Episodes

On this week's Stansberry Investor Hour, Dan and Corey welcome Matt Weinschenk back to the show. Matt is the director of research at Stansberry Research. He's also the editor of the free weekly newsletter This Week on Wall Street and a member of the investment committee for Stansberry Portfolio Solutions.

Matt kicks things off by describing what he does at Stansberry Research and what type of investor he is. Because his career began right before the great financial crisis, he says he tends to lean more conservative. This leads to a discussion about controlling risk, preparing for market surprises, and needing to "get slapped in the face a few times" to understand the stakes. After, Matt gives his nuanced take on crypto – from its use for diversification to the "scam" meme coins. He notes...

Projects that are building real things... and actually solving problems... have been the ones under this regulatory environment that have been disallowed because they look like securities... All the junk that is blowing through people's savings, that was actually legal.

Next, Matt weighs in on artificial intelligence ("AI") and the huge amounts of capital flowing into the sector. He explains that there are safer ways to invest in AI than buying the headline-making names, using Nvidia versus Cisco Systems as an example. And he points out that even if AI is currently experiencing a bubble, the technology will both benefit the economy and make companies more productive in the long term...

It's going to be a deflationary impulse on the market. And so all the other companies that are not tech companies – and you saw this in the wake of the dot-com [bust] – are just going to be able to have stronger margins, better businesses. So there's going to be a lot of opportunities in things that have no relation to AI.

Finally, Matt goes in depth on the current macroeconomic environment and his outlook for the future. This includes President Donald Trump's tariffs disrupting specific industries, what the CBOE Volatility Index ("VIX") and high-yield credit spread are signaling, fears of a recession, and the bond market expecting a growth slowdown. Speaking about a potential valuation reset, Matt says...

You may not be able to justify 25 times earnings on the S&P anymore, right? We might be headed back to 18 or so as the new normal for an extended stretch here. So it could really be a regime change. If you change this many things so quickly between rates, global growth, inflation that might come from tariffs... it's hard to say it should be at the elevated levels we saw for the last couple years.