Title: I Just Bought Two NEW Stocks Show: Joseph Carlson After Hours (YouTube) Guest: Joseph Carlson (host; individual investor / The Investing Channel) Date: 2026-06-23 URL: https://youtu.be/skTafAkldz4 Length: ~48 min Note: fillers (um/uh/you know/stutters) removed; wording otherwise verbatim. Timestamps from the YouTube transcript kept exactly. Bracketed lines summarize the off-ticker fail-of-the-week segment.
00:00 Today on the Joseph Carlson Show, I added two new stocks to the portfolio. They are Uber and DoorDash. Now, this is not just me buying Uber and DoorDash. This is me expanding my portfolio into durable quality growth companies. And this is going to be the game plan throughout the remainder of 2026. These are not the only buys that I'll be doing.
00:20 I'm going to be doing buy after buy after buy. But instead of going the direction where the market's going, where everybody's piling into AI companies, infrastructure plays, bottleneck companies, valuations are getting stretched, investors are getting skeptical. We have momentum investors piling into those stocks. While everybody's zigging, I'm going to be zagging and buying quality durable growth companies that have been left behind.
00:44 Uber and DoorDash represent the first of these buys. But I have a game plan going out throughout 2026 that I plan to go over in this episode. So, what we're going to be doing is going over these two companies, why I'm buying them today, how they fit into the portfolio, and the plan throughout the remainder of 2026.
01:02 And then of course, we also have the fail of the week, which in this case is Polymarket. As we know, I hate prediction markets. I've been no fan of these from the beginning. They offer to pay creators obscene amounts of money to sponsor their videos. That's why virtually everybody's sponsored by Polymarket or Kalshi.
03:10 Now, we'll start things off by addressing the two new positions that I added to the portfolio. It is Uber and DoorDash. I initiated an investment in both of these positions late last week. And you can see them added to the passive income portfolio here.
03:28 We have all the OG companies, the MasterCard, Meta, ASML, some of my Google here, S&P Global, Costco, Microsoft, Texas Roadhouse, Moody's, and then we have the two new positions here, DoorDash and Uber. I've added $10,000 to DoorDash and $10,000 to Uber. They are a split buy, so I'm equally buying both of these companies and I plan on continuing to buy them.
03:50 In terms of buying strategy, I'll be adding to these positions over the next couple of months every single week. So as I get more cash flow, as I earn more money, I'll be buying a little bit more of DoorDash and Uber every single week, every single month, and trying to build these positions up. I want to get them to the point where they're around 30 to $40,000 positions apiece.
04:11 So each one of them will be mid-size positions. In total, they'll be a very large position split between the two. At 30 or $40,000, that is a meaningful position.
04:27 So, of course, there's the obvious questions. Why Uber, why DoorDash, and why now? And I think to answer that, I first want to back up a little bit and restate where I think we are in this market. Uber and DoorDash are just two companies, but they play a broader role in overall how I'm trying to position my portfolio.
04:53 What I believe is happening is this is truly a bifurcated market. It is a market where you have a group of winners that everybody's focused on, and then you have companies that are being left behind, being forgotten about, the valuation multiples are coming down, and they are these so-called losers. Now, they're not losers because they're fundamentally weak, but they're losers because the jingly keys, the excitement, everything that's going on is going on with these AI bottleneck infrastructure stocks.
05:20 Those are the ones that are getting all the attention. And this is readily evident in all the data. For example, one of the companies in my portfolio that's done tremendously well, it is my best performer over the past year, is ASML. ASML, if we zoom in on this, it's up so much.
05:44 I'm up 177% on this stock. This is time-weighted returns. I'm up $103,000 in gains on this company. My average share price is $724. I bought $56,000 at that price. Now, this stock trades at $1,900 per share. So I bought a bunch of it at around 700 bucks. It's gone up like crazy. They're buying back shares. They're growing. Demand's growing for this company. I initiated this position in 2025.
06:28 I bought the position size that I like, which is that nice $40 to $60,000 range. ASML from there took off and continued to compound, and I hadn't sold a share. In fact, last Friday was the first time I've ever sold a share of ASML. And I just trimmed the position by 10%. So my position size was around $165,000, and I sold $16,000 and reallocated that $16,000 with $8,000 apiece to DoorDash and Uber.
06:59 Last week marks the first time I've been willing to take any money out of the stock, and I do so with reluctance because ASML is an incredible company. Nothing about this company has become weaker. In fact, ASML has become structurally a stronger, better, more monopolistic, faster-growing company over the past year. Now, despite that, ASML is a company that has grown in valuation and multiple expansion and excitement faster than the fundamentals have grown.
07:29 The stock price has undoubtedly raced ahead. The stock has traded up to a near 50 forward PE ratio. It's down to a 1.3% free cash flow yield. So ASML represents one of the companies that is caught up in this AI hype. Now, there is a lot of hype and a lot of true fundamentals to justify the valuation.
07:49 So while ASML remains a monopolistic, amazing company, I think that it's prudent to take some off the table, and I've taken 10% off the table. I still believe the company will do fantastic. That's why I have $150,000 still remaining in this company. I want to be crystal clear here. I am not bearish on ASML.
08:09 I'm not selling out of ASML. I did a 10% trim of this company to reallocate that money into companies that I believe are being left behind. ASML is not the only company that's in this dynamic of a stock that's in the right place at the right time. There are many companies across this entire vertical of semiconductor companies and related stocks that have gone parabolic.
08:34 We can look at the other obvious example, ASML's primary customer, which is TSM. TSM is in the green today. It continues to go up. Like ASML, it's up 50% this year. Over the past year, it's up 122%. TSM is where all the action is. People love this bottleneck stock today.
08:55 They love semiconductors. They love AI. We can also look at Micron Technologies. This is one of the ones that all the attention's going to. Not only has Micron caught the attention of true AI enthusiasts, it's caught the attention of just momentum investors. Lots of people are fleeing crypto, selling out of MicroStrategy, and buying Micron.
09:15 They're shifting from one exciting stock to another. And the stock price clearly reflects this enthusiasm. Year-to-date, it's up 277%. Over the trailing year, it's up a staggering 875%. Now, the fundamentals are also going parabolic. So part of this is very warranted.
09:36 Look at their last quarter. It looks like a mistake. It's not. This is truly how much their revenue is growing. But this is where all the excitement is. When we look at another company that's had this explosive bottleneck performance, we have SanDisk. It's a multi-thousand dollar share price. It's moving up hundreds of dollars per day.
09:56 Investors are looking far and wide for any company that could be included in this basket of AI winners. Even companies as old as Intel, if they're making products that are relevant and exciting in the AI world, their stock price is going to reflect it. Intel is up a staggering 251% year-to-date. Over the past year, it's up 553%.
10:35 Even the companies that are in construction, that are building all of this stuff, you find companies like Caterpillar. Caterpillar is now a $1,000-plus stock. It is up 70% year-to-date. In the past 1 year, it's up 176%. Since they make bulldozers, excavators, and a lot of other construction equipment, this stock is going up like crazy.
11:16 Everything in this entire chain related to AI is going up. And the reason that I bring this up is not to say that this is unwarranted or that investors are dumb buying into these companies. I don't believe that, and I believe a lot of this momentum in prices is justified. In fact, I own one of these companies. I'm a big shareholder of ASML, and I believe that everybody should have a leg in the AI race.
11:37 We should have investments that are exposed to this bullishness. If not, you're missing out on all the momentum in the market today. But like I said before, I don't think it's healthy to go all in on this because I already see some cracks that investors are becoming more skeptical of how much this AI momentum can last.
11:55 We're seeing a level of enthusiasm pushing these companies to valuations that I believe put them in a more difficult to justify situation. And so I'm not sure how much longer all of this hype can go on. Maybe 6 to 8 months, and maybe 12 to 18 months. We don't know, but it's going to end eventually.
12:32 For example, this chart here shows the different contributions to the S&P 500's performance. So if we look at the S&P 500 overall, it's up around 8 to 9% year-to-date. But if we look at the factors that are causing the S&P 500 to go up, it's broken down in this chart. We have energy. S&P energy is above zero, a positive contribution.
12:54 Then we have S&P AI. Any direct AI stock is doing the heavy lifting. You have all the AI stocks that make up the huge majority of the positive momentum in the S&P 500. Then we have everything else. So if you look at the S&P 500, you take out AI, and you take out energy, it's negative. The market would be in the red this year.
13:17 And likewise, if you have a portfolio that is primarily not energy stocks and not AI stocks, your portfolio's in the red this year. That's the factors that's driving these markets. Basically, if you haven't piled into AI stocks this year, you are underperforming the market.
13:59 But the warning here is that this type of momentum is almost always temporary. And like any type of strong momentum in the market that we've seen historically, it's almost inevitably followed with sharp unpredictable pullbacks. I don't know when those pullbacks will happen.
14:16 But rather than trying to predict when the pullback will happen, rather than trying to buy these companies at ever-increasing valuations, I am rather buying the stocks right here. The ones that are being forgotten about. I'm buying a select number of them that I believe are high-quality companies.
14:34 The basket of companies that I'm focusing on building up my portfolio the most today are high-quality durable growth companies that are not inherently AI stocks. In essence, what I'm trying to do is buy the companies that the market is not focused on today, but I believe the market will be focused on once the AI hype fades.
14:55 This is a strategy that Peter Lynch often employed. He said, quote, "Invest in simple companies that appear dull, mundane, or out of favor and haven't caught the fancy of Wall Street." Peter Lynch frequently talked about investing in great companies that were not in hype.
15:27 Right now, there's lots of them. There's stocks like Spotify, FICO, Shopify, Copart, you name it. There's a lot of companies that you could pick from, and the list is growing. There's lots of non-AI companies that are getting left behind. But there's a couple reasons that I chose Uber and DoorDash in particular.
15:45 First of all, if we look at this chart, this clearly shows the price performance discrepancy between the semiconductors, which is SMH, that's a semiconductor ETF, and Uber and DoorDash's price. If we look at just the past year, Uber is down 16%.
16:05 DoorDash is down 23%, and semiconductor stocks are up 156%. Now, if we look at Uber and DoorDash even more closely over a longer time period, they're well off their highs. Uber was at $100 per share, and now it's in the $70 per share range.
16:24 So it's had about 30% of its market cap chopped off from the highs. DoorDash in a similar situation, over the past 5 years, this stock is down even more. It's down about 40-43%, depending on the day. So both of these stocks have moved down big while the rest of the market is continuing to get led by these semiconductor stocks.
16:40 But if we look at Uber and DoorDash's fundamental performance, both of them are just growing their revenue like crazy. Uber, the trailing 12-month revenue is going up like crazy. Uber's a massive company because they have the ride sharing, they have the food delivery. They're by far the biggest ride sharing company.
17:15 So if we look at Uber, it grew its revenue 26% CAGR. DoorDash is growing at 56% revenue growth. I believe over the coming 3 to 5 years that Uber will continue to grow revenue above 10%, maybe the 10 to 15% range, and I believe that DoorDash will continue to grow revenue in the high teens, 17 to 20%.
17:37 Both of these companies will grow revenue far faster than the S&P 500. If we look at other KPIs, we can look at the amount of trips that Uber's doing. The amount of trips that they're doing is going up like crazy. It's been going up 15% per year. Uber's up to 14 billion trips, which is an insane amount.
18:37 Now, another underrated aspect of these companies is they are subscription companies, they're membership companies. Similar to Costco, where you have a lot of revenue but it's pretty low margin. Costco makes the majority of their actual net income by their membership model. Well, these companies have the same opportunity.
18:57 They sign up for DashPass, the DoorDash membership, or Uber One, which is their membership, and that gives them a bunch of benefits. Because this lowers the fees, it makes a clear value proposition. The churn rate is very low. We have Uber growing theirs to 50 million members. We have DoorDash at 35 million.
20:24 For example, on Uber, they give a KPI of active users on the platform. It's like 200 million. The gross bookings continuing to grow like crazy. And then the financial profile, the free cash flow of Uber is a very pretty graph. It goes up and to the right. They hit that point of operating leverage. So Uber is a highly profitable free cash flow generative company.
21:05 We also look at DoorDash. All the different metrics with their orders, gross volume, EBITDA, all of these graphs are going up and to the right. And DoorDash actually is a profitable company. It's not as far along in its monetization and operating leverage as Uber, but it's already reached profitability. They're generating $1.75 billion in free cash flow as of the trailing 12 months.
21:44 When we look at some of the concerns, there's some questions about the moat and predictability of these companies going forward. For example, with Uber, the primary concern that I've voiced many times is AVs. In particular, we have companies like Waymo that pose a significant threat to Uber because Waymo has excellent self-driving technology.
22:20 Waymo could choose to go their own way. That poses a threat to the forward-looking growth of Uber, and that is the primary reason that Uber trades at such a low valuation today, such a high free cash flow yield despite its incredible success. It is a question and concern of Waymo, of Zoox, and other robo taxis.
22:38 Uber knows full well about these risks, and they have invested aggressively into partnering with basically every robo taxi company that they can. Dara knows the importance of becoming the dominant aggregator, and he is doing everything he can to shift this company into aggregation mode, and that includes inviting robo taxis into the fleet of vehicles.
23:02 Uber shares lowered this morning after the company said it will bring its own robo taxi service to Houston, a launch that would put Uber up against Waymo and Tesla in one of the only US markets where all three will be competing. Commercial service is slated for next year, but testing is already underway with Lucid supplying the vehicles and Nuro providing the self-driving tech.
23:24 It's the latest sign of how dramatically Uber has reversed course on autonomous vehicles. Six years ago, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi sold off Uber's in-house self-driving unit. Now, Uber's said to be spending more than $10 billion to re-enter the market through partnerships. Uber's invested hundreds of millions into Lucid and Nuro and expanded its purchase commitment with Lucid to at least 35,000 robo taxis.
24:03 Uber understands the importance of having this technology within their own network. And although there will be some market share loss from Waymo or Tesla in the future, Uber has such a gargantuan lead. They have done 14.17 billion trips in the last 12 months.
24:43 With Uber, that risk is primarily AV disruption. But with how big Uber already is and the fact that they already control 70% market share of ride sharing in the United States, I think that that chance is very small. With DoorDash, they own 60 to 70% market share food delivery within the United States.
25:01 It's already a deeply entrenched market. Both of them are huge concentrated market winners within the US, and they're the biggest ones going across Europe as well. I believe both of them will play hugely important roles in the future as this new type of dynamic of food delivery and ride sharing continues to grow.
25:23 Now, the first bit of news that we get into today is that Google stock is going down. It's down 6% on the day. Huge red day. So, what's going on with Google? Well, the big news over the weekend is that Google has faced its worst day because of AI concerns after high-profile exits.
25:45 The brain drain concerns began last week when Google's vice president of engineering and co-lead of Gemini AI models Noam Shazeer announced Wednesday that he was leaving the company to join the rival OpenAI. Shazeer's departure came less than 2 years after he returned to Google.
26:04 Then we have another exit that came just last Friday when John Jumper, DeepMind vice president and engineering fellow, announced he was leaving the company after 9 years for rival Anthropic. Now, when I look at this, I basically think that investors are way over-indexed on how important a few top talents are at a company.
26:23 I don't think that these top researchers, as magical and as smart as they are, are the biggest indicators of who's going to be the winner in the AI race. While I respect top talent, the real moat in AI doesn't come from having the best model. It doesn't come from having a slight breakthrough. The winner is how you're able to distribute the model, how many customers you have, how you're able to package it, and your entire infrastructure and process.
27:04 When you look at Google, they have the full stack. They have the entire development process. They have all the infrastructure, the cloud hosting, all the GPUs, the TPUs. Then you get further up the stack and they have the distribution, all the software, billions of people using their thousands of products. They can intertwine AI into Gmail, Google Maps, Google Drive, the Gemini app, the Android phone, YouTube.
28:03 So when I look at Google overall, I do think it's important to have smart people, but a couple people, two or three leaving the organization, is not some big indicator that tens of billions of dollars should be shaved off the market cap of the company. It means that investors don't fully understand what the moat of Google actually is. The entire time the moat has been their full stack development.
29:05 I think that we're going to get earnings reports in the future of Google continuing to win, growing like crazy. It's going to prove that their AI models being smart is one thing, but also the infrastructure is the real moat here. Now, finally we move on to the fail of the week, which in this case we are highlighting Polymarket.
29:24 And I'll lump in Kalshi. I don't like either of these companies. Prediction markets I think is a fancy way of saying gambling. What these companies do is entice you with the enticement of gambling. In reality, what these companies sell is a highly addictive product. Gambling can wrap people into it. It can change their life, and it puts them in a lower economic state.
32:40 [Fail of the week: a Wall Street Journal investigation found Polymarket paid mostly college-age creators to film fake trades / fake wins on near-perfect copy websites (e.g. a misspelled "poiymarket.com"), instructed them not to disclose they were paid, and ran a clipper army (via marketing firm Virality) to make it look organic — Carlson calls it deceptive, borderline a scam, and urges other channels to drop Polymarket/Kalshi sponsorships.]
48:02 That's going to be it for this episode. Hope you enjoyed. See you in the next one. </content> </invoke>