Silver ETF Volume Beats S&P 500: The ‘Abnormal’ Signal & What Comes Next
Summary
Market Liquidity vs. Economy: Despite flat retail sales and rising delinquencies, U.S. equity turnover tops $1T daily, with notable global participation in U.S. markets.
AI Infrastructure: Massive AI capex is driving long-dated corporate financing, with Alphabet’s (GOOGL) 100-year bond framed as balance-sheet strength and a funding match for multi-decade buildouts.
Big Tech Concentration: The guest argues AI leaders will continue to drive market performance, with limited, short-lived rotation away from growth.
Gold Outlook: Gold’s surge is consolidating, but drivers such as potential rate cuts, USD softness, geopolitics, and sustained demand (notably from China) support higher prices ahead.
Silver Dynamics: Silver shows strong investor interest and fundamentals (supply deficits, reindustrialization, tech demand), exemplified by record SLV volumes; volatility is high but underpinned by real demand.
Platinum Opportunity: Platinum is highlighted as a potential next mover, trading far below gold despite historical premium, with both industrial use and investor rotation as catalysts.
Commodities Underinvestment: Years of underinvestment in mining contribute to shortages and price spikes, creating opportunities across precious metals.
Crypto vs. Metals: Bitcoin shows malaise and selling pressure while capital rotates into gold and silver, weakening the prior “digital gold” narrative.
Transcript
Welcome back. I'm Jeremy Saffron. We begin today with a market that is sending two diametrically opposed signals. First, on the economic front, the data shows a consumer that has hit the brakes and is now sliding backward. December retail sales have come in flat at 0.0%. In the core, what they call control group, which feeds directly into GDP, is actually negative. But even more concerning is the debt data hitting the wire this morning from the New York Fed. According to them, consumer delinquencies have uh risen to 4.8%. It's the highest level in nearly a decade. And it looks like Americans aren't just slowing their spending. But delinquencies are showing they're increasingly missing payments. Yet, financial assets are moving at a historic velocity. The Dow industrial average is trading firmly in the 50,000 range. Spot gold looking quite nice here. It looks like it's established a floor, trading comfortably around $5,000 uh on the spot side. And the most critical number hitting the wire today isn't price, it's volume. Bloomberg Intelligence reports that the daily turnover in US equities has surpassed $1 trillion. And joining me to break down this disconnect is a man who doesn't just watch these markets. He built the instruments that trade them as a founder of CEO of Granite Shares. He manages both the physical gold trust and the high veloc high velocity leveraged ETFs driving this turnover. Uh he sees the actual capital flowing before it hits the tape. Will Ryan, welcome back to the show. Good to see you. >> Thank you, Jeremy. Good to be back. >> I want to talk to you about this uh this new report out of Bloomberg. Uh that trillion dollar turnover figure. I mean, most analysts see this as a kind of a headline number, but you see the order book, Will. I mean, when you see daily volume exceeding a trillion dollars while retail sales are a little bit flat here, not a little bit, 0%, delinquency rates are hitting nearly 5%. What's the quality of the volume? Is this, you know, institutional conviction, pension funds, sovereigns allocating for the long term, or is it purely highfrequency trading and retail leverage turning the same dollar back and forth? >> I think it's all of the above. And maybe to throw into the mix, Jeremy, I think the thing that these reports perhaps sometimes under reportport is that the US is the largest capital market in the world. And in terms of the AI companies or the large tech companies, they're here in the US. And so this is very much a global phenomena. In other words, a lot of that volume is coming not just from the US, it's coming from other markets as well, where if you're in South Korea or if you're in Australia or whatever, the only way you can trade Google, trade Nvidia, trade Tesla, etc., is to come to the US. And that's what those people are doing. >> Interesting. So a little bit of that overseas volume and and in your daily creation and you know you look at the redemption log specifically for your leverage single stock ETFs are you seeing net new capital entering the system I mean are these you know creations meaning fresh cash is coming from the sidelines or is it the same capital moving just 100 times faster >> it it's actually really interesting so what we see and this is a generalization because of course there'll be some days where what I'm about to say might be might be contradicted But >> I would say as a general rule of thumb, what we tend to see is selling when the market is high and buying when the market is low. Now, specifically for some of these stocks, that means that when you see new highs being made or when you see technical tops being made, we tend to see selling more than buying. And then vice versa, if there's a dip, we definitely see dip buying happening um in a lot of these key names. So I think it's healthy in terms of market behavior that at least we see from our platform. >> Yeah. Interesting. So I mean every dip does seem to be bought even when we see those slight corrections like we've seen in the market. So to be clear I mean our creations are they they're positive are they flat? Are they negative this week? >> They're positive this week Jeremy and positive I would say um for the last at least couple of weeks. Um, and typically when you see the big flushes to the top in certain names, that's when you typically see uh redemptions or outflows. >> Yeah. Wow. Fascinating. All right. Well, we got to move over to the credit markets cuz this uh this story, you know, Alphabet's raising $32 billion in in 24 hours and and specifically that 100-year bond. I mean, the last time we saw tech companies issuing century data debt was in the late '9s. from your seat. Is this the sign of corporate strength or or is it a warning? Does a company lock in a 100red-year debt because they believe rates are going lower or because they fear capital is about to become more scarce? >> You know, it's funny. We we used to only talk about this being possible with governments and that, you know, this was a sort of a hangover from wartime etc. that only a sovereign could raise debt um with that particular sort of maturity. Um but now we've got companies in the world that are in a better financial position than a lot of governments. And so what we see here is another example of this where I think the question probably to your point Jeremy is they raise money because they can. Um and you know this is not necessarily a indictment on future interest rates so much as it is I think the stability uh for any company over time to be able to predict uh financing and you know run the business around that. >> Yeah. Interesting. So is this you know the first sign that large corporates are are starting to think like quasi sovereigns? Well, I think that um this is something first of all that we have seen before. Albeit people will say that perhaps not quite to this effect. But if you recall when interest rates will last incredibly low, we saw a lot of the large tech companies using that opportunity to raise hu what seemed at the time huge amounts of debt. You know, the Apples and things of the world doing that at very low interest rates. And that was one thing that really then acted as almost like a tailwind to earnings when interest rates rose again. And of course the common logic at the time when the fed started raising interest rates was to say well if the Fed is raising interest rates that means that the cost of debt for these large tech companies is going to be a lot higher and that's going to hurt them. But of course, the converse was actually true because just like a homeowner who had taken out a mortgage at exactly the right time, the rising interest rate didn't affect the company and actually acted as a tailwind because the financing costs were. So, I think this is an extension of that and they're doing it because they've got the balance sheet to do it. They're doing it because the infrastructure investments needed for AI are the largest that we will see in our lifetime. And therefore secure financing is is fundamental to that buildout. >> Yeah. I mean, you know, when the conversation used to be exclusive to sovereigns, it was about currency and stability. If if corporates are now having it, I mean, does that signal declining trust in future capital markets themselves? I mean, locking in funding for 100 years suggests fear of future access, not confidence in future efficiency. >> I I wouldn't necessarily read into it that much or or in that way. I think it's more about the scale of the buildout that we're seeing and perhaps investors you know fears and and sometimes I think that is um right to have some fear of the size of the buildout you know again it's like in the late '9s or the early 2000s where a lot of these companies that we now look at the mag 7 um as being so dominant in the sector that was the case that they were spending huge amounts of capex at that time you know the Amazons and things of the world and the companies weren't profitable uh because they were reinvesting so much into growth. And I think this time around, you know, clearly the market doesn't necessarily like um the amount of money that's been spent in capex, but maybe this is one way to appease investors that um the pathway to doing this is more secure. >> You know, speaking of capex, I mean, if if big tech is absorbing 32 billion in a single day, what does that do to the rest of the market? Are we seeing a crowded out effect where the industrial, you know, in the commodity sectors, the real economy are kind of being starved of capital because it's all flowing into that AI infrastructure debt? I think you could look at it to some degree like that and maybe that's been you know really the the trend for the last decade plus whereby you know investors have favored the growth stocks the growth stories in this market that those have been the companies that have been able to attract capital when needed enable to to spend on the sort of investments that they want and that has meant that for some sectors and for mining companies other companies involved in the commodity sector more broadly that has meant much more difficult because they haven't had the growth story. They haven't had the the same sort of attractiveness on paper that some of these tech companies have had and therefore that's led to underinvestment and we're now see seeing the the um the results of that um today where that underinvestment in the mining space you for a number of years is causing this shortage and causing price spikes in certain commodities. >> Yeah. Let's uh pivot to the metals here, Will, because I mean, gold sitting here holding firm in the $5,000 range. We have, you know, bad retail data today. Yields are softening. Textbook economics says gold should be exploding higher on this. Uh it's it's up, but it's not parabolic. You know, with the stock market kind of turnover so high, is gold competing for oxygen still? Is is the safety trade being ignored simply because the liquidity trade in stocks is so loud right now? And could that be why we saw that that selloff? I I think it's a bit of a consolidation at this point, not just for gold, but for other metals in the space. I mean, we saw just moves in the market that we haven't seen from since the late '7s. Uh that rally. So, we saw really outside move. I mean, a 10% move in the gold price is extraordinary. So, I think it's it's natural that the market's looking to consolidate. The other thing just about this week, Jeremy, is that we've got um non-farm payrolls on Friday, which I think will be a bigger number for the street than perhaps these retail sales numbers that we had today uh and some of the other data points. So I think you know the market's looking for or looking towards Friday to get a better indication of you know whether the labor market's softening and of course as it pertains to gold and other hard assets whether that means the Fed is more likely to then uh cut rates and perhaps cut rates more than the market expects if the economy is softening. >> Yeah, it's it's been fascinating to watch this what we call debasement trade, right? I mean, it almost got a little meme there. And and you run the Bar Gold ETF. I I want to know about the type of buyer you're seeing right now. Are they seeing wealth managers, you know, allocating 5% and sitting on it or are they just seeing the same hot money that hot money that kind of trades in Nvidia trying to trade gold now? Because the stickiness of that capital is is matters for the price floor. >> Yeah. and and for just speaking for us and for bar um and the other products we we run I think for gold it's been very steady and in my mind what's happening is yes of course there have been people allocating to gold but it it's been much more methodical than I think you might think um so we haven't seen that sort of frenzy or mania um that we sometimes see in other markets at different times and for me that sort of tells you that the the buying behavior and gold is still very rational. I think what we saw in the last couple of weeks was more related to retail investors in China and some of the leverage that was used in the markets um that caused the volatility much more than say US investors who are typically long and you know don't really move the the positions that much. >> When we hear about these squeezes on the physical metal side and we'll get to silver in a second. I mean you know running those types of ETFs, what can you tell me? I mean, how much how much concern do you have there? >> Well, I I think that we we have concern for outsized volatility in any market where you wouldn't expect outsized volatility. So you take gold and you see these wild swings um that we just haven't seen um in our career then that's clearly caused for concern because you know gold is something that people buy uh they buy as almost like the the anti- volatility play and so for gold to to trade like that is something that investors are not used to. I think to to a certain degree there's an expectation that silver is more volatile but again not to the sort of degree that we've seen you know over the last couple of weeks and so you know I think that part of that can be explained by uh the frenzy that happened you know in China and some of the the unwinds uh in the leverage market but clearly I hope now we're getting to a point where there's more stability in the market. >> Yeah. I mean, if if China is now setting the marginal price for gold, does does that change how we should think about gold's behavior going forward, more volatile, less predictable, but but more anchored to physical demand? >> I think to some degree, um, that's been the big elephant in the room, I think, over the last sort of 20 years. And of course, it started with the speculation that the Chinese central bank was buying gold. And of course, gold was strategic to China's long-term vision. And of course, we just didn't know exactly how much they were buying um because they didn't release the data in a perhaps as trans transparent way as as other central banks did. But I think now that sort of cats firmly out of the bag, so to speak, that um they're amassing huge amounts of gold. And not only that, the the Chinese retail investor is firmly on board as well. And I think we're living in a world where you know gold has become the de facto al currency alternative to the US dollar. You know we know that it surpassed the euro already in relevance and is now the de facto. And I think for some countries maybe that is you know becoming or the aspiration is for gold to become the de facto currency of the world and even replace the dollar. And that's part of what's going on I think outside of the US. And when you look at that market, Will, I mean, so while the US markets are trading paper at record speed, China is moving physical metal. I mean, are we watching two different gold markets kind of collide? >> I think we're watching the same gold market, but just different sources of demand and different um, you know, pools of capital competing for ultimately the same prize, which is ownership of gold. And so whereby before you know gold might have had a narrower market you know with a narrower investor base just like we started this conversation Jeremy by talking about US equity trading volumes that the world is global. It might not feel that from an the industrial perspective or from a geopolitical perspective right now but from a markets perspective and currency perspective it's still global and global capital is chasing gold. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's it's actually fascinating. You and I were chatting just briefly about the plat off off air too. I mean it hasn't broken out like gold but it certainly hasn't broken down even as the consumer weakens and industrial demands seems to be slowing down. What does platinum see that equities and even gold doesn't? I think platinum is the potential next metal to go and indeed we have the platinum ETF PLTM is the ticker and that's the one where there's been you know again considerable volatility in the price just like we've seen from silver because platinum's more industrial but that's one I would point to as being a huge amount of interest in PLTM in platinum more broadly gold I think a lot of people perhaps the rally took them by surprise fortunately for those already in trade. They were long already. They didn't um perhaps take the opportunity to add more to the position, but nevertheless are happy because the value of their holdings went up. I think certainly there was some more chasing as people looked uh to silver that perhaps had missed out a lot of the gains in gold. And I think some of those people are now looking at platinum and looking at palladium um as the sort of next metal to run. Of course, when we're talking about platinum specifically, although it's broken out, platinum's still trading visav around half or 50% lower than the price of gold, which of course for the longest period in history, platinum used to trade at a premium to gold. And so if that could be retaken again, it's big upside from here. >> That's interesting. I was going to ask you, I mean, you know, when you say platinum could be the next metal to move, it implies kind of a sequence. I just wanted to know what changes in the system when capital starts moving beyond gold and into platinum. Is it just that kind of squeeze sign or is it the FOMO effect? You know, >> I think it's a bit of both. I mean, we certainly saw that in silver and you know, my argument was that um it was inconceivable that we could have gold at the price levels that we were seeing without the silver price reacting um in a sort of catch up fashion that we'd seen previously in every other, you know, cycle. And so silver was more obvious and I think people started to to understand that and therefore started to buy silver and of course then the the effect is self-fulfilling. And I think the same things going on with platinum at the moment um and perhaps to a lesser extent with palladium where people are looking at those metals and saying well if platinum can retake um an ounce of gold so retake 5,000 and trade at a premium again to gold then there's still plenty of headwind. >> Yeah. Wild, huh? You know, silver too, Will. I mean, 80 bucks today on the spot side. Uh, we saw that dip, you know, we saw that correction. It came down fast as we're used to it happening. Um, the gold silver ratio remains quite wide though. I mean, if the consumer is slowing down, you know, that 0.0 sales. The industrial case for silver maybe weakens here. So, what's holding the price up? Is it the monetary demand finally entering the silver silver market? Well, I think it's the combination of, you know, the silver market and the same thing for platinum trading at a deficit. So, you have strong fundamentals. The market is clearly um consolidating at this level. I think we'll consolidate to a higher price. And if we consolidate to a higher price than the previous all-time high, that shows you how healthy the market is. So, we'll yet to see, you know, longer term whether that happens. But I think it's showing you that yes there could be um a slowdown but is there a slowdown in the demand sources that really will propel silver demand namely technology AI we were talking about data centers the electrification of everything are those the places that are really slowing down or are we talking about a more general consumer-based malaise >> yeah I was going to ask you I mean is silver's price is it kind of being set by investment demand now, not the fabrication demand because I mean it got a little meme stocky as people were calling it there for a second. >> I I think it's a mixture of both but I mean what starts it is clearly the fundamentals have to be right in the first place >> um for any speculation to start and the fundamentals with silver were right. Um this is a market that again hasn't been invested in from a capex perspective for for a number of years. We had more demand than we had supply. Countries around the world, but namely specifically the US and to a lesser extent other western countries are now re-industrializing. There's a need strategically both from a national defense perspective and from a pure manufacturing perspective to invest more to bring manufacturing onshore. What are we manufacturing and what are we producing? Well, at the core of it, more power. more power for technology, for AI, etc. electrification, and that's all going to need silver, copper, um, and other core commodities. Is the silver price, you know, still being set by futures and ETFs, or are you starting to see physical demand pushed back against the paper market? >> Um, I I think that probably at the margin, you'd have to say at the moment that the price has been set by more investors. Now whether though whether you count you know that being Chinese investors and whether you count that being specifically you know through one instrument or another is difficult to say but I think at the at the margin the investors firmly interested in in silver at the moment and that seems to be the sort of the the dominant uh marginal buyer >> and and let's say with the silver ETFs just for a second because you know silver trades heavily through paper vehicles as we know but what are you actually seeing in silver ETF flows are investors is adding exposure or are they trading around volatility? >> Yeah. So to give you to give you a sense and now we don't have a silver ETF but the SLV which is the largest silver ETF um last week the SLV was trading the most in other words the highest volume of any security on the planet. Now, to put that in perspective, you're talking about silver market trading more than the S&P 500 in ETF form, which is on any given day the most liquid, the most traded security on the planet. So, that is extraordinary um in anybody's book. Now, of course, that is abnormal. We're not trying to say that that there's anything normal about that, but I think it just shows you the level of interest in silver at the moment and indeed in the sector that has been unloved for for so many years versus perhaps some of the other areas of the market. >> Yeah. I mean, it's it's wild, right? Everybody's talking about, oh, we we hold our silver, but is is that intensity coming from silver being used as a volatility instrument rather than kind of a metal investment? I mean I think a lot of it um if not all of it um for the last couple of weeks has been driven by you know heavy speculation with the momentum and the price movement in silver and all the excitement that comes with that but again I go back to underpinning that is an actual real fundamental story and just like we've seen in some of the big AI names whether people you know talk about Nvidia or talk about other companies there have been times when there's been an absolute fever to trade that stock, but it but it has been rooted in real fundamentals. So, it's not necessarily the case that it's just wild speculation for no reason. That there is a real reason behind it. >> Yeah. Yeah. Well said. Um, you know, we're also seeing Bitcoin trade around just 70,000 today. It's 1.69. In a session where, you know, those retail sales are flat, yields are dipping. Kind of a classic setup for alternative investments. Bitcoin is struggling to break out. I mean, does this confirm that Bitcoin has become a high beta, you know, tech proxy? If the economy slows down, does Bitcoin catch a bid as a store of value or does it just sell off with the NASDAQ? >> Well, it has been selling off and not only selling off with the NASDAQ, selling off while the NASDAQ is going to new all-time highs. So, decoupling from that tech trade where AI still seems to be going in one direction and that's up and Bitcoin is going in the other direction, firmly south. Now the irony here is Jeremy a few years ago I would have been probably on this show and one of the questions you would have asked me would be hey with all of the oxygen going into the Bitcoin market is that oxygen being taken out of gold and silver and therefore is you know are investors moving from gold to Bitcoin I think today we're asking the exact opposite question that with all the oxygen in the gold and silver markets >> and other precious metals is that where investors are putting their capital today and our investors taking money out of Bitcoin and putting it into gold and silver. And I think that that's what you're seeing um that certainly some of the old the OGs um as they call it in the Bitcoin world, but some of the the original holders and largest holders of Bitcoin have been dumping holdings uh especially from over $100,000 a coin downwards. that has been putting a lot of pressure and it doesn't seem like there's that spark, there's that catalyst to propel prices higher at the moment. Um especially in a world where gold's hitting highs, equities are hitting highs, other asset classes are hitting highs. So there is no real reason why Bitcoin hasn't caught a bid. And I think part of it is because, you know, there is a bit of malaise because the price action hasn't been hasn't been responsive and people are looking for that in other areas of the market. >> Yeah. And is is Bitcoin increasingly, you know, being used as a source of liquidity, something traders sell first when margin calls hit rather than something they hold through the draw downs? >> That could be part of it. And indeed with the proliferation now of derivative instruments around Bitcoin, clearly there are way more ways to play the price of Bitcoin than just holding on to physical, if that's the right way to say it, bitcoins themselves. Um, so from that perspective, there are lots more ways to speculate on it. And I think that brings a lot more competition to the traditional method of just buying the actual bitcoins themselves. And from that perspective, I think more of that um liquidity does decrease the scarcity ultimately of it, which is having an impact on the price. >> Yeah. I know you don't like to give outlooks. Do you think that uh you'll see a little bit more buy in in the Bitcoin market? Any any kind of figure you can give me that you think that we'll end the year out with? I I honestly have no idea, Jeremy. I think that the what what I can say is I think the people who believe in the Bitcoin story, they won't be perturbed by this. They'll just say it's another Bitcoin winter and um however that long however that cycle lasts will be however however long it lasts and that Bitcoin will go on to retain new all-time highs. I think I'm much more worried about the investors who were sort of on the fence and maybe just chasing Bitcoin for momentum. I think for a lot of those investors they they might not be coming back um to Bitcoin and I think that they are looking and re-evaluating crypto. I've seen a huge amount of negativity online that I just haven't seen before even in previous um bare cycles. And so we'll have to we'll have to wait and see. But I think um with so many other asset classes performing perhaps in a different way to the past when it seemed like Bitcoin was perhaps the only asset that was performing and others were not. Um I think that the sort of undecided investor in the middle um is perhaps this time moving away and might not come back. >> Yeah. Going to the physical. All right. Uh all right. We've held you up here, but as you look across, you know, the metals complex right now, gold, platinum, silver, what do you think the order of strength you expect if this divergence kind of persists? I mean, where do you see gold, silver, and and and the plats going this year? Look, I mean, I think um whether it's in the next few weeks or in the next few months, I think we're going higher and you know, we are in a world where the US dollar is weakening. We have a new Fed chair coming in in a few months time. And despite what you might read uh in the press, unless it's one of the biggest head fakes ever, um we would expect the new Fed chair to be a bit more doubbish um than the current chair and guide policy lower in a way that perhaps is a bit more predictable to the current administration. So from that perspective, you look at an environment where rates are coming down. Inflation seems to be in check, but again, there could be a surprise or two. We have a tariff environment which is still unstable and with the drop of a tweak can still cause a lot of volatility in the market and geopolitical concerns around the world that just don't seem to go away. So we're in an environment where China, other countries are stockpiling gold. They're stockpiling this currency. And I think for that reason um we are in an environment where we can see gold prices higher than than they are today. And I think that's already feeding into the other metals. And you can just argue that the other metals have more of an industrial, you know, demand tilt to them and more of a relevant industrial story given what's happening with AI, with data centers, with power. Um, that is all feeding into the story for uh silver and for platinum, palladium, etc. >> Tailwinds, that's for sure. Okay. Well, final question here. I mean, we have that kind of flat economy with rising defaults. We got that trillion dollar turnover in the stock market. Gold's holding at 5,000. I mean, history tells us divergence don't last forever. So, I mean, you know, looking at the next 6 months, does the stock market correct down to the reality of the consumer or does policy inflate the economy up to the asset prices? I I think when we talk about the stock market, sometimes we have to make a distinction that it's almost too general a word to describe what's going on. And it's a bit like when people talk about the consumer. It's too general to describe what's happening. There is it's a multi-level or multi-tiered system. The stock market is not one homogeneous thing. as we measure it through the S&P 500. The story is there are a few tech companies that are doing incredibly well are printing huge amounts of money and reporting almost record profits every quarter or every year. Now those companies are driving what we call the market. So really when we talk about the market it's a story about those companies >> and then we have the rest. It's like the consumer. We have the wealthy consumer and we have everybody else. So I think the answer to your question, Jeremy, is I think we're in the early stages of AI. I think that the largest tech companies will continue the build out, will continue the race for AI and those companies will continue to do very well. Now the rest of the market I think will be dragged along by those companies but it'll be very much down to uh individual sectors and individual companies as to who performs and who doesn't. We've already seen some some lackluster data from the retailers from the end of last year and we'll see whether that sticks um as the year continues. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean we we got the Dow in the headlines 50,000. If capital is rotating, it's moving within equities from from growth and momentum into cash flow and balance sheet names, or is this really just de-risking dressed up as an index shift from the S&P to the Dow? >> I I don't really see any noticeable rotation and whenever people talk about that, it seems to be very shortlived. So take the last couple of weeks that we saw a sell-off in tech fueled by concern regardless of you know how you look at it but you know another bout of AI bubble concerns and and I guess you could convince yourself maybe for one minute that there's a bit of a rotation happening but to my earlier point the question is well what are you rotating into? >> Yeah. And if you're rotating into a sector, a stock, a company that's not growing, you then come back to the problem that ultimately investing is about growth and you need everybody needs growth. And so there was a violent snapback in terms of the AI trade and tech trade as people I think realized that that's where the growth is. And we, you know, whether we like it or not, we've got to be invested in in growth. And so people will always come back to that for for so long as that story is intact. >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess I guess we could say it's it just changes the rapper, right? It doesn't uh reduce risk there then. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean it it's it's not about reducing risk unless you take the view that you know the Nvidia, the Googles are the gold equivalent of stocks and that this is not actually a risk in the way that perhaps it's sometimes communicated >> um at least with stocks you know more broadly because what you're buying is the highest quality names that are the most profitable names the you know most sovereignlike dare I names uh in the market and therefore you know that should be viewed as a less risky investment than say companies that do not have the same kind of profile. >> Yeah. Yeah. Um on a personal level before I let you go will I haven't had you on the show in a while. Did that run up on the medals just surprised you? Did you catch you know it caught a lot of people by surprise just how fast it went? >> Oh I mean there's there's no doubt. um you know various points in my career $5,000 gold was something that um you know 10 years ago you would I mean there was the Peter Schiffs and and people of the world that were talking about $5,000 gold and again credit to them they were right it was just a question of timing >> um but clearly that was a very that was a very abnormal sort of call um a long time ago and and the the rise of gold, I don't think anybody would have predicted um with the exception of a few people. Um the the speed and the size of this particular rally. >> Yeah, it's been wild to watch. All right, Will Ryan, CEO of Greenwich. Always appreciate the look inside the market plumbing. Uh really good insight today. Thanks for joining us. I appreciate your time. >> Thanks, Jeremy. Great to be on. >> Appreciate it. All right, gold in the $5,000 ret uh range. It looks like retail sales are a little bit flat in the stock market. It's moving a trillion dollars a day. The divergence is real and we'll be here every day to track it. Now, I'm Jeremy Saver. For more exclusive interviews and data analysis that you won't find anywhere else, make sure to subscribe right here to Kiko News Channel and hit that notification bell so you never miss an update. Thanks for watching. Heat. Heat.
Silver ETF Volume Beats S&P 500: The ‘Abnormal’ Signal & What Comes Next
Summary
Transcript
Welcome back. I'm Jeremy Saffron. We begin today with a market that is sending two diametrically opposed signals. First, on the economic front, the data shows a consumer that has hit the brakes and is now sliding backward. December retail sales have come in flat at 0.0%. In the core, what they call control group, which feeds directly into GDP, is actually negative. But even more concerning is the debt data hitting the wire this morning from the New York Fed. According to them, consumer delinquencies have uh risen to 4.8%. It's the highest level in nearly a decade. And it looks like Americans aren't just slowing their spending. But delinquencies are showing they're increasingly missing payments. Yet, financial assets are moving at a historic velocity. The Dow industrial average is trading firmly in the 50,000 range. Spot gold looking quite nice here. It looks like it's established a floor, trading comfortably around $5,000 uh on the spot side. And the most critical number hitting the wire today isn't price, it's volume. Bloomberg Intelligence reports that the daily turnover in US equities has surpassed $1 trillion. And joining me to break down this disconnect is a man who doesn't just watch these markets. He built the instruments that trade them as a founder of CEO of Granite Shares. He manages both the physical gold trust and the high veloc high velocity leveraged ETFs driving this turnover. Uh he sees the actual capital flowing before it hits the tape. Will Ryan, welcome back to the show. Good to see you. >> Thank you, Jeremy. Good to be back. >> I want to talk to you about this uh this new report out of Bloomberg. Uh that trillion dollar turnover figure. I mean, most analysts see this as a kind of a headline number, but you see the order book, Will. I mean, when you see daily volume exceeding a trillion dollars while retail sales are a little bit flat here, not a little bit, 0%, delinquency rates are hitting nearly 5%. What's the quality of the volume? Is this, you know, institutional conviction, pension funds, sovereigns allocating for the long term, or is it purely highfrequency trading and retail leverage turning the same dollar back and forth? >> I think it's all of the above. And maybe to throw into the mix, Jeremy, I think the thing that these reports perhaps sometimes under reportport is that the US is the largest capital market in the world. And in terms of the AI companies or the large tech companies, they're here in the US. And so this is very much a global phenomena. In other words, a lot of that volume is coming not just from the US, it's coming from other markets as well, where if you're in South Korea or if you're in Australia or whatever, the only way you can trade Google, trade Nvidia, trade Tesla, etc., is to come to the US. And that's what those people are doing. >> Interesting. So a little bit of that overseas volume and and in your daily creation and you know you look at the redemption log specifically for your leverage single stock ETFs are you seeing net new capital entering the system I mean are these you know creations meaning fresh cash is coming from the sidelines or is it the same capital moving just 100 times faster >> it it's actually really interesting so what we see and this is a generalization because of course there'll be some days where what I'm about to say might be might be contradicted But >> I would say as a general rule of thumb, what we tend to see is selling when the market is high and buying when the market is low. Now, specifically for some of these stocks, that means that when you see new highs being made or when you see technical tops being made, we tend to see selling more than buying. And then vice versa, if there's a dip, we definitely see dip buying happening um in a lot of these key names. So I think it's healthy in terms of market behavior that at least we see from our platform. >> Yeah. Interesting. So I mean every dip does seem to be bought even when we see those slight corrections like we've seen in the market. So to be clear I mean our creations are they they're positive are they flat? Are they negative this week? >> They're positive this week Jeremy and positive I would say um for the last at least couple of weeks. Um, and typically when you see the big flushes to the top in certain names, that's when you typically see uh redemptions or outflows. >> Yeah. Wow. Fascinating. All right. Well, we got to move over to the credit markets cuz this uh this story, you know, Alphabet's raising $32 billion in in 24 hours and and specifically that 100-year bond. I mean, the last time we saw tech companies issuing century data debt was in the late '9s. from your seat. Is this the sign of corporate strength or or is it a warning? Does a company lock in a 100red-year debt because they believe rates are going lower or because they fear capital is about to become more scarce? >> You know, it's funny. We we used to only talk about this being possible with governments and that, you know, this was a sort of a hangover from wartime etc. that only a sovereign could raise debt um with that particular sort of maturity. Um but now we've got companies in the world that are in a better financial position than a lot of governments. And so what we see here is another example of this where I think the question probably to your point Jeremy is they raise money because they can. Um and you know this is not necessarily a indictment on future interest rates so much as it is I think the stability uh for any company over time to be able to predict uh financing and you know run the business around that. >> Yeah. Interesting. So is this you know the first sign that large corporates are are starting to think like quasi sovereigns? Well, I think that um this is something first of all that we have seen before. Albeit people will say that perhaps not quite to this effect. But if you recall when interest rates will last incredibly low, we saw a lot of the large tech companies using that opportunity to raise hu what seemed at the time huge amounts of debt. You know, the Apples and things of the world doing that at very low interest rates. And that was one thing that really then acted as almost like a tailwind to earnings when interest rates rose again. And of course the common logic at the time when the fed started raising interest rates was to say well if the Fed is raising interest rates that means that the cost of debt for these large tech companies is going to be a lot higher and that's going to hurt them. But of course, the converse was actually true because just like a homeowner who had taken out a mortgage at exactly the right time, the rising interest rate didn't affect the company and actually acted as a tailwind because the financing costs were. So, I think this is an extension of that and they're doing it because they've got the balance sheet to do it. They're doing it because the infrastructure investments needed for AI are the largest that we will see in our lifetime. And therefore secure financing is is fundamental to that buildout. >> Yeah. I mean, you know, when the conversation used to be exclusive to sovereigns, it was about currency and stability. If if corporates are now having it, I mean, does that signal declining trust in future capital markets themselves? I mean, locking in funding for 100 years suggests fear of future access, not confidence in future efficiency. >> I I wouldn't necessarily read into it that much or or in that way. I think it's more about the scale of the buildout that we're seeing and perhaps investors you know fears and and sometimes I think that is um right to have some fear of the size of the buildout you know again it's like in the late '9s or the early 2000s where a lot of these companies that we now look at the mag 7 um as being so dominant in the sector that was the case that they were spending huge amounts of capex at that time you know the Amazons and things of the world and the companies weren't profitable uh because they were reinvesting so much into growth. And I think this time around, you know, clearly the market doesn't necessarily like um the amount of money that's been spent in capex, but maybe this is one way to appease investors that um the pathway to doing this is more secure. >> You know, speaking of capex, I mean, if if big tech is absorbing 32 billion in a single day, what does that do to the rest of the market? Are we seeing a crowded out effect where the industrial, you know, in the commodity sectors, the real economy are kind of being starved of capital because it's all flowing into that AI infrastructure debt? I think you could look at it to some degree like that and maybe that's been you know really the the trend for the last decade plus whereby you know investors have favored the growth stocks the growth stories in this market that those have been the companies that have been able to attract capital when needed enable to to spend on the sort of investments that they want and that has meant that for some sectors and for mining companies other companies involved in the commodity sector more broadly that has meant much more difficult because they haven't had the growth story. They haven't had the the same sort of attractiveness on paper that some of these tech companies have had and therefore that's led to underinvestment and we're now see seeing the the um the results of that um today where that underinvestment in the mining space you for a number of years is causing this shortage and causing price spikes in certain commodities. >> Yeah. Let's uh pivot to the metals here, Will, because I mean, gold sitting here holding firm in the $5,000 range. We have, you know, bad retail data today. Yields are softening. Textbook economics says gold should be exploding higher on this. Uh it's it's up, but it's not parabolic. You know, with the stock market kind of turnover so high, is gold competing for oxygen still? Is is the safety trade being ignored simply because the liquidity trade in stocks is so loud right now? And could that be why we saw that that selloff? I I think it's a bit of a consolidation at this point, not just for gold, but for other metals in the space. I mean, we saw just moves in the market that we haven't seen from since the late '7s. Uh that rally. So, we saw really outside move. I mean, a 10% move in the gold price is extraordinary. So, I think it's it's natural that the market's looking to consolidate. The other thing just about this week, Jeremy, is that we've got um non-farm payrolls on Friday, which I think will be a bigger number for the street than perhaps these retail sales numbers that we had today uh and some of the other data points. So I think you know the market's looking for or looking towards Friday to get a better indication of you know whether the labor market's softening and of course as it pertains to gold and other hard assets whether that means the Fed is more likely to then uh cut rates and perhaps cut rates more than the market expects if the economy is softening. >> Yeah, it's it's been fascinating to watch this what we call debasement trade, right? I mean, it almost got a little meme there. And and you run the Bar Gold ETF. I I want to know about the type of buyer you're seeing right now. Are they seeing wealth managers, you know, allocating 5% and sitting on it or are they just seeing the same hot money that hot money that kind of trades in Nvidia trying to trade gold now? Because the stickiness of that capital is is matters for the price floor. >> Yeah. and and for just speaking for us and for bar um and the other products we we run I think for gold it's been very steady and in my mind what's happening is yes of course there have been people allocating to gold but it it's been much more methodical than I think you might think um so we haven't seen that sort of frenzy or mania um that we sometimes see in other markets at different times and for me that sort of tells you that the the buying behavior and gold is still very rational. I think what we saw in the last couple of weeks was more related to retail investors in China and some of the leverage that was used in the markets um that caused the volatility much more than say US investors who are typically long and you know don't really move the the positions that much. >> When we hear about these squeezes on the physical metal side and we'll get to silver in a second. I mean you know running those types of ETFs, what can you tell me? I mean, how much how much concern do you have there? >> Well, I I think that we we have concern for outsized volatility in any market where you wouldn't expect outsized volatility. So you take gold and you see these wild swings um that we just haven't seen um in our career then that's clearly caused for concern because you know gold is something that people buy uh they buy as almost like the the anti- volatility play and so for gold to to trade like that is something that investors are not used to. I think to to a certain degree there's an expectation that silver is more volatile but again not to the sort of degree that we've seen you know over the last couple of weeks and so you know I think that part of that can be explained by uh the frenzy that happened you know in China and some of the the unwinds uh in the leverage market but clearly I hope now we're getting to a point where there's more stability in the market. >> Yeah. I mean, if if China is now setting the marginal price for gold, does does that change how we should think about gold's behavior going forward, more volatile, less predictable, but but more anchored to physical demand? >> I think to some degree, um, that's been the big elephant in the room, I think, over the last sort of 20 years. And of course, it started with the speculation that the Chinese central bank was buying gold. And of course, gold was strategic to China's long-term vision. And of course, we just didn't know exactly how much they were buying um because they didn't release the data in a perhaps as trans transparent way as as other central banks did. But I think now that sort of cats firmly out of the bag, so to speak, that um they're amassing huge amounts of gold. And not only that, the the Chinese retail investor is firmly on board as well. And I think we're living in a world where you know gold has become the de facto al currency alternative to the US dollar. You know we know that it surpassed the euro already in relevance and is now the de facto. And I think for some countries maybe that is you know becoming or the aspiration is for gold to become the de facto currency of the world and even replace the dollar. And that's part of what's going on I think outside of the US. And when you look at that market, Will, I mean, so while the US markets are trading paper at record speed, China is moving physical metal. I mean, are we watching two different gold markets kind of collide? >> I think we're watching the same gold market, but just different sources of demand and different um, you know, pools of capital competing for ultimately the same prize, which is ownership of gold. And so whereby before you know gold might have had a narrower market you know with a narrower investor base just like we started this conversation Jeremy by talking about US equity trading volumes that the world is global. It might not feel that from an the industrial perspective or from a geopolitical perspective right now but from a markets perspective and currency perspective it's still global and global capital is chasing gold. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's it's actually fascinating. You and I were chatting just briefly about the plat off off air too. I mean it hasn't broken out like gold but it certainly hasn't broken down even as the consumer weakens and industrial demands seems to be slowing down. What does platinum see that equities and even gold doesn't? I think platinum is the potential next metal to go and indeed we have the platinum ETF PLTM is the ticker and that's the one where there's been you know again considerable volatility in the price just like we've seen from silver because platinum's more industrial but that's one I would point to as being a huge amount of interest in PLTM in platinum more broadly gold I think a lot of people perhaps the rally took them by surprise fortunately for those already in trade. They were long already. They didn't um perhaps take the opportunity to add more to the position, but nevertheless are happy because the value of their holdings went up. I think certainly there was some more chasing as people looked uh to silver that perhaps had missed out a lot of the gains in gold. And I think some of those people are now looking at platinum and looking at palladium um as the sort of next metal to run. Of course, when we're talking about platinum specifically, although it's broken out, platinum's still trading visav around half or 50% lower than the price of gold, which of course for the longest period in history, platinum used to trade at a premium to gold. And so if that could be retaken again, it's big upside from here. >> That's interesting. I was going to ask you, I mean, you know, when you say platinum could be the next metal to move, it implies kind of a sequence. I just wanted to know what changes in the system when capital starts moving beyond gold and into platinum. Is it just that kind of squeeze sign or is it the FOMO effect? You know, >> I think it's a bit of both. I mean, we certainly saw that in silver and you know, my argument was that um it was inconceivable that we could have gold at the price levels that we were seeing without the silver price reacting um in a sort of catch up fashion that we'd seen previously in every other, you know, cycle. And so silver was more obvious and I think people started to to understand that and therefore started to buy silver and of course then the the effect is self-fulfilling. And I think the same things going on with platinum at the moment um and perhaps to a lesser extent with palladium where people are looking at those metals and saying well if platinum can retake um an ounce of gold so retake 5,000 and trade at a premium again to gold then there's still plenty of headwind. >> Yeah. Wild, huh? You know, silver too, Will. I mean, 80 bucks today on the spot side. Uh, we saw that dip, you know, we saw that correction. It came down fast as we're used to it happening. Um, the gold silver ratio remains quite wide though. I mean, if the consumer is slowing down, you know, that 0.0 sales. The industrial case for silver maybe weakens here. So, what's holding the price up? Is it the monetary demand finally entering the silver silver market? Well, I think it's the combination of, you know, the silver market and the same thing for platinum trading at a deficit. So, you have strong fundamentals. The market is clearly um consolidating at this level. I think we'll consolidate to a higher price. And if we consolidate to a higher price than the previous all-time high, that shows you how healthy the market is. So, we'll yet to see, you know, longer term whether that happens. But I think it's showing you that yes there could be um a slowdown but is there a slowdown in the demand sources that really will propel silver demand namely technology AI we were talking about data centers the electrification of everything are those the places that are really slowing down or are we talking about a more general consumer-based malaise >> yeah I was going to ask you I mean is silver's price is it kind of being set by investment demand now, not the fabrication demand because I mean it got a little meme stocky as people were calling it there for a second. >> I I think it's a mixture of both but I mean what starts it is clearly the fundamentals have to be right in the first place >> um for any speculation to start and the fundamentals with silver were right. Um this is a market that again hasn't been invested in from a capex perspective for for a number of years. We had more demand than we had supply. Countries around the world, but namely specifically the US and to a lesser extent other western countries are now re-industrializing. There's a need strategically both from a national defense perspective and from a pure manufacturing perspective to invest more to bring manufacturing onshore. What are we manufacturing and what are we producing? Well, at the core of it, more power. more power for technology, for AI, etc. electrification, and that's all going to need silver, copper, um, and other core commodities. Is the silver price, you know, still being set by futures and ETFs, or are you starting to see physical demand pushed back against the paper market? >> Um, I I think that probably at the margin, you'd have to say at the moment that the price has been set by more investors. Now whether though whether you count you know that being Chinese investors and whether you count that being specifically you know through one instrument or another is difficult to say but I think at the at the margin the investors firmly interested in in silver at the moment and that seems to be the sort of the the dominant uh marginal buyer >> and and let's say with the silver ETFs just for a second because you know silver trades heavily through paper vehicles as we know but what are you actually seeing in silver ETF flows are investors is adding exposure or are they trading around volatility? >> Yeah. So to give you to give you a sense and now we don't have a silver ETF but the SLV which is the largest silver ETF um last week the SLV was trading the most in other words the highest volume of any security on the planet. Now, to put that in perspective, you're talking about silver market trading more than the S&P 500 in ETF form, which is on any given day the most liquid, the most traded security on the planet. So, that is extraordinary um in anybody's book. Now, of course, that is abnormal. We're not trying to say that that there's anything normal about that, but I think it just shows you the level of interest in silver at the moment and indeed in the sector that has been unloved for for so many years versus perhaps some of the other areas of the market. >> Yeah. I mean, it's it's wild, right? Everybody's talking about, oh, we we hold our silver, but is is that intensity coming from silver being used as a volatility instrument rather than kind of a metal investment? I mean I think a lot of it um if not all of it um for the last couple of weeks has been driven by you know heavy speculation with the momentum and the price movement in silver and all the excitement that comes with that but again I go back to underpinning that is an actual real fundamental story and just like we've seen in some of the big AI names whether people you know talk about Nvidia or talk about other companies there have been times when there's been an absolute fever to trade that stock, but it but it has been rooted in real fundamentals. So, it's not necessarily the case that it's just wild speculation for no reason. That there is a real reason behind it. >> Yeah. Yeah. Well said. Um, you know, we're also seeing Bitcoin trade around just 70,000 today. It's 1.69. In a session where, you know, those retail sales are flat, yields are dipping. Kind of a classic setup for alternative investments. Bitcoin is struggling to break out. I mean, does this confirm that Bitcoin has become a high beta, you know, tech proxy? If the economy slows down, does Bitcoin catch a bid as a store of value or does it just sell off with the NASDAQ? >> Well, it has been selling off and not only selling off with the NASDAQ, selling off while the NASDAQ is going to new all-time highs. So, decoupling from that tech trade where AI still seems to be going in one direction and that's up and Bitcoin is going in the other direction, firmly south. Now the irony here is Jeremy a few years ago I would have been probably on this show and one of the questions you would have asked me would be hey with all of the oxygen going into the Bitcoin market is that oxygen being taken out of gold and silver and therefore is you know are investors moving from gold to Bitcoin I think today we're asking the exact opposite question that with all the oxygen in the gold and silver markets >> and other precious metals is that where investors are putting their capital today and our investors taking money out of Bitcoin and putting it into gold and silver. And I think that that's what you're seeing um that certainly some of the old the OGs um as they call it in the Bitcoin world, but some of the the original holders and largest holders of Bitcoin have been dumping holdings uh especially from over $100,000 a coin downwards. that has been putting a lot of pressure and it doesn't seem like there's that spark, there's that catalyst to propel prices higher at the moment. Um especially in a world where gold's hitting highs, equities are hitting highs, other asset classes are hitting highs. So there is no real reason why Bitcoin hasn't caught a bid. And I think part of it is because, you know, there is a bit of malaise because the price action hasn't been hasn't been responsive and people are looking for that in other areas of the market. >> Yeah. And is is Bitcoin increasingly, you know, being used as a source of liquidity, something traders sell first when margin calls hit rather than something they hold through the draw downs? >> That could be part of it. And indeed with the proliferation now of derivative instruments around Bitcoin, clearly there are way more ways to play the price of Bitcoin than just holding on to physical, if that's the right way to say it, bitcoins themselves. Um, so from that perspective, there are lots more ways to speculate on it. And I think that brings a lot more competition to the traditional method of just buying the actual bitcoins themselves. And from that perspective, I think more of that um liquidity does decrease the scarcity ultimately of it, which is having an impact on the price. >> Yeah. I know you don't like to give outlooks. Do you think that uh you'll see a little bit more buy in in the Bitcoin market? Any any kind of figure you can give me that you think that we'll end the year out with? I I honestly have no idea, Jeremy. I think that the what what I can say is I think the people who believe in the Bitcoin story, they won't be perturbed by this. They'll just say it's another Bitcoin winter and um however that long however that cycle lasts will be however however long it lasts and that Bitcoin will go on to retain new all-time highs. I think I'm much more worried about the investors who were sort of on the fence and maybe just chasing Bitcoin for momentum. I think for a lot of those investors they they might not be coming back um to Bitcoin and I think that they are looking and re-evaluating crypto. I've seen a huge amount of negativity online that I just haven't seen before even in previous um bare cycles. And so we'll have to we'll have to wait and see. But I think um with so many other asset classes performing perhaps in a different way to the past when it seemed like Bitcoin was perhaps the only asset that was performing and others were not. Um I think that the sort of undecided investor in the middle um is perhaps this time moving away and might not come back. >> Yeah. Going to the physical. All right. Uh all right. We've held you up here, but as you look across, you know, the metals complex right now, gold, platinum, silver, what do you think the order of strength you expect if this divergence kind of persists? I mean, where do you see gold, silver, and and and the plats going this year? Look, I mean, I think um whether it's in the next few weeks or in the next few months, I think we're going higher and you know, we are in a world where the US dollar is weakening. We have a new Fed chair coming in in a few months time. And despite what you might read uh in the press, unless it's one of the biggest head fakes ever, um we would expect the new Fed chair to be a bit more doubbish um than the current chair and guide policy lower in a way that perhaps is a bit more predictable to the current administration. So from that perspective, you look at an environment where rates are coming down. Inflation seems to be in check, but again, there could be a surprise or two. We have a tariff environment which is still unstable and with the drop of a tweak can still cause a lot of volatility in the market and geopolitical concerns around the world that just don't seem to go away. So we're in an environment where China, other countries are stockpiling gold. They're stockpiling this currency. And I think for that reason um we are in an environment where we can see gold prices higher than than they are today. And I think that's already feeding into the other metals. And you can just argue that the other metals have more of an industrial, you know, demand tilt to them and more of a relevant industrial story given what's happening with AI, with data centers, with power. Um, that is all feeding into the story for uh silver and for platinum, palladium, etc. >> Tailwinds, that's for sure. Okay. Well, final question here. I mean, we have that kind of flat economy with rising defaults. We got that trillion dollar turnover in the stock market. Gold's holding at 5,000. I mean, history tells us divergence don't last forever. So, I mean, you know, looking at the next 6 months, does the stock market correct down to the reality of the consumer or does policy inflate the economy up to the asset prices? I I think when we talk about the stock market, sometimes we have to make a distinction that it's almost too general a word to describe what's going on. And it's a bit like when people talk about the consumer. It's too general to describe what's happening. There is it's a multi-level or multi-tiered system. The stock market is not one homogeneous thing. as we measure it through the S&P 500. The story is there are a few tech companies that are doing incredibly well are printing huge amounts of money and reporting almost record profits every quarter or every year. Now those companies are driving what we call the market. So really when we talk about the market it's a story about those companies >> and then we have the rest. It's like the consumer. We have the wealthy consumer and we have everybody else. So I think the answer to your question, Jeremy, is I think we're in the early stages of AI. I think that the largest tech companies will continue the build out, will continue the race for AI and those companies will continue to do very well. Now the rest of the market I think will be dragged along by those companies but it'll be very much down to uh individual sectors and individual companies as to who performs and who doesn't. We've already seen some some lackluster data from the retailers from the end of last year and we'll see whether that sticks um as the year continues. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean we we got the Dow in the headlines 50,000. If capital is rotating, it's moving within equities from from growth and momentum into cash flow and balance sheet names, or is this really just de-risking dressed up as an index shift from the S&P to the Dow? >> I I don't really see any noticeable rotation and whenever people talk about that, it seems to be very shortlived. So take the last couple of weeks that we saw a sell-off in tech fueled by concern regardless of you know how you look at it but you know another bout of AI bubble concerns and and I guess you could convince yourself maybe for one minute that there's a bit of a rotation happening but to my earlier point the question is well what are you rotating into? >> Yeah. And if you're rotating into a sector, a stock, a company that's not growing, you then come back to the problem that ultimately investing is about growth and you need everybody needs growth. And so there was a violent snapback in terms of the AI trade and tech trade as people I think realized that that's where the growth is. And we, you know, whether we like it or not, we've got to be invested in in growth. And so people will always come back to that for for so long as that story is intact. >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess I guess we could say it's it just changes the rapper, right? It doesn't uh reduce risk there then. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean it it's it's not about reducing risk unless you take the view that you know the Nvidia, the Googles are the gold equivalent of stocks and that this is not actually a risk in the way that perhaps it's sometimes communicated >> um at least with stocks you know more broadly because what you're buying is the highest quality names that are the most profitable names the you know most sovereignlike dare I names uh in the market and therefore you know that should be viewed as a less risky investment than say companies that do not have the same kind of profile. >> Yeah. Yeah. Um on a personal level before I let you go will I haven't had you on the show in a while. Did that run up on the medals just surprised you? Did you catch you know it caught a lot of people by surprise just how fast it went? >> Oh I mean there's there's no doubt. um you know various points in my career $5,000 gold was something that um you know 10 years ago you would I mean there was the Peter Schiffs and and people of the world that were talking about $5,000 gold and again credit to them they were right it was just a question of timing >> um but clearly that was a very that was a very abnormal sort of call um a long time ago and and the the rise of gold, I don't think anybody would have predicted um with the exception of a few people. Um the the speed and the size of this particular rally. >> Yeah, it's been wild to watch. All right, Will Ryan, CEO of Greenwich. Always appreciate the look inside the market plumbing. Uh really good insight today. Thanks for joining us. I appreciate your time. >> Thanks, Jeremy. Great to be on. >> Appreciate it. All right, gold in the $5,000 ret uh range. It looks like retail sales are a little bit flat in the stock market. It's moving a trillion dollars a day. The divergence is real and we'll be here every day to track it. Now, I'm Jeremy Saver. For more exclusive interviews and data analysis that you won't find anywhere else, make sure to subscribe right here to Kiko News Channel and hit that notification bell so you never miss an update. Thanks for watching. Heat. Heat.