Frank Holmes: 2021 Could Be Another Big Year For Silver

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Silver is set to become a major beneficiary of emerging industrial applications.

That includes sources of renewable energy, solar specifically, which continues to ramp up around the globe in response to a combination of carbon emissions legislation and a rapid decrease in the cost of “green” electricity. President Joe Biden has made addressing climate change one of his top priorities and has ambitions to legislate a more rapid transition to clean technologies that favor not just silver but other metals as well.

According to a report by CRU Consulting, solar power generation will increase to 1,053 terawatt hours (TWh) by 2025, close to double the amount that was generated in 2019. Amazon alone is planning five major solar projects around the world, including its first in China, as the retail giant seeks to reach 80% renewable energy by 2024 and 100% by 2030. Once completed, these five projects will generate 1.2 million megawatt hours (MWh) of energy every year, or enough to power 113,000 average U.S. homes.

John Polomny: WSB Gamestop Play Is Just Another Manifestation Of Central Bank Corruption Of Our Money

 

 

Because of the central banks zero interest policy and over prinitng of currency to deal with the huge debt situation most people have been turned into speculators and now gamblers. In my view the recent Gamestop short hedge fund body slam, although amusing, is just more rank speculation and will end in tears for most players. Mayor de Blasio, Comptroller Stringer, and Trustees Announce Estimated $4 Billion Divestment from Fossil Fuels https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/...​ Diamond Offshore exit from bankruptcy: http://investor.diamondoffshore.com/n...​ Big Oil hits brakes on search for new fossil fuels https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oi...​ Follow me on Twitter: @JohnPolomny

MacroVoices: #256 Russell Napier: Prepare for Secular Inflation

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How are stocks rallying to new all-time highs amidst the ongoing pandemic?

Stimulus into real economy – will this still support the stock market?

How far Bond Yields could go

Financial repression and inflation outlook

Inflation may be good in the beginning but for how long?

Benefits of inflation on the stock market

Perspectives on commodities including Copper and agriculture

Gold vs. Bitcoin

Is there a strategy to evade financial repression?

Jeremy Grantham: Waiting For The Last Dance, The Hazards of Asset Allocation in a Late-stage Major Bubble

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The long, long bull market since 2009 has finally matured into a fully-fledged epic bubble. Featuring extreme overvaluation, explosive price increases, frenzied issuance, and hysterically speculative investor behavior, I believe this event will be recorded as one of the great bubbles of financial history, right along with the South Sea bubble, 1929, and 2000.

These great bubbles are where fortunes are made and lost – and where investors truly prove their mettle. For positioning a portfolio to avoid the worst pain of a major bubble breaking is likely the most difficult part. Every career incentive in the industry and every fault of individual human psychology will work toward sucking investors in.But this bubble will burst in due time, no matter how hard the Fed tries to support it, with consequent damaging effects on the economy and on portfolios.

 Make no mistake – for the majority of investors today, this could very well be the most important event of your investing lives. Speaking as an old student and historian of markets, it is intellectually exciting and terrifying at the same time. It is a privilege to ride through a market like this one more time.

Meb Faber: Episode #278: Lucas White, GMO, “Since Inception Of The Strategy…We’ve Been Buying Companies At A Significant Discount, Yet Our Portfolio Has Had Earnings Growth That Far Exceeded The Broad Equity Market”

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In today’s episode we’re talking all about resources and climate change as an investment strategy. Lucas sets the stage with why he believes the resource sector offers a huge opportunity and currently trades at an 80% discount to the broad equity market. Then we dive into GMO’s climate change strategy. Lucas explains what led them to focus on climate change and clean energy and officially launch a strategy in 2017. We talk about the allocation to different areas, including copper, food and water.

Frank Holmes: Closing the Gold Window Opened the Door to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)

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The drawback is that, in the years since the end of the gold standard, there’s been a significant and growing lack of discipline when it comes to government spending. Before 1971, there was a natural limit to how much money could be printed. New issuances were dependent on the amount of gold sitting in the nation’s coffers.

Today, with the dollar backed not by a hard asset but by the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. government, the federal debt is closing in on an astronomical $28 trillion, which is more than 130% of the size of the U.S. economy.

John Polomny: Get Ready For The "Crack Up Boom". AIA Weekly Market Update 1-23-21

With all the money being created and injected into the economy to fight covid I am expecting a reopening of the economy to lead to a Crack Up Boom. The increased money will outstrip the economies ability to prodcue goods and services which will lead to rising prices.

It will look and feel good at first but will have the potential to end in disaster.

Grant Williams: The End Game Episode 14- Paul Singer

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Bill and Grant welcome Paul Singer, Founder, President, Co-Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Chief Investment Officer of Elliott Investment Management L.P.

Among the topics covered in this extremely rare and endlessly fascinating conversation are Paul's thoughts on the importance of understanding markets are little more than mass experiments in psychology, the fallacy of 'sitting passively', the creation of value for clients and the corner into which the Fed and other central banks have painted themselves.

Chris Mayer: The Best Investors of All Time

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Who are the best investors of all time?

You probably thought of Warren Buffett or Peter Lynch or John Templeton or other renowned money managers, past and present.

But did you think of the Walton family, the Rales brothers or Jeff Bezos? 

Yes, we tend to think of them as entrepreneurs. But they do own stakes in public companies just like any of those other investors. In this case, the public companies are Walmart, Danaher and Amazon, respectively. The returns on these stocks have been, well... let’s just say they would be the envy of nearly any traditional money manager you care to name.

Let’s think about Sam Walton for a moment. He opened the first Walmart store in 1962 at the age of 44 (then called Wal-Mart). In 1970, he took the company public. The IPO generated nearly $5 million, which doesn’t sound like much these days. The Walton family retained ~60%, which put the overall equity at about $13 million. The Walton family stake was worth about $8 million.

Massiff Capital: Q4 2020 Investor Letter

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We are beginning to see significant capital flow into real asset businesses (where the primary investment and value creation is derived from tangible rather than intangible resources). In the last 24 months, roughly 51 SPACs have either gone public or been announced that are capital-intensive businesses focusing on the energy transition. These companies have IPOed for a combined ~$15 billion. Today, the combined market capitalization stands at ~$84 billion. The share-price of those firms has grown an average of over 200%. 

The Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy-focused think tank, expects $40 trillion to flow into new low carbon assets before 2050.4 The critical link between all these investments, though, is that the companies involved are all either growing fast (some of them are young and growing fast), turning over their balance sheets quickly, investing heavily in next-generation processes and technology, or adjusting business models that in some cases (for example steel, bulk chemicals, cement, etc.) have not changed in more than fifty years. The world of capital-intensive tangible asset businesses, long considered boring compared to the exciting tech world, is fast becoming a driver of economic change. 

Given the impetus and interest in financing solutions to combat climate change, paired with technologies in the energy, transportation, materials, and utility industries that appear on the cusp of large-scale commercial adoption, we feel comfortable stating that: 

We have not seen this level of future growth in capital intensive industries for decades. 

Investors searching for high growth opportunities have not had capital intensive businesses in their hopper of growth opportunities over roughly the same time horizon. 

This has profound implications and raises important questions. Namely, how do you value high growth capital intensive tangible asset businesses? 

Macrovoices: #254 Luke Gromen: The FED Faces No Easy Choices

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• Is this the beginning of the end for the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency?

• Relative decline to other fiat currencies or loss of purchasing power?
• Democratic control of the Senate – how does this affect yields?
• When will deficits start to matter?
• How do you translate the current state of the dollar into investment strategies?
• Bitcoin vs. Gold

• Are we finally at a point of runaway wage & price inflation?

John Polomny: Joe Biden's Banana Republic. Weekly Market Update 1-16-21

 

“Typically, a banana republic has a society of extremely stratified social classes, usually a large impoverished working class and a ruling class plutocracy, composed of the business, political, and military elites of that society.” Like all Banana Republics, the US economy and social structure is now on the way to perdition with virtually no chance for Biden & Co to reverse the inevitable course of events. Joe Biden's Banana Republic: https://www.goldbroker.com/news/joe-b... Macrovoices Luke Gromen on the dollar and inflation: https://www.macrovoices.com/935-macro...

Howard Marks: Something of Value

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What is Value Investing?

Value investing is one of the key disciplines in the world of investing. It consists of quantifying what something is worth intrinsically, based primarily on its fundamental, cash flow-generating capabilities, and buying it if its price represents a meaningful discount from that value. Cash flows are estimated as far into the future as possible and discounted back to their present value using a discount rate made up of the prevailing risk-free rate (usually the yield on U.S. Treasurys) plus a premium to compensate for their uncertain nature. There are a lot of common valuation metrics, like the ratio of price to sales, or to earnings, but they’re largely subsumed by the discounted cash flow, or DCF, method.

Importantly, value investors recognize that the securities they buy are not just pieces of paper, but rather ownership stakes in (or, in the case of credit, claims on) actual businesses. These financial instruments have a fundamental worth, and it can be quite different from the price quoted in the market, which is based on the manic-depressive ups and downs of a character Benjamin Graham called “Mr. Market.” On any given day, Mr. Market can be exuberant or despondent, and he quotes prices for securities based on how he feels. The value investor understands that – rather than informing us as to what a given asset’s value is – Mr. Market is there to serve us by offering up securities at prices, which can be meaningfully disconnected from the actual value of a stake or claim in the underlying business. In doing so, he sometimes gives us the opportunity to snatch up shares or bonds at a meaningful discount from their intrinsic value. This activity requires independent thought and a temperament that resists the emotional pull of the market cycle, making for decisions based solely on value.

Smead Capital Management: Throwing Caution

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As we begin 2021, the investing public is tied up in a “frenzy,” to quote Charlie Munger from a recent interview. This “frenzy” can be captured a couple ways. Whether by the investment banking activities that usually coincide with poor market returns going forward (stock market failure), or by the sell-side research analysts playing hopscotch to raise their price targets over their competition in the most exciting stocks. Rather than look at Wall Street, who can often exact nefarious schemes and ideas on investors, we think it would be best to look at market participants to understand where we sit.

Call buying relative to put buying is at a 20-year high as noted by the chart below. Investors have never been this enthused to speculate in options at any point since 2000. This is Munger’s “frenzy.” They aren’t avoiding caution. As the song says, they’re “throwing caution.” They believe “the winds of change are blowing wild and free.” Individual and institutional investors are telling us stories of what the future will hold and what the market has capitalized. As Marty Whitman would remind us, they’re way too interested in the “going concern” and not interested enough in the balance sheet of these situations. Predicting earnings in the future is tough. Looking at the capital structure of a business is more predictable.

John Polomny: President Joe Biden And The $3 Trillion Dollar "Stimulus". AIA Weekly Update 1-9-21

 

President Joe Biden is proposing a $3 Trillion so called stimulus package. He said, “economic research confirms that with conditions like the crisis today, especially with such low interest rates, taking immediate action - even with deficit financing - is going to help the economy.”

Not sure what experts he is talking about but the great reflation trade has begun.

Peter Sainsbury: Agflation is here to stay. How to play the agricultural commodity bull market

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Agricultural commodities look like they are beginning to see the start of a sustained bull market. First, precious metals, then base metals and now agriculture. Since the middle of 20202 soybeans and corn have increased by 55% with wheat registering a 35% gain.

Governments in Asia (China in particular) and in North Africa have been buying imported grains and pulses in an effort to build up their strategic reserves. Authorities in many countries made use of those reserves to dampen down domestic food prices during the pandemic, but now those reserves are running low.

Crescat Capital: December Performance Update

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It is time to gird for full Modern Monetary Theory. With the democratic sweep in place, we are about to experience even more of the double-barreled fiscal and monetary stimulus that we saw in 2020. Overwhelmingly today, such policies have served to incite animal spirits toward financial assets. Investors are already positioned, all in, on both stocks and bonds in the US creating a highly imbalanced market. The problem is that money printing married with fiscal spending is crashing head-on with an emerging commodity supply problem that will likely stir up rising inflation which is bearish for both equities and fixed income. Get ready for a volatile 2021, the year of reckoning for twin asset bubbles as the world attempts to emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic.

MacroVoices #253 Art Berman: U.S. Oil Production Still Set for Steep Decline in 2021

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Erik Townsend and Patrick Ceresna welcome Art Berman to MacroVoices. Erik and Art discuss:

Saudi Arabia’s production cut decision and what this means

Will U.S. shale industry recover?

Expected decline in demand in oil

Analysis of current comparative inventory report

Pandemic and U.S. consumption recovery – what does this mean for gasoline?

Perspectives on previous prediction of a big decline in U.S. production in Q1

Can OPEC compensate for loss of U.S. production?

Lag times between getting the rig started to actual oil production and what this means

Price vs. Comparative inventory yield curve

Smead Capital Management: From the Impatient to the Patient

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"The stock market is a device which transfers money from the impatient to the patient.”

—Warren Buffett

As we enter 2021, it appears that Buffett had things upside down in 2020. The things which had gone up the most by the end of 2019, went up the most in 2020. We invest on behalf of clients who want to avoid stock market failure and history shows most investors are impatient and are like a car stalled on the railroad tracks.

Fortunately, it is for these critical junctures in the stock market which disciplines like ours were created. First, we believe valuation matters dearly. It didn’t matter in 2020, in fact, you were better off to buy the most expensive securities carrying the highest possible risk during the year. Historically, valuation is a driver of alpha and usually makes a roaring comeback when a “frenzy” (like Charlie Munger describes today’s stock market) breaks and shifts the capital to those who are patient.

John Polomny: Making Predictions Is Tough, Especially About The Future. AIA Weekly Update 1-2-21

 

The title of this video is a riff on one of Yogi Berra's famous quips about predictions. We had a great Q4 with our stock picks and an awesome year overall. I review the portfolio's performance and discuss some things I am watching for in 2021.

Jim Rogers: Legendary investor warns of stock market bubbles in 2021

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Famed investor Jim Rogers, the founder of the Quantum Fund, recommended investment in silver in the New Year as its price is substantially lower than historic high.

The financial commentator made the advice in a recent joint interview with the Korea News Plus and E-Trend, a YouTube channel focusing on economic and stock market news.

“Silver is down 50 percent from its all-time high. Gold is down 10 percent from its all-time high, less than 10 percent. I will buy both, but I will buy more silver than gold,” he said.

“I have been buying travel, entertainment, tourism, wine, and restaurant companies because people did not go out and could not go out, but in 2021, people will go out again, and people will travel again,” he said.

Louis Gave: Inflation Will Come Back With a Vengeance

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Yes, I think inflation will come back with a vengeance. One of the key deflationary forces in the past three decades was China. I wrote a book about that in 2005; I was a deflationist then, as my belief was that every company in the world would focus on what they can do best and outsource everything else to China at lower costs. But now, we’re in a new world, a world that I outlined in my last book, Clash of Empires, where supply chains are broken up along the lines of separate empires.

 Let me give you a simple example: Over the past two years, the US has done everything it could to kill Huawei. It’s done so by cutting off the semiconductor supply chain to Huawei. The consequence is that every Chinese company today is worried about being the next Huawei, not just in the tech space, but in every industry. Until recently, price and quality was the most important consideration in any corporate supply chain. Now we have moved to a world where safety of delivery matters most, even if the cost is higher. This is a dramatic paradigm shift.