VALUE: After Hours (S08 E04): Unemployed Value Degen on Abacus ($ABX), Newell Brands ($NWL) and Ramaco Resources ($METC)

TRANSCRIPT

[Tobias] And we’re live. This is Value After Hours. I’m Tobias Carlisle, joined as always by my co-host Jake Taylor.

Our special guest today, he’s returning. He’s back. He’s back.

Unemployed value degen. Steve, how are you? Good to see you again.

[Steve] Oh, I’m very well. And thank you for having me, Toby. It’s a real pleasure.

Small-Cap Value Stocks Are Beating Growth Again — Is the Rotation Real?

[Tobias] We had some great feedback from the last one. So tell us what’s happening in small value land.

[Steve] Well, after years of being kicked around, toward last fall, it started to feel, you know, cautiously optimistic, like there maybe was some kind of rotation going on. And it’s been continuing now through January. And if you look at the Morningstar style box going out three months, I think that bottom left-hand corner, small value is something like up 15%.

And the upper right-hand corner for large growth is down 5%. I could have my numbers off, but it was something like 20 points of outperformance of small value over large growth.

[Jake] I send that to Toby about three times a day.

[Steve] Well, I mean, we’ve earned it after these last few years of everybody who bought NVIDIA just, you know, being high on life and us value guys saying it’s going to work eventually, it’s going to work eventually, it’s going to work eventually. And it’s finally working.

[Jake] Is there truth that all the SaaS bros are now unemployed value degens, or all those have fallen down into your- Unemployed SaaS degens.

Will AI Kill Software Stocks? Why Value Investors Aren’t Convinced

[Steve] Yeah. Well, there is a narrative that AI is going to eat all software. And I think the narrative is overdone.

I think we’re going to hit the limits of what AI can do. You know, I don’t think that the technologist religion is accurate, that they’re going to make these, you know, super gods that are going to destroy all scarcity. I think we’re going to hit a limit to what AI can do in however many years.

And also, I think there’s more to a software company than just the software. You know, there’s business relationships, there’s switching costs, there’s ancillary services. So my original thesis was that it would be easier for existing businesses to adopt AI than it would be for AI startups to come in and eat those businesses.

And I think there’s going to be, you know, there’s going to be some value opportunities in software, but the knife is still falling. So I’m not trying to catch it today, because that knife is going to… Because, I mean, I saw a company that was down 60% and it’s still trading at eight times price to sales.

And it’s down 60%. And it’s still eight times price to sales.

[Tobias] It used to be expensive. That’s a big discount now. That’s a 20% discount.

[Steve] Yeah. And so I’m still finding value in other places. I’m still finding things that I think are going to have huge tailwinds and they’re trading at, you know, 0.3 times price to sales. So there’s still things out there other than software to buy, but maybe this time next year, I’ll be buying software.

[Tobias] We’ll pursue what you think is interesting to buy in a moment. But you and I got tagged in an interesting chart today that showed…

[Jake] It wasn’t Epstein related, was it?

[Tobias] Sorry. Just completely derailed. This was looking at ISM, which is the Purchasing Managers Manufacturing Index.

When that’s above 50, that’s good for small value. When that’s below 50, that’s bad for small value. It spent three years below 50, which sort of indicates retrenchment in that manufacturing in the States and above 50 indicates growth.

And so that was kind of an interesting chart. Is that a fair characterisation of it? Do you think?

Yeah.

Manufacturing Recession Explained: Interest Rates, Inflation, and the 3-Year Freeze

[Steve] But I think I need to emphasise the magnitude. Three years, this is, I think, the longest stretch ever that manufacturing has been in a recession. For three years, it’s been just a hard manufacturing recession because Jerome Powell’s interest rates, it was too much.

I understand wanting to get the inflation down, but a huge chunk of that inflation was driven by the lockdowns, telling lumber mills, if one person tests positive on these PCR tests, which by the way, now we’re finding out had like a 90% false positive rate and the whole thing was a giant crapshoot. They’re shutting down lumber mills, they’re shutting down meat packing plants. A lot of the inflation was supply side driven.

And these interest rates, cranking them up so high really had a huge impact on manufacturing, all the capital intensive industries. And then while interest rates were extra high, they were also rolling off the mortgage backed securities from the Fed’s balance sheet, which were illegal to buy and the Fed never should have bought them. But if you’re going to roll them off, why are you doing it when interest rates are at record highs and widening the mortgage spread?

And why are you making all of the pain of monetary tightening fall in the middle class? Jerome Powell, he’s treated, he’s lionised in the media. And I think he’s, I take the opposite view.

I think he’s a pretty big scoundrel. But yeah, the manufacturing has been frozen for three years. The housing market has been frozen for three years.

And now it’s from some of the earnings calls. So this time of year is a great time to listen to earnings calls because they’ll talk about the past quarter. And sometimes they’ll give you a little hint because the earning call will be like one month into the next quarter.

And they’ll say, but guys, things are really good right now. And two companies I follow, they said like in October, it was like a light switch was flipped. So the interest rate cuts we’ve already had have already unfrozen both the housing market and manufacturing, but people don’t know it yet.

And then ISM expecting 48 and then getting 52 is a huge deal. So I think the housing market is already in the process of unfreezing. Manufacturing is unfreezing.

And the big thing is, and I was wrong. I thought this would have a big impact in 2025, but Trump’s budget had 100% accelerated depreciation on equipment. And this is very seldom talked about, but this is a huge, huge deal for any equipment heavy industry that you can get the full purchase price of your equipment back in the first year on your taxes.

And I thought it would have an impact in 2025, but the tariff uncertainty was so much more powerful, but coming into 2026, interest rates are low enough. The tariffs are certain enough, and you get a hundred percent accelerated depreciation on equipment. I think this economy is about to rip everybody’s faces off in these capital intensive industries and the reshoring industries.

And half of the things I read online are still bearish. And people think that we’re about to enter a recession. It’s completely insane.

[Tobias] It’s hard to read because there was no talk of the recession that we went through for the last three years. I documented it in 22. I had this like long Twitter thread of all of these companies saying how tough everything was.

And the data series that I like to track at the moment is leading economic indicators against coincident economic indicators, which as a ratio seems pretty good at picking tops and bottoms in expansion of the business cycle. And so it’s as low now as it was in 1982 and 2009. It hasn’t turned yet, but I imagine that with the next print or so, we’re going to see that, which is very positive for small value, little industrials and those kinds of businesses.

[Steve] Yeah, industrials and materials are catching some love right now. And energy could follow suit, although I’m a little suspicious about energy. I feel like Charlie Brown about to kick the football again, but maybe this is the time.

Why Consumer Stocks Could Rally: Tax Cuts, Wages, and the ‘Yee-Haw Economy’

[Steve] And the thing I’ve been trying to shout from the rooftops about, and I might still be early on it, is consumer discretionary, because you’ve got the interest rates, even if the 10-year treasury stays where it is, with the overnight rate coming down, there are aspects of the consumer economy that the overnight rate affects, like home equity loans. And I think you’re going to see, and now we’ve got $150 billion extra consumption coming in from these jumbo tax refunds. So you’ve got no tax on tips and no tax on overtime for 2025, shows up in this year’s tax return.

And for 2026, it’s not being withheld. So as we flip into January, those blue-collar people have higher take-home pay, and they’re about to get a huge fat tax refund. So I think one of the themes that has been so consensus might start breaking down, and that’s the K-shaped economy.

And you might see a return of the blue-collar wages had been suppressed with tens of millions of illegal immigrants. And so consumption was only on the high end. And now that you have 2 million self-deportations a year, and also the data centre build-out demand on blue-collar wages, you’ve got electricians in Texas making $200,000 a year now working in data centres.

So a rise in blue-collar wages and white-collar wages being suppressed by the AI revolution. I think the K-shaped economy, I want to start buying a bunch of consumer discretionary stocks that are exposed to the Yee-haw economy instead of the K-shaped economy.

[Jake] Yeah. What falls under that? Is it- Apple.

Yeah, right now. I was going to say Justin Boots, but Berkshire already owns them.

Newell Brands Stock Turnaround: Insider Buying, Brand Power, and Value Potential

[Steve] Yeah. There’s a lot of brand conglomerates that are beaten down that I think have room to be a four-bagger from here. One in particular, I’ve been stocking this company for two years thinking they’re about to return to growth, and I’ve been early on it, but it’s Newell Brands.

They had a new management team came in, and when the management team came in, I follow insider buying as a signal. And the chief financial officer took 3 million bucks out of his own checking account and bought in at I think around $14, $12, and $10 a share. And now the stock is like $4.50. So I go to imagine this guy around the dinner table- So he doesn’t know what he’s doing then, obviously. He’s a very seasoned professional, and I think the management team has made all the right steps, but the market has not appreciated their turnaround stories. I think you’re going to see just a return to cyclical growth, and it’s going to re-rate back up to a $15, $20 stock. But the chief financial officer who’s put $3 million in the company, and now the stock price has fallen 65% from where he bought in, and he’s watched his personal account go from 3 million to a million.

My heart goes out to the guy sitting around the dinner table with his wife. I can’t even imagine what the conversation’s about. What does Newell Brands do?

Newell Brands, so they have a lot of things for back to school. They’ve got Sharpie and Expo and Elmer’s Glue. They’ve got some of the- It’s a fragrance company.

No, well, if you’re out there sniffing markers. Yeah, and glue. Drug delivery.

The glue’s not great. They also have some things that were hurt by the Bed Bath & Beyond bankruptcies. They got Yankee Candle, and they’ve got a lot of stuff for outdoor camping.

They’ve got Coleman Brands for camping. It’s a big brand conglomerate. They’ve got some baby stuff like Graco strollers and things like that, so it’s just a very broad consumer brand conglomerate.

I normally like to go more small cap and more niche, but when I see a chief financial officer spend $3 million on insider buying, I just say, oh, captain, my captain, let’s just jump in and play along. Also, I’ve done my due diligence, and I like the company. Their turnaround strategy was firing all of their less profitable SKUs, so they cut like 60% of their product lines, and they dramatically improved profitability, but when the market sees falling revenue, they don’t like it, and part of that was 2025 was a bad consumer year.

Part of it was that they cut a bunch of unprofitable SKUs, and now I think it’s a return to growth and back to the races.

[Tobias] There’s a comment from Austin8635. He says, super interested in NWL, but they have a lot of exposure to Chinese manufacturing. Is that a problem?

[Steve] When they cut 60% of their SKUs, they freed up a lot of manufacturing capacity in the US, so they are reshoring. It’s only going to take them about a year or so, but they are reshoring a significant chunk of that. All this stuff takes time, but whatever tariff impact they get this year, next year will be half, and so on, and so on.

It’s in process. I’m not turned off by that. That might create the entry point.

It bottomed out in November around $3 a share, and it’s 50% off the lows already, I think around $4.50. I might have the price off for today, but I think the bottom is in as of last November. I think this is off to the races. I could be wrong about charts, but I think it’s a great setup.

[Tobias] I like those Greco car seats. I put three kids through those Greco car seats. They worked.

They made it. They’re filthy. They smell, but they made it.

[Jake] They made it the distance.

[Steve] I got two of those right now, but I’m hoping for a third. We’ll see if I can convince the like. Good luck.

[Tobias] Thank you. Thank you. What other stocks have you got out there, Steve, that are interesting?

The $75 Trillion Baby Boomer Wealth Shift — Investment Opportunities Ahead

[Steve] Well, my number one thing, and for anybody watching, I’ve got my background with my mascot dancing with the baby boomers, is the baby boomers have something like … The number keeps going up because the stock market goes higher, but they’ve got something like $75 trillion of assets. The first level narrative is like, oh, wow, millennials are going to inherit all this wealth.

My take on that is, well, maybe not so fast. I was a financial advisor at Merrill Lynch. One thing that really shocked me in the culture of the baby boomers is about half of them don’t believe in inheritance.

Half of them are in the Warren Buffett giving pledge mentality and think that the kids are better off without the inheritance. They should spend it on themselves. I’ve been looking for companies that are going to help the baby boomers monetise their assets.

Life Settlement Investing Explained: Inside Abacus Global Management’s Strategy

[Steve] My number one pick that I’ve been banging the table on so much, it’s my largest position right now personally, it’s called Abacus Global Management. The symbol is ABX. What they do is …

The formal term for it is called life settlements, but for people that aren’t aware of this, there’s two kinds of life insurance, term life and whole life. Whole life, it’s this policy that says when you die, your estate is going to receive X amount of dollars to your descendants, but you’re going to pay monthly for this policy for the rest of your life. Term life, it’s okay maybe for the next 20 years, but whole life is for your whole life.

There was a Supreme Court case in 1911 that established that in the US, that life insurance policy is property. As property, you can assign it, you can sell it, and it has a value. For people that need cash now, they can go ahead and sell that life insurance policy.

You have to be a little bit close to the finish line because of compound discounting, but if you’re within 15 years of the finish line, suppose you’re 70 years old, there’s a company that’ll buy that life insurance policy from you. What’s so amazing about this market is life insurance in the US is a $13 trillion asset class. That’s bigger than the stock markets of Japan and Germany and South Korea combined.

This is a massive asset class, and there’s not a lot of players in that industry. Abacus has about 30% market share of a $13 trillion asset class, which is absolutely insane, but it’s very underpenetrated. 90% of life insurance policies expire worthless.

What happens is you buy the life insurance policy when you’re 30, thinking, if I die, I want my kids to go to college and the house to be paid off. You say, I want this million-dollar life insurance policy that I take out when I’m 30 years old. When you’re 65 years old, and you start retirement, now your income is lower.

You leave your career, your income is lower. You have this monthly bill for the life insurance policy, and its purpose is no longer there. Your kids have graduated college, and your mortgage is paid off.

What the heck is the purpose of this life insurance policy, and why should you pay this bill now that your income is lower? 90% of life insurance policies, it just lapsed. Last year, $450 billion of life insurance policies lapsed.

150 billion of those, the people were old enough to have some residual value. They could have sold it, but they just let it lapse. There’s a lot of money left on the table.

The entire life settlement industry only bought about $5 billion worth of policies out of 150 billion that were eligible. This whole industry could grow 30 times, like a 30X, and the market would still be relatively not even penetrated. Abacus Global Management has 30% market share of buying these life insurance policies.

What’s so amazing about it is they buy these policies, and then they turn around and sell them to private credit funds. For one thing, it’s an uncorrelated investment, because when people passing away, it’s completely unrelated to how the stock market is doing. Private credit funds are super hungry for these things, because if you sell somebody, and also just at the current market clearing rate, Abacus is buying these policies for around a 14% internal rate of return, and then they sell them to private credit for about an 11% or 12%.

What private credit fund isn’t going to want an 11.5% uncorrelated fixed income instrument? That’s one of the sexiest things you could possibly be selling to the private credit market. So Abacus Global Management, they can sell everything they can acquire.

Their current fight is just to educate everyone and penetrate the market, and not have $150 billion worth of policies expire worthless, but actually capture that market, turn around and sell it to private credit, which has pretty much an unlimited appetite. We’re talking about a multi-trillion dollar marketplace in private credit. They could absorb $100 billion of life settlements a year if they’re getting 11%, 11.5% uncorrelated return. It’s just educating people buying these policies and flipping them. I think in 2023, they turned over their inventory four times. They did a debt raise to have more cash, just so they could hold these policies on the balance sheet longer, because then the longer you hold them on the balance sheet, there’s a chance you might have a payout, although it’s a little- Get your 14.

Yeah, a little ghoulish to think about how these policies pay out, but if you hold it on the balance sheet longer, there’s a chance you get the payout. They’re like an option with a positive theta, because every year you hold them, they become more valuable. A policy for a 76-year-old is more valuable than a policy for a 75-year-old.

This is my number one thing. I’m pounding the table on it so hard. The stock price is down.

There was a really negative short report, and I wrote a rebuttal to that short report on my sub-stack. Then the management team did three or four acquisitions, which I think were very strategic, but the market gets a little suspicious about empire building with these acquisitions. I don’t know how long you want to get into this niche company, because I’ve got six write-ups about it on my sub-stack.

If you’re talking about the $75 trillion of wealth the baby boomers have, another aspect of this is managed care. When you start getting into the senior care facilities, there’s such a huge quality of life difference between the Medicare or Medicaid-only facilities and the ones that you have to pay $7,000 to $12,000 a month to stay in. I have an aunt who had a stroke recently, and she’s not of means, but she’s doing physical therapy.

The quality difference, it’s a very sad story, but the quality difference in these facilities is enormous. There’s a lot of people out there that are going to be delighted if they can take their parents’ life insurance policy, cash it in, and have that fund three years in the posh senior care facility. It’s not all going to be partying on the Congo Line and Norwegian Cruise Lines.

A lot of it is going to be going into health care costs as they accelerate, because these managed care facilities, they’re pretty pricey. If you want to have a full staff on the weekends and not have to worry about if the nurses are calling in sick and if the food is good and things like that, you’re talking about $7,000, $8,000, $9,000, $10,000, $12,000 a month for these facilities. What was the short report?

What was the focus of the short report? I’ve had about five companies I’ve followed that had a short report come out. The common thread is to try and find some claim to illegal activity or fraud.

That’s the number one thing of every short report. In a recent one against a mining company, Aramco Resources, it was because the CEO’s brother in the 1980s was convicted of fraud. Whatever kind of attachment to fraud you can possibly put on the company, even if it’s 35 years ago and the sibling of somebody, that’s the number one thing.

The three founders of Abacus Global Management, I think what the story is here is when life settlements was a young industry, I think the life insurance companies were trying to use the regulators to destroy the industry while it was nascent. That’s their margin, right? Yeah.

Obviously, the life insurance companies want 90% of these policies to never pay out. If you look at all of the large players in the life settlement space, there’s only two. If you look at both of them, there’s regulatory actions by the regulator against both of them.

You go back and you read into the details, okay, what was this regulatory action? Why was this there? Ask yourself, are these guys a bunch of scoundrels?

Is the entire industry a bunch of scoundrels or were the life insurance companies trying to destroy competition? The way I read into it is I think the regulators are trying to destroy competition. Somewhere over the last 25 years, I think it’s become a consumer advocacy thing where if you actually care about the little guy and 90% of the policies never pay out, wouldn’t you rather have them get something rather than nothing?

I think the regulators have shifted gears and they look more favourably on life settlements now. That was the big thing of any short report is, oh, these founders are a bunch of scumbags and they’re a bunch of swindlers and they’re all awful people. I didn’t find the Abacus short report to really be all that compelling in that regard.

There was other points too. I’ve got a long point by point rebuttal. The biggest claim is Abacus Global Management pays more than their competitors.

If you’ve got a million dollar face value policy and you’re 70 years old and one company offers you $150,000 and Abacus offers you $210,000, it’s a pretty big difference. I think on average, Abacus pays about seven times the life insurance company’s surrender value. If the life insurance company offers you $30,000, Abacus is offering you $210,000.

Their closest competitor, it’s down from seven times, I think something like 5.8 times. It’s a pretty big difference in payouts. What is that?

[Jake] Just scale that they’re able to do and that they can pay more and then- No, it’s just margins.

[Steve] Their competitors keep even fatter margins. Both companies sell these policies to private credit, but do you want a 20% markup or a 30% markup? Abacus is accepting thinner margins, but trying to have greater scale.

Over the last 10 years, they’ve gone from 20% market share to 30%. It’s working. Accept a thinner margin and have higher volumes.

A big part of the short report was if they’re paying so much for these policies, then they’re going to go bust because they’re going to lose money on them. That criticism from the short report, it’s laughable on its face because they don’t hold this stuff on their inventory. They sell it immediately as soon as they get it.

There’s no longer any risk there because if you predict somebody is going to pass away when they’re 85 years old and they live to be 95, well, that was not a great policy for you. If you predict they’re going to pass away when they’re 85 and they pass away when they’re 81, then you’ve made more money than you thought they would. The short report says, well, they’re systematically underestimating how long people are going to live.

It’s all a moot point because they sell the policies. It’s not on Avidus Global Management’s balance sheet. Private credit’s problem.

Yeah. That’s private credit’s problem and they’re big boys with trillions of dollars. They can handle that problem.

Shalom, God bless. That’s on them now.

[Tobias] One obvious question, why not just hold it on the balance sheet or stick it into a vehicle that you can control and get some fees on it?

[Steve] That is one of the directions they’re pivoting to. The current CEO has a very, very bold vision of having 70% of the revenue for the company become recurring revenue from management fees. I think currently it’s like 10%.

One of the acquisitions they did is they bought a mutual fund company and they’re creating these gated mutual funds. Instead of having private credit get 11.5% uncorrelated, then individual investors in a gated mutual fund have a chance to get 11.5% uncorrelated. Again, the big danger here is if biotech companies make a longevity pill and everybody starts living to be 120.

That mutual fund would have much worse returns if we crack the longevity problem. For Abacus, they’ve already sold the policy. By keeping it in their own mutual funds, they can start getting this recurring revenue management fees coming off of it.

I think over time they want to shift away from private credit and into these gated mutual funds. Then as a side benefit, there’s two main channels how they are able to acquire policies. One is by direct television advertising or Facebook advertising.

The other is through the financial advisors, through the RIA channel. Most financial advisors don’t even know this is a thing. You’ve got this 75-year-old who has this certain financial situation.

Either they know about it and they’re reluctant to do it, or they just don’t even know it exists that they could sell their life insurance policy. There’s a lot of people who get to be in their 70s. They don’t even have kids.

What do you have a life insurance policy for? There’s a lot of education to go on. Now that they have this mutual fund company, the CEO is going to every RIA conference teaching everybody about these gated mutual funds.

By the way, as a financial advisor, you can also talk to your clients about not they want to sell their life insurance policy. That’s trying to grow the RIA channel. It gets all of the conference fees for presenting.

It’s also an important part of the marketing story.

[Tobias] They do the sourcing and that’s why the private credit wouldn’t go direct. They need someone who’s out there doing the advertising and running all of these programmes.

[Steve] It’s not easy. Goldman Sachs tried to enter this industry about 15 years ago. They gave it a try and they gave up.

They said it was too hard. It’s not an easy business. The longer you’re in it, the more accurate data you have.

They have their giant proprietary data set for being in this industry for 20 years. It’s not an impenetrable moat, but if you’ve got a 20-year proprietary data set and Goldman Sachs tries and gives up, it’s a pretty good sign that they’re in an enviable position.

[Jake] This might be a nice natural hedge if you were long GLP-1s.

[Steve] For their business itself, again, they don’t keep this stuff on the books longer than a year usually. They don’t have the huge risk if there is some huge healthcare shock and we start living to be 150. Now, that GEDA mutual fund will have the risk.

You have to ask yourself, do I think we’re going to all become immortal or do I want 11.5% uncorrelated fixed income? That’s something an investor can take on. But Abacus Global Management, again, they’ve already sold the policies, so it just doesn’t affect them.

[Jake] So then you don’t have to root for another pandemic either then.

[Steve] It’s good.

[Jake] Yeah.

[Steve] But during the pandemic, they made a lot of money. I would imagine.

[Jake] You probably want to slow play your selling off those ones in that time period.

[Steve] Yeah. So they have about, I think, 15% of their book is policies they’ve held longer than a year. And the average age of those people is over 85 years old.

So there is about 15% of their book that they’re trying to play the long game on.

[Jake] Can they do any tranching of that in AAA rated health versus just one look at the guy and like, okay, this guy’s never going to make it to a hundred.

[Steve] So this is pretty amazing. They just sold last fall their first asset-backed security that they got a ratings agency to, you know, they stacked it and layered it and tranched it and they created a $50 million face value asset-backed security. And regional banks and insurance companies bought the thing.

The press release said that it was at the interest rate they paid that it was, what is it called? Medium single digits. So I was trying to back out what interest rate that could be.

And just by legal terms and using terms of the industry uses them, the highest interest rate it could have been would have been 6.9%. So you have a company that’s acquiring policies with an internal rate of return of 14%, and they just sold them with an internal rate of return of 6.9%. So it’s a hundred percent markup. Yeah. Yeah.

And I don’t think, what’s amazing to me is how few people have the financial experience to understand how big that markup is, because this was just a trial balloon. They’re going to start doing one or two of these a year for much larger face value. And a company that has traditionally had a 20% markup, you know, just announced to the world that we’re capable of generating a hundred percent markup.

And also in the last trailing 12 months, it grew revenue by 90% and it’s trading at about a price to earnings of 10. So it’s, I think it’s grossly undervalued for a company that has just pulled off that sort of a rabbit out of the hat to take a 20% markup and turn it into a hundred percent markup.

[Tobias] That’s fascinating, Steve. Thanks for sharing that one with us. Let me give a quick shout out and then we’ll do some veggies with JT.

Breckenridge, Snohomish, go Seahawks, Bangalore, India, Orlando, Florida, Tomball, Texas, Valparaiso. What’s up, Mac? Serbatone, London, in the UK, not London, Texas, Bellevue, Haifa, Israel, Lawrence, Kansas, Cincinnati, Lausanne, Switzerland, Tehran, Iran.

There’s an Aussie in Sochi in Russia on a VPN. Love it. Good stuff.

JT, hit us with the veggies. Top of the hour, folks. Mark it.

[Jake] All right. Today’s veggies are trying to square two recent pieces that I quite enjoyed, actually. One was GMO’s collab with Jeremy Grantham and Ed Chancellor that was making the rounds that’s Valuing AI, Extreme Bubble, New Golden Era, or both.

The second one was from Mark Andreessen, who’s a bit of a futurist venture guy. This was the Techno Optimism Manifesto. F.

Scott Fitzgerald put this really nicely at one point. The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. That’s what we’re going to try to do today.

Is AI a Bubble or the Next Economic Revolution? Investors Debate the Future

[Jake] Not to pick a side, but hold two ideas in tension, even if it feels a bit ineluctable. Is artificial intelligence the biggest bubble of our lifetime or the foundation of a new economic era? The uncomfortable answer that we’re going to try to explore is that it might be both.

History suggests that dangerous mistakes don’t come from believing in the future, necessarily. They come from believing the future will arrive cleanly, smoothly, on schedule, like some train that’s never late, never crowded, never on fire. It occurred to me that we might be able to gain some insights by filtering these two very different views through Stuart Brand’s pace-layering mental model, which we detailed before in a previous Veggie segment.

As a quick reminder of the pace-layering thing, the fast layers up at the top or the outside are fashion and commerce. They thrash around, they overshoot, they’re always changing. Then below that, you have the slower layers, which are infrastructure, governance, and culture.

They absorb what survives on these higher layers and help to set this very stable base that the faster layers can move around on. Most people, I think, are arguing lately about the fast layers of AI. Let’s start there.

Grantham obviously spent decades studying bubbles, not casually, but with quite a bit of grim statistical focus. His view of a bubble is the price gets far above a long-term trend. Usually, I think two standard deviations is his definition.

They’ve studied 300 plus two sigma bubbles at this point all over the world. Of course, every time it breaks, the prices come back down to that old trend line. That move doesn’t happen politely, typically.

It tends to snap back and then hard. That’s what makes these bubbles so tricky. They’re often usually attached to something very real.

Railroads were real. Electricity was real. The internet was real.

AI seems real. The error isn’t so much in believing about this technology, it’s in believing that financial markets can price that future rationally while it’s still forming. While the product is still changing week to week, the economics are still very embryonic, and the winners aren’t clear yet.

So when the markets hit these extremes, they don’t usually glide back to fair value. It tends to be violent. Pick your favourite paroxysm here of dot-com or housing or whatever, Japan.

But what makes this cycle unusual so far, and I’m sure I’m going to give Toby a little bit of PTSD talking about this, but it was an unwind that never quite finished. In 2022, the script looked very familiar, if you guys remember. Rates went up, growth stocks collapsed, speculative names imploded.

The party was over, and it felt like the release valve might have been finally opened. Don’t cry, Toby. Then ChachiPT was launched, and suddenly, this bear market just stopped behaving like a bear completely.

A new story took over, capital rushed back in, valuations re-expanded. A narrow set of AI-linked firms started carrying the index to fresh glories. Grantham’s warning is that bubbles extend themselves not by disproving scepticism necessarily, but more postponing it with something dazzling.

It has to feel like it’s something brand new here and shiny.

[Tobias] Did he say that before the AI reflation?

[Jake] I don’t know. He talked about it in his most recent one.

[Tobias] I don’t remember him saying it. Sorry, I didn’t mean to derail you there. I’ll come back to that.

[Jake] That’s okay. In part two of that piece, this is Ed Chancellor writing now, he’s pushing the argument further, and he lays out the anatomy of a technology mania. He leans on Alistair Nairn’s rubric in the book, Engines That Move Markets.

If you’ve been with us for a while on the show, we did a segment about that book a few years back. It was season six, episode one, in case you were wondering. We looked at the early history of the automobile industry and broke it down through this.

It proves a useful mirror, even if it is a bit disconfitting. AI fits this template quite well. First, a revolutionary technology arrives with claims that are extravagant, but just plausible enough for you to believe.

It’s going to boost productivity, it’s going to cure diseases, solve climate change, replace labour, maybe threaten human extension, who knows? There’s no real middle ground in here at this point. It’s quite a black or white debate.

Second, then money and momentum amplify this belief. Something going up is proof that it’s real, that it can be enough to keep the party going. Third, promotion then explodes.

Past manias had pamphlets and glossy magazines about them. This one has podcasts and social media. Now AI itself is generating a lot of the content that reinforces the narrative, which is quite funny.

It’s very autocatalytic in that way. Fourth, you get capital formation gets frictionless. Venture floods in, private valuations get stretched, deals get done on vibes and urgency.

There’s no time for due diligence. You’ve got to write the check. Debt quietly has been joining the party as well.

We’ve got to finance all these data centres and infrastructure, even though we don’t really know what the unit economics are going to turn out to look like. But we could throw some sanguine assumptions in there and just plough ahead. Fifth, the overbuild eventually comes.

It’s almost guaranteed. Hyperscalers spend as if losing the race would be fatal. This classic prisoner’s dilemma.

Everyone invests because everyone else is investing. The result is inevitably going to be excess capacity at some point, which of course is a killer of returns. And then, of course, you always have what J.K. Galbraith called the bezel, and that’s wealth that only exists because nobody’s admitted the losses yet. It’s not always quite outright fraud at first. Often it can start off as very optimistic accounting, circular financing, conflicts of interest, adjusted everything. This rot usually tends to be quite pernicious until it collapses under its own weight.

And they argue that the bezel isn’t just this illegal fraud. It includes legal but dubious accounting. And then comes the shakeout inevitably.

Earnings contracting along with valuations, bankruptcies rising, feedback loop between investment and profits runs in reverse now. Valuations get killed, funding freezes, the weak firms disappear. And even the eventual winners, Grantham’s referenced Amazon multiple times, falling 92%.

But they can fall almost to where you couldn’t even imagine before they eventually recover. And sometimes it takes years, sometimes it’s decade plus to recover. And markets can be quite brutally unsentimental when it comes to that kind of thing.

So that’s the GMO bear case that we’re in an AI bubble. And I think if your natural proclivities are like us, it’s pretty compelling with how much it rhymes with history. But if we stop there, we might be missing something.

So let’s look at the slower layer case. What of the capabilities of AI are real and transformative? And so Andreessen looked at the same moment today and see something very different than Grantham or Chancellor.

Not a market cycle, but actually more like a civilisational one. And his starting point isn’t valuations, it’s stagnation. And for all the talk about rapid progress, measured productivity growth over the last several decades has been weak per Mark.

And at the same time, the developed world is running into demographic headwinds, fewer workers, ageing populations, fiscal strains. It’s all quite lugubrious arithmetic, to be honest. So Mark argues that AI isn’t arriving into abundance, it’s arriving into constraint, actually.

And from that perspective, AI isn’t simply replacing workers, it’s substituting for workers who in many places don’t exist in the growing numbers. Like we need someone to come do this job, and we don’t have people behind the ones who are doing it now. So the other problem too, is that this fear of mass unemployment can be confused jobs with tasks.

So tasks disappear all the time, jobs recombine with new tasks. And there’s jobs that we don’t even know about, probably. So there’s this historical pattern where even if the transition is messy and dislocating, the people still end up with things to do.

And they tend to work on more high value and interesting problems over time. He also points out this idea of like super powered individuals now. And so the idea is that AI may not flatten skill differences, it might actually amplify them.

So good people get better, great people become frighteningly effective. And the bottleneck then shifts really from access to knowledge, or to something instead more like agency, and the ability to define a problem, learn quickly and act without permission. And that shift then is when you’re building things, and if you’re is great, but it’s bad if your job is one that’s sort of protected by friction.

So we’re seeing this in small ways already, supposedly the 100x coder, prototyping everything faster, learning faster. I think my own personal experience has been there’s been an incredible amount of productivity unlocked from this for me. So even if the market crashes, like all these capabilities that people are building right now don’t disappear, the tools spread, workflows adapt, norms change, the baseline ratchets upward.

And that’s how general purpose technologies tend to work. They don’t arrive with like some ticker tape parade, like they sort of seep in like water, you know, quiet until they’re pretty much ubiquitous in the system. So wrapping things up here, AI can be a speculative bubble and a historical breakthrough at the same time.

Markets, because they’re a reflection of humans, are prone to overpricing the short term and maybe underpricing the long term. Investors can lose crazy amounts of money, even as society becomes more capable. Railroads transformed economies while also bankrupting their shareholders.

Internet rewired civilisation while totally nuking capital. Progress is actually often orthogonal to returns. And the danger is confusing sort of one layer scoreboard, the faster layers, for the whole game, which might include the slower ones.

So the lessons should be that, you know, demand a margin of safety, assume commoditisation, expect drawdowns, respect competition. People probably worry too much about this infinite demand of AI and maybe not enough about the inevitable ROIC killing prospects of a supply gut at some point. And then, of course, don’t confuse important with investable at any price.

For builders and workers, the lesson might almost be the opposite, like learn aggressively, you know, combine skills of things that you’re good at, use the tools, redistribute the tasks that can be painful, but that might turn into like even better jobs eventually. And then, of course, like for policy makers, the challenge is to let experimentation happen without financial fragility kind of poisoning the whole deeper layers that carry the future. Easy to say, hard to do, and usually contingent upon politics behaving like adults, which so good luck there.

But so is AI an extreme bubble? Very possibly. Is it also a new golden era for human leverage?

Also possible. I think the mistake is thinking that we can only hold one of these thoughts in our heads at a time.

[Tobias] Huge consumer surplus potentially.

[Jake] Could be huge consumer surplus, hopefully.

[Tobias] Do you feel that there’s been a little reversal with the stock price going the other direction, stock prices going the other direction?

[Jake] Well, to use Buffett’s analogy that he’s used before about, you know, when you knew the car was coming, the idea wasn’t to figure out how to be long the car, it was to figure out how to get short the horse. And it looks like there’s a lot of horses that have been getting taken to the glue factory.

[Tobias] It’s been interesting to watch. I don’t think the initial reaction is the right one, but it’s been interesting to watch. There’s some good questions in here.

I’ve lost it. Sorry, team. Someone said, why do I get the feeling JT times these veggies for after silver and gold got slaughtered?

I don’t see the connection, honestly. What do you got, JT?

[Jake] I don’t follow either. Sorry.

[Steve] Yeah, I’ve been following the metals market. I rotated from the gold miners to copper miners, and now copper is getting hot. So I wrote a bunch of pieces on nickel.

There is a huge amount of speculation, and a lot of it’s coming from Korea. Those guys are absolutely insane. And mainland China, too.

You can find a recent news article about an interview with a Chinese housewife that YOLO’d $150,000 into gold futures and got completely wiped out. But there was, you do have this, you know, I think it is a Grantham quote, or I don’t remember who it is, but, you know, a mania doesn’t happen on a bad investment. A mania happens on a good investment.

What a good idea. And so gold, as we go from the unipolar world to the multipolar world, there’s this old book by, it’s on the origins of money by Carl Menger. And he kind of is the first one to pinpoint that money is a network good with that self-reinforcing feedback loop, that one money is going to win.

So when BRICS were talking about, we’d use a basket of goods, what that means is, well, the best thing in the basket is going to be the base currency. So the BRICS basket currency just means gold is the new global currency. And so central banks have been buying gold and the price of gold has doubled.

And then on that very sound thesis, then the mania comes in. And we had this massive mania that then crashed, but if you’re following it today, you know, the sharpness of the V-shaped recovery is pretty encouraging. So I’m not banging the table for $15,000 an ounce gold, but if you’re making, you know, a $2,000 an ounce profit, a lot of these miners, I think, have years and years.

And I wrote a post on Twitter the other day and a bunch of people called me an idiot. And I said, you know, if you’re a junior miner and you don’t lock in collars on 50% of your production for the next two years, you need a good kick in the nutsack. And, you know, I had a bunch of people in the comments saying, but I want, you know, pure exposure to commodities.

And I’m like, look, these are businesses, they have bills to pay. You know, they’re funding the build out of a new mine. It’s a perfect time to lock in some collars.

[Jake] I’ve got really stupid M&A to do in front of us.

[Steve] I’ve got to incinerate some capital. Oh, geez, what a sector. But yeah, you know, and silver is a little bit different.

I don’t think silver is as, you know, silver is historically a monetary metal, but I think the world’s so wealthy now, it’s not really anymore. Well, it’s got some industrial uses too, right, that make it a little bit less perfect as a monetary metal. But, you know, they’ve had these huge swings, but at least in the past, it was sort of poor man’s gold.

And I think, you know, with gold, it, you know, almost tripled the price of platinum. I think there’s a good chance platinum is going to be the new poor man’s gold. And that’s going to have some pretty wild swings.

So I got my platinum miner. But yeah, it’s still a sound fundamental thesis. And silver has this solar panel demand.

And at first, I brushed off the idea because Elon Musk says a lot of things, but he wants to build 100 gigawatts a year of data centres in space. And he’s been talking about solar electricity a lot. But you have the problem with, well, what if it’s cloudy?

What about nighttime? And solar panels in space kind of bypass all those problems. And solar electricity would be kind of interesting.

So that’s going to require an enormous amount of silver, unless there are companies working on the technology to switch to copper, in which case it’s going to take a lot of copper.

[Jake] I heard something interesting. It’s actually difficult to cool something in space, even though you think like, oh, it’s, you know, freezing out there. Right.

But the problem is, is that there aren’t molecules next to whatever it is to vibrate and absorb the energy and then move it away from it.

[Steve] Yeah. Vacuum is a very good insulator. That’s a space is very insulated.

[Jake] Better said than what I was saying.

[Steve] Yeah. So, you know, I that’s why I was sceptical about it at first. But but Elon Musk keeps pushing it.

And so I don’t want to I don’t want to bet against him on his engineering bona fides. But I played around with the A.I. a little bit to try and find out which critical minerals, you know, if Elon Musk really does start building 100 gigawatt hours of capacity a year of solar panels in space, what what critical minerals are going to be needed for that? And two that pop to the top of the list is gallium and germanium, which are prevalent in that company I mentioned earlier, Aramco Resources.

So I’ve got a and I haven’t updated the write up to mention that yet. I just have a they also had a short report come out against them and I have a short report rebuttal. And I interviewed the CEO and I have all those write ups in my sub stack.

But if Elon Musk is is serious about this orbital data centre idea on solar panels and he also just built a lithium refining facility that was pretty state of the art cutting edge. So he does he takes the supply chain into account of having a U.S.-based domestic supply. And if that’s going to happen, then I think this Aramco Resources with their gallium and germanium deposits is going to be critical.

“Ramaco Resources Stock: Critical Minerals, Rare Earths, and the Future of U.S. Mining”

[Tobias] So what’s the story on Ramaco?

[Steve] So Ramaco, they they have a coke and coal mine in Appalachia that kind of anchors the business. And then the the CEO, he actually has a finance background.

He doesn’t have a geology background, which is fantastic because with the coke and coal mine, he he staged the capex in such a way that the cash flow was always growing. He didn’t use capex to make the cash flow volatile or make the cash flow shrink. So it’s kind of perfectly done, which sometimes it’s fantastic to have a CEO that has some some financial background to not tank their own stock price.

They have a deposit that they’ve they’ve drilled and proven out the mineral resource. The base of it is a thermal coal deposit in Wyoming. But there’s these thin layers above and below each layer of thermal coal, which is very rich in critical minerals.

And this was part of the short report was like, oh, the parts per million is low and this and that. And if you if you really get deep into rare earth, sometimes they’ll have really high parts per million, but not all of them are the expensive critical minerals, because there’s like 10 or 11 of these rare earth elements in the in the rare earth element list. And it’s only the heavy magnetic ones that are really fetching high prices.

And if you look at the the makeup, the composition of the critical minerals for that Rameco Resources has, there’s a pretty good mix of the heavy magnetic ones and then three others, which is gallium, germanium and scandium. And gallium and germanium, again, that’s you know, China has it on their, you know, prohibited exports or limited exports to the US. I think in the very first batch of things that they limited for export because it is required in high tech manufacturing.

And there are other ways to get it. So you can get some as a byproduct from nickel smelters. But then, you know, if you’re this is kind of a common theme all over the as manufacturing gets more high tech, they need more niche stuff.

So there’s another company ASP Isotopes that, you know, for years and years and years, all of these rare isotopes we could get as byproducts. You know, you scrape it out of the you scrape it out of the scrubbers of coal electricity plants or something like that. You get all these rare byproducts.

But as high tech manufacturing gets higher volume, you’re actually going to need a virgin source of like carbon 14 or silicon 28 or all these, you know, ytterbium, whatever. And so they’re actually going to have to make these from scratch from a virgin source. So ASP Isotopes is one of those.

And then the whole rare earths complex, but gallium and germanium are would be critical for doing satellite data centres in outer space. And scandium is an interesting one, because if you guys are familiar with molybdenum, molybdenum makes. Yeah, so molybdenum makes steel stronger and lighter weight.

Scandium makes aluminium stronger and lighter weight. So this right now scandium is fetching kind of a low price on the market. But Boeing could reduce the weight of all their aircraft to 25%.

So, you know, if Ramico Resources is able to get some long term offtake agreement with a company like Boeing, then their, their, their deposit in Wyoming would get built out because that would anchor the value of the whole thing. So it’s kind of just waiting to see, you know, is Boeing going to bite the hook and commit to make all of their aircraft 25% lighter and buy scandium at three and a half million dollars a tonne. But if we’re in this world of modern like drone warfare of having really, you know, lightweight drones for payloads and humanoid robotics, and the need to have lighter weight aluminium, I think is there.

So I, it’s kind of a niche thing, but between the gallium, the germanium, the scandium, and the heavy magnets, I think there’s a really good chance that Ramico is successful in building out this, this Brook mine.

[Tobias] How big is the, how big is the mine? How big is the deposit? How, like how many years of supply do they think they’ve got there?

[Steve] Oh, like a hundred. It’s, it’s, it’s enormous. And it’s also not been, it’s not been fully drilled everywhere to prove the whole thing out because, you know, they’re, all of these miners drill a little bit at the time as they have more cashflow because they don’t want to just throw a bunch of money into the ground on drill holes.

So the part that’s been delineated so far is like a hundred, although they did just update their mine plan to mine it twice as fast. So if they’re going to mine it twice as fast, it’s like a 50 year life.

[Tobias] What about something like oil, Steve? You follow energy.

[Steve] Yeah. Yeah. I’ve been, I’ve been in an abusive relationship with energy stocks for the last couple of years.

And I, I, yeah. One of the problems with energy is it’s hard to find things that are, you know, if you can’t get the timing, right. Some of the shale stuff has such a short life on it.

I haven’t found a lot of energy extractors that I like because you don’t have the sort of long lived assets at a cheap price. So I’ve been a lot in energy services trying to get the picks and shovels. You know, I’ve got my, I’ve got my offshore drillers.

That’s, you know, you can, there’s, that’s been a popular theme in, you know, the value degen space for a long time. And that they’re all, they’re all good companies that whatever differences there were between them, since I started writing about them, they’ve all been worked out. So for example, Transocean has a large anchoring shareholder.

His name is Frederick Moon and he’s does some insider buys once in a while. But since that time, you know, the shipping magnet, John Fredrickson bought 10% of Valeris. So they have a large anchoring shareholder.

And then the Noble is 10% owned by the Maersk family. So whatever differences there were between them, they’re, they’re, they’re pretty much all good companies.

[Tobias] The significance of having a big anchoring shareholder is that it makes them a little bit more sensible when it comes to capital allocation and things like that.

[Steve] Yeah. I think it takes away a lot of the risk of the CEO doing a bad acquisition, you know, just incinerating capital and really doing something stupid. If you’ve got a 10% owner of the company who sits on the board and he’s going to cause a big stink and, you know, pissing the punch bowl about it, then I think there’s a much lesser chance they’ll do a bad acquisition.

So that’s, you know, in that regard, they’re all about the same. Transocean has more financial leverage. They’re the only company that didn’t go bankrupt.

So Valeris and Noble are both post-bankruptcy, all their debt wiped away. Transocean still has the debt attached, but Transocean also has the best technology. They have the most cutting edge equipment.

They have two eighth gen drill ships and they have the, you know, Norway capable, semi-submersible drill ships. So that’s, you know, you’ve got some, some quality differences. They do mean a little bit.

So while the seventh gen ships are fetching about $400,000 a day, the eighth gen ships are fetching about $600,000 a day. But, you know, I think they’re all good. You know, they’re all good dogs.

[Tobias] What about the price itself? Do you use any of those, like gold oil, anything like that to sort of, like the spikes in gold oil ratio are as high as I’ve ever seen them. And a lot of that’s to do with gold having a very good run, but the bottoms in that gold oil ratio are, they’re all like significant turning points and we’re close to the lowest ever now.

[Steve] Yeah. Yeah. No.

So I think they’re all interesting. I always want to know what the causality is between them. And, you know, like the, the copper gold ratio, gold, gold comes out as a by-product of copper mines.

So, you know, you kind of have a, and also gold is a safe haven when the market crashes. So there’s, there’s reasons why most of this stuff works. There’s a lot of these different relationships.

I don’t always know the reason. What’s very strange about energy. And I, I own a lot of energy.

You know, I’ve, I’ve been, you know, unhappy with it for the last couple of years. I really feel like Charlie Brown about kick the football again, but you know, I haven’t sold any of my energy positions. I just have a sinking suspicion that, you know, the commodity prices are a 2027 story.

And I could very easily be wrong here. But if you look at you know, for example even though ISM just flipped above 50, freight is still way down in the U S now freight rates are higher because how much capacity has come offline, but freight is down. And if you look at how much more efficient engines have gotten, so U S gasoline consumption is down because the engines are so much more efficient.

So I think we might have to get pretty far into this boom with, you know and precious metals kind of led the metals boom, but gold is too small to really affect energy consumption. But if you start getting iron and aluminium prices high for a sustained period and the big base metals mining, ramping up production, then you could start seeing enough diesel consumption being used. You start seeing freight volumes going up.

I think you could actually have a set. I don’t think the demand side of the equation is there yet for a huge energy spike yet, but I think it’s inevitable, right? It’s a cyclical.

It’s going to happen someday. I just don’t think it’s a 2026 story, but let me hedge my bet a little bit because the stock bond correlation was negative pretty much from Alan Greenspan until Jerome Powell raised interest rates. And it was the negative stock bond correlation that made the 6040 portfolio work.

If the federal reserve is chasing inflation, that means they can’t cut interest rates when the stock market crashes by as much as they used to, which means the stock bond correlation would be positive, right? Stocks fall and bonds fall at the same time. And if the stock bond correlation stays positive and the 6040 doesn’t give you that sort of reduced volatility, then that would drive a decade-long increase in portfolio allocations to energy and gold because energy and gold are the two things aside from bonds that have the ability to give that negative correlation.

I think Morgan Stanley already said this is the age of the 60-20-20, 60 stocks, 20 bonds, 20 commodities. I think that takes a decade. By the time that trickles all the way down from Morgan Stanley to Edward Jones advisors in the strip mall, I think that’s a 10- or 15-year process.

But if energy stocks rise, even while the energy commodity is flat or struggling, I think it’s because portfolio managers are being told by their research departments to start increasing portfolio weights to gold and energy. And that’s going to be a tailwind that’ll cover a whole decade, right? That’s going to be a massive tailwind for those sectors for a long time.

So I’m happy owning energy, but don’t quote me on the timing of it.

[Tobias] That’s good timing. We’re coming up on time, Steve. So what’s the best way to follow along with what you’re doing or get in contact with you?

[Steve] Yeah, on Substack, I’ve got the Unemployed Value Degen Substack. And it’s just been such an amazing and fantastic community. I think everybody in the entire community is nice, except for maybe one or two people.

And out of those two- You can name them if you want. Yeah, one of them, I just kept being nice to them over time. And eventually, they just gave up being mean to me and started being nice.

So there’s only been one person in the entire community who’s just decided to stay with being a jerk. And I won’t name them, but good riddance. But no, it’s just been a fantastic website.

And now, Michael Burry from the Big Short fame created a Substack, brought in a huge new volume of people. And it’s a fantastic network. Hopefully, some people trickle down into the 20th bestselling and 30th bestselling and find me and start subscribing to that as well.

Well, congrats.

[Tobias] And you got a good Twitter account too. Yeah, thank you very much. Unemployed Value Degen.

It’s S. Farrington, Stephen Farrington.

[Steve] Yep, Steve Farrington. Yeah, I wasn’t smart enough to go anonymous. So if people want to hit on me, they can track me down.

JT, any final words?

[Jake] No.

[Tobias] Check out Generalytic, folks. Steve, great job again. We’ll have you on again in the future.

Folks, good seeing everybody.

VALUE: After Hours (S08 E04): Unemployed Value Degen on Abacus ($ABX), Newell Brands ($NWL) and Ramaco Resources ($METC)

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