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What up boys and girls? Welcome back to another Me Kevin video. Today we're learning how to do the Vladimir Putin because in today's geopolitical world we've got to learn how to adapt. So we're out here with Western Horseback trail rides and they'll take you out on a trail ride. Great people, great time, but we got to talk about what's going on in stocks geopolitics and the madness in the Hermuz. Is it open or is it closed? I don't know, but I'm going to go find out. Well, folks, it looks like we're back at it again. Y'all were hating on my belt yesterday, so we're going no belt today, and the Iran has attacked the UAE, launched cruise missiles at US ships and
even North Korean ships. So, what's going on? Well, not only did we hear about phone alerts in Dubai, we had three Indians injured uh in the UAE after the Fujira port uh port city and a company called Vital was struck by an Iranian drone attack. So, in this video, we got to break down what's going on over here. What does this mean for our economy? Obviously, we know short term what this means for oil, but what does this mean longer term? Does this change or derail what's going on in the economy? What data did we just get this morning and what are we finding from institutions that is also equally shocking? Well, let's break that down after we get through what just happened.
So, Iran fired multiple drone attacks at the Vital company. Now, this Fujiro port is really interesting because it sits on the Gulf of Oman, which if you look at the straight of Hormuz is sort of the thing in the middle, if you will. On the right side, you got the Gulf of Oman. On the left side, you got the Persian Gulf. The Persian Gulf is where you're stuck. That's where you're either trying to send oil through Saudi Arabia through the East West pipeline or you're trying to get out through the Straight of Hormuz. Fujyra is really interesting because it is a port that sits on the other side of the straight of Hormuz and it gives uh shippers an opportunity essentially to route through the UAE oil
through land and out of this port. Now this port is actually the second largest port in the country. So it's a pretty big deal. Uh and it was attacked. Now Iran is saying, "Hey, hey, we're done. We're not going to launch more attacks." But why did this happen in the first place? And that's what a lot of people are wondering. Hey, wait a second. You know, I thought we were in a ceasefire. Why is Iran doing this? I'll tell you exactly why Iran is doing this. Iran is doing this because Donald Trump has finally moved to make his blockade what we like to call semi-permeable.
Permeable would mean things can flow through. It's really not a blockade. Semi-permeable means, hey, we're going to allow ships to go through that we like. So neutral commercial uh vessels or allied vessels uh they may be let through but anyone affiliated with Iran might get blocked. At the beginning of this blockade at the beginning of April I mentioned that one of the benefits of a blockade was that Donald Trump could end up having a semi-permeable blockade which a lot of folks bashed me in the comments for and said Kevin that's crazy then it's not a blockade if it's semi-permeable. I mean my opinion is the whole point of having a blockade is so that you could choose who gets to go in
and out. Now Iran maintains its blockade in the actual straight of hormuz but Donald Trump has just now with sentcom. So in coordination with sentcom started what's called operation freedom or project freedom. Project freedom is really the attempt to say hey we're going to try to get this straight back to normal. Iran doesn't like that because the strait not being back to normal, Iran holding down while their economy is collapsing, holding firm on their blockade while the US holds firm on their blockade without permeability, that creates pain on both sides. If you start alleviating that pain and all of a sudden the United States doesn't have as much pain anymore than slightly higher
oil prices, you know, almost by a factor or two, then Iran loses its leverage. Iran doesn't want to lose leverage. Iran wants to get a permanent ceasefire in place. They want guarantees that attacks are going to stop. In fact, I have their 12-point sort of concept of a plan right here. They want a removal of the blockade. They want an immediate reopening of the straight of Hormuz. They want the counter blockade, the US one, lifted. They want a deferment of nuclear items. Uh this is really a der delay in discussions around uranium enrichment and really no nuclear related demands until after the war is settled
and they essentially kick the can down the road. Now, why? Well, and then of course they want an infinite ceasefire, a permanent sessation of violence, no more strikes against Iran. Donald Trump says that Iran has about 15% of their weapons capacity left, which we did see some of that used today. Drones made it into the UAE and damaged uh the Vital energy facility at the port. That area, by the way, not only the second largest port, but it also houses uh it's it's called a bunkering port. And it houses over 118 million barrels worth of oil. I say worth of oil because it's measured in uh I think it's like metric tons or cubic units something like that is how they actually measure it when it comes to
storage. It's different. But the thing here is you have to remember that nuclear weapons provide deterrence. They prevent companies. They prevent countries from attacking nuclear armed uh you know defenders. Essentially, this is why Bill Clinton expresses regret that he convinced Ukraine to give up their nuclear weapons because he actually believes Russia may not have been crazy enough to invade Ukraine if they had nukes because your Ukraine would have probably used them. And this is why the global, you know, sort of outlook is that we should have fewer nukes so we don't have mutually assured destruction, especially amongst smaller countries that are more likely
to go, "Ah, we got nothing left. Let's go." Now, Israel's got plenty of nukes, and Iran knows this. And Iran knows until they have nukes, they are likely to continue to get attacked over and over again. And this is why Donald Trump is kicking the can down the road on this promise of, "Oh yeah, we'll stop attacking you because we know it's probably not realistic." At the same time, Iran is probably trying to buy time to continue enriching. This is my opinion. I want to separate this. They're probably buying time because I think what they're doing is they're enriching that 60% highlyenriched uranium over at the Pickax Mountain facility. You know, Pickax Mountain.
Imagine it's like right here. We bombed Ferdo and Esaha and we bombed the other facilities, but we didn't bomb Pickax Mountain. And there's plenty of satellite imagery. If you Google satellite imagery, Pax Mountain, there's plenty showing there's active construction going on there. And we haven't bombed it. Now, one of the reasons we probably haven't bombed it is because this facility is believed to be even deeper than any of the others. So, that's why I believe it's likely that you actually have enrichment happening there happening there right now. And Iran wants to do anything they can to just kick the can down the road. Hey, we don't really want to give up that 60% highlyenriched uranium, which serves
really no purpose other than making a weapon because we're kind of in the middle of using it to make a weapon. Not great. Now, Donald Trump is convinced the highlyenly enriched uranium is buried somewhere, but I don't believe him. Okay, my opinion aside, let's focus on what we do know. We do know that Apache and Seahawk helicopters uh took down a bunch of small attack boats in addition to four cruise missiles that were launched. Three were intercepted. One fell into the sea. These uh cruise missiles were launched against US uh ships, which isn't great. US ships in the blockade though are intentionally outside of drone distance. Uh and so this is why cruise missiles were used.
Brent crude did pop up and obviously the stock market moved down slightly on this. But Tron has at least promised that this is it. They wanted to send a signal. Now they're good to go back to the drawing board. Hey, let's talk about this. So what does this mean? Well, in the short term it means volatility in stocks and obviously volatility in bonds. And I personally think most of this is bad for bonds because you have higher for longer oil. We've been talking about it, higher rates for longer as a result. Uh and I think this latest news is really just drama that's going to end up being bought by the stock market. Now remember, a higher stock market also gives Donald Trump more of an opportunity to be aggressive.
So one of the downsides of that is Donald Trump doesn't have to taco as soon, which is generally bullish because the market is high. He usually tacos after the market sells off. Uh, and this is why in our course member live stream this morning, if you haven't enjoyed it yet, join us over at mekevin.com. Our course member liveream this morning, we set a new price target for the NASDAQ 100 and we reiterated that what we want is a price target at the end of the month. The reason for that is we have big catalysts coming. Now, I'm going to talk about economic data and facts in just a moment, but things that you have to remember, Palanteer after the bell.
We've got labor uh the labor report on Friday. We've got Joltz on Wednesday. We've got uh ADP on Wednesday. Jolts might be Thursday. It's one of those days. We've got a lot of data. We've got the Challenger job cuts report coming out. Uh we've got AMD earnings. We've got uh ARM earnings. We've got App Love in earnings. There are some big names that are reporting. And so we want to see this continued cap X boom, but we also potentially want to see some revival in software. Both of those could lead indices even higher. And this is where institutional analysis gets really interesting because the institutions are telling us the following. If you're looking for reasons to short, and this
is per the marketer, the setup feels incredibly irresistible. But here's the problem. Positioning says you're way too early. From Morgan Stanley to Goldman to JP Morgan, fast money isn't max long. It's in fact barely engaged. Gross and net leverage are subdued. Tech is just one of the biggest degrow just had one of its biggest degrossings in a decade. And even crowded semis trades aren't at extremes. Let's break that down for a moment. When the war started, a lot of people sold to reduce margin and pay off debt to increase cash available. that cash is still waiting to be deployed in some part. This crowded semis idea with the exception of companies like SanDisk
which are just rocketing on momentum companies like AMD, Nvidia actually have relatively inexpensive uh price targets or uh prices at the moment. In fact, Nvidia stock I personally think has a fair valuation at $300 per share. Yet, Nvidia is stuck just under $200 and actually sold off 9% over the last week. while Socks kept running, which was another call we had in the course member liveream in the alpha report. If you're not part of that yet, we even did an alpha report this morning even though we're traveling uh house hack related work, investment related uh event that we were invited to. So, we're really excited about what we're doing, keeping us a little bit busy and they take us on
they take you on little like wine and dine excursions too, but it's really more of an opportunity for us to meet very important people that we highly respect and uh that we're working with, which we're very excited about and look to continue working with. Great news for Houseack. Uh, but keep this in mind, if leverage is low and the degrossing has been done and doubt is high, then you're not really at that contrarian signal yet where everybody in their mom is bullish, right? This is what I said since the beginning of April. Like the more people in my comments are like, Kevin, it's too soon. You know, this is going to get worse before it gets better. That might be true. But what happens after this war is we end up
with an oil glut and we actually end up with a massive stimulative boom of de in um defense spending uh infrastructure spending, AI spending and then cheaper oil. Now you would think that spending would actually go down because of the war, but it didn't in March. Look at what happened to economic data that just came out this morning. Factory orders 1.5% gain in a month. Keep in mind that's like an 18% year-over-year gain when you analyze that out. That's insane. That's almost three times the expectation of 6 and five times the prior at.3. Durables, which are things like washing machines and dishwashers, those are up8%. Listen to this. Non-durables. So the regular stuff that you use on a regular basis,
whether you go buy, you know, water bottles, the supplies for your kitchen, clothing, whatever, stuff that might have like a threeyear lifespan, you know, as opposed to something that has like a 10ear lifespan, like maybe a car, which would be a durable, right? Uh these regular sort of consumer goods, clothing, makeup, whatever, we saw an increase of 2.1% on a monthly basis. That's well over 25% on an annualized basis. the highest boom that we have seen since October of 2022, which was literally the bottom of Nvidia when I sent a course member signal to buy Nvidia and that 200 or like $300,000 investment turned into multi-millions of dollars, which is crazy, which is great.
Knock on wood, we can do more of that. We love that. But that's usually because I like buying when things are unpopular. I don't like buying momentum when it's soaring and the valuations are nuts. I like buying things when they're unpopular. Keeping in mind that you know the sort of self-fulfilling nature of a triple leveraged ETF like a sockel is also somewhat risky because you start building momentum after momentum and you disconnect from fundamental valuations. So you do have to be careful. Definitely some things that are way expensive, some things that still have good money to be made in
them. This morning we were doing some more fundamental analysis as well. Remember you can join us over at meetke.com. So make sure you're a part of that. But anyway, uh the economy did not care when it came to factory orders. Uh and I just keep checking my watch here to make sure everything's cooking and my framing's all right. But um the other thing that you should be looking at in addition to factory orders or the economic data that we've had over the last few days is this idea that Iran doesn't have much of a great capability to negotiate. So they need to lash out every so often to make the issue seem urgent. When Iran does this sort of stuff, everybody starts talking about
Iran again. Nobody's really been talking about Iran for the last month. It's certainly died down a lot after the original ceasefire, but now they're front and center again. This is how you end up getting phone calls from European allies or Chinese allies maybe or the Canadians or whatever like, "Hey, we need to deal with this. Let's get this done. Let's stop kicking the can down the road, Trump. Come on, man. Let's get this finished. Let's, you know, rather than like half-heartedly finishing this. Let's actually finish this." That's what Iran wants. Iran says, "Look, you could declare victory. Just don't talk about our nukes for the next uh, you know, foreseeable future." But again, that's
probably because they're sitting there enriching it right now. Again, that's my opinion. So, I want to be clear about that. Overall, how do I feel about all this? Overall, uh, I expect this volatility. In fact, this morning, literally on the course member live stream, we said focus on the end of the month for bullishness because we're going to have volatility. Are we going to get the confirmation we're looking for this week from software or is it still going to take six months for software to rally? We'll see. Palanteer after the bell and others. Uh then we've also got to pay attention to how's that jobs data on Friday? We got plus or minus 20K. Who gives a flying hoodie duty? But you know what if it's a
negative read? Uh what if labor force participation skyrocketed and all of a sudden the unemployment rate is starting to trend towards 5%. Nobody knows. So there's a lot of data coming this week. We're getting towards the end of the earnings season. And what we want to focus on now is just be conservative. You can be bullish, but look for the good deals in the stock market. There are a lot of them out there. You don't just have to chase the momentum. You can see our list over at mekevin.com. In the meantime, thank you so much for watching. Hopefully this caught you up on all the madness that's going on. And we'll see you in the next video. Goodbye and good luck. It's also
worth remembering that the AI boom just keeps going. I mean, we're seeing this at Reinvest as well, which we're very excited about in the conferences that we go to or whatever. But what's incredible here is Google Cloud growth, we know, is up 63% year-over-year. But remember this, their user growth was up 40% quarteron quarter. Also insane, and their TPU, their tensor processing unit backlog for their chip doubled to $462 billion. Current estimates are that we're going to have about $800 billion of capex this year. And then we won't double like we did from last year, but we'll get all the way up to about $1.1 trillion next year, which is insane. I mean, the boom
just keeps going. The spending keeps going. And I mean, we see the power of AI, you know, at Reinvest and Hell hack. And so, we can't wait for uh finally the end of Q2 to roll around. We're almost there. Uh so we could really show off our real estate valuation AI. We're excited.
