Ep 75 (published Sep 14) — stance reflects how each name was framed in this episode (not a price rating). The guests' positions are the partners' own (their Substack/fund book); Eisman's are marked as his. Research: QT Qualtrim · SA Seeking Alpha · STK Stock Analysis.
| Ticker | Name | Research | View | What was said | At |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GLD | SPDR Gold Shares (gold) | QT · SA · STK | Positive | Collins: "I've had as much conviction in this precious metals [position] as I've had in anything in a long, long time" — central banks are swapping someone else's liability (Treasuries) for an asset with no debt; gold "just stays there. Everything else goes down," and the dollar's century-long decline "probably accelerates at this point because they're out of arrows." Last word: printing in a crisis or the status quo, so "gold continues to do well… that's where the majority of our capital sits." Gold as a metal, rowed via GLD per hub convention. (Eisman does not own gold — Sep 11.) | 1:53 |
| GLNG | Golar LNG | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Daniel: "we own a lot of" it — four floating-liquefaction ships that "pull up to a country like Argentina and convert the natural gas into liquid natural gas," on "basically a 20-year contract, a toll road," with minimal capex (~$2.5–3.5B) versus a $30–50B onshore build. Two ships go to Argentina to "pull the gas out starting next year" — part of a broader bullish-Argentina thesis (Milei's balanced budget, trapped oil and gas, rates from 100%+ to ~30% and falling). | 41:25 |
| GLASS | Glass House Brands | QT · SA | Positive | Collins owns it and Eisman: "I own it too." A converted vegetable greenhouse in California — "the low-cost provider," ~$90–100/lb pro forma. Medical cannabis moved from Schedule I to Schedule III; the prize is exporting (interstate or overseas): "in California they sell it for $200 a pound… in Germany it's 600, 700 bucks a pound," which would mean "50 to 65% EBITDA margins." Timing: "evolving slowly… a 2027 event"; first hemp sold overseas this quarter. A small cap (~$0.8–1B). | 44:59 |
| GOOGL | Alphabet (Google) | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | The partners: "we've owned Google for years but that's basically the only household name" — bought "when Google was allegedly being disrupted," their rule for entering mainstream names only when "something's for sale." Also cited as evidence of the regime change: the hyperscalers went from cash machines buying back stock to issuing debt, and "Google issues $85 billion in equity." | 47:53 |
| NOW | ServiceNow | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | The partners: "when [the] SaaSpocalypse or whatever we call it was there and they were destroying some of these names, we bought into it and ServiceNow on the cheap" — one of the rare mainstream longs, taken only because it was being dumped. | 47:21 |
| NVDA | NVIDIA | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Eisman, via Ed Zitron and his own read of the 10-Q: revenue "up over 100%," but "note 7 says that the top five direct customers of Nvidia accounted for 70% of accounts receivable" — "totally concentrated in a handful of names and a couple of those handful of names are not looking so good. Open AI certainly." A concentration flag, not a call (he remains "less long," Aug 28). | 13:27 |
| LNG | Cheniere Energy | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | The capital-heavy contrast to Golar: "you can either build a huge project like Cheniere does in Louisiana, which cost them… billions of dollars" — versus a floating liquefaction ship. A comparison, no view. | 41:44 |
| YPF | YPF S.A. | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Daniel: "YPF in Argentina is going to spend 30 to 50 billion dollars building" onshore LNG — the long-dated alternative the Golar ships bridge. Named inside the bullish-Argentina thesis (trapped Vaca Muerta-type gas, Milei's surplus), no stated position. | 42:10 |
| ALLY | Ally Financial | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | The price benchmark in the Carvana short: "Ally is one of their biggest financiers," paying "between 102 and 104" for Carvana's loans — so if Ally is ~20% at 102–103 and the average gain on sale is 109–110, "somebody in the world is paying north of 110." A reference point, no view on Ally. | 37:14 |
| Anthropic | Anthropic (private) | — | Neutral | Eisman: "Anthropic put out like 11 and a half billion in revenue for the June quarter… up over 100% in 3 months" — the strong lab. But with OpenAI it is ~70% of hyperscaler AI revenue (25–35% of total cloud revenue), and Collins: "they're going to let Anthropic come public because they need to… just like SpaceX, it's bad for the market" — new supply. An enterprise friend now sends only "a small percentage of the very very important queries" to Anthropic/OpenAI. | 22:50 |
| Delaware Life | Delaware Life (Mark Walter-linked insurer, private) | — | Neutral | The alleged Carvana "mystery buyer": "allegedly Delaware Life owns a heck of a lot of Carvana paper"; in court filings its related-party transactions went "from like three to something like 30 or 40%." Walter (the #5 Carvana holder via a special-purpose vehicle) "came out and said publicly there is no fraud here." The short's catalyst: "if Delaware Life goes under… the buyer of the paper is gone." | 38:36 |
| OpenAI | OpenAI (private) | — | Negative | Eisman: "Open AI was at 6.5 billion and it was up only 18% in 3 months. Its costs were 12 billion… their revenue went up a billion and their cost went up three. So I think Open AI is in trouble." Losing share daily and people; "your cost of capital is rising… and you can't afford that." His joke: "whoever buys OpenAI out of bankruptcy, it's going to be a fantastic deal" — the railroad/Wachovia/Bear Stearns pattern. Earlier: if it failed and the capex reversed, "the economy would go into recession almost immediately" (not yet his call). | 23:09 |
| SPCX | SpaceX | QT · SA · STK · FA | Negative | Collins: "just like SpaceX, it's bad for the market… it's supply… new stock of supply… that's what usually has killed markets… in 2000, in 1929." "Look at SpaceX. Where's the re[turn] when everyone who made all this money finally sells?" Eisman ribs the S-1's asteroid-mining section (the For All Mankind theme); Collins: full self-driving "is about a decade behind" — Musk "makes a lot of good comments that don't quite come true." | 17:29 |
| TSLA | Tesla | QT · SA · STK · FA | Negative | The partners: "we've been on and off only short or nothing Tesla for [the] better part of five or six years and fundamentally many could argue that we've been right" — Eisman: "there's no question fundamentally you've been right," earnings "down… and the stock has gone up." The lesson: "don't short a cult… sometimes we don't learn our lesson… you can't help yourself." | 32:34 |
| FICO | Fair Isaac | QT · SA · STK · FA | Negative | All three short — "we are short FICO." / Eisman: "Me too." Shorted "the day that Bill Pulte came out"; "it goes back to… companies gouging customers": had FICO raised prices at "inflation plus 2%," like Visa/Mastercard, "nobody would even have paid attention," but "they raised prices 1,600%… It was piggish," charging mortgages "3 to 5x" what card and auto lenders pay — "just because they can because of the law." If I were Rocket or Fannie/Freddie, "you're going to lower your price now." | 33:57 |
| CVNA | Carvana | QT · SA · STK · FA | Negative | Daniel/Collins short: an online used-car seller that finances the (largely subprime) loans, with "between 75 and 100%" of pre-tax income from gain on sale. Ally pays 102–104, yet the average gain on sale has been "109, 110," so a "mystery buyer" pays "north of 110" — allegedly Mark Walter's Delaware Life, whose related-party share jumped to 30–40%. "The market believes" Walter's "no fraud" statement — "I got squeezed." ~30–40× earnings "for a used car company"; "a lot of their profits are probably artificial… but proving that is going to be impossible." | 36:14 |
| CRCL | Circle Internet Group | QT · SA · STK · FA | Negative | First name offered when asked for a short "you really like" ("Yeah, but it doesn't work"): "Circle doesn't make any sense to me." — "Zero." "And yet the stock has rallied enormously… The crypto legislation nonsense." Fintech — "our neck of the woods." Position not explicitly stated. | 33:19 |
A jargon-free summary of the view on each name — what it is and why it is framed that way. (Plain-language companion to the table above; renders on each ticker's consolidated page.)
GLD is a fund that simply holds gold bars, so it moves with the gold price. Porter Collins and Vincent Daniel keep most of their money in gold, and their reason is the US government's budget: interest on the debt plus programs like Social Security already eat most of what the government collects in taxes, and nobody in power wants to cut spending or raise taxes.
That leaves printing money, whether things go badly (emergency rescues) or stay as they are. More dollars make each dollar worth less, and gold, which nobody can print and which is nobody's debt, tends to rise in dollar terms. Central banks, including China's, have been buying it for the same reason. Eisman disagrees on the urgency: he thinks the deficit is bad but not yet a crisis, and he doesn't own gold.
Natural gas has to be super-cooled into a liquid (LNG) before it can be shipped overseas. Normally that takes a giant plant on land costing tens of billions of dollars. Golar owns ships that do the cooling on board: they park off a country's coast, liquefy the gas and send it to buyers.
Argentina has huge gas fields it couldn't export. Golar's ships are headed there next year on roughly 20-year contracts, so Golar collects a steady fee like a toll road, without the enormous building cost. The partners also like Argentina itself now that President Milei has balanced the budget, and see Golar as a way to own that story.
Glass House grows cannabis in huge former vegetable greenhouses in California, and it can do so more cheaply than almost anyone. Collins and Eisman both own the stock.
The federal government moved medical cannabis out of the most restricted drug category (where heroin sits) into a much lighter one. The bet is that this eventually lets Glass House sell outside California. Cannabis sells for about $200 a pound in California but $600 to $700 in places like Germany, so exports could make it very profitable. The catch is timing: they expect real progress around 2027, and it is a small company.
The partners mostly own small, obscure companies, and Google is their one big household name. They bought it when the market feared AI chatbots would destroy Google Search. Their habit is to buy famous companies only when investors are panic-selling them.
They also point to a change: Google used to throw off so much cash that it bought back its own shares. Now it is raising money, including selling $85 billion of new shares, to pay for AI data centers. That shift worries them about the AI boom as a whole.
ServiceNow sells software that big companies use to run IT help desks and internal workflows. When investors decided AI would wipe out software companies (the "SaaSpocalypse"), shares like this were dumped, and the partners used that fear to buy it cheaply. It is a bet that the panic went too far.
NVIDIA makes the chips that power AI, and its sales more than doubled. Eisman looked in the quarterly report for who owes NVIDIA money, and five customers account for 70% of it. Sales that big from so few buyers are risky, especially when one of those buyers, OpenAI, is losing a lot of money. This is a warning sign, not a bet against the stock.
Anthropic, which makes the Claude AI models, is private and growing very fast: about $11.5 billion of sales in a quarter, double the previous quarter. Together with OpenAI it provides roughly 70% of the AI revenue at the big cloud companies, so they matter to the whole AI chain.
The partners worry about two things. Companies are learning to send only their most important work to these expensive models and the rest to cheap free models. And when Anthropic lists on the stock market, it adds a huge amount of new stock for investors to absorb, which historically weighs on markets.
Delaware Life is a private insurance company tied to billionaire Mark Walter, who is also a major Carvana shareholder. Short sellers believe it is the buyer paying unusually high prices for Carvana's car loans, which would inflate Carvana's profits. Court filings showed its dealings with related parties jumped sharply. Walter says there is no fraud. The shorts' argument is that if this buyer ever stopped buying, the high loan prices, and Carvana's profits, would go with it.
OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, had about $6.5 billion of sales last quarter, up only 18%, while its costs were about $12 billion. In three months its sales rose $1 billion and its costs rose $3 billion, so the losses are getting bigger, not smaller.
A company losing money depends on investors willing to fund it. When the story around it turns sour and people leave, that funding gets more expensive. Eisman thinks OpenAI is in trouble and jokes that whoever buys it out of bankruptcy will get a bargain. The concern is wider than one company, because so much AI spending and economic growth depends on it.
The worry about SpaceX is supply, not rockets. A giant listing means billions of dollars of new shares hitting the market, and early insiders eventually sell. Collins notes that floods of new stock helped end the 1929 and 2000 booms, because buyers' money has to stretch across far more shares. He also doubts Musk's promises: full self-driving is years late, and the company's filing lists mining asteroids as a goal.
The partners have bet against Tesla on and off for five or six years. Tesla's earnings have fallen as they predicted, yet the stock went up. Their lesson: a stock with devoted fans (a "cult") can ignore bad numbers for years, so being right about the business doesn't make a short bet pay. They still can't resist it, but now bet much less money.
FICO makes the credit score lenders use for mortgages. All three of them are betting its stock falls. Their complaint is price gouging: FICO raised prices about 1,600% in five years and charges mortgage lenders several times what it charges card or auto lenders, largely because the rules require its score.
Had it raised prices modestly, as Visa and Mastercard do, nobody would have noticed. Instead it drew the housing regulator's fire, and big mortgage players like Rocket, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac now have every reason to push back.
Carvana sells used cars online and lends buyers the money, often to people with weak credit. It then sells those loans to investors. Most of its profit comes from selling a loan for more than it lent ("gain on sale").
The partners' puzzle: a known buyer, Ally, pays about $102 to $104 for every $100 of loans, yet Carvana's average sale price is around $109 to $110. So someone must be paying well over $110, which is unusually generous. Short sellers suspect Delaware Life, an insurer linked to a big Carvana shareholder. If so, Carvana's profits may be propped up. Proving it is hard, the owner denies wrongdoing, and Collins lost money when the stock jumped.
Circle issues USDC, a digital token meant to always be worth one dollar. The partners say its stock price "doesn't make any sense" and that it rallied on new crypto laws rather than on the business. It is the kind of financial company they like to bet against, but they admit these short bets haven't been working.
Summary derived from the public YouTube video (transcript in transcript.txt) for personal study. Speaker attribution is inferred from context; auto-captions do not label speakers. Not investment advice. © The Real Eisman Playbook / Steve Eisman for source material.