Carlson is a long-term quality/compounder stock-picker who runs a real-money book (the Passive Income Portfolio + the Story Fund). "View" is his explicit stance in this video. Research: QT Qualtrim · SA Seeking Alpha · STK Stock Analysis.
| Ticker | Name | Research | View | What he said | At |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UBER | Uber Technologies | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Pick #1 and the clearest dislocation: "a battleground stock" trading at a 24 PE on ~20% revenue growth and high-teens EPS growth, at a ~4% normalized free cash flow yield, because AV risk "is being priced into the stock aggressively." His answer: "I don't believe that AVs will disrupt Uber to the extent that's being priced into the stock. I don't actually think it's going to be close." Waymo's 500,000 weekly rides is what Uber does every 17 minutes — "Uber is 600 times bigger" and the distance "is getting larger, not closer" — and because Uber already has network density everywhere, it "can be late to the game with AVs and still be in the lead." He's bought $24,000 (+~$1,500), a small but growing position, and sees $150–160 in three or four years from ~$70. Honest caveat: "Uber may, in fact, get disrupted. Maybe the stock goes to zero. And that's why we invest in more than one company." | 7:51 |
| META | Meta Platforms | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Pick #2, down 8% this year and 21% over the past year on two bear cases he sizes very differently — the kids-safety lawsuits are "the smaller" one (settlements, product controls, legal fees), while the real fear is capex with "no way to directly monetize it" because Meta isn't leasing out compute. His bull case is neither the ads-improvement argument nor superintelligence: Zuckerberg's same-day essay makes clear the spend is about not being "reliant or bottlenecked by other companies" — the Apple App Store / Android toll booth again ("roughly twice as profitable… if they didn't have to go through Apple"), with Anthropic and OpenAI cast as "the Apple and Google of AI." The gap to the frontier "has been closing quite quickly," it makes Meta full-stack and wide-moat, and the downside is protected: a failed race can be turned into a neocloud that "would pay for the investments that Meta's already made with an attractive return." "A rare case of a company that has huge ambitions, huge potential upside, but a lot of the downside is already priced into the stock and largely limited." | 13:10 |
| NFLX | Netflix | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Pick #3 — down 37% over the past year "because of a narrative, a bear case, that I disagree with": the claim that engagement per subscriber is falling. He answers it metric by metric — the CEO says the season-1→season-2 drop-off has improved, subscribers grew last quarter, and total engagement rose 2% year-over-year. Per-user watch time is down only because the saturated high-TV markets (US, Canada, Europe) are already penetrated and new growth is in regions that watch less TV — "that's not a concern intrinsically about the company." He also rejects the like-for-like comparison: an hour of a series you're invested in is not the same object as an hour of scrolling Instagram reels. Underneath, "the company fundamentally is growing quickly, margins are moving up, their free cash flow is enormous, they're doing lots of buybacks" — "another one that offers a unique value in a market where most things are overvalued." | 18:04 |
| GOOGL | Alphabet | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Both a graded past call and a live defence. The past call: accumulated through the stuck $150–180 range (biggest buys ~168) into "a massive position," built by "correctly understand[ing] the bear case… and why it doesn't make sense." The live one: he takes the other side of SemiAnalysis' "Gemini is cooked" article, which says DeepMind's talent exits (Demis, Jeff Dean) drop Google's odds of reaching state-of-the-art again "to zero." Carlson: the same shop called Gemini the best model in the world in November — "if Google is able to create a state-of-the-art model not even 1 year ago, then that means there is some chance that they could do it again… These four or five people made that impossible[?]" He does agree with the report's second half: Google is fine even at second tier because it is deliberately putting more money into Google Cloud than into training models — cloud that "could grow above 100%" with operating margins ticking up "every single quarter. Now up to 35%." "I would not rule out Google so hastily." | 21:39 |
| MSFT | Microsoft | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Held and endorsed, but explicitly not a buy-today call: at $507 "I'm not highlighting this one as great value or one that you have to jump and race to buy, cuz it's already gone up." He uses it as the worked example of the method — the time to highlight it was January 2025 at $220 (his "Big Tech is cheap" video), when something was visibly wrong; he bought at 244 and around there, and it has since outperformed the S&P by going up ~120%. "I have a huge holding in Microsoft, $82,000 with $40,500 in gains… In my other portfolio… $25,000 worth with $13,000 in gains." | 1:44 |
| ASML | ASML Holding | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | The second graded call, and again no longer the dislocation: at $1,750 and "close to its all-time highs," "I don't talk as much about ASML anymore." A year ago at ~$740 he was making videos consoling investors through a −10% post-earnings day — "I don't think it changes anything with the company" — while buying it himself ($8,000 at $719, $5,000 at $750, $10,000 at $750). Up ~150% since; "a $124,000 position with $91,000 in the green." | 3:28 |
| AMZN | Amazon | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | The most recent call to have played out: highlighted at the start of the year as a top pick on the argument that "Amazon is being underestimated with AWS," backed by a dedicated "AWS is going to explode" video charting the reacceleration and the estimate revisions that would follow. "Amazon now looks like it owns a complete juggernaut" — +12% in the past month, +22% YTD, and on a ~$170 cost basis it has moved ~$100 above it: "a massive position, $200,000 with $77,000 in the green." Used as evidence for the pattern rather than re-argued. | 5:15 |
| AAPL | Apple | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Referenced only as the gatekeeper in the Meta argument, not as an investment. The App Store's "very intense terms and conditions," review of "every single app update that Meta does," and a "history of favoring their own products and services on their platform above Meta's" are what Zuckerberg says costs him roughly half his profitability; the fee/toll-booth dynamic repeats on Android. The one comparative jab: Meta is going full-stack so it isn't "reliant on licensing other AIs like Apple now is." No stance on the stock. | 14:08 |
| Waymo | Waymo (Alphabet, private unit) | — | Neutral | The entire Uber bear case, and treated with respect: "Waymo is no joke. It's the real deal. It's scaling rapidly" — fleet growing, entering new cities, and succeeding on its own as well as through the Uber partnership. Carlson's counter is arithmetic and structural, not dismissive: 500,000 rides a week is 17 minutes of Uber volume, and "the challenge for Waymo is they need to have network density in every place that they go" — Miami needs enough Waymos to serve Miami — whereas "Uber has to earn" nothing, it already has the density globally. No view on Waymo as an asset. | 10:15 |
| Anthropic | Anthropic (private) | — | Neutral | One half of the AI duopoly framing that carries the Meta thesis: "there's two companies that are leading the AI race, Anthropic and OpenAI. They're almost like the Apple and Google of AI." Zuckerberg's fear — and Carlson's stated bull case for Meta — is that the pair end up "duopolistic bottleneck gatekeepers to all AI for everyone," the phone-platform outcome repeated. Also named as the flagship benchmark Gemini is measured against. No investment call. | 15:09 |
| OpenAI | OpenAI (private) | — | Neutral | The other half of the same duopoly framing — the two model leaders Meta is spending to avoid depending on, because a supplier "can determine how you use it, how much you use, what type of guardrails. They can discontinue your use at any time." Cited alongside Anthropic as the frontier bar Meta hasn't cleared ("they don't have a flagship model, they're not state-of-the-art") and as the models Gemini is being ranked below by SemiAnalysis. No investment call. | 15:09 |
| OPEN | Opendoor Technologies | QT · SA · STK · FA | Negative | The fail-of-the-week exhibit. Keith Rabois defended it on CNBC in 2021 as GAAP-profitable and dismissed stock-based compensation as "fake" — "when a company gives away shares, equity from other investors, it just prints more of them"; Carlson's rebuttal is that this is a real expense, and Uber's own CFO says so publicly ("Stock comp is not one of those items"). The verdict is the chart: since that interview "the stock has literally gone nowhere. And most of the time, people have been bag holding this one for over 5 years. It's just been obliterated." Used as the cautionary case against adjusted-earnings storytelling, not as a short idea. | 26:13 |
"View" is Joseph Carlson's stance in this video, not a price rating. Positive = the three new picks (UBER, META, NFLX), the defended GOOGL, and the three graded past calls he still holds (MSFT, ASML, AMZN — endorsed but explicitly no longer the dislocation); Neutral = referenced without a call (AAPL as the App Store gatekeeper in Meta's argument, Waymo as the AV threat, Anthropic and OpenAI as the AI duopoly); Negative = OPEN, the fail-of-the-week chart. Research: QT Qualtrim · SA Seeking Alpha · STK Stock Analysis. Named in passing and intentionally left out of the table: SemiAnalysis (a research firm, not a security — the "Gemini is cooked" article), Chevron (only as "different companies pay for the gas stations" in the asset-light analogy), PayPal (only as Keith Rabois' résumé), CNBC, and the people Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Demis Hassabis, Jeff Dean, Keith Rabois and Deirdre Bosa.
A jargon-free summary of the thesis behind each substantive name — what it is and why he holds that view. (Plain-language companion to the table above; renders on each ticker's consolidated page.)
Uber runs the app that matches people who want rides with drivers who have cars. The market has decided that self-driving cars — mainly Google's Waymo — will eventually take that business away, and the share price reflects that fear: the stock trades at 24 times earnings while revenue grows about 20% a year and profit per share grows in the high teens, and it throws off roughly 4% of its market value in cash each year once you adjust for insurance money it holds temporarily. That is a cheap price for a fast-growing business.
Carlson's argument is that the fear is out of proportion. Uber never had to buy the expensive parts of its own business: the roads were paid for by taxpayers, the fuel stations by oil companies, the cars by the drivers themselves. Uber only supplied the layer that connects them, which is why it could spread across the world so quickly. A robotaxi company has the opposite problem — it must buy and physically place enough cars in every single city before anyone in that city gets a usable service. Waymo currently does about 500,000 rides a week; Uber does that many every 17 minutes, "600 times bigger," and the gap is widening rather than closing.
That asymmetry is what makes the timing risk survivable. Because Uber already has enough riders and drivers everywhere ("network density"), it can simply add self-driving cars into its existing app whenever they become good and cheap — "Uber can be late to the game with AVs and still be in the lead," even by four years. He has bought $24,000 so far, sees the stock at $150–160 in three or four years from around $70, and is blunt that he could be wrong: "Maybe the stock goes to zero. And that's why we invest in more than one company."
Meta owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and is spending enormous sums on data centres, chips and AI training. Investors dislike this because, unlike Amazon or Microsoft, Meta doesn't rent that computing power out to anyone — there is no invoice at the end of the spending. (A separate worry, lawsuits over the apps' effects on children, Carlson considers minor: settlements, tighter teen controls, some legal fees.)
The usual defence is that AI makes the ads and feeds better. Carlson thinks the real reason is different, and Zuckerberg spelled it out in a long essay published that same day: he refuses to depend on someone else's AI. If you build your product on a supplier's model, that supplier decides how much you can use, what you're allowed to do with it, and can cut you off. Zuckerberg has lived this before — Apple reviews every Meta app update, favours its own products, and charges App Store fees he says cost Meta roughly half its potential profit. Now Anthropic and OpenAI look set to become "the Apple and Google of AI," and this time Meta has the cash to refuse that outcome rather than accept it.
What makes it investable rather than merely principled is the floor under the bet. If Meta never reaches the frontier, it still owns a vast amount of computing hardware, and it can rent that out — becoming what the industry calls a "neocloud." That is a mediocre business compared with social media, but a real one, and it "would pay for the investments that Meta's already made with an attractive return." So the upside is a genuine shot at independence and superintelligence, while much of the downside is already in the price and structurally limited.
Netflix has fallen 37% over the past year on a single story: that people are watching less of it per subscriber, so the product must be losing its grip. Carlson thinks the story is wrong on its own terms and contradicted by the company's numbers.
His first objection is that "watch time" isn't one thing. An hour spent inside a series you're genuinely invested in is not the same as an hour scrolling short clips while eating lunch — the two produce different levels of attachment, so counting them in the same unit misleads.
The second objection is factual, claim by claim. The idea that viewers abandon shows after season one: the CEO says the drop-off from season 1 to season 2 has actually improved. The idea that subscribers are leaving: they grew last quarter. The idea that engagement is falling: total engagement rose 2% year-over-year. Watch time per user has slipped, but for a mundane reason — the countries that watch the most television (the US, Canada, Europe) are already saturated, so new subscribers increasingly come from places that watch less TV overall. That lowers the average without saying anything bad about the business.
Behind the narrative the company is growing quickly, margins are rising, free cash flow is large and being used for buybacks, and churn looks healthy — which is why he counts it among the few genuinely undervalued things left "in a market where most things are overvalued."
A respected research firm, SemiAnalysis, published a piece arguing that senior researchers leaving Google DeepMind mean Gemini will never again be the world's best AI model — and stated the odds as literally "zero," not "close to zero." Carlson takes the other side, on a simple consistency point: the same firm called Gemini the best model in the world less than a year ago. If Google could do it then, from behind and as the underdog, the probability of doing it again cannot be zero.
But he agrees with the article's second half, which matters more for the stock: Google is fine even if its models are permanently second-tier, because it is deliberately shifting money away from training models and into Google Cloud — the business that rents computing power to other companies. That business could roughly double in size over the coming year, and it is becoming more profitable as it grows, with operating margins now around 35%. Given a choice between owning the best model and owning a large, insulated, high-return cloud business, he'd take the cloud.
He also uses Google as the case study for his own method: he accumulated it while it was stuck between $150 and $180 and sentiment was poor, with his biggest purchases around $168. The skill wasn't spotting a good company — it was "correctly understand[ing] the bear case… and why it doesn't make sense."
Microsoft is a large holding — $82,000 in one account (up $40,500) and $25,000 in another (up $13,000) — and it is up around 120% since he highlighted it. But the point of raising it here is the opposite of a recommendation: at $507 the opportunity is gone. "I'm not highlighting this one as great value or one that you have to jump and race to buy, cuz it's already gone up."
The moment that mattered was January 2025, when the stock was $220 and something looked wrong with it. That is the uncomfortable rule the whole episode rests on: the only time a quality business is cheap is when there is a visible problem, so the buying has to happen while the news feels bad, not after it feels good.
ASML makes the machines that print the circuitry onto advanced computer chips. A year ago it fell 10% in a day after an earnings report, and Carlson made videos arguing the drop changed nothing about the business — while buying it himself in size ($8,000 at $719, then $5,000 and $10,000 at $750).
It is now $1,750, up roughly 150%, worth $124,000 to him with $91,000 of profit — and precisely because of that, he has stopped talking about it. A stock near its all-time high is no longer a dislocation; it is a position you hold, not one you're urging people into.
Amazon is the most recent of his calls to pay off. At the start of the year he argued the market was underrating AWS, Amazon's business renting computing power to other companies, and made a dedicated video predicting the growth rate would accelerate and force analysts to raise their forecasts. That is what happened.
The stock is up 12% in the past month and 22% for the year; against a cost basis of about $170 it has gained roughly $100 a share, making it a $200,000 position with $77,000 of profit. He raises it here as evidence for the method rather than to re-argue it — the same shape as Microsoft, ASML and Google before it: a high-quality, fast-growing business that was being discounted for a reason he judged didn't hold up.
Opendoor buys homes directly from sellers and resells them. It appears here as a cautionary tale rather than an investment view. In a 2021 CNBC interview, investor Keith Rabois insisted the company was profitable under standard accounting rules; when shown the reported losses, he dismissed share-based pay to employees as a "fake" expense.
It isn't fake. When a company pays staff in newly issued shares, existing owners end up with a smaller slice of the same business — a genuine cost that simply doesn't move cash. Uber's own finance chief made the point publicly: "Stock comp is not one of those items. More companies should include it as a real cost."
The verdict is the price chart. Since that interview the stock "has literally gone nowhere," and "most of the time, people have been bag holding this one for over 5 years." The lesson Carlson draws is about adjusted-earnings storytelling generally: when a defence of a business requires deleting a real expense from the accounts, the business usually isn't earning what its promoter claims.
Summary & timestamps derived from the public YouTube video (transcript in transcript.txt) for personal study. Not investment advice. © The Joseph Carlson Show for source material.