Another wild week on Wall Street! We’re pulling back the curtain on the brutal reality of red days, a historic crypto massacre, and the tough decisions we’re making in our own portfolios right now.
📉 Surviving the Sell-Off: For every massive gain, there’s a painful drop. We get transparent about handling portfolio pain and why community is your best defense when the market turns against you.
⚠️ Crypto’s Great Liquidation: Millions in crypto vanished in minutes. Krzysztof explains the catastrophic leverage event that wiped out traders and the harsh lesson of perpetual futures contracts.
🎯 Portfolio Shake-Up: The Badger is making moves. Luke reveals exactly why he’s trimming his huge Rocket Lab winner plus Axon, exiting Airtel Africa, and adding to his Novo Nordisk position. $RKLB $AXON $AAF $NVO
💰 Is PayPal a Trap?: Krzysztof uses Fiscal AI to go deep on PayPal. Are massive share buybacks and 45%+ Venmo growth signals of a massively undervalued giant, or is the market right to be scared? $PYPL
🧠 FU Money Isn’t What You Think: The Monkey’s portfolio has rocketed to a 877% one-year gain, but the real lesson isn’t about the money. We discuss why true financial freedom is about controlling your time, not just quitting your job.
Segments:
00:00 Cold Open – Surviving Market Pain
00:50 Welcome to Wall Street Wildlife
01:27 Vodafone Outage & Single Points of Failure
05:14 Monkey’s First Spiffy Splat – Down Over 1,000 Bananas
10:30 The Crypto Liquidation Massacre – Friday’s Wipeout
16:53 Why Leverage Kills: The Math of Getting Wiped Out
22:09 Luke’s Portfolio Rebalancing Decisions
24:20 Trimming Rocket Lab – When Your Conviction Gets Tested
26:15 Exiting Axon Enterprise – Loving the Company vs. The Numbers
29:50 Selling Airtel Africa & The “Would You Buy It Today?” Test
31:15 Adding to Novo Nordisk – The GLP-1 Pill Thesis
33:45 PayPal Research with Fiscal AI
42:42 Wall Street Wildlife Betting History
44:56 877% Gains – FU Money & Life Choices
50:25 One Battle After Another vs Tron Ares
53:16 Wrap Up – Sunday Releases & Patreon Early Access
WSW – EP102 – No ADs
[00:00:00] Krys: And it’s not that hard to survive if you don’t do things that might actually kill you. And I’m speaking, you know, I’m not, this isn’t a holier than thou, I’ve made an egregious, egregious, several errors in my investing career exactly because of this.
[00:00:14] Luke: You might have been looking at your portfolio and pulling your hair out and going, oh wait, what’s coming? What’s gonna happen?
[00:00:19] Krys: please don’t let me confuse you when I say this is not, this is, this is one piece of a thousand pieces, but I’m starting to look at this from the question
[00:00:28] Luke: Yeah, you’re right. And I think that’s really gonna be the value of this investing community that we’re building because things are gonna get ugly at some point and like when everybody is feeling the pain along with you.
[00:00:46] Luke: Welcome for the Deep Investing Jungle with your host Luke, the Badger Hallard and Christophe Monkey Pikey. This week for every spiffy pop, there is a spiffy plop. Here’s our deal with the difficult red days. I looked at my reverse. DCF spreadsheet last week. If you wanna know that is check out episode 1 0 1.
If you wanna get the spreadsheet, go check out wall street wildlife.com ’cause it’s right there for all our Patreons. And as a result of doing that analysis, I rebalanced my portfolio, exiting a couple of stocks and trimming a bunch of others. Plus I added to one. So we’ll be chatting about those actions this episode.
[00:01:27] Krys: Badge. Uh, today’s episode is gonna be a little bit shorter because we’ve been delayed quite a lot because things blew up in your neck of the woods. What the hell? What the hell just happened? You were, you were the, the whiskey in your Tesla, in the driveway. Like what?
[00:01:45] Luke: Exactly. Yeah. Like this is me. For the last two hours, literally we’re about to hit record. Like I lost my home network. I’m like, oh, what’s happened? I rebooted everything. It’s still broken. And I’m like, what? Let me just message Crystal.
And I’m like, my phone is down as well. What’s happened? Like these two things should not be correlated. And I eventually realized like I’ve got Vodafone providing both my broadband for the house and my mobile phone, and they’ve just had like a massive UK outage yet, and literally like live, it came back in the last 10 minutes.
Uh, so I dunno if it’s like a cyber attack on the UK or just vodafone’s incompetence.
[00:02:22] Krys: Yeah, who knows? But, but, uh, immediately, uh, as you might suspect, I thought, well, I hope bad you’re safe, and that. There’s no cyber criminals like carrying him off to a dark dungeon. But more importantly, you know, a STS, uh, their satellites are now, you know, there’s all these photos, uh, of the big plane taking the big satellite over to India.
And, uh, and this is exactly the kind of things that won’t be. issue in about a year’s time. Uh, Vodafone being one of Ass’s, uh, main companion partners. Uh, and I also side note, side note, uh, I’m thinking about getting the, the Apple Watch Ultra, uh, because a longer battery and you know, like it’s a cool gadget, but you know, they already, I didn’t realize.
Have one of these functions where it shows you, if you’re out in the boonies, you could point your watch, you know, toward the satellite and then be able to text and do stuff without any, you know, wifi. So it’s like a thing, it’s a, it’s.
[00:03:28] Luke: I am an A STS shareholder. I hate to rag on it. Uh. But unfortunately that wouldn’t have helped me because a STS are like an intermediary passing the traffic to Vodafone and literally Vodafone was completely down. Their websites were down. Like they had like the channel, the Vodafone was Kapu for two hours.
So yeah, if anything it’s a in favor of starlink ’cause they’re like completely independent.
[00:03:54] Krys: I, I was wondering, I was wondering about that. I wonder what kind of, uh, backups. There’s gotta be some backup stuff. I don’t know the engineering enough, but if all you have Yeah, I don’t, yeah, I wonder, I wonder, I I, I would put an asterisk next to would that actually not, would, would even a STS customers be out?
I, I get what you’re saying. It, it makes sense.
[00:04:19] Luke: Anyway, it’s a, it’s a good lesson in single points of failure. ’cause I’m literally here, how do I even tell Christophe? I’ve got no way of communicating. I SMS you. But I was like, I had to phone the wife. She confirmed Vodafone was down. It wasn’t just me being a knit wit. And then she emailed you and you got a fricking complicated surname.
So,
[00:04:40] Krys: It had to be spelled right. Yeah. Uh, but I did get the SMS though, uh, I, I thought to check it because, you know, you weren’t replying on WhatsApp, but how did you, how did the SMS go through?
[00:04:52] Luke: I think just their data seemed to be down, so they had like 4G, but no 5G and no data service. Anyway, it’s done. We’re back, and I’m literally in another browser window. I’ve got like broadband deals and fiber deals, and I’m gonna find myself a new home provider right now.
[00:05:07] Krys: All right, badge. Uh, I wanna lead us off this week. By talking about monkey’s first, spiffy, splat, uh, or spiffy flop or whatever. It was just, this is, uh, this past Friday monkey’s, uh, king of the jungle portfolio was down over a thousand bananas, which is more than we started with, you know, and I thought to write that post I wrote on Saturday morning because, uh, everybody in their, in their orangutan cousins.
You know, gets all uppity in your face with how well they’re doing as investors when things are going well. Correct.
[00:05:45] Luke: Yeah,
[00:05:46] Krys: Everyone’s a genius,
[00:05:47] Luke: exactly.
[00:05:48] Krys: but notice how quiet it gets when you have this big red day and everybody’s butt holes are puckered and you know, it’s just like unpleasant. You know? It doesn’t, it, it, as human beings, it’s unpleasant to, to watch your money, uh, disappear.
[00:06:05] Luke: And it’s not, yeah, like it’s not even a big down day, like it was a down day, but it took us back, you know, a few days in valuations. I think my portfolio rewound to like Tuesday.
[00:06:17] Krys: Yeah. Well, I have, I have a part two to this, what, what I’m about to say. ’cause I think it’s, it’s more interesting than, than I think, uh, you know, f from, from my side so far. But anyway, I wrote that post because, um, my intention was one transparency. That’s kind of what me and you do, and we’ve been talking about this now for, you know, ever since the bull market euphoria started getting a little toppy, toppy that, uh, the reason we’re building our community is so that when shit goes bad, people don’t freak the fuck out.
Pardon, pardon my, my language. And stay the course because that is the most important thing, right? To not abandon ship. But when you lose for some people for the very first time, what seems to you like. You know, all these magical gains people do and will make awful decisions around this very point. So I just wanted to model like, yes, things go up.
Then very next day, things can go back down and it’s painful. So one of the ways of dealing with it in, in, I suppose in writing that post, it’s kind of therapeutic. I mean, you know, our Patreons in, in the sense, you know, they’re not posting these long posts, that’s our job. But just sitting at the computer right, and going through the numbers and then pulling the graphics, it’s like, yes, this is what happens in the market.
And that’s the, you know, strong. Um, selling point of something like journaling and having a, a, a co-host to talk things through. So that just eases some of the emotional angst, and I think it’s crucial. It’s not, it’s a simple point, but it’s not an easy point.
[00:07:58] Luke: Yeah, you’re right. And I think that’s really gonna be the value of this investing community that we’re building because things are gonna get ugly at some point and like when everybody is feeling the pain along with you. But you’ve got some members of that community who’ve seen this story before.
They’ve been through the downtime, they’ve been through the upturn. Like you, you, it’s not that we’re necessarily leading the way. But we can say with some conviction, like we’ve seen this before. Um, and so hopefully that will help, uh, well everybody stay the course as an investor, because you only really do yourself serious long-term damage if you were either like investing with money.
That you needed in a short period, like less than five years, or you panicked and you sold at the bottom. If it’s money you don’t need for like 10 years plus, well you’re just gonna ride it out, maybe gonna add new money, and it’s gonna be like a really positive time in terms of long-term decisions.
[00:08:58] Krys: Amen and hallelujah. So badge, I got a part two to the story that you’re probably not aware of. So that day on Friday, uh, I actually was by the computer quite a bit and I was doing a lot of, um, charting and more of the technical stuff. I mean, it was very wild day and there was a lot for me to process.
Right. And I was just, just working. Right. But it was, it was tiring. Right. It’s tiring watching the market go down, down, down, down, down. Okay. yeah. Right. Okay. Stop swaying monkey. Okay. So anyway, my day ended and I went to meet a friend. And so that was good. Get outside. Just have a normal conversation, you know, let the down day pass. All good. Uh, conversation ended and, uh, I opened my phone and what do I see in my own personal portfolio? It dropped another, uh, very, very sizable amount post-market close.
And I’m like, what in the God’s name? Right? And then, then that was the, the Trump tweet and you know, the market plummeted even further, right? I was, dear God, you know, it’s one thing to get through a rough day on Friday, but you’re like, cool weekend’s here. And then another double the loss afterwards. It was especially bad for me badge because, uh, one of my very largest positions is Chain Link. And Chainlink is in the crypto world, even though it’s not, you know, the bad crypto. But crypto had the largest liquidation event in its history on Friday, right around the Trump Tweet. So, uh, couple of things about this. In hindsight, people who analyzed this saw that there was a massive whale that set themselves up short. Some it feels like some sort of, you know, inside information thing, but you know, somebody always knows kind of thing. So they bet against Bitcoin. Bitcoin drops, uh, tanks and then they get out and they made some massive amount of money on the thing, like hundreds of millions of dollars or some, something huge. An advantage, an uh, I’m going somewhere specific with this. One advantage of crypto or blockchain is that everything is mathematical, so you get the truth right. But a disadvantage of that in a sense is everything is mathematical. So unlike working with banks where there’s delays and there’s like humans involved and there’s black boxes, you know, if you get a margin call with a bank, sometimes that just takes, they’re like, please deposit some money, or this and this will happen.
In the crypto world, it’s automatic because there’s no human interference in the sense. So as soon as this liquidity thing started. It got worse and worse because once, you know, people get liquidated, more people get liquidated, right? Um, and it was a complete, uh, fucking disaster
So, uh, the technical term in, involved in this is called a perp. A perp is a perpetual futures contract. And in the world of crypto, I want our listeners to think this is exactly kind of like options in the stock market. Where you’re increasing your leverage in order to go long or short, but there’s no expiration date. So that’s why crypto people use this stuff. But again, like in the crypto world, once certain collateral levels are, let’s call it exceeded, then the math starts and the cascade starts. And because of the Trump tweet and the kind of like game theory, you know, shortcuts, things. Cascaded to such an extent that in the aftermath of this badge, um, it became clear that a stunningly large number of crypto people were completely wiped out.
So it was the biggest massacre ever.
[00:13:25] Luke: So I, I know why, but go on down for us. How you got what, how someone gets wiped out with something like that. ’cause you think you should lose a bit of money.
[00:13:35] Krys: Right, because, um, if you’re trading, so these perp things are collateralized loans. In other words, it’s margins. Let’s say you deposit a thousand dollars. You buy this vehicle that says you can get a hundred x on this coin or this crypto token, and as long as the price of that token stays above. You’re collateral, then you’re fine.
But as soon as it dips below that, then you’re forced to sell. And in the crypto world, there is no arbitrage. There’s no real time. Right. But the, here’s the tragic thing, because honestly, many people lost, uh, millions or hundreds of thousands where there are life savings. There’s a bunch of stuff about people potentially taking their own lives.
I mean, it was, it was absolutely, uh, devastating. Um. The, the worst part was that even people who said to themselves, I’m playing it really safe and I’m not going crazy with either the amount or it would have to fall by, you know, this massive amount for this ever to be triggered, and that’s so highly unlikely and lo and behold, right, it was sort of. It was, you could think of it, a kind of attack on the system to see just how far it could bend and just how bad it could be. And for many people it was, it, it, it completely wiped them out. Here’s my um, uh, so when I looked at my phone and I saw chain link in some exchanges fell to $8 from 22 or whatever it was to eight.
Chainlink is, is not, again, you know, it’s not a shit coin, it’s a, it’s, it’s the future of the world’s financial system. And, but because it’s tied to this particular system, it felt, what, 65% in like five minutes? Right. And so I look, I was looking at my phone and I just saw that, I’m like, like, that’s not like, like, you know, uh Right.
It was kind of like your outage. And of course it came back. Something like, I don’t know, half an hour later there was a V-shape, but those people who were at the bottom of the V are dead. They’re done. They’re, they’re completely, uh, out of it. Here’s the lesson. I, um, I didn’t, I was sitting there like wondering like, uh, are all the, you know, like, how’s, how’s any of this possible?
And the only, the only, like, why am I not affected by it? And I, this, this isn’t intended to be a holier than now thing, but I never for second thought I should use my chain link tokens to do anything, but have them sit there in its own little account and, you know, accrue value the long and hard way. And I have some of them staked with Chainlink Labs, which is, you know, I’m getting interest.
Payments in link, but that’s inside chain link’s coffers. They’re not being distributed on some weird exchanges. So in other words, I’m not playing around with my chain link. The people that got wiped out, it was because they were using leverage, even though they thought the leverage was, was safe. So,
[00:16:53] Luke: I wonder, I wonder if we can, I wonder if we can just go a little bit deeper on that. ’cause it, and it’s not a crypto or a chain link thing, it’s just like a really good example of yet again, why. You should never use leverage if you do, you know, very cautiously and really understand, because as you say, things can go, uh, they things that be worse than you expect.
And let’s just explain why it happens. Like if, let’s say you own a thousand dollars in chain link stock. Well, if, if it like gets decimated by 60% overnight, like within a few minutes, okay, you’ve lost like 600 bucks. Let’s make the numbers bigger, right? Because this, this actually impacted people’s lives.
If you’ve got like a million dollars in chain link, you just lost $600,000. Um, but then if it v-shaped recover and comes back to where it was, you’re back where you started. So you’ve lost nothing. Like you maybe, you know, you panicked a bit momentarily, but hopefully you didn’t do anything and you kind of got out with the skin of your teeth.
If you had leverage, you might have had, let’s say for example. I don’t know, 10 x leverage. So you might have had a hundred thousand dollars with a 10 x lever. So you actually, you know, your a hundred thousand dollars is kind of controlling a million dollars worth of stock, in this case, chainlink tokens, but could have been Bitcoin, could have been anything.
And as soon as the market drops by what, 10%, but it not even 60%. Well, your million dollar exposure just went to zero. So. If you’re lucky, you’ll get closed. You know, you’re closed out of that position and you literally have nothing and, and when the market comes back, you have nothing to come back, so you’ve just wiped out your a hundred thousand dollars.
If you’re unlucky, and depending how you’ve set it up, you might end up getting margin calls. You might find you own your, you owe your broker more money and you have to start selling like uncorrelated the quality stuff to pay it. And if you really are lucky, you know, you might have to mortgage your house ’cause you’ve got this massive debt that you can’t, um,
[00:18:59] Krys: Right. Look bad. Here’s, here’s, yeah, here’s, here’s the bottom line for me. I feel really awful for many people who in one sense were completely, uh, effed by. The bad actors that basically precipitated this deliberately, right? I mean, my heart goes out to, especially the people that lost, I mean everything, um, that said in the crypto space, since I’m the representative of, of this pod that follows that world, one, as I’ve said over and over again.
Stay away from the 99% of what crypto offers. ’cause it’s still a circus. Just do not, do not go there. But what’s, but even if you’re holding something like Bitcoin or Chain Link, understand that these Black Swan events sometimes happen. That’s the whole point. And because you already know. That the system is still, you know, young and it’s, you know, the, the edges of, of, um, innovation and call it like the frontier, then by, by God do not increase the risk by playing with, with leverage or margin.
It’s already crazy enough as it is, and there’s an adage in the market. That it’s not how you do in the market. It’s your time in the market and you have to survive.
[00:20:35] Luke: Yeah.
[00:20:37] Krys: And it’s not that hard to survive if you don’t do things that might actually kill you. And I’m speaking, you know, I’m not, this isn’t a holier than thou, I’ve made an egregious, egregious, several errors in my investing career exactly because of this.
So that’s why, you know. I would never be tempted to play around the way, you know, I was shocked at the massive numbers of people that were doing this kind of stuff in the crypto world. I’m like, are you insane? So, um, anyway, I’m off. I’m off my, um, I’ll get off my, my, uh, what’s it called? Soapbox, but sad, sad day for many in the crypto world.
Uh, but hopefully our listeners will learn a lot from that.
[00:21:20] Luke: Yeah, and like if you let, let’s bring it around to stocks because on Friday and through the weekend. You might have been looking at your portfolio and pulling your hair out and going, oh wait, what’s coming? What’s gonna happen? Are we gonna go into like a protracted downturn? Is it, is this like the end?
And it seems like it’s not, you know, we’ve all had a respite yet again, and markets are back up and you know, maybe we carry on for another few months, another few years, who knows. But if you felt like fear and pain. It probably means you’ve got too much exposure and you wanna de-risk your portfolio ’cause you’ve got a do-over Now.
Today is Monday the 13th of October and hopefully you’ve still got like that do-over when this episode goes live. so take some risk off the table, right? You don’t have to sweat it.
[00:22:08] Krys: Amen.
[00:22:09] Luke: I took some risk off the table in my own investment portfolio last week. I’ve increased my cash allocation.
Should I tell you a little bit about that?
[00:22:16] Krys: Yes, please. You were busy, Lowell. Uh, I was gonna say monkey, but you were, you, you were interpreted. You were no imitating monkey in your own badger, Badger like way, which is very cute. It’s very cute to to see
[00:22:32] Luke: Yeah. Busy badger badges are always busy. We didn’t have time to like drink daiquiris and swing by the by. Our tails we’re busy like foraging. Anyway, I did some foraging in my own portfolio and. I, so if you check out episode 1 0 1 last week’s, uh, it’s nice being in the triple digits, isn’t it? It’s like more feels, feels material, right?
It’s good. Um, in episode 101, I shared my reverse discounted cash flow spreadsheet template. And if that sounds boring and tedious, it’s actually pretty useful. Um, and if you’re a Patreon or if you go swing by Wall Street wildlife.com, you can pick up that template. Yourself and you can use it and there’s a whole bunch of instructions there, and you can build your own reverse DTF.
And it’s a useful tool to have one of many tools in like your toolbox as a investor. Uh, so having done that, I started looking at my own portfolio and I thought, same thing. Maybe I’ve got too much risk on the table. Maybe I’ve got some positions that, um. I’m no longer tracking, no longer believe in. Um, and you know, channeling Wise Monkey, you said about 10 episodes in response to one of our Patreon questions.
Maybe, you know, you got too many. I think it was Chris or one of our Patreons had like 60 something stocks in his portfolio. Your good advice was like, try and find. A few candidates, five or 10 companies, you’re just not interested anymore, not tracking and just exit them from the portfolio. So I did a bit of that too.
Let me take you through what I did. So what did I do? A bunch of things. I looked across the whole portfolio and first of all. I, I had to take a decision I didn’t really wanna take, which was Rocket Lab. It had become my largest position. And in my retirement portfolio, all of these actions are, uh, ’cause that’s the one that’s like funding my lifestyle.
It’s pretty important to me. Um, and I had 16.75%, nearly a 17% allocation to Rocket Lab. My plan back in June was to like. Diamond hands this up to a 20% allocation or until neutron was about to launch. But frankly, I ain’t got the balls through it, so it got to an amount of real dollar money. I’m like, this is too much.
So I was losing sleep, so I trimmed it and I don’t like to make big moves, so I trimmed. I trimmed it down to 14% last week, and then I have planned to trim it down to 10%, probably in two more trenches, and I’m gonna do that sometime over the next couple of months.
[00:25:15] Krys: Badge. Can I say that? I, um, one, thanks for the insight about your poker game. That means monkey has some, some, uh. Uh, the, the big balls, you know, maybe monkey’s going to, going to send some fear in badger’s eyes when we’re sitting, like, how,
[00:25:33] Luke: We’ve already playing pretty big
[00:25:34] Krys: yeah. Okay. Uh, but, but two, I know it takes, uh, it feels good to do those little trims.
Like it’s scary at first, right? But then that evening you’re like, oh, I’m glad I did that. Right.
[00:25:49] Luke: I’m gonna kick myself because immediately, obviously Rocket Web went up like 10% the day I
trimmed. But you know, you gotta make those no regrets decisions. And that was one of them. And I only trimmed a bit and I planned to trim more, so I’m still getting some of the back end of it. Anyway, I did some other things as well.
I. Uh, I looked at the valuation for a whole bunch of my companies ’cause I did that reverse DCF, so that was like a finger in the air valuation across the whole portfolio. And one that stood out to me was Axon Enterprise. I know I’m a big fan of this company, but, um, the valuation is just unsustainable and the company is paying themselves egregious levels of stock-based compensation.
like in this chart, you can see they paid out stock-based comp of over half a billion dollars in the last rolling 12 months. And that’s on revenues of like just over $2 billion. It’s a lot of money going to insiders and not a lot left over shareholders.
This is always, I’m not surprised, right? This has always been the story for Axon, but on top of like slowing growth and. A valuation that’s really kind of out there, um, just became too much. So I’ve trimmed that back pretty materially, and I’m gonna keep that to like a sub 2% position. I think it’s now down to a one and half percent.
[00:27:11] Krys: badge. Uh, a point from me being an outsider on this. I see one of the most common investing mistakes around exactly this kind of thing where you love the company and you confuse the fact that the company and the stock and the company in. What you’re trying to do as an investor are two very different things, and it’s human nature to this to become attached, you know, and, and in the trading world, I mean, a little bit more in the short term world, there’s, you know, inside jokes about are you gonna marry this one?
Are you gonna date, you know, this one, or is it a one night kind of thing? And that’s all about, you know. Uh, timing durations, but many, many long-term investors get stuck in this. Um, I call it a mental trap, where you’re like, well, I still love the company. They’re making great products. You know, they look at this new gadget thing and you completely lose sight.
That’s, you know, you could love the company, uh, without, you know, with owning half the shares. So I’m, I’m proud of you for, uh, making that cut.
[00:28:19] Luke: Yeah. Like I think it’s definitely when I, when I became, I started thinking of myself as a professional investor. Um, not like a guy who just follows a story. Like, I love a good story and I love like a mission and I love good leadership and like Axel’s got all of those things. I really like what the company is doing, but if I’m really thinking of myself as a professional, I’ve gotta manage to the numbers very hard and the numbers are no bueno right now.
[00:28:48] Krys: Yep. And, and also to the, your previous point about rocket lab. Sometimes you will get egg on your face and it does exactly what the universe is, is programmed to do, is make you look silly the moment you, you sell. But, you know, a year from now, two years from now, six months from now, I doubt that this was a bad move on your end.
So, uh, props.
[00:29:09] Luke: and then two other things I did in the portfolio. Uh, and by the way, like I wrote a long. It took two days, Patreon post, and this stuff is like, it’s on the Dolphin Trading channel. And I did this as like a dolphin, uh, exclusive post, but now I’m sharing with everybody, um, like on the Patreon.
This is the kind of stuff that Christophe and I now do, like we share in real time our thinking. What we’re doing and why we’re doing it and we can debate it with our Patreons. So, you know, having good conversations on there about this sort of stuff. I did two other things and I think they’re both interesting.
Uh, I sold Airtel Africa, which is a stock I recommended seven investing. About, maybe about three years ago, and I’ve had it in my own portfolio. Um, the thesis is intact. It’s a solid company. It delivered like a nice 70% return. I think in my investment portfolio. It’s been paying a good 2% dividend. The thesis was all about incredible demographics in Sub-Saharan Africa, um, mobile money and increasing connectivity, and I think that thesis is still solid and robust.
But if I’m honest, I’m not tracking the stock, I’m not watching the company closely enough. I have to like force myself to skim the quarterly deck. I can’t remember the last time I listened to an earnings call for this one. So natch, it’s gotta go from the portfolio. So I did that and
[00:30:32] Krys: And, uh, and you remember what the secret, uh, hack to those, these kinds of decisions. Is for me.
[00:30:39] Luke: keep in one, share that one.
[00:30:41] Krys: Uh, no. Um, well that, yeah, uh, that’s one of it that, um, it eases the stress, but it’s more, uh, the question today, if you didn’t own it, would you buy it?
[00:30:52] Luke: Hmm. Right,
[00:30:54] Krys: My guess is you wouldn’t.
[00:30:55] Luke: Correct. Yeah, absolutely. and I did one other thing in the portfolio, which was like I was ruining the fact that I had to sell one of my very few dividend stocks. So I looked for an opportunity to add. To a dividend stock, and the one I picked was Novo nor Disk. And I, I bought that for the first time in April.
I added again just in August, like a month and a half ago. Um, but it seems like it’s good value. Um, the thesis, my thesis is all about oral GLP ones like Wegovy in a pill and they’ve got their pill form coming out. Um. But in Q4 this year, they’re waiting for FDA approval, but it is expected they are three to six months ahead of their competitor, Eli Lilly.
In clinical trials, it looks like Novo Nordisk’s pill form is better in terms of, um, clinical results than the equivalent from Eli Lilly. So it seems like a winner and the stock has taken a real bashing over the last year or so. Um, a lot of that was because they just didn’t scale up the manufacturing in time.
They didn’t take full advantage of this like unique opportunity they had when they launched the first set of like injectable wegovy. And they’re ahead of that now. They’re already scaling up manufacturing in anticipation of the FDA approval. So if they get, as long as they get FDA approval, that’s the right thing to do.
Um, I feel pretty happy about this one. I’ve now doubled my exposure. It’s a one and a half percent position for me.
[00:32:35] Krys: Cool. Good job.
[00:32:36] Luke: Great. I was going to do a screen share and have a look at like Novo Nordisk valuation live, but I think we’re gonna keep today’s episode tight because we started super late thanks to Vodafone. So maybe we’ll do that next week instead. And the other thing I have created that I’m gonna release to Patreons today is a valuation cheat sheet.
So I’ll share that on a future podcast. But essentially, like you and I are starting to think about how, how should investors use tools like fiscal ai, um, how should they use some of the other technical trading tools you have in your toolbox? And we’re gonna start doing that stuff live on the podcast. I think we’ll do it live on the Patreon first, and then it will hit the podcast too.
[00:33:21] Krys: Yeah, that sounds good. Uh, do you have anything more, uh, in terms of your, your trimming and, and buying with the retirement, or is that good?
[00:33:32] Luke: That’s probably good. I looked at a bunch of other things, uh, and I decided not to execute all of the other decisions I considered.
[00:33:38] Krys: I, on the other hand, um, I don’t know if this is a good time to show this, uh, but like a very, very high level way of playing around with fiscal ai. Uh, I’m on, um, a PayPal kick right now. So I already bought two shares for King of the Jungle and I even bought a call option, very risky call option that, uh, is expires in March.
So better than the Rocket Lab fiasco I got myself into last year. But it’s still pretty tight because, um. What I’m seeing is very, very compelling. But you know what? To really build up a position, you, you, you have to do hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of research. So I’m, I’m, I’m kind of in the middle of it and, uh, fiscal AI just makes this stuff so enjoyable and easy.
Uh, I thought maybe we could, uh, share my screen and I could kind of walk you through three tabs. Of, uh, a couple of things I did. Does that sound good?
So the very first thing when you get to fiscal AI is you, you know, you, you have the company overview, which is useful in many ways, uh, for our purposes. Uh, when I get here and I see these valuation metrics, just from doing this a long time, I think, wow, this is, these are really, really low. So, you know, quick, quick glance to, uh, to help you see that, uh, and I see here that they, they in, they have $2.16 billion in net debt.
So that’s basically after you subtract the cash, they, that’s the amount of debt they have, uh, on their balance sheet, which is why. The enterprise value is $2 billion more than the market cap. ’cause if you were to buy this company, you would need to also take on the debt. And that matters because there’s some debate about should PayPal be paying down its debt or doing something else with the money it’s making.
That’s, uh, I’ll talk about that in a second, but over here, I also like this because I could type in some of Badger’s competition, the enemy. And, uh, let’s put, uh, add in in here. And just like that, I have a nice comparison of the performance of the stock over five years and so. Uh, it’s, it, it’s a good visual.
It’s one of these, you know, one of a hundred puzzle pieces. But if I’m investing in PayPal and I see it’s down 66%, whereas its competitors are up in the, you know, similar timeframe, I gotta have a very good reason why I’m gonna allocate my bananas now to seemingly the worst company, right.
[00:36:37] Luke: And lemme just jump in there ’cause a lot of. Beginner investors would look at that and they would go, oh, I should buy PayPal because it’s down, it’s gonna come back. And like, I should be bearish on Wise and agen ’cause they’re up. I mean actually they’re all down, but, and they’re, you know, up in comparison.
’cause that kind of assumes reversion to the mean and that ain’t how the world works. Usually things are down. Because they’re in a bad place and they’re executing poorly, and you’re executing poorly, unless you take really material actions to turn that around, like it’s just gonna get worse.
[00:37:11] Krys: Yeah, exactly. So please don’t let me confuse you when I say this is not, this is, this is one piece of a thousand pieces, but I’m starting to look at this from the question is PayPal undervalued? Or is it a value trap? And here, this shows me Oh yeah, it’s, there’s a good reason to think that it’s underperforming and usually you wanna add to your winners.
And in this case, obviously PayPal is, has not been winning. Um, it’s also very easy to, uh, switch this to something like market cap, where you could see relative. To one another, the size of these companies. And as soon as I switch that, I see that PayPal is over seven times the size of wise and about, eh, not, not quite twice as big as Aian, but it’s definitely the, the big behemoth in the space.
So that’s also noteworthy. Anyway,
[00:38:07] Luke: got some, uh, you’ve got some mixed currencies there, but directionally That’s right.
[00:38:11] Krys: yeah. Oh, right. ’cause this is, uh, euros and this is pounds. Right. But it’s still directionally correct. Yeah. Okay. Um, anyway, it’s a great overview, but then I click over to the financials and this is where, uh, fiscal AI really shines. And this is what I meant by my previous comment. What are they doing with their cashflow?
And here, this is one of the most compelling metrics. That I’ve seen about PayPal because you could see that while their market cap has basically plummeted since the highs, and it’s kind of traded sideways for now many years, during this time, the shares outstanding have been precipitously dropping, and this is one of these data points that.
Tells me management is confident management themselves. The insiders themselves are confident that the shares are undervalued, and it’s a better use of their money to take off shares from the table than to pay down the debt and this kind of steep curve. Is actually quite rare from my in, in my experience, where the market cap really goes sideways and then you could see the rate of change is just vast, vastly different.
This crossing doesn’t mean anything exactly, but. In all the years doing this, I know a stock could remain undervalued in the spring. Like thing keeps compressing and compressing until like overnight, seemingly it pops. I remember this happening badge with Microsoft, with Activision, where, you know, I was looking at the finances and it’s like, why isn’t this going up?
Eventually. If the thesis is right, it does. Um, and so last point that I wanna show, you know, I’m just going through these tabs here. You get to investor relations and they have comp compiled all in one space, all the latest. You know, info, this is the stuff where you’re really digging in the weeds. And Alex, Chris is this, uh, hotshot, CEO that took over from the previous, uh, management team that were vastly underperforming.
And I’m scrolling, scrolling, reading, and bam. I get this quote on, on pay with Venmo, we’re seeing 45% plus growth with pay with Venmo. I think we’re just getting started in terms of merchant adoption and really igniting consumer there. With buy now, pay later, we’re growing greater than 20%, so on and so forth.
And the whole, at this point, you know, I’m, I’m many, many, many hours deep in research. I could tell you that the thesis statement on PayPal or the, the bear statement is so, okay, it’s this big massive company, but they’re no longer growing. So, uh, it’s either, it’s more likely a value trap from the bear perspective.
But when the CEO gives me numbers like this, which in theory, even if they didn’t grow with all the share buybacks, that could still make for a good investment from these cheap levels. But when I’m seeing. These double digit growth numbers in some categories, not all, but they’re also expanding in vast number of categories.
All of a sudden I’m getting a very clear picture that this is where I need to do more work and, um, and look very, very carefully because I smell a serious opportunity coming. So th that’s just like a quick example of, you know, a very nice workflow of how, uh. I use fiscal ai and there’s just so much more here that, you know, we’re not even scratching the surface of, but it’s just easy, right?
That, that’s, I think, what makes this tool great. It’s easy, it’s all right there for you. One screen, one platform, and that these visuals, um, maybe last common, if I go back to, um, the financials without over overdoing it, what I love about a picture like this is, it’s too. Two data points. It’s not complicated, and it tells a very powerful story, which is what vis, uh, visuals are intended to do.
So,
[00:42:16] Luke: Good job. Very good. We we’re gonna start using fiscal ai. More regularly on the podcast live like Christophe just did. Um, and if you wanna sign up and check it out yourself, go check out fiscal AI slash wildlife for a handsome discount.
[00:42:34] Krys: Amen. And it just occurred to me badge, uh, for better or worse, um, I see another, I smell another bet. Wall Street Wildlife bet cooking because, uh, we, we have two, we have the annual, you know, who wins the year’s return, and the king of the jungle. We also have the. Uh, Exxon versus EOS bet, which ain’t looking too hot for you.
Uh, today, unfortunately, after EOS popped another 25%,
uh, um, and, and, and actually EOS has now joined Rocket Lab in my first 10 x uh, our second Wall Street Wildlife 10 x. So, but the next bet. Obviously, obviously is gonna be, if my research validates what I think I’m seeing with PayPal, I’m gonna push PayPal chips all in and you get to pick, uh, wise, or, or one of your other fintechs and we’ll go, uh, head to head in, in something like that.
So I’ll give you some time to prep to think it through, but that’s what I’m smelling.
[00:43:36] Luke: All right. I like it. Yeah, I’m down for that bit. That’d be fun. The, uh. And we do have another bet as well, and it’s not gonna settle for another two weeks, but I bet that your overall portfolio will be up more than 500% in year two at the King of the Jungle. And we’ve got a bottle of vintage rum on that.
How am I looking?
[00:43:56] Krys: how is it? Side note, how is it that every time you, and I bet it seems like I win, but you get the benefit, like those EOS calls right now that you as a loser are now up whatever, uh,
[00:44:12] Luke: let, let me, let’s park on that, right, because we, we had a bet on something else I forget, and the loser who had to pick. A thousand dollars option for the other, or like a stock, an investment for the other. And I lost that bet. Forget what it was. And you told me I had to spend my a thousand bucks on an EOS call option.
And yeah, good job. It’s worth $5,000 now. I’ll take that.
[00:44:37] Krys: Yes. And I’m the one buying you the rum mother. Mm. That’s what I’m saying. This, this world, it’s a fixed game. It’s a rigged game badge, uh, to your point. This is nuts, man. Uh. Last November, 24th, after year, one of, uh, king of the Jungle Monkey’s portfolio was at a, uh, underwhelming 1,600 bananas. As of our recording right now, it’s at 15,636
[00:45:10] Luke: Wow.
[00:45:11] Krys: for a gain of 877%.
[00:45:16] Luke: That’s a case of rum. I, I’m gonna ask you, I’m gonna ask you a question on the podcast I asked you privately, uh, like a month or two ago?
[00:45:28] Krys: Yeah.
[00:45:29] Luke: Eight. Okay. 800% gain. How
[00:45:32] Krys: 8 77.
[00:45:33] Luke: Seven, eight? Yeah, like, so like a nine bagger on your whole portfolio in King of the Jungle.
[00:45:38] Krys: Yeah.
[00:45:39] Luke: Like how come you’re still working?
[00:45:41] Krys: Yeah, and I, I encouraged you to ask me this because forgive, forgive the upcoming philosophical rant, but I think this is important. Money is not the point of life. The point of life is, uh, how you choose to live it. And my job, what I call my job, is teaching young college students. There are few things on this planet that give me more in intrinsic satisfaction than showing up in the classroom and teaching my philosophy of Zen course and my, what I think of as how to think better courses in the spring.
Um, and so it’s one of those things where even. If I don’t have to work, I feel honored and privileged that I get to do that work. The bonus is that I get to, I made a decision. I don’t need to work full time. So as soon as there’s a threshold where they make you go start going to all the meetings and all the admin stuff, I’m like, no, thank you.
So I’m exactly at the kind of course load where I get the insurance, I get the benefits I get to teach and then no more. And that’s because I can, uh. Of course I could also leave, you know, uh, so my, you know, I go to Sicily and, you know, all these things. So it, it’s, it’s you and I agree on this through and through
[00:47:10] Luke: Yeah,
[00:47:11] Krys: time.
Time is the gift of, of being a great investor. And right now I’m choosing to spend it the way I want.
[00:47:18] Luke: Great. Like I think the technical term for that is FU money. Like once you’ve got FU money. You can say F you to any opportunity that comes along and just pick and choose the stuff you wanna do and having like agency over your time. That’s been like such a change for me in the last four or five years.
[00:47:39] Krys: Yeah. Now, to be fair and transparent, uh, I am not at your level because as a professional, I’ve been in the education business all my life. I never made big bank, ever,
[00:47:51] Luke: You do. If you do like you do, like 877 again next year, you’ll
[00:47:56] Krys: Yeah. Then we’ll be, we’ll, we’ll be there. Yeah. Yeah. Let fingers crossed, right? but actually it’s worse than that. I was a graduate student for eight years as a graduate student. I was not making any money. That’s the, that’s the vast majority of my twenties. I was not putting away anything substantial. I was investing.
But you know, like when the capital base is tiny, that’s nothing to write home about. And yet, I mean, this is not me thumping my, my chest. This is even educators. Even educators like me, if you play the long game and you do this for long enough, you will have f you money if you follow the principles. So, you know, you retired, you know, you, you did both things.
You, you had, uh, a good, uh, uh, professional career, you invested wisely. And then, you know, now you’re, you know, you’re legitimately playing with f you money. I need a couple more years to catch up, but you know.
[00:48:53] Luke: Keep going, keep going. I wanna see you turn your King of the jungle portfolio into like a hundred thousand dollars. That’d be awesome.
[00:49:00] Krys: Yeah, that’d be pretty
sweet,
especially
[00:49:03] Luke: like you’ve, like you have turned now it was a hundred dollars a month and now for the last 10 months, $200 a month, and we we’re not even two years in, and you’ve turned that into $15,000.
That’s actually a material amount of money.
[00:49:18] Krys: Right. Nobody could sneeze, right? Nobody could sneeze, uh, like oh, 15 k like.
[00:49:22] Luke: Yeah. Yeah,
[00:49:23] Krys: but actually it’s worse than that. I was a graduate student for eight years as a graduate student. I was not making any money. That’s the, that’s the vast majority of my twenties. I was not putting away anything substantial. I was investing.
But you know, like when the capital base is tiny, that’s nothing to write home about. And yet, I mean, this is not me thumping my, my chest. This is even educators. Even educators like me, if you play the long game and you do this for long enough, you will have f you money if you follow the principles. So, you know, you retired, you know, you, you did both things.
You, you had, uh, a good, uh, uh, professional career, you invested wisely. And then, you know, now you’re, you know, you’re legitimately playing with f you money. I need a couple more years to catch up, but you know.
[00:50:15] Luke: All right. Very good. Well done. Hey, you know, who isn’t having such great financial time of it potentially right now, but maybe they’re gonna be happy when award season comes around. Uh, Warner Brothers with one battle after another. I know it was a critic’s favorite and it was a Christoph favorite. My buddy Tom didn’t like it.
And it looks like the audiences aren’t either ’cause uh, it doesn’t look like they’re gonna reach $300 million break even. They need.
[00:50:45] Krys: doesn’t surprise me, I suppose. I think that movie is too smart and too, uh. Also, uh, well, I don’t know. Movie, you know, when, when, when garbage, you know, uh, makes trillions of dollars, you know, in beautiful art films sometimes, you know, don’t even see the live of day. That’s not surprising. We’re in a cultural disaster zone.
But, uh, did you see it?
[00:51:12] Luke: I, I have not had a chance to, sorry.
[00:51:14] Krys: Yeah. The other, the only other thing to note is that it’s highly political. I mean, it’s basically a snapshot of the United States or the world, you know, where, and it depicts left fighting the right, and it has its own subjective viewpoints. I think it does a fantastic job of taking the piss out of both, uh, ideologies, uh, and leaves us with something extraordinarily.
Um. Rich and, and nuanced in the middle, so to speak. I’m not ruining anything by saying that, but not everybody wants to go, you know, and think hard about, oh, you know, this is what it looks like and feels like to be in this entangled mess. yeah,
[00:51:57] Luke: I should check it out. I’ll try and I’ll try and make sure I watch that before I watch Tron Aries, which has been pounded with absolute like garbage, but I kind kind of wanna see it, so.
[00:52:10] Krys: Yes, please, please do. Watch, watch one battle after another. It’s just so brilliant.
[00:52:15] Luke: Okay.
[00:52:17] Krys: in fact, I, I think I might see it for the second time in the theaters, which I’ve never done before for any movie,
[00:52:24] Luke: Oh wow. Okay. Yeah, that’s cool. I’ve, I’ve done that. Twice with Pulp Fiction and the Matrix, both of which I went to see and had to go and immediately watch the very next day ’cause my brain was so blown by both of them.
[00:52:36] Krys: Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Right on. Uh, I’d love to hear what our, uh, our jungle crew has to say about any three of those movies. So that’s why we have our, uh, weathering Hole channel. So, to any of you listening, if you’ve watched those movies or you had some sort of, um, life altering experience at the cinema, please uh, let us know.
We’d love to hear from you.
[00:53:02] Luke: Great stuff like the, uh, the Jared Lito Tron Aries fans will come out of the wardrobe.
[00:53:07] Krys: Alright. Badge. Well, I’m glad that you were not cyber attacked and whisked off into some dark, dark layer by some, uh, black hoodie digital monsters. So.
[00:53:18] Luke: Yeah, well, I mean maybe, maybe that’s happened to like Vodafone. It remains to be seen, but I’ll definitely be pulling some of my business from them, so I haven’t got that single point of failure. I, I will say that we were gonna try and keep today’s episode tight and we still managed to chat for an hour.
Like, there’s just so much to talk about. Um, but we have got confident enough with our editing workflow. Thank you to our glorious editors and their support. Um, we’re bringing the podcast forwards, so you might have noticed that episode 1 0 1 drops a little bit earlier. We’re now gonna aim to get the podcast out on the YouTubes and on the Spotifys every Sunday.
Uh, and we’re also bringing it forward on the Patreon so you can get early review, and we’re gonna get it out every Friday. So, uh, if you wanna see the pod two days early, go sign up@wallstreetwildlife.com.
[00:54:08] Krys: badge. Uh, are you ready to become a beast of an investor?
[00:54:14] Luke: I am. You can get it right here.
