+0.0
net board stance
what this means
48.44
-0.3% · close 2026-09-08
-0% / +6% / +20%
1m / 3m / 12m
-0%
vs SPY since 2024-04-19
90%
of 52w range · -1.9% off high
0/1
hit rate as primary · α -40
Where we stand — 0 live ideas
No active idea holds this ticker. Anything below is history.
Where the winds are blowing
NET BOARD STANCE, LAST 60 EPISODES —
rising = the besties are building this position, falling = abandoning it. Replayed from
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PRICE VS SPY OVER THE SAME WINDOW, % — did the
talk lead the tape or follow it?
Who's pushing which way
each voice's net push ON THIS TICKER — their most recent stance per idea × the idea's direction × strength, so supporting a bearish idea pushes down. Not conviction (that lives on the idea); this is direction of travel per person. what w= means
Track record on EWU
As a PRIMARY play the besties are 0 hit / 0 partial / 1 miss over 1 closed window — credit 0.0, average α -40.3. Adjacent plays are listed but never scored.
| idea | call | play | verdict | R | α | closed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🏛️ Speculative-competition antitrust blocks chill tech M&A | ▼ SHORT | adjacent | MISS | -75.1% | -108.9 | 2024-12-08 |
| 🏛️ Socialist policy turn across the industrialized democracies | ▼ SHORT | adjacent | MISS | -12.8% | -25.6 | 2025-07-12 |
| 🌍 UK mortgage resets flip the UK economy upside down | ▼ SHORT | primary | MISS | -21.9% | -40.3 | 2023-10-01 |
The tape — what was actually said
every capture on any idea holding EWU, newest first · quotes verbatim, timestamps deep-link into the episode
And I think when everybody realizes that the alternative is essentially some insane form of socialism and redistribution, I think the alliance will hold and that they'll find some common ground.
And that's why I'm so convinced that there's a rise in socialism in this country because in this sort of an inflationary environment, like we're seeing so far this year, you don't see it in the dollar inflation numbers. You see it in the dollar currency numbers. You're going to say, man, I need an alternative.
I think the three of you guys are a little exaggerated, to be quite honest. I mean, all the rhetoric sounds very clever, but I don't think it's accurate. I think the way that I see it is more nuanced than this.
they don't see that socialism always fails wherever it's tried. San Francisco went through this. I mean, it was a doom spiral. Now, I think we've turned the corner. LA is in the midst of going through it, and a large portion of LA just burned down because there's no water in the fire hydrants. Basically, all the public services have been looted. And New York is about to learn this for themselves.
For me, it feels like actually a little bit of a beginning of a wave that's going to continue to sweep over this country starting in cities. And I think that we're at the very early stages. I think we'll look back and I jokingly say that Kamala Harris is going to look like a conservative candidate pretty soon.
And that's why I said my contrarian bet for this year was this rise in socialist policy and the response to some of the actions the administration might take. But we'll see how it goes out.
The individual governments of Europe are vibrant and powerful. The European Union itself was created almost without any real teeth. And so what happened is the folks there started to pass inordinate numbers of laws. And that has made it really complicated to be a European company, a European citizen. And that has to get sorted out.
You know, GDP per capita in the EU, $60,000 a year, GDP per capita in the United States, like $82,000, but GDP per capita in India is $2,500 and China's $12,600. There's a greater incentive in those countries to manifest upside than there is for the United States and the EU who are more worried about manifesting downside. ... And the countries that are more techno-pessimistic are unfortunately going to find themselves asking for greater government control, government intervention in markets, government's creating jobs, government making payments to people, government's effectively running the economy.
So the backroom buzz is that Donnie from Queens is going to make M&A great again. Couple of reasons there, Sacks, the wrath of Lena Cohn's coming to an end, Mag-7 sitting on massive amounts of cash, and that cash is growing as people have laid people off and they're focused on getting fit.
I think that we've talked about on previous pods that perhaps there was not as targeted and surgical an approach was used. And as a result of that, it did have a chilling effect on M&A. And so it hurt the small tech environment. And so I think that we need to fix that part of it.
Then on the M&A side, if all you're doing is waiting for Lina Khan to not be there, to me, I think that that betrays what M&A is supposed to be, which is you're supposed to underwrite some industrial logic from first principles where things are very accretive and very accretive things should not hang by a thread on the emotional regulation or dysregulation of the FTC Commission.
They're not going to attack. If you think that the intelligentsia, quote unquote, the Bill Gates, Reid Hoffmans of the world that funds, Dustin Moskovitz that funds the Democratic apparatus at the highest level, if they can't change, what are the odds that the state infrastructure or the local infrastructure changes?
My big prediction over the next few years is you will see a more centrist Democratic Party as they try and re-incorporate.
I don't know what happened to the single and double M&A market, but it seems to be completely gone. Everything from Adobe and Figma to other mergers that could be happening are essentially frozen.
I agree that her approach has been overly broad, and has had a chilling effect on M&A.
RE
Reid Hoffman
support ×3
▼ on
🏛️ Speculative-competition antitrust blocks chill tech M&A
E194 · 2024-08-30
▶ 32:40
her theory is you got to prevent the aggregation of powers, you got to fight every acquisition of note. And the problem, of course, is that actually quells venture capital investment.
I think that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie sanders are now the thought leaders and really the beating heart of the Democrat Party. I think what's happened is the Republican Party has moved to right-wing populism, and the Democrats in response to that have concluded that they need to basically move to left-wing populism in order to compete with that. So both parties are becoming fairly populist. Now, what does left-wing populism mean? It basically means soak the rich, right?
And I was looking at the total GDP of the United States is $25 trillion. The federal budget for next year is proposed to be $7.2 trillion. And state and local budgets combined is about $4 trillion. So if you look at government spending, it's about half of GDP now
Google wants to accelerate beyond AWS. They want to become the leader and they're going to look for other sizable transactions that will pass antitrust muster.
On Wiz, I think the most likely explanation is that they just want to keep building this as a standalone company. I think they're probably also worried that they can't get the deal through.
I don't think that she should stop some of these, what I would call R&D acquisitions, from taking place where there's no accretion of market share, but rather starts being bought because they contribute a useful piece of technology. I don't think you want to shut down that part of the market. Lord knows we don't have enough exits as it is
I do think Friedberg is touching on something, but I think the explanation doesn't have to be this idea that people are embracing socialism.
Yeah, look, I don't think that the use demand for socialism is what's driving the results in France at all.
But really what I think we're seeing is a much bigger shift where there's this bigger battle between socialism and free market democracy.
we can't sell them because LinaCon is going to scuttle this M&A, and what that means is in a very real way, we have dollars being taken out of innovation in early stage