Don’t look back because the market is closed. Good Thursday afternoon, everyone. Kip Herriage here with the Daily VRA Investing Podcast. Hope you had a good day today. You know, look, we have so many great listeners here every day. You already know probably what I’m going to say. Yes, it’s my day to get the podcast because the market was up solidly today.
It is remarkable, is it not remarkable, how often Tyler gets down days and I get up? I’ve never. I actually, I. I think I have to every day. Maybe all of us should start using buying puts and calls. You know, we alternate every day, so it’s easy to. You know, sometimes we help each other out if we have something going on, but, you know, we primarily stick to a schedule of me one day and Tyler the next. And I. I think you’ve made a fortune.
I know you would have over the last. We’ve been doing these podcasts now, what, four or five years? I think you’ve made a fortune doing this. If you. Because he gets the down days almost all the time. But I keep telling you, it’s character building. He’s paying his dues, right? I’m the senior veteran here, and so I get the easy days, but he consistently gets the rough days. So sorry about that, son. I don’t know what to tell you.
[00:01:12]:
We’ve talked it out and we’ve been mixed up the schedule, so we try to outsmart the market. It just doesn’t seem to work. We may have to look into an official strategy using options trading for the days we do our podcast. If nothing else, maybe it’ll break the cycle. Right? But again, it was a good day today. Got some good things to talk about today. You’re gonna hear a lot. We’ve been writing this up for the last few days.
Bear trap. This looks like a masterfully structured bear trap from talking about the deep seek news. Okay, I’ll talk about that a little bit. Cause it is. And this is the way this happens. This is the way. Hedge fund plant stories. This is the way the.
The Goldman’s. The sleaze bags, right? The. The vampire squids of the world. What’s Goldman Sachs and. And their friends in New York. This is the way that they run their businesses. And they have a plant stories. They scare people.
They get in futures, in futures trading overnight. You know, it doesn’t take much money. I’m talking about like maybe a million dollars to scare the shit out of the global markets by just dumping or, you know, buying a bunch of going and shorting the market and futures trading and next thing you know you have a cascading move and others join in. It’s coordinated. I have no, I have no doubt about it now. Whether or not deep SEQ was that, I don’t know. We’ll talk about that more in just a moment because it looks like this is a, again, masterfully structured bear trap, trapping the bears on that big decline on Monday only so that they can get out of the short. Whoever instigated this, if this is what happened, this has the fingerprints all over it to me.
[00:02:57]:
They can get out of the shorts that they put hedges on and then they can go aggressively long on Monday. Remember Ted Parsons never settle on a Monday. Monday was that buying opportunity. We almost got stopped out of our semi position. We did not. It came close. We didn’t get stopped out. Semis were up big, big today.
We actually got earnings today from intel just a few minutes ago after the close. Intel’s up over 3% of the news. The semis are up over 2% today. They’ve, they’ve rallied exactly off of those, those, those Monday, Tuesday lows and looking lot the. I think we think Tyler said it yesterday. We think the semis lead from here. This will be. It really would be a perfect bottom for the semis which of course lead the market in both directions in most times.
Not every day, of course, but for, for as. As market trends go from the birth of quantitative easing in 2008, 2009, the semis have led on the way up and way down in every major bull market and bear market. And it doesn’t mean you can’t have a bull market if the semis aren’t going. We’re seeing that, aren’t we? The semis have not been doing well for the last four months, but the markets kept going up. So this is the strength again. This, this is another characteristic and of the personality of this particular bull market. This is another reason we think this is such an incredibly strong and will be continue to be an incredibly strong bull market for years. Because these are the characteristics you see when the, when, when the semis can get smoked.
All right, again, they were down well, they were down 10% on Monday and yet the market, the Dow closed up that day, 289points. The semis were down again. Nvidia, the leader of the semis, okay, the leader of the leader was, was, was down 17% on Monday. It’s in the Dow Jones yet. The Dow Jones finished up 289. That’s it’s extraordinary. I, I’m emphasizing this, so I try to make this point really clearly. This bull market is showing all the signs of being exactly what we’ve been saying it is the strongest bull market in my career.
[00:05:02]:
These are the things you look for. And if in fact this was a bear trap, sort of looks like it now. And we have more to back that up. Matter of fact, I’m on the topic. Let’s cover it now. Okay. If Tyler covered Meta’s earnings yesterday on the earnings call with Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, founder CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the, on the call, when he was asked about Deep Seek and will they be reducing their capital expenditures or capex, Zuckerberg answered it. He said, no, we, we’re gonna, we have, we’ve, we have announced plans to spend 60 to 80 billion in CapEx this year over the next 12 months.
That’s, that’s still in place. As a matter of fact, in the future we’ll spend hundreds of billions of dollars. So no, this is just beginning. And then today, so that, that the market really turned on that when Zuck said that the market really turned higher because it made Deep Seq look like a less big deal. And of course, no one knows a real story. Have they developed some really cool AI technology and the ability to process LLMs? Sure, they have. Obviously they’ve done some good things. But now the story’s coming out that, you know, they piggybacked off of OpenAI and other AI algorithmic programs that are already in existence.
So they took some shortcuts, number one. And number two, probably the most obvious point, it’s a Chinese company started by a hedge fund that’s pretty new. A guy that not a lot of people knew a lot about beforehand. And it is open source, that I will give them that. But it’s Chinese, Chinese, Chinese company. How many major US companies or even minor are going to trust China with their data by downloading the Open a. Excuse me, the, the, the Deep Seek app. I don’t think many, because if you, if you read the privacy policy of Deep Sea, it reads like a horror story.
They tell you right there, we will take everything you sign up, we get access to everything. I’m paraphrasing, but that really is what it says. So again, I think, I think the Deep Seq story is now, as we said at the time, on Monday, we did not believe that it was going to be as big a deal as the markets made it look like in Monday’s trading. Okay. And that’s because we have great contacts, we have great sources, we know who to trust, who not to trust and all the. There were some folks that got it wrong that typically get things right. But you know, you listen to Billy Elon Musk, who was pooh poohing right from the start, did not believe it. Didn’t believe they’d only invested 10% of what US companies have invested to get the same result or better result right.
[00:07:40]:
Musk wasn’t buying it. And so we have some great sources here in the VRA as well, including. I’ll just call him Ted. It’s not his real name. Pretty close though. But he’s one of our long term VRA members and he and I were, and Tyler were going back and forth with a series of texts and emails about this and he is, he’s our Silicon Valley insider. He’s been, been in Silicon Valley more, more than three decades. Smart as a whip.
And he, he, he said the same thing. Look, this is the, this isn’t going to knock Nvidia off of any perch. And this is, there are a lot of questions about this have not been answered. Now we’re starting to get some answers to those questions. So in, in addition to what Zuckerberg said about the hundreds of billions of dollars they’re going to spend in Capex going forward, deep seat impact we hear today from OpenAI. Now this is, this is, this is, this, this blue. This blew me away. OpenAI, this was just a couple hours ago announced that they’re in talks to raise money at a valuation of $340 billion.
That’s more than double the valuation from October three months ago. Three months ago. The valuation three months ago was 157 billion. They’re raising money now at a $340 billion valuation, more than, again, more than double what it was just three months ago. So that would not be happening if people if the big serious money, okay, that, that’s open AI. You and I couldn’t invest in it, but you know that you got to be a billionaire plus to get in that, in that party. But they’re not, you know, those investors aren’t, aren’t, aren’t shying away. So look, the AI boom is real again, as you know, if you follow us for long, we’ve never really said this is the, this is the key to this whole thing is the AI boom.
Now it may be the backbone and the architecture of what’s going to come, but this is so much broader than just AI. This is an innovation revolution. Yes, again, the brains of a lot of this, autonomous vehicles, robotics. A lot of this is going to come stem from the ability to process data at speeds that just almost incomprehensible. Okay? But it’s much, much deeper than innovation is taking place in so many areas. That’s really what’s driving this market. And that’s why if you get the macro theme right, if you get the macro right, everything flows from that. Our macro has been now for over two years.
[00:10:04]:
This is the innovation revolution that will power everything. The fact that now we have Trump 2.0, right, he’s the right president for this time with a, again, a cabinet administration that reads like a who’s who list of free market capitalists. Right? This is, this is the. I’ve said this now for since Trump was elected, we have now entered the wild west of free market capitalism. For some people that’s going to be scary. But if you’re a business owner, if you’re an investor, if you’re a mover and a shaker, if you’re an alpha male or female, the wild west of free market capitalism is music to your ears. And folks, that’s what we have. We now have a government.
This. They’re going to be at least neutral. They may not be on our side, but they’re at least going to be neutral instead of our enemy. And that is a huge sea change. Understand how massive this is and this is why you again, if you listen for a long time, you’ll hear me say it’s a lot. You’ve heard say it’s a lot. We’ll say it again. Buy the DIP will remain the smartest of smart money strategies.
And it’s not easy even for us. Money was scary. We told you that, right? When something happens that you don’t know, it catches you out of the, out of the blue. You can’t help but be a little concerned, especially if you care about the results and about the work that you do. And we do. Obviously you do, it’s your money. But if you get the macro right and then you. As long as the macro doesn’t change, if everything stays in place, why would you change your investment policy or your investment strategy? Of course you wouldn’t.
You would just use dips to add to your positions. That is will continue to be, I think for many, many years because we’ll have dips. You know, we had it from 1995 to 2000.com melt up. I researched this, you know, when we first started. Yeah, this. I think it’s in the Book maybe, but the big bribe. But you know, we had five corrections of 10 to 20% from in the, in the dot com bull market. Five of them.
[00:12:09]:
They were pretty painful. We had one bear market in the NASDAQ of 32%. Three month bear market. 32% happened 18 months before the end of that bull market. And that’s the final leg of it was parabolic, right? Just like Nasdaq gained like 170% in 18 months. And that, that, that, that then that marked the top. But so many people got shaken out. Who can you blame them? 32%.
You know, you tend to think, okay, this, this is a beer market now and things have changed. But they hadn’t because the macro never changed. And that’s why, by the way, during that five year bull market run, once I figured out what was going on, we were aggressively long. We did a lot of trading though. We used to, we had, we had a good IPO desk. So we had a lot of IPOs. It was, it was, it was a blast of five years. And while I mentioned that, again, I’ll say again, what has not happened yet in this bull market? Remember, it’s still young.
We just didn’t hear, we just entered year three. But what is yet to happen in this bull market? We’ve yet to have an ipo. Boom, right? That happens. It should start about now. It still has, they are starting to pick up, but not, not to the level we had with dot com, where you know, in back to back years there were more than 100 companies that on their IPO day, their stocks doubled in price. In back to back years, there were more than 50 companies each year where their shares went up more than 300%. So we have nothing like that here. But you know that’s coming, right? That, that’s on the come.
So again, we are so early in this bull market, we’re even earlier in the innovation revolution. Okay, this thing’s gonna go on for a couple decades. Magic is gonna happen. This is living in the Justin’s, folks. The Jetsons have arrived. The future is here. Embrace it, love it, learn from it. And we’ll, we’ll all get there together.
You know, I’m, I’m not the smartest technology guy in the world, probably one of the dumbest frankly. But I’m a tre and I got Tyler, so I’m golden there. And again, we have great contact. But if you’re a trend follower, you don’t have to understand all these crazy new technologies, right? And what’s hot and what’s not unless you are a really good stock picker. We’re trend followers and then we find our favorite stocks, we keep adding them our VRA10 baggers and it’s unless until, unless something changes. Why is the Peter lynch approach don’t change your investment style unless something changes. Meaning in a particular company you get a management change, your product stops working, you know, your earnings and revenues begin to go the other way. So unless that happens, then you stay actively invested and you continue to add to positions.
[00:14:49]:
That is the Peter in essence the Peter lynch style of investing. And he invested in what he knew by the way. He invested in what he knew also something very important to do. So again the Zuckerberg news, the OpenAI news today just more fuel for the fire that the AI boom is real. We saw it today in the market. Again the doubt. The market today was, was down. Dow is down a couple hundred points.
NASDAQ was down over 100 points. Okay, here we go again. Nope, not so fast. Then here came the rally. Right, let’s cover that real quick. Dow Jones today finishing these were not at the highs of the day but not far off. Dow Jones up 168 points. That’s 4/10 of 1%.
SB 500 beat that up 5/10 of 1%. Russ 2000 up better than 1%. Look, this is a tough group to invest in. It’s all over the map. It’s an ugly chart. But once again it’s another characteristic of how young this bull market is. It’s yet to broaden out to small caps. A rising tide lifts off boats eventually.
We’re not even at that point yet. Now small caps obviously are doing much better now but they’re, they’re laggards. They’re big time laggards. That group is going to get going big time before this bull market ends. That’s how early we are. And then NASDAQ today up up 2/10 of 1%. But again the leader today was a semis finishing up 2 since 1% quickly on earnings. I, I, I’m not gonna, I’m not as good a Tyler to this.
[00:16:15]:
He’s gotten exceptional at following earnings and reporting on them. He covered you know yesterday IBM smash 13 gain, 13% gain in one day in IBM. Okay. Intel reported after the close stock like Tesla yesterday the stock dipped lower and now is up almost 3%. Again the semis up more than 2% today. Yesterday of course we had Tesla which Tyler reported on fully. The stock today was up just under 3%. On the day up $11 a share, right at 400 right now as I speak.
And again, Tyler nailed this investing. Elon Musk said it on his call. What? What, What? That. Look, I’ve been, I’ve been an investor In Tesla since 18 bucks a share, right? I’ve been on. I think, I think, I think I may have missed one or two earnings calls. I’m either on them live or I listen to the playback or read the transcript. Without question, this is the most bullish and excited that I’ve ever heard. Elon Musk, this is going back to what 2014, I think is when I first invested is without question the most bullish that I’ve ever heard him excited.
And then he laid out the reasons why the bullet points, the talking points from that. Everyone should read that transcript because he’s telling you this is happening, folks. Autonomous is happening. It’s going live in Austin this year in June. It’ll be throughout Texas and California. Fully autonomous. Not, not, not driver supervised fully autonomous vehicles in Texas and California by the end of this year, then in every state next year. All right, that, that, that’s a little mind blowing.
I mean I, I have a Tesla now. About time, right? Finally broke down and got one. I got the Model S plaid, which is a full self driving and it is, it is extraordinary. I love driving the car because it’s just lightning fast. Zero to 60 in less than two seconds. And you don’t feel it. The acceleration of a electric car is not at all like a combustion, a combustible engine. You don’t get the jerk, right? It’s just a smooth.
[00:18:19]:
Here we go. Next thing you know you’re going 60. How did that happen? Right? So anyway, but the use of the FSD is amazing. But by the end of this year I won’t even have to. The thing with that FSD is it’s actually kind of a funny story. I didn’t know this when I bought it. You get like five strikes because it’s not like you could sit in the passenger seat and let the car drive itself. This is, this is supervised.
You have to keep it tracks your eye movement. So you have to keep your eyes up. If you look down at your phone more than. It’s not long, I think it’s like two, three seconds. The car starts, you know, flashing at you, beeping at you. Okay. And if you don’t follow, if you don’t put your eyes up after the beeping, it gives you a strike. You get like five or six strikes.
But then you can’t use FSD anymore. Full self driving. Something I did not know. So I’ve already got like, I got like four strikes. I got two to go. I don’t know what happens. I guess I got to take it in and have them wipe it clean or something. But I’ve been much more careful since I figured out what this strike policy was.
I don’t like cars telling me what to do. So frankly, it pissed me off that I’m being candid with you. But look, I want this to work. This is all part of getting autonomous driving where we want it to be, all of us want it to be eventually. So, you know, I don’t mind playing by those rules. And I’ve gotten better after my four strikes. A couple were not even. I didn’t even deserve those.
[00:19:44]:
But anyway, so yeah, you got to pay attention to the road. But there are some cheats you can use as well. You can turn off full self driving if you need to check your email or text, you should be doing your driving. I know, but you know, most of us do that, so. Depending how fast you’re going. But anyway, the point being, Tesla is going to have California and Texas completely legal non supervised autonomous driving this year. And then Musk said it’ll be all over the country next year. And then of course that’s also the case in Europe.
China is more difficult because they don’t allow data sharing. It’s a very complicated story, very tough for Tesla to crack that. But of course they’re working to do it. And again, he covered so many important areas yesterday about Optimus, where they’re going with the growth there. They’re going to have like 5 or 10,000 Optimus robots this year in Tesla. Only in Tesla facilities, right, to work at all the kinks. And then next year is when the mass production begins. They said they’ll have 100,000 robots next year, and then every year after that it’s exponential growth.
So it’s 100,000, it’s a million, then it’s 10 million, then it’s 100 million. And so as Musk has said on many occasions, it won’t be that long, that many years, I don’t know, 10, 15, 20. Until there are more robots than there are human beings. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. That’s crazy though, isn’t it? But that’s the power of what they’re going to be able to do and make it. That’s the innovation coming our way. And then it doesn’t even cover what they’re doing with a bad, with energy storage. That’s, that’s an amazing story itself, of course, the improvement in battery life.
You know, one of the reasons everybody didn’t want to buy an electric car was that you could only get like 150 miles before your range died out. And if you’re stuck, you can’t. At the time there weren’t these chargers everywhere and now they’re pretty much everywhere. And you know, so you’re screwed. Well now the range is 350, I think for mine it’s 380 miles some. And that’s only going to go up in a couple of years. It’ll be 5, 600 miles as range. And so again, when Musk first said that it won’t be very long until combustible engines are just a thing of the past.
[00:21:56]:
I mean, he’s right. That is where we’re headed. I think most ambulance will keep at least one car in case they commandeer the grid or something bad happens and they have a esp, right? That’s not right. You know, I’m saying an energy burst. Like I said, I’m not the tech guy. So you want to keep at least one combustible engine car for a worst case scenario. I think, I think a lot of families do that, but the cost of driving can be so much lower. And then again with the robotaxis, cyber cabs as they call them, those are going to be out, you know, this year with the full rollout.
Next year again, they’ll be everywhere. I just heard read today, pretty cool about Cyber cab number one. They are going to be 80% less expensive than driving a car. 80% less expensive than driving a car. And that means a lot less expensive also compared to an Uber or a Lyft. Right. The other thing, and again, I did not know this until today, the wire, the cyber cabs, which are going to be everywhere, you just, you know, just get on, get on your app, call one, it’ll be there in two minutes. You go, you won’t need a car.
Think about no car payments, no insurance payments, right? No upkeep on your vehicle. You know, the downside of course is they’re two seaters, but they’ll come out with more as time goes on. But my question was always, okay, how are these cars without drivers? How are they going to charge? Well, I found out yesterday they’re gonna, they have wireless, they’re gonna have wireless charging. You will not have to plug anything into your car to charge it what that’s coming sounds a little bit like, like, like the original Tesla does it not with wireless energy, wireless power. And so it’s an exciting future. Companies like Tesla are must own companies. And again the backbone of all this is going to be the semiconductor industry. That’s why we said we believe this would be the, this would be the lows.
First in, first out. As Tyler covered yesterday, the semis leading both directions. They’ve been moving in a, in a sideways pattern. It’s been fairly gnarly but it has been consistent pattern. The semi SMH. The semi ETF has fallen below its 200 day five times since August of last year. But every time it’s marked a buying opportunity. It looks like that just happened again.
[00:24:18]:
It looks like that just happened again. So now we think the semis will lead higher. They should. It’s time. Because none of this, very little of the AI boom can happen without semiconductors and the semis. So again it’s kind of a shooting match. You don’t know which one is going to be, who’s going to be the winner. That’s why we prefer ETS frankly.
Nvidia obviously has been an amazing investment but we just like the leverage ETFs. It gives us the same kind of exposure and move but without the risk of investing in one company. So ETFs are fantastic for that diversification and of course the leverage component gives you the juice to keep up with even the best of investment. You just got to have a discipline knowing there’s a point to take losses, right, you gotta have a stop and then as a point to take gains at extreme overbought on steroids. And that’s our trading approach with ets. Let’s see. I guess let’s take a look under the hood today. Just so much going on.
I don’t want to keep you too long. Intel again just last, last report here. Intel on earning is up 3%. Apple’s down 2.3%. Kind of a mixed, mixed, mixed bag there. But those are the two big companies reporting today so far. Really good news on Q4 earnings. And remember we now we have Trump, now we have Animal spirits.
That’s what’s gonna be powering both the economy and the markets going forward. That’s another reason why these dips are going to be shorter and shorter because people get it, they want to be in this market. So that $7 trillion of money markets it’s going to keep coming out especially if race keep calling. That spinner call remains our call. Money’s going to keep coming on the money markets, keep planning stocks that’s going to keep these, that’s these, these, these, these, these moves lower. Very, very short lived right with the odd psyop, the odd bear trap that we’ve just had in the, in the semis here with the deep seat scammy kind of news. Let’s take a look under the hood today because I do want to talk a little bit about gold, silver and bitcoin. We’ll come to that at the end here today.
[00:26:19]:
This internal, these are, these are stunning. These are stunningly good. Again coming out of a rough Monday today. NASDAQ advanced positive across the board trifecta. Nasdaq today 2 to 1 positive advanced decline NYSE 3 to 1 positive volume 2.5 to 1 positive on Nasdaq. 3 and a half time to 1 positive on NYC. What is that? Let me just give you a percentage on that. Apologies, I did not run that before.
74, almost 75 up volume for NYC. It’s very good. And our 52 Kai’s lows also very good. We had right at 300 stocks in a 52 week high to 132 hitting a new 52 week low. Sector watch boom again. 10 of 11 sectors finished high on the day. Very good day today folks. Utilities leading the way.
Rates are going lower and obviously we need more data, data centers and we’re going to need more utilities and streamlines. A lot of money’s going into them. It’s a great, great AI story. So many great AI stories. First, second, third, derivatives of the AI story. It’s just folks, this is the bull market of my lifetime. I’ve never been this bullish and if that changes, I promise you I’ll let you know. Real estate also up today nicely 1.4% again the markets know rates are going lower.
This is great for the housing market which is also in a massive long term bull market. 40% of Americans own their home without a mortgage. Are you kidding me? You can’t. So all the crash callers and they’re everywhere, still saying, oh, we’re about to have another financial crisis, the housing market’s going to crash. They’re idiots. If you find someone, I don’t mean to be, you know, rude here or an asshole, but if you find someone saying that you have found someone that either is purposely misleading you or they just don’t know what they’re doing and they just don’t know how to research because you cannot have a housing crash when 40% of homeowners own their home without a mortgage. What? You can’t have a housing crash when consumer net worth is hitting all time high every month. That’s just not the way it works, folks.
[00:28:32]:
68% of homeowners own at least one home. Okay, so again, and now you have the millennials powering everything. I mean this is, it’s going to be that, it’s going to be that bull market, folks. Going to be that bull market. Again. We have a lot of groups up 1% today. The only stock, the only sector lower today, oddly was technology, down a half percent which is strange because again, NASDAQ was up today. I don’t really know what to, how to account for that, frankly.
But anyway, we’ll move on. That is strange in our commodity watch today. Quick refresh. Oh, here. This is. What a great story. You know, I love telling this story. I sent out a, we sent out a long VRA letter this afternoon.
Fairly long, a little more in detail because all we’ve been consumed with AI and deep seek and everything. So it’s time to get back, focus on our other holdings. And of course, key to this group, to our holdings is precious metals and miners. We’re very long this group. Our forecast, the beginning of the year. And by the way, we were super bullish last year. Gold finished up 26%. The miners only finished at 10% though.
So I mean you’ll take 10% gains, but that was disappointing because the market did so well. But this year our forecast again is for better than 20% gains in gold and silver. Well, gold really we’re gold bugs. But it’s like 8020 gold to silver. Maybe 70 at 30, but more like 80 20. We have been selling some gold to buy to get a higher allocation of bitcoin. That’s just a personal decision of ours and mine with our, with our family office here. But again, gold today booming.
[00:30:08]:
Okay, up $58 an ounce right now, up better than 2%. These are rare days you don’t often see gold up more than 2% at 28:51. All time high on gold. Golf clap. We are big time gold bugs here. First recommended gold in 2003. In my second ever letter, gold was at $375 an ounce. And recommended silver at $5 an ounce.
We’ve never once sold it. We’ve always used gold and recommended people use gold as an alternative to saving and fiat money. Now I cannot tell you the number of times people have called us, called me irresponsible for saying this, irresponsible for advising our subscribers and clients to do this because I guess on face value most people will tell you put 5% of your money in gold. That’s typically what you’ll hear, right? That’s what I said on Wall street to I didn’t know any better side story. I finally I was invited by a client of mine to go to a gold mining conference and precious metals conference. The New Orleans one, the big one in New Orleans every year. Todd and I’ve been to that. And it was time for us to go again, frankly.
But that’s where I was first exposed to alternative money and the truth about fiat currency. I didn’t know all that before. Wall street doesn’t teach you that. So that opened my eyes big time. Which is why ultimately we started telling people to save in gold instead of fiat money. US Dollars. That may seem risky until you know the facts. Here are the facts.
Since 2003, when I first recommended gold and silver in my second ever bureau letter, a $100,000 investment in gold today was worth more. It would be worth is worth more than seven hundred thousand dollars. One hundred thousand dollars turned into more than seven hundred thousand. That same hundred thousand dollar investment in the US dollar after inflation that alter inflation and is less than it’s like $67,000. So inflation has destroyed savers. It’s the hidden tax of the worst kind. And because most people just don’t understand it, it’s the Federal Reserve putting our money into oblivion along with a very compliant Congress that’s caused all this of course is why both spouses and most families have to work because their their dollar has been destroyed. But this is how you get even.
[00:32:21]:
You invest in gold. And now we have bitcoin as a and they’re completely different investments. I never understand people and I hear it on Twitter all the time. X all the time now when I talk about gold. You idiot. You should have all your money in bitcoin now. You don’t, you don’t understand anything. These are completely different investments.
Yet one may be called digital gold. But listen, digital gold can be eliminated with with something right? Where that something might be a hack, it’s stolen from you. This happens all the time. Maybe they pull the plug on it. If this is in fact as we believe is an intelligence community created a currency or investment then they can pull the plug at any time. And of course that would crash the markets into oblivion. That’s why you never put all your money in one investment. Whether it’s gold or bitcoin or One stock or whatever.
That’s why diversification is so important. If the worst case happens, it hurts, but you don’t. You’re not destroyed by it. Right. But anyway, gold today up nicely and why? Why? Because rates are going lower. Why? Because the dollar’s going lower and because the money printing machine ain’t going to stop even with Trump as president. It can’t stop here or globally. It’s going to continue.
It’s likely going to pick up speed. That’s how, that’s, that’s the dangers. Right. Of endless money printing is those debt totals do start to add up, especially with rates higher now. So, but again, we’re very bullish on rates. We’re going lower. Bullish on bonds, I should say. And we’re also very bullish, excuse me, very bearish on the dollar.
[00:34:01]:
These are both good reasons and very strong reasons with the high, high predictability factors. To own gold and silver. Silver today up a big 4.3%. 3276. Copper today also up nicely. Some really good stories out there. Thank you for sending us, Robert. The one you sent today, outstanding copper is an amazing investment here.
We don’t have a copper specific investment. We did it got bought out a couple of years ago. Turquoise Hill got stolen by Newmont, you know, and just got stolen. It should have been so much more. We did well in it, but should have made so much more money. Anyway, copper is a great investment. We think we’re looking for an alternative, but we already have great exposure to this group. So, you know, copper for 31 a pound today up.
What is that? Six tenths of 1%. Crude oil today bouncing back up 63 cents a barrel at 73.25. And finally today, bitcoin. I want to spend a couple minutes on bitcoin as well. I don’t get into a whole lot because it’s a little repetitive because I’m a simple man. I’m a simple Texas boy. Okay. And again, the macro story with Bitcoin, by the way, last trade, 100, just over 105,000, up one and a half percent on the day.
The macro story about Bitcoin is all about supply and demand. Yes, it’s an alternative currency. Yes, it is maybe a new currency, what have you. That’s. That story is amazing. But it’s the supply, demand component that they’re never going to print. Mine more than 21 million Bitcoin. We’re close to 20 now.
[00:35:32]:
So what broke overnight, though was the fact that Norway’s central bank, Norway’s Central bank invested $500 million into Michael Saylor’s NSTR. Right. MicroStrategy, which of course the big bitcoin investor. This is, this is big. This is earth shattering news, frankly. A central bank did this. So you know what’s coming next? Well, first of all, the US under the bitcoin president is going to have a strategic reserve of bitcoin that’s coming in the near term. I don’t know.
What does that mean? Three months, six months? Don’t know. This year? Yeah, I think so for sure. Again there’s some, Congress has to agree to this, right? So there’s some work that’s got to be done. But look at Trump’s administration. In addition to being the most pro business administration in the history of America, they love bitcoin. This is happening folks. And when it happens again, the pile on effect from other countries doing the same thing and then sovereign wealth funds are start piling in. You can see what’s going to happen here.
It’s going to be a mad rush to get the last million bitcoin because the people that buy, these people buying it now, they ain’t selling and they won’t sell. You got prime, it’s like akin to having prime New York City real estate, right? You got Trump Tower, you’re not selling that because real estate prices aren’t going down in New York as bad as that city may be. But again, it doesn’t matter where you have the real estate key, real estate, if you can just keep holding on to it and you can leverage against it, you can do so many options, right? So these people, these investors coming in now to bitcoin aren’t the mom and pops, right? Trading 1/10 of a bitcoin or something. These are big time investors that aren’t going away. So there’s going to be a parabolic move higher, I think. I think it’s starting. I would not be surprised. Matter of fact, I expect bitcoin to be 150,000 by the end of second quarter.
I think it could happen first quarter and it wouldn’t surprise me at all. But I do expect it’ll happen in the first half of this year. And then our again our year end target is 200,000 and then our cycle high which is a two to four year time frame is 350,000, was 250 last year, we’ve raised that to 350,000. So look, I was on Wayne’s show this week on the root reaction and I’ll repeat what I Said there, look, this is that bull market. You must be invested in it. They’re going to be. Almost every investment that you can invest in will go up. They’re all.
[00:38:00]:
But you know, we want to be in the ones that go up the most. That’s the key because this is the market to stay locked in on. This is the time to build wealth creation like you always thought you could do in this great country of ours. Now it’s here. A red carpet has been laid out for all of us. We just have to get on board and stay positive. I do not understand these negative Nancy’s. I do not understand these people that are so addicted to negativity.
They’re always looking for something to go wrong. I’m a glass of that full guy, always have been. But I’ll just, I’ll, I’ll wrap with this. I don’t understand it. If there’s a slap of negativity, I think that best explains it. We’ve had a horrible two decades. It’s not that I don’t get it, we get it. But think of every person you know that you respect the most.
Big time successful people, maybe people you look up as role models or you know, business models, etc. What’s the one personality trait they have in mind? They’re all optimists. They’re all optimist. So again, I think it pays to be an optimist. I know it pays to be an optimist. This is the time. There’s never been a better time to be an optimist than there is right now. Our best days are ahead of us.
It is the golden age of America and we’re staying locked in folks. Hey, always appreciate to listen. Hope you had a great day. Even better night. We’ll see back here again tomorrow after the close.