We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP428: Is Russia the most contrarian investment? w/ Harris "Kuppy" Kupperman
Episode Date: March 6, 2022Trey Lockerbie sits down with Harris Kupperman, or as most would call him, “Kuppy.” Kuppy is the CEO of Praetorian Capital Management, a hedge fund that focuses on major macro themes. They discuss... how Kuppy uses to buy and hold, leverage, options, futures, and indexes all in a heavily concentrated portfolio. IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: 01:33 - The recent events with Russia and how buying Russian assets might be the most contrarian trade in today’s markets. 05:05 - The forecast for oil, which is a number that might surprise you. 05:57 - The driving factors behind oil’s price movement. 23:27 - His massive trade on Bitcoin and how he compares it to gold. 24:32 - His biggest current position is in Uranium. 31:17 - The pivot away from real estate for Mongolia Growth Group. 37:56 - Potentially undervalued stocks in US real estate. And a whole lot more! *Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Kuppy's Blog. Praetorian Capital's Website. KEDM's Website. Kuppy's Twitter. Trey Lockerbie's Twitter. NEW TO THE SHOW? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Bluehost Fintool PrizePicks Vanta Onramp SimpleMining Fundrise TurboTax Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm
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Discussion (0)
You're listening to TIP.
On today's show, we have Harris Kupperman, or as most would call him, Cuppie.
Cuppie is the CEO of Praetorian Capital Management, a hedge fund that focuses on major macro themes.
He is also the CEO of Mongolia Growth Group, which is a publicly traded company listed in Canada.
In this episode, we discussed the recent events with Russia and how buying Russian assets
might be the most contrarian trade in today's markets, his forecast for oil, which is a number
that might surprise you? The driving factors behind oil's price, his massive trade on Bitcoin and how
it compares to gold, the pivot away from real estate from Mongolia Growth Group, his biggest
current position, which is uranium, potentially undervalued stocks in U.S. real estate, and a whole
lot more. Cupby's approach is similar to a Swiss Army knife. We discuss how he uses buy and hold,
leverage, options, futures, and indexes, all in a heavily concentrated portfolio. I hope you
enjoy it as much as I did. Here's my conversation with Harris, Cucson.
Cuppie Cupperman.
You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most.
We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected.
Welcome to The Investors Podcast. I'm your host, Trey Lockerbie, and today we have Harris Cupperman calling in from Puerto Rico.
How are you, Harris?
Doing great. Thanks for having me on.
All right. Well, I've been following your blog and I've been really enjoying it. I think the only
place that's appropriate to start this conversation is around Russia and the market's impact and
probably much will have changed by the time this airs. But it's the number one headline at the
moment and we have to start there. They just invaded Ukraine. The M-O-E-X, which is the rubble
denominated benchmark of the Russian stock market, dropped 45% in one day this week. And it's actually
popped a little bit, back up 20% today. So without speaking much to politics, I'm curious,
what are the reasons we should consider possibly investing in Russian assets? Because I can't
think of a more contrarian thought at the moment. Yeah, it's contrarian all right. Look, in the
end, Russian assets are unusually cheap. A lot of the largest companies in their index trade at one
and two times earnings, you know, spare bank, the large bank, trades at a huge discount to
book value, which is, you know, the key indicator for a bank, except for it's very profitable
unlike most European banks.
There's double-digit dividend yields.
It's a very cheap collection of assets that is very highly tied to commodity pricing.
Russia is a lead exporter of multiple, multiple commodities.
And so if you think commodity prices are going higher, and I certainly do, then the profitability
of these businesses should go higher.
offset obviously by all the political risks. I don't think sanctions will do anything to these companies,
if anything, probably just increases the profitability of the companies. But there's always the risk
that they confiscate your shares, that they stop the dividends or don't pay the foreigners the dividends.
I think the biggest risks remains that the government instructs my broker to liquidate my position
and I get a terrible price. I think there's a lot of ways to lose on this, but you don't usually
see high-quality businesses at one and two-time earnings. And it only happens at moment's
like this. And if nothing too terrible happens, I think these things will trade up back to historic
multiples, which were very cheap as well. Though there's probably a ceiling on evaluations,
just given all the drama that just happened, there's a lot of portfolio managers that
for ideological reasons cannot own Russian stocks anymore. And that's, I guess, unfortunate
because they're potentially going to miss out on the gains. But yeah, I think it's a contrarian,
but I don't know, cheap assets usually are. Now, you were reporting that they were cheap even before
this big drop, but you are also referring to the RSX index. I'm curious how the RSX relates to the
M-O-E-X and if there's any preference between the two. Well, I'm not sure how I can buy the M-O-E-X.
I bought the RSX. It's a U.S. dollar denominated basket of the largest companies in Russia.
It hits all the big ones. That's just the way I'm playing. It's amazingly liquid.
This deep option chain on it with amazing liquidity as well. That's just the way I've chosen to play it
myself. Look, I wrote on Monday night that I thought it was cheap when it opened the next morning
and about 19 to half. That's where I bought most of mine. It's at 16 right now, which is a little
annoying. You know, they usually don't go this far against me this fast. I've done this over 20 years and
sometimes you get them wrong or sometimes you're just early and, you know, it's kind of a fine line
between the two of those. And, you know, I bought some a bunch more yesterday, which was Thursday when it
opened down. I also bought Spurbank and I bought some other Russian assets. I've since taken, you know,
some profits just because we had a bounce and at my core position, I trade around the core position.
I've managed this by writing some additional puts from by selling some calls to harvest that
volatility. And I'm just trying to box it in with short calls against. And, you know, I expect
volatility say hi. It's going to be a great way to add some yields. You mentioned that Russia is
obviously a big exporter of some commodities. Oil comes to mind. They're obviously an exporter there.
The sanctions you also mentioned are interesting because, you know, the U.S. just enacted some
sanctions, but they're saying that it won't affect oil. So I'm just kind of curious how oil
will be impacted from this development, in your opinion, if at all. Well, I mean, it's probably
going to be bullish for oil. Global inventory has been ran down for a while now. They peaked out
in the summer of 2020, it's been running down. If you're a consumer of oil that doesn't produce
your own oil, I think I'd be terrified. I'd be stockpiling and it likely increases demand for
oil. You know, you have all such of things happening and this potential that the supply gets disrupted.
This should be very bullish for oil. And it has been leading up into this crisis. Oil traded up quite a
lot. I would expect oil to stay elevated and likely go much higher. Yeah, I mean, to that point,
it did have a huge run lately. It's hit $100 as of late. It's slightly below that at the moment.
What are the implications of oil being at 100 or higher? Look, I don't think there's any implications.
You know, it's a global commodity that, you know, is going to be swinging around.
It's for, what is it, 150 years.
It's been volatile.
It's going to remain volatile.
When there's more demand than supply like we have right now, it's likely to keep going
higher until additional supply comes online.
And there really isn't a lot of supply coming online for the next year or two.
Just, I mean, you have reasonably good visibility when it comes to oil in terms of supply.
And this isn't much.
And then on the demand side, I see dramatic increases in demand.
I mean, oil for the last decade has been all about the supply side, where they had,
been excess drilling in U.S. shale mostly. And for the first time, in a very long time,
it's going to become a demand story because six billion people want the same standard of living
that a billion of us have in the West. And a lot of these people use almost no oil today. And
I think eventually they're going to start using quite a lot of oil. And I don't think people
realize what that S curve is going to do to demand. You know, I think a lot of the large
forecasters are expecting a million barrels a day of incremental demand each year. I mean, what
if it's three? What if it's four? I think it could just dramatically overshoot. And a lot of this
demand is not price sensitive. And so, I think oil should go much higher.
We could argue also, I guess, that if oil continues to go higher, things like gas prices will
continue to go higher and it should have a trickle down to some, you know, inflation effect.
Oh, yeah, this would be very inflationary. That's almost inevitable. It's going to be wildly
inflationary. If you look at oil, it's one of the biggest components of all CPI indexes because
it basically goes into everything from logistics and transport to, you know, plastics and
And everything basically has oil and an oil component.
I think it's going to be amazingly inflationary.
I think oil is going to end up going to a couple hundred dollars.
And I don't think people realize just how inflationary that is.
You know, I probably could be bad consumers too.
You know, inflation always hurts the poorest the most.
And that's kind of the marginal consumer that's really going to suffer here.
Yeah, I'm no expert on oil, which is why I guess I'm so curious about it.
The dollar index is also quite high.
It's sitting just shy of 97.
I'm curious if there's any correlation there,
between the US dollar strengthening and oil strengthening at the same time.
Does that have any kind of correlation or impact?
I'm no expert in currencies.
I find currencies very difficult to cipher.
I mean, the easiest way to look at currencies is that when it's cheap to go on vacation,
it's cheap to go get dinner and a beer.
It's usually a good currency to buy.
When it feels expensive, it's usually a good currency to sell.
And over the long periods of time, I've mostly made money with that sort of logic.
You know, outside of that, predicting the direction of currencies,
I don't feel like I have any special edge.
I don't know how much oil really matters to that. I mean, there's certain petro currencies
that probably should do quite well because, you know, their trade services will expand.
It's hard to predict. And I found the people who try to predict that usually get it wrong.
There's much easier ways to make money in the markets. I'd rather focus on those.
I'm also just curious about the driving factors leading into the oil price because obviously
in early 2020, oil even went negative. So when you talk about all this demand that's there
and has been there, that story really hasn't changed. And if anything, it's growing.
And I think what you're touching on there is this pendulum swinging and this lag effect, right?
Where to get oil going again and getting new drills in place, it takes, what, two years?
The supply side, you know, a couple of major problems, okay?
Let's start with OPEC.
They've dramatically underinvested because the revenue goes to social programs.
And it's going to be hard to get the capital to invest.
It's going to be a lot of the OPEC projects are long cycle projects.
And so, you know, you're talking five-year legs, get them to go.
Next, you have U.S. shale.
that's quick cycle. But the problem is the shortages of every component. I mean, the impediments to growing
production are just dramatic. You have kind of three buckets if you want to think about it. You have the
OPEC where they've been investing minimally. They've really been putting the revenue into social
programs. It's going to be hard for them to take revenue away from social programs to invest in
production. And that's why they haven't really grown production in a while. They've always had
excess capacities. They never thought to grow production. Well, it looks like their excess capacity is going
to be put to the limit and there's not going to be enough capacity there. And they're actually going to
have to invest. And it's going to be slow. These are long cycle projects. You have in the U.S.
where, yes, Shale is a quick cycle, but it's not going to come back like it did in the past.
There's huge impediments, mainly labor, but also drill rigs casing, pretty much every component of
ramping up. And you can't just take a guy and hire him and put him on a drill. He has to be trained.
It takes a long time. And so I think there's real structural impediments to ramping. But that will
ramp up over the next two years, maybe. And then, you know, it's a lot. And then, you know,
And then finally, where most of the world's oil comes from is large integrated oil companies.
And these companies are not making sort of investments they used to, much of it being long-term
investment, a long cycle.
And that's because everyone's attacking them.
You have courts that are blocking them.
You have pipelines getting canceled.
You have drilling permits getting canceled.
You're having carbon taxes.
You're having people talking about excess profits taxes.
You're having a lack of access to capital, which is forcing to deal over their balance sheets.
They can't issue bonds.
They can't get banks to deal with that.
that kind of these pariah companies, yet they're vital to the global economy.
And so there's a lot of incentive for these companies not to expand, especially if they're going
to be just taxed and penalized. And so you're not seeing anything on the supply side. And, you know,
like I said, you have six billion people that are going to have just dramatic increases in demand.
And that's why I think oil goes to a couple hundred. And anything geopolitical is just gravy
on top. But I think it's almost irrelevant. It's just going higher.
Now, as retail investors, do you have a preference if we were to kind of take a position in oil,
I think you focus mostly on oil futures.
I'm curious as to why that is versus, say, like, oil producers.
Well, oil production is just a really terrible business.
All the things I just talked about, you know, you're happily running your well,
and then someone comes along and puts an excess profit on you or says you have to pay a carbon tax
now or they cancel a permit or, like, who wants to deal with that?
I mean, I'm not a geologist.
The geologists get it wrong.
You take a ton of M&A risk.
You take corporate governance risk.
You take all these risks that I don't really want.
when all I want to bet on is oil going higher. And since I want to just bet on oil going higher,
I just own oil. The great thing about oil is that it's an amazingly liquid asset with an amazingly
liquid futures and options chain. And so if I want to bet on oil, I'm just going to go buy
out-of-the-money oil calls. It's the cleanest way to bet on oil. And it's the safest way.
I don't have to take any of these risks. I'm not going to wake up in the morning. And there's
some bad news. If there's some bad news, it probably means my oil goes up, actually.
The Fed policy as of late, I've heard you refer to it as Project Zimbabwe referring to the fact that
Zimbabwe eventually had a thousand dollar bills, right? And we might be heading that direction.
The Fed seems very obviously trapped here. And it seems every policy decision will be an error.
They're right now tightening into weakness now that the market's even rolling over.
How much pain do you think the market can handle before the Fed starts to change course here?
Well, there's a lot of guys out there who think Fed's going to tremendous.
dramatically tightened. I think they probably should have. I mean, they should have been like Q3
of 20, even tightening. But in the end, they didn't. And they're going to have to pay the
price for that. And I don't know what they're going to be able to do now. When you look at it,
look, the economy, it's a lot stronger than people think. You're coming up against just huge
numbers last year, year over year because of stimulus and because of a lot of things. So you'd
expect it to trail off a little. But if you comp negative over a huge year last year, then it's
called a recession. When you look at a two years stacked, the number is still quite good, but, you know,
rated change is not going in everyone's favor. But at the same time, you know, like we just talked
about, oil is going much, much higher. And so if oil goes to a couple hundred, well, inflation's going to
go to 20. And they can't be, you know, zero interest rates in, you know, printing money still.
I mean, I think it's ludicrous. They're still printing money because inflation's like seven
or eight. They said they're going to stop printing money. They're probably going to raise rates a bit.
But the economy's addicted to stimulus and is addicted to cheap debt. I have to
have to think that after a few rate increases, the economy rolls over. And the Fed's totally
trapped because I think you see inflation at 20 with the stock market down by half. And I don't
know what they're going to do, but I think the path of least resistance is to call it transitory,
blame it on Russia, whatever it is they do, raise rates a few times and just stay dramatically
behind the rate of inflation. I think it's almost inevitable. That's don't think anyone has the
willpower to have a recession. And so you're going to see just a lot of inflation instead. We've
seen, you know, Paul Volcker is the rare guy that actually went out there and he accepted a recession.
You don't see other central bankers doing that. All the rest of them, you know, they talk tough
and they just trail inflation. So no, I think the Fed's going to stay, you know, really far behind
and talk tough and do nothing. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
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I think everyone should own some gold. I think it's a great long-term investment and should be, you know,
a core piece of everyone's portfolio. I know I know a lot of it personally. But in terms of, you know,
my portfolio, I look at commodities as being really a question of supply demand and of being, you know,
really just tied to that. It's simple calculus in a way. Look, there's a ton of gold that they have
warehouses full of this stuff. Very different than, say, oil where the supply is draining every day and it
actually gets consumed. You know, every day the world uses 100 million barrels of this stuff,
and we're draining about one to two every day. And, you know, so it's just going to make tighter and
tighter, whereas the stock of gold is just going to keep going up every day because they keep mining
it. I just don't think that's the way to play it. If I wanted to play a commodity, you're going to
play something where supply demand is going to get tight, and that's going to force the price higher.
And preferably, you want to play something at your starting point is below the marginal cost of
production. When I started in oil, oil was in the 40s and 50s and no one could produce it profitably,
or at least, you know, the marginal 20 million barrels of it or something.
That's where you want to start a commodity investment where no one can produce it
profitably on the margin.
You know, gold, I mean, all in cost, the industry is like 13, 1400.
It's got a $400 gross margin right now.
Just not as attractive, though.
I think everyone should own some.
Yeah, there's been this thesis out there that Bitcoin is the new gold, right?
And this week, gold kind of seemed to decouple quite a bit.
If you zoom out, obviously, the performance is quite different.
You're definitely not a Bitcoin maximalist, I would say, but you've managed to trade it pretty effectively.
You bought it under 10,000 and sold out around 58,000.
And the price has been pretty flat since then.
So I'm really curious to know what the signals were that you were looking at when you traded out of 58 and what signals there might be to even buy back in.
So I've been doing this for 20-something years.
And I just get these gut feels sometimes.
And I've learned over time not to overthink it when my gut says something.
I just go with my gut.
And oftentimes it has no logical reason.
But it's one of these things where you wake up in the middle of the night and you say,
why do I own so much Bitcoin?
It's something that's kind of like nags that you can't sleep.
So you sell a quarter of it.
And the next day you have the same problem.
You sell another quarter of it.
And pretty soon you kind of toss the position.
I mean, the thing that really, I guess I zeroed in on was the fact that if you think of liquidity
in the financial system, you know, most things in the financial system work based on
the rate of change.
and second derivative. Bitcoin is like fifth derivative. It's so far out there on the curve in terms
of rate of change, of rate of change, blah, blah, blah. And it got to be the spring of last year.
And it got to this point where it was obvious the Fed wasn't going to be able to stimulate anymore.
And they would have to eventually pull back some of the stimulus because you saw inflation
starting to pick up. And on the rate of change, if the rate of incremental stimulus slowed,
then that's the place Bitcoin lives. It lives and dies on rate of change. And then the thing that really
kind of crystallized it for me was when you started seeing,
some of the mining stocks, the crypto miners, where they started to diverge, where Bitcoin was making
new highs. And it kept making these little new highs. You'd go up 1,000, make a new high, pullback 5,000.
They make a new high by 1,000 pullback. That's not a healthy behavior. And the crypto miners,
they stopped making new highs months before Bitcoin stopped. And whenever you see that burgances like
that, where the producer in a commodity where the producer is trailing the commodity itself.
And we've seen this in lots of cyclical tops of various commodities. And I do a lot of commodity
investing. So I'm always attuned to it. It's usually a sign that the relative strength of the trend is
changing. So between not to pedal sleep at night and having a long history with commodities,
having, you know, made and lost fortunes at it, it just said, I said myself, it's time to exit.
And no, besides, I mean, what's Bitcoin worth? It's a quote on the screen. It's very
ephemeral. And so it traded almost any price and had a really good gain in it. And you don't
want to wake up one day and give that back. So I said, okay, I'm done. In terms of when to get back
in, look, I had a great entry on my Bitcoin. Like,
because the Fed was printed a ton of money. I knew it was time to get in. I'll probably get back
in when the Fed is getting ready to print again or something else in the narrative changes. But I see
no reason to own Bitcoin. I don't think it's going to crash. I don't think it's going to spike. I think
it should be range bound, you know, 25,000 by 50,000, 60,000, something like that. It's going
to digest a lot of movement. And there'll be a time to get back in. I'm watching it. I understand
why I want to own it. It just doesn't feel ready yet. I wish I had something more concrete to say.
No, I think that's totally valid.
I'm curious about like the position, I guess the philosophy on gold versus Bitcoin and
where you stand because obviously as you put it, it kind of sounds like you take a,
I don't know, Ray Dalio approach or something of, hey, have at least a little bit of gold.
Everyone should have it.
It's good insurance.
A lot of people look at Bitcoin the same way.
But to hear you talk about it, obviously you have different opinions on the commodity and
how it serves a purpose.
So I'm curious what the difference there is to you.
Well, I think there probably is a point of owning both, but honestly, or,
stores of value. They have unique attributes. I think there's reasons why Bitcoin is superior,
just because, you know, I could trade it to you right now, whereas it take me a day to get
some crew rents to you. There's certain advantages to that, but the certain advantages to having,
you know, gold in your hands, I think people should own a bit of both. You know, in terms of
which one's better, it's situation dependent. But rather than, I mean, I'd rather just own some
uranium or something where it's below the marginal cost of production and this huge supply
deficit. It kind of hits both buckets in terms of what makes a great commodity investment.
Whereas Bitcoin is above the cost of producing it, as is gold.
And there's not a deficit of either.
Let's talk about uranium.
That's super interesting as well because it seems to be very uncorrelated to the stock market.
What has piqued your interest in uranium recently so much so that I think it's even one of your largest positions now?
Yeah.
I mean, Sprott, physical uranium trust, spot, as they call it, is my largest position.
It's probably traded NT that owns physical uranium.
I like the idea of owning physical uranium.
I'm, you know, that's where I have most of my uranium bet, though I do own some Kazatamprom, which is the world's largest producer and also the lowest cost producer.
But the thing with uranium is that the world consumes, you know, in this year 2020, we're probably going to consume about 185 million pounds of it, 185.
And we're going to produce about 155, let's say.
And so there's about a 30-ish million deficit.
And that deficit is coming from warehouses where they have been surplus in prior years.
But uranium is well below the marginal cost to produce it, which is around 60 or 70.
And, you know, of course, uranium has to go above the marginal cost to produce it.
Right now, it's at 46.
I bought my uranium at 31, you know, well below the marginal cost to produce it.
And so as these physical stocks get absorbed and consumed, you're going to see the price move higher
as people start getting worried about supply and access to supply.
Because unlike a lot of other commodities, if you run out of uranium, your power plant has no point of existing.
And so I genuinely expect the price of your...
uranium to go higher. What's interesting is you have this entity called Sprot Physical Uranium Trust that has a
very active share issuance program that they use to acquire additional uranium and that's ongoing every day.
And so what it's done is it's added a new element to the supply demand imbalance where you have financial
players like myself that are acquiring uranium off the market. And so it's going to speed up the
price discovery because excess uranium will disappear. It also has the effect of adding some FOMO in that as the
price starts going up, I would expect that the trading volumes would increase and this entity will
issue more shares. And so as the price goes up, the demand will go up, which is usually counter to
how most commodities operates. And so I think the two of them will lead to an overshooting.
It's very similar to what I saw with a gray scale Bitcoin trust, where this financial entity
was acquiring Bitcoin and had a mission to acquire coins and never sell coins. And so after a while,
they accumulated enough of the free float. It was impactful to the price. And I just recognize
that as the free float got kind of cornered by this entity, it would push the price up,
which would lead financial speculators into the market, which would accelerate this kind of process,
the feedback loop. And we've seen the same thing happening with Sprott. They've now bought about
28 million pounds since they launched the vehicle, which is a decent amount of uranium.
You know, we're talking about roughly 20% of global production, and they bought that over five months.
So it's just changed the supply demand imbalance, that you're almost at 60 million pounds
versus the 30. It would normally be. I think this will accelerate.
I think the price will overshoot.
It takes a few years to bring a mine online, and it will likely overshoot quite dramatically.
And so it's my largest position because when I invest, I try to do two things.
I try to invest at an inflection where the story is getting better.
And that's what's definitely happening in uranium, especially as it's being seen as a green energy source.
But you also try to invest in a way that if you get the thesis wrong, you eat your money back.
And uranium at 31, it had basically been that price, give or take a few dollars for a very long period of time
when the fundamentals of uranium were far worse.
So now that the fundamentals are improving, you know, it seems unlikely that I lose more
than a few dollars.
And that's the whole point of investing.
You look for something we can make five or ten times your money if you're right.
And you get it wrong, maybe you lose 10%, maybe you lose 20%, sometimes you even make
a little money.
And if you offset the two intelligently and you have a portfolio of these sort of risk a little
to make a lot of investments on, you basically make a lot of money over time, as long as you're
patience and you don't do anything stupid along the way.
Now, do you think we could see another parabolic move in uranium, something like
like we saw in 2008, where it just spiked beyond belief?
Yeah, I think it's almost inevitable.
I think we're going to see a dramatic overshooting of the price of uranium.
Right now, this entity is buying a million pounds a week roughly,
and some weeks it doesn't buy any, some weeks he buys two million pounds.
If you have the price start going up, the entity only has one mission statement,
which is issue shares by pounds.
And so if the price starts going up and it attracts speculators,
what's inevitable is the volume goes up.
And then issues more shares and buys more pounds faster, which then drives the price up,
brings in more speculators, and the process just kind of keeps going. It's one of these
reflexive sort of concepts. And I think that is the sort of thing that, like I said,
they've been buying a million pounds a week when the price was in the low 40s. At 100,
they could be buying two or three million pounds a week. And what that's going to do is to squeeze
the available supply globally. You know, eventually some regulator will stop it and stop it because
you can't have price go crazy and have utilities run out of uranium. But, you know,
force it higher over time until someone steps in. Now, is that facing any kind of geopolitical risk
as well? And the uranium would it have any impact? Oh, I mean, there's geopolitical risk and
everything. I think the real geopolitical risk in uranium is that Kazakhstan is roughly half the
world's uranium production. It has had something of a revolution there. And people are rightfully
concerned about stability of their supply of uranium. I was a nuclear power plant and I had an
agreement with Kazatamprom to buy 100% my uranium from them for the next five years,
I'd be quite worried that something happens to that mine and I can't get my uranium,
whether it's that there's some sanctions, you know, who knows, what side Kazakhstan's going to
be in with Russia or, you know, something happens to the mine.
Like, the whole world relies on this one company and really one country.
At the same time, Russia is by far the largest producer of a refined uranium.
They processed the uranium from U-308 into a usable form.
and no, if we sanction Russia and they want to actually do something back to the West,
I mean, the easiest thing they could do to the West is just to say that they're not going to sell us more uranium as processed.
It would cost them a few billion dollars a year, so it's a rounding error.
You know, it has a couple days of oil sales that cares.
And what it would do is turn the lights off in America and deep bunch of Europe.
That's the place where they can really grab us because we're so vulnerable.
So there's a number of geopolitical aspects to this.
And I think tensions with Russia and what's going on in Kazakhstan, they had an element of
risk to uranium. And I think it's yet another reason why utilities that have let their aboveground
inventories get run down for quite a period of time that they'd want to replenish those inventories.
You just had a fear. Remember, you have a $10 billion nuclear reactor. If you run out uranium,
it's worth it. You can't do anything with it. And so no one wants to run out, especially when uranium
is only a couple percent of the total cost of running the facility. You'd be ludicrous to run out,
which I think is going to lead to restocking a lot more demand.
You're also CEO of Mongolia Growth Group, which is a publicly traded company.
And I'm curious as to what the initiative is that brought you to Mongolia.
It's obviously a real estate and you're doing a lot of development there.
What made you choose Mongolia?
And what's the backstory on that?
In the summer of 2010, I went to Mongolia.
At the time, it was the fastest growing economy in the world.
It had a very bright future for future economic growth.
And I decided to start an entity to invest in Mongolian real estate.
We listed it in Canada.
We raised $50 million to invest in Mongolia real estate.
We did everything we said we'd do as a management team.
We raised capital.
We built Mongolia's only institutional property management group.
We built what I think is the second largest sales leasing organization in the country.
We acquired some of the best assets in the country, mainly in the downtown core on the main street.
Unfortunately, we got the thesis wrong.
And hereafter, we started the company to have an election.
and the new government banned foreign investment, arrested a lot of the foreigners, stole a lot of
assets, killed a couple of foreigners. It just became a terrible place to be an investor. And it's
remained a terrible place to invest. It's been a 10-year economic crisis for a country that gets most
of their income from selling commodities, you'd think in a commodity boom, they'd be doing quite well.
But oddly, they've thwarted all the mind and just made a mess of everything. And so it turned out to be
a terrible thesis. We still have a team there on the ground doing great work against
possible odds. And we're going to soldier on and hope that the Mongolian government eventually
does the right thing. In the meantime, we have diversified the business by selling some non-core
assets. We have used that capital to purchase public securities that have done surprisingly well,
actually. But a decent chunk of the balance sheet now is publicly traded securities and cash.
We've launched a publication called Ketam that's a company's event-driven monitor. It's a service
that tracks about 25 event-driven strategies.
I use the service.
We created it because I wanted the data, quite honestly.
But it tracks about 25 event-driven strategies and basically just flags them.
And it's a weekly update on what's going on the market plus some, you know, my own commentary.
But it's actually become a profitable business as well.
We've transitioned to business to be a merchant bank.
And we're looking for businesses we can acquire some minority or majority interest in,
potentially 100% interest, that we can impact the outcome of those businesses.
by adding our relationships and hopefully some financial discipline and create some value.
And so it's gone in a different direction that I ever thought was possible.
But it's been interesting.
It's been exciting.
And the company's in decent shape for the first time in a very long time financially.
Very interesting.
I want to shift over to the real estate in the U.S.
It's been kind of skyrocketing here the last two years.
I heard you say that we are somewhere around 5 million homes behind population here in the U.S.
So I'm curious, are you seeing a top here now that the tapering has begun, or are we kind of still just getting started given that deficit we're running with the amount of homes?
Well, there's a huge deficit of homes in America.
America used to produce over a million homes a year.
And then starting in 2009, we started producing 600, 700,000 homes a year.
And the population of the country has grown quite dramatically since then.
And so there's a huge catch-up wave now that's with very early stages of.
In terms of building housing, you also have a huge demographic.
moves. You have work from home, which has allowed people to avoid having to live in a city. It's
very expensive. They can live anywhere they want. You have people that have chosen to move to lower
cost states to states with low or zero income tax. And that's why you have places like Texas and
Florida that are absolutely booming. And so it's not just that you need more units, be units in the right
places. And so the two of them have led to huge demand for housing. And I don't think that's going to change.
I mean, raise interest rates, you know, a little. No, I already said.
I don't think they're going to raise it much.
Let's say a 30-year mortgage goes up by 1% or 2%.
It adds a couple hundred dollars a month to the mortgage bill.
Like, who cares?
You save that much and more by leaving Manhattan and living in Florida just from state income tax.
So I just don't think it's going to matter what Federal Reserve does.
There's a lot of people that are cashed up.
I mean, consumers are in great financial position.
They have to stimulus and they didn't spend money for two years because of COVID.
They're in great shape to go out there now and put a down payment on a home and build
some equity. So I think this trend's a great trend. I think it's a powerful trend. It's one of my favorite
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dot com slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right, back to the show. You've written about
CNR, which is cornerstone building brands, and I have to say, I agree with your assessment here.
The stock popped from $14. It's up to $23 recently. It's on some very strong fundamentals.
Does a play like this on housing play into the longer macro views you have on the market?
Well, absolutely. Home building is a pretty terrible business. You know, you're basically,
basically buying call options on land and you're hoping those call options go into the money.
If land prices stop appreciating, your balance, you get shredded.
You buy a bunch of inventory. You pre-sell a home. You're supposed to deliver it in six
months or nine months. You don't really know what your costs are going to be.
This huge cost inflation, this huge labor cost inflation, you don't even know if you can get
components with supply chain issues. When the music ends, people find a way to get out of their
home purchase contracts. And you're left with a bunch of inventory. You can't sell you
have to mark down. It's a very cyclical, terrible business. I don't wish that
anyone. What I like is companies like Cornerstone where they produce the components that go into a home.
You can ramp up and ramp down very rapidly. Cornerstone is the largest producer of vinyl windows.
The United States are also one of the largest producers of siding, gutters, doors, facade.
Every component that goes into the home, they've consolidated a lot of players. The returns on capital are 30%,
maybe even higher. They put a little bit of debt on that and your returns on equity or 100.
and, you know, it's a company that's trading for, I think, about three, maybe four times earnings.
It's such a good deal that the 49% shareholder has offered to take them private at 2465,
which I think is an absolutely ludicrous price.
I really do hope the board of directors shows some backbone and rejects that offer.
And when they reject it, I bet the stock drops $5 and I'll probably just buy some more.
I'm not the sort of guy that sells a company that's at, you know, the second or third inning of a 10-year trend.
I don't sell those sort of things for four times earnings.
That sounds crazy.
That's the sort of thing I buy.
And so I really do hope they don't sell it.
But I think that a lot of the companies in the housing supply chain are do just great.
And that's where I'd be putting my capital.
Yeah, another one of those companies seems to be St. Joe, which is J.O.E.
This company is based in Florida and has also popped about $10 in the last few weeks.
You've written about this.
What is the appeals?
Is it similar?
Or do you have a preference over the two?
Oh, Joe is much better.
It's by far a better business.
It's much cheaper, too.
St. Joe is one of the largest owners of land in the state of Florida.
They own most of the land in two counties that are two of the fastest growing counties in the United States.
It's truly beautiful where they own their land.
The beaches are white crystalline.
You've got lakes.
It's an amazing place.
And they're avoiding the terrible business of home building.
They're just selling lots.
They're prepping lots and selling them.
And the advantage and the value of that is that it used to be timber land.
So it had really no value except for as timber.
But as you bring people through the home builders, you can.
then build commercial real estate and earn recurring revenue. They're building hospitality assets.
They're building golf clubs and marinas and all these businesses that have pricing power because
they're the only guy who has the land. And it's been getting great developer margins. And so they're
selling the lots capitalizing the value of the land, bringing people. And every time you build a home,
all the land around it goes up in value. It's a huge network effect. And then they're going to have
a hundred year runway to be going and doing it. The amazing thing is that the stock trades for about a
quarter of net asset value today, and it's unusually profitable. All their metrics are going
the right direction, 50 to 100 percent growth year of a year. And it's year of a year against last
year, which was 50, 100 percent growth also. So all the metrics are going great place. You're buying
this business for about a quarter of what I think the land is worth and the land and the assets they
have. And they just announced earnings this week and they're phenomenal. But I expect them to be
phenomenal. I'm really actually kind of confused that the stock doesn't trade for a few hundred
a share, you'd think that a business like this growing as rapidly as it is would trade for a premium
to net asset value, not a discount. But that's what makes the market. And that's why I tend to make
money at this market. You find things people miss. We tend to make money in lots of different ways.
Just from this discussion, it sounds like you have this Swiss Army knife of, you know,
different approaches. And I'm curious what you use the most. You've talked a little bit about options.
Is that the main way you play the market just by buying and selling calls and puts and hedging in that
fashion or are you guys ever buying holding long term? So most of what I do is buy and hold long term
stuff. I find a strong macro trend like housing and I just buy. I mean, I've owned Joe for over two
years now, I've on Cornerstone for over two years. You find something good and you just buy it.
And eventually something will change in the trend and you sell. But I try to buy the best assets
and the strongest trends. And sometimes it only lasts a couple of quarters. Sometimes it lasts for years.
You never really know. But that's the core of what I do. I say the second thing I do,
is event-driven. That's why, you know, we built cadm so that we can systematize this and do it
better. It's amazing what it flags in terms of corporate events and cap structure changes and
fun flow events and that stuff we missed and we're just making a fortune. And what it was done is
it's a change the portfolio. You know, when you look at a portfolio, most people have a static
portfolio where they have a certain number of positions and they go up and down with the market.
And what we've done is try to replicate what Warren Buffett does where he owns businesses. Every
every month he gets more cash. The cash just keep coming in. And he gets to reallocate that cash. Sometimes
he buys more private businesses. Sometimes he buys more public businesses. But that cash just keeps
coming in. And with the adventure of inside, we're pretty reliably having positive months,
you know, 10, 11 months a year, the cash comes in. And when you get it wrong, you don't really
lose much. And when you get it right, sometimes you make huge amounts of money, you know, a couple hundred
basis points a month, maybe even a thousand dips in a month. And that just lets you just keep
adding and adding. And it really works well in that it does well, usually when the market's volatile.
And when the market's volatile, my poor book goes down. So it's great to have this cash come in
because you're buying a bunch of stuff that you really like that just dropped. And so the two
offset very well. And it's created really a much more dynamic portfolio. It's just living,
breathing organism as opposed to just a list of ticker symbols and shares. And so by evolving
the portfolio in that way, I think it just dramatically increased the returns.
Yeah, I'm curious about volatility, actually, because, you know, the market definitely
rolled over a bit this week. I think it was down almost 15%. And volatility hasn't spiked a whole
lot. I mean, I'm following the V-I-X-Y mostly when I watch. And I'm not seeing that really
reverse in the same fashion or the same magnitude. Are you long volatility, you know, longer term,
or how do you kind of look at volatility? Do you ever play that?
Occasionally, I'll play volatility. I'm, I tend to mostly lose at it. I'm a volatility seller.
I usually sell volatility, usually by writing put. Sometimes we sell covered calls. But I'm usually
selling volatile and letting time work in my favor. When it comes to, you know, the calls or the
puts, it's usually, it's something that I don't mind owning on the put side. Sometimes I'm not dying
to own it. Sometimes I really am dying to own it. But I set a price I want to own it at. I always
make sure I have the cash. I write the put. Either I make 5% on my capital, you know, give or take,
five, six, seven, whatever the number is over a month. Or I get shares really cheap that I don't mind
owning or maybe even I want to own. It's the best tradeoff there is. I think everyone should be
doing that. And the same goes with covered calls. You know, you set a price if you want to sell it at,
and you sell those calls and, you know, maybe you only make 1% a month. But that 1% just, it just heads up.
This gift from heaven that when you're a portfolio manager like myself, if you make 15% or 20% in a year,
you're a god at this game. Well, just selling calls against everything you own basically gets you there.
There's a lot of easy things you can do that really improve returns. And, you know, it's just easy stuff.
It's just being disciplined, though. But I'm a volatility seller. And on the VIX,
I don't know. Sometimes I buy it. I usually lose.
One question I'm really dying to ask is around cash.
You know, our TIP finance tool has a momentum feature,
and there's a stop loss recommendation for the S&P around 4,000.
And this week, the S&P dropped all the way to 4,100.
It touched it. It bounced back up, going higher today.
But for the momentum to turn red, that's a pretty scary indicator
to potentially move to cash, in our opinion.
I'm curious how you look at cash, because obviously we're kind of in a
double bind here where you don't want to be losing money in the market, but you also don't
want to be sitting on cash with it inflating away at 8 plus percent. So how much cash do you typically
have on hand in emergencies for reallocation? And when do you think about moving more into cash
in times like this? So I have a dynamic portfolio. I tend to sell stuff when it gets to 80 cents
on fair value. And I don't fight that last 20 cents. I mean, the money in the market's made it,
buying something at 20 cents and selling it at 80. It's not, you know, holding it from 80 to
are. And so I tend to run a portfolio with far more liquidity. I mean, we target about 115 to
long. So we're usually a little bit levered. Call it 120 is as baseline. So when I'm sitting there
and I'm 100 long, you know, there's no cash in the balance sheet. But I have 2,000 points
of room that I can reallocate. And with those 2,000 points of room, I have the flexibility that
if something happens like, you know, Russia came out of the blue, I can allocate or some other idea
comes out of the blue. You can allocate fast. You don't have to sell something to make room.
because then you have slippage going both directions.
You only want slippage going one direction.
And the thing is you can use that excess room for the event driven
because event driven is often self-liquidating.
A lot of the event-riven we do is writing puts.
And so two to six weeks later, they go to put heaven.
And it self-liquidates itself.
And if you have to, you know, you're right to put it a dollar.
And something great comes.
It's only stringing at 30 cents.
Okay, fine.
The last 30 cents I won't capture.
You can recycle that money really fast and move on.
And so I like to have extra room.
I like to run degrossed.
I'm not scared to gross up to 150 when there's something really attractive to do.
But you don't want to be sitting there at 150 unless there's some amazing opportunity,
like at the bottom in March of 2020.
Otherwise, I usually keep my exposure low because you never know when something like this week comes along.
And it was terrifying and I put a lot of money to work.
You know, and everyone else was panicking.
And I was just excited.
For the first time in a while, I got to feel real greedy because I knew I was buying great stuff cheap.
You know, in terms of momentum indicators, I have no idea.
I always buy cheap stuff.
And, you know, if you get to own something for a couple of years in a macro trend,
there'll be times where the momentum's in your favor, there'll be times when the momentum's bad,
there'll be times when the chart looks good, there'll be times when the chart looks gruesome.
You know, we're just going to own it.
Now, with options, I'm kind of curious, is there a sweet spot here for you when you're
looking at, is there a certain implied volatility number or even just a certain amount of expiration
days that you kind of like to play in?
I like to be somewhere between a couple of days in about eight weeks.
I rarely go out more than two months.
Sometimes I'll do stuff that's only a couple of days, but it's usually about two months.
I think the key with the options is a lot of people go to an option scanner and they choose
the most, the companies are the highest volatility.
And you end up with a bunch of biotech stocks.
And those things are 200 volatility because realized ball might be 300.
It might actually be undervalued.
So just looking at it from a volatility standpoint is the wrong way to look at it with options.
We really need to look at and say, if I got to sign this stock at this price, would I be happy or upset?
That's the only thing that matters.
And then from there, you can kind of prioritize it.
I have a big working list of undervalued stocks.
We have just a spreadsheet of them, stuff we are happy to own at certain prices.
And you can obviously prioritize it.
You know, if something's a 20 ball and something else is the 60 ball, we're probably going to write the 60, not the 20.
In the end, you know, or maybe we'll do two thirds in the 60, one third in the 20 because we want to be a little diversified.
I don't know.
But no, you get paid better when the ball is higher.
So it's worth doing.
But the mistake people can make is to go into high-bile names because sometimes those things
ought to be high-de-ball to really know that you want to own it.
Now, with something like oil, are you ever buying long-term leaps on something like that,
given that you have such a long-term time horizon for it?
Yeah, we own quite a lot of out-of-the-money call options, a futures options on oil.
We own 23 call spread.
We own 25 calls, multiple different strikes, and some call spreads.
But we bought these back when volatility was like 12, and they were, you know, reasonably far out of the money with tail valves.
And I think volatility's kind of picked up a bit now just because more people are starting to look at them and realize that, you know, if you're going to hedge your portfolio, you know, most people buy puts to hedge their portfolio.
But I think the best way you can hedge a kind of generic U.S. equity portfolios by buying coal options on oil.
Because every scenario that has the stock market crash involves oil going to 500.
Whether it's, you know, Russia starting a war or, you know, the Federal Reserve panic,
the Federal Reserve isn't going to do a panic 100-bibs hike unless oil is 300 on the way to 500.
So every scenario that leads to the U.S.
market crashing usually starts with the price oil going crazy.
So it just seems like a superior way to hedge or a cheaper way to hedge.
So we have that trade-on for directional purposes, but also as a hedge to the rest of the book.
Well, Covey, this has been so fun and fantastic.
I really want to give you an opportunity before we sign off here to hand off to the audience where they can learn more about you,
where they can learn more about your resources or even your fun.
and any other endeavors you want to share?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, the best place to follow me is Adventures in Capitalism.
That's my blog.
I've been writing there for 10 years.
It's free.
You can't get what you pay for.
You know, we flagged a lot of interesting themes and stock ideas in the last decade.
I think my hit rate is probably better than any other blog out there.
I'd say the other place to go is Cuppie's Adventure and a Monitor, KEDM.com.
And those are the two best places to find me.
Fantastic.
Well, Cuppie, I hope we can do it again sometime soon or really enjoyed it.
Yeah, absolutely. Happy to do it anytime. Appreciate it.
All right, everybody. That's all we had for you this week. If you're loving the show,
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finance tool. And with that, we are wishing peace for the planet. And we'll see you again next time.
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