If this were Doomsday, Markets would Show It (Alyosha)
Summary
Geopolitics & Energy: Extensive discussion of Middle East tensions and the imperative to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, with potential catastrophic infrastructure risks on both sides.
Oil Market Dynamics: Expectation of a major supply surge and market share war if the strait opens, citing large onshore/offshore inventories and SPR releases that could drive prices down.
Energy Sector Implications: U.S. energy abundance, Canadian pipeline potential, and global storage/floating inventories point to opportunities and volatility across integrated oil, E&P, and midstream.
Gold Thesis: Gold framed as a monetary constant and barometer of currency debasement; current elevated levels could face pullbacks despite its role as a long-term value anchor.
Silver Volatility: Silver’s parabolic move and subsequent risks highlighted, stressing the metal’s propensity for extreme squeezes and the importance of disciplined exits.
Market Signals: Despite headline risks, equities, rates, and gold price action are used to gauge whether fear is truly priced in, emphasizing price before narrative.
Companies Mentioned: References to Exxon Mobil, Nvidia, Meta (Facebook), and Beyond Meat as illustrative examples rather than active pitches.
Trading Approach: Focus on participation, strict risk management, and hard stops; plan scenarios ahead of catalysts like a strait reopening to react decisively.
Transcript
JD, we uh we're we're trying to figure out what the future looks like. And I I'm pretty sure that to figure out what the future looks like, you've just got to ask people who have experienced as many cycles as possible and have been so in tune with markets for that entire period of time and people who write about it so diligently. >> I think that's a great way to look at it and I think we've got the perfect guest today. So JJ is the fellow who's joining us. She writes under the Substack name Ali Osha and when you reference having experience JJ has a wealth of it and it's from a a much different lens to most the other people we've interviewed in the show previously he has been a pit trader in the states so you know those those images those videos you see of people physically shouting out yelling out trading commodities trading precious metals trading oil all these sorts of things and we got hooked on his writing some time ago and I would highly recommend and any of the listeners out there to to check it out under the name Ali Osha because it just sucks you in. He's got a fantastic way with words and that experience just bleeds through in in his writing. So, go check that out. >> He's um he's brilliant at just tying in the historical context to the today. Um and he's just funny. It's quite funny to read. >> He is he is every uh every sentence I think he puts it has to earn its place in in its in its paragraph in the writing and you feel that you see that it's so insightful. So, it's one that we regularly share in the newsletter. >> But before we give you a dose of JJ, JD, we've got to thank our marvelous partners who, thanks to them, bring you this wonderful podcast and conversation with JJ of Sanvic Ground Support. >> Sanvic Ground Support, cornerstone, wonderful partner, big supporter of the podcast for a long time, led by the billion dollar man at the front, Mr. Derek Herd. Mate, why do people need Sanvic ground support? They need Sanvic ground support because they want the best ground support in the industry. Ground support is what keeps the underground mining world thriving. And why not go for the best? Why settle for less than the best? These guys, as we've highlighted before, are at the bleeding edge of technology. They're coming up with new equipment all the time. We on the day this episode is announced, Travis, are going to Africa. We're going to go see some underground mines, and I bloody hope they're using sandic ground support. If they're not, I'll be chucking in an order myself, >> which you can do on the app these days. >> Absolutely can. Go send the ground support. Chuck an order in right now. Over to JJ. >> All right, money miners. We have a super exciting guest. We've got JJ with us. Comes with a wealth of experience as we as we sort of touched on in the intro there, trading in the metal space, in the energy space. So JJ, thank you for joining us. We're super excited to chat. Thank you, gentlemen. I'm I'm pleased to be here. It's uh it's it's the evening for you and it's it's the morning for me. So, I've got some very bright sun coming in the room. That's why I have everything kind of dark here. >> We're just coming into to Easter time. So, the the the the times are kind of changing on our end. But when we look at geopolitics, things are as interesting as they've they've ever been. It's it's been wild on that front for quite some time. And the last month has been no exception. I was kind of tossing up speaking with Traf where should we kind of start this this conversation and there was a a true social post from from Trump that I came think came out in the last day or so which is a natural kicking off point because it just dominates so much of the uh the conversation. So I'd love to hear because you've been following it super closely. You've been writing about it. How you see the situation poised in in the Middle East and what that kind of means. >> I don't think it's been a war yet. It's been a conflict, a violent negotiation, excuse me, but there's been very very limited mortality. Uh I think uh 15 Americans have died, 20 Israelis, about 1500 Iranians according to their own count, which is fewer than uh mortality in a single day in Ukraine. So calling it a war is kind of glib. I think it's uh it's it could be a war. It feels a lot like, you know, if you were to go back in time imagining what D-Day would have been like in 1944. Uh tremendous buildup of troops. Obviously there was something imminent coming. Uh the US has been gathering its forces now for a few weeks with I think at least 50,000 men in the region. Um but I don't think it's going to be the kind of you know massive ground invasion on Utah Beach or anything like that. uh what we're looking at is is a WMD situation without any kind of atomic detonation. In other words, the the two sides have a asymmetrical but equal uh force opposing each other. On the one hand, you have the Iranians um who have the ability to destroy uh most of the GCC regions and Israel's water which they rely on uh 99% from deselination. These are coastal installations, soft targets, almost impossible to defend. and they have the uh capability, missile capability, they've proven that type of precision accuracy to destroy them within, you know, within a few minutes actually. So to do that, you know, would have the very same kind of catastrophic effect of of a single strike device on millions of people. uh massive uh disruption, dehydration, uh uh suffering pretty much. And and on the other hand, Trump has the very same uh equal power uh to send Iran into the stone age as he said, you know, put them in a state of utter and complete darkness, no electricity, no refrigeration, no elevators, no hospitals, their backup generation would go in two or three days. Anyone on life support or anything like that would die. So, you know, the the catastrophic nature of what we're looking at, I think, is overlooked by a lot of people. Not because it's been so so kind of like TV tamed, you know, uh yeah, the bombing and the the flashing at night and all that stuff, but you know, as I said, mortality is is is fewer deaths in the entire month. It's less than a single day in Ukraine. So, um, we're coming to the edge of the world here right now with Trump, you know, and he has no options. There's no time now. I mean, even Exon Mobile says that if if if we were to have the straight open today, but there's probably 300 million barrels behind the straight right now. Plus, that's in ships. Plus, the Saudis have built storage on shore, which is about 300 million barrels. So let's just say there's 600 million backed up there behind the street. Even if they were to open that thing right now because of the shutins uh and impairments and curtailments, it might it might be six months before u they could begin to normalize their previous rates of production. So you know if we leave that unattended that rate of decay is going to accelerate down. The only thing that sustains them right now is their sovereign wealth funds have acquired over many years about six or seven trillion dollars and they are substituting loss of cash flow from oil sales with sales of assets which have had an impact on global markets as you see you know S&Ps over here have been under pressure because equities are of course the deepest most liquid source of immediate liquidity. US Treasury bonds. Uh this is the first time since 1950 in any great conflict that that uh bonds didn't go up because they're selling, you know, and everybody, whoa, what's going on with bonds? Well, okay, the Arabs are selling. Uh gold is not a strategic asset, you know. I think that they had maybe this varies somewhere between 15 17 million ounces. So they've been selling some gold, but you know, gold at $5,000 doesn't take a hell of a lot to knock it down a 100 bucks or 200 or 500 actually. So, um, they might hold their gold. Uh, but there's, you know, we'll talk about gold in a minute. At any rate, just just wrap up where we are with the GCC and and and this war here. Uh, no leader in the world would want the responsibility of putting millions of people in a state of calamitous risk where it is possible rather than having like a single strike instantaneous you know death of millions like Hiroshima or something like that with these a kind of if you do this to me, I'll do that to you. You know, you you you knock out my power, I'm going to knock out your water and all your resources. Uh no leader wants that responsibility. But the Iranians, you know, on our side, in other words, your prime minister or anyone in Europe or, you know, Carney in Canada or even Trump, but this has fallen on on Trump and I don't, you know, I don't want to talk about the politics of whether he's right or wrong. He's way be way beyond that right now. Someone has to open the straight. That has to happen. If it does not happen, an inverse calamity will sweep across the planet as as 30% of the world's production is at risk of being destroyed. Destroyed organically by doing nothing. In other words, let's just say I I curtailed your breathing. I I pinched your nostrils and then I cut off half your mouth and then I closed your mouth. That's really what's happening with the store news now. So, if we're going to save that anatomically, it has to have the kind of tracheal opening. And um I I don't know, you know, I mean, as far as uh Iran being able to charge a toll going through, well, why why wouldn't the United States charge a toll for going through the bearing straits or the British charge a toll for going through the channel or any other international waterway, which the world has has the legal right to use freely. So, you know, that's not a question. It's got to open up. And here we are. The only guy who has, you know, who has to say yes or no, happens to be Donald Trump. One of the most unique characters I think in my time, perhaps in many, many years. Uh, this will be studied what's happening, what we're doing today. This will be studied in colleges for the next thousand years perhaps more getting a sense of where we are. You know this is not like for just a front page story. This is global. This is uh a completely different asymmetric type of weapons of mass effect or mass disruption where the outcomes if they're allowed to unfold would be no no less as I said calamitous than Hiroshima. You know this grasp that 90 million people in Iran, no electricity, no power, no refrigeration, the elderly, the young, the children, darkness, darkness for many, many months and years to fully rebuild or all of the dalination and I don't know you guys know enough about what's going on over there gets wiped out all at once. And I don't think that there's a logistical way, particularly because, you know, I I've been a little pjorative here about the Europeans and the Chinese. They're just so damn prissy saying, "Oh, it's not my war." You know, well, it is your war. Whatever happens on this planet, whether it happens in Australia, whether it happens in California, whether it happens in Paris or London, is yours. You own that. I own that. our silence. We could go on X anytime we wanted. You, you, me say, I don't I don't agree with this. I don't want this. But our voices, you know, all we are is we're like, yeah, well, that's what's what's going on in the war today, you know, but when it happens, if it happens, you know, I would say that the blame for what would happen falls on every everybody. Everybody. You, me, them, us, she, Sarmmer, Mcronone, Vanderland, MS, all of them. Carney, Trump, all of them. I left out your prime minister because you're a stratist. >> You get where I'm coming from, right? >> 100%. >> You can't walk away from this one. No, you can't. You can't say, "Oh, he did it or he did it." That that that doesn't wash this time. This is not this is not 1944. >> So, I'll leave you with that. >> I I think you've done a great job there, JJ, at at um you know, summarizing the the precariousness of the situation we're kind of in. And there's there's so much to to kind of get into from there. you made the comment on how it's perceived or I was inferring how it's kind of perceived in the states at the moment perhaps there's not such a big deal and you're kind of seeing this in the prices of of some financial assets out there is is that the case that you you think right now because we sit here in Australia and and we're starting to to feel it with with diesel with fuel these sorts of things because we are so reliant on what comes out of that part of the world but this uh American energy independence and these sorts of things do Do you think that for the time being has diminished how it's felt in in your part of the world? >> Well, we're pretty uh I don't know how do I say this? We have a lot of oil. So, we don't feel that, right? Uh we're the largest producer of of petroleum fluids, crude. We have Canada right on our border. Canada's massive energy giant. Uh Trump just uh started this new relationship, I guess you could call it, with Venezuela, which has 300 billion barrels of proven reserves. Um 500 years they say, of natural gas between the regions and the north and in our hemisphere, 500 years of consumption at current rates. Plus, we're using coal, a massive amount of coal. we have um alternative energies, renewables. So the bouquet of of of energy is immense, you know, so we we don't have problems like Europe, you know, they've uh they've got a serious problem over there. Russia, of course, you know, they're huge producer and uh they're eight days away from China and Japan, so they can fill that hole. um you know if Canada wanted to uh they could duplicate the TransCanada very very quickly with you know uh fasttracking andbridge and some of these other uh TransCanada pipeline companies they could get a pipe to the west coast and move another million there a very very short period of time um I think they're crazy that they haven't done it but I don't know you I grew up uh with half of my family Canadian, half half American, so I kind of understand them. Um they're remarkable people. Uh anyway, so uh oil's not a problem. Um we have uh we have a lot of debt like everyone, but that in itself is also, you know, kind of hyperbolic. Um the balance sheet of the globe is really is very very strong. Uh everybody has tremendous resources, tremendous human capital. We know so much. Uh AI is just an expression of that. Um we're we're circumnavigating the the moon this weekend. You know, the idea that we're that we're limited in any way by a handful of of bureaucrats and uh proffleant politicians, you know, is it's just it's just click baiting nonsense. Um there have always been plutoaucrats. There have always been, you know, skevy grifting going on in politics. This is just is something like, you know, it's not something that I think you should worry about if you're an investor. You're never going to make any money betting on the end of the world ever. So, don't I'm an old man now. You know, I always said to myself, you know, when I when I first went into gold, my father said, "You are crazy. This is where all the lunatics are going." He said, "Go to the stock market. That's where the great money is made." And I said, "No, no, no, Dad. you don't know what you're talking about. So, I bought seats on the COMX and I went into commodities for years. But, uh, you know, over time, you look back at your life and you say, "Where did I make a lot of money?" You know, you're probably going to make a lot of money on your business. Uh, you're going to make a lot of money on um on stocks. You know, my wife and I, we own stocks that we've had since the 80s, you know, and you make money, you make money doing nothing. Just do your job, you know, try to try not to get run over. Uh, I own some gold. I bought some gold. I've been a gold all my life, actually. So, I have Krueger rants from the 80s. And they just sit in a sock drawer and they'll probably go to my kids. So, you know, this is just one of those things, you know, that we're going through right now. I'm hoping it will whether you like him or not, you know, Trump has some things going for him that are really pretty good. He's a businessman. He's a builder. Uh he likes peace. He'd rather he'd rather butttheads in trade rather than bullets. But he's not afraid to to fight, you know, like anybody else. I worked on the floor for years. I mean, every now and then you had a fight. You had to fight. You had you had your traitors usually don't leave their pits. You have the guys around you who are your friends and your allies. And so other guys that you are your I wouldn't say enemies, but they're your competitors, your adversaries. And if you're not gonna if you're not willing to fight for your money, you're going to lose it. Period. That's that's life, man. and and it's never going to be any different. So, over here, we're pretty chill. We have we have everything we need and uh as much as we complain about our leaders, I think they're as good as they've ever been. So, we're we're pretty okay. >> It it it might be a bit of a tangent, but I'd love to hear what what sucked you in about commodities. I mean, we've got it. Clearly, most people listening to this podcast got it. What what sucked you away from working in in bonds in in stocks into the the comx and nx back in the day? >> Well, I was a 60s rebel, you know. I had hair down the middle of my back. Uh I was my father was an army guy. Uh also very successful uh uh businessman in New York. Uh so for you know my teens uh I went away to boarding school. I went away to school. I didn't really have a lot of a close relationship with my father. Kind of waspy kind of thing, you know. It wasn't like a huggy thing. We shook hands when we wanted to express respect for one another. Uh so I we became alienated and you know I was I got out of school. I was doing odd jobs, roofing, barn roofing, hanging drywall construction and so forth. I was in New York. He lived in Grammarcy Park and I I was working at Maxis Kansas City with busing tables and uh 24 25 years old. I was just sick of being broke. So I I went to see him and I said uh can you help me get a job? And he he did. He got me a job on Wall Street as a runner and I went from the stock exchange to a better runner's job working for Continental Grain. And I, you know, I went up, I went up as soon as I saw the floor, the first day I walked on the floor of the exchange, I said, "I can do this. I want to do this." you know, and uh so I I got there somehow, you know, I I went to my boss's uh uh who who the Connie Commodities was the name of the company under Continental Grain, which is one of the largest privately held companies in the world, and I said, you know, I'd like to I'd like to get get into the office. And I was a kind of go-getter. Even though I didn't have to be at work until 7:00, I was always there at 6. 6. I I got the broker's coffee. I did our errands for them. I rolled up the Dow Jones tapes. The end of the week, I took them home and I read them all. And I decided, you know, I'm not in in my day. There really were no geniuses. You know, those guys were in books. Uh trading trading was really like a guild kind of thing where the guys on the floor uh had the edge to make prices buying and selling and all you had to do was participate. People were selling twos, you bought them, right? You try to buy 180s when it's two bit if you could, you know, depending on what kind of size was there and then you you'd sell two and a halfs. So during the course of the day, you know, you weren't really thinking about where the market was going. It was just was is it busy, you know, and how much flows going through? And then, you know, you kind of you evolve from there because we didn't have Bloomberg. We didn't have BLS statistics. No one was telling us, you know, what employment was. We didn't really care. you know, all the news that came to the markets came through the phones and they and the expression of of of whether or not, you know, it was meaningful was really the way the market auctioned that that kind of information. You know, prices would move and then the story would follow it, which is the natural way of things, right? Today, it's the opposite. Wall Street creates stories and then they use volume to validate them. So you create a story at 8:30 in the morning, you know, non-form payroll rose 110, boom, prices follow that, right? Prices are following the story. That's a bullshit market. But really, the real markets are prices move. So look at the way things are happening right now. You know, if this was the end of the world, do you think gold would be unchanged? If this was the end of the world, would stocks be unchanged, right? Interest rates unchanged? Would they just be sitting there? No. I mean, if we thought we were going to if the shit were really going to hit the fan, these markets would be moving and uh they're not. So whatever they're telling you, the the market is not validating what they're saying. And that's a very very important point for you guys when you're looking at something. I I remember um I remember co JJ and it felt like in the in in the month maybe two months before the market really shot the bed there. It felt like there was there was enough intel about the situation that was freely available and on Twitter and it was just like you know the the inertia of the mainstream just hadn't caught up yet and then all of a sudden it caught up all at once. Um, and I know that this this situation is very different because everyone has had so much time to put put together potential scenarios and everything, but is there is there not a um a possibility that that markets just have so much inertia? They're complacent. they're they're um they're they're they're in that they're expecting the best case scenario as opposed to uh the downside and hence and hence you know lots of these markets you mentioned are flat. >> I don't know. I can't answer that. I can only tell you what the market's doing now. You know uh I I have a kind of a process of looking at markets every day. take a look at a monthly chart. Even though it's monthly and it doesn't change much, I always start there in the morning and look at weekly, look at daily, hourly, take it down into different fractal samples and say, you know, I I always have a a really good sense of where the market was. You know, it doesn't mean I know where it will be, but it gives me a a a solid confidence in in why it is where it is. And um right now stocks are high, incredibly high. Everybody's talking about, you know, gold going to 8,000 or 6,000 or this that and the other thing. $5,000 gold is high. It's extremely high. And the reason why it's high, you ask yourself why why because it takes a lot of money to get a market like gold. uh to double its market cap in a in a year or two. I mean, the market cap of gold is I don't know whether it doubled, but it was in the teens a couple years ago, and now it's it's in in the 30 trillions. Uh there's seven billion ounces, seven, just do the math. Um it takes a lot of money to get it there, right? which means a lot of my people, institutions, everybody else has committed the the amount of cash they have to that so they're in it. And the same thing is going on with equities. Uh fixed income is is I think at a very very low EB and heavily short right now. Bonds are very very short. Uh so gold could go down a thousand bucks just because you know we let's say we I don't think this is going to last a long time no matter what happens this conflict thing it's going to be resolved the straight has to open that is it period and how messy it is that that's that's the aftermath but you know that's actually just going to have to happen I'm hoping that this is what I hope is that these politicians who have chops like she in Europe especially call Iran and say, "Hey dude, you're not getting the straight. That's it. You're not getting the straight. Period." But they're not. See, they're not doing that. And I I So that's that's going to happen. Even even so, when that oil comes out from behind the straight, oil's going to go straight down. There's 140 million Russian unshaned oil in floating storage right now in Asia, which I think is, you know, which is helping suppress those prices. Uh there was 100 million of Iranian. There's 400 million coming from the IEA's SPR release. I mean, we're talking about a billion barrels. You know, that's that's 10 days of supply. That's a lot of oil. Plus, the US has taken in 50 million uh in the last six weeks into our storage. So, I mean, we're getting up into like COVID uh uh inventories in the US right now. Prices are really high. So, when you get high high prices, what do you think producers do? They sell. They you know, you've got you want it, you got it. And I don't know whether you watch the oil curves. I traded oil all my life. Uh, gold and oil. I mean, just the TI curves are like nay May June is like a $12 spread. 10 or 12 spread. I don't know. Let's look at it. See where it is. Uh, where is it? May June. May June is trading 1304 this morning. I mean I I you know for a guy like me who's traded this all my life having I don't know 480 million barrels in in inventory and that's in pad three pad two pad one I mean that's that's life that's having having people pay 13 for May over June if if that if this trade opens and this this oil you becomes available to the market, the first thing that's going to happen is the GCC guys, the Saudis, the Iraq, anybody who's been shut out is going to go after market share because Russia has taken it. We have taken it, Norway has taken it, and they want it back. They they've been going on five, six weeks out of the market. Somebody else sleeping with your wife, right? It's going to be a market share war and there is a vast amount of oil and oil is just like anything else. You know, you don't need to pump it. You if you if you have it in the ground, you can borrow it. You can borrow it and you can sell it. So, uh that's that's coming. I think >> it's super super daunting for for the market, but we'll see what comes to pass on on that front. On on your comments on gold, JJ, I was reading a recent piece you wrote. I I think it was titled to the effect of what's going on with gold right now. And there was this line that was just screaming out at me that I wanted to ask you about. And you said, "Gold is the only market that is always right." And I'm really curious to to know what you meant by that. Okay. Well, um there's there's a line the fairerryyman says in Hessa's uh Sidarththa, "The river never moves." Right? So, you've heard the classic throwaway. You know, when I was a young man, a gold coin bought me a new suit. Now I'm an old man. A gold coin will buy me a new suit. Right? Terms of uh I wrote this. I can't remember what it is. Uh, let's just use oil. So, the price of gasoline in the harbor in New York right now is about 20% cheaper than it was in 2008 nominally, right? So, it settled at 307 on Friday. I don't know where it is. I I can't see my leaderboard right now, but it's it's a little bit lower. Um so the high in 2008 was uh 360. So just nominally is 20% lower. If we were to take a CPI inflation adjusted dollars, the price of gasoline is about two bucks a gallon right now at the pump here in America. So it's about 40% lower uh and in adjusted dollar prices. So it the purchasing power of the dollar has lost 85% of its value since 1975 when uh gold was legalized. So 85% of 5,000 $4,500 because that's where it is right now. We put gold at about 600 bucks. Uh it would put uh crude at around $15 a barrel. And in 1975 the high for crude was around 1350. So, and I've done this work going all the way back to 30s. You know, the the river really never moves. Uh, the value of money is constantly depreciating because that's the way we manage our lives. You know, it's what they do in Australia. We do it here. We do it in Europe. Uh, is it right? I don't know. You know, it it is what it is. This is the way we we manage our lives debasing our currencies. And so generationally each generation has the same rate of of of realities, difference in realities. You know, we t my generation sees the S&P from a base of 150. Your generation sees it from a base of probably 2,000. So, you know, and and if we were to use my generation's money, like I said, oil is $15 versus 13.5 in 1975. The S&P would be like a $900 item, 900, not 7,000. Right? So keeping a sense of you know like gold gold is like it's like the sun in a solar system of orbiting financial entities and everything else is moving around gold. So when you see gold going up if you can try to imagine the reality of of the flat earth idea gold is not moving. Everything else is going down. The faster gold goes up on your board, that's the faster everything you own is losing value in terms of your own money. Your house, your hammer, your hat, your bag of groceries, your car, all of those things, if you were to express that in Australian dollars, it's it's actually going down. only goal is going up because that's the way we that's the way we do it. That's it. So stop thinking about gold like everything else. It's this little pituitary gland and the anatomy of all our finances that keeps everything in balance. That tiny little gland, I don't know where it is. I think it's like here. That's the pineal. Uh, but you know what I'm saying. >> Totally. Totally. I was listening to a conversation with with Russell Napia, sort of financial historian, and he spoke about this and looking looking at data going back 800 years speaking to the to the same effect. You know, gold doesn't appreciate, depreciate. It it holds its value. And you can go back and you can see that over such a long period. It's a it's a wild thought to to think about on on such big time frames. If we if we pivot slightly to another precious silver is something you've written about and something you've followed for a long time now and January and Q1 in general might have been one of the most spectacular quarters we've seen for for a commodity in in quite some time. There were the the trap shorts you know the the volatility right at the end of that month Jan Jan 30 marking I think about 120 bucks. How did that month kind of weigh against your your experience of following that market? >> I knew it was coming. I wrote about it. I started writing about it in 2024 and everybody said, "Ah, JJ, get out of here. There's no shortage of silver." I kept writing about it, you know, and and uh as we got into the the bigger moves in the spring of 2025 after, you know, we had that that tariff day crash and everything came back. Gold started really going up in uh September of 2025 is when when silver really started going higher. And I I have written many times saying you guys just don't know what you're getting into here with silver. You know, you just have no clue what silver can do. Silver is not gold, but it has a lot of gold DNA in it. And it has a lot of cultural uh I don't know what to call it um appropriation from gold. So people, you know, they think, oh, gold's going up. I'm going to buy silver. So, you know, I got out of I was long sober for all that time and writing about it and bullish on it, but I got out in December. I got out early. Um, you know, the old saying, all my rich friends sold too early. Uh, anyway, so I missed really the last leg up, but I don't care. You know, I made a a I was very happy with with the way my trade worked out and I wanted to get as far away from Crakatoa as I could because I knew it was coming and I you know what good is it to ride a market you know from I don't know whatever price you get in let's say you got in the 50s or the 40s or the 30s or something like ride all the way up to 120 and then you know you're trading it all the way up your long and then it goes down 40% in one day, you know, and then, you know, for all of the people it's just the way markets work. You know, people come in late. Um, I'd say the m there was just a lot of money lost and I didn't want to be anywhere near it. And I did not want to I I never told my readers, you know, like buy this, buy that or anything like that. But if I feel strongly about something, I will tell them what I'm doing. You know, I say, I'm looking at this. This is what I want. This is where I This is where my attention is right now. This is where the voice in my head is going off. And so, if I'm writing that all the time, and you're reading what I'm writing, you know, you know where I'm coming from, right? And I don't have to tell you where I got it. And as a matter of fact, I could tell you guys and all your all your listeners where where the price of crude is going to close tomorrow, right? And every one of us would have different trades. Every one of us. Some of us get in right away. Some of us get in in a couple hours. Some of us get in $5 higher or lower or something like that. And I bet you probably at least 70 or 80% of the people even though I told you would lose money because that's just the way way people are. So I don't want to drag people into, you know, into silver when I know. So I said, you know, I'm I'm out. And then I got a whole lot of people saying, you know, what? You're out. what are you doing? You know, I said, I have this saying, I know I've been saying it for a long time. Always leave a party when you're having fun. Just get the greatest discipline in trading is getting out. Getting in is easy. It's so easy to say yes, you know, on an impulse this that and the other thing. Over time, you know, you get burned doing that. If you you know you getting it is important but direction is most important. If you have direction right then and confidence in your direction and you can weather being too early you can weather bad location and so forth. But you know getting out is one I it's really only one word that I can say that that's uh enough. You know how much is enough? Like when I was on the floor I I built a pretty big brokerage company. You know I was one of the largest uh paper brokers filling filling orders in the pits. And so uh during those years I put 35 guys in the ring guys. You know, I hired grand at Grand Union bag and groceries, uh, order clerks at the Essex Diner who could just great math in their heads, you know, and the only thing that you really needed from from from a skills perspective, if you're going to work on the floor, you had to be honest because we were on the honor system. You had to honor all your trades. You had to honor all your words. No matter how much you hated guys or anything like that, you you sell them 102 and it's eight bid. you're writing down 102, you're going to lose that 60k. That's gone. Right? So, uh, the other thing is you had to be numerate. Add, subtract, do multiply in your head very, very quickly and be accurate. If I turn around, I had a thousand lots on my card and I hand out my clerk. I said, "What's my count, right? I wanted that count in 15 seconds." And it had to be right. Otherwise, I was going to lose money, right? So those two skills, you know, and you start out, it's like a guild. You're a write up clerk, then you get to be a booth clerk, then you get to be a phone clerk, then you do ARB, and if you're really good at all those things, then you get to go in the pit, and you get a sponsor, and your sponsor puts you in the pit. And by the time you finally make it in the pit, the whole community, the entire trading membership knows you. They know you like a golf player knows you. They know you. They know you've got backbone. They know you. They know you can add and subtract. They Honesty is a given. It's expected. And all of those things are in place. And then you're allowed to go in and handle handle a lot of risk and and trade with everybody. JJ, you've been um you've been writing a very long time and I'm just like I'm just curious how would you synthesize your your trading philosophy and and how would that differ from most other financial writers trading philosophy. >> Just get the ball over the net. >> You know that's how you win the games. you know, your your job is not to be a genius, you know, uh, participate. If there's a rumbling, you know, Nancy Nancy Pelosi's buying Nvidia, you don't have to buy 10,000 shares. You don't have to buy 5,000 shares, buy 100 shares. Just participate, right? Exon breaks out. What? It's not really a thoughtful process when the best company in the whole world with a credit rating equal to or greater than the United States Treasury that's never skipped a dividend in an oil market is breaks out. You don't have to be, you know, just buy something. Buy 50 shares, buy one share. I I don't know. Don't don't don't put a lot of pressure on yourself about about being right. Uh although nothing works better than being right. Put a lot of pressure on yourself about managing losses. Um I think 90% of good trading is participating and and getting out. getting in is is it should be you know it's just you should you should be kind of intuitively constantly contingency planning all of the things you know if this happens that happens that so you're not thinking you know you're reacting you know what's going to happen right you I'm telling you guys this is what I this is what I'm thinking anyway if we have peace depending on how it unfolds if they open that straight there's going to be a shitload of oil coming out so how are you going to react to that Because believe me, things are going to start moving, you know, and have a plan. Have a plan and stick to it. Always have a stop. You can have a stop in gold. You can have a $4,000 stop and it's trading 4500, you know, but if you have that stop, you can never move that stop. It's got to it's got to be a hard stop. If you don't have a hard stop, you wind up, you know, you wind up owning some shit stock, I don't know, like like Beyond Meat or something like that. That went from 60 bucks to like 58 cents. You know, you no matter how how it you know, like my wife ran the gold test to get in Leman. This is after we were married and um so you know, a lot of her money uh was in Lemanto. And in 2008, uh, like she stopped working in the 90s when we had kids, but, uh, she had a lot of leave stock and, uh, in 2008, you know, we had to have a stop. So, I mean, trading 60, even if you have a $30 stop, you have to have that stop. And what what happened to Leman? Of course, we know, right? If you didn't have that stop, you have zero. I I worked at Refco. I have you ever heard of Refco? >> Yes. largest futures broker in the world, right? They did an IPO in 2005, so we all got shares. And I, you know, I I not only got shares, but I bought a lot of shares because uh my wife told me, she said, "This is where you make a lot of money. You know, when your company goes IPO and you're that that good and you're that big, you should really load up." So, I had a lot on. So, uh, my average entry price on what I bought was probably around like 18 or 20 bucks and I closed at $30 one day and I just got out a half. Just I didn't tell anybody. I just said, I'm I'm taking half of this money. So about two weeks later, uh it this guy Phil Bennett uh lied on the IPO uh disclosures and they found out about it and uh I had a stop and the rest of my Rifco stuff at at like, you know, some kind of 20 or 17 or 18 or something like that. That went on the opening. Four days later, Rifco closed at 25 cents. So stops got to have them. >> Wow. Wow. You you've got a fantastic way with with writing as well, JJ. And I'm curious from from the trading lens on Trav's question just there how how vital that is to your process as well of being a good trader. >> Well, I'm not I'm not I never think of myself as a good trader. you know, I've been able to uh educate my kids and and raise a family, but I'm by no means rich, you know, uh I could have been, but I just I just missed a lot, you know. It was a pretty good ham and I'd say, but you know, if you if you look at all the guys who who came off the floors, the difference between us and our skill set and our ability to see value and and trade it, although we we all had our own different ways, might have been 1,000th of 1%. But it is that tiny difference that makes the difference between a guy like me and a guy like Draen Miller. In order to survive making money, you have to be profitable. Most people can't. That's just the way it is. So going from profitable or making a decent living at it to making a lot of money at it, that's the difference between what you were saying, being a good trader. So why do I write? Um, I I've always been a broker who writes. I love writing. And uh I know I I know a lot, but you will never know because you didn't you weren't born where I was born. You didn't you didn't go to school in the 60s and 70s and you never will. So, if I don't write it down, uh, it'll it'll all be gone. And I've I've I'm leaving a pretty good record. I've written about I've actually I know what I've written. I've written over a million words on Substack, over a thousand pieces since I've I've started writing in uh the summer of of 2024. And uh I write twice a day. So I'm hoping, you know, in the end what I'll be able to do is create a compendium if you ever, you know, I'm gone because I can't keep doing this forever. Uh you can go to a book called Market Vibes and you can say what was happening on December 13, 2025. You can see the chart, right? Something happened. So, you'll be able to go back and you'll see exactly what I wrote about it in my style, which is not your not your average. It's it's not like what most people uh the way they write about it, but it'll it'll be it'll it'll give you a sense of how it felt rather than what the data says. Your style is unique, JJ. It's addictive to read. As uh as JD mentioned, you've got some um unique characteristics about about your style of writing as well. And that's an uncharacteristic abuse of lowercase as opposed to capitalizing. I've just got to ask why. Because I don't want to yell at you. I want I just want you to consume it. you know, it's sort of like I'm taking the salty, spicy stuff out of it, uh, and letting you make what you want out of it. You know, basically I I uh I think one of the most important uh things that people need to work on when they're approaching markets is humility. and uh avoid avoid you know measuring yourself against the market or or other people you know I didn't make enough on this or you know I was talking to uh I made friends with Rupert Mitchell who's one of your guys down there of blind scroll completely different type of approach to the markets than I have right so um I mentioned to him that uh when Facebook IPOed uh it came in at 50 and I I didn't do anything and it dropped to 38 I think the very next day uh or it may have dropped to 38 that day. Opened at 50 and went down and I I said to him, man, that's one of the my worst trades that I didn't do, right? I I should have Facebook then. I I should have participated, right? But I went back and I checked it and it actually went down to 19 in in that week. So there was just this massive gaping opportunity to get into a generational stock and I let it go. You know, I missed that one. Um so anyway I I uh I write about markets from that perspective. You know how how it felt to have been in silver uh constantly telling people because I traded you know I traded silver in 1980. I was working for Norton Waltok. I was in the pit in those days. I made a lot of money standing next to a guy named Frankie Lesey and I lost every penny up down right that that really hurt me. I had to sell my seats. Uh I had to go back to the back of the line, become an ARB clerk. I worked for Rudolph Wolf for a while. Got up on an ARB stand. Finally, they of course I was really good at it. I brought in a lot of business, made some money, so they put me back in the ring. But I went back into the ring again with a tremendous sense of humility. You know, I I I don't want that to happen again. So, uh the 80s were really great years for me and I I think uh this the late 70s were really bad for me. Um I came I had a lot of advantages as I said as a kid and um I was arrogant uh snotty. I thought it, you know, I thought I was going to make wild amount of money and it was never going to end and then boom, you know, well, the market has a way of of chastising you for that kind of behavior. So, humility is is uh is really an important thing to try to remember. You you you don't lose touch with that. >> I think a point on on humility is a is a great spot to leave this conversation. and JJ really appreciate you joining us sharing your your experiences, your thoughts on on the current state of markets. And for any of the the listeners out there, they can track you down under the name Alihasha. We'll include it in the the show notes, but I would I'd recommend they go and check out not only your daily writing, but some of the short stories going back over over the years of your experience. Uh they're just fantastic reads. So, I'd highly recommend them. Get in touch. Thanks again for for joining us, JJ. >> Thank you very much, gentlemen. I I appreciate it. Um you can reach me at jj745substack.com. >> Fantastic. Thank you. One we've honored to make happen for quite some time. Thrilled that JJ could join us and share some wisdom. Massive thank you to Sanvic ground support intrlinks focus the platform by market naten and metalshub. >> Hudoo huru. >> Now remember I'm an idiot. JD is an idiot. If you thought any of this was anything other than entertainment, you're an idiot and you need to read our disclaimer.
If this were Doomsday, Markets would Show It (Alyosha)
Summary
Transcript
JD, we uh we're we're trying to figure out what the future looks like. And I I'm pretty sure that to figure out what the future looks like, you've just got to ask people who have experienced as many cycles as possible and have been so in tune with markets for that entire period of time and people who write about it so diligently. >> I think that's a great way to look at it and I think we've got the perfect guest today. So JJ is the fellow who's joining us. She writes under the Substack name Ali Osha and when you reference having experience JJ has a wealth of it and it's from a a much different lens to most the other people we've interviewed in the show previously he has been a pit trader in the states so you know those those images those videos you see of people physically shouting out yelling out trading commodities trading precious metals trading oil all these sorts of things and we got hooked on his writing some time ago and I would highly recommend and any of the listeners out there to to check it out under the name Ali Osha because it just sucks you in. He's got a fantastic way with words and that experience just bleeds through in in his writing. So, go check that out. >> He's um he's brilliant at just tying in the historical context to the today. Um and he's just funny. It's quite funny to read. >> He is he is every uh every sentence I think he puts it has to earn its place in in its in its paragraph in the writing and you feel that you see that it's so insightful. So, it's one that we regularly share in the newsletter. >> But before we give you a dose of JJ, JD, we've got to thank our marvelous partners who, thanks to them, bring you this wonderful podcast and conversation with JJ of Sanvic Ground Support. >> Sanvic Ground Support, cornerstone, wonderful partner, big supporter of the podcast for a long time, led by the billion dollar man at the front, Mr. Derek Herd. Mate, why do people need Sanvic ground support? They need Sanvic ground support because they want the best ground support in the industry. Ground support is what keeps the underground mining world thriving. And why not go for the best? Why settle for less than the best? These guys, as we've highlighted before, are at the bleeding edge of technology. They're coming up with new equipment all the time. We on the day this episode is announced, Travis, are going to Africa. We're going to go see some underground mines, and I bloody hope they're using sandic ground support. If they're not, I'll be chucking in an order myself, >> which you can do on the app these days. >> Absolutely can. Go send the ground support. Chuck an order in right now. Over to JJ. >> All right, money miners. We have a super exciting guest. We've got JJ with us. Comes with a wealth of experience as we as we sort of touched on in the intro there, trading in the metal space, in the energy space. So JJ, thank you for joining us. We're super excited to chat. Thank you, gentlemen. I'm I'm pleased to be here. It's uh it's it's the evening for you and it's it's the morning for me. So, I've got some very bright sun coming in the room. That's why I have everything kind of dark here. >> We're just coming into to Easter time. So, the the the the times are kind of changing on our end. But when we look at geopolitics, things are as interesting as they've they've ever been. It's it's been wild on that front for quite some time. And the last month has been no exception. I was kind of tossing up speaking with Traf where should we kind of start this this conversation and there was a a true social post from from Trump that I came think came out in the last day or so which is a natural kicking off point because it just dominates so much of the uh the conversation. So I'd love to hear because you've been following it super closely. You've been writing about it. How you see the situation poised in in the Middle East and what that kind of means. >> I don't think it's been a war yet. It's been a conflict, a violent negotiation, excuse me, but there's been very very limited mortality. Uh I think uh 15 Americans have died, 20 Israelis, about 1500 Iranians according to their own count, which is fewer than uh mortality in a single day in Ukraine. So calling it a war is kind of glib. I think it's uh it's it could be a war. It feels a lot like, you know, if you were to go back in time imagining what D-Day would have been like in 1944. Uh tremendous buildup of troops. Obviously there was something imminent coming. Uh the US has been gathering its forces now for a few weeks with I think at least 50,000 men in the region. Um but I don't think it's going to be the kind of you know massive ground invasion on Utah Beach or anything like that. uh what we're looking at is is a WMD situation without any kind of atomic detonation. In other words, the the two sides have a asymmetrical but equal uh force opposing each other. On the one hand, you have the Iranians um who have the ability to destroy uh most of the GCC regions and Israel's water which they rely on uh 99% from deselination. These are coastal installations, soft targets, almost impossible to defend. and they have the uh capability, missile capability, they've proven that type of precision accuracy to destroy them within, you know, within a few minutes actually. So to do that, you know, would have the very same kind of catastrophic effect of of a single strike device on millions of people. uh massive uh disruption, dehydration, uh uh suffering pretty much. And and on the other hand, Trump has the very same uh equal power uh to send Iran into the stone age as he said, you know, put them in a state of utter and complete darkness, no electricity, no refrigeration, no elevators, no hospitals, their backup generation would go in two or three days. Anyone on life support or anything like that would die. So, you know, the the catastrophic nature of what we're looking at, I think, is overlooked by a lot of people. Not because it's been so so kind of like TV tamed, you know, uh yeah, the bombing and the the flashing at night and all that stuff, but you know, as I said, mortality is is is fewer deaths in the entire month. It's less than a single day in Ukraine. So, um, we're coming to the edge of the world here right now with Trump, you know, and he has no options. There's no time now. I mean, even Exon Mobile says that if if if we were to have the straight open today, but there's probably 300 million barrels behind the straight right now. Plus, that's in ships. Plus, the Saudis have built storage on shore, which is about 300 million barrels. So let's just say there's 600 million backed up there behind the street. Even if they were to open that thing right now because of the shutins uh and impairments and curtailments, it might it might be six months before u they could begin to normalize their previous rates of production. So you know if we leave that unattended that rate of decay is going to accelerate down. The only thing that sustains them right now is their sovereign wealth funds have acquired over many years about six or seven trillion dollars and they are substituting loss of cash flow from oil sales with sales of assets which have had an impact on global markets as you see you know S&Ps over here have been under pressure because equities are of course the deepest most liquid source of immediate liquidity. US Treasury bonds. Uh this is the first time since 1950 in any great conflict that that uh bonds didn't go up because they're selling, you know, and everybody, whoa, what's going on with bonds? Well, okay, the Arabs are selling. Uh gold is not a strategic asset, you know. I think that they had maybe this varies somewhere between 15 17 million ounces. So they've been selling some gold, but you know, gold at $5,000 doesn't take a hell of a lot to knock it down a 100 bucks or 200 or 500 actually. So, um, they might hold their gold. Uh, but there's, you know, we'll talk about gold in a minute. At any rate, just just wrap up where we are with the GCC and and and this war here. Uh, no leader in the world would want the responsibility of putting millions of people in a state of calamitous risk where it is possible rather than having like a single strike instantaneous you know death of millions like Hiroshima or something like that with these a kind of if you do this to me, I'll do that to you. You know, you you you knock out my power, I'm going to knock out your water and all your resources. Uh no leader wants that responsibility. But the Iranians, you know, on our side, in other words, your prime minister or anyone in Europe or, you know, Carney in Canada or even Trump, but this has fallen on on Trump and I don't, you know, I don't want to talk about the politics of whether he's right or wrong. He's way be way beyond that right now. Someone has to open the straight. That has to happen. If it does not happen, an inverse calamity will sweep across the planet as as 30% of the world's production is at risk of being destroyed. Destroyed organically by doing nothing. In other words, let's just say I I curtailed your breathing. I I pinched your nostrils and then I cut off half your mouth and then I closed your mouth. That's really what's happening with the store news now. So, if we're going to save that anatomically, it has to have the kind of tracheal opening. And um I I don't know, you know, I mean, as far as uh Iran being able to charge a toll going through, well, why why wouldn't the United States charge a toll for going through the bearing straits or the British charge a toll for going through the channel or any other international waterway, which the world has has the legal right to use freely. So, you know, that's not a question. It's got to open up. And here we are. The only guy who has, you know, who has to say yes or no, happens to be Donald Trump. One of the most unique characters I think in my time, perhaps in many, many years. Uh, this will be studied what's happening, what we're doing today. This will be studied in colleges for the next thousand years perhaps more getting a sense of where we are. You know this is not like for just a front page story. This is global. This is uh a completely different asymmetric type of weapons of mass effect or mass disruption where the outcomes if they're allowed to unfold would be no no less as I said calamitous than Hiroshima. You know this grasp that 90 million people in Iran, no electricity, no power, no refrigeration, the elderly, the young, the children, darkness, darkness for many, many months and years to fully rebuild or all of the dalination and I don't know you guys know enough about what's going on over there gets wiped out all at once. And I don't think that there's a logistical way, particularly because, you know, I I've been a little pjorative here about the Europeans and the Chinese. They're just so damn prissy saying, "Oh, it's not my war." You know, well, it is your war. Whatever happens on this planet, whether it happens in Australia, whether it happens in California, whether it happens in Paris or London, is yours. You own that. I own that. our silence. We could go on X anytime we wanted. You, you, me say, I don't I don't agree with this. I don't want this. But our voices, you know, all we are is we're like, yeah, well, that's what's what's going on in the war today, you know, but when it happens, if it happens, you know, I would say that the blame for what would happen falls on every everybody. Everybody. You, me, them, us, she, Sarmmer, Mcronone, Vanderland, MS, all of them. Carney, Trump, all of them. I left out your prime minister because you're a stratist. >> You get where I'm coming from, right? >> 100%. >> You can't walk away from this one. No, you can't. You can't say, "Oh, he did it or he did it." That that that doesn't wash this time. This is not this is not 1944. >> So, I'll leave you with that. >> I I think you've done a great job there, JJ, at at um you know, summarizing the the precariousness of the situation we're kind of in. And there's there's so much to to kind of get into from there. you made the comment on how it's perceived or I was inferring how it's kind of perceived in the states at the moment perhaps there's not such a big deal and you're kind of seeing this in the prices of of some financial assets out there is is that the case that you you think right now because we sit here in Australia and and we're starting to to feel it with with diesel with fuel these sorts of things because we are so reliant on what comes out of that part of the world but this uh American energy independence and these sorts of things do Do you think that for the time being has diminished how it's felt in in your part of the world? >> Well, we're pretty uh I don't know how do I say this? We have a lot of oil. So, we don't feel that, right? Uh we're the largest producer of of petroleum fluids, crude. We have Canada right on our border. Canada's massive energy giant. Uh Trump just uh started this new relationship, I guess you could call it, with Venezuela, which has 300 billion barrels of proven reserves. Um 500 years they say, of natural gas between the regions and the north and in our hemisphere, 500 years of consumption at current rates. Plus, we're using coal, a massive amount of coal. we have um alternative energies, renewables. So the bouquet of of of energy is immense, you know, so we we don't have problems like Europe, you know, they've uh they've got a serious problem over there. Russia, of course, you know, they're huge producer and uh they're eight days away from China and Japan, so they can fill that hole. um you know if Canada wanted to uh they could duplicate the TransCanada very very quickly with you know uh fasttracking andbridge and some of these other uh TransCanada pipeline companies they could get a pipe to the west coast and move another million there a very very short period of time um I think they're crazy that they haven't done it but I don't know you I grew up uh with half of my family Canadian, half half American, so I kind of understand them. Um they're remarkable people. Uh anyway, so uh oil's not a problem. Um we have uh we have a lot of debt like everyone, but that in itself is also, you know, kind of hyperbolic. Um the balance sheet of the globe is really is very very strong. Uh everybody has tremendous resources, tremendous human capital. We know so much. Uh AI is just an expression of that. Um we're we're circumnavigating the the moon this weekend. You know, the idea that we're that we're limited in any way by a handful of of bureaucrats and uh proffleant politicians, you know, is it's just it's just click baiting nonsense. Um there have always been plutoaucrats. There have always been, you know, skevy grifting going on in politics. This is just is something like, you know, it's not something that I think you should worry about if you're an investor. You're never going to make any money betting on the end of the world ever. So, don't I'm an old man now. You know, I always said to myself, you know, when I when I first went into gold, my father said, "You are crazy. This is where all the lunatics are going." He said, "Go to the stock market. That's where the great money is made." And I said, "No, no, no, Dad. you don't know what you're talking about. So, I bought seats on the COMX and I went into commodities for years. But, uh, you know, over time, you look back at your life and you say, "Where did I make a lot of money?" You know, you're probably going to make a lot of money on your business. Uh, you're going to make a lot of money on um on stocks. You know, my wife and I, we own stocks that we've had since the 80s, you know, and you make money, you make money doing nothing. Just do your job, you know, try to try not to get run over. Uh, I own some gold. I bought some gold. I've been a gold all my life, actually. So, I have Krueger rants from the 80s. And they just sit in a sock drawer and they'll probably go to my kids. So, you know, this is just one of those things, you know, that we're going through right now. I'm hoping it will whether you like him or not, you know, Trump has some things going for him that are really pretty good. He's a businessman. He's a builder. Uh he likes peace. He'd rather he'd rather butttheads in trade rather than bullets. But he's not afraid to to fight, you know, like anybody else. I worked on the floor for years. I mean, every now and then you had a fight. You had to fight. You had you had your traitors usually don't leave their pits. You have the guys around you who are your friends and your allies. And so other guys that you are your I wouldn't say enemies, but they're your competitors, your adversaries. And if you're not gonna if you're not willing to fight for your money, you're going to lose it. Period. That's that's life, man. and and it's never going to be any different. So, over here, we're pretty chill. We have we have everything we need and uh as much as we complain about our leaders, I think they're as good as they've ever been. So, we're we're pretty okay. >> It it it might be a bit of a tangent, but I'd love to hear what what sucked you in about commodities. I mean, we've got it. Clearly, most people listening to this podcast got it. What what sucked you away from working in in bonds in in stocks into the the comx and nx back in the day? >> Well, I was a 60s rebel, you know. I had hair down the middle of my back. Uh I was my father was an army guy. Uh also very successful uh uh businessman in New York. Uh so for you know my teens uh I went away to boarding school. I went away to school. I didn't really have a lot of a close relationship with my father. Kind of waspy kind of thing, you know. It wasn't like a huggy thing. We shook hands when we wanted to express respect for one another. Uh so I we became alienated and you know I was I got out of school. I was doing odd jobs, roofing, barn roofing, hanging drywall construction and so forth. I was in New York. He lived in Grammarcy Park and I I was working at Maxis Kansas City with busing tables and uh 24 25 years old. I was just sick of being broke. So I I went to see him and I said uh can you help me get a job? And he he did. He got me a job on Wall Street as a runner and I went from the stock exchange to a better runner's job working for Continental Grain. And I, you know, I went up, I went up as soon as I saw the floor, the first day I walked on the floor of the exchange, I said, "I can do this. I want to do this." you know, and uh so I I got there somehow, you know, I I went to my boss's uh uh who who the Connie Commodities was the name of the company under Continental Grain, which is one of the largest privately held companies in the world, and I said, you know, I'd like to I'd like to get get into the office. And I was a kind of go-getter. Even though I didn't have to be at work until 7:00, I was always there at 6. 6. I I got the broker's coffee. I did our errands for them. I rolled up the Dow Jones tapes. The end of the week, I took them home and I read them all. And I decided, you know, I'm not in in my day. There really were no geniuses. You know, those guys were in books. Uh trading trading was really like a guild kind of thing where the guys on the floor uh had the edge to make prices buying and selling and all you had to do was participate. People were selling twos, you bought them, right? You try to buy 180s when it's two bit if you could, you know, depending on what kind of size was there and then you you'd sell two and a halfs. So during the course of the day, you know, you weren't really thinking about where the market was going. It was just was is it busy, you know, and how much flows going through? And then, you know, you kind of you evolve from there because we didn't have Bloomberg. We didn't have BLS statistics. No one was telling us, you know, what employment was. We didn't really care. you know, all the news that came to the markets came through the phones and they and the expression of of of whether or not, you know, it was meaningful was really the way the market auctioned that that kind of information. You know, prices would move and then the story would follow it, which is the natural way of things, right? Today, it's the opposite. Wall Street creates stories and then they use volume to validate them. So you create a story at 8:30 in the morning, you know, non-form payroll rose 110, boom, prices follow that, right? Prices are following the story. That's a bullshit market. But really, the real markets are prices move. So look at the way things are happening right now. You know, if this was the end of the world, do you think gold would be unchanged? If this was the end of the world, would stocks be unchanged, right? Interest rates unchanged? Would they just be sitting there? No. I mean, if we thought we were going to if the shit were really going to hit the fan, these markets would be moving and uh they're not. So whatever they're telling you, the the market is not validating what they're saying. And that's a very very important point for you guys when you're looking at something. I I remember um I remember co JJ and it felt like in the in in the month maybe two months before the market really shot the bed there. It felt like there was there was enough intel about the situation that was freely available and on Twitter and it was just like you know the the inertia of the mainstream just hadn't caught up yet and then all of a sudden it caught up all at once. Um, and I know that this this situation is very different because everyone has had so much time to put put together potential scenarios and everything, but is there is there not a um a possibility that that markets just have so much inertia? They're complacent. they're they're um they're they're they're in that they're expecting the best case scenario as opposed to uh the downside and hence and hence you know lots of these markets you mentioned are flat. >> I don't know. I can't answer that. I can only tell you what the market's doing now. You know uh I I have a kind of a process of looking at markets every day. take a look at a monthly chart. Even though it's monthly and it doesn't change much, I always start there in the morning and look at weekly, look at daily, hourly, take it down into different fractal samples and say, you know, I I always have a a really good sense of where the market was. You know, it doesn't mean I know where it will be, but it gives me a a a solid confidence in in why it is where it is. And um right now stocks are high, incredibly high. Everybody's talking about, you know, gold going to 8,000 or 6,000 or this that and the other thing. $5,000 gold is high. It's extremely high. And the reason why it's high, you ask yourself why why because it takes a lot of money to get a market like gold. uh to double its market cap in a in a year or two. I mean, the market cap of gold is I don't know whether it doubled, but it was in the teens a couple years ago, and now it's it's in in the 30 trillions. Uh there's seven billion ounces, seven, just do the math. Um it takes a lot of money to get it there, right? which means a lot of my people, institutions, everybody else has committed the the amount of cash they have to that so they're in it. And the same thing is going on with equities. Uh fixed income is is I think at a very very low EB and heavily short right now. Bonds are very very short. Uh so gold could go down a thousand bucks just because you know we let's say we I don't think this is going to last a long time no matter what happens this conflict thing it's going to be resolved the straight has to open that is it period and how messy it is that that's that's the aftermath but you know that's actually just going to have to happen I'm hoping that this is what I hope is that these politicians who have chops like she in Europe especially call Iran and say, "Hey dude, you're not getting the straight. That's it. You're not getting the straight. Period." But they're not. See, they're not doing that. And I I So that's that's going to happen. Even even so, when that oil comes out from behind the straight, oil's going to go straight down. There's 140 million Russian unshaned oil in floating storage right now in Asia, which I think is, you know, which is helping suppress those prices. Uh there was 100 million of Iranian. There's 400 million coming from the IEA's SPR release. I mean, we're talking about a billion barrels. You know, that's that's 10 days of supply. That's a lot of oil. Plus, the US has taken in 50 million uh in the last six weeks into our storage. So, I mean, we're getting up into like COVID uh uh inventories in the US right now. Prices are really high. So, when you get high high prices, what do you think producers do? They sell. They you know, you've got you want it, you got it. And I don't know whether you watch the oil curves. I traded oil all my life. Uh, gold and oil. I mean, just the TI curves are like nay May June is like a $12 spread. 10 or 12 spread. I don't know. Let's look at it. See where it is. Uh, where is it? May June. May June is trading 1304 this morning. I mean I I you know for a guy like me who's traded this all my life having I don't know 480 million barrels in in inventory and that's in pad three pad two pad one I mean that's that's life that's having having people pay 13 for May over June if if that if this trade opens and this this oil you becomes available to the market, the first thing that's going to happen is the GCC guys, the Saudis, the Iraq, anybody who's been shut out is going to go after market share because Russia has taken it. We have taken it, Norway has taken it, and they want it back. They they've been going on five, six weeks out of the market. Somebody else sleeping with your wife, right? It's going to be a market share war and there is a vast amount of oil and oil is just like anything else. You know, you don't need to pump it. You if you if you have it in the ground, you can borrow it. You can borrow it and you can sell it. So, uh that's that's coming. I think >> it's super super daunting for for the market, but we'll see what comes to pass on on that front. On on your comments on gold, JJ, I was reading a recent piece you wrote. I I think it was titled to the effect of what's going on with gold right now. And there was this line that was just screaming out at me that I wanted to ask you about. And you said, "Gold is the only market that is always right." And I'm really curious to to know what you meant by that. Okay. Well, um there's there's a line the fairerryyman says in Hessa's uh Sidarththa, "The river never moves." Right? So, you've heard the classic throwaway. You know, when I was a young man, a gold coin bought me a new suit. Now I'm an old man. A gold coin will buy me a new suit. Right? Terms of uh I wrote this. I can't remember what it is. Uh, let's just use oil. So, the price of gasoline in the harbor in New York right now is about 20% cheaper than it was in 2008 nominally, right? So, it settled at 307 on Friday. I don't know where it is. I I can't see my leaderboard right now, but it's it's a little bit lower. Um so the high in 2008 was uh 360. So just nominally is 20% lower. If we were to take a CPI inflation adjusted dollars, the price of gasoline is about two bucks a gallon right now at the pump here in America. So it's about 40% lower uh and in adjusted dollar prices. So it the purchasing power of the dollar has lost 85% of its value since 1975 when uh gold was legalized. So 85% of 5,000 $4,500 because that's where it is right now. We put gold at about 600 bucks. Uh it would put uh crude at around $15 a barrel. And in 1975 the high for crude was around 1350. So, and I've done this work going all the way back to 30s. You know, the the river really never moves. Uh, the value of money is constantly depreciating because that's the way we manage our lives. You know, it's what they do in Australia. We do it here. We do it in Europe. Uh, is it right? I don't know. You know, it it is what it is. This is the way we we manage our lives debasing our currencies. And so generationally each generation has the same rate of of of realities, difference in realities. You know, we t my generation sees the S&P from a base of 150. Your generation sees it from a base of probably 2,000. So, you know, and and if we were to use my generation's money, like I said, oil is $15 versus 13.5 in 1975. The S&P would be like a $900 item, 900, not 7,000. Right? So keeping a sense of you know like gold gold is like it's like the sun in a solar system of orbiting financial entities and everything else is moving around gold. So when you see gold going up if you can try to imagine the reality of of the flat earth idea gold is not moving. Everything else is going down. The faster gold goes up on your board, that's the faster everything you own is losing value in terms of your own money. Your house, your hammer, your hat, your bag of groceries, your car, all of those things, if you were to express that in Australian dollars, it's it's actually going down. only goal is going up because that's the way we that's the way we do it. That's it. So stop thinking about gold like everything else. It's this little pituitary gland and the anatomy of all our finances that keeps everything in balance. That tiny little gland, I don't know where it is. I think it's like here. That's the pineal. Uh, but you know what I'm saying. >> Totally. Totally. I was listening to a conversation with with Russell Napia, sort of financial historian, and he spoke about this and looking looking at data going back 800 years speaking to the to the same effect. You know, gold doesn't appreciate, depreciate. It it holds its value. And you can go back and you can see that over such a long period. It's a it's a wild thought to to think about on on such big time frames. If we if we pivot slightly to another precious silver is something you've written about and something you've followed for a long time now and January and Q1 in general might have been one of the most spectacular quarters we've seen for for a commodity in in quite some time. There were the the trap shorts you know the the volatility right at the end of that month Jan Jan 30 marking I think about 120 bucks. How did that month kind of weigh against your your experience of following that market? >> I knew it was coming. I wrote about it. I started writing about it in 2024 and everybody said, "Ah, JJ, get out of here. There's no shortage of silver." I kept writing about it, you know, and and uh as we got into the the bigger moves in the spring of 2025 after, you know, we had that that tariff day crash and everything came back. Gold started really going up in uh September of 2025 is when when silver really started going higher. And I I have written many times saying you guys just don't know what you're getting into here with silver. You know, you just have no clue what silver can do. Silver is not gold, but it has a lot of gold DNA in it. And it has a lot of cultural uh I don't know what to call it um appropriation from gold. So people, you know, they think, oh, gold's going up. I'm going to buy silver. So, you know, I got out of I was long sober for all that time and writing about it and bullish on it, but I got out in December. I got out early. Um, you know, the old saying, all my rich friends sold too early. Uh, anyway, so I missed really the last leg up, but I don't care. You know, I made a a I was very happy with with the way my trade worked out and I wanted to get as far away from Crakatoa as I could because I knew it was coming and I you know what good is it to ride a market you know from I don't know whatever price you get in let's say you got in the 50s or the 40s or the 30s or something like ride all the way up to 120 and then you know you're trading it all the way up your long and then it goes down 40% in one day, you know, and then, you know, for all of the people it's just the way markets work. You know, people come in late. Um, I'd say the m there was just a lot of money lost and I didn't want to be anywhere near it. And I did not want to I I never told my readers, you know, like buy this, buy that or anything like that. But if I feel strongly about something, I will tell them what I'm doing. You know, I say, I'm looking at this. This is what I want. This is where I This is where my attention is right now. This is where the voice in my head is going off. And so, if I'm writing that all the time, and you're reading what I'm writing, you know, you know where I'm coming from, right? And I don't have to tell you where I got it. And as a matter of fact, I could tell you guys and all your all your listeners where where the price of crude is going to close tomorrow, right? And every one of us would have different trades. Every one of us. Some of us get in right away. Some of us get in in a couple hours. Some of us get in $5 higher or lower or something like that. And I bet you probably at least 70 or 80% of the people even though I told you would lose money because that's just the way way people are. So I don't want to drag people into, you know, into silver when I know. So I said, you know, I'm I'm out. And then I got a whole lot of people saying, you know, what? You're out. what are you doing? You know, I said, I have this saying, I know I've been saying it for a long time. Always leave a party when you're having fun. Just get the greatest discipline in trading is getting out. Getting in is easy. It's so easy to say yes, you know, on an impulse this that and the other thing. Over time, you know, you get burned doing that. If you you know you getting it is important but direction is most important. If you have direction right then and confidence in your direction and you can weather being too early you can weather bad location and so forth. But you know getting out is one I it's really only one word that I can say that that's uh enough. You know how much is enough? Like when I was on the floor I I built a pretty big brokerage company. You know I was one of the largest uh paper brokers filling filling orders in the pits. And so uh during those years I put 35 guys in the ring guys. You know, I hired grand at Grand Union bag and groceries, uh, order clerks at the Essex Diner who could just great math in their heads, you know, and the only thing that you really needed from from from a skills perspective, if you're going to work on the floor, you had to be honest because we were on the honor system. You had to honor all your trades. You had to honor all your words. No matter how much you hated guys or anything like that, you you sell them 102 and it's eight bid. you're writing down 102, you're going to lose that 60k. That's gone. Right? So, uh, the other thing is you had to be numerate. Add, subtract, do multiply in your head very, very quickly and be accurate. If I turn around, I had a thousand lots on my card and I hand out my clerk. I said, "What's my count, right? I wanted that count in 15 seconds." And it had to be right. Otherwise, I was going to lose money, right? So those two skills, you know, and you start out, it's like a guild. You're a write up clerk, then you get to be a booth clerk, then you get to be a phone clerk, then you do ARB, and if you're really good at all those things, then you get to go in the pit, and you get a sponsor, and your sponsor puts you in the pit. And by the time you finally make it in the pit, the whole community, the entire trading membership knows you. They know you like a golf player knows you. They know you. They know you've got backbone. They know you. They know you can add and subtract. They Honesty is a given. It's expected. And all of those things are in place. And then you're allowed to go in and handle handle a lot of risk and and trade with everybody. JJ, you've been um you've been writing a very long time and I'm just like I'm just curious how would you synthesize your your trading philosophy and and how would that differ from most other financial writers trading philosophy. >> Just get the ball over the net. >> You know that's how you win the games. you know, your your job is not to be a genius, you know, uh, participate. If there's a rumbling, you know, Nancy Nancy Pelosi's buying Nvidia, you don't have to buy 10,000 shares. You don't have to buy 5,000 shares, buy 100 shares. Just participate, right? Exon breaks out. What? It's not really a thoughtful process when the best company in the whole world with a credit rating equal to or greater than the United States Treasury that's never skipped a dividend in an oil market is breaks out. You don't have to be, you know, just buy something. Buy 50 shares, buy one share. I I don't know. Don't don't don't put a lot of pressure on yourself about about being right. Uh although nothing works better than being right. Put a lot of pressure on yourself about managing losses. Um I think 90% of good trading is participating and and getting out. getting in is is it should be you know it's just you should you should be kind of intuitively constantly contingency planning all of the things you know if this happens that happens that so you're not thinking you know you're reacting you know what's going to happen right you I'm telling you guys this is what I this is what I'm thinking anyway if we have peace depending on how it unfolds if they open that straight there's going to be a shitload of oil coming out so how are you going to react to that Because believe me, things are going to start moving, you know, and have a plan. Have a plan and stick to it. Always have a stop. You can have a stop in gold. You can have a $4,000 stop and it's trading 4500, you know, but if you have that stop, you can never move that stop. It's got to it's got to be a hard stop. If you don't have a hard stop, you wind up, you know, you wind up owning some shit stock, I don't know, like like Beyond Meat or something like that. That went from 60 bucks to like 58 cents. You know, you no matter how how it you know, like my wife ran the gold test to get in Leman. This is after we were married and um so you know, a lot of her money uh was in Lemanto. And in 2008, uh, like she stopped working in the 90s when we had kids, but, uh, she had a lot of leave stock and, uh, in 2008, you know, we had to have a stop. So, I mean, trading 60, even if you have a $30 stop, you have to have that stop. And what what happened to Leman? Of course, we know, right? If you didn't have that stop, you have zero. I I worked at Refco. I have you ever heard of Refco? >> Yes. largest futures broker in the world, right? They did an IPO in 2005, so we all got shares. And I, you know, I I not only got shares, but I bought a lot of shares because uh my wife told me, she said, "This is where you make a lot of money. You know, when your company goes IPO and you're that that good and you're that big, you should really load up." So, I had a lot on. So, uh, my average entry price on what I bought was probably around like 18 or 20 bucks and I closed at $30 one day and I just got out a half. Just I didn't tell anybody. I just said, I'm I'm taking half of this money. So about two weeks later, uh it this guy Phil Bennett uh lied on the IPO uh disclosures and they found out about it and uh I had a stop and the rest of my Rifco stuff at at like, you know, some kind of 20 or 17 or 18 or something like that. That went on the opening. Four days later, Rifco closed at 25 cents. So stops got to have them. >> Wow. Wow. You you've got a fantastic way with with writing as well, JJ. And I'm curious from from the trading lens on Trav's question just there how how vital that is to your process as well of being a good trader. >> Well, I'm not I'm not I never think of myself as a good trader. you know, I've been able to uh educate my kids and and raise a family, but I'm by no means rich, you know, uh I could have been, but I just I just missed a lot, you know. It was a pretty good ham and I'd say, but you know, if you if you look at all the guys who who came off the floors, the difference between us and our skill set and our ability to see value and and trade it, although we we all had our own different ways, might have been 1,000th of 1%. But it is that tiny difference that makes the difference between a guy like me and a guy like Draen Miller. In order to survive making money, you have to be profitable. Most people can't. That's just the way it is. So going from profitable or making a decent living at it to making a lot of money at it, that's the difference between what you were saying, being a good trader. So why do I write? Um, I I've always been a broker who writes. I love writing. And uh I know I I know a lot, but you will never know because you didn't you weren't born where I was born. You didn't you didn't go to school in the 60s and 70s and you never will. So, if I don't write it down, uh, it'll it'll all be gone. And I've I've I'm leaving a pretty good record. I've written about I've actually I know what I've written. I've written over a million words on Substack, over a thousand pieces since I've I've started writing in uh the summer of of 2024. And uh I write twice a day. So I'm hoping, you know, in the end what I'll be able to do is create a compendium if you ever, you know, I'm gone because I can't keep doing this forever. Uh you can go to a book called Market Vibes and you can say what was happening on December 13, 2025. You can see the chart, right? Something happened. So, you'll be able to go back and you'll see exactly what I wrote about it in my style, which is not your not your average. It's it's not like what most people uh the way they write about it, but it'll it'll be it'll it'll give you a sense of how it felt rather than what the data says. Your style is unique, JJ. It's addictive to read. As uh as JD mentioned, you've got some um unique characteristics about about your style of writing as well. And that's an uncharacteristic abuse of lowercase as opposed to capitalizing. I've just got to ask why. Because I don't want to yell at you. I want I just want you to consume it. you know, it's sort of like I'm taking the salty, spicy stuff out of it, uh, and letting you make what you want out of it. You know, basically I I uh I think one of the most important uh things that people need to work on when they're approaching markets is humility. and uh avoid avoid you know measuring yourself against the market or or other people you know I didn't make enough on this or you know I was talking to uh I made friends with Rupert Mitchell who's one of your guys down there of blind scroll completely different type of approach to the markets than I have right so um I mentioned to him that uh when Facebook IPOed uh it came in at 50 and I I didn't do anything and it dropped to 38 I think the very next day uh or it may have dropped to 38 that day. Opened at 50 and went down and I I said to him, man, that's one of the my worst trades that I didn't do, right? I I should have Facebook then. I I should have participated, right? But I went back and I checked it and it actually went down to 19 in in that week. So there was just this massive gaping opportunity to get into a generational stock and I let it go. You know, I missed that one. Um so anyway I I uh I write about markets from that perspective. You know how how it felt to have been in silver uh constantly telling people because I traded you know I traded silver in 1980. I was working for Norton Waltok. I was in the pit in those days. I made a lot of money standing next to a guy named Frankie Lesey and I lost every penny up down right that that really hurt me. I had to sell my seats. Uh I had to go back to the back of the line, become an ARB clerk. I worked for Rudolph Wolf for a while. Got up on an ARB stand. Finally, they of course I was really good at it. I brought in a lot of business, made some money, so they put me back in the ring. But I went back into the ring again with a tremendous sense of humility. You know, I I I don't want that to happen again. So, uh the 80s were really great years for me and I I think uh this the late 70s were really bad for me. Um I came I had a lot of advantages as I said as a kid and um I was arrogant uh snotty. I thought it, you know, I thought I was going to make wild amount of money and it was never going to end and then boom, you know, well, the market has a way of of chastising you for that kind of behavior. So, humility is is uh is really an important thing to try to remember. You you you don't lose touch with that. >> I think a point on on humility is a is a great spot to leave this conversation. and JJ really appreciate you joining us sharing your your experiences, your thoughts on on the current state of markets. And for any of the the listeners out there, they can track you down under the name Alihasha. We'll include it in the the show notes, but I would I'd recommend they go and check out not only your daily writing, but some of the short stories going back over over the years of your experience. Uh they're just fantastic reads. So, I'd highly recommend them. Get in touch. Thanks again for for joining us, JJ. >> Thank you very much, gentlemen. I I appreciate it. Um you can reach me at jj745substack.com. >> Fantastic. Thank you. One we've honored to make happen for quite some time. Thrilled that JJ could join us and share some wisdom. Massive thank you to Sanvic ground support intrlinks focus the platform by market naten and metalshub. >> Hudoo huru. >> Now remember I'm an idiot. JD is an idiot. If you thought any of this was anything other than entertainment, you're an idiot and you need to read our disclaimer.