Episode Archive

This week Dan clears up last episode’s remarks about his views on the bull market before turning immediately to this week’s podcast guest, Michael Covel. Michael is a five-time author whose financial background includes work at Solomon Brothers before an undercover group of investors caught his attention for their new way of doing things – and far superior profit-making abilities. Michael pulls back the veil on trend following in this episode, explaining how to know when to act on a possible trend, and why you can ignore almost all of the information about any company or commodity you’re deluged with to focus on five constant questions.

With no guest this week, Dan is free to look back on the first year of his predictions and observations since taking the helm of Stansberry Investor Hour roughly a year ago. From the ongoing bull market, still standing even after a few rough patches, to the rash of IPOs and continuing dominance of FAANG stocks, there’s a lot to unpack. Dan gets to Google’s eye-popping growth in its latest report, and Beyond Meat’s first-ever profit that, seemingly paradoxically, took a bite out of its share price – though the stock is down 22% since Dan recorded based on what Dan calls a far more significant Tuesday development for share price.

In a week with the latest drama with WeWork on full display, Dan breaks down the ultimatum it faces from SoftBank and its founder Adam Neumann’s $1.7 billion parachute, and also shares insights from some of the more insightful Vegas speakers from last month. He then gets to this week’s guest, Jason Goepfert. With the Dow dropping as much as 1,000 points last month, you won’t want to miss Jason’s thoughts on the edge that sentiment analysis can give investors – and how it can put both your and everyone else’s emotions to work for you.

We guarantee you'll learn plenty from this week's guest, Mark Dow.  Dan never fails to learn something valuable from reading Mark's website and Twitter posts.   Mark runs Dow Global Advisors and the @BehavioralMacro twitter feed and blog, where he shares his trade ideas and risk management techniques, along with macro commentary. He has more than 20 years of experience as a policy maker, investor, and trader—all of which focused on global macro and emerging markets.

Recording from Las Vegas for the annual Lifetime Stansberry Conference, Dan shares some of the insights he revealed to the most elite members of Stansberry Research, and a book recommendation that’s prompted his newest recommendation he just unveiled in Vegas. He then gets to the biggest bubble in history, which is giving rise to things like Austria’s 100-year bond unrolled last summer, and explains why this is, in fact, bigger than the tech or housing bubble or any other mania we’ve seen.

In this episode, Dan jumps straight into the interview with this week’s guest, David Levine. David is the Founder of Odin River and operates the popular @paranoidbull Twitter account. He has spent his career at top private equity and hedge fund institutions. David is an advisor and investor in numerous startups including Artivest, a successful Fin-Tech company with over 100 employees and ~$3B in AUM, which he helped to found. He was previously a key member of the investment teams at Paulson & Co. and Colony Capital. David’s background in philosophy has carried over to his investing approach, as has his own brand of risk analysis. Interestingly, he has this in common with his old professor Elizabeth Warren, who he used to have many chats about moral hazard and financial risk in our system – although as you’ll hear, this may be the only thing they have in common.

In this week’s episode, Joel Litman, CEO of Valens Research stops by the podcast to share how his firm uniquely cuts through Wall Street’s spin to tell if companies are lying. This is the guy Wall Street doesn't want you to know about. Extreme Value Editor Dan Ferris reveals how listeners can get into next month’s sold-out Stansberry Investment Conference in Las Vegas at a massive discount! Then Dan answers your questions from the mail bag. 

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.

We’ve covered mental models in previous episodes – the unique patterns of thought that open up opportunities – and reveal pitfalls – that the vast majority of more conventional minds don’t see, or even understand. Dan gets into a new mental model in this week’s episode, describing second-level thinking. “This one is very important for investors – it’s no coincidence that the first chapter of Howard Marx’s book is all about second-level thinking.”

What if we were in the midst of a gold rally, and no one was talking about it? Now that gold is up 7-8% over the last few months, Dan sheds light on why the uptick is so unreported, going largely unmentioned by mainstream media like The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. Dan thinks the answer lies in the aftermath of the Federal Reserve’s latest meeting, and the dovish interpretation that prevailed. Clearly, the Fed is now thinking about supporting asset prices, now that their stated objectives of reaching full employment have already been met. Of course, that has some inevitable consequences. “If you screw with the market this long, the market says, “Uncle, Uncle!” And you gotta have some gold.”