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New Constructs analyzes how a 25% tariff on foreign cars and 10% baseline tariff on imports will hit markets, arguing uncertainty creates opportunities for disciplined investors. Their AI-driven stock screener outperformed the S&P 500 by 5-9% year-to-date, using economic earnings and three valuation metrics to find undervalued stocks.
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Thanks everybody for joining me today. Excited to get started. Excited to cover some of the biggest news we've seen in a while with respect to markets. A long-awaited announcement from the president as to what all this Crazy tariff stuff is going to mean, and I thought it was important. Today is one of the biggest days in a long time, considering we've been waiting on pins and needles for a while about what this tariff stuff means, and we've seen the markets correct in a big way. So what do we do? First disclosures and disclaimers: we are not advisors. We are not giving advice. Nothing we say is meant to be an offer to buy or sell or anything like that. That is not what we do in new constructs. We're here to provide. Research. We're here to provide truth, and we do it better than anybody else. All right, so what are the big headlines? Right, what I just said. We got the news about the tariffs. Investors have been on pins and needles. Markets are down. Most people are underperforming. But I want to make the big point: the best investors make their hay in markets like this. So what happened? 25% tariffs on all foreign-made cars. Common sense, kind, reciprocal tariffs across many, many nations. He put a chart up. He showed what they all were. Chart made a big point of showing that that all of our tariffs are substantially below what they're charging us. I don't know the math behind all that, so I can't speak to that. The minimal baseline tariff is going to be 10% for everybody, and you get a 0% tariff if you build your product in the USA. The other big news is that it appears that the strategy is working, at least that's what was presented, and that we're seeing companies start to spend a lot of money on building plants and factories in the United States. This is a major change. We've been outsourcing to the world for a while, and we have really kind of gutted a lot of our industrial base. And so onshoring a lot of this stuff probably feels like in generally a good thing, especially I think when it comes to certain technologies. Like semiconductors, you know, I think that's been across administrations and presidents that we need to onshore a lot of stuff. And it's hard to argue against that, especially, you know, if it's strategic or if it's being built in an inhumane way, which we know happens quite a bit. So what are the themes that come out of this? Number one, tariffs are bad, right? We talked about it. That's just a tax on the economy. And I think that's true on the surface. I also think that it's possible to say that the world has operated in a particular way for a long time, where the United States has been the backstop financially, militarily for so many folks in the world. And maybe that made sense for a long time. I think it made sense when it was possible that the United States could simultaneously win a war against everybody. We could We could take the world, take on the world. It was kind of like what we did in World War II. We, we, we, we won 2 wars at once against 2 bad guys. And, and for a long time, we were kind of the biggest and baddest on the block, but that's not really the case anymore. And so we need people who are allies to be able to stand on their own 2 feet, in my opinion. And so in some ways, I don't know how to do that, but I think that that's at least whether it's intended or unintended consequence of this. I think it is, it's happening. And, you know, we see that manifest in Germany. really spending on defense for the first time in a long time. Yes. Could that be bad news for some of our, our own defense companies? I don't know. I mean, I think having more clients around the world is ultimately a good thing. Sure. Germany is going to try to do a lot of it on their own. But, you know, we're a big leader in that. I think that in some ways they're going to have to get some of the technology from us. And it's going to be a way for us to increase the addressable market for defense spending outside of our own country. But for sure, tariffs bring a lot of uncertainty. I don't think we know what the tariffs are going to be. Now, how the math plays out transaction by transaction, I don't think we know what that means. But I think the most important takeaway here is that uncertainty creates opportunities. So not a time to go and hide, not a time to sell everything. Sell certain things for sure, but there are a lot of tremendous bargains out there. Wall Street and the media want you to believe you can trust their certainty. We've been saying that for a long time, right? They've always tried to make you believe that they've got a certain view. And that's why they've been fanning the flames of panic because it's impossible to be certain with tariffs. Right? They're at a disadvantage. They can play the game of selling you whatever they want to sell you. Right? When there are no exogenous threats, the people just, and administration just letting the markets go, letting Wall Street sell you whatever. Right? And I like to go back to the Caddyshack phrase. Right? It's easy to grin when your ship's coming in. And you got the stock market beat, but the man you can respect is the man who can smile where his pants are too tight in the seat. I didn't get that quite right, but you know what I mean. It's easy. It's easy when we enter Goldilocks economy, when the administration and everyone is doing everything to protect the economy. You have the Fed put, all kinds of puts like that. If it's that bad, they're going to do something about it. Well, I think maybe what the focus is now is to take on some bigger problems because just making ourselves rich here internally or making certain segments of our economy super rich. Well, and regardless, the media is going to fan the flames of panic because look, that's what they do, right? You don't get paid for writing nothing. If it bleeds, it leads. You get paid for writing the most scary and unexpected stuff. That's what we expect them to see to do. And that's what they have been doing. And here's Wall Street selling you certainty, right? 57% of all ratings are buy ratings. We're a lot different than that. New Constructs is bringing you a different message. And it's not just Wall Street ratings, it's Morningstar ratings. Some of you've seen these slides before. Our ratings are very different from people. Why are we different? We've done the diligence. Fair and pure and simple. We've done the diligence. doing the diligence, and we uncover data that's legally buried and sometimes illegally buried. And look, you know, name another research firm out there, uh, and again, I'll give— I'm going to give you our next long idea for free if you can name another research firm out there that has papers from MIT Sloan School of Business. I'm sorry, MIT Sloan School of Management, Harvard Business School, Ernst Young, the Journal of Financial Economics. If you can find another firm out there that has just one paper From as prestigious an institution written about them, proving the superiority of the research? Please put it into the chat. Share with us. I don't think there's another one. Your stock ratings are different, but how do we know they're better? Well, how about being ranked number one by some zero every month for I think it's I think we're up to 45 straight months now. Not bad. About the fact that there are live actively traded indexes or indices. That are outperforming the S&P 500 year to date. This is a Bloomberg index. You can look up the ticker. There's the ticker. You go to Bloomberg, look it up. It's a very attractive stocks index. It's beating the S&P by 9.2% for the first quarter of 2025. You want evidence that our ratings work? I think that's evidence, right? We're up, market's down. Diligence is in favor, my friends. Diligence never goes out of style. That's why we've seen the performance over a 5-year period, you see, was also a very strong outperformance. If you guys want Put in the chat. I can show you this stuff live on the Bloomberg website about the Core Earnings Leaders Index, right? This is just stocks that have the strongest core earnings power. It's outperforming extremely well too. Oh, that's the wrong picture. Core Earnings Leaders Index. Here's the right picture for that. It's up, market's down, right? That's the Core Earnings Leaders Index outperforming by a significant amount. Again, this is just about focusing on And up by over like almost 5%, right? That's a big— that's a significant margin. This focuses on holding the companies with the greatest earnings power. And then this index is the Core Earnings Weighted Enhanced S&P 500. So if we just let someone else pick the stocks, we can still outperform because we'll weight those stocks based on core earnings as opposed to market cap. And again, I can show you this live. And if you want to know more about these, Bloomberg, or these special indices. Bloomberg is hosting a special webinar. I'll put this link into the chat for everybody. Here we go. I got some questions I haven't been seeing coming in here. But that's the Bloomberg webinar. They're going to do a special big promotion about our indices and our effectively, you know, footnote season, how you uncover hidden value based on superior data. So I think the takeaway here is trusting Wall Street is like trusting the tobacco companies. Who said cigarettes are not harmful or addictive? Wall Street's gotten away with this for a long time. They're going to continue to get away with it as long as you let them, just like the tobacco companies did with cigarettes. Now I'm going to show you how to find great stocks in the market today. Our independent research also has a technology edge, so we're not just independent, we've got AI working for us, the first and best AI for investing. I've done plenty of webinars why our AI is the first and the best. But for now, trust me based on the results. Mainly, it's helpful. What it does is get better data to build better models and get better ratings, effectively revealing the truth. And it creates ratings. This is where we're talking this very attractive element right here. Those— that's what's driving that index. It's outperforming the market by 9% in just the first quarter of this year. The key drivers of this rating system are Quality of earnings, where we look at economic earnings, which is the real measure of earnings, the more comprehensive, different from core earnings. It's even better than core earnings. Core earnings is better than reported EPS. Economic earnings is even better than core earnings. But we look at how the economic earnings compare to the reported EPS, because when we see divergences, good and bad, it's a big signal. We look at return on invested capital. How good a steward is the company being of your capital? Then we got 3 valuation techniques. or valuation metrics, 2-year average free cash flow yield, price to economic book value, and the market implied growth appreciation period. The market implied growth appreciation period is based on our best-in-the-world reverse discounted cash flow model where we quantify the number of years of profit growth required to justify the stock price. You could think about if you're a fixed income analyst, it's the implied duration in the stock price. Naturally, if the implied duration's really long, if the company has to grow profits for a really long period of time, that makes it expensive. This metric is probably one of the strongest individual metrics of the all 5, maybe the strongest and most important in terms of what our backtesting shows. And our, and another thing to keep in mind is that our AI has the ability to comb through thousands of government filings with precision. These 5 metrics that I just went through, I believe are the best in the business. You put them all together, you get the best rating. But what's, what's most valuable, I think, is that we've made it simple. Green means good, red means bad for ratings. All 5 metrics matter. So does hundreds of thousands of filings that have gone into analyzing and putting together this data. But we all bring— we bring it down to one very simple signal. Green means good, red means bad. We've synthesized for our clients. We're the only rating system with an official U.S. patent behind it. And again, the only rating system that I know of that has an index That's beating the S&P 500 by 9% in just the first 3 months of this year. All this to help you understand that our performance is no trick. It's no accident. This is based on better, harder work, and what we're seeing is some tremendous opportunities in the market right now. In fact, I just actually reviewed a new long idea. We'll go out tomorrow morning to our professional subscribers. Unbelievable. A great example of a stock that has been beaten down. I think it was down 50% last year, down another 25% this year. It's trading as if its profits will decline by 50% when profits are growing. It's in a very strong sector. I'm going to put a link to where you can find a snippet about this in the chat for everybody. It's in the long ideas section, but it's going to be an amazing report. I'm excited. Before I come out, I reviewed it today, and I'm reading this, and I'm like, this is unbelievable. This is a perfect example of the kind of stocks we're going to be talking about in our next training. So I'm going to drop another link here. This is for a training about our most recent research. We've done a couple stock bundles. I'm going to show you here how we use our stock screener, the best stock screener in the world, and we used it more recently to create some special bundles. Called— this was the Super Stock Bundle. Well, that's a terrible slide, isn't it? What happened here? Oh, sorry folks. This is Super Stock Model Portfolio, and for some reason the slide's all messed up. But this is— this was for stocks at an overall rating of attractive or better, and economic profit was greater than zero, and economic profit was greater than net income. So this was a bundle that we, we sold last year, then earlier this year. Super outperformer. What's the stats here? You can see over time we've looked at this significant outperformance for these stocks versus the S&P 500. Another called the Alpha Stock Portfolio. This is where the GAAP rating was attractive or better. Remember I told you that that rating was super important? They had economic profit greater than zero, and then economic profit was greater than net income. So we didn't care at all about the overall rating. This had to be attractive or better, and we had to see economic earnings greater than accounting earnings. That one also very strongly outperformed. We've got a new piece of research, a new discovery that we're going to be sharing on April 15th at 1 PM. And I put that link in here as well. But now let's do a demonstration. Let's show you exactly how this stuff works. I'm going to take a second here to answer some questions. Why does Tesla go up when deliveries are down? Yeah, great question. Haha. You know, I think there's manipulation in the options market where you've got people that go in and they buy a ton of options. And you know, for every option you get an underlying 100 shares. And I think they've called this gamma. Someone please correct me. I bet Ryan Mitz knows better than I do. There we go. Option contracts. He's already talking about it. Right after the election, there were reports that ODTE call options equaled 166% of their volume. With call options volume reaching 320% volume. So people can use that trick, buying tons of options to force the option seller to buy the underlying stock, which forces the stock to go up. It's a trick. I mean, when you got as much money as Elon Musk, you can afford to spend a couple billion on options, which gets 100x'd into Tesla shares. So if you're spending $10 million, you can turn that into a billion. Volume. That's, that's not a small amount. I think that's part of it. And this is tracked. In fact, why don't we go and put this up? Ryan, put, put this in here from Twitter. It's all one big game of punting ODE options, creating tremendous spikes of buying pressure. And here he's tracking it. A look back in November, and you can see exactly what happened there. People have been writing about this for a while. This is not a new phenomenon. So I think that's probably What happened? So what we're talking about in new constructs is how to find stocks the real way, because I think at some point we can trust that the the house of cards is going to potentially fall in. So let's talk about how we find stocks in today's market. Well, first of all, I showed you the rating and the way that we are able as a pro user. To find great stocks in this market. And I'm going to show people this. I don't usually show this on a free webinar because this is a super, super powerful tool. I'm giving away a lot, but because we've got another set of earnings come in, a lot of this data is going to change. But our screening tools are extremely powerful. Now I'm going to start from the opposite end because I don't want to give away too many good easy long ideas. We're going to be publishing one tomorrow, as I mentioned. But with our screening tool, you get all the precision that goes into calculation of our rating system, all the stuff that's been vetted by Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan, and Bloomberg. Remember I told you you wanted to see these ratings and these indices live? This is a live website. We add S&P 500 and we look year to date, up almost 5%, down almost 3.5%. So it's close to, you know, over 8% outperformance. That's live. That's real based on very attractive stocks, right? Why does very attractive stocks do so well? Right, because of all that diligence I showed you about the rating system. So flipping it around, just pretend we're looking at very attractive, but I'm going to show this on unattractive. But just say, for example, you want to find the best sectors and you want to go because of tariffs, you want to go non-cyclicals, right? Not stuff that people can put off. It's things they need. What are the best sectors? And you want to, you want to, you want to dig down a little bit more. Personal and household products and services, things people have to buy. You want to find the best. You want to make sure the return on invested capital— we're going to say it's less than here, but it's greater than 10%— and a free cash flow yield that's greater than 10%. Again, we flip it all if we wanted to do this, and bam, you get an answer. One stock in this situation, right? So my point being here That this tool allows you to screen the entire market for the best stocks in a second. An incredibly powerful tool, the best screener in the business by a long shot. And this can apply to all types of sectors. Bam! Same thing. Unattractive. Oh, there's a lot more in the healthcare. Turns out there's a lot more very unattractive stocks in that sector. The same tool applies. And capability applies for ETFs and mutual funds. So you want all the very attractive in the non-cyclicals, more than a billion. I'll take both ETFs and mutual funds, and I want total annual costs. Oh, nothing very unattractive in consumer cyclicals with a billion in age. Let's just take that off. Nothing in consumer non-cyclicals is very unattractive. Interesting. I thought every sector had something a little bit unattractive. Let's go and flip it over to very attractive. And let's say we want something with more than $1 billion and total annual costs have got to be less than or equal to 2%. Those are the very few funds that fit the bill. So you can see here in just a matter of seconds, you can leverage hundreds of thousands of hours, hundreds of thousands of filings, hundreds of millions of dollars in capital to build a technology that's done the diligence. on all the stocks over all the years of history and models, because there's a lot of dead companies in our coverage universe. Not every company we've covered since 2004 is still around. We don't throw that out. It's part of our diligence. So close to 7,000 companies in our system over the years, all the work that's gone into that, all the diligence gone into understanding the metrics and determining thresholds to identify which are the good companies and the bad companies and the good stocks and the bad stocks. Based on data back to 1998 for 7,000 companies. That's a lot of intelligence, and in a matter of seconds you can take advantage of it to find the best stocks in the market. And we're going to be revealing those in a couple of weeks at that link for that webinar that I just mentioned to you. And tomorrow we're going to be revealing one as a long idea. So if you're already a Pro client, you get our long ideas as part of your Subscription. All right, I'm going to take some requests now for particular stocks, put them in here. We've got a couple minutes left. AIG. This was something that was, I think, recommended by somebody I heard on CNBC, like, as a stock— like insurance stocks, they're good to own in this environment because no matter how uncertain it is, you got to have insurance. That's one of the things that you can't not own. Let's go through our screener and figure out where the best insurance stocks are. Insurance, and let's go. Okay, we're going to do this the really fun way. I want greater than return, greater than 10%, greater than 10%. Go. Nothing. Let's take this out. See if we can just get free cash flow. Nothing. Let's just go zero that too. All right. Looks like there's free cash flow is the real limiting factor here. But there you go, list of the best insurance stocks in the market. AIG isn't there at the top. These very attractive stocks, that's pure gold, folks. Pure gold. Look how very attractive stocks have outperformed this year, and very attractive stocks have outperformed consistently over the years as well. It's our calling card. You think Bloomberg didn't test this back over many years? Actually, let's go back 5 years. Look at that, practically double the stock market. In 5 years. Short term, long term, short term, long term. Very attractive stocks. Good way to go. This is an extremely good starting point for people who want to find good stocks that are not so cyclical. Can't beat it. And then of course, if you want to dig in, go a little bit deeper, we've got it all here for you. You know that we can break down the rating, so you can see here Why is this good and rising? Because the economic earnings are rising. We like that they're positive and rising. How's return on invested capital been? Very consistent. Not super good, but it gets an attractive rating. Margins on the rise, capital turns on the decline. This is probably why return on invested capital isn't amazing. Then we can look at free cash flow. Got a 2-year average free cash flow in red and just a 1-year free cash flow. On the left, on the in blue, we can go through and see the actual data. See the free cash flow numbers are pretty big. The TTM and the last fiscal year are the same because we just got a 10K for these guys or an annual report. Here's the free cash flow margin. It's pretty nice number, up over 10%. That's just free cash flow divided by revenue. How about the price to economic book value? We like seeing economic book value. Greater than stock price. What that means is that the stock price is implying a permanent profit decline. Remember when we looked at AIG? Didn't look so good. This stock looks a lot better. Market implied growth appreciation period, less than 1 year. So this is a better looking stock. You want to check the credit rating? We don't do credit ratings for insurance companies anymore. That's right, because they, they have an ownership structure that really doesn't help us have a real clear-through vision as to Who, who has recourse on what debt? All right, any other requests for stocks to cover or take a look at? I think one came in earlier. JEF. Let's do that real fast. Jeffries Financial stock. Oof! Looks really cheap. So price to economic book value 0.3. I'm guessing that their NOPAT had a pretty nice bump this year. You can see a jump in economic earnings, return on invested capital. The NOPAT margin, it's been pretty— holding pretty steady. Interesting. One of the other things you can do as a professional member here is you can go in and see, wow, okay, net income's been all over the place. So big jump in net income. I guess the market is expecting that the profits are going to be quite a bit less this coming year. Notice how much less volatile NOPAT has been than net income. How's that for interesting? Bunch of non-operating expenses that we've been pulling out. And then let's look at the balance sheet. Balance sheet: up, down, up, up, flat, up, down, flat, up. Yeah, so invested capital quite a bit less than in total assets. Any other valuation adjustments? Quite a bit, quite a bit of debt here, $6.9 billion. Pensions look okay. So yeah, Jeffrey's pretty good-looking financial stock. Pretty good-looking financial stock. All right, thanks everybody. Oh, we got some news here. Word is that Musk will be stepping down from his position in DC in the next few weeks. Yeah, I guess maybe Tesla's more important than the country after all. I don't know. I'm a big fan of Doge. I think we need some of that. I think it's hard to argue that there's been rampant spending for a long time. Anyway, the main takeaway is. We've got the best system for finding good stocks. We're doing it all the time. We're delivering it. Our performance is delivering. If you want to be able to be successful in any kind of market, but especially a volatile market, go back to diligence. Go back to what's made Warren Buffett successful over all these decades. We do it better than anyone else. We've been, we've been working away at how to do diligence better and better and better for 2 decades ourselves. We built technology to do it. There's no better place for diligence than us. Proof is in performance. Thank you. Have a great day.
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