Production for Security: The guest outlines a multi-year shift to onshoring and energy security, prioritizing domestic supply chains in critical areas like chips, power, and minerals.
Semiconductors: Preference for domestic chip manufacturing with INTC positioned as a potential national champion supported by policy tailwinds and investment incentives.
AI and Valuations: Caution on AI high-flyers (e.g., Nvidia and peers) due to stretched multiples, rapid tech obsolescence, and rising capex scrutiny.
Power & Utilities: Massive electricity demand from data centers favors electric utilities, renewable electricity, and nuclear buildout; solar-heavy power providers are seen as underrated beneficiaries.
Energy Complex: The real value is in refiners and processors, with natural gas (and even coal as a bridge) supporting power generation until nuclear scales; oil equities are viewed as undervalued.
Critical Minerals: Strong focus on rare earths and uranium supply chains, emphasizing domestic processing/refining capacity as a strategic imperative.
Market Outlook: Potential rotation from mega-cap AI into energy, utilities, and national champions; double-digit upside is possible, but a 10–15% drawdown risk remains amid policy and China-related uncertainties.
Rates & Policy: Expect supportive policy (accelerated depreciation, deregulation) and lower yields (10Y near ~3.6–3.7%), aiding capex-heavy themes and infrastructure buildout.
Transcript
To me, there's two things that come out of a kind of pre-war mindset. An urgency, right? We haven't had this urgency. We've been talking about the lack of rare earth critical minerals for years. We've been talking about, yes, you know, moving to solar winds, fine, but it's not going to create the backbone. We're not doing enough fast enough. And we watch China kind of outpace us. So, I think there becomes an urgency. And the other part of this is almost a sense of sacrifice. Will we sacrifice something? And I think in our case, some of that sacrifice is going to be no more cheap goods or fewer cheap goods, right? We're going to be paying more. >> And I think we're going to have to sacrifice some of our regulations that we put in place, right? Things that we felt were very important, maybe like Bill Gates thought were very important, get deprioritized when you realize, ooh crap, if we focus on only that and China goes here and beats us, this won't matter because we lost to China. [music] Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Tagert. The Wall Street fears of Trump's tariffs and trade wars are greatly diminished these days, at least by the stock market, which has been flirting with new highs of late. Now that we're nearing the end of the year and a resurgence of inflation hasn't materialized, and new trade deals have or are being finalized with many of America's largest trading partners, including China, too, now it seems. An important question is starting to emerge. Will the economy start experiencing tailwinds soon from the administration's policies to discuss, we're fortunate to welcome back to the program Peter Chur, head of macro strategy at Academy Securities. Before we get started, folks, just be forewarned that Peter's audio had a slight issue in the first part of this interview. We fixed it about a third of the way through and it was fine after that. All right, with that caveat out of the way, Peter, thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks a lot for having me back. >> H really glad having you back, Peter. Um look, lots uh lots to talk about here and a lot going on this week. So why don't we just start dialing through the list if you don't mind. Um we are speaking the day after uh the FOMC came out with its latest release and Jerome Powell hit his most recent press conference. Um the Fed pretty much delivered as expected. uh it is uh it did another 25 basis point rate cut. It announced that it will be ending quantitative tightening starting on December 1st. And I guess the only really maybe major notable takeaway from it was that Pal took Pays to say, "Hey, look, a rate cut in December isn't baked in the cake." He's not saying that they're not going to cut. He's just saying if you're putting all your chips on them cutting, you should think twice about that. Um, so curious just to hear in general your your reaction to all this. >> Yeah, I think he tried his best to, you know, say they're looking, you know, it's very difficult for them to do much without data. They're not sure where they say the economy is. I think the market's just reading through a lot of this knowing that by February, March of next year, it'll probably be a very different makeup on the Fed and they are probably going to cut to get us down to 3% maybe under almost no matter what the economic data is. So I think that's kind of why we had that ble brief dip in the markets and stocks as he was speaking but we kind of quickly retrenched that. I think anything he says he's a little bit of a lame duck now and if people really thought okay wow this might delay it by 6 months to a year that would be a big deal. If it's going to push off the cuts two 3 months I I just don't think anyone cares that much. And it's going to really come back to what are earnings look like? What's the cumulative effect of a lot of our policies and where are we going with China and trade? >> Okay. So, um, earnings, policies, and trade. Um, why don't we tackle those in order? So, um, we we had the, um, earnings over the past couple of days for, uh, the major, um, a lot of the major Mag 7 companies. I think there's still two more big announcements later today, Apple and Amazon, I think. Um, but we just got Google and Meta and, um, one other big one I'm blanking on. Um, Pardon me. >> Microsoft. >> Microsoft. You're right. Um and uh you know mixed so far, right? Um Google I think was up a bit. Microsoft was down a bit. Facebook was actually kind of down big. Um because all these companies are having to spend um much more so than they used to have to in the past in terms of capex as you know all this as part of this whole AI buildout. Now, we just had Nvidia cross5 trillion dollars uh in market cap this week. Um and uh you know, no huge surprise because everybody's spending their capex money on Nvidia's chips. Um but I guess my question is is um uh you know at what point given the just stratospheric valuations that these stocks are reaching and and and and by that I don't just mean all-time high prices but I mean very stretched multiples multiples to earnings multiples to sales etc. um you know at what point do we say hey look unless earnings really start growing tremendously these current market valuations aren't supported um uh or you know maybe somebody just looks at this and says hey I I maybe this is kind of overblown maybe we pulled too much of tomorrow's valuation into today and this is going to take years longer to to manifest all the incremental revenues we we think it might have so I guess where I'm going here is is from an earnings perspective Um, what level of concern, if any, do you have about today's um, prices for the AI highf flyers? >> Yeah, I'm a little bit worried, not necessarily in terms of earnings. I think they're going to continue to grow, but a will they grow anywhere near the pace that people have priced in. What's interesting to me, it looks like on Meta at least, for the first time, people are saying, well, that's great that you spend a lot of AI, but did we get enough benefit for that spend, right? like for a little while was almost free money when a company said I'm going to spend X billion on AI and your stock increased 2x or multiples of X in terms of valuation. So you're not getting that for the first time. It's it could be a one-off. It could just be, you know, a weird thing, but I think that's the sort of thing a lot of people will be looking to. Is this a signal that people are starting to dealt with whether these companies can really grow into the multiples they have? Should they keep spending at the current pace? >> Yeah. And you know, I I don't want to come across as a doubter in AI that the technology doesn't have real benefits and that it probably very well will be super transformatory or transformative the way the.com uh the way the internet was during the dotcom boom. Um but it is this question of you're pricing these things for perfection or better than perfection. Can earnings really realistically keep up with all this? So, you know, >> I would add maybe even I feel like we're also pricing this to that the US will remain clearly clearly in the lead and that China is going to be way behind or that China is kind of on its knees almost begging for Nvidia chips. I'm not sure that's the case, right? G didn't really seem to bring up Nvidia yesterday. Trump said they didn't really discuss Nvidia chips. You've seen a lot of, you know, kind of interesting announcements coming out of China in terms of what they're trying to do in AI and data centers that they're trying to be more efficient. They're using cheaper chips, less electricity to get potentially very good results. I think, you know, trust by verify with everything coming out of China. Yeah. >> But we seem to kind of ignore that. You've got this behemoth who's proven themselves to be pretty good at a lot of different things. And I feel like we're kind of completely ignoring the risk that whether it's China or even maybe domestically, someone turns the industry on its head, right? You've been evolving so rapidly. Some of these companies we barely heard of three or four years ago, you know, Open AI, I, you know, I've got to admit, wasn't really on my radar screen certainly five years ago. Now it's this dominant entity potentially doing a trillion dollar IPO. What what else is out there that we might not have heard of that disrupts this Apple part? Because one thing I does seem to me is the pace of innovation is like cycling really rapidly. The life cycle of chips seems very low. The life cycle of technology turn around and people are talking about fusion these other things. The technology just is amazing how quickly it's growing and it's you know unclear whether even today's great winners are tomorrow's great winners. >> Can I ask you a question about about the technology there? So in in the.com boom and I think in in most sort of previous technology transformative booms the pattern seemed to be you you overbuilt at the start right so there was a mania a ton of capital came into the space and we built a ton of railroad lines across the nation or we built a ton of dark fiber you know across the nation across the world um and then over the ensuing decades uh you know there was a bit of it was kind of a die off as folks realized we we we overbuilt initially and demand full demand wasn't there. There was a bit of a die off but the new companies came in or the survivors you know picked themselves back up and then eventually they used that that excess capacity and filled it out over time. with AI. I've heard it said that it's it's maybe not quite like that because the chips kind of have a shelf life. Um, and partially because the technology is getting so much better that a chip that was made a year ago is kind of a snoozer compared to a chip that's coming out now. Um, is is there any sort of valid worry there that if we just build out a ton of data centers with today's chips, they might not have the same value 5 years from now? Yeah, I I think there's some degree of risk on that. I also think the flip side of this is, you know, electricity was never such a major component of fiber. You look at the electricity demands that are slated to go online, needed to go online, if we're actually going to drive the data centers and AI at the pace that people are talking about building them out. I don't know that we have that. I don't know how successful so far we've been doing in planning around that. I think there's all sorts of efforts. You've all of a sudden seen the government launch a slew of initiatives to kind of get nuclear up and running. But that's a five, seven, 10, 12 year sort of, you know, time horizon. We're going to need all sorts of electricity. You're seeing a little bit of backlash in various places like even in Northern Virginia is people complaining a little bit about, hey, you know, we're getting browns. We're not seeing the electricity that we need or at the price that we need because so much of it being going into some of these data centers. So I I I think there's all sorts of things that make this even more complex than fast. As you said, what happens if you build out all these data centers on this sort of technology and 6 months down the road, a year down the road, it becomes very apparent, wow, this other technology is really the way to go. And are these data centers still relevant? We build in the places we need to go. Um, you know, I think we're going to face real competition from the Middle East where the Saudi Arabia are kind of hands up saying, "Give us the chips. We have solar energy. We have cheap fossil fuels. We can desalinate water if we need to, you know, do the cooling. We will do all of this." And so I I think feels to me like a we're still assuming that we are the sole, you know, providers of this that we're way ahead of everything, which is true. I'm not sure that's going to continue. So I feel like these valuations maybe we'll see much bigger valuations down the road. Maybe we're going to see them in the next few weeks. But I feel it's all a little bit susceptible though. I will say this, you know, chunk, you know, yesterday Nvidia popped kind of or two days ago Nvidia popped on Trump talking about their super duper chips and how China might get them. And they didn't really sell off today on the fact that They said G and him didn't talk about it. So there is still this kind of nature. So I wouldn't step in front of that train. But I I have a very low to minimal exposure to that kind of MAG7 type trade. I'd much rather own the energy providers. I want to own what we've been calling production for security where this administration I think is going to go looking at chip manufacturers. So I do own Intel. I continue to own Intel. I think Trump is going to do what he can to support Intel. It's his nature. It's how his style. Um, I'm looking for who are going to be a national champion maybe in the energy space in who we decide to back, right? Westinghouse just got this big investment. Go ahead with nuclear. So, I kind of like playing that angle. I don't, you know, some of those stocks are a little bit frothy, but I think there's a lot more, you know, you're not going to get necessarily the same pops, but I don't think you have the same downside. So, I kind of like those areas. I think that's where the growth comes as we really focus. And I was a little bit worried that we'd have some great deal with China. I think we have a one-year runway to get as much of our act together as we can before we're back at the table with that. >> Okay. Um I want to dig into that uh very deeply right now. Real quick, folks, I just want to note um we had some audio issues with Peter early on. We're we're we're going ahead with the audio solution we have here. Hopefully, it's good enough for you. Just know that there's a I think there's sort of some storms going on in his area and some other things like that. So, just soldier through the audio with us. All right. So, Peter, um, real quickly, can you just expound for folks a little bit more to make sure they understand when you talk about production for security and how that is a trade strategy of of yours and your firm there, Academy Securities? >> Yeah. And I'm going to take it a step further. I think what we've been calling this production for security is really going to become the new ESG and kind of globally. And I think you look at what we need to be sustainable and I think we took a very narrow definition of sustainability and oh it'd be nice to have things that are completely renewable. It'd be nice to have very low carbon footprint. And I think what's gone on certainly in the last year with kind of China threatening on rarest and critical minerals in terms of if we want to be number one at data centers and AI, we need this electricity. And so I think we're taking a step back and saying both as a nation, I think it's going to make it to the corporate and investment level just like ESG did. People are saying, "What else do we need to produce ourselves to be somewhat secure in our lifestyle? How much do we have to produce on our own? How much can we produce with close allies? And then how much can we buy on the open market from people we may or may not trust very well, but they're the cheapest price?" And when you look through the sustainability as it was kind of defined before, that wasn't part of the equation. So, I think people are going to be much more careful about supply chains. Hey, what does my supply chain look like? And if I am invested in Vietnam and Thailand, but both of those ship right beside China, maybe I'm not that diversified there. So I think people are going to take a hard look at anything that it's obvious at the government level. We're going to take a hard look at anything from defense spending to, you know, the rarest and critical minerals and not the rarest critical minerals themselves as much as the refined and processed version of those electricity production or electron production. How much we have to do of that chip production. I think you're going to see some of this in pharma. You're going to extend this on out space and we're going to see levels of investment to make sure that we can do a lot of that on our own and are somewhat dependent maybe on our close allies and very independent of other countries and I think that's going to go through the entire corporate ecosystem and it's going to be kind of a new ESG type mentality of what do we need to produce here? I think Europe's going to be behind the curve, but even they, I think, are going to start seeing the value of this, right? You can't be in industrial power. You cannot be in data centers if you're dependent on someone else for all your electricity. And it's kind of this wakeup call, and it sounds like Bill Gates is all of a sudden, you know, downplaying the, you know, imminent doom from electricity production of various forms. So, I I think this is all fitting, I think, a multi-year investment timeline that we haven't thought about before. And I do think there will be, you know, close sector production for security committees where there were ESG committees or maybe the ESG committee will evolve to that. But I think if you think about sustainability a little bit more harshly, it has to include those things. And if you're not doing those things, are you really a good governance? So I think that's I I really see this going aggressively. I think some states will embrace it, some states will fight it tooth and nail, but to me, this is the direction we're headed. >> Um all right. Um well, look, I got a lot to say in response to that. First, real quick, I just want to let folks know um that we took a break after the last answer Peter just gave to see if we couldn't troubleshoot the um the audio. I think we've got a better solution in place right now. So, thanks for sticking with us, folks. Um all right, Peter, you know, when you you talk about um Proc kind of being um more like a new take on sustainability. Um, I I I sort of think of it that way as sort of like sovereign sustainability, like the things that that governments or or nations need to make sure they do well to kind of stay around. And so that could be, you know, resilience like resilience of supply chains. It could be, you know, national security priorities. Um to me this is kind of goes hand inand I don't know if you're familiar with Michael Every uh the um uh global analyst at Rabo Bankank but for many many years he talked about how mercantalism was sort of the way that the world worked and that this era of globalism that you and I and most of the viewers grew up in was actually kind of the historical aberration and that things were much more likely to the pendulum was much more likely to swing back to mercantalism. We've sort of seen that happen on steroids in recent years. And and basically his definition of mercantalism is is more or less nations are going to do what nations have got to do. And it's not just going to be free markets and global free trade. It's going to be, hey, I might starve this one part of my economy to overfeed this other part of my economy because that's where our national interests lie right now. You're nodding as I'm saying all this. Um, so >> yeah, I think that's perfect. >> Good, good, good. Um, and by the way, if you don't know Michael Every, you you you definitely should get to know him. I think you guys would really enjoy just sharing notes with each other. Um, your point about Bill Gates, I thought was really interesting, too. So, um, you know, we we've you've probably seen the same chart that I've shown on this channel a couple of times, which shows America and Europe's electrical production capacity for the past, I don't know, 50 plus years. And it's it's pretty much a flat line. I mean, slowly growing, but pretty flat. Then you see China's and China's is almost vertical, right? And it dwarfs the US right now. So that seems to have have really gotten, you know, America's uh the attention of our our um ruling class right now. Um we've got, you know, all hands on deck. They're prioritizing nuclear, you know, all this stuff that was just languishing. Um, and of course, you know, they're realizing, look, if we're going to try to win the AI race, we got to have as much, if not more, cheap electrons than China does to win it. So, that's going to be a big trade. It sounds like that's already one of the things that's kind of on your radar, but I'll let you talk in just a minute, but yeah, I I I noted the same thing you did with Bill Gates where maybe it's just coincidence, but I don't think that it's coincidence that that he would have this sort of reversal on the criticality of climate change if Microsoft weren't if if its future wasn't so dependent upon the buildout of of this new energy grid, which of course is going to need a lot of fossil fuel, as you were saying to get built out and to be maintained. >> Yeah. No, and I think um you know the one thing you talked about where you might need to starve one part of the economy to do something with another part of the economy. It it resonates with something we've been talking a little bit about and I have the pleasure of working with Spider Marks who's on CNN a fair bit. He's a retired general and academy. We've got 30 retired generals, admirals, some CIA people I get to work with. And he's been talking about that we're moving to a pre-war footing. And [clears throat] for me that's fairly interesting. And what he means by pre-war is really even between World War I and World War II, we are caught by surprise. But post World War II, we lived in a postworld war or post-war economy, right? People were very comfortable. We built up things like United Nations to prevent another war. >> And then after we had the demise of the Soviet Union, we really lived in this peace dividend, right? Europe stopped spending on defense. Everyone kind of became very altruistic. >> And so the three things about a pre-war economy I think that are really important. One is you only do a pre-war economy to prevent war, right? if you become very good at it. >> And starting up, but pre-war means like we're going to be kind of like on Defcon 3 as our as our status quo, like we're just going to be expecting a war at some point. We're prepared for >> Right. Right. And it's kind of like deterrence, right? Okay. Once we realize that, I think that feeds naturally into this, you know, mercantalism or the production for security. And to me, there's two things that come out of a kind of pre-war mindset. An urgency, right? We haven't had this urgency. We've been talking about the lack of rare earth critical minerals for years. We've been talking about yes, you know, moving to solar wind's fine, but it's not going to create the backbone. We're not doing enough fast enough. And we watch China kind of outpace us. So, I think there becomes an urgency. And the other part of this is almost a sense of sacrifice. Will we sacrifice something? And I think in our case, some of that sacrifice is going to be no more cheap goods or fewer cheap goods, right? We're going to be paying more. And I think we're going to have to sacrifice some of our regulations that we put in place, right? Things that we felt were very important, maybe like Bill Gates thought were very important, get deprioritized when you realize, ooh crap, if we focus on only that and China goes here and beats us, this won't matter because we lost to China. So, >> and this takes us back, right? There's been encouraging moments. You know, we put people on the moon. We did the Manhattan project. When the nation kind of unites around this shared goal, there is something to be done. So I think there's that potential. >> Okay. So um [clears throat] for the people that are listening that think okay yeah this makes sense to me. Um how it does the pros strategy then transform into an investment strategy and and you you you mentioned um you know fossil based energy as as as a component but but right now what what are you looking at in a proc portfolio? Yeah. So there's kind of three pieces I'm looking at right now and it's kind of evolving relatively quickly. Some of it, you know, for lack of a better word, I'll call the lottery ticket type thing. You're looking for small manu, you know, companies, maybe sub 10 billion that are involved in either nuclear, the processing, refining of rare earth and critical minerals, maybe something in biotech that becomes interesting. Biotech's just hard because there's so many things whereas I think the rare earth and critical minerals are a bit easier. someone who has really interesting electrical technology um you know a little bit in the chip industries I think you can look to defense who's good in the drone space you know is there someone who can do ice breakers for the US places that are going to really become national security and so you look for a slew of these you know small ones some of whom have IP maybe some intellectual property that they can use so I want to own kind of a small subset of these and you're going to get some wrong you know they're very volatile in where they are you know some like an MP have already been bought that was probably a great example. I did not own that one. LEU, which was one that I've owned off and on. I currently don't. Um, you can look at some of the nano reactors. So, there's NE, which I don't own. SMR, which I own a little bit. I find I have to trade these a little bit because they are very volatile, but that's kind of a lottery ticket. And then I think you move to trying to identify national champions, right? So, you kind of had US steel, right? I'm not sure exactly where that stands, but I'd kind of categorize that at the national champion sort of level. Trump allowed them to be bought by Nipon Steel, but the US has some sort of involvement. Intel to me, right? That's going to be our national champion for trying to build chips out here. It's going to force other companies. I want to continue to own that. Just by his nature, Trump likes to win. Trump views that he on behalf of the US people owns 10% of this company and he will do a lot, I think, to try and get that business going. I think the stocks above 40 last time. I think there's more room to run on a market cap basis. It's still tiny compared to the other chip producers. And I'm trying to figure out will there be, you know, Westinghouse might qualify in this? Will there be one of the big energy companies? He says, "We're really going to work with you to expand what we're trying to do. We're going to force an investment on you or you're going to offer you investment that you can't refuse." So, that's going to be part and then I'll circle back to what I'm trying to avoid doing. I looked at a few of the rare earth and critical minerals ETFs for example and one I happen to pull up the second largest holding was China something. So when you're looking if you want to go ETFs I do think you have to spend a bit of time looking at who's the underlying and I'm trying to prioritize companies that are either 90 you know 100% or close to 100% US focused 50% US focused with maybe an Australia Canada you know close ally sort of element maybe even in Argentina where Trump seems to be very involved I think those are okay anything that really smells of China or an India or you know you know a real foreign involvement. I don't think those are going to benefit the same way. Yes, they'll benefit from the commodities or the refining doing well, but they're not going to get that impetus from the US government. So, that's been one of the things I've been asked a lot of questions like, oo, why does some of these, you know, rarest and critical minerals ETFs or the uranium things not perform as well as some of the underlying and that's because some of the large companies were not really US. And Trump is not going to go out of his way to support a company that's not primarily US. and he's going to go out of his way, I think, to, you know, make it difficult for a Trump company that is more Chinese focused. >> Yeah. Got it. And of course, that that certainly fits under an America first banner. So, I'm curious, um, do you have strong feelings, strong opinions on the US government taking equity stakes um, in US companies? Or do you not care? You're just like, look, I'm just playing the market as we have it and that that influences stock prices. So let's see that's a tough answer or question to answer. Um I think in an ideal world I would like to have seen some sort of guidelines put in place for what happens when the US government takes a stake. >> You know how do we behave? What are our roles? How passive are we or not passive? So in an ideal world I think I would have liked to see corporate governance put in place before these investments took. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the way it's playing out. I don't think that it's necessarily fair that the president can, you know, kind of pick winners and losers and maybe force people to do business with or without, you know, these companies that we've invested in. Having said that, for now, I'm going to try and take advantage of that because I can't figure out how to stop it. >> And I'll take the, you know, go a big step backwards though. You know, the chips act for example, right? That was designed in theory to help, you know, the chips companies. One, it was going to give grants to these chip companies. So I would actually rather have as a taxpayer us get the benefit from these investments going well than us kind of giving this money as grant money and the current shareholders doing well and they just get our money. So I I I think kind of the thought of an investment if done more organized would be really good and ideal and a lot of those chips act money did not actually get taken out which is why Trump had the money around to get this intel investment and part of that was because we were trying to force a lot of policy on those companies. So, we are forcing different types of policy, but we are forcing who they could hire, what sort of daycare they had to provide on site. There are all sorts of strings attached to getting that chipsack money. And I'm not sure that's any better or worse. In fact, maybe it's slightly worse than what we're doing. So, you know, I I don't think we're in a perfect solution. I would have liked to see guidance, but I think it's hard to say that the CHIPS Act was any more fair and probably slightly more unfair if you're a taxpayer. And, you know, I think this will evolve over time. >> Okay. Um, do you expect to see more of this going forward? I I think the answer is yes, but >> yeah, I really do. I think, you know, they're starting to talk, I think it was Senator Lumis on the it was more crypto that they're going to try and convert some gold into this $3 trillion war fund that they can buy crypto. I think in the end they wind up doing this $3 trillion fund, but a lot of it actually just goes to investment in our industries, our corporations much more so than a crypto. And that same mechanism where they try and convert some of the gold, sell some of the gold to create a sovereign wealth fund because that's the one thing that Trump is running out of right now is pockets of money you can use. He had the Intel money. There was some money around a department of defense I think they use for the MP investment. I believe it's the Department of Energy had money for the LAC which is lithium America's corporation investment. So I I think they are going to try and create a bigger sovereign wealth that will let them do this. And you know, you're also seeing kind of I don't want to say tricks, but the government is allowing nuclear projects to be built on military bases, right? The US government has immense say on regulation of federal land, which the military bases are on. So, >> so people are saying, "Not in my backyard." So, Trump's saying, "Okay, fine. We'll just put it on, you know, >> right military. >> It might be, right, it might be in your backyard, but you now have no say over it." So, um, you know, and again, that's not ideal, but again, I think we're on the early stages. And I think this kind of mentality is going to permeate a little bit more where everyone's got to say, okay, let's take a step back and if mercantism is right, I really like that idea and how she said Avery was from Ao Bank was explaining it like if this is what we're going to do, what are we doing wrong in that respect? How do we fix this? And I also think it does tells very nicely if you look at the attention we're spending now on South America whether it's what we're doing in V Venezuela or Colombia which have their own issues what we're trying I think to do ultimately with Mexico and our involvement with Argentina we're taking our eye back on to you know the north south um rather than you know the Asia Pacific and the reality is it is much easier for us to be militarily and you know navywise in control of the region than it is in the Southeast Asia where China's naval, you know, has come and as I've learned from a lot of our military experts, the tyranny of distance is real. The further you are from something, the harder it is for you to maintain any element of control. So, I think we really are turning our attention back to this, you know, north, south, Central America alliance. >> Yeah. This sort of Monroe Doctrine, right? >> Yeah. >> Neo Monroe doctrine. >> Yeah. I think the Monroe doctrine gets a lot of talk, but I don't think anyone's done anything about it in a long time. And I feel like we're at the early stages again of adopting something like that. >> Yeah. And I imagine that's probably part of why we invested in Argentina, right? Which is, hey, this is an ally. We we we want more of this type of model in the southern hemisphere uh on on our side of the map. Um and uh and probably also why we're taking a harder line against places like Venezuela and whatnot because hey, if we can kind of help regime change there, and I know I hate to say that because the US really, my personal opinion shouldn't be in the business of regime change, right? But they'd love to get that, you know, they'd love to get that problem resolved, but more importantly, I think they'd love to get uh China's influence out of there and they would love to get that that Venezuelan oil flowing again. But but in our hemisphere, >> yeah, and I don't mean to be flippant. It'll probably come across a bit as flippant, but you know, we've had this war on drugs for decades, and now it actually looks a bit like a war. So, you know, I I think it's kind of interesting what we're trying to do. I think there's questions marks around some of this and again like a lot of things Trump has done on the economic side I think he's doing on this side we're pushing the envelope in terms of what's normal engagement what's approved engagement but it is setting a very different tone. >> Yeah. Um so I'm going to say something and I do not mean it to to come out partisan. I'm not I'm not trying to make a comment in favor or against but um in business there's this saying if it doesn't get measured it doesn't get moved. And there's a lot of things like you were sort of referencing earlier, Peter, that um [snorts] you know, probably honestly for a number of different administrations, Republican and Democrat, you know, we've kind of been naval gazers on a lot of this stuff. So Rare Earths is a great example. You know, we talked forever about the fact that, hey, we're probably too dependent on other parties for this, right? But we just never really did anything. And hey, we've got rare earths, you know, in North America, but we just really didn't prioritize, you know, building our own domestic uh industry for that. And now, of course, we're scrambling, right? Um it seems like the new administration on a lot of things is starting to to measure, right? Um how much fentanyl is coming into the country? We don't want it. Okay, let's start. Where are we points? Okay, it's coming in by sea. Let's just start blowing up boats and hopefully diminishing that, right? Too many illegal aliens. Okay, what can we do to close the border? and you know all of a sudden there's zero basically border crossing stuff like that. So they they are using the the measurement set. So let me ask you this they they're they're using that mercantalist playbook. How how likely do you think this is to work? And if by working we mean advancing America first priorities of of becoming a lot more uh resilient or sustainable as a sovereign nation. >> One I think it works much better if we go back to kind of working with our allies a little bit. So I think it's been encouraging a little bit some of the deals they've been announcing you know in this recent trip but before that with Australia on some of the rarest and critical minerals a little bit less you know encouraging how we continue to fight with China but sorry with Canada. So I I think if we go back to again kind of my base market or benchmark is x% a fairly large percent has to be done domestically but some part is going to have to be optimized with your allies and neighbors. And again I think it was encouraging that Trump seems to be taking tariffs off things like bananas and coffee which we don't really grow. I guess we grow coffee in Hawaii but it's already very expensive coffee so they're not going to be protected by tariffs anyways. >> So I I see some of that change. I think to the extent we keep this friction on it's a real race. Anyways, I think China right now is trying to gauge how much control they have over rarest and critical minerals and the process and refined versions and whether it's worth them trying to choke that off or not versus how quickly they're evolving their AI and data centers. They know they're ahead on electricity. They're behind on AI and data centers. They seem almost willing to say, you know what, we're going to avoid some of the Nvidia chips because we believe if we kind of force necessity on us, we'll grow this. So, I think it's far from a done deal. Again, China is down to only we're representing only about 15% of China's trade, right? So, they have done a great job diversifying away from us. I think we talked about this last time. My view has been that for the last five or six years, China's been transitioning from a made in China to made by China. And in made in China, they were making our goods and content for us to sell those across the globe. And now they're aggressively trying to sell their own brands, whether it's Huawei, whether it's BYD. And so, they've made a lot of progress on that. they have really strong you know bilateral sort of trade agreements or negotiations where a lot of the autocratic resource nations sell their rare earth commit you know commodities basically to China and China in turn loads them back and sells them a bunch of their finished goods and I don't think we should underestimate a lot of the emerging markets countries have been frustrated over the decades that they need the dollar to buy goods that the swift system is a very expensive and you know obtuse system to use that we periodically use sanctions against them so there's a lot of, you know, willingness, I think, for countries to like explore trade with China. So, I think it's far from a done deal. And the more erratic we appear, the more kind of we flip-flopped, the more we hurt our allies. Um, again, I have no idea why we seem to be in friction with India excessively, right? India would have been one of my first stops in trying to compete against China is working closely with India. We seem to have gone the opposite. There's time for that. So, I I think it's very up in the air and I think we're going to go through some hiccups as we go through this. >> Okay. Um, I think you just asked this answered this question then, but it's the one I was going to get to next, which is, you know, you have a bunch of um, current and former uh, both military experts and I just think political experts um, in your your network there at the Academy of Securities. Um, as I understand it, and I am not a military or political expert, but that the reason why Trump did Liberation Day and kind of put trade war tariffs and and you know, trade pressure on everybody all at once was because he said, "Look, um, I got to I I got to contain China and I don't have a ton of time and so I think I've got the best hand at the poker table right now. So, I'm essentially going to do a global flex and I'm gonna basically call everybody and you're gonna kind of, you know, if you got a better hand than me, great. Congrats to you. But I'm betting you don't. And if you don't, you get to kind of pick team America or team China. And so my question to you is is I know it's messy, but net net, is he getting more people closer to our side through this or is he pushing them further away and into China's arms? You know, there's a lot of debate for that. I would say we don't seem to see Peter Navaro on TV anymore. So maybe he just listened to the wrong adviser at the time as well. So, you know, Trump is not a afraid to change who he listens to, who he takes, you know, >> works with. It seems like Besson has become his right-hand person. I'm not sure whether Besson would advise this or not. Um, you know, >> but that said, he hasn't backed out of these trade deals either. >> No. And I think personally I'm of the opinion we probably could have had a lot of these trade deals without going through the liberation day process that I think we could have negotiated with a lot of these countries. And the one fear that I have is the president, you know, he loves deals, but you look in his company last time, you know, it was thousands and thousands of LLC's and everything's an individual property, right? And this golf course in Ireland, maybe there's two or three golf courses in Ireland that are tied together, but it's a series of individual transactions and the world doesn't quite work that way, right? There's only, you know, 20 some odd countries, regions that you need to deal with and people have a memory. And it does not surprise me at all that everyone is coming around and shaking hands and doing deals because what else are you going to do right now? But behind the scenes, what are they trying to do to alleviate themselves from this, you know, potentially chaotic policy, right? It's, you know, they, you know, Japan did played very nice. I believe she gave him a golden golf ball. She um, you know, they've done a lot of things to encourage him, but behind the scenes, what is the relationship? How long does it continue? What's going on behind the scenes? Is China able to use that? And I do think China is relying a little bit on the fact that we may just switch our attention to something else because that seems to be the nature of the US and that whatever China decides they want to do for the next year, they will do because no one has choice. The corporations don't have a choice. The people don't have a choice. >> Anything Trump says, one-third of the population is going to think is idiotic. One third of the population is going to think awesome. the one-third of the population that's trying to figure out whether it makes sense or not has trouble getting good information because the we only hear from the other two sides and so it is much harder for us as a nation I think to put these things in motion and you're probably going to see a lot of people position against you know and go pro nimi because if Trump's for you know for Nimi and you know they'll go no no no we have to protect our things they're setting themselves up for whether it's the midterms or the next set of you know presidential elections so it's more chaotic here to you know navigate through this So maybe I should have added that when you ask who's going to win that is the one thing that's hard even if we have a great strategy it is hard to implement because first US corporations have their own risk responsibilities globally not just to the US and we have so much friction internally it's sometimes very difficult to figure out where we're headed and what's the right answer and actually get people moving in that direction despite the fact that I am very comfortable that when I travel across the country I talk to corporations I talk to some of the large states and municipalities I talk to a lot large asset managers, no one who I consider kind of decision-making people are that far apart on what we think we should be doing. Unfortunately, I don't think they're very well represented by DC, but there there is this, I think, overwhelming kind of consensus in and around the middle of what are the right sort of trade-offs. And yes, there would be some friction push comes to shove what you give up or won't, but I don't think we're that far. We can kind of unleash this middle. >> Okay. Um, God, I'd love to keep digging into this with you. Um, I guess we're just gonna have to have you back on again soon, Peter. Um, but let me let me get back into the question I sort of asked in my intro here, which is, okay, all this is going on in the trade side, right? Um, with trade, you know, come comes these tariffs, right? And, um, the tariffs are making some goods more expensive. Um but they are also putting money in the coffers and the the general treasury account for the government to spend right helping us cushion the deficit a bit. Um uh and most notably we we haven't seen um you know runaway inflation the way that folks initially feared. Now, now granted, we're probably not feeling the full effects of the tariffs yet, but also too, hopefully a number of these tariffs are going to get reduced, right? And that's a big part of, you know, what's going on right now with with these these live real-time trade negotiations. So, um, but I guess my point is is tariffs don't seem to be the um radioactive issue that they were thought they might be back in April. Um, we now will have we now have some trade deals in place and and should hopefully have more in place soon and pretty soon we'll have covered all the big countries that really matter, right? The 20 that you were talking about. Um, we also have the passage of the big beautiful bill. Um, whether you agree with it or not, it's now passed and so that deregulation uh is taking effect. Uh we also have some incremental tax relief beyond just extending the the tax uh cut from the first Trump administration. So these are all things that are stimulative to the economy. And so do you expect at some point as we enter 2026 that we will actually start getting some material tailwinds from all this or are there other concerns that make you think that's too simple assumption? >> Yes. Yeah. So, I think I'll play a little bit of devil's advocate here because I do agree things like the big beautiful bill can help especially the accelerated depreciation, right? That goes handinhand with what we've been talking about this production for security, right? Oh, if I got to build new, you know, property, plant and equipment, acceleration, accelerated depreciation helps a lot towards that. I would say the two things that make me less, you know, comfortable is we've been getting about 30 billion of extra tariff revenue a month. 25 to 30 billion extra tariff revenue a month since um only since May really. So it's about $180 billion of extra tariff revenue is coming through the system. So it's not that meaningful yet, right? And it's helped on the deficit, but it's you know it's kind of only cropping up. I also think the large corporations have avoided a lot of that because they they have the working capital to you know get orders accelerated to get them brought in. So, I think of the problems that are being faced at the tariff level are really small companies right now, mid-size companies who are struggling. They tend not to show up in the data. I don't think our data captures the small and mid-size companies as timely as we tend to capture the data from the large companies. We don't see it because we don't have to look at their stock prices. We don't get earnings announcements. So, I think we I think we're I think it won't be until Q1 that you start hearing a little bit more about this. I would say the other two factors to me that are very, you know, kind of go hand in hand is, you know, at least when I was in business, you know, everyone had a couple quarters of things squirreled away. So even if terrorists were impacting you, you don't necessarily have to show it today because you're waiting to see where this all plays out. >> You had some cushion. Got it. >> You had some cushion. And then finally, no one wants to say anything right now to attract this administration's attention, right? You do not want to go on your conference and call and say, "I hate these tariffs. They're awful." Because the next day something will happen to you potentially in the press. you'll get some, you know, nasty social media tweet about yourself. So, I think people are downplaying this and figuring out ways and like you say, hoping that trade deals and stuff take, you know, into effect. So, I don't think we start hearing or seeing anything about tariffs until Q1. I think that slows it down. And in the meantime, I do think we have been seeing, you know, some impacts from, you know, the AI and the less hiring. I'm very, very worried about college grad jobs where that's all headed. And then you know we had the recent bankruptcy of I guess you can either call it tricolor or tricolor. Um you know that was probably directly a result of some of our migration policies right it was a company it's my understanding was heavily dependent on lending in and around Texas. Many of the people there may have been you know affected by the crackdown on migration. So you know there's a lot of good I I think a lot of these things make sense. Having said that there were people who are spending money. You look at, you know, the talk about switching all these people to robots. And I my gut fear is that everyone's going to cut back a little bit on spending coming into next year. There's still so much uncertainty and your expense is someone else's revenue. And that to me, I think that's why we're going to stay a little bit slow. You know, I'd love to see this big boom. I'd love to see all these things turn into fruition, but we've also heard a lot of promises on potential future capital outlays. I'm not sure how much we've seen in terms of existing capital outlays. And when I talk to foreign corporations, despite some of what's being said at the government level, I think there is a lot of concern about putting property planning equipment on the ground in the US after you saw what happened to the Huawei plant, you know, sorry, uh, Hyundai plant, um, you know, factory. I would like to be more optimistic. I think there's a heavy drag on this economy and if the AI spend cracks at all, I I think we could see a problematic Q1, Q2. >> Okay. uh in the Hyundai factory that was basically sort of ICE coming in there and and uh saying hey we think a lot of your workers here there were a lot of them Koreans but aren't aren't legal. >> Yes after Korea made a big investment. So I think again I don't know the details we haven't seen much who turned out to be illegal how many were here properly or not but you know things like that don't encourage companies certainly don't encourage the workers to come over. >> Yeah. Okay. All right. So, uh, sounds like in a nutshell you said you are concerned that Q1 and Q2 may be softer than folks are currently expecting right now. Um, okay. >> But I'm not completely bearish or anything like that. I do think >> yields will be okay. And again, the one thing we haven't talked about, I think Trump will ultimately cave on solar. I think he is being told by all his advisers that you really do need solar as part of this. I think they might be telling about wind on that. I think he's going to fight wind much longer than he has a certain visceral I think hatred of wind. Um whether it's because it destroyed his views in his Scottish golf course or I think partly he does not like the death that it causes with birds and things like that. Um but I think solar he's going to wind up having to accept. So I do like being a little bit overweight some of the solar names partly because they do not trade very well. And by solar names, not the companies that lend against putting solar on your roof, but really the electricity or energy providers that are heavily solar who their stock prices are low, they still have fairly large short interest. I think they will actually do surprisingly well as the need for electricity pulls solar with it. >> Okay. Um, super interesting. Again, I'm biting my tongue. I'm looking at we only have 10 minutesish left. Um, so Peter, we'll have to, like I said, have to have you on again soon. Um, okay. So, um, I want to get to kind of a market outlook, but just for a second, um, we we we talked a while ago about, um, concerns that that that, uh, could be voiced about, uh, whether the AI stocks are going to be able to or the the AI companies whose stocks are high-flying are going to be able to grow their earnings enough to justify their current uh, market valuations. If they can't, um, and I'm not saying you're predicting this is going to happen, but if they can't, that would cause a substantial repricing in that that sector, which of course now makes up such a huge percentage of both the S&P index and even more so of the NASDAQ, that there would be a pretty big material general market correction, and that would have probably some negative wealth impacts that would slow the economy even more. Correct. >> Yeah. And that's why I think I'm kind of trying to be overweight kind of these national champions. These things that I think are going to develop from ProSac, which clearly if the AI story fades at all, you're going to see electricity prices probably come down. So you'll see some of those stocks fade. So again, your lottery tickets probably get crushed, but some of the longer term plays I think do well. I think you want to own some of the small caps. Some of the things that have been left behind. You know, I've been starting to look, I don't have this on, but the equal weighted indices, and you know, there are ETFs that you can do. the equal weighted indices have really lagged behind the market cap weighted indices recently. So maybe you switch, you know, take some profits in the market cap weighted ones and switch to. So I don't think you want to be out of this market. I'm not that afraid of the world, but I do think you kind of want to look for those opportunities. And I think you want to dabble in some of the parts of Europe, whether it's Poland. I still like Poland. I think that's going to become a huge beneficiary of any rebuild. >> And I do think that this production for security is going to catch on globally. So I think there might be some value in some of the you know European energy stocks that haven't done as well as the US energy stocks. Um so I I kind of want to own heavily weighted to kind of prosac kind of and the left behind less weighted to you know the big highf flyers precisely for that risk that you talked about and I basically have cut all my exposure to China because I do think there's potential for more friction long before the one year ends. >> Got it. Okay. Um, so, uh, general market call, I mean, I'm not gonna hold you to this, but I'm curious. >> Since 2022, which was a down year for both stocks and bonds, stocks have done very well, right? Uh, plus 20% returns in 2023 and 2024. Definitely unless something goes pretty wrong now, at least double digit returns again here in 2025, right? Um, what kind of what kind of year do you think that the market's going to have next year? And I don't need necessarily a number, but it could be a downyear, slightly up, way up, uh, kind of kind of guesstimation. And and I'm guessing whatever you're going to say, >> you you see that there's going to be well, you think it's it's quite possible that there could be a pretty sizable capital rotation from these high-f flyers over the past few years into some of these other spaces like the pros. >> Yeah. So I I think you're going to see the outperformance from these other areas next year. I think they're going to do they're going to outperform the highf flyers next year just based on valuation and where I see the attention this government's going to you know I see another potential for a double digit returns as much as I talked about some of the caveats right you know if these things all do click right and we really start seeing the government investment in pros lead to corporate investment in that lead to asset managers chasing those things and again that's been one of the beauties right of you know the US is every asset manager is looking at some of these stocks that I've been talking about or those sectors and saying, "Wow, they've crushed it lately. They're up 30%. They're up 50%. They're up 100%. They're up 20%." Money will flow into that and I think it can feed on itself, right? Again, in a the best of all worlds, right? Capitalism actually does allow capital to flow into areas that we should be growing. And so, it won't just be the government putting money into that. So, I think you could see really good growth. I think you can see corporate strategies in and around that to some degree, right? You could even look at the mags, you know, the data center AI people, how closely they're aligning themselves to the electricity producers, right? They realize that their business is not sustainable unless they have, you know, captive energy producers or very closely tied energy producers. So, if that permeates, I think you have all those kind of, you know, tailwinds going through you. You've got less investment uh sorry, lower interest rates you're going to have. I think the tenure is not going to get much above 4%. In fact, I think it'll probably probably get down to 360 or 370 early next year. So, you're going to have those tailwinds. And if we can get these deals with other countries and kind of back off this whole friction and China lets us go for the year without trying to stop us, I think we could have a great year. I also see a real solid chance of being down 10 to 15%. So, I think I want to own some hedge strategies. I want to be careful every time we get excited. I want to look for some sort of optionality. But again, that's why I find some of those pros names more comfortable because I feel that their downside is much less than their upside. >> Yeah. >> And that's kind of why I want my portfolio. So even if I'm wrong on about the upside story, I don't think they get hit as much on the downside. >> Okay. All right. Hey, by the way, I appreciate you being so specific like this. All right. We're going to get to just rapid fire for the next couple minutes. Um, and you've already answered one of my rapidfire questions, but anything else you might want to add to bonds and bond yields next year. Heard you say 10 years likely to go down maybe somewhere around 3.6. Anything else you want to say about bonds for 2026? >> Yeah, listen to Bessant. He says he wants 3%. We'll get to 3% on Fed funds. He wants sub 10 4%. He wants a 3% tens. I think they'll push it. I think people underestimate the willingness of the Federal Reserve to do things to keep yields low. I think they have operation twist which we've done and I will say I don't think we get to yield curve control and people like oh why would we ever like I think Bernani got very close to yield curve control. Yellen got very close to doing yield curve control. Powell hasn't had to do it but it is on their playbook and if any administration is comfortable setting the prices. Trump talks about setting the prices for tariffs. He talks about setting the prices for Fed funds. I I do not get I I think this administration with Besson and Treasury will keep 10 years under control and we won't have some sort of backlash even if we cut rates. And I think that's one of the biggest fears out there that people have had that's going to be misplaced. And I think corporate credit's going to do fine. I think private equity, private credit might have some issues. It's small. It's not going to drag down the economy. Corporate credit as a whole is very solid. So I'm very comfortable with your fixed income portion of your portfolio, which allows you maybe to be a little bit more aggressive in your equity side of the portfolio. >> Okay. Um, God, I love I love you being so concise and specific. It's awesome. Oil. >> I like oil. I think the commodity itself will only do okay. I'm reasonably convinced, and this might sound tinfoil hat, but I think it's reasonable. Is that the Saudis will keep oil below 70 as much as they possibly can. They have a diminishing resource anyway. So, you it's diminishing in value over time. They want chips. So, I think the agreement they have, whether it's implicit, tacit, or just, you know, wink wink, is you sell us chips, we keep oil under 70. I don't think they let it go below 50 because that starts hurting you as producers. But I think the real value is going to become on the companies that can refine and process energy, oil prices, natural gas. I think natural gas has a lot more room to run. I think the companies around that I think you're going to see a lot of development in and around, you know, natural gas fired electronic production and even coal >> because that'll be the bridge fuel for for the data centers until nuclear hopefully comes online, >> right? That's the two to sevenyear backbone. >> Yep. Okay. Awesome. Um, in and the oil stocks are pretty beaten down right now. So, presumably a good time to be entering, >> right? And that's why I love them. I think the hedge funds still don't like them. I think there's, you know, shorts in them. And I think people have not understood that we are having a shift in what we think about in terms of sustainability and how important these are going to be to our growth and getting out of this morass that we've been stuck in. >> Okay. And by the way the one thing although it takes 5 years say to build you know let's call it three years to build a you know um gas fired plant that three years is going to require all sorts of construction material to build it there is going to be a huge amount of demand for these resources and jobs coming out of it just like the data centers as they're being built I think data centers actually create more jobs while they're being built than when they're actually built but that's a separate issue but yeah there is that demand for these hard raw commodities so I think energy all they do very Well, they're still undervalued. >> Got it. And I'm assuming um I'm going to ask you about gold next, but I'm assuming copper would would benefit from what you're talking about. >> Gold. Yes. I think all the industrial, you know, they will all continue to do well. This growth is happening. And you know, the only way I think it stops is if China really puts a clamp on their exports of process and refined rares and critical minerals is what I and I can't remember if I mentioned this last show. This become probably one of my favorite quotations is it was during co the CEO of um Whirlpool went on TV and said just as a reminder a washing machine that's 99% is not done and I think that's the risk with China's control of the rarest and critical minerals the process and refined versions yeah they're only a tiny component of many things but if that tiny component doesn't get to us we don't have a finished product and so I think that's the risk of China and that's why I I view that this administration has such an urgency to allevate that risk. >> I'm curious um in the uh rare earth space um I mean I know in the past month or so the publicly traded companies that have anything to do with rare earths have just exploded, right? Because everyone's realizing, oh my gosh, we've determined this is like >> priority number one. Um >> too late to get in on that or early innings still? >> I still very early innings. I think you got to be careful. Again, some of the lottery tickets I've sold, you know, some of those out. I'll be reloading, but I would want to focus on those who have processing and refining cap capacity, right? We can still buy like China does not produce all of their own rare earths and critical minerals, right? They refine almost the entire world. So, I think they have about a 60 to 70% control over the pro the rare and critical minerals themselves, but it's the 90% on the processing refining. We completely seated it. We all closed our eyes and said, "Well, it's a dirty process to, you know, refine these things, so we'll give it to China so it's not so dirty." And I think that was insane. So, we have the >> just like we gave all our plastics and they just dumped it in the ocean. But yeah. >> Right. Yeah. So, we were worried about plastic straws and they're, you know, destroying the universe very quickly. So, I I think that's where I want to be is who has some sort of technology or an edge around that, you know, refining or processing. And again, I think the nuclear story is even easier. You know, who's going to be supplying the uranium? These things are going to take time to come up, but I think what the government's trying to do is, you know, ramp that up through what they're able to do on federal lands to get those economy of scale. So, I don't think it's too early at all or sorry, too late at all. I think there's still plenty of opportunity. >> Okay, great. Gold, >> you know, I don't really touch that at this stage. I've lost track of, you know, where it is. It's been a phenomenal investment um for the people who involved, you know, overdone to me possibly. I I think so. I think this, you know, but I I I don't have a good enough sense on that and I've given up following it. It's kind of not a part of my portfolio because there's certain things you just realize I get wrong all the time, so I'm just going to ignore that part. >> All right. Hey, I you very much appreciate that in in a in a uh in a capital manager. Um somebody who just says, "Hey, look, this is my zone of expertise. This one isn't in it right now. You know, don't don't use me as your your source on this." >> All right. Um, Peter, look, this has been fantastic. We're at the end of the time here, but um, thank you so much. For folks that would like to follow you and your work, where should they go? >> So, they can, uh, go to our website atacademyurities.com. They can find a bunch of our research out there, or you can follow me on Twitter, TFMKTS. >> All right, fantastic. And Peter, when I edit this, I will put up uh the link to your website and your Twitter handle there on the screen so folks know where to go. Folks, the links will be uh down in the description below this video as well. Um folks, please do me a favor. Join me in thanking Peter for being so generous uh and specific with um all these details. Uh let them know that by hitting the like button and then clicking on the subscribe button below as well as that little bell icon right next to it. Um, if you are a DIY investor and you know really like what you've heard from Peter here, uh, then definitely go to his uh, website and avail yourself to all the resources there. Uh, if you're not a DIY investor and you are inspired by what Peter talked about here and would like to get some professional help in answering how you might be able to put some of these ideas to use in your portfolio, I highly recommend you get that advice from a good professional financial adviser. importantly, one who takes into consideration all the topics that Peter has mentioned here. If you've got a good one who's doing that for you, great. Stick with them. But if you don't, um, or you just like a second opinion from one who does, consider scheduling a free consultation with one of the financial adviserss that Thoughtful Money endorses. These are the firms you see with me on this channel week in and week out. To do that, just fill out the very short form at thoughtfulmoney.com. Only takes you a couple seconds to fill out. These consultations are totally free. There's no uh commitments involved. It's just a service these firms offer to be as helpful as possible. Peter, thanks so much. It's always wonderful talking to you. Um it's going to be really interesting to see what happens in 2026. We'll get you back in Q1 uh to provide an update for us. Uh but in the interim, best of luck and again, really appreciate everything you shared with us today. >> Thanks very much and sorry about the early audio issues. >> Hey, look, that's we that's sometimes just Murphy's law. I think we did a good job correcting it halfway through. Um all right, Peter, thank you so much. And everybody else, thanks so much for watching.
The USA Is Now A 'Pre-War' Economy | Peter Tchir
Summary
Transcript
To me, there's two things that come out of a kind of pre-war mindset. An urgency, right? We haven't had this urgency. We've been talking about the lack of rare earth critical minerals for years. We've been talking about, yes, you know, moving to solar winds, fine, but it's not going to create the backbone. We're not doing enough fast enough. And we watch China kind of outpace us. So, I think there becomes an urgency. And the other part of this is almost a sense of sacrifice. Will we sacrifice something? And I think in our case, some of that sacrifice is going to be no more cheap goods or fewer cheap goods, right? We're going to be paying more. >> And I think we're going to have to sacrifice some of our regulations that we put in place, right? Things that we felt were very important, maybe like Bill Gates thought were very important, get deprioritized when you realize, ooh crap, if we focus on only that and China goes here and beats us, this won't matter because we lost to China. [music] Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Tagert. The Wall Street fears of Trump's tariffs and trade wars are greatly diminished these days, at least by the stock market, which has been flirting with new highs of late. Now that we're nearing the end of the year and a resurgence of inflation hasn't materialized, and new trade deals have or are being finalized with many of America's largest trading partners, including China, too, now it seems. An important question is starting to emerge. Will the economy start experiencing tailwinds soon from the administration's policies to discuss, we're fortunate to welcome back to the program Peter Chur, head of macro strategy at Academy Securities. Before we get started, folks, just be forewarned that Peter's audio had a slight issue in the first part of this interview. We fixed it about a third of the way through and it was fine after that. All right, with that caveat out of the way, Peter, thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks a lot for having me back. >> H really glad having you back, Peter. Um look, lots uh lots to talk about here and a lot going on this week. So why don't we just start dialing through the list if you don't mind. Um we are speaking the day after uh the FOMC came out with its latest release and Jerome Powell hit his most recent press conference. Um the Fed pretty much delivered as expected. uh it is uh it did another 25 basis point rate cut. It announced that it will be ending quantitative tightening starting on December 1st. And I guess the only really maybe major notable takeaway from it was that Pal took Pays to say, "Hey, look, a rate cut in December isn't baked in the cake." He's not saying that they're not going to cut. He's just saying if you're putting all your chips on them cutting, you should think twice about that. Um, so curious just to hear in general your your reaction to all this. >> Yeah, I think he tried his best to, you know, say they're looking, you know, it's very difficult for them to do much without data. They're not sure where they say the economy is. I think the market's just reading through a lot of this knowing that by February, March of next year, it'll probably be a very different makeup on the Fed and they are probably going to cut to get us down to 3% maybe under almost no matter what the economic data is. So I think that's kind of why we had that ble brief dip in the markets and stocks as he was speaking but we kind of quickly retrenched that. I think anything he says he's a little bit of a lame duck now and if people really thought okay wow this might delay it by 6 months to a year that would be a big deal. If it's going to push off the cuts two 3 months I I just don't think anyone cares that much. And it's going to really come back to what are earnings look like? What's the cumulative effect of a lot of our policies and where are we going with China and trade? >> Okay. So, um, earnings, policies, and trade. Um, why don't we tackle those in order? So, um, we we had the, um, earnings over the past couple of days for, uh, the major, um, a lot of the major Mag 7 companies. I think there's still two more big announcements later today, Apple and Amazon, I think. Um, but we just got Google and Meta and, um, one other big one I'm blanking on. Um, Pardon me. >> Microsoft. >> Microsoft. You're right. Um and uh you know mixed so far, right? Um Google I think was up a bit. Microsoft was down a bit. Facebook was actually kind of down big. Um because all these companies are having to spend um much more so than they used to have to in the past in terms of capex as you know all this as part of this whole AI buildout. Now, we just had Nvidia cross5 trillion dollars uh in market cap this week. Um and uh you know, no huge surprise because everybody's spending their capex money on Nvidia's chips. Um but I guess my question is is um uh you know at what point given the just stratospheric valuations that these stocks are reaching and and and and by that I don't just mean all-time high prices but I mean very stretched multiples multiples to earnings multiples to sales etc. um you know at what point do we say hey look unless earnings really start growing tremendously these current market valuations aren't supported um uh or you know maybe somebody just looks at this and says hey I I maybe this is kind of overblown maybe we pulled too much of tomorrow's valuation into today and this is going to take years longer to to manifest all the incremental revenues we we think it might have so I guess where I'm going here is is from an earnings perspective Um, what level of concern, if any, do you have about today's um, prices for the AI highf flyers? >> Yeah, I'm a little bit worried, not necessarily in terms of earnings. I think they're going to continue to grow, but a will they grow anywhere near the pace that people have priced in. What's interesting to me, it looks like on Meta at least, for the first time, people are saying, well, that's great that you spend a lot of AI, but did we get enough benefit for that spend, right? like for a little while was almost free money when a company said I'm going to spend X billion on AI and your stock increased 2x or multiples of X in terms of valuation. So you're not getting that for the first time. It's it could be a one-off. It could just be, you know, a weird thing, but I think that's the sort of thing a lot of people will be looking to. Is this a signal that people are starting to dealt with whether these companies can really grow into the multiples they have? Should they keep spending at the current pace? >> Yeah. And you know, I I don't want to come across as a doubter in AI that the technology doesn't have real benefits and that it probably very well will be super transformatory or transformative the way the.com uh the way the internet was during the dotcom boom. Um but it is this question of you're pricing these things for perfection or better than perfection. Can earnings really realistically keep up with all this? So, you know, >> I would add maybe even I feel like we're also pricing this to that the US will remain clearly clearly in the lead and that China is going to be way behind or that China is kind of on its knees almost begging for Nvidia chips. I'm not sure that's the case, right? G didn't really seem to bring up Nvidia yesterday. Trump said they didn't really discuss Nvidia chips. You've seen a lot of, you know, kind of interesting announcements coming out of China in terms of what they're trying to do in AI and data centers that they're trying to be more efficient. They're using cheaper chips, less electricity to get potentially very good results. I think, you know, trust by verify with everything coming out of China. Yeah. >> But we seem to kind of ignore that. You've got this behemoth who's proven themselves to be pretty good at a lot of different things. And I feel like we're kind of completely ignoring the risk that whether it's China or even maybe domestically, someone turns the industry on its head, right? You've been evolving so rapidly. Some of these companies we barely heard of three or four years ago, you know, Open AI, I, you know, I've got to admit, wasn't really on my radar screen certainly five years ago. Now it's this dominant entity potentially doing a trillion dollar IPO. What what else is out there that we might not have heard of that disrupts this Apple part? Because one thing I does seem to me is the pace of innovation is like cycling really rapidly. The life cycle of chips seems very low. The life cycle of technology turn around and people are talking about fusion these other things. The technology just is amazing how quickly it's growing and it's you know unclear whether even today's great winners are tomorrow's great winners. >> Can I ask you a question about about the technology there? So in in the.com boom and I think in in most sort of previous technology transformative booms the pattern seemed to be you you overbuilt at the start right so there was a mania a ton of capital came into the space and we built a ton of railroad lines across the nation or we built a ton of dark fiber you know across the nation across the world um and then over the ensuing decades uh you know there was a bit of it was kind of a die off as folks realized we we we overbuilt initially and demand full demand wasn't there. There was a bit of a die off but the new companies came in or the survivors you know picked themselves back up and then eventually they used that that excess capacity and filled it out over time. with AI. I've heard it said that it's it's maybe not quite like that because the chips kind of have a shelf life. Um, and partially because the technology is getting so much better that a chip that was made a year ago is kind of a snoozer compared to a chip that's coming out now. Um, is is there any sort of valid worry there that if we just build out a ton of data centers with today's chips, they might not have the same value 5 years from now? Yeah, I I think there's some degree of risk on that. I also think the flip side of this is, you know, electricity was never such a major component of fiber. You look at the electricity demands that are slated to go online, needed to go online, if we're actually going to drive the data centers and AI at the pace that people are talking about building them out. I don't know that we have that. I don't know how successful so far we've been doing in planning around that. I think there's all sorts of efforts. You've all of a sudden seen the government launch a slew of initiatives to kind of get nuclear up and running. But that's a five, seven, 10, 12 year sort of, you know, time horizon. We're going to need all sorts of electricity. You're seeing a little bit of backlash in various places like even in Northern Virginia is people complaining a little bit about, hey, you know, we're getting browns. We're not seeing the electricity that we need or at the price that we need because so much of it being going into some of these data centers. So I I I think there's all sorts of things that make this even more complex than fast. As you said, what happens if you build out all these data centers on this sort of technology and 6 months down the road, a year down the road, it becomes very apparent, wow, this other technology is really the way to go. And are these data centers still relevant? We build in the places we need to go. Um, you know, I think we're going to face real competition from the Middle East where the Saudi Arabia are kind of hands up saying, "Give us the chips. We have solar energy. We have cheap fossil fuels. We can desalinate water if we need to, you know, do the cooling. We will do all of this." And so I I think feels to me like a we're still assuming that we are the sole, you know, providers of this that we're way ahead of everything, which is true. I'm not sure that's going to continue. So I feel like these valuations maybe we'll see much bigger valuations down the road. Maybe we're going to see them in the next few weeks. But I feel it's all a little bit susceptible though. I will say this, you know, chunk, you know, yesterday Nvidia popped kind of or two days ago Nvidia popped on Trump talking about their super duper chips and how China might get them. And they didn't really sell off today on the fact that They said G and him didn't talk about it. So there is still this kind of nature. So I wouldn't step in front of that train. But I I have a very low to minimal exposure to that kind of MAG7 type trade. I'd much rather own the energy providers. I want to own what we've been calling production for security where this administration I think is going to go looking at chip manufacturers. So I do own Intel. I continue to own Intel. I think Trump is going to do what he can to support Intel. It's his nature. It's how his style. Um, I'm looking for who are going to be a national champion maybe in the energy space in who we decide to back, right? Westinghouse just got this big investment. Go ahead with nuclear. So, I kind of like playing that angle. I don't, you know, some of those stocks are a little bit frothy, but I think there's a lot more, you know, you're not going to get necessarily the same pops, but I don't think you have the same downside. So, I kind of like those areas. I think that's where the growth comes as we really focus. And I was a little bit worried that we'd have some great deal with China. I think we have a one-year runway to get as much of our act together as we can before we're back at the table with that. >> Okay. Um I want to dig into that uh very deeply right now. Real quick, folks, I just want to note um we had some audio issues with Peter early on. We're we're we're going ahead with the audio solution we have here. Hopefully, it's good enough for you. Just know that there's a I think there's sort of some storms going on in his area and some other things like that. So, just soldier through the audio with us. All right. So, Peter, um, real quickly, can you just expound for folks a little bit more to make sure they understand when you talk about production for security and how that is a trade strategy of of yours and your firm there, Academy Securities? >> Yeah. And I'm going to take it a step further. I think what we've been calling this production for security is really going to become the new ESG and kind of globally. And I think you look at what we need to be sustainable and I think we took a very narrow definition of sustainability and oh it'd be nice to have things that are completely renewable. It'd be nice to have very low carbon footprint. And I think what's gone on certainly in the last year with kind of China threatening on rarest and critical minerals in terms of if we want to be number one at data centers and AI, we need this electricity. And so I think we're taking a step back and saying both as a nation, I think it's going to make it to the corporate and investment level just like ESG did. People are saying, "What else do we need to produce ourselves to be somewhat secure in our lifestyle? How much do we have to produce on our own? How much can we produce with close allies? And then how much can we buy on the open market from people we may or may not trust very well, but they're the cheapest price?" And when you look through the sustainability as it was kind of defined before, that wasn't part of the equation. So, I think people are going to be much more careful about supply chains. Hey, what does my supply chain look like? And if I am invested in Vietnam and Thailand, but both of those ship right beside China, maybe I'm not that diversified there. So I think people are going to take a hard look at anything that it's obvious at the government level. We're going to take a hard look at anything from defense spending to, you know, the rarest and critical minerals and not the rarest critical minerals themselves as much as the refined and processed version of those electricity production or electron production. How much we have to do of that chip production. I think you're going to see some of this in pharma. You're going to extend this on out space and we're going to see levels of investment to make sure that we can do a lot of that on our own and are somewhat dependent maybe on our close allies and very independent of other countries and I think that's going to go through the entire corporate ecosystem and it's going to be kind of a new ESG type mentality of what do we need to produce here? I think Europe's going to be behind the curve, but even they, I think, are going to start seeing the value of this, right? You can't be in industrial power. You cannot be in data centers if you're dependent on someone else for all your electricity. And it's kind of this wakeup call, and it sounds like Bill Gates is all of a sudden, you know, downplaying the, you know, imminent doom from electricity production of various forms. So, I I think this is all fitting, I think, a multi-year investment timeline that we haven't thought about before. And I do think there will be, you know, close sector production for security committees where there were ESG committees or maybe the ESG committee will evolve to that. But I think if you think about sustainability a little bit more harshly, it has to include those things. And if you're not doing those things, are you really a good governance? So I think that's I I really see this going aggressively. I think some states will embrace it, some states will fight it tooth and nail, but to me, this is the direction we're headed. >> Um all right. Um well, look, I got a lot to say in response to that. First, real quick, I just want to let folks know um that we took a break after the last answer Peter just gave to see if we couldn't troubleshoot the um the audio. I think we've got a better solution in place right now. So, thanks for sticking with us, folks. Um all right, Peter, you know, when you you talk about um Proc kind of being um more like a new take on sustainability. Um, I I I sort of think of it that way as sort of like sovereign sustainability, like the things that that governments or or nations need to make sure they do well to kind of stay around. And so that could be, you know, resilience like resilience of supply chains. It could be, you know, national security priorities. Um to me this is kind of goes hand inand I don't know if you're familiar with Michael Every uh the um uh global analyst at Rabo Bankank but for many many years he talked about how mercantalism was sort of the way that the world worked and that this era of globalism that you and I and most of the viewers grew up in was actually kind of the historical aberration and that things were much more likely to the pendulum was much more likely to swing back to mercantalism. We've sort of seen that happen on steroids in recent years. And and basically his definition of mercantalism is is more or less nations are going to do what nations have got to do. And it's not just going to be free markets and global free trade. It's going to be, hey, I might starve this one part of my economy to overfeed this other part of my economy because that's where our national interests lie right now. You're nodding as I'm saying all this. Um, so >> yeah, I think that's perfect. >> Good, good, good. Um, and by the way, if you don't know Michael Every, you you you definitely should get to know him. I think you guys would really enjoy just sharing notes with each other. Um, your point about Bill Gates, I thought was really interesting, too. So, um, you know, we we've you've probably seen the same chart that I've shown on this channel a couple of times, which shows America and Europe's electrical production capacity for the past, I don't know, 50 plus years. And it's it's pretty much a flat line. I mean, slowly growing, but pretty flat. Then you see China's and China's is almost vertical, right? And it dwarfs the US right now. So that seems to have have really gotten, you know, America's uh the attention of our our um ruling class right now. Um we've got, you know, all hands on deck. They're prioritizing nuclear, you know, all this stuff that was just languishing. Um, and of course, you know, they're realizing, look, if we're going to try to win the AI race, we got to have as much, if not more, cheap electrons than China does to win it. So, that's going to be a big trade. It sounds like that's already one of the things that's kind of on your radar, but I'll let you talk in just a minute, but yeah, I I I noted the same thing you did with Bill Gates where maybe it's just coincidence, but I don't think that it's coincidence that that he would have this sort of reversal on the criticality of climate change if Microsoft weren't if if its future wasn't so dependent upon the buildout of of this new energy grid, which of course is going to need a lot of fossil fuel, as you were saying to get built out and to be maintained. >> Yeah. No, and I think um you know the one thing you talked about where you might need to starve one part of the economy to do something with another part of the economy. It it resonates with something we've been talking a little bit about and I have the pleasure of working with Spider Marks who's on CNN a fair bit. He's a retired general and academy. We've got 30 retired generals, admirals, some CIA people I get to work with. And he's been talking about that we're moving to a pre-war footing. And [clears throat] for me that's fairly interesting. And what he means by pre-war is really even between World War I and World War II, we are caught by surprise. But post World War II, we lived in a postworld war or post-war economy, right? People were very comfortable. We built up things like United Nations to prevent another war. >> And then after we had the demise of the Soviet Union, we really lived in this peace dividend, right? Europe stopped spending on defense. Everyone kind of became very altruistic. >> And so the three things about a pre-war economy I think that are really important. One is you only do a pre-war economy to prevent war, right? if you become very good at it. >> And starting up, but pre-war means like we're going to be kind of like on Defcon 3 as our as our status quo, like we're just going to be expecting a war at some point. We're prepared for >> Right. Right. And it's kind of like deterrence, right? Okay. Once we realize that, I think that feeds naturally into this, you know, mercantalism or the production for security. And to me, there's two things that come out of a kind of pre-war mindset. An urgency, right? We haven't had this urgency. We've been talking about the lack of rare earth critical minerals for years. We've been talking about yes, you know, moving to solar wind's fine, but it's not going to create the backbone. We're not doing enough fast enough. And we watch China kind of outpace us. So, I think there becomes an urgency. And the other part of this is almost a sense of sacrifice. Will we sacrifice something? And I think in our case, some of that sacrifice is going to be no more cheap goods or fewer cheap goods, right? We're going to be paying more. And I think we're going to have to sacrifice some of our regulations that we put in place, right? Things that we felt were very important, maybe like Bill Gates thought were very important, get deprioritized when you realize, ooh crap, if we focus on only that and China goes here and beats us, this won't matter because we lost to China. So, >> and this takes us back, right? There's been encouraging moments. You know, we put people on the moon. We did the Manhattan project. When the nation kind of unites around this shared goal, there is something to be done. So I think there's that potential. >> Okay. So um [clears throat] for the people that are listening that think okay yeah this makes sense to me. Um how it does the pros strategy then transform into an investment strategy and and you you you mentioned um you know fossil based energy as as as a component but but right now what what are you looking at in a proc portfolio? Yeah. So there's kind of three pieces I'm looking at right now and it's kind of evolving relatively quickly. Some of it, you know, for lack of a better word, I'll call the lottery ticket type thing. You're looking for small manu, you know, companies, maybe sub 10 billion that are involved in either nuclear, the processing, refining of rare earth and critical minerals, maybe something in biotech that becomes interesting. Biotech's just hard because there's so many things whereas I think the rare earth and critical minerals are a bit easier. someone who has really interesting electrical technology um you know a little bit in the chip industries I think you can look to defense who's good in the drone space you know is there someone who can do ice breakers for the US places that are going to really become national security and so you look for a slew of these you know small ones some of whom have IP maybe some intellectual property that they can use so I want to own kind of a small subset of these and you're going to get some wrong you know they're very volatile in where they are you know some like an MP have already been bought that was probably a great example. I did not own that one. LEU, which was one that I've owned off and on. I currently don't. Um, you can look at some of the nano reactors. So, there's NE, which I don't own. SMR, which I own a little bit. I find I have to trade these a little bit because they are very volatile, but that's kind of a lottery ticket. And then I think you move to trying to identify national champions, right? So, you kind of had US steel, right? I'm not sure exactly where that stands, but I'd kind of categorize that at the national champion sort of level. Trump allowed them to be bought by Nipon Steel, but the US has some sort of involvement. Intel to me, right? That's going to be our national champion for trying to build chips out here. It's going to force other companies. I want to continue to own that. Just by his nature, Trump likes to win. Trump views that he on behalf of the US people owns 10% of this company and he will do a lot, I think, to try and get that business going. I think the stocks above 40 last time. I think there's more room to run on a market cap basis. It's still tiny compared to the other chip producers. And I'm trying to figure out will there be, you know, Westinghouse might qualify in this? Will there be one of the big energy companies? He says, "We're really going to work with you to expand what we're trying to do. We're going to force an investment on you or you're going to offer you investment that you can't refuse." So, that's going to be part and then I'll circle back to what I'm trying to avoid doing. I looked at a few of the rare earth and critical minerals ETFs for example and one I happen to pull up the second largest holding was China something. So when you're looking if you want to go ETFs I do think you have to spend a bit of time looking at who's the underlying and I'm trying to prioritize companies that are either 90 you know 100% or close to 100% US focused 50% US focused with maybe an Australia Canada you know close ally sort of element maybe even in Argentina where Trump seems to be very involved I think those are okay anything that really smells of China or an India or you know you know a real foreign involvement. I don't think those are going to benefit the same way. Yes, they'll benefit from the commodities or the refining doing well, but they're not going to get that impetus from the US government. So, that's been one of the things I've been asked a lot of questions like, oo, why does some of these, you know, rarest and critical minerals ETFs or the uranium things not perform as well as some of the underlying and that's because some of the large companies were not really US. And Trump is not going to go out of his way to support a company that's not primarily US. and he's going to go out of his way, I think, to, you know, make it difficult for a Trump company that is more Chinese focused. >> Yeah. Got it. And of course, that that certainly fits under an America first banner. So, I'm curious, um, do you have strong feelings, strong opinions on the US government taking equity stakes um, in US companies? Or do you not care? You're just like, look, I'm just playing the market as we have it and that that influences stock prices. So let's see that's a tough answer or question to answer. Um I think in an ideal world I would like to have seen some sort of guidelines put in place for what happens when the US government takes a stake. >> You know how do we behave? What are our roles? How passive are we or not passive? So in an ideal world I think I would have liked to see corporate governance put in place before these investments took. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the way it's playing out. I don't think that it's necessarily fair that the president can, you know, kind of pick winners and losers and maybe force people to do business with or without, you know, these companies that we've invested in. Having said that, for now, I'm going to try and take advantage of that because I can't figure out how to stop it. >> And I'll take the, you know, go a big step backwards though. You know, the chips act for example, right? That was designed in theory to help, you know, the chips companies. One, it was going to give grants to these chip companies. So I would actually rather have as a taxpayer us get the benefit from these investments going well than us kind of giving this money as grant money and the current shareholders doing well and they just get our money. So I I I think kind of the thought of an investment if done more organized would be really good and ideal and a lot of those chips act money did not actually get taken out which is why Trump had the money around to get this intel investment and part of that was because we were trying to force a lot of policy on those companies. So, we are forcing different types of policy, but we are forcing who they could hire, what sort of daycare they had to provide on site. There are all sorts of strings attached to getting that chipsack money. And I'm not sure that's any better or worse. In fact, maybe it's slightly worse than what we're doing. So, you know, I I don't think we're in a perfect solution. I would have liked to see guidance, but I think it's hard to say that the CHIPS Act was any more fair and probably slightly more unfair if you're a taxpayer. And, you know, I think this will evolve over time. >> Okay. Um, do you expect to see more of this going forward? I I think the answer is yes, but >> yeah, I really do. I think, you know, they're starting to talk, I think it was Senator Lumis on the it was more crypto that they're going to try and convert some gold into this $3 trillion war fund that they can buy crypto. I think in the end they wind up doing this $3 trillion fund, but a lot of it actually just goes to investment in our industries, our corporations much more so than a crypto. And that same mechanism where they try and convert some of the gold, sell some of the gold to create a sovereign wealth fund because that's the one thing that Trump is running out of right now is pockets of money you can use. He had the Intel money. There was some money around a department of defense I think they use for the MP investment. I believe it's the Department of Energy had money for the LAC which is lithium America's corporation investment. So I I think they are going to try and create a bigger sovereign wealth that will let them do this. And you know, you're also seeing kind of I don't want to say tricks, but the government is allowing nuclear projects to be built on military bases, right? The US government has immense say on regulation of federal land, which the military bases are on. So, >> so people are saying, "Not in my backyard." So, Trump's saying, "Okay, fine. We'll just put it on, you know, >> right military. >> It might be, right, it might be in your backyard, but you now have no say over it." So, um, you know, and again, that's not ideal, but again, I think we're on the early stages. And I think this kind of mentality is going to permeate a little bit more where everyone's got to say, okay, let's take a step back and if mercantism is right, I really like that idea and how she said Avery was from Ao Bank was explaining it like if this is what we're going to do, what are we doing wrong in that respect? How do we fix this? And I also think it does tells very nicely if you look at the attention we're spending now on South America whether it's what we're doing in V Venezuela or Colombia which have their own issues what we're trying I think to do ultimately with Mexico and our involvement with Argentina we're taking our eye back on to you know the north south um rather than you know the Asia Pacific and the reality is it is much easier for us to be militarily and you know navywise in control of the region than it is in the Southeast Asia where China's naval, you know, has come and as I've learned from a lot of our military experts, the tyranny of distance is real. The further you are from something, the harder it is for you to maintain any element of control. So, I think we really are turning our attention back to this, you know, north, south, Central America alliance. >> Yeah. This sort of Monroe Doctrine, right? >> Yeah. >> Neo Monroe doctrine. >> Yeah. I think the Monroe doctrine gets a lot of talk, but I don't think anyone's done anything about it in a long time. And I feel like we're at the early stages again of adopting something like that. >> Yeah. And I imagine that's probably part of why we invested in Argentina, right? Which is, hey, this is an ally. We we we want more of this type of model in the southern hemisphere uh on on our side of the map. Um and uh and probably also why we're taking a harder line against places like Venezuela and whatnot because hey, if we can kind of help regime change there, and I know I hate to say that because the US really, my personal opinion shouldn't be in the business of regime change, right? But they'd love to get that, you know, they'd love to get that problem resolved, but more importantly, I think they'd love to get uh China's influence out of there and they would love to get that that Venezuelan oil flowing again. But but in our hemisphere, >> yeah, and I don't mean to be flippant. It'll probably come across a bit as flippant, but you know, we've had this war on drugs for decades, and now it actually looks a bit like a war. So, you know, I I think it's kind of interesting what we're trying to do. I think there's questions marks around some of this and again like a lot of things Trump has done on the economic side I think he's doing on this side we're pushing the envelope in terms of what's normal engagement what's approved engagement but it is setting a very different tone. >> Yeah. Um so I'm going to say something and I do not mean it to to come out partisan. I'm not I'm not trying to make a comment in favor or against but um in business there's this saying if it doesn't get measured it doesn't get moved. And there's a lot of things like you were sort of referencing earlier, Peter, that um [snorts] you know, probably honestly for a number of different administrations, Republican and Democrat, you know, we've kind of been naval gazers on a lot of this stuff. So Rare Earths is a great example. You know, we talked forever about the fact that, hey, we're probably too dependent on other parties for this, right? But we just never really did anything. And hey, we've got rare earths, you know, in North America, but we just really didn't prioritize, you know, building our own domestic uh industry for that. And now, of course, we're scrambling, right? Um it seems like the new administration on a lot of things is starting to to measure, right? Um how much fentanyl is coming into the country? We don't want it. Okay, let's start. Where are we points? Okay, it's coming in by sea. Let's just start blowing up boats and hopefully diminishing that, right? Too many illegal aliens. Okay, what can we do to close the border? and you know all of a sudden there's zero basically border crossing stuff like that. So they they are using the the measurement set. So let me ask you this they they're they're using that mercantalist playbook. How how likely do you think this is to work? And if by working we mean advancing America first priorities of of becoming a lot more uh resilient or sustainable as a sovereign nation. >> One I think it works much better if we go back to kind of working with our allies a little bit. So I think it's been encouraging a little bit some of the deals they've been announcing you know in this recent trip but before that with Australia on some of the rarest and critical minerals a little bit less you know encouraging how we continue to fight with China but sorry with Canada. So I I think if we go back to again kind of my base market or benchmark is x% a fairly large percent has to be done domestically but some part is going to have to be optimized with your allies and neighbors. And again I think it was encouraging that Trump seems to be taking tariffs off things like bananas and coffee which we don't really grow. I guess we grow coffee in Hawaii but it's already very expensive coffee so they're not going to be protected by tariffs anyways. >> So I I see some of that change. I think to the extent we keep this friction on it's a real race. Anyways, I think China right now is trying to gauge how much control they have over rarest and critical minerals and the process and refined versions and whether it's worth them trying to choke that off or not versus how quickly they're evolving their AI and data centers. They know they're ahead on electricity. They're behind on AI and data centers. They seem almost willing to say, you know what, we're going to avoid some of the Nvidia chips because we believe if we kind of force necessity on us, we'll grow this. So, I think it's far from a done deal. Again, China is down to only we're representing only about 15% of China's trade, right? So, they have done a great job diversifying away from us. I think we talked about this last time. My view has been that for the last five or six years, China's been transitioning from a made in China to made by China. And in made in China, they were making our goods and content for us to sell those across the globe. And now they're aggressively trying to sell their own brands, whether it's Huawei, whether it's BYD. And so, they've made a lot of progress on that. they have really strong you know bilateral sort of trade agreements or negotiations where a lot of the autocratic resource nations sell their rare earth commit you know commodities basically to China and China in turn loads them back and sells them a bunch of their finished goods and I don't think we should underestimate a lot of the emerging markets countries have been frustrated over the decades that they need the dollar to buy goods that the swift system is a very expensive and you know obtuse system to use that we periodically use sanctions against them so there's a lot of, you know, willingness, I think, for countries to like explore trade with China. So, I think it's far from a done deal. And the more erratic we appear, the more kind of we flip-flopped, the more we hurt our allies. Um, again, I have no idea why we seem to be in friction with India excessively, right? India would have been one of my first stops in trying to compete against China is working closely with India. We seem to have gone the opposite. There's time for that. So, I I think it's very up in the air and I think we're going to go through some hiccups as we go through this. >> Okay. Um, I think you just asked this answered this question then, but it's the one I was going to get to next, which is, you know, you have a bunch of um, current and former uh, both military experts and I just think political experts um, in your your network there at the Academy of Securities. Um, as I understand it, and I am not a military or political expert, but that the reason why Trump did Liberation Day and kind of put trade war tariffs and and you know, trade pressure on everybody all at once was because he said, "Look, um, I got to I I got to contain China and I don't have a ton of time and so I think I've got the best hand at the poker table right now. So, I'm essentially going to do a global flex and I'm gonna basically call everybody and you're gonna kind of, you know, if you got a better hand than me, great. Congrats to you. But I'm betting you don't. And if you don't, you get to kind of pick team America or team China. And so my question to you is is I know it's messy, but net net, is he getting more people closer to our side through this or is he pushing them further away and into China's arms? You know, there's a lot of debate for that. I would say we don't seem to see Peter Navaro on TV anymore. So maybe he just listened to the wrong adviser at the time as well. So, you know, Trump is not a afraid to change who he listens to, who he takes, you know, >> works with. It seems like Besson has become his right-hand person. I'm not sure whether Besson would advise this or not. Um, you know, >> but that said, he hasn't backed out of these trade deals either. >> No. And I think personally I'm of the opinion we probably could have had a lot of these trade deals without going through the liberation day process that I think we could have negotiated with a lot of these countries. And the one fear that I have is the president, you know, he loves deals, but you look in his company last time, you know, it was thousands and thousands of LLC's and everything's an individual property, right? And this golf course in Ireland, maybe there's two or three golf courses in Ireland that are tied together, but it's a series of individual transactions and the world doesn't quite work that way, right? There's only, you know, 20 some odd countries, regions that you need to deal with and people have a memory. And it does not surprise me at all that everyone is coming around and shaking hands and doing deals because what else are you going to do right now? But behind the scenes, what are they trying to do to alleviate themselves from this, you know, potentially chaotic policy, right? It's, you know, they, you know, Japan did played very nice. I believe she gave him a golden golf ball. She um, you know, they've done a lot of things to encourage him, but behind the scenes, what is the relationship? How long does it continue? What's going on behind the scenes? Is China able to use that? And I do think China is relying a little bit on the fact that we may just switch our attention to something else because that seems to be the nature of the US and that whatever China decides they want to do for the next year, they will do because no one has choice. The corporations don't have a choice. The people don't have a choice. >> Anything Trump says, one-third of the population is going to think is idiotic. One third of the population is going to think awesome. the one-third of the population that's trying to figure out whether it makes sense or not has trouble getting good information because the we only hear from the other two sides and so it is much harder for us as a nation I think to put these things in motion and you're probably going to see a lot of people position against you know and go pro nimi because if Trump's for you know for Nimi and you know they'll go no no no we have to protect our things they're setting themselves up for whether it's the midterms or the next set of you know presidential elections so it's more chaotic here to you know navigate through this So maybe I should have added that when you ask who's going to win that is the one thing that's hard even if we have a great strategy it is hard to implement because first US corporations have their own risk responsibilities globally not just to the US and we have so much friction internally it's sometimes very difficult to figure out where we're headed and what's the right answer and actually get people moving in that direction despite the fact that I am very comfortable that when I travel across the country I talk to corporations I talk to some of the large states and municipalities I talk to a lot large asset managers, no one who I consider kind of decision-making people are that far apart on what we think we should be doing. Unfortunately, I don't think they're very well represented by DC, but there there is this, I think, overwhelming kind of consensus in and around the middle of what are the right sort of trade-offs. And yes, there would be some friction push comes to shove what you give up or won't, but I don't think we're that far. We can kind of unleash this middle. >> Okay. Um, God, I'd love to keep digging into this with you. Um, I guess we're just gonna have to have you back on again soon, Peter. Um, but let me let me get back into the question I sort of asked in my intro here, which is, okay, all this is going on in the trade side, right? Um, with trade, you know, come comes these tariffs, right? And, um, the tariffs are making some goods more expensive. Um but they are also putting money in the coffers and the the general treasury account for the government to spend right helping us cushion the deficit a bit. Um uh and most notably we we haven't seen um you know runaway inflation the way that folks initially feared. Now, now granted, we're probably not feeling the full effects of the tariffs yet, but also too, hopefully a number of these tariffs are going to get reduced, right? And that's a big part of, you know, what's going on right now with with these these live real-time trade negotiations. So, um, but I guess my point is is tariffs don't seem to be the um radioactive issue that they were thought they might be back in April. Um, we now will have we now have some trade deals in place and and should hopefully have more in place soon and pretty soon we'll have covered all the big countries that really matter, right? The 20 that you were talking about. Um, we also have the passage of the big beautiful bill. Um, whether you agree with it or not, it's now passed and so that deregulation uh is taking effect. Uh we also have some incremental tax relief beyond just extending the the tax uh cut from the first Trump administration. So these are all things that are stimulative to the economy. And so do you expect at some point as we enter 2026 that we will actually start getting some material tailwinds from all this or are there other concerns that make you think that's too simple assumption? >> Yes. Yeah. So, I think I'll play a little bit of devil's advocate here because I do agree things like the big beautiful bill can help especially the accelerated depreciation, right? That goes handinhand with what we've been talking about this production for security, right? Oh, if I got to build new, you know, property, plant and equipment, acceleration, accelerated depreciation helps a lot towards that. I would say the two things that make me less, you know, comfortable is we've been getting about 30 billion of extra tariff revenue a month. 25 to 30 billion extra tariff revenue a month since um only since May really. So it's about $180 billion of extra tariff revenue is coming through the system. So it's not that meaningful yet, right? And it's helped on the deficit, but it's you know it's kind of only cropping up. I also think the large corporations have avoided a lot of that because they they have the working capital to you know get orders accelerated to get them brought in. So, I think of the problems that are being faced at the tariff level are really small companies right now, mid-size companies who are struggling. They tend not to show up in the data. I don't think our data captures the small and mid-size companies as timely as we tend to capture the data from the large companies. We don't see it because we don't have to look at their stock prices. We don't get earnings announcements. So, I think we I think we're I think it won't be until Q1 that you start hearing a little bit more about this. I would say the other two factors to me that are very, you know, kind of go hand in hand is, you know, at least when I was in business, you know, everyone had a couple quarters of things squirreled away. So even if terrorists were impacting you, you don't necessarily have to show it today because you're waiting to see where this all plays out. >> You had some cushion. Got it. >> You had some cushion. And then finally, no one wants to say anything right now to attract this administration's attention, right? You do not want to go on your conference and call and say, "I hate these tariffs. They're awful." Because the next day something will happen to you potentially in the press. you'll get some, you know, nasty social media tweet about yourself. So, I think people are downplaying this and figuring out ways and like you say, hoping that trade deals and stuff take, you know, into effect. So, I don't think we start hearing or seeing anything about tariffs until Q1. I think that slows it down. And in the meantime, I do think we have been seeing, you know, some impacts from, you know, the AI and the less hiring. I'm very, very worried about college grad jobs where that's all headed. And then you know we had the recent bankruptcy of I guess you can either call it tricolor or tricolor. Um you know that was probably directly a result of some of our migration policies right it was a company it's my understanding was heavily dependent on lending in and around Texas. Many of the people there may have been you know affected by the crackdown on migration. So you know there's a lot of good I I think a lot of these things make sense. Having said that there were people who are spending money. You look at, you know, the talk about switching all these people to robots. And I my gut fear is that everyone's going to cut back a little bit on spending coming into next year. There's still so much uncertainty and your expense is someone else's revenue. And that to me, I think that's why we're going to stay a little bit slow. You know, I'd love to see this big boom. I'd love to see all these things turn into fruition, but we've also heard a lot of promises on potential future capital outlays. I'm not sure how much we've seen in terms of existing capital outlays. And when I talk to foreign corporations, despite some of what's being said at the government level, I think there is a lot of concern about putting property planning equipment on the ground in the US after you saw what happened to the Huawei plant, you know, sorry, uh, Hyundai plant, um, you know, factory. I would like to be more optimistic. I think there's a heavy drag on this economy and if the AI spend cracks at all, I I think we could see a problematic Q1, Q2. >> Okay. uh in the Hyundai factory that was basically sort of ICE coming in there and and uh saying hey we think a lot of your workers here there were a lot of them Koreans but aren't aren't legal. >> Yes after Korea made a big investment. So I think again I don't know the details we haven't seen much who turned out to be illegal how many were here properly or not but you know things like that don't encourage companies certainly don't encourage the workers to come over. >> Yeah. Okay. All right. So, uh, sounds like in a nutshell you said you are concerned that Q1 and Q2 may be softer than folks are currently expecting right now. Um, okay. >> But I'm not completely bearish or anything like that. I do think >> yields will be okay. And again, the one thing we haven't talked about, I think Trump will ultimately cave on solar. I think he is being told by all his advisers that you really do need solar as part of this. I think they might be telling about wind on that. I think he's going to fight wind much longer than he has a certain visceral I think hatred of wind. Um whether it's because it destroyed his views in his Scottish golf course or I think partly he does not like the death that it causes with birds and things like that. Um but I think solar he's going to wind up having to accept. So I do like being a little bit overweight some of the solar names partly because they do not trade very well. And by solar names, not the companies that lend against putting solar on your roof, but really the electricity or energy providers that are heavily solar who their stock prices are low, they still have fairly large short interest. I think they will actually do surprisingly well as the need for electricity pulls solar with it. >> Okay. Um, super interesting. Again, I'm biting my tongue. I'm looking at we only have 10 minutesish left. Um, so Peter, we'll have to, like I said, have to have you on again soon. Um, okay. So, um, I want to get to kind of a market outlook, but just for a second, um, we we we talked a while ago about, um, concerns that that that, uh, could be voiced about, uh, whether the AI stocks are going to be able to or the the AI companies whose stocks are high-flying are going to be able to grow their earnings enough to justify their current uh, market valuations. If they can't, um, and I'm not saying you're predicting this is going to happen, but if they can't, that would cause a substantial repricing in that that sector, which of course now makes up such a huge percentage of both the S&P index and even more so of the NASDAQ, that there would be a pretty big material general market correction, and that would have probably some negative wealth impacts that would slow the economy even more. Correct. >> Yeah. And that's why I think I'm kind of trying to be overweight kind of these national champions. These things that I think are going to develop from ProSac, which clearly if the AI story fades at all, you're going to see electricity prices probably come down. So you'll see some of those stocks fade. So again, your lottery tickets probably get crushed, but some of the longer term plays I think do well. I think you want to own some of the small caps. Some of the things that have been left behind. You know, I've been starting to look, I don't have this on, but the equal weighted indices, and you know, there are ETFs that you can do. the equal weighted indices have really lagged behind the market cap weighted indices recently. So maybe you switch, you know, take some profits in the market cap weighted ones and switch to. So I don't think you want to be out of this market. I'm not that afraid of the world, but I do think you kind of want to look for those opportunities. And I think you want to dabble in some of the parts of Europe, whether it's Poland. I still like Poland. I think that's going to become a huge beneficiary of any rebuild. >> And I do think that this production for security is going to catch on globally. So I think there might be some value in some of the you know European energy stocks that haven't done as well as the US energy stocks. Um so I I kind of want to own heavily weighted to kind of prosac kind of and the left behind less weighted to you know the big highf flyers precisely for that risk that you talked about and I basically have cut all my exposure to China because I do think there's potential for more friction long before the one year ends. >> Got it. Okay. Um, so, uh, general market call, I mean, I'm not gonna hold you to this, but I'm curious. >> Since 2022, which was a down year for both stocks and bonds, stocks have done very well, right? Uh, plus 20% returns in 2023 and 2024. Definitely unless something goes pretty wrong now, at least double digit returns again here in 2025, right? Um, what kind of what kind of year do you think that the market's going to have next year? And I don't need necessarily a number, but it could be a downyear, slightly up, way up, uh, kind of kind of guesstimation. And and I'm guessing whatever you're going to say, >> you you see that there's going to be well, you think it's it's quite possible that there could be a pretty sizable capital rotation from these high-f flyers over the past few years into some of these other spaces like the pros. >> Yeah. So I I think you're going to see the outperformance from these other areas next year. I think they're going to do they're going to outperform the highf flyers next year just based on valuation and where I see the attention this government's going to you know I see another potential for a double digit returns as much as I talked about some of the caveats right you know if these things all do click right and we really start seeing the government investment in pros lead to corporate investment in that lead to asset managers chasing those things and again that's been one of the beauties right of you know the US is every asset manager is looking at some of these stocks that I've been talking about or those sectors and saying, "Wow, they've crushed it lately. They're up 30%. They're up 50%. They're up 100%. They're up 20%." Money will flow into that and I think it can feed on itself, right? Again, in a the best of all worlds, right? Capitalism actually does allow capital to flow into areas that we should be growing. And so, it won't just be the government putting money into that. So, I think you could see really good growth. I think you can see corporate strategies in and around that to some degree, right? You could even look at the mags, you know, the data center AI people, how closely they're aligning themselves to the electricity producers, right? They realize that their business is not sustainable unless they have, you know, captive energy producers or very closely tied energy producers. So, if that permeates, I think you have all those kind of, you know, tailwinds going through you. You've got less investment uh sorry, lower interest rates you're going to have. I think the tenure is not going to get much above 4%. In fact, I think it'll probably probably get down to 360 or 370 early next year. So, you're going to have those tailwinds. And if we can get these deals with other countries and kind of back off this whole friction and China lets us go for the year without trying to stop us, I think we could have a great year. I also see a real solid chance of being down 10 to 15%. So, I think I want to own some hedge strategies. I want to be careful every time we get excited. I want to look for some sort of optionality. But again, that's why I find some of those pros names more comfortable because I feel that their downside is much less than their upside. >> Yeah. >> And that's kind of why I want my portfolio. So even if I'm wrong on about the upside story, I don't think they get hit as much on the downside. >> Okay. All right. Hey, by the way, I appreciate you being so specific like this. All right. We're going to get to just rapid fire for the next couple minutes. Um, and you've already answered one of my rapidfire questions, but anything else you might want to add to bonds and bond yields next year. Heard you say 10 years likely to go down maybe somewhere around 3.6. Anything else you want to say about bonds for 2026? >> Yeah, listen to Bessant. He says he wants 3%. We'll get to 3% on Fed funds. He wants sub 10 4%. He wants a 3% tens. I think they'll push it. I think people underestimate the willingness of the Federal Reserve to do things to keep yields low. I think they have operation twist which we've done and I will say I don't think we get to yield curve control and people like oh why would we ever like I think Bernani got very close to yield curve control. Yellen got very close to doing yield curve control. Powell hasn't had to do it but it is on their playbook and if any administration is comfortable setting the prices. Trump talks about setting the prices for tariffs. He talks about setting the prices for Fed funds. I I do not get I I think this administration with Besson and Treasury will keep 10 years under control and we won't have some sort of backlash even if we cut rates. And I think that's one of the biggest fears out there that people have had that's going to be misplaced. And I think corporate credit's going to do fine. I think private equity, private credit might have some issues. It's small. It's not going to drag down the economy. Corporate credit as a whole is very solid. So I'm very comfortable with your fixed income portion of your portfolio, which allows you maybe to be a little bit more aggressive in your equity side of the portfolio. >> Okay. Um, God, I love I love you being so concise and specific. It's awesome. Oil. >> I like oil. I think the commodity itself will only do okay. I'm reasonably convinced, and this might sound tinfoil hat, but I think it's reasonable. Is that the Saudis will keep oil below 70 as much as they possibly can. They have a diminishing resource anyway. So, you it's diminishing in value over time. They want chips. So, I think the agreement they have, whether it's implicit, tacit, or just, you know, wink wink, is you sell us chips, we keep oil under 70. I don't think they let it go below 50 because that starts hurting you as producers. But I think the real value is going to become on the companies that can refine and process energy, oil prices, natural gas. I think natural gas has a lot more room to run. I think the companies around that I think you're going to see a lot of development in and around, you know, natural gas fired electronic production and even coal >> because that'll be the bridge fuel for for the data centers until nuclear hopefully comes online, >> right? That's the two to sevenyear backbone. >> Yep. Okay. Awesome. Um, in and the oil stocks are pretty beaten down right now. So, presumably a good time to be entering, >> right? And that's why I love them. I think the hedge funds still don't like them. I think there's, you know, shorts in them. And I think people have not understood that we are having a shift in what we think about in terms of sustainability and how important these are going to be to our growth and getting out of this morass that we've been stuck in. >> Okay. And by the way the one thing although it takes 5 years say to build you know let's call it three years to build a you know um gas fired plant that three years is going to require all sorts of construction material to build it there is going to be a huge amount of demand for these resources and jobs coming out of it just like the data centers as they're being built I think data centers actually create more jobs while they're being built than when they're actually built but that's a separate issue but yeah there is that demand for these hard raw commodities so I think energy all they do very Well, they're still undervalued. >> Got it. And I'm assuming um I'm going to ask you about gold next, but I'm assuming copper would would benefit from what you're talking about. >> Gold. Yes. I think all the industrial, you know, they will all continue to do well. This growth is happening. And you know, the only way I think it stops is if China really puts a clamp on their exports of process and refined rares and critical minerals is what I and I can't remember if I mentioned this last show. This become probably one of my favorite quotations is it was during co the CEO of um Whirlpool went on TV and said just as a reminder a washing machine that's 99% is not done and I think that's the risk with China's control of the rarest and critical minerals the process and refined versions yeah they're only a tiny component of many things but if that tiny component doesn't get to us we don't have a finished product and so I think that's the risk of China and that's why I I view that this administration has such an urgency to allevate that risk. >> I'm curious um in the uh rare earth space um I mean I know in the past month or so the publicly traded companies that have anything to do with rare earths have just exploded, right? Because everyone's realizing, oh my gosh, we've determined this is like >> priority number one. Um >> too late to get in on that or early innings still? >> I still very early innings. I think you got to be careful. Again, some of the lottery tickets I've sold, you know, some of those out. I'll be reloading, but I would want to focus on those who have processing and refining cap capacity, right? We can still buy like China does not produce all of their own rare earths and critical minerals, right? They refine almost the entire world. So, I think they have about a 60 to 70% control over the pro the rare and critical minerals themselves, but it's the 90% on the processing refining. We completely seated it. We all closed our eyes and said, "Well, it's a dirty process to, you know, refine these things, so we'll give it to China so it's not so dirty." And I think that was insane. So, we have the >> just like we gave all our plastics and they just dumped it in the ocean. But yeah. >> Right. Yeah. So, we were worried about plastic straws and they're, you know, destroying the universe very quickly. So, I I think that's where I want to be is who has some sort of technology or an edge around that, you know, refining or processing. And again, I think the nuclear story is even easier. You know, who's going to be supplying the uranium? These things are going to take time to come up, but I think what the government's trying to do is, you know, ramp that up through what they're able to do on federal lands to get those economy of scale. So, I don't think it's too early at all or sorry, too late at all. I think there's still plenty of opportunity. >> Okay, great. Gold, >> you know, I don't really touch that at this stage. I've lost track of, you know, where it is. It's been a phenomenal investment um for the people who involved, you know, overdone to me possibly. I I think so. I think this, you know, but I I I don't have a good enough sense on that and I've given up following it. It's kind of not a part of my portfolio because there's certain things you just realize I get wrong all the time, so I'm just going to ignore that part. >> All right. Hey, I you very much appreciate that in in a in a uh in a capital manager. Um somebody who just says, "Hey, look, this is my zone of expertise. This one isn't in it right now. You know, don't don't use me as your your source on this." >> All right. Um, Peter, look, this has been fantastic. We're at the end of the time here, but um, thank you so much. For folks that would like to follow you and your work, where should they go? >> So, they can, uh, go to our website atacademyurities.com. They can find a bunch of our research out there, or you can follow me on Twitter, TFMKTS. >> All right, fantastic. And Peter, when I edit this, I will put up uh the link to your website and your Twitter handle there on the screen so folks know where to go. Folks, the links will be uh down in the description below this video as well. Um folks, please do me a favor. Join me in thanking Peter for being so generous uh and specific with um all these details. Uh let them know that by hitting the like button and then clicking on the subscribe button below as well as that little bell icon right next to it. Um, if you are a DIY investor and you know really like what you've heard from Peter here, uh, then definitely go to his uh, website and avail yourself to all the resources there. Uh, if you're not a DIY investor and you are inspired by what Peter talked about here and would like to get some professional help in answering how you might be able to put some of these ideas to use in your portfolio, I highly recommend you get that advice from a good professional financial adviser. importantly, one who takes into consideration all the topics that Peter has mentioned here. If you've got a good one who's doing that for you, great. Stick with them. But if you don't, um, or you just like a second opinion from one who does, consider scheduling a free consultation with one of the financial adviserss that Thoughtful Money endorses. These are the firms you see with me on this channel week in and week out. To do that, just fill out the very short form at thoughtfulmoney.com. Only takes you a couple seconds to fill out. These consultations are totally free. There's no uh commitments involved. It's just a service these firms offer to be as helpful as possible. Peter, thanks so much. It's always wonderful talking to you. Um it's going to be really interesting to see what happens in 2026. We'll get you back in Q1 uh to provide an update for us. Uh but in the interim, best of luck and again, really appreciate everything you shared with us today. >> Thanks very much and sorry about the early audio issues. >> Hey, look, that's we that's sometimes just Murphy's law. I think we did a good job correcting it halfway through. Um all right, Peter, thank you so much. And everybody else, thanks so much for watching.