Bulls vs. Bears

Hosted by MPC Markets

Business Investing

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Episodes

132

Latest episode

Aug 2026

Language

EN-AU

About the show

Bulls vs Bears is a weekly Australian stock market podcast from MPC Markets. Every Friday, Mark Gardner, Jonathan Tacadena, and Kai Chen wrap up the week in markets, what moved, what mattered, and where the opportunities are heading into next week. Part weekly market recap, part investment debate, part Friday afternoon pub chat. The team covers ASX and US stocks, sector themes, commodities, macro trends, and the bull and bear case on the ideas that matter most. New episode every Friday. Subscribe for your weekly market wrap.

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60 recent

August 21, 2026Episode 13336 min

US Debt Hits $40T, Gold Surges & ASX Earnings Winners and Losers

US debt hits $40 trillion. Bitcoin surges 20%. Moderna rockets 177% on a breakthrough cancer treatment. And Bessent starts buying the long end of the curve — is this the white flag on US fiscal discipline? In this week's Bulls vs Bears, Mark, Phil, JT, and Finn (filling in for Kai) break down ASX earnings season — CSL shines (+7%), BHP delivers a record dividend, and consumer discretionary gets hammered across the board. Plus the team debuts a new segment: Buy, Avoid, and Wildcard picks. Topics covered: $40 trillion US debt — what it means for fiat currency and precious metals Bitcoin's 20% rally, the Clarity Act, and why Finn says be patient on the 4-year cycle ASX earnings: CSL, BHP, Stockland (+12%), Breville, and the consumer pain trade Why gold miners are still cheap despite record gold prices Bond yields, yield curve targeting, and Bessent's "surrender" Oil creeping toward records while the US consumer burns through savings Each team member's Buy, Avoid, and Wildcard picks Bulls vs Bears verdict: 2 bearish, 2 bullish heading into NVIDIA week Next week: RBA Minutes, Aussie CPI, NVIDIA earnings, Jackson Hole, and the "Next Winners in AI" webinar. General advice only. AFSL 579 757.

August 14, 2026Episode 13248 min

The Forgotten Themes of 2026

Bulls vs Bears Ep. 132 — The Forgotten Themes of 2026. It's been a quiet week, so the team digs into the thematics that got buried by geopolitics and headlines. Rare earths are down 41% from highs and JT lays out three catalysts for a comeback. Software caught a private equity bid on Workday. Kai explains AI sandbox escapes and why cybersecurity keeps running. Plus, an ASX earnings wrap, next week's big reports (NAB, BHP, CSL, JB Hi-Fi), the private equity wave sweeping ASX mid-caps, and why the "neocloud" might be where the next phase of AI investing really kicks in. General advice only. AFSL 556167.

August 7, 2026Episode 13146 min

EP131: AI & SaaS Bounce as Investors Regain Bull-ief

EP131: AI & SaaS Bounce as Investors Regain Belief The full crew reunites — JT's back from holiday, Phil's settling in, and markets are at all-time highs across the board. Record ETF inflows, fear & greed stuck at 40, and ASX earnings season is off to a flying start. We unpack AMP's gap-up, Credit Corp's algo-driven sell-off (and why buying it at the open was the move), James Hardie's US aftermarket rally, and the Nick Scali playbook. In the US, Microsoft and Amazon saved the week while Google's AI team had a mass exodus. The SaaS apocalypse is over — CrowdStrike, Palo Alto and Atlassian are up 100%+ from lows. Kai's five pillars trade continues to deliver. Big segment on the "Situational Awareness" hedge fund that went from $45B AUM to near-zero on a 20% move. We talk Kelly Criterion, Martingale strategy, and why position sizing is the real edge. Plus: gold bouncing off $4,200, commodities turning green, Trump commoditising insider trading, AI model benchmarks, and our Bulls vs Bears calls for next week.

August 3, 2026Episode 13032 min

EP130: CHIPLASH

Memory chip stocks delivered some of the most violent moves we've ever seen this week — Micron down 9% then up 18%, SK Hynix down 15% then up 29%. The index barely moved. Welcome to Chiplash. We break down the chip carnage, Microsoft's best day since 2007, Amazon's AI cloud hitting a US$26B run rate, Meta getting sold off, the chip-to-software rotation, Australia's CPI surprise and what it means for rates, oil market spin from the US energy secretary, Korea's margin call crisis, and a viewer-suggested SaaS stock that actually passed the sniff test. Plus: JT wins the Bull/Bear comp from overseas. Kai almost picked Boeing. Phil gets most improved. New episodes weekly. mpcmarkets.com.au

July 24, 2026Episode 12937 min

EP129: Hyperscalers Turn Into Hyper-Spenders

We welcome Phil Deloughery to the team and dive straight into the hyperscaler CapEx blowout — Google's first-ever negative free cash flow quarter, Oracle's spend ballooning 26x in five years, and all the major cloud players expected to go negative free cash flow next year. Plus: Iran escalation and Houthi disruption shutting down the Bab el-Mandeb strait, US oil reserves at 45-year lows, Brent at $100, Tesla down 14% on zero robotaxi/Optimus updates, Aussie employment blowing past expectations (+76K) making another rate hike near-certain, the ASX SaaS stocks getting crushed, and Trump slapping tariffs on Australia under a forced labour technicality. Next week is massive — RBA, FOMC, Aussie CPI, US GDP, core PCE, plus Apple, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon earnings. Stay sharp. Free portfolio review at mpcmarkets.com.au

July 17, 2026Episode 12851 min

EP128: is it time to "Abandon Chip" or buy the "Chip"

Chip stocks are getting hammered. TSMC beat earnings by 10%+ and still dropped. Netflix lost 9% after pulling more transparency. IBM got flogged 37%. Is this the dip to buy — or the start of something worse? Mark, Finn and Kai break down the wreckage, the CapEx risk heading into Alphabet and Tesla earnings, and where the real opportunities are sitting. Oil gets a deep dive — US reserves at 40-year lows, Hormuz back in crisis mode, and refining margins 20% above previous records. Buy-the-dip picks include Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Coinbase, and Arista Networks. Kai explains why Arista's open-source networking switches are the essential plumbing of every AI data center. All three hosts are bearish. New team member Phil Deloughery debuts next week.

July 10, 2026Episode 12738 min

EP127: Be fearful when others are greedy

The optimists are away — JT's sailing to Japan and Finn's in Tonga with the whales — so the ex-bond traders are running the show. Mark walks through 12 risk factors that have been quietly building: record margin lending, rock-bottom cash allocations, almost zero downside protection, and corporate bond demand starting to dry up. Meanwhile, the semiconductor sector is splitting in two — memory chip makers are printing money while the hyperscalers writing the cheques are starting to feel it. Plus: Meta making its own chips, Apple's luxury AR glasses play, the India-Australia uranium deal, copper's relentless grind higher, and why next week's US bank earnings (JPMorgan, Goldman, Citi, BofA, Wells Fargo) could set the tone for the quarter. And yes — Mark has finally overtaken Kai on the leaderboard after 191 days. Not financial advice. General advice warning applies. Do your own research.

July 3, 2026Episode 12648 min

EP126: The Half Time Report

The best first half in the Dow in fifty years is in the books. Mark, Kai and guest Finn unpack a monster six months — the record SOX rally, why chips just cracked (Micron down 20% in two sessions), and where the money's rotating next. Plus: the ASX halftime card, why healthcare could finally be turning, Kai's Pro Medicus trade of the half year, and a deep dive into the AI stack — infrastructure, cloud, application — and why the cloud distribution layer is the opportunity most investors are sleeping on. MPC Markets also turns three. Happy birthday to us.

June 26, 2026Episode 12535 min

EP125: Chips Ahoy!

Micron beat earnings by $6 billion and hit record highs. Memory chip stocks — MU, SK Hynix, SanDisk, Lam Research — are all running. The catch? It's coming out of the Mag-7's margins. Hyperscalers are paying through the nose for HBM RAM and it shows in their charts. This is the clearest divergence in the AI trade right now. We also cover SpaceX raising $85.5B in equity plus a $25B corporate bond and reportedly building its own gas pipeline for data centers. Sam Altman has pushed the OpenAI API IPO to next year. CATL dropped a sodium energy storage system — bad timing for lithium stocks. On the ASX: WiseTech hitting new lows, Telix eyeing FDA approval for EchoIQ by September. Plus commodities swinging wildly, Apple hiking prices across the board, and Fear and Greed sitting at Extreme Fear while Micron breaks records. Episode 125 of Bulls vs Bears from MPC Markets.

June 19, 2026Episode 12449 min

EP124: The next Mega IPO's

Bulls vs Bears EP124: The Next Mega IPOs — SpaceX, OpenAI vs Anthropic & What Actually Matters SpaceX just listed. OpenAI is burning $14B this year. Anthropic just hit a $965B post-money valuation. So which one is actually investable — and which ones are traps? In this week’s episode, Mark Gardner, Kai and JT cut through the noise on the biggest IPO and AI stories moving markets right now. We break down: The full SpaceX share lock-up release schedule and the five dates that could make or break the stock (QQQ inclusion, Starship Flight 13, Q2/Q3 earnings unlocks, and Musk’s 366-day lockup) Why Anthropic is eating OpenAI’s lunch in enterprise (40% LLM market share vs OpenAI’s 27%, 80% of revenue from business customers, and 15.7x valuation growth in 14 months) OpenAI’s staggering scale (900M weekly active users, 2.5B prompts/day) versus its $14B losses and cash-flow-positive target of 2029 Technical setups across ASX200, Nikkei (fresh record highs), Nasdaq and global indices Commodity moves in gold, silver, crude and the surprising HPA (High Purity Alumina) trade that’s flying under the radar What the new Fed chair, US-Iran deal and memory chip shortage actually mean for positioning Blunt practitioner takes. No guru dogma. Just what the data and flow are really saying. Listen now & subscribe: https://mpcinvest.co/podcasts Timestamps: 00:00 – Intro, track record & weekly market colour 05:30 – SpaceX IPO deep dive + cumulative unlock timeline 18:00 – Five dates that could make or break SpaceX 25:00 – OpenAI vs Anthropic: The real AI arms race 38:00 – Why Anthropic is winning enterprise (and what it means for valuations) 45:00 – Technicals, global markets & commodity wrap (gold, silver, crude, uranium, HPA) 52:00 – Next week’s data & closing thoughts #SpaceXIPO #OpenAI #Anthropic #AIStocks #MegaIPO #InvestmentPodcast #BullsVsBears #MPC Markets