It's Much Better to Be Off Wall Street
Dear subscriber,
I spent the past week in Las Vegas at our annual Stansberry Conference & Alliance Meeting – our biggest event of the year.
It is three days, jampacked with fascinating presentations from world-class speakers... new insights on today's investing environment... and candid conversations with colleagues and our readers.
Despite the name of this letter, Stansberry Research is definitively off Wall Street.
Wall Street is a place of consensus estimates, groupthink, and churn-for-fee services.
There's a lot of information on Wall Street... but there are better places to do independent thinking. It's not a coincidence that Warren Buffett lives in Omaha and Peter Lynch lives in Boston. (Stansberry Research is based in Baltimore.)
At our annual investment conference, we want to get at the big ideas. We didn't sit through presentations of earnings projections and financial models.
To me, the tone of the conference was best summed up by Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Dave Barry...
Dave and I had dinner with Zack Kass, a former researcher at OpenAI, and James Nestor, the bestselling author of Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.
After a deep and compelling conversation on AI and consciousness, Barry quipped, "We are at the most intellectual table in all of Las Vegas."
That's exactly how the Stansberry Conference goes, each and every year.
This year, we heard from Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball... and separately from baseball manager Billy Beane, the subject of Moneyball.
We also heard from CIA experts and two former ambassadors. And we even learned the best place in the world to buy an investment property. (It's one particular little village in northern Portugal.)
Of course, we talked plenty about specific investments. And I should share with you a few themes that carried throughout the week...
First, gold has had stellar performance this year, up more than 30%. But the experts I trust still expect it to go higher.
In short, the entire move in gold has been fueled by global central banks buying the metal. "Everyday" investors are still on the sidelines. (You can see this by talking to gold dealers and looking at inflows to gold exchange-traded funds.)
In the investing world, that's a sign of room to run. Trends don't typically end until retail investors pile in.
Next, people have deep concerns about our national deficit and government spending.
Folks have chirped about this for decades, and the U.S. has done just fine. But now, the concern seems to be widespread, well informed, and urgent.
Those two points sound bearish for stocks. National deficits add risk. And fear tends to drive buying in gold.
But there are still many, many outstanding businesses out there that investors can buy...
As we covered at the conference, sectors from cybersecurity to real estate to energy all have powerful tailwinds behind them that can drive returns for the next few years.
On actual Wall Street, it was a fairly quiet week. As of this morning, stocks have fallen 0.8%. But after powering higher all year, this is just a normal breather.
That takes me to my last theme of the conference...
Investors appear to be sitting on their hands ahead of the election. Any data-driven analysis will tell you this election has come down to a pure coin flip, leaving little room for investors to make smart moves ahead of it. They're waiting to see who wins... and will adjust accordingly.
I suspect markets will stay calm until November 5 – barring any last-minute "October surprise."
After that, I expect the action to pick up.
What Our Experts Are Reading and Sharing...
Our own Corey McLaughlin covered this year's conference, in depth, in the Stansberry Digest. Here's Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3. Also check out his conference wrap-up here.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ("FDIC") will insure bank deposits up to $250,000. When Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failed in 2023, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, of course, made a special exception. But that's not the new normal. The First National Bank of Lindsay, in Lindsay, Oklahoma, just failed. And depositors that exceeded the FDIC insurance limit aren't getting a bailout. For goodness' sake, don't keep more than $250,000 in your bank account.
If you want to get a read on the global economy, look no further than Coca-Cola (KO). It sells more than 200 brands in more than 200 countries. The company's recent results were resilient, with Coca-Cola beating revenue estimates. The beverage giant expects organic revenue growth of 10% this year – a measure that adjusts for things like acquisitions and currency fluctuations to get at the question, "Are people actually buying more Coke products?" Here's a recap on Coca-Cola's earnings from CNBC.
New Research in The Stansberry Investor Suite...
One stock has been rising in our Stansberry Score rankings.
It's a company that some left for dead after the invention of smartphones crushed its original product.
But this company has come roaring back. Over the past three decades, it has built a solid business on top of its world-class technology... enough so that the Stansberry Score considers it the 12th best stock out of the 4,714 stocks we rank today.
That score is based on outstanding fundamentals, like a free-cash-flow margin of 21%.
Moreover, this company is a "backdoor" way to profit from the boom in weight-loss drugs. A thinner, fitter population could push growth in this company's two biggest product categories.
Stansberry Investor Suite subscribers can read the entire report here.
If you don't already subscribe to The Stansberry Investor Suite – and want to learn more about our new special package of research – click here.
Until next week,
Matt Weinschenk
Director of Research
What do you think about This Week on Wall Street? Send any and all feedback to thisweek@stansberryresearch.com. We read every e-mail you send in.