NEW PODCAST WITH CHRIS AND BRAD

We’ve got a new podcast to share with you this week. Chris MacIntosh and our head trader, Brad McFadden sat down with Danny over at CapitalCosm.

• On the knife’s edge: we’re in the middle of a stagflationary environment that looks very dangerous (and very few investors are actually positioning for it). Historically, this almost always coincided with wars.
• What’s going on with gold?
• The brilliance of George Soros and his “find a narrative that’s wrong and bet against it” philosophy.
• Why energy is the bedrock of inflation
• How the “green” mania opened up the door to a wide range of asymmetric setups. Getting gassy: why every energy investor should be keeping an eye on the alarming trends in US shale
• The convergence of multiple decades-long or even centuries-long cycles that’s happening right now and how it affects macro investing.
• What investing in cheap assets really means (and why it has little to do with discounted cash flows, etc.).

You can listen to the entire conversation on Youtube here.

  AND THE WORLD’S #1 PERFORMING STOCK MARKET IS…

Any guesses as to what the world’s top performing stock market so far this year might be? Hint: it’s not the tech heavy Nasdaq.

Yep, it’s Argentina. As it turns out, Argentinian stocks have thus far clobbered both the S&P 500 (which these days is really a proxy for the Magnificent 7) as well as the Nasdaq by more than 2x.

We touched on Argentina in the last missive, so won’t be rehashing the fundamentals and the political and economic sea-change under Javier Milei that’s fueling a lot of this growth. Nevertheless, it’s a textbook example of what can happen when things (at least in the eyes of investors) go from completely “phac’d up” to less so.

One other thing worth pointing out is that despite this impressive performance so far, Argentinian stocks are still cheap as chips. As a quick comparison, here’s how they stack up against the S&P 500.

We are actually on the ground in Argentina right now, looking at investing opportunities — both publicly listed and private. We’ll have more to share in the future, so stay tuned.

One thing we can comfortably declare — after a sumptuous asado dinner last night — is that this is probably the worst place on Earth to be a vegan.

  THE TIDE IS TURNING

The following chart caught our attention (h/t @VladBastion):

We often wondered if the whole “net zero” push was a byproduct of low interest rates. While correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation, there does seem to be some truth to that. The above chart shows two very clear trends:

1. The excitement hype around clean energy is gone.

In just a few years now, we essentially went from this…

To this…

More broadly, Morningstar reports that 349 ESG funds have closed or merged across the EU and US this year, 102 in the third quarter alone so far.

And here’s the second takeaway from the above chart…

2. Investors are waking up to the reality that nuclear energy isn’t going away.

And not only that, for the first ever, the amount of money invested in nuclear/uranium funds now exceeds that of clean energy funds.

Somewhat ironically, we now also have Mag 7 companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft directly involved with nuclear. We have to admit we never saw it coming, but being that uranium is one of the core themes in Insider, we’ll take it.

  THE POWER OF PATIENCE

Some timeless wisdom from Jesse Livermore (h/t @marketplunger1):

Today — almost 100 years later — this is more true than ever. It appears that patience is a declining skill these days, at least from an investing perspective.

We shared this chart in the Insider Newsletter a few weeks ago, and it perfectly demonstrates out point — the average holding period in the stock market shrunk from 8.3 years in the 1960’s to just 7 months today.

Now, in all fairness, it is all very well saying you are more patient than others (i.e., have a longer time frame), but when the market comes for you, sitting on your hands and doing nothing indeed becomes much harder.

  WEEKLY HUMOUR

And lastly, a brief commercial message from our Big Pharma sponsors.

Have a great start to the new week!