WeWork is in the news with preparations for its IPO, and Dan targets his weekly rant on the company’s mission you’ll never be able to deduce from its IPO filings. With its mission statements reading like mantras – “elevate the world’s consciousness, community company committed to maximum global impact,” Dan gets to the really damning statistic buried deep in the filing – “the bigger they get, the bigger their losses get. This thing ain’t working.” Dan then gets to the bubble in late-stage private financing, vulture capitalist Martin Shkreli’s latest antics, AT&T’s huge move, and the similarities between stocks today and stocks in 2018 right before the 20% plunge.

Dan’s weekly “rant” this episode my actually qualify as a rant – a 22-minute expose of a company about to go public that’s positioning itself as “the Facebook of fitness” even though it’s burning through cash at a rate like Netflix. Then again, there’s no denying the cult-like following this company has built – including a subscription service with a more than 95% renewal rate, which Dan acknowledges would be enough to get Stansberry management their own private island. “I’m just so flabbergasted by it all.” Dan then gets to the event some analysts are saying could add hundreds of billions of dollars in valuation to Amazon. “Of course this is gonna drive subscriptions, and people are gonna love it.”

In this week’s Investor Hour Podcast, Extreme Value Editor Dan Ferris discusses three different land mines for investors… Elon Musk, Beyond Meat’s latest bounce, and a looming reckoning in the bond market. Our special guest, Marty Fridson shares a dire warning about the next shoe to drop in the bond market.

On the heels of a new report warning GE is a bigger fraud than Enron, to the latest unjustifiable IPO of a flashy tech star, to the testing of autonomous vehicles, there’s a lot to unpack this week. Dan then gets to this week’s special guest, John Doody. John Doody brings a unique perspective to gold stock analysis. With a BA in Economics from Columbia, an MBA in Finance from Boston University, where he also did his PhD-Economics course work, he became interested in gold due to an innate distrust of politicians and concern over their habit of debasing the currency via inflationary economic policies. 

In a week of schizophrenic market behavior – a Monday morning rally followed by an intense midweek selloff – a lot of people are understandably rattled. With talk of a recession becoming even more pronounced thanks to inverted yield curve, Dan gets straight to some historical perspective. Meanwhile, it’s impossible to miss the headlines and chatter about negative interest rates – including the debut of the world’s first negative interest rate mortgage – paying borrowers to take out a loan – reported in The Guardian. Launched by Denmark’s third-largest bank, this could be paving the way for an eventual global phenomenon.

Obviously you’re wondering what’s next after this week’s big market dip. And while Dan never pretends he knows for sure what’s coming, he is ready to give listeners some historical perspective. When markets lose 2.9% in a day, people are understandably jittery. But Dan’s research shows the markets have lost more than 2.5% in a single day 287 times since 1990. You’ll be comforted to know what happened after each and every one of those crashes.

It’s summertime, so Dan starts his weekly rant with something Americans should talk about once each summer – baseball, and in particular the surprising reason behind a spike in grand slams starting in 2015. In a week that includes a rash of insider selling at Beyond Meat, the mysterious disappearance of the owner of the largest coffee chain in India, to Madoff’s plea for a presidential pardon from Trump, to Forever 21’s strange shipment of Atkins Diet Bars with Plus-Sized orders – “one of the epic retail failures of my lifetime!” – there’s a lot to unpack before this week’s podcast guest.

Some familiar names are making big moves this week, as Dan discusses Microsoft’s latest plunge into AI, Alibaba’s declaration of intent to become the go-to online marketplace for U.S. B2B activity, and even shares the best – and free – source to get the sharpest analysis on Tesla he’s ever seen. Dan then gets to this week’s podcast guest, Michael Mauboussin, the Director of Research at Blue Mountain Capital Management.

In a week where markets hit new all-time highs, Dan gets to the question everyone asks with each new record. “You all know where I’m gonna come down on this.” With this high-water mark, it’s a good time to reflect on the principles of investing, from risk management, to value, to growth. Dan gets into the weeds on the literature of investor behavior – and the findings by DALBAR on individual investing performance, which while never changing year after year, are always shocking.

Dan’s long kept a close eye on mining companies for the big returns a select few of them can offer. Not for nothing is the little-known miner he’s publicly staked his reputation on up 132% and counting, for example. In fact, the top-performing Stansberry recommendation in our firm’s history, Seabridge Gold, returned 995% at one point. But the sector is fraught with risk. Between precious metal price fluctuations, geopolitical instability, and environmental challenges, there’s a lot that can go wrong.