The Next Big Energy Boom
You exist thanks to cheap energy.
Throughout the vast span of human history, energy was muscle. The sun fed plants... which created chemical energy... animals (including humans) ate those plants and turned the chemical energy into motion... or they ate other animals for the energy trapped in their muscles.
If you wanted to plow a field or transport your grains to the market, you'd better have put your back into it. Add in a little wood burning for heat to cook food... and that's all we had.
Around 4000 B.C., humans started burning coal for heat. Later, the Romans learned to use the heat from coal to produce iron.
But even acquiring that coal was mostly a matter of muscle... For example, mines that run deep and close to the water table can fill with groundwater. You've got to get that water out to have a productive mine.
For centuries, that meant essentially hauling it out by hand, a bucket at a time. Eventually, humans figured out how to hitch horses up to a system of buckets and pulleys to draw out the water. But still, that's just someone else's muscle.
Then in 1698 A.D., a British military engineer devised a system to keep coal mines dry by capturing the heat energy generated by cheap, abundant coal and convert it into motion for water pumps. Thomas Savery's steam engine changed human history by showing how it was possible to turn one form of energy into another...
As the Industrial Revolution progressed, we found greater and wider uses for this new energy by powering trains, factories, and electrical power plants.
With the commercialization of oil, our energy use expanded further still. The internal combustion engine led to billions of people owning their own transportation, which could take them further in a day than most humans in history had traveled in a lifetime.
A barrel of oil contains roughly the same amount of energy as 1.5 million calories of food. Compared with the era of muscle power, that's cheap energy.
In 1500, the 500 million living people were using about 13 trillion calories worth of energy a day. By 2011, the 7 billion people on Earth consumed about 1.5 quadrillion calories per day, according to the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.
Put another way, the number of humans grew 14-fold, while our energy consumption increased 115-fold.
Without mankind's ability to harness a host of energy sources, the Earth could not support billions of people.
Much of the energy that modern humans use comes from oil and gas companies.
But according to my colleague Rob Spivey – from our corporate affiliate Altimetry – despite our reliance on these energy companies, traditional accounting drastically understates their true profitability. And that has led to a once-in-a-decade opportunity...
With energy demand rising and global supply under pressure, Rob believes we're at the start of a major bull run for companies that most investors have written off.
Click here to learn about a rare chance to get ahead of a multiyear energy boom.
Now, let's get to this week's Q&A... And as always, keep sending your comments, questions, and topic suggestions to feedback@healthandwealthbulletin.com. My team and I read every e-mail.
The Importance of Trailing-Stop Discipline
Q: Just read your note about stocks having nosebleed valuations and that got me thinking. I have a couple of stocks that have done very well. One is Microsoft (MSFT) that I bought years ago at about $40. I would hate to sell all of a stock like that if it hit my 25% trailing stop. But at the same time I don't want to ride it down a long way (like I have done on other stocks!). Would you recommend [widening] my trailing stop, or selling some of the position if it hits the stop? Or would you recommend just HODL? – D.D.
A: First of all, bravo to you for holding Microsoft from $40 a share to around $514 a share. That takes a lot of discipline to not think about selling over the years after seeing such monster gains. (In my Retirement Millionaire newsletter, we bought Microsoft at $26 way back in 2010... And we're up about 1,500%.)
But like you said, the last thing you want is to give back all those gains.
That's why you have an exit strategy. You decide in advance what would make you get out of an investment – in your case, shares falling 25% from their peak – and then you follow it. No questions asked.
You might tighten a stop loss to protect even more of your gains. I do that sometimes in my newsletters. But if you dial it back or disregard your stop entirely... then you've defeated the purpose.
A few years ago, I worked with a very smart analyst who was bullish on the health insurer Humana (HUM)... He recommended shares in November 2021 with a 20% hard stop. That means he'd sell, no questions asked, if shares fell 20% below his entry point.
Not even two months later, Humana slashed its projected Medicare enrollment. Shares crashed 19% in a single day, triggering the stop. It was time to sell.
But the analyst did what lots of average investors do... He loved Humana. He still believed in the company despite the massive loss. He wanted to buy the dip. But our policy at Stansberry Research is to follow our stops.
At first, it looked like our rigid policy was costing subscribers money... As the analyst had predicted, Humana bounced off its lows and rose for a while.
Then it crashed again. And it crashed again. And today, shares are about 60% below their November 2022 highs... and nearly 40% below the initial recommendation's stop-out level.
This is your risk when you disregard a stop to "HODL," or decide that you'll never sell a given stock.
As you said you've also experienced... it's all too easy to ride a stock all the way down.
Stops can cap your gains, but they also cap your losses. And avoiding big losses is one of the best ways to generate wealth in the long run. That's my top priority as a conservative investor.
"Conservative" doesn't have to mean small gains. Open positions in my Retirement Millionaire model portfolio are up an average of 130%.
That's thanks to a strategy of holding great stocks while they're going up.
You'll have a much harder time getting rich by holding onto stocks while they're going down.
What We're Reading...
- Did you miss it? This market darling is set to fall.
- Something different: A weak password left 700 workers unemployed.
Here's to our health, wealth, and a great retirement,
Dr. David Eifrig and the Health & Wealth Bulletin Research Team
July 25, 2025