Episodes

Dan Ferris:                 Hello, and welcome to the Stansberry Investor Hour. I'm Dan Ferris. I'm the editor of Extreme Value and The Ferris Report, both published by Stansberry Research.

Corey McLaughlin:    And I'm Corey McLaughlin, editor of the Stansberry Daily Digest. Today we're going over our top 10 surprises for 2025.

Dan Ferris:                 That's right. These are 10 things that if they happened would surprise the daylights out of investors and a lot of other people in 2025. They're not predictions. We're not saying these are going to happen. We're just saying these would surprise you if they happened in 2025, based on current conditions of course. All right. Let's dive into the top 10 surprises.

Corey McLaughlin:    Let's do it.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah.

Corey McLaughlin:    For the last 25 years, Dan Ferris has predicted nearly every financial and political crisis in America, including the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and the peak of the Nasdaq in 2021. Now he has a new major announcement about a crisis that could soon threaten the U.S. economy and can soon bankrupt millions of citizens. As he puts it, "There is something happening in this country, something much bigger than you may yet realize, and millions are about to be blindsided unless they take the right steps now." Find out what's coming and how to protect your portfolio by going to www.americandarkday.com and sign up for his free report. The last time the U.S. economy looked like this, stocks didn't move for 16 years, and many investors lost 80% of their wealth. Learn the steps you can take right away to protect and potentially grow your holdings many times over at www.americandarkday.com. You got the first one?

Dan Ferris:                 I'll take the first one. No. 1 is bitcoin keeps hitting new all-time highs then begins an 80% drop. So of course, this would surprise everybody because I checked this morning and bitcoin had hit $106,000. Who knows where it'll be by the time you're listening to this, and it's just gone straight up like a rocket ship and everybody thinks it can't fail. So of course, it would, by definition, surprise people if it made more new all-time highs and then wham, started its 80% drop, which would be pretty typical, right, in 2025.

Corey McLaughlin:    Right. So, the typical thing to do for bitcoin after making new all-time highs, eventually when it hits that top, is to drop 80%. The last two times it's done it, it's topped in 2021, before that 2017. After each of those times, bitcoin's fallen at least 80% to the new low after that. The good news is, I don't think we're near the top for bitcoin yet. We're getting closer to it, I think, but based on the various indicators that people like our Eric Wade, Crypto Capital editor, look at and what not. I don't think we're quite at the top yet, so I'm curious what level that actually gets to, but I think once we get there and everybody's like going crazy over bitcoin – I don't think we're there yet, but once you're there, I think you want to be prepared for that big drop afterward, because I'm pretty confident it will happen. But I think there are also a lot of upsides still.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. I think Eric mentioned – he's mentioned this a couple of times. The last time I heard him say it was at a panel discussion at the Stansberry Conference in October, and he mentioned the four-year cycle, and he said, "Well, that's got three more years to go." I think he said three more, "and then you'll get your 80% correction," he said. But it's going strong. So one thing I did notice, though, and you alluded to it, was the two waves, right, 2017, 2021, and then wham. And as I look at a five-year chart of bitcoin, I feel like I'm seeing similar waves.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah, totally.

Dan Ferris:                 I won't bring it up, but it's got these patterns, I guess. And Eric is obviously tuned into them much better than we are, so I guess –

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah, I would say those patterns, yeah. I mean, they are real to me, that four-year cycle. Every time bitcoin has one of these halvings, it's usually like a year, 18 months, two years after that is when that peak has happened, and this time around that would put it around February, March, sometime this spring. We'll see if that happens or not. It's not like a hard and fast rule. I'm just saying based on the previous cycles, if you want to time try, look out, timing on these things, which you can't do perfectly, but it would be around springtime. So we'll see. Bitcoin's still a teenager in asset years, so we'll see what happens.

Dan Ferris:                 [Laughs] That's good. All right. Let's move on to No. 2. All right, moving on. Top 10 surprises, No. 2 for 2025 is MicroStrategy crashes more than 50% and has to sell bitcoin to pay its debts. Now, do I really think this is going to happen in 2025? I don't know, because as long as bitcoin keeps making new highs, they're golden. So if we're right about the cycle in bitcoin, then this one, it would be an even bigger – it would surprise the heck out of me. It won't surprise me if this happens eventually, but it will surprise me I guess if it happens in 2025.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah, I think right now that would probably surprise a lot of people, given the timing for 2025. It's just Michael Saylor's out everywhere now, you know, he was just on I think CNBC, Fox News, and Dave Portnoy's podcast all in the same two-week period. So he's out there, and yeah, MicroStrategy as stock is  essentially a way to get exposure to bitcoin through various ways, leverage, or the bonds, or whatever it may be. So you know, up and down it will go as the market turns bullish or bearish on bitcoin.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, maybe we shouldn't make too many assumptions here. So MicroStrategy is a business software company run by –

Corey McLaughlin:    Software company.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, run by Michael Saylor, and it sells equity and debt to buy bitcoin, and the market cap is at about 100% premium to the value of the bitcoin. So the market cap is somewhere around I think $86 billion or close to $90 billion or so. Half of that is bitcoin and the other half is evaluation on its software business, which is in the most generous accounting – it could be worth a few billion, like very generously, and bitcoin is... What he did to try to kind of save the company because it was a dot-com darling, and it crashed, and was having a lot of trouble after that. So he's borrowing money and he's issuing stock to buy bitcoin, and they own a lot of bitcoin. It's worth, I guess, a $40-odd billion, and what he's doing is he's manufacturing shareholder value out of thin air because he can sell a dollar of equity and get $2 worth of market cap. He can go buy his dollar worth of bitcoin and, poof, he's got $2 worth of market cap. It's magic based on an extraordinarily overvalued stock.

As long as bitcoin keeps going up, he can do this, and he's doing it with convertible bonds that are – the strike of the convertible bond is way at a huge premium to where the share price is. So for the convertible bond to be worth anything more than the thousand dollars of debt when you buy one of these, bitcoin has to soar and cause MicroStrategy share price to soar with it at another 40% or 50% or some huge amount like that. I forget what the – I think it's like $600 and some a share that it has to get to. So it's a levered play on bitcoin, and the market is treating that way and has fallen hopelessly in love with it. As long as bitcoin keeps going up, this thing will keep soaring, and then when Bitcoin goes down, they are going to have a big problem. They're going to have billions and billions of dollars' worth of debt, and they have a plan that they came out with on October 30, said "We're going to sell $21 billion worth of equity. We're going to sell $21 billion worth of debt, probably more of these converts, and we're going to buy bitcoin with it." [Laughs] So it's going to get a lot bigger before it blows up, and I think it inevitably will blow up. It has to. If you understand the mechanics of it, you know that this cannot last. They could be buying gold. They could be buying whatever you want, real estate, anything, and if it gets like this, it's a crash waiting to happen.

Corey McLaughlin:    Totally. I don't have too much to add there. You covered it. You have to know what you're getting into with that, if you're playing around with MicroStrategy.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. It would be a big, big surprise if it happened in 2025. That's what we're saying here today, right? If this happened in 2025, I would be like, "What?" [Laughs]

Corey McLaughlin:    It'll be a headline. You'll see it and be like "Oh. What? MicroStrategy down 50%? Oh, God. What happened?"

Dan Ferris:                 [Laughs] Yeah, I know. "What happened? All ready?" You and I will be saying "All ready?"

Corey McLaughlin:    Right. Yep. All right, No. 3. We're going into the DOGE department here. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy announced that it is politically impossible to shrink the federal government by any meaningful amount. Now, qualifier here, remember this is potential surprises, not necessarily the things that we don't want to happen, but surprises.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. None of these things are things we want or don't want to happen. Our wants are nowhere in this, OK? But we're saying here that it would surprise everybody if after all this optimism with Trump getting elected, and DOGE being created, and Musk and Ramaswamy being put in charge of it, that it would be a big surprise if people found out that these guys were up against an absolute leviathan political machine, the giant U.S. government, and just couldn't get anywhere with it. It would surprise me probably if they announced this in 2025 because the DOGE project has a deadline of July 4, 2026. So that's one of the reasons why it would be a big surprise, if it happened in 2025, to be fair.

Corey McLaughlin:    Right. Yeah. Gotcha. That's good to know, because there will be a lot of discussion in 2025. You're going to have another kind of debt-ceiling deadline I know coming up early this year. Sure, this will play a central role in that, and you'll begin to hear what might actually be able to happen or what might not. When you're talking about trimming the government, you're going to get into the things that everybody – defense spending, entitlements. Those are the big ones right off the top of my head – and then what's the pain involved there when you get down to it? I have no doubt something's going to happen. Something will happen with this, with the DOGE department but not exactly sure what it is. I figure at least some small things I think will happen. I just don't know if it'll meet people's expectations, to your point.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. No, I agree with you. If we're getting into what we really think is going to happen, and not what would surprise the daylights out of everybody, yeah, I think they're going to do something. They're going to reduce something. They're going to make something more efficient. They're going to eliminate something. They're going to have some maybe early successes or whatever where they are able to actually take, I don't know, $100 billion, $200 billion, $500 billion or something, $100 billion here, $100 billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money, out of the federal budget. So yeah, that'd be great. I hope they do. If we're getting into what we want, Elon Musk says he can cut $2 trillion – I want him to be able to do it. If he cut $2 trillion off of 2024 – fiscal 2024 ended September 30 – that would have taken government spending just below receipts.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah. [Laughs]

Dan Ferris:                 Like no deficit, slight surplus. Wow. If he can really do it, of course we all want it, for that reason. But we'll see. I'm certainly behind them. I did a Digest where I said this is something worth investing some hope in. Now, don't change anything in your portfolio because of it, but hope. Hope all you want that these guys can do this. I'm hoping. I'm very hopeful.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah. I think we all want a more efficient government that we feel is working better for everybody, and this sounds like the best chance to do that so far that I've heard in a really long time, and people who actually – but we also saw what Elon Musk did at a place like say Twitter [laughs] where he gutted the staff and things kind of – some people liked, some people didn't. So I assume we'll have something similar happen here, depending on – again, it's like what we talked about with Argentina. You want it. You want the change until you lose your job, and then it doesn't sound so good. So we'll see, and it's like, "Not in my backyard" thing, too, with the energy arguments as well.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah.

Corey McLaughlin:    But yeah, I'm curious to see what'll happen, but I would be surprised if they announce something like what we're saying, "Hey, we're not going to be able to do anything in 2025." That would be a surprise.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. There are some weird things about this, like the federal payroll I think is like – it's a small percentage. I forget what the exact number is. A very small percentage of the overall budget – the budget is really transfer payments, trillions and trillions of dollars of transfer payments, and nearly a trillion of defense. So that's really what – if you're talking about making big reductions, you don't have to fire anybody. You just have to figure out a way to get these transfer payments down, but see, I don't think that's going to happen, and they have what they call "mandatory" and "discretionary." Mandatory means the law mandates the payment has to be made, and like a huge amount of it is mandatory – like more of it's mandatory than not. And certainly all the Social Security and Medicare and all this stuff, that's all mandatory, and defense is not mandatory, it's discretionary, but Trump's going to cut defense? I don't think so. He says he's going to modernize it. That sounds like spending and upgrading. Upgrades tend to cost money, so we'll see. I'm hopeful. Maybe we should just leave it at that and not try to make any more guesses about it.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah. Sounds good. All right, let's move on to No. 4. We've got this surprise for 2025: prices down but CPI up because everything gets more expensive every year, but the CPI actually doesn't go anywhere.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. To be fair, the CPI does always go up. We don't mean to say that, right, but what we mean to say is we see all these extremely important things, like rent and food, going up a lot more than whatever 2% or 3% or whatever, 0.2% a month, and it feels out of kilter. It does. The CPI feels very much out of kilter with the experience of everyday Americans, including myself. I actually go to the grocery store. My wife hasn't stepped foot in one in years because she orders everything to the house, but she sends me down there to get prescriptions and various things, and I see –

Corey McLaughlin:    Sounds familiar.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. [Laughs] That's right. And I see these things myself, so it feels like it would surprise everybody if the widespread reports were "The price of food is down –" let's say 10% or 15%, and rents are down 10% or 15%, and the cost of housing, which is the big component that's been pouching the CPI up or keeping it higher than it would have been – if housing suddenly became much more affordable, those things would be big surprises, right?

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah. If housing becomes more affordable, that would be a big surprise, I think, for people. [Laughs] Which would change up things for wealth in a lot of people, I think, the calculation. But yeah, CPI is just – you could say 2%, 3%, but it's not what people experience day to day, and so you could have reports of inflation slowing down, but then people go to the grocery store, like you said, and do not see that in the prices, and I've been writing about this for – as soon as inflation was starting on its path to 40-year highs, and then whenever I would report something that says — it was mainly because of reader feedback, and I report something that says, "Hey, investors think the pace of inflation is slowing. Inflation has peaked and is slowing down" I would get ten e-mails from people being like, "You idiot. The prices are not going down at the store." I'm like, "No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying a lot of investors say –" It's two different things, and obviously I think that came to bear in the presidential election. People are told the economy's great, and they're like, "Well, no, why is every item I buy 20% more than three years ago?" So yes, CPI is flawed in many ways.

Dan Ferris:                 Right, and part of it is just this desire to have these statistics, all these government economic statistics. We think because we have them, we can tweak the economy to make the statistics reflect that everything is better, and that that means that everything is better, and it's a little silly. I think the gathering of all these statistics is – I hate to say it, but all this information is part of the problem because we think all the information makes us more informed, and it really doesn't. You can't tweak a $29 trillion economy with all this government regulation and central-bank policy and all this stuff. It do what it do, and if you try to interfere you just make things worse. But maybe that's a discussion for another day. [Laughs]

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 Moving on. OK, the fifth surprise for 2025, Dan's going to get his annual surprise out of the way. I do this every year until it happens, which means I'm probably going to do it until I die and it's never going to happen. So that surprise is the S&P 500 falls more than 20% in one day. Why do I say this? Because people say it can't happen because there are circuit breakers on the exchanges. So the first circuit breaker, 7%. If the S&P 500 falls 7% in one session, they halt trading for 15 minutes, everybody sort of takes a breath and lets things play out, and then they resume trading. Then if the S&P 500 falls further in that same day to minus 13%, they stop for another 15 minutes and then regain, restart trading. And then if it falls 20% that same day, they halt trading for the day, they close down the exchange. My argument is not technical. It is philosophical. I think people are in markets the way fish are in water. Yes, markets are about what humans do and how humans trade with each other, but I think the market is just – it's not something we create so much it's something that happens when people decide not to interact by doing violence to each other, right?

So if you're not beating each other over the heads, stealing and killing and all that stuff, and you decide, "Let's interact more peacefully," you trade, markets happen. We don't really control markets. Market prices are the result of a myriad of unfathomable inputs that we can't control, and I think it's possible that the bid and ask could fall more than 20% below the previous day before they close the exchange is all I'm saying. Maybe not. Maybe there's technical reasons why that's not true, but it just strikes me as typical modern human hubris to assume that it can't happen. Spiel over. That's my spiel. [Laughs]

Corey McLaughlin:    It's a good annual spiel to hear, because I think people forget a lot of what's possible or the mechanics, and especially today, I'm trying to remember earlier this year, where there was something –not a decimal point, but there was some small technical thing when that happened with the VIX, and things went haywire pretty quickly. I don't know if you remember what I'm referring to, but –

Dan Ferris:                 Vaguely.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah, it's just something like that would not surprise me personally because the intricacies of all the technology involved today, and stuff that wasn't in the language even like five years ago as much, like the zero-day options, I feel like something there could trigger something. I'm not sure exactly what, but just what's going on there hasn't – that hasn't blown up yet in any meaningful way, I don't think. It might have for individuals, but it hasn't created a widespread crisis or something yet. So maybe there's something there, but yeah, the circuit breakers are there, but it just means it would be a slower 20% loss. It could still happen during the day. It just slows things down.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. Part of the point is that you could halt trading all you want to, but in our hearts and minds, we're still calculating the bid ask. We know what we'd bid if the market was open. We know what we'd ask if the market was open, so it's about the markets being interaction of humans and being unpredictable more than anything else, I think, and our inability to control them, too. We're a little too full of ourselves. We think that the Fed can control the market or the economy or whatever, and they have this mandate to control unemployment and price levels, and they can't do any of it. So this is another [crosstalk] of that –

Corey McLaughlin:    No, yeah, they're reacting.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. All right, I think I've beaten my annual horse to death here. So let's move on to the next one, which is simply that the S&P 500 gains another 20% – we're saying would surprise folks. It's just had some stellar years here, and just gaining another 20% would be like "Wow, it really is 1999 all over again" right?

Corey McLaughlin:    Exactly, yeah. If we finish out 2024 the way it looks, as we're speaking here, like a couple trading days left, overall you're going to end up 25%-ish, maybe more, up this year. It was 20% in 2023. It was the first time that's happened since 1997 and 1998. So that would make next year 1999 if we're following this analogy perfectly, which people, if you've been around long enough, you know what happened in 1999 and 2000. Everybody was giddy in '99 and fewer people were giddy in 2000. So yeah, I'm just saying I guess this is more towards maybe people who are more skeptical that this bull market has more room to run, which personally, yes, this is a time to I think get more cautious after this bull market's been going on since October '22 and S&P's up 70%-ish since then. Just like in October '22, a lot of people were bearish, that would have been the time to get bullish. I think now is the time to get a little more bearish. Not like out completely, but just to recognize that the reward-risk balance is a little changed now, and we can talk about all the different reasons for that, but just given the history of where this bull market is right now historically I think it would surprise even the wise thinking person if the market kept going from here another 20%, like we've seen irrational things before.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. It would definitely surprise the wise thinking person, but we're saying it would surprise most people, which it would surprise a lot of people, we'll put it that way. Like "Wow, really? It is 1999." Yeah. So we'll see. We'll see where we are at the end of 1999, how many people – see, I said 1999 – at the end of 2025 and if they were surprised by it.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah, I would say just kind of understand what we might be in, if we are in '98, '99, you know? Let's not get to the end of 1999 and be surprised that things are going to blow up, you know? [Laughs]

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, that's the surprise none of us want.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 OK.

Corey McLaughlin:    All right. We got another S&P general five market surprise here.

Dan Ferris:                 OK, lay it on me.

Corey McLaughlin:    S&P 500 enters a bear market, which more than 20% off its highs by the end of 2025.

Dan Ferris:                 So we're saying big moves in either direction would surprise a lot of people. I think this would be a bigger surprise right now. [Laughs] I think a lot of people are super bullish, and I think this would be a big surprise because people are talking about "Well, fed rate cuts, hey, that propels prices higher." Everyone's very optimistic about Donald Trump being in office and maybe cutting taxes, maybe cutting the size of the federal government through DOGE, and they're pretty giddy right now. So the S&P 500 entering into a bear market and being in a bear market by the end of the year, in the official minus 20% calculating that, I think it would really shock the heck out of a lot of people. They would say, "Oh my God. 2025 is not 1999. It's 2000." [Laughs]

Corey McLaughlin:    Right. [Laughs] Yep. Exactly. And if this happens though, people should not be shocked because the market will either be down 20% in a day by your annual surprise. None of our listeners should be surprised by this. But it can happen, right? A lot of people were caught off guard in 2022. That was for sure.

Dan Ferris:                 Yep.

Corey McLaughlin:    And we're going into that year at all-time highs, and even with inflation a problem and people knowing that the Fed was going to hike interest rates, you had a bear market, and so even when people are more or less expecting it or at least some people are expecting it, it happens. So it's the way it is. Bull markets and bear markets happen, and yeah. It would surprise a heck of a lot of people I think now because we're definitely I feel like in the buy the rumor part of the incoming administration, which I wish all the best – but it's like the buy the rumor and then the sell the news part, is the news good or is the news bad in '25 or '26.

Dan Ferris:                 And is it better? [Laughs]

Corey McLaughlin:    I feel like the rug might be pulled out more so in '26 because this year we're still – if anything, because this year it's still kind of the previous policies, and then '25 we'll see what might happen or actually happen, which might go into effect in '26. But I don't know.

Dan Ferris:                 So Trump gets inaugurated in January of 2025, so maybe the newness really shifts into a higher gear, the optimism shifts into a higher gear. We can all see that, right? That makes a lot of sense, and then it wears off in '26, and 2026 becomes the analog for 2000 as we said before, etc., etc.. That feels rhythmically good to me. [Laughs]

Corey McLaughlin:    It does. It feels good in my head. But we'll see if it's reality or not.

Dan Ferris:                 It really will. All right. Our next surprise, which is – well, we've alluded to it, haven't we? But let's just say it outright – would be the Fed is done cutting rates and signals or executes hikes. So done cutting – we're counting signaling hiking, and there's a lot baked in here, right? They would have to get higher inflation data or something. Something would have to spur this or like a big market crash or whatever. I'm sorry, not a big market crash. A big surge in inflation and if the market continues like 1999 style, you're like "Well, OK." They're looking around and seeing all the signals and the surge in inflation would be like – if the market goes up like 1999, they're golden. They're fine, right? But if that's accompanied by a surge in inflation data that they can't ignore, back up to the kind of numbers that we saw throughout 2021 and into 2022, then they really just would not be able to turn their backs, and they might have to actually hike. They might have to pivot. Pivoting from dovishness to hawkishness would surprise the heck out of absolutely everyone right now, I think.

Corey McLaughlin:    Exactly, yeah. Couldn't say it any better than you just said it. You look at the inflation numbers just the last couple months. They are picking up already. So I think the possibility is here that the Fed's done cutting rates. They might be done after the December meeting, and they might say that the possibility's still there next year, but what you said, if the number's keep doing what they've been doing the last two months and the labor market stays where it is, it's hard to have an argument to keep cutting rates, but we also know the Fed is notoriously and by definition late to these trends and making decisions based off of them. So it might take a long time for this admission or a pivot, but it could still happen this year, I think.

Dan Ferris:                 By the end of the year, right?

Corey McLaughlin:    By the end of the year, but I still think that would catch people off guard, and based on now, if you look at market expectations and whatnot, people are expecting at least two cuts, I think, at the very least, most traders, until next year. So for a hike to happen would be the complete opposite of that, and that would certainly shake things up in the market.

Dan Ferris:                 Yep. [Laughs] Why don't you take the next one? I got off rhythm here. I'm sorry, I took one of yours, so why don't you do the next one?

Corey McLaughlin:    Oh no, you're good, but I will. We got No. 9 here: Wars in the Middle East and Ukraine escalate, and here's maybe the more surprising part, and directly involve U.S. troops.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. So the U.S. troops are over there doing some kind of advisory role, but I think U.S. troops with guns pointing them at – [laughs] you know, at Russians and pulling the trigger would really surprise the heck out of everybody. I'm not saying I expect it to happen. I'm saying it would surprise everyone because I think people who know about this, and we've even had a guest on saying they think they'll get it ironed out and the war will deescalate in the coming year, and that it's nearly over even. So I think if it gets worse, especially in Ukraine is what our guess was referring to, if either one of these gets a whole lot worse, I think it probably – it would surprise me, I have to say, because for all my talk preparing for the worst and buying defense stocks and all of this stuff, I have to admit even if it all comes true it'll be a shock to me. I'll wake up and see headlines, and I'll go "Oh my God, what's happening?" You and I have lost the ability to be surprised a lot of the time, but this would surprise me.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah, I think it would surprise me, too. Yes. You see enough stuff that things don't surprise you very often, but for U.S. troops to be kind of involved in a large-scale way in – yeah, I would say Russia, Ukraine, Iran, that would be more surprising, I think. We've seen the history though of wars and you don't need to look very far at all to know that U.S. troops get involved a lot for different reasons, depending on what the president thinks. You think it's going to be a short-term thing, and it turns out it's not. You have confidence that it is. You're going to be in Afghanistan for, I don't know, six months, a year, and then you're there for over a decade.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, 20 years, that's right.

Corey McLaughlin:    So we've seen this happen before.

Dan Ferris:                 Vietnam, same thing.

Corey McLaughlin:    Maybe we shouldn't be surprised, but it feels like we should be surprised this time around. Hopefully.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. Yeah, when I think of these and I think of potential U.S. involvement, I do think of Afghanistan and Vietnam, and Vietnam is like – I think there were like 20,000 – I forget what they called them – military advisors, but there were military people telling the south Vietnamese how to fight and where to go and who to shoot and whatever. [laughs] And JFK was going to pull them out, and he signed an order to do it, and then he got killed a month later, and then the next guy signed the order to send – I think it was 250,000 U.S. troops into the thing, and the other people, RFK, the first one, Sr., and Martin Luther King were big peace advocates as well, and bang, bang, they're all dead, and the Vietnam War raged and raged. [Laughs] So yeah, I hope this doesn't become another damn Vietnam. We sure don't need that. Of course, war is inflationary, too, so guns and butter economy of LBJ, the so-called great society, plus Vietnam War was a huge, huge reason why – that's when the big inflation started in the late '60s. Anyway. Let's hope that one doesn't happen.

Corey McLaughlin:    One quick point on that, exactly, from the market standpoint — I've seen this year when you've had some sort of escalation that kind of directly involves the U.S., it's been a down day for the markets overall. You would have oil prices up, you'd have stocks down, you have gold up. Like earlier this year when Biden green lit the use of the U.S. missiles deeper into Russia. That morning  people were like freaking out. "What is this going to mean?" So you hope it works out. Both sides seem to be open to negotiating some sort of end to it. But if it doesn't happen, that would be a market moving event, to say the least, I think, and if U.S. troops were involved, even more so for the U.S. markets, for sure.

Dan Ferris:                 Absolutely. Totally agree. All right. So this brings us to surprise number ten, our final one of our top ten surprises for 2025, and this one strikes a little closer to home. Surprise No. 10 is Whitney Tilson becomes the mayor of New York City, and of course our friend and colleague Whitney has thrown his hat in the ring and is running for mayor of New York City, and I saw him on Fox News, of all places, talking about this. My wife says, "Hey, Whitney's on TV," and so I ran in, and I forget who the commentator was interviewing him, and he said, "You sound more like a Republican than a Liberal" and Whitney's like, "No, I've been a Democrat all my life, but I'm just not an extreme far left –" and he was really adamant. He said, "All this far left stuff, we have to get rid of this, and we have to lower crime in New York" and he was just saying a lot of reasonable things. I don't remember the list that he did, but I remember he talked about reducing crime and that he was adamant that he's more of a sort of classic centrist Democrat and not on the far left, and I thought, "Well, if there's anything New York City needs it's like no more far left-y stuff." So I wish him well, but it would surprise me just because I don't know how well Whitney is known to the people of New York City. He's known to the investors of New York City.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 I mean, he's known to – Warren Buffett knows who Whitney Tilson is, but I have no sense for how viable a candidate he is or not even though I think he's a good guy and would probably do a good job.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah. Like you said, this might even surprise people just that we're talking about this. I'll say it again. Whitney is running for mayor of New York City. He's the lead editor of our Stansberry Investment Advisory, but in another way, if you know Whitney, it might not surprise you at all, just based on – he's a world traveler, has tons of  experience, was kind of directly involved in the "Biden dropping out, Kamala Harris coming in" discussion. He was making headlines during that transition, and just has thoughts on why the Democrats lost the election, but his solutions are very common-sense solutions for New York. From what I've heard from him, it's kind of like you would like to go back to the days when a business-centric guy was running the city. Bloomberg was the last one, and crime was down under him. People may hate him, like him, whatever, but things were going better, and so I think Whitney —–he's a long-time New York City resident and, yeah, I think he'll do good. I know he's raising money now. He was trying to raise money from New York city residents because you get this big matching program from the city. It's like the company match with your retirement fund, which I didn't know that existed, which is interesting, because I grew up outside New York.

So yeah, New York's had its issues like a lot of cities recently, people moving out, people can't afford it. That's one of the things Whitney's been talking about is making housing more affordable, something we talk about here, just the lack of supply of housing. It goes for New York City, too, and the crime. I know he wants to cut it by – 50% is his goal. So hey, you can check out all his stuff there. I think it's Whitneyformayor.com, if I'm remembering correctly, or you could Google him and figure it out.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. You should be able to Google it pretty easily. So those are our top 10 surprises, things we think would surprise investors and other folks in 2025. They aren't things that we want or don't want to happen. We wish our colleague Whitney Tilson well certainly, but there are things that as Corey and I look around the landscape right at this moment, we think that – for example, when we say it would surprise people that stocks gain another 20% after doing so well for the past couple years, just soaring as he said, 70% off that big October 2022 bottom, it would surprise us to keep seeing these enormous 20% or more gains, and likewise because everyone is so optimistic, it would surprise everyone absolutely if a bear market started and the market dropped more than 20%, right? Anything but a middling performance from here I think is going to drop some jaws, and we sort of have skin in the game because we talk about investments in our daily work, but these are just things that we think are surprise –

And I freely admit I started doing this in imitation of a guy names Byron Wien, a big Wall Street guy. I don't know who he works for. I thought he worked for Goldman Sachs. Maybe not anymore. I could be wrong about that. Byron Wien, he did his 10 surprises for the coming year, and he usually gives two or three bonus surprises too that he couldn't resist telling people about. But I took his more as predictions that nobody else is predicting, and that didn't feel right to me, so I started doing the top 10 surprises, just things that would surprise people without predicting, because as we always say, "Prepare, don't predict." Predicting is a bad way to run an investment strategy, especially for individual investors who probably don't have – people on Wall Street making predictions know what all the institutions are going to do, so maybe they base a prediction on that, but we don't know that. Anyway, that's it for 2025. You got anything for the people?

Corey McLaughlin:    Yes, for the people. To me, this exercise just always reminds me, like what you said, prepare, don't predict, but you also – and this got beat into my head from you as well, for good reasons – prepare for the possible outcomes, right? I think that's kind of what we're talking about here, especially with the S&P. We're talking about up 20%, down 20%. I think the point is there's ways to be invested in any market really, but just be prepared for your personal view to not be what actually happens, I would say as I'm sitting here thinking about it right now. That's kind of the point I'm taking away this year, and should be every year really, but right now things are good, and you look at the technical trends and whatnot that I like to look at, things look sturdy right now. We're not panicking right now or anything, and if anything, like you said, it's time to hope for some things to actually change over the longer run of things that could happen in 2025, but there will be surprises to be had. I can say that, right?

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. Right. Nobody went into 2024 saying, "I bet Trump barely misses getting assassinated, and I bet he wins the election." People didn't think he could win, and after they shot him in the ear in Pennsylvania, almost killed him if he hadn't turned his head at the last minute – and I said this at the time in the July issue of The Ferris Report, you know, that was his Iwo Jima moment, and the photograph from Iwo Jima, I was saying, was – Trump's photograph from the cover of Time I was saying was analogist to the famous Iwo Jima photograph of raising the flag on Mount Suribachi, and they use that photograph to sell war bonds, and I thought, "Well, I think Trump's going to use it to win the election."

Corey McLaughlin:    He did.

Dan Ferris:                 I think it helped, yeah. So there's always surprises. I don't know how good – I haven't even kept track of how good we are at throwing these surprises out, if any of them happen. That's not the point. The point is what would surprise people based on what's happening now, and this is what we think 10 of them could be. Corey, it's going to be an interesting year, and it was a fun year with you last year, and I look forward to all our interviews and insights that we're going to get from guests, and it's fun to ride along with you and our listeners. It really is.

Corey McLaughlin:    Fun with you, too. I keep learning stuff every episode every day, and yeah, we'll have great guests on this year to talk about all these things. When they actually happen, we'll be ready for it.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. All right, folks. That's another episode of the Stansberry Investor Hour. We do provide a transcript for every episode. Just go to www.investorhour.com, click on the episode you want, scroll all the way down, click on the word "transcript," and enjoy. If you like this episode and know anybody else who might like it, tell them to check it out on their podcast app or at www.investorhour.com please, and also 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. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram. Our handle is @InvestorHour. On Twitter, our handle is @Investor_Hour. Have a guest you want us to interview, drop us a note at [email protected], or call our listener feedback line 800-381-2357. Tell us what's on your mind and hear your voice on the show. For my co-host Corey McLaughlin, till next week, I'm Dan Ferris. Thanks for listening.

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