Tyler Crowe

It was almost a perfect mirror.

Rising gas prices, consumer sentiment would fall to the floor.

It was only a couple of years ago, again, when we started seeing a lot of this...

AI anxiety, I guess you could say, in society of labor, consumer sentiment, you started to see this decoupling where we would have relatively low gas prices, but consumer sentiment continued to decline.

And it's been a fascinating topic of how...

Number one, maybe gasoline is not the end-all, be-all price signal that people used to think of in terms of consumer anxiety anymore.

Perhaps they are looking at other things like healthcare costs, insurance costs, a lot of the other things that have been rising at rates above inflation for quite some time.

Yes, there's been relief elsewhere.

A lot of durable goods prices have, at least in terms of total spend, have gone down, but a lot of what we call them

The things in our lives that don't necessarily spark joy, like buying your health insurance or your housing, have gone up at rates kind of disproportional to what we are normally used to.

There's just this additional layer on top of what you're talking about, because you have jobs anxiety as well as the household no-joy costs seem to be going up as well.

When you see these sort of signals, consumer anxiety, perhaps, like you said, going to Carvana, maybe used cars instead of new cars, and spending going to the unessential places, is that, to you, any signal in terms of, perhaps I want to be holding more cash in my portfolio for opportunities, maybe some of my more highly valued companies, I'm going to take more look at perhaps trimming those?

what we're talking about here with a theme of consumer anxiety, low sentiment, affect your portfolio and investing decisions?

I agree to a large extent on the downstream effects of the AI build-out that you were talking about, Tom.

That seems to be the growth megatrend that is relatively immune to consumer sentiment because enterprise spending is going to be wholly decentralized.

tangential to what's happening on the consumer market.

As far as consumer sentiment, one of the things that I, as an investor, tend to do in these situations is look a little bit like the Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

When I do look at the consumer spending levels, it is going back down to the grocery stores of the world, the durable spendings, the Walmarts, the Targets, things like that, where

the wallet share is going to be a bigger proportion there as people start to prioritize their spending in places like that.

That seems to be the big trend that I would be focusing on in this in general.