Just Own the Nasdaq and Chill: Reading the AI Selloff

Colin Santucci (0:00)

Welcome to the Rigatoni Capital Podcast. I'm your host, Colin, and it's Pre-Market, Thursday, October 15th. Very sunny day here on Wall Street. Hopefully, this podcast will be a fast one. And I want to give everybody a heads up that I did not sell anything yesterday. After I told you, I was thinking about trying to sell something to prepare for rates to continue to go up in the margin account. So, you know, usually margin at a broker firm that you have, either it be Robinhood, Schwab, whatever, Interactive, whatever, whoever you have. Usually, it's slightly above the Fed funds rate, right? And if we're going to get at least one more hike, then that means that's going to go up again. And I was doing the math on the margin balance. I realized that, you know, I was not being able to... I didn't want to deposit more money per month to be able to pay off my monthly interest. So, that means I just have to sell something. That's all that means. And I told you I was very disappointed because I had to turn off the drip on my dividends, which sucks. You know, I don't want to do that. But you know, I got myself into this situation. I am very confident I will not get margin called. You know, as far as I understand, the market would definitely need to sell off more than 51% for me to start getting concerned. Now, again, that's the market. Some of my specific stocks, they can go down more, which could also trigger the account could go below 51%. Pretty if I have, you know, if Bitcoin crashes and Nvidia crashes, then yeah, I'm in trouble a little bit quicker. Right. So the whole point is just to keep that bound, that margin balance a little bit less. And now the market crashed yesterday. So now it's like, I don't want to sell on such a large down day. So I'm in that situation. I would have to imagine a lot of other investors are thinking the same thing. And to be honest with you, what do you think investors are thinking about when they see rates continue to go up and they own a CoreWeave?

You know, Kevin Bagholder was on my podcast the other day. Right. And we discussed, he was discussing like, hey, I see, you know, too much debt on their balance sheet with the interests that they have to pay on this debt. I mean, it's extraordinary stuff. I mean, no way in hell is this company going to crawl out of it. Most likely, it's just too much debt. These NeoClouds have so much debt. You know, it's one thing to be bearish, something like a Meta or Alphabet or Microsoft. You know, because they don't have the same cash problems.

They're not fueled on debt, right? So these NeoClouds, yeah, that's tricky stuff. And I always didn't understand why you wanted to play an arbitrage play. Why not just either own the hyperscalers themselves that rent out compute demand? Or why not just own Nvidia, for example? I never understood why you needed to play that arbitrage play. And, you know, not saying like told you so, because I didn't know. I thought I was hopeful that these companies like a CoreWeave would be fine. Haven't checked Nebius. I see people still love Iron, Nebius all day. Smart investors, finance investors that I follow, they still like those companies. But I don't pay attention to them. Not on my radar list, because I don't have any interest in that industry. You know, we can call them a NeoCloud, whatever you want to call them. They just don't have any interest in it. I'd rather just own the Nasdaq 100 and chill, right? I don't need the stress. You know, cost be down again, over 7% last night. Why not just own and be more freaking diversified and own the Freedom 100 Emerging Market CTF, which does not look now as bad as cost be. In fact, the Freedom ETF is heading towards its 200 day. You know, that might be a good time to get in, you know, regardless of what the cost be is doing, because you're not only in the cost be when you own the Freedom 100 Same with the QQQ. I don't need to pick the tech winners in the AI world, the world of agentic AI. There's so much disruption going on left and right. I mean, you know, Alphabet just came out with their new frontier, and Meta just came out with a frontier, and whatever it is, you know, and OpenAI and Anthropic are going to be commoditized, and all this stuff like, you know, maybe just owning Nasdaq 100 is the way to go in this future of uncertainty.