Blog

March 14, 2022

Is the Fed Shorting Bitcoin?

So, the other night, I had a dream, and I woke up from this dream. And it was like it was real. And it was about the Fed. And it was a very scary dream. When I woke up the other day, I haven’t been able to really sleep since and I’ve been thinking about it. I’m like, do I make this podcast? Do I record this concept? Do I freak people out? Do I create controversy? And I’m like, you know what, I got to at least say what I’m thinking. I think the Fed is in trouble.  And if the Fed is in trouble, when you’re in trouble, you do desperate things, right? And I think the Fed has the ability to do desperate things. First of all, let’s start with what the Fed is. The Fed is not even the government, the Fed is some entity that’s owned by people that we don’t know who they are. That it’s called federal. And it’s called reserve. Neither one of those things are true. So just the name Federal Reserve Board, or Federal Reserve Bank, neither of those terms. And those phrases are actually true. Because they’re not federal, they’re not part of the government. They’re not reserves, there are no reserves, there used to be, we used to have some reserves. And you know, they’re not a bank. Like they are a money printing press. So, everything in the name is meant to just obfuscate the kind of tyranny or the kind of lying that’s going on. Now what I mean is you probably are hearing that we are going well, that the United States is fine. And you know, we’ve been fine for 250 years. Yeah, okay, fine. But governments end, right. And when they end, you don’t expect them to end.  Like nobody expected Hitler to come to power, right? Nobody expected. It. 

The concept here is that the Fed is painted into a corner, they started really painting themselves heavily into this corner. Of course, it’s been happening since 1971, when it  went off the gold standard, but it’s happened before and before and before and every government has happened before. 

About when we went off the gold standard, the Fed really went to a totally Fiat by decree, money standard, right, which basically means print money when you want to.  The government now is realizing they’re sitting next to stacks of money and they can buy votes. What they do is they got to pass laws, and they do these big old plans with $3, $4 or $5 trillion. And now we’re just printing money If you look at the graph, it looks like a hockey stick.  And then all of a sudden, it just goes off the off the charts.  It is just straight up right now. And they have to continue printing money because the money has been propping up all these assets. We have bubbles everywhere. We have bubbles in real estate, we have bubbles in the stock market. We had a bubble in cryptocurrency that’s kind of blown up. We’re getting rotating corrections, rotating bubbles bursting around the world. And it’s because we’ve faking, we’ve made money that’s out of nothing. The ECB has done it in Europe, the Japanese yen has done it, not quite to the extent that we’ve done it, China’s doing it, Russia is doing it, everybody’s printing money, and the money is becoming worth less and less. Certainly, when you compare it against Bitcoin, and that’s where I had this dream. And the dream is that the Fed has decided to crush Bitcoin. 

Man, what does that mean? Well, how can you crush Bitcoin? Well, you can crush it by decree. You can crush it with law, you can crush it with the media, you can crush it with FUD, fear, uncertainty and doubt. And that’s what they’re doing.  They are not allowing regulated spot markets. We’re turning down ETFs that are spot currencies even though people want to invest in them. We’re making it really hard for people to buy, with the IRS scrutiny. If you try to open up a crypto account, you can do it but it’s like you have to you know, dance on one foot and eat crackers and sing a song and like you have to do all this stuff because of what they call KYC laws (know your customer) and AML anti money laundering. And by the way, they try to blame crypto and Bitcoin for money laundering. But it’s not like the dollar or the yen, or the euro doesn’t have anything to do with money laundering. I mean, people walk around bags of cash and buy drugs and you know, they hide money and it’s just crap, right? And so, the Fed is really threatened by Bitcoin, specifically the other Cryptos maybe too, but mainly Bitcoin. Why? Bitcoin has a scarcity? It has 21 million, and that’s all that’s ever going to be printed for Bitcoin. So, everything else will be measured in Bitcoin at some point, because it’s got the only thing that doesn’t move in value, right? It’s a Bitcoin, like, I don’t know if people think Bitcoin crashed or not. But the way I look at it is when I bought a Bitcoin, a few months ago, it’s still worth one Bitcoin, right? It may not be worth as many dollars to the Bitcoin, but that fluctuates. A few months before that it was worth twice as many dollars or three times it’s gone up 50,000% in 11 years. 

If you measure it by the dollar, if you measure it by the Bitcoin, it’s the same. Gold is got the same value, right? It still buys the same amount that it did before. It’s just measured in dollars, so you could see fluctuating. Alright, so I thought, would the Fed, could the Fed be sinister enough to short Bitcoin? 

Alright, so let me explain what shorting is. First of all, shorting is when you sell something you don’t own. In the stock market, normally people go and buy low and you sell high. That’s how people make money. Well, in the stock market, and in other markets, you can short things, which means you sell them first. And you can buy them back at a later price, hopefully a lower price at a later date. And so that what happens, let’s say you wanted to short Tesla, you think that they’re not going to hit their numbers this quarter, you think that Elon Musk is a jerk, whatever it is, and you short Tesla at $1,100? And you say, “I’m going to buy Tesla back when it goes to $900”. That means you can make $200 on your $1,100 investment. Because it is an investment, even though it’s short. When you sell something, of course, you know what happens? You get money when you sell something. 

But how can you sell something you don’t own? Well, the way mechanically it works behind the scenes, is you have to go borrow it from somebody who’s willing to lend it to you. So, you have to go borrow those shares of Tesla, and then you go out and sell them.  Then you have to pay something to the people you’re borrowing them for. Because when you borrow something, you usually incur interest, you’re borrowing, you’re incurring an interest charge, you’re paying to the people that lent it to you, and then you’re hoping it goes down. And when it goes down, you can use that interest to pay back the person that lends it to you. Okay, that’s what happens behind the scenes, you borrow it, you short it, you sell it, and then you hopefully buy it back at a lower price. Instead of buying low and selling high, you just do it in the opposite order. You sell high and you buy low. 

But we all have, you and me and the institutions, we don’t have unlimited money. But you know, who does the Fed. So, in a normal case, if you short Tesla, and it goes up, they make you come up with the money because it could it could go up to infinity, I would say you know if you short things, it’s really risky, because things could go to infinity when nothing goes to infinity, but doesn’t mean you can’t withstand a big old spike. 

And so, if Tesla starts to run up, the brokerage firm calls you up, and they say, “Hey, Mark, it’s time for you to bring in some more money, because now you’re out of whack”. If Tesla keeps going up, you need, we mark the price to the market.  And when we mark it to the market, that means if it’s going to 1300 you got to come up with that extra 200 bucks because now, you’re in the hole and the brokerage firm isn’t going to pay it… !? 

So, what about Bitcoin?  What about the Fed? The Fed might have put out through its minions. By the way, the government would never lie to us, right? They would never take our gold; they would never lie to us. They would never tell us that there’s weapons of mass destruction in Iraq so, we need to go and invade. They would never lie to us. Why would they do that? They lie to us all the time, guys, especially lately. I don’t know if you’ve noticed. But let’s just say that they’re lying to us in this case, or maybe they’re not. But they’re they might be saying through a subsidiary located in Switzerland, Luxembourg, or even, you know, stateside one,” hey, listen, we’re going to just keep giving you money, all you have to do is short Bitcoin, drive it down”. And bitcoin comes down 50% this year, if you measure it against the dollar. And so, they started at 65,000 – 69,000. They just started shorting it. They said, “we’re going to be out of business anyway so what do we have to lose, we’re in trouble”. Go ahead and start shorting it, we’ll keep giving you money. 

And, you know, if it goes up, we’ll give you more money. But if it goes down, you’ll be here, we’re going to be in a profit, you’re not going to have to come up with any money. And so, they’ve driven it down. Let’s say, this isn’t a dream, right? So, they’ve driven it down and they keep driving it down and they’re up 50% on their investment at some point. They’re going to have to buy it back. Maybe. Or they just keep driving it down until people can’t take it anymore. They can’t take it anymore, and then they have enough time to cover it up. Oh, it’s so good. So, it’s so risky, it’s going to hurt people, it’s already gone 70% 80% 90%. No one will be able to buy it all back. But nobody will be able to buy it from them. Because they’ll have outlawed it, at least here in the United States. This is just a theory, just a dream, just the concept. But imagine because they have unlimited wealth, unlimited ability to print money, that as it goes up, they just keep shorting it because they could keep, you know, keep putting the money in, and they can keep the price depressed. Now I think eventually it tips because you’re starting to see countries go to Bitcoin, you’re starting to see states, Texas, Arizona, Tennessee, Oklahoma, they’re all talking about a Bitcoin standard in their states, there are cities, Miami city, that’s Bitcoin, the mayor of New York is taking a Bitcoin salary, a lot of sports people, it’s getting out of their control, and they’re running out of time. 

So, they need to crush it. Now, I know this is controversial, and it’s just a dream, right? It’s just a bad dream or a nightmare. But what if the Fed actually did have the power? Or did have the idea to short Bitcoin? Because a lot of people are saying, you know, isn’t affected by Bitcoin, because they’re behind the curve, you know, and if they started investing in Bitcoin, then they’ll be part of the future. But the Fed doesn’t think like that. The Fed is a self-preservation entity. And if they can crush Bitcoin, rather than being part of it, it’s a competitor that can crush them. 

And maybe that’s the solution. 

Now, I’ve never heard anybody talk about this, but I think it’s viable. I think it’s possible. And it’s awfully scary. Because if they can do that with your money, because this is your money, your taxes are going to fund the money to pay back all these deficits that we’re running, and these fake printing presses that the Fed is using. 

If the Fed is using your money to do that, you should have a say in it, because it’s your money. 

It’s really scary. 

If there’s a place below the video, if you’re watching the video, make a comment. If there’s a place where you can make a comment on the podcast, make a comment. I’m curious to see what you think. By the way, follow me like subscribe, you know all that stuff. It would really help me out a lot. We’re getting this podcast going right now. And we could really use your support. I hope you like the little dream that I put out. I hope you like the concepts that we’re going to be starting to put out.  Might be a little controversial. Might not might be the future. I don’t know. But boy, is it scary if the Fed could short Bitcoin with your money, run it out of business, the only thing that’s really competing with it. 

 Think about it.

March 14, 2022

Kamala to the Rescue

We are right in the middle of a war, well actually we’re not in the middle of it. It’s not our war, but we’re certainly interested in it because the press keeps throwing it in our face. And, there is some oppression going on, it’s been happening for thousands of years. And maybe we should feel like we’re somewhat responsible because we really are. But we’re good though, we’ve got a solution, we’re going to be sending in Kamala Harris or the vice president to solve the problem, just like she solved the border problem, they sent her over there. And they said, “Here, we’ve got a problem at the border, make sure you go check it out”. And that’s what she did. She went checked it out, and she’s solved the problem. And I guess they’re sending her over to Ukraine, and she’s going to solve the problem. She’s our vice president. So, you know, everybody’s going to listen to her, because she’s the second person in command underneath Joe Biden, everybody listens to him. So, I saw this clip, not sure if you saw it, but you should want to watch this clip. Now, Fox News, and I’m not trying to be political. This is actually a little bit tongue in cheek but I just think this is so funny. That, we’re trying to have with this really serious thing, with millions of people being displaced, with people’s bank accounts being frozen, with people being killed and bombs going off in a country, and a real calamity is starting to happen in another country. And we’re sending in probably our most unserious person to solve the problem. I don’t know how much gravitas she has around the world; I find it to be interesting that this is the choice rather than sending the President or sending somebody with some serious demeanor, they send this person take a look.  Here is an excerpt: “It is time for us to do what we have been doing and that time as every day. Every day, it is time for us to agree. This whole thing about the border, we’ve been to the border, we’ve been to the border, you haven’t been to the board. And I haven’t been to Europe. And my pronouns are she her and hers, she would look down at me and come on, what do you want? What do you want, and I look back up and I said, you’re going to literally see the craters on the moon with your own eyes, I’m telling you, we must together work together to see where we are, where we are headed, but also see it as a moment. Yes. Together, it is the perspective of a woman who grew up a black child in America, who was also a prosecutor who also has a mother who arrived here at the age of 19 from India, who also you know, likes hip hop. What do you want to know?” So, we think that this is our person, that is, I think she’s like a BS artist or whatever. Like, I don’t think even if you voted for her, whether you didn’t doesn’t really matter to me, you can’t look at this person and go, oh, this person is going to be able to interface with high level people around Europe and Putin, and be able to really solve this problem and figure out a way to credibly, you know, take care of the whole Ukraine Russia situation, like, I don’t think you’re thinking clearly and you can really think that. Maybe you can? Anyway, my opinion, I can’t. I can’t possibly look at this person. I just think it’s funny that this is what we do. We’re obviously not serious about being involved in solving this problem, right? If we were, we would say, “Okay, let’s turn on the pipeline. Let’s start to drill a little bit more, let’s figure out ways to get oil under control, we’ve got an inflation problem, that’s going to get 10 times worse”. Oil hit $115 A barrel today, never thought I’d be saying that this year. Right. There was a time a couple of years ago, where it was minus dollars, right? You they paid you to buy oil, right? But for a while, you know, a couple years ago was at $46 a barrel for a long time it was pretty stable. We’re paying $2.49 a gallon. Now it’s going to five and in six dollars, California, you’re going to see $10 gas, I think by the end of the year. Why? Well, you know, we’ve got some global warming and let’s shut off all the nuclear plants because they’re so bad for the environment. They’re not.  They’re actually one of the cleanest forms of energy that we have. But the Germans were like, “Hey, let’s shut them off. And we’ll turn on our windmills and our solar panels”. And now they’re really screwed because now they’ve got to rely on Russia to give them oil and gas. And since the United States decided to shut off their capacity, when we were the world’s producer of oil, now we’re the net importer of oil. We’ve got to import Russian oil. So, our costs are going to go up, that means we’re competing against the Europeans. And their costs are going to go up, like, nobody’s got a plan. Or if they do?  This is the plan. The plan is to make it so expensive to drive a car, that you’re just going to throw your car away, go buy an electric vehicle, by the way, you forgot that electricity is produced by a lot of other things other than the sun and the wind, which only work part of the time. Anyway, I’m getting off on this. But to me, this is a whole podcast about how serious are we as a nation? How serious are we as a world of creating stability. Now, we don’t have stability anymore, we have the potential for a madman that’s going to explode some nukes, because we wanted to get rid of our gas cars and go to electric cars, or because we wanted to put a few more solar panels in.  Nobody’s really thinking of the repercussions of being a weak power. And the United States, in my opinion, love this country, but we’re at the end of our strength. We’re at the end of being a superpower in the world.  The new superpowers in the world, are Russia and China. That’s the way it is.  Everybody that is in Europe, they’re weak. Germany is now you know, they are reliant on Russia, and China.  And, if you started to look at the world politics, you would see, this all makes total sense. This is all calculated, everybody makes fun that Trump gave a compliment to Putin. All he did was say, the guy’s a genius, right? Like, you don’t have to like him to know that he’s got a plan, right. And his plan seems to be working. He’s driving everybody else’s oil prices up higher. And we’re financing his war, because we’re paying more than a billion dollars a day to Russia, by just driving around in our cars, so that he can fund this war. Are we going to stop driving around in our cars? Oh, maybe we should have thought of that, before we empowered this plan. So, say what you want about him, or say what you don’t want about him. But the plan is, the point is, he’s got a plan in his mind. And his plan is probably way, way, way ahead of the people, like the person that I just showed you, who’s supposed to be the person that’s going to go to Europe and solve all of these problems. Because when she went there before, a couple of months ago, she said she had it under control. Don’t worry, it’s all good. We got out of control. I’m going to go ahead and rein everybody in. And now you see what is happening. So, we’re clearly not serious about it. And it’s affecting our wallets. This is the wealth architect podcast. And I want you to know, whatever you think about politics, at the end of the day, it comes down to money. And so, you’re going to be spending way more money on the things that you buy. One of the things you buy is oil, and everything else that you buy relies on oil, right? Everything gets trucked to your store. So, when the store is paying more for diesel and gas and truckers, you’re going to be paying more for your lettuce and your eggs and your meat and your dairy. Right? So don’t think this is Putin over there doing something. This is affecting your wallet. Right? Our foreign policy is affecting your wallet. And this is the way we’re handling the situation. 

March 9, 2022

Will the Fed Kill The Housing and Mortgage…

So, the markets have been crashing for maybe three or four weeks, and at the beginning of January, the beginning of 2022. And the market had just gone down and down and down. In fact, the NASDAQ was down about 17% from the time around Thanksgiving, the end of November. And so, the market is crashing. Why? Well, because the Fed came out and said, “we got to get on top of this inflation situation and that inflation has gotten out of hand…”.  

What are they doing? They’re going to raise rates as if that’s going to solve the problem. Well, when you raise rates, you put brakes on the economy. Why is that? Well, first of all, you raise rates, and it makes it harder for people to borrow. It’s more expensive. People don’t want to spend more money on mortgages. And so, people quit spending money on mortgages. Well, when you quit spending money on mortgages, people quit selling houses, or building houses, or buying houses.  

And so, the housing market starts to slow down. When the housing market starts to slow down, what happens? People get laid off, when people get laid off.. What do they do? Well, they look to the government for money, or, you know, they take a wage cut. But that’s not good for the economy, you need velocity of money, you need money moving around a society to be able to sustain it. That’s the way we’ve set up our capitalism, right? We’ve gotten people addicted to consumption, instead of production. And so, now we consume things. But what happens when people don’t have jobs where they can’t buy the handbag? Or the Gucci shoes or the Nikes? Right? They quit spending money? Well, when you quit spending money, people quit paying taxes, or pay less. And it’s a downward spiral. So without getting into the debate of whether the Fed can really raise rates on a sustained basis, because they said they’re going to raise it four to six times this year.  

I don’t think they’re going to be able to even do one, they’re going to try it, and it will spook the markets like it already has. And they’re going to go, okay, okay, because their real mandate now is not inflation, their mandate is not let the market go down. Because, you know, politicians are the ones that appoint them.  

So, I think they’re painted into such a corner. And the question is this, is it going to kill the mortgage market? And therefore, is it going to kill the housing market? If the Fed raises rates, what people hope and what Jerome Powell, the Fed Chairman hopes, is that he’s going to raise rates a little.  

And they will say, well, it’s only a quarter of a point, it won’t kill the market. So, we will raise it another quarter point, the market gets used to it. But see, it won’t. You can’t, if you take a tissue, and you hold it up on top of your head, and you start to blow the tissue up, the tissue will rise.  

But eventually, the tissue will come back, because you’re going to have to take a breath. So, Jerome Powell is hoping that the market just takes a little breath, and then the tissue will continue to rise. But the problem is, he doesn’t have much breath anymore, right? They have no more tools in the toolbox. And so that’s what’s happening to the government, to the Fed, is that they’re screwed, he can’t really raise rates, because the markets will continue to crash.  

So, I think they’re going to cause a big housing bubble to burst, they’re going to cause a mortgage problem, they’re going to kill the housing market, it’s going to create a recession. I think it’s beyond a shadow of a doubt. Now, if it’s a depression that comes out of a recession, we’re in real trouble. Because we’ve weakened the dollar, we’re at a real risk of losing the US Dollar as the reserve currency.  

But we put sanctions on Iran over the last 10 years because Iran’s the bad guys right? We deem them bad guys. And so since Iran are bad guys, we tie up all their money.  

Whether you agree or not whether we should do that. That is what the US does. It is that “where’s the big bully in town”? We then say “don’t let anybody do any business with Iran”. So, Iran says, “well, we got all this oil, who wants some oil”?   

We don’t want to make America mad at us, right? America’s big and strong. We don’t want to make them mad. But after a while people are like, you know, “screw America”. They’re blowing everything up. They’re, bombing people that don’t need to be bombed, and they’re printing money that doesn’t need to be printed. And they’re, ruining the dollar. We’re using it and they’re debasing it.  

Hey, Iran, maybe we come up with a little something else to use to buy your oil. They’ve come up with a makeshift thing that they’ve cobbled together other than the dollar to buy their oil.  

And now they’re doing Bitcoin.  

So now that Iran, one of the biggest oil producers in the world, is telling people just pay us in Bitcoin, go around the dollar, we don’t need it anymore. You know, where else is this going to happen?  

It’s going to happen in Russia, where everybody’s trading oil and gas and everything else in Petrodollars. And Russia’s like, “I think we have a weakness here”. We’ve got a weak president over there in the United States, potentially. And if he’s weak, then maybe we’re strong, and we can weaken the dollar. We’ve wanted to get off this dollar reserve system for a long time. Why don’t we go ahead and weaken the dollar? Or forget about the dollar all together? Let’s look to use Bitcoin. They haven’t said they’re going to do it yet. But you know what they did recently, they came out and said:  

We think that Russia can be a big player in the mining business. Pretty good. That doesn’t sound like an outing of Bitcoin to me. And then one of their members of parliament, and their financial ministry came out and said, “we’re going to figure out a way to regulate Bitcoin, so that it’s fair to everybody”. They didn’t say anything about banning it, or getting rid of it like China says they’re going to try to do. Because China wants everybody to be on their central bank, digital currency. That”s their crypto.    

Russia is like, “hey, why don’t we get people trading Bitcoin over here”? And then we can trade oil with Bitcoin. And then other people, other countries will accept Bitcoin, and we can blow the US out of the water and the US is no longer the reserve currency. US is having supply chain problems anyway; people are going to move over to some new currency anyway. Russia doesn’t have to create it and have to compete against China. China doesn’t have to create it and, you know, blow everybody else out. It’s already there. Just use it.  

That’s a real potential.  

It’s really interesting to see what’s going on in the world when it comes to this. Hope that was helpful. I just wanted to shed some light on those subjects.  

March 9, 2022

Predictions 2022

We’re going to go through what I consider a fool’s errand, and that is to predict 2022. Now, I normally don’t like to make predictions, but you know what? A lot of people ask me for them. So, listen, I’m not a financial adviser, I don’t get financial advice. This is all just opinion, talk to your financial planner, get your attorney involved, whatever, but don’t come after me. Because this is not financial advice, it is just my opinion based on 40 something years of being in the markets. So, I want to start by telling you, look, I don’t want to make a prediction, but I’m going to make a prediction. If we go back and we see this age as well, great. If we go back, and we see that it doesn’t, great. But the bottom line is that it educates you, and starts to get you to think so. The first one right off the bat is very micro, and that is that Amazon will underperform. What I’m seeing in Amazon, I’ve ordered a couple things from them. They’re not showing up at my door, the orders are getting lost, they’re getting canceled. I’m hearing about it happening to a few other people. And there’s a little chink in the armor of Amazon and I think it’s the supply chain. Now everybody says, oh, no, no, they got their own ships, they got their own shipping. But, you know, if there’s a supply chain happening to Walmart, there’s probably happening to Amazon. I don’t think their growth is going to be as much as it was. And I think the pandemic is going to curtail, we’ll talk about that prediction in a minute. And as the present pandemic curtails fewer things will be ordered at home, not many fewer things, but fewer things enough to make you a little bit scared of the next quarterly report. So, I think Amazon this year, or at least part of this year will underperform the stock market. Number two, speaking of the market, I think we’re going to see a stock market crash of probably 20% or more, and that’s considered a crash or correction or whatever you want to look at it crash gets headlines, but bottom line is markets correct about every year, at least 10%, sometime during the year, on average, and every couple of years. Certainly, you know, every few years, you get a big correction. And I think we’re setting up for one of those corrections, I think we’re getting bubbles in a lot of different places. We’ve seen a bubble in cryptocurrency, we’ve seen a bubble in real estate in certain parts of the country, it’s an incredible level, we’re seeing bubbles in the stock market. The next one is two or more governments or currencies will collapse. Now at the beginning of 2022. And by the way, we’re recording this on the 13th of January 2022. We’re seeing that Turkey’s lira is collapsing, right? It’s collapsed by about 40%. This year against the dollar, huge inflation people are going into Bitcoin, right? That’s a foreshadowing, I think of something going on. But we’re going to see a couple of governments either fail or collapse. We’ve created a lot of fakeness in the last couple years of this pandemic. And we’ve flooded the markets with certain things, and Turkey has been no exception. They’ve put fake stuff into their market, now they’re paying the price. And I think President Erdogan of Turkey is not an economist, and he’s doing the exact wrong thing. And it’s debasing their currency even more, and now they’re going in and they’re stealing it from the companies, they’re taking their foreign reserves. It’s not good, but I think Turkey might be one of them. And there might be two or three other ones as well. And you’re going to see that there’s going to be some collapse collapses of government a little bit of disturbance this year, in the world markets. Bitcoin is going to be adopted as legal tender, and at least two countries, we already know that it’s adopted as legal tender alongside the dollar in El Salvador. And I think it’s going to happen in a couple other countries, Tonga being one of them, some other African countries being other ones, potentially Venezuela and Argentina, you might see them adopt some kind of a Bitcoin standard, because Bitcoin has a scarcity, right? They’re only going to make 21 million Bitcoin. It’s not like they’re just printing free money. And, you know, people are looking at that, like, why would we want to invest in the dollar and use that as our currency when we could just go to Bitcoin, and if they can, they will, or at least it’ll be alongside the dollar or alongside their own currency, it’d be interesting. The Fed is going to try to raise rates in 2022. They’ve signaled that they’re going to do that the signal that to curtail buying of assets, they’re called a taper. I think the pet for the Fed is in such a corner, I don’t think they’re going to be able to do it, they’re going to probably try to raise rates, the predictions from Goldman Sachs is it’s going to happen four times this year, the Fed says three, I think you’re looking at one, and I think soon as they try to raise the rates, and the market crashes or we get some kind of a pullback or a hiccup, the Feds going to go okay. Alright, let’s just print more money. I think the Feds are going to fail on that. And the government therefore will continue to debase the currency. We’re going to continue to have spending programs into an election year, and we’re going to continue to print more money, because we’re going to figure some crisis to say we need to give some free money to buy some boats. For this, this list of constituents, things like that a Bitcoin spot ETF is going to be approved. Okay, a Bitcoin spot ETF there’s a futures ETF on Bitcoin that’s been approved. And there’s been talk of a spot ETF being approved. But it’s been a lot of years coming and still hasn’t come. I think this is the year I think that’s this is the year for a lot of clarity to come in Bitcoin and in cryptocurrency, so that’s going to be interesting. Another 20 million people are going to adopt Bitcoin right now it’s at 130 million people around the world are using it, it’s just a drop in the bucket of what I think is going to happen. So, another 20 million people will probably adopt it this year. That’s a big number, right? And then gold is going to hit $2,000. In an ounce, we’re in an inflationary environment where the government says we’re have, we have 7% inflation, and you should watch my other podcast or see some of my videos about inflation. I think 7% is a lie, I think it’s more like 20%. And because that’s certainly the amount of money they’re printing. And so, I think gold is an inflationary hedge. And as an inflationary hedge, the dollar is going to continue to go down, and therefore gold will continue to go up against the dollar. And I think we’re going to see $2,000 An ounce this year. And my last prediction, we’re going to all be okay. Things happen in the world; they always have happened in the world. And when they’re right in front of us, they seem big. And when you look at them in the rearview mirror, they look smaller and smaller and smaller. So sometimes when you go back, you don’t even realize that they were big at one point, right? We’re already looking at 911, we’ve forgotten the pain of 911. If you look back to 1963, you forget the pain of JFK assassination. Right. Lincoln’s assassination is even similar. And what about Napoleon and things that happened? 500,000 years ago, you probably couldn’t even remember or very few.   Very few people’s lives you can you actually quote or remember. So those things get smaller and smaller, and they’re just little blips on the chart of life. I think we’re all going to be okay. What I would say guys is step away from the social media, step away from the TV, spend some time with the people that you love, laugh, live, enjoy life, don’t get caught up in the political stuff, and the strife that we have, it’s being created by the media. And I think your life is going to be way better. So those are my predictions for 2022. Don’t quote me on it, but you probably will. And, you know, anybody that makes predictions is setting themselves up for failure. And I know that but I’m doing it anyway because a lot of people were asking me about it.  

 

 

March 9, 2022

Freedom Trucker Convoy

So, there was a big old trucker convoy going on in Canada.  I don’t know if you know, but a couple of weeks ago, Canada put out an edict that says, hey, if you’re coming to Canada and you’re a trucker, you need to be vaccinated. Well, about half the truckers estimated about half of them aren’t, but truckers are really in demand. Right now, we have a supply chain crisis. And truckers are ”you ain’t gonna tell me what to do?” Well, maybe a couple of them said, “you can tell me what to do.” Because otherwise they didn’t want to lose their trucking job, or they didn’t care about getting the you know, the shot. But now what’s happening is they started to talk on their little radios, and all of a sudden, it became a huge movement to say, “hey, look, government’s not going to tell us what to do.” The US government got involved and says you’re not coming over here, unless you’ve gotten the shot. So, the truckers like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on a second. And they started creating this convoy. And they were on a mission. Many had driven all across Canada. And I think there were about 50,000 trucks or something like that, like all kinds of trucks, dump trucks, garbage trucks, diesels, 18 wheelers, whatever kind of truck, and even pickup trucks. Then cars started joining. At the time it was 70 kilometers long, which is about 40-50 miles long. Imagine 40 to 50 miles of trucks that were headed to the capital of Canada in Ottawa. Right. So these trucks had made their way to Canada, and people were joining in, there were people on bridges, and they were waving their flags, and the press was not covering it because they didn’t want to show that people have power, even if they don’t have some weaponry. Their weaponry is their ability to join together. And Canadians were just tired of being pushed around like they had been pushed around for almost two years. They weren’t able to go out, they had curfews and one of the things I heard was that you could not go to Costco nor Walmart unless you were escorted in and you were only allowed to buy groceries. Unless you had the jab. And you can only go into buy groceries and food you can’t buy like other stuff that Costco or Walmart sells. And then you’re escorted out. Otherwise, you’re locked down in your home. Here we are two years later, everybody’s been the good little person in Canada, because that’s what Canadians do. They comply with stuff. They’re really nice people. So, they comply. They believe their government. They believe Trudeau is awesome or whatever. I don’t know what they believe about that guy. But like they’ve done everything they were supposed to do. If they were still getting sick, they were like, wait a minute, what are we doing? Especially the truckers were like, wait a second, you need us. And if you need somebody, you don’t piss them off. All that to say, they ended up pissing off the truckers and so the truckers got together and they all headed to Ottawa. At the time you could not get in or out of Ottawa, the capital of Canada. It’s a small town. A good leader would normally stand up and state, “I believe that this is the right thing to do.” But what did the Canadian leader do? He left, he took off in the middle of the night and went to some little secret hideout, because he was scared of the truckers. What were they going to do to him? They had been oppressed for a long time, and they were not taking anymore. I find it really funny that the press didn’t really cover it. They were more worried about Neil Young, this 107-year-old rock and roll guy that is a has been pulling his music off of Spotify, which is not even really a story. And some other guy named Nils Lofgren in Norway pulling his stuff off of Spotify and Joni Mitchell. All these really old artists are pulling their music off of Spotify. Nobody knows who they are anyway. So, it’s not like they were going to drop in sales. They’re just jerks, trying to force one of the only bastions of free speech, which is Spotify, to get rid of other people’s podcasts. Joe Rogan, for example, they did not want Joe Rogan’s podcasts on there, because he allows people say it how it is. He doesn’t censor people; he shuts up and lets people talk and they don’t like that. Because it’s not part of the narrative. It’s not part of the Trudeau narrative, either. They’re more concerned about that. And so, people were looking at that going, “Hey, wait a minute here.” Why do we care about this? But that’s who the press is and was covering, because they didn’t want you to know that there was a big movement that was very powerful, and might have a big voice. There are some really interesting things going on in the world today. It’s happening in Australia, where they’ve been the most oppressed country for the last two years. It’s going to happen and it’s starting to happen in the United States. It’s happening in Canada. It’s happening in France; it’s happening around the world. You’re not hearing about it, because the press has their own agenda. So very left-wing agenda. I know what they’re trying to do. But I have a feeling it’s not good. And a look if it’s good, let people talk. Right? Let people have a debate about it. Don’t censor them. This is what Russia did. Right? We had, Pravda was supposed to be the truth, right? That was the official paper of the USSR back in the 60-70s. Well, that was all government approved stuff that they propagandize that to you, right? That was what you read. You were like, “well, this is a truth.” But there wasn’t another side, there wasn’t a debate and you saw how oppressed those people were. And we’re going in that same direction, because we’re systemically trying to get rid of our institutions, and trying to create censorship so that people can talk. It’s a real shame. But those truckers in Canada, hats off to them. And I give them a lot of credit for doing what they did because they may make some changes in the world. Time will tell..  

 

March 4, 2022

Fed Printing Money

Today, we’re going to have just a quick little lesson on economics. And this is my big thing right now. And it’s been my big thing for a while actually. And that’s inflation caused by the Fed printing money. Now the Fed doesn’t really print money. But let’s go back and talk about what the Fed is. The Fed is the Federal Reserve Bank, right? It’s actually not a government organization, it’s a privately held bank, it’s supposed to be specifically separated from the government. And it’s supposed to, it was started in 1913. And it was supposed to basically be the, like the diaphragm of the economy, right? When you need to breathe in, you need to expand the money supply, and the Fed was there to provide that. And then when you need to contract the money supply, because things were growing too quickly, the Fed was there to pull things back. But what has ended up happening through a very slow evolving process. It’s become an enabler, to fiat currency. And fiat currency just means money that’s backed by nothing, right? For a long time, money in the United States was backed by gold and silver. In fact, I’m a coin collector. And if you pull out some of my old bills, on the top, it would say silver certificate, or some of the old ones would take gold certificate. And if you read it, it said, you were able to take that certificate into the bank and get an equivalent amount of silver or gold, right? In 1971, we went off of the gold standard, meaning we didn’t have the gold to back up the value of the dollar. And that thing that started that launched this incredible period of time, where things just went out of control, and they weren’t backed by anything other than the full faith and credit of the US government. Well, we’re able to leverage that, at least up until right now. But I think that’s in jeopardy, because we were the reserve currency of the world. Now, very few currencies, that are the reserve currencies of the world last more than 100 years, like the last one was the British pound. And we took them over. And before that, I think it was the French franc, or, you know, before that it was the, you know, the Netherlands, Netherlands had their money. And before, you know, whatever, it just goes like that, where after 100 years, people realize, you know, that, that people get corrupt in government, and they start to waste money when they start to get corrupt. And it’s happening here. And so let me go back to what that is all about. So, in 71, we went off the gold standard, and we just went to this fed, that was supposed to be independent. But really, they’re now more than ever, certainly tied to the Treasury. They’re tied to the government, they work hand in hand, and they basically painted themselves in the corner. Now, what does that mean? Well, the Fed has been expanding the balance sheet at a rapid rate, certainly since 2008, when we had the financial crisis. And so, as they’ve been expanding that balance sheet, just in the last couple years here, since the 2020, decade began, has been, I don’t want to say exponential, but it’s pretty darn close to exponential, right, we’re going almost parabolic with the amount of money that we’re supplying. So, the way you have to look at that is, okay, Mark. So, what, it’s always worked in the past, it’ll always work in the future. But there has never been a currency that’s lasted very long. In the past, like, we’re not using the stuff that the Romans used to use, that was a great currency. And then there was a decline of the Roman Empire, right? We don’t use the same currency that the Greeks used to use. 2000 3000 years ago, there was a decline of the Greek Empire, right. And so, currency and economies go hand in hand, empires to the United States have been the preeminent Empire for 200. And something years now, certainly in the last 100 years, where we won a couple of wars, and we help rebuild continents and countries. But that’s coming to an end. And it’s coming to the end, and you’re seeing it on a graph, right? It’s not that, it’s an opinion, it’s the graph, like when things go parabolic. I’m a stock trader, when they go parabolic. That means there’s a period of time where you can make a lot of money, and then all of sudden things crash, and you can lose a lot of money. Now, I don’t know when the party ends could end in 20 years, 20 months or 20 days. I don’t know, all I can tell you is that never before in our history have we printed this much money now. It’s not actually a printing it used to be they used to, you know, crank up these printing press and they would just pump out all these $100 bills. And by the way, why aren’t there $500 bills now, why aren’t $1,000 bills, but that’s a subject for a different podcast. But they print these bills. Well, that’s what they were doing. Now what they do it’s so easy. All they do is they go in and add zeros to the banks to the federal bank reserve system, and they add some zeros to the end. And it’s pretty easy, right? They click a mouse, and boom, there’s a bunch, you know, there’s billions or trillions of dollars pumped into the economy. And what happens when you have extra money sitting in your pocket? Well, you either want to save it or you want to spend it, you could invest it. And that’s what a lot of people are doing from their savings. But most people spend it. And so, they go and buy stuff that they wouldn’t have bought when they didn’t have the money. And if they’re willing to buy something for $100, well, since they have a little extra money, what’s 110 And that creates inflation. And that’s all really coming from two things. It’s coming from government irresponsibility, they spend more than they bring in in taxes, right? And they spend it in a very inefficient fashion. So, if the government allocated that money to private enterprises, most private enterprises, right, not all of them, obviously, but private enterprises do a much better job than the government in allocating and spending capital. So, what happens is the government takes in all this money, but they’re not business people. They’re the government. Right? So, they hire a bunch of people to do the same job that just a few people might do in a private industry, right? Why isn’t the government Amazon? Well, Amazon’s much more efficient than the government, right? The government can’t even deliver your mail without losing billions. And, you know, Bill, I think it’s probably trillions now. But anyway, we’ll go with billions of dollars every year, it’s delivering mail. And they get to have all this money and subsidy come in from Amazon where you know, they were, they were going to go to the house anyway. Now they get the extra money for stopping off and dropping an Amazon package, and they still can’t figure out a way to make money. So, if you put the postal services in the hands of a private company, they’ll probably figure out a way to do something better than the government is doing. But yet the government is slow and clunky. And we there are certain things that we believe that we should have the government do and the post cert Postal Service is one of those things. But at the end of the day, when we have the government doing anything, certainly in charge of the money, they behave irresponsibly. And that happens hand in hand with two entities right now. It’s the government’s the politicians, and the politicians need money from the Treasury and the Treasury is run by Janet Yellen. And Janet Yellen used to be the secretary of the Fed, right? She used to be the head honcho at the Fed, the Fed was supposed to be independent. And then they took Janet Yellen, they put her in the government. So, are they independent anymore? I don’t think so. Right. I think first of all, I don’t think she knows what she’s doing. And second of all, I think that the Fed and the government are in cahoots. Now, because they need each other, the government needs to spend more money to buy more votes to let people sit at home or do whatever it is they do, are put in these government programs give out free things, and they’re not free, that means that rest of us are paying for them. And we’re paying for them either in higher taxes, or a very insidious tax called inflation. Inflation is a tax on mostly the poor, because a lot of people can, you know, can afford to spend an extra $10 on a TV, right, but that extra $10 for somebody who doesn’t have a lot of money that goes for groceries. And so now when that $10 goes for groceries that they did, like, they don’t have extra money after that. And so, you’re really taxing the poor. But the poor don’t realize it, right? We just vote for these people, because they go, they’re going to give us all this free stuff. But they don’t realize that they’re paying for that in taxes because of inflationary pressures. So, the government spends all this money because they’re buying votes, and they’re doing things in a very inefficient way. And so, they need a lot of money. And they’re like, hey, where are we going to get this money? And they turn to the Treasurer, and they go, can you give us some more money? The Treasury returns to the Fed and they go, can you guys give us some more money? And the Fed goes, well, sure, we’ll give you more money. So, the Fed has kept inflation rates, sorry, official inflation rates, and official Fed Funds rates, the amount of money that they charge their overnight lending, lending banks, members banks, right, at a very artificially low price. And that’s created that’s helped to create more and more inflation. So that chart that we put on the screen is indicative, the higher that value goes, the more I believe, right, that more that we’re in jeopardy as taking that dollar off the dollar reserve. We’ve been in the dollar reserve currency for 9495 years now. We’re putting that in jeopardy and we’re making that less likely to stand right. And if that happens, I think it could happen quickly because we’re all connected, right? Right now, right? I mean, 100 years ago or 50 years ago. When we didn’t have the information that we have now, now we have tons of information. We know almost at the moment how much more we’re paying for things. We know how much the government; we think we know how much the government is printing in money. And so, these things are happening faster and faster and faster, the brain can’t comprehend it, which also means that things could collapse faster and faster when they do. I don’t know when they will, if they will, I believe they will. And I believe if you study the past economies over the last 1000 2000 years, you see the same graph, right? You see irresponsible government, you see money printing, fiat money, money that goes off the you know, the standard as a reserve currency, and then you see a collapse of economies and oftentimes, followed by collapse of civilizations or certainly collapses of empires. So that’s what’s going on. And that’s the quick little lesson on the money supply. And it’s a quick little lesson on the government and the Fed and how printing money causes inflation. Inflation hurts you and it’s going to hurt our economy. At some point. When the party ends and the music stops. You better have a chair to sit in.

March 4, 2022

Stocks, Options and Crypto

Today we’re just going to have a brief podcast and talk about stocks, a little bit of real estate, some crypto and some options, right? And these are some asset categories that you should know about, if you want to make them part of your portfolio. So, let’s start with stocks. Now, I’m going to keep this fairly simple, we can get really complicated. I’ve been doing stocks for over four decades. But listen, a stock is basically a share of ownership in a company. So, I don’t know exactly after a company has an initial public offering how that really affects the company, that this secondary trading in the secondary markets, you know, works for the company, I think it’s based on the future of if they want to raise more money or buy back their shares, I can’t really understand I think it’s actually a gigantic Ponzi scheme. That’s been held up for a long time. But you know what, we could debate that. But that’s not the purpose of this. I think the point is, when a company does well, and you own shares of it, if the company does well, they’re supposed to in the past, they used to pay you dividends on that company, right? So they would make money, and they would pay you a portion of those profits. Well, today, most growth companies certainly are not dividend companies, they don’t pay any dividend, they pour the money back into their research and development. Like look at Amazon, for example. Amazon for the for most of the last 20 years, hasn’t made any money. So what they did, they didn’t pay their investors any dividends. But the stock went up like crazy, like 1000s of percent, right. And so when they when it went up, the investors benefited, but they never were going to get dividends out of it, they made money on capital appreciation of the shares. Well, Amazon didn’t make any money on that capital appreciation of the shares unless they had some shares in their treasury, Amazon made money by, you know, going out selling products eventually and making a profit, but it took them like 20 years to get to profitability. And investors anticipated that. And so as they anticipated that they drove the stock up higher. But why would you buy a stock if they’re not going to pay you any part of the profits? Well, it’s because there are other people that are buying stock, because they’re not going to pay you any part of the profits. So at some point, it becomes a greater fool theory, there’s somebody that’s going to be willing to pay you more for the stock that you then you bought it, and then the stock price goes up. But still, you’re not making any money on the stock only if it goes up. But there’s a lot of growth, stock stocks that go up, that make money or they don’t make money. And there’s a lot of growth companies that go down, that make money to or don’t make money. So who knows. The bottom line is a stock trades on anticipation of future earnings, I’ll say that, again, a stock trades on anticipation of future earnings. So if a company is a growth company, in other words, Amazon, for example, if you’re like what Jeff Bezos was doing, he was taking all this money. And he was reinvesting it into the infrastructure of Amazon, buying trucks, buying distribution centres, building stuff around the world, making a bigger company, making it more efficient, putting different places so they could have more efficient distribution, making better deals on the products that that were being sold, making vendors more wealthy through the process of creating a platform where they could become more successful capitalist. And so through all of that, while he didn’t make money, as a company, in fact, they lost year over year over a year, they plow that money back in to building this company. And then when they stopped building the company, all the money went into profits, right. And so that’s what ended up happening now. They’re still not sharing that profit with you, they’re still like cutting you a dividend check. So is the company going to continue to go higher? Well, I don’t know most people are still buying stuff on Amazon. So probably, it’s going to continue to go higher, I don’t think it’s going to grow as quickly, I don’t think it’s going to have profit growth as much once it plateaus. And that’s generally what happens with growth stocks. So part of your portfolio should be in growth stocks, and I always look at it like growth stocks are a way to stay ahead of the inflationary curve. And there’s a huge amount of inflation going on right now, you know, this, when you go to the grocery store, you know how much more you’re paying per pound of chicken or per pound of beef, or for eggs or for dairy, even for bread. I remember when I was in college, and this is dating me, but you know, college was a long time ago, but I was paying 59 cents a can for a can of tuna. And now a can of tuna as a you know, like a buck and a half or something like that. That’s almost triple not quite triple. So if you’re if you look at that over a period of 30 years, and you say well, that’s basically you know, 50% of, you know, a decade. That’s a pretty high inflation, right? And even if you look at it today. Inflation because the government is printing so much more money now than they were ever printing in the past. Even percentage wise, they’re printing so much more. You can see inflation just permeating itself throughout the economy. And part of that is because it permeates through the transportation system. If gas prices are up 50%, and they’re up at least 50%, at least where I live here in Florida, they’re up at least 50%. So if gas prices are up, 50%, you know, the truck prices are going to be up. And since wages are going up for truckers because we have a supply side supply chain shortage there, they need to pay truckers more and more money truckers are making like 95,000 a year now they can command that. And people are willing to pay it because we’re still looking for products. And we’re we have a supply chain issue. So we’re like, give us some more toilet paper, give us some more soap, you know, give us some more big screen TVs, I don’t know. And we blame it on the ships that are sitting offshore. And that’s certainly a part of it. But we need to move those goods around our country. So we pay the transportation companies to do that. And when that happens, that permeates through the price of your products, right. So wage prices are permeating through the price of your products transportation, and then this free money that’s floating around, when there’s extra money floating around, people are willing to pay more for things like Hey, I got an extra 10 bucks, I’m willing to buy that Now then, maybe last year, I wasn’t because I was scrimping. I didn’t have that extra 10 bucks. Now, so I’m getting off on that. But stocks are a way to hedge inflation. Let’s talk about real estate. Real estate is also an asset, a stock though you can take your mouse and you can click on it you can be in or you can be out of stock. Very liquid has some real benefits for liquidity. Now that can cut both ways, because it can go down very quickly when there’s a lot of panic selling. So you can you know, things can move. But I remember back in the year, you know, 2006 2007 I was given some seminars, and some talks and people would come up to me at the breaks or after the talk. And they would say you know I’m invested in real estate, not stocks, because real estate never goes down in price. Never saying that. And I remember thinking real estate never. Now I hate the word never right never goes down in price. Well, we know what happened in 2007. And 2008, real estate prices just got shellacked. And a lot of people lost their homes, because they had that belief that real estate never goes down. So they were highly leveraged, and they weren’t able to get out of it. So real estate is an excellent asset class. In fact, the government wants you to own a lot of real estate, so they give you tons of incentives that give you the ability to depreciate things and take them off your taxes. Because, you know, if you have a roof that eventually needs to be replaced, t that replacement only happens once every, what, 25 years or something 20-25 years. So they’re gonna allow you to take the value off each year of what you would have paid, if you divide it by 25 years, you get to take that off the income on your taxes. So there’s some benefits to owning real estate, that’s just one of them, you get to deduct mortgage interest, things like that. So real estate is an excellent asset class for stability. Now, it’s not a very good liquid asset class, like if you want to get out of your house, and you have a market that’s not like it is right now where it’s really hot, you want to get out of your house tomorrow, you’re going to have to sell it at a pretty big discount, right? So it’s not as liquid as clicking a mouse. It’s quite illiquid actually. And it usually takes time for you to actually sell real estate, you can’t do it within a few seconds like you can’t with a stock. So those are two asset classes that generally track inflation, the benefit that real estate has is that people need a place to live or people need a place to have their office or you need a place to make your products or have a distribution center. So real estate has a really cool role in the fact that there’s major utility built into it. In the case of a stock, there isn’t a lot of utility built into it for you. And so it you know, it doesn’t have that same advantage of real estate, so real estate’s a great asset class to have in your portfolio. Now, let’s talk about options. And I’m not going to go really deep into options, I’m just going to tell you that an option is basically the right, but not the obligation to do something. So when you buy an option, you buy the right, but not the obligation to do something. And usually there’s an expiration time on an option. And so before that option expires, you have the right but not the obligation to perform a certain act to buy something to sell something. And if you don’t take advantage of that the day that it expires, the moment it expires, it’s worth zero, right? And so that is it’s basically a written contract of what you can do you have the right but not the obligation. So for example, if I have the right to buy your house for $500,000, I buy an option on that I have the right to buy it, that doesn’t mean I have to buy it. What if I don’t think your house is worth 500,000? By the end of the option? What if it’s only worth 450,000? Well, I don’t have to buy the $500,000 house from you because I could go and buy it on the regular market for 450,000. So that’s how an option works. Now an options a highly leveraged vehicle usually right when you’re a buyer of an option, you’re not going to pay for it or 50,000 for that option, because it has that expiration time, right, it’s worthless after it expires, you’d rather have had the asset. So you’ll pay for the right to do something. And usually to do that, you’ll get some gigantic leverage. So maybe it only costs you $4,500, to have the option to buy that house for 450,000, or 500,000, or whatever the number is. And so it’s a fraction, it’s a fraction because of the inherent depreciation of the value because as it moves towards its expiration date becomes worth less than last month. And so there’s that value in options, options play an incredible role in a portfolio, I believe, though, you have to be on the sell side of options. In other words, you have to be not the person that has the right, but the obligation, but the person that gives the right or the obligation to someone else. And then in exchange for giving that right for to do that for someone else, you collect a premium. So if I give you the option to buy my house at $500,000, you’re gonna pay me for something to for that, for that ability to do that, I get to pocket the money. And whether you exercise it or not, it’s an agreement that we made, but I get to keep that consideration, I get to pocket that money. So options can play a really, really great role in your portfolio. And if you want to learn more about options, we got lots of stuff about it. But there’s lots of stuff on the internet too. So options are really cool vehicle. And the last one I’ll talk about is what I call a tech asset. And a tech asset is like think about the Internet. In 1995. Yeah, there were a couple of websites, there were some emails going around, people didn’t really know how it was going to work out. But it worked out like our whole lives are right around the internet. And it’s growing even more exponentially, today around the world. And so if you think about that was a tech asset, Imagine owning some really cool tech assets at 1995. And having them today, right, you know, 20 years later, 2030 years, almost 30 years later. Imagine how cool would that be? If you just put them away, went to sleep and own them that much later, they’d be worth, you know, way, way, way, way, way, way more? Well, I think tech assets are always a part of an investment strategy. And I believe you should have some tech assets. Now the tech assets for me today are in things that are cutting edge, cryptocurrency, crypto assets. So if you can get involved in the cryptocurrency market, and I’m talking about getting involved in a responsible way, by the way, this is not financial advice. This is just an opinion, do your own research, but get involved in a responsible way. What is the most utilitarian cryptocurrency out there? To me it’s Bitcoin it’s the most tried and true, it’s not been hacked. It’s, it’s been tested, it’s really clunky, right? It’s like the, it’s like the big, you know, IBM Vax that they used to have the big computers that you couldn’t really mess with them. They didn’t go down much, but they weren’t really fast. That’s what Bitcoin is. But bitcoins like the most adopted cryptocurrency out there, so it’s probably not going to be unseated. I was looking at Bitcoin, like the Coca Cola of cryptocurrencies, right, you’re not going to unseat Coca Cola, even if you wanted to have a great soft drink. Coca Cola has got that market covered, you might be able to take a shot at Pepsi, or maybe you know, diet right or whatever the next one is our C, but you’re not going to be able to unseat Coca Cola. But there are other really great utilities for other cryptocurrencies. Ethereum has a smart contract buyer. So a lot of has smart contract layer. Cardano has a really great story. Helium has a cool story, like there’s a lot of utility out there. Going back to the internet. When I sat through that, boom, I watched all these beautiful stories that had, you know, like, they weren’t making any money at all, but they had all these really cool ideas, some made it some didn’t, some didn’t at the time. And now they’ve made it like, you know, Amazon was not a big deal bringing, you know, groceries to your door. That was called Web van, I think at the time, and everybody goes, Wow, that’s a really great idea. And then it crashed. But now, getting groceries delivered to your house is not a big deal. Amazon does it. And other companies do it as well. And you can have people shopping for you at the grocery stores and things like that. So sometimes, you know, if you’re really ahead of the game, you can do well, but sometimes you can, you know, catch that falling knife or, or maybe it goes all the way to the ground and you never catch it. So tech assets are should be a part of your portfolio, gold and silver and some of those other things that are hard assets should also be a part of your portfolio as well. Alright, so I kind of gave you a smattering today of some of the assets that you should learn about to be part of your portfolio of stocks, options, real estate, tech assets, and even a little bit of gold and silver. Right gold and silver has been around for 1000s and 1000s of years. It’s been a medium of exchange for us, traditionally, and I you know, while I don’t make gold and silver, my cornerstone of my investment strategy, I think we should have some of it in there. And then the other part that you’re looking for is you know, some digital gold and I kind of look at Bitcoin to be digital gold. So, Things to think about things to look into and, and you know, have as part of your investing strategy. Invest in portfolio. Don’t just be a real estate person. Don’t just be a stock person. Don’t invest just an options. Don’t just invest in gold and be a gold bug. There’s lots of ways to make money and if you allocate and diversify among those asset classes, it can create a much more sound financial plan. Hope that helps. Have a great day. See you next time.

 

March 4, 2022

Welcome to the Wealth Architect Podcast

So, I’m excited to be here. Not sure exactly where we’re going to go with all this stuff. But I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. So if you’d like to have fun, that’s like, what I always want to do is no matter what I’m doing, I want to create, but I want to have fun. And so I want you to hold me to that standard. How about that. So this is the first episode of the wealth architect podcast, listen, I start everything from what they don’t teach us in school, you know, we go to school for all these years, and we learn about Copernicus, and we learn about the Egyptians or Cleopatra, or, you know, the ancient Greeks, or you know, and all that stuff is great. We learned about Romeo and Juliet, and the Pythagorean Theorem, but you know, we don’t learn about how to do our taxes, how to buy a car, negotiate, how to buy real estate, how to invest in the stock market, how to create our financial future, how to make it so that we’re not slaves to, you know, working all our lives until we’re 65, when we’re too old, to really do anything meaningful with our retirement years, right. Like, we have to keep ourselves in incredible shape, just to be able to enjoy that small window of time, but we worked 4050 years, all of our lives to get to that point. So I kind of come from everything from that particular place, right? I want to help people figure out that there are other ways. So there’s shortcuts, right? There are ways to get there a lot easier. And so I want to kind of focus on what they don’t teach us in school. I mean, I think it’s all flipped, like, you go to school, and you’re on this stuff. And they teach you all these things, and you come out and you you’re supposed to be well rounded. But like I use money every day, I don’t use the Pythagorean Theorem every day, I don’t use the, you know, the a squared plus b squared equals c squared. But I can tell you, I can think about taxes. And I can think about negotiation, I think about human relations and communication. And those are things they don’t teach us in school. So we had graduated from school, when we had 12 years, almost 30,000 hours to learn things right between 24 and 30,000 hours, where we sat and listened to did homework. And they missed that opportunity to teach us the things that we needed. Why? Because they want to put us into this little box and make us go to work from nine to five and put a screw in a hole for eight hours. That’s how our how our education system was created. And I want to change that, right? I think we you know, we go to school, and we learn all this stuff. And then when we finish school, then we have to learn the real stuff. Like that’s all optional. Like the optional stuff should be taught first. And then if we want to learn about the Korean War, we should go and learn about the Korean War, or what happened with Madison and Hamilton, and all those guys. I mean, I think it’s cool to know about your country for sure. Don’t get me wrong. And I think there’s a place for all that, but come on, like Teach us how to file taxes, right? Teach us about the economy, teach us about things that we don’t have to get a higher degree to figure out what we’re doing right though, gets me it really gets me going. And then a lot of people go to school and they spent a couple $100,000 In education, they owe money for the next 30 years to pay off that education. But education doesn’t teach them the main thing, how to make money. Like that’s the whole point you go to school. Otherwise, you could just not go to school, if you’re going to be living in your parents basement after spending 200,000 on a policy degree. And don’t get me wrong. If you got a policy degree, that’s great. And especially if you can make it work in your field. Good, but I don’t think you’re the majority. I mean, if you’re going to go to school, and you’re going to become a veterinarian, or a doctor or lawyer or an account or something that actually translates to making some money when you graduate. That’s awesome. But most people don’t have a plan. And if you’re one of those people that has one of these degrees, that I’m gonna poopoo from time to time. That’s great. And if you’ve made it work, that’s great. And College is great. I went to college, I loved it. But I could tell you I’ll quote my my university professor Mars, President Marshall Crider at the University of Florida who said 99% of the things you learn are outside the classroom and he was absolutely right. So here’s here’s a podcast that we’re going to teach you things that are outside of the classroom. So here’s we’re going to talk about money. We’re going to talk about passive income. We’re going to talk about the importance of cash flow. Yeah, we’re going to talk about the economy and the economic situation and issues that come up. We’re going to talk around system but systems around

05:00

finances, we’re going to talk about stocks to like from time to time, I’m going to talk to you about some timely stocks like Tesla’s pretty timely right now, and I’ve invested in it, you know, I’ll probably going to show you some charts if you’re watching the video version of this podcast. And so we’re gonna, but really, we’re also going to focus on the success mindset that you need to have, you know, 90% of any success comes from the mindset you have going into that success. And whether that’s investing or in life, we want to focus on the mindset, we think that I think it’s really critical. So. So who are you listening to? My name is Mark Yegge. And maybe you don’t know me yet. But I look forward to getting to know you, either through these podcasts or, you know, maybe some interactions, or maybe you get involved with me, during some of my courses, or some of my seminars or whatever, somewhere down the road, that’d be really cool. But I’m a wealth architect, what the heck does that mean? Well, I help six and seven, figure investors structure things financially using offense and defense. Right. So a little bit about me, I’ve had my own Wall Street brokerage firm. For several years, I was a pioneer in electronic trading. So if your electronic trading right now, I was at the very beginning of that revolution, helping you create some of those systems at something called an electronic communications network and ACN, one of nine SEC approved trading firms to do what we did, it was a financial technology play was a lot of fun growing that thing from nothing to, you know, multi million dollars, and a lot of employees and a lot of associates and really doing lots of cool stuff on Wall Street. And I had to have all the licenses. So I’ve been through being a customer all the way through being an owning my own brokerage firm, and being a broker and a financial planner, and all that stuff. So I’ve traded over $14 billion worth of securities, notional value, through my hedge funds, my company’s personally, and now I help other people learn how to do that through my systems, my programs, my courses, my mastermind groups, my mentoring. And so that’s, that’s kind of where I come from, and all this financial stuff is that, you know, I think about it all the time. And I’m always immersed in it. So I feel like I’m on the cutting edge of what’s going on. And I don’t have all the answers. You know, what, you put two economists in a room, you can get eight answers, right? And I’m, I’m basically one of those, but I think I have a common sense approach to stuff. And I come from the Austrian School of Economics, where, you know, it’s a little bit different than the Keynesian school, or, or the modern monetary theory, which you’ll hear about. And I believe that that’s an important part. Because if you study economics, you can be prepared for it, right? You don’t have to have a degree in it. But you can be prepared for the economy and what’s coming, if you study and if not, you’re just kind of ignorant, you’re going along with what they tell you on TV and 90% of the time, that stuff is wrong. So listen back to the offense and defense. Offense is making money. It’s cash flow, it’s passive income. It’s the types of investments you’re in those kinds of things. Defense is about structuring things to be bulletproof. Right? When things don’t go your way, when the market goes the other way. How are you bulletproof? Are you are you got your tax stuff in order? Are your asset protection things in order? Are you understanding the economy? And by the way, I’ve been doing this investing game since I was about 12. When you know, I came home one day, or actually, every day, my dad was looking through the Wall Street Journal, tracking his stocks writing things down, and I finally got curious. And I was like, Dad, what is that? And he started to teach me about the stock market. And I invested, and I put in like 100 bucks, and it turned into 300 bucks. And then I put in $300. And it turned into $600. And pretty soon I bought a stock called us or Allegheny Airlines that became US Airways. And it went from 17 to 35. And I made a bunch of money that I learned how to short. So it was really fun. I bought my first car for my investments. And I was hooked ever since. So I’ve been investing ever since that period of time. And it’s it’s been a lot of fun. And I think I’ve got some nuances, because of the Wall Street background that I’ve got that I can kind of give you some secrets that Wall Street has. And maybe we can take advantage of some of those secrets. That’s what I like to do is kind of figure out the hacks the the cool ways that Wall Street’s doing things, but maybe they’re not sharing with us. And I think you should know about them. And I teach those people, I teach people those things all the time. So what is the wealth architect podcast? Like I said, welcome to the first episode. Hopefully, there’s gonna be many, many more, but we’re gonna be talking about the stock market. We’re going to be talking about crypto assets in the crypto market, because I think that’s a big thing that’s going on. We’re gonna be talking about real estate, I’ve got a background in real estate. I don’t love real estate, I’ll be honest with you. It’s a great way to make money. But for me, it’s, you know, it’s not my favorite thing, right? And maybe I’m just doing it wrong. But I’ve been doing it for a lot of years. And I don’t love real estate. But I think it’s important. I think it’s a plays a critical role. So from time to time, we’re going to have real estate people on here, in addition to stock market people in addition to crypto people. And in addition to the comments that I’m going to be making, based on the news of the day of the news of the week, we’re going to be talking about the economy a lot, right? We’re going to weave that in and my theories on it and maybe your theories on it and our guests there is about that

We’re gonna mostly also be talking about success mindset principles, personal growth, development, positive approaches to life language, some of those things that you may not hear about on other podcasts from other places. So I’m excited about that, it’s going to be really fun. And it’s going to create a lot of really cool dialogue. So I have this quad investing strategy, by the way, it’s based on trying to get you to cash flow and passive income. So you’re gonna hear me talking a lot about that. It’s basically hard assets, like real estate, soft assets, like stocks, and crypto, well, tech assets, or crypto, and then being in your own business. So we’ll talk a little bit about entrepreneurial things, leadership, management mindset, how you can create best practices with your people, your teams, and even in yourself getting organized, things like that. So we’re gonna cover a broad group of things. But really, it’s about, I don’t know, being successful and doing whatever you do, and making it so that you focus a little bit more on money that maybe you have in the past, I don’t believe that you need to focus your whole life on money. But I can tell you, if you don’t have it, it’s a lot better when you have it. And if you don’t have it, you need to figure out how to get it. And, you know, I travel a lot. And I go to Europe, and I go to Greece, specifically an awful lot. And it’s funny how my mindset shifts, my mindset shifts when I’m in Greece, because in Greece, they really don’t focus on money very much. It’s probably why they don’t have a lot of it a lot of people, right. But you know, they focus on laughter, family, good times, having fun, enjoying vacations, things like that. And I realized that when I’m there, I become a bit different. So in our Western society, and I don’t know where you’re listening to this podcast from or watching this, but in the West, in our Western society, we focus on money. And I think money’s great to focus on. But if you build your whole life around it, you’re I think you’re missing the point. I think the Greeks and the Europeans and a lot of other parts of the world they haven’t, right, the money is a means to get to that lifestyle. So we’re going to be talking about lifestyle, right? For me, I like to travel the world. So you’re going to see this podcast from different parts of the world. And maybe I’ll tell you about him while I’m there. But you’ll hear me talking about because I love to travel and meet new people and new cultures. And I always learned something about myself. And I learned something about these cultures. So that’s going to be fun for me, hopefully, I’ll take you along with me to, to some of these really cool places. And so, you know, when we talk about hard assets, we talk about a portfolio mix, there’s a mix of hard assets, soft assets, tech assets, and business assets that we’re going to be talking about. And so I like hard assets to be about 30%, soft assets to be about 40. Tech assets to be five to 10%. That’s your crypto and things like that. And then your business assets to be 20 to 25%. But you know, what, you may not have all those. And the main thing is I’m talking about cash flow. And I read years ago that we all need a cash cow, we need something that brings us in our cash, we need cash to live on cash to save, the Save becomes investments, the investments become passive income, and then we can start living on the passive income, we don’t have to work and exchange time for money. So I’m going to be talking about all these concepts in this podcast. But you notice there’s kind of a theme, it’s really all revolving toward a great lifestyle. So listen, I’m not going to kill you with more of this podcast. First episode, I just wanted to lay the land get you to kind of get to know me a little bit. And that’s basically it, I want to thank you for being here being part of the first podcast, I’m not exactly sure where this is gonna go. But we’ll figure it out together. And if you want to make some comments in here, and tell me Give me some comments on how I can improve it, I want to improve things in life. So that’d be kind of fun. Come back often, I My goal is to put this out at least weekly, and have some really cool interviews on here. And if not, I’ll just give you some spin on what I think is going on in the economy or with the stock. And by the way, I’m going to be making this at least the intention is to make this a video podcast also. And the reason I’m doing that I can make it audio so that you can listen to it at the gym and things like that. But by doing it as a video podcast, as well, I might be able to annotate things for you. So for example, if you know a stock is doing a certain thing, and I want to do an analysis of a chart, I love to do analysis of stocks, on charts, and a lot of people love the way I do it. So you can’t really describe that on an audio podcast. I’ll have the video podcast for those that want to watch YouTube while you’re on the treadmill. But if you’re listening to it on an audio podcast, what I’ll try to do is I’ll try to describe as best I can, what I’m showing on my screen so that if you’re not able to catch it on the screen, and you’re just listening to it, you can still basically picture as I describe it, so I’ll do my best to do that. Hopefully I’ll be able to, to show you that I’m but but primarily this is going to be of an audio driven podcast with some video support, but I’m going to be doing both of them. So anyway, that’s it. Thank you for being here.

Scroll to top