Episode 406: The Recent Downturn Is Actually a Growth Reset
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.
Click here or on the image below to watch the video interview with Matt right now. For the full audio episode, click here.
(Additional past episodes are located here.)
The transcript is coming soon.
This Week's Guest
Matt Weinschenk is the director of research for Stansberry Research. He also serves as editor of This Week on Wall Street, senior analyst for Dr. David Eifrig's franchise of publications, and a member of the investment committee for Stansberry Portfolio Solutions.
At Stansberry, Matt works to find safe ways to grow capital with income-generating investments. His approach marries fundamental research and business quality with a quantitative understanding of the factors that drive stocks over both short- and long-term horizons. Before joining Stansberry in 2013, Matt provided research for The Oxford Club and was a founding analyst for the White Cap Report and Wall Street Daily – focusing on small-cap stocks and disruptive technologies.
Matt has been a Chartered Financial Analyst charterholder since 2014. He also holds bachelor's degrees in economics and political science from the University of Pittsburgh and a master's in applied economics from Johns Hopkins University.
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 talk with our Director of Research, Matt Weinschenk.
Dan Ferris: I've known Matt for many years. He is the person I report to in the organization. And so, I'm going to have a great chance to butter up the boss here and pick his brain and find out what's in there about the current investing environment and beyond. Let's talk with Matt Weinschenk. Let's do it right now.
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 could 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.
Dan Ferris: Matt, welcome back to the show. Nice to see you.
Matt Weinschenk: Nice to see you, Dan. Corey.
Dan Ferris: Now, Matt, I recognize your face and your name is somewhat familiar to me, but maybe tell our listeners who you are again and remind me who you are again.
Matt Weinschenk: Oh, I thought I'd get an intro. I've got to come up with my own. Let me see. So, I am the Director of Research here at Stansberry Research. I've worked with Doc – if your listeners are already fans of Stansberry Research, I've worked with Doc for a long time as his analyst and worked on a lot of the more conservative stuff, the income stuff, some of our options stuff. But now I'm helping run the team, helping make sure you guys have the tools you need, making sure the company's doing well, and helping our readers out. So, CFA, economics degrees, all that kind of stuff. I don't think we care about those kind of credentials, though, do we?
Dan Ferris: We sort of do, but we pretend we don't because we're too cool to do that now.
Matt Weinschenk: Exactly.
Dan Ferris: But what Matt is not telling you is that I report to him. He writes my, what do you call them, assessments at the end of the year.
Corey McLaughlin: Your boss and ours.
Dan Ferris: So, basically, this is going to be like, yeah, the most softball interview you've ever heard in your life.
Matt Weinschenk: Yes, it better be better be, Dan. It better be. I will remember this. Come in a year and we'll see how it goes.
Corey McLaughlin: It'll be in your review next year, Dan, if it's not –
[Laughter]
Dan Ferris: Yes. "Dan, did a wonderful interview." Yeah. All right.
Matt Weinschenk: No, but just to point out, we've got an amazing team, and you guys are all pros and I like to think of it as like player-coach-type thing. You guys know what you're doing and we're just trying to put you in the right place and make sure you have all the right information and things like that. So, we joke about being a boss and things like that but –
Dan Ferris: Yes. And objectively speaking, look, I've – I'll tell any member of management or the board of Marketwise or Stansberry, anybody, anything I want anytime and they can fire me and that will be fine. So, trust me when I say Matt is the best person who I've ever reported to in his job. There were – there was actually a really good guy named Austin Root right before him. But that was the beginning of the much better period. Brett Aitken is the best publisher I've ever read reported to. You're the best in your role as director of research.
Matt Weinschenk: Well, thanks.
Dan Ferris: And it has been good. It's been really good.
Matt Weinschenk: Thank you, Dan. It's a pleasure working with you, too. And I'm sure people are clicking off the podcast at this point as we keep going. But I do want to –
Dan Ferris: I know. I know. We've got to stop this. Yeah. Yeah.
Matt Weinschenk: This is really a wonderful place. And if you look at the longevity of people who stay here, and I think – I believe you do need to have happy workers to have a good company. And that's something I take when I look at stocks and things like that, too. Places like Costco and things like that. Treating employees well leads to a better product, helps your customers, all things like that. So, everybody kind of really loves working here. So, it's been great.
Dan Ferris: Yeah, I want to seem ambitious and move around and stuff, but I've been here more than two decades because you won't – it's just I can't leave. It's too good.
Matt Weinschenk: It is. It's incredible.
Dan Ferris: I just get to do what I want every day and nobody bothers me. That's wonderful. And now – and this is for our listeners, Matt. This isn't just the mutual admiration society. Now, I think even the podcast is going to get some love, which it never did before.
Matt Weinschenk: Well, yes –
Dan Ferris: And I'm really looking forward to that.
Matt Weinschenk: I'm sorry. I keep interrupting.
Dan Ferris: No, please.
Matt Weinschenk: But I just received news that you are about to cross 3 million downloads. Did you know that?
Dan Ferris: I did not. That's –
Matt Weinschenk: Yeah, so 405 episodes, 3 million downloads. And yeah, we're working – we'll probably talk about this as we go on, but we're working on getting some of this stuff out there to more people and giving it some extra juice. And it's kind of been a labor of love for you, so to speak, and for your dedicated listeners but we're going to try and grow it. But we know we're not going to – for the people who love it, we're – it's not going to change really. We're just going to try and get more eyeballs on it. Or ears. However you put it.
Dan Ferris: I keep wanting – it might change a little. I keep wanting to try to make it better in some way because there are things that other people are doing that inspire me as an investor and as an analyst and a podcaster, and I do take some inspiration from them. And if it changes, hopefully it will be greatly for the better. But overall, this is what we do. This is what we've been doing. This is what we're going to do. So, let's – now that we've established how wonderful we are, let's just talk to Matt about investing and junk and stuff like that. If I asked you what kind of an investor you are, if we never met before and I didn't know the answer to this question, just to refresh our listeners, what would you say?
Matt Weinschenk: Yeah. So, Stansberry Research really does have a philosophy that is ingrained in our style of investing, I think. And everybody's a little different. You're a little different than me and Doc, but we really do start with business quality. We want businesses that we want to – we are partial owners and businesses. We want to own them for a long time. We have a hard time picking things that are pre-revenue or unprofitable. And there are people who can trade those things, I guess, but I think we realize – or I realize you need to be able to sleep well at night. You need to know – look at right now. If you're trading a zero-margin business that's got all sorts of execution risk in their business plan and they get whacked with tariffs, that thing's gonna have a drawdown and it might not come back. But if you've got to ride out macro markets like this, if you have that underlying business quality, that's what's going to deliver your investment returns over time.
And then, I like to say – so definitely start bottom-up. Definitely are looking at businesses and just picturing them in a vacuum. But then I like to make sure we're macro-literate and know what's going on. You can't always – you don't always want to predict. I feel like we're very sympatico on these things. But you want to make sure you're not stepping in a pothole. You're not getting into the wrong thing at the wrong time. And then, if you get a little extra luck, you can really kind of be in the right sectors and industries that have a tailwind behind them. So, it's matching that bottom-up with the top-down and being pretty conservative on the stuff that we publish. That's partially because of the products we have are geared towards conservative investors, the one I work on. But that's the overall thing. And I think you're pretty similar, Dan. You're definitely bottom-up. But the macro today is kind of what's driving markets, and it feels like what you need to know about and it feels like it's hard to keep up on. But if you can avoid the traps and get a little bit lucky, that's where you end up getting your big returns.
Dan Ferris: Yeah, avoid the traps. See, we get – we're getting here quicker, aren't we, Corey? We always get here with all the investors we interview who know what they're doing. But I feel like we –
Corey McLaughlin: Yes. I was just going to say, this reminds me of our – or, a lot, but also our recent one with Dan Rasmussen just a couple days ago. So...
Dan Ferris: I was thinking the same thing. Yeah.
Matt Weinschenk: Yeah.
Dan Ferris: We got to the to the risk-control aspect of things quicker this time. Usually with the traders, we get into it – into the interview a little ways, but we got there with you real quick, Matt. So, that tells me that you understand that you've got to kind of – you've got to look down before you look up. You say, "How far could I fall here?" before you ask how high you can go. Where does that come from? Were you always that way?
Matt Weinschenk: Well, it's probably – I got started sort of as a professional in this industry. Well, even before that, I was in college during the dot com boom. And it was interesting. Being in college wasn't really watching the markets and stuff, but you could sense the frenzy going on. And so, I was sitting there in my dorm room going like "Oh, this stock thing seems pretty interesting." And of course, by the time I was really thinking about it, it was late 2000 and then you saw that crash. And – but I was insulated from it. But then, I started professionally in 2006 and walked right into 2007, 2008 and saw all that happen.
So, they say every generation needs to – in markets, every generation needs to relearn some of the same lessons, that stocks actually do go down, that home prices go down. So, you saw all these things sort of happen right at that time to just make – put it in your head that you have to question all your assumptions really. It's very simple. You talk to people who ask you "Well, what do I do with my 401(k)?" and you kind of start with, "Stocks – you can generally expect 7% or 8% a year." But, man, that's a loaded statement. The tails are really fat and there's big down years in there. And you really need to internalize sort of the statistics of that and understand that surprises come over that period. Just something like Citigroup seemed impenetrable, just a complete – one of the best banks ever and it – I don't know, didn't it go down 90% or something?
So, at that point you like to pick stocks, you're like, "OK, Coca-Cola is going to be good forever." And it probably will, and I use that as a good example. But man, you never really know. And so, I think you just need to get slapped in the face a few times, hopefully early in your career, and understand – and I didn't have a ton at stake at that time. I was just getting started and things. So, it wasn't like I blew up some giant hedge fund or something, although I'm sure I would have if someone had let me. So, it's just experience.
And in 2020, some people had that experience. Some people had that COVID experience and some people had that in 2022 when sort of the meme-stock thing came around. But man, it doesn't seem like – maybe it's just social media or whatever. It doesn't seem like people are prepared for any sort of downturn.
Dan Ferris: No.
Matt Weinschenk: Yeah.
Dan Ferris: No. I – well, I guess by the time this podcast gets published it will be in the past. So, I was going to say "a preview of an upcoming Stansberry Digest," but not really. I'm writing my Digest and putting some things together, and I found this report by Bridgewater that says the last 15 years were the best 15-year period of any 15-year period since 1970. So, basically, anybody really alive and investing and putting money to work today, this is like, "This is it, man. This is your best 15."
And as you just pointed out, people – they tend to take that for granted. And they feel like – well, that's their expectation going forward. So, they're not ready. They're completely – they're as complacent as ever. Even with markets down in what people are calling correction territory as we speak, they're still just – they don't understand. They think every dip is to be bought.
Corey McLaughlin: There's a lot of dip-buying instinct from what I see on, at least on social media and people you talk to. It's like "Buy the dip." You saw Eric Trump out tweeting about when bitcoin's down, or all the cryptos, "Buy the dip," like he's suddenly the voice of reason when it comes to investing advice. So, it's there.
Dan Ferris: Yeah, where do you stand on – do you own bitcoin, Matt?
Matt Weinschenk: Yes, quite passively. My crypto story – I'm trying to think of how detailed to go. A friend and me were actually mining light coins in 2013, 2014, and we got a whole bunch of them and I converted some to bitcoin and then I just kind of sat on them. And I found it very interesting. And then, what was it, like 2017 you had this [initial coin offering ("ICO")] boom? That was the first sort of non-bitcoin stuff and you had all these things where it's like – initial coin offerings and it's like, "We're going to build a business. Here's an initial coin offering." And it was very clear to me that that was just kind of – those were scams. Or even in the well-meaning case, they were going to zero. So, I kind of stopped paying attention to stuff then because I could tell, I was like, "Oh, there's bitcoin but everything else is kind of junky." And then sort of left behind the [decentralized finance ("DeFi")] boom and things like that.
So, I've got some that I'm sitting on, but I'm waiting for Trump to institute his no taxes on capital gains on cryptos and then we'll see what happens. But it's not a life-changing amount. But it's funny, I think your question is kind of like, "Are you a crypto skeptic or enthusiast?" And I just think it's very interesting. I feel like I'm right and you can describe it perfectly by my generational status. It's interesting. I don't fully trust it. I get that there's nothing there, but if people are willing to pay for something, it has value. So, I've followed it very closely. I don't have a strong answer. It's a very curious thing to me that I don't know if I'll ever fully understand. But we have in our Total Portfolio, we've got 2% or 3% in there. It's certainly a diversifying asset. It's not gold. It's more like a tech stock if you watch how it behaves. It kind of falls in the spot for me, like whatever – AI stocks, whatever you have that's got a lot of upside. You've just got to position size it. People just get – I do know a person who literally cashed in his 401(k) and put it in bitcoin two years ago and I'm like, "I don't – that's just a mistake." Anyway, you – I don't care if that goes to a million and he – it is a mistake. So, it's really about position sizing: 2%, 5%, something like that is reasonable.
Dan Ferris: And it's – yeah, I agree. And it's worth talking about a little bit why that's a mistake, since we started down this path of talking about risk controls. And a 401(k) is a – it's a retirement fund. It's a tax advantage retirement account that you want it to be there. That's its purpose, is to make sure it's there in the future. But bitcoin draws down 50%, 80% and – normally.
Matt Weinschenk: Yeah.
Dan Ferris: That doesn't say "Be there" to me.
Matt Weinschenk: I'll even revise it. You said you want it to be there. I would say you need it to be there. Right?
Dan Ferris: Yes.
Matt Weinschenk: This is a need. This is your future. And I know if you're younger, you have a longer time horizon. You can take more risk and things like that. But that only works when there's an underlying value. If you have a business that has a cash flow and you say, "Well, look, I've got a long time horizon, I can let that be volatile," but when there might be zero there in the end, you can't – a long time horizon doesn't kind of excuse all sort of risk taking, like some people think it might.
So, yeah, part of why I wanted to come on today is because there is this culture in finance and trading and investing now where it's turned to gambling for a lot of people.
Dan Ferris: Yes. It has.
Matt Weinschenk: And skeptics – people don't love Wall Street. They say, "Oh, stocks are gambling." But there – it's not a zero-sum game. There's value creation there. It creates wealth for people when done right. But I don't know if it's people feel like this is the only way to get ahead or I don't know if it's just the frenzy of the – sort of that pandemic boom that people saw and they think it's going to happen again, or where the impetus comes from, or it's a generational thing, but man, people just – the zero-day options, meme stocks, the meme coins that are totally – like I said, I'm not a bitcoin skeptic, but some of those meme coins are just complete junk and everybody knows it, but they all play this pump-and-dump game.
And so, it's – there's a weird tone to what people are doing with their money today, probably particularly young people. And that just sort of concerns me. I don't know if there's anything we can really do to change that for everybody, but I think we'd like to change it for a few people and hopefully get them a little – I sound like an old bearish fuddy-duddy, but they're doing it wrong. And I hope we can find a way to get them a little more conservative, understand what they're doing, buy and hold a little more, understand some fundamentals. But it's concerning. People – I don't know. I'm sure you're – you can go off on a rant on this kind of stuff, but –
Dan Ferris: Well, here's what I – yeah, I probably could, but just objectively speaking, the exploration and innovation in cryptocurrencies is risky enough. It's like this giant $2.7 trillion venture-capital fund that we don't really know what – which ones are really going to be worth something. The market says bitcoin is the most valuable one for now. OK. I guess that's true. It says Ethereum is pretty valuable and it says a few other things are valuable right now. We don't really know in the future, though, what any of it's going to look like because we don't really – most of us don't use it. We use our Visa card and whatever else we have. So, that's enough risk by itself.
Matt Weinschenk: Yeah.
Dan Ferris: But then you add Peanut the Squirrel and Hawk Tuah and all this other crazy stuff, the Fartcoin and all the rest of it, and that's pure absolute scam. It's not gambling. It's "scambling." It's just a disaster, and getting involved with that is just – is a disaster. So, yeah, we're on – I think we're probably about on the same page there.
Matt Weinschenk: I think so. And just one more thing on crypto. We've got Eric Wade in our stable here, and he is just amazing at this stuff and he doesn't care for the meme coins. He doesn't care for the scam stuff. But man, he digs into these projects that are building real things and they're getting real features and actually solving problems. But those have been the ones under this regulatory environment that have been disallowed because they look like securities. And so, the prior [U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC")] was like, "No, these aren't allowed. They look like securities." OK. All the junk that is blowing through people's savings, that was actually legal because it wasn't securities.
Dan Ferris: Yeah, not securities. Yep.
Matt Weinschenk: Right. And so, I'm sitting here and I'm hoping – Trump came in and he's crypto-friendly and he said all these things, at least on the campaign trail, on the reserve, but I'm really hoping the SEC has – these companies wanted to register. They wanted to become securities. They wanted to follow the rules. And they said, "Well, you can't get exist because you're a security. And you can't register because you're not a security." And they're just kind of stuck in the middle. So, I think it's really throttled innovation in that sector. But I'm watching Eric. I think there's going to be some cool stuff out of there. But this is, to your point, the venture-capital sort of arm of anything. These are businesses that have to grow and figure out their model. And so, they have a lot of challenges, but man, there will be opportunities if they can get a fair shake, I think.
Dan Ferris: All right, let's move on to the next speculative thing, which is AI.
Matt Weinschenk: Yeah.
Dan Ferris: And you recently sent around an AI questionnaire for the Stansberry analysts and made it clear that if your position is "don't know, don't care, don't want it in my life," that's OK. That was not my position, by the way, Matt. But – well, I guess we all know where I am on it because I've written a little bit about it, but just quickly, we actually spoke with Dan Rasmussen about this, and he's written about it, too. We mentioned him – Corey mentioned him earlier. And he makes a good point of comparing AI at this point, the highly capital-intensive thing that isn't getting a return yet, that we don't know quite how it's going to work, to a shipping company – or, I compared it to the mining industry. Massive amounts of capital at the – what appears to be maybe the peak of the cycle when we really don't know what things are going to look like. By definition, the return is going to be a lot lower with all the capital pouring in. I've – I don't know, I've heard you talk about it like you're expecting some good things eventually.
Matt Weinschenk: Yeah, it's a – I have a lot of thoughts. It's hard to figure out where to start and how to how to weave them all together in a coherent way. But to me, there's still a big end question on AI and it's not a toy and it's not useless. Some people are pretty dismissive. I don't think that's the case. It's going to help people out. It's going to improve people's productivity. But it's unclear whether, I don't know, say 10 years from now it's Microsoft Office coming into the business world and instead of working with paper and stuff you have a spreadsheet and that's a huge productivity boost. And I think it's going to be at least something like that.
There's another sort of vision of, OK, we're going to get to "AGI," "a general intelligence" or maybe "super intelligence," and it's going to take off and it's going to be able to do all these things for you. And what I find, if you compare it to the dot – so, that's what a technology person, like a technologist working in AI, they're very excited, they say, "We're going from here to there. Buckle up." And they might be right over time. I think it'll be slower than they do, but who am I to say. But what I think people should – or what investors should realize is if you talked to a technologist in Silicon Valley in 1996, they would have said, "Oh, here's what the Internet's going to be. It's going to be this and this and that." And they were mostly right. And there's a huge, huge, huge drawdown in between there, a 90% decline in Cisco and things like that.
So, technology optimists – I'm an optimist. I'm a technology optimist. I'm a rational optimist, whatever you want to – however you want to put it. But there's a long window between here and how – when these products get figured out and what the revenue streams are and how much those are going to be. And they're going to have to be very big to justify this spending. Very big.
Dan Ferris: If you're spending this kind of money, it better be very, very big.
Matt Weinschenk: Yes. Exactly. And –
Dan Ferris: With very, very incredible margins.
Matt Weinschenk: And just like dot-com, they were spending like crazy to build out fiber optics and things like that. And I'm glad we – we're probably using them right now, but they overbuilt. They – telecom was not the industry really to be in – that's not where the value accrued. That's a pretty commodity industry after all that investment. And it's the same thing now. The models themselves look like they're going to be pretty commoditized. The hyperscalers seem like a good bet – Microsoft, Alphabet – because whether they're spending on training or inference, the more people who are using this stuff, we are going to need more computing power. But what's their return on capital on this $300 billion or depending on what kind of projection you want to look like, it's hard. It's very hard to measure. And to me, it really depends on that end stage of AI, like where it is in five or 10 years. And that is an unanswerable question and something I read about extensively. And it's an unknown unknown. Or it's a known unknown, I guess you could say. We just have to be along for the ride.
And so, should you be investing in AI, if people want the headline question? In the right size. In the right size and at the right valuations is how you can do this without going too far. But there's a big opportunity there, I think. It's exciting. But it's tough.
Dan Ferris: I think if you focus on the quality businesses that you started out talking about earlier, as we do at Stansberry mostly – overwhelmingly, I would say – you're going to wind up with companies that are making – that are constantly making technological improvements. So, if you own, I don't know, Costco or Visa or just about any financial institution, or even manufacturers, all kinds of businesses, if you own really great businesses, they're figuring out how to do this. They want to be efficient. They want to get thicker margins. So, you're probably – yeah. You have money in it already.
Corey McLaughlin: Yeah, I was just going to say that's how I've been trying to think about it, too, is these bigger companies, they're going to have some exposure – they already do – to AI. The trends. So, you're going to have some there, but the exciting part to me is the smaller companies that nobody knows about or doesn't even – don't even exist yet, that a lot of them are just private, a lot of them are small groups of engineers and whatnot just trying to figure this stuff out. I think those are the ones where you can – we don't know what they are, but they – you think of Zuckerberg creating Facebook and those sorts of things. That's kind of the exciting part to me about AI.
But the – to me, the – what Matt's saying too makes a ton of sense to me. You just – you don't know what the answer is, that return on capital. You guys know better than I do on all that stuff. But the return on capital just seems like, to me, these data centers that they're investing in right now, it seems to me like all that stuff should get more efficient at some level in the future compared to what they're spending now. And so, that's maybe just the simple way of looking at it. But yeah, this is just kind of what people try to think about when you're thinking about the valuations of these companies.
Matt Weinschenk: Yeah, and I have a perfect story for you, and it's actually kind of counter because instead of going small we went really big. And in June of '24, Doc and I basically warned people about Nvidia and said, "Look, yes, this is a great – the fundamentals are fantastic, but at 30 – was at 30 times revenue or something? – this just can't be justified." It might go up a little bit. It might go – over the next year or two, but you can't build wealth buying things at 30 times earnings, especially when they're that big. Maybe if they're really prerevenue, almost.
Anyway, so we – and it's such a phenomenal business. Huge margins. They're the only ones that make these chips, but the competition is coming. Yes, they have a great moat. It's hard to make chips. It's going to take years to compete. But people – one company's margin is another company's opportunity. So, people are coming. So, we stopped and said, "Look, yes, we want to bet on AI. No, we can't justify paying this kind of price for Nvidia." And we recommended Cisco.
And so, Cisco – this is one of the one of the keys to quality businesses. These – they have huge cash flows. They have the opportunity to pursue new opportunities because they have a good business with a solid moat, real cash flows. We liked the dividend in our income product. And Cisco was in data centers. They use Nvidia chips, but they also use an Nvidia networking product called InfiniBand. I'm going to say it wrong. InfiniBand. So, they connect – they interconnect the servers in the data center using the Nvidia things. The Nvidia network connections were faster than others, and you really can't have a bottleneck in there. But Cisco had just upgraded its sort of more standardized ethernet products, and they were just getting – and if you're building these huge expensive data centers and you have another option and it's more standardized and it's just as fast and it's a little cheaper – so, they have been getting taking market share. They're helping build the AI thing but they're at a reasonable price. And there are opportunities like this. And since then, Cisco's up 35% and Nvidia's down 12%.
So, it was – it's not that hard to kind of dig in. But what I really think the lesson is, is valuation gives you an opportunity. Buying at a reasonable valuation gives you the opportunity to rise, whereas Nvidia lowers a projection for next quarter and the whole thing comes down 20%. That's not investing. It was priced to perfection. And that's trouble for you. So, the opportunities are out there and you can do it in safer ways than the big headline names, the prerevenue companies that haven't done anything. And so, that's the kind of things we try to focus on. And Cisco still looks really good from here, pending all the market –
Dan Ferris: Yeah, Cisco's a great example. They were the Nvidia of their day. They were the Nvidia of the year 2000, 1999.
Matt Weinschenk: Exactly.
Dan Ferris: And they still haven't eclipsed that valuation, by the way.
Matt Weinschenk: No, they have not. They're not even close. And that was kind of the story we told. And just like – this is something people don't think about enough, but you want to put yourself in a position to get lucky. And good companies get lucky. And so, we recommended Microsoft 12 years ago or something. And the story was they've got Office, they've got all these cash flows. It was a very cheap stock at the time but they've got so much cash coming in. And it was a value play. It wasn't a – well, it wasn't a deep value play. But we did not foresee cloud coming along. We didn't foresee Satya Nadella being a really good CEO. But the fact that they had all these cash flows allowed them to pivot to cloud. And that was like – I've never seen a tech company with a second or even third life like that. I guess Apple would be another example. But they were in the position to get lucky. They had smart people. They had big cash flows and that allowed them to jump on the next thing. So, being in conservative quality companies lets you be in a place to take advantage of whatever is next. But you can't – we did not know Microsoft was going to do that, obviously. Well, not obviously, but I'll admit it, I should say. But that's how you get lucky. And it's – I don't know, it's a 12-bagger or something for us.
Dan Ferris: I think what Matt really means to say is that I could have had a 15-bagger out of it if I hadn't sold it so early. I was in that thing – I was in Microsoft – I sent an email around to – when there were about five people in the company and I said, "They actually have enough cash on balance sheet and cash flow to serve as bonds. They could afford to use their cash and borrow money and buy all of their outstanding shares and have plenty left over to pay dividends." It was incredible. And so, Porter recommended it right away. And then, I followed on immediately after that and recommend it in Extreme Value. And like you said, it's – selling it has been the only mistake up to now. It's just – it's been amazing. And we did the same thing with Apple and stupidly sold that one too. And I've done that with a lot of things. I picked a lot of unbelievable, huge multi-baggers. If I hadn't sold one all those things, that Stansberry Hall of Fame that we publish every day in the Digest would be nothing but me. I'm serious. It would be nothing but me.
Matt Weinschenk: That's true. That's true.
Dan Ferris: But I sold stupidly. And of course, this has been the best 15 years ever, we were saying. So, that is gone and now we have to look forward and say, "Well, OK, it was stupid to sell and you would have been smart to buy every dip. But now what? Now what?" Because it's different. It's not – Microsoft's not a value stock anymore and – not even close. And this AI thing is going to be a huge – it's a bubble in and of itself. And that – most – much of that investment will be impaired. Huge – there will be huge impairments to some of the most valuable businesses in the world right now. And nobody's thinking about that, I don't think
Matt Weinschenk: Yeah, it's tricky. The best case I could come up with – looking past the current tariff turmoil and stuff like that, but a longer-term picture of growth and productivity, it can be a lot like the Internet in a sense that if you look at the total factor productivity numbers, like the actual measured productivity of the economy, all the internet and even sort of the computer revolution did not show up in productivity numbers. They've been pretty much flat or declining, which is kind of a puzzle. And what I think happened is the gains from those things were competed away. So, every company now, thanks to Microsoft and the internet, is so much more efficient. All this is really a deflationary sort of thing. We can produce so much now with so much less capital and labor. But it's deflationary in the sense that everything is more efficient.
And so, if you look down the line, AI – so, we've got this big AI buildout. So, bubbles – I'm getting all over the place. Bubbles are constructive to the economy because you end up, you have – you build all these railroads, a railroad bubble crashes, well, great. Guess what? You have all these railroads now and prices for – went down and you can ship stuff around much cheaper. Same thing with the internet bubble. We built all this fiber, thought it was going to make people billionaires, and then it all collapsed, and then – but guess what? We had all this cheap fiber. We would not have been able to have YouTube and all this sort of high-bandwidth stuff had we not overbuilt the broadband.
So, these bubbles leave capacitive assets in their wake. And so, now we're going to have tons and tons of compute power. It's going to get cheaper to – and we're going to have AI. We're going to have these tools to use it. So, now you look down the line, we're going to be able to – companies will be more productive, they'll be able to produce more. 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, are just going to be able to have stronger margins, better businesses. So, there's going to be a lot of opportunities and things that have no relation to AI, like you were saying. But it's going to take – there'll be a bottom three years from now or something where that starts to take hold. So, that's the bullish case. I don't know if it'll happen.
Dan Ferris: No, yeah, these things go in cycles. Nvidia will be a value stock one day. I promise.
Matt Weinschenk: Oh, that might be true. Yeah.
Dan Ferris: It'll get its day in the sun of trading at 1 times peak earnings or something like that. You made an interesting comment, too, in this same vein when you said that macro has become more important.
Corey McLaughlin: Yeah, that's what I was just going to say, Dan.
Dan Ferris: It's hard to do anything about it.
Corey McLaughlin: Look at us.
Dan Ferris: There you go. Well, why don't you say it? I'm sure you have a lot more to say than I do. Go ahead.
Corey McLaughlin: Well, no, I was just going to say a lot – I know a lot of what Matt's been writing about in his This Week in Wall Street publication, which comes out every Friday. Obviously, you can't ignore this macro stuff right now, which is – I know I can't while I'm writing the daily stuff. And what do you make of just this period right now? It seems like it seems like Main Street fear, I've heard more of that than I have in a while. What's your general take on what's going on right now?
Matt Weinschenk: Yeah, general take. Just to go back to macro being important, we love looking at businesses. We love just going, "Oh, these guys are doing something cool. They've got a new product or whatever. They've got good returns on capital." Whatever it is. And then starting in 2019, 2020, it was like – a lot of our income products and stuff, well, guess what? Interest rates just came back to life. They weren't a story. Interest rates and inflation sort of took over everything. And so, we were writing and being like, "Gosh, we've really got to talk about this macro stuff. I wish we could just pick businesses and pick stocks, but we have to focus on the macro. This is important." And now, geez, every week when I'm like, "I would love not to write about Trump this week. Please let me talk about the business world." And boy, man, there's nothing else to talk about. If you wanted to tell someone what happened this week, you start with Trump. And he loves to do things on Fridays and then screw up the whole weekend. But yeah, it's hard. It's hard to avoid.
Corey McLaughlin: In his first term he was always firing people on Fridays. At least that hasn't happened yet.
Matt Weinschenk: Yeah. And then we're in – Corey and I are in Baltimore, in Maryland, and so we see a lot of the – we know a lot of people in the government, just socially, and so we see a lot of stuff going on there. But it's all about the feedback mechanism. I think maybe we are all in agreement that tariffs do not make economic sense. If we want to have a debate about that, we can, but I'm not in favor of them as a way to grow the economy. And it seemed like he was – maybe Trump was using these as a negotiating tactic to get other concessions out of countries, but he's gone beyond what I would think. And it's unpredictable as well. Can you imagine being one of these automakers – or if you just – so, as we're talking today, they put new tariffs on aluminum and steel, or metals and steel, or something like that. So, if you're a business now using steel here, what do you do? Do you – because he's only around for three more years – well, I guess it's a full four years, basically. Do you go and reorganize your supply chain to get the U.S.-made steel? And then in four years, are you still going to be using that? Can you even make that investment? Or are you just going to pay these tariffs? So, we saw in COVID how delicate these supply chains can be. And the answer is both very delicate and also pretty robust to adjusting, but given enough time.
So, anyway, I don't like – so, the feedback loop that I'm looking for is how much attention is he paying to the stock market, because certainly you would have expected – he does care about the stock market, I think, and you would have expected him to have reacted to this already, would have been my impulse going in. If we gave up the whole sort of Trump gain since November which we had, I think he would – I would have said he'd be like "OK, hold on. I'm listening to that signal." But he doesn't seem to be yet. I'm sure business leaders are in his ear saying, "These are screwing up my business." He thinks we have some – there's some sort of benefit on the other side, which there are national security benefits. I don't know if he wants to reshore things – it'll create jobs. But all those things will take years to come to fruition. So, you're not going to see factory jobs rising and wages rising, even if he's right, until – for what, two years? These things take a lot of time.
So, the question is just when is the pain too much in his view? And it's – gosh, so it's really all about Trump at this point, and if he stops – and if he cools off on tariffs, and then when the Fed steps in, that's your reaction function. And like I said, we like looking at businesses from the bottom up. I can't predict that. I have some feelings and gut thoughts, but I – you can't you can't trade around that or you can't invest around that necessarily. So, it's very it's very confusing. I'll admit that.
Dan Ferris: It is. So, if you want an indicator, a possible contrarian indicator, I've got one for you. One of the things that I personally do with real money is I buy out-of-the-money [Long-Term Equity Anticipation Securities ("LEAPS")] puts on indexes and individual names. And I'm always – it's like a minimum one year out. Usually, I go for the most distant one and I just go out of the money. I almost don't care how much it costs. I just – because it's a tiny position. So, you just do that and forget you own it for two years, and maybe do it every year, two years out, something like that.
And that portfolio of mine is down. It's always down about 30% or 40%. Always. And then it's up a little, it's down a little, but it's always down about 30%, actually. And now it's up 15% or 20% just in the past week or so here. It went from negative to up 15% or 20%. I figure I'm doomed to lose every penny I put into this. And I've lost six figures over the past several years, just buying insurance, basically. Even when I made money. I made money in 2018, but still I've just done so much of it for so many years that I've – the losses are about six figures. And it's just – this is like a speculative account. It can go to zero – it doesn't matter. So, I figure I'm doomed to lose forever on this. That will be my lot in life on this particular type of thing, because I only make money on stuff that I just hold and forget about forever. So, this might – this could be your moment, because Dan's up on his put portfolio, and he figures he's doomed to lose forever on it. So, do with that information what you will.
Matt Weinschenk: Yeah. And in that vein, some of the things – so, people are very panicked about – they were panicked when this was a 5% drawdown. I don't know. Maybe we're at 10% now. And they're panicked because they're in the AI stocks and the meme coins and things like that. So, maybe that's just what I see online. Online is not the real world. I think we all need to remind ourselves. But anyway, people were very panicked.
But when you looked – so, we went from a super great economy to now, OK – and now the – people are talking about like "Oh, this is going to be a complete collapse." But if you look at the [CBOE Volatility Index ("VIX")], which is a part of the options prices you are paying, Dan, which is what made me think about it, that's up to 25, which is – it was historically low. It's at 25. So, that's not that concerning to me. If you're hitting 30, 40, that's when people are really scared. And credit spreads too, the high yield spread. is also still very low.
And the point of those – of looking at those is saying, OK, people were a little too bullish. Now markets are pulling back and now they're panicking like everything's going to break down because of these tariffs. And the signals in the market are like "OK, no, it's a growth reset." We're not to the point where you actually – we're on recession panic personally. We still need to see a few more things break down before we get to that point. But the average – or, I think the median stock and the S&P is now down 20% off its high, but the weighting makes it look a little less than that.
So, we've had a really significant pullback. There's still some signs that things are a little OK. And like I said, these supply chains are pretty robust if given some time. So, I think, like in many things, the truth is in the middle of, yeah, growth slowdown but we don't need to fully panic just yet. Does that mean by the dip today, on March 12? I don't know. It depends on the headlines tomorrow, which is kind of the market we're in now. But yeah, so the VIX isn't that high. So, your options have room to run if people get more panicked. So, hold on to that portfolio for now.
Dan Ferris: Oh, yeah. I'm devoted to this strategy with this small part of my assets. So, don't worry. I'm in it for the duration.
Corey McLaughlin: One thing Matt said about – and relating to maybe a lot of new investors who might be panicked themselves at this moment of – with about a 10% drawdown in the S&P – they're probably feeling it more because it's 20% in the Mag Seven, equally weighted, if you're going by that. But what you just said there, the – a couple of simple indicators, like looking at the VIX, looking at high-yield spreads, if you understand what those mean, you can quickly see that this is not the economic calamity of – it's not the financial crisis. It's not – you're not – we're not headed there, which I feel like a lot of maybe people who got into things in 2020, whatever they think of Trump, they think Trump comes in the office, "Oh, they're cutting all these jobs. Oh, we're going to go into a recession." All of a sudden, recession came out of nowhere. The recession fear just came out of nowhere. So, I feel like just – I don't know, you write about these things every week – just these simple indicators that you can look at, if you have enough of them and you piece it all together, you can really – I don't know, you can make some actual real decisions off of that instead of selling at the exact wrong time, right?
Matt Weinschenk: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so, let me give you an example. I think it was February 19 we had an issue that said there were undercurrents of fear in the market. No, let me correct that. February 14. February 19 was the high but – of the market. And so, everything was still very bullish. And again, we want to be bottom-up guys, but you could just do a little bit of this stuff and kind of get a sense for things. But if you looked at the sort of the rotation in the market, consumer staples were soaring, gold was going up. bitcoin was selling off. Tesla was coming down. We have a special risk-on, risk-off indicator that was starting to turn over.
So, at that point on February 14, it was like the market is doing really well, but you're seeing all these things where money is starting to move towards more conservative things. Of course, February 19 comes around. That was the peak and that was when things started rolling over. And part of what you're doing with these – so, then, to move on to now, you look at the VIX isn't that bad, you look at credit spreads aren't that bad, so maybe we're not in a full-on crisis. And these things are useful because sometimes – OK, you want to know the future as an investor, but sometimes there's enough value in just seeing the present clearly. "Here's what's happening right now."
Now, can that credit spread spike and we are heading to a recession? Absolutely. I don't know where it's going to go next. But you can at least get a sense – have your finger on the pulse. If you assume some of these markets are pretty smart – and they're not always right, for sure – but if you assume these markets are pretty smart and you get a handful of things that you sort of understand why these things would move and why they wouldn't, you can get a good sense of what's happening.
So, just the growth slowdown. You have 10-year real yields are declining. That says that the bond market, which is very smart, is expecting growth that is less than they would have expected a few months ago. So, I don't know, it doesn't translate to an actual number, but maybe they thought GDP growth was going to be 2% over the next five or 10 years. Now it's like 1.3%. I'm making those numbers up just to put a sense of what it's kind of telling you.
But there's a lot of things out there that can keep you on the right side of things, help you understand things, just figuring out what's happening right now. Never mind what will happen next. And that's just a little bit – extracting a little bit of value out of that can give you some calm as an investor in your long-term plays. It can give you a little bit of warning. And it can also show you – staples are doing great. If you own consumer staples like we love to, well, you've been doing really well. Coca-Cola, things like that. Anyway. Yeah, it's part of the puzzle of the market and it's part of trying to understand what's going on. And when someone says to you "Hey, what's going on with these tariffs? Is there going to be a recession?" And then you listen to people talking and they all have their predictions. And then I'm like – I go on – I have the [Federal Reserve Economic Data ("FRED")] app on my phone and I'm pulling up charts – and nobody likes actually when I do that. But you're like, "No, it's right here. I know what's happening. The numbers are telling you." So, it's – I don't know. It gives you some calm when you can find the signals that you need. And I think that's what investors might need right now.
Dan Ferris: I'm sorry. I was going to look and see where the VIX was, but I think I'm locked out of my computer for typing in the wrong password without my glasses. Anyway, I was going to say VIX –
[Crosstalk]
Corey McLaughlin: We're around 25 as we speak, but it obviously changes –
Dan Ferris: Right. VIX mid-20s is not a problem? It was my question.
Matt Weinschenk: Yes, so it depends on what decade you're talking about.
Dan Ferris: It's not very high, I think you said?
Matt Weinschenk: Yeah, it depends on what decade you're talking about. I mean, 20s used to be nothing.
Dan Ferris: True.
Matt Weinschenk: Now you're – 15 is sort of the average. I mean, 20s is definitely getting there. I think 30s and 40s is when you say, "OK, we're really in a panic." But – so, 25 and it's also peeled off the top a little bit. And you saw spikes in mid-2024 and December. So, the credit spread is a more useful indicator now, but I think when we first did this, VIX was at 20, which I had more confidence in. VIX at 25 is another step up. So, fair point. But also in the 2000s, VIX at 20 didn't really seem to be anything at all. So, yeah, you have to evolve with these things. But yeah.
Dan Ferris: Yeah. Brent Johnson from Santiago Capital pointed out that you normally – to get to 20, mid-20s like this, it's like a spike. You wake up in the morning and it's 15, and then that day within 20 minutes or whatever it is you're at 25 or 28 or something. But this has been gradual over several days at least, like an adjustment. And he was saying it's kind of like an adjustment to a new regime, a new way of thinking about things. And I guess that new regime, new way of thinking about things, it depends on where our commander in chief is on any given day on what he's thinking. And none of us seem to know because he's like – he doesn't seem to have ideology or principles or anything. He's just – it's realpolitik. It's extremely practical. So – in his mind, it's practical. I don't know how charging Walmart more for Chinese goods and passing that cost along to the poorest people in the country is good for America but – or practical, but he's thinking about it that way. So, it is just a strange, strange – it's interesting times. It's the Chinese curse.
Matt Weinschenk: And I was just – and speaking of regime change, this is something I was sort of thinking through today. So, I don't know, call it a year ago, you had the S&P at 25 times earnings or something like that. And it's been – valuations have been high and you could justify them because U.S. growth was good. Global growth was good until recently. Interest rates were low. So, you go, "Yeah, 25, it's the new normal. High valuation but this kind of makes sense." But if you look forward, and if the bond markets are telling us there's a growth slowdown – so, if you put that in place, if you say now interest rates are 4.5%, something like that, they're not 1% anymore, and the – you may not be able to justify 25 times earnings on the S&P anymore. We might be headed back to an 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., yeah, I think – you can sit down and do your sort of simple model of where the S&P should trade, and it's hard to say it should be at the elevated levels we saw for the last couple years. So, that might be a –
Dan Ferris: Or even impossible.
Matt Weinschenk: Or even impossible. I think – you might look back at the end of 2025 and be like, "Yeah, we were a little crazy on valuations for a good stretch there, but now we've reset back to something that's closer to the historical average," which isn't that far from here. So, it doesn't mean we have to totally get wiped out. But we could be in for a regime change in that sense.
Dan Ferris: Yeah. And who knows?
Matt Weinschenk: Not me, Dan. I don't know why you have me on here because I do not know.
Dan Ferris: Yeah, we're just sitting here. We're at the guessing phase of the macro analysis process.
Matt Weinschenk: I know. I know. And then I'm afraid to even say anything because by the time this airs, who knows? Who knows what will have changed, right?
Dan Ferris: Yeah.
Matt Weinschenk: And it's not that long –
Corey McLaughlin: I will say this – and speaking of that, just today, we had the former Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, out saying that he thinks people are just simply overreacting to things that Trump is doing and saying. And that's from somebody who worked for him for four years as the Treasury Secretary. And so, I think there's actually a lot of truth in that statement because, yes, these tariffs start off as a negotiating tactic and they've worked to some degree and – but then – on some things, but then it is escalating to a point where I think – we're at the point where if it escalates, I think, from here more, I think that could create more issues. And of course, we've got to get to the China question probably next month with – when those – when that becomes more front and center, I think, with the reciprocal tariffs and all that sort of thing. But I do think – my point is if you can kind of get through this period and actually think clearly, like you are, about thinking about this is as a growth reset, that makes a lot of – what's happening now actually makes a lot of sense when you're – when you think of it that way past the headlines.
Matt Weinschenk: Yeah, and one of the things on that front, Corey, sort of Wall Street and some analysts were – weren't that worried about tariffs at first because one thing is, tariffs are a step change. You're going to raise all the prices and it's a step change in inflation and then you're back on whatever path you're on. So, it's kind of a little bit easier to deal with. But instead of getting a step change, we got a – they're on, they're off, now it's this country, now it's that country, and it hasn't been as simple as it could have been. It's been almost played for maximum disruption.
And so, there are times when everything seems crazy and then you look back and – remember the banking crisis of 2023 with Silicon Valley Bank and it was like, "Oh, that was –" it was another crazy time and now you think back and you're like, "Oh, I barely remember that." And you won't even see it on a long-term chart. So, hopefully we can end up in that sort of story, but it sure feels like everything and anything today to try and figure out this tariff trade. But I don't know, we're going to stick with our with our quality companies and trust them to ride through it.
Dan Ferris: Yep, that's not a bad bet, I don't think. It's time for our final question, Matt. And you've answered it before, but I'll remind you. It's the same question for every guest, no matter what the topic, even if it's a nonfinancial topic. And if you've already said the answer, by all means, feel free to repeat it. I just want to know simply, if you could leave our listener with a single thought today, a single takeaway, what would you like that to be?
Matt Weinschenk: I don't want to turn this into a pitch, but I do want to go back to how – the concerns of the gambling culture in investing today and how people are really swinging for the fences and feel like it's about getting lucky on DraftKings or their Robinhood account or whatever it is. And because of that, we're trying to reach out and do more. Like you said, we're going to grow the podcast more. We're going to have more on our YouTube station, channel, whatever you call it. I'm too old to know. But all our work has been behind the paywall at Stansberry Research. We've been doing this for 25 years. And I think it's time we want to get out there more and try and help walk people from this gambler mentality to a real investor mentality.
So, we're going to have – I'm going to do This Week on Wall Street on YouTube. Dan, I'm going to have you on there multiple times, so get ready for that. But now's the time where the people should be questioning – people who have been riding these wild markets – "Do you see this bear market?" You start saying, "Oh, man, there might be more risk here than I thought. These things don't always go up." Now's the time to get educated. Now's the time to learn how to invest, learn how to be a little more conservative than you might want, maybe leave some money on the table, or at least be willing to, because that's what builds your wealth over time. So, I would just say, look, if you've been having fun in these gamblers' markets, know that it's not always like that. And let's work our way through this together. I don't even know if that was a whole thought, but...
Dan Ferris: No, that's – no, it's a great thought.
Matt Weinschenk: All right.
Dan Ferris: It's a great thought. Thanks for it. And thanks for being here. Always a pleasure to talk with you.
Matt Weinschenk: You guys, too.
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Dan Ferris: Well, it's always good to have an opportunity to butter up the boss, isn't it?
Corey McLaughlin: I'd say. Yeah. But he deserves it. He deserves the plaudits, I believe is the right word, right? Or –
Dan Ferris: Yeah.
Corey McLaughlin: But yeah. No, he does a great job. He kind of is in charge of all you formal editors and analysts more than myself, so you guys work with them more. But yeah, he knows what he's doing. And I like – I always like his coach-player analogy. That's a nice way to think about – from what I see in the relationship. So, yeah, and obviously –
Dan Ferris: It's better than the jerk-victim regime, that's for sure. It beats the heck out of that.
Corey McLaughlin: Which can happen amongst coaches and players as well. Yeah.
Dan Ferris: Yeah, I suppose so. But yeah, Matt's a great guy. And it's funny because I talk to him about internal stuff with the podcast and with the publications and things, and we forget until we get him on the show that he's this great analyst who works with Doc and has been with the company for so long just finding all these high-quality businesses and contributing to Doc's amazing track record, etc., etc. So, there's that, too.
Corey McLaughlin: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. When I first started with Stansberry – what was it, 2019, actually – I started off working with a couple of people, but one of them was Doc and Matt and that whole team on Retirement Millionaire and Income Intelligence. And, yeah, just the stories he would pull out to go with the investments, too, are always enlightening. There's very much like a – he's one of those people that can make a complicated topic and take away – create a takeaway from it that is actually useful and helpful when making investment decisions. And he still does it. It's – so, I think you heard a lot about that. And it sounds like we will see more of Matt on our YouTube channel and I guess you as well. And we'll look forward to it. I think it's a great thing if we can reach more people. So, let's do it.
Dan Ferris: Yeah, absolutely. I can't wait for that. And it'll be nice to turn the tables a little bit and be Matt's guest instead of having him as ours, too.
All right. Well, that's another interview. And that's another episode of the Stansberry Investor Hour. I hope you enjoyed it as much as we really, truly did. 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 liked this episode and know anybody else who might like it, tell them to check it out on their podcast app or at 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 feedback@investorhour.com 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, until next week. I'm Dan Ferris. Thanks for listening.
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