] Logan Kane: So if I want to send a couple hundred dollars to Latin America, I think Mexico’s cheaper, but other countries have a less like developed banking system. It might cost me, I don’t know, maybe $20 in fees, 14, $20. So that’s like 10% of the transaction. And there’s a ton of these. There’s a ton of people who work in the US or Europe and send money home to their families.
[00:48:22] Logan Kane: So this Lightning network is allowing people to send these remittances for a much, much lower fee, and that just drives adoption for Bitcoin. There’s this thing called Metcalf’s. It says the number of users increases, but the value of the network increases exponentially with the number of users and because the supply of Bitcoin is fixed.
[00:48:40] Logan Kane: I think that’s very attractive in the long term. We’ll go back to modern portfolio theory here on Bitcoin. One of the tens of modern portfolio theory is that if you’re not sure how much of your money to invest in an asset to match the amount of global wealth that’s in the asset. So for crypto, that’s around one to 2% right now, and that’s what I would put in your portfolio.
[00:48:59] Logan Kane: If it goes up [00:49:00] more, you can sell it and if it goes down, you can add more. But crypto’s here to stay. Bitcoin’s here to stay. My preferred way to play Bitcoin is actually the Grayscale Bitcoin trust. It trades at a 37% discount and there’s a litigation play going ongoing. They’re trying to petition the US government to allow them to convert it to an et.
[00:49:18] Logan Kane: So if they’re successful at this, you can get in excess to a 50% return. Cause you’re buying 63 cents in a dollar. The Bitcoin will be redeemed at a hundred cents in a dollar. The case was filed in the DC Appeals Court, which is better. The courts in California can be quite clogged. But the DC court, it’s much more efficient by court standards.
[00:49:37] Logan Kane: So, so you’ll, you’re, you should get a decision by around July of next year, this last I luck. And you would earn that in addition to the rate of Bitcoin. My feeling is that they’ll win if more crypto malfeasance comes out over the next few months. I mean, the judge might say, Hey, we don’t really want this.
[00:49:53] Logan Kane: They might shut down Bitcoin or something, but I kind of doubt it. I think I was surprised that the SCC didn’t approve it right away. The case was very technical related to like protecting investors from market manipulation and stuff. I actually wrote in to lobby them to A lot of people did to ask them to approve it.
[00:50:10] Logan Kane: One of the reasons I asked them to do this is so people don’t put their money in places like FTX, which turned out to be potentially unsafe for customer deposits. And I’ll add there that the, as far as I know, the US part of FTX is functioning normally, but the main offshore suspended withdrawals, and I don’t think they’ve restarted.
[00:50:29] Rebecca Hotsko: I am wondering about Bitcoin. There’s always something that happens with a platform, a scam, and it just kind of, again, taints the picture for the industry and probably scares a lot of investors. It honestly makes me very hesitant because you have to not only believe in Bitcoin itself, which. I think a lot of people can agree with the long term use case, but then how to actually get it and invest in it in a safe way is so tricky when there’s a lot of scams and things that go on with the exchanges and the platforms.
[00:51:03] Rebecca Hotsko: It really reduces the likelihood of, I guess, greater adoption. So do you think that the increased regulation in the space if the SCC bill goes through, will that kind of help the industry?
[00:51:18] Logan Kane: I think so, because I mean, it couldn’t be any worse than it is right now. I mean, the grace kill, Bitcoin trust, as far as I know, is perfectly safe.
[00:51:25] Logan Kane: I think it’s registered in Canada as it is. It might be close and fund registered in the us but they’re trying to convert it to a US based etf. I imagine they have insurance, I imagine they have, they understand the best practices and stuff. I’ve never invested in an ETF and like lost any money due to fraud or MAL or anything.
[00:51:43] Logan Kane: Or a close been fund. Listed on a US exchange for that matter. I have a lot of friends who have invested crypto and various schemes, various exchanges and stuff, and everybody has a story. Like I almost lost my password, my block file. I would’ve lost a couple thousand dollars. Maybe I could have got back in, maybe I couldn’t.
[00:52:01] Logan Kane: I actually sold my phone to the AT&T store and it had my credentials on it. So I don’t know how close I was to getting locked out, but hopefully not too close. So now I’m in the Grayscale bitcoin Trust .
[00:52:11] Rebecca Hotsko: What is the ticker for that
[00:52:15] Logan Kane: GBTC
[00:52:15] Rebecca Hotsko: Cause? Yeah, there’s all these ETFs coming out and I know they’re available in Canada, but I wasn’t sure for the US listeners if they were available in the US actually.
[00:52:26] Logan Kane: If you’re listening to this in Canada, you already have SPOT ETFs you can invest in. You can still do GBTC if you want as a discount play, but there are better and cheaper ETFs available to Canadians just by default. because Canada has already approved the ETFs. That’s all.
[00:52:42] Rebecca Hotsko: That’s good to know. The last thing I want you just touch on with Bitcoin, with you is valuation and how do you think about valuing Bitcoin?
[00:52:52] Rebecca Hotsko: I think this is something. A lot of investors struggle with, I have no idea how to value it properly, and what tools to use, what method? What is your approach to this?
[00:53:04] Logan Kane: So, I mean, nobody really knows for sure. Nobody knows what the weather’s going to be. One way you could value it is to make a persistence forecast, which is the value of Bitcoin.
[00:53:13] Logan Kane: Tomorrow is the value of Bitcoin today. Another way you could value it is trend. You could say, if the adoption increases, then this is going to then it should be worth X in 10 years. Those are actually both things. For meteorology, I took a couple of meteorology classes. In college economics is more, it tends to use more supply and demand, so I think the best argument is that the supply is fixed and that the demand can continually increase from adoption from the third world and from adoption.
[00:53:40] Logan Kane: From people in Western countries who just want to diversify their portfolio. So I don’t have an exact number on it. I mean, I think a hundred thousand is a pretty reasonable number over the next five years. It’s one of the higher upside assets around, I think it could go to 10,000. With the liquidations that are ongoing, it might even go a little lower.
[00:53:56] Logan Kane: We’ll just have to see. Just all across the average, and I think you’ll do quite well, especially in gray scale Bitcoin Trust, if they are successful at converting.
[00:54:05] Rebecca Hotsko: That was super helpful. We covered so much in this episode. I’m going to close it out here for today, but before I let you go, where can the audience connect with you and learn more about you and your work?
[00:54:18] Logan Kane: So I would say the best place is Seeking Alpha. That’s the main platform that I publish on Seeking Alpha’s Good. because you get access to me, you get access to a lot of other authors. You kind of have to find the good authors on the site and filter out some of the ones who are just kinda like some of the authors are in it for the clicks, but there’s a lot of good authors on there as a platform you can find fabulous investors on.
[00:54:40] Logan Kane: You also get access to, you know, financial statements, earnings estimates. They have quant ratings, which are pretty good. And the other main place I publish my work is on Substack. So I have a small Substack that I’ve started and I have a few interesting kind of thinky real estate pieces on there that I encourage people to read.
[00:54:58] Rebecca Hotsko: Amazing. I’ve been enjoying reading all your articles and your Substack, so I will link those both in the show note. And I want to thank you again for coming on, Logan.
[00:55:07] Logan Kane: Thank you, Rebecca. My pleasure.
[00:55:10] Rebecca Hotsko: All right. I hope you enjoy today’s episode. Make sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app so that you never miss a new episode.
[00:55:19] Rebecca Hotsko: And if you’ve been enjoying the podcast, I’d really appreciate it if you left us a rating or a review. This really helps support us and is the best way to help new people discover the show. And if you haven’t already, be sure to check out our website, the investors podcast.com. There’s a ton of useful educational resources on there, as well as our T I P Finance tool, which is a great tool to help you manage your own stock portfolio.
[00:55:44] Rebecca Hotsko: And with that, I will see you again next time.
[00:55:47] Outro: Thank you for listening to T I P. Make sure to subscribe to. We Study Billionaires by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Every Wednesday we teach you about Bitcoin, and every Saturday we study billionaires and the financial markets. To access our show notes, transcripts, or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com.
[00:56:08] Outro: This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.
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