November 8th, 2025 - Typical Bull Market Behavior

This week, Steve Van Wie and Joey Loss discuss current market performance, emphasizing the ups and downs of various indices and the impact of economic factors like job cuts and government shutdowns. They delve into cryptocurrency skepticism, highlighting the risks and misconceptions associated with digital currencies and reinforcing the importance of understanding before investing. Additionally, they explore the potential implications of financial market predictions, individual stock investments, and significant technological changes.

Transcript

Steven H Van Wie 0:00

It's Saturday morning. It's 10 o'. Clock. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie. So we finally get the intro change to reflect everybody. And my wayward son is off somewhere in pursuit of football and other things.

Joey Loss 0:05

And I'm Joey Loss.

Joey Loss 0:16

Yeah. Following the Saturday college dreams.

Steven H Van Wie 0:18

Yeah. He got an offer that he literally could not refuse.

Joey Loss 0:22

I would have taken it, too.

Steven H Van Wie 0:23

Yeah. His son is looking at colleges and one of them he wanted to see was Clemson. They've got a friend whose kid goes to Clemson. The guy called him, said, we wound up with a couple of extra football tickets for Saturday night and want to know if you guys want to use them. And Justin was going to go look at Clemson anyway one day. So that was that. But what really did it, the football game was against Florida State. So they got. It's not. They're not going for great football, let's put it that way. But for a great time. Florida State and Clemson, hard to beat. Yeah.

Joey Loss 0:53

Yeah.

Joey Loss 0:57

The big risk there is Clemson. So, I mean, I don't know anybody who doesn't love Clemson who went to Clemson or is associated in some way. So his risk there is he might be locking in and out of state tuition. So those free tickets might be the most expensive game he ever went to.

Steven H Van Wie 1:10

That's true. One of the things I like about Clemson, you get a few miles away and all of a sudden you see these tiger paws in the streets going to it. Yeah. You know, somewhere. We're getting really close up there. Yeah. Anyway, he'll be back next week as usual, and we'll carry on without him for today. That's not a problem at all. You know, I've said for years, the trouble with people like me is not having enough to say. It's trying to get them to shut up once in a while. A fact that I am reminded of not infrequently, at my house. So talk a lot today and then Sarah will be happy. Right. Got it. Good gosh. I should welcome everybody. The regulars. You are what has kept us in there now for year number 11, won't be long. We'll start year number 12, actually, February 1st. And if you're new to the show and haven't heard it before, try to stick around for the hour. And we will. We'll do our best to have everybody learn something by the end of the program today, as we always do. And I remind everybody that we will say what we want to say, talk about what we want to talk about. Unless you pick up the phone and dial 904-222-8255

Joey Loss 1:48

I'll do my part. All right.

Steven H Van Wie 2:26

and you can go to the head of the class and change the subject on us. We'll talk about whatever you want to talk about in the second section. Today we will be talking about an email we got from a listener which serves two purposes. One is an interesting topic, but the second one is you should all be reminded that if you ever want us to discuss something you don't want to go on the air live, which you should have no reticence about because we don't bite. But for those people, send us an email and we'll get it. And within the next week we'll have either the answer or the discussion, depending on what the topic is. Because there is no right answer to today's topic. Everyone has an opinion, but I don't think there's a single answer. So with that in mind, let's I can't put it off any longer is what I'm saying Talking about the week in the market. So let's hear what happened.

Joey Loss 3:26

Joey yeah, I think we we broke our one weekend streak where Adam gave me an up week. So let me break down what's going on in the market, starting with the five day return for each index. As of Friday's closing bell, the S and p was down 1.63%, the Nasdaq was down 3.09% and the Dow was down 1.21%. Small caps were down about 1.8 and developed international markets were mostly flat, Emerging market down a little over 1%.

Joey Loss 3:56

To color this in context, overall, the year to date picture still remains remarkably attractive. The S and P showed a year to date gain of about 14.4%, Nasdaq is up over 19%, GDP Dow over 10% and small cap domestic growth just over 9. Within US markets, the semiconductor, tech and industrial sectors continue to lead the way. Developed international markets have shown gains of 26.8% for the year, obviously a winner. And then emerging markets lead the pack for everybody with 31.7% gains since the start of the year. Gold and silver were mostly flat so far for the month. Year to date, gold is up 52% and silver a whopping 67%.

Joey Loss 4:39

On the jobs front, continued government shutdown means Friday was the second straight delayed release of the federal monthly jobs report. Alternative measures gauging the health of the labor market send mixed to negative signals depending on where you look. Wednesday's ADP release indicated a tepid uptick in Jobs, an aggregation of state level jobs reports, however, suggest that current levels of claims continue to follow typical seasonal trends. Certain areas particularly affected by the government shutdown are showing anomalous levels of jobless claims. DC, Maryland and Virginia are all seeing unusual upticks with a four week moving average up over 150% year over year.

Joey Loss 5:18

As far as what's going on, I mean headlines, you know, we kind of watch the headlines and they get a little bit worse when something like this is going on. There's a momentary increase in sensationalism and look, this is all just typical bull market behavior. These you can't just have all time highs every Friday. I'd love to read about them. Ad hogs them. I only get to tell you when this stuff happens. But you know, this is really normal bull market behavior. Does that mean it'll continue? I don't know. But historical data suggests that in the 39 years when the S&P was up 10% through October, which is the case this year, November has seen an average gain of 2.6%. And the last two months of the year have been a continuation of the momentum from the beginning of the year. Doesn't mean it's a shoe in for this year, but it's nice to see that the historical data continues what we all presumably hope to happen.

Steven H Van Wie 6:07

Yeah. Even if you don't get a guarantee, it's nice to have some precedent for sure. Yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 6:14

I'm kind of amazed it wasn't worse. When you look at the politics of the week and you know, we've always said that the market doesn't run on politics, but what happens is the politics affect the market in a short run, not in the long run. And after this week, it's amazing. All right, we're going to go to. Good morning, Brad.

Brad 6:36

Good morning. Do you have anything to say about the quantum financial system that's been going around the Internet lately?

Steven H Van Wie 6:48

Quantum financial system? I don't.

Joey Loss 6:52

Okay.

Brad 6:52

It's about cryptocurrency taken over and it's all backed by gold and it's got poor seniors trying to buy crypto and they're getting ripped off.

Steven H Van Wie 7:05

We, you know, we talk about crypto but there's no one in the office that believes in it. And I know you can stare at it and you can read about all the crypto billionaires and all that stuff. We're just not believers in the concept of something out of nothing for nothing. And that's all I can see. How about you, Joey?

Joey Loss 7:27

Yeah, I think we believe that there's something to the technology and it's a frontier to watch. But as far as going to replace the current monetary system, no, I think if it's adopted properly, it'll be a supplement to the technology that backs the world's financial system. I don't see some sort of radical replacement takeover taking place.

Steven H Van Wie 7:47

No, I think it's kind of a conspiracy theory where people think that the dollar is going to just vanish one day and the government is going to force us all into crypto. I just don't see it happening. You look at the impact the dollar has around the world and it's just too great. We've only got about 15 seconds. Would you like to go on hold and start after the break and redo this, or shall we just talk about your topic afterwards?

Steven H Van Wie 8:14

Oh, he's gone already. So all right, then, we know. All right, we're going to take a short break. We'll be right back and pick up this topic and some other things. Don't go any. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie. And I'm Joey Loss and I remind everyone that the lines are open. 904-222-8255.

Steven H Van Wie 8:34

And as usual, we have a trivia question. And as usual, it's brought to you by Paul Lloyd, First Coast Alarm. You can call Paul at 904-636-7888.

Steven H Van Wie 8:46

October had an unusual distinction in that it was the Highest October in 20 years for job cuts. There were 153,000

Steven H Van Wie 9:00

job cuts announced in the month of October. This is, it's kind of an aftermath of the whole stocking up because Covid was over thing. A lot of people overstocked. It has undertones of AI because people are, instead of growing their companies with people, they're growing them with AI and there's just a lot going on and I don't know where it's going to go exactly. But any, any major technology change winds up creating a lot of jobs. So it might break even or whatever on this. But my point, and I do have one, is

Steven H Van Wie 9:43

the highest of any October since 2003. What technology was it in 2003 that shook the market so badly that there were even more job cuts back then in October? And this one, if you get it, I'll be surprised that I'll put it that way. If anybody gets it, they'll be surprised. All right, let's, let's go back to crypto for a bit before we get into the other topics. And my personal problem with crypto is that I want my money to say on it. This money is legal tender for all debts, public and private, in the United States. And my coins and my dollars do say that, and they do mean it. Crypto doesn't say that because they can't. So what if you want to go shopping one day and your money is crypto, and you go to a merchant and say, I'd like to buy this, whatever it is you're selling, here's my crypto. And the merchant says, well, we don't take crypto. And I said, well, then no sale. Is that my bad, your bad, our bad, or tough? I don't know. And I frankly don't care. At 75 years old, I really don't care anymore about crypto. It was a cool idea, I guess, and a lot of people have made a lot of money. Some people are having fun with it. But let's get the perspective of a younger person on it and have Joey tell you what he thinks.

Joey Loss 11:19

I agree with you. I think ultimately the dominant form of currency will almost certainly need to remain some sort of government backed reserve currency of some kind. And the Trump administration has actually taken steps to adopt some of the crypto technology I was warming up to earlier through the Genius act, which was recently passed. And what it does is it's going to introduce the concept of stablecoins in a more broad fashion. Stablecoins adopt some of cryptocurrency's better traits, which is that it can transport money from one place to another more quickly and at a lesser cost. And without a third party.

Steven H Van Wie 12:00

There's a public ledger and from locations that are so remote that they don't actually have any physical dollars.

Joey Loss 12:06

Exactly. And to satisfy what Steve was talking about, the rules are that those have to be backed by US Treasuries. So in effect, they're a form of the US Dollar. They're called a US Dollar stablecoin. And what they'll do is if I need to send money from point A to point B, you know, let's say I want to send $100 somewhere right now. That's a high Western Union fee. I need that third party to facilitate the transaction. And then both of us are a little bit anxious until we all confirm that the money landed where it was supposed to land. Additionally, when you think about trading in your portfolio or raising cash, this is something that comes up for us a lot. You know, we tell people, hey, it's going to be three days for us to sell this. The Security, raise the cash, let the cash settle, and then send it to your bank account, which takes another day. Stablecoin and all the technology in the genius act point to a future where I think it'll be possible for us to raise cash immediately because the security will be sold in a tokenization format and basically that transaction will occur immediately. Transferable money will be raised immediately and we can get it to a bank account virtually immediately. So 20 minutes after a call, I don't think that's going to happen overnight. But I say all of this to say if the US Was doing absolutely nothing to adopt any of the technologies in cryptocurrency, I think the potential for some sort of larger overhaul would be higher. But the fact that we're leaning into this and looking for ways to improve the system as it is, I think lessens the reality that there's going to be some sort of major overhaul or something else that overtakes it.

Steven H Van Wie 13:39

Yeah, they're getting a crypto in general is getting a big push right now because the Trump family is big in it and that's certainly going to help a lot of, for a lot of young people. It's, it's the answer to a lot of things. For, as you were saying, in our business, I can see some excellent applications as a facilitator.

Steven H Van Wie 14:02

Not just we're going to send you Bitcoin or whatever, but we're going to facilitate, facilitate your cash transfer using that as an interim step. And I think things like that, whatever you can do in our business to make it quicker and easier and cheaper. When I started in this business, a trade at Schwab was 2995 and then it went to 1995 or 2195. 1995. 17. Down, down, down, down. And Charles Schwab's long term objectives personally were to make it free. Well, guess what? He did it. I love it. But then the next thing that happened was the three day period to clear a trade with an equity became two, which is now one, I think Adam told me. Right.

Joey Loss 14:50

So to clear it fully. Yeah, yeah.

Steven H Van Wie 14:52

So we, we have made things a lot easier for us and for the clients using that kind of technology. Not the crypto kind, but technology itself. And I really like that. So is it coming? Yeah. Is it going to take over the world and replace everything? No. You can quote me on that. Insofar as I will say this, it's not going to happen in my lifetime. That is one of the closest things you'll ever hear from me to a promise.

Joey Loss 15:22

Yeah. And the only other thing I want to say on the quantum financial system phenomenon specifically is, you know, if anywhere on the pages that discuss this, they're selling you some sort of commodity that's going to prepare you for this transition, which a lot of these, you know, a couple clients have brought this up. Just be wary because

Joey Loss 15:43

that's a totally speculative asset, whatever they're selling. And it depends on that actually occurring. And it's just, you know, if you're going to participate in some way, just be thoughtful about the level of participation.

Steven H Van Wie 15:54

Yeah, And a couple more points. The definition of currency is producing it by a government that has that power. The other word is money. Money is whatever someone will take for whatever it is you want. So I have long referred to crypto as crypto money, not cryptocurrency. And you should know that. And you should also know that the IRS doesn't treat it as money. To irs it's property. It is the same as buying and selling a house. It's treated as property. So you don't pay income tax on it. You pay capital gains tax. You can take losses against the gains and so on and so forth. But it's not recognized by IRS as money. You should know that too. There are things that you shouldn't get into unless you know enough to be at least adequate. Not if you don't know enough to be adequate, then you know enough to be dangerous. And I never apologize to people for losing money in something they didn't understand. And we have tried for. I've been on the radio now for 23 years and change. I have tried all that time to tell people, you got to get to understand it before you do it. And it's got to be tangible. You got to be able to see it somewhere, independent website by a third party, preferably. Anything else is speculating. Our jobs do not involve speculation, they involve investing. Therefore, when we have clients that are interested in it, we tell them, well, thank you for bringing it up to us. Now we know that about you. Now go find an account somewhere to trade this stuff in. And I don't care if once in a while you tell us if you made or lost money, but it's not going to be handled in our house.

Joey Loss 16:03

Right.

Joey Loss 17:40

Yeah, the main way we handle that is we just want to figure out, you know, what, what participation level doesn't affect your financial well being for the long term in the plan, you know, and then, you know, ultimately you decide what you do with it. That's our job not really a complicated.

Steven H Van Wie 17:51

But it's not.

Steven H Van Wie 17:54

System that we use for that. We were going to get into this listener's email, but we've only got about three minutes left in this segment. So let's tackle a couple little things and we'll get this right after the bottom of the hour. Here's a disturbing thing. The typical first time home buyer is now 40 years old. This is not a healthy situation for a country as vibrant as ours. It it was in the 20s not very long ago, first time homebuyers. What's holding it back? Several things. The rate of interest, definitely the mortgages are high. When mortgages got low, housing prices got higher. When mortgage rates went up, housing prices didn't get lower. They will eventually be drifting down just because you have to search for buyers. But think of the equity buildup that somebody has between let's say 25 and 40. If they buy their first home at 25, not having the first part of that equity buildup until you're 40 years old, it's like an anchor on your financial future. We've got to get that number back to where it can be back into the 30s first, then back into the 20s or it's not going to be good for the long run for people's retirements. But one of the things that I read a lot of articles and so on about this whole situation, one of the things nobody mentions is illegal immigration. Why do I bring that up? Because we've had such a flood of cheap labor, wages have not kept pace with things in this country. Young people who are more likely to be seeking out the jobs that have been driven down through the illegal immigration, they're the ones that are having trouble paying enough of their debts and only then can they start saving a down payment. So you're going to have to see some real favorable financing for young kids to buy their first home. And if you live long enough, you understand that's what got us in so much trouble. Much more to come. Take a quick break and be right back. Don't go anywhere. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie. And I remind everyone the lines are open 904-222-8255.

Joey Loss 20:14

And I'm Joey Lost.

Steven H Van Wie 20:21

And the trivia question is out there, why? What happened? What technology happened kind of spooked the market in 2003 where there were even more October layoffs than there were this year. And that was a big number, 153,000. So what was going on in oh three. It's not one of those where you can just shoot out a number, which we frequently do, but this one's a little different. All right, we got an email this week from a listener and it reads as follow. I can't wait to hear your show Saturday. And by the way, I'm a big supporter of the kill the filibuster now and reinstate it prior to midterms and couldn't have come up with a much more controversial subject. What do you think?

Joey Loss 21:08

Yeah.

Joey Loss 21:10

What do I think? I mean, I just, I don't like the precedent of playing with that because anything you do on one side, it's going to become a tool and weapon of the other. And it's just the nature of American politics that we're going to change. Power is going to change hands over and over and over. That is the system we live in. And what kind of precedent do we want to set ourselves up for later?

Steven H Van Wie 21:31

Yeah. And the only way that I can see that that power exchange would stop is, is if we had a couple of big events happen, like some extra states and some extra court justices and things like that, in my opinion. And you're all you're going to hear here is opinions because there's no right, wrong or truth or lie in this whole thing. In my opinion, the Democrats will, next time they get power in the Senate, they will break the filibuster. They may or may not ever try to re restore it, but I'm pretty sure they'll do it. So if I were to take that half of the discussion, I would say it's virtually mandatory that the Republicans do it now as a preventative for what coming. But then I'll switch hats and go over to the other side and say, well, they would have every right to do it if the precedent were set by us. And we couldn't really complain very hard about that.

Joey Loss 22:37

Yeah, I mean, you know, both sides, when it comes to media, both sides love playing the nanny, nanny, boo boo game. You know, they did it first that I just hate when something gets sloppy. And not that anybody loves a filibuster, but it has served as some sort of a useful tool against big, big changes that one side's trying to push through. And sometimes, you know, either side is capable of not fully getting it right. And so if that causes a second look and some, some reconsiderations in the structure of something, I'm not terribly opposed to that.

Steven H Van Wie 23:08

Yeah, I, I'm, I'm kind of in that camp. What I guess the potential scares me if you want to look at an example of this kind of thing, just dig up Harry Reid, literally, and ask him how it works out. It used to be for nominees that you had to get a nominee that was filibuster proof for judicial offices and that sort of thing. And the theory is that if you can't find somebody that's at least acceptable to a few of the opposition, then perhaps you got somebody that maybe is a little too radical one way or the other. That's the theory. So when. When we were having trouble, when the Democrats were having trouble getting some of their people approved, Harry Reid announced that he's going to remove the filibuster from judicial appointments, except for the Supreme Court. But Harry did what Harry does, and he stuck his nose. Harry's camel got his nose under the tent. And what happened after that? Well, we take over again and have trouble with. With Supreme Court nominees. So the logical thing for the Senate to do is say, all right, well, all other judges, now there's no filibuster. So effective from this day forward, we're not going to have a filibuster for Supreme Court nominees either. Now we got to live with that when the next time comes, and the next time could come pretty soon. If they get the opportunity to pad the Supreme Court, it's going to come real soon, and we will be absolutely helpless to stop it. That, I think, is the greatest danger. It's a clear and present danger for America.

Steven H Van Wie 24:53

But then there's that thing about they're going to do it anyway. So I'm sorry, I can't give you a definitive answer, but I don't know that anybody else can. It's easy to support the concept. I listen to Trump. He makes a very specific case for doing it. I absolutely agree, but he doesn't look at the same at the downside risk the same way I do. And on this, I have to. I have to say, not right now. I think Thune, as the Senate leader, is being a very rational guy lately. And quite frankly, he was not one of my choices for this job, and I've been very happy with him. And I'll be the first one to say so in public. When somebody does something well, they should be rewarded for it. And I think he's done it very, very well. Time will tell. So I apologize to the listener for not being able to come up with an answer. All I can say is when you've got so many reservations about something, you probably better off to not try it. Yeah, yeah.

Joey Loss 26:05

A lot of these Political norms, like

Joey Loss 26:08

have a real purpose, even though they're very annoying, depending on where you stand. I mean, they're just so annoying and unproductive. But at the same time, what do they keep from happening at the, at the worst, you know, stuff that hasn't happened, you know, it's just unimaginable.

Steven H Van Wie 26:24

Yeah. The nature of the House with elections every two years and so on, that's supposed to be the fast moving body that responds to the whims of the public and so on. The purpose of the Senate is to deliberate and deliberate and do things very slowly and cautiously to prevent big mistakes. And that, that can be as annoying as everybody knows. My God, usually when you mention anything about the Senate, you're not complimenting anybody. That's the truth. So we'll see what happens. But I'm, I'm truly afraid of them doing it even if we do it. But it goes from they'll probably do it anyway to they will definitely do it anyway if we get rid of it. Yeah. Try to put it back on, they're going to do the same thing. First day they'll kick it out and the day, the day before they're going to leave that particular Congress, they'll put it back on and then they'll either undo it or we'll get the Senate again and we'll undo it.

Joey Loss 26:46

Yeah.

Joey Loss 27:24

I think there's a bit of mutually assured destruction that might keep both sides from doing it.

Steven H Van Wie 27:28

You know, that's absolutely true. So if anybody has comments about that and you want to talk about it, you can call us on the phone or you can send an email or whatever, or let's use this as a learning experience and say whatever topics on your mind and you want to hear it discussed on the show, just drop us an email on the website Strive Us wealth partners, which is striveswealth.com

Steven H Van Wie 27:51

too long to type out the rest of that thing. And we will of course, get back to you. So there we are. Now let's get into the, the situation you were talking about. And Joey knows a little more about this than I do, meaning a lot more. I'll put it on him. A lot of you will remember who he's talking about here.

Joey Loss 28:11

Okay.

Joey Loss 28:14

So we were talking about, we mentioned briefly before the last break that, you know, when financing starts to get too available, subprime lending rises. Those are the types of things that create an environment like 2007 where we're so concerned short term about housing availability, which is a real problem. The access to housing, the rising Rate of the first time homebuyer Rising Age of the first time homebuyer those are real issues that need to be addressed or paid attention to and thought about. But sometimes the solutions we come up with actually create a totally different problem. And that was the case in 2007 when Michael Burry is the famous investor in the movie the Big Short, which was originally a book by Michael Lewis where they dive into how did he know that this trade was the right trade to make and how much money did he make out of it? And the answer is hundreds of millions of dollars betting against the housing market, which was something that everyone else was so excited about everything. Real estate was rising at a rapid rate at the time and he was the one, one of the loudest voices taking the biggest bet against it and it paid off. Since then, however, he has been wrong in at least five distinct periods with similar such calls. And the reason I call that out is because he was in the news this week taking big bets against Palantir and Nvidia. He has big short positions which he put out in his 13F, which is a SEC filing right as the earnings calls were coming out for Palantir. Was that timing intentional? I don't know, but it's interesting to see that he's doing that. But I want to point out his track record since then because there's a couple lessons to draw from it. In December of 2015, Burry gave a rare interview suggesting the US stock market was in a bubble and that a crash was looming. He predicted a major market crash in the following months. What actually happened? The market had a minor correction in early 16, but then rallied significantly. The S and P finished up about 11% in the 12 months following his prediction. In 2017, he predicted another financial collapse, this one completely new, and he pointed to mounting risks in the financial system. What actually happened? The market continued its strong bull run. S and p gained over 19% in the following year. That is twice the historical average 2019 ETF bubble crash predicted by Michael Burry. What actually happened? S and P gained 15% in the next 12 months. While the COVID 19 crash did occur in March 2020, it was caused by a completely unknown set of factors to the time that he made his original prediction. In 2021, he predicted the mother of all crashes due to speculation in meme stocks, crypto and high growth tech. While many of his targets like the Ark ETF did crash in 22, the broader market rose 16% in the months that follow. His most dire warnings. I can keep going. But the idea is here is pretty clear. You can get, you know, anybody can be right once, especially if you're predicting these events every single year. But he has been in the headlines every year. Same with Robert Kiyosaki is predicting these massive collapses. And I just point that out because I think I said something north of 10 or 12% four or five times in that mix. And that's what you would have missed if you listened to every single one of these. And that's the danger to short term trading. That's why we're such believers in long term allocation.

Steven H Van Wie 31:25

And I have warned people for a long, long time to beware of people selling newsletters. And my, my usual favorite is a guy named Harry Dent and he just recently was quoted as saying Tesla, Nvidia and bitcoin, the hottest things going are going to be down 99% in the next year. A comment on that right after the break because I'll use the break to say the words that I want to say and then I'll clean it up and do it on on the air. This is nuts. All right. We'll be right back. Don't go anywhere. This is the Van Wie Financial Hour. Welcome back to the Van Wie Financial Hour. I'm Steve Van Wie.

Joey Loss 32:07

And I'm Joey Loss and I remind.

Steven H Van Wie 32:09

Everybody, lines are open 904-222-8255

Steven H Van Wie 32:13

and we were talking about all kinds of crazy things in the break. Anybody who listens to someone say within the next year Tesla, Nvidia and Bitcoin are going to be down 99% if you look at the balance sheets of Nvidia and Tesla, that sort of thing, there's so much cash in there that if they were down 99% everybody would do one thing. They would say fold up shop and distribute the assets and we're going to get a hell of a lot more out of that than 1% of the stock price, more than 280. This is just insanity. He's selling a newsletter and his claim to fame is that he was right about the Japanese market crash in the 80s. Now I'm not picking on Dent. I'm illustrating because he leaves himself out there to be illustrated. There are many others. Stansberry. I've never been so sure about anything in my life. And then it doesn't happen. Don't, don't listen to those people. Anybody who makes wild predictions like that, they'll get one right once in a while, but they're going to get most of them wrong. The market doesn't care.

Joey Loss 33:29

And the framing never acknowledges the cost to your own financial well being of being wrong. So like, if you react in such a way that you think a huge market, let's say someone gives you a date and a time and a percentage drop and you decide to react to that, if you're wrong, and for several years, as I just read through before the break, there's 12, 15, 19, 26% returns, what does that mean for your financial future? You'll never get the opportunity to get that window back. And so that doesn't mean we're always bullish and we always think the market's gonna go up in the short term. But over the long term, if you're investing the right way, I think that's a pretty good bet. And one thing that isn't talked about a lot, and I think it relates to the quantum financial system question earlier, is if we were to see some sort of massive overhaul or destruction of any of these financial Systems or a 90% drop in stocks, say 99%, do you think anyone cares about their portfolio after that? Because the pandemonium that follows.

Steven H Van Wie 34:29

We got other things to worry about.

Joey Loss 34:30

Yeah, your physical. Right. Food, civil infrastructure, clothing and shelter, social safety.

Steven H Van Wie 34:36

Safety. You go down to Maslow, do your door locks work? That why is the lowest rung on Maslow's hierarchy safety? Because you got nothing unless you got safety. Absolutely right. And he recognized that. We were talking in the break about individual stock buying and it's not something that we've ever.

Joey Loss 34:39

Yeah, those are the things that matter.

Joey Loss 34:44

Right.

Joey Loss 34:47

That's right.

Steven H Van Wie 34:58

It's not that we don't support it, we never encourage it. And one of the problems is that bad things happen to good companies and good things happen to bad companies. And I'll give you a personal example way back when,

Steven H Van Wie 35:13

I'm not even sure, it's probably right around the turn of this century. I don't remember exactly, but an old friend of our family, his name was Bob Nardelli, Many of you have probably heard of him and seen him. He was at one time the chairman of or CEO of Chrysler and a bunch of other things. Wildly successful guy. He was hired by Home Depot to be the first non family CEO of Home Depot. And Home Depot was like a little country club of family members. Everybody loved Bernie and so on and so forth. But when it came time to put it in the hands of a professional, they were so unorganized that they owned companies that nobody even recognized that they owned. So they brought Bob in. Bob didn't get the job as the CEO, ge. When Wells retired, it went to, I don't even remember his name, the idiot. Anyway, they should have hired him, but they didn't. Anyway, Bob took that job and everybody was mad at him because he wasn't a family guy to them. And he, he took away from GE

Steven H Van Wie 36:28

package that he was owed. It was worth about $210 million. So Home Depot guaranteed that package to him if you take the job with them. And everybody who doesn't pay attention to such things would say that Home depot paid him $210 million. And that was absolutely not true. They took over a continuing guarantee to get somebody in there. Well, everybody talked about it. They all disliked him so badly. In Bob's tenure at Home Depot, he tripled sales and tripled profits and the stock went down. During the exact same time period, Lowe's arch competitor tripled sales and tripled profits and their stock soared because they didn't have a bone to pick with the guy running it. That's what happens. I bought the retail ETF and I owned both of them. Now you can say, well, yeah, one went up, one went down. So where'd you get. Well, also had Target in it during the heyday, made a lot of money on Target. It's just such a concentrated form of risk that most people would be better off not taking that concentrated form of risk, risk overall. And I think that was the point that we were trying to make here and go ahead and do it. We tell clients all the time, if you want to do some stock trading on the side, open up a little account at one of the little brokers, Robin Hood or wherever you want to go and trade some stocks. And then if you're really good at it once in a while, if you've made a lot of money and you want to get back down to your starting place, maybe you got ten grand extra one day that you didn't have before, slide that over to your long term investing with us and start over again and do it. And we have an amazing amount of people who do exactly that. But it's funny how little money comes over from the profits. Yeah, that's something you don't see very often.

Joey Loss 38:23

I think it's important to engage with it though. Like there's something to be said for the experience. You can read all you want from John Bogle and all these other guys that advocate what we say and preach every weekend. It's worth the experience to some degree to go out there and trade and, and understand why things don't always go the way they do. Because, because once you have that experience, I think you have better appreciation for, you know, a meager couple of 20% years that we've had. Right. It's an amazing S and P performance.

Steven H Van Wie 38:52

Day traders make a fortune in good years.

Joey Loss 38:54

Right. Everybody's smart in a raging bull market where 10 companies are so dominated,

Joey Loss 39:01

sometimes.

Steven H Van Wie 39:01

You'Re smart, sometimes you're lucky and sometimes you're none of the above. Yeah, but that's we one thing we've said way back when, 23 years of radio and when we set the rules for this one. My rules have always been the same. I don't discuss with anybody more than just on a superficial level, individual stocks. And I'll tell you one of the early ones when I was, when I was first in the business, it's probably, probably hadn't done five radio shows yet. When Microsoft announced their first gigantic dividend. It was going to be a one time cash distribution of $3 a share. I believe it was. And we took a phone call on the radio and the young guy says I think I got a great way to make money. Okay, tell us about it. And he said Microsoft is going to pay $3 a share next week. So how about I buy it on Monday and sell it on Friday and keep the three bucks? I said, well, I have a little bit of bad news for you. What the market does is they close one night at a certain price and if that is the day that the dividend is paid on, let's say it's $3. So if Microsoft was at 25 and they're going to pay $3, so they close Monday night, it's 25 Tuesday morning. They don't open at 25, they open at 22. They take the dividend off of the price of the stock and you could hear the deflation in the guy's voice. It was just, he was crushed. He had this great idea and they beat him to it. Yeah, if you can think of something like that, trust me, it's already been done and it's already been stopped. That's the same thing. If you're, let's say you want to, you've got a loss out of stock and you want to do some tax loss harvesting. So you want to sell your, whatever Microsoft before the end of the year so you can take that loss against your profits. So let's sell it in my brokerage account and then I'll have my wife buy it in her IRA with short of those 30 days for the wash sale they got that one too. They'll just look at it and say, there's no wash sale here. You bought it back? No, my wife's IRA brought it back. Same thing that I tell you. Try, don't try to game the system. They are a step ahead of you and they always will be. Some little things to know. All right, let's talk a little bit. I don't want to run out of time here. And we're getting pretty low in 2003. What spooked the market and I've scratching my head on this since I found out about it, it was the development introduction of cell phone technology and for some reason that caused a massive number of layoffs in October. And think what the cell phone industry has done since then for job creation. I just found it extremely ironic and I thought I might just share that with all of you. Something I never would have thought of. So once again we saved Paul Lloyd some money this week. Nobody got it.

Joey Loss 41:28

Yep.

Joey Loss 42:14

I think there's something to be said about the relationship between what you just reminded us of and the current concerns over the job market in the face of AI. If you think about pre cell phones, pre wide adoption of Internet, where now virtually 100% of businesses are on the Internet, right. But that was not overnight. People were concerned, you know, what does this mean for jobs? The Internet's going to do everything we don't have. What are we going to do after that? I think 70, 60 to 70% of jobs that exist right now were unimaginable in 99 and 2002.

Steven H Van Wie 42:45

I'll take it back even further. My first job out of college was computer programmer. When I took it, it was for a division of Tenaco, big outfit. And I had never even seen a computer in my life. But they, we did aptitude testing, that kind of thing. I was a math major and always loved math. So I tested very high on the math scale and there weren't a lot of programmers around because it was brand new. So I was there a couple years and I learned all about programming and such. And we would always talk among the people in the department and a lot of people were worried constantly that computers were going to replace people. You can't imagine the reaction of the managers in the, in the system when we started giving them information. They wanted more, so we'd give them more and they want more. So the department grew and the whole demand for information grew and the whole thing just spiraled upwards and they were all wrong. So you never know. That's why you got to live a long time. This was fun today. Thanks, everybody, for listening. We'll see you again next week at the same time.