Episodes

Broadcasting from the Investor Hour Studios and all around the world, you're listening to the Stansberry Investor Hour. [Music Plays] Tune in each Thursday on iTunes, Google Play, and everywhere you find podcasts for the latest episodes of the Stansberry Investor Hour. Sign up for the free show archive at investorhour.com. Here's your host, Dan Ferris.

Dan Ferris:                 Hello and welcome to the Stansberry Investor Hour. I'm your host, Dan Ferris. I'm also the editor of Extreme Value published by Stansberry Research. Today, we'll talk with Enrique Abeyta. Man, I love Enrique. He was on Wall Street for more than 20 years, raised $2 billion in assets, and he's got great stories. He's starting a brand-new research product totally focused on special purpose acquisition companies, SPACs. Yeah, we'll talk about SPACs and other stuff Enrique is into these days, can't wait. This week in the mailbag, there are lots of comments about forest fires and climate change. That's always fun. Plus, questions about closed-end funds and options trading.

In my opening rant this week, I'll just take a look at what's happening in the world and talk about what's good, what's a little crazy, and what's downright troubling. That and more right now on the Stansberry Investor Hour. A couple weeks ago, I talked about the passing of my mom and I talked about this upheaval in your life can be a catalyst for positive change, and that it's kind of my job to do that. And I'll tell you something, my work routine since that event has been screwed. I've just been – I just can't go back to whatever I was doing. It's just – I don't know. Even though I feel like I'm dealing with my grief okay, it's just everything's different. And I think that's going to be reflected in the show from now on because I'm just more interested in kind of looking at what's happening in the world, looking at the news, and figuring out if it's good, bad, indifferent, profitable, unprofitable, etcetera.

So I think from now on, I'm always going to try to find some good news. In these rants, I find a lot of stuff that I don't like. Let's find some good news. And here's some good news that I don't know if anybody's going to make any money off of it, but it is really cool. When it happens, it will be one of the great innovations in history. There's an article in the New York Times and it says – the headline is "Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor Is 'Very Likely to Work,' Studies Suggest." And they give a couple examples of projects that are ongoing right now of people building nuclear fusion reactors.

So the nuclear reactors we have right now are fission reactors, and you've got to have uranium, and that creates a whole thing in the uranium market. You must have uranium, that's the one thing we know how to do in a fission reactor. And the fuel is kind of expensive, and it requires a lot of mining. Whereas the fuel for these fusion reactors is usually isotopes of hydrogen. So it's far more plentiful than uranium, and fusion would generate less radioactivity, less waste, and it's just less dangerous overall... which is pretty cool. So there have been significant hurdles to this. People talked about it as kind of a pipe dream many years ago – "Oh, it'll never happen." But it's starting to happen. So there's this reactor called SPARC. It's being developed by researchers at MIT, plus this spinoff company – like an MIT spinoff company of which there are many – called Commonwealth Fusion Systems. And the project is supposed to start next spring and take three or four years, which is a really, really short timetable.

There's been another project in Southern France called ITER, International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. It's been under construction since 2013, and it's actually not designed to actually generate electricity, but it was expected to produce a fusion reaction by 2035. And I think they've poured like billions of dollars into that, and they've raised I think $200 million for this SPARC project, and they have a little picture – a little artist's rendering – of what the reaction chamber looked like. And they show a little model of a human standing next to it, and it's like – I don't know – it makes the reaction chamber look like it's about 20 feet tall and 30 feet wide, whereas the other thing is like the size of a soccer field. Literally, they said SPARC will be far smaller than the ITER, about the size of a tennis court compared with a soccer field.

So that international project is estimated to cost about $22 billion. So this could be really cool. If we can generate electricity with this hyperabundant fuel – I mean there's no shortage of hydrogen in the world – that's really cool, and it makes an interesting point. If you read the work of an economist named Julian Simon, he's always making this point about energy saying there may be a finite supply of crude oil on planet Earth. There's probably a finite supply, although we don't know that it isn't constantly being generated deep in the bowels of the Earth. But let's just say it's not, let's say that's unlikely and there's a finite supply. So people are always predicting the end of the world.

We're going to run out of crude oil, then what are we going to do? We've got to do something. And Simon's whole point was always that look, it's not the supply of the resource you're using, it's the technology. The technology at any given moment defines what the resource is that you need. And if the resource changes from crude oil, which we're digging way the hell down in the ground and using all this high-pressure fracking technology and stuff, that's a massively expensive, capital-intensive thing. And of course, building a fusion reactor probably would be a capital-intensive thing. But then you build it, and I'm guessing that if you do it right, it'll produce electricity for at least decades if not a century or more. And the fuel becomes, not crude oil dug out of the ground for lots of capital investment, but hydrogen which you don't have to dig out of the ground.

How they produce the hydrogen necessary, I'm sure there's a lot more to this than a headline in the New York Times. But to me, it's a really cool example of this constant innovation that seems to trump so much that doesn't work in human society. So much of the government meddling and downright foolishness, and we pollute the Earth, and we treat each other badly, and yet there are these ongoing innovations that make life better for all of us. All right, moving along – that's my good news this week. I think that's just about all the good news I have. The rest of it's all like mediocre or really bad.

So the next thing that caught my attention was at iflscience.com. There was an article with a video about a meteoroid – they called it a meteoroid like a meteor – that bounced off the Earth's atmosphere, and they have a video of it. So apparently this was early morning hours of September 22, so recently, above Northern Germany and the Netherlands, I think, where they took this video. And so this is called an Earth grazer. And it's a meteor that has to approach the atmosphere at a very low angle or else it could penetrate and go into the atmosphere. But it bounces off and then flies away. And that sounds like, "Oh okay, well that's cool, I wish I saw it." But then, if you read the whole article, apparently there was an event back in 1908 and the point of it was the Earth grazers aren't completely harmless. On June 30, 1908, an Earth grazer generated a massive explosion that flattened 830 square miles of Siberian forest with tremors felt as far away as the United Kingdom and the United States.

It is believed to have released 30 megatons of energy, enough to level a city. And they think it's a shockwave that was created by an Earth grazer that bounced off the atmosphere and created this huge shockwave. So to me, that's an example of a potential – like a second-order effect. And too often, investors base their decisions on first-order effects, right? And the first-order effect here would be, "Oh, Earth grazers. Oh, that's not going to hurt us. Hey, that's pretty cool." The second-order effect is don't be in the Siberian forest when one of these suckers generates this shockwave because you will get flattened. You know, 30 megatons is enough to level a city. And I think a lot of that type of thing is going on in financial markets that people don't understand. And I think that's how, for example, the COVID response didn't need to crash the market 34% in about a month, but it did. And the idea that you can sort of buy every dip, I guess it's good as far as it goes as long as you really are religious, and even when the dip is 60%, you're still buying and can hang on for the long term. But look, there's potential in the stock market for huge, quick, nasty consequences.

You must always be aware of them. It's one of the reasons why I stress true diversification. Believe me, if we get some huge, nasty one week 30% or 40% drawdown, that can happen. People think it can't, but it really can. It may be rare, but let me tell you something, when it happens, you won't care how rare it is. You will just be gasping for oxygen and by oxygen of course, I mean cash. Everyone will be heading for the exits and wanting to raise cash. And if you already have a big slug of it, you will be much, much better off. So just an example of second-order effects, something to keep in mind. This is how nature behaves, it's how markets behave, right?

Alright, let's talk about value stocks a little bit. Actually, before I do that, I want to talk about gold. I meant to talk about gold real quick. Gold started out around a little over $1,500 in the beginning of the year. It got up as high as $2,067, almost $2,100, and it's around $1,800 as I'm speaking to you. Gold will fluctuate, it will be up and down. But what I want to talk about today is why you're holding it because I've been thinking about this a lot over the years. And I used to think it was all about inflation, but it's not. It's not really about movements in consumer prices and movements in asset prices even, it's not. It's about systemic risk and maybe the tail risk – the highly unlikely but extreme event called hyperinflation, or just a really nasty, regular inflation... maybe like we had in the '70s. It's about those kinds of nasty outcomes. And for 5,000 years – sometimes I say 6,000 years if you go back to the time when they were using electrum, the naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver – for thousands of years, people have used gold as a store of value, and it's worked. And I think today, it's really more about systemic risk and the risk of serious currency debasement than anything else, rather than movements in consumer prices and asset prices. It's insurance, and I think you need to keep holding it even though it's down from its all-time highs. It can be cut in half. A gold bull market can have 50% drawdowns in it, and I think you just keep holding. Just wanted to say that real quick.

One more thing to talk about this week. Look, I'm the value guy. I'm always telling you why you need to buy value, but I realize I do need to say something about the other side of this. And the other side of it, well, there's a really good article on Barron's – or at least it's good in that it makes the point – on September 21, by Evie Liu and Barron's. And the headline was "Value Stocks' Drop Suggests a Less Optimistic View on the U.S. Economic Recovery." We commented on that last week as well, and it's true. I think that value is very much a reversion to the mean strategy that assumes a certain level of economic recovery in a case like where we are right now or just ongoing economic prosperity, rising GDP, if nothing else. And the kind of companies that you wind up buying if you're buying deep value, they're not necessarily businesses you want to hold on to for a long time. And as the economy struggles, they can really struggle.

That's what we've emphasized in my newsletter, Extreme Value, and all over Stansberry. You'll hear our guy, Austin Root, talking about this. He manages several portfolios for us. We've emphasized high-quality businesses, not traditional value and extreme value – and high-quality businesses throughout Stansberry – for this very reason because these are the ones that are going to – some of them thrive in bad times. And they all are highly likely to recover from bad times and wind up being a great long-term holding that if you buy them in bad times, you get a good price and you get even higher returns out of them over the long term. So I have to be the guy – if I'm going to be the guy who says, "This could be at time to buy value," I also have to be the guy that says, "You know, it's not a guarantee."

Just because value has underperformed for so long and is cheaper relative to growth stocks – high-growth tech stocks and other high-growth stocks – it doesn't mean that this is the moment to buy it. Or rather, I should say it may mean that, but it doesn't mean that the performance will be there this week, or this month, or this year, or even next year. It's a long-term proposition. These are long cycles when we compare these value and growth metrics. And I just felt like I needed to be the guy to kind of admit this if I'm going to be the guy that says, man, I love value, right? So I will continue saying I love value. I will continue saying value has underperformed for way too long and it's time to start allocating there. But I don't think you dump all your money into a deep value fund tomorrow or today, as you're hearing in my voice, and then walk away and expect great performance for this week, this month, this year. It's a long-term thing, it's a transition, and I suspect deep value will be a much better deal after we get some kind of a big bear market or a big break in the market. All right? Gee, that wasn't as hard to say as I thought it would be, all right? [Laughs]

Okay, I hope you found these ideas valuable. I'm trying to kind of cover the waterfront a little bit more these days. Write in, [email protected]. Always let me know what you're thinking. Alright, let's do this thing, man. Let's talk with Enrique Abeyta, let's do it right now. [Music Plays]

Hey guys, I want to talk to you about my colleague Dave Lashmet for a minute. He is absolutely one of the best biotech stock pickers on the planet in my opinion. Earlier this year, he recommended Inovio Pharmaceuticals and it went up 1,100% in four months. Since 2015, he's had 19 triple-digit winners, like double or more in his portfolio. I can tell you; I've not had 19 triple-digit winners in the past five years. It's pretty phenomenal, especially in a risky area like biotech. And right now, he's working on this thing.

He's found this tiny little drug company and they've discovered this huge break through. And he thinks 1,100% is great in four months, but he thinks this thing is going to be a lot bigger – like 20 times, huge. And he calls it his "Pick of the Decade" because he thinks they could have the power to cure a disease that affects millions of Americans, and no, I'm not talking about COVID-19. This is much bigger than COVID-19. It leads to 10 times more deaths than COVID-19 every year. And Dave says, seven out of 10 Americans could wind up being prescribed this new drug that this tiny little company is making. He says it'll change the world. It'll solve a global crisis if it works out. In particular, he says it's been really bad in the United States over the past three decades. But these things don't stay secret forever, and this is a little tiny company going up against some big pharma companies.

But their drug trial results are doing better and better, and it looks like they're going to hit the market before the big companies. So Dave made this little video where he explains how this little company that's a fraction of the size of these giant companies made a huge discovery, and he thinks it could be a 20-bagger. If you want to see the video, go to www.investorhourtech.com. Dave gives you all the details. Again, that's www.investorhourtech.com. [Music Plays]

Looking forward to this one. I love talking to Enrique Abeyta. Enrique Abeyta is the editor of the brand-new Empire SPAC Investor Newsletter. We'll talk about that. Following his graduation from Wharton, Abeyta spent 20-plus years on Wall Street where he founded and served as managing partner of two long-short hedge funds. Throughout those 20-plus years, Abeyta raised more than $2 billion in assets. His impressive track record included strongly outperforming the S&P 500 Index over a decade-long period, including generating positive returns during the bear markets that followed the dot-com bubble and the global financial crisis.

Most recently, Abeyta served as co-founder and CEO of digital media and e-commerce company Project M Group, founded in 2017. The company acquires digital media properties including Revolver Magazine, the biggest hard rock and metal magazine in North America with more than 1 million subscribers. Wow, who knew? In addition to his interest in digital media, finance, heavy metal, and tattoos, Abeyta is an avid long-distance runner. He has run seven marathons and plans to complete the sixth World Majors with Berlin in 2020. He currently lives in Arizona with his wife and two children. That's a lot of stuff. Welcome to the program, Enrique.

Enrique Abeyta:          Thank you, it's good to catch up. It's been a little bit. The last time we talked was right on the verge of the craziest world ever. But hope you've been safe and well.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, and you too. It has been crazy. So I do actually – before we get into finance and the SPAC investor and stuff – I do want to talk a little bit about Project M Group and Revolver Magazine. The fact that this thing has 1 million subscribers blows me away. It must be one of the biggest publications of any kind.

Enrique Abeyta:          Well, so that's 1 million digital users. And it's funny, the company has actually grown a lot even in the last nine months since we last spoke. So today, we own the No. 1 brand in hard rock, heavy metal revolver. We actually own the No. 1 brand in tattooing, something called Ink. And we own something that is the No. 1 brand in music comedy, sort of the "Onion" for rock and metal. But to give you an example, at the tattoo brand we have, we actually have over 50 million followers on social. So these are pretty big markets. People don't think about it, and digital allows you to go worldwide. So yeah, it's a fun business.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, I love finding that. I love finding this huge market and this really cool business that you just never would have thought of. To me, you finding Revolver and having this Project M, it's an example of what you can do and what is out there if you just keep looking. It's great.

Enrique Abeyta:          Well, we started the business – it was started by myself and a bunch of heavy metal and tattoo fans. But it's a really incredible time for private businesses and to create new businesses because of what's happened in social media, what's happened in e-commerce, etcetera. I think very quietly under the waves of the ocean, we are seeing an entrepreneurial revolution the likes of nothing we've ever seen. I mean, as big as what happened in the '90s. It's just spread. Now it's empowered by these large platforms, but it's empowering smaller businesses like ourself. But we'll talk about private markets in a bit. But that's what gets us really excited in addition to the rock metal and tattoos.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, very cool. I completely agree that five or 10 years from now, people are going to be looking back on the COVID-19 crisis as the start of all kinds of good things, innovations in medicine and business and other places I can't even fathom. So let's get into this discussion about SPACs and private markets because – my knee jerk, Enrique, right now is when people say SPACs. I go, oh jeez, that's a mania, that's going to blow up. There's going to be a lot of bad deals. That's my knee jerk. I know the reality is a guy like you can dig in and find a lot of good deals probably. What attracts you to SPACs? Why get involved in this? And why create a whole newsletter for SPACs?

Enrique Abeyta:          Yeah, look, it's a fascinating spot. I've been involved in them for over 25 years. I would characterize SPACs generously as a Wall Street backwater historically. And I always like to look at areas that were sort of off the radar screen. My partner, Whitney, actually put together a SPAC fund back during the financial crisis. I think he may have had literally the first SPAC fund or one of the very first that was ever created. What's so interesting about it is that when I started on Wall Street in the '90s, there were a bunch of mid-tier investment banks – Montgomery Securities, Hambrecht & Quist, Roberts & Stevens, Alex. Brown Baltimore – and those companies did a great job of taking a lot of small and mid-size entrepreneurial companies public. Sort of think of $500 million, $1 billion, $2 billion, $3 billion type IPOs. And back in the '80s and '90s, that was a spectacular way to make a ton of money and find some really great ideas.

Now let me be clear, most IPOs stink historically. But if you're looking for really high growth, I mean things that go up five- or 10-fold, you're a lot more likely to find that in the IPO market than you are buying a company that's been publicly traded for 20-some years. And then, what's happened through time with the consolidation in financial services, all those banks are gone, you know, DLJ, you name it. Every single one of them is gone. And now, the IPO market... it really just consists of four or five banks –  JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs. And those guys, they're not interested in anything less than like a $10 billion IPO. In the meantime, though – and this gets back to what I was saying about the private markets – there's still been an explosion in entrepreneurship.

There's been an explosion in private equity, a lot of investment, and some of that private equity goes into these mega companies like the Ubers, and the WeWorks, and things like that. But there's a ton of investments being made in really high-quality growth names taking advantage of technology and also sort of other big secular themes, and they haven't really had a place to go. Goldman's not going to do a $400 million IPO. Direct listings – which is something that's picking up a little steam – there were a couple direct listings today or this week. So what you have is you have a really large group of high-growth companies that are very different than '99. These are companies with revenues. These are companies with earnings. These are companies that have been around for three, four, five years, and they didn't have a place to go.

So what's happened with the SPAC market as it's evolved – and there were a lot of huge regulatory changes in the past 15 years – it's kind of filled in the gap. So the funny thing is, I don't like SPACs as an asset class. I look at SPACs as an IPO mechanism. And what it's enabling people to do is, for decades, the best returns that have been out there have been of the private market. I was saying this. One of the reasons I started a private digital e-commerce company was to get on those kinds of returns. But that was really only open to venture capitalists and the big hedge funds and all that. And the SPACs are kind of opening up a window where investors can get in on these great ideas that are, again, real companies. I'm not going to say all of them, but a lot of them... and that's what we're here for. And it's just a really unique opportunity. I think there could be literally hundreds – I don't know if there are thousands – but hundreds of opportunities that have been allowed to grow across the last few years that they're going to the SPAC market now.

And the last things I'll say – what gets me most excited about that – there's a core opportunity... there's not a lot of coverage. At most banks, there are no SPAC analysts. Every SPAC is doing something different. A lot of times, SPACs will take public companies that don't have comparables. There are all these weird windows when they do the deal, and there's some information out there. That's where really good experienced analysts can really figure out a kind of value. And again, I think it's a great opportunity for us and our readers.

Dan Ferris:                 That sounds very cool. I'm going to push back a little bit because I saw a chart in the Financial Times recently that showed a lot of these special purpose acquisition companies, SPACs, trading below their $10 SPAC IPO price after the deal. So it seemed like the point was most of the deals aren't that great, but some of them are phenomenal.

Enrique Abeyta:          Are you saying after they've closed a deal, or after they've announced an acquisition? So once the deal is done, meaning they've bought a company, or during the period before they buy the company?

Dan Ferris:                 I think it was actually post-closing, so after the deal is done.

Enrique Abeyta:          Yeah. Look, they're still buying companies. And if you buy a bad company, you buy a bad company. I would walk you through the same data on IPOs. You go back and look, I don't know if it's a majority, but there's a very strong percentage of IPOs that trade lower and many of them never look back. So it's like anything in the markets, and I wrote a note to you earlier this week. There are interesting opportunities that emerge, but if you buy a bad company, it doesn't matter whether it was a SPAC, an IPO, a direct listing, or just a plain old stock. A bad company is a bad company, and there's no getting around that. But what I do think is that there are a lot of – I won't say diamonds in the rough – there are a lot of great companies that haven't been available to investors that are now being made available, but you have to be selective.

You know that's my thing. I've always said you need 10 to 20 stocks – it's all you really need in an investment portfolio. There are 3,750 publicly traded stocks out there, you should really just focus on the 20 best ones. So selectivity is always key. I would not recommend to anyone to just go out and buy the SPAC market the same way I wouldn't go out and recommend them to just buy the IPO market or anything other than a very, very broad index.

Dan Ferris:                 That is an interesting comment to me because I guess I just take it as a function of there are so many SPACs around today that even a selective guy like Enrique can create a whole new research product based on SPACs. Do I have that about right? Is that the situation?

Enrique Abeyta:          Yeah, look, it's just changed so much. Like I said, I think that we have hundreds of companies today post this private equity boom across the 2010's that, if this were 1988 or 1998, would be going public with a Montgomery Securities. A Montgomery Securities does not exist anymore. A Goldman Sachs is not interested. And so what you've seen happen is a new way to do this which is the SPAC because the SPACs are able to get public. And there's just really unique advantages. For the acquired company, they don't have to do this whole game of "Well, we're going to try to price it at $10, but maybe we can up the size and get it to $12, but maybe it trades at $8." They go and they do a deal with the SPACs sponsor and they know what price they're getting, period, end of story. How the stock trades afterwards, they can't control. For SPAC sponsor – or for actually the investor – there's two really cool things.

You're partnering with these SPAC sponsors who are typically very experienced investors and entrepreneurs. That doesn't mean that they're aren't wrong sometimes. But to be honest and with all due respect to Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs takes a company public and then they're kind of out. They're like, next. If you're a SPAC sponsor and you've been a successful entrepreneur for 30 years, you really want to get this right. This is your real reputation, and I think that gives investors an advantage to partner with these savvy investors. And then the last one, which is the greatest thing about this, is there's this beautiful window before a deal's been announced that you're sort of along the optionality of them doing a great deal. And if the deal's a dud, you can just sell your shares back at the $10 offer price or something like that.

So you kind of get a free look. So between the lack of visibility, the newness of this market, the emergence of this new private equity pre-IPO opportunity, the combination of the advantages or the companies, the opportunity to partner with sponsors and this free look, yeah, there's a lot of opportunity at this moment. This has never existed before, there's no doubt about it. This is a singular time in history for this opportunity, and it's a very unique one.

Dan Ferris:                 Right, so I feel like we should actually just backtrack a little bit for the sake of listeners. We have listeners of all different types, individuals managing their own money, institutional people, run the gamut. So SPACs are special purpose acquisition companies. Some people think of them as "blank check" companies. They raise money and then they tell you that we're going to go out and find a business to acquire with the money that we've raised. And if they don't acquire something in – what is it, Enrique? About two years usually, a year or two?

Enrique Abeyta:          Two years-ish. I think there's very few that are under two years. Some of them have pushed a little bit further, but two years is a good industry norm.

Dan Ferris:                 Right, and so if they don't find a deal, you just kind of get your money back and that's the end of it. And some people like to buy these things – most of them IPO at $10, then they go looking for a deal. And when you can find one that trades for less than $10 or whatever, or $9.85 – whatever amount of cash is in there – that gives you a nice margin of safety.

Enrique Abeyta:          Yeah, and there's a couple other things. It's when they become public, they also will include – when you buy the unit, you get warrants. So the amount of warrants will vary greatly, but that's the other thing that's nice about getting involved in a SPAC after it's gone public, but before it's announced the deal. Not only do you get your $10 back if you don't like it, you have the optionality of them doing a great deal, but you also have the opportunity to get some warrants which can give you additional upside.

Dan Ferris:                 Love warrants, man. Warrants are cool. When they work out really well, it's really cool. I assume if you're starting a whole newsletter that there are specific deals like – you must have a list of things that you're ready to pull the trigger on right this minute.

Enrique Abeyta:          Yeah, it's actually been kind of a bummer because I've had a couple ideas that I wanted to do in my other newsletters, and I held them for the SPAC newsletter. And a couple of those are up like 600%, so I missed it a little bit. But the cool thing is, our team, Empire Financial Research, Whitney, Berna, myself, we've been on Wall Street for 25-plus years. I started in 1993. We have relationships with these sponsors. Bill Ackman, who just launched the largest SPAC ever at $4 billion, I think he was college roommates with Whitney or they lived on the same hallway or something like that. We're going to be launching with the product something called SPAC Field Book where we're going to be interviewing the biggest and best sponsors out there.

And again, with our experience we really have the access to these folks, and that does two things for us. No. 1, we can get our readers and our audience in the room, which is like having a private one-on-one with these. And again, it's all legal, there's nothing nefarious about it. But most of the time, your average investor is not going to get a chance to do a 30-minute call with Bill Ackman or Harry Sloan and Jeff Sagansky. We have that kind of access. The other thing is this helps us find really great ideas. We've got three ideas right now that are primed up that will be part of the initial launch. I'm super excited about all three of them and can't wait to get them out there.

Dan Ferris:                 And I assume – I just want to make sure – these ideas right now, they're for new paying subscribers only? There's nothing you can mention on the program. I just want to test the waters there.

Enrique Abeyta:          Yeah, I prefer not to. Look, what I can do is I can point to a couple SPACs that we've talked about in the past, like to give an example and one we still like, Virgin Galactic. It was a name that we recommended back in December in Empire Investment report at $10 or something like that, and the stock here is at $19.91. I think it's been more than a double. It's been incredibly volatile, but we did a great job there. That was a great story. When I first learned about it – and again, talking about our network – a buddy of mine said you should call x, y, z at this fund, it was a friend of mine. And I called him up, and he says, "Yeah, we own a big chunk of it, I really like it, I'm kind of a space geek." And he says, "But I only have five minutes..."

So I started getting him talking about it. And, Literally, like 95 minutes later, I was like, dude, I've got to go pick up my kids from school. But he basically said, "Hey, let me get the CEO. I'm going to put you guys on a text, you should talk to him right away." And we were talking to the CEO there 24 hours later. And again, it's nothing nefarious. It's all completely the way things should be done. But the ability to get the access to these people and be able to ask them intelligent questions. Virgin Galactic is a space tourism company. And Whitney and I actually went out to New Mexico and visited the spaceport. So look, this is how we like to do things.

We do the work, we've got great relationships, we cross our Ts, dot our Is, and get our hands dirty. But Virgin Galactic is a perfect example. I would absolutely buy Virgin Galactic right here to grasp the SPCE. In fact, I was going to recommend it in one of my newsletters this week for a trading newsletter, and the fricking thing was up 22% on Monday. But we still love it longer term here. I think it's a great name.

Dan Ferris:                 Interesting. You like this business longer term. What does it cost me – I mean it's space tourism – what does it cost me to fly into outer space as a tourist?

Enrique Abeyta:          $250,000.

Dan Ferris:                 Okay, that sounds like it might be a decent business. How many people do they fly into space at a time though?

Enrique Abeyta:          Eight, but when they're done – I mean, I'll give you the quickest pitch on it. There're just two things to think about. There are something like 40,000 Lamborghinis sold a year or something, and if you look at luxury sports cars above $200,000, there's like 85,000 or 100,000 sold. There's quite a few. The other element of that is that they basically completely reengineered everything. So their technology – one of the craziest things – their crafts are actually really just gliders that have on-time use rockets in them that are sort of like a firecracker, which sounds crazy. And in the actual craft, they do not need any electricity. It can run completely with out electricity.

So what they've done is they basically just took everything on space travel that we know, multitier gas-powered rockets and all of that, threw it away, and totally reengineered it. So they have an incredibly efficient model. And again, I don't have the model in front of me, but they believe that they're going to be profitable by 2024 or 2025. When we were recommending the stock, we were actually getting numbers – we were like three or four years out, this might be trading at four or five times even. That's crazy for a business that's going to be growing incredibly. And the big upside here is hypersonic travel. I think it's still probably a good five-plus years off, 10 years off. But eventually, we're going to do hypersonic travel, and people will be able to go from New York to Tokyo in an hour and 20 minutes. Again, that's the dream. I was more focused on how many customers can you get? How much money do you make? Does the cost of the model make sense?

But yeah, it's a really smart, clever business plan. I also want to say one more thing about SPACs. This is what SPACs are really good at. I had this conversation with actually Harry Sloan, he's the most successful – Sloan and Sagansky – the most successful SPAC sponsors out there. And they said, look, if you've got a biotech company, biotech companies go public all the time. You've got to retail it. They go public all the time. What SPACs do really well is they go out and find businesses that kind of are off the run. Virgin Galactic was definitely off the run in terms of the type of business. Yeah, I think it's a cool company. Mind you, it's speculative. If it's your retirement account, don't go out and load up on 60% Virgin Galactic. I would not recommend something like that, but I think it's a very intelligent speculation.

Dan Ferris:                 Sounds good. Wow, it's just cool to me that, like you said, crazy off-the-run business could have really solid prospects, speculative of course. But there's a real market for it. Let's talk a little bit about the actual contents. I want to know about this SPAC newsletter that you're starting, like if I sign up for this thing, what am I going to get?

Enrique Abeyta:          Well, and I think we kind of jumped into it, but one of the things that we do, we spend a lot of time on education. I've always taken great pride in an ability to explain relatively complex financial things or concepts in words that – I always joked – words that my late mother could understand. And my mom was a very intelligent woman. She worked as the General Manager of an HMO, all that stuff. She just didn't trade stocks or things like that. So the first thing we do is we kind of outline it in very, very simple English so anyone can understand. Because ultimately, SPACs aren't really that complicated in terms of getting to understand them.

The second thing we do is we spend a lot of time talking about what the opportunity is and why the opportunity exists. That used to be one of the things with my hedge funds that we would always ask. When we found something that we thought was too good to be true, we were like, why does this opportunity exist? We talked a little bit about this, why this opportunity exists, and we talk a lot more about it in the report. And then what we do is we give guidelines about how we're going to approach this and what the opportunities are. And then with the core subscribers, we go through these three great ideas, which we just finished up today, so they're very, very fresh, as well as people have access to the SPAC Field Book.

And then going forward, what we'll do is every month, we'll have a new pick. But in between that, we're going to do a lot of other stuff. We're going to be doing a lot more education. We'll have access to additional SPAC sponsors. So I don't really look at it as just sort of a one-and-done kind of thing. It's really a product that's going to explore this area of opportunity on an ongoing basis for investors.

Dan Ferris:                 Cool, is it a once-a-month newsletter?

Enrique Abeyta:          It will be a once-a-month newsletter.

Dan Ferris:                 Cool, and you're putting together an event, October 8, 8:00 p.m. Eastern time. It's a webinar. And folks who are interested can sign up at spacdeal.com, S-P-A-C-D-E-A-L.com. What are you going to do on the webinar, Enrique?

Enrique Abeyta:          Everything I just said but on video. [Laughter]

Dan Ferris:                 Okay.

Enrique Abeyta:          So I live out here in beautiful, carefree Arizona. Jared Kelly and I had been talking about this, and he was getting more and more excited as I was getting more and more excited. So literally, he grabbed one of the film crews and got everyone out here to Arizona, all appropriately socially distanced and all that. The great thing about Arizona is we all live on like two acres of land, so you can manage it real well. But we filmed a 90-minute video, and we talk there – that actual video, I think we spend most of our time talking about the opportunity and why the opportunity exists. And so we spend a lot of time just explaining why we have this great opportunity and really flesh it out and go threw it.

We also have the opportunity again to speak to Jeff Sagansky and Harry Sloan. As I mentioned, these are the most successful of the SPAC sponsors. They have just completed their fifth SPAC. They did DraftKings, which is one of the ones I wanted to recommend that I missed basically. That stock is up 600% or something like that. So it's pretty exciting stuff.

Dan Ferris:                 I think it's so cool that you have the connections you do. For me, I have connections like in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Toronto in the mining business. And I'll tell you; in that business, you don't put your money at risk if you don't know who's involved. I'm not saying SPACs are like that, but I'm just saying there are situation where having the connection, it's just an irreplaceable advantage. It's really terrific, and I suspect that that is true here as well. So, Enrique, we're actually at the end of our time already.

Don't worry, I'm going to send people to spacdeal.com at least one more time after we get done talking. But if I could do what I always do with all my guests and ask you just to leave our listener with one thought. What might that one thought be today?

Enrique Abeyta:          You know, look, I think that one of the things I've been most successful with in terms of investing is getting involved in an emerging, or complex situations that take real work. And if it's really easy to understand, there's tons of information, and there's a thousand people following it, it doesn't mean that there's not real good money to be made. But it does mean that maybe the best returns have already been seen. I like to get my hands dirty. This emerging SPAC opportunity, because it is so emerging, we will do more SPAC issuance this year probably cumulatively than the last 10 years.

That presents risks, but also presents incredible opportunities. So when you get involved in complex situations where the setup is right and you do the work, there are some really great returns and that's what ultimately gets us most excited.

Dan Ferris:                 That sounds awesome to me, and it sounds tailor-made for you, and I can't wait to read the SPAC newsletter myself. I'll watch that presentation on October 8, and I'll be reading the newsletter, too. Looking forward to it. Well, thanks, Enrique. It's been a while, and I hope it's not too long before we speak with you again.

Enrique Abeyta:          Yeah, have me on anytime, you know I've got plenty to say.

Dan Ferris:                 Thanks a lot, man. We'll talk to you soon.

Enrique Abeyta:          Good, talk to you soon. Bye.

Dan Ferris:                 All right, I have to say I'm prejudiced because Empire SPAC Investor, the Empire organization is like an affiliate associated with Stansberry Research. But I don't care, I still love those guys. Love Whitney, I've known him for – God, I don't even know how long – 15 years or so? I was at one of the very first old Value Investing Congresses he did, and I went to almost every single one of them. So I've known him for a while, and I've known Enrique for a few years here. And I'm always impressed with these people. They work very hard – very, very hard. And you notice Enrique is an avid long-distance runner, we said that when we introduced him, Whitney is the same way. He's like climbing mountains and doing like Iron Man type events.

These people are like super-duper performers, and they're really highly motivated, smart people with lots of connections and track records too behind them. So, glad we got to talk to Enrique. And if you are interested in this SPAC product that he's got coming out, which I sure am – whatever Enrique is doing, I want to know about it. It will be a webinar on October 8 at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time. And to sign up for that, you just go to www.spacdeal.com, www.S-P-A-C-D-E-A-L.COM and sign up for it. I'm sure it'll be a great presentation. I don't know about you, I just like hearing Enrique talk because he's smart and he always says things that I didn't know. Spacdeal.com, check it out. [Music Plays]

Well, I've talked a lot about gold today, and even with gold prices off a little bit, people are still asking can this thing go to $2,500 an ounce, $5,000, $10,000, numbers like that. And I think the answer is yes, that's why you don't sell just because it's sold off a little bit. And our top commodities guy, Bill Shaw, he definitely agrees with me. And he's found a business that he thinks is like his No. 1 pick of 2020 and like the best single gold business on the planet he calls it. And he said he thinks it's got more upside potential than any other gold stock but has a low risk – what he calls an ultra-low-risk profile. And I'm like – I'm salivating. I'm like, gold, huge upside potential, ultra-low-risk profile? Sign me up.

So Bill made this video talking about this thing and talking about just why in general he thinks it's the best moment in decades to buy gold. So he's going to share this thing, his No. 1 pick for 2020. You don't want to miss that, and you probably want to hear what else he has to say about why it's time to buy gold. I know I do. So go to www.investorhourgold.com. That's www.investorhourgold.com, and Bill will lay it out for you and tell you what he thinks. Check it out. [Music Plays]

In the mailbag each week, you and I have an honest conversation about investing or whatever is on your mind. Just send your questions, comments, and politely worded criticisms to [email protected]. I read every word of every e-mail you send me, and I respond to as many as possible. This week, people responded to my comments about the forest fires last week. Remember, we had two listeners writing in telling me, oh, you didn't say anything about climate change with the forest fires, you said it was all mismanagement. And of course, it's not even controversial, it is mismanagement. People wrote in and they responded.

Hunter wrote in and said, "Dan, I simply wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your mailbox forest fire rebuttal this week. Thanks for the hard work and speaking truth in a world of deception." Hunter, thank you. I don't know if it's as grand as all that. It's just kind of common knowledge around here anyway. Brendan K. writes in and says, "Dan, don't neglect Joe K.'s and Levi N.'s comments. Those two know what they're talking about Mr. Ferris. I put my wholehearted faith in the California state government to manage the forest in addition to its energy industry. I don't know about you, Dan, but I love forest fires and blackouts. I even visited the DMV this week just for fun. Keep well, Brendan K." Dripping with sarcasm, love it.

Mimi in Atlanta writes in and – oh, we're off the forest fire thing now, sorry. Moving along, new topic. Mimi in Atlanta writes in, and she says, "Dear Dan, I have wondered why you've never heard about CEF funds – why we've never heard about CEF funds on the podcast. I would love an education of that area of finance. Great job on the podcast, never miss it, Mimi in Atlanta." So CEF closed-end funds, I don't know, Mimi. I don't know if there's a lot to know. God, they've been around forever. I can remember folks – when I first got into the business of publishing my investment ideas over 20 years ago, I would hear a presentation or two it seemed like every several months about somebody whose whole strategy was to buy closed-end funds at a 10% to 15% discount to net asset value. And it didn't occur to until later on, why are these things trading at a discount? And they're trading at a discount, some of them, because of the fact that they're a managed fund, right?

And so there's the net asset value minus whatever fees may be taken out. But there are a bunch of them around, and like anything else, it's a bottom up one at a time thing. And if you look at each one of them, bottom up one at a time, and assess what's in it and whether or not you want to own that stuff, read the fund letters – usually, you can read several fund letters. It's not a complicated thing, but it's not nothing. You've got to do some work, and it's all from the bottom up, one at a time. I don't think there's much of a – I can't say good or bad overall, yeah, closed-end funds are great or closed-end funds stink. It's a one at a time type of a thing. Sorry, that's probably not very helpful, but if it inspires you to do plenty of good homework, then I think I've done a good thing for you.

Jeff writes in – he wrote a much longer thing. He didn't like that we criticized option traders when we were talking with Andy Furman. And Andy says, I just tell most people don't trade options. And I was kind of laughing at that and agreeing to a certain extent. And Jeff wrote in, and he said, "I know you're a value investor, stop throwing Doc – Doc Eifrig at Stansberry – stop throwing Doc and every option trader under the bus. Just because options are not your taste does not make it bad or wrong, Jeff." Jeff, you misunderstood. This is just like the topic of technical analysis. I wouldn't say these things aren't to my taste. Right now, I have more money in options than I do in anything else. I own puts on short sales and calls on various things. So I wouldn't say they're not to my taste. Like technical analysis, though, I believe that many people – within the sound of my voice, unfortunately, at this moment – are probably too naive about their options trading and they're not informed enough about the risks. So they shouldn't be doing it.

And look, Jeff, I mean Porter Stansberry – I've heard Porter Stansberry – actually, I've seen him in writing and I've seen him stand up in front of a crowd of people and say most of you people shouldn't buy stocks. If Porter can say most people shouldn't buy stocks, I can say most of you shouldn't be trading options, and I'm not doing anyone a disservice. I'm certainly not doing Doc a disservice, that guy... he's forgotten more about options than I'll ever know, and I freely acknowledge that. So Jeff, you kind of mistook me there, or maybe I didn't make myself clear. I hope that clears it up. Next, Abelardo G. writes in and says, "Dan, I enjoy greatly listening to you almost every week. On your last episode in September during your rant on the subject, how come you did not include/mention bonds in the portfolio. I bought the Credit Opportunities subscription this year, and you don't seem to implicitly recommend it, Abelardo G."

Abelardo, I believe you are referencing my constant recommendation to be truly diversified when I say you should own stocks, you should have plenty of cash, you should have precious metals, gold and silver, and you should have at least a little bitcoin. Abelardo, please don't take this to mean that I think these are the only assets you should own. To me, that is the most basic components of what I would call true diversification, given what's available in the world today. Now given what's available in the world, absolutely Credit Opportunities specialized in high-yield bonds, and they make one at a time, bottom-up bond picks just same the way we make stock picks.

And by all means, I would probably classify that as part of the equity portfolio in my overall true diversification scheme there. And I've kind of thrown out some basic percentages, you know, how much to allocate to each of those things. But that's just spitballing, throwing out a general number anywhere within 10% of those. Or if you see it differently, maybe radically different numbers. But those to me are the basic assets that constitute true diversification. And by all means, bonds can certainly be a part of that, okay? Good question, glad you asked.

Samuel B. is next. He says, "Hey Dan, I was really surprised to hear in Episode 173 that the guest, Mr. Furman, recommended nonprofessional investors like me completely avoid options. I'm a subscriber to your newsletter which doesn't recommend option trades, but I'm also a subscriber to Stansberry products, Retirement Trader, DailyWealth Trader, which recommend options strategies specifically to reduce risk of capital loss. In my experience with those products, I've done exactly that, experienced gains with limited downside. Maybe David Eifrig could come on the show and discuss why he sees his use of options as risk reduction for retail investors like me, contrary to Mr. Furman, Samuel B." Again, Samuel, I won't speak for Andy, but what I mean is people who are just buying naked call and put options and probably putting way too much money into them.

You know yourself. Everyone listening to my voice, you know yourself. You know if my comments apply to you or not. Okay? Let's just leave it at that. You know yourself, and you know whether I'm talking to you or not, I think. And it sounds to me like you are aware that I'm not talking to you. All right, I've got a couple more of these. There was a lot of good stuff this week and every now and then, I just like to have a lot of e-mails because I really like hearing from you guys and reacting.

So Ben S. writes in – Alliance Member, Ben S., he identifies himself as an Alliance Member. Thank you, Ben. Ben says, "I'm sure you're receiving an abundance of e-mails this week relating to your remarks about climate change last week –" I'm going to stop you right there. I made a few comments about climate change. I said that was how you know that people who are talking about what's happening in the forests on the west coast with all the fires – that's how you know that they don't really know what they're talking about because we all know that it's a pretty simple management problem that has been hampered and wrecked by politics among other things. So, "– remarks about climate change last week." Ben S. continues, "Dave Collum," who we've had on the show, "did a good breakdown of climate change argument in his 2019 year-end review. Send all the people busting your chops to read that and the source literature, and then come back once they have more of a grasp than the mainstream view. Whichever side you find yourself on, I think it makes the most sense to try to live as cleanly as possible. That's about all that's in my power to do anyways. I'm never going to support more government intervention." Then he says, "That's long enough for this week." I appreciate that, Ben. He says,  "Hope you and your family are doing well. Have you had a chance to get out shooting since the range has opened back up? Alliance Member, Ben S." Yeah, I've been out shooting a few times. I try to go once a week, and I'm having a lot of fun buying new guns, doing lots of shooting. And just so we're clear, I like this comment where he says, "whichever side you find yourself on," like in climate change. And the trouble is – and if you read Dave Collum's 2019 year-end review, you can just Google that and you'll find it. It's at peakprosperity.com. One of his comments is like, he has no idea what the climate's going to look like in 50 years. And if people are being honest today, the implication there is, if scientists are being honest and all the people who write about this are being honest, neither did they.

They don't really know. That's the problem. Too many people are being apocalyptic and saying they know something that they don't really know, and they're fearmongering. And they're fearmongering, of course, because there's money in it for them, right? Okay, one more of these deals on the forest fires actually. "Hi Dan," this is Tim P., "I was listening to Episode 173, you mentioned climate change in connection to the forest fires. My belief based on available information is that yes, the climate is getting warmer. You seem to have an opposite view." No, Tim P., I do not. I think being an apocalyptist and being – I think forecasting this huge environmental apocalypse is deceitful. You don't know. There's no way you can extrapolate that out of what's happening right now. And also, it fails to appreciate what a dynamic system the climate is.

There's no way anybody really grasps all that is going on enough to make a prediction about it. And then he says, "You seem to have an opposite view." I do not. He continues, "But I do not care who is right or wrong as long as I am investing on the right side of the table. You always say you do not know, which is the right thing to say. So you could explore this thought in one of your podcasts. What if climate scientists are right and we have plus five degrees of global warming and 20 meters risen global sea level? Think of the implications to the world. What if Manhattan had to be damned in the same way that Holland has done for the entire country? And the same for all of the rich countries and their cities all around the world? That would instigate an absolute and all-out infrastructure-building boom of the century. Trillions of dollars would be invested to protect the rich cities the way it's already happening in Venice, Italy. And if Greenland melts," wow, "there will be a massive hunt for riches, copper, gold, nickel, etcetera. And what about inhabiting the South Pole. Anyways, great podcast and great guests, Tim P."

So Tim, you understand what I started to say there. You understand that even if the climate scientists are right and we get much more warming than has occurred, we're humans. We adapt. I agree. I agree with the implication here wholeheartedly. I think that's the way to look at it, and that gets you away from that apocalyptic view that says, oh, we've got to have the government involved right now and we've got to steal more money from productive people and put it into these crappy technologies that we don't necessarily need a lot of. Yeah, good point. Okay, one more and then we're done with the mailbag this week. Thank you. I hope you guys like the mailbag as much as I do. I love it.

Gary K. writes in and says, "Dan, I'm not really certain. I hope you're laughing at this. I just listened to this week's podcast," Oh, the subject line, he said I was a closet Keynesian, okay? And then he started his e-mail and says, "I'm not really certain – I hope you're laughing at this. I just listened to last week's podcast, and purely by coincidence, I happened to read the chapter in Peter Bernstein's Against the Gods," which is an excellent book, excellent. I highly recommend everyone read it. Peter Bernstein, Against the Gods. He continues, "... where he discusses Keynes' A Treatise on Probability. Given your opening rant, I was struck by phrases like, 'distrusted classical theories based on the laws of mathematical probability or assumptions of certainty as guides to decision making,' or 'When somebody persuades me that I am wrong,'" he wrote, "'I change my mind. What do you do?' Or 'Keynes view of economics ultimately revolves around uncertainty.'" Those are quotes that he read in Against the Gods, and he says it reminded him of what I was saying. He continues, "It would be interesting to know how Keynes would have viewed bitcoin." I agree. "At any rate, let me contribute the thought that the crazies on the Left are every bit as wrongheaded in their certain view of the world as the crazies on the Right, and the pandering politicians compound our distress. This, in my humble opinion, is a global condition if for no other reason than human beings populate the entire planet, and we all have governments which increasingly seem to engage in tribal behavior. Finally, I submit that a possible corollary to modernity," which we discussed last week, "is that if you disagree with another person's position on a topic, arbitrarily ignoring everything else they think or say is idiotic. To quote Dan Ferris, 'You should listen and pay attention.' Cheers, Gary K." I agree, Gary.

If somebody says 2 + 2 is 4 and you know that they're voting for a candidate you don't like, it doesn't mean 2 + 2 doesn't equal 4, right? It's a good point, it's a point worth addressing in these highly polarized semi-insane times that we live in, and I thank you for making it.

All right, that's another mailbag and that's another episode of the Stansberry Investor Hour. Hope you enjoyed it as mush a I did. Do me a favor, subscribe to the show on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And while you're there, help us grow with a rate and a review. You can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram, our handle is @InvestorHour. Also, follow us on Twitter where our handle is @Investor_Hour. Have a guest you want me to interview? Drop us a note at [email protected]. Till next week, I'm Dan Ferris. Thanks for listening.

                                    Thank you for listening to this episode of the Stansberry Investor Hour. To access today's notes and receive notice of upcoming episodes, go to investorhour.com and enter your e-mail. Have a question for Dan? Send him an e-mail, [email protected]. This broadcast is for entertainment purposes only and should not be considered personalized investment advice. Trading stocks and all other financial instruments involves risks. You should not make any investment decision based solely on what you hear. Stansberry Investor Hour is produced by Stansberry Research and is copyrighted by the Stansberry Radio Network.

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