Stansberry Investor Hour

Extreme Value Editor Dan Ferris discusses the tweet now “burned into his brain.” He’s joined by New York Times bestselling author Diane Henriques, whose book about Bernie Madoff “The Wizard of Lies” became a HBO movie starring Robert DeNiro. She explains why the next Bernie Madoff will be impossible to spot.

Extreme Value Editor Dan Ferris reveals what it means to be bullish or bearish, and why most market predictions right now end so badly. He’s joined by Dr. Richard Smith, CEO and founder of TradeSmith to talk about the Bull vs Bear Summit, and how his unique approach can help investors… no matter what side they’re on.

A handful of billionaires have renewed their warnings of a global recession – with one legendary commodities trader even predicting something worse than the Great Depression. In this week where 20 tons of gold have mysteriously disappeared from Venezuela’s vaults, Tesla has another $920 million in debt payments due, and a value investor just dived into an iconic fast food business, Dan Ferris makes sense of it all. He’s joined in this week’s episode by Grant Williams. Grant is co-founder of Real Vision Group and has more than 30 years of experience in finance during which time he held senior positions at investment banks in London, Tokyo, New York, Sydney, and Singapore. Real Vision TV, the world's only video on-demand channel for finance, has been described by some as the "Netflix for Finance Geeks."

With markets continuing to recover this week after an epic selloff that included the worst December since The Great Depression, Dan revisits his initial 2017 warning, when he first reported that a genuine stock market mania had arrived.   Dan looks briefly at three blue chip stocks, then talks about the Extreme Value recommendation he made public on the podcast weeks ago… The company is performing well. With the business rapidly unfolding expansion plans in China, bouncing off a multi-year low valuation, Dan “thinks we’re golden with Starbucks.” The talk turns to Facebook, and rumblings that up to half of the 2 billion accounts in existence could be fake. Dan admits it would still be a great business with one billion accounts, but that more bad news would likely push the stock down—especially if it comes out that CEO Mark Zuckerberg knew about the situation but didn’t act quickly enough.   Dan then turns to this week’s podcast guest. Fraser Buchan is the co-founder of Tradewind Markets Digital Gold Company.  Fraser has spent most of his career in the precious metals industry.  And now he’s founded a company that is revolutionizing the gold and silver market.  During the interview, you’ll learn how Fraser’s company – Tradewind Markets – has created a technology that’s behind the safest, most secure and lowest cost way we’ve ever found for individual investors to own physical gold.   When he describes the advantages his technology has over gold ETFs – including no management, administrative, or storage fees – Dan marvels at how he’s disrupting an industry. Dan concludes, “You’re just sucking out the cost and giving the end user a phenomenal deal… you’re like the Amazon.com of gold.” 

Dan launches into this week’s episode dissecting the warning from billionaire investor Ray Dalio, who’s saying there’s significant risk of a recession in 2020 – not just in the U.S., but a global slowdown. While no one can tell the future, there is one grim statistic on Dan’s mind that doesn’t dispute this claim.  He then introduces this week’s podcast guest, Christopher Irons.  Christopher started writing about finance and "pulling the curtain" back on the B.S. of the industry under his moniker Quoth the Raven in 2013. Since then, he has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and Barron's, has made Seeking Alpha's list of Top Bloggers, Forbes' 100 Twitter Accounts in the Financial World to Follow, and has shared the stage as a speaker with acclaimed investors David Einhorn, Andrew Left, Ben Axler, Jon Najarian and many others. He's got a firm opinion on Tesla – and a prediction on exactly how the stock’s downfall will come about. And he’s not shy about calling another household name “fraudulent.”  In fact, Christopher is known for his blistering analysis behind shorting companies, starting with the first presentation Dan ever saw of his, titled “Short the Whole $%#@*&$ Thing.” 

It’s been a huge week for the auto industry, with developments rippling beyond Volkswagen’s $50 billion push into Tesla’s territory of electronic vehicles. Dan unpacks the decision by Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Volvo, jaguar, Land Rover, and Mini to boycott the Detroit Auto Show, and concludes it marks a permanent shift in the industry. “The way we buy everything is changing.” And on the heels of a podcast episode that examined why Tesla is truly vulnerable to competitors, Dan breaks down Volkswagen’s decision to build an $800 million electric vehicle factory in Tennessee, part of its plan to pour $50 billion into electric vehicle production by 2023.  Then, with Eddie Lampert’s eleventh hour deal to save Sears finally on the books, Dan muses on the wave of creative destruction hitting retail right now – and the sector’s latest victim, poised to close 900 stores nationwide. He then introduces this week’s podcast guest, Aaron Edelheit. Aaron is the CEO and Founder of Mindset Capital, a private investment firm. After being of their first investors, Aaron was also the Chief Strategy Officer of FLO Technologies and helped the company grow from a pre-revenue startup to raising $28 million and launching in over 500 Home Depot stores.  Aaron also founded and ran a successful money management firm, Sabre Value Management from 1998 to 2011. Released last year, his first book, The Hard Break: The Case for a 24/6 Lifestyle makes the case for taking one day a week off from work, email and smartphones for a more productive, healthier and more creative life.

On a week where markets roared back, the most expensive tuna ever was sold for $3.1 million, and the government shutdown officially became the third longest in history – and still with no end in sight – Dan Ferris number crunches some more historic milestones. Because last week was Apple’s turn to suffer, Amazon is now the world’s largest company. Dan talks about how, once those companies both hit trillion-dollar valuations, something told him he was wrong. And while he got his readers out of Apple before the main meltdown, “I wish I had followed my gut.”  Dan then introduces this week’s guest – Shane Parrish, the founder, curator and wisdom seeker behind Farnam Street. What started as a personal, anonymous blog where Shane could explore what others have discovered about decision making, purposeful living, and how the world works, quickly blossomed into one of the fastest growing websites in the world.  With over a million page views, nearly 200,000 subscribers, consistently sold-out Re:Think workshops and over 3 million podcast downloads, Farnam Street has become the go-to resource that CEOs, athletes, professional coaches and entrepreneurs rely on to find signal in a world of noise.  From his idea to take Warren Buffett’s style of investing and apply it on a macro-level – snapping up cash-gushing small businesses and capital efficient “Mom and Pop” stores – to his revolutionary thinking on “Mental Models,” Shane is full of insights on how to change your investing results through changing your thinking. 

After a brutal December, Dan Ferris rings in the New Year and addresses the question every investor is wondering: Where will the stock market go in 2019? The best way to predict the future, he says, is to understand the present – and that starts with what he calls “the most expensive moment in the history of the stock market” which we saw just last fall.  It’s been costlier for investors than any equivalent moment in the Dot.com collapse or the 2008 crisis – and it’s the best indicator Dan’s seen of where stocks are right now. “If history rhymes… within two years, you see a big fat hairy bottom. Normal levels would be 60%.” “There’s a lot of downside left if history rhymes.”   Later on, they’re joined by Mark B. Spiegel. Mark is the Managing Member & Portfolio Manager of Stanphyl Capital Partners and is a New York-based equity investor.  Prior to founding Stanphyl in 2011, he spent six years as an investment banker financing public companies. Prior to becoming an investment banker Mark spent a year working for a microcap Nasdaq tech company, and he began his career with 17 years in the commercial real estate industry where he experienced firsthand the opportunities and challenges faced by a wide array of client companies.  Mark believes that all these experiences– banking public companies, working for a public company and securing real estate for a wide variety of companies– combine to provide the kind of “real world” experience that’s extremely useful for an investor.