Episode Archive

Today’s rant by Dan Ferris is about you – you and your investments. Hardly anyone will tell you this, he says, but investing is personal – it’s an extension of who you are. And before you buy one stock, or bond, or share of a mutual fund, there are questions you need to know the answers of concerning… you. Most people shouldn’t want anything at all to do with the stock market, because of their own beliefs and preferences. And big banks and Wall Street don’t want you to know investing is so personal – they want you to think there’s a one-size fits all formula to it. It’s total B.S. – and as Dan will show you, you can no more outsource investing your capital than you can outsource someone to digest your food. Of course, people like Dan can point you to helpful insights and “news you can use.” We’ve got a bit of that this week, as Dan breaks down the news of Tesla’s $20,000 deposits on its new semi truck, Apple’s game-changing streaming service, and Lyft’s looming $2.1 billion IPO.

On the heels of the 10-year anniversary of the March 2009 stock market nadir, Dan sums up how things looked when the S&P 500 bottomed out at 666 at the dark days of that crisis, how things look a decade later, and why investors should keep a two-word phrase at the top of their minds: “Cycles matter.” 

Last week Dan talked about the master investing skill of accumulating capital.  But what do you do with it once you have it? Here lies the big difference between being an investor and a speculator. And according to Dan Ferris, before you buy one more stock or bond, you really should understand how they are different. He provides a detailed definition of what investing really means, and how you can avoid being just a speculator. He’s later joined by this week’s podcast guest, Chris Mayer. Chris likes sharing investment wisdom through books as well. His first, Invest Like a Dealmaker: Secrets From a Former Banking Insider, covers time-tested essential principles of investing. His newest book, 100 Baggers: Stocks That Return 100-to-1 and How to Find Them, teaches readers all the key characteristics of companies that return $100 for every $1 invested.

The biggest news over the last week has undoubtedly been the release of Warren Buffett’s annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway investors, which contains some gems Dan is ready to break down for you. By now, as Buffett points out, his partner Charlie Munger is 95, making 88-year old Buffett the young one. And there’s one prospect Buffett mentions in his letter that “causes my heart and Charlie’s to beat faster.”

Extreme Value Editor Dan Ferris discusses the tweet now “burned into his brain.” He’s joined by New York Times bestselling author Diane Henriques, whose book about Bernie Madoff “The Wizard of Lies” became a HBO movie starring Robert DeNiro. She explains why the next Bernie Madoff will be impossible to spot.

With the market’s whipsaw turnaround from December continuing through this week, the question of where the market is headed for the next 10 months of 2019 is dominating most financial discussions. Everyone has an opinion – and Dan Ferris is ready to reveal why those opinions are often catastrophically wrong. From billionaire Paul Tudor Jones predicting markets could go “crazy” on the upside at the ed of 2018 after the midterm elections, to surveys of 22 of America’s most powerful banks and brokerages being wrong on market movements by an astonishing 14.6% each year.

A handful of billionaires have renewed their warnings of a global recession – with one legendary commodities trader even predicting something worse than the Great Depression. In this week where 20 tons of gold have mysteriously disappeared from Venezuela’s vaults, Tesla has another $920 million in debt payments due, and a value investor just dived into an iconic fast food business, Dan Ferris makes sense of it all.

With markets continuing to recover this week after an epic selloff that included the worst December since The Great Depression, Dan revisits his initial 2017 warning, when he first reported that a genuine stock market mania had arrived. 

Dan Ferris launches into this week’s episode dissecting the warning from billionaire investor Ray Dalio, who’s saying there’s significant risk of a recession in 2020 – not just in the U.S., but a global slowdown. While no one can tell the future, there is one grim statistic on Dan’s mind that doesn’t dispute this claim. He then introduces this week’s podcast guest, Christopher Irons.

He then introduces this week's podcast guest, Aaron Edelheit. Aaron is the CEO and Founder of Mindset Capital, a private investment firm. After being of their first investors, Aaron was also the Chief Strategy Officer of FLO Technologies and helped the company grow from a pre-revenue startup to raising $28 million and launching in over 500 Home Depot stores.

On a week where markets roared back, the most expensive tuna ever was sold for $3.1 million, and the government shutdown officially became the third longest in history – and still with no end in sight – Dan Ferris number crunches some more historic milestones. Because last week was Apple’s turn to suffer, Amazon is now the world’s largest company. Dan talks about how, once those companies both hit trillion-dollar valuations, something told him he was wrong. And while he got his readers out of Apple before the main meltdown, “I wish I had followed my gut.”

After a brutal December, Dan Ferris rings in the New Year and addresses the question every investor is wondering: Where will the stock market go in 2019? The best way to predict the future, he says, is to understand the present – and that starts with what he calls “the most expensive moment in the history of the stock market” which we saw just last fall.

On the one-year anniversary of the peak value in Bitcoin, Buck, Dan Ferris, and Stansberry’s top retirement expert Dr. David Eifrig break down the grim-seeming news facing investors this month, from the “worst December for markets since the Great Depression” all the way to oil’s slide and the sentencing of President Trump’s former top lawyer Michael Cohen. Having worked at Goldman Sachs for almost a decade, Doc gives his take on the bank’s 1MDB scandal, and why he has no doubt the bank knew what was going on in real time. Dan and Buck discuss Trump’s pressure on the Fed to table its rate hikes, and Doc explains why he doesn’t pay much attention to the Fed these days.

In a week of the debut of Elon Musk’s underground tunnel, a #MeToo outcry against “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” and a British currency crash in the wake of a delayed Brexit vote in Parliament, there’s a lot for Dan Ferris and Buck to unpack this week. Most significant for investors – and surely on a lot of minds – is JPMorgan’s warning that a 70% likelihood of a recession is looming. Dan explains why the projection is utterly irresponsible – and why, instead of predicting recession, value investors can prepare for one regardless.

In the wake of Tuesday’s market carnage, with almost all of the major indices losing 3% of their value, Dan sees a rough slog ahead for almost all U.S. stocks. By any reasonable metric, stocks are a bad deal – but a few diamonds exist in the rough. Of course, there are not just bad deals to be found, but also outright land mines for investors, as is the case with GE, whose rotten pension dilemma Dan breaks down this week for listeners. Later on, Dan and Buck are joined by Dr. David (Doc) Eifrig and Stansberry Senior Analyst Matt Weinschenk. Doc has a storied past working for years trading derivatives at Goldman Sachs before leaving Wall Street to become an eye doctor before finally joining Stansberry in 2008. Matt has spent over a decade as an investment analyst and six of those have been here with Doc.

In a week that included a one-day 257-point surge for the Dow, record Black Friday spending, and a legal challenge to Apple’s “monopoly” continuing its march to the Supreme Court, Buck once again brings on Extreme Value editor Dan Ferris to make sense of things. In the wake of Elon Musk’s own admission that Tesla “almost died this year,” Dan breaks down the latest numbers: as it produces 1,000 Model 3 sedans a week in Q3 and keeps bleeding cash, his position on Tesla “has never changed.”

As the selloff continues, a lot of familiar names are making history in the worst kind of way. Facebook is on track to post its longest losing streak ever, with its third straight month in the red. And while a recent New York Times report savaging its top management won’t help any, Dan Ferris notes that value investors still like the company – if they’re willing to wait 2-5 years. But Facebook is far from the only big name on the run.

This week’s continued market selloff had some high-profile casualties – and brings to mind a great Warren Buffett quote that, “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who was swimming naked.” One of the biggest casualties was beleaguered GE stock, down another 15% from just last week. Buck shares an amazing finding with Extreme Value editor Dan Ferris – turns out, if you’d bought GE in 1994 and held on, your shares would be worth the same amount of money today. Dan thinks the worst may be yet to come. In fact, he says the stock has a chance of going to zero. “I’ve never said that before.”

Meanwhile, with markets reacting to a split decision that invites a new era of gridlock, Dan Ferris gives the lay of the value investing land, starting with the moves of the greatest value investor of all time. “You can’t be a value investor and not talk about what Warren Buffett is doing.” Dan’s got a theory of why Warren Buffett has held on to a cash hoard of over $100 billion for five quarters now, and what his relatively meager $1 billion buyback of Berkshire stock really signals. They’re joined by this week’s special guest, Chris Cole.

With markets continuing their whipsaw movements, it’s hard to know where the dice will fall. But with the major indices up almost 2% yesterday, there are a lot of tea leaves to go over – and a lot of bargains still to be had. In a choppy week for markets, Extreme Value editor Dan Ferris joins us again to give his take on what this signals for stocks – and in a week where all sorts of quality companies are trading at discounts, where the biggest opportunities can be found.