🎙️ NEW PODCAST WITH CHRIS MACINTOSH

Chris recently joined Christian White on the Discourse with Christian show. This one was a doozy — big ideas, some unexpected tangents, and plenty of “hmm… that’s actually a great point” moments if we dare say so ourselves.

Here’s just a few of the topics Christian and Chris covered:

• The collision of cycles that explains all the chaos we’re witnessing — from Fed noise to global conflicts — and why most investors are missing the bigger picture.
• Why Brussels’ pointy shoes believe war is Europe’s best option (as you can imagine, it has nothing to do with what’s best for Europeans).
• Asymmetrical warfare gets real: how $200 drones are single-handedly disrupting billions in global trade flows (and why this changes everything about modern conflict).
• Times of disruption… times of opportunity: the asset classes that historically thrive during chaos are now trading at their cheapest levels in decades (or in some cases, the cheapest they’ve ever been)
• Why “net zero” defies centuries of energy history. Despite what the greenies might want us to believe, the reality is that new energy sources have never replaced existing ones… they just get stacked on top (and what this means for investors’ portfolios).
• The Argentinian opportunity hiding in plain sight: despite all the recent positive developments in the “land of silver,” you still have an entire stock market worth just $3 billion (for comparison, all the stocks in Argentina are about 0.07% of Nvidia’s market cap)… and how it compares to the Magnificent 7 in terms of actual risk.
• The four ways governments “solve” sovereign debt problems.
• Chris’ contrarian take on Nvidia and Meta over the next 12 months… and what the crowd might be missing.
• The gates are quietly closing: how Australia and the UK are implementing capital controls without calling them capital controls (and why this matters more than you think).
• The perfect storm brewing in gold mining stocks… and why today’s setup is different from what we’ve seen before.
• Chris’ unfiltered thoughts on second passports. When they make sense, when they don’t, and what most people get wrong about the whole process.
• Plot twist: why the net-zero movement has been one of the greatest things ever to happen to shipping investors (oh, the irony).
• How Trump’s tariffs are essentially a roadmap to Chapter 11… and what this tells us about trade wars in general.
• The George Soros lesson that opened Chris’s eyes to oil and gas and mining opportunities (and why timing is everything in resource investing).
• Numbers vs. narratives: it might seem to work for a moment, but over the long-run, investing through compelling stories instead of cold, hard data is a recipe for portfolio disaster.

But don’t just take our word for it. Tune into the full conversation on Youtube here.

🧑‍🎓 DISPATCHES FROM THE IVORY TOWER

The following comment from a Harvard professor and former IMF economist is a perfect example of why the public’s faith in so‑called “experts” is in the gutters.

Now, let’s translate that word salad into plain English…

Despite Bitcoin climbing from $100 to over $110,000 in the past decade, it wasn’t him who was wrong about it. Nope, it’s the 100 million people who own Bitcoin that are just too blind to recognize the blatant “scam.”

This, ladies and gents, is what passes for “analysis” in ivory tower circles: hedged excuses, obscure jargon, and a last‑minute pitch for a new book.

Meanwhile, ordinary investors who actually put skin in the game (most of them without fancy PhDs or IMF résumés) were the ones who captured one of the greatest wealth‑creating runs in financial history.

Here’s the bigger point for us at Capitalist Exploits: we don’t have to buy into every hype cycle, nor do we need to apologize for sitting out certain trades. But we never shy away from calling things as they are.

Bitcoin isn’t perfect. It’s volatile, it’s messy, and it attracts plenty of dubious characters you probably wouldn’t want at your dinner table.

But at the same time, it’s also one of the few assets that has held its own against the tidal wave of monetary and fiscal lunacy that’s defined the past decade.

That credibility gap — between how “experts” talk about Bitcoin and how it has actually performed— is exactly why we stay curious and keep an open mind.

We might no longer hold Bitcoin in our Insider portfolio currently. But we’ve long argued it makes sense to own some in cold storage (remember: not your keys, not your crypto).

🥦 WHEN THE PLANT-BASED SIZZLE FADES

We flagged Beyond Meat a while back as a textbook example of not what to buy, but what NOT to buy.

You probably remember all the hype around it…

Back in 2019, the stock IPO’d at $80 and skyrocketed to $230 in just a few weeks. It had all the ingredients of a “hot stock” story: big promises, cultural tailwinds, and breathless commentary about how they were “saving the planet.”

(We never quite figured out how selling pea‑protein burgers to the blue-haired crowd was going to save the planet, but hey… it made for a great narrative.)

Fast forward to today…

Beyond Meat just announced its filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy…

But what’s more curious is that the hype around the broader plant‑based “revolution” seems to be unraveling too. We note that Eleven Madison Park — the Michelin three‑star restaurant that made global headlines for going all‑in on vegan fine dining during COVID — is now tip-toeing back to serving meat.

The bigger lesson? This had little to do with fake patties or saving the planet.

The plant‑based craze was, in hindsight, another zero‑interest rate phenomenon. It thrived when money was free, markets rewarded “story stocks,” and investors were hungry (pun intended) for the next moonshot idea (sprinkled with a generous dash of ESG shullbit).

Now that the world has shifted, the fad is deflating. And like so many others from that era, it’s ending. Not with a bang, but with a bankruptcy filing.

🤷‍♂️ EMERGING MARKETS: 30 YEARS LATER…

Moving on from the “what not to buy” bucket… let’s talk about what we have actually been buying in Insider.

Take a look at the chart below (h/t @ekwufinance)…

Relative to US stocks, emerging market equities are now the cheapest they’ve been in a looong time — since the late 1990s. That’s nearly three decades of history… and we’re back to where we started.

Now, try to remember the investor enthusiasm for emerging markets back in the late 1990s… oh right, there wasn’t any.

Between the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, the Russian default and LTCM implosion in 1998, and Argentina’s default in 2001, emerging markets stocks were considered toxic waste. No one wanted to touch them with a 40-foot barge pole.

But what happened next? From 2001 through 2011, emerging markets absolutely smoked developed‑market equities, outperforming by roughly 250% (if memory serves us right, it was around that time when Wall Street minted the BRICS acronym and sold it as the next big thing).

Fast forward to today…

Here we are in 2025 and emerging markets are once again priced like pariahs. Except this time there hasn’t been a string of defaults, crises, or panics. In other words, emerging markets haven’t “done anything wrong.”

They’re simply out of favour, and for bargain hunters like us, that’s exactly where opportunity starts.

👕 SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO CALL IT

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Have a great week!