Lifetime Partnership; Predictions for 2022; Home in Tigoni; Super immunity; How we're treating our COVID
1) In this, my last daily e-mail of the year, I want to give a final plug for our Lifetime Partnership offer.
Rather than a series of one-off subscriptions to our various newsletters, in which we have to bug you to renew each year, you can instead make one payment (plus a small annual maintenance fee) and receive everything we publish, both now and in the future.
There is simply no better (or cost effective) way for you to benefit from the experience and insights of the entire Empire team, led by Enrique, Berna, Herb, and me.
We have a special offer that expires at the end of this year – midnight tomorrow – so please click here to take advantage of it before it's gone forever.
2) I'd like to make some predictions for 2022...
I remain constructive on the market, but don't expect another year of 20%-plus returns. The U.S. market is up more than 17% annually over the past five years and more than 16% a year over the past decade, far above the long-term average annual returns of 9% to 10%. This has lulled investors into lofty expectations which almost certainly won't come to pass.
As always, my advice is to concentrate your portfolio in the stocks of high-quality companies and keep speculative positions like cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens ("NFTs"), and options very small (or eschew them altogether). Remember, the surest way to get poor quickly is to try to get rich quickly!
My favorite stocks are both exchange-traded funds in the beaten-up cannabis and biotech sectors, as I discussed yesterday:
The AdvisorShares Pure U.S. Cannabis Fund (MSOS) is my favorite pick for 2022, for reasons my friend Doug Kass outlined last week. A second pick is another exchange-traded fund, the SPDR S&P Biotech Fund (XBI). Empire Stock Investor subscribers can read our report on the sector, "This Classic Growth Sector Just Became a Screaming Value," by clicking here. (If you're not a subscriber, you can become one for only $49 for the first year by clicking here.)
My top stocks to avoid are AMC Entertainment (AMC) (see my December 20 e-mail) and Digital World Acquisition (DWAC), about which I wrote the following on Tuesday:
If I were to pick one stock to avoid in 2022, it's Digital World Acquisition (DWAC), a SPAC that has announced a deal to partner with a company owned by former President Donald Trump, Trump Media & Technology, to launch a social media company called TRUTH Social. I first wrote about it on October 22 and then followed up on December 8, 15, and 20.
I think it's highly likely that the SEC blocks this revolting deal, which has been carefully engineered to rip the faces off retail investors and/or Trump supporters. If so, DWAC's stock will likely trade back to its cash value of $10, representing more than 80% downside.
I think the omicron variant will prove to be the end of the pandemic, as I wrote in last Wednesday's daily: I have increasing confidence that the pandemic will soon be over:
Based on eight more days of data since my December 14 e-mail entitled, Will the pandemic soon be over?, I have a higher degree of confidence (perhaps 70%, up from 50%) that my theory is correct that "the omicron variant, rather than being a global nightmare, may actually soon lead to the end of the pandemic, morphs into something akin to the seasonal flu in the next month or two."
That said, the huge omicron-driven surge of cases that's already happening in the Northeast, Puerto Rico, Ohio, Illinois, Hawaii, Wisconsin, and Florida is going to spread across the U.S. in the next few weeks – breaking all prior records – which is going to freak everyone out. But then cases will peak, likely in mid-January, and hospitalizations will remain under control, thus transforming the pandemic to an endemic.
As I've argued many times recently, I think the high inflation we're seeing is the result of a white-hot economy, temporary supply chain disruptions, and year-over-year comparisons with a pandemic-driven tepid economic slowdown. I think the latter two go away by mid-year, and inflation returns to roughly 3% and ceases to be an issue.
Finally, as I discussed in my December 21 e-mail, I think the bettors on PredictIt are right that President Joe Biden and Senator Joe Manchin will strike a deal and a smaller version of the Build Back Better legislation passes in the first part of 2022.
3) This morning I sent an update to my coronavirus e-mail list, describing how my father and I are treating our COVID (as always, to subscribe to it, simply send a blank e-mail to: cv-subscribe@mailer.kasecapital.com). Here's the first part (to read the rest of it, click here):
Thank you for your many kind e-mails. We flew home safely yesterday afternoon and are now at my parents' home in Tigoni, which is 40 minutes outside Nairobi.
My dad and I both still have symptoms, but are feeling a little better today. He's mostly in bed under a warm blanket, while I'm – what else? – cranking out e-mails! 😂😜👍
The good news is that, as soon as we recover, we'll both have super-immunity: Breakthrough infections generate 'super immunity' to COVID-19, study suggests. Excerpt:
Breakthrough infections greatly enhance immune response to variants of the virus that causes COVID-19, according to a newly published study from Oregon Health & Science University...
"You can't get a better immune response than this," said senior author Fikadu Tafesse, Ph.D., assistant professor of molecular microbiology and immunology in the OHSU School of Medicine. "These vaccines are very effective against severe disease. Our study suggests that individuals who are vaccinated and then exposed to a breakthrough infection have super immunity."
The study found that antibodies measured in blood samples of breakthrough cases were both more abundant and much more effective – as much as 1,000% more effective – than antibodies generated two weeks following the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine.
The study suggests each exposure following vaccination actually serves to strengthen immune response to subsequent exposures even to new variants of the virus.
"I think this speaks to an eventual end game," said co-author Marcel Curlin, M.D., associate professor of medicine (infectious diseases) in the OHSU School of Medicine who also serves as medical director of OHSU Occupational Health. "It doesn't mean we're at the end of the pandemic, but it points to where we're likely to land: Once you're vaccinated and then exposed to the virus, you're probably going to be reasonably well-protected from future variants.
"Our study implies that the long-term outcome is going to be a tapering-off of the severity of the worldwide epidemic."
To figure out how to treat our COVID, I e-mailed Dr. Kevin Maki, an epidemiologist who's been an incredible resource for my readers and me over the past year (you can read his bio here or here).
The first thing I asked him about is the highly controversial drug, ivermectin. He replied:
Ivermectin is very safe. While I am not optimistic that it would have a large benefit, there has been enough low-quality evidence to justify including it in NIH trials. It could have a modest benefit, but that is uncertain.
To hear the argument against the drug, I had a long conversation with a close friend who's a doctor and senior executive at a major hospital network. He strongly discourages the use of ivermectin to prevent or treat COVID, for a variety of reasons.
In the rest of my e-mail, I addressed:
- Arguments against ivermectin and why we're taking it
- Is Fluvoxamine the COVID Drug We've Been Waiting For?
- Vitamins and supplements
- Sunset and flying pics
Again, click here to read the entire e-mail.
Best regards,
Whitney
P.S. I welcome your feedback at WTDfeedback@empirefinancialresearch.com.
P.P.S. The Empire Financial Research offices are closed tomorrow in observance of New Year's Day. Look for my next daily e-mail in your inbox on Monday, January 3. Happy New Year!