What to Do While Everyone's Chasing the Same Seven Stocks

Summary

• AI: Framed as a transformative wave akin to the internet buildout, with value creation likely at the edge via consumer and enterprise applications rather than solely in infrastructure
• Agentic AI: Apple (AAPL) is positioned to lead with on-device, privacy-preserving assistants, though Siri's shortcomings and historical incumbent missteps pose execution risk
• Mega-Caps: Alphabet (GOOGL) faces search monetization risks in an AI world; Microsoft (MSFT) and Amazon (AMZN) cloud units risk pricing pressure as data centers commoditize
• Data Centers: Massive capex meets real-world bottlenecks—FERC permitting, interconnect delays, and multi-year turbine lead times—raising questions on near-term returns for hyperscalers
• Commodities: Emphasis on supply-driven analysis over demand narratives; opportunities exist beyond hyped tech in the “S&P 493,” with oil and materials highlighted
• Oil: Despite underinvestment in shale and geopolitical tensions, prices remain subdued; focus on E&P supply dynamics and bankruptcy-driven capacity cycles
• Copper: AI/EV buildouts support demand, but supply is the key variable; incentivization pricing and long lead times drive cyclical outcomes
• Blockchain: Separated from crypto speculation, ledger technology is seen as enterprise-enabling (healthcare, accounting, title), offering durable productivity gains

Transcript

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Hello and welcome to the Stansbury Investor Hour. I'm Dan Ferris. I'm the editor of Extreme Value and the Ferris Report, both published by Stanberry Research. And I'm Cory Mclaclin, editor of the Stanberry Daily Digest. Today we talk with Stansbury Research senior analyst Gabe Marshank. >> Get out the pens and pencils. take good notes. This guy's really smart. He's fun to talk with and he's got a lot of really good ideas. So, let's do it. Let's talk with Gabe Marshank. Let's do it right now. Gabe, welcome to the show. Really nice to have you here today. >> Thank you very much. I'm excited to chop it up with some guys who uh who know what they're talking about. >> All right. Well, we'll try to find a couple of those for you. In the meantime, Cy and I will be peppering you with questions. Um, so I uh, of course I don't know if this has become tedious for you since uh, you've become involved with Stansbury, but I'm going to do it again since it's just so cool to people like us. Um, if you could tell our readers um, a little our readers and listeners right now um, a little bit about your your resume as an investor because it's really cool. >> Um, yeah. No, I'm happy to talk about it. I mean it's it's me. Um so I went to undergraduate at Yale. Uh and most of the people in my class who were interested in business were going off to become investment bankers. And uh I talked to some folks who graduated and I was like what's that like? And uh this is 1997 when I'm graduating. Investment banking was a really cool thing to do. People were making a ton of dough and everybody was miserable. They were all working their tails off sleeping in the office and that had no appeal to me. So, I set out a goal to find a job in either New York or San Francisco. I'm originally from the Bay Area, so that appealed. And I wanted to make at least $25,000 a year, which sounds kind of laughable, and in retrospect, it is. Uh, but I got a lead on a job at a hedge fund, and at the time, nobody I knew had ever even heard of a hedge fund. And so, I had to go to the, uh, Sterling Memorial Library at Yale and look it up in the card catalog. We didn't have it online at that point. Look in Dewey Decimal System. and I found out a hedge fund was basically whatever you wanted it to be. So I go down to New York to interview with this guy. Turns out to be Lee Coopermanman. Now Lee is famously super loyal to his employees and also tough as nails to work for. And I'm being generous when I say nails. Uh he the interview consisted of the guy who had brought me in to interview David bringing me to his office and saying, "Lee, here's this guy, Gabe. Um I think you might like him." And and Lee goes, "I don't got time for this. If you like him, I like him. see how cheap you can get them. Uh, the answer was $35,000 a year. So, I was over the moon. That was like 40% higher than anything I expected. >> Oh, wow. >> So, I started working in a hedge fund, but I was not doing any of the hedge fund stuff. I was getting lunches and handing out day reports and uh basically just being the young guy on the desk. I mean, I was a week off graduation from college when I started at a hedge fund. I I I knew nothing. Um, but I'm a pretty scrappy dude. And so, first I taught myself uh accounting. I hadn't studied uh economics in college or or at least not business. I studied economics. I was a political science major. Um and then I followed up by starting to get my CFA, taking courses on Excel, literally just teaching myself all the substrate of what you need to know to become a hedge fund analyst because I saw these guys in their 20s making millions and I thought like, yeah, 35 grand is good, but a million's better. I'll take that, please. Uh and so I started going around to guys and being like, what can I do to help you out? And first it was uh listen to this conference call and and just take some notes and let me know what the company said. And then it was go to this corporate presentation at a conference and tell me what the company said. And then it was call around to the sell side, that's the Wall Street banks, and and get some uh um financial models on what you know these analysts think the companies are going to do. Uh and then it was look at the look at the models and um start to tell me which you know what they say and where they differ. And then all of a sudden, this guy, his name is Larry, and he says, "Uh, well, you've you've seen the companies, you've seen the models. What do you think?" Uh, Larry is, of course, Larry Robbins. He now runs Glen View Capital. He's a billionaire, and he was my first mentor. So, he really started me in the business. Um, and and you know, there's a an old axiom, an old saying my friend has. It's not where you work, it's who you work for. And I was really fortunate enough to work for Larry. And, and he really taught me the ropes. Um, from there I went on and uh, over the course of my career I was lucky enough to spend eight years working at SACE with Steve Cohen. Um, I was an analyst as a generalist. I focused on a lot of capital intensive industries like cyclicals, industrials, energy, utilities, but I really looked at at whatever I wanted. Um, and with SACE I was able to move to London. Uh, I was following a lot of London uh, European stocks. I thought there was a great opportunity in Europe and I moved out there and that kind of got me out of the noise and that really changed my investment framework. Uh and then while I was in London I then moved over to Greenlight Capital working for David Einhorn. Uh David is not only a very funny dude uh he is whipsmart and a tremendous investor and I've learned a tremendous amount from him as well. So I've had the fortune to work for a bunch of these investment legends and you know each one of them I tried to draw something that was really going to be of value for me. So what um c can you give us like one sort of big lesson like what's the one big thing you learned from Einhorn one big thing from Cohen Coopermanman was there >> I mean look there's so much it's it's really hard to say but I I asked David uh Einhorn um at one point I said what do you believe now that you don't believe five years ago and this is a question I think that is something I always ask myself it's it's really important to have intellectual flexibility in the stock market because it's always changing. And we were going through a financial model and he looked down at it and he said, "I don't think the answer is here." Pointing of the model, he said, "I think the answer is out here." And so, I think that that numbers are the starting point. And for my entire career, I've been very very focused on numbers. I take SEC filed documents as gospel. I ignore what's in investment pitch books that aren't SEC regulated. I build my models to a to a very high degree of sophistication integrating the income statement, balance sheet, cash flow and making sure they project forward. And that said, that was just a way station towards understanding the bigger picture, which is how businesses actually interact in the real world. So that was the the lesson from Einhard. Um the lesson from Steve was very different and that was uh about when to know when you're on to something. And so what I'm working with um for finding ideas going forward is this instinct that I've built up after 25 years in in the market um of I'm not on to something pretty big. I'm on to something huge. And I've learned to trust my instinct on that. And we say instinct, but instinct is really just a a learned response after tons and tons and tons of of reps, right? you know, a home run hitter might have an instinct of how to swing, but it's only because they've they've tried so many times. And so, that's kind of what I've tried to design into my process is that that feel, you know, Whitney Tulsen likes to call it his Spidey sense. You know, uh I think you have your own version of this. Anyone with gray hair is still around in this business is going to have their version of, hey, this has worked for me for 25 years. I'm going to go back to that. Well, >> yeah. Right. For me, it's like I don't think this is going to be a big disaster, you know, because because when you start I'll tell you, Gabe, when you start in the newsletter business, um you're surrounded by people pushing the most speculative sort of, you know, lowquality stuff, every now and then somebody hits a, you know, multiagger and the rest of them are like, you know, minus 50 to 100%. Um, and getting out of that was like, whoa, whoa. So, there's such a thing as a real business and it works like this that, you know, >> see, it's funny. We we've come to I think we've probably just uh high-fived as we were crossing paths. So, my background was Lee Coopermanman is a legendarily a value investor. Uh, and so I I cut my teeth on on value investment, right? Hey, here's a business that's going to grow a little bit more than the S&P that's trading at a little bit of a discount to the S&P and I think I can own that for a while. or even worse, here's a okay business that's super cheap and maybe it goes back to being okay and investors revise that. And um what I found over time is that a small degree of winners constitutes the the majority of my gains. And so the thing that I'm training myself to do is how to just hang on to a winner. And going back to what I was saying earlier, you know, the answers out there are not always in the numbers. You know, I think we've all made the mistake and my biggest investment mistakes I can tell you are not the ones that went to zero. They're the ones that I sold even if I sold them at a double. I mean, you know, I think back even even at the time I've been involved in Stanbury and its affiliates, you know, my biggest mistakes have been cutting my gains. And that's a real Steve Cohen lesson is is how to uh how to cut your losses, but let your gains go. We we did maybe high-five each other. Maybe we high-fived each other going the other way, but um over time it's just um it's like I've lost the extreme viewpoints. You know, it has to be all value or all this or all that. And um you know, you develop that what what Whitney calls spidey sense or whatever. I it seems to me like I I feel like I've developed it about a number of things because we've had some some big winners um in extreme value and in you know hopefully the Ferris report we're getting some triple digit winners after a couple years here and the ability to hang on to the winner man uh I don't know if those have been my biggest mistakes they well put it this way you're right they're the biggest mistakes because they would have more than amortized losers and then given you a bigger your overall gain. So, I I have to agree with you on that one. >> That's right. And there's no one-sizefits-all. This whole notion of value versus growth is just an asinine distinction. You know, >> value investing um buying something less than intrinsic value. You know, you can buy a stock at 30 times earnings, but if it's growing fast enough and profitable enough, that's less than its intrinsic value. That's fine. >> So, you know, value investing often, you know, the the old version of it, right? The gram and dod that, you know, the people in the 50s, 60s, 70s kind of grew up on. Yeah, >> you know that applied to a different world and it applied to a world and I'm very cautious about saying when things change but the thing that has changed in the US economy in the last 30 years has become less capital intensive right it used to be to have a business you had to invest your capital in it and so as a result margins were mean reverting right if you made too much money somebody would come in and build a new car factory or start a new airline and then that would cause over supply and pricing would come down and margins would come down and then people go bankrupt and all of a sudden there'd be less supply and prices would go up and margins would go up And so you get this big cycle, right? >> And book value meant something, right? >> And book value meant something now, right? And we can return to book value if you really want to get into obstruuse uh um accounting. Accounting is kind of core of what I do, but I try not to talk about it too much because it's so tedious for most people. But the uh the the fact of the matter is that Google is not mean reverting, right? Google search is a platform that it's not like you can start a competing search business and compete away their margins. It's not going to work that way. Same with Facebook. Same with AWS. AWS actually I take that back. That's a little different. Somebody else can come in with more data centers and that's happening. But if you look at a lot of these tech businesses and therefore the composition of the S&P, it's these businesses that um have defensible margins. Not only are they defensible, they're high, right? Even for the companies that see competition like a Salesforce or an Oracle, those are high margin businesses that have no capital reinvestment. So the difference in the composition of the economy I think takes this sort of fundamental belief of value investing and renders it invalid. So we have to all be just investors. We don't get to label ourselves anymore as value or growth. It's just a how do we make money and what are we comfortable with? What can we live with? Because the thing that I keep on trying to remind myself is how do I get into an investment where I'm not going to get shaken out, right? The analogy is you're walking through the woods and you got to follow a path and every once in a while you see these these trail markers, right? You want to set yourself up so you know the trail markers so you know that you're on the path. If if you're going to get pushed around by the wind or the sun or the weather, then you don't belong on that trail in the first place. And same way with investing. If you're going to get shaken out because the market drops 10%, your stock drops 25, you probably don't belong there in the first place. Probably don't know why you're there. >> Yes. And I I just going back to your comment about, you know, Dan has gray hair and he's probably got his own spidey sense. You know, if you have no hair like me, we're still relatively younger. Um, it's probably because you're skeptical of a lot of things. At least I am. And so that's that's where I ca I I I started off in journalism and got into this that way. And um I think part of the reason maybe we're all here is just kind of like independent thinking about things is what is what I'm hearing from you just in terms of the approach that that you take like is just just essential, right? >> Yeah. You know, I try to take an iconoclastic uh approach to how I view investments, which is just a fancy way of saying I don't care what other people think. Um, I have been around long enough, as I said, to trust my gut, but also to have seen a lot of patterns repeat themselves. And, you know, when I look for stocks, I look for companies or industries where I say, "I've seen this movie before, and I know how this movie ends." It's always the James Bond analogy for me, right? You go to every Bond movie, you don't know exactly who like who the bad guy's going to be, what the gadgets are going to be, who's going to be his love interest, but you kind of know they're all going to be there, and you kind of know he's going to save the world in the end, and you kind of know that he's going to get the martini. Like, that's what I want in my investments, right? And so, I'm looking at AI today. I have the framework of what happened in Shale because I think that's very, very relevant. The US onshore business gives us a great uh framework to to think about it. And what happened in I don't want to call it dotcom but in the telecom buildout uh at the end of the millennium and these were capital intensive buildouts of uh of networks that had a tremendous amount of utility that enabled these new businesses and enabled this flourishing of investment and there was huge misallocations of capital and tons of busts along the way and that's totally okay. That's the market working effectively. The greatest tool that capitalism has is bankruptcy. And I think that's a really weird thing to say, but I spent a lot of my time, particularly in London, focused on other markets. I've been to China 20 times because we had a huge investment focused on iron ore. And so to understand iron ore, you had to understand the country that was consuming half of the world's iron ore. So I went there to understand the financial system, which obviously is not capital. And capitalism has bankruptcy as this wonderful self-correcting mechanism. And and you know, I've become, which is funny from a guy coming from Berkeley, California, but but a huge believer in in that element of capitalism that that really just is this this self-healing function. >> Well said. No, I I I I can probably count on one hand the number of people who have talked about bankruptcy in glowing terms like that, but it's true, isn't it? And and not only that, but you know, trying to prevent it from doing its good work is is usually a mistake, a big bigger mistake than most people realize. >> Yeah. And there's look, there's limited exceptions, right? I don't want to completely um dismiss the importance of the the TARP rescue in 2008 because there was a much larger risk looming and we can talk about that. And I think very rational people think the government shouldn't have acted. And I think that's a discussion that you can have, but it's tough to make the counterfactual, right? It's tough to tough to imagine what what it would have looked like had the government not stepped in. I think that there's room for it. But um you know in general I think it's it's just like life itself. You know you got to weed out the the weaker and uh and the stronger will will go on to do better. >> So you are so while we're quoting Whitney Tilson um you're you're a make money investor, right? You just get get rid of get rid of my value and growth labels and I just want to make money. Um, and we said we were high-fiving each other, going the opposite direction. I was headed from speculative companies to to better ones. Are you telling me you were headed from, you know, better ones to more specular? It sounds like sounds like your your evolution was not quite that. It was something else. Am I >> Yeah. Again, it goes back to this notion of of, you know, I've seen this before. Uh I think we're at a particular moment in time where we are on the cusp of a huge flourishing of new industries, right? Nobody can deny that AI is is going to have this this absolutely um transformative impact on the stock market. But if we look back to the dotcom boom, I'll call it um for shorthand, but really it was a boom in uh networking that enabled internet communication. you know the the biggest companies to come out of it. Google at the peak of a.com was a private company. Facebook hadn't even been invented yet if memory serves and uh and Amazon was a bookstore. >> Right? So you had the transformative technology that came in in terms of ubiquitous internet access and the companies that have taken the most advantage of it didn't even exist at the peak in the stock market. And so I think we'll see much the same in in AI, which is that right now we're seeing the capital intensive part of the boom, which is giving us the the um the substrate, right? The the physical capacity to manage AI. But you know, if you look at all the true success stories, they fall in two categories. They are either companies that enable businesses to operate more efficiently or companies that enable consumers to spend their time um more more pleasantly. Right? So if you look at the companies that grew out of the.com boom really you have you know software ate the world is the is the axiom right there were all these software companies that enabled HR sales all these other corporate functions to to work more effectively right and then there's the consumer side of it cat videos on the internet I mean those are worth a lot and one of the cool things about AI is that as it reduces the demand on overall labor people are going to have more free time it's a it's a productivity enhancement I know there's a bad side. People worry about the impact on jobs, but last time I checked, we're employing basically more people than we ever have in the history of the United States. So, something's working right >> and we're also employing them less hard. Work weeks were whittleled down to 40 hours and now it seems like we might be going less. Everybody's just on a side gig these days. So, somebody's working right that enables a lot of use of more use of free time. And you know, the one industry we can point to definitively is the rise and rise of gaming, right? Hollywood was our main outlet and I think there's only been three billion sorry three movies that made over a billion gross. It's probably a hundred games that have made over a billion gross, right? So we as we moved on to new forms of entertainment because we had more leisure time, we've created this whole new industry and now of course you see the the buyout of EI sports um just last week. So I I think we will find new industries. They will be AI enhanced or AI enabled. Um they may involve generative AI. I think we'll also see Agentic AI. I want my own personal assistant on the phone. We're very close to that. That's coming somewhere. I don't know who will own that. Whoever owns that is going to earn another trillion dollars of market value or so. Now, getting back to your point, that's speculative, right? If I come to you and I say, "Hey, look, there's this um this private company that is started by uh Johnny IV that has an investment from OpenAI and it's got this little device. It's going to be your your AI agent." you're like, "Yeah, that's credible." But we're in a funny market cycle where some of those companies are public. And so, yeah, it's I think okay to speculate when the prize is so large. I mean, if you look at how the stock market is treating small modular reactor stocks, right, in the nuclear space, >> I don't know if any of those companies will ultimately grab the prize, but the prize is so big and that the market is just pricing in a little bit more chance that one of those companies might succeed. And what's really cool is there's this feedback loop element where if the market marks up the the companies, the companies can then raise more capital to reinvest in the technology and give them a better shot of actually success in the end. >> Sure. >> Now, will those companies that are publicly listed be the su the ones to succeed? I don't know. But they're already up like 400% in the last year, right? Again, our job is to try to make money. And so if our money-making is to say I bought a stock that went from a 1% probability of a trillion dollar market to a 10% probability, I think that that's very valid. I think that's intellectually consistent with my framework. Even if that is to be very clear a speculation. >> Okay. Well said. Um I'm sitting here as as we as we speak just before we started recording. I was collecting all my uh you know uh the intelligence speculator books basically Phil Caret and a few others because I I know this needs to be dealt with in the next issue of the Ferris report. So it's a subject near and dear to my heart right now. Um, but you know, you said something um, we had a meeting with a lot of the editors at Stanbury and and you said something um, really quickly one day that really grabbed my ear and I thought, "Oh, yeah." Because of course it's it's hard to just be this old and not have seen what happened to a lot of the capital that was invested in the dotcom boom, the TMT or whatever you want to call it. um you know a lot of it uh a lot of it was misallocated and a lot of it was allocated to stuff that is extremely valuable to us like the usage went up a thousandfold and the revenues went down like you know 50% or something um because it just got cheaper and cheaper more things more abundant they get cheaper it's the definition you know the they're the same thing basically um and and now we see people building lots of data centers And that's the, you know, the middle of the network. And you mentioned about the value creation at the edge of the network. And you just mentioned a couple instances, right? The the consumer-f facing companies that give us a more pleasant life um and and companies that make things easier for businesses. Um, do you have any um do you have any like absolute favorites among those that you might want to share with us that you know maybe the listener isn't like really familiar with or even if they are familiar they might you might have a different take on you know if you have a different take on Alphabet. Great. >> Yeah. So the answer is yes and no. The the answer is yes. I'm I'm working on a couple of favorites and no I'm I'm not going to share them just yet. That's uh okay that's going to be ultimately um for subscribers I think but uh >> let's start with the framework okay >> Apple has created uh this wonderful ecosystem as it always likes to call it um where I think the most important part that Apple has gotten right is that its users trust it so I would say it is in the pole position to dominate agentic AI and when I say agentic AI I want to be able to pick up my phone and say, "Hey, can you look up for me on Kayak what the cheapest flights are that get me in and out of London and then put together a itinerary of hotels I'd like and I want you to focus on some restaurants, so on and so forth, right? You can't do that today, but there's no reason you shouldn't be able to do that. We just haven't quite gotten it all meshed together because you can do that essentially on the large language models, right? Chat GPT or Perplexity or any of those. What you don't have is one of those that's embedded in your phone that will be able to look at all of your apps. And the reason that matters is because there's a difference in privacy. When I put that out on ChatGpt, they own it. If I do it on my phone, I own it. And that enables me to to do a lot more more important things. Top of the list is commerce, right? I'm not gonna put my credit card data on chat GBT. They own that. But if I do that on my phone and I trust who's managing the privacy, then all of a sudden I've gotten a personal assistant in my pocket. Now, Apple's in the lead and they have so far totally bungled it, right? Siri is a very poor product. It is the least good of the of the uh chat bots. So they are sitting in pole position and they might fumble it. And you know who else has done that? Lots of tech companies. IBM and mainframes. They couldn't take make the transition to PCs. Eastn Kodak was the leader in digital photography. Uh if you go up to Rochester, you'll just see a couple of empty buildings they used to be in. Uh the the list is longer than than you can imagine of all these companies that led in technologies and fumbled their lead. In fact, I would say it's actually been very unusual that a company like Amazon was able to pivot from e-commerce to AWS and hold its lead that Netflix was able to pivot from physical DVDs. >> Exactly. I was going to say, isn't that the rule though? You know, that failure to make that enormous change like you know IBM from from mainframe to p like isn't that sort of the rule? It's historically it's the rule and I think we're sitting on a lot of exceptions that probably skew investors views of how successful the incumbents are going to be. Um, you know, if you go back and look at the history of the S&P and look at the top 10 stocks by market value every decade, you know, they change like five to seven of those stocks every decade, it would be unprecedented if five of the or seven of the top 10 today were still in that spot in 10 years. And so, you know, we can look backwards at the success stories, but the question is, sorry, Alphabet Google, sorry Apple, what's next? >> Yeah. Yeah. That >> with Apple, I keep >> what what Apple I keep thinking, what number iPhone can we go up to before things, you know, before what do they have, you know, unique and new that's that's coming out most people? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I remember I remember years ago if if you recall The Onion, the the satire newspaper. I remember getting it, but it was actually a newspaper. That's how old I am. >> And uh it was after um Gillette had released its threebladed razor. It's Mach 3 and it was a supposed interview with the head of Gillette and he goes, "Screw this. We're going to six blades." You know, now there's six blade razor out there. Exactly. You know, it's like to your point, Cory, how far can you go? I think that kind of misses the the the question, though. I mean that Apple will change its form factor. It's going to go to a folding phone pretty soon. Great. All that's cool. That's still just a phone. I don't want to be on a phone. I don't think any of us really want to be typing on a phone anymore. I want to speak to something. Now, what that form factor winds up being a form factor is just a technical way of saying how it looks. If that's a little block this big, they've gone with little pins. Obviously, Meta has the glasses. I don't know. Honestly, I think any of those are plausible. it's gonna follow the function of it, right? And so the question is what is going to be the device that enables the consumer to have an AI agent that it owns and is private and is personal? Apple has that possibility, but so far there's no there's nothing to suggest that they're going to be able to convert it other than the fact that they did it once before when they moved from PCs to the iPhone, but that was under a guy named Steve Jobs who's not with us anymore. So if I if I wanted to extrapolate from what you've just told me um the the once again even though it seems more even though the businesses that are there just seem utterly dominant the top 10 S&P 500 or whatever you know you want to use even though once again it seems like they are just unbeatable unassalable it sounds like no historically speaking we still things aren't that different and we shouldn't expect them to all be there necessarily 10 years from now. >> That's correct. And and you know, you kind of got to take it piece by piece, right? So, Microsoft, I'll be candid, I'm not that familiar with. I've always found it a fairly boring business, but um you know, they've got this this uh operating system at the heart of basically most PCs on the planet. And that's a great business, but a lot of their growth has come from cloud. And cloud is essentially a commodity business. With all of this money that's getting poured into data centers, one would expect pressure on pricing. And >> it's fiber cable. It's the same thing. Yeah, exactly. >> So far, data growth has exceeded pricing pressure because of new capacity at some point that breaks and all of a sudden you're going to go to, you know, people will be talking about break even costs for a data center. And my guess is that's down 70% on pricing. That also impacts AWS right now. Obviously, Amazon is trying to put in all sorts of services over and there's a lot of ad services and that's great, but you know, it's like selling bubble gum in a convenience store at a gas station. Like, sure, that adds a lot, but if your core business is pretty commodity, it's not going to be the greatest business in the world. So, those are business I identify as potentially at risk. Google search. Now, how will search function in an AI world? Lord knows Google is spending enough time, they bought Deep Mind for a reason. they are trying to integrate AI into their search, right? So maybe they give you a virtual tour of a city and everywhere you look it says Starbucks or Jack in the Box. Sure, maybe. But I I can't believe that Google search will be as good a business in 10 years. And when I say Google Search, I mean the existing online PC or mobile driven looking up a listing and getting paid listing. >> It seems likely that that will see competition. And so Google's got to find an outlet. And so really what the whole market revolves around right now is you have a half trillion dollars I think this year of of AI related capex. Will there be an ultimate return on that capex? Now some of that capex is is clearly worth zero and some of that capex is worth so much. It's it's and you know it's like they used to say about advertising, right? Only 50% of advertising works. The problem is you don't know which 50%. Right? That's kind of where we are when we have these big investment bubbles. But I would like to sidestep the question. I would like to not have to make the bet on which of the tech giants that's spending $70 billion this year is going to be uh the winner. I would like to know what they're spending it on. It just seems like an easier bet to make. I'd like to know the company that's going to not just the companies that are they're spending it on because we've seen the the boom and all the utility and data center stuff. I'd like to know the companies that are going to take advantage of it. That's the real the real holy grail here, right? Let's find the next Facebook, the next Google search that like that's the way to make money. >> So, the companies that are going to exploit all of the infrastructure that the hyperscalers are building. >> Yeah. Who's going to say, I can use AI to make this consumer-friendly brand that is going to basically involve no capital? It's going to be a service to consumers. I'm just going to put myself on top of of AI, you know, that's provided by somebody else, but I'm going to interact with the consumer in a way that delights them and amazes them and that they're willing to pay for. >> Yeah. Yeah. No, that's it's that's exciting to me, too. I've been thinking about that, you know, ever since I kind of said, "Hey, this kind of looks like the dot uh buildup here and then bust, right?" Well, you know, who knows when that happens, but it it, you know, eventually probably will. I'll say eventually probably. And then um but like who's the next AI what's the AI company being built in somebody's dorm room right now at Harvard like like Meadow was you know uh with Facebook with Zuckerberg all those years ago. I mean like that's and that I it's interesting the way you put it like Google was was just private you know back then. Uh Facebook was wasn't even built yet. I think it was 2004 or when it came out. and um and Amazon. So, yeah, it's that that's exciting to me, too. I just wonder how how do we know how where do we look if I don't I don't even know if these companies know what the the like the bigger companies that are spending know what they're doing yet outside of the the data center buildout. Yeah, I heard a um that that a lot of that's true, I think, because for example, this guy Harris Co that we've an investor we've had on the program a couple times. He um he put out a piece about how they were spending x amount on data centers and it was generating x amount of revenue or something. Um, long story short, he got a bunch of feedback from from people who are really in the business um because he's really wellconed and they were like, "Your your pessimistic assumption is too optimistic. None of us think we're going to make money on this. We all think we're, you know, we all think we're running some kind of massive lossleading enterprise that is going to allow us to do something else." >> Oh, well, >> yeah. And that's that's, you know, >> I wasn't exactly saying that. I could see that. But that but that but that uh I just don't know right. Like I I don't know personally. I don't know where those those things are. And that's exciting. >> I don't know what the enterprise Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Look, I think it's Corey, I think it's dangerous um to talk about, you know, when the bust comes because that implies that a bust will come and and that it has certain characteristics. I think what we have to say is that over time the market will parse which capital is efficient and which capital is inefficient. that could come all at once and be painful or it could just be a, you know, a slow process of winning winnowing out the winners and losers. Um, you know, and so I don't think we have to I don't think we have to predict or spend any time on that prediction on on how it happens. I think we have to just focus on the winners and losers. Um, you know, Dan, your point's an interesting one, right? So, is Google really spending all this capex on on AI? You knowing that it's loss losing? I mean, they have plenty of ideas internally about how they're going to be able to monetize it, but I have plenty of ideas internally about um how my daughters should approach their homework. It doesn't mean that they're going to follow them or that they will come to fruition. >> Right. Right. And they probably have, you know, their culture being what it is, they probably have, you know, let's just say they have a hundred ideas. um you know not all hundred of them are going to get attention and money and and and who knows which one is right. I mean it's it's um you know it's like running a a a venture capital portfolio, right? Just like we know something huge is going to happen out of these hundred things, but you know, pick pick the huge thing that's going to advertise the loss for all the rest of it. Who knows what what that's going to be? >> And I'm saying that that's okay, right? Yes, that's how it works. >> Articulated >> why that that was a sensible approach to be taking in today's market. So if it's good for the goose, it's good for the Google, >> right? And at the other end of it though, Gabe, isn't it true like if you're if you're a retiree, let's say, and you don't like all our subscribers, our listeners, they want to actively manage some portion of their of their money, right? Um, but let's say you you don't want to like AI is going to find you the same way the internet found you in your S&P 500 fund, right? If it, you know, it found you in in this form of those, you know, six or seven of the top 10, really eight or nine probably at this point, the top 10 names, right? You don't worry, it'll be there. You'll benefit, right? >> Well, look, if you're investing passively, you're already long AI up the yin-yang. That's a technical term, but period, >> you know, tech stocks are are the dominant force in the S&P. And guess what? >> I wouldn't have owned Nvidia on my own, I don't think. Well, actually, I might have. We we we talked about that internally, but you get the you get the joke, right? You're not going to wind up long all these winners if unless you're a passive investor, and that's cool, but if you're an active investor, like you have a really easy choice to make, which is, >> do I want to fight this battle that everyone else is fighting? I don't, right? Like when I play basketball, I don't want to play against my friends. I want to play against my kids' friends because I can dunk all over them. And it's the same in the market. We can sit and we can we can debate Nvidia till the cows come home. There is literally nothing we can say of interest about Nvidia. And I I say this respectfully, you're a smart dude, but there is nothing that is that we can say about Nvidia that has not already been said. >> Exactly. >> But we can look at other areas of the market and say like, hey, what about commodities with the dollar depreciating 10%. What does that mean for commodity demand? Why aren't we talking about oil in in an environment where we're kind of at perpetual war? The US is not reinvesting in shale and yet oil's down in the 60s. Why aren't we talking about this industry or that industry or literally anything else but the most tedious conversation, sorry tech, but it's tech. It's all anybody talks about. And that's what gives us, I think, another huge opportunity. We can invest in big speculations in tech because things are transformative. that there is an S&P 493 of stocks out there that are big cap great companies that I think is where we should be spending most of our time. >> Oh yeah, big cap great companies. Yep. That's that's the that's the rich pond. That's the that's the target-rich uh environment. Um >> yeah and so the question is you know it becomes it becomes a lot >> it's easy to say that in in concept it becomes a lot more difficult when you sort of start to to pick it out one by one right so if we're looking at consumer staples >> is there anything interesting in consumer staples well you've got the oenic stuff and you've got this trend against sugar that's a pretty tough industry maybe we don't want to spend our time consumer discretionary I think you have to have a view on what's happening to income um which means you have to have a kind of a view on jobs that's a pretty macro bet that I don't like to But maybe there's some interesting stuff in consumer discretionary that's actually fueled by this AI that could change things. How people approach their spending, right? What is the Expedia that is AI powered? And now we're talking about consumer discretionary spending for travel. But what's the next generation of it? That's going to be something interesting. And so on and so forth. AI will transform every industry. I'm gonna call back. So in in 2000, I was working at a fund called Peekquat Capital. And it was the best tech fund on on the street. It was run by a a really wonderful guy uh named Art Samberg and his partner was Dan Benton who'd come over from Goldman Sachs and he was he was the ace analyst on consumer hardware sorry on on it hardware he was the guy on Dell and they made 100% in 99 and they were the best tech investors out there and so we sat down as a firm and said how does the internet impact your business and everyone said oh you know it's going to change people are going to buy homes on the internet and I mean 25 years later it's kind of True. Kind of. Not really. But >> it got to me and I was covering cyclicals, industrials, and energy at the time. And I said, "The internet is going to impact our lives because my companies sell widgets or they sell goo, but they're going to sell widgets or goo using the internet." And that's very true and it's very, I think, profound. The the way that these companies have operated, they've been able to rip out costs. These guys were using faxes and hand invoices and people doing all the back office data entry and all of that is automated now. That's completely transformed their cost structure. That's what AI is going to do for businesses across the board. And so we want to find companies that are quick to that trend, implement it well, and ultimately we want to find the companies that are able to give them the AI to do that. And and just while we're, you know, headed back in time, let's, you know, just go back a ridiculous amount of time and address the fact that every time some new technology, and right now I'm just thinking of the the lites in the textile industry, every time some new text new uh technology comes about that is really transformative, the really big ones, everybody has the same prediction that it's going to put everybody out of work. And every time what happens it creates this whole new u sort of ecosystem of you know dozens and dozens of new businesses. So yes there is there is disruption you know people get disrupted and people >> and how many people do you know personally that you'd consider within your you know circle of somebody you qualify as a as a friend who are farmers. Uh well I I happen to know a couple but they're farmers because they did other things and now they bought a farm, you know, because they wanted to change their lives. >> Yeah. Not including wine makers here, buddy. But my point is 200 years ago that answer would have been 100%. >> Yeah. >> Right. Or maybe 400 years ago. You get the idea, right? Right. >> Farming has been automated to the point where very few people are needed to do that. And that's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. It is a it is a complete I think um you know sort of I understand the fear and this is where the term lite came from right it was the it was what the loom >> in in England >> stocking frame yeah that's right >> yeah but you know busted stocking frames yeah >> right but you know really what this has always done is it's improved people's lifestyles and it's it's it's led to more leisure time and so you know that's a that I mean Howard Linden talks always about the DGEN economy, right? All the spending on on you know, crypto and gambling and you know, he's not wrong. When people have more time on their hands, that's what they like to do with it, >> right? >> Actually, crypto is another that that may be the ultimate example of what we were talking about where, you know, it's a hundred different things and then one of them is really valuable, right? Because there are like I think the last time I looked on coinarketcap.com, I was like, I is that true? Are there million have millions of cryptos been created up to this point? There are 39,000 of them trading on like 850 exchanges. Is that really true? And and it's you know >> Yes. >> A lot of it will wind up Yeah, it is. It is. It is. We I ran it down for the recent digest I wrote about this. Um and that's the way it works as you say, Gabe. That's how it works. That's a good thing. Crypto is is and I don't want to go too far into it because everybody has their own view and so it's a little bit like politics or religion. There's no point in talking about it but I think that uh the focus on crypto misses the point that blockchain is a transformative innovation and I think that people spend so much time on on crypto but again any industry that ever has had a filing cabinet should be able to replace that with blockchain and that to me is a fundamental change in how healthcare for example and accounting and will do business. I think that's um a tremendous value, right? There's really no reason that you can't use blockchain to record your housing transaction rather than have to have title insurance, right? It's a really antiquated industry. So, I think that there's all these business applications >> for blockchain. And note, I didn't have to mention crypto at all to to make that case. So, you know, I think a lot of industries we often forget like when people talk about AI, 95% of the time, if not more, they're talking about large language models. The fact is that machine learning was making tremendous advances before chat GPT3 came out and kind of blew the world up, right? And and it was industries like um like onshore oil drilling where they were using machine learning to help target their landing zones more effectively uh for for when they did a horizontal drilling to contact most of the productive shale, right? That's a use for AI that is not AI. And so you know I try to in the same way as I I caveat crypto out of blockchain. I kind of try to take AI is mean is generally used to describe large language models but um machine learning and other versions of artificial intelligence I think have tremendous productivity that don't involve you chatting with a screen >> right yeah AI is uh it it's like talking about it's it's it's identical to talking about the internet people you know they say AI does this and AI does that you know and it says those conversations tend to say very little about specific specific applications that like as such as the kind you just named. So, >> but there's a historical reference which I think is useful which is that most people's introduction to AI at this point is through chat GPT and some of its analoges but really chat GPT is kind of a shorthand for it and uh I think looking back you could say that most people's introduction to the internet was through AOL and its analoges >> but it it is the entry portal I don't know if you remember that term well you you do I'm sure right it is the portal but ultimately that's not where the value resides now the idea that open AI and I'll bust in OpenAI because it's a private company so I can't I don't I don't like to bust on public stocks because it's a more nuanced thing. But the idea that Open AI is worth a half trillion dollars. That's a pretty astonishing um uh fact that's coming out, right? They're trying to raise money currently at that valuation. That to me seems like that could be a tremendous misallocation of capital because last time I checked I'm I'm paying for OpenAI, right? I use Chat GBT and uh if somebody came along and offered the same product for two bucks instead of 20, I'd switch in a heartbeat. I don't think there's any stickiness or pricing power in the business as constructed. That's not to say that they can't pivot, but as is constructed, going back to what we keep saying, that's not a business, right? >> Yeah. >> It's a commodity. And we know how that we know how the price of commodities works out. Speaking of commodities, actually, uh, now that I think of it, um, you mentioned oil. I've heard people talk about and I may have been one of them. I may have said this. I can't remember now. Um talk about well I I wasn't saying it myself. I was talking about people who say it. That's right. So about copper as the new oil, right? because all of all of the things that we're building now from um electric cars, whatever you think of them, people seem to a certain amount of people seem to want to use them to data centers um and all kinds of other um things that facilitate all the technological revolution that we're living through require copper, right? And uh therefore it it becomes at least as important as oil in building out this new world that is filled with this stuff. >> Yeah. I you know you hear this from time to time. You know what the new oil is? >> What's the new >> oil? >> Oil. Yeah. >> So look oil has the unique ability of being a transportable source of fuel. That's what oil really resolves down to. Right? That is the the largest use of it. But it's I something like 20% of global energy consumption is is you know transportation fuels of various stripes which is driven by oil. The rest is stationary and those can be used much larger power sources whether coal, nuke, hydro, whatever. Copper is copper. I think copper is a fascinating commodity. It's called Dr. copper by a lot of people in Wall Street because historically its ups and downs have predicted the economy. Um, but the amount of copper that's going to be used in the in the buildout of AI, it's it's there. It's real and everybody knows it. It's not so surprising. Um, but it's also not the bottleneck. So, if we look at the infrastructure that we are trying to build out uh for to support AI and also electric vehicles, everything else, but it's really AI that's that's the the largest impact here. Um, the bottlenecks are twofold. One is the government. So when you build a power facility, you need to interconnect it to the grid and to connect to the grid is I think around a seven-year process right now. It goes to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission FK. It's a real pain in the ass. And and actually and I would say actually quite surprisingly the administration has been has been um making it more difficult. There was a huge power line that was just canceled. Um they canceled the power line to this to this uh offshore wind turbine project in in Rhode Island. But the fact is that there's really no other source in the in the near future for power. So I think that'll probably change because there's such insatiable power demands. But that's bottleneck one. The second main bottleneck is really in turbines. So you can say, "Hey, I've got gas. I've got a data center operator. I've got a PPA, which is a power purchase agreement between the two. All the numbers stack up. Let's go." And they'll say, "Cool. We can get you the turbine that you use to to run that that uh gas uh power plant in about five or six years." It's like, well, okay, that's not great. And so that's why stocks like GE Vernova have gone through the roof. It's like stocks um so that's GEV. If you look at Quantum Power, for example, PWR, right? That's gone through the roof. They are the largest provider of interconnect buildout, right? And they they are generally seem to be pretty good at navigating this FK process. That's where the real bottlenecks are. It doesn't seem at the moment that copper has a bottleneck. However, there is great demand growth. So, you shouldn't see bottom cycle sort of prices. >> But if you take a look at say lithium as an example, it's been recovering recently, but you had a huge boom related to EV and then it just collapsed because you had a a a huge glut of supply. So, even in conditions of very strong demand and it's fine. Supply is always what matters in commodities, right? And that was, you know, we did the work when I was when I was back at at um Greenlight. We were short iron or stocks because we had this sort of this ven diagram. We're like, "All right, well, you know, uh, China's going to grow between 5 and 7% and iron or supply is going to grow between 11 and 14%. Even if it's the best growth of of demand and the worst growth of supply, there's still going to be too much." And sure enough, pricing totally collapsed. So I think for copper, I'm not super on top of the supply picture right now, but I don't think it's a a surprise to the industry to know that there's great demand growth, which means they should be bringing supply. >> They should. Um the guys at Altius Minerals did some really interesting work u where at the time, it was a few years ago, they determined what they called the incentivization price, the price at which it makes economic sense to build a new copper mine was like five bucks a pound. But they researched further and found that historically speaking um you need you need to achieve something like twice that price to really get a significant amount of capital to move in and actually increase the available supply uh in a in some amount of time. So um you know that is what it is. But I'm glad I just want our listeners to Gabe to know something. what Gabe just said. Um, if you're any kind of a commodity investor, what Gabe just said is very important. There's two things about you. You you can the supply is the important part and it's the knowable part, the more knowable part. The other part is the part that gets everybody excited. Everybody gets excited about the demand, but but you know, if you're that kind of investor, just learn about the supply. That's where your that's where you're really your knowledge leverage is the greatest. Anyway, >> yeah, I'll take you one further than that, Dan. I think it's it's it cannot be emphasized enough. Not only is supply much more knowable than demand because if you think about it, you know, it takes a couple years to get a copper mine on. So you have good visibility, >> right? Right. Good visibility. And that's the case for any commodity, right? You have you can't just make it up out of nowhere. Like it takes a while to get these world scale projects on. >> Um but also supply varies a lot more, right? Demand economists will be like, well, I think the economy is going to grow 3.2%. And someone will say actually it's going to grow 3.1%. And the answer is >> who cares? It doesn't really it's a it's a it's an order of magnitude off from the changes in supply that you get. And so I've spent my entire career focusing on the supply side. I when I was back at at Peak, like I said, I was doing cyclicals, industrials, and energy. I built a spreadsheet of every auto plant in the world. >> So I was like, how many ladas are going to come off the production line in Russia this year? and and that's how we figured out what was going to happen to pricing of pickups in the US, right? And and all the money that the the GM was making at the time was in pickups and so we were able to have a view on GM which was a good view to have. So supply is orders of magnitude more important and knowable and yet it's the one that nobody focuses on. It's it's a dream I've always enjoyed. >> It's not where the stories are, right? It's not where where the Yeah. And one of the things that I always look for and I love is when you see a bunch of bankruptcies in in an industry, a commodity industry because that's your first sign that commodities coming on >> and Goldman shuts down their trading desk, right? Those two things >> that that but like if you look if you look at at uh you know what happened in the coal industry, right? You had loads of bankruptcies and so supply came offline and even though demand continued to decline, supply demanded quicker and declined quicker and you had a spike in prices. I think we're seeing that in a couple of industries um right now and I think you know I there's an idea out there I'm not going to disclose it here but that I absolutely love that that that's exactly the dynamic that's that's happening. Oh, >> okay. So, we're going to find out more about this. Uh uh I I think I think October 29th is an important date that we probably need to discuss. um and Stanbury and actually everybody within the sound of my voice can learn more about it um by going to stansburyc.com and uh starting on October 29th all these things that Gabe doesn't want to tell you and I fully I'm I'm I'm highly sympathetic. I have a lot of things I can't tell you either because I have subscribers. We're going to be having an event and it's going to go through um uh not just, you know, sort of the history that I'm touching on here in the investment framework, but obviously most importantly is uh is actionable ideas. Um you know, I as I said, I think that there's loads of stocks out there that I'm super excited about and we're going to talk about one that could be a 10bagger, if not more. Um, you know, I'm really focused on, uh, look, I'm I'm trying to balance I come from this this background of understanding real industries and real businesses, but, you know, we're at a moment in time where, um, you know, there's an opportunity, and I don't want to I don't want to overe the case. We always have to be careful. We always have to be thoughtful, but but sometimes being careful and thoughtful means um, means taking a little bit of of a of a swing. And things are moving so quickly right now. I'm so excited about these opportunities that I'm seeing and I haven't been this excited about the market in a really long time. >> That is great. Um, and I have to say it has been absolutely a sheer joy and pleasure to have you on. I I I don't want my other guests to take this personally, but I've enjoyed talking with Gabe very very much and so much that I'm going to invite him to come back really really soon. I usually say, "Hey, another six or 12 months. I hope you won't mind if I give you a call, but I don't want to wait that long because I'm having a hell of a good time. I don't want to stop even though it's it's time for us to move on to our final question. And and the question is simply, if you could provide them with a single takeaway today, um a single idea, what would it be? And if you've already said it, feel free to repeat it. >> So, it's not going to be original, but there's a reason that this advice has lasted through the ages. It comes from the oracle at deli in Greek myth and it's know thyself. You know the biggest mistake I think that I see investors make and I I put myself at the top of the list because I've made just about every mistake out there. I've I've literally over the course of my career I've lost billions of dollars. I've I've made billions and netted out very much ahead. But I've lost a lot of money for a lot of rich people and they were still willing to let me come back and have another crack at it. And it came down to this knowing what you are good at and being really rigorously honest with yourself. Right? You invest in a stock and you think if I get it right, will I feel vindicated or will I feel lucky? If I get it wrong, will I feel silly or will I feel unlucky? Now, if you can be on the vindicated, unlucky side of the spectrum, you're going to be a very good investor. The way to get there is to know who you are as an investor and who you are as a person, right? If you love the cotton thrust and the day-to-day, maybe you shouldn't buy a stock that's a buy and hold with a lot of volatility because you're going to get stopped out. vice versa. If you think, okay, I'm gonna buy this stock and set it and forget it because I think this company is going to be dominated, you know, going to be dominant in its space, then don't go trading stocks every day. Figure out who you are as an investor. Be really honest with yourself about who you are and and then do that, right? Plan the trade and then trade the plan is kind of a motto that we've had for years. And really that comes down to knowing who you are as an investor and honestly as a person. >> Well said and a great message. That's a that's a I'm I'm glad you went back to the Oracle of Deli and put it in your own words as well. Thanks Gabe. It's been a real pleasure to have you here. I really enjoyed this. >> Thank you very much. It's been an honor to talk with you and uh let's do it again soon. >> Very. Yes. We'll have you back soon. Yeah. It's been great. Thanks. Well, I meant what I said. That was a lot of fun. And before I forget, I'm going to say one more time and maybe even again before we uh exit today. Um, stansburysec.com. You want to sign up and find out what Gabe is going to talk about on October 29th. Um, he is one of the most brilliant folks that we've ever had in the Stansbury universe. Um, great investor, very smart guy, and just a great guy to listen to to talk. Didn't I mean, isn't Gabe a just a great talker period? You know? >> Oh, yeah. Great talker. Uh, for sure. Uh, he's coming for for my spot here probably, right? But, uh, >> it's, uh, he's, you know, since he's joined us, I mean, even internally, just like different things that he's done, uh, talking to different analysts and editors and in meetings and whatnot. you did a little like crash course for some of like the for everybody um on different approaches uh you know capital intensive etc and and how to identify businesses and whatnot um yeah he's been great and I think you got a sense of that there uh even more so and and his background and what he brings to us is uh tremendous >> absolutely it's all in fact I would go so far as to say any conversation with Gabe about investment topics for me at least is always an education. I'm always the student, you know, when a guy like that starts talking for sure. >> Yeah. So that's why I sort of counseledled people to get out their pens and pencils. I hope they did. So um and you know having I can't even underscore the importance of having someone around who thinks like this because I'm I'm evolving um all the time. you know, we we all are hopefully trying to do some of that, but I've recently changed a lot more, you know, and I think guys like Gabe, they're better at changing their they're better at evolving. for me, you know, I' I've sort of I practiced the value craft for a long time and then I practiced it on, you know, the better businesses and so forth, but now I'm really changing things and trying to understand um where value is being created in in in AI and other kinds of technology. Quantum computing is another one that's got me kind of interested right now. >> So Oh, nice. >> Yeah. So, um, just, you know, I I will struggle through that and I will learn and I will grow and it will benefit my subscribers. But, you know, I gota I I have to say it when it's true. You know, Gabe is a a step or two ahead of me on that one and and you should really listen to what he has to say. Um, on October 29th, go to stansburysec.com and and take some good notes and listen closely. You'll have fun, too, listening to him talk. >> All right. He's definitely a guy that that you whose work you want to be following. If you're not familiar with the name in our universe, uh you definitely want to. Alliance members already have >> uh you know, I've been getting stuff from him. But uh you know, everybody else can go to that stanberry.com and uh check that out when that when that new uh talk comes out. >> Yeah, that'll be like >> I'm looking forward to it. >> Gabe for everybody instead of just for alliance members. That's right. >> Yeah. Well, that's another interview and that's another episode of the Stanberry Investor Hour. I hope you enjoyed it as much as we really truly did. Opinions expressed on this program are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Stanbury Research, its parent company, or affiliates.