Ugly Clothes and Bad Advice

Pee Wee Herman on acid... Valuation is so 1994... The same old drumbeat... Wall Street's 'Best Dressed Man'... Fashionable touting... Tolkien vs. Disney... Get serious now...

As market excesses get crazier, my job gets easier...

When the finance world is humming along and the stock market isn't in mega-bubble valuation territory, it's harder to find something fun to report on each Friday.

But when folks with lots of money start doing insane things, the stories write themselves.

For example, recently, I've touched on bitcoin treasury companies like Strategy (MSTR), which borrow money to buy bitcoin. These companies have no revenue or cash flow.

Strategy now owns nearly 629,000 bitcoin worth roughly $73 billion, compared with the company's market cap of roughly $114 billion. So where does the other $41 billion of its valuation come from? Who knows? The strategy is doomed to fail, or at least to produce massive losses at some point.

I've also talked about Ark Investment Management founder Cathie Wood. She has once again been bragging about the performance of her exchange-traded funds, which are loaded with speculative companies that burn cash – another ultimately doomed strategy.

This week, I'm focusing on Dan Ives, the hyperbullish Wedbush Securities global head of technology research.

Ives' stock picks and flamboyant wardrobe are well known on Wall Street...

He often wears pink and purple jackets with brightly colored, busily patterned shirts and brightly colored pants. During a recent CNBC appearance, he wore a matching pink, yellow, and lime green jacket and shirt. It was like Pee Wee Herman on acid.

His investment views are decidedly bullish, with zero reference to exorbitant valuations. For example, he says defense and intelligence IT provider Palantir Technologies (PLTR) "has a golden path to become an AI stalwart."

I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds wonderful. How could you ever go wrong buying a company on a golden path? And who cares that the stock trades for nearly 600 times earnings and more than 130 times sales? Valuation is so 1994.

Palantir was one of Ives' five picks for the second half of 2025. (When anyone makes picks for such short-term periods, that's a red flag that you're dealing with a marketing person, not an analyst.) The other four picks were Nvidia (NVDA), Microsoft (MSFT), Meta Platforms (META), and Tesla (TSLA).

The inclusion of Tesla in the list makes me wonder if Ives might be Wood's long-lost twin.

The company's core business of making cars is deteriorating, but that's OK because Ives views it as an AI stock. In other words, he's ignoring the decline and suggests buying the stock because of all its talk about robotics and AI. With Tesla trading in the low $300s, Ives' price target is $500 per share.

If Ives were just a bad analyst in funny clothes, I might ignore him. But according to him, the clothing and the stock picks are connected...

I dress differently. I go to the beat of a different drum, but it's just like I do in terms of picking stocks... The clothing is symbolic of just the way that I attack investing.

Recommending the most popular, widely owned stocks in the world is not how you 'go to the beat of a different drum'...

Ives marches to the same beat as millions of investors who can't get enough of the world's most popular stocks. If he didn't push the status quo hard, CNBC wouldn't bother with him.

Ives is the 2025 version of dot-com analysts like Henry Blodget and Mary Meeker.

Blodget was the Merrill Lynch analyst who was wildly bullish in public about companies he deemed "junk" and "crap" in private emails. It turns out, the companies he recommended had ties to his employer's investment banking business. He was eventually fined $4 million and banned from the securities industry for life.

Meeker, the "Queen of the Net" during the dot-com boom, behaved similarly at Morgan Stanley – with allegations of biased research. But somehow, she escaped prosecution.

In short, they recommended everything and anything that went up during the dot-com boom, before their favorite stock picks turned to toxic waste.

Again, if Ives were just a guy claiming his toddler-esque fashion sense and populist stock picking were part of the same wonderfully accurate worldview, I might be less interested in him.

But he has gone from merely wearing weird clothes to selling them...

Ives has now inked a deal to sell his own line of clothing through Brooklyn-based Snow Milk, a company that sells hoodies and jackets printed with busy, colorful graffiti-like designs. A press release touting Ives as "Wall Street's 'Best Dressed Man'" said:

The collection includes men's and women's staples – including a long-sleeve button-down shirt for women and a short-sleeve polo shirt for men stamped with custom artwork, including one with a sleeve portrait of Ives sporting his well-known sunglasses and a cap.

According to a recent CNBC article, Ives wants to bring "the same originality and authenticity to clothing as he does to financial research." That includes a polo shirt with his face emblazoned on the sleeve.

Maybe he's authentic, but recommending the most widely owned stocks on Earth is the opposite of original. It's another red flag indicating a lack of analytical rigor.

But it gets worse...

Ives also told CNBC that his hyperbullish, status-quo stock picking comes from the same place as his funny-looking clothes. And he is now selling his own graffiti-laden clothing line to "inspire" others to make bold decisions. From CNBC:

The well-known tech analyst has long said his clothing choices help him make market calls that sometimes seem idiosyncratic. Now, Ives said he hopes the clothing pieces inspire others to similarly make bold decisions in both fashion and investing.

"In my decades on CNBC, viewers have seen my fashion evolve along with my view of tech stocks," Ives said. "This is just another step in that journey."

If you have to keep telling everybody how original you are, well... the gentleman doth protest too much. But it's exactly what you'd expect from the land of hyped-up advice: the marketing pitch is the opposite of reality.

As for Ives' "journey"?

If history is any guide, Ives will disappear into obscurity during the next bear market (unless he gets involved in a scandal). But I daresay he'll survive. On Wall Street, you never get fired for being too bullish, only for being too bearish. Had Blodget never been found out, he'd still be on Wall Street today, like Meeker.

All of this reminds me of J.R.R. Tolkien and Walt Disney...

Disney's classic animated film Snow White was first released in December 1937, just three months after Tolkien's book The Hobbit was published.

Tolkien was a serious scholar of medieval languages and what he called "fairy stories," like the Brothers' Grimm tale "Little Snow White," which the film was based on. Tolkien didn't view old tales like the Grimms' as innocuous children's stories, but as essential mythology to help folks deal with real life challenges.

In The Hobbit and his Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tolkien paid homage to the old stories by writing epic tales of life, love, death, betrayal, and war... and the bravery and wisdom necessary to meet those challenges. The protagonists in his stories sometimes failed, and most of them eventually triumphed, but not without great cost. His stories are a philosophy for living, not light entertainment.

Meanwhile, Disney's version of Snow White whitewashed the original, darker story. The blogger the Culturist spelled out the important differences between the two in a recent essay:

In the original 1812 Brothers Grimm version of the tale, Snow White is repeatedly hunted by her murderous stepmother. She bargains to earn her place in the dwarfs' home, and when the evil queen is finally punished, she is forced to dance to death in red-hot iron shoes... the Grimm Brothers version is much closer to The Odyssey or Beowulf than it is to any modern children's tale.

In Disney's Snow White, however, the darker elements of the original tale are replaced with songbirds, sweetness, and a kiss. The dwarfs — figures with deep roots in Norse mythology and Germanic folklore — are no longer skilled craftsmen, but cheerful and comedic characters. Snow White is welcomed in without a struggle, and the evil queen disappears in a lightning strike. While the story itself remains entertaining, it lacks the depth required to engage earnestly with the evils of the world.

Wall Street is the finance version of Disney. Everyone is promised great riches by riding whatever trend is currently in fashion – like Internet stocks in 1999, housing and mortgages in 2006, oil and gas in 2014, and various kinds of cash-burning garbage in 2021.

Wall Streeters talk about their favorite stocks as though risk doesn't exist and losses never happen. Ives won't warn you about Palantir's exorbitant valuation. On the contrary, he says the stock is "the most underappreciated tech name."

Folks like Ives don't want to tell you that investors have little hope of succeeding long term without the skills of recognizing, understanding, and controlling risk. (Regular readers will recognize those as three chapter titles from Howard Mark's must-read classic The Most Important Thing).

But even if you have those skills, you will still be forced to take losses, as all investors must do from time to time. There's simply no getting around investing's dark side. All the very best investors are masters at taking losses.

That's why Stansberry Research editors are obsessed with controlling risk, taking losses when necessary, and moving on.

But just like you won't see the wicked queen dancing herself to death in red-hot iron shoes at Disney World, you won't see folks like Ives warn about investing risks. It's just too dark and real.

But no matter what I think of him, Ives is more in tune with the times than me...

He's the one telling everybody what they want to hear: that AI is a revolution making everything more wonderful than ever. And that you can make a lot of money by buying the mega-cap stocks that will benefit from the trend. It's nearly the exact same pitch Blodget and Meeks made about Internet stocks in the late 1990s.

Meanwhile, I keep talking about egregiously high market valuations. I keep warning folks that buying stocks without any regard whatsoever for business fundamentals or valuation is a huge mistake, especially when those valuations are at all-time highs (by some measures).

I don't begrudge Ives his moment as a budding fashionista. He's probably having a lot of fun with it.

But I don't like how he claims a link between his stock picking – which many investors take seriously – and his wardrobe – which is clearly not meant to be taken seriously. It makes his investing advice seem like a massive joke on the world. It's like Ives is making fun of anybody dumb enough to pay 600 times earnings for stocks.

The market might get sillier and rise higher from here... but sooner or later, it'll turn deadly serious to anybody who gets bamboozled by ugly clothes and bad advice.

New 52-week highs (as of 8/7/25): Agnico Eagle Mines (AEM), Arista Networks (ANET), Broadcom (AVGO), Barrick Mining (B), Alpha Architect 1-3 Month Box Fund (BOXX), Cisco Systems (CSCO), WisdomTree Japan SmallCap Dividend Fund (DFJ), iShares MSCI Italy Fund (EWI), iShares MSCI Spain Fund (EWP), Franklin FTSE Japan Fund (FLJP), VanEck Gold Miners Fund (GDX), VanEck Junior Gold Miners Fund (GDXJ), Kinross Gold (KGC), Lynas Rare Earths (LYSDY), Altria (MO), Newmont (NEM), OR Royalties (OR), Pan American Silver (PAAS), Uranium Energy (UEC), Telefônica Brasil (VIV), and Wheaton Precious Metals (WPM).

In today's mailbag, feedback on this week's Stansberry Investor Hour episode with our Dr. David "Doc" Eifrig, which we shared in yesterday's Digest. As we discussed, Doc was recently named the CEO of MarketWise, the parent company of Stansberry Research... Do you have a comment or question? As always, e-mail us at feedback@stansberryresearch.com.

"Dan and Corey, your episode with guest Doc Eifrig was an excellent show. It was great to hear from the CEO of Marketwise but the most important thing to me was how you all care about what you do and who you do it for. It is clear to me that trust is a valued attribute for the people at Stansberry Research (I do not know enough about the other brands to comment on them). The point that writing honest information and sharing it with others is worth something is true. Every reader is at a different time in their life and if your information is good enough it is worth getting paid for it.

"Thank you for the enjoyable conversation you had on this episode." – Subscriber Francis M.

Good investing,

Dan Ferris
Medford, Oregon
August 8, 2025