Lumida Wealth : Non-Consensus Invest Beyond the Ordinary

Ram Ahluwalia
  • 5.0 (4)
  • Investing
  • Updated Weekly

Thought provoking conversations with world class leaders in business and investing. Where are the overlooked opportunities? How are hard decisions made? What makes a great investor? Host: Ram Ahluwalia, CEO Lumida Wealth Frequency: Weekly Run time : 60 mins per episode Previous Guests: Frank Rotman (CIO, QED Investors), Marc Weill (Partner, Two Sigma Ventures), Doug Cifu (CEO, Virtu Financial)

  1. 2d ago

    FSD: My Visit to Anthropic & The State of VC

    00:00 - Introduction & San Francisco Dispatch 00:30 - Visiting Anthropic HQ & Intense Security Protocols 04:36 - Anthropic’s Enterprise Sales & Hyperscaler Playbook 06:28 - Internal AI Productivity Tools & Agentic Workflows 07:44 - Office Culture, Velocity, and Moving to SF 09:00 - The Future of AI: Solopreneurs, Agents & Coase’s Theorem Connect with Us Online: Lumida News Lumida Deals Lumida Wealth Lumida ETF   Watch the video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Lumida_Wealth 🌐 Website: https://www.lumidawealth.com 🐦 Twitter Follow us on https://twitter.com/LumidaWealth 🎵 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lumidawealth 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lumidawealth 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lumidawealth

  2. 3d ago

    FSD: The Sports Team Tax Shield

    In this FSD episode, titled How Kushner Wrote Off the Lakers, Ram records on the drive to the Cross River Classic and opens on the tax story everyone has been asking about. Jared Kushner and Bob Iger bought the Lakers in a roughly $10 billion deal, and Ram frames why a sports team is one of the few assets that can offset active income. He lays out the three ways you get taxed, the difference between active and passive income, the 15-year depreciation schedule on a team versus 27 and a half years for residential real estate, and the 500-hour material participation test that turns courtside seats into a supervision function. His key point is that this is not a loophole. Sports teams just happen to check every box the code already has. The real engine, he argues, is deferral rather than avoidance. He explains depreciation recapture, then does the simple math on why deferring a billion-dollar bill and compounding it in the S&P 500 for 15 years can generate more than enough to pay what you originally owed. That leads into goodwill amortization on brands, why Buffett sits in the never-sell bucket with Coca-Cola but rotated out of Apple, and which businesses carry the same intangible quality: wealth management roll-ups, accounting firms, and restaurants like Jersey Mike's. He then runs through the wider menu most people are already using in some form, including 1031 exchanges, ETF in-kind transactions, the solar investment tax credit, Delaware Statutory Trusts, QSBS, and tax-aware long-short investing. He ties it together under what he calls wealth architecture and previews a Second Opinion calculator his team is building. In the back half he turns to the Wall Street Journal piece on Meta's off-balance-sheet data center financing. He describes the 1,700-football-field data center going up in Louisiana, how a sale-leaseback turns CapEx into OpEx, and how Blackstone and Blue Owl finance these projects cheaply by riding Meta's investment-grade counterparty credit through triple net leases. He gets into the emerging market for data center asset-backed securities, checks the live numbers with Grok, and compares it to the Invitation Homes buy-to-rent asset class Blackstone pioneered after 2008. He maps exactly where NVIDIA sits in the capital stack, why putting tens of billions of excess cash to work alongside Blackstone is close to a no-brainer, and reaffirms it as his top pick with a $275 target. He wraps on Cross River, Stripe's $7 billion acquisition of OpenRouter, and his meta theory that tokens are becoming money. (00:00) Intro and today's agenda (01:16) Kushner buys the Lakers: the sports-team tax shield (04:44) Why it's a great deal: the Buffett endurance test (07:06) Why now: Stripe, SpaceX, and OpenAI distributions (08:05) Goodwill amortization and which businesses qualify (11:16) Depreciation recapture and the power of deferral (15:11) Other tax moves: 1031, ETFs, and the solar credit (16:59) Wealth architecture and the Second Opinion calculator (21:54) Sports teams as an asset class (23:39) Meta's 1,700-football-field data center (25:30) Sale-leaseback: turning CapEx into OpEx (27:44) How Blackstone and Blue Owl finance it (31:59) Cleaner accounting for the cost of a token (33:20) Data center vs GPU securitization (36:10) Asking Grok: the data center ABS boom (38:33) The Invitation Homes playbook (41:03) Where NVIDIA sits in the capital stack (44:46) Why the trade is a no-brainer for NVIDIA (47:23) Cross River, and Stripe's $7B OpenRouter deal (50:01) Why Stripe did it, and tokens as money About the show: Non-Consensus Investing is Ram Ahluwalia's running commentary on markets, where he shares how he's actually positioning capital and talks through the ideas most investors are missing. Real-time analysis, specific names, and a bias toward what's overlooked rather than what's crowded. Connect with Us Online: Lumida News Lumida Deals Lumida Wealth Lumida ETF   Watch the video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Lumida_Wealth 🌐 Website: https://www.lumidawealth.com 🐦 Twitter Follow us on https://twitter.com/LumidaWealth 🎵 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lumidawealth 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lumidawealth 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lumidawealth

  3. 4d ago

    FSD: Who Cut the Watermelon

    In this FSD episode, titled Tokenize Main Street, Not Wall Street, Ram records on a Friday night in a week full of 13F filings. He opens with a story he heard on Al Goldstein's podcast about a CEO who cut a watermelon for the office every day until he stopped, and no one noticed for a week. The point is initiative, the willingness to pick up the knife and do the value-creating work, which he argues is getting rarer in a swipe-and-tap digital world. He ties it to AI: as AI moves from doing tasks to owning entire workflows and producing deliverables that only need supervision, the humans who can actually do work, and give candid feedback, become far more valuable. It is why he believes there has never been a better time to be a founder. He then reads the latest hedge fund 13Fs as idea generation. NVIDIA is the top position at Renaissance and Harvard, Druckenmiller carries a 5% TSM weight, and Dan Loeb and Renaissance trimmed semis like Lam Research, Micron, and Sandisk ahead of quarter-end. Poking around Whale Rock's book, his team surfaced an interesting data center electrification name adjacent to Sterling and Powell. Bill Ackman bought Netflix, which Ram uses to think through the bull and bear case on a maturing business, and he notes the irony of Bridgewater sitting long the AI trade while Ray Dalio talks a bearish book. On the macro, he thinks rates head lower, the inflation print came in fine, and for the first time in a while there are real opportunities in rate-sensitive names like utilities, mortgage companies, banks, and muni bonds through MUB. But tight high-yield credit spreads tell him equities are close to fully valued short term, so he expects a healthy pullback and rotation. Names still in focus include Reddit, Western Digital, Sterling, AppLovin, TSM sub-20x, memory, Workday, small caps through IWM, and Brazil via Stone, PagSeguro, or EWZ. The back half is a full teardown of tokenizioning it in 2023 and 2024, with twoAmerican Banker op-eds, Ram is disappointed that tokenization keeps chasing U.S. equities, the most efficient maron earth, where there is no real problem toy is tokenizing SBA 7(a) loans to fix theliquidity constraint on community and regional banks, the lenders who actually serve middle America and know how underwrite to the four Cs of credit. The monnie Mae and Freddie Mac did for mortgages:standardization plus a secondary market and securitization. Tokenizing SBA 7(a) loans would let banks recycle capital into their communities, capture oriand let local people co-invest in the debtfor a coupon and eventually the equity of businesses they actually know. He explains why private securitizations will stay opaque, since the investment bankand closes with an executable playbook: pick a motivated bank in a geography, run a proof of concept, tokenize something end to end, then do it again. He signs off with a plug for the Lumida Invest app, week to the feed and the institutions view. (00:00) "Who cut the watermelon" and the va (01:38) The new social engineering pitch: "I'll do the work" (02:58) Why people who do real work become (05:01) Reading the 13Fs: NVIDIA, TSM, Druckenmiller, Harvard (05:53) Loeb and RenTech trim semis before (06:45) A Whale Rock electrification name near STRL and Powell (07:47) Ackman buys Netflix: the bull and b (09:04) Bridgewater is long the AI trade, and the Dalio irony (10:03) Rates, inflation, and rate-sensitiv (11:27) Tight high-yield spreads point to a healthy pullback (12:57) Names in focus, and Brazil: Stone, (15:00) Where tokenization went wrong (17:00) Playing the long game: Anduril, Str (17:52) Community banks versus the mega-banks (20:07) The SBA 7(a) loan program, explaine (23:21) The Fannie and Freddie securitization blueprint (25:15) The real opportunity: tokenizing SB (26:32) Community co-investment, from debt coupons to local equity (28:08) Why private securitizations stay op (29:54) How to execute: find a bank, run a POC, repeat (31:31) Closing thoughts and Lumida app upd About the show: Non-Consensus Investing is ntary on markets, where he shares how he'sactually positioning capital and talks through the ideas most investors are missing. Real-time analysis, specific names, and a bias toward what's overlooked Connect with Us Online: Lumida News Lumida Deals Lumida Wealth Lumida ETF   Watch the video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Lumida_Wealth 🌐 Website: https://www.lumidawealth.com 🐦 Twitter Follow us on https://twitter.com/LumidaWealth 🎵 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lumidawealth 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lumidawealth 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lumidawealth

  4. Aug 14

    FSD: Winners Keep Winning

    00:00 - Winners Keep Winning: NuBank & Market Momentum 00:02:40 - The US Competitive Advantage: Innovation & Capital Markets 00:05:09 - How Capital Formation & Modern M&A Work 00:08:56 - The Evolution of Startup Execution & Culture 00:12:43 - Regional Tech Hubs & US Macro Superiority 00:16:33 - International Markets: Taking a Look at Brazil 00:17:40 - AI Adoption: Moving from Tasks to Workflows 00:18:59 - The Peptide Boom & Unlocking Healthcare Opportunities Connect with Us Online: Lumida News Lumida Deals Lumida Wealth Lumida ETF   Watch the video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Lumida_Wealth 🌐 Website: https://www.lumidawealth.com 🐦 Twitter Follow us on https://twitter.com/LumidaWealth 🎵 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lumidawealth 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lumidawealth 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lumidawealth

  5. Aug 13

    FSD: Relationships Matter & Momentum

    In this FSD episode, titled The Market for Compute Will Clear, Ram records on the drive home after a day of conversations in New York with a group of thoughtful VCs and a private credit investor who came up during the 2008 crisis. He opens on the AI infrastructure trade. CoreWeave rose 18% on the day and doubled its backlog, but the more important signal is the read-through for the rest of the industry: any compute that gets built will find a buyer. A100s manufactured years ago are still being sold, the NVIDIA financing consortium with Blackstone and other large private credit funds is set up to backstop and fund even more compute, and Anthropic's planned Q4 IPO reduces the counterparty risk that firms like Oracle carry, which is part of why Oracle traded up on the news. From there he works through the semiconductor and memory names, many of them down 40% to 60% and, in his view, oversold. Memory is the complicated one, with new competition entering and NVIDIA leaning on photonics and system design to ease the demand for it. His pick of the day is Western Digital, a less crowded name than the memory leaders, with strong forward revenue growth, a valuation cheaper than the S&P 500, and direct exposure to the data center buildout. He trims a little energy as oil looks like it may have put in a local peak, but still likes energy on cheap valuations and steady demand, and he flags the political risk building around data centers heading into the midterms. The back half moves away from markets. Ram talks about why relationships and community still matter as AI pushes people further into their phones, pointing to founder retreats, investment clubs, and community events that keep growing, and why he thinks higher education is overpriced and ripe for disruption even as the network it provides holds its value. He spends real time on health and longevity: using the Apple phone to aggregate medical records, leading his own care with advanced lipid and genetic testing, and the reminder that a longer life means planning a longer duration portfolio. He closes on tax, where he sees the same pattern he sees everywhere else. Most CPAs just file the return instead of mitigating, wealth management and tax prep sit near the top of the list of service businesses AI will disrupt, and Lumida is launching an AI tax calculator called Second Opinion by the end of the month. (00:00) The conversations behind tonight's episode (00:34) CoreWeave jumps 18%, and why compute will clear (01:01) The NVIDIA financing consortium and (01:22) Anthropic's Q4 IPO and Oracle's counterparty risk (02:24) Semiconductors and memory, oversold (03:30) Why we bought Western Digital (05:03) Data center politics, the midterms, (05:57) Relationships, networks, and community in the AI age (09:08) Higher education is overpriced and (10:36) Managing health and longevity with your phone (11:38) Leading your own healthcare (12:47) Genetics, ancestry, and the FOXO3 longevity gene (14:45) Why longevity changes how you inves (15:40) Tax mitigation and the case for Intuit (16:44) Second Opinion and the service busi About the show: Non-Consensus Investing is ntary on markets, where he shares how he'sactually positioning capital and talks through the ideas most investors are missing. Real-time analysis, specific names, and a bias toward what's overlooked Connect with Us Online: Lumida News Lumida Deals Lumida Wealth Lumida ETF   Watch the video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Lumida_Wealth 🌐 Website: https://www.lumidawealth.com 🐦 Twitter Follow us on https://twitter.com/LumidaWealth 🎵 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lumidawealth 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lumidawealth 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lumidawealth

  6. Aug 12

    FSD: Lender of Last Resort

    00:00 - Introduction & The $10B Unicorn Calibration 01:11 - Pre-IPO Liquidity & Venture Capital Lessons 01:52 - Nvidia: The Lender of Last Resort & $500B PE Syndicate 02:44 - Nvidia’s Margins & Free Cash Flow Advantage 04:41 - Compute Demand, Backlogs, & CoreWeave 05:19 - Pass/Fail Grading Trends & Real-World Preparedness 08:04 - Real Enterprise AI Adoption & Case Studies 10:08 - Why 90% of AI Proof-of-Concepts Fail 14:31 - Limitations of AI: Impressionability & Good Judgment 17:00 - Market Sentiment, Trimmed Positions, & Opportunities 18:33 - Wealth Taxes, Policy Risks, & Lumida Second Opinion 2 2:15 - Travis Kalanick & The Autonomous Vehicle Future Connect with Us Online: Lumida News Lumida Deals Lumida Wealth Lumida ETF   Watch the video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Lumida_Wealth 🌐 Website: https://www.lumidawealth.com 🐦 Twitter Follow us on https://twitter.com/LumidaWealth 🎵 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lumidawealth 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lumidawealth 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lumidawealth

  7. Aug 8

    FSD: Travis Kalanick

    In this FSD episode, titled A Founder's Founder, Ram spends the first half on Travis Kalanick. After being pushed out of Uber, Travis went quiet for about six years and quietly built a set of businesses that now do around $450 million in revenue. One is a ghost-kitchen operation, and the core is what he calls the wheels business, essentially physical AI, robots with sensors. Uber is reportedly an investor, which Ram calls the ultimate validation when the firm you created cuts a check to back your next act. Ram uses Travis to make a bigger point about where money is flowing. Venture is shifting from software to hardware, from bits to atoms, and he ties in names like Anduril, Shield AI, and SpaceX as part of that theme. He also explains why he rates Travis so highly. It is not the storytelling, it is the person: the tenacity, the chip on the shoulder, and the discipline to build for years without complaining. Ram is doing homework on Atoms, Travis's new deal, the same way he did before investing in Shield AI, and he asks viewers to share any research they have. The back half turns to the market. Ram calls the day a junkie, animal-spirits rally and expects some chop ahead, but he still sees good names. He picked up AppLovin, which is growing revenue about 50% with strong earnings, and floats a theory that management talked the stock down to make their share grants more productive. He likes Riley Exploration in energy, a family-owned Permian name he compares to the show Landman, and a mispriced biopharma name he plans to cover in the newsletter. Software is working, with Atlassian jumping on the day, and he sees select opportunities in semis. On the question of Google losing senior engineering leaders, Ram is unbothered: the platform, the data, and the depth of talent are what matter, and he compares the worry to past scares that faded. He closes on Costco as a reminder that valuations matter, and a plug for the Lumida app, with real-time earnings transcripts landing Tuesday. (00:00) Why today is about founders (00:42) Travis Kalanick's quiet comeback (02:12) Physical AI and the shift to hardware (02:50) What makes a founder's founder (04:54) Taking a close look at Atoms (05:24) A junkie rally, but still good names (05:49) AppLovin: a great quarter and the SBC theory (06:58) Riley Exploration and a biopharma pick (08:06) Software and semis: Atlassian jumps (09:05) Does Google losing engineers matter? (10:56) Costco, valuations, and what's next About the show: Non-Consensus Investing is Ram Ahluwalia's running commentary on markets, where he shares how he's actually positioning capital and talks through the ideas most investors ar Connect with Us Online: Lumida News Lumida Deals Lumida Wealth Lumida ETF   Watch the video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Lumida_Wealth 🌐 Website: https://www.lumidawealth.com 🐦 Twitter Follow us on https://twitter.com/LumidaWealth 🎵 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lumidawealth 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lumidawealth 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lumidawealth

  8. Aug 7

    FSD: The Kids Will Be All Right

    In this FSD episode, titled The Kids Will Be All Right, Ram Ahluwalia records on a Thursday evening drive after a down day for the market and argues the setup is healthier than the mood. He walks through the classic bear market conditions, the 1970s stagflation, the 1987 crash, the egregious valuations of the dot com bust, and points out that none of them exist today. What exists instead is a wall of worry, with Michael Burry helping to build it, and a fun fact he cannot get over: valuations for AI linked names are cheaper now than they were in 2023. The real AI moment, he argues, was not ChatGPT but Claude Cowork, because it drives workflows and revenue, with Anthropic potentially reaching $80 billion in revenue this year. From there he works through the evidence. Klarna scrapped its call centers and then rehired people to supervise the AI, biotech anecdotes hint at what is coming, and a $7,000 full body workup at NYU Langone now exists where it did not before. Geopolitics gets a quick dismissal: China's one person rule makes it fragile with no chain of succession, and Russia has spent a generation of young men. On markets, he flags the earnings season pattern where names report strong growth and still drop, and he is buying into it: more AppLovin, Riley Exploration at under five times forward earnings with oodles of free cash flow, and Cigna, a quality compounder with no Medicare Advantage exposure that is, at the very least, better than bonds. Snowflake gets a pass after a Capital One customer described building an internal stack to cancel it, with Capital One now selling a data lake to other banks. The back half turns to names and news. Zillow, which he calls Kleenex for tissue paper, finally hit a price worth buying after dropping 17 points, his first ever purchase of the name. Microsoft makes more sense after its divorce from OpenAI. The day's pullback cleared out excess optimism, oil rallied on Strait of Hormuz doubts, and energy looks like an overweight with free cash flow yields running as high as 40 percent. As for the $100,000 Truth Social feed, just assume Trump tacos, he says, saving you a fee that Citadel and Millennium will happily pay. He closes with the Lumida Invest app's new near real time earnings feed. (00:00) Intro: the kids will be all right (00:30) The S&P 500 through every crisis (01:35) Focus on earnings, not the past (02:10) The bear market checklist (02:46) AI valuations cheaper than 2023 (03:45) Claude Cowork was the real AI moment (05:16) Where AI adoption stands (05:50) Klarna and the call centers (06:46) The $7,000 full body workup (07:30) China and Russia are fragile (08:38) The earnings season pattern (09:24) AppLovin and Riley Exploration (10:26) Asking Grok who reported today (11:14) Capital One cancelled Snowflake (12:23) Lumida Invest app update (12:54) Cigna is better than bonds (14:11) Charter and the bear case debate (15:14) Zillow is Kleenex (16:30) Microsoft and the pullback (17:22) Headlines: Hormuz, tariffs, oil (17:59) Energy overweight and Trump tacos (19:07) Wrap up About the show: Non-Consensus Investing is Ram Ahluwalia's runhere he shares how he's actually positioning capital and talksthrough the ideas most investors are missing. Real-time analysis, specific names, and a bias toward what's overlooked rather than what's crowded. Connect with Us Online: Lumida News Lumida Deals Lumida Wealth Lumida ETF   Watch the video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Lumida_Wealth 🌐 Website: https://www.lumidawealth.com 🐦 Twitter Follow us on https://twitter.com/LumidaWealth 🎵 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lumidawealth 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lumidawealth 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lumidawealth

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Thought provoking conversations with world class leaders in business and investing. Where are the overlooked opportunities? How are hard decisions made? What makes a great investor? Host: Ram Ahluwalia, CEO Lumida Wealth Frequency: Weekly Run time : 60 mins per episode Previous Guests: Frank Rotman (CIO, QED Investors), Marc Weill (Partner, Two Sigma Ventures), Doug Cifu (CEO, Virtu Financial)

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