Transcript
00:00
Quentin Lumsden: Hello, everybody! It’s amazing to see all the names popping up of subscribers, and I know a lot of you have been engaging with me for a long, long time. And know a lot about how I think and what I do.
00:20
Quentin: We’ve called this talk “The End of Paper Money?” because I read this amazing article saying that I grew up with the idea that there were safe haven currencies. But of course, people always need safe havens for their money in a troubled world. And, when I was growing up the safe haven currencies were the Deutschmark, the Japanese yen, and the Swiss franc. And those were the three main ones, really. And then after that, there was the dollar. Then, maybe sterling. Sterling it depends where you’re coming from. And I read this amazing article suggesting that really none of these work anymore. The Deutschmark has become the Euro, which means all the crazies from the Mediterranean now affect what is happening to the euro, and it’s no longer a greatly trusted currency. The Japanese yen has apparently lost the plot. I haven’t really been looking at it very much, but that’s what it said in the article. The Swiss Franc is too small to accept large flows of money. Sterling has completely lost it, as far as being a strong currency is concerned, except against very weak currencies.
01:42
Quentin: And, so money has been pouring into the dollar and the dollar and dollar assets have become incredibly dominant in the world. And the suggestion is that this is unsustainable, and there is at some point the whole dollar thing is not going to work either. And because there’s so much money going into the dollar, it puts the Americans in an amazing position because they print dollars. But they don’t actually have to take responsibility for it. Because people just take them and put them in their treasuries. So lots of stuff is free for the Americans. They just give you a dollar, and you don’t do anything with it. You just hoard it.
02:34
Quentin: And so this has created the background in which inflation has sort of come back into the world. And it’s also made people wonder if it really ever went away. I’ve got a cousin who’s always saying that inflation is always there. It’s just that sometimes it pops up in the form of goods and services, which is what we’ve just had. And sometimes it pops up in the form of assets. They sort of, it’s either one or the other to some extent. If it’s goods and services that depress assets. If it’s assets, then goods and services can become almost deflationary, and then it looks as though inflation has gone away.
03:20
Quentin: Now, if one accepts that inflation is still with us, and it’s really going to kind of stay with us a and be an accepted phenomenon. And at the same time, technology is getting rid of paper money. So you’re not even aware of money. It’s just, ah, you know, it’s Apple Pay. Just wave your phone and you wave one machine at another machine and you’ve bought something. Then it’s easy to imagine that people are going to be looking for somewhere, to store their savings and store their wealth. That creates a very exciting background for people who do the right thing with their money. And, one of the options is property and I personally think that the property boom is just in hibernation at the moment and it’s going to come back possibly very strongly. And for example, my flat has gone up 15 times in value since I bought it and I expect it’ll go up a lot more in the future. It’s not going up at the moment, but I think that’s just a temporary phenomenon. People will either get used to current interest rates or the interest rates, or maybe even go down again.
05:03
Quentin: And, the other thing that is influencing how people feel about paper money is how they feel about politicians. And, I think something is happening to politics all over the world. We’ve got in a lot of countries. We’ve got people who increasingly are dictators. Where Putin is obviously a dictator. He started off as a democracy, yippee. Gorbachev and Yelson came in. The Communists went, and it all seemed wonderful and democratic, and exciting. But Putin is exactly like Stalin, really, even to having a name that ends in IN. And he seems to be trying to rebuild the Soviet Empire, and we we seem to be getting closer and closer to being back in a cold war which could even become a hot war. It’s a proxy war already in Ukraine. And so. And then we’ve got the Israelis fighting in Gaza, that looks as though it’s gonna run and run. And basically, again, it’s a proxy war against the Iranians. And if China were to attack Taiwan, we find ourselves in yet another proxy war and cold war.
06:35
Quentin: And all of these things tend to add to the pressure on inflation. Because if you’re fighting a war then you’re not going to care about inflation. You’re going to print money, make weapons, distribute weapons. Make sure your allies have got money. All of these things happen. So, I think again, and also all the people who live in these places which are close to the front line of these wars will be desperate for safe havens for their money. So there’s a huge demand for safe and attractive assets.
07:20
Quentin: Then the other dramatic thing that has happened in my lifetime is with share markets. When I first started investing there were share markets all over the place, and exciting things might be happening in wherever sometimes the US Market was exciting. There were plenty of exciting shares to buy in the UK stock market and most of my attention tended to be on the UK stock market. I went to Australia for a while way way back in the day when something called the Poseidon boom was raging and that is still the most amazing boom I have ever encountered in my life. And, European shares were never up to much. Nobody ever bothered much with European shares. Chinese stock market didn’t exist. And frankly, basically, it still doesn’t. So what has happened is that more and more investors are putting their money into the US Stock market. And the US Stock market and it’s great that we can put money in the US Stock market. When I was growing up until Thatcher took power in 78. That’s 78, 79, all right. Yes, until Thatcher took power we had something called the dollar premium. So you had to buy dollars from a pool, had to pay a premium for them. Then you had to buy your US shares, I mean, the whole thing was performance. So that tended to, and it was designed to do, which was to keep money in the UK and force people to buy UK assets and not send their money off to the States.
09:17
Quentin: Well now, none of these things exist anymore. So we are in a wonderful period when you can buy your shares without any problem at all. And not only can you buy US shares without any problem at all, but you can also do something that wasn’t really available so easily before which is, you can research US shares very easily because of the Internet. The Internet basically has made the US stock market completely accessible to everybody. And in the process, people have discovered that it is by far the best stock market in the world. The US has a much stronger belief in capitalism than any other country. It has become the beating heart of Adam Smith Capitalism and shareholder capitalism. And it has an incredible choice of growth shares.
10:16
Quentin: When I look at the stock market, if I go through I can find every single day I can find an exciting new US Share. And what I’m planning to do, one of the things I’m planning to do with Quentinvest is alerting those shares without taking them full board into the portfolio. So they’ll sort of join a watch list. I’ve developed a new technique actually, for hunting these shares down. It’s working amazingly well, I’m really excited about it. I feel like a gold miner who finds a nugget of gold every single day. And so that is going to be even more exciting great shares, because, as I expect, subscribers have noticed I’ve been very focused in, for most of this year, on quite a small group of shares. One of the reasons why I’ve done that is because I’ve realized that you simply don’t need to hold many shares to get fantastic coverage. The most obvious example is the Magnificent 7, the Megan caps. So you got 7 shares which account for I don’t know. I’m picking a figure out of my head, but I don’t think it’ll be too far wrong, 50% of the American Nasdaq 100 Index. Some of those shares, single-handedly, are bigger than foreign stock markets. I mean, it’s just incredible how totally dominant America has become in world stock market. And some people worry about this and say, oh, well, basically, the value guys come in and say, oh, this is wrong, you know, we need to buy, find some cheap Egyptian share on 2 times earnings. Well, there’s a reason why some cheap Egyptian shares on 2 times earnings cause nobody in his right mind would buy it. And the fact is that the Magnificent 7 companies are not only are absolutely amazing companies, but they’ve got the resources to drive the technology revolution forward.
12:46
Quentin: And, that’s the second reason why the US Stock market is so amazing. Not only in the States do they have a much more free market capitalist, shareholder capitalism approach than in any other country in the world. So maybe Canada or somewhere. But on top of that they are the front line of a technology revolution which it’s actually amazing. If you look at the stock market, the US Stock market as you can find an index that goes right back to where you can find index and goes right back to the 19th century, the Dow Jones. But if you go back to the Second World War and look at the index. Look at, say, the S&P 500. Alan Turing invented the first computer, the first number crunching machine, the first effective one, anyhow, in the middle of the war, the enigma machine to break the code, the German enigma code. And you can actually plot the entire progress of the US Stock market since then, and particularly the Nasdaq 100 when that came into existence in terms of advanced and computer technology. More powerful, smaller computers. Basically is how it ran and ran and ran. And this has driven the most incredible boom in US shares.
14:36
Quentin: If I look at the Nasdaq 100, which is my favorite index which started in 1984. So it’s been going 40 years. In that 40 years, they’ve only been 7 years on a candlestick chart. If you look at candlesticks, one candlestick candlesticks, one for 1 one for each year. Red candlestick for a down year. Blue, green candlestick, sorry for an up year, there’s only been 7 times, 7 red candlesticks in all that period. So if you just bought at the beginning of the year 33 out of 40 years you would have made money, and in some years you’d have made a lot of money.
15:21
Quentin: Alternatively, you could have a sort of Warren Buffett approach, where you bought at the end of the war if you old enough to have done that which he was. And you held for the whole time. Now I’ve got the figures for the Nasdaq 100, and they only go back to 84, 40 years, but in 40 years the Nasdaq 100 has gone up 167 times in dollar terms and 259 times in sterling terms. If you look at that, you’ve got to think, why on earth would anyone want to go anywhere else? The US Stock, the UK Stock market has done absolutely nothing since 2000. Pick a share at random like Barclays. Barclay’s current share price is the same as it was nearly 30 years ago in 90, 95. And you find the same thing all over in Europe. And once you get much beyond Europe, in the UK you wouldn’t want to touch the shares anyhow. You got Chinese shares, you definitely wouldn’t want to touch. Excuse me.
16:36
Quentin: And so now then, the next wonderful thing that happened with American shares, which is what I have started to really follow closely a few years ago was that there is a huge industry managing people’s investments, insurance companies, pension funds, unit trusts. All kind of savings groups that. And what they used to do back in the day was they take your money and they would charge you 4 or 5%, and they would invest it. And if you were lucky they made 4 or 5 cents, so you didn’t actually lose any money, because but they made money because they took all the 4 or 5 cent or went to them. They got the whole lot. And it became increasingly apparent to a lot of people that all these people were what were called closet index trackers. They just invested like the index. So people started inventing, inventing ETFs, and ETF is a share which is quoted on the stock market. ETF stands for exchange-traded fund and because it tracks an index there’s no management fees. So if you buy an index tracker like SP, I can’t remember if it’s SPX or SPY. But if you buy an index tracker which tracks the S&P 500, which is what Warren Buffett recommends people should do. Your management fee is like something like 0 point 1% a year. So you get the entire gain in the S&P. You avoid the risk of having a manager who makes a complete shambles of the whole thing and actually loses money. And you will do as well as the S&P which is driven by the American economy. It’s a sort of leverage bet on the American economy. So just buying the S&P 500 ETF, a tracker for the S&P 500, is quite a good investment choice.
19:01
Quentin: But then, once you’ve decided to do that, you can then think, well, how can I make this even better? Well, the Nasdaq 100, I mean the Nasdaq composite does better than the S&P 500. It’s all the shares in the Nasdaq and the Nasdaq 100 strips out financial shares, and does better than the Nasdaq composite. So that’s why I focused so much on the Nasdaq 100, and you could buy an ETF called QQQ which tracks the Nasdaq 100. That’s a very good choice, 167 times at 250 times, 259 times in sterling terms if that ETF didn’t exist for all the period. But if it had, you’d have done 259 times in 40 years. So that’s a fantastic investment choice. Nasdaq, the QQQ. So you’ve got to think, well, can I do even better than that? Oh, yes, you can. Because you could buy a leveraged version of it and that is something called QQQ3. QQQ3 is leveraged 3 times QQQ. And but it doesn’t do 3 times as well. It actually does much better than that, because it’s rebalanced every day. So this makes it a really aggressive momentum bet all the Nasdaq 100. It’s very volatile, obviously, because it’s 3 times leverage. So if the index goes down 2% a day, QQQ3 goes down 6%. But over time the performance is absolutely incredible. I mean, that’s only existed since 2012 or something and I trough to peak it’s up 90 times. And although people keep on saying it’s too volatile you should buy it. My impression is:
Number 1: it’s a fantastic investment, anyhow, if you just buy it and hold it.
Number 2: it’s a perfect choice for a pound cost-averaging program. You just buy some every month, you get, all that volatility turns into more shares, more performance. It hasn’t yet reached a new high in this cycle. But I will be absolutely astounded if it doesn’t do so at some point. And so QQQ3. And there’s one of my subscribers help me with this. There’s a London version called LQQ3, which you can buy without the kid rules. But it’s a fantastic thing to have in your portfolio. I think it’s just a really really good idea.
22:01
Quentin: I did have for a while investments in QQQ3. And I also had 2 other leveraged ETFs. One was SOXL, which is a leveraged ETF, 3 times leveraged on just on semiconductor shares. Which I thought was an incredibly exciting ETF to hold. The unlevered version is SOXX and there’s another one called TECL. And that’s a leverage version of technology shares. And they all work fantastically well. But there’s all sorts of problems with buying them because of the kid rules and the UK investors. It’s difficult for them to buy them. So, but anyhow, you can certainly base your strategy on ETFs, and I mean, if you just do QQQ and QQL, QQQ3, that straight away gives you a very exciting home for your savings.
23:08
Quentin: And, but then we get closer to what I do which is individual shares. And remember, I only look at the US. So that straight away rules out everything else. I don’t completely rule out other shares, because what happens is when I’m studying American shares if there was and exciting something exciting happening in Europe, or the UK or China, or somewhere else, Hong Kong, or anywhere, it would tend to be referenced in some way with these with when while I was studying these US shares. So it’s not that I’m going to miss it completely. But it’s not happening at the moment, as far as I can tell. And US shares seem to be absolutely where the action is.
24:01
Quentin: I would also pick it up on the global charts. UK chart’s been trending sideways for 30 years, if it, 25 years, sorry. If it suddenly starts to really break out higher and start going up higher, and we start, we get a government, some amazing, improbable government that starts cutting taxes and freeing up the whole economy, and really getting it all going, which could happen. If it does, I should be voting Reform UK, to try and further the destruction of the Tory party and a realignment on the right. Try and make it happen. We’ll see if that happens, I’ll notice it, I’ll change my approach. But for the moment it’s 100% about the US.
24:53
Quentin: And it’s in the same way as people talk about property. When you’re buying property shares. You should think about location, location, location. I tend to think about American shares as being technology, technology, technology. I think and when it’s not something I think it’s, it’s completely obvious that there is an accelerating technology revolution in the world. One of the reasons why this technology revolution is accelerating is because if you look at the research budgets of any American company involved in technology, their research budget is exploding. I did some sums at one stage and The Magnificent Seven, just those 7 companies had a research budget of approaching 200 billion dollars. A fifth of a trillion dollars on research that buys a lot of breakthroughs. And, not only is that the case, but also coming out of the universities now. What are people studying at university? They’re studying machine learning, they’re studying artificial intelligence, they’re studying, goodness knows, everything’s to do with technology. So pouring out of the world’s universities are people who had been learning about technology. There’s also a generation thing. I could barely work a mobile phone. My 7-year-old grandson has a conversation with the TV every time he gets up. So it’s a completely different world. There’s a generation that’s coming through, the education is happening. The generational shift is happening. The money is being spent and all of this is creating a technology revolution which is proceeding at a dramatically accelerating pace.
26:50
Quentin: And on top of that we have had what looks to a lot of people like a tipping point. A massive black swarm, something new. The world will never be the same again even in the form of generational AI. Artificial intelligence is really coming of age. And two things are making that possible. One is an incredible increase in computing power, and the other is an explosion in data. And this whole thing is all, these are all phenomena basically, of this century, this millennium. And, a very exciting thing that’s happening is that Moore’s law, which drove doubling computer power semiconductor power every 2 years. I think it was every 18 months or 2 years. Moore’s law has slowed down dramatically.
27:57
Quentin: But it doesn’t matter, because, cometh the hour cometh the man, Nvidia has come along with their GPU chips, which were originally intended for gaming, that have transformed the gaming industry. Now Nvidia, under its unbelievable CEO and founder, Jensen Wang, realized that these GPUs were perfect for artificial intelligence. And, so he has been working for 10 years with his company on producing GPUs, which would enable artificial intelligence, enabling the huge computing power that’s needed to process all this data. And then, came ChatGPT. I think it was at the end of 2022 that they launched the first version of ChatGPT. But everybody immediately realized that everything had changed. And so they’re now trying to reinvent the world’s data centers to basically, as I understand it, you can’t trust me too much on computing, because I don’t know that much about it. But as I understand it, all the world’s dating data centers are turning themselves into kind of supercomputers so that they can process all this data at a fantastic rate. And, in order to do that, they need Nvidia’s GPUs. And they not only do they need Nvidia’s GPUs, but they need Nvidia’s software. So, it quickly became apparent to me that Nvidia was a really exciting company. Perhaps the most exciting company the world has ever seen.
29:54
Quentin: And, so and Quentinvest started re-tipping Nvidia in its post slump the shares crashed in 22, like many technology shares because of the rise in interest rates and the rise in spike in inflation. But we started tipping them at $143. And now I’m trading, I’m not quite sure what they are exactly at the moment, let’s say around $900. And, I think it’s one of them. It’s arguably the greatest business the world’s ever seen. One of the people who talks about Nvidia says it’s like IBM was in the 60s and 70s, Nvidia is to this generation. Doesn’t mean the shares won’t be volatile, their shares are volatile, they go up and down, that’s what they do. But they go up and down like the Nasdaq100, they go up, down quite sharply, but over the long hall, even over the media hall, they end up, going a lot higher. And, I think one of the things that’s an obvious thing to do is to invest in shares that are making this artificial intelligence revolution happen. Also to invest in shares that are driving innovation forward at a very rapid pace. So, there’s a very good choice of shares and ETFs for doing all that. And we’re already learning about that in Quentinvest. And, you will know what they are. And if you don’t, you can refer back to past alerts, and you can wait for future alerts. But there’ll be plenty of them providing fantastic opportunities.
31:46
Quentin: My feeling is, one of the questions I keep getting asked by people is, when should I sell? It’s a really difficult one. When should I sell? And I tend to feel that if you’re in a bull market, and if you feel that there’s a big following win like the technology revolution or the AI Revolution. And if you feel that you’ve got shares in a really good company, you should probably just hang on and not really think too much about selling. In December 21 I looked at all my benchmark charts, and they all seem to be, not all of them, but an enormous number of them seem to be pointing down. And at the same time, the US board deals seem to be pointing up and that seemed like a perfect storm for US shares after a long period of rising values. And sure enough, it was. And, so 2022 was a terrible year for shares. But my feeling now is that it was not the end of the world, not even a bare market. It was a correction in a continuing bull market and I think the bull market has resumed. But the charts look very positive. Nasdaq100 and the American charts look very positive. But it hasn’t really got going yet. Maybe it will fall interest rates in the States, or something like that, to get it going.
33:34
Quentin: Now, the other thing that I have done going back to my 3G strategy. I start with, because obviously, the key point with shares, where shares tend different from other assets is that it’s very important which share you buy makes a huge difference. The difference between buying Nvidia and buying Peloton is ginormous. So I’m very, very focused on choosing exciting shares. I see that as my main job at Quentinvest is to choose the most exciting shares. And, so I will always be introducing new shares to buy, and on the whole, once they found, not being too bothered about selling because if you look at all the people who’ve made an enormous amount of money in the world, they tend to be people who own a large share in an excited company because they founded it, are the CEO or whatever.
34:52
Quentin: And I’m not a great believer in diversification. So I don’t. But I’m not against that. And another thing in relation shares that I can see is happening in the US Stock Market, which is quite exciting and may become a global phenomenon. I’m sure it’s going to become a major phenomenon in the US is that more and more companies are going to get involved in artificial intelligence are going to benefit from it. And so there’s going to be lots of winners and losers there and so trying to pick the winners is going to be an important strategy. So, if you look at the share market you sort of start with the Nasdaq 100 is amazing likely to stay amazing because of waning faith in politicians and paper money. And then you add onto that either the safety, the safer approach of the ETF route. If you want to make sure that you’re going to make quite a lot of money or if you want to be really bold, the choice of individual shares trying to pick the Nvidia’s and the super micros and shares like that. And then, of course, once you bought your share or when you’ve taken the decision to buy a share. There’s the whole question of how you buy it, which brings in all my other games with building portfolios, buying shares, using leverage, buying CFDs, buying spread bets where you can have leverage, and also you can avoid tax on your profits.
36:43
Quentin: So I think, for a more dedicated investor, more active investor, spread bets make an enormous amount of sense. The problem I have is, I confess to many times is that I’m too aggressive. And so I do very well when shares going up, that I get major wipe out when they go down. And I want this ridiculous roller coaster the whole time and for some reason, I don’t they seem to be able to get off it. It’s annoying, but there it is and even so, I do well. Now, so that’s individual share selection and that’s the sort of heart of Quentinvest. And I think we’ve got a very good approach to that, and I think the way I do charts, and people you’ll have noticed I use very long-term charts. The reason why I use very long-term charts is because I’m not interested in trading. I’m not interested in short-term performance. I’m interested in picking the really exciting shares with exciting breakouts, and exciting uptrends, and on these very long-term charts I can see these stocks that I’m interested in very clearly, and then I could look at them. Look for the other things I’m looking for. Look for the magic, look for the something new, look for the great management, and look for the following wins, and all the things that I look at to find those shares.
38:20
Quentin: Now, there does seem to be another interesting possibility in this world where people are losing faith in politicians, are losing faith in paper money. And, that is cryptocurrencies and I have a feeling that we have gone through a significant moment with cryptocurrencies. With the arrival of ETFs. The ETFs make it much easier to buy Bitcoin, and they also cast a sort of badge of respectability upon them. It is like the authorities have accepted that Bitcoin is not a scam. It is a serious alternative asset that people will want to hold. And once you accept Bitcoin as a serious asset. It’s an amazing asset because you can’t make any more of them. The supply is strictly limited to 21 million. There are Bitcoin miners, Bitcoin mining gets more and more difficult, especially with harving events like the one coming up in April. The absolute ultimate total is 21 million. The current total is something like 19.5 million. I think they’ve done the hard bit because the value of all the Bitcoin in the world has gone from 0 to 1.4 trillion. It’s arguably already the greatest investment that the world has ever seen. And there are a lot of sensible people who think that with this new source of demand from ETFs with the possibility of corporations getting more involved with their treasury reserves, buying for their treasuries. And even the possibility at the moment the only country in the world that’s bought Bitcoin, and he’s very happy that they did so is El Salvador. So, not exactly going to move the needle very far, for in terms of acceptability. But imagine, if some bigger country eventually does so, it does seem that the path for Bitcoin is slowly but surely greater acceptability, and with the greater acceptability more money coming in a greater crowd of investors who follow Bitcoin and a higher price. And if it could go to $70,000, why should we go to $100,000, or a quarter of a million dollars, or half a million dollars, or a billion dollars, or whatever? So it’s possible now to make a very bullish case the Bitcoin. But it’s still very volatile, obviously, and there’s still plenty of people making tons of money ready to sell.
41:28
Quentin: My daughter is looking at me and thinking that we what? We’re coming to an end, are we?
41:32
Arabella Angell: Oh no no, we just, sorry, thank you, Daddy. The reason I was looking at you is because, there’s a few questions that have come through and I think, we should try and just address them because there’s only 15 minutes left.
41:47
Quentin: Oh, right? Okay, gosh, sorry guys, yeah. I get totally carried away as always.
41:32
Arabella: So if, because this is our first time, what I’ll do is I’ll pull up the question. Sorry, can you hear me? Can everyone hear me a bit better now? Sorry, I realized that Dad’s got the Airpods and that’s why we can’t, that’s better, ok, brilliant. Right, let’s move up Dad so we’re still in the camera and then I’m just gonna look over here to look at your questions. So, the first one from Shabir.
42:25
Arabella reads a question from Shabir: You recommend shares to buy. Could you recommend, when to sell, if things are not working out or time to take profit? Thank you. And then he’s also added. Tesla seems to have gone to sleep. What is your view on Tesla?
42:37
Arabella: Now there’s a couple of other questions, so take those afterwards.
42:44
Answer from Quentin: I, yeah on the on the selling thing. I don’t really know when to sell, but I do have a strategy for selling and what I do and I call it Kamikaze Plus. Just very briefly, Kamikaze Investing is where you buy with leverage where the shares fall. You put more money in to take your margin to get rid of the margin call, and if they go up you buy more to exploit the fact that you’ve got spare equity, and they go up. What this means is that with a strongly rising share, your holding builds up incredibly rapidly, and you make absolutely tons and tons of money, but also you get an increasingly scary portfolio. So, I have, that’s why I call it Kamikaze, and I’m inclined to think that maybe with Kamikaze you need to sort of say to yourself, you know. What I found is a good rule which I never apply. But I think it is a good rule is ever is if ever you think to yourself, my God, I’m doing incredibly well, you should immediately sell. That is an incredible sell signal. It works every damn time. I wish I could do it. I never do. But it’s it seems to be almost infallible. And, after all, doing incredibly well is a win, isn’t it? So, you know, if you do that, if you keep on doing that, you’re gonna be happy.
44:18
Arabella: And Tesla?
44:19
Answer from Quentin: And well no the other thing I wanted to say, though, is, as to the selling, I have something else called Kamikaze Plus. The Kamikaze Plus is the same as Kamikaze, with one important difference. And I call this surfing and I first discovered this strategy in 2021. And basically, I had a portfolio then, and every time I got a margin call I sold the red ones, the ones that were losing me money, and I reinvested in the ones that were making me money. And, but what this meant was that my portfolio was, I was operating my portfolio rather like QQQ3, with its daily rebalancing and because I was rebalancing from the weakest performers to the strongest performers, I started making money at an insane rate. It really was absolutely insane. And so I have recommended that as a strategy, you have to have a portfolio in order to do it because you’ve got to have something to surf out of. You’ve got to have weak performers to sell to reinvest in the strong ones, but if you keep on doing that, so that then takes me to Tesla. Now imagine, if you had the Magnificent 7, your portfolio consisted of the Magnificent 7. Well, there are some clear differences in performance in the Magnificent 7. And if you bought the whole lot at the same time, your Tesla holding would have gone into the red quite a long time ago. Your Nvidia holding will be way up in the blue. So with your Meta platforms holding, and your Microsoft holding, your Apple holding will be a bit dodgy. And, God damn, what’s the other one? Your Google holding would be sort of going sideways. Well, if you were so doing, Kamikaze Plus on that, you wouldn’t be holding Tesla, you’d have sold them a long time ago. Now that doesn’t answer the question. Is that Tesla still a good investment? And, I, my guess frankly on that one is as good as yours. I don’t do research, and it’s important to realize this. I’m not a researcher. I don’t go out there and take a company like Tesla, and study all the fundamentals and say, yes, I have studied everything about Tesla. I’ve decided that this company is going to be the world’s leading Electric Vehicle Company. And then it’s going to be this, that, and everything else. I instead of doing that, I’m a curator. I look at what other people say about the company, and I pick up on that. So if somebody says they think that Tesla is going to end up as I don’t know an insurance company, and a Transporters, a Service Company, and things like that. I think, well, that’s a very good possibility. That’s very exciting. But I’m not going to touch them until the share looks, chart looks good. The chart doesn’t look good at the moment, so I it’s not on my dying list at all, Tesla, at the moment. The chart is faffing around if not week. And yes, there’s a wonderful potential story there. And yes, Elon Musk is an amazing crazy, whatever he is guy. All those things are still there, but I don’t have to bother with it. I’ve got better fish, better fish to play with than Tesla at the moment, so I’ll play with them and come the moment if Tesla starts to look good again. Yeah, it’s got an amazing story. Tesla is the one of the biggest collectors of data in the world. So its opportunities for artificial intelligence should be absolutely amazing, but it’s not doing it at the moment. So, or at least it’s not appearing in share price terms at the moment. So, I’m not in Tesla, and I wouldn’t be, and I would have come out a long time ago. I did come out a long time ago. So, yeah, but I can’t actually tell you. Will Tesla succeed? Am I absolutely sure Tesla will succeed? I expect it will. My best guess is that it will. But my best guess is as good as your best guess on that.
48:49
Arabella: Okay, thank you. So next one, Dominic.
48:53
Arabella reads a question from Dominic: It can be really difficult to get out of the share if it has been good and then starts to decline. The decline can happen quickly, and there’s a big temptation to wait. A good example of this at the moment is Scaler. Is it still a good share? But in my portfolio, it is showing a loss. Do I keep it? And do I sell it? And when? Many thanks, enjoying the Webinar, Dominic.
49:15
Answer from Quentin: Well, Dominic, I, again it’s the same thing, Zscaler, and Palo Alto networks. I’m sure they’re okay. But they had disappointing figures. Out of that, I see that little group, is Palo Alto Networks, ZScaler, and CrowdStrike, and out of those 3, I prefer CrowdStrike. So I would come out of ZScaler into CrowdStrike. That’s what I would do there. And, I’m always wanting to be in the strongest shares and selling weakness! What I’ll never do is sell a strong share and buy a weak share, never, ever, ever do I even think about doing that. I mean horses, of course, you know people have different approaches, but yes, so out of those 3, I prefer CrowdStrike.
50:12
Arabella: Ok, uh, Robert.
50:15
Arabella reads a question from Robert: Quentin, I have a spreadbed account with IG. Can I buy unleveraged positions?
50:23
Answer from Quentin: Yeah, the only problem with buying an unleveraged position in a spread betting account, although it’s actually a good idea to do it even so, is that you have to pay interest, because IG charges you interest on the entire position, not just, and so if you’ve got 4 times, leave 400 borrowing and 100 of equity. They don’t charge you interest on the 400 they charge you interest on the whole 500. So, if you put in, I don’t know a thousand 5,000 pounds, and buy 5,000 pounds worth of, make a 5,000-pound bet. That you can avoid the interest by doing an actual spread bed. What I’m talking about is what they call a daily funded bet. If you make a daily funded bed it runs forever and you pay interest. If you buy a spread bet, which apparently is a better way of doing it, according to my lady, who tells me about things in IG. A spread bet means that IG makes its money from the spread. The longer the spread the longer the period before you have to renew the spread the longer you pay. So if you do a 9-month spread bet, which is the longest one you can do the spread will be wider. But it still will be less than paying the interest for 9 months on a daily funded bet. So if you think you’re gonna hold for 9 months it makes sense to buy a 9-month bet, you could still sell whatever you like obviously. And also you could roll that bet over. So it is still, you can still hold it forever. So actually making a spread bed is the way to go, is using the spread to make the bed. Is the sensible way to do it.
52:21
Arabella: Okay, thank you. Alright. I think that’s it for the questions. If you wanna finish on anything. But, thank you.
52:29
Quentin: Well, I’m very excited about the way things are. I’m excited about two things. I’m excited about the prospects for assets generally in this world, particularly for US assets, and particularly for US assets exposed to technology and artificial intelligence. My charts are telling me, my long-term charts are telling me that we are, that prospects look very, very good for a continuing bull market. And so that’s number one chart. We’ve got great charts, great story, great growth, so fantastic amount of 3G excitement in the US Stock market. And the other thing I’m very excited about is the approach that I’m using to find shares and find what’s going on. I think it’s working really well, and really happy with it, and I’m always trying to improve it. But you know, I personally think that what I’m doing with Quentinvest now is better than anything I ever did with my print publication. I think I’m in a whole new place where I can, you know, really provide a good service for you guys. And obviously, it’s a joint effort. I throw ideas at you and you decide what works for you. And that’s exactly how it should be. We all have different personalities, different objectives, different things we want to do. So, but yeah, I hope it’s working for you, and I’m really glad to be talking to you for the first time.
54:08
Arabella: Brilliant. Thank you very much. We will let you know, hopefully, we’ll do another one soon. But yes, thank you for your patience. Thank you for joining. Everyone have a lovely weekend. Take care. Bye-bye.
54:21
Quentin: Goodbye!
