Everyone kevin here in this video we're going to go through a few updates on a tesla, palantir peloton and then we'll talk a little bit about airbus and hydrogen intel and a few other stocks and commodities. So this is more of a wrap up of multiple stocks that i'm looking at and always considering investing again, and i wanted to give some summaries about some things happening here recently. So, first, it's worth noting that the financial times just did a beautiful breakdown on a tesla moving to an older style battery, the iron, the lithium iron phosphate style batteries. Now, in the past these iron phosphate batteries were deemed to be uh.

Well, they are cheaper they're, not only deemed to be cheaper. They also were potentially deemed to be slightly less safe than the nickel and cobalt batteries. But now the marketing for these is turning around on its head, because apparently the cheaper iron phosphate batteries are actually more thermal resistant, leading to potentially fewer fires, especially in the time where the felicity ace that ship in the atlantic is still on freaking fire from uh. Electric vehicles like porsche tycans and others catching on fire and them not being able to extinguish these cheaper and safer batteries sound good.

Now, usually, these iron phosphate style batteries are used for things like golf carts and home backup systems, and right now only about 10 of the batteries used in evs are iron based, but tesla is now vowing to flip this and the biggest reason aside from that lower Potential fire risk, it's still an ev battery, though uh aside from that is price. The problem is 88 of the batteries made outside of china are using the nickel-based lithium-ion batteries. The nickel and cobalt based ones are significantly more expensive and they're deemed to have a longer range per kilogram, so uh. In other words, they have more energy density you're able to get further with the same amount of weight.

Tesla switch, however, could convince other manufacturers like a bmw or ford or gm to also consider switching over to these iron phosphate batteries. Lithium iron phosphate so lithium still component here. The problem with this or the potential problem is 95 of iron-based batteries. Right now are made in china, so this could be a big potential boost to byd and catl, which there's a big cat catl facility.

That's pretty close to giga, shanghai and giga. Shanghai is the one that's absolutely blowing up right now, not only with additional investment, but growth. Giga shanghai is now almost on track. To produce a 1 million vehicles per year.

Remember tesla in 2021, delivered 936 000 vehicles just short of the 1 million target, and that includes production from shanghai fremont and still no production yet, though from giga, berlin or giga texas, so just shanghai and fremont. Well now, shanghai alone is on the trajectory to hit 1 million vehicles per year. In fact, annualized production at the end of 2021 was already over 800 000 vehicles per year. They then injected 200 million dollars into giga shanghai in november of 2021 and expect to hire 4 000 more employees.

Shanghai is now has now surpassed fremont's production and with their proximity to catl, which is cranking out. These iron phosphate batteries. Tesla could really blow up here by using these cheaper batteries still being able to deliver safe and reliable cars at a cheaper price, really solidifying their competitive edge. I love this now.

It's not all good news for tesla. Obviously, tesla stock is getting hit pretty hard right now under the uh ukrainian drama uh. Well, russian inspired crisis here, uh right now, we're trading for about 782 dollars per share and another unfortunate headwind for tesla seems to be the lawsuit that's going on in germany. Right now see this lawsuit by environmental groups might end up leading tesla to lose their water supply contract.

If the lawsuit rules in favor of environmental groups who are challenging a license granted by its water supplier, the water supplier vasa via bante strausberg, probably screwed, that up wse could potentially have to cancel their contract with tesla and restart negotiations about where it could source water. One of the issues for this berlin giga factory, even though we're potentially within uh six weeks here, of opening up giga texas, this uh this water delay here for tesla, will not only be a current issue for getting the factory opened at all, but could also be An issue for future expansion, as the region does say they have maybe enough water to support the factory size now, but as soon as they want to expand in the future they're going to have to source water from somewhere else, and you know being in california. I know that sourcing water from other locations with pipelines isn't particularly popular as some would say. It's a pipe dream now tesla's faced a lot of challenges here, not only related to water, but also over the removal of trees and potentially risking the lives of endangered snake species.

A lot of issues here now: let's talk about palantir, so we got to talk about pounds here, but first i do quickly want to shout out our sponsor for today's video and that is ftx shout out to ftx.us check out the link down below and you'll get A ten dollars in free cryptocurrency for signing up the fact that they integrate trading view is unreal. I absolutely love the trading view, a trading platform uh, it is very easy to use and the trading tools they have available are really incredible. I generally keep this up during the day, and i just monitor the btc uh price candles here and obviously we're seeing a little bit of pain here, which it's worth noting that btc is also a well tesla holds over a billion dollars of btc. Okay.

Let's now talk about pallent here, so what's going on with palantir. Obviously, kathy wood has uh almost completely sold out of pound here. At this point, including yesterday, uh and the day before, where she sold in excess of 10 million shares per day, she's really closing out of this position here and the question is why what's happening here, kathy wood was excited about palantir, as it was diversifying away from Government sources and potentially getting into other companies, but why then, as she was buying palantir in the 20 to 30 range, would she be dumping it close to 10 to 11? And this is a big question. So i did a little bit of digging and it appears there's some concern that and this this is kind of like a little bit of, i would say, um, oh, how should you say it like at the achilles heel for palantir right now? It has to do with their investments into spec companies as a way of generating customer growth, and this is making some individuals nervous see.

As of their current report that was published on february 17th, they only acquired 34 new customers in quarter four, they did close 64 deals. 27 of those were in excess of 5 million deals, 64 were 1 million or more and 19 were 10 million or more so. These are, these are large contracts, but for a 21 billion dollar company folks are worried that if they're relying too much on too few customers, it might become difficult for them to eventually expand. Now.

Unfortunately, some of these new customer acquisitions came through the strategic investments of investing into spec deals. Now, when i actually went through their 13f filing, which shows all of the different specs that they've invested in, they only have about one percent of their entire market. Cap invested into these random sort of specs, so personally, i think maybe the spac fear is a little overblown, but just to give you an example as to why palantir could be rotating down with some of these spacks remember. Pound here was a direct listing.

It's not a spec itself, but it could be because they did. They do have a 15 million dollars that they invested into a company like ad torrent. That is now worth nine million dollars, because the spec went from ten to six dollars. They have uh babylon holdings.

They have 20.4 million dollars invested in the company. Unfortunately, that stock went from 10 dollars to 4.75. They got 12.3 million dollars in bird global. That stock went from ten dollars to three dollars and eighteen cents, black skytech.

They got three point six million dollars and that stock went from 10 dollars to 2.2 million or 2.2 dollars per share right. So we get this. These massive declines here in prices now maybe they're up on their boxed ink investment up, but potentially as much as 50. But most of these other companies they've been losing on now.

The reason they're doing these strategic investments is is their thesis is hey if we get if we partner, basically venture capital partner with some of these specs by investing in their pipe, which is a private investment into public equity. The theory here was hey. If we partner with these companies, maybe uh they'll sign contracts with us and we'll be able to sign them on as new customers. So it's kind of a way of acquiring customers, in addition to having a sales staff, they're partnering with companies and they're like hey.

By the way, let us be essentially your snowflake. Let us be your your uh, your manager of of data, so we can figure out how to streamline your logistics, streamline your sales processes. Whatever remember, palantir has two big issues: two big divisions they've got uh gotham for their their police and military use and then, of course, they've got the private side for logistics and and making sure they can squeeze whatever kind of conversions they can. Now things go a lot deeper here.

This video is not supposed to be delving into exactly what palantir does uh, but it's it's a sas, biz software as a service, one of the downsides of the sas biz, though for valentiers they've, got really high startup costs compared to some of their other competitors, their Startup costs are a lot higher because they work with a sales team to actually purposely tailor the product to their customers, and so this is when we zoom in to some of their growth figures. Hey look yeah. The top line. Growth figure shows a 34 year-over-year growth rate, which is great but remember in order to reach their 25 their 2025 targets.

They need to have an annualized growth rate, as alex carp tells us of in excess of 30, which they still say on their filings they're. Trying to get to an excess of 30 percent growth, but the problem here is the following: yeah: they hit 34 growth now, but if you take out the spec revenue, their growth was 26 percent, which sounds nominal. But if you need to hit that compounded 30 coming in at 26 because of the decline in specs and seeing spax get absolute, absolutely obliterated on the market, leaving questions as to how long we could keep relying on this sort of spac based growth. It's no surprise that pound tier is falling a little bit now.

Does that make me overall concerned for palantir? Well, look i'm overall concerned for virtually all stocks right now, so don't look at what i'm doing with my money, but let me just put it this way: i'm looking at pound tier as a potential investment, i'm not invested in pound tier i'm not short volunteer, but I like what paluntir does so that's why i've been studying palantir, and i really want to understand some more clarity as to where they're really getting their customers outside of the government, because we have seen a little bit of a slowdown in the amount of contracts they're. Getting from the government, in fact, we have seen some contraction in the government sector. We've also seen a lot of their revenues concentrated in a handful of larger commercial customers. This is why these these spec deals are bringing a lot of questions, because we're still concentrated we still haven't, spread away and really to get this stock to trade higher.

We need to beat this 30 growth, and so i think that's why we're seeing some of this concern. It's really the weight of that spac uh problem here now they are going to spend money and more money on their sales force. In fact, they expect to hire 200 more sales professionals as soon as possible, and what i thought was interesting is in their earnings calls they talk about how they're not actually just trying to hire sales people they're trying to hire engineers and professionals that can actually understand The product and then sell it, which personally i support, i think, if you are selling a product you need to understand the product inside and out and then selling the product becomes. Second nature.

That's why, when i became a real estate agent, the first thing i did was: okay, i got to buy a house, i got another product, i got to know the process myself, you know anyway, we do have a big boost, though, and contribution margin. This would be like their revenue minus their variable costs, and basically you want your revenue. Minus variable cost to be really really high, because that means your sales dollars are more effective, so the commissions you're paying are more effective at bringing in more top line and we are killing it compared to what we were doing pre-covet so palutear has had a huge Boost really, since their ipo not sure how much covet was involved, but since they're ipo really really huge boost. Now, why is kathy potentially selling? This is the big question.

Some folks are somewhat confused here and they argue that kathy wood has this sort of halo effect. Where, when kathy would buy something, she pumps it up like pound here, 20 to 30 dollars now, when she's selling she's actually dragging it down? Of course, a lot of folks are now joking that okay. Well, now that kathy's out, we can finally go to the moon on palantir, but people are still now speculating. Why would she sell palantir to buy things like roku and i have to agree? I thought this was kind of interesting, because when i read the roku earnings call, all i heard were wages are going up, which is their number one factor in opex.

Their component prices across the board are still creating significant issues for them and while some prices have come down, they expect prices to remain significantly elevated uh. They say that they're uh they that tvs, are a very low margin, business and they're, trying to pass the costs on to their consumers and that they're paying more money as well for their engineers, trying to understand how to use different system on a chips. So they can use different suppliers and then customize them for the tvs that they're trying to uh implement with with their chipsets, and so this is all increasing costs. But what blew my mind was at this like in one paragraph: they're like yeah tvs are a really low margin business and we have to pass on the cost, but, on the other hand, they're talking about how manufacturers have pricing power and how now they're thinking about Becoming their own manufacturer of tvs, so they too can have that pricing power, but now they're trying to get pricing power in a very low margin business.

So i'm like wait a minute. Personally, i look at rook. I'm like are y'all confused in terms of how to make money, because y'all are supposed to be, as you say, the checkout counter for ads when people decide what to watch we're not netflix youtube, who? What are we gon na watch right? That's supposed to be you guys and you guys are supposed to advertise and and get premium payment for those sorts of placements now you're thinking about manufacturing your own tvs. When you yourself say this is a low margin, business and and it's it's super competitive and yet kathy's behind that one.

I don't know i'd love to have a conversation with arc and and hopefully i will have the blessing of having a conversation with arc soon, because i just want to ask those questions and i think any investor would want to ask those questions and just have a Little bit more clarity, because i'm sure there is a reason i just don't know what it is. I do, however, know that there is some pain for peloton. Listen to this so remember when peloton had those recalls for uh for well a lot of their recalls on their tread, because a child died, two, which is absolutely horrific. I mean i have two children.

I don't even want to think about it anyway. So a child died. They recall these four thousand dollar treadmills that that really just started getting released to their customer base. Well now it turns out that apparently uh they had a whole uh background project going all on called quote project tin man and project tin man was about how they were covering up rust on the internal components of the peloton bikes in the past.

They would basically send these as not saleable or put these aside as not saleable, because they'd get them from manufacturers in taiwan. They'd say: okay: this is not a saleable product, we'll put this into the refurb pile, we'll refurb it and then sell it as essentially a refurb, but we're not going to deliver that to our customer, which we peloton doesn't even call our customers customers. They call them. Members because they want to act like they love their customers, so much right well, apparently, in september of 2021 around the time they started having all these issues with their stock falling and issues of of uh, you know like not being able to sell enough the products, Because not only was their supply catching up, but they started having a lot of defects in these supplies or in these in these products and these bikes, because they started noticing rust.

They ended up issuing statements saying well. We don't believe that the rust actually affects the reliability of the product or functionality, performance, durability or quality of product. So this is just cosmetic oxidation. It's on the inside.

You can't see it anyway, we'll cover it up and we'll deliver the product anyway, and this got so bad that employees within peloton leaked this stuff. Eight of them leaked this to the media because they were fed up with this about how a company that's like all about their customers, is actually covering up rust on the products and then excluding rust from their warranty agreement to the point where customers would call their Support line and say hey, i just got a brand new bike, it's already rusted what gives and they're like sorry rust isn't covered like what this is terrible. I mean this is this is not a good uh expose here for for peloton, but i'm glad we know about it, because it's it's disgusting, i hate to say it uh. Obviously, a lot of consumer stocks under pressure right now, a lot having to do with underwhelming gross margin and supply chain issues.

We know this we know. Obviously ukraine is helping push a lot of these stocks down ukraine and russia. I do think that buying opportunities are being created and we do have a federal reserve, who more mostly broadly believes that, while inflation, i'm sorry, not inflation, while growth might slow down towards the end of the year, they do believe that the economy is still quite strong And they do expect growth to continue, and so they don't necessarily believe that inflation is going to last. It seems like they still believe that inflation is transitory.

The economy is doing well, let's not try to choke out the economy to deal with the boogeyman of inflation. If the boogeyman of inflation's going to go away alone, uh, however, they do acknowledge that it is possible that growth could slow towards the end of the year, and this is creating some concerns for consumer discretionary companies, because people have less money now potentially or will have Less money in 2022 they still have large bank balances, so it's leading to pain at companies like home depot and macy's and etsy, and some of these other consumer discretionaries, because not only are we seeing margins under pressure but we're finally starting to see certain segments get Hit, for example, home depot saying the do-it-yourself segment is getting hit a lot more. The pro business is doing very well, but the do-it-yourself business is slowing down a lot. Their stock was just down like nine percent, but big backlog of uh orders from their pro customers.

Macy's is starting to see some of their customers get pissed about price ranges on things like mattresses and sofas, so they're starting to realize they can't just keep raising prices, which is actually a good thing to finally keep a lid on inflation. Now we do also have intel, apparently uh, now coming out with a new bitcoin mining chip. This is really going to be one of the first challenges to the chinese rig manufacturers. This is going to be called the bonanza mine chip.

I think this is kind of interesting, apparently square block and argo blockchain are expected to be some of the first to get this. I keep getting asked about hydrogen as well, and i'm being told uh through some research here now that listen to this, when it comes to hydrogen, i mean this. This is wild. Apparently, airbus is trying to test hydrogen-powered planes.

What they're going to do is they're going to have a normal plane with four conventional engines and then they're going to put a hydrogen engine on the back, but listen to some of the insanity that they have to go through. So they have to put 400 kilograms of liquid hydrogen. So what is that, like? I don't know six seven people worth of liquid hydrogen that will be stored in four tanks at minus 253 degrees celsius. Then they need to develop which doesn't even exist yet a cryo.

I can't even say that cryogenic distribution system that'll be developed to accommodate the fuel at that temperature they'll and then because hydrogen burns at a higher temperature they'll have to use certain materials and coatings and special cooling devices. That also don't really exist yet, and they expect that this to be such a complex engineering feat that they don't actually think they'll have uh hydrogen as a partial fuel for their flights until at least 20 35.. At the same time, we've got commodity prices, just absolutely going nuts listen to some of this. We know already that natural gas and oil have gone nuts up 20 to 25, but if you're worried about inflation, listen to this aluminum, this is year to date.

Okay, so this year is only seven weeks: old, okay, 17 aluminum, 18, nickel, six to 26 percent for iron ore, depending on the type 25 for soybeans 13, wheat, 9, coffee, 33, hogs, 11, lumber, 35 palm oil. The only thing that's down is sugar down. Two percent copper is roughly flat, palladian's uh, palladium is up 28 and gold is up about four point: two five percent of your date. So i i don't know that doesn't sound good for inflation by the way, uh, international or intercontinental hotel group.

That's the holiday inn and such they uh, they say: they're, 70 back to pre-covet levels. However, their number of rooms have fallen about point six percent as they've closed some businesses, some hotels, whereas hilton and marriott, have actually been growing their room council anyway uh. These are all sort of investing ideas that i'm watching and keeping an eye on. So hopefully this is helpful to you.

If you like this sort of video, let me know in the link down or in the comments down below and maybe we'll make more of these all right thanks. So much bye and quick reminder to check out that link to ftx in the description down below.