Good morning everybody. Kirk Spano, April 14th. Make sure you get your tax extension in by tomorrow like I am doing today. All right. I have read a lot of articles uh from the macro perspective from people who just aren't very good macro people and you can tell when you read their articles that they are just data fitting or coming up with an opinion then asking an AI to write an article in support of their opinion. It is blowing my mind that I'm seeing these articles all over the place. I can look at them and go, "You you didn't write that." And it is kind of disconcerting to me that so many of these articles get read and people say, "Oh, that's a good article." And really, they're not. And really, where an article fails is in the first principle. It is in the very first thing they say that sets their premise. and then they write a big long article to support their premise that was fundamentally flawed right from the get-go. So we have seen through generations and generations and centuries and centuries that rhetoric uh which often turns into propaganda starts with what somebody wants to be true or what they need to be true or what helps them make money. And the idea that China needs a deal on trade more than the United States is so far from the truth that I just thought I would address it in a short article that'll probably end up being one of my rare 3,000 worders. But this is the gist of it. Right at the forefront of this trade war is the idea that China has taken advantage of us on trade. And that is partially true. And I've told this story before. When I was in college, I had a dissident Chinese professor, somebody who could not go back to China because they'd probably kill him or imprison him. Dissident professor from China said to me, because I asked him about Chinese trade, I said, "I'm watching this develop in real time, right? I I I knew about how uh Nixon had started a lot of the Chinese trade and the idea in 1990 911 I think it was one of those two years I think it was that school year and I don't remember if it was autumn or spring I said you know we're we're starting to open up to China and China is about to go through a big growth phase and at even at that point I understood demographics I said if they grow and we keep sending factory jobs and manual manufacturing jobs to them. How is this going to shake out? And he said to me, "Well, they don't just want those jobs. They want all of your technology and they want the capital investment that they'll never really fully repay. And they will just offer the carrot. They'll dangle the carrot over and over and over again, and then they'll take it away. And they will keep using the same carrot over and over again to get what they want out of the United States, which is technology and capital." And he said, "Your corporate executives have to be forced not to fall for that or at least not to exploit it." And what we saw, and I'm a rust belt kid, what we saw over the next, you know, which had already started in the 80s, but what we saw over the next couple of decades to the financial crisis for sure and a little bit afterwards was that United States corporate executives kept offshoring jobs, particularly to China, because China paid them to do it. And then because of the labor price disparity, right, that they they were employing Chinese people at surf wages, the corporate executives saw bigger stockbased compensation because margins went up and then and bonuses. So the corporate executives, the reason they make so much money in the United States is largely on the back of offshoring jobs to China, which started in the 70s and 80s, but really accelerated in the '9s and especially after China was given WTO admission and and most favored nation status in 2002 one. It was right in that range and it directly contributed to the financial crisis but really has contributed to the failure of a lot of the United States to participate in the quantitative easing recovery after the financial crisis. I've told this story before. So the second time I took my kids out to the east coast, we were going to see the fireworks on the mall in Washington DC. We were driving what I called the Dadillac. I had a Cadillac at the time and blew a transmission line on the highway and we got towed to a town called Beaver Falls. Beaver Falls is famous for what? Who knows who was born in Beaver Falls? He has the Medicare commercial out there now. Are you getting the benefits that you deserve? Yeah, Joe Nameoth. Joe Nameoth was born in Beaver Falls. And so we went there and went to a place called uh I think it's Brighton Hot Dogs while they worked on our car. They ended up fixing my car for like 165 bucks. Uh put in a new transmission line, filled me up with transmission, did kind of a all points inspection. I think they topped off my oil. I basically did a little little mini mini oil change with transmission service. 165 bucks. I thought I was going to get creamed and they were just the nicest people. But in that town there was half of Main Street was closed and there had been a couple of steel mills and other factories that were closed and they said these have all closed down uh going into the financial crisis coming out. This was 2 years later hadn't recovered. It's like ah that's pretty quick. So I thought okay well it'll come back. I have been back to Beaver Falls twice uh in the last 15 years. The last time was 2019 and it still hadn't recovered. The only new buildings were a nursing home and a Medicaid building and there was low-income housing. I I remember the street. It was just all three were just off of Main Street. There was an old bank had to be from the 1800s. This beautiful old bank and it was uh hosting a thrift shop. So, somebody the bank had gone under or had left and it was just a building was, you know, just glorious building and somebody bought it and put a thrift store in it. It's just mindblowing to me. I actually looked at buying one here in Milwaukee a few years back, but I couldn't get a deal. I explained to the people that I camp with uh a couple years later, I guess it would be I forget what year it was. Uh I think it was actually that year, 2019. and we were camping and and somebody was talking at the campfire about how the Midwest had screwed the country by electing Trump. And I said, "Well, here's the thing. The the reason why most people voted for Trump is because they just were so disaffected by the financial crisis and the fact that the East and West Coast rebounded much more from the quantitative easing than the center of the country. So, there's a lot of people who lost jobs, who lost retirements, who never got them back, even though everybody on the press is saying how good things are, and they're shrugging their shoulders saying, "I'm in Pennsylvania. I'm in Ohio. I'm in Indiana. I'm in Wisconsin. I'm in Minnesota. I'm in Missouri. Pick a state." And we're not seeing that kind of recovery. And here we are 17 years after the financial crisis and you still have big parts of the middle of the country that haven't seen the recovery that the people who made out from quantitative easing and bailouts, you know, how they recovered. So I always explain, you know, I don't really like President Trump. I I think that his policies probably don't make things better. However, I understand why people voted for him. I understand why people in the rust belt and other parts of the Midwest and and the center of the country look to each coast and go, "Well, wait a second. All this money printing out of Washington, all this money printing out of the Federal Reserve, all these bailouts, it went to the bankers and the richest people." Because I'll tell you what, I didn't get my factory job back. Tell you what, the neighborhood that I'm in where I had a small business, that didn't come back. and and and it's easy for them to see that. And the farmers, you know, the farmers just keep taking it on the chin and they can see that something had to be changed. And they got to the point, you remember the movie Batman? I think it was Batman Begins, but I could be wrong, where the Joker says, you know, some people just want to see the world burn. And this whole idea of break it to try to fix it better later, it appeals to enough people that President Trump won a second term because they have an experience to come back that a lot of other people have. I'm fortunate. I'm in finance. I came back. I I've done very very well. However, I sit in a room with 80 or 90 or 100 poker players once a month. uh people that I've known anywhere from a a few hours, but many of them I've known for 15, 16, 17 years. And and you know, we can't keep track of each other's lives. And I can tell you, not all of them have ever gotten past the the point of struggling, right? They save a couple bucks in their 401k, you know, they finally get to buy a house. Uh, but I would be surprised if I'm, you know, if there's more than one table of millionaires out of 10 tables, you know, and that's only because there's old retired guys there. So, I think the logic that a lot of people have is it wasn't working for me anyway. Let's see what this other guy can do. Now, my my humble belief is that uh President Trump's policies kind of suck. Uh, and they are very self-motivated. I think that's the most diplomatic way I can say that. So when I see articles that talk about China needs a deal more than we do, I just kind of laugh and I'm like, you know, if they lose US demand, do you really believe that a country that has four times more people, an economy just as big, and the whole world out there irritated with the United States, you really think they can't make that up? I think that it is silly. and the idea that the dollar is losing some value. Uh, and I just did some research this morning before I came on. You know, US Treasury auction has been a little bit under pressure. Uh, stocks uh, are being sold by European investors and I think probably from investors all over the world. RBC was just on Bloomberg this morning talking about that the dollar getting weaker and the yuan rendon B whatever you want to call it getting stronger that allows the Chinese to consume more right because they're like oh our our currency is getting stronger and the government's doing policies that encourage me to consume and my money buys more so temporarily they'll have a supply glut which will keep prices down and Europe is cutting a deal with them to buy more things on the cheap. I mean, does anybody really want to see the world turn away from the United States and towards China? Well, that's really what's happening right now because we came out firing, President Trump came out firing at everybody rather than going to our allies and saying, "Hey, I need three things from you. I need you to step it up on military spending. I need you to help me put the screws to Russia, Iran, and China, and I need you to keep buying our debt. And he didn't say that. He came out and said, "Tariff, tariff, tariff, tariff." Right? You're screwing us. You know what? We're the richest country on the planet and we did it with low tariffs. Think about that. Do you really think that high tariffs are good for us? You know, I I I remember Mark Cuban saying on Shark Tank once, and I read something else that he said. Uh he didn't say it when I met met him at the Mavericks game, but you know I imagined he did. He said, "If something's working, just keep doing it until it doesn't work." Well, what the United States has been doing for a long time has been working. The thing that I don't think people understand is that the reason why money flows uphill is that the people at the top, not all of them, but too many of them, buy a politician or buy a bunch of politicians or they chip in to buy politicians and they proportionately get bigger tax breaks than everybody else. We know that the Trump and George W. Bush tax breaks flow to over 80% to the richest 1% of the people. I can tell you as somebody that earns six figures that as my income has been going up, my tax rate has not been going up. And if I somehow start making a seven figure handle, I can tell you there's more and more available to me, especially through real estate ownership, go figure, that will keep my tax rate, my effective tax rate down. I know people who make seven figures, a lot of them actually, and they're not paying the the the same tax rate that I am. Their their effective tax rate is lower, right? Because they're not paying social security taxes after a while after about 160 grand. And everything comes to them as capital gains and they depreciate all the real estate. and then they do a 1031 exchange which doesn't really add any investment but they get to recycle all the tax breaks again. As somebody who's starting to use those tools, I do it because it's there and I think anybody would but they shouldn't be there. There should be a limit that once you're earning a certain amount of money, I think the number could be a cool million, right? Easy number to wrap your head around. Hey, you make over a million dollars, you don't get the tax breaks anymore. Maybe that's a way to do it. Bernie's uh um what Bernie Sanders has been having uh whatever he's call rallies, whatever he's calling them, and they've been just packing in places. So, we'll see. I've talked about the snapbacks that happen when we go too far to the right or too far to the left, then we snap back the other direction. What I wonder is if we snap back too far to the left next time, or if we just pull to the middle, which is where we belong. On average, that's where we are over time. Uh but right now we're too far to the right and it's a weird right. It's not traditional conservatism. It's not really even populism. Uh it's it's it's something akin to dictatorial uh totalitarianism. And we'll see we'll see how it turns out. Somebody Teresa says that Bernie will be in Boise tonight. Yeah. You know, I I don't know if I I don't know which way Idaho votes. I presume red but I think that we are in the early stages of seeing a shift the problem is that these transitions as we've talked about over and over again transitions take time so while I agree there should be more strategic manufacturing and high-end manufacturing in the country this is something that can't happen overnight and the transition is going to be painful uh there will be some winners uh we're going to talk about MP materials in coming weeks I think that it's kind of on a hype rally right now. It has been since President Trump has been elected because of the way capex cycles work and they did just do a shelf offering. I think the MP materials is destined to go back into the teens again. But Shamath and his little buddies, they have podcasts and and spaces. They're going to just pump it back up. So, we probably want to look for a chance to buy MP materials if it gets into the teens because they will have financial stress. There's just there's no way that they don't uh unless suddenly there's a specific tax break carved out just for them, which I don't think that there will be. But we'll see. The homebuilders have been talking a lot lately about pent-up demand. Absolutely there is. But with mortgage rates uh back up, you know, how many Americans with 6 million behind on their mortgages, which is as many as during the financial crisis, are actually going to build houses? I'd like to build a house. You know what? I can't build in the subdivision I want to build in because they don't have the money to put in the roads. It's mind-boggling to me. I've offered to partner with them. I've offered to bring them an investor and they don't want to do it. Well, we'll just wait because we want to do it ourselves. Fine. I get it. But that is happening all over the country. If you don't have cash to do something, the interest rates uh through the banks, which are about to get dragged into the treasury market again, just don't facilitate enough credit. I have seen my own offers of credit dry up. Uh, you know, I'm not losing any credit, but I told you a few years ago that everybody was just throwing credit at me, throwing it at me. And now they're not throwing it so much. You know, I can probably get credit. You know, I just financed the car, but the people who were getting credit card offer after credit card offer, and you tell me, are you getting good credit card offers? I still get them, hey, if you you can do this and it's only 35% a year. are like, "Why would I ever do that? How did my name got get on your list?" So, credit is drying up. We know that foreign investment in the United States is drying up. We know that the world is unhappy with us. I think that there's a lot of leaders out there, European in particular, who are not going to deal with Trump, period. And China doesn't need to. So, if China and Europe, who are talking about trading more, turn their back on the United States for a little while, what does that say for our short run? Now, will we end up with more strategic industry here in a few years? Yes, we will. And and one of them, I'm telling you, I I was just at Intel. I stayed right across the street. And Intel's massive. That's a company that the government has to support. If they don't uh you are you are taking a look at one of the great American uh success stories employers strategic corporations if they fall apart if Intel falls apart there are big big big big problems for the US economy so I think that they're harbinger I think the car companies are are harbingers you know these are all the canary and the coal mine companies and if Intel Texas Instruments if Ford and GM if these these companies start laying people off in the next few months. That will be our sell almost everything moment. Now, I did not say sell almost everything earlier this year. I've just been telling you to trim into the strength. I think, and I'm going to put my outlook out this week, I think that we probably do get a rally coinciding with the reconciliation bill and probably a rate cut by the Fed. Uh if not in May, uh I mean I think that they're gonna have as soon as unemployment ticks up, they're going to start cutting rates. I think that's coming. I think we're literally weeks to months away, not years. And when it becomes apparent to people, what is apparent to me, having been in five cities now recently, is that the United States is already in a recession. We saw the GDP now plunging. That's not that's not an anomaly. Phoenix has been slow. Dallas has been slow. Vegas has been slow. Chicago and Milwaukee are both slow. You tell me where you are and tell me if you think it's booming the way it was two years ago. I don't think anybody can say that. Florida is in a recession right now. The housing market has collapsed. Everywhere else in the middle of the country, you can't get a house. My son just listed a house for $350,000. Little thing got four over 400 for it. He's got another house for sale at 750. I think he's going to get almost 800. He might get 800. The guy who owns that house also has commercial real estate and he's selling that. There's a lot of smart money selling right now. And I think that it is very likely that what the Trump administration is doing by kind of, you know, jab, jab, punch, jab, jab, punch, you know, duck duck. Uh, I think that they're just helping buy some time so that the in then smart money people, and I talked to some of these people, can sell. I know of a $40 million property here in Milwaukee that they're trying to get out of. I know of an office tower that is on the verge of going into receiverhip and then that one will probably get bought and be made into condos or apartments like a different one that was. So, I think that any rally that we have is something to sell into. I really like selling cash secured puts on companies that are already beat up and really have nowhere left to go on the downside and we'll see if I'm right. History has been that I get these big ones right. I I haven't got a big one wrong. I tied once, you know, back in 2015. I thought we were going to have a recession and a crash and we just got a flat economy and a choppy market for year and a half, two years. Somebody says, "When you get to individual stocks, do you think MP is a sell after this surge?" I think at a minimum you should sell cash. Excuse me. I think at a minimum you should sell covered calls. Uh but I don't think it uh hurts to trim if you have a large position. I think if you have a large position, a lot of you could be up around 50% on MP, I would imagine. So if you're up around 50% on MP, maybe you take the gain off the table, right? sell sell a third of it, right? If you're up 50% and sell a third, now your original investment's still intact. Math. Uh and then maybe sell covered calls on quite a bit of the rest. All right, let's talk about two stocks. Not going to make this a super long call because I do have just a just a mountain of writing to do. Uh and I want to really pound it for the next uh five weeks here uh before I head out to Dallas for a week. All right, New Fortress Energy. What's the story? The story is that companies that aren't favored, that aren't in the meme crowd, that are hard to understand financially, are getting the crap kicked out of them. New Fortress Energy is one of them. Now, we know that the runway for natural gas is much better than the runway for oil. And these guys are a liqufied natural gas company. They have refinanced the majority of their debt, pushed it out five years. They just sold some oper non-core operations in Jamaica for a billion dollars to help delever their balance sheet. They were able to finance their second LNG plant in Mexico. And their floating liqufied natural gas, which is modular versus the gigantic ships that others have, uh can be assembled anywhere in the world pretty cheap. And that business has been starting to pick up, get people snooping around. I think that New Fortress Energy has conquered their financial problems. I don't think the market cares because people have recency bias and short investors can pound something down pretty far. This stock is at six bucks right now, 579 today. It is worth 20 to $30 all day long. Now, what is going to be the catalyst to driving it up? I don't know. that catalyst might not come until next year. So, what do you do? I think you sell cash secured puts. You collect the premium. If it gets put to you at a net lower price, so be it. I showed you last week that I sold $6 cash secured puts and got two bucks for them. That means that my net price would be four bucks. That is mind-blowing to me. So, if you take a look at the June $6 puts, you're getting a $137 for those right now. I mean, that is just, you know, mind-blowing. I mean, that is over a 20% premium for May and June for about 10 weeks. So, you can annualize that and you have over a 100% internal rate of return on this if you annualize it. I don't know. That's pretty good. If the stock gets put to you, fine. Then you just wait until next year. So I think that New Fortress Energy, you should be and this I'm presuming that most of you have a position. Sell the cash secured puts. If it gets put to you, fine. But if not, that $137 reduces your cost basis on your other shares if this just expires. And my guess is that it will. It has a WOFF buy signal. You see the last one got a rally from it almost doubled. I think that this channel down is about to pivot and it'll take a couple quarters to pivot, but it's going to pivot up and this stock will eventually get into this range and then if the world is getting better, if we've done quantitative easing, which is what I expect by next year, it might be sooner, but I think by next year we have quantitative easing. If Powell doesn't do it, the next Fed chairman will. This is a stock that could set new all-time highs, right? one, two, three, and then does it break out from the third test? If it doesn't, you get all the way, right? Then you sell it and you let it come back down. But I think this could break out because I think that the revenues once the capex cycle is more in their favor, which is going to take a couple more years. And this is a stock that could go on a very long-term rally, presuming the macro doesn't blow them up again in 3 four years. The one thing to keep in mind is that I think we're probably going to get a double dip recession. I I have a hard time wrapping my head around or arguing that the rest of the world is going to suddenly play nice with Donald Trump in 2028 going into the next election. Well, we'll get all the Russian robots on Twitter, but for the most part, follow the money. And I don't think the money is going to come in to help JD Vance or Trump trying to get a third term. Uh, in fact, I find it nauseating to the point of throwing up in my mouth that Steve Bannon is trying to say, "Oh, we got people working on getting him a third term." that fat And I say that as a fat So, you know, this idea that, you know, they all claimed to be constitutionalists until they didn't like what was in the Constitution. That's so unamerican. It's off the charts. In any case, I think New Fortress Energy can't get much lower if it does for a hot minute. So, what uh it's headed to between 20 and 30 in the next few years and it might break out and then it might break out again. We'll see. Enovix, I have been talking for the last month or two about how clean energy stocks uh solar in particular uh and batteries were under direct threat from President Trump. The reality is that they're still growing super fast. And these guys with their setup in Malaysia that gives them favorable tax treatment and their ability to license their technology to American companies to get around tariffs, which is what's going to happen. I I don't I don't say this might happen. I am telling you they are going to license their technology in America probably to multiple companies. It'll be free money for them. They don't have to build anything. Think that through. They have some of the best batteries in the world. They have deals with seven out of eight of the biggest uh phone manufacturers now and they can't build fast enough in Malaysia. Remember, we're only 330 million people. The rest of the world, a few more than that. So, they're going to supply the world with these batteries for devices and ultimately it comes back around to EVs. I think that these are the perfect batteries for the ER EVs. They're light, they're more efficient, they charge well. So I think that Navix probably has Enix could have tremendous upside just tremendous upside because of the speed at which you know building a plant with a better battery would take but again they're not a they're not a chemistry company they're chemistry agnostic they came up with a different architecture and it's patented so everybody's going to have to you know license this technology I just I just think that there are going to be a licensing monster so I think that you get woff buy signals here. I think for sure if you don't have a position, you should take a starter and I think you should just be pounding cash secured puts right now. The June $6 put, you're getting almost a buck for notice that on New Fortress Energy, the pessimism was higher because you're getting a buck 37. You're only getting 90 cents for this one. I mean, I think you can put it into your order at a buck if you really want to. Uh, but I think 90 cents against six, you know, that's pretty good. That's what 17% times five. You know, you're getting a an 85% annualized internal rate of return. That's pretty good, right? That's all right. So, I think that these are the two puts that I want you to be selling right now. They both have WOFF buy signals. So, if they do rally and you just want to close the put because you're afraid of the next cliff, that's fine. If all of a sudden your $137, you can buy it back for a quarter, you know, you can do that. You know, if you want to buy back your 90 cents for a dime, you can do that. You know, if you think that there's news over the weekend that might send the market down 5%, and I promise you there will be again, close your puts. And so, these are the kinds of setups with these signals, you know, the the likelihood that it rallies back into here and maybe it falls again. Who knows? But I think that we're over the next, you know, over the next three quarters, this is going to start to pivot. I think one of the surprises that you could see is if we get bad unemployment data right before the Fed meeting, you could see Powell cut in May. I don't think he's going to. I think he's going to wait until that there is a couple of months of upticks in unemployment. And I think that over the summer is when you start to see Powell start to cut. And if unemployment really ticks up, he will cut by like a half point instead of a quarter point. And your intuition is, "Oh, that's good." No, that's going to scare the out of people. If they see the Fed as panicking or as being behind the curve, which is what they always talk themselves into, when in reality it's Congress that sucks, you know, you could see could see a sell-off. So, if we have a second quarter rally, which I think is a coin flip, but I, you know, it's it's a coin flip. You know, it's not like unlikely. I told you the start of the year wasn't going to be so good. But I think that second quarter we might get a rally or some chop, but as the Treasury market dries up in the second half, cuz ain't nobody coming, folks. Ain't nobody coming until they do QE. Ain't nobody coming. And I'm already seeing the millennials online saying, "Oh, QE, that means it's going to go to the moon." Not if there's crowding out. Go back and study your econ 102 macro textbook. Emerging markets get crowding out all the time. Government soaks up too much in the money. Doesn't get into the private sector. We need 15 to$30 trillion of quantitative easing by the end of the decade. I just don't see this administration cutting the deal with Congress in a way that it'll make a lot of sense for the economy. What they should do is they should use social security, create a trust fund, an actual trust fund, a lock box, like some guy said back in 2000, 25 years ago. The person who creates the social security lockbox saves America. Not because it saves Social Security, which doesn't really need much saving. Social Security is 70% funded until the end of the century, presuming we're good for our IUs. But if they issued 30 to 50year bonds, put it in a lock box, gave it a special 3% interest rate, fully funded social security, and then put part of our payroll into index funds, you suddenly recapitalize the entire economy for a 3% 50-year mortgage. How many of you would love for your mortgage to be 3% for 50 years, right? Pretty good deal. If you're ever plump with cash, you pay it off. If you're not, so what? It's 3%. you're writing off the interest. The fixes for our economy again are not terribly hard, but the big ski by some people who are enabled by bought for politicians mainly on the right, mainly in the Republican party at this point. I mean, I'm not saying that that is a universal truth. I'm just saying it is right now. You know, isn't getting done. It's not getting done. The things that we need to fix the world are not getting done. This is just more dumb stuff, more big ski. And you have got to navigate this. I'm trying to help, telling you what I'm doing with my money. And if we get a rally here or next month or two and it still looks like nobody's playing nice and unemployment starts to tick up, which I think it's going to, you know, I'm not positive, but I think it's going to. Unemployment ticks up, you're going to want to get down to 20 to 40% in equities max. A lot of these cash secured puts will expire if we get that rally. I have a whole bunch of covered calls expiring on Friday. The stocks have gone down enough that I really can't write good covered calls again. So, I need this rally to sell more covered calls. So, that's the game plan. The game plan is write cash secured puts now on the things that are dirt cheap that are getting buy signals. They get assigned to me, fine. If they expire and I just have money in my pocket, great. If we get a little rally, I'll sell covered calls and trim positions. And if unemployment ticks up, I'm going to sell a lot of stuff. So, keep your eye on unemployment because it is the canary in the coal mine. All right, let's call it a day. I will actually get this uh posted pretty quick. I have discovered that I can put a link up to the raw footage. So, as soon as the link is available from Zoom, I will post the link in the chat rooms and then I will edit it for YouTube publication at some point tonight or tomorrow. All right, everybody have a fantastic