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The Resilience No One Trusts | Brent Donnelly on Why War and Oil Haven’t Broken This Market
01:04:43
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- [00:01]
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- [01:00]
Brent Donnelly
The fundamental thing I think that I just always have in my head is that stocks need a steady stream of bad news to go down and they just need nothing for for them to go up. A way to lose a lot of money generally is to just be contrarian all the time and to just trade positioning all the time because you miss every structural trend and every like, meaningful trend in the market is generally accompanied by significant positioning for a really long. But if you're getting just these rolling shocks, then positioning and sentiment and mean reversion become a lot more useful because by definition a shock is not permanent. The more worries there are, the, you know, the more The S&P 500 is going to climb the wall of worry. And I mean, honestly, that has to be the base case all the time. And then you try to note when you see it when like this credit stuff bleeds through or like the top of the K stop spending.
- [02:01]
Excess Returns Host
You're watching Excess Returns, the channel that makes complex investing ideas simple enough to actually use or better questions lead to better decisions. Our guest today when people say they want to look at markets through the beady little eyes of an expert, they're only talking about one man. Spectra Markets, author of Alpha Trader, new edition out soon, so I hear, and publisher of the AM fx. It's my favorite bd, which is to say nothing about his eyes. Brent Donnelly, welcome back to Access Returns.
- [02:28]
Brent Donnelly
You're actually not the first person to say that, but so I'm not insulted at this point. I guess it's just true.
- [02:37]
Excess Returns Host
It's just true. Your beady little eyes, is that correct?
- [02:40]
Brent Donnelly
Yeah, they're not getting any less beady as I get older. But anyways, how are you doing?
- [02:44]
Excess Returns Host
I'm doing well. And as somebody who wears contacts for certain outdoor activities and wonder about the size of my own eyes when these aren't on my face, I deeply relate to that strange experience. Instead of it, I'm going straight to the Friday Speedrun, which if you're not subscribed to, go free. There's no excuse for you not having this in your inbox. One of the most insightful things that I look at every single week. You said last week you're anti big government. I can relate to this sentence, which is why I have to start here. Anti big government, anti war, anti politics, equally. But you have no choice because government keeps making itself the center of the game. Like what's going on right now is this one regime? Is this a series of regimes? What is this?
- [03:25]
Brent Donnelly
Yeah, I mean, sometimes I get accused of being anti Trump or like having derangement syndrome or whatever, but like I hated the 2021 fiscal stimulus once everything was already back to normal and Biden was doing that. I just don't like big government. And the analogy that I made or that I, I've made before is like, in a good baseball game or in a good sporting event, the referee or the umpire is just enforcing the rules quietly and they're not part of the game. Like a bad umpire is a showboat that's getting involved and you know, dancing around and flailing and all that. And that's what government is like now. It's just like the center of everything, this self important thing that's trying to, you know, pull every single lever to make everything happen. And so unfortunately though, I can't ignore it because my job is to write about markets and this big interventionist government that we have in the US right now is causing most of the market moves. So what are you going to do? You know, so I don't think it's tds, it's just I don't like big government and I think there's a lot of people that will agree. But in this case, what we have is big government doing a lot of policy shocks and a lot of interventions and a lot of state capitalism. And if you want to make money, then you got to, you got to, you know, understand what that means for markets and like not be short intel because you have a, you know, you're pro capitalism, so you hate that the government's bought a stake in intel and then you short it. And I know people that did that basically like on a philosophical basis. I mean the front cover of the Economist did that said like this is a fantasy. Well, whether it's a fantasy or not, the, the market is putting a premium on companies where the government is a shareholder. So do you want to be short that or do you want to be long? I'd rather be long.
- [05:16]
Excess Returns Host
What do you think of this? Go ahead.
- [05:18]
Brent Donnelly
No, I was just going to say non investment advice. When Intel's now trading at 62, it's basically tripled since the Economist said it was a piece of shit idea.
- [05:27]
Excess Returns Host
Good job. Magazine cover indicator. This one will mar your record. What do you think about like the succession of these shocks? Because it seems like it's like a shock and then a shock and then a shock and then a shock. It's like they just keep coming. Does that, what's that do to your brain?
- [05:43]
Brent Donnelly
Well, if you. So my trading style is relatively short term and my P and L is correlated to volatility. So for me it's good. But I don't discount the fact that it's pretty disgusting to be saying like a war is good for you. P and L. Like that's an absolutely horrifying thing to be thinking or saying. Again, like, I'm just playing the game that's in front of me. I don't really have a choice and I think it's pretty gross. But in general volatility is good for what I do. And so then you got to tweak your methodology because you know, for example, a way to lose a lot of money generally is to just be contrarian all the time and to just trade positioning all the time because you miss every structural trend and every like meaningful trend in the market is generally accompanied by significant positioning for a really long time. But if you're getting just these rolling shocks, then positioning and sentiment and mean reversion become a lot more useful because by definition a shock is not permanent. And then also the shocks themselves have a mean reverting component to them because the moves in the market change the policy reaction function. So if liberation day happens and the market shits the bed badly enough, then they announce a 90 day delay to the tariffs or etc. So you know, if oil goes to 200, policy is going to be different than if it stabilizes here and goes back down. So there's a built in, like reflexivity isn't necessarily the right word because I think people usually think of that as feedback loops that amplify, but in this case there's feedback loops that dampen the moves because as things go crazy, you know, if 10 year yields go to 5%, that policy is going to react to that. So because it's like the observer effect where you have to take into account the moves themselves when forecasting future moves. So you know that that creates a bit of more of a mean reversion type of element. And so then it's like, okay, separating out. There's a say, for example, there's a structural trend in Brazil. Like if people love Brazil, it's high carry, it's got a good story. That's. So regardless of how crowded Brazil gets, I'm not going to start taking the other side just for shits and giggles because that's a structural trend. But then in other things you can think the opposite way and say, okay, well this policy shock is causing X, Y, Z to happen. But if XYZ keeps happening, they're going to reverse the policy. So at some point then positioning and sentiment and overbought oversold and all that kind of stuff matters. So it's really like all about applying the right framework to the regime and then noting the regimes within the regime. Because like I said, we have a structural appreciation of Brazil, for example, going on at the same time as we have all these other mean reverting stocks in the usa.
- [08:58]
Excess Returns Host
You've sort of pondered philosophically, it's almost that nothing matters. And I'm thinking about this from zero net jobs since liberation day. Oil up whatever percent it's up now, Hormuz closed, partially closed, whatever. We want to declare the status as of when we're recording this on the 14th. And yet you're holding all this in your head. So does, does nothing actually matter except for like what the policy direction is and this reaction function?
- [09:28]
Brent Donnelly
I mean that's sort of the, the, the billion dollar question, I guess, because you can even take it all the way back to they hiked rates 17, well there were 1725 basis point increment hikes. Some of them were 75 or 50 at a time. But they hiked rates from 0 to 5% basically, which again should be meaningfully bearish for long duration assets. And yet we've somehow pretzeled our way into rate Hikes are good because it gives savers more money and rich people have more money to spend and so they're going to buy more Amazon or whatever. So yeah, the two competing thoughts are the US economy is unbelievably resilient. And then on the other hand, the US economy is not indestructible. Like at Some point, these things could all matter. And then my base case is extreme resilience. But then I think it's stupid to just think that an unlimited amount of shocks can be borne by the economy. And to the job's point, I mean, the weird thing is that really, jobs growth is still at break even. So it's not like the jobs market is super loose and there's all this slack in the economy. It's just that the immigration crackdown and a bunch of other stuff has ruined the supply of jobs. So demand for jobs is lower, but supply for supply of jobs is lower. And actually we're kind of in perfect equilibrium. Like unemployment rates still 4.3%. You need like basically 0 to 20k jobs a month to maintain equilibrium. And that's what we're getting. Or we're getting even more than that. So a lot of it comes down to, like, what are the conditions initially, which was like, coming out of the, out of the pandemic, like, massive amounts of savings, excess savings, no corporate debt, yada yada, Everyone knows all that stuff. And that those initial, like, conditions, which is sort of the definition of antifragile, I suppose, from Nassim Taleb, have held and held and held. And like, everyone was like, oh, there's no such thing as a soft landing. I mean, we're in, what, year four of the soft landing?
- [11:41]
Excess Returns Host
The softest landing ever?
- [11:42]
Brent Donnelly
Not just pretty much. Yeah. So I think your base case has to always be that the US economy is unbelievably resilient. And then your second thing has to be, you know, if you look at a heat map of the stock market today, for example, this is a good example. Even though, like, it's irrelevant, it doesn't matter when this podcast goes to air. You know, Wells Fargo's down 6%, banks are kind of struggling, there's some like, credit concerns. But if you just run the heat map of the market, all the. So the boxes are sized by market cap, right? And there's basically these seven gigantic boxes and then a bunch of bullshit little tiny boxes that are the other 493. So then the question becomes the real question, ultimately with all this stuff is will the earnings of those big Companies that are 40% of the market continue to be okay? And so far the answer has been yes. I mean, you can make a good argument that going from capex light free cash flow printing machines to capex heavy uncertain future payoff machines is scary as hell. But so far the market's weathered it and, you know, AI is is running the show again. So I think at some point if you ever believe that, that, that AI CapEx is in jeopardy, for example, or that that MAG7 earnings are in jeopardy, then you have a problem. Like 2022 was a, a real bear market and you can't just shrug off a one year bear market. Like you know, if you were bullish that whole year you had problems as Tesla went from 300 to 100 or whatever. So I do think you have to just always be like aware of the risk of especially technology earnings rolling over. But again, $100 oil doesn't do that. And the one thing with oil is that if you look at where the absolute price level has gone from say 2005 to now, obviously prices of everything have gone way up, wages have gone way up. And so like $4 gas, you know, how scary is that compared to 18 years ago when it was a big headline story. Now $4 gasoline, when energy is like, I don't know, it's something like 18% of consumption and it was like 35% then. So like oil is pretty cheap. Gasoline prices are pretty cheap. Yeah, they've gone up. But like how scary is that? Again, I don't know. And like the, the stupid thing is always that the stock market, like the cliche is the stock market climbs the wall of worry. And so that kind of can always give you a license to just blow off everything because you just say oh well, nothing matters because it's the wall of worry. So the more worries there are, the, you know, the more The S&P 500 is going to climb the wall of worry. And I mean honestly that has to be the base case all the time. And then you try to know it when you see it when like this credit stuff bleeds through or like the top of the case stops spending. Because that's the other thing is like you can look at, oh, Clara has a lot of charge offs or whatever and like the low end of the, of the consumer is, is weak with whatever you want to look at 90 day delinquencies on credit cards and all that stuff. But those, that part of the economy is so small compared to the marginal spending of like the, the largest upper middle class. And like you know, when you look at the data of like oh, the middle class has disappeared. Well a huge portion of the disappearance of the middle class is because they went and became upper class or upper middle class. So like there's so much spending power up there and do those people really care if gas is 3, 10 a liter or sorry, 310 a gallon or, or 402. I mean, again, I'm not totally sure.
- [15:35]
Excess Returns Host
With a more fuel efficient car and with less of a commute in many of their cases and all this stuff, I mean.
- [15:41]
Brent Donnelly
Yeah, and I mean the fundamental thing I think that I just always have in my head is that stocks need a steady stream of bad news to go down and they just need nothing for, for them to go up. So like as long as things aren't getting worse, stocks have, have a predisposition to go up because of the amount of money flowing through the system is always increasing due to deficits and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So unless there's a continuous flow of bad news, the bearish fire just slowly withers and goes out.
- [16:15]
Excess Returns Host
Perfect transition. You have said that if you were forced to take a view, you'd be long equities. And you do this with this overlay chart of the S and p and the 200 day average across various shocks. Parse that a little bit further per what you're just saying.
- [16:31]
Brent Donnelly
Sure. So I think it's important to establish, especially because you said the word investing at the, in the intro and I'm not an investor. So I was, I was bearish stocks and bullish dollar for like basically the almost all of March. And the reason was that the reality and the pricing looked detached to me. Like it looked like a lot of bad news was coming or happening, a lot of scary things were happening. All of the things that I just described, basically credit and, and the war and oil and all that stuff and the market hadn't repriced. So in that period I was bearish. And then at the end of April or sorry, at the end of March, I flipped just simply because I felt like the, the stream of bad news or the news flow had stabilized and the sort of second derivative of the news flow was actually getting better. Even though the news was bad, it was less bad. And so when you look at most of the bottoms like the China Trade War, Liberation Day, Covid's in there. But I don't usually think about COVID as relevant to anything that will ever happen again because it was just such a unique thing. But if you look at those, the trade war in 2018 and the liberation Day I think are the best analogs because they were like own goals by the administration or like strong policy shifts by the administration or however you want to look at it that were by their nature not going to continue if stocks kept going down. And so when you look at those, you got a V shaped bottom. And when you recapture the 200 day, it just never looked back. And that's just what it looks like again. So again, I'm always pretty flexible, but when I look at, you know, that just look at what's happening in front of me, it just looks exactly the same as Liberation Day. Like the, the magnitude of Liberation Day was larger, but the structure of the move is identical. Like V shaped bottom gap above the 200 day, little tiny retest and then off to the races again. And if people aren't really that scared about AI anymore being like stocks being overvalued due to AI because like, obviously like multiples have collapsed because of the software thing, then, you know, there's room for people to just start buying stocks again. And, and like I said, you know, by the time this thing airs, I could be bearish again. But. But yeah, for the last, I don't know, whenever it is. Today's the 14th, so for the last two weeks I've been more constructive simply because it's just the same pattern. And I, I do feel like it's tricky with pattern recognition because obviously like things don't just keep doing the same thing over and over or it would be easy. But at the same time humans do keep making the same mistakes and getting scared and then having fomo and like the human patterns are actually quite similar. So what I do is like, so what I just described, obviously that's invalidated if we go back below the 200 day. So it's a pretty easy framework for me to have where I always have reassessment triggers where I say, okay, if this goes here, I'm wrong. So like if oil makes a new high or S and P takes out the 200 day, then I'll definitely capitulate on my bullish view. And I think the oil thing's interesting too, because it actually is tracking the 2022 move very similarly as well. You had that when, when Russia invaded Ukraine, I guess, for the second or more time, I mean, whatever, however many times they've invaded, starting with Crimea, but whatever time that was in 2022 and you had this spike in oil, you touched the absolute high Sunday night around 7pm, which is a feature of markets a lot of times because there's like a liquidity vacuum at that time. And then you consolidated, but you never retested that high. And that's exactly what we've got here so far, is that Brent and Nyx both gapped on the Sunday and then have not retested that high. So that the whole point here being that I will always have some reassessment triggers that tell me, like, okay, you're whatever analog or whatever pattern recognition machine you have in your head, that pattern is no longer valid. And then that stops. Like, that keeps me from, you know, being short all the way down and then riding it all the way back up or being bullish when you know there's no reason to be bullish anymore. Predator Badlands now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney.
- [21:12]
Excess Returns Host
Here you're not the predator, you're the prey. Prey, prey, prey. Pray, pray, pray, pray.
- [21:20]
Brent Donnelly
Critics are saying it's epic, stunning and breathtaking.
- [21:26]
Sponsor/Advertiser
Many have come here.
- [21:29]
Brent Donnelly
None have survived. Predator Badlands now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney plus rated PG13
- [21:38]
Excess Returns Host
take me to bonds because I'm curious about reassessment triggers in the land of fixed income and rates. First off, like, what's the lay of the land? U.S. rates, ex U.S rates. How are you. How are you thinking of this?
- [21:49]
Brent Donnelly
Yeah, it's a weird one because there's two ways that central banks can view an oil shock. One is it's inflationary headline inflation goes up. Our job is to contain inflationary expectations. And yeah, sure, there's a deflationary growth shock aspect to it, but we don't know when that's going to happen. So normally it's oil shocks are inflationary at first and then they become disinflationary as people start spending less and people lose confidence because oil's so, so high and it's taking up too much of their wallet. So different central banks react differently. Like ECB hiked into the oil shock in 2008 and 2011, and people like to make fun of them for that. But like, they're just kind of doing their job in a somewhat simplistic way. They're saying we need to worry about inflationary expectations and we can't print oil. So what we can do is hike rates and reduce demand and that will reduce demand for oil and will also create a disinflationary impulse in the market which will offset the inflation of oil and yada, yada. And then some central banks like New Zealand are just saying, you know, we're going to look through it and see what happens. So in the rates market, it's pretty nuanced because you could easily get the ECB hiking two or three times and say, like RBNZ and the New Zealand central bank doing nothing in the face of identical macro data. So I think it's pretty nuanced, but I do feel like those, some of the most dangerous words in markets is when people say too much is priced in in the rates market. So like there have been a lot of blow ups this or in March in hedge fund land because of, you know, when you're playing for like say half a hike is priced in and you're planning to take the other side of that and then three hikes get priced in, you were short, basically you're short an option and that option went crazy. So the problem with playing the too much is priced in game is that the more can just keep on getting priced in even if it's not rational. So unless you can hold to maturity then you always have a problem. And that's why there's a hedge fund down 14% this month in March and some other hedge funds down a lot. So I don't generally like playing that game just because I feel like you're, it's generally not a hold to maturity game. It's, it's a game where you take the other side and then you blow up and then you were right and you lost money. Like same thing with Silvergate was the other direction. People that were expecting no rate cuts or even maybe rate hikes from the US and then a bunch of cuts got priced in and you know, a lot of people blew up. So generally like that stuff just doesn't appeal to me that much. And to answer the original question, like what's the lay of the land? To me it looks about right, like a couple hikes priced in the ecb, Fed's doing nothing. And you know, other central banks mostly have cut a lot. The ones that have cut a lot could hike a couple times. And that all kind of makes sense to me. There is an inflationary aspect to oil and it does eventually flow through to core and, and then obviously it dissipates due to base effects as time goes on. But then it doesn't always dissipate as fast as you think because some restaurant in, you know, the town where I live just feels the inflationary pressure from oil and hikes the price of their menu for the salmon dinner or whatever and they're not cutting the price of the salmon dinner when, when oil goes back down. So there can be some like more permanent inflationary aspects of people just say, oh, let's see if we can hike prices here. Because everyone's like, everyone knows there's a lot of inflation so let's just see what we can do and maybe we can increase our margins by increasing prices. So there can be like a knock on effect that, that central banks need to care about.
- [25:49]
Excess Returns Host
For the average salmon eating 60, 40 investor or somebody who owns both stocks and bonds, how are you thinking about either correlations or the relationship between the two asset classes? Those two asset classes right now?
- [26:01]
Brent Donnelly
Yeah, I mean obviously in years when there's a lot of inflation, like 2022 or when the Fed's hiking aggressively, like 2018, those sorry, coincidentally or not coincidentally, I'm not sure. But those are both midterm years. But every single asset basically went down in 2018 and in 2022. So there's like no safe harbor and there's no correlation benefit from bonds when inflation is high or rising. But I don't overall I don't really see this as being like a permanent situation. So I, I still feel like even though they haven't worked going forward, bonds will probably be okay because I do think like the US economy is a lot less anti fragile than it was. So I would think like the big risk, the big downside risk to stocks is recession. And if you get a recession then obviously bonds will work. And if you don't get a recession then stocks will probably be fine and you might lose a bit of money on the bond side. But I still think it's a good hedge for recession. And empirically or historically, recessions are really the only thing that makes the stock market go down for a protracted period. So you're disappointed that you own bonds now, but you wouldn't be if there was a recession.
- [27:23]
Excess Returns Host
I want to shift to fx this idea. The dollar is not a safe haven and not a risky asset. Its reaction to a crisis is almost completely dictated by positioning going in. Explain this to me so you can
- [27:38]
Brent Donnelly
go all the way back to 2008. So the idea that the dollar is a safe haven and there's a dollar smile theory which is basically if the US does very well or very badly, you buy dollars. And that all was kind of born of the 2008 crisis when every single liability in the world was priced in dollars. And there was a massive funding trade to be short dollars and long any other currency because like New Zealand rates were like 10%, Australia was nine. You know, people were doing Icelandic bonds to try to capture the carry. Like there was one of the biggest carry trades of all time and that whole thing unwound. And so the dollar absolutely ripped in 2008. But then in 2001, 2002, NASDAQ went from 5,000 to 1,000 and the dollar got absolutely creamed in that time. So it's just very nuanced. It just depends which way the market is going in because generally risk aversion just drives people to reduce their gross because they have to reduce leverage. And so, I mean, you even have a more micro example of going into Liberation Day, the consensus was that tariffs are bullish dollar and fiscal is bullish dollar for that period. And Trump coming in and red wave, all of Those things were bullish $. So everyone was Max long dollars. Then liberation day happened and the dollar dropped 10% in one month. One of the biggest drops. And again, it's not complicated. It's just everyone squares up or gets closer to home and everyone was long dollars, so they sold. And then in 2026 you have the war in Iran. And you know, if you're like, sorry, if you're a macro analyst with no view to positioning and stuff like that, it's not really obvious whether a war in Iran is bullish or bearish dollar from like a macro lens. But going into it, everyone was short dollars. So guess what? The dollar rallied. So you have two episodes, one year apart of massive risk aversion. And one of them, the dollar got smoked 10% in one month. The other one, the dollar rallied 4% in one month. And the simple, like Occam's razor applies is it's just people getting closer to home and repatriating and covering whatever they have. And so I don't think the dollar serves any real useful purpose in a portfolio either way. As a hedge, it's unless you really know what you're doing and you understand what positioning is because it might go up next time or it might go down. It just depends what the initial conditions are as we go into the next crisis, whatever that is, or, or risk
- [30:15]
Excess Returns Host
aversion episode, because that becomes another piece where I don't want to pin the policy tail on the donkey again here, but I want to put the. It's like you have to understand positioning. So when something pushes it way out of bounds, you understand, like here's where people were coming into this move. That's the way you're saying to make sense of it.
- [30:32]
Brent Donnelly
Yeah, And I think people like to have a structural view on the dollar. Like generally most non FX people are always bearish dollar for de dollarization and end of US hegemony or whatever. Hegemony. Sorry, hegemony. Yeah, hegemony, hegemony. And so which has not proven to be correct over the last 50 years. Like there's books in 1968 about the death of the dollar. The dollar to me is generally more, almost all cyclical. Like if you look at the share of reserves, yeah, central banks have bought a bit less dollars and bought a bit of like Chinese yuan and stuff like that. But overall the external value of the dollar is a cyclical phenomenon that's based on the US economic cycle, the global cycle, which is kind of determines like is there somewhere else to invest or is it only the US and then positioning and like more micro things. So I don't feel like there's really any money to be made in taking structural views on the dollar. It's more like, okay, well you can forecast what's going to happen for like the next year based on cyclical stuff. And then just like, okay, sure, maybe you know, it's the fall of the Roman Empire. But like there's literally. I've written about this, actually it's in my new book is like you can find newspaper clippings from 1895 describing the end of, of the U.S. empire as similar to the end of the Roman Empire and like the Dalio stuff and all that. It's sure it's true on like a 400 year time horizon. But like I'm going to be dead in less than 400 years. So I, I just don't factor it in at all to my analysis.
- [32:13]
Excess Returns Host
Not the AI Brent Don Don bot that I'm making, you know, out of these recordings.
- [32:18]
Brent Donnelly
So yes, but that's not me. That's just a synthetic, you know, facsimile.
- [32:25]
Excess Returns Host
That's not what he said. Tell me about gold. What do you think's going on with gold?
- [32:30]
Brent Donnelly
So gold was a great trade obviously for a long time it was a central bank. Kind of like follow the central banks, follow the flow. It completely decoupled from what it used to follow, which was real rates. Because as a negative carry asset, normally you don't want to have a ton of things in your portfolio that don't have any carry, but because the central banks were just buying it for five straight years or whatever, it just went straight up. But then it all culminated with essentially what was, and I don't like to call every bull market a bubble, but it culminated with a bubble in silver, which kind of was partly sympathetic reaction in gold. And so if you look at there's websites that track like what is the most discussed security on Reddit, Wall street bets. And obviously that gives you a sense of like what are retail people doing? And normally it would be like Rigetti computing or like, you know, OKLO nuclear reactors or like, whatever the story the flavor of the week is. And in that time when gold and silver were going up and made their final peak, the number one and number two securities traded on Wall street bets or discussed on Wall street bets were GLD and slv. And if you look at options volumes, it was the same thing. So it was essentially like classic gamma squeeze, where people just retail bought so many options that if it starts going up, it just keeps going up, but then when it stops going up, it goes back down. It's just like a short gamma market. And so I feel like that whole thing has kind of played out now. And like, people have done the trade and got bored of it and moved on to oil and moved on to whatever else and back into AI and maybe a bit into crypto and hype and whatever. And so like, that money, that is like the hottest possible money, it just chases whatever is moving and then goes off and does something else and rarely comes back to the same thing. Like they tried to do GameStop again and it doesn't work the second time because the market's like, yeah, this is stupid, and just sells into it. So the bubble having burst now, I think puts gold in a better position for people to be bullish again. And then the sort of core thesis like Lynn Alden does a good job of encapsulating it is just like nothing stops this train that US deficits are never going to get smaller. And like, the new budget is like off the charts. They were talking about cutting defense spending at one point. Now they're talking about increasing it by 40%. Like Doge was a joke. It was all cosmetic. They didn't do anything. Deficits are higher now than they've ever been. And this is all happening with an unemployment rate at the lows. So, like, it started in 2017. Like the old thing was, in a recession, you increase deficits to prime the pump and make the economy work. And then starting in 2017, they were just like, okay, forget about that. We're just going to rip the deficit higher even though we have like a super strong economy. And Biden continued it through Covid, While Trump started 2017, Biden continued it, and now Trump's doubling down. So in the end, I think, like, that's the sort of gold is the epicenter of the debasement trade. And unfortunately for gold bulls, gold turned into a risky asset because of the. The retail over owning it. But I think now it's kind of back to being like the normal thing. Which is a decent proxy for the debasement. Trade and debasement and massive deficits is still absolutely the thing. So overall I would say gold is probably a good part of a portfolio again. And you can always be more tactical, I think with gold. But overall I would say I'm bullish. Gold, kind of neutral silver. I feel like silver is more of like a retail thing. People get bored of it and then just, you know, it could go back and just be trading 50, 75 for the next three years. And I wouldn't be surprised. The same thing with bitcoin. Like people are bored of it. It could just trade 6580 or 6585 for a year. That wouldn't be that shocking to me. Those retail play things need momentum and once the momentum breaks that people just get bored of it. Whereas gold I think is more of like always has a structural bid from central banks and from people that are just trying to create a portfolio that's more resilient to constant debasement and insane deficits.
- [37:10]
Excess Returns Host
I like this framing of retail play things for this because and like specific to silver. Silver is one of those things that I will go months if not years with not a single client question, whisper utterance of the term silver. And then all of a sudden for like a month it'll be like, what about silver eagles? Should I have a bunch of those like in a safe under my garage or something? And we, we hit that point whenever the, the top was there. And it was just one of those where it's like people are talking about this like a plaything.
- [37:42]
Brent Donnelly
Yeah. And I mean that goes to the whole like shoeshine indicator and stuff. And I do feel like there's value in that. Like sure. When your brother in law who is a lawyer and like doesn't trade and looks at his only as 401k emails you and says like, hey, should I be buying, you know, small nuclear reactor stocks? I'm here. And those are good. And that's usually actually a pretty good sign that you know, the final marginal buyer has arrived and then you know, the thing's about to shut the bed. Because ultimately it's a weird thing, but in every domain people want to buy things at a discount. But in markets like it's a veblen good is the economic term. The more expensive something is, the more people want to buy it. It's just like this weird thing. And obviously it's easier said than done to buy low and sell high. But retail always only wants to buy high and sell Higher. That's the only framework that like, not all retail, but a lot of retail runs on. And so you get this shiny object and then it, you know, people get bored of it. And actually, I just want to kind of correct myself there because there is a huge cohort of retail that just buys a dip as well in. In specific things that they love, like Tesla. So there's. There's kind of two cohorts. One is chasing like the. The shiny objects, which is more like the lotto ticket buyers. And then there's the buy the dippers who just buy every dip. Because Pavlov, like Pavlovian reinforcement, there hasn't been a recession in so long that the message from the market since 2008 is just buy every dip and you can't lose money.
- [39:23]
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- [39:40]
Excess Returns Host
message board out there for everyone. That's. That's what I know to be true. So another quote of yours that I come back to over and over again, and this is definitely why, if somebody's talking to me about, especially a young person, they want to get into not just investing, but into trading. It's like, have you read Alpha Trader yet? For stuff like this? And I'm very excited for this new edition because I think it's a really important book because it's one of the few places that's not. And as much as I love reminiscences of a stock operator, and we'll quote it, you know, forever in a day, it's not practical in the sense that Alpha Trader is, which is why I appreciate it. So the best predictor of success is rationality, and the best predictor of failure is overconfidence. I'm thinking about the message for traders, thinking about the people. I'm thinking about 2026 and where we are here in like, middle of April. Best predictor of success is rationality. Best predictor of failure is overconfidence. What do you see? Extrapolate that over markets. Be philosophical with me.
- [40:36]
Brent Donnelly
So it's funny, I feel like I don't know if we talked about this once before, but I'm going to cover it anyways because I just find it so fascinating. But like, reminiscence of a stock operator, obviously, like, that's good company to be compared to and that's one of the first books that I read about trading. I read that Market Wizards and, you know, sell Wall street the Movie and Red Liars Poker. And so I just listed four things that made me want to get into markets. And three of them are cautionary tales. Like, three of them are basically saying, like, don't do what this person did because it's horrible.
- [41:09]
Excess Returns Host
They're books of please don't.
- [41:10]
Brent Donnelly
Like, please attracted me to the markets. And like, Reminiscence of a Stock Operator is like, basically how. No, I mean, it's a fantastic book and it's like full of awesome things about how to trade momentum and stuff like that. There's a lot of good advice in it. But also, ultimately he went bankrupt three times and took his own life because of the bankruptcy that was caused by the gambling, which was really the fundamental. Once you understand trading and read that book again when you're 40 years old, it's a book about gambling, essentially. And so that is what takes over a lot of times in retail trading, especially because you have a smaller account sometimes and you're like, it doesn't move the needle to make two grand. So if you have a $50,000 account and you make two grand, it doesn't really move the needle. So you feel like you got to take bigger positions and then, whoops, you blow up. But it's also true in institutional settings as well. Because of moral hazard, people have kind of screwed up incentives to take a lot of risk, and they have the upside and not the downside. So what I was trying to do with Alpha Trader is there's a lot of good books about, like, you know, Mark Douglas's books about psychology or Ken Grant's books about risk management. And like, there's millions like Alexander Elder's books about trade setups and all that. There's a lot of good books about fundamentals, technicals, behavioral psychology. Those are kind of like the four pillars of trading. And I wanted to, like, take my experience and make a book that's all. That kind of combines all four, synthesizes all four of those into one thing. And essentially I just feel like, you know, I don't know if I'm really answering your question, but I feel like the risk management and trade structuring side is where most people fall down like new, new, like inexperienced traders. Because it's just way more fun to read about trade setups and think about your ideas and think about, you know, how much money you're going to make. And it's not really that fun to think about, like how much money you could lose and like, where am I going to get out? And having like a rigorous plan before you do it. It's boring to fill out like a little, little worksheet or however you do your thing. Journaling is boring. You know, you just want to trade and then go get drunk after. But in between that, you need to like do the boring stuff. And I feel like that's kind of true with a lot of things too. Like with writing a book, it's the same. Like it's fun. Actually. Rick Rubin talks about this in his, in his book, there's kind of like different elements of doing something. One is like inspiration, which is the fun part. Like, ooh, I got a great novel idea, I'm gonna like start writing. And then you realize like half of it doesn't make sense. And then you have to go and do the really boring thing, which is like have an outline in Excel of like what are the five page section's going to be. And like, you know, with my new book it's like, okay, it's fun to bullshit about war stories and fun trading things that happen, but then you got to tie it all together. But then when you're done, you got to get someone to like proofread it and you got to get someone to create an index for your book and like really super boring stuff. And I think so that's one big part that I think is missing from trading for a lot of people is doing all the boring stuff. Reading the central bank speeches, like, you know, doing journaling, having a process that keeps you from blowing up and all that kind of stuff. So I think there's an element of overconfidence that comes from success. Like, you know, you double your account from 40k to 80k and you think you're the shit. And then you don't do the boring stuff because why would you, let's just have fun and double it again. But then obviously the market will always then punish you for that. So the market tends to create periods of overconfidence, no matter how good or bad of a trader you are. And so even a person who's fundamentally not that overconfident will then get sucked into overconfidence a lot of times. Again, it's mostly through inexperience because there's no 45 year old successful hedge fund PM who is like wildly overconfident about their abilities in the market. Like it barely exists because the market just pummels you when you get overconfident Honestly, I'm not really sure if I answered your question as of April 2026. What does that mean? I mean, I think it just means that the same things that held true when I wrote the book in 2021 hold true now, and they held true in 1995 when I started. Which is like the market is very unforgiving. And even when you think you found the answer, the answer today is not the same answer as is going to make money tomorrow. So it doesn't even matter. Even if you found the holy grail of edges and you're pumping out a four sharp, by definition all the computers out there and all the humans out there are looking for four sharp trades and somebody's going to find it. And so you know the humility to like know that nothing lasts forever in terms of edge and all that. But then also the, I don't know if it's ambition or like the grinder ability to grind to even when you're doing well, to say, okay, what other things can I find that are going to have an edge? Because this edge isn't going to last. And So I need 16 other ideas that I could be working on while I'm pumping, pumping out cash from this one great idea.
- [46:49]
Excess Returns Host
I do think it's interesting and I think it's, I approach that from sort of the, the average trader or the person who's just gotten into it and being aware of that overconfidence because to your point, you're not going to meet a 45 year old hedge fund guy who hasn't been humiliated and humbled to the point of like, listen, nobody really knows anything.
- [47:09]
Brent Donnelly
Yeah.
- [47:09]
Excess Returns Host
And like here's like the six things I kind of know. And I think I can make a living on these like six things I kind of know. But that means I got to avoid the rest. Which is strange. Back to the beginning of the conversation. In such a policy driven market where the policies are always announced with such confidence. And it's easy to see people get swept up in that confidence as like we're gonna do this and then we taco. Yeah.
- [47:35]
Brent Donnelly
And see, that's a huge distinction in terms of how I think is that I'm never really thinking like, okay, are they going to close the straight? Or like how is a naval blockade going to impact physical versus futures pricing of oil or whatever. I'm more always sitting here thinking like, okay, what does the market think that is going to happen? So I'm thinking about what the market's thinking much more than I'm thinking about what I actually think. I have no clue what is going to happen in Hormuzzi, but I do know like people expect xyz so if X, Y, Z doesn't happen then there's going to be a lot of pain in you know, ABC asset class. And so that's generally more how I'm thinking about it is that I don't have any way of being an expert on, you know, vaccine timelines and whatever, but I can follow all the experts and then I can follow whatever all the hedge fund PMs and, and retail and what everyone else is saying. And then I can see when there's disconnects between you know, what are the, the scenarios and what is price and then looking for like asymmetries like okay, this thing's 80% price. So if this doesn't happen that's going to be a major, major turn of events and then either pre positioning for it or a lot of times just reacting like, just saying okay, I know like, and this actually is something for my, from my new book as well, which I think is something that I've never quite like codified until recently. But if you can think about whatever asset class you're trading and think about like what are the headlines that would really change market pricing or market perception here?
- [49:15]
Excess Returns Host
And you're saying like a, like a made up headline like just as a thought.
- [49:17]
Brent Donnelly
Yeah, just like just brainstorming ideas like okay, Avis is in a short squeeze right now and so if they do a secondary. I know enough about Avis from the float and stuff that a secondary would be a meaningful bearish thing for Avis. So I don't want to just be short this thing because it's squeezing that is a waste of money. But I know like secondaries are usually announced between 4 and 5:30pm and I don't want to pay the borrow so I'll try to just be short between 4 and 6pm every day because I know there's like this asymmetry but I, and I don't know what's going to happen. It might never happen. But like the EV of that trade is super high because you're just paying transaction costs or you're, you're making a shitload and there isn't really like a bullish Avis headline that's going to come between 4pm and 6pm that's as big as the secondary would be. So I don't know if that's a weird example, but you can use that in macro too. You can Say like okay, I'm long oil right now. What's going to help me and what's going to hurt me, you know, and right now it's hard to think of the convex upside headline in oil other than maybe like Iran blows up a Navy, a U.S. navy ship or something like that. And then. But anyways, whatever it is, you could be ready for those things. And then it also helps with risk management because like you're not sitting there, say you're just playing Avis, the long side, you're not sitting there at 5pm and the secondary comes out and you, you get destroyed. And you probably should have known that was a risk kind of thing. So having like the, I'm getting a little bit too granular with like this Avis example because that's like super granular. But essentially knowing what the asymmetry and the convexity is in different things and a lot of times it's not symmetrical. Like sometimes it is, but sometimes it's just obviously not. Like there's just, you know, you know that, you know when dollar yen is at 160, it's either going to go up slow or it's going to collapse because they're going to intervene. So like there's another asymmetry that you know about, you know, like, so I'm always trying to think in those terms. And then you know, Obviously if everyone's long $yen and is at 160 then the asymmetry is even better and etc. Etc. But like using a bunch of different frameworks to try to understand like okay, this based on what's priced in. I know that this thing is going to go down a lot or up a little bit. And then you know, that's where technical analysis will come in on the up a little bit side. So you don't just keep on holding it as it grinds higher and higher. I think that's the biggest value of taxes. It gives you like a wrong if this happens, and I feel like every single trade has to have that or it's not a good trade, you have to have an explicit thing of if this happens, which is usually it goes to a certain price but also can be other things if this happens. I'm wrong because otherwise if, if it goes against you and you don't have like a thesis breaking moment, then you just want to like you bought the thing at 8 and it goes to 4, well then it looks, you know, even more attractive and you just keep on buying the thing. So yeah, anyways, yeah, you end up
- [52:34]
Excess Returns Host
liking it twice as much because it got cheaper. And that's what you do when bananas go on sale or whatever.
- [52:39]
Brent Donnelly
Yeah, or. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's a funny thing.
- [52:42]
Excess Returns Host
It's a very funny thing. Talk a little bit more about just like the journaling process around standard process for like thinking through a trade and not necessarily putting it on, but like the pre metacognition process of like working through this stuff and writing it down. What's that look?
- [53:00]
Brent Donnelly
First of all, I would say bananas going on sale is a terrible example just because the initial conditions are that bananas are very cheap. So I'll just put that out there.
- [53:09]
Excess Returns Host
But I am only speaking from the. I ate a banana this morning that was very grateful to find in my kitchen and I was like really glad my wife bought these like last week because we've been traveling and it was, it was actual like it timed the ripeness right.
- [53:24]
Brent Donnelly
Oh, nice.
- [53:24]
Excess Returns Host
The odds of this win are so low, but I'm gonna so appreciate the payoff.
- [53:29]
Brent Donnelly
It's like the 37 hour window of banana awesomeness.
- [53:32]
Excess Returns Host
Exactly.
- [53:33]
Brent Donnelly
So the value of journaling it for me is essentially like when I'm trading badly, I don't have a plan. And usually that comes when I'm doing really well because I have like when I'm trading badly I tend to, or like when I'm losing money, I tend to trade really well because I'm rigorous and like I'm not overconfident. But I never really lose my confidence anymore just because I've been doing it for so long. So I just tend to stick to my process and be very mechanical and methodical. But when I'm doing, when I'm over earning then sometimes I just start gambling and I don't always have a plan. And so writing things down for me is just basically the enforcement aspect of do you have a plan for this trade? Yes or no. And it doesn't always have to be like journaling. Like I'll have like sheets like this that just have like, you know, whatever I'm long this thing if this trades get out. And at least that because like it's so easy to lie to yourself and go like, well you know, now that's at 28, I, you know, I wasn't really going to cut because like I'm not fully at max risk. I could actually add a little bit here and you start negotiating with yourself and all kinds of bullshit. So I feel like when you write something down, it's like you're sending a message to your future self. Of like, okay, if this thing trades at 28, Brad, you're out. Like, kind of the third person speaking to yourself and then journaling. Like, post fact or like, like actual what people would normally think of as journaling. I just feel like it's the same. It mostly has the same effect as like talking to a therapist or whatever is that there's just so much going on inside your mind. Or I'll speak for my own mind. Like, there's just a lot of, you know, voices that sound like me telling me stuff that I shouldn't be doing, but they're trying to convince me to do the stuff and all that. That it just becomes so noisy that when you write something down, it, like, establishes it as a meaningful thing that's going, like, all these things are in my head. Which ones of them are meaningful? Okay, I'm writing this down. Like, today I felt this. Obviously, the very fact of me writing it or typing it means that it has some meaning. So it gives a way of filtering out and like, essentially just being honest and saying, like, okay, here's how I felt today. And I mean, the cliche or like, it's not a cliche, but the famous quote is like, I write to find out what I think. And, like, I think that quote is so good because literally sometimes I'm writing stuff and I'm like, oh, I didn't even realize this. Like, that was one of the biggest values of writing AM FX when I started was I'd be bullish Aussie for, like, whatever reasons. And then I'd start writing and I get like one page in and I'm like, yeah, I don't even believe my own self here. So, like, I definitely can't publish this. And the bad trader or the bad thing would be like, okay, I already wrote a page. I'm just gonna, like, you know, squeeze my way into this view and just do it anyways. But, like, I'm so, like, endowment effect is like, everyone said, like, all the biases. The crazy thing about them is you can know about them and still have them. But I truly believe I do not have endowment effect. Like, if I buy something and then change my mind, I'll just sell it ten cents worse and take the two grand loss or whatever. I just don't care. I've just done so many trades in my life that I have no emotional attachment to any trade that I ever do. And so sometimes when I'm writing, I will learn something about like, okay, this view isn't as good as I thought or Sometimes it's like I'll start writing and then I'll say, you know, there's three reasons I'm bearish dollar cad and then I do the bullets. And then I'm like, wait a second, I got one more. I have one more. Like all of a sudden I got eight bullets. And they're all pretty good reasons. And then I'll like double the risk that I have. So I feel like it's essentially a way of like accessing the truth inside a crazy insane system that has many truths, which is like the inside of your brain, which is just like full of lies and truths all the time inside my head anyways. Does that make sense?
- [57:55]
Excess Returns Host
It did actually.
- [57:56]
Brent Donnelly
Okay. Not only to find out what I think, I think is a really good summary of how writing is useful in trading. That's the one thing. And then also as an enforcement mechanism or like a note to. A note to your future self of like, if this happens, I'm going to do this. And then because I still don't even trust my future self, I usually automate everything too. Like when I put a trade on, I just put my stop in interactive brokers, like on automated. And if I don't, it's usually because I'm up a lot of money and I'm being lazy and I'm about to lose a whole shitload of money.
- [58:32]
Excess Returns Host
At least you know, at least you know it's coming or you knew it was coming. Well, your time machine back to the note.
- [58:37]
Brent Donnelly
Yeah, I should have improved a lot in that area because I have conditional formatting in my P and L sheet. So if I'm over earning, it turns red. And I know like, okay, you have a choice here. You can start gambling and go back to where you were four days ago, or you can square up and be happy that you just, you know, had a wicked run and start over and reduce your units. Normally what I'll do is I'll try to square up if I can. If I can force my hands to the buttons, which is like. And then I'll like reduce my unit size of my spreadsheet to 50% and then, you know, I'll be back to full size, you know, within 24 hours. But at least it's spinning out smaller positions, which I can then, you know, so that's, that's a like risk reduction during over earning as opposed to normal. Normally people would think like, you reduce risk when you're under earning, but I actually feel like if anything, it's actually when I'm over earning that I'm in the most danger, but that's just me. Like, a lot of people will double down. I just don't have that. I just, I'm always cautious of. Like, I've always said I have a lot of risk appetite, but I'm very sensitive to like blowing up, breaking risk limits. I mean, that mostly comes from work at a bank because, like, that's the only thing that could really. Like losing money every single day for 50 straight days wouldn't really get you in that much trouble, but losing like twice your limit in one day would. And so I have like a visceral reaction to breaking my own limits or breaking stops and stuff like that where. Which I just don't like how that feels. Like my face turns red and I can feel like. I don't know if visceral is the right word, but like meta, metabolic, whatever. Like physiological I think is the word I was looking for. But I like when I break my limits or like break my stop and stuff, I could. I have a physiological reaction to it and I don't like that. So. But then when I'm making a ton of money, it's easy to just start gambling because I don't have that feeling at that time. That's why I need the checks and balances.
- [60:49]
Excess Returns Host
Yeah, you have to have those internal counters. So you're coming back because there's a new version of the book coming. But prior to that, like, why, why did you decide now was the time to revisit Alpha Trader and why'd you want to do it again? Basically a new version of this.
- [61:06]
Brent Donnelly
So when I wrote Alpha Trader, it's. It went over very well with professionals. But what I thought I was kind of writing was like a how to guide for anyone. Like not, not just for noobs, but
- [61:20]
Excess Returns Host
spoiler is that's what I thought you were doing.
- [61:22]
Brent Donnelly
But anyway, so like, it was not for noobs, but it was kind of like for anyone like you. A professional should enjoy it, but a noob should also be able to understand it and whatever. And I feel like I, I succeeded in that. Like, I feel like a lot of, like, people my age that are PMs at big hedge funds have told me, like, wow, that book helped me or whatever, but it's kind of a little bit limiting because you have to explain a lot of things and kind of like, whatever. So I wanted to write a book for experts and professionals where I felt like the baseline knowledge was already high. And then also just like five years have elapsed since I wrote Alpha Trader so there's a lot of new things that I've incorporated which are more like things from outside of trading, like the DSM 5 and like poker and you know, physics and multiverse theory and like random shit that I've just learned about and become interested in. And then you as a trader you just see the parallels. And so I think the idea of the book, like more macro is to make people think about like, okay, what are the areas that I know a lot about, whether it's like frigging crochet or you know, nuclear fission or whatever and how can I apply those to markets, to think differently about markets? Because like the punchline is kind of like if you think like everyone else, you perform like everyone else. And you know that's an extremely negative statement because overall performance is way below just an index, you know, for fund managers and retail and everyone. So like, if you want to perform like everyone else, which is shitty, then do what everyone else does. So the idea was to kind of branch out of the four pillars that I said which is like fundamentals, behavioral, quantitative and technical. Almost all the books are about that stuff. So I'm trying to go take these other domains, see how they apply to trading, give a whole bunch of examples of how I use them and then like LLMs didn't exist in 2021, now they do. So like here's how I use LLMs to trade and all that kind of stuff. So all kind of like I would say second order thinking instead of Alpha Trader is still pretty first order. Like here's how technicals work, here's how I use them. And then now I'm trying to go like a little bit more second order thinking and multi domain and, and all that.
- [63:52]
Excess Returns Host
Well, I can't wait to unpack that one with you. I'm very much looking forward to that because I think this like second layer on top of it is tremendously useful and especially with the new new tools.
- [64:03]
Brent Donnelly
And I think it's fun, like it's weird when like this is to be the third trading book that I've written and still I don't know for sure if people will like it. Like the first one I was kind of like, is this just like a boring textbook about currency trading? But then people liked it and then Alpha Trader was like, am I saying something new here? Which I think I was. And people liked it. And then this one, I know I'm saying something new but like, am I just like all over in crazy town talking about things and will people relate to what I'm talking about because now I'm not just saying like buy it at 68 and sell it at 72. So once again, I guess we'll see. And you know, the stakes don't feel as high on the third book. Like I hope people like it anyways, but we'll see what happens.
- [64:49]
Excess Returns Host
Well, the Lord of the Dawnelly Rings trilogy is now.
- [64:54]
Brent Donnelly
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
- [64:55]
Excess Returns Host
I look forward to the Hobbit. People want to find the new book. Are pre orders out yet? Can we pre order this thing yet?
- [65:01]
Brent Donnelly
No, it's the Because I don't know the date and the mistake I made last time was setting the date and pre orders and then like some of the things like indexing and cover design took longer and it created a lot of stress. So I'm choosing this time to just when it's ready, I'm going to release it. And I know that's not optimal from a marketing point of view, but if people want to read it, they'll find it.
- [65:21]
Excess Returns Host
They'll find a way to it.
- [65:23]
Brent Donnelly
So the estimated date is is around mid May, which is a coincidence, but May 22, 2021 is when Alpha Trader came out. So maybe it'll be on the fifth anniversary if you're Inshallah.
- [65:35]
Excess Returns Host
If the gods. If the gods attend, it shall be there. People want to find you on the Internet. They want to bug you. Where should we send them?
- [65:42]
Brent Donnelly
Spectra markets.com so s p c t r a markets.com and pretty much everything's there.
- [65:50]
Excess Returns Host
Everything's there. Sign up for the Friday Speedrun. If nothing else, get on that damn list people. This is Excess Returns. Brent, thank you so much for coming back on. Like subscribe comment all the things below.
- [66:01]
Brent Donnelly
And we are out.
- [66:02]
Excess Returns Host
Thank you for tuning in to this episode. If you found this discussion interesting and valuable, please subscribe on your favorite audio platform or on YouTube. You can also follow all the podcasts in the Excess returns network@excessreturnspod.com if you have any feedback or questions, you can contact us@accessreturnspodmail.com no information on this podcast
- [66:22]
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should be construed as investment advice. Securities discussed in the podcast may be holdings of the firms of the hosts or their clients.