Episodes

On this week's Stansberry Investor Hour, Dan and Corey welcome Frank Trotter to the show. Frank is the president of Battle Bank, which is looking to revolutionize the digital-banking industry.

Frank kicks off the show by sharing how he got his start in banking and how interest rates have changed over the decades due to various crises and bear markets. That leads to a discussion about the U.S.'s 10-year Treasury yield and why it has soared since the Federal Reserve cut rates. Frank also dives into EverBank, the direct-to-consumer online bank he co-founded in 1998 that amassed $28 billion in total assets...

We really looked out at the market and thought, "Well, people are not getting value. They're not getting service. They're being charged high fees. Maybe there's a slot for us to slide into." As it turned out... there was.

Next, Frank explains what the current regulatory environment is like and how EverBank survived the dot-com bust. He then goes in depth on Battle Bank, which is focusing on the national direct-to-consumer branchless market. Frank covers Battle Bank's conservative strategy for lending money, whether environmentalism and politics have had any impact on lending to natural resource companies, and the specific advantages Battle Bank has over larger banks...

We kind of like to give the money back to the clients and provide them with service by phone, chat, e-mail that's coming from people that know what the hell they're talking about. It's not a call center where you got somebody fresh out of college reading off a script. It's somebody who might've worked in Manhattan as a branch manager for 20 years and got tired of [the] one-hour-each-way commute.

Finally, Frank talks about crypto acceptance at Battle Bank, "eCash" being ahead of its time in the 1990s, and the larger limitations of bitcoin that will impede it from becoming a reserve currency. He also gives his thoughts on Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency and its lofty goal of cutting $2 trillion in federal spending. And he closes the episode out by urging listeners to think about the future and ask themselves some tough questions...

We spend all this time looking at portfolios. We spend all this time looking at individual stocks we might want to buy. What's going on in your debt life? Should you be paying that mortgage down or borrowing more?