Hello.

Big edition today. Lots of moving pieces, one question that affects more of your net worth than any headline.

Let's get into it.

This is not financial advice. Always do your own research. Past performance doesn’t guarantee future results.

"Renting is throwing money away." We've all heard it. The math tells a different story.

The S&P 500 has averaged roughly 10% annually over the past 30 years. Real estate has averaged about 4% in appreciation over the same time frame. Put $60,000 into a down payment on a $300,000 house, and after 30 years at 3% appreciation, that house is worth about $970,000. Put that same $60,000 into the S&P 500 at 10% average returns, and invest just $2,000 a month (instead of putting that into paying off your home), and you'd have over $4,000,000. With full liquidity the entire time (unless it’s in a retirement account).

And that's before you account for the housing costs that build zero equity: property taxes, insurance, maintenance, and repairs eat about 2% to 2.5% of your home's value every year. On a $300,000 house, that's $6,000 to $7,500 annually going nowhere.

Now, renters have costs too (rent increases have averaged about 3-5% a year, and they build no equity). But the renter who actually invests the difference between rent and home payments ends up ahead in the vast majority of simulations.

The key phrase there is "actually invests the difference." Most people won't. A mortgage forces you to build equity every month whether you feel like it or not. The best investment strategy is the one you actually stick to. If owning a home is the only way you'll reliably build wealth, it's the right move. Full stop, zero judgment (it’s what at least one of us is doing as well!).

To really crank the wealth-generation engine up with real estate, you need multiple properties… and you need to treat it like a business.

You put 20% down and control 100% of the appreciation. A $300,000 property that appreciates 5% in a year gives you $15,000 in value on a $60,000 down payment. That's a 25% return on equity. Add income from renting the home out, tax benefits (depreciation, 1031 exchanges), and the ability to refinance into the next property, and it starts to look like a business (because it is one, and it will take up a lot of your time).

Which is amazing for people who want to go down that route, but not everyone wants to do that. Some people would rather stuff that money into stocks!

Renting and investing wins the pure math.
Homeownership wins the behavioral game.
And multi-property real estate wins for people willing to run it like a portfolio.

As long as you know which game you're playing, we could get behind any one of these approaches! None is correct or wrong, it just depends on your goals/preferences.

If you're on the "invest the difference" side of that equation, the next question is which stocks. Our partners at AltIndex use alternative data (social media sentiment, job postings, web traffic, app downloads) to score stocks and surface trends before they show up in earnings reports. If you want help picking where to put the money you're not putting into a down payment, start a free trial here.

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US stocks ripped to fresh records on Tuesday as tech led the charge and oil prices pulled back from Monday's surge.

AMD crushed its Q1 earnings report. Revenue came in at $10.25 billion, up 38% year over year, beating the $9.89 billion estimate. EPS was $1.37 vs. the $1.28 expected. The big number: data center revenue hit $5.8 billion (up 57%). The stock jumped 18% in premarket. AMD isn't catching Nvidia anytime soon, but they're still carving out real share in the AI chip race.

Anthropic committed $200 billion to Google Cloud. The deal is $200 billion over 5 years for cloud computing and custom AI chips, making it one of the largest cloud contracts in history. We've been saying for a while that Google has an Nvidia inside of it (between TPUs, Waymo, DeepMind, and now this Anthropic deal). We think Google is one of the strongest long-term candidates to hold that top spot.

Michael Burry sold his entire GameStop position. The "Big Short" investor had built a stake in GME based on the thesis that eBay's acquisition would turn GameStop into an "instant Berkshire" conglomerate. But when GME loaded up 5.2 to 7.7 times debt-to-EBITDA in leverage to try and make the deal happen, Burry bailed. His one liner was “Don’t confuse debt with creativity,” which is actually pretty slick in our humble opinion.

Michael Saylor said he might actually sell Bitcoin. On Strategy's earnings call, Saylor told investors "we will probably sell some bitcoin to pay a dividend" on the company's preferred stock. This is a break from his "never sell" mantra. Strategy holds 818,334 BTC at an average cost of $75,537 and faces $1.5 billion in annual preferred stock dividend obligations. The company also posted a $12.54 billion net loss in Q1. The stock fell 4% after hours. When the guy who said he'd hold Bitcoin forever starts talking about selling, it's worth paying attention to what that signals about the pressure on leveraged crypto strategies.

James Murdoch is in talks to buy New York magazine and Vox Media's podcast network for $300 million or more, CNN reported. The deal would give the younger Murdoch a significant foothold in US media after breaking with his family's right-wing empire in 2020. Vox's podcast portfolio includes "Pivot" with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway.

Retro video games are emerging as a collectible alternative asset with documented appreciation. Pokémon FireRed for Game Boy Advance, once widely available for $20, now costs $100+ for just the cartridge, with sealed copies exceeding $1,000 and graded examples nearing $3,000. A sealed Pokémon Black DSi bundle purchased for $100 in 2014 is now valued at over $1,000, representing 900% appreciation in just over a decade.

The pandemic supercharged the market, and prices never returned to pre-2020 levels. The rise of grading companies like WATA Games recalibrated values across the category after a sealed Super Mario Bros. sold for over $2 million. Industry experts cite genuine scarcity as hardware ages and parts become rare, while the shift toward digital downloads on new consoles makes physical cartridges increasingly collectible. Worth checking your closet or attic, that stack of old Game Boy cartridges might be worth significantly more than you think.

Your feedback matters to us! Let us know what you liked or didn’t like about today’s edition.

That’s all for today. Did we miss anything? Smash the reply button to let me know.

Cheers,
Brandon & Blake of Invested Inc