Watch our Special Webinar: The Game Plan for 2025

Hello, everybody. Happy Friday. It's not such a great Friday. It's not been such a great week. I think a lot of us will be glad to see that it's coming to an end. But I wanted to step in here as CEO and founder of New Constructs to let our clients know and to let the world know That diligence is mattering more now than ever. The hard work that we've been doing for the last 20 years is paying off in a big way. I'm going to show you exactly why that is true, and I'll go through some specific stock picks that we've recently reiterated that are actually up even in the last few days and are really unscathed by what I would call a long overdue reset. On a lot of levels in a lot of ways. You know, you've heard me say for a long time, whether it's about IPOs over the last 5 or 10 years that have been ridiculous, or meme stocks or meme coins, a lot of kind of nutty stuff has been happening where capital has been allocated not because it's a good business, but because they've got a good marketing campaign or they've got a charismatic CEO. And that is grift. that is taking money from you to make somebody else rich without any underlying value to society. And New Constructs, what we've always stood for is getting capital to where it deserves to go most. And those are to businesses that are going to create value. Because if we create value, then we as a society, we grow, we prosper. And that's a big part of what's made the United States successful for the last 200 years and really allowed us to go from a newcomer to the world stage 250 years ago to the strongest and best country in the world. And if we don't get back to some of those basics around allocating capital to its highest and best use, then we're in trouble. But the good news is that the market, despite all the noise, ultimately cares about allocating capital to its highest and best use. And that's why we've been successful. Let me share my screen here. I'm going to go through A few slides, and then we will jump into some very specific stock picks and very specific advice. I'm going to give away a lot more today than I normally do because it's it's a crazy time, and think investors deserve it. And we're going to basically give away a lot of milk for free, so to speak. And really, what I provide people is that there's a game plan here. The game plan is not to go hide under your under your mattress, hide your money in your mattress. There's a real game plan, and the game plan has been is not different than what it's been. For the last 20 years for new constructs. Just so happens our game plan works exceptionally well in tough markets. It works really, really well. I would say exceptionally well in all markets, but in this one, given the comfort it can provide while everyone else's hair is on fire, I think is super valuable. So let's just jump in. Disclosures and disclaimers. Look, I'm not an advisor. I don't pretend to be. We're here to provide information. We're here to inform you to make your own investment decisions and not for us to Make them for you, or to tell you what to do. So look, let's just set the table here. Markets are getting crushed. People are panicking. And this is when diligence matters most. The best investors make their hay in markets like this. And these are the headlines that are going to be kind of dominating, right? For the most part, look, tariffs are bad. No one knows for sure how bad. Markets don't like uncertainty. This is what Wall Street wants you to believe. There is never certainty in the market. They want you to believe that they can give you that. There's never certainty unless you've got a crystal ball that can predict the future. Never certainty. There's diligence and there's risk-reward, but there's not certainty. So all of a sudden there's uncertainty. No, what you have is your less than robust strategies that seem to work so easily for so long, they just don't work anymore. That's the code for uncertainty, and so I got no room for that. This is just really people being lazy, and it's blowing up in their face. We've never been lazy, and that's why our picks aren't blowing up in our faces. The real reality is that uncertainty is more opportunity, and Wall Street doesn't like that because they've never done their diligence. It's a marketing firm, and most most of these firms are marketing. Most of these popular stocks are more about marketing than they are about. Underlying value and creating value. That's why I'm saying Wall Street and the media want you to believe you can trust their certainty. It's fake, it's false, and we're seeing it blow up in their faces right now. This is going to happen on a regular basis, going to keep happening perhaps more often than not when you've got a market that's so overextended as the one that we've seen, and so many stocks so overvalued as the ones that we've seen, and so many stocks crowded with trades because people want to just Do what everyone else does, piggyback on someone else's diligence. The problem is if there's no diligence to begin with, you're piggybacking on a dead horse. And while the media is freaking out out there, I'm here to give you some calm and clarity, not just on when this kind of craziness will end, but what kind of stock picks you can have made in the past and now and in the future. And I only mention the past because I want to be clear, we're going to put our money where our mouth is. I'm going to show you some very specific stock picks, recommendations we've written up just in the last month, and that stock is up in the last few days. And others that we've written about recently that are up in the last few days, not to mention live-traded indices that are outperforming dramatically. So let's be real here, right? Most of the time, the large majority of Wall Street stocks get buy ratings. Over 57% get a buy rating. That's what we went into right before this correction. All buys. That's their certainty. Certainty is BS, and their buy ratings are BS. We have a much lower percentage of our coverage gets a buy rating, and even less than 13% get our very attractive rating or our best rating. And the same is true from other firms that claim to also be independent. Here's Morningstar. Here's their ratings on a bunch of stocks compared to our ratings. Quite different. Why is our research different? For those of you who've not been with us for a while, the answer is we've done our diligence. We do the hard work. We analyze thousands of pages of SEC filings. We read footnotes, which gives us data that no one else has. Hard work is not good for the— for hard work's sake. Hard work is good if it provides alpha, and we actually provide alpha. This has been validated by and vetted by some of the biggest and most prestigious institutions in the world. MIT Sloan School of Management, Harvard Business School, Ernst Young, even the Journal of Financial Economics, which is a top-tier peer-reviewed journal. So are we different? Yes. Is it better? Absolutely, it's better. We've been ranked number 1 by SumZero every month in at least 1 or 2 categories. I think we're at 45 months now. And then we've got these indices that are live traded at Bloomberg. This is our Very Attractive Stocks Index for the first quarter of 2025. It's up nearly 5% when the market's down nearly 5%. It's outperforming by 9% in one quarter. This is a fund just based on— or an ETF just based on our Very Attractive Stocks. You think our ratings matter? Yeah, up 5% while the market's down 5%. I know things have changed since then, but this thing continues to outperform. This is the enhanced S&P 500 index, or core earnings weighted S&P 500. All we're doing here is saying, hey, instead of just market cap, let's weight based on core earnings. Guess what? It outperforms too, right? So we don't even need to pick the stocks, we can just weight them better than than other people and outperform. In other words, there's real alpha in our data. And so I'm saying Wall Street research is silly. It's like trusting the tobacco companies when they used to get away with telling you that cigarettes weren't harmful or addictive. Now let me show you how we found some great stocks in the market today. We use not just hard work, but we've leveraged it with technology called RoboAnalyst technology. I call this the first and best AI for investing. The first and the best, because it's based on a dataset that is extremely clean and extremely well curated. AI is only as good as the data that goes into it, and it results in a rating system. You can see here goes from very attractive to very attractive, and it's the very few stocks that get a very attractive rating that Bloomberg has created an index around. And it's performed extremely well. The key to this AI is it has the ability to comb through thousands and thousands of government filings and pages, hundreds of thousands, millions of pages that I think New Constructs has gone through. There are 5 parts of the rating system that I showed you just a second ago. And these 5 metrics are important, each one of them, and together they provide the best rating system in the world. Economic versus accounting earnings. ROIC, 2-year average free cash flow, price-to-economic book value, market implied growth appreciation period, which is based on the one and only reverse dynamic discounted cash flow model, the best one in the world and the only one that's been scaled. And this metric by itself sometimes is, is the most important metric of all the 5. But altogether, they give us the best rating system in the world. And the good news is we make it simple. I'm not here to overwhelm you with a bunch of complexity. I'm going to get to some very specific stock picks in a second. that have outperformed, and we will expect to continue to outperform. Truth is not hard if you're in the business of truth. Truth is hard if you're Wall Street and you're not in the business of truth. I was on Wall Street. I'm not speaking as an outsider. I was at Credit Suisse before, during, and after the tech bubble. I know what goes on. I've been there. I've seen it. I fought those battles. And I knew that for all this work to be valuable to people, I didn't need to deliver them a 50-page paper or a complex page or any kind of complexity. Green means good, red means bad. That simple. Attractive and unattractive. One other way we're different, we have an official US patent behind our data and our system. No one else has that. And again, look, proof is in performance. Proof is in performance. This very attractive stocks index Dramatically outperforming the S&P 500. So let's dig in with some real-world recent stock picks. I got 2 for you, maybe 3: HCA Healthcare and Kroger. Let's go to the website. Let's start with HCA Healthcare because HCA— we look at performance while the rest of the market's getting crushed the last 5 days. HCA is actually up. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to pretend that, that when the market's like in turmoil, stuff's going to go down. Look, you've got to have trust, which is why diligence matters to begin with, because this is going to happen every now and then. This is a forest fire, and it's going to be worse probably than what we've seen in a while because we haven't had a controlled forest fire in a long time. We need to. COVID didn't even count as a correction. That lasted like 3 days before things bounced back. So what you need to be able to know is that you can survive the inevitable corrections, ups and downs of the market. I'm not saying anything new here. So it's always been said, but HCA, it's up. How many other stocks are up over the last 5 days, last month, up 13, 14% year to date? Name another one. Well, guess what? New Concept HCA. Well, it's in the Very Attractive Stocks Index. That's helping. And we just wrote a report on it a couple months ago, end of February, telling people to go back and take a good look at this stock. Here's the report, right? So this is what you're getting from New Constructs. This is for professional clients only, right? This is not something we're just giving out to the world for free. Today I am because I know people upset and I want to be helpful, right? And I want them to have a chance to really understand With examples of how what we're doing is good. But here's HCA, a great pick that we pointed out and we reiterated early this year. How about another stock that's up and doing really well this year? I think you just saw my screen before I came over here. Tyson, right? One month, year to date, up 6%. How many stocks that you know that are up that much? Tyson's been a stock that we've been talking about and have been bullish on for a long time. You can see we wrote about it in, in early in 2023. Let's talk about Kroger, another stock. In the last 5 days, it's up. Year to date, up a lot. Kroger, we were— we reiterated that one back in August of last year, put it on our focus list. It's remained on our focus list. Just got a new 10-K. So this is examples of stocks that have been winners in an incredibly terrible market. That's the kind of research we do. We also just published another long idea to our professional clients. I think it went up on Wednesday, Tuesday night, Wednesday, that we think is going to be another Kroger, HCA, Tyson, etc. A stock that you can, you can really trust is going to be a great performer even in a down market. And look, let me, let me make it clear: performing in a down market, performing well, is what it's all about, my friends, right? It's easy to grin when your ship's coming in and you got the stock market beat, but the man who's worthwhile is the one who can smile when his pants are too tight in the seat or when the market's crashing, right? Look, diligence is boring. It's boring. It doesn't matter until it does. And then when it does, it matters a lot. And I'm here to tell you, we do better diligence than anybody in the world on US stocks. We're going to cover all stocks in the world eventually. But right now, we're the best in the world in the US. And if you want to be in the stock market at all, I think you need to be using our research. I don't know how you can make a straight-faced argument against using our research when we've got the performance, the track record, the vetting, the detail, the transparency. Show me a flaw in what we do. I'm happy to address it. Now let's dig in. This is where we're going to get really exciting. I'm going to show you our screeners, and I'm going to show you exactly how you find more good stocks like the one we just found. How do we use our system to do that in a matter of seconds? It's the most powerful screening tool ever built in the history of the stock market, as far as I'm concerned. It is so valuable. Our professional membership is $1,000 a month, $999. You know what it costs you to build a screener like this? Probably at least $20 million if you wanted to start from scratch. And it costs you at least $2 to $3 million every quarter just to maintain it. That's what it takes to build the models, to go through the data, to do the diligence on so many thousands of stocks that you have a rating system that actually works. And you've tested it and seen it over time. You've modified it, you fixed it up, you've perfected it over time. But that perfection is possible only if you're doing it in a world where you've got good data. The good data is critical. It's the only way you know what works and doesn't work. Otherwise, you're faking it. You don't know if it's luck or good data. We've been doing this for over 20 years. We know it's not luck. We know we've got the best data in the world. Harvard Business School published a paper proving no one else in the world has footnotes. No one has it. There's alpha just in footnotes. That's what our Core Earnings Fund is all about, and the Very Attractive Index is all about. Our Core Earnings Index is all about— it's about better data. Better data gives you an edge when it's put together in an intelligent way. I could say we've done that. And on April 15th, we will be doing a special Event. I'll put a link in here for you to register for it, to talk about how you can get access to this research. And actually, we're gonna do better than that. We've got another set of great stock picks that we're going to be showing you how we've combed through our proprietary system. It's not just Bloomberg that's been able to put together indices for us. We can do this on our own. We're doing some of our own diligence on our own data, and we're finding new ways to find great stocks. But, you know, let's face it, these very attractive stock rated stocks are pretty awesome. And we're going through and we're finding the best of the best of those very attractive. We'll be talking about that on April 15th. All right. Now for demonstration. So let's talk about where to find good stocks. Everybody wants to know where are we going to find good stocks? Well, why don't we take a look at a sector and we can maybe— why don't we look at all our overall sector ratings? What's our favorite sector right now? Hmm, consumer cyclicals. Financials used to be up there, but they had a big run. Everyone's got to have insurance at all times. You can't give up your insurance. You got to keep paying for insurance. You got to keep having energy. People need telecom too. Non-cyclicals, consumer non-cyclicals is also— people still got to buy food, still got to buy toilet paper. You got to still buy the things to keep yourself going from, from day to day. So consumer non-cyclicals, top-rated sector. And in this analysis of the overall sector, we'll show you the best stocks in the sector. There it is, folks. Worst stocks. Best ETFs. We don't have any bad ETFs, which is interesting. Best mutual funds. So one click, one page. Best sectors ranked. Let's go look at that sector. And then what does New Constructs deliver you in one click here on one page? Best stocks, worst stocks, best ETFs, best mutual funds. That's where you go. Does it get any more sophisticated, robust than that? Yes, it does. But only at New Constructs. Let's go to the screeners. Let's go to consumer non-cyclical since we're talking about that one. And then let's go in and say we want to know all the very attractive and attractive rated with greater than 10% ROIC and greater than 10% 2-year average free cash flow yield. Great. 2. Now keep in mind what we just did here. We went through thousands of stocks and plucked out the best of the best, the crème de la crème. If these are your metrics, you might like other metrics. You might say, you know what, I want my growth appreciation period to be less than or equal to 10 years, and I don't care about return on invested capital, I don't care about current free cash flow. Go. There's a different list. It's a lot bigger. The point is, in a matter of seconds, you can screen through the most valuable fundamental database in the world to find good stocks. So what's my game plan for 2025? Getting back to it. Start at the top here. My game plan for 2025 is to tell you that the next couple of quarters are going to be choppy. It's going to be bad. If you haven't done your diligence, it's going to be painful. If you've listened to Wall Street, you listen to other pundits, you listen to other gurus trying to sell you on some crazy secret trust fund or some conspiracy theory or whatever BS they're trying to sell just to titillate you, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, but in the next couple months, the next couple of quarters, it's time to dig in. It's time to jump into the foxhole and get back to the fundamentals. Fortunately, we've got foxholes dug. We've got one waiting for you if you want to sign up. Just go to our website, www.newconstructs.com, and know that you can be safe and know that you can trust real research. So we got 2 quarters. It could be over faster than that. But again, remember my analogy in the beginning, which I got from my good friend John Ricciutelli, who works with us in sales. This is a forest fire like what we saw in California, unfortunately, where they hadn't done the work to have controlled fires and to clean up stuff on a regular basis. So guess what? When the fire finally comes, it gets blown up. It gets really bad. That's what's happening in the market right now. We've got a lot of bad habits, and in many ways, society It's been like frog in a frying pan. The temperature's been rising. Nobody's paying attention. It's been so good for so long. The warm water feels good, right? We haven't been honest with ourselves about what we've needed to call and where we've wanted to invest. We've spent billions on projects to nowhere, and we've known the government has done this for decades. I joke with my kids, I heard about the $400, $500 hammer in the '80s, and guess what? Nothing's ever happened. And when misallocation of capital becomes systemic and it bleeds into the stock market, meme coins, meme stocks, it's a joke. It's been a joke. We get a movie about a thing called Roaring Kitty and people invest based on that. Give me a break. Are you kidding? Can we honestly say that with that stuff going on in our market, we think markets are reasonably efficient? No. This is a well-deserved And, and I think it's going to take at least a couple of quarters to flush through. At least by the 4th quarter, things should get a little bit more stable. But if you're a new constructs customer, you don't care. You're making money rain or shine because we've got superior data and fundamentals matter. It's been in the back burner, don't get me wrong. Look, when, you know, Hertz is about to go bankrupt and it goes up because there's a short squeeze and they can sell stock and survive GameStop, AMC, the classic ones, Koss. There's a bunch of, there's a bunch of others that we called out that didn't survive. There's all those IPOs we pointed out that were terrible. Anyway, our zombie stock list, that's free for folks who want it. Just email me and I'll give you a free copy of that. Go to our website, you sign up on our website, you get a free copy of the zombie stock list. We give that away for free because we want people to know how to avoid the landmines. New Constructs is a research firm that when we say we're here to help investors, we're being honest. And I will tell you, not going to make me a lot of friends, but a lot of other firms, they're not being honest. We can prove it. You don't want to trust me, you want to trust Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management, the Journal of Financial Economics, Bloomberg, or real performance on the screen. And then if you've seen our research tools, you know all the transparency. We will show you How to get to the data on every single one of our models. So let's just go, just take an example here. We want to go to one of these stocks. Let's just try Ingredient. And one of the features in our system is that we will give you details on every one of these ratings. So a breakdown, what's going on on each one of those details will reconcile back to the reported numbers. Hey, here's what they're saying their net income is. Well, what do we think the operating profit after tax is? Oh, it's higher. Interesting. What are all the adjustments you do to get there? Oh, here they are. Same is true for the balance sheet. Total assets unadjusted, all the adjustments. Here are valuation adjustments showing you what those are. We want you to know how much work we're doing. And then ultimately, if you want to come in and say, well, where do you get that data, David? How do I know you're not making it up? Well, guess what? Marked-up filings. You want to see the income statement adjustment, that $1 million that we showed you in the adjustment before? There it is, page 69. Amortization of prior service cost. It's not, it's not part of the operations of the business, unrelated to the operations, purely to the pension, does not reflect the operations of the business. So we pull it out. That's the kind of diligence we do for you, and we prove it. By the way, we'll go back for as long as this company's been around. Look, 1998. Every single data point, every single adjustment. Let me show you where it is. There's a bunch more integration acquisition costs. This after-tax restructuring, page 88, right? It gets buried deep in there, all over the place, all over the balance sheet adjustments too, all over the place. There's that one buried in the fine print. Anyway, you get the idea. We— the reason that Harvard Business School and Bloomberg and Ernst Young and MIT and the Journal of Financial Economics, the reason they want to work with us is because it's 100% provable, reliable, and auditable. And that's the reason you should want to work with us as well. Even if our stock picks weren't that good, this transparency, this honesty about how to provide a superior measure, that's worth its weight in gold by itself. You add in the fact that our stuff outperforms. Give me a straight-faced argument as to why you shouldn't be a client of New Constructs, and I would be happy to talk with you about that. All right, we're going to take a couple of requests before we go here. SYF, Synchrony Financial. Good rating. We wrote about it a while ago. We like it. Credit rating not as good. Stock rating looks good all the way across the board. Gets a very attractive rating. That's typically a very good sign. How about DHI? I know a little bit about DHI. Very attractive rating. We wrote about this earlier in the year as well. How's DHI done? I would imagine— wow, there's another great example. Thank you, Stephen, you teed that one up for me. And I'll be honest with you, we're doing a lot of stuff. I'm not always going through and figuring out what to cherry-pick, but I— this— if there's one to cherry-pick, this is That's one of them, DHI. It's in our focus list, it's in our dividend growth model portfolio. We just reiterated early this year. Guess what? While the rest of the market's getting tanked, we're up 3% in DHI this week. In the last month and during this really down market, it's done really well. Yes, we've been bullish on this stock for a long time. Again, it's a, it's a focus list stock. It's been a great performer for us for a while. Okay, thanks everybody. Any more questions? Any anything else? Let me just close with what I started with. New Constructs is the best research firm in the world for U.S. stocks. It's not just about transparency; it's not just about honesty; it's about performance. And we're the only firm that I know of that can give you both. We don't have to hyperbolize; we have to come up with crazy conspiracy theories. We don't have to tell you to be a gold bug. We don't need to do these wild things just to titillate you and get your attention. Maybe we're not as entertaining as those other firms, but we're more honest. We're more true. We're more valuable. And we are an incredible deal. The cost to replicate this technology, to go through hundreds of thousands of filings, to tease out the footnotes, to categorize them correctly, to do that hundreds of thousands of times so you put together the best ever AI for investing. I don't know if you can put a price on that. It's certainly a lot cheaper than $9.99 a month for our pro subscription. But again, thank you for being with me. I hope you like this game plan for 2025. Do your diligence. You keep doing that, you're going to be fine. I think we're going to see a turnaround later in the year, probably by the 4th quarter. But that doesn't mean you need to stop doing diligence. If anything, this convinces you to do diligence, consider it a blessing. It's a good thing that this market's happened. It's gotten you to straighten up and fly right, to get smart. And get smarter with new constructs. Thank you. I hope you have a great Friday and a great weekend.