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Broadcasting from Baltimore, Maryland, and all around the world. You're listening to the Stansberry Investor Hour. Tune in each Thursday on itunes for the latest episodes of the Stansberry Investor Hour. Sign up for the free show archive@investorhour.com Here is your host, Dan Farris.
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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Stansberry Investor Hour. I'm your host, Dan Farris. I'm also the editor of Extreme Value, a value investing service published by Stansberry Research. Now, before we get going today, I have a favor to ask of you. So about a week or so ago, my Stansberry colleague Austin Root sent me a note with a Wall Street Journal article attached. And he said, hey, I think you'd do a great job writing about this in the Stansberry Daily Digest. That's our daily email that goes out to every paying Stansberry subscriber every day of the week. And I had seen the article before. It was about Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax, which in some cases means investors wind up paying like, more than 100% of their investment income on certain investments, you know, in taxes. Just crazy. And I saw the article, but I was like, eh, you know, I just kind of passed it by and I didn't think of it again until Austin sent me his note. And I thought, well, he thinks I can do a good job with this, so I'm gonna take a crack at it. And, you know, I think I struck a nonpartisan tone on the topic. And our readers wrote in to say they really enjoyed it. So, you know, they're the ones who know if I've done something good, right? If they enjoy it, then it's good. And here's the thing, right? I had dismissed the thing previously, but Austin made this specific point of saying that he thought I would do a good job with it. So I went ahead and did it. I trusted him. And the reader did enjoy it. Apparently I did a good job. Folks wrote in. And the point is, it never ceases to amaze me how bad I am at knowing who I am, what I'm good at, what my strengths and weaknesses are, and so many other things about myself. In fact, I even I know that I have a book. I have like a couple hundred books in my Amazon cart at all times. You know, I just kind of obsessively put them in there. And I know there's one in there about how we don't know ourselves at all. And I, maybe I should read that because that's what's happening here. So here's what I'd like to do. I'd like to ask you a favor and my reading has fallen a little behind and I'm not sure where to pick it back up. So I thought I'd ask you for a suggestion. Is there one book out there that you think I'd really enjoy based on, you know, what you know about me from the podcast and all the stuff I've said on here? Maybe something that you remembered from a previous podcast that kind of struck your interest? And if there is, if there's something you think I should be reading based on what you know about me from the podcast, I would love to hear about it. So write in with your suggestions to feedback investor hour.com and I'm going to I sent a similar note around internally to Stansberry for ideas on, you know, what to read and what to write in the Digest and things because I thought, well, you know, if it happened once, it could happen again because people have a certain idea about you, me, whoever, and sometimes that idea contains quite a bit of insight. So it's valuable to know what people think you're good at. And so and in general, if you ever see something news article, a book, an idea, a company you think I'd find interesting, I'd be really grateful if you sent me a quick note about it@feedbackvestorhour.com so, you know, thanks in advance for that. And before we move on to serious financial matters, I need to warn you, I'm kind of in the holiday spirit. I love the holidays. Come from a huge family. Seven kids. My parents had seven kids. They have something like 20 grandchildren, handful of great grandchildren, children. You know, it was always a big, big scene at the holidays and so I don't know what that's going to mean. I don't know if I'm going to be, you know, having a little hot toddy here maybe on the podcast, but I'm in the holiday spirit so I could get a little, a little loony and I just thought I should warn you. Now in a recent episode I mentioned my 92 year old mother had broken a wrist and elbow and pelvis and stuff. And, and we talked about life and what you should do since life is short and folks wrote in. I was very touched by all the emails and it wasn't looking great for dear old mom. But for now she has rallied and I'd love to think all your well wishes had something to do with that. I'd love to think the world worked that way. But she, you know, she broke her pelvis, but. And she's like 92 and she broke her pelvis, but they got her out of the hospital into a rehab facility. She does therapy every day. She's standing up and walking, so. Wow. You know, I won't say who knew she had it in her because I knew. I grew up with her. But, you know, again, thanks for all the well wishes. Okay, now to serious financial matters. I do have one particular topic on my mind today. Then we'll take a look at several news items and then take a peek inside the mailbag, and then we'll go spend time with our loved ones for the Thanksgiving holiday. So let's just call this Share Repurchases Part three or so. Okay, so, you know, just let me finish up with this topic, you know, for now topic of share repurchases, which I talked about on the last two episodes. So overall, I think you could argue that share repurchases are a bullish phenomenon in the stock market. As the market has risen, the supply of stock has fallen, due largely to share repurchases. A company called Trim Tabs monitors these changes in the amount of stock available in the market and what they call the float, the amount of stock available. And in a recent Market Watch article, a guy named Mark Hulbert, who's been around the newsletter business for a long time, he published some Trim Tabs data showing that in each of the last five years plus halfway through this year, the supply of stock has fallen. So, you know, the float is shrinking. So given the same demand, a smaller supply means, hey, bullish, right? Price goes up. So they measure it by the market value of the change of outstanding stock. So last year, for example, US Companies bought back more than a trillion in stock, net of all the stock that was issued. According to Trim Tabs, this year through the month of June, there was like 700 million less outstanding. Now, that doesn't mean the stock market lost that much value. It means that much stock was, well, mostly repurchased or acquired or otherwise taken out of the market. Now in, in Monday Stansberry Digest, I mentioned some data that I looked up on FactSet. FactSet is like Bloomberg Lite. It's, it's just a system that finance people use to look up data. And the data showed the top 10 share repurchasers of the S&P 500 had as a group underperformed the S&P 500 over the previous year. So the biggest share repurchasers on average were beaten by the market during the last four Quarters. Okay, but so that I, you know, I thought, wow, geez. You know, that was, that was unexpected. But I'd be remiss if I didn't also point out that the performance of the trim tabs all cap us free cash flow. ETF ticker symbol ttac, which invests in companies with the biggest reduction in float, did better. It has beaten the S&P 500 by 1.9% annualized since it started up in September 2016. Not a long track record, but I think it could be instructive. I think they're kind of onto something here. As much as I criticized various aspects of share repurchases and basically said, you know, if the company isn't doing great share repurchases, they're not gonna save them. Overall, the continued repurchase, I think people do have a point that it's part of what holds up the stock market. And you might remember I mentioned, my colleague Scott Garlis mentioned share repurchases as one of the big reasons why he expects the market to continue to rise. Makes a lot of sense. Okay. I'm just saying there's data that's. That I've looked at that makes a lot of sense. And I, I don't like to just agree with something that sounds good unless I have looked at some, you know, some real. Some real data, some real reasons to suspect that it's true. Corsair repurchases have become popular over the past many decades for a reason. And I, as I believe I showed last week, they're not all necessarily good reasons. And also, if you read Monday's Stansberry Digest, I think I should note it's not always good reasons. Right? But the man who made share repurchases look like an easy way to generate big returns was a guy named Henry Singleton. I think that really is where this all started. Singleton was a genius. He was an MIT trained PhD engineer who liked to play chess without looking at the pieces, right? Like basically blindfolded, you know, he kept the moves in his head and he could play chess without looking at the board. Right. Kind of a smart guy. He founded a company called Teledyne in 1960, started it with 225,000 in cash. And he did two things. I'm not going to tell the whole story. You can Google Henry Singleton and find all kinds of stuff about him, and I encourage you to do so. Like, he's one of Warren Buffett's favorite people of all time in the business world, and you should know about him. But, but I'm going to keep it short here. First of all, like, he did two things that, that basically forever secured his reputation as a bona fide corporate genius. The first thing he did was whenever the price of his company, Teledyne stock, when it was Soaring in the 1960s, he used the stock to make by some counts approximately 130acquisitions, right? They used to call it Chinese paper. When you use really expensive stock to make an acquisition. You know, you're, you're, you know, I mean you're basically printing money at that, at that point, right? And during the 60s, you know, based on all these acquisitions, growing this company from nothing, the sales grew from basically 0 to 1.3 billion. And net income also from essentially 0 to 58 million. So, you know, he knew what he was doing. He knew how to, he knew how to acquire his way to a big company. Lots of people have done that. But he, he was actually very good. He built an incredible business that, that scored huge returns on capital. I mean, it was like I said, it was like Warren Buffett's dream. Okay? That was the first thing he did. He, he used the expensive stock to make acquisitions. The second thing he did to cement his reputation as a bonafide genius, when the stock tanked, when Teledon stock fell along with the whole rest of the stock market in the early 70s, he bought the shares back hand over FIST. Over a 12 year period like 1972 to 1984, he reduced Teledyne's share count by around 90%, bought back 90% of the stock. And when he started buying the stock in 1972, it was just under $17 a share. It hit like 300 in 1984. And I saw an old price chart published by Omega Advisors and, but it was an old price chart, really old and it was kind of, kind of foggy looking, but it was from, it looked like it was from Teledyne's IPO into like the 1990s, early 1990s. And it was really faded. But it looked to me like a split adjusted price chart because it starts out at like 3 cents a share and ends up at like 70 or 80 bucks over on the right, I mean just huge. And, and, and circled on the chart are like four spots right around the 1974 bottom where he bought back shares. So you know, ever since Henry Singleton bought back Teledyne's shares and created this huge, huge multi bagger return doing it, folks think, you know, in corporate America think, oh well, it's easy to make the stock price Go way the heck up by buying back shares. But it's not. Singleton was a singular genius. He was good at everything he did. He knew how to make acquisitions. He knew how to manage businesses. He knew how to buy back stock. And in fact, the company went through these very specific periods of time, you know, the acquisition to build it phase, the intense management phase, the, you know, buying back the shares phase. And, you know, you never find somebody who's good at all those things. And his timing was legendary. I mean, you know, he did all these sherry purchases right at the bottom in set, like 73, 74 time frame. I mean, you just don't see this. You know, it's very, very rare. So thinking that Singleton is an example to follow is right. But you gotta know exactly what you're following. You're not just blindly buying back shares. You're brilliantly timing share repurchases. And people, you know, they sort of ignore that and they, oh, I'll just buy back the stock, just like Henry Singleton. Yay. And you know, on top of all this, he was like the most upright, decent, honest guy in the room. You know, he never took stock option grants. He never sold one of his own shares, according to Leon Cooperman of Omega Advisors, where I saw that chart that I just mentioned. So Singleton was a very, very, very unusual guy. You just don't find people like him in corporate America anymore. He died in 1999. I think it was 82 years old. You know, just stellar career, one of a kind. Late in his career, he looked at all the shares that corporations were repurchasing, and he said, well, if everyone's doing them, there must be something wrong with it, right? So that's. And that's kind of part of the point that I've tried to make sure everybody's doing it. And sure, overall, we reduced the float in the market, so it's overall bullish. But most people, most corporate managers are really bad at it. They're not Henry Singleton, okay, so, you know, I wonder what he'd say, you know, today if he were alive. He'd probably say the same thing. I'm hoping he'd say something like what I'm saying, you know, everybody's doing it. There must be something wrong with most of it. And I think there is. Bullish as it is. It's weird, isn't it? I have to admit that it's an overall bullish thing. But bottom up, one at a time, the example suggests that these people just don't know what they're doing. Buying back all this stock. And in the end, I believe you must do that. You must analyze each company, including its share repurchase activity, on a one at a time, bottom up basis. Right. So my advice is to approach share repurchases with a healthy suspicion, but with the knowledge that done right, you know, maybe you will find another singleton like performance out there somewhere. And of course, you know, you'll never have any idea which you know, whether it's suspicious share repurchase activity or the next Henry Singleton, unless you get in, dig in, roll up your sleeves, do substantial homework. Okay. I think that may be all I have to say about share repurchases for a while. I'm not sure why this topic grabbed me, but it did. It's so many people on Twitter talking about it. There's so many opinions, such extremes. You know, some people think they should be banned, some people think they're great, some people are in between, whatever. So last three episodes, you know, you know, this episode in the last two, you know what I think? Right. All right, let's look at what's new in the world. Well, the first thing that's new that I just want to mention briefly is that Bitcoin crashed below 7,000 earlier this week. As you're listening to this, I don't know where it'll be, but, you know, probably in the same ballpark. Don't ask me what it means, don't ask me what it means that bitcoin is below 7,000. But I have to mention it because I know a lot of people will be thinking about it right now. My view is that if you have a position in bitcoin that's big enough to cause you to notice and really care that the price has fallen, you have too much money in bitcoin. I'm sorry, I know it's a. We've had very smart people in this program talking about crypto and bitcoin. We had Mark Yusko on a while ago, hedge fund manager and value oriented, cyclically aware guy who really likes bitcoin as a portfolio diversifier, among other things, and lots of other folks. You know, we had the crypto Dr. Eric Wade on last week. Lots of folks talking about bitcoin. I continue to think that you can, you can't be all in on this kind of thing. It's. It's difficult to even to know exactly what it is. I mean, I bought like a thousand bucks worth of it a couple months ago and sometimes even if I'm reading about it, I forget that I Own it. That strikes me as the right position size in Bitcoin. Oh yeah, I remember I own a little bit of that, so be careful. You're not all in on Bitcoin, I hope. Now, speaking of position sizes, let's talk about Bridgewater Associates, biggest hedge fund in the world, run by the famous billionaire Ray Dalio. 150 billion in assets. Wall Street Journal published an article last week that said Bridgewater had placed a one and a half billion dollar bet on a falling market. It said that Bridgewater bought one and a half billion dollars of put options on the S&P 500 and the Euro Stoxx 50 equity indexes. So if either one of those falls, they'll make money. And the, the puts expire in March, So it's a fairly short term kind of a bet. Now, Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio took to the Internet, posted a rebuttal of the article on LinkedIn, and he basically said, hey, we told the author of this piece that we have no net short position in stocks, right? So they're not, it's not a net bet that the market is going to fall. It's a hedge protection in case the market does fall. They have 150 billion assets under management. This is a 1% position in put options. I'm sure, you know, I don't know for sure, but I'll bet you anything they've got tens and tens of billions in stocks and they got these little bitty thing in put options. Now 1.5 billion is a big bet, but you know, you gotta look at the context and if you think about it, Dalio's statement that they have no net short bet makes sense. Bridgewater is known for using a strategy called risk parity. That's where you balance your assets based on volatility. Right? So just say stocks are more volatile than bonds. So you have more bonds than stocks. And you buy bonds until the volatility of the bonds is equal to the volatility of stocks in your portfolio. And you balance all your assets that way under risk parity. So you buy more of the less volatile assets, less of the more volatile assets. Lately, volatility in the stock market has fallen. The Vix is below 12 as I speak to you today. So it's likely that Bridgewater bought a bunch of stocks. Right, the risk parity. Right. Stocks volatility goes down, they buy more and they're hedging the position, I'm guessing with put options. So it makes, I believe Dalio, and I don't. I think the Dalio accused the Wall Street Journal of going for a sensationalistic headline over journalistic accuracy. I think he's probably right, right? Given the emphasis on risk parity of Bridgewater. If they wanted to be short stocks, they'd probably do it by being long, something else like bonds, cash, gold, whatever they think would perform well if stocks fell. Right. It's hard for me to imagine, like a $150 billion hedge fund actually being net short stocks. I think it would be difficult to pull off. So I believe Dalio and I think the Wall Street Journal, you know, it just silly headline, not true. Okay. Got that out of my system. Other thing I noticed is that Uber lost its license to operate in London. And here's why I'm going to quote from the Wall Street Journal here. Quote, Transport FOR London, or TfL, the city's main transportation regulator, said it had found 14,000 instances in late 2018 and early 2019 in which unauthorized drivers swapped their own photos with those of authorized drivers on Uber's platform, allowing them to pick up riders themselves. A TFL spokesman said in some cases, it believed drivers were using the loophole to allow people they knew to use their own accounts to pick up riders. End quote. So there's basically this back door into Uber software which they claim to have fixed. Okay, they claim. They didn't say, like, how widespread it was, but they said that they rolled out a fix for this operationally and, and, you know, technologically in the software. So Uber has. Uber says it has three and a half million riders and 45,000 drivers in London. So it's one of the company's largest markets globally. It's largest one in Europe. Five markets make up about 24% of Uber's gross, bookings around 10 billion bucks. The other four, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sao Paulo, Brazil. So this is pretty big news. And the stock fell how much on the news? 5, 10, 15%? No, no, 1.5%. And maybe that makes sense because when your business has this, like, basically 50 billion ish valuation and you're lighting money on fire, well, the fact that you may earn less in the future, then, you know, earn more negative. I'm not sure how you would say that. Yeah, earn more negative in the future because your sales are down, maybe that shouldn't impact the share price more than one and a half percent. I thought that was the insane part of this because, you know, I know they said they fixed it, but if there's one backdoor into the software, maybe there's another. I Don't know, I, I didn't, I, I never even thought that, hey, you can hack Uber and swap your photo in and use the program and not pay Uber anything and just kind of be a pirate Uber driver. I thought that was very weird and I think the Stock Only falling 1 1/2% is very weird too. Okay, next. You probably heard, if you have seen been anywhere near a financial news source, that the luxury goods company LVMH is buying Tiffany for 135 bucks a share. It's close to 17 billion once you figure in all the stock options and debt and everything. But I think just for the Stock it's like 16, little over 16 billion. Now. They bid on this thing a month ago for about 14 and a half billion. You know, now they're bidding 16 billion. Looks like it's going to happen. If it does happen, and we have no reason to suspect it won't, it'll be the biggest luxury goods acquisition in history. The first time around, LVMH was bidding around 26 times earnings. Now they're bidding around 29 times earnings. Price sounds steep, but it makes sense to me as I've, I believe I've indicated this before, right? My three sort of big brand comp deals, you know, big deals with, with really solid brands are Mars buying Wrigley for 32 times, InBev buying Anheuser Busch for 28 times and Procter and Gandal, I'm sorry, Procter and Gamble buying Gillette for 30 times. And if you look at Tiffany's five year price to free cash flow, it's around 26 times actually. So just up in that high 20s ballpark is what you pay for a brand that's been around for like 180 some years and which is really solid. So activists got involved in Tiffany a couple years ago, the CEO resigned and now LVMH is buying it and hoping to kind of revitalize it. They're going to redesign stores, launch new products and try to make the brand more appealing to millennial age customers. Good luck with that. Generally speaking, of course, most corporate acquisitions don't create value. Many destroy value. But also generally speaking, one great business buying another. Like the three examples I named a moment ago, that usually works out pretty well. And that's how I'd characterize this deal. One great business buying another luxury goods is a great business because all the stuff you use to make luxury goods is all the same stuff you use to make everything else. You know, it doesn't. But you just slap your little logo on it and say it's the finest whatever in the world and you can charge, ooh, exorbitant amounts and make huge margins. You know, it's like, I think Ferrari is like a good example of that. Right? Okay, so that's lvmh. And I'm going to talk more right now about some other acquisitions or really one other one in particular. But it strikes me that, hey, maybe you don't know why I'm talking about acquisitions all the time. It's a real good topic for investors, what happens here, especially in deals like this. And I mentioned those other three, right? So we got LVMH buying Tiffany Mars buying Wrigley AB, InBev buying Anheuser Busch and Procter and Gamble buying Gillette. So these are the most knowledgeable buyers in the industry buying one of the, if not the best business in the industry. You see that? So if these people don't know what the business is worth, no one does. And they do know. They know exactly what it's worth and they know what they can do with it when they buy it, how much, you know, earnings, power they can wring out of it. So what they're doing and why this is important for you as an investor. Learning about acquisitions, reading about acquisitions, understanding them is one of the more important topics for you as an investor because these people are basically telling you what these businesses are worth. If you're a long term fundamental, bottom up type investor who buy stocks, you know, not as momentum trades but because you want to be involved in that business, right? You, you think it's a good business. You know, you like Amazon or Google or whatever it is and you think it's going to be a good business for a long time. You're a long term fundamental investor at that point and you want to know what these things are worth. So that's why you read about and study acquisitions. And, and I just, I just wanted to say that, you know, I, maybe it's obvious to you, but if it's not, there it is. And so on Monday, Scott Garlis, my Stansberry colleague Scott Garlis and the Stansberry Newswire team noted a flurry of acquisitions besides LVMH Tiffany's. There was a mining deal, Kirkland Lake, the mining company buying a Canadian gold miner called Detour Gold that was about $3.7 billion. Big pharma deal, Novartis buying medicines company for 9.7 billion. Bloomberg published a pie that said 56 billion in deals were announced on Monday. And they also noted, you know, basically we're in a, we're in a five year mergers and acquisitions boom, showing no signs of letting up. But the deal that really catches my eye these days, which I think is just incredible, the circumstances of it are incredible anyway, is discount broker Charles Schwab buying its rival td Ameritrade for 26 billion. Now this is interesting because on October 1, Schwab announced to the whole world that it would stop charging commissions on equity trades, free equity trades. Right. So from, from the day before, from September 30th to a couple days later, October 3rd, Schwab stock was down 16%. Over that same period of time, TD ameritrade stock fell 30%. Okay. Why the big difference? Well, because as, and I have to give Matt Levine and Bloomberg props for covering this, this story first, because commissions only made up about 7% of Schwab's revenues, but they made up like 36% of TD Ameritrade's revenues. And, and as soon as Schwab announces that it's going to eliminate commissions, TD Ameritrade and everybody else who hadn't already done so had to do the same thing or they'd lose all their customers to Schwab. So you see what happened here, right? Schwab eliminates commissions, TD Ameritrade stock tanks. Now Schwab is buying TD Ameritrade. It's almost like they planned it that way. In fact, it all happened so quickly, within like what, five, six weeks? I can't even believe, I don't believe for a minute that they hadn't already decided to bid for TD Ameritrade when they announced they were eliminating commissions on October 1st. The first bid came last week. And then the deal is, I think the deal was accepted and now it just has to go through the usual processes, antitrust and all that, business approvals this week. So, you know, probably not illegal, but man, sure looks shady. I mean, I guess that's business, right? Anyway, that's. That, that's sort of what's on my mind and in the news and stuff. But let's look at, let's let's just take some time now and look through the mailbag and then let's take a few days and spend some time with the family on Thanksgiving. All right. Hey guys, real quick, I just want to tell you something. As host of the Stansberry Investor Hour podcast, I also enjoy listening to other podcasts. It helps me figure out ways to make the Stansberry Investor Hour a better experience. For you. One podcast I really like is called We Study Billionaires, hosted by Preston Pysh and Stig broderson of the investors podcast.com it's the biggest investor podcast on the planet, enjoyed by thousands of listeners. Every week. Preston and Stig interview legendary billionaires like Jack Dorsey, founder and CEO of Twitter and payments company Square, and billionaire investor Howard Marks, whose book the Most Important Thing I've recommended dozens of times. Sometimes Preston and Stig spend a whole episode reviewing lessons learned from billionaires they've studied, like Dell computer founder Michael Dell, tech industry maverick Peter Thiel, and macro trader Stanley Druckenmiller. Before starting the We Study Billionaires podcast, Preston went to West Point and Johns Hopkins, founded an investment company, and his finance videos have been viewed by millions. Stig went to Harvard and worked for a leading European energy trading firm. They're smart, experienced investors who know the wealth building secrets of billionaires better than anyone, and their listeners love it. And I'm one of those listeners. Head over to theinvestorspodcast.com and check out We Study Billionaires with Preston Pysh and Stig Brodersen theinvestorspodcast.com check it out. Time for the mailbag. This is where you and I get to have a frank conversation about investing. You write into feedbackvestorhour.com with comments, questions, politely worded criticisms, and from now on, book suggestions and ideas and companies you think I should look at. All kinds of stuff, whatever's on your mind. Feedbackvestorhour.com and I read every single one of them. The only thing I don't read nowadays is the Russian spam, but I read every single feedback email you guys send in. So this week we actually didn't have a whole lot of it, but we had some good ones. We had a couple of really good ones. Now the first one is from April. Didn't give a last name, so I'll just call her April in Seattle. Now, April, you wrote a nice long email and I really appreciate it, but obviously we can't read the whole thing, so I'm going to just read a couple parts of it. So you said it's understandable for Covell. That's previous podcast trend following expert Michael Covell. April says it's understandable for Covell and Jim Simons to keep their strategies close to the vest, otherwise their techniques will be exploited by market participants and lose its edge. However, I am curious if their strategy significantly changes over certain periods of time, mainly because the trader I am training with has Been using his trading techniques for several decades with great success. Not to say he has not adjusted or perfected his technique over his career. I'm going to answer that part first, April, and then I'll just read your nice comments at the end for everyone to hear. So yeah, how much does this stuff change? Well, I've only heard little bits of things here and there, so I can't really claim to know. But the basic idea, if you just think about it, say you found a pat. They're always looking for price patterns, right? So say they found this price pattern that looks really good and you buy at a certain time, sell at a certain time and you make money like hand over fist and you can do it over and over again and then all of a sudden it stops working. Well, if it stops working, you have to assume that means everybody else knows about it. And if everybody else knows about it, then if it stops working, then I would think that the tweaks you could make would, would be fairly obvious to everyone as well. So you know, you, you live and die by your ability to say this doesn't work anymore. Stop doing it and move on. Now you say you're working with a trader who's been using trading techniques for several decades with great success. Hey, whatever works, whatever works for you. I'm not the trend following trading expert here at all. Nothing, nothing like it. That's why we have folks like Michael Covell on the show. But I will say that I am. I've spoken with some quantitative people and interacted with some of them on Twitter. By the way, Twitter is a wonderful resource. You can really build up a really great Twitter feed and learn a lot and interact with some smart people that you might not interact otherwise. And I've just interacted with some people and spoke with some quant traders and stuff and some of them, actually, most of them seem to seem to be saying that the techniques and things that worked like gangbusters, the classic trend following techniques that worked gangbusters in the 80s and 90s, they don't work so great anymore. And you know, I, when I say that to some people, oh, that's ridiculous. You know, I'm a classical chartist and I still use the same techniques I've been using for decades like this person you're talking about and that's poppycock. Trouble is nobody ever shows you their results, right? So you don't really know who's telling the truth truth here, you know, and everybody always over, over exaggerates. Right. But I would suspect that that that's my suspicion that when something stops working, part of your success, your success is based on your discipline of abandoning it and moving on and looking for something else. And so if you're using the same thing for decades anyway, I'm. I'm suspicious of anyone who says they use the same thing for decades. I'm not calling anybody a liar, April. Okay, not at all. But I just think intellectually, it's my job to be suspicious of that. Put it that way. And April also says. Finally, just wanted to say I really, really appreciate all your hard work that you put into your podcast. Your podcasts are seriously the highlight of my week. I hope that does not sound too sad. Ha ha. Let's just say the world of finance could be a lonely world. It's very freeing and educational to have a conversation about money and what we do. Please tell Porter we love you and that you have very, very loyal fans. If your podcast were a paid subscription, I would pay for your podcast. Well, April, just for you, from now on, it's a thousand dollars a week. Just kidding. Then she says, that is how much I like your podcast. Please have a happy Thanksgiving with your family. Warm regards, April. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the kudos. And I. I really just have one more of these because we didn't get many this week. And this one is from Lyle, whose name I have mispronounced as Liesl, because that's how it's spelled. Lyle P. Lyle P. Says. Thanks for another informative interview, this time with Eric Wade. One question has always concerned me about bitcoin that maybe you could respond to. I understand why bitcoin cannot be inflationary, but it also seems to me that it has to be deflationary. Let me explain. Since there will only ever be a fixed maximum number of bitcoin produced, what about all of the bitcoins that are taken out of circulation because the owner has lost, forgotten, abandoned, died without telling anyone about them, etc. Over a long enough time, the number of bitcoins available for transacting business could theoretically decrease to zero. Isn't that a catastrophic weakness in the system? If this is a naive question, don't feel you have to respond to it. I don't think it's naive. I think it is logical. But I want to tell you I wouldn't be afraid of that, because the truth of the matter is, I think it would take much longer for that to happen, or much longer for there to even be a hugely meaningful dent in the supply by, you know, people forgetting their keys and dying and all that stuff that you mentioned. So I think this is nothing you ever need to worry about during your lifetime or probably the lifetime of your children and maybe even your children's children and so on and so on for generations to come. But you say if this is a naive question, and it is a very simple kind of a question, but it's the kind of thing you have to ask, isn't it? Because Bitcoin may as well be like the currency on Mars. We don't even. We just. We haven't been here before. We don't know what to expect. So the reason why I read this question is because, yes, ask questions like this. Ask absolutely everything you can think of, because we have no idea. You must ask everything. So I like the way you're thinking. I don't think it's naive. I think it's, you know, one of a long list of questions that you must ask. You must always ask, what the heck is this? What can I expect? You know, who made this? How does it work? What's going to happen? Always, always, always. Because, you know, we're in weird territory. We've never done this before. Okay, that is another episode of the Stansberry Investor Hour. Thank you so much for listening. It's my privilege to come to you this week and every week. And be sure to Visit the website www.investorhour.com and write into us at feedbackvestorhour.com you go to investorhour.com we have a transcript for absolutely every single episode we've ever done. Just click on the episode, scroll all the way down. The transcript is at the bottom. If it's not there yet, I promise it will be there soon. Okay, so transcript for every episode and you can listen to and read a transcript. We still have every single episode we've ever done available on the website. Pretty cool, huh? So do that and enter your email so that you can get updates about all the future episodes. Very cool. And of course, write in, write in, write in. I want to hear from you. Feedbackvestorhour.com I can't even say it enough. I really, really, really enjoy hearing from you. I get some of the questions are great and the rationale behind them and the thought behind them. It really is great. So please write in. Another thing you want to do is go to itunes. Go to itunes, subscribe to the podcast and hit like, if you hit like, it pushes us up in the rankings and more people find out about the podcast and then we get more wonderful feedback and the program improves and you'll like it better and you'll have more fun and you'll be happy forever. Won't that be wonderful? So go to itunes, subscribe to the podcast, hit like and I thank you in advance for doing that. Okay, that's another episode. Thank you so much. Have a happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy life. Enjoy your family. I'll talk to you next time. Thank you. Bye bye.
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Thank you for listening to the Stansberry Investor Hour. To access today's notes and receive notice of upcoming episodes, go to investorhour.com and enter your email. Have a question for Dan? Send him an email@feedbackvestorhour.com this broadcast is provided for entertainment purposes only and should not be considered personalized investment advice. Trading stocks and all other financial instruments involves risk. You should not make any investment decision based solely on what you hear. Stansberry Investor Hour is produced by Stansberry Research and is copyrighted by the Stansberry Radio Network.