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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
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B
Hello out there. Happy New Year and welcome back to Macro Mondays, our first show of 2026. My name is Mig Oswald. I'm going to be your host this year as well. And I'm going to be joined today and throughout the year by you, Andreas Stino. Welcome to the show, Andreas, And Happy New Year.
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A
Happy New Year, Mikkel. And well, you know that we're recording live from Scandinavia because I can tell the audience that you're going straight on vacation in a couple of days from now, even though we've just had a couple of weeks vacation, Michael. So that's, that's really typically Danish, right?
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B
Europe stuff. Yeah, that's how we do it over here. We go on vacations. You can take our islands. We'll. We'll get back to that address. What a start to the new year. It's. It's been really eventful. We've had the. The arrest of Nicolas Maduro, the actions in Venezuela. We're going to be covering the effects on oil markets on and a couple of trade ideas on that. And we are going to be extrapolating a little bit from that to discuss what might be next because it feels like there's blood lust going on in Washington at the moment. Who's next? Who's the next target? We'll get to that. And we're going to talk macro as well. Even though this is a macro event, we're going to talk about the macro as well for a little bit. And obviously we're going to be taking all your listener questions. So feel free to chip in into the chat. Whether you're watching on real vision X, YouTube or wherever you're watching, we'll be sure to grab those. We've already got a few in there. So before we get started, Andreas, I want to do a little bit of advertisement for the crypto gathering that's coming up. The annual Real Vision Crypto gathering. It's in Miami Beach. You and I are going, Andreas, assuming we're allowed to go to the U.S. assuming Denmark is not at war with the U.S. we're going to Miami at least January 22nd to 25th at Miami Beach. You don't want to miss it. Check out realvision.com for tickets for that. Really much looking forward to that. We've got a really pack week coming up here at Real Vision. We're back with a bang after the. The New Year's. We are updating our portfolio. We, we. During the holidays, Andre, we released our big 2026 outlook with our thematics and stock picks for the new year. We're already changing that. Of course, things move that fast, but we're, we're updating that. And as something new. If you're an alpha subscriber out there to Real Vision, you're going to be getting a little bit of a digest each week of the stuff that we publish on the pro Chair at Real Vision. So you can look forward to that. We're going to dip our toes tomorrow, I believe, or at least during this week. So that's, that's going to be a lot of fun. Andreas, to, to, to reach even wider also. Andreas, before we get to Venezuela and all the other stuff, we just need our usual disclaimer here. It was an eventful 2025. I think 2026 is going to be equally as eventful. We're going to be actionable, come with trade ideas and they might be.
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A
Summertime is, may be good. Summertime it may be.
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There we go, Andreas. Nothing new there. So, Andreas, you want to start with Venezuela? It's the big one. Affected market heavily today, obviously. Let's start there maybe. Did you see the market reactions today that you were expecting over the weekend?
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A
I mean, the oil market is kind of treating this as any other day, right? To begin with, we traded a little lower this morning, European hours, and then now we're up a little bit down. I mean, it wasn't really as big of an event for oil as one could have feared, at least initially on Saturday morning when we got the news. So to some extent we have to accept that this Venezuelan oil story is pretty much a nothing burger for now for a couple of reasons. We're talking about a very outdated infrastructure. We're talking about an oil production that is currently not by any means firing on all cylinders. So we're talking approximately a million barrels a day right now. We're most likely talking about less since this shock effect leads to a decline in oil production. And we also know that the US Navy is currently not allowing any ships in and out from Venezuela. So in that sense, spot speaking, we're probably talking about decline in the oil supply from Venezuela. But over time, there's a scope here, and let me stress over time because we're talking about, as I mentioned, a very outdated infrastructure. We're talking about some of the more difficult oil barrels to transform into gasoline, et cetera, on Earth. So this whole notion that the US Just seized the biggest oil reserve on Earth, you need to take that not even with a pinch of salt, but with a truckload of salt, because we're not talking about an oil reserve that is easily coming online from here. We're rather talking about an exercise that will take many years and will take billions after billions in investments to really move the needle on the oil supply. So if anything, we're talking about something that adds flexibility on the top side, supply wise over the course of 1, 2 years, capping oil prices. But we're not talking about anything that will lead to a landslide in oil prices here, maybe even rather the contrary short term.
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Andres, we discussed this over the weekend that the case might as that be some of these companies that are going to help Venezuela do this. This is a little bit speculative because we don't know exactly who's going to be governing Venezuela. We don't know what's going to be the relationship. But Donald Trump told us explicitly that he had been discussing this with oil companies or refineries beforehand. So it seems like there's a plan for US Refineries who are used to this type of heavy crude to get in there. Is that the play here? What do you think Andreas? And is that already over today? Because a lot of these companies have seen huge rallies today. Yeah.
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A
And I mean honestly in hindsight, some of these companies already saw rally on Friday. Ye that makes me speculate at least whether someone from within the very inner circle of the administration leaked something. Well, I don't think this story is over from the perspective of more structural capex, we're likely talking about a story that Scott legs for another couple of years, maybe even three years from now. So I think you have plenty of time to join the bandwagon on some of these, jump the bandwagon on some of these names. Just before going on air here, we traded a couple of these names in the portfolio. We'll make sure to update all of you as soon as possible. I think it's maybe already out. So the point here is that I see this as a meaningful story also years ahead while the very near term stories probably already in the price. Right? Yeah, yeah.
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B
And the thing is Andreas, I've been pondering this a lot today and yesterday because initially I expected this to be sort of an invasion, a regime change. You would tear down the Maduro regime, the narco terrorist regime, replace it with something new. That's not the case. Maduro is out, his wife is out. Everything else stays the same. The army is still there, the police are still there, the whole power apparatus and most likely one of Maduro's inner circle guys, Andreas is going to be going to be the new leader, obviously, as a US puppet, essentially. So this is not a regime change. This is not Iraq or Afghanistan. And this was done so quickly, Andreas, that it never materialized into a true macro story. Obviously it affects markets today and there are place for this. But if this had happened on a Tuesday, we would have seen huge fluctuations in oil and equities, most likely until we had more clarity. But everything was over so quickly that now we have at least clarity enough that this is not going to escalate and have wider market repercussions. Do you agree with that?
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Yeah, for now. That certainly seems to be the logical conclusion here. From a geopolitical perspective, I have to agree with you that we have to accept that this is not a full regime change. It seems like the playbook has changed probably due to the lessons learned in the Middle east over the course of the past couple of decades. So instead of trying to force a democracy into something that hasn't really worked as a democracy for a while, they're probably going to accept that they have the puppet in there for a while. I think this is an old saying in geopolitics, but it may be a son of a bitch leading the country, but at least it's our son of a bitch. And that's kind of the notion that they're following now.
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The thing is, I'd like to hear.
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You, Meghul, because the question I've received all day, both from members of Real Vision, but also from our hedge fund clients, is what is next? And I mean, it's obviously highly, wildly speculative whether we get an invasion or whether we get a similar military operation elsewhere. But to me it really seems like the administration is high on success here. So why not try and do more now that there is a window of opportunity. Miguel, where?
- [09:49]
B
Yeah, to me it seems like they're like teenage boys who just found a porn magazine under the dust that's drawer. Look at this picture I have in our slide deck here of Lindsey Graham. I don't know if you saw this today. I think it was on Fox. He done the make Iran great again hat that tells you where we're at for us here in Denmark. We can hope that Iran is next and not Greenland. But let's discuss the geopolitics a little bit. Does the USA need the Venezuelan oil? No, but it's better to have it US controlled than Russia or China controlled. This is a big issue for China strategically because they were relying on Venezuela being a source of oil, especially in times of conflict. However, if it came to an open conflict between the US and China, the US would relatively easily be able to cut off that supply chain. But still it was a part of the Chinese built supply chain. And that's where I see this. If there are any geostrategic strategic elements to this, it's about building larger supply chains and controlling these supply chains in the era of decoupling, which is one of the our big trading thematics for 2026. So that's also where I see these traits fitting into. It's part of the larger decoupling between the US and China. Getting back to your question, Andreas, what's next? We're having a lot of names floated. I mean if the narco terrorist narrative holds, which I don't really think it does, then Colombia, Mexico should be obvious. That's going to be entirely different cases. I don't think you're going to get away with just flying in and capturing the Colombian president or the Mexican president. I don't think that's going to be possible. It's very clear to me that in Venezuela you had someone on the inside who if not participated in this then at least let it happen. I don't think you're going to have that in Colombia or Venezuela to any degree like that. They're much more complicated countries. So they're going to be looking at what opportunities do we have because they want to keep this momentum going. Right now everything is working out for Trump. The Iran attack back in the summer worked out incredibly well. He feels like he's done a great peace deal in armenia, in Myanmar, etc. And in, in Thailand. So I mean if things continue to escalate in Iran, we might see that the US administration tries to give the regime that final little notch that makes it fall over again. It's a whole different beast. Iran is a multicultural country, could devolve into a civil war. We all know where all the refugees are going. But it could be interesting for the US to try and get rid of the ayatollahs there and then address. We have so many questions on this also because we're Danish and we have to to to to declare that Greenland, that's the easy one. There's no military opposition there. It's very natural in it's in the western hemisphere so it fits with the Don Row doctrine. And I have to say for us and I think in the Danish mind this was something that was there could happen next year. We don't know to which is over the past or over the weekend switch to this is going to happen. Trump said as much. This is going to happen in a few weeks. In a few weeks we're not going to see a US invasion of Greenland, but we're going to see a term sheet essentially presented to the Danish government and then, then, then we'll see if there is a deal to be made out of that. I'm quite fearful of that because if Trump really wants Greenland to be American, what kind of deal can you really make? You can give the, the Americans freedom of, of military access and they already have that. So can the Danish government sell Trump something that he already possesses? I don't know. Maybe. Do you see any, any other angles to the Greenland story? Do you see any investment angles to that? Andreas?
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A
Well, you have a few companies at least exploiting the opportunities within mining to the very south of Greenland. They've already seen inflows both today and on Friday. So I mean you have niche stories there. In my opinion, it's more obvious mining case than Venezuela, especially if you look at rare earths, which we had a lot of discussions ongoing on social media on whether Venezuela was huge deposit of rare earths and not least cobalt and antimony. Both were probably hallucinations from a large language model, I have to admit. So some pundits were really tricked by the prompts that they made with some of these big, large language models over the weekend. In any case, I consider it very interesting to watch the price action in commodities just after the market to open here in the us. I'm looking that the screens now gold is absolutely through the roof and I think that makes sense because if the coupling was semi confirmed on Friday it is definitely fully confirmed by Monday. Here we're talking about on a trend basis a decoupling that is hard to reverse now between the US and China and the Global south will obviously buy gold in response to that. The big question is whether silver will follow. For those of you who tracked my, you know my writings on, on X and LinkedIn and Real Vision etc over the course of the Christmas holidays here, you'll know that I've been caught in the crossfire between all of these Silverbucks over the course of the past few weeks. I think silver is very sensitive here first and foremost due to positioning. We're talking about 20 billion plus longs in paper longs that is. And the CME is raising margins more or less on a bi daily basis at the moment, meaning that you have to put up more collateral basically for your longs in these silver positions. On top of that it is not as clear to me that silver is a precious metal anymore since the industrial use has been increasing, not by a lot, but though increasing on a trend basis, meaning that it is less obviously a debasement trade than gold is. So I would personally prefer gold and bitcoin to silver as decoupling bets on this. We're thankfully also starting to see some pretty solid price action in bitcoin, say over the past week or so. In any case, what I'm trying to say here is that the decoupling base case is now solidified. It is hard to reverse, meaning that those obvious decoupling bets will continue to rally. And I think there are some, you'll find some tremendous opportunity in some of the names that can actually deliver on this question. On rare earths, one of our top picks there, Energy Fuels has had a tremendous start to the year and I think there is more in store for us in relation to this bet. So overall I probably shouldn't say this, but I couldn't be more happy with the developments, at least from a monetary standpoint. I mean we're making money right, left and center. It's basically what we anticipated. This.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, that's on a trend basis. Yeah, that's what the show is about. Address. There are plenty of shows in international law and morals and ethics. Will, will, will let other, other guys handle that. Speaking of bitcoin, Address. Yes, Venezuela had, has the largest oil reserves in the world, but they also had a bitcoin reserve of 600,000 bitcoins that has now been either seized or frozen a little bit unclear year by the US government. So obviously the oil reserves, they're hard to move out of Venezuela. These bitcoins are extremely easy to move. They're very, very easy to displace. Some of them might find their way into, I don't know, I won't even speculate into that. But that size of a bitcoin reserve that the US government now holds five years more or less, five years ago that would have been a hot potato for most governments. Now it's a big asset. Do you think, think could this restart the talks of a US federal bitcoin reserve or what? Or I mean they're not going to flood the markets with them, are they?
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No, I mean, at least if they follow the playbook that they laid forward last year. We're talking about a strategic reserve that is built up when you see stuff, right? We're not talking about a reserve that you add to on a running basis by buying. But I mean if you somehow get hold of some, you'll keep them in that reserve and that would be my base case here. So I as you, I saw some of these stories around this Venezuelan bitcoin reserve. I'm not sure it's fully confirmed the size of it, Michael, but in any case, if it's true that it's worth as much as you mention, we're probably talking about something that could either be added to the US Strategic reserve or else the administration will ensure that the new administration in Venezuela will not sell it. And I guess that holds for the Venezuelan gold reserves as well. Some of those gold reserves are held in London to my knowledge. Meaning that you could obviously also fear that those reserves could be frozen or sold or whatever. But I don't think that will happen, especially not given the stance that we see from this administration on this topic elsewhere. No.
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And I mean the Chinese are reportedly owed, I think it was $19 billion in oil. What's going to happen to that? Is the US going to repay them? That no one knows. Those are the big questions. And also Andreas, what I'm interested about, just to keep the eyes on the geopolitics a little bit, okay, we've got Madura out of the place. We have a new stable government. This is looking much better than Iraq or Afghanistan. From a cynical perspective, you probably have a functioning government. The water is running, garbage getting picked up, people are getting arrested for thieving and whatever traffic violations a society is running. But this is not a well functioning society, Andreas. This is a society that's going to run out of money in a couple of months. Then they're going to have to go to Washington and ask the Americans to fill up their state covers. They can't go to Moscow for that anymore. They're not going to go to Beijing for that anymore. And, and, and, and make those transactions. They're going to go to Washington and that's going to be the next one. How long and how deep are the US Willing to go? They can set up similar arrangements to the Chinese where they loan the Venezuelans money that's going to be repaid in oil or bitcoin. But there is going to be a bill to pay here. That's all I'm saying. And then we're not even getting into the risks of Venezuelan being discontent with the Maduro government continuing. We'll have to see if that evolves into a macro case address. It's obviously manageable from a size perspective, but there's going to be a bill or a tap to pick up should we just talk a little bit else than Venezuela, Andreas?
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Yeah, but obviously it's been the biggest story, but I think it's noteworthy that over the course of the Christmas season, also the first couple of days of the new year here, we're receiving a confirmation of the price data that we also gathered ahead of Christmas. We're talking about a substantial disinflation impulse now in the US And I think it is even in play that we get relatively close to the 2% target over the course of the first quarter here. What happens from Q2 and onwards is a bit more debatable in my opinion. I mean, we could accelerate from there. The point I'm trying to make here is that amidst this, which is evidently accelerating the debasement case from a geopolitical standpoint, we're likely going to receive a couple of rate cuts, if I'm right, from the Federal Reserve just during this quarter, meaning that you'll also fuel this whole dollar debasement notion via that channel. You'll fuel small caps, you'll fuel risk taking via the interest rate channel as well because inflation will allow them to cut interest rates. And I think that's a really, really interesting backdrop. It sounds kind of odd to be as bullish as I am here amidst what's going on, but we're talking about a geopolitical backdrop that typically accelerates these debasement trends. While we're seeing inflation decelerating, we're seeing the Federal Reserve cutting, we're seeing slightly weaker dollar on a trend basis. And we're, by the way, in the very early innings of observing the ramifications of this new legislation for banks in the US Called the eslr. And we've written extensively about that for the pro tier in our macro subscription package. And we're talking about something that will likely provide the banks with plenty of billions of extra lending capacity, but not least repo capacity, which has been much needed after a tight quarter turn and year turn in dollar liquidity. So being on the other side of this tighter dollar liquidity landscape is also a positive. So lower inflation liquidity going up, this geopolitical backdrop, I think we have a very strong return profile ahead of us in January. Yeah.
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B
And supporting the case for a renewed cutting season is the ISM print that was just out, I think, half an hour ago here, 47.9 fair bit lower than the consensus supporting the rate cut theory. Any other thoughts on that print? I know, it's just hot in so much time. You had to.
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No, but I mean, if you look at our now costs on everything manufacturing related. It wasn't a surprise to us at least this print. I know we've been banging the drum on better trends in the manufacturing sector for a while. What's important here, and this is now my main thesis is that the big beautiful bill establishes window of opportunity for CapEx this year. That window was not there last year. So you can basically write off or use your capex from a tax perspective this year as a consequence of the big beautiful bill and it allows you to to look at these capex investment cases with a much more benign set of assumptions when it comes to the irr, the internal rate of return. I think that is why we've seen the manufacturing sector holding back last year because they knew this benign window was upcoming from 1st of Jan. But obviously we need to see that now. We need to see some orders from the manufacturing sector, we need to see some capex and my best guess is that we'll get exactly that because the manufacturing cycle is doing better outside of the US than in the US right now. Not least explicitly visible via the massive chip exports from Korea and Taiwan to the us it is really accelerating at the moment and it seems like January will also see an acceleration there. Semiconductors have been off to very, very hot start of the year.
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Okay, I just want to get past a few list of questions here. We already have had a few on the ISM print so we covered that. But a bit more to the Venezuelan and geopolitical situation from Peter Wenzel here, here. I'm just going to bring it up here, one second. Here we go. Peter is based in Colombia. He's following the situation closely. I don't see Colombia heading down the same path. Whatever the accusation from the US and the Colombian president's unpopularity here in Colombia, he was still democratically elected, which should make a Venezuelan style playbook far less likely. And that's an important point here Andreas, because this was possible in Venezuela because Maduro was, he was voted out of office two years ago or a year and a half ago. He was very, very unpopular. He wasn't democratically legitimate. So this obviously the other cases, the next steps we're talking about are going to be much more, much more difficult for the US to carry out. So very important there and note there, don't expect a similar action to happen in Bogota anytime soon. A question here from Andre Atro, which is interesting also for you Andreas, but I'll answer it first. Happy New Year guys. Given the situation in Venezuela, is there a chance that China interprets this as a green signal to take over Taiwan and if so, is intel looking good from a macro point of view. So I mean address, I know you have a good story and all the, the nuclear war scenario, how do you prepare for that? But I mean if China goes to war over Taiwan, Taiwan, it's most likely major conflict. I think two ways of looking at this. One is there's a blueprint here. If the US can do this to Venezuela, then China can do this to Taiwan. And this is all China needs to do to Taiwan is go in there and replace the leadership. They probably need to replace more than the top leadership but still they don't need to occupy Taiwan. They don't need to. They simply need to change the leadership to someone loyal to Beijing. So for China this is a blueprint on how you can do it. The US can't really complain too much if they do it. On the other hand, losing Venezuela is a strategic setback for China. So all else being equal, it reduces actually the risk for Taiwan I would say in the short term. So yeah, a bit of both here. I don't think Chinese action over time one is imminent but it's something to watch and they're obviously going to hold this to the Americans if that should ever occur. And so I don't think you should make any TR trades based on the expectancy of a Taiwan war. But any views on that? Andres.
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A
For what it's worth my reading is that an invasion of Taiwan got less likely after the Venezuela special operation simply due to the fact that in case of a full on international conflict, Venezuela was sort of a oil lender of last resort for China. And we know that most major wars are lost when you run out of fuel. I mean it's putting things a bit too simply. But in any case, you know some, some people responded to me yesterday saying that well, Russia will be able to provide China with fuel. And, and the short answer to that question is no, Russia is not able to fully provide China with fuel in case of an international conflict. We're maybe talking at best about 40, 50% of the daily consumption in China. So they'll have to have access to other trade partners with, with loads of fuel rule and Venezuela was one of them but no more.
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They kind of need big storages because the counterpoint to that would be in the event of a global war, and we're talking hypothetically here, the US would be relatively easily able to blockade Venezuela, cut off those oil supplies, but they would still play a big part in filling up the Chinese inventories and the storages before conflict. That's even more how I see it. So okay a couple of topics there. It was a huge weekend dress. We covered as much of the as as we could. You can go to realvision.com to read our fuel full coverage of this both from a geopolitical oil perspective also from the fake news on commodities angle that you you you posted about. Andreas lots of good stuff there especially if you're into or interested in rare earths and and and that entire discussion that's all we had for you this week. We'll be back next Monday. I'll be calling in from the Canary Islands. You'll be here in Winter Copenhagen. Andreas, so sorry about that but that's the way it is and hopefully we will still be at peace with the US by then. Fingers crossed. Andreas, thank you for joining this week. Thanks to everyone for listening. We'll be back.
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It.