Brian Tam

Co-Founder @BareboneTeam | ex @GoldmanSachs

[Brian Tam @briiantam]

Everyone's calling this the revenge trade.

Most people missed Nvidia. Even more missed Micron. And on July 10, the most powerful AI memory chip stock on Earth finally lists in America. Before you follow the crowd, here are the traps nobody is warning you about.

These are the kind of investing insights every trader and investor needs before trading this listing.

Here is what the hype is hiding.

SK Hynix needs no introduction. The second largest company in Korea makes the high bandwidth memory without which no AI works. The stock went up over 8x in a single year. Now it is doing the biggest listing any foreign company has ever done in America, raising $29B. So we ran it through Barebone. Two traps came back.

Trap one. You are buying the top, and the seller knows it. Look at history's biggest listings. Nearly every one burned the buyers. Saudi Aramco, for years the biggest ever and almost the exact size of this deal, is still underwater. Three weeks ago SpaceX pulled off the biggest IPO in history, shot up, then crashed in a week. Cerebras, the hottest AI chip listing of the year, is down 30% from day one. A company sells stock when the price is best for them, not you. Max hype, max price, max money raised. That is exactly what SK Hynix is doing.

Trap two. The crowd already holding it is buried in debt. In Korea, people are not just buying SK Hynix. They are borrowing to buy it. Loans against the stock hit $3B, up 5x in six months. Billions more poured into 2x leveraged ETFs. So when the stock dips, these bets fall twice as fast, and borrowed money forces the crowd to sell into the drop. Two weeks ago SK Hynix crashed over 10% in a single day. It fell so fast Korea's exchange halted all trading.

But a great company and a great investment are not the same thing.

This content is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research before making any investment decisions.

Comment SKHY to access Barebone's full research. Valuation, the Korean debt picture, and the bull and bear cases.

[Brian Tam @briiantam]

I built a surveillance radar to legally spy on the stocks billionaires are buying.

Not to chase the next winner. To never be the last one holding what billionaires are starting to sell.

Here is how it works...

[Brian Tam @briiantam]

Ferrari just released Luce, its first ever electric car. The hate was so extreme it wiped $4 billion off the stock. A $640,000 EV designed by the man behind the Apple Magic Mouse. Even Ferrari's own seven-time F1 world champion could barely force out a compliment.

These are the kind of investing insights every trader needs before trading a brand-name dip. Here is why Wall Street is quietly buying while everyone else mocks the car.

When we ran Ferrari ($RACE) through Barebone, it flagged something. The last time Ferrari was this cheap, the stock tripled in three years. Its P/E just dropped to 32. The five year average is above 40. The last time it hit the low 30s was mid 2022, when the stock sat at $176. It then tripled to $519.

But this is not just a chart pattern. There is a reason this stock keeps bouncing back.

Ferrari sells only 14,000 cars a year. Not because it cannot make more. It deliberately makes fewer cars than people want. Most companies cut prices to sell more. Ferrari raises prices and demand goes up. Economists call this a Veblen good. The more expensive it gets, the more people want it.

That is why the waiting list runs through 2028. Why over 80% of buyers come back for another. And why gross margins are 52%, when a normal car company makes maybe 20% in a good year. Revenue went from $4 billion to $7 billion in four years.

This is not a car company. It is a luxury monopoly. And Wall Street knows it. JP Morgan says buy. 14 of 19 analysts are bullish. The consensus target is $450, over 30% above where it trades now.

But Barebone flagged three risks every investor needs to weigh first, and one of them is the Luce backlash itself.

Comment RACE to access Barebone's full research. Insider buying activity, a stress test on Ferrari's brand, and Wall Street price targets.

[Brian Tam @briiantam]

NVIDIA can really just pop the AI bubble.

This week Jensen Huang reports Q1 earnings. Trillions are on the line. Most investors do not realize this one call will decide the fate of every AI stock on the planet.

These are the kind of investing insights every trader needs before trading any AI position this week. Here is what Wall Street is actually watching to know if the AI bubble holds or cracks.

This year, $700B is being spent on AI by Big Tech. Google. Microsoft. Meta. Amazon. Almost every dollar flows through NVIDIA's chips. So when NVIDIA opens its books, this is not about NVIDIA. This is about whether the AI boom continues.

Wall Street is watching two things.

1️⃣ Can NVIDIA hold pricing power. Right now for every dollar of revenue they keep about 75 cents in gross profit. If that margin starts dropping, it means Big Tech is pushing back on NVIDIA pricing, building their own chips, finding alternatives. That is not a weaker NVIDIA quarter. That is the first crack in the trillion dollar AI bubble.

2️⃣ Will AI spending continue. Most investors only look at revenue and earnings. But past data does not move stocks. What NVIDIA says about NEXT quarter does. If Jensen drops even a hint that demand is softening, every AI stock on the planet could crash overnight.

Polymarket says there is a 95% chance NVIDIA beats earnings. So the AI boom is safe, right.

Not exactly. "Beating earnings" is not one number. It is three. Earnings. Revenue. Forward guidance. Miss any one of them and the stock drops. Most retail investors do not even know there are three.

That is why even if the bubble probably is not popping, every serious trader on Wall Street is locked in on this print.

When the data drops, do not just check analyst estimates or Polymarket odds. You need instant reads on all three numbers the second they hit.

Comment AGENT to unlock Barebone's earnings features.

It checks earnings, revenue, and forward guidance the moment they print, so you can play earnings season like a Wall Street pro

[Brian Tam @briiantam]

The best brokerage apps hold your money, but none of them think for you.

That's why today we're launching Barebone Live Portfolio. A new AI feature that connects to over 20 trading apps. Barebone's AI systems monitor your portfolio live, flag hidden risks, and help you optimize your positions. Exactly just like having an actual Wall Street analyst working for you around the clock.

I quit Goldman Sachs to train the AI behind it, and we're opening access to 20 beta testers first.

Comment BETA to apply (sign up link is also in bio). You get 3 months free and will directly shape what we build next.

Follow for the next lesson in Barebone Investing Principles. This is Lesson 9 of Barebone Investing Principles. 10 lessons to turn you into a confident investor.

[Brian Tam @briiantam]

Trump loves manipulating the stock market. Here's how.

This is Lesson 8 of Barebone Investing Principles. 10 lessons to turn you into a confident investor.

Most people get this wrong. Stocks don't move on news. They move on the gap between news and what the market already expected. Trump wages war against Iran, but if the market already priced in war, nothing happens. If it didn't, stocks crash instantly. Same news, completely different outcome.

Every stock price is one equation from Lesson 5. Cash flow divided by discount rate minus growth rate. Every single market move traces back to one of those three variables. Trump has been manipulating all three at once.

The US-Iran war is the case study. February 28, Trump attacks Iran and the Strait of Hormuz closes. Nobody expected it. Cash flows drop. Growth rates drop. Stocks tank.

Then oil prices spike because supply is cut off. Oil is a core ingredient in almost every good in the economy, so inflation rises. The Fed can't cut interest rates with inflation rising. Discount rate stays high. Stocks tank further.

Then Trump announces a ceasefire nobody saw coming. Risk drops instantly. Cash flows recover. Growth rates go back up. Stocks rip. Then the ceasefire breaks down. Stocks tank again. The strait has opened and closed multiple times and markets have whipsawed every single time because each move still catches the market off guard.

This applies to tariffs, trade wars, or any major headline. When a big announcement drops, ask which of those three variables just changed and whether the market saw it coming. That gap is where the money is.

This April we made 74% in just 3 weeks doing exactly this. Barebone's AI monitors the market around the clock and the moment news drops, it maps it to expected stock movements so you know what moves and why. That's why I quit Goldman Sachs to build it.

Comment BONE to try Barebone free and start reading the market like Wall Street does.

Follow for the next lesson, where we rank the best apps for buying stocks.

[Brian Tam @briiantam]

@coldoyle22 thanks - just popped a DM

[Brian Tam @briiantam]

Math says there's actually an optimal time to buy any stock.

This is Lesson 7 of Barebone Investing Principles. 10 lessons to turn you into a confident investor.

The stock market runs on two modes. Short term, it's driven by narrative and emotion. Long term, stocks always land on their true value. Your timing strategy depends entirely on which mode you're playing.

Short term, the rule is simple. Never fight the crowd. Crowds move markets, one person cannot. You read where the crowd is going in three steps.
1) Pull the price chart for six months and find support and resistance levels where prices keep reversing.
2) Cross-check upcoming catalysts like earnings reports, product launches, and policy decisions.
3) Then check sentiment using the Fear and Greed Index.
If all three align, you've got a setup.

Long term, timing is simpler. All you need to know is whether the stock is trading below its true value.
1) Compare the P/E ratio against its own five year average to see if it's cheaper than normal.
2) Compare that P/E against its closest competitors to find a relative discount.
3) Then run a DCF model. Project all future cash flows forward, discount them back to today.
If the current stock price sits below that number, it's undervalued.

Three checks say cheap, the timing is right. A great company at an expensive price is still a bad investment.

You can do this manually using TradingView, CNN Fear and Greed, SEC EDGAR, and Yahoo Finance. But every trade takes hours from scratch.

Barebone's AI agents run every one of these checks automatically in under 60 seconds. That's why I quit Goldman Sachs to build it. We made 77% last year, and 74% this April.

Comment AGENT to try Barebone free and find your next entry point.

Follow for the next lesson, where we break down how Trump manipulates the stock market.

[Brian Tam @briiantam]

One equation explains every stock move on earth.
Value = Cash Flow ÷ (Discount Rate − Growth Rate)
Three inputs. Cash, growth, risk.
Take $TSLA. Earns $5/share today. Looks tiny.
Plug in 25% growth, 10% discount rate → the math spits out a massive number.
Drop growth to 5% → value collapses.
That's the entire Tesla debate. One formula.
Now the kicker:
The discount rate is tied to interest rates.
2008 → rates near zero → bottom of the equation shrinks → growth stocks go parabolic.
2022 → rates spike → same stocks crash.
Tesla didn't change. The cost of money did.
This equation is why rates move billions.
Took me years at Goldman to actually internalize it. Most investors never will.
So I built Barebone. AI agents running this across every stock, every day. Made 77% last year.
Comment BONE.

[Brian Tam @briiantam]

a $10 stock isn't cheaper than a $200 one.
cheap is relative to what the company's actually worth.
two ways to figure that out:
→ P/E ratio. price ÷ earnings. apple at 30x is cheaper than msft at 35x.
→ DCF. project future cash, discount to today. price below that = cheap.
hedge funds pay PhDs millions to run this across thousands of stocks every quarter.
i built barebone to do it with AI. made 77% last year.
comment BONE for access.

[Brian Tam @briiantam]

Your favorite stock could be a terrible company and you’d never know it.

This is Lesson 3 of Barebone Investing Principles. 10 lessons to turn you into a confident investor.

Most people buy stocks without ever checking if the company is actually good. A great company does two things: makes money today, and makes more of it year after year.

You figure that out by opening the income statement and running three checks.

First, is it making money? Revenue at the top is money coming in. Net income at the bottom is what’s left after every cost. If that number is positive, the company makes profits.

Second, is it making more money over time? Pull up the last 3 to 5 years. If both revenue and net income are growing, that’s a strong signal because growth is normally the best predictor of more growth.

Third, is it keeping a bigger cut? This is the one Wall Street actually cares about. It’s called margins. One company makes $100 and keeps $50, that’s a 50% margin. Another makes $200 but only keeps $20, that’s 10%. The first one is the better business. High margins mean customers pay a premium, competitors can’t undercut you, and the bigger you grow, the more money falls straight to the bottom line.

Three yeses and you have a good company. Anything else, keep looking.

But even with three yeses, the income statement is just the starting point.

That’s why I left Goldman Sachs to build Barebone. AI agents trained on Wall Street’s frameworks of analysis so you get Wall Street quality stock research on demand.

We made 77% last year using this.

Comment AGENT to get access to Barebone and start filtering out the garbage.

Follow for Lesson 4, where we teach you how to know if a stock is actually cheap.

[Brian Tam @briiantam]

Even Donald Trump cannot fight the power of interest rates.

This is Lesson 2 of Barebone Investing Principles. 10 lessons to turn you into a confident investor.

Interest rates are the cost to borrow money. If rates are 3%, you borrow $100, you pay back $103. Simple.

The person who sets that rate is the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank. They are extremely powerful because one decision can single handedly move the entire global economy.

When the Fed cuts interest rates, banks borrow cheaper. That means businesses and people borrow cheaper too. Businesses expand, consumers spend, companies make more money. As profits grow, stocks start beating other investments like bonds or your savings account. More money flows into the stock market. Stocks go up.

The simple rule is: rates go down, stocks go up. Rates go up, stocks go down.

But here’s what most investors miss. That chain of logic doesn’t hit every stock the same way. When rates drop, most stocks go up, but bank stocks can actually go down because banks make less money on every loan they give out.

Two problems. Most people don’t know what the Fed is doing. And even if you do, most cannot connect those dots fast enough to act on it.

That’s why I left Goldman Sachs to build Barebone. Our AI agents form that chain of logic in real time, every single day, not just when the Fed moves. We made 77% last year using this.

Comment AGENT to get access to Barebone and start connecting the dots before the market does.

Follow for Lesson 3, where we teach you how to know if a stock is actually good or bad.

[Brian Tam @briiantam]

Goldman Sachs taught me why most people lose money in stocks.

The market only has two modes. In the short term it's a voting machine — every buy and sell is a vote, crowds pile in, crowds pile out. That's why meme stocks explode and AI stocks rip for no reason. It's pure emotion and narrative.

But in the long term it's a weighing machine. Given enough time, prices settle on what a company is actually worth based on how much money it actually makes. Emotion fades and math wins.

Here's why that matters: when the market is voting, most people lose money following the crowd in but never knowing when to get out. When it's weighing, the people who did their homework get paid. Most people can't tell which mode the market is in — and that's exactly why they lose.

This is Lesson 1 of Barebone Investing Principles. 10 lessons to turn you into a confident investor. Follow for Lesson 2 where we break down the single most important thing that moves billions in markets every day.

Comment "stocks" for a free 7-day trial to 20+ AI agents to 10x your speed and quality of investment research

[Brian Tam @briiantam]

Get ready with me to go to the Strait of Hormuz

Jokes aside, Citrini Research sent an analyst to the Strait of Hormuz.

He signed a pledge not to gather intelligence at the border.

Then immediately broke it.

Speedboat. No GPS. 18 miles from the Iranian coast.

What he found is the most important supply chain story in the stock market right now.
The strait isn't closed. It's filtered. Transponders off, GPS wiped, identity codes pulled from decommissioned ships.

Oil is still moving. Iran decides who passes.

And unless you're paying for satellite imagery, every pricing model Wall Street runs on oil is built on ship-tracking data that only works when ships leave their trackers on.

20% of global oil supply. Priced on broken data.

That broken data flows downstream fast. Oil to refineries. Refineries to jet fuel. Jet fuel to airline margins. The whole chain reprices the second Hormuz opens.

VLCCs, tanker stocks, refinery margins, Delta, United. Five different layers of exposure most investors haven't mapped.

We ran the full simulation on Barebone. The chain of second-order trades is in the video.

Comment AGENT to access Barebone and run your own market simulations.

[Brian Tam @briiantam]

80% failure rate

That's the real number behind every ceasefire the world has celebrated since 1975. 196 conflicts. Only 20% held.

The US-Iran ceasefire just sent $8 trillion in sidelined cash rushing back into growth stocks overnight. Wall Street made billions before most investors even woke up.

But the history is brutal. The US brokered 7 major ceasefires since the 1950s. Zero led to lasting peace. Trump personally signed 9 peace deals. Every one involving active conflict collapsed.

So the stock market is now pricing in an outcome that has never once worked.

Oil prices, airline stocks, defense spending, the entire macro setup hinges on whether this ceasefire holds or falls apart. And the data says it falls apart.

That's why the smartest money on Wall Street isn't buying the peace rally or shorting it.

They're running a chaos hedge. A specific options structure using oil ETFs like $USO paired with airline stocks like $DAL, $LUV, and $UAL that prints in both directions.

War resumes, oil calls explode. Peace holds, airlines rip on cheap fuel. One side always covers the other.

The full breakdown of the strategy, the exact tickers, the options setup, and how Barebone's AI mapped the ceasefire data across 196 conflicts in under a minute is in the video.

Comment CEASE to access Wall Street intelligence.

Barebone's 20+ AI agents will analyze your portfolio, identify your exposure to oil, airlines, and geopolitical risk, and show you the exact frameworks Wall Street uses to trade chaos without ever picking a side.

[Brian Tam @briiantam]

Google put $200M into a stock trading at $8.

Their average cost was $22. They haven't sold a share.

Here are the 3 signals you should track to uncover these trades:

1) Institutional investor tracking is one of the most overlooked edges in the stock market right now. When a company that size holds through a 60% drawdown, the market is either right and they're wrong, or the market is missing something entirely.

2) Insider buying. The CEO and CFO are both in with their own money. Every insider trade in the last 6 months has been a buy. 100% of them. That kind of conviction from people with full visibility into the books doesn't happen by accident.

3) Analyst coverage. 18 Wall Street analysts follow this stock. Not one has a sell rating. Half say buy, half say hold. When no professional with skin in the game is telling clients to exit, that's data.

These three signals, tracked together, are how you find stocks before they show up on the radar.

The ticker, the full breakdown, and why all three signals are pointing in the same direction right now are in the video.

All research conducted by Barebone.

Comment BONE to track institutional moves, insider conviction, and analyst positioning in real time, so you find stocks before Wall Street starts talking about them publicly.

We clean insider and institutional data so only trades where insiders are putting in their own money makes it through, not employee benefits or irrelevant fund activity.

[Brian Tam @briiantam]

Markets are crashing. Time to buy the dip?

Here are three stocks to watch if markets keep heading downwards. None of these are cheap yet. The dip hasn't gone deep enough to call these discounted. Prefer to watch rather than buy under current conditions.

Three stocks across three completely different sectors, all connected by one thesis: buy quality businesses when fear is highest.

Photonics is the first. $LITE and $COHR make the lasers and fiber optics that physically move data between AI servers. Nvidia just invested $4 billion into this space. Both companies got added to the S&P 500. There's no ETF for photonics, so individual stock picking is the only way in.

The second is a brokerage play. $IBKR runs on volatility. Every time the stock market sells off and trading volume spikes, their revenue goes up. Pretax margins near 80%. That's not a typo. Almost every new dollar of revenue drops straight to the bottom line.

The third is the one I'm most bullish on long term. The only company on Earth that builds its own AI chips, runs its own data centers, owns its own energy deals, and distributes through Search, YouTube, and Android. Over $400B in revenue last year. Funding the entire AI race from its own cash flow.

The full breakdown on price levels, timing, and why these three specifically is in the video.

Comment AGENT to get 20+ AI agents to 10x your speed and quality of investment research.

Not Financial Advice.

[Brian Tam @briiantam]

@Randomuser19988 Thank you please check your DMs

[Brian Tam @briiantam]

Nobody’s watching Bab al-Mandab.

They should be.

Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz and oil spiked. That part made the news.

But Saudi Arabia rerouted through the Red Sea, and 72 hours ago, Yemen’s Houthis threatened to block that exit too.

If both straits close, 25% of the world’s oil supply is locked in place.

Oil is at $112 a barrel. $FRO is charging $423K per day for a single tanker. That’s 4x last month.

But oil isn’t even the scariest domino.

Iran’s missiles hit Qatar’s gas plants. That wiped out a third of global helium supply. Helium cools AI chips. Helium makes fertilizer. Prices already doubled.

The Fear and Greed Index just hit extreme fear. Only 13% of S&P 500 stocks are above their 20-day moving average.

Mag 7 is down. Software is down. Consumer is down.

Three sectors are printing right now, but only one setup survives if peace talks hit.

The full breakdown and the framework for when to buy are in the video.

Comment BONE for access to Barebone.

[Brian Tam @briiantam]

Google just killed AI stocks in 48 hours

Billions wiped out

Google released an algorithm called TurboQuant that compresses AI memory banks to a sixth of their original size

Here's how it cooked markets

Google released an algorithm called TurboQuant that compresses AI memory banks to a sixth of their original size.

Runs 8x faster. No quality loss.

The stock market sold memory chip makers immediately. If AI needs a fraction of the memory, it needs a fraction of the chips. $MU, SK Hynix, Samsung all took hits.

But the sell-off has a hole in it.

TurboQuant only affects inference. That's when AI answers questions. Training, where AI actually learns, still burns through the same amount of memory as before.

And this pattern has played out before. DeepSeek made AI 95% cheaper to train last year. Semiconductor stocks cratered. Investors panic sold. Then companies ran more AI than ever, and $NVDA hit all-time highs months later.

Every time AI gets cheaper, usage explodes. The demand doesn't shrink. It compounds.

So the real question for AI hardware isn't whether memory chips lose. It's which names get repriced and which ones get bought.

Barebone ran the full breakdown. Two buys and one sell across the three biggest memory chip makers.

Comment TURBO to get the full analysis sent to you.