Peak Prosperity - Does Super Micro Indicate Big Trouble at NVIDIA?

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

Chris and Paul discuss the financial landscape, focusing on Trump administration optimism, market risks, AI sector bubbles, and the importance of diligent investment strategies.

Nothing in this program should be considered investment advice. It is for educational purposes only. Please hit pause and read this disclaimer in full. You would more than likely see NVIDIA and some of these other stocks follow pretty much the same pattern that all bubble stocks have in the past. And they give back nearly all, if not all, of the gains that they had in the euphoria phase. Now, that would cause the markets to have tremendous amounts of damage. The following is the audio version of a video released at peakprosperity.com. Visit peakprosperity.com to watch the video and to find other insightful content,

such as articles, discussion forums, and exclusive subscriber-only content. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this edition of Finance U. I am your host, Chris Martinson of Peak Financial Investing. And you can tell we're going to talk finance because of these awesome things behind me now. Hey, Paul. Paul Kiker of Kiker Wealth Management. Always a pleasure to be back with you. How are you today? Doing great. Good to see you, Chris. And I like your new artwork in the back. Looks good. Well, you got some new artwork back there, too. Is that post election? Did that inspire your particular selection? It inspired me post election. Renee and her husband bought that for me probably six or seven years ago.

It was in the office on the other side. And I got to thinking about after the election and just kind of the hope that a lot of the country's feeling and the potential that we're going to be repairing a lot of the things that are going on. And I thought, you know what, I'm going to put that back here. So I've had it up here. And what is that? So it's a painting of a lady stitching back a torn flag from, from a battle. So she's stitching that flag together. And then

of course, for me, I love the scripture that's at the bottom and says, if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray, all of us are called by him. If we'll humble ourselves and pray, he'll heal the land. And so that's a reminder to me to just keep asking the Lord to grant us wisdom, you know, guidance and to heal the land. Of course, one of my prayers for the past several years is that he would lay our leaders bare and bring all the secrets out of the closet before the American people. So hopefully we're going to see some of that over the next couple of years. Well, hopefully we will. Obviously, it's going to make some very turbulent, I think, financial conditions and market conditions. Now, of course, stocks just go up into the right. Right.

I don't know if that's because the Fed has a rheostat and they turn it or because. But as you and I have discussed, we'll discuss that. We'll discuss stocks. Do they continue to go up from here? If not, then what? We're also going to discuss I think there's cracks in the AI armor out there. I want to talk gold and silver with you today. And I also want to talk about just, I'm getting more and more calls from people, Paul, who they have the optimism. They can feel like something important and seminal happened in the country. And they're still as nervous as can be about future conditions. Cause let's admit like, you know, even if they get the department of

governmental efficiency and they hack stuff, well, that'll cause the economy to have its own reaction to that. If, uh, we still have a couple trillion dollars of deficit spending, that's kind of in the cake, it's independent of presidency. So I just want to be very clear what presidents can and can't do. I know they say this president had this kind of economy and that one had that kind. I don't see it that way. I think presidents can do relatively little unless they do something very specific in a big programmatic way. Tariffs. We might want to discuss those because those could have an impact. Yes, they could. It would be measurable. If I can't even believe Trump said this, he's like, maybe we should just get rid of income tax. And people are like, that's an interesting idea. So we're at that stage where you can talk about a lot of different things that would have been verboten off the table just a couple months ago or a couple of weeks ago at this stage.

So with all of that, where should we start today? How about up into to the right? Is—what are we looking at here, Paul? Is this the Santa Claus rally? Is this Trump optimism? What's happening here? PAUL HODGES, So, I think a lot of it is just Trump optimism. Everybody remembers 2016, because, you know, we were told before, if Trump wins the election, the economy is going to crash in 2016.

I don't know if you remember that, those of you out there. I do because doing this for a living, it was like, what in the world is going to happen when he wins? You know, market tanks immediately upon the news first thing in the morning. Like we had no back test, basically a straight rally all the way through 2017 and early 2018. So there's a lot of investors that were a little too worried that sat on the sidelines. I think people are afraid that they don't want to make the same mistake as they did last time. So they're remembering 2016. There's tons of optimism out there right now, rightfully so, correct?

Rightfully so. But I believe that there's the perception and this fear of missing out right now that, hey, it's up and to the right from this point, Trump's going to solve every problem, fix everything that's taking place in the underlying economy. But I want to remind people, and I'm in no way, am I being a perma bear or anything of that nature? Because I've clearly stated, I think the path of least resistance is higher at least into the end of the year, maybe into the spring. If the information changes, I'll change my opinion. But I don't think this is a completely different environment than 2016. Housing prices were actually really affordable in 2016. So the average person could go out, interest rates were reasonable, actually really artificially

held low. Inflation was not a problem. Deflation was our biggest concern back in 2016. So this is a completely different environment. Even though there's a lot of reasons to be optimistic, I just want to encourage investors not to be complacent, not to be complacent. And here's one data that I wanna share. So, sentiment trader, Jason Gopart, let me share my screen here, came out. I love what he does, because he shares statistics on the market, action from the past.

So he posts, and this was on November the 7th, and this is pretty interesting, because we want the markets to go up in general. We want the majority of stocks to participate. So Jason posted, the indices soared on X. The indices soared while the average stock did not. It was one of the worst ever days for participation, participation meaning the number of stocks that actually go up, on a day that the S&P 500 jumped more than 2.5%. On the New York Stock Exchange, fewer than 70% of issues rose and less than 70%

of volume flowed into those issues. This has only happened three unique times. In the aftermath of 1987, the 2020 crashes, and around the 2000 peak. So if you go back and take a look at that, this shows after the 1987 crash, the 2020 crash, the COVID crash, it's happened here and it's happened there. Now, if we go back to what occurred after that green dot, that was the 2000 to 2003 decline.

So, you know, over the next 12 months, you know, from 2000, 131, 321, you know, you had a one and a half, 24%, 11% decline. Now, does that data tell us that's going to happen this time? Or are we at a 1987 bottom? I think it's a little bit different right now because the markets haven't corrected. 2020 decline, the COVID crash, you know, you had all of that government stimulus that took place. This is just a warning that we have to pay attention to. Is it actionable yet? No. But that's something that we just need not, we don't need to be complacent. We need to be diligent. We need to be hopeful. And we need to pay attention to what the market's telling us under the surface.

So that's my biggest concern. That's the one thing I want to put out there to investors right now is be diligent. Well, you know, Paul, a lot of people are kind of busy right now. I've been having a lot of conversations this past week. People are ebullient, feeling like, whew, we dodged a bullet with this election. That's how a lot of people feel. I'm among them. But that it was,

that at best what happened was we got a little extra time in this story. You know, it would have been a faster ride with one option, and we have slightly slower, speed bumpy sort of ride maybe on the other, because a lot of the big things that you and I have been tracking on this program

remain in place, right? We don't have that obvious next engine of growth. We have over $100 trillion of collective debt in the United States system across everything. You and I know that commercial real estate is a trillion-plus-dollar black hole that we haven't reconciled at this point. We know that banks are sitting on these massive unrealized losses. Nobody's talked about how we're going to get rid of those. And then we have a federal government that's way overspending. And listen, they could cut that, but that doesn't come without its consequences. Point is, we got a lot of things on the horizon right here that are something other than roses, you know, and unicorns. So with all of that, it just feels to me like, you know, if this is Trump

optimism that's come around, okay. But I think reality's got to set back in here at some point. What does that look like to you when that comes back? No, I agree completely. So I believe that when reality comes back, typically what's going to happen to the average investor who is doing it themselves because they feel like they haven't found anybody that they can trust to hand it over to. They're not doing it because they enjoy it. They're those people that enjoy doing it themselves. They wake up. They study.

They love it. That's what they do. Matter of fact, I've got a client that I've worked with for a long time. He says he's really good at making it, and he is. He's good at it. This guy is just, to an extent extent a gambler that's really good. So he'll peel off the top every time he doubles and brings it to me, and he says, you manage the money that I can't afford to lose.

I'm managing the money that I can't afford to lose. And, you know, he keeps adding it up. So I work with lots of different people like that. But my bigger concern out there in how you deal with this is you just got to be diligent. You've got to pay attention. My concern is I had mentioned the prior administration was spending so much money, so fiscally irresponsible. We know that it was working its way into the economy. And I can't remember the numbers exactly, but, you know, something like, I'm going to underestimate, because it was a rather

surprisingly large number, and I don't have it at my fingertips right now, something like 70, 60 to 80 percent of our GDP was from government stimulus directly. So my concern was they were putting so much effort, foolishly running up our national debt, to try to make sure, because we saw they did everything that they could do to paint this picture that the economy was great, running into the election. And if they won, they didn't care if the markets came apart on the other side because they're in control and they'll just print more money.

But if Trump was to happen to win, which the mainstream media just didn't believe would happen, then, well, hey, that's a bonus because if the economy comes apart when he takes over, right, they use their media machine to demonize it's all his fault. Well, you know, like you said, the government, the president has some impact on the economy, but typically that's going to occur down the road from the policies we put in place today. So my concern is, is what happens on the other side of this election? You've got Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, Department of Government Efficiency. That's crazy that D-O-G-E is the symbol for that. And Elon Musk is, you know, that's his thing, right? So, you know, what happens if you gut and gut all of the foolish spending, that's going to pull some GDP pressure out of the economy. And then what happens if you get out there and you're forcing the truth across the board, you're not covering things and keeping them in the dark and shuffling papers around and companies actually have to report what's really taken place under the surface. I don't know what that looks like, but I do believe that

this is a completely different environment than 2016. And yes, it's possible that we can continue to run. I mean, Bill Ackman put out a tweet within the past 24 hours—I've got it here—because he puts together a great argument. I'd like your opinion on this, Chris. Bill Ackman's a very smart man. He does. He puts good arguments out there. Yeah. He really does. What's he say here? So, he's saying the business community is giddy with excitement about the Trump administration.

He said he's hearing this from everyone, including people who didn't vote for Trump. Now, he's right, especially in this. Business confidence is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Business leaders are becoming more confident about the country and the economy. This means they're going to make more investments in our future, which will drive the economy and the stock market, reducing the cost of capital and bolstering confidence further. So this will feed on a self-reinforcing cycle. He claims that merger and acquisition activity is about to explode. That's going to drive efficiency and profitability. He mentions the Department of Government Efficiency and Deregulation is going to drive government efficiency and make America a vastly better and lower risk place to do business efficiently and effectively. Hey, and I'll tell you this, if they were removed some of these ridiculous

government regulations out of our industry, our people could focus more. I could release some of my employees to customer service more so than government paperwork. Yeah. And this is a really good point that he makes. He's also hearing about non-U.S. companies that are desperate to immediately create a presence on U.S. soil. And, you know, Trump does what he says he's going to do.

So if these tariffs come through, these companies are frightened to be locked out of the most important economy in the world. You know, they want to build factories, make new investments here to avoid the risk of tariffs. And he highlights something very true. China's economy is in trouble right now. Europe's a mess. And the U.S. has now become by far the best country for investment. So, you know, that's optimistic.

There's a lot of optimism in that. The question is, if we get back to fiscal spending, that's what we need to other factors going to hit quick enough to make up for it? Because we've got to remember, Chris, this market is overvalued. It's in line with 1929. Now, it's possible that all of this optimism and this money from the rest of the world coming back in here could be enough to keep this euphoria going. Who knows? It's possible we might break all the historical records, but we're still going to have to experience some pain at some point in the future. It's not all sunshine and rainbows. So what I'm hoping is we're going to experience

some of that correction now so that it becomes a correction with the backdrop of all these positive things that Ackman talked about to where we have a correction. And it could be kind of nasty. You know, 2000, 2003 was a 47% decline in the S&P 500, 80% decline in the technology index because it was a technology bubble. Now, Buffett value stocks, all of those underpriced stocks, the things that people were selling to chase the new economy, they did really good from 2000 to 2003.

Technology industry experienced a recession, but for most Americans, they came right through that just fine. It wasn't like what occurred in 2008. So we still couldn't have a decent economic backdrop, a normal recession, valuations come back to normal and move forward. I don't know how this is going to pan out. Our strategy will tell us how to navigate it. As the information unfolds, we'll make adaptations. So I'm cautiously optimistic. Let's put it that way.

How are you? All right. Well, I think that Trump is inheriting some of the most cooked books of any president ever. Now, the government makes a sort of a business habit, a practice out of cooking the books. It's been true since Lyndon Johnson, right? Whenever they could sort of lean on the jobs number, the inflation number, whatever they have, right, for political purposes, right? If nothing else, this cycle has taught me that politics is even worse than I thought.

I mean, you know, they told you, you know, two things you never want to see being made, right? Sausage and politics, right? And so I get it. Now I really kind of get it. I just did a live cast earlier on Wednesday with Evie, and we talked about this thing this new thing, this thing that I just come across came out on November 11th, which was that the German equivalent of the CDC, it's called the RKI. They got FOIA'd. They tried to put out a bunch of blacked out emails.

Actually, they got refoiled and they had to give the actual emails out. So in one of those emails, they said that, that the FDA is not going to be releasing or authorizing the MRNA shot before the election, because that would be deemed to be helpful to Trump. No way. And that they agreed over there and that Europeans agreed. Yeah. Let's just hold off on this whole thing. Now they might be thinking perfectly legit, you know, that this shot really could help.

And there's a lot of disagreement about that. I fall on the other side of that story. But if they really believe this could help, they're like, but for politics, maybe we should just hold it back. That's what we're talking about here. So when people are like, oh, Chris, do you really think the BLS cooks the books? I'm like, dude, they don't even have to kill anybody. Of course they're doing it. I fully believe they do too. Of course they do. So I actually think these are the most cooked books in history, right? Because you and I have been seeing like the McJobs report, as we call it, right? That's

getting downgraded every single month, you know, inflation understated by too much. And they use something called the PCE to deflate or it reflates into the deflator for the GDP. And that's their measure of inflation. It's a little different from the CPI, but both of those numbers don't have anything to do with each other. And they're both too low on and on and on and on. So as Bill Ackman said, hey, look, business optimism feeds on itself. I get that. But so does business pessimism, right? It might be possible that things are actually a little weaker than advertised, in which case, if that sort of catches on and becomes the vibe, that's trouble into that story. Yes. And, you know, and you go back statistically, all the revisions that have taken place over the past four years,

and especially within the past year, you know, when nobody's paying attention because the computers are trading on the headline numbers. I've not had anybody mention that they're trading on the revisions. And, yeah, there are revisions that have always occurred, but not to the extreme that they have now. So, you know, that is a great concern. If we peel back, if the Trump administration and all those around them peel back these deceptive covers and we love the truth again, yeah, that's a huge risk because the question is, is how over... What is the truth? What is the truth, right? And the only way to move forward and build a foundation is for us to actually really have the truth. And that's what I'm hoping that they're going to do is regardless of the pain in the short run. And if I'm Trump, look, if this is all a facade and it has been, I want to peel back the curtain, lay the truth out, let the markets, you know, have their calamity over the next 12 months and then let these policies rebuild everything going into the next election cycle, because that's what's going to matter. I hope that there's not a pride in there that says, well, let's just put this off and let's

try to keep these markets going, because we're headed to a calamity if we don't get back to normal valuations at some point in the future. Indeed. And so, as you saw, maybe people listening don't know, but I sort of threw my hat into the ring for a potential position with the administration, because if we're going to do this right, I'm interested. I've never been interested in public service before because, Paul, I judged that I have no interest in sort of tilting at windmills and being part of a machine that has no interest in the truth. But if we could get to truth, the agency I was interested in, one of the first things I would do, one of my top priorities would be to strip apart their

statistics department so that we can get real instrumentation back on the dashboard. It's just part of being, it's how you would run your business. Can you imagine running your business and you have no idea how people are spending their time or whether more money is coming in than is leaving, how much inventory you have, right? Literally, that's the nature of how we're running government. We're running it. I don't know. I don't even understand it as a businessman.

So I'd be like, we're going to fix this right up. You know, we need some good reporting right away. And I hope they put somebody in the BLS who just really comes in and just, you know, cleans house because we need we need good and we need good, we need some numbers. We need to know what we can believe in, even if the truth is ugly. We got to know, right? Maybe the truth is better than we know. We don't know.

I hope so. Well, one of the things I hope if they go into the BLS, I'm going to come back to you, Ben, your nomination for that, or not nomination. What's the term I'm looking for? People voting for you. You being nominated through the voting process. You know, I hope whoever gets in the BLS, too, makes it a level playing field. Look, we're not going to give you big banks information before we give it to everybody else. You can see the market trade before the data comes out, right?

That is not a fair advantage to the retail investor. That's, you know, rewarding those that are close to the centers of power. Let's make it true across the board. Everybody gets information at the same time, regardless of the consequences. But I would encourage everybody out there that's listening, and I may find that maybe, Chris, you can tell everybody how to do it. But I have gone and voted for Chris. Everybody on our team has gone and voted for Chris because you guys that have known Chris for a long time, that have followed him for a long time, know that he would be a lover of the truth and perfect in that position. So I highly encourage all of you to go to that link. And Chris, where they can find,

I know it was on your, is it on your Twitter page where they can find that link? Yeah, I have it pinned at the top of my Twitter feed. So if you went to at Chris Martinson on Twitter, it's pinned at the top there and you just click a link. And it's coming through the Maha side. So this is RFK's juniors endeavor. So it's coming up through that channel. I'm not sure that's the best avenue for this particular role

because I want to be in the Department of Energy. And again, my qualifications are I can't possibly do worse than Jennifer Granholm. I can't. Not a chance. Not a chance. That's a good point. I can literally roll D&D die and make decisions and still do better because I got a 1 in 20 chance of getting it right.

You know, just whatever. It's just it's astonishing. There's some things that could be fixed. But I've never had that. So back to Ackman's thing, like I have that optimism, like if we're going to do this, I'm in. Right. Yes. It turns out it sort of just defaults back into normal swampiness. I have no interest in that. I'll keep being who I am in the world, you know. But if we're going to do it right. OK, that's that's intriguing. Yes. Well,

and you could be a part of that. Imagine the impact. You know, one of my concerns is now that the election's over, I go back to telling clients I'm an equal opportunity basher of all presidents, regardless of size. Good. Me too. So my great fear is like, you know, my great fear has always been with Trump. Is this too good to be true? Are they really going to do this? Or is this just good cop, bad cop? Right? going to be true? Are they really going to do this? Or is this just good cop, bad cop, right? Like my wife and I played good cop, bad cop with the kids at times, you know, strategically

to, to, to discover information or to help discipline them. So, you know, we'll find out relatively quickly. And especially if you were, you know, chosen to be in that position, you'd find out relatively quick, quickly as well. Are we really going to roll up our sleeves and get this thing fixed? Or, or is this just, you know, good cop, bad cop, and Are we really going to roll up our sleeves and get this thing fixed? Or is this just, you know, good cop, bad cop, and we're still going to head in that globalist direction? Which I don't think so, and I hope not, but I still want to be asking those questions. Yeah. And to that end, Paul, we're going to take a break now very quickly because I want people to hear about the great webinar we did on the great taking. My concern is that if it is a good cop, bad cop,

that we stand a chance that that great taking machinery could get activated. So we'll be right back. Hello, everyone. I'm Chris Martinson of Peak Prosperity. And I want to tell you about something. So you've probably heard about the Great Reset. You know things are highly uncertain right now. There are things happening in the markets that just don't make a lot of sense.

And there's an unfortunate conclusion lurking under all of that, which is that there's some people out there, I call them the raccoons of Wall Street, who have found ways legally, air quotes legally, to take your money, your wealth, your stocks, your bonds, maybe even your house from you. This falls under the idea of something called the great taking. And it's a fairly complicated topic, but this is what I do and I do exceedingly well. I will find ways to understand this and communicate it to you. And I'll find the other experts out there who are just the best at figuring out what you can do and how you can understand this thing. Now, I hope that nothing comes of this great taking idea. I hope that the trigger is never pulled,

but it might. So to help you get there, we have the great taking webinar, a variety of experts, and we have seven strategies that we will outline and also are contained in this workbook that comes along with the great taking it's there anytime you want once you have secured your access to the great taking webinar you'll be able to download it look at it and view it anytime you want and you should actually do this with people you love other people you care about and anybody else you think who might need to know this information. So with that, please consider taking advantage of this amazing offer to get educated and then take action to protect your wealth. Because the great taking, it's a very real thing. Obviously, they wouldn't have spent so much time finagling the law and putting in this trigger if they didn't

mean to pull it one day. Let's hope that they don't. But if they do, I want you to be on the right side of the line so that you're not on the great taking side of the line. Now, back to our program. So, yeah, Paul, I'm still concerned about the great taking. I'm worried that if there is like, you know, you mentioned the possibility of a 30, 40, 50 percent decline in the S&P. We've had them before, but we didn't have pick a number one, two, three quadrillion of derivatives hanging on that. And we didn't have a set of legal machineries coded in through the titles and acts out there that said, oh, if this gets really bad, we reserve the right to bail the big system out at the expense of everybody else. Yes.

Well, and I believe the Great Taking webinar was done very well because you're presenting all the information and sharing, giving information to individuals. So we're diligent. I'm having conversations with every client we talk to about the great taking. One, stay in a type one account. There's ways to structure the account to make sure. Get your insurance from a long-term standpoint and physical goal. Guys, these are not recommendations of those of you out there, but they are recommendations that I specifically cover for individuals when we talk with them and clients when we're working with them. So we got to go back to the point Warren Buffett stated around 2011, 2012, derivatives are weapons of mass financial destruction.

And we don't have all of these. We just don't have the regulation in that department or oversight. So another concern of mine with the optimism is, look, this has been a huge battle between the deep state and Trump. So if he's really what he says he is, what's the one thread that you could pull to cause a massive amount of chaos? If you had an accident occur in the derivatives market that fed on itself, that could lead to a massive financial collapse, that's something that could catch everybody out of the blue. And we don't know ultimately how far this thing goes, right? Will SIPC insurance be there?

Who knows? But you set levels of protection. You put everything in place that you can prudently put in place to protect yourself. And at least if you're going to continue to do options and use derivatives, you need to understand that you're carrying excess risk when it comes to that great taking potential. At least structure your accounts where you're maximizing SIPC coverage on top of those. Yeah, indeed. I mean, there are a lot of steps people can take, but, but first it's just understanding what the great taking is for people who don't know. I have a whole series on that.

I think it goes through it pretty completely. And that's of course the concept by David Rogers Webb, read his book as well. Free. He's got it at great taking.org i believe um easy to find a great concept if you have money and you don't know about it you know and you're worried about protecting your wealth you should know about it if only to say nah i'm not worried about that um it needs to be examined to be dismissed i think and um everybody ought to take a look at that um paul i want to talk to you about this goofy thing that came across my radar a while ago.

Stocks, up and to the right, you showed that terrible participation. It's because, really, it's the big seven again, right? I've expressed my concern in the past that there might be secret government money funneling to some of those big seven to help promote government policies like censorship and all that other stuff. Who knows? I'd love to have

some transparency in that. But again, my data for that is the government reported a $1.8 trillion deficit last year, but the debt went up by 2.3. So something didn't get reported. I have my suspicions, but could be wrong, but a little transparency could help that. But in that big seven, of course, AI. It's been the AI story. We got the AI. Oh, what are we doing with AI? So I want to pull into something. So a number of companies in the space, one of them, SMCI, Supermicro Computer, they take these GPU units from, say, NVIDIA, and they put them in these racks, and they're part of that whole infrastructure play. So you've got to make the chips, you've got to put them in racks, you've got to do all this stuff, build out the data centers. There's a lot of money going into this from many directions. So this is pretty interesting.

You know, as recently as October of 24, not that long ago, about a month ago now, a month and a week, Super Microshare soar after server company says it's shipping over 100,000 AI GPUs per quarter. I mean, this is just a whole story there about AI and technology and all that. But then we just come forward a little bit later, just a little later, and we find out that Super Micro receives a lot of their NVIDIA Blackwell AI server orders, 25% of total supply. So they are 25% of NVIDIA's book, this one company. Okay, cool. All right. A little concentrated, but okay. And then don't forget back in August of 2020, the SEC charged SMCI and its former CFO, Howard Hidashima, with a prematurely recognizing revenue. So they got a little accounting violations. So that was 2020,

but that's okay. They must've fixed it. That's what we're going to think here, right? This is the stock price of, sorry, of SMCI. Anybody who's looking at this, you need to understand what you're seeing. You are looking at a bubble bursting, okay? That's as clear as it gets. There's like no clear, and the mistake would be to think, oh, well, this is just a little piece of the bubble. This isn't the whole bubble because Nvidia stock is still up there. Now, I have enough gray hair in this story, Paul. I watched this happen with housing during the housing bubble. Same thing.

Individual little pops at the edges and then the whole thing went. Right? I've seen this before. What do you make of that? That's a bubble that's burst. I mean, clearly. And the pain is just getting started. And that company, who knows, may stay in business if they don't get put out for fraud, but reality has set in. And if that's 25% of NVIDIA's production, right, 25% of the orders, that shows you right there that something's changed under the surface that investors aren't paying any attention to. So that's a of the reasons that we manage risk because in the year 2000, it had been so long since you saw a market bubble burst like that, that investors just were not aware of it. And so many retirees were impacted. So that's a classic, that's how bubbles end. And that's how all of the

bubbles that are in the market right now are going to end at some point. Yeah. And now if you are interested, anybody watching this uh nobody is tracking this better than just dario that's at dario cpx on twitter um he's just been like on it like like a dog on a bone it's been pretty intense and by the way this is about to hit boiling point because um the meme i love it that meme he's got a whole article on it it's really worth reading because he talks about the shenanigans it turns out that just today uh which is november 13th it turns out that smci filed a form nt 10q instead of their 10q that means that they aren't able to meet their filing deadline. They couldn't find a CFO that was willing to sign a set of documents that Ernst & Young

backed off of and said, we're not touching that. So accounting irregularities 2020, Ernst & Young walks away. And if they don't have their 10Q filed by the 16th, they get delisted from the NASDAQ because it's a requirement that you have to have this filing in. So they got three days to work this out from the time of this recording, Paul, but this isn't just like, you know, where there's smoke, there might be fire. Dude, that's a bonfire right there, okay? That's a bonfire. Well, and think about all the funds out there that have restriction that you have to be listed on New York Stock Exchange to be on. That's just going to further exacerbate selling to the downside.

And it looks like the investors have spoken clearly. Whatever they've represented is not what it seems. Yeah, but it is. It's not just a piece. It's a it's a leg of the AI stool. So who knows what to make of that at this stage? But again, you mentioned maybe it's time to be a little cautious. Maybe it's time to be nimble. And, you know, Paul, I talk with a lot of folks and and and many of them are busy right now because they're busy, like running their dehydrator and, you know, putting their gardens to bed or looking for land or they're busy running their dehydrator and putting their gardens to bed or looking for land. I see a lot of people making some pretty big moves right now that's requiring a lot of their attention. And maybe they don't really have time to look at this and interpret what it means. So I think it's really, when you say people need to be prudent, I think they need to work with somebody like you who is paying attention to all this for them, you know, while they're attending to other stuff that's important.

Well, that's what we do. I mean, you know, I've had time and time again, I've talked to people and they're like, I have learned more from you in the first two hours of our meeting. And you've demonstrated to me more information about where we are than whoever I've worked with for the past 15 or 20 years. And then we take them through and explain clearly, this is how we do what we do. This is the strength. This is the weakness.

And I've had so many people that just say their, their peace has increased because, because now they, they feel like they work with somebody that knows them, that understands what their goals are, that can help them plan, answer the questions that they have, and the peace of mind that comes with them being able to focus on other things. I mean, that's one of the most enjoyable things to me is being able to meet. And, you know, I've had several people that's like, hey, this is how much you need. You're on track for your retirement, even at 5.5% inflation. You've got some margin for error.

You've got X amount of money you can go put into that farm that you've been wanting to get. You know, just don't spend more than this. The rest comes out of cash flow. So being able to help people structure to where they can build resiliency and be able to take this burden off their shoulders has been the joy of my life, quite frankly. And so it's so nice to know that you're bringing peace to the people that are out there. Yeah, it's a great feeling. It really is. And I get to do that too, in my own funny way. Gold and silver. I got a lot of calls this week too, from people saying, what is up? Because, you know, we were off to the moon and then not. And my interpretation of this, Paul, can't wait to hear yours, is that this is the same

old, same old. Here's the same old, same old. The bullion banks, all four to six of them, depending on how deep down the structure you want to go, they issue paper, gold and silver in unlimited quantities while it's going up in price. And then one day they pull the rug. Can I show you what the rug looks like? Actually, it looks like pulling. It's like they shove gold and silver down a set of stairs. This is coming to us from Jesse Colombo. That's at TheBubbleBubble on Twitter. Silver slammed 10 out of the past 13 trading sessions,

and it happens at the exact same time in the morning. Big slams between 8 and 10 in the morning. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. That's not a market. That's just what happens. Right. So they're always to the downside. They occur between 830 and 11 and it's high volume. And we will see the commitment of traders report out of the CFTC this week and find out if they actually closed up enough of their open interest, ringing the cash register to so we can form a bottom and go back up again. But I think gold and silver, Paul, it's the same old, same old.

I've seen this story so many times. I'm curious to see if the commitment traders have closed their positions out. I've got a feeling that they have. Whereas I was wanting to pull up my, that's my currencies. I wanted to pull up the silver chart here because you know, we, and silver's behaving a lot different than what gold is. Now, Chris, here's one thing that I will share that's kind of positive. So what I'm sharing right here is, and this is not a recommendation, but you know but SLV is mostly derivative contracts. I mean, it's not 100% physical golding. So Aberdeen has the physical silver shares ETF, and I like to

track that. So we had talked about the breakout that occurred back in October in silver, massive breakout of this consolidation phase. And this is a chart of silver daily right here. That was the resistance we broke through. Well, we've since collapsed below that on the short term, close to being a little bit oversold. But on the weekly, we're just about to test that prior resistance that we had after this breakout. Now, we kind of toyed with it, bounced off the average. So I'm really curious to see if we've had a pullback. Gold's had a pullback, which absolutely makes sense.

Silver's just been magnified. So, you know, potentially from a long-term standpoint, what's Russia going to do if they've announced that they're going to be adding to their strategic reserves? That's a big deal. If you're a professional, you're going to buy these pullbacks. I'm not recommending that to anybody. You've got to talk to your advisor before you do that. I am not allocating, you know, dramatically right now. We do have some exposure to silver, but I think this is going to be a buying opportunity in the long term.

I do. You're just going to have to be patient in that space. Well, let me broaden it out a little bit because, you know, we have competing narratives here. One is Bill Ackman style, up and to the right, business optimism. Everybody's excited. Now, there are two things I track when, but he did couch that by saying China's looking a little shaky here. Okay. And China is a big driver of what I'm about to say. But in truth, Dr. Copper and oil are usually fairly reliable barometers of where we're going. So let me pull this up real quick. This is copper here. This looks sick as all get out since October. Look at this. Since the Trump election, copper has been getting destroyed.

So that's not entirely consistent with, woohoo, everything looks awesome. Of course, here you see gold and silver and platinum and palladium. Nobody needs that anymore. Remember just back here, it was like 2,100 ounces or something back, I don't know, a year ago? Anyway, looks like a deal here, not investment advice. So we got that, and then we have the same thing going on where let's say,

let's look at, oh, we'll look at Brent. So this is worldwide crude. This just, it's, it's nowhere. Like this is, this is not, this declining price structure is not consistent with animal spirits and economic growth. So how do we begin to square what copper and oil are telling us with that larger bullish narrative? Well, the argument on oil is, hey, Trump's going to open up the spigots and oil prices are going to stay down. So investors are staying away from it. Okay. I could probably, you know, believe that, but it's going to take some time for that to take place. If this growth is accelerating quickly, but when you really look at copper and commodities, it takes in place, you know, the dollar has strengthened relatively dramatically.

So, so it's, it's, it's, um, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. The big surprise may be, this was a burst of positive activity where people allocated their funds and we reversed to the downside on the other side of that. We're going to react accordingly, but it's just hard to tell. Hey, one thing I thought about that I meant to say earlier that I want to go back to on Supermicro. So think about the technology. So 2000 was a technology bubble that when it burst, NASDAQ went down 80%. Look, Amazon's a great business.

Cisco's still in business. Microsoft's still in business. But those stocks didn't recover their 2000 highs for 14 years. Okay. Business investors just got too giddy and expected it was a new economy again. But let's go back to 2008. Bear Stearns collapsed, right, in February of 2008. I remember well. Yeah. Everybody thought that was okay, but they were at the center of the housing crisis. That was the first canary in the coal. There were plenty of canaries in the coal mine, but that was the first major calamity from the housing debacle that was under the surface. And then when Lehman Brothers collapsed in September, it was happen to this bubble out there right now if Supermicro is stock declining as much as it has?

They can't cover, if there is concern, no honesty. They can't get anybody to sign off on that report, so they get delisted. That's kind of the canary in the coal mine for the AI bubble because that's driving everything right now. And then what would happen not too far behind it if that is the case is you would more than likely see NVIDIA and some of these other stocks follow pretty much the same pattern that all bubble stocks have in the past. And they give back nearly all, if not all of the gains that they had in the euphoria phase. Now, that would cause the markets to have tremendous amounts of damage, regardless of an economy that

has all these positive impacts that Bill Ackman points out. Well, I'm still waiting for that. Like, tell me what AI is really, really going to do, besides put a lot of people out of work, potentially including the people at MSNBC, who apparently it's up for sale. Who knew? Yeah. Who knew? And CNN's about to fire a lot of people. I mean, who knew, Paul, very confusing that providing a product nobody wants would be bad for business. I don't know. I'll leave that up to them. But I could ease, I don't quite get the AI story yet. So I think there's a good chance of that, a rug pull on that one.

But this won't be my first bubble. I've been through a lot of bubbles in my life, unfortunately. You should live through one. That's what history says. You know, I got an internet bubble. I got a housing bubble under my belt. I got a bond bubble. Who else remembers 18 trillion of negative yielding

bonds, right? Come on. You know, negative yielding. I'm still confused. I still don't understand why our government didn't sell every hundred-year treasury, change the laws, sell every hundred-year treasury that you possibly can. You know, if you're a CFO of a company, you give anything to have negative rates. Somebody pay you to take your debt? Yeah, throw them out the door. How many? We got lots. We got unlimited 100-year paper here.

Take it. They should have. Absolutely. So, but I think that, you know, this looks, smells like a bubble to me because, you know, I have people telling me, Paul, and they're very earnest and they're like, Chris, you don't understand. There's this whole business case there. I'm like, I hear the business case, but what usually happens is if it's a really good technology, the business cases write themselves. You see it, right? Yeah, you can see it.

Where is it, right? Okay, I think it could make Amazon distribution more efficient, but is it going to make it more than 3% or 4% more efficient? Cause it's already pretty tight ship, you know? Oh, they run an unbelievably tight ship. It's incredible. Yeah. I mean, it's just, so I'm looking at like, I see business cases, but I'm like, but we're pouring a trillion plus into this on the front end, you know? So I want to see more than that on the backend. I don't, I don't know yet. So, so we'll see where that goes. Um, let me also rewind oil. You know, I see the thing and people like, you know, and I saw the whole Trump statement and he's like, I'll let Bobby Kennedy run the health stuff. But I got the golden,

the golden liquids mine, right? Yeah. Stay away from oil. You can do whatever you want. Yeah, I'll keep the golden liquid. Fine. But here's the thing. I invest in oil and gas. Full disclosure, I won't list things, but I invest very intimately. If oil goes down in price, we will have less drilling activity. It's kind of at the price where we're already starting to see a rollover in rigs. And there isn't. So the whole idea that just because Trump, he says, go, let's drill more.

I hate to say this, but Paul, it's a very simple business. It's cash based. If the ROI ain't there, they're not going to drill. It's just it's a very simple business in some respects, right? You spend money and then dollars come out the hole in the ground. It's pretty simple that way. So I, I'm like, so when people say, oh, he's going to open up drilling, my first question is where? Like, just give me a name. Like, oh, there's this County in Colorado. It's full of oil. Nobody's ever drilled there. And we've just locked it off for no good reason i'm like okay i'm intimately familiar with every possible location listen we haven't drilled the east coast right for reasons and we haven't drilled we stopped drilling off the west coast for reasons you could open that back up but that's like those first flows even if Trump went hog wild on that and opened up

all those permits tonight, and he can't till January, it would be past his presidency before we would see the first drop out of those. It takes that it would take that long to pull them out. It just takes you got to go and you do your 3D mapping and then you drill, you know, some test well holes they're like two inches three inches right then you're like oh there's oil there then you got to like move in your production rig to come in and you got to set that whole thing up and then you got to get it from the rig to the shore so you got to lay a bunch of pipeline um it just takes years for offshore uh you know typically from first wow we have a major discovery to peak flows is about seven years on an offshore, give or take, depending on how far and how deep and all that stuff like that.

But it just takes time. Well, that tells you right there the president can make a lot of changes, but it doesn't necessarily bring an impact immediately. I did not realize that it was that long from, you know, in that. So, yeah, you're right. So we still have some issues. Yeah, it's a thing. But so I'm less clear about that. But on copper, this is a bizarre story. So take a look at this. Here, let me move this over a tiny bit. So here we have Bloomberg. This article just came out today. This one caught me by surprise, Paul. Maybe you can help me understand

it. Copper smelters, the smelters who make the metal from the ore, battered by tight supplies on one side and weakening demand on the other. So this is crazy. This is really, what a horrible place to be stuck as a business. So tensions are running high as smelters are being hit by tighter supply of mine doors. Cause we're deaf for definitely running out of the mine doors and, uh, and deteriorating demand for the refined metal. So no supply on one side of you and no demand on the other.

Uh, it's such a bizarre place to be stuck. Hmm. And of course, you know, as we showed before, um, copper is just looking, looking, not just weak, but, but like something, something, something is not good over here in the big old world, a copper.

Well, you can suspend reality for a short period of time, but Dr. Copper, I mean, it has the name Dr. Copper because it can tell you a lot about what's going on in the economy. So that's very indicative of how weak the underlying economy actually is. If we look at this, it's still relatively high compared to history, but man, you know, it's, wow, I don't know. It's, again, but tough, tough, tough business to be in right now with no supply on one side and no demand on the other. Tough time to be a smelter. Yeah, you're on the front side of that bottleneck, which means your profit's going to get squeezed, and you're going to be cautious on what you take in and put out in that manner. So if we do accelerate really quickly and you've got that bottleneck with tight supply and the demand does pick back up, then you can see prices. That brings inflation back. That's another thing that I'm concerned

about is the inflationary pressures are not completely gone, right? We had this kind of Goldilocks CPI report that came out today, and I didn't memorize everything before we had a chance to talk. But good report, looked like it came in line with expectations. But we're still at all-time highs in inflation, the cumulative inflation. So there's still inflationary pressures there. It's going to be tough to get out of the spot we're in. And, you know, and hopefully Trump's playing that long game. And investors, we're just going to have to understand that this is a completely different environment than 2016, which means there's going to be completely different opportunities and there's probably going to be completely different winners.

That playbook runs, but it doesn't repeat itself exactly. Well, on that front, I'm expecting a lot more inflation because I think when push comes to shove, we can talk about government efficiency. I like the idea. I'll bet you anything they kill a couple of weird NIH studies about, you know, monkeys in Egypt or something, whatever. But it's going to be very hard to trim a couple trillion. And worse, when we get into a little pickle, the instincts of Trump are not going to be to pile on. It's going to be, hey, Jerome, I need a little help here. Let's get this thing going. Hey, Congress, let's get some stimulus. He's going to be very aggressively

working to reliquify the situation and get things going in the correct direction again. Although I consider recessions to be corrective and necessary or burn the dead wood out and then you start afresh, but that doesn't seem to be de rigueur anymore in Washington, D.C. I'm expecting a lot more inflation over the coming years. Is that where your head is, too? Yo, that's my biggest concern. I'm talking to, you know, I had a conversation with somebody yesterday. It's like, oh, Trump's one inflation is going to go away. No, it's not. No, it's my biggest concern. I'm talking to, you know, I had a conversation with somebody yesterday. It's like, oh, Trump's one inflation is going to go away. No, it's not.

No, it's not. Let's say that it's postponed for a period of time. But the prior administration set off a chain of events in the BRICS that I believe currency and the dollar loses, you know, continues to wane as its status as a global reserve currency, that means, what, 60%, I think, is it, Chris? Do you know that number of our dollars in circulation are overseas? Well, then they're going to come back home. That in itself is ridiculously inflationary. So, you know, I'm still really concerned about inflation. And I can be because our strategy can shift to protect capital against deflation if that's the case. But everything is telling me that no matter how much of a reprieve

we get over the next six to 12 months or however long that is, inflation is going to be your greatest risk as a retiree. And it is the most devastating for individuals that are unprepared for it because it's a slow killer. You wake up 10 years from now and you're like, how come I can't do the things that I didn't do before? And it's because it's deceptive and it's evil in its application. And now I'm enjoying having these conversations with clients when I show them 5.5% inflation in retirement, just how devastating it's going to be because I've really learned how to communicate that to people now

and show it to them. So, yeah, that was a long-winded answer that I'm terrified of inflation for retirees, for us as a nation, for us as individuals, because it's an unnecessary evil. Except the bankers love it because there's less defaults in the long term. Well, you know, again, it's very hard to read all these cross-currents. I'm having trouble. Here's an area I'm having trouble. Here's an area I'm having trouble. So from the fifth onward, you see United Health Group vaulted here from 570 to 625. So I thought with Trump

winning, make America healthy again is not going to be positive for this particular outfit right here. Remember, these are the people, if I pulled up a big long-term chart, let me see how long this will allow me to go back. This is Obamacare back here and this company, because they harvest off of sick care dollars, particularly off of the American, the ACA, the Obamacare Act. Look at that explosion in stock prices going on here in United Health Group. So I kind of thought that they might have been seen as, if this was rational, I think the market should have said, wow, possibly, you know, an RFK Jr. Trump combo is not going to be good for this company.

I don't understand that either. Halte, an interesting lesson that I learned about our strategy going back. So you mentioned going back to Obamacare in 2010, right? 2010 was when that got rolled out. So I was awake back then, but I was still learning, learning really quickly. Like, you know, having those moments of panics, like, what do you do? You know, you've been there, Chris. I keep talking to people. I've talked to people that are there now. They're in a panic. Like, what do you do? You've been there, Chris. I keep talking to people.

I've talked to people that are there now. They're in a panic. Like what do I do first, right? So I remember when Obamacare came out and all of the argument, oh, this is going to be great for the people. And then all of a sudden in our relative strength analysis, FXH, which is the First Trust Healthcare Index, popped in as one of the targets to buy in the portfolio. And I was telling my mentor, I'm like, there's no way I'm touching that. What's going on right now?

And the mentor had been doing this for quite some time. He's like, well, Paul, that tells you that Obamacare is going to be a lot more profitable for the companies at the expense of the people. And I'm like, but, but, but. He said, quit button, follow the money flow, and follow the strategies you've got together. So we added it.

You know, and what? It was the number one performing. Now, I'm supposed to counteract something horrible with something good. Added, but forget that. It was one of the best performing sectors over the following six, seven, eight year period, if I remember correctly. And, you know, in hindsight, you can see now, but the market anticipated that and sniffed it out. That's the amazing thing about money flow. Big investors know what's going on. They ignore the narrative that the average person's hearing on the mainstream TV.

And that's why the average person that's listening to the mainstream TV, if they're still trusting them, they got everything wrong. That's why they're dying. But if you're still listening to them, you got to find another source. Spend the time to learn X because that's where the truth is. Listen to people like Chris. Because the market behind the scenes knew that Obamacare was going to be highly profitable expense of the patient and the individual. And we've all experienced that in our lives. Premiums are through the roof and service that's, you know, and companies that don't want to pay for anything.

Embarrassing service compared to a lot of other countries. You know, one of the biggest things people do now is medical tourism, right? Like, so you're like, well, I could sort of fight through this thicket of American expense and crappy service, or I could just fly my whole family over to Turkey, get everything done, save a bundle, have a vacation in world-class facilities by people who've trained at top universities, and they actually have a service orientation. It's such a different thing when you get in with somebody who has a true service orientation, like they're here to help, right? Like I know you do with, with your clients. Um, that's my big dream is that we could just, like, I feel very adversarial, like that my government state, local, municipal, federal, like I'm the enemy and they're the enemy. It's very adversarial, you know? Um, and, and I kind of wish that could get back to where they understand they're in a service role. And if you don't want to be in a service role and you hate it and it makes you miserable,

then don't be in it. Go do something else, right? You're there to serve. So serve. Should be pleasant. One thing on the side, I'm going to plug FLCCC right now because they've opened my eyes. For those of you that aren't familiar with FLCCCC, Chris can tell you everything about it. You've got to follow it. But after I've been following them and learning,

I've had to go see some doctors about a few things, not to get into the details, but some neck issues going on. Now, before COVID and all that, and Chris, what you educated that, first doctor I went to was like, you're going to have surgery now. I'm like, okay, sign me up. Let's have the surgery. After FLCCC and you and everything else that we're trying to find the truth as a lover of the truth, I took the time and just went and saw five different doctors

and just grilled them with questions. One was just ridiculously offended at the questions. And I'm asking everybody that I know, So you're going in there and finding out. And the two docs that I like the most are like, look, you don't want to have the surgery until you have to, right? And they explain, here's when you have to have that surgery. If you can postpone this for 10 years, postpone it for 10 years. If you can postpone it for five, these are the signs that you need to look out for when you do. And Chris, I got teary-eyed with the doc that I'll potentially have the surgery with, but now I'm looking forward to the new treatments and I'm going to be interviewing other doctors. And it's amazing just how much of an impact the FLCC has empowered me as a potential patient to go in there and

just ask the questions that I should have been asking and be skeptical of the answers and go get multiple opinions. And so it's already impacted my life for the better dramatically. Oh, well, thanks for mentioning that. And for people who don't know, I have been on the board of the FLCCC pretty much from the beginning. You know, because one of the first things I surfaced in my COVID reporting back in the day was in March of 2020 was this kind of weird thing. It's a math plus protocol that came out of a place called EVMS, Eastern Virginia Medical. And that was Paul Merrick.

And some doctors had found stuff that worked and they just wanted to tell people. And they were naive doctors at the time, as we all were. And they're like, look, better data and outcomes. Yes, that's what we do. And they found out that's not how the system is operating at all. So I invite everybody to kind of go on a health journey. But here's the fun part. With this latest thing, hopefully RFK Jr. gets, like, the commanding position. I hope he gets, like—if he doesn't, I will feel like some sort of a deal got reneged on, personally. And so with that, though, you know what's fun?

It's kind of like FLCCC and Peak Prosperity. And so with that, though, you know what's fun? It's kind of like FLCCC and Peak Prosperity both get to look and say, yeah, we were just trying to stand on the side of truth the whole time. And finally, it's come around to where we are now. And that feels good. Paul's kind of like I have a whole closet full of bell bottoms and they're back in style. I'm like, I knew it. You know, that's good. Well, a love of the truth will always put you in the right path, the wisest path. And when you have a love for the truth, you might stumble, but you won't fall, right? There's no catastrophic wipe out. If you're honestly with all your heart pursuing the truth. And that's the thing I love

about what you do. That's what we do when it comes to the markets. That's what FLCCC does when it comes to healthcare is that love of the truth. And, you know, at that conference that we went to in Phoenix last year, and those of you have not been, and you're not familiar, they'll, when will they announce the upcoming conference, Chris? It'll be pretty soon if they're announcing it. Yeah. I'd encourage you, if you can make it, go. Because you've got to, all the people there are like at your event, the annual summit in New Hampshire. There's a love of truth, and regardless of preferences and personalities, that one love of truth blends everybody together. And that's the path that we all need to pursue and head towards.

Well, it proved to me that, you know, some of the things I know when you're on the right track, too, is that the other side hates it. You remember this one? Oh, what are you going to do your own research? Like, yeah, that's exactly what I'm going to do. Because you guys don't do any research whatsoever. And you think you know what the score is, right you guys don't do any research whatsoever and you think you know what the score is right i can't tell you how many doctors i schooled on stuff that they were certain about paul they had no data on their side and they didn't know it they thought because everybody told them that they had all the data they hadn't they didn't have the data right it's anyway yeah little research goes a long way in this world, including SMCI. Yes, it does.

You just look at that stock price and it tells you something right away. Yeah. If you know what you're looking at. You know, it's amazing. You keep putting Germany on my radar and I'm seeing it, so I actively go watch for it. But what our strategy does is as soon as that, that supply and demand changes and rolls and we exit, I'm focused on, on what we're targeting on where we are. And I'll look up, you know, there's all kinds of indicators that I watch, but I'll miss something like SMCI when it's not on my radar. If it's not a target of our portfolio or not owned by clients, because that's just, you know, you focus on what you own. This is one thing I tell people, you've got to know what you own and why you own it you don't necessarily have to okay but your advisor has to know what you own and why you own it and clearly

demonstrate why it's why it should be in your portfolio we have a clear process like that so you know hope's not an investment strategy. When you go through the right process, you still hope that that investment's going to do what you hope that it does. You can hope on something, but you don't own something just with the hope that things are going to be okay. You own it because you know why you own it. You have a strategy and rules that filter out what not to own so that you can focus and be successful over the long term. Most successful investors are not worried about the next three months. They're worried about where they're going to be 12, 24, 36, 5 years and 10 years from now and continually operating in that direction.

Understand the strengths of your strategy. Understand the weaknesses of your strategy. So if you're a passive investor buying whole, what are the strengths? You're going to do exactly what the market does, no matter how ridiculous it is. The weaknesses are, you're going to do exactly what the market does whenever truth comes back into the picture, which it always does. Reality sets in and you're going to ride that thing all the way to the bottom because passive investing, that's what you're supposed to do. And if you're unfortunate enough that it hits you right after retirement, or if it's, or if God forbid, it's another 1929 type correction, that truth comes back to reality, then, then the future may not be as bright as what you

think it is. If you don't have a strategy that can deal with those risks. Well, indeed. And unfortunately, we also have to consider the narratives of the day because, you know, we've been in so long. I'm old enough, Paul, I remember what fundamentals are. You know, they used to matter. I don't even pay attention. Like it used to be on my on my financial radar screen earnings. Right. Big, big day. Right. Big week, you know, I'm always tracking the earnings. Irrelevant at this stage, you know, almost to what happens next. So I tune them out a little bit at this stage, but fundamentally they do matter at the end of the day, but they don't matter if the narrative is that a PE of 15 is fine. No, 20. Did I mean 25? 30 is fine. 35, 40. Wait a minute. Let me explain a PE of 200. You're going to love this story, right?

You know? That's the narrative. So the earnings are irrelevant in that story if you can just continually float the expansion narrative, right? So we go there. But I like something you said a lot earlier, which is track the money. The money always snows in advance. That's why in 2008, to go back to that sector, about two weeks before things really cracked apart, I told all my followers, go to the bank, get cash out right now. I don't know what I'm watching, but it's bad.

And I was watching the housing market. So sure, some of the big home bubblers, as I called them, the home builders at the time. Sure, the mortgage insurers, yeah. But it was actually these derivative life and, sorry, insurance companies I was watching. They started to tank. And I was like, oh, this is worse than I thought, right? So it was the money. That's what told me first.

That's why I track the markets. People are like, Chris, why finances? Because this is where we get our early warning system. This is where we know where things are going. Because the big money always knows where it's going. It always knows. One of the biggest arguments my wife and I had back in February of 2007 was I was watching the data that we had and I'm like, honey, this is not our forever house. We built it to live in for two or three years to sell. We got to get rid of this house. Well, we put it on the market in November of 07,

didn't get a single offer until February. The first offer that came in was so low, I told her, I said, we're going to play poker here. And I responded back and said, get serious or leave me alone. That was my response. So they came back, and Holly was like, we just need to hang in there. And I'm like, honey, I'm looking at money flows under the surface. These bank stocks are absolutely coming apart. I'm begging people to sell the bank stocks.

I'm getting pushback from even local community bank presidents are calling you better stop telling people to sell those stocks right you're hurting us no i'm not hurting you i'm serving the people that i serve and uh and you know we exited and then rented for a period of time until things got better but you know it the money flow was telling us that there were troubles. The problem is several times since really 2015, the money flow was telling us there were troubles and the Fed stepped in and bailed out. And then they decimated the shorts and they decimated the prudent people who recognize that fundamentals matter. And then I started watching people throw in the towel. Okay. They're throwing in the towel. It's like fundamentals don't matter anymore. I'm a passive investor. I'm a long-term buy and hold investor, but they're scared to death.

And then they become complacent. And then there's the few of us that are like, hey, I don't like this. Fundamentals don't matter. But when we built that strategy, by God's grace, what I didn't know is money flow matters more than anything. Our risk management, it gets more extreme as fundamentals get higher. So that allows us to play the game by the rules that are forced upon us. But at the same time, when you're so detached from historically proven fundamentals that if it really is different this time, throw out all the historical textbooks, ignore what Benjamin

Graham, Charles Dow, all the legends that we study tell us to do about investment, throw out your finance degrees. But reality and truth is going to stand the test of time because we go through these cycles. So money flow is important, but, you know, and we can ignore fundamentals for a period of time, especially when government has intervened and fueled this moral hazard, at some point is going to cause I mean, there's going to be an unbelievable amount of pain for people. You know, I think about the individuals that had no clue that Trump could win the election, much less no clue that that I mean, I was shocked that they took the Senate and they've officially taken the House now, right, the Republicans? Correct. And the popular vote. I figured that could happen, but I was surprised it all happened so quickly.

But, you know, there's been absolute, complete meltdown by those individuals that fully trusted the media that didn't tell them the truth because they were presenting a narrative. Their mental pain is really tough right now. The problem is there's a lot of investors that have trusted the so-called experts or the salespeople that are driven to be like the doctors who were trusting their source of advice and advisors who are just doing what they have to trust the people behind. And all of them are deceived as to the reality of what it really takes to be a successful investor over the long term. And that's what our job is, quite frankly, is to be prudent, iron sharpening iron, and say,

look, here's how we play the game by the rules that are forced upon us. And the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay patient without making a mistake, get emotionally sucked in at the worst time, or we have rules by which to exit whenever this thing ends. And that's the hard part. That's why even right now, the hard part's begun in asset management and everything that we have as a country going forward, because it's not going to be easy from here. It takes diligence. It takes work. It takes paying attention to the details. That's what we do for people. Well, and you do very well. And I'm very glad that you do it for people. So for anybody who

does want to talk with Paul and his amazing team, there's a process. Go to peakfinancialinvesting.com. Fill out a very simple form. Somebody will be in touch with you within 48 business hours and get the process stolen. It's free. No obligation. As Paul mentioned earlier, you probably heard he talks with people all the time and sometimes they become clients. Sometimes they don't. Doesn't matter. The point is to help you and get you some of the guidance you need. And so Paul and his team are very glad to do that. They do it really well. And I'm just very pleased to be working with them on this to help people.

Because I think, Paul, we're going to need some help coming forward. This could be rocky going forward. I think so, too. One thing that I do want to mention, and I forget, I've been meaning to tell people as you and I talked about this. One thing I want to say is it takes a while to get in to see me and it takes a while to get in to see some of our team from time to time. The commitment that I make is to our clients first, those that are clients that we're serving. So it takes a little while for somebody to get in on my schedule. You get a hundred percent of my attention when we get on that calendar and we get

put together. I put several hours into planning before we meet in the planning meeting, but I keep openings in my schedule so that if I have a client that calls me and needs to talk to me this afternoon or tomorrow morning, they can get in first. So don't think that because it takes a while to get in, that once you're a client, you don't get that call. There's many people that are calling in, it's like, hey, can I talk to you tomorrow? I've got a change that came up in my life. And I'm like, absolutely. And they're like, yeah, you really do what you say you do. So we keep that capacity in there. Whether you work with us or not, my commitment is that if we spend time together, that you're going to get some piece of information that's going to make you a better investor, have a more resilient retirement plan,

and be better informed about your situation, whether we work together or not. We're not high pressure. So I tell everybody, if you're curious, you're looking for somebody that you want to build a relationship with, understands what you're looking at, can demonstrate stress test your situation and has courage to tell you, look, you got to make some changes. What do you want to give up? Do you want to take less income? Do you want to work longer? Do you want to raise risk? We step you through those options so that you can make an informed decision with a recommendation that's in your best interest. And if we don't work together, that's fine. By God's grace, hopefully my number one goal is you will leave that situation better informed

with more wisdom going forward than what you had before we took the time to talk. Excellent. Well, thank you for clarifying that. It's a really important point to make. All I know is people say that it's amazing that when they call, they get somebody and you're there and you and your team have time for everybody. It's a, dare I say, you, you kind of treat them like family or like, like people should be treated. So that's the best part about all this for me. I just love people getting, getting treated right. I enjoy it. That's our, you know, and that's the one thing we can do. And I always tell my staff, if you don't, if you don't demonstrate to people that you care about them, then they don't know.

And the cool thing is our clients do end up becoming family. And as a fee-based advisor, I have a bunch of little bosses everywhere. So every person that I'm talking to is a boss, and I have to perform for that individual and do what's right for them, right? And my job, which we take seriously, is to sometimes I have to pull them out of their comfort zone, you know, pull them back a little bit more conservative. Sometimes I have to push them out of their comfort zone, but we're able to demonstrate in that plan, help them make the decision of where they want to be. And then we go to work, roll up our sleeves so that they can focus on their life and know that somebody is watching every position that they own on every single day

and making adaptations when the information changes. So with that, Paul, thank you for your time today. We'll be back next week and really looking forward to seeing what comes up over the next, well, first I guess we've got to make it to January, and then we'll see what happens after that.