The Pomp Podcast - #1557 Anthony & John Pompliano | Countries Are RUSHING To Buy Bitcoin Now

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

John Pompliano and Anthony Pompliano discuss all things bitcoin, bitcoin bonds, hash-rate, legislation about the US buying bitcoin, stock market, why so many people missed the last rally, what it means for your portfolio, and how bitcoin and stocks could perform the rest of the year.========================Invest as you spend with the Gemini Credit Card® (https://www.gemini.com/pomp). Sign up today and get approved by 6/30/25 to earn a $200 Bitcoin bonus. Terms apply (http://gemini.com/legal/credit-card-intro-promo-terms). The Gemini Credit Card is issued by WebBank. See rates & fees (https://www.gemini.com/legal/cardholder-agreement) for more details. Some exclusions apply to instant rewards in which rewards are deposited when the transaction posts. This content is sponsored by Gemini, but my opinions are my own.========================Core is the leading Bitcoin scaling solution, enabling you to lock in yield by locking up your Bitcoin. Simply lock it on the Bitcoin blockchain to secure the Core network, and get rewards. No bridging. No lending. Just holding. Still your keys. Still your coins. Now your yield. Start at https://stake.coredao.org/pomp========================Polkadot is a scalable, secure, and decentralized blockchain technology aimed at creating Web3. Created by Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, Polkadot empowers users to build decentralized applications with ease. Backed by industry leaders, making it a preferred choice for big names, Polkadot stands out as a leading choice for investors seeking a reliable, future-proof solution in the growing world of Web3 technology. Learn more at https://polkadot.com/.=======================Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/=======================View 10k+ open startup jobs:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on, guys? Today, we've got an excellent episode with John Pompliano. We do rapid fire. We go through all things Bitcoin, Bitcoin bonds, what's going on with hash trade.

What should we actually expect from legislation about the United States buying Bitcoin and much, much more. Then we also talk about the stock market and why so many people missed the most recent rally, what it means for your portfolio and how I personally expect stocks to perform through the end of the year. This conversation is full with insights that I haven't shared anywhere else. So I hope that you enjoy it. Here's my latest conversation with John Pompliano. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular

investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Today's episode is brought to you by Gemini. Are you interested in effortlessly growing your Bitcoin portfolio? I sure am. So good news. Gemini designed a product just for this. Meet the Bitcoin credit card powered by Gemini, which offers instant Bitcoin rewards on every purchase.

This MasterCard World Elite product has no annual fee and no exchange fees to acquire your Bitcoin rewards. It's that simple. The magic of the card doesn't stop at the rewards. The card is sleek metal design that comes in rose gold, silver, black, and the new limited edition Bitcoin orange. Sign up today to earn a $200 Bitcoin bonus to jumpstart your Bitcoin portfolio whenever you spend $3,000 in the first 90 days. Obviously, terms apply. Go to Gemini.com slash card for more details. That's Gemini.com slash card.

Go check them out today. Today's episode is brought to you by Core. You can earn yield on your Bitcoin by just holding your Bitcoin. It's simple. Core, the leading Bitcoin scaling solution, will reward you for not selling your Bitcoin. It's not magic. Here's how it works. Core is a protocol secured by elected validators. You can help elect validators and secure the network by simply locking up your Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain.

No bridging, no lending, and just holding. When your validator secures Core, it earns rewards fueled by network activity and passes them back to you as yield. With a minimum lockup of just one day, when the time lock ends, you get your Bitcoin back untouched. Steal your keys, steal your coins, now your yield. For even higher rates, stake Core alongside your Bitcoin and multiply your yield. And if you want to see what your Bitcoin is securing, join millions of others in exploring the largest Bitcoin DeFi ecosystem. There are over 100 live apps in the network and the deepest liquidity in all of Bitcoin DeFi.

Get off zero and start earning yield on even just 1% of your Bitcoin by going to stake.cordow.org. slash Pomp. Again, that's stake.cordow.org slash Pomp, or go click the link in the description. Today's episode is brought to you by Polkadot. Polkadot offers secure, scalable, and decentralized blockchain technology that perfectly aligns with the needs of innovative projects. It was developed by Gavin Wood, one of the co-founders of Ethereum and the creator of Solidity. Polkadot aims to build an internet where users have full control over their data and their applications. Polkadot offers tons of unique features, a shared security model, along with a new auction model and significant implementations like ASIC banking.

Given these characteristics, it's easy to understand why Polkadot is gaining more and more traction in the cryptocurrency world. Some people even are talking about it as the AWS of Web3. Now, companies such as Mythical Games, Astro Network, and over 50 other independent blockchains with hundreds of applications already leverage Polkadot's technology to power their platforms. If you're looking for a reliable, scalable, and cutting-edge solution, Polkadot seems to be the top choice for industry players. Go check them out today at polkadot.com. All right, John, what's the first topic we got going here? Russia's largest bank, Spur Bank, went ahead and launched a Bitcoin bond.

What the hell is a Bitcoin bond? Well, it's a very good question. The first thing to understand is that Bitcoin is a magnet for capital, right? People want to go put their capital and store it inside of Bitcoin. obviously is very asymmetric. Now, there's different types of Bitcoin bonds, right? Bitcoin bond is just bonds related to Bitcoin. Now, if you go and you take a look, there are things in the public market, obviously strategy and other companies, they're issuing all kinds of kind of debt related instruments that could be convertible notes. Some people are trying to do structured notes. There's all kinds of stuff. The idea there is, hey, I give you something,

you give me capital. I take that capital and I go and I buy Bitcoin. You may convert it to equity later. I may pay you some sort of interest where there's a lot of stuff happening in the public market, people trying to raise money to buy Bitcoin. Got it. Now, the second thing that people have been talking about, and it's become a more popular idea over the last three or four months, is this idea of a bit bond. The idea of a bit bond is, let's say that the US government would go and they would issue a bond, and you give $100. When you give $100 to buy that bond, what they do is they take 90% of it, and they say, we're going to go waste it by trying to fund the government. Well, they take 100% of the money right now and go waste it and fund the government.

They won't take 90% this time, so we already got some improvement. The other 10% they would take and they would buy Bitcoin with it. Now, the idea is that they would promise you some sort of interest rate on it. Let's say maybe it's as low as 1% is what the proposal that I've seen from the Bitcoin Policy Institute. When they issue that bond and tell you that they're going to give you 1%, they've bought 10% Bitcoin, 90% goes to fund the government. Obviously, the thought process is that Bitcoin will appreciate in value. As that Bitcoin appreciates in value, they may say to you, but you know what we're going to do? we're going to give you 100% of the return of the first 4.5% of the Bitcoin. So now you got a 1%

coupon on the bond. Now you get 4.5% from Bitcoin. So you got 5.5%. Sounds pretty good, right? But then they said, well, Bitcoin's probably going to go up even more over a long period of time. And so then after the 4.5% of Bitcoin appreciation, we split it 50-50. So if Bitcoin goes up, let's say another 10% past the 4.5%, now you would get 5% of that and the government would get 5% of that. And so when you do that, you then now have a way for them to pay much higher rates of interest or return on their bonds, but they're contractually only obligated to pay you 1%. So it's all dependent on the Bitcoin price appreciation. Obviously, if the government's able to do this, they still get 90% of the $100 to go and fund the government. That 10% makes it

more attractive. It's a way to incentivize people to come in and buy the bonds of the United States, use Bitcoin to potentially deliver a better return. And also the government may recoup some of the 90% that they wasted to fund the government because they get 50% of the Bitcoin return above the 4.5% initial return. So a BitBond is very interesting because if the government could do this,

there are some rumors, analysis, proposals out there that actually this could help address the national debt. Whether it could or not, I don't know. So we got the structured stuff and the public market stuff. Then we got the BitBonds. And then we have what we saw yesterday, which is this bank in Russia, they decided they were going to issue a bond that is related to Bitcoin. Now, what it does is, and we're still waiting for a lot of the details, but so far what we know is there's basically two different ways that this bond can become more valuable in the future. The first is appreciation

of Bitcoin and US dollars. The second is that there is a strengthening of the US dollar against the ruble. And so what you are seeing is essentially the bond market, which is a very large, liquid, deep market of capital, is saying to themselves, Bitcoin and bonds are going to marry each other. And people are going to find all kinds of interesting ways to do it. Maybe Bitbonds is the thing that's gotten the most attention and obviously the public company stuff because of these Bitcoin treasury companies. But I think that we are going to see people do all kinds of things moving forward. And you already see some of this, like BlackRock has a fixed income fund that they went and they changed the documents so that they can put, I think it's up to 10 or 15%

of that fund into Bitcoin. I don't know if they've actually done that yet or not, but you can see people are saying, wait a second, if I take Bitcoin and I add it to a bond, or if I add it to a portfolio, the portfolio case, the Sharpe ratio goes up. If I add it to a bond, maybe the bond will perform better, which means that I can actually raise more capital. That's the future of where a lot of this stuff is going. And I think that is why people are so interested in kind of understanding the intersection of Bitcoin in the bond market. Who's going to buy those bonds? Is it more countries? Is it institutions? Is it high net worth individuals? Who is actually going to benefit from owning these bonds? And where's the

market basically? I think it's all of the above, right? Different people want different things. Some people may be really attracted to buying a public company issued debt that is related to Bitcoin. They may want to buy the convertible notes. They may say, hey, look, I want to lend money and have some downside protection, but then I want to be able to convert into equity at some sort of premium or something, right? You could see institutions doing that. You could see nation states. You could see sovereign wealth funds. That's similar to the Bitcoin treasury stuff. Yeah. So like take a strategy as an example, like a convertible bond is essentially a way for people to say, hey, I'm going to give you this IOU, right? You're going to give me money. And a lot

of these convertible bonds have been done at 0% interest. So I don't owe you any interest. But when you give this to me, I am going to give you some downside protection. You get paid first, your top of the capital stack. There's all these kind of downside protections. And in exchange for those downside protections, you're not going to be able to convert that bond into the equity at the current price. You may have to do it at 30, 40, 50% higher. And so there's this trade-off of how much risk do I want to mitigate versus how much return do I want to try to capture? And so this is how the bond market works in general. But I think that you're going to see the bond market, which currently services all those groups that you mentioned, they're now just

going to start to infuse Bitcoin. And it's less likely that like, oh, individuals will be attracted and institutions won't. What's more likely to happen is 10% of every group, 10% of institutions, 10% of sovereign wealth funds, 10% of individuals, they'll be attracted to this first. And then over time, that number will become bigger and bigger and bigger. And I think that's really how you bring a lot of capital into the Bitcoin ecosystem. All right. The Bitcoin conference was last week. David Bailey and his team seem to do a fantastic job. Pakistan announced that they're going to do a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Are other countries coming? They're all going to do it. Of course. Right. It's like saying, is every country going to have a gold reserve? Of course

they need a way to store value. Now in the United States, and we've talked about this, we have a strategic petroleum reserve. We have a strategic gold reserve. We have a strategic cheese reserve, right? We got all kinds of crazy stuff. And so if you think about Bitcoin, And Bitcoin is just another asset the government is going to hoard in case ABCD different things. Now, why is the United States doing it versus maybe another country? That's up for debate, right? There are plenty of countries that are going to start buying Bitcoin and creating a strategic reserve because they're worried about U.S. sanctions in the future. There's other countries who say, you know what?

I'm a friend of the United States, but just in case, I'm going to buy a little bit of Bitcoin. There's other countries that will say, you know what? I'm going to put in my sovereign wealth fund, right? We've seen that start to happen with the exposure to the ETFs. And I think that's going to appreciate in price. So whether you're buying it as a store of value, whether you're buying it for the censorship resistance, whether you're buying it for price appreciation

or a multitude of other reasons, it kind of doesn't matter. It's just the fact that you have an asset that millions and millions of people around the world have all decided for different reasons, I want that asset in my personal balance sheet. Well, if it's good enough for individuals, then it's good enough for companies.

If it's good enough for individuals and companies, it's gonna be good enough for countries. And I think that is the progression that we're seeing here. And as I've talked about for years, the beauty of this is that it started with the individuals. Historically, technology goes from the militaries and the countries to the companies and then the people. We were the last ones, individuals, the last ones to get cell phones. We're the last ones to get laptop computers, right? We're the last ones to use technology because you got to get the cost down enough

where an individual can buy it. Bitcoin has completely flipped that. It was actually individuals who adopted it first and were going back up the stack. And so it was individuals, then it was companies and financial institutions. And now we're getting to sovereign wealth funds in nation states, which is pretty cool. That is cool. Let's talk about Cynthia Lummis a little bit. She said that Trump recently, she thought the idea that Trump is supporting the one million Bitcoin purchase for the United States. How do we get there? We buy it. But how do we how do we convince, you know, how do how do we get over the edge so they actually buy a million Bitcoin? I don't actually think that we need the congressional approvals and stuff.

I know that that's the path that we're going to go, but I actually do think that we could just do it, um, uh, through the executive orders and stuff like that. But if we're going to go this path, great. Um, I believe that there are a multitude of ways to get there. Uh, one, which I said at one point, I said, look, we should have just issued $250 billion worth of debt and just go buy Bitcoin. Right. And we're like, ah, printing money, whatever, like we're going to print the money anyways, guys. Right. So like, at least let's go use good, good use for it. I don't like the idea of printing money, but when I said it, we can go back and check the price was a lot lower. right so we would already maybe uh wiped off uh some portion of the national debt um so that's

we could just print the money the second is that we could stop spending money on dumb things and start spending it on smart things right and i'm not somebody who thinks that the government should go put 100 of their assets in bitcoin right just like i don't think an individual should do that either um but i do think that's probably a higher percentage than most people think um and i think that most bitcoiners if you go and you ask them if you own bitcoin very few of them have only one percent of their assets in it, right? Again, each person is different. I know people who have three to 5%. I know people who have 10%. I know people who have 99%, right? But the idea that you're only going to put 1% with an idea like Bitcoin is probably not realistic. And so the US government

likely is going to buy more. So you could stop spending money on things, change the budget up and just redirect some of those funds to something else. And the third thing is we can earn or acquire Bitcoin through other means. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, should we have the United States using some of our energy resources to mine Bitcoin? Should we be asking other countries to pay us in Bitcoin? Should we figure out ways to acquire Bitcoin that doesn't require us to take dollars and issue them? Maybe BitBonds, right? Part of the BitBond idea is 50% of that performance over the first four and a half percent goes to the US government. Well, in the proposal from the Bitcoin Policy Institute, that 50% that goes to the government would go into the Strategic Bitcoin

reserve. So you could actually issue debt and somehow end up with more Bitcoin, right? And so there's all these different ways to do it. But I think that a million coins sounds like a great idea, right? Let's see if the US government can get there. What I hope does not happen, it's my big warning, I don't want to see companies nationalized. I don't want to see ETFs nationalized. I don't want to see the use of violence or the state coming in and coercing or taking people's assets. So I think that we have to do it in the proper way, but the United States should definitely rush

and try to get to a million. So I think one thing that's been on a lot of people's mind recently as we've seen all these companies buying Bitcoin, right? GameStop was probably one of the most recent companies to announce a multi-billion dollar purchase of Bitcoin. Why isn't the price going up? I think that's a big concern.

Yeah, I think that's a big concern for retail is, look, like everyone buying, buying, buying, buying, buying, but my stack's still the same size. Yeah, this is a little bit of alpha for folks. You are seeing people buy. What they are essentially doing is they are going and they are putting money into these companies. But a lot of the people who are putting money into these companies, they are more so arbing the difference between the price of Bitcoin and the premium that the public companies are trading at. So for example, if I have a company that I want to invest in, and that company says to me, if you give me $105,000, I'm going to go buy one Bitcoin. Great. Well, they issue me that at their current share price, right? So I give them $105,000. I now have one share of, let's say, their company, and there's one Bitcoin backing it. I then, because I am long their stock, go and I short Bitcoin for $105,000. And they say, well, if you're long $105,000 and you're short $105,000, what's the difference?

Well, the third piece of that equation is that these companies are not trading at NAV. They're trading at a premium. So if the company now is trading at 150%, kind of a 0.5% or a 0.5X premium, I now have neutral exposure to the market. I'm not long or short Bitcoin, because I'm long the stock, I'm short Bitcoin. But what I'm essentially doing is, in a very generalized manner, I'm locking in that premium. So I basically got, again, generalized, 50% return, because without taking risks to the market of Bitcoin going up or down. So when you see the dollars coming into the market, what you're seeing is, oh, look at

billions of dollars is coming in to buy Bitcoin. what you're not seeing in the announcements is a lot not all but a lot of that capital is going and hedging elsewhere and so they're essentially just bouncing themselves out so for every dollar long there's a dollar short now again that's not a hundred percent of people right we have seen bitcoin's price appreciate over the last you know whatever a couple of months um but i do think i think it was at 70 000 uh on november 1st or 69 000 uh and so you know in less than a year we're up from 70 to 105. Like, hey, let's not be greedy here. We're up 50%. But I do think that as people are seeing so much buying coming into the market, a huge part of this is that there are long dollars

that are being hedged on the short side. And so the question becomes, do some of those shorts get blown out at some point? Is there a short squeeze? Do those people take that stuff off? They sell the shares and then they take off the short at the same time? A lot of unknowns in the market and it's hard to really understand what are the exact numbers, right? How much capital is long? How much capital is short? What other hedges are they using? What derivatives or spot? It's just very, very difficult. People smarter than me can try to figure it out. But that is one of the main reasons why you're not seeing Bitcoin's price just explode is because there's actually kind of a neutralizing effect of the capital that's going into these companies.

Staying on the topic of market participants, Bitcoin hash rate reached an all-time high. what's going on with the market? Are there more miners online and it's just pushing the hashrate up? Or what is the correlation between price, hashrate, and market participants? I think that there's just a long-term trend about the Bitcoin hardware for mining gets more and more efficient over time. If you go back and you look at even the S9, which is about a decade ago or so, was the equipment to today, the equipment is way, way better. Also, not only is it just like pure hardware improvements, but what we do with the hardware. So things like immersive cooling, right, is a completely different way to think about setting up these facilities than air-cooled

facilities and where you can do them and how you do them and all this kind of stuff. So I think that's kind of one big thing is you would expect that as these companies get bigger, they get more access to capital, they're buying more efficient machines. There's kind of a persistent tailwind that happens there. The second thing is that people want Bitcoin. And so just like people are buying Bitcoin in the spot market, that means people are incentivized to mine Bitcoin as well. Mining is a hard game, right? And so you're not only seeing very large players do it, you're trying, you're seeing people very small try as well. But it's very difficult capital intensive game to get it right, and especially be able to weather kind of these cycles, but people want to

do it. And I think the third thing is that you're just generally across the world seeing more computing power come online. As you see more computing power come online, people are choosing should I do it with artificial intelligence? And some of the computational needs there? Should I do things with Bitcoin or something in between. But I think you're just seeing in general us move from kind of an industrial manufacturing physical world, you know, type economy to something that is much more about electrical robotics, computation power, you know, all that stuff. And so naturally, if that is a big generational shift that we're living through, you're going to see more and more computing power come online for all kinds of use cases. And obviously, Bitcoin will be a big winner

there too. Okay. JD Vance recently got interviewed and seemed to be pretty bullish on Bitcoin and looking forward to the future. How much of this is sentiment versus, you know, hey, we're actually going to do something and we're kind of sitting, we're waiting, we're learning. And then, you know, in two, three months, maybe they announce something or maybe they get into the market a little bit deeper. I don't know. But what I do know is I don't want to be short the U.S. government, right? In things like this, there's plenty of things that you could short the U.S. government on in terms of, you know, their treasuries or, you know, all kinds of stuff that they're involved in.

But when you have something where there is an asymmetric information aspect to it, where at any moment in time, the government can go and buy Bitcoin, announce it, and it probably will have a positive impact on price. And the people who are responsible for the administration

and those potential decisions, they're talking bullish. You don't want to get caught off sides, right? And so I think that it goes back to, we could sit and analyze, what are the words JD Vance used? Is he tipping something off? Do people think this date or that date or this amount or whatever?

But I always come back and kind of zoom out for a second. I say, look, Bitcoin is an asset that has sound money principles, that's decentralized, that continues to appreciate at a very attractive rate compared to other assets in the market. In a way, Bitcoin has become the hurdle rate for an entire new generation, myself included. If you can't beat it, you got to buy it. OK. Then it almost doesn't matter what the administration does. It doesn't matter what people are saying. It doesn't matter about bit bonds and this and

bam, bam, whatever, right? Instead, the best strategy for people over the last 15 years was to simply just continue to dollar cost average into Bitcoin. And don't worry about it. It's kind of like the S&P. Like, is the S&P going to go up, down, sideways, backwards, whatever? Like, I don't know. I just know that the S&P goes up and to the right at a 45 degree angle because they've not stopped and print money. Okay, well, you should just keep dollar cost averaging into the S&P, right? Bitcoin very much is becoming that thing for an entire new generation. And so It's intellectually stimulating to talk about and learn about and try to predict what's going to happen in the future.

But at the end of the day, really what we're seeing here is just people are going to keep putting capital into the Bitcoin network, and that likely is going to continue to give them a return that they are excited about so that they keep putting more and more capital into, which then has a reinforcing effect to it, which drives the price higher and higher over time. I'm glad you mentioned the S&P. Let's talk about stocks for a second. There's a comment saying, doomers make headlines, optimists make money.

in May, it was the best month for stocks in 30, best May for stocks in 35 years. Why? Well, it's a classic example of surprise. Everyone was offsides, right? If you go back to February, I think that there was a lot of folks when they first started talking about the tariffs were like, ah, it's a negotiating posture. They're not really going to put tariffs on our two, you know, two of our three largest trading partners. They're not really going to tariff mexico and canada and then bam bam it was like i think in like a one week or maybe in the same day or whatever right and they just knocked both of them and all of a sudden people were like uh-oh like didn't expect that and so that was the first surprise was people thought it was a

posturing thing and it turned out to be a reality thing right i don't even remember if i had an opinion as to whether they're really going to do it or not do it i think it was just kind of like hey they're talking about this maybe they do it maybe they don't i don't really remember um at that moment fast forward through february march we got some announcements this is whatever gets a liberation day everyone remembers they brought out the the poster boards like they were doing a seventh grade science fair right you know howard lutnick there he had his little thing bam bam this is what we're doing and people were like yo these guys ain't playing around right and you had a choice it was a it was a uh a fork in the road you either believed what they were saying or you

didn't believe what they were saying. And I chose to simply listen. I said, there are people who are making these decisions with more information than I have. And they also have the benefit of understanding what their ultimate strategy is and their goal, et cetera. If they tell me that they're trying to get the 10-year yield down, I'm going to believe them. If they tell me that they are going to put the tariffs in place, I'm going to believe them. If they tell me that inflation is not going to come, then I'm going to believe that, right? And there's a lot of people, and I took a lot of heat. I mean, how many times have you and I talked privately where I would tweet things or talk about this stuff? I got attacked mercilessly. Still, I'm still getting

people who just will not stop. And what they essentially said, if I had to characterize all of the attacks, was the following. You're dumb. You're some MAGA mouthpiece, and you don't know what you're talking about. We all have reached consensus that tariffs equal bad, tariff equal inflation. That's basically their entire talk show. And as I've talked about on this podcast many, many times, I knew they were all wrong when dissent was outlawed. The second that they all said, you can't have a different opinion, I said, the different opinion is right. And so I said, okay, well, let me go and let me do the work. These guys are saying that there's not going to be inflation. These guys are saying all this stuff. I get that it's political posturing and

talking and all this nonsense, but what if they're right? Right. And one of the experiences that I've had in my life that actually drove me, and I haven't shared this yet is, um, I went down to, uh, to Texas a couple of years ago, and I had the pleasure of going to lunch with Kyle Bass, Kyle Bass, the famous investor, he shorted the housing market, everything. And afterwards, uh, Kyle was kind enough. We went back to his house and, uh, we sat there and we record a podcast episode. It was one of my favorite episodes because Kyle said something to me in there that was one of those small offhand comments that I extrapolated out and I use all the time in my life. And what Kyle said to me was the reason he knew to short the housing market is because he

was looking into housing. And he kept asking people that were analysts, okay, you have this model that housing prices, this and mortgages, whatever, all of your models go up. They all say that housing keeps going up. What if housing doesn't go up for a year or two years? And they were like, well, no, housing always goes up. Like that never happens. And he was like, but what if it does? Right. And so that gave him the intellectual curiosity to go and investigate more and say, well, what are the odds that it goes down? What happens in this? And he uncovered what was probably one of the greatest trades of our lifetime. To me, the tariff situation, understanding that Kyle Bass story, drove me to say, well, what if the tariffs actually don't

lead to inflation? What are the odds of that? And that's what I went and I looked. So if you bring that to stocks, there's a bunch of people who listen to the mainstream media, the conversation in social media, listen to their economic professor at college and said, tariffs equal bad, bad equals inflation, inflation equals stocks go down. And here's the thing is that stocks did go down. They went down 15 to 20% depending on the different index, et cetera. Let's say 20% because famous Buffett quote, the stock market is a voting machine in the short term. It's a weighing machine in the longterm. And so guess what? When it was down 20%, I came on here. I said, all time high before the end of the year, that'll look so crazy. Now we're down

20%, it looks insane. And I knew that. And I took the heat for it. But I think I'm going to end up being right. And I'm more convicted than ever, we're going to hit an all time high before the end of the year. Now, we may not, but I think we will. And so if you go and you fast forward to okay, well, let's look at the month of May. And there's this guy, Ryan Dietrich, he's the chief market strategist at the Carson Group, like a $40 billion RIA. I recently did a podcast interview with him on our new show from the desk of Anthony Pagliano, which you can watch on YouTube and also on X. And in that conversation, Ryan walked through the fact that the S&P 500 returned 6% in the month of May. Now, why is that important? That has only happened six times in history and

all six times within 12 months, 100% of the time, the stock market is higher. Average return 20%. So if you go and you look at this, you say, wait a second, the month of May, he says, is the single best predictor of performance for the next year. Out of all the different months, month of may is really important and if the month of may the s&p appreciates more than five percent eighty four percent of the time we rockin and rollin through short term hundred percent of time over the long run and so if you went up six percent in may listen maybe maybe history doesn't repeat but it sure does rhyme a lot and so my guess is that we're going to see a very very good performance in the stock market um and i think that's okay like this is like the most hated

rally of all time. People are like, oh, it shouldn't be going up. Well, like, you could take that perspective. Or you could take the perspective that the market's a referee and the market is telling you that maybe your worldview, your framework was incorrect. So you can fight it and be like, ah, the market is wrong. Or you can say to yourself, maybe I missed something. Maybe I don't understand some component of this and go do the work to try to figure that out. And we're gonna have both people right that's how markets get made that's why some people are still selling that's why institutions are sitting on the sidelines the institutions are too smart they're looking at all these data points doing all this calculation whatever right it's like you ever

seen the the memes it's like you know this is my quant and they got you know some some whatever guess what retail did retail simply just said i'm buying i don't care how far it falls it's gonna come back i'm buying discount buy buy buy buy buy hand over fist buy as much as you can I saw another data point. It maybe came from Ryan, maybe from somebody else. U.S. retail investors have bought $50 billion of stocks since I think April or March. Huge number.

But here's what's most interesting. On down days, dips, retail heavily bought. The performance of the next day after a down day has been 0.36%, which doesn't, 0.36%, what? historically, the performance of the stock market the day after a down day is 0.02%. So call it 15x plus higher performance the day after a down day. What is it? That's retail buying the dip. And so if you see that play out, you say to yourself, we got two different players in the market now. Institutions are still larger. I think that the numbers like retail investors

have about 36 or 38 percent of uh uh stock um you know allocations um but that used to be a lot lower at some point they're going to flip retail will be bigger than the institutions i believe oh you think so well that's the trend right i don't know maybe it takes 20 years but like if we're at 36 38 whatever the number is like if you just increase by 50 percent you're knocking on the door now right a 50 well do you think it's going to grow more than 50 percent their share of the market right over the next 10 years 20 years of course we're shifting from a world that used to be all about institutions and financial advisors and stock brokers and all that stuff to a world where all that's being compressed the fees are being compressed it's

becoming harder for the people to run those businesses uh the idea of quote-unquote advice what you think ai is not going to start to play a role give people the ability to allocate directly to the market like the trend is we are going to have a rise of self-directed investors okay well individuals self-directed independent retail whatever you want to call them they're going to have a larger and larger share of the stock market moving forward hot take i actually think most people should be self-directed and not use an advisor it depends what you're trying to accomplish right i know some advisors that are amazing i know a lot of advisors who are idiots right and everything in between but guess what i know some doctors that are really good i know a

lot of doctors that are idiots right i know some investors that are really good i know a lot of investors that are idiots. And so it just goes back to like anything, the top 1% or the top 10% of a profession are really, really good. And then the below average people are below average, right? So I think it's just if you need certain types of advice, if you need certain types of services, if you need certain types of products, go find the best at it. And I think that financial advice is an area where you probably don't want to skimp out on, oh, this person's not as good as the other person, but you know, they're going to charge me a little less in fees. Like it's kind of to me, right. In my opinion, uh, that's a place where you probably want to pay, you know, you want to

get what you pay for. And so, uh, finding the right type of financial, but I'm not in the financial advising game, right. I don't, I don't do that. Um, but if it was me, that is the thing that I would look at. It's just like, Hey, who's the person who can give me the best advice? Not who's the person who's going to charge me the least. So you talked about S and P hitting an all-time high this year. You and Tom Lee seem to be kind of on board with that. He was on CNBC yesterday talking about a $6,600 S&P. What are the important metrics to watch as we go throughout the year, right? Is it, hey, look, let's look at the futures market. Is it, hey, look, let's just look at broader sentiment or sentiment in the market. What are you looking at to hit that new

all-time high? I think that you've got a couple of data points. The first is, are they going to print money? And it looks like they are, right? Looks like they're going to blow out the freaking deficit. So I don't like it. It's good for asset prices. Dichotomy. Not good for my country. Great for my portfolio. I think there's a lot of people who they're sitting there saying, I'd actually give up a little bit on my financial returns if it was better for my country. I definitely would do that. I am not the decision maker. So not good for my country. It's going to be great for my portfolio. I think that's one big thing. The second thing is that you need to watch GDP growth. Q2, We're going to be booming, booming.

Is that based off tariff revenue? Booming. No, it's the fact that everyone was contracting. Oh, no. Tariffs, economic downturn, doomsday, recession. Remember, recession, depression, Black Friday, all crazy things people were predicting. The second that they were like, eh, tariffs are lower. Let's get rocking and rolling.

Boom. Here we go. We're booming again. and i think that there's going to be a big time gdp jump by the way no recession if we boom in q2 there ain't no recession like i told you uh and i think that that's not priced in yet so that can drive asset prices higher um i also think job growth has stayed very steady for the most part people still getting jobs jordy visser who we talk with every Saturday. Amazing episode. Many of you like it. He has said all along, you can't have a recession

if you don't have job loss. Right. And then I think that there is going to be a bunch of deregulation and tax breaks and stuff. Again, just pushing capital, pushing innovation into the economy. And so I think we are going to have the golden age. We're going to have the economic boom, all the things that were promised. I think that we took a very winding route with no straight line. There are things that the administration was talking about that I really like and excited about them doing. There's things that they're doing that I think, hey, I probably wouldn't do that if I was them, right? But I think there is some sobering going on of people across both sides of the aisle. The people who are big time critics are like, all right, maybe this isn't

going to be as bad as I thought it was going to be. The people who were supporters, they're saying, hey you know what not everything is you know uh flowers and roses and and uh sunshine and then there's people like me who are in the middle who say look i'm an independent there's some things i like some things i don't like there's some things that democrats do i like some things they don't do that's fine whatever i'm a rational person right not no one i know is 100 bad or 100 good right you can go and you can look and there are people like the the dichotomy of life or the paradox of life is the fact that you can have somebody who's a murderer who still does something positive. Murder's bad. You should go to jail, right? You should be in trouble. Obviously it's

common sense, but how do you explain that? Right? And so the same thing happens when it comes to politics or whatever is they can do something that is absolutely asinine. You're like, what are you doing? But then you can say something else in their activities or legislation or whatever. And you're like, that's a good idea. That's what we've lost. I think in this country is the ability to say, let me look at topic by topic. What do I agree with? What do I not agree with? Everything is just blue or red, right? And I think that's a bad way to look at it. And if you really ask me why I think a lot of people miss this entire economic situation is because they were blue or red. Now, the red people seem to have done better because they believed, right? But I don't see blue

or red. I'm like, what is it? Blue and red mix. You get green, I think, right? I'm a green person. And it's just like, look, I think that there's both sides, whatever. In this specific case around tariffs, I believed what they said, right? And it seems like that's working out. There's other things I don't believe, right? And that's fine. But I think that is really how you're going to see this play out. So if you look at the economic data points, it's growth, it's jobs, it's printing of money,

it's all the normal stuff. It's right there in front of your face. Global liquidity is telling you where asset prices are going. All you have to do is open your eyes and look at the chart. guess what up here we go i appreciate you being uh on the fence because i know you get called a mega mouthpiece you also get called a democratic mouthpiece on the same video uh that literally literally people in the comments will be like you're a mega mouthpiece and then there'll be somebody else and they'll be like look at this democrat left-leaning shill i'm like can't win

well that is winning to me that is winning that people are so confused that i could somehow be accused of being both right that's that that says more about them than it says about me 100 all right i think that's it for today all right thanks for doing it