These are the biggest cyber security stocks over the last 90 days. The brown line is the S&P Tech Sector SPDR (XLK), which, as you can see, is trailing all but one of these names. The rest are absolutely on fire. CrowdStrike (purple) is the obvious leader here (we talked about why with the CEO the other day, read it / watch it here). But, as you can see, there is a bigger phenomenon taking place. Look at SentinelOne and CyberArk and Palo Alto and, yes, even stodgy old Check Point, one of the grandaddies of the industry. They’re all ripping.

What’s going on?

Well, it turns out that with the ubiquity of AI technology, the need for increased spending on AI-powered cyber security defense is exploding.

These are the best positioned companies to reap the rewards of what is arguably the most critical war the civilized world will now have to fight.

And that’s at the enterprise and government level. At lower planes of existence, there is the constant need for vigilance to guard against theft - financial, identity and otherwise. The hackers will avail themselves of the latest and greatest technology as sure as the sun will rise. Which means corporations, municipalities, nation states, organizations and everyday people need to stay a step ahead. The total addressable market for cyber security solutions is only going in one direction.

It’s a guaranteed bull market.

Pay attention because there aren’t a lot of these. There’s no guarantee the stocks will keep going up, of course. In fact, I would guarantee they’ll be volatile and make the ride excruciating at times too. But the need for more spending here is virtually guaranteed and that’s going out as far as the eye can see. If you can figure out who’s going to capture and keep the dollars being spent, you can make some money here.

Dan Ives walked us through the rationale for these stocks and others away from the Magnificent 7 on an all new episode of The Compound and Friends this weekend. The video went up last night and has been watched by twice as many viewers as normal as of this writing. This is a big episode.

If you want to listen instead of watch, the episode is here:

The best pastrami sandwich in NYC

A hundred years ago, working men and women (it was mostly men) in New York City either brought a metal lunch pail with food from home or they sat down at a counter to eat the midday meal. Lunch counters were everywhere and whether you were a lawyer, a banker, a writer, a jeweler, a postman, a clerk, a politician or a realtor, it’s where you ate. Anyone could be on either side of you. The places were long, narrow corridors with enough room to hang a jacket on the wall behind you and a few inches of space in front of you for a bowl of soup or a sandwich. Nobody ate salads or sushi. Oh, there were probably ash trays.

Anyway, one such lunch counter still exists in Manhattan’s Flatiron district on 5th Avenue in the 20’s. For all of my time in New York, it was called Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop and it looked as though it hadn’t been updated in decades. On purpose. That was sort of the charm. It’s directly downstairs from the Business Insider’s old headquarters so I used to meet my friends from the newsroom for lunch there.

Anyway, someone bought it and restored its name to what it was originally called in 1929 - S & P Lunch. Pete Wells from the New York Times wrote it up last year and now there’s a line of people up against the wall in the narrow space waiting for a seat at the counter to open up or for one of the small handfuls of tables in the back to vacate. You might think it’s crazy to wait 20 minutes to eat a sandwich in a place like New York City with thousands of other options. But that’s because you haven’t had the pastrami yet.

Kris, Michael and I took a visitor from out of town for our first time at S & P Lunch this past week and it absolutely lived up to the hype. You can skip the matzoh ball soup (I’ve had better) and go right to the assortment of Reubens, corned beefs and burgers. All of them legit. But if you’re a pastrami enthusiast, do what I did: Take it down straight on a sandwich with rye and mustard, the old fashioned way. No cheese, no Russian dressing. Pastrami on rye with deli mustard, period. Oh, and a diet Dr. Brown’s cream soda over ice in a red plastic cup.

The pastrami is cooked off-premises and then heated to order. They’re not using a deli slicer, they’re cutting it into chunky slices like you would a brisket at a barbecue joint. And it’s outstanding.

Look at the bark on that. It almost has this barely perceptible crunch to it, like a hint of a hint. And look at how perfect the color is on that whole wheat rye bread. The two main challenges with this kind of sandwich is nailing the meat-to-bread ratio and getting the juiciness right while still having a bit of crisp on the exterior. They nailed both. It’s a showstopper. If you’re mid-conversation upon taking your first bite, you’re going to stop talking for a few minutes.

If you ask a New Yorker where to go for an old school deli sandwich, they’ll typically say things like Sarge’s (since 1964) or 2nd Avenue Deli (which is actually on 1st Avenue) or Carnegie Deli (which closed in 2016, no one seems to even realize) or Katz’s (which is nothing special but people just repeat things they’ve heard). They should be directing you to S & P from now on instead. I think they will as the word gets around.

Put this one on your list if you’re coming to my city anytime soon.

Ray-Ban Meta glasses in the wild

I don’t know if you remember the demo Zuckerberg did for these a few months back but now the product is available. And for a first version of something, it’s pretty amazing. As a non-Facebook fan, I certainly don’t have any reason to say otherwise. And I am not going out to buy them for myself either. But I put a pair on this week and I can’t deny I had a little bit of a “holy shit” reaction.

My friend Bryn Talkington (you know her from the Halftime Report) stood in front of me and pressed a button on the frame of her brand new Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarers (that’s the official name).

This resulted in a photograph that looked just like something my iPhone would have taken.

Assume the clarity and crispness will only be getting better and more photorealistic from here. Bryn said there’s actually a livestream setting (which she disabled) so you could walk around like a video camera with legs. We’re getting into some new territory here where we might have to start assuming we are always being filmed, even if we don’t see someone holding up a phone.

I put them on and started asking them questions. “Hey Meta, what’s five plus five?”

“Five plus five equals ten,” a male voice softly said, as though he was saying internally, from inside my brain. The tiny speakers are on the arms, just above your ears. What’s the time, what’s the temperature, what day is it, what do I have next on my calendar, do I turn left or right to get to the dentist, etc. The wearables are going to be co-piloting us through our daily routines, making us better at getting through everyday life.

Bryn says “Imagine you have someone standing in front of you speaking Japanese and the glasses are telling you what they’re saying.” She’s right. We could travel around the earth and all be able to speak with each other as though there were a single common language. The wearables are going to be world changing.

I’m an Apple guy so I will await the product from Apple. As Dan Ives explains in the pod episode above, they look like ski goggles and cost $3500 now. In two years they’ll cost $1,200 and look like a regular pair of shades. Just blink your eyes and it will be here. The first version is for developers, the second version is for Silicon Valley bros. But the third version will be for you and the fourth will be for your parents. That’s how this stuff goes.

This writer says 2024 will be “the year of AI glasses” and that by the end of the year everyone will be wearing them. Read this take here at Computerworld.

Hard not to be bullish these days.

Have a great weekend, talk soon! - Josh