Episode Archive

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.”

In a week defined by Facebook’s announcement of its cryptocurrency Libra – which, with the company’s 2.5 billion users, may be the most powerful endorsement of cryptocurrencies to date – as well as sideshows like the deletion of Elon Musk’s always-dangerous Twitter handle, there’s a lot for Dan Ferris to unpack. Then there are the serious warning signs – including the aftermath of the Fed’s decision announced this week to hold off on raising interest rates. Dan reads the tea leaves to reveal what the Fed thinks chances of recession looming really are.

In this week’s episode, Extreme Value Editor Dan Ferris shares the two key concepts investors need to master to value a business, and why the most famous metric is, to him, totally meaningless. We also chat about Beyond Meat’s spectacular rise, and possible fall… and discuss a fear-mongering article from Bloomberg about the “fear gauge.” Fielder Capital Group CEO Frank Byrd stops by to share his fascinating story inspired by Warren Buffett.

Dan has long warned about the dangerous odds of short-term trading – yet in recognition of the fact that so many readers are still determined to do it, he offers some essential principles to anyone engaging in short-term trading – if they must. The important, No. 1 principle is counter-intuitive, and we expect some of you to argue – but hear Dan out about how the most important thing is not how much you make, or even if you make any money at all. And amid all the risk management tips out there, there’s one Dan reveals as the very best he’s ever heard – “the one that separates the heroes from the zeroes.”

Dan leads off with a shorter Rant segment this week, about how hard it is to do short-term trading because of all the big traders with billions of dollars that you’re competing against in the market. He says it’s as hard as trying to open an online retailer to compete against  Investors can profit from actively investing their own money, but they need to be more long-term oriented.  Dan also shares the “Coffee Can” story written by Robert Kirby back in 1984.  It’s all about how an investor followed his adviser’s buy recommendations, but not his sell advice… and wound up making a huge amount more money as a result of holding good companies for the long term.  In our What’s New segment this week, game software provider Zynga is selling its San Francisco headquarters and making $600 million—a ton more money than it’s made on its real business. Then Dan runs through a few “macro” bits in the news, suggesting that volatility is likely to increase over the next three years. Dan shares some personal research he did on the VIX, which he believes indicates that, the farther the VIX gets below 15, the more it resembles a “coiling spring,” set to soar. 

Dan opens up this week with an essential mental model all investors must master.  It’s a simple way to figure out where you’re most likely to succeed, in the stock market and in life.  Great financial minds like Warren Buffett, Andrew Carnegie and Ben Horowitz of Andreesen Horowitz have used this idea to achieve stunning success and enormous wealth.  In What’s New this week, you’ll see why the recently IPO’d Chinese company, Luckin Coffee, might not give Starbucks as much trouble as investors think.  We’ll also contemplate the recently reported “deaths” of both inflation and value investing.  We’ll finish up with a look at Whitney Tilson’s Tesla prediction… which is looking pretty good these days!

You’ve probably heard Warren Buffett say, “Be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy.”  You probably never stepped back and realized that’s a model of how emotions affect the stock market.  In this week’s opening “Rant” segment, Dan shares with you his model of the basic emotional makeup of the stock market. It’s different than the Buffett model. Dan pulls evidence in from some interesting sources he’s been looking at recently, from physicist/quant investor Emanuel Derman and mathematician/author Steven Strogatz. 

It seems like a distant memory with May’s headwinds for markets, but technically the “Everything Rally” is back this year, with 90% of 70 financial classes showing gains through this spring. Of course, the market action of this week, leading up to the S&P 500’s nearly 1% on Thursday morning, calls the entire rally into question. Luckily, there’s a kind of insurance available for investors against this kind of market movement – and it actually gets cheaper when it’s needed most, like property insurance premiums falling right before a Category 5 hurricane hits. In this episode, Dan explains how he used to double his money last week after a bet that May would be a horrible month for markets paid off.