New Year’s Resolutions, the $15 Trillion Liquidity Flood With Garrett Baldwin, Reacting vs Predicting

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Compound and Friends. I think this is it. This is the last episode of the year. Boy, are you in for a treat. We did an all new edition of What Are Your Thoughts sponsored by our friends at Public. More on Public in just a moment. Garrett Baldwin joined me and we went deep on some pretty big topics. The gold and silver rally this year, what the Fed is actually doing despite what it says it's doing, the $15 trillion flood of liquidity that's come into global asset markets since 2024, and so much more. I think you're going to love the show. Michael Batt was on vacation with his family, but Garrett came to play, and we had a lot of fun chopping up some of the most important things happening right now. So please, if you will, enjoy the show. Happy New Year. We'll talk to you soon. Welcome to The Compound and Friends. All opinions expressed by Josh Brown, Michael Batnick, and their castmates are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ritholtz Wealth Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. come on look at this the last show of 2025 yo in the in the chat tell me if you guys are excited for uh for tonight's tonight's episode i am so excited we have uh uh i guess just your second time back on the compound network all right returning champion Garrett Baldwin is joining me tonight. Nothing medical or catastrophic has happened to Michael Batnick. He is in Disney with his children, and I demanded he take the week off. Because you know, Mike, he'll set up his laptop in Epcot Center and just start grinding topics with me. But it's like, how many times do you get to bring your kids to Disney? Once in a lifetime, twice maybe? So Michael's taking the week off We miss him But man do we have an unbelievable guest tonight Garrett say hi to everyone Hi everybody hope you're doing well Happy New Year to everybody Thanks for having me on Josh Look at that Alright let me just do some quick shouts to the chat Georgie D I see you Happy New Year my friend Ryan Tumbleson hello again from Chattanooga Thanks for joining us dude Matt is here Julian is here Brandon Daly Brian Donnelly my bad guys I'm on a small laptop I see some bees in the chat that's the Duncan Hive Brian Robbins Andrew Corman we're so excited to see you guys thanks to all the regulars who come every week we love you who's this? J. Cool says Josh I'm here too I know I know we have a sponsor tonight before I get to Garrett's introduction Let's pay some bills very quickly here. Josh, please read this verbatim. Today's show is sponsored by Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. You can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and then lets you backtest it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in just a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com slash W-A-Y-T and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash W-A-Y-T, paid for by Public Investing, full disclosure and podcast description. All right. Joining me tonight on the year's final edition of What Are Your Thoughts is Garrett Baldwin. Garrett is a financial writer and investor with a background in journalism, economics, market research. He has completed advanced studies in global security, trade economics, and finance at institutions including Johns Hopkins, Purdue, and Indiana's Kelly School of Business. Before launching Me and the Money Printer and hosting Market Masters at TheoTrade, he spent more than a decade in financial publishing and competitive intelligence covering hedge funds, private equity, and public markets. Garrett, you're what they call a polymath. Do I have that right? Something like that, yeah. You wrote this bio. Wow. This thing goes on for a while. It's probably too much. I forgot I did all these things. I appreciate it. Yeah. You're an accomplished guy, and I read all your stuff. Thank you. I was so excited that you were free to be on the show because there's a lot of deep stuff going on in the world at large, in the economy, in the markets. and you really put a lot of thought into some of these like brain breaking topics. But what I think you do really well is you then come down to like from the 10,000 foot view down to the 10 foot view. All right. So what do you do about it? Like a lot of macro thinkers, they kind of stop at the 10,000 foot view. Whereas I think you try to be a little bit more practical for our viewers. So I'm really excited to get into this. I appreciate that. Yeah. I mean, again, I went to Hopkins with the goal of being able to explain to my mother in one sentence what a derivative is. How to go. Because that's my audience. That's the people that I'm trying to talk to. I only got it down to two sentences, though. I'm still working on it. All right. So let's start here. We finished. I mean, I'm saying this a day in advance, but humor me. We finished 2025, record highs in the stock market, give or take, consumer spending breaking records, a full-blown CapEx, IPO, and corporate investing cycle all over the place. And faster than expected GDP growth was like the last big economic headline of the year. And taking all those things, it's a little bit curious to also note that we finished the year with another interest rate cut. Right. Make it make sense. yeah we're pricing in a 16 chance of a january cut i don't think we're getting one but whatever even if even if it's a small chance but we had uh how many cuts this year three cuts so okay all right so what's going on yeah look i think that this is um you have to stop thinking about the economy and you have to start thinking i think about liquidity and michael howe is number six at Substack for Finance. He's been writing about this for years, that basically the numbers are cartoonish. Global liquidity, the way that he defines it, basically everything past the M2 has expanded by roughly $15 trillion since January 2024. And 13 trillion of that comes this year alone. So this is not a tailwind. It is a flood of capital. And when you inject that much balance sheet capacity into a system, markets are going to do exactly what they're supposed to do. I mean, this is Stanley Druckenmiller said, look, liquidity moves asset prices. House says money moves markets. Asset price rises. CapEx comes back because financing's abundant. IPO windows will reopen because multiples expand before the fundamentals catch up. And consumers are still spending because the nominal incomes, the asset values, and the credit availability all rise together, basically even if the real economy underneath feels uneven. So in that context, I don't really think that record highs are mysterious. I think they're mechanical. Faster GDP growth isn't really a miracle either. If you look at the National Financial Conditions Index from the Chicago Fed, we are at the loosest that we have been since COVID. And if you flip that chart upside down, and it's a pretty funny thing to do, flip the National Financial Conditions Index upside down since COVID started, it basically tracks the S&P 500. Wow. So you would, all right. So everything went up this year. Here's what didn't go up this year. I think nationally home prices were sort of stagnant. Bitcoin was down. It had been up a lot at one point during the year, but it's finishing the year flattish, downish, and oil and energy stocks. Other than that, emerging markets, tips, cash, developed markets, like every large country around the world, whether it's Japan, Germany, Europe, everything in developed Asia went up. China went up. Chinese tech went up. US stocks went up. The Russell was up 9%. S&P up close to 20 in total return. Gold went up 65%. I think silver doubled. Like it's really hard to find things that didn't go up. So you're ascribing, you're using a figure of $15 trillion in liquidity added to the system since 2024. So can you explain that? What do we mean when we say liquidity? Well, we're talking about the way that this is measured. So it is the global liquidity index. It's capital that is coming from virtually every financial system, whether it's the Federal Reserve, whether it's coming from the Treasury, whether it's coming from central banks in China. The bulk of that liquidity expansion is everything past the M2. And this is where the way that he's defined it with the global liquidity indices. It's the shadow banking system. It's over $100 trillion. And, you know, we talk about the M2 and we see that relationship between the M2 and the S&P 500. but it's that global liquidity index that Hal has been showing since 2011. And it just showcases the MSCI is just going straight up. Asset prices continue to rise. And what's pretty interesting about this is that it is, the way that Hal defines it, debt is exponential, liquidity is cyclical. So where we are right now, according to him, is that we are at the top of the liquidity cycle at this moment. Right now, the US is very stretched. China is not. So that's kind of where the expectation is that that's where the next wave of capital would come from. But I mean, there's no coincidence to any of this. If we go back and we assess the financial markets, you go back to 2023, everybody was bearish heading into 2023. And then Howe comes along and explains, well, no, this is the bottom of the liquidity cycle after the guilt crisis. And then it just absolutely takes off. And we have these 20% annualized returns and everybody's sitting around trying to explain it and basically thinking that everything is being driven heavily by uh by effectively earnings there's another chart that we're going to show in a little bit but since that bottom in 2023 the bulk of the uh returns are coming from valuation expansion not from earnings themselves but so let me so let me let me hit pause on that. We're still raising rates in 23. So how are we also simultaneously adding liquidity? It's coming from the front end of the curve. It's coming from the treasury issuance. And then this capital finds its way into the repo system. And what's interesting about this is that there's no coincidence when Japan announces $117 billion and the Federal Reserve this year, I found it to be actually refreshing this year, that the Federal Reserve effectively comes out and admits that the SOFR is what they need to pay attention to, that they have to make sure that the repo market is functioning properly. And that is where the bulk of this is coming from. It's coming from that rehypification. And you have all of these funds. Last time that you and I chatted was, I believe, August. And we were talking about the fact that back in April, when the market collapses, they ask Janet Yellen, well, why is it that, you know, the, you stepped in or why is it that the Federal Reserve was on, uh, was, was concerned. And she said, well, because a lot of these leveraged hedge funds were dumping treasury bills. And that's, I mean, at the end of the day, they have revealed this. They have effectively said the thing that matters most right now is not the Fed funds rate. It's the SOFR and it's, it's the stability and the health of the repo system. And that's exactly what we're looking at right now. That's what all of this activity. Why is Why is that so important? Because otherwise you have a complete and total freezing of overnight lending. And that goes back to that 2019 crisis that we had where the repo rates went to 10%. People don't remember that. It was a blip. And because we had COVID soon after, but there was a moment where the Fed was taking action or was it Fed or Treasury? Somebody was trying to shore up that overnight repo market as quickly as they could. And that coincided with, I think some yield curve stuff was going on. And then we all forgot about it because the pandemic started six weeks later. But I do remember that episode that you're referring to. And not just that. I mean, Powell comes out and actually states it. And I think that when we go back and we assess the last three central bankers and who led it, Powell is going to be, I think, remembered not as the guy who was the inflation guy or the rate cutter or the hiker. I think he's going to be – his legacy will be the person who governed through financial conditions instead of the policy rates. And again, that's why I go back and I say if you just assess and look at the National Financial Conditions Index, it is the inverse of the S&P 500. And I think it's because, at least my argument is, that effectively the markets are front-running liquidity. OK. So I do agree with that argument. I want to go back to that MSCI chart. so the y-axis on the right is trillions of trillions of dollars in liquidity and on the left we're looking at the global stock market do i have that right so that's that's the msi that's the msci global index and keep in mind that back in around 2011 the u.s was about 33 percent of the msci it's about 70 now so that is a lot of capital that continues to flow into the United States. And then when we get to our risk section, that's the key concern that I still continue to be a little bit concerned about. It's the idea that foreign capital may potentially leave, and then that would lead to the valuation compression that was similar to what we saw in 2022. So this is interesting. Chartoff, guys, we had a lot of people from the hedge fund world on the show this year, notably in the spring and in the summer. And, you know, there's a lot of recency bias at that time. But people were talking about how angry the rest of the world is at Trump for the way that he was rolling out these tariffs and the way that Besant was negotiating and they were playing hardball. And there was this really popular idea amongst like the Bridgewater types that the next shoe to drop was going to be this exit of global investors from our markets. But that sort of didn't happen. They were net buyers of US stocks, I think, at least through Q3. I'm sure it didn't change much in Q4. And we didn't have these hiccups in the treasury markets from the Japanese dumping or the Chinese dumping or whatever the boogeyman was at the time. Like I'm not saying it can't happen. I'm just saying it's been nine months, uh, eight months. Um, we haven't seen it yet. Interestingly enough there a there a strange paradox when it comes to us monetary policy and anything that is accommodative And that is that every time that the U has engaged in some form of QA more capital from abroad came to the United States chasing real returns. Now, will that change with Japan potentially raising rates? That remains uncertain. But it's very, very clear that every single time that, look, we can get into the fundamental debate of whether or not another $450 billion in short T-bill purchases and support for the repo system is a form of quantitative easing or not. At the end of the day, though, the only thing that matters is stability. I still don't believe that the Fed's mandate is inflation and the labor markets. It's stability. And the Bank for International Settlements basically said in April in a very damning report that no central bank globally can take action without impacting everybody else. And that has been the lesson of that April or that August sell-off that we had last year, August, 2024. The thing that's so wild about this is we are sitting in a scenario right now. We have had six moves on the VIX going back to August of last year, where in 10 days, the VIX has fallen 40%. That had never happened before in 2011. We call those, do you guys in In Chicago, do they call that a vol smash or vol crunch? Like the VIX spikes and within three days, it's like nothing ever happened because it just gets crammed down with liquidity. Right. And the most recent one was November 21st. And then you had a couple along the way. I think you had one in August. You had April of this year. But it was that event last year in Japan. And that still does remain, I think, the story that everybody became an expert on Japanese central banking policy like a month and a half ago. But it still is an issue. It's still going to be a concern. And that carry trade issue still remains. And at some point, that money is going to leave. Whether that is next month or five years from now, that's anybody's guess. That's the fastest financial crisis in my lifetime. Right. That lasted 10 hours. Mm-hmm. There were blue chip stocks on the Nikkei that were down 20% in a day. NVIDIA fell 33% in a week and a half. Right. And then what was that? Oh, nothing. You didn't see that. Right. But the other thing about this, and when we look at these markets, I think people are trying to make as good of an estimate and understanding of these types of moves. And the thesis that I have is the fundamental shifts in the market post 2008. So what happened post 2008? Well, as Hal will argue, we became a refinancing mechanism and that leads to these ebbs and flows of equities. But as I really started to dig into this, we went back to 1995. And I think the last time we talked about this was 93 and we had a candle box reference. But The key thing was that value arbitrage, like value-style investing, was like 80% of flows in the 90s. Leverage funds were 15% and passive was 5%. Today, it's 50% passive, probably 30% leverage, and maybe 15% to 20% in value arbitrage. Why does that matter? because the stocks that are the most aggressively owned in ETFs, that NVIDIA, Apple, Amazon, they're 50%. Then you have these stocks that are also being rehypothicated in repo. That's 35%. And then all of a sudden you have, you know, like Buffett buying Google technically falls within that metric. Well, what's interesting about it is when those things unwind, they unwind violently. and all of that. So you have, you have, you have, you have forced, you might have forced selling in passive in ETFs. You have this, this leverage from abroad that might be crushed at the same time. And then you have all the, and then you have all the, uh, the, the leverage funds doing it as well. Plus all of the retail that's panicking all of the exact same time. The offsetting the counterbalance to what you've just described, however, and I started writing about this 10 years ago, but I think at this point it's become widely accepted as gospel. The counterbalance is the forced buying, which is basically a portion of every American's paycheck every two weeks being plowed directly right back into the stock market. I don't think it stops volatility. I don't think it prevents crashes or corrections. What I do think it does is it dampens volatility. And my only evidence is the experience of the last 15 years post the financial crisis. We've had the Fed raising rates. We've had them cutting rates. We've had them raising rates again. We've had QE. We've had no QE. We've had balance sheet runoff. We've had, you know, Operation Twit. It seems like we've experienced like every season under the sun in that period of time. But the constant is 401k balances have gotten, have swollen to the point where they're big enough to swamp whatever the VIX is doing that morning. And again, it doesn't mean we can't have another event. We probably will. But I think the minor volatility that used to be more routine gets crushed even faster. I don't disagree about the ETFs and all of that additional funds. But I think that there is what I have seen. Well, not ETFs. There's no ETFs in 401k. 401ks. But yes, indexing, passive flow. Right, right. Sure. Is this idea of what's transpiring, and typically every single crisis is some sort of short-term liquidity event that's transpiring, even earlier this year. I mean, when you had that sell-off that started in February of this year, there was a little bit of a liquidity gap that was transpiring. And the Fed did make a policy change at the end of March when they were reducing the balance sheet runoff. But every single, I don't know if we pulled this chart up, but it's the FNGD. It's the microsectors FANG plus index, negative three inverse leveraged ETN. I couldn't tell you what this thing does, but what I can tell you, every time that this thing breaks its 50-day moving average, something's wrong. Wait, wait, wait, stop. What the hell is this? It's the microsectors FANG index negative three inverse leveraged ETN. And it is a promissory. It is a bank promise from. Let me get this. Let me let me let me wedge this comment in. We are not endorsing this product. No, no. But but I will tell you this when it breaks above its 50 day moving average, something's wrong. Something's wrong in the market. Go back and look at go back and look at August of last year. I mean, it completely and totally spikes. So I've been talking about this thing for, I don't know, two years because we have a momentum signal. And when the signal goes negative, we look and see if this FNGD is breaking out. Because my argument is that's where leverage is leaving in some of these terms. That's it. All right. So that's a bet against the FAANG stocks in a very leveraged way for short-term traders who sense a turning point in the market. If you want to trade it. But I'm just using it as a signal. I'm just paying attention to see where, you know, where the bottom's falling out. And I, I, it was funny cause I've been talking about it. That micro sectors reached out to me. They said, we want to send you a shirt. I said, I don't want a shirt. I want to talk to your money manager and I want to understand how this thing works. So we're, we're trying to set up a time to chat at some point in the future. But no, I mean, the other thing about this and, and we look, when we look at these, we look at these big events, there is a policy change. And then we see significant amounts of insider buying, um, uh, executives buying their own stock. And if we go back to 2008, insiders have called the bottom of every major event. And in recent times, there have been more of these spikes of insider buying, but they're not as significant as the ones that happened in 2009, 2011, 2015, 18, 20. It just means that there's more of these events. There's, I mean, how many multiple, I think we've had a four sigma event, at least one over the last six years. So I guess the charitable way of looking at that, like why it's good, is that it periodically reintroduces the wall of worry. It stops runaway freight train bubbles from really getting to where we know historically they've gotten to. And it keeps everybody a little bit honest. And I kind of like having a freak out every 90 days. But I want to double click on something that you said earlier because I think this is the big takeaway. And then we can move on to something else. We can leave the Fed behind for the year. But you said the Fed says it's got a dual mandate, which is like steady inflation and full employment. But you said the truth is somewhere along the line that got transmogrified, whether subconsciously or deliberately, secretly, into a new single mandate, which is promoting stability. Now, people at the Fed would tell you those things all go hand in hand with stability. So it's actually – it's not actually a detour from what the rest of us think their dual mandate is. But I just wanted to hear what you thought about that. I just continue to argue that stability is the action in a post-2008 world. Stability for financial assets specifically. Yes, specifically. Not stability for the quote-unquote job market because if you believe in the primacy of the financial asset economy, jobs will take care of themselves so long as prices continue to rise. Well, the biggest concern is a debt deflation crisis. And that's what 2008 was. And that's what 2020 was. And that's where you have these events like 2022, where the Fed raises interest rates. They break Sri Lanka. They're definitely involved in the breaking of England as well. And they have to provide the accommodation that's necessary to prevent a debt deflation spiral. And China's got that problem as well. That's not going away anytime soon. So basically the argument is that all roads point to more monetary inflation in the future. I don't know what that's going to look like. Last time we chatted, we were talking about who was taking over politically in New York and the case-shaped recoveries. I think that that might be where that hits ahead. It's just a matter of time. It's got to be a matter of time before politicians really put one and one together on the impact of monetary policy. Well, what I would say is, I would say like to build on your point, the irony of financial stability is it creates political instability. Because financial stability, the externality of that is richer or rich people and non-investors left behind. So that's the built-in irony of look how much financial stability we have. We smash the VIX down. Anytime it comes even close to 25, nobody's ever really at risk. Well, guess what? Now you've got this permanent underclass that grows increasingly divorced from the ability to live. And now you've got political instability that has been bred by the financial stability. So congratulations. Would you really win? Well, as I said, I really- Very cynical way of thinking about it. We chose such a happy new year to get involved in with our lives. Yeah. All right. Let's do this. Guys, give me my Ben Carlson graphic on screen. So this is a LinkedIn post from my colleague, Ben Carlson. Another new all-time high for the S&P 500 today. This was last week. That's 38 this year. Here's the number of all-time highs every year this decade. 2020, 32. A lot of people won't remember that. 2021, 70. 2022, one. Zero all-time highs in the year 2023, which I had to go back and look. I was surprised by that. 2024, 57 new all-time highs. And 2025, again, 38. My comment was, and I might just be repeating something I just said, but like think of what's been thrown at us in this period of time. A record drop in employment during this period, a record bear market, like the speed of a 20% decline. I think it happened in three days, five days. Record comeback, back into a bull market from a bear market, which happened in April and May of 2020. We had the Fed hiking rates, the Fed cutting rates. We had every type of stimulus under the sun. We had 9% CPI readings. Like there's no financial condition you can dream up outside of a Great Depression that hasn't. Think about we had Democrats in office. We had Republicans in office. We had tax cuts. We had every type of stimulus, fiscal, monetary. Like there's nothing that we didn't experience during this period, good and bad, outside of an outright depression. and think about the number of new highs we're seeing in this period. It's truly remarkable. Well, it goes back to the argument of Hal's chart, right? Because that liquidity cycle bottoms out sometime around 2018 and expands. You move into 2021, we peak November 2021, and then rates start to move up. And then we start to see a liquidity squeeze out of the market. I was stunned to actually see that we only had one record high in 2023. Yeah. No, none, none, none. That's crazy. In other words, the 21 high was not eclipsed. That's crazy. Until 24. And the funny thing about 2022, you know, when that new high was the first day, first day, right? Because downhill from there. Yeah. Because our momentum, our momentum signal turned negative on the third and it was just off to the races. And then we had that period in the first, second month, February. Wasn't that during that cybersecurity event? And we lost. We were flying blind on hedge fund data for like two months. Good times. Yeah. Just such a happy time. Fed Minutes came out today. Didn't appear to be like terribly market moving. they approved the quarter percentage point cut by a vote of nine to three which sean notes uh my research guy sean russo notes that's the most descents since 2019 yields were sort of mixed short-term yields went lower which i guess they interpreted that as being dovish long-term yields were flat and the one-month yield dropped five basis points to three spot five for and that was that was so not much to do about nothing uh in the in the minutes okay can we talk about silver and gold yeah let's do it okay massive rallies this year for both gold and silver i'm going to show you some charts and then have you react to them give me the 20 year gold chart hey now so gold spent most of the 20 teens in a consolidation period at some point it was bear market-ish. Stocks were rallying and gold was doing nothing. And then around the pandemic it broke out to a new high consolidated a little bit longer and then last year and this year just went absolutely vertical Here silver Yep So gold has annualized at 11 over the last 20 years So after all those consolidation periods, it more than made up for it in the last couple of years. Silver, same thing, 11.6 over the last 20 years, but it's parabolic. It's $20 an ounce in 2023 to 80. And here is Three year gold performance to illustrate that Annualizing at 34.5% Of the last three years Which is amazing Silver annualizing at 49.4% Over the last three years Is that silver up? The chart up? This year gold is up 66% Best year since 1979 And silver also the best year since 79 up 169 nice percent so gold and silver in 79 were ripping on geopolitical stuff like the Iran hostage crisis the Hunt brothers tried to corner the market and obviously you had like massive inflation I don't know what's going on now what's the story behind this now And how can it continue? Well, the gold our audience cares about the gold's easy because what happened in February 2022? The United States freezes Russia's assets, and that becomes a catalyst for massive amounts of central banking purchases. Now, at the same time, you're seeing a lot of speculation. We're at that we're at that peak of the liquidity cycle. That's typically where we do see a lot of speculation around metals. But what's so critical about this is just the fact that this is central bank buying. There is an ample amount of central bank buying because those central banks realize, look, the US dollar, if they can freeze Russia's reserves, they can freeze ours. So I think that that's one thing. Again, we did mention the excess global liquidity. I think that that's leaking into stuff that has no counterparty risk. That's very critical. So it's not a panic trade. It's more of a balance sheet trade. Non-U.S. central banks, sovereign pools, large private capital. I don't think retail was late to this. Retail has been buying the dip of every gold run the last couple of months. They were mobbing Costco and buying the physical coin. The stores couldn't keep physical gold coins in stock for years and years and years. You're right. And then you have silver. You've got to go back to earlier this year. The gold-silver ratio hit 100. And everybody said, look, historically, silver catches up. Silver's also got a very important AI component to it as well. You can't do anything with it. And then you have all this other nonsense and madness going on with comics. And I really haven't followed that story close enough because it is the holidays. But there were rumors floating around today that some bank blew up and that the Fed had to step in. And I haven't been able to confirm any of that. But obviously, the CME group stepping in, raising margin requirements for precious metals contracts, that's plumbing. That's not really a conviction thing. Margin hikes force leverage out of vertical moves and creates volatility, not typically trend reversals. So I've been very, very bullish on silver and gold since 2022 when all this happened with Russia. And if you believe a guy like Eric Sprott, who's been buying Highcroft, HYMC stock, hand over fist, it was at three, now it's at 23. He thinks that it's possible that the silver and gold ratio drops to 34 on the way to then meeting somewhere, which I believe he has argued that it is the global mining ratio, which is something like eight to one. So a lot of the people who are – what's the adage go that sometimes it takes – nothing happens for decades and then decades happens in weeks or something like that? That's kind of where we are. It's a total repricing trade. There are years where nothing happens and there are weeks where years happen or something like that. Yeah. This feels – I mean I don't want to like – I don't want to make a short-term price prediction. This feels like everyone is way too confident that gold is just going right to 5,000. It sort of reminds me of Bitcoin ripping to 17,000 and change. Sure. And then like next thing you know, it's 10. like i don't think gold would be that volatile but it just it feels like too easy like you buy it it's definitely going higher um for the people that have been accumulating it for years bravo i don't so i don't trade gold i buy the i buy the i don't think it's the gld whatever the other one is and i buy it no no no no no not gold miners i buy one of the gold etfs um iau is that it. Um, it's it, but it's in like my public account and the same amount goes into it every month. I don't even look at the price. Um, I do the same thing with Bitcoin. I don't have a view on gold, but I would just, I would say it seems like it's too obvious right now. If I were like looking to trade it long, I'd probably want to see somebody get scared and nobody's scared in this market. Well, I mean, I've been in, I trade a Sprott closed end fund, uh, P H Y S. So I have a long position in that. And then I bought CEF, which is, uh, the Sprott physical silver and gold ETF. And that, that's my preferred way to do it because I know that that's really more of a one-to-one claim than dealing with, you know, anything with the miners, but that's, that's kind of where my focus has been. And I, and I still think that gold has, uh, has room to run, but yeah, we're certainly in an environment right now where things are not stretched And I mean, a palladium move of 16% the other day. I mean, that was quite a bit. All right. There was a little bit of volatility in this market, though, recently. So let me just share this. Margin requirements were raised at the CME, which I suppose makes sense as an asset does what this has done. You don't want people taking more risk at today's prices, at least not if you're the one lending them the money to do it. So let me read this. After a strong week-long rally that sent gold, silver, and other precious metals to all-time high prices, fell sharply Monday after exchange operator CME Group made a key change to its contracts. After peaking at $45.65 per troy ounce Friday, spot gold was down more than 4%. Spot silver fell 9%. Prices for platinum and palladium also fell dramatically on Monday. The CME group raised its margin requirements for precious metals contracts, forcing traders to add money to accounts that insured against defaults. Exchange operators ordinarily raise margin requirements after strong price rallies. Essentially, it raises the minimum amount traders must give brokers. Okay. So then why do the prices fall? Because not everybody can come up with the money. Simple as that. Okay. Short-term distraction, not really the story here. Would you say? Again, I think that this is more of a monetary debasement story than it is anything else. And again, if they're going to keep printing money and pumping money into the system, it's going to be beneficial to metals. But there's no real prediction figure. I view it more through the lens of what we talked about earlier, where gold is certainly impacted by liquidity. You also could potentially see some strength coming out of China relatively soon, because China, I believe just hit the thousand yuan per gram. And that's behavioral. That's where people step in and start buying. Probably a lucky number or something. Right. Yeah. I got a guy here in Boca that I met recently who was like the original cash for gold guy. And I'm tempted to tell him to get the band back together. Because if that labor market does end up cracking, you are going to have retail uh gold buying like we haven't seen since 2011 or whatever it was 2010 um so i'm almost i'm almost tempted to tell them that let's let's let's start let's start it up again what do you think i mean i'm on board they had they had one of the guys who's from like one of those uh one of those not hoarder show i forget what it is um one of the one of the um not repo. Um, what am I blanking on here? Um, pawn shop, like a pawn shop star was on Fox business today. Like as the, as the Bitcoin gold expert and like, okay, that might be a top if we're, if we're bringing in people like that. Um, no, I think the top will be like, I think it will be something reality show ish. It'll be, it'll be like a plot line on real house wives where the husband is like buying the biggest house in his city because he's a gold person or like Kevin O'Leary mining ventures. They'll start advertising on CNBC, something like that. I don't think we're quite, quite, quite there, but we're directionally, we're headed there. This is you writing at your fabulous sub stack, me and the money printer. You said, The reality is this. We have nothing to compare our current situation to. There are too many variables. A Federal Reserve that's printing money out of thin air and then telling us they're not. The Treasury Department is manipulating our debt issuance to stabilize the fiat banking system. A bifurcation of global trade partners. A reserve currency on the brink. Billions of people on the planet all acting in their self-interest. A Congress with an approval rating lower than colonoscopies. Told you guys, Garrett's a great writer. But worst of all, people who really don't understand how the system works after 2008. Everyone is a self-proclaimed expert and everyone has an opinion, but it's clear that so many people are still stuck in a 1990s mentality on how money moves. My argument is to avoid predicting too much. Just react. That is what you can control in the year ahead. We have a specific momentum signal that has navigated the post-2020 era very well, despite all the unprecedented actions by our financial elite. Why is it important to react rather than predict these days more than ever? And how do the traders and investors in our audience implement what you're talking about? Yeah. So again, I see the world through, you know, a very unique set of macro factors. You know, I look at, I look at Hal's focus on liquidity, Druckenmiller's focus on liquidity. I have studied insider buying my entire career. I look at what JD Henning's doing on momentum. I focus on policy, policy, policy. And then I watch that thing, the FNGD. And the reality is that in this environment, we are, I don't want to say that you use the term the new normal, but there are tools that are in play. There are things that people can use that work, but people are still very, very frustrated. But work for what? Avoiding risk or capitalizing on- In terms of market timing. I mean, as far as just, I mean, doing something as simple as just looking at the bell curve, the far ends of the bell curve of stocks, you know, up on up 5% on a week and up on a month and down 5%. I mean, that alone can give you a lot of conviction. And, you know, I go back and I built a system, a momentum strategy on the work of JD Henning, on Gary Antonacci, my father-in-law. And what we've been able to do is avoid those massive downturns because we are doing a simple math. It's physics. It's an equation. It's not a model. It's not an algorithm. It's just watching money move and watching how it behaves. And then, as I've said, the insiders have called the bottom over and over again. Policy has been dictating these markets. I remember it was, I know you're reading what I write, and November 20th, I could not have been more bearish. I really couldn't have. And then I wake up in the morning And Japan says they're printing $117 trillion or billion dollars. And then I go and I look at SECform4.com and see the insider buying spike to the highest level since April of this year. Right. So you're going to have contradictory signals all the time. It's unavoidable. Sure. Unless you're using a single variable like me. I just use a 200-day because I'm a dumb-dumb. And I think that that's a very good strategy. I think it's good to do things where you have a list of stocks and follow the 20. But if you're using economic signals, market-based signals, price-based signals, things like insider buying, which is sort of like you have to come up with some sort of systematized way to value what it's doing, meaning you might have one insider who buys so much stock it's a false signal because it's not being repeated by other buyers and other stocks. Like that's a thing that could happen, I suppose. So you have to not only have all of these signals and have nuanced ways of reading them, but then you have the secondary thing where you have to decide which overrides which. And I think that's so hard for people to do, right? Because it's like competing thoughts in your mind at the same time. But again, what I continue to just focus on is just capital in, capital out. And that alone has been, what you have to look at is I don't think that Henning and the work that Antonacci have done with momentum systems is enough by itself. There can be false signals. It might just be the S&P 500 bouncing off the 20-day moving average, and then it doesn't break down and it rebounds. What I have seen and what I have studied is that the work of how, when there is this big negative event that's transpiring, that is tied to liquidity in the system. That is likely tied to repo. That is likely tied to leverage leaving the system in a very quick moment. So I think that it's very important because there's so much damn noise. Like we've worked in financial media long enough to know that everybody's got an opinion, but things have drastically changed in the financial system, particularly after 2008. We became a refinancing system. And on top of that, as I laid it out, it's really about, people keep saying the AI trade, the AI trade. It's not the AI trade. It's the leverage and the passive flows that are providing all the support. And at the end of the day, valuations are not necessarily as important anymore because valuations continue to – money just continues to come into the system. It flows into these very similar stocks. And then – Yeah, I agree with that. We go RSI, MFI, overbought. Oh, weird. It's sold off. There are money managers who are regularly buying Apple at a PE ratio of 16 and at 32, and then at 40 and then at 24. Right. They don't give a f*** about the valuation. It has nothing to do with it. They might say they do because they sort of have to because they went to Wharton, and they're speaking to an audience of other people that went to Wharton. Sure. They have to nod to the valuation, but they view their job as explaining the valuation, not caring about what it is. True. At any given moment, they could tell you why 40 makes sense as a trailing PE ratio. They could tell you why 30 makes sense. Right. And the story could change. It made sense last year because of this, and next year it makes sense because of that. and the job is explaining it and they're really good at it and they're buying it either way. Right Taking new money Apple a 4 weight Why am I buying it at 40 times earnings I don know I bought it at 30 Nobody stopped me And you have to and you also have to know where you are And if you prescribe to the, or subscribe to the theory of, you know, what Hal does with liquidity and what, you know, we've talked about in this kind of oscillation. You know, I go back to like, I go back to 2022. I tell this story a lot because I don't think I have respect for the man. Jim Cramer goes on CNBC, and he was very upset because in October 2022, Meta got crushed. And it was a very iconic moment of him saying, I got this wrong, I got this wrong, I got this wrong. But the reality is it was a liquidity event that was transpiring that year. And if you turn around and you look at what happens, the moment that the liquidity cycle starts to inflate again, meta goes up from 80 bucks to 700. And it, again, it's high beta stocks, lots and lots of passive flows. I think it's 1,500 ETFs on meta now. You have the valuation expansion. We have a chart on that that we pull up in a minute or two. And valuation expansion, to your point. drove those equity gains and have done so of every up and down move that we have had. There it is. Okay. So it is true that there is earnings growth. Sure. But this is the whole world. I think that's important to point out. We have had multiple expansion in countries all over the world. And ironically, in the US, I think earnings growth has kind of kept pace or outgrown. We might have had multiple compression this year for I think the S&P 100, meaning those stocks grew earnings faster than their prices rose. But for all over the – as a global phenomenon, you're absolutely right. I think some of this is like – I'll let you explain the chart in a second. But I think some of this is like just this massive global realization that the US rebounded better from COVID than any other country. And what sets us apart? The breadth and depth of our capital markets have built in this resiliency into the overall economy. And so I think you saw countries around the world get really serious about removing regulations or, in the case of Japan, forcing reformation into their markets and basically demanding CEOs to create value again. And I think that's been reflected, this new push toward capital markets as the savior of an economy. Here's what you get. you get multiple expansion in England, France, like of all places, right? Germany. Germany at a time that everybody's complaining. Put the chart back up. Tell us what we're looking at. Yeah, tell us what we're looking at. So this is valuation expansion and what drove it. And it's being driven by, effectively, we're still arguing this, that it's being driven by that liquidity cycle again. But it's not earnings. It's somebody willing to pay $23 for the same earnings that somebody paid for $21 a year ago. And that is, this is the big question, Josh. And this is when I look at risk in the market, we are at, I believe, 19% of the S&P 500 or U.S. markets is foreign capital. I believe it was 8% in 2008. So more and more money. the question is, it's almost chicken and egg. What actually would lead to the market having that valuation compression happen again? And the only thing that I could potentially think of is foreign money leaves. And then from that point, you start to see that valuation compression happen from the leverage funds and possibly the passives. But at the same time, you've already hit the nail on the head that every two weeks, Americans are just buying the same stock over and over and over again. So, you know, that's my risk, but I don't want to sit here and say that it's going to happen in the next four months, because once again, we're pumping $40 billion a month through April. And then you have what? 117 coming from Japan. And then China is going to start relatively soon. And that's going to be bullish for copper and bullish for manufacturing for them because they're kind of at the low end of their liquidity cycle right now. We got two more things to get to. We do this one quickly. New Year's resolution? Getting in the pool. I got to get back in the pool. That's what you want to do? Thursday morning, I will be done at, well, we're not, markets closed, but Friday morning, when the market, when my show is over, I am driving to the gym and I will be back in the pool and I will try to get back up to swimming a mile a day. You want to hear what an asshole I am? I have three resolutions and they're all about getting people to leave me alone. I wrote these up on my blog and I do it like almost every year. It's a good exercise for me, but it was like, I'm going to stop paying attention to other people's political bullshit and letting it affect me. I'd probably say that every few years. I really mean it this time. The second is I'm going to stop being so much of a people pleaser and getting myself involved with things I don't want to do just to avoid hurting someone's feelings. And I already forgot what my third one was. Well, it's hard. I mean, look, it's hard to say no. I mean, it's hard to say no to people. So, yeah, I got to do a better job. I hate it so much. I hate that oh I said I'm going to be more skeptical but not cynical which I think I already blew that today I'm going to because I think skepticism leaves room to change your mind or to say I missed something cynicism it's really hard cynicism is like burning the boats it's really hard to about face from cynicism It's easier to be skeptical and then say, you know what, actually, the ATM machine is helpful. The ETF is a good innovation. Like if you're cynical about everything new that comes along, you can't change your mind. So that's one of the things I'm going to work on. Well, again, I think you – one of the very – when we first – when I first launched the Substack and when it was postcards from the Florida Republic before it became me and the money printer, the slogan of it or the argument of it was, I wanted my audience to focus on three things, their health, their wealth, and their self. And if you can't do those three things first, get out of other people's business. I mean, that's kind of the way that I want to live my life. And again, if I can't get my act together, I'm not going to be worried about other people's political opinions. All right. So the word of the year, according to whoever's in charge of this stuff, maybe it's merriam-webster i forget is slop as in ai slop which probably could become the word of the year next year too um my word of the year the word that i out of nowhere just heard more of than any other word i can think of this year was grift i just i mean even with this somali stuff going on in minnesota now i just i feel like this is like very much in the zeitgeist everyone looks at everyone else as though they're grifting everyone's a grifter okay so i thought this was funny um put this graphic up guys this is from um a great site called securities docket grift etf tied to washington access in trump era hits a wall um so you know the guy at tuttle capital management he did like the anti-kramer conversation about him the other day and i can't remember where yeah i don't know him personally he's clever though he comes up with matt tuttle he comes up with uh he created the inverse like he created the inverse kathy wood i think that was like the first claim to fame was right and i think at the at the bottom of the tech market but that's neither here nor there all right um connecticut-based tuttle capital management proposed an exchange traded fund tracking the perceived value of political access but the machine ran into a wall the tuttle Capital Government Grift ETF. This is true. I'm not making this up. Ticker GRFT is designed to target firms with apparent ties to Washington power brokers from cabinet officials to stock trading lawmakers. Yet no major exchange has agreed to list it, according to Matt Tottle. So Eric Boutchunis said, this is the first time I can recall an ETF where they can't list anywhere. Right. Well, and it's funny too, because this news hits the same day that Trump announced five ETFs today as well. The made in America with a made in America focused. And, you know, I think what this is really, what this really showcases. And I think we talked about it last time right now, there's 4,200 US stocks. There's 4,800 ETFs. And, and what, you know, what is, what are the, on top of nonsense. And you have to judge a market or a system by its incentives. And people are incentivized to just create an ETF that tracks the S&P 500, right? I think we talked about the Catholic ETF, CATH, which is just, it's just the S&P 500. And people are collecting 30 basis points for that. So is that a form of grift? I don't know. I consider it more of a form of extraction. It's not more easy. The problem, no, the launch of the ETF is not in and of itself, Grift. I think just the idea that Grift is so big in the zeitgeist right now that somebody would even come up with the idea of like, well, can we at least invest in it? I thought that was interesting. It was pointed out, Taking Care of Business Loco in the chat said, public can do that for you. That's right. Our sponsor, Public, has generated assets. I'm going to see if we can log on there and create a grift generated asset portfolio. Somali day carry TF would be hot right now. All right. We have like one minute left. I wanted you to just tell me your favorite investment theme or individual idea or whatever for 2026. We normally end the show with a make the case. So I know you guys have something to say. Still want to see your ministry chart. But yeah, so I have another letter called Postcards from the Edge of the World. And this is a pretty simple theme. It's buying what families in history bought during times of great uncertainty. So I went back and I really assessed what was happening in Judea in 60 AD, what was happening in periods of when Caesar was around. And the reality is this, they were just sovereign wealth funds. They were legitimately just investing in choke points in the economy. And we just talked about the concept of grift. I view it through the lens of like extraction. I think that people right now know that they're being nickeled and dimed everywhere. And that kind of concept is like, look, the reality is this. If you want to own these things, You want to own things that are pricing in the ongoing expansion cost of insurance. I mean, I just recommended Kinsey. You want to own the – you want to invest in the extractors. I want to invest in the extractors. I love that idea. Yeah. All right. Let's you and I explore that idea more thoroughly the next time we chat because that deserves, I think, a bigger segment. You want to own what pays rent, and it's slow, and it's boring, and it's cash-heavy, and it's annoyingly necessary. I love it. All right. I have a mystery chart. I'm going to stump you. All right. Well, let me give you a clue. At least I'll give you two clues, okay? Okay. All right. One is this is one of the 11 sectors of the S&P 500. so you have one out of 11 shot of guessing it and the second clue is it's got a relatively heterogeneous how do I want to say that word? Mix of companies meaning it's not the energy sector where they all go up and down together so now you have a 1 in 10 shot because I told you it's not energy which which S&P sector excluding energy is this a chart of and this goes back uh 15 years um I'm gonna say the XLV no okay uh any other guesses I'll give you one more um healthcare that's the XLV you guys say oh sorry forgive me financials I would uh all right got it on the second guys let's go show that's what i actually meant to say nailed it and i said xlv instead i mentioned health care i actually was going with financials all right i got a couple i got a couple of other uh xlf charts worth all of us looking at this massive performance um in that 15 year chart this year was interesting they ran up into the summer they paused and now they're off to the races again uh i want people to remember yeah this is dominated by jp morgan and bank of america but you got insurance here you got alternatives you got um brokerage you've got um payments there's a lot of different things happening here um do we have one more or or is that a um total return price percentage when did uh pretty good year when when did when did japan when did japan print that that's that bottom right there in november isn't it and again it goes back to the uh the argument that when we engage in support it's good for banks and when china does it it's good for manufacturing and metals because they are a manufacturing economy guys let's um let's uh let everybody know um garrett's newsletters so you've got postcards from the edge of the world which um i love because i'm into history you've got me and the money printer which i never miss in addition. And you're doing this Market Master show. So for the people that are into YouTube and live streaming, tell us the details. How can they find that? Yeah. So we're at Theotrade.com and we do this show every morning, 845 to about 920. And then the rest of my team, they go live from 930 all the way to four o'clock. So we're busy. We're in the room every day doing trading education. And yeah, I've done this morning show. I even did it yesterday after the Phish concert. I can't believe I actually got it done. Look at you. You're a beast. And here you are ending the day on another live stream. So, hey, thank you so much for doing this. Guys, follow Garrett everywhere he's writing. He's fantastic. He makes me think. I learn things. I laugh. And you will too. Shout out to Michael Batnick, who will be back after the first of the year. And I do want to, yeah, in Disney, I do want to let you guys know we, this is not a surprise. We're letting you know in advance. We're actually going to do an impromptu compound and friends live stream on Friday morning, which I guess is the second. Yep. Here we go. So it's, it'll be Ben Carlson, myself and Michael. We're going to come on live at nine 30 for the open of trade of the first day of the year. And I hope you guys can join us. All right. That's it from us tonight. Love you. We'll see you soon. Bye.