Hey everyone, me Kevin here. We need to talk and no, I'm not talking about talk about the expiring coupon code tonight. And what we're going to talk about is obviously these institutional pieces on Iran. I've got a lot to talk about here. We've got to talk about artificial intelligence. We got to talk about what's going on with the consumer. We got to talk about what's going on with the labor market. We got to talk about this snippet regarding Netflix earnings. Uh and we got to also touch on these issues. Oh, sorry. That's the coupon code again. Uh, we've got to touch on this issue in the Wall Street Journal.

This issue in having to do with basically ships not getting through the straight of four moves. This issue regarding Pickax Mountain. Folks, there's a lot. And my little newswire tab is up right there. Fine. All right. A lot to break down here. Let's just, as usual, try to keep this concise and get down to the facts of what's going on. So, why don't we go in reverse order here and just cover a little bit of news and then we're going to get into the institutional analysis. So, first things first, the Wall Street Journal wants Donald Trump to basically go finish the job. The Wall Street Journal is essentially saying Donald Trump is right to go kick Iran's AS and if Iran's concessions like opening

the Straight of Hormuz are actually legitimate and turn out to be real, great. Then he did a great job. But if not, then basically Iran is going to assume that Donald Trump telling the world that today is Iran victory day and we've won. We've won the war and it's over. Everything's great now is really just because Donald Trump is impatient because the stock market went down a little bit. The S&P 500 was barely down 10%. Barely, we were looking at a correction and we got massive taco. The Wall Street Journal is basically saying, "Look, dude, if the Iranian regime calls your bluff, then uh the regime is quote less likely to make concessions because you're desperate to end the war to pump the markets again because you've got a

midterm election coming up, then it's going to be even harder for Donald Trump to actually win in the long term." So, in other words, the Wall Street Journal editorial board is saying, "Ho, ho, ho, hold on a minute. Everybody's cheering about this. Oh, the straight of Hormuz is open." But is it? Are the Iranians actually striking a deal with us, or are they letting Donald Trump declare his own sort of victory to artificially prop up the markets to all-time highs? Or is that just what Donald Trump does? So, that's what we're going to analyze in this. This is what the Wall Street Journal starts with and it comes off the back of talk like this. Here we have video of ships turning away from the straight of Hormuz as confusion

persists. Some analysts like this commodity researcher o over here Matt Smith the director over here says look Iran has clearly not given approval for ships to just broadly pass through the straight. They're basically just saying, according to an IRGC linked news network, they're basically just saying, look, you could go through the same exact way that we said you could over the last 2 weeks. Just because the foreign minister says it's open to everybody doesn't mean it's actually open to everyone. That the IRGC doesn't want any hostile uh nation ships or any ships linked to hostile nations going through. And that's exactly what they've said for the last two weeks, which means maybe the straight of hormones isn't

actually open. This is why there's also talk about Donald Trump using some form of maybe up to $40 billion of US cash, money they take from us for taxes to create insurance where we previously didn't need insurance in a straight of Hormuz for terrorism and wartime insurance because no insurance carrier is dumb enough to touch it. So, the United States wants to back uh stop it, but whatever. So, we can see here the Wall Street Journal is setting up some doubt. They're saying, "Hold on a second, everybody. This could be Donald Trump prematurely declaring victory, and that makes Trump look desperate. That makes it harder to negotiate with Iran."

We've got confusion regarding the ships with the IRG linked News Network, uh the TASnam News suggesting, yo, nothing's changed. and which I've talked about multiple times throughout the war. You know this. Leave a comment if you know Pickaxe Mountain. Okay, that was supposed to be a little bit more dramatic. I was supposed to have it like ready and up, but it really wasn't. Anyway, Pickax Mountain. What's really interesting about this is Pickax Mountain is right now front page news on the New York Times because now the New York Times is finally exposing exactly what I've been talking about since the beginning of this war that you know we still haven't done anything to Pickax Mountain. Probably because we

don't have the weapons to actually get deep enough into Pickax Mountain and do anything. And I personally wouldn't be surprised if that is exactly where the highlyenriched uranium was moved from when the Iranians evacuated for and Espahan before our B2 bomber strikes which we knew were coming. We just didn't know when. And we saw trucks. We tracked trucks on our live streams, you know, basically setting up to leave outside of the nuclear facilities where the enriched uranium was suspected to be. And 460 kgs of uranium sounds like a lot, but you're probably talking about like less than 10 barrels of oil, which you know, a barrel of oil probably goes up to about your, you know, your waist

and maybe, you know, weighs 100 lb or whatever. You know, it's like one pallet on a forklift. You know, you put it in a U-Haul and you're good. Might glow in the dark, but I'm just kidding. But anyway, so the New York Times is talking about Pickax Mountain. Pickax Mountain, and this has been regularly argued, is not only a mountain that remains or a facility that remains untouched, but it's buried so deep, it's probably deeper than any of our bunker busting bombs can reach. And there's satellite imagery. As you go through this, they basically talk about, I'm just going to summarize it for you. They basically talk about how there's a lot of satellite imagery indicating that we've

got a lot of developments still going on at this facility even throughout the war. quote, "Iran's Iran's unimpeded access to Pickax Mountain and its recent activity there make that site a higher priority with satellite imagery showing work including the use of dump trucks, cement mixers, backhoes, and cranes to harden the facility's entrances. You know, it was just I think it was last night somewhere here. I uh saved it on my pile. Uh I don't have it handy. I was just reading about uh the Oh, where is the darn thing? Oh, here it is. Oh, yeah. No, I saved it. Front page on my desk. I had it right in front of me, not in my trash pile. That'd be crazy. Right here. Tran deploys Chinese satellite to target US bases across the

Middle East. Now, of course, China, China's foreign minister dismissed this as untrue, adding, "Recently, certain forces have been keen to fabricate rumors maliciously linking them to China. Yet, leaked Iranian military documents show a satellite TE01 Bravo was acquired by the IRGC for about $36 million in 2024 from China, launched with their ballistic missile program. And they've been photographing the Prince Sultan air base in Saudi Arabia on a daily basis, which maybe helped Iran target our very own planes that were based there. You remember the images of the E3 century that was hit by Iran, our own product.

Anyway, so this is some of the suspicion that's going on. And this isn't to say that there's a need to, you know, flip-flop this, that, or whatever on the market. We're going to talk about the market in just a moment, but we have to understand a little bit about Donald Trump. And this is where we can get into the institutional pieces to try to put some of the pieces of the puzzle together. So, first, uh, you've got Bank of America who comes out with this sort of game theory style for Donald Trump. And basically, they say, look, there's no Nash equilibrium here, which this is a little bit more complicated. We start getting into game theory here, but basically, if you put together this

chart of like, hey, if the White House can either escalate or deescalate, and a stock market participant could either buy or sell, then you could buy when they escalate, or you could deescalate, or we could buy when they deescalate, or you could sell, right? you could either buy or sell, right? The whole point of it though is that the whole game theory of this is screwed up by the fact that when the White House escalates, the stock market knows that at some point stocks are going to go down to the point where Donald Trump or the White House are going to deescalate because they're going to taco because they can't stand the market going down. And because of this, listen to this. This gets wild. in anticipation, the market does not

sell off as people just stay put because people already expect there's going to be a taco. That's why we only got a 10% correction and not more. But then, of course, in anticipation of that, the United States escalates even more, like we're going to obliterate a whole civilization and send them back to the Stone Age. And the market doesn't react that terribly either because again, we usually get taco And so this is actually really interesting and I'm going to bottom line this a little bit more. Bank of America is basically saying the stock market has already way priced in that Donald Trump is really good at being the bull in the China shop and destroying things and not putting all of the pieces back together.

And so I wrote my own very little list of this and I'm just going to give a few examples. Okay, there are a lot of these. This is not to be political and I'm not trying to take a political side. You all know me. I've always pitched myself as 5149. Everybody has my opin their opinions on that, but at least I've got the balls to say it. So, number one example, Donald Trump has always told us we're going to repeal and replace Obamacare. Of course, all we ended up getting was them holding up a binder. Look, the plan is ready to go. They never released the text of the plan because there never was a plan. And Donald Trump later admitted there was only a concept of a plan. This is Donald

Trump's method to unwind things he doesn't like or things that are going to be politically popular for him to do like complain about Obamacare uh and then never really resolve it. The same is true about our 200 trade deals. We're supposed to get 200 trade deals done. We actually only got three trade deals done. The rest are really just temporary truths. handshakes to kick the can down the road to lower tariffs a little bit and agree to talk and work out all the details in the future. Only three countries have worked out details. The United Kingdom, Vietnam, and China, but China only for one year. The others even more temporary. And all three of those are of course in question because of the

Supreme Court decision in February regarding the illegality of the AIPA tariffs. Anyway, so you can't really blame the fact that, you know, 90 deals in 90 days never actually happened. That was just a nice marketing plan to indicate, yeah, yeah, yeah, we just created a whole lot of crap. We haven't put it all back together yet, but don't worry about it. Everything's good, right? Market's up, right? Down 50,000. Just like the Epstein files. Okay. Sorry. Then I actually personally expect that Iran will be just like this. See, just moments ago across the wire services, Donald Trump said that maybe we won't end up extending the ceasefire

if there's no deal by Wednesday, which implies that there might be strikes again starting next week, especially since we're going to keep our blockade. However, Donald Trump then reiterates that Xiinping of China is very happy that the strait is open, even though we don't actually know that it's actually fully open. And Donald Trump cheers that Iran won't have a nuclear weapon and will get to keep the dust, the highlyenriched uranium. But we don't know about that. All we know is the market basically bets on Taco. And every time you bet on Taco, it works out. And we hope it continues to work out. I believe it'll continue to work out.

That's why we bought the dip. That's why we have a list of 12 stocks we're buying for the next 10 years. And we went crazy buying the dip. And I'm glad we did. Obviously, uh, and of course, you can see all of what we're buying and our trade alerts and, uh, you know, all the courses on building your wealth and the, uh, course member live streams over at meet kev.com. Uh, our coupon expires tonight at 11:59 p.m. if I'm up then, otherwise it'll be first thing in the morning. But anyway, uh, next, what you got to know is this isn't just about taco. This is also about people regularly telling us, "But Kevin, you know, oil is going to

crush the consumer. We'll have a recession." No, oil will hurt the consumer, but typically only the low-end consumer. The low-end consumer represents just 15% of consumption. So, if stocks go up, as they have been over the last, you know, week here and week and a half since we called the bottom, we did a good job calling the bottom, got to admit. But anyway, since then the middle and upper class who spend way more money than the bottom 15% well again spend the other 85% they get richer. So in other words, higher stock prices can basically offset higher oil prices or higher interest rates for a little bit. So it doesn't really matter as long as Donald Trump pumps the market. And I think everybody realizes this is why

Donald Trump cares so much about the market because the market can cover all of the broken China that's on the floor of the china shop when Donald Trump the bull came through it. But every market only wants a bull anyway because we only want the market to go up. Okay. So what about the other underlying issues? Well, retail sales are not doing great. Retail sales are basically flat and that includes everyone's spending which isn't fantastic. Uh in fact if we look at retail spending in the last uh 4 months annualized out we can see on a real basis we're actually negative. So on an inflation adjusted basis we're actually negative on uh consumer spending and that is even absent uh you know once we adjust out for gas it's not doing good.

Now, that's overall. If we actually look at what's happened, not over those last 4 months and then annualizing it out. If we just look at what's actually been happening on card spending over the last few weeks during the war, spending is actually held up. This suggests the consumer so far hasn't really been affected meaningfully by the war. It means we've been slowing down. economy has been slowing but the economy hasn't done much to push people over the edge which is bullish which is also the same thing that we're seeing in the jobs market in fact if you jump from Bank of America to Deutsche Bank you could see that Deutsche Bank is analyzing the BLS statistics on a 12 6 and 3month basis

and we could see not only this stabilizing but what they call firming up of the labor market and this is critical because this is that you know ghouls beef famously said this like a year and a half ago. He's like, you know, the labor market doesn't just trend down and then magically stop and stabilize. Well, that will either prove to be famous because he's right or it will be proved or, you know, his line will prove to be famous because he was wrong. And it did end up stopping to stabilize right at zero, which is wild. But it's also what we're seeing with the ADP data. The ADP weekly data last week was fantastic. I expect this week it'll be good as well. Even though the BLS is screwing with the participation numbers,

the private surveys are showing optimism. So, we've got no one falling off the cliff on the consumer side or the retail side mostly because total consumption is propped up by the stock market which keeps getting propped up by Donald Trump's sort of half measures to finish deals. But those are good enough for the stock market because the stock market looks through it. The jobs market is stabilizing and on top of that artificial intelligence per Jeff greed and fear has no sign yet of any slowdown. Now that is critically important because guess what? We would basically be in a recession without artificial intelligence. That is exactly what Goldman Sachs has told us in the past.

Artificial intelligence has not started rolling over. When it does, it'll be a problem. But if you actually look at inflationadjusted AI related investment, we could see that AI related investment has actually blown up over the last year from December 2024 to December 2025. Massive move up here, which is great. And this is all relative to the chat GPT moment over here at the 100. other nonAI investment non-residential private fixed investment is actually negative and uh US private non-residential fixed investment is barely up so basically AI is holding up this market jobs are stable the consumer is holding on that would be in this section right here so far the lower-end consumer doesn't matter so much and the peak of bad news

is probably coming in Q2 when inflation peaks because of oil. But then of course we're going to have to balance that with a potential continued reaceleration of the labor market which would really be quite bullish. So when you put all of this crap together, what does it mean? Oh, we didn't even mention private credit, right? When you put all of this together, it means we're going to be raising the prices on the alpha membership. Okay. No, no, we are. But, uh, you know, it's because it's it's things like this. Like people ask me about Netflix this morning, and you know, we go deep in our earnings calls and we're like, why is Netflix's operating expense level growing faster

than their revenue, which is bad, right? That would be a negative margin. And then we find out it's because they actually took an extra $275 million of mergers and acquisition related costs. And when you adjust those out, they actually are only growing their operating expenses at 10%. And their revenue is growing between 16 to 17% and so is their earnings per share uh level including the forecast. Right? So now you actually have positive margin when you adjust for this. This is the kind of deep dive stuff that we like doing every morning in our course member live streams. I wish I could, you know, share more of this uh just in public videos, but I get the feeling people get bored of some of the nitty-gritty.

Uh but it's like some of the most important and juicy stuff. I just I guess it doesn't make a good title, you know? Netflix pee pe actually larger than expected. Like all five people would click on that. Except I actually think a lot of you see this like ah that is actually a really good point, Kevin. That's that's an interesting thing to do to go into the earnings call and adjust that. You know what? That's good advice. I'm going to start doing that myself. Like that. Well, that's my hope. My hope is that people who watch my channel go through life and go, "Oh, you know, I learned a few things from that Kevin guy." Anyway, so when we put all of this together, what does it mean

to me like practically as a bottom line? Well, practically as a bottom line, it means I'm going to go for long walks with my beautiful wife Lauren. I'm going to play with my uh you know RC car that uh well, it's actually Max's that Max got the other day. We looked at a lot of your recommendations. Thank you. Max is not ready for one that goes 60 to 70 mph yet. Those are ankle destroyers. No, really. And I'll put I'll share some videos on Instagram if you want to follow me there at me Kevin. But um what does this practically mean regarding the stock market? So my belief is that really private credit stabilizing, the labor market stabilizing, the consumer is still stable, and the stock market

going up, all of these things together basically make it impossible in the near term to have some form of sudden recession. You need something to roll over. The biggest and like worst thing that could roll over would be probably AI. If for some reason tomorrow, you know, Nvidia said their earnings or their forecasts were down 30%. Because earnings or uh you know, orders weren't coming in anymore, we would probably rapidly devolve into a recession because that would be like us falling off a cliff. That would be a lot of circular spending that would dry up and would fall off a cliff. or if all of a sudden people who got laid off couldn't get jobs anymore and they were actively looking for work every month

because they needed a job and the BLS actually showed them as participating in the labor market but unemployed less than 6 months. So they're actively in the labor market, then the unemployment rate would skyrocket and that would be another form of falling off the cliff which would come in conjunction with an AI rollover. However, neither of those it's possible may happen if the stock market keeps booming. So, it's sort of like, well, what comes first? The stock market crash or the layoffs? The stock market crash or the AI rollover? The answer is we have no idea. We just know that the stock market really fell, and I mean like 30 to 40%. Then you'd see layoffs and you'd probably see AI roll over. So,

is Donald Trump potentially right? Hey, if I just keep propping up the stock market, I could cover a world of sin, a world of stupid tax policy or mistakes in foreign policy or whatever that I dress up as victories and it's all good as long as the stock market goes up. Can that keep going on? Yeah, for some period of time. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, it could literally keep going on until somebody tries to start cleaning up the mess. Maybe in 2029, maybe that'll be another Republican. Maybe that'll be a Democrat. Maybe we're going towards socialism. I don't know. That's possible as well. We're starting to see more and more of a push towards socialism. Uh the Wall Street Journal is

airing Bernie Sanders who wants to kill all AI in the uh op-ed section of the Wall Street Journal. I don't even know where to go from there. All I got to say is good luck out there. Stay safe. And frankly, I'm glad I bought the dip and there's still opportunities to buy out there. There are still plenty of lowpriced stocks. They don't have to be stocks that I'm buying. We analyze stocks every single day in the course member liveream. If you're not part of it, make sure you're part of it there so you can see my actual deep dive fundamental analysis combined with my technical analysis and guidance during the day. And then you can make your own decisions as to what is right for you. but get the

information first. So, use that coupon code. Join us over at meetke.com. We'll have the price go up uh tomorrow. Uh so, if we're up tonight, we'll change the price tonight. Otherwise, it'll be tomorrow. You get all nine courses, every trade alert, every private live stream, every alpha report. Uh and then of course, if you want as well, we're going to do a pretty large price increase on this as well. Uh though I haven't been pitching this much because uh we're about to release the bleeding edge of this AI uh at the end of the month for me uh which we promised everybody would release it by uh the end of June. So the fact that I'm going to get the bleeding edge uh by the end of

this month gives us technically a full 2 months but you know it could be ready earlier. So we're still on time for releasing the bleeding edge of this uh to everyone. And I can't wait. I'll be on the bleeding edge of course first and testing and validating it. I'm pretty excited. I'm already doing a lot of background validating and uh you know AI rating work, so it's uh it's quite fun. Uh it's a lot of work, but uh we enjoy it. Uh anyway, thank you so much for being here. We'll see you in the next one. Goodbye. Good luck. And use that coupon code dude 444. Remember, dude 44 is the call sign of those uh fighter pilots who went down behind enemy lines.

Why not advertise these things that you told us here? I feel like nobody else knows about this. We'll we'll try a little advertising and see how it goes. Congratulations, man. You have done so much. People love you. People look up to Kevin Praath there, financial analyst and YouTuber. Meet Kevin. Always great to get your take.