In this week's Stansberry Investor Hour, Dan welcomes Cullen Roche back to the show. Cullen is the founder of portfolio-management firm Discipline Funds. He is also the author of several books, his most recent one titled Your Perfect Portfolio.

Cullen kicks things off with his thoughts on market uncertainty due to the Middle East conflict. He believes that volatile oil prices (and other commodities) will have an impact on the market. Additionally, he says that the U.S.'s attacks could prompt an escalating confrontation with China – where the latter decides to invade Taiwan and seize control of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM), the world's largest semiconductor producer. And he expresses his desire to see a freer market unhindered by tariffs...

I think corporations should be able to dictate where they're going to trade and with whom they're going to trade. I don't love the idea of intervening in the markets... I've been really critical of that to a large degree because I worry about the way you have this negative knock-on effect, where China now, rather than trading with us quite so much, they start trading with India more, they start trading with their neighboring countries more, they start trading with Europe more. And this starts to fund investment in things that actually accelerate and closes the [technological gap] between the United States and these other countries.

Next, Cullen delves deep into AI and how it relates to his investing strategies. He states the risk that the technology poses with many companies and sectors pouring money into it. However, he doesn't see that outcome playing out. He then shares how AI has been beneficial for him and says that utilizing it in creative ways can help differentiate your business from the competition. And he gives his outlook on robotics and how that will impact jobs in the future...

The labor market that I always tell people that you actually need to worry about is, one morning, you're going to be driving down the road, and you're going to see a robot walking on a construction site carrying a nail gun. And that thing will wake up at 7:00 a.m., and it will start punching... 10,000 nails an hour... It'll navigate over complex construction sites, it will climb up second stories, and it won't require insurance. It'll operate from 7:00 a.m. until 7:00 p.m., at which point it'll shut down, recharge, and it'll start again.

Finally, Cullen details his exchange-traded funds ("ETFs") and what their purposes are. He also shares the time horizons for the ETFs so investors can know how to plan their strategies over those periods. But Cullen does allow flexibility with his funds to ensure that they can evolve and shift to match the changes in the markets and decrease risk. And he compares the pros and cons of using equal-weighted indexes versus market-cap-weighted indexes...

There's good and bad [in weighting strategies]. You could argue that there's a lot of good in that it creates a very efficient process for a passive fund. The problem, though, is that it's so static that there's no dynamic nature at all to these things where they can't evolve and change to [volatility]. So if the [Magnificent Seven] becomes 80% of the index, the S&P 500 will just look at it and say, "It is what it is"... And there's an argument that this is how the market has evolved... And then there's an element that would look at that and say, "Wait a minute. I now basically only own seven stocks in this diversified index fund. That's counterproductive to the whole point of indexing."

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(Additional past episodes are located here.)

The transcript is coming soon.

This Week's Guest

Cullen Roche is the founder of Discipline Funds, an ETF firm focused on aligning investment portfolios with real-world time horizons rather than market predictions. For more than two decades, his research and writing have helped shape the discussion around macroeconomics and portfolio construction. He's the author of Understanding the Modern Monetary System, Pragmatic Capitalism, and Your Perfect Portfolio.