Beige Book and Portfolio Reviews (4/15/2026)
Back to normal-ish, with the ongoing negotiations: hopefully a peacetime discussion is around the corner.
Timeline
0:00 - Intro & market overview (S&P, oil prices)
1:40 - Earnings surprises & bank results
2:36 - Why to go to cash during a crisis
4:20 - Airlines & the danger of "obvious" trades
5:14 - Exxon trade recap
12:05 - Cybersecurity & the Mythos/Anthropic discussion
14:22 - AGI personalities & how they develop
25:10 - Going to cash & portfolio positioning
31:20 - Short-term portfolio & martingale risk
34:28 - Being too early — 1999, 2007, timing the market
38:00 - Valuations & why earnings beats aren't moving the market
42:09 - The deficit, corporate taxes & federal revenue breakdown
51:50 - How to actually fix the budget (Phil's plan)
1:03:59 - Oil exports, EIA data & the Beige Book release
1:10:00 - Beige Book analysis — consumer, labor, inflation
1:21:00 - Business sentiment & AI replacing workers
1:22:00 - The debt spiral & Powell vs. Trump
1:39:09 - CLF (Cleveland-Cliffs) trade walkthrough — no-margin version
1:50:00 - CLF trade — margin account version
Transcript
Hi guys. The questions don't pop up the way they used to. I'm an old man who doesn't like change.
Oil's at 91.80. The S&P futures are at 7,040, so the actual S&P must be right around 7,000 — where we'll probably get rejected and pull back a bit. But I talked about that yesterday, so let's not go there today.
We did a lot of stuff in chat today and I left off in the middle of something, so let's pick up from there.
We've got the Beige Book coming out at 2 o'clock — that'll be interesting. A few things worth noting from earlier: earnings surprises are coming in very strong.
