‘Major Reprice’ Of All Assets; Bubble Burst, Gold to $5k (Uncut) 02-16-2025
‘Major Reprice’ Of All Assets; Bubble Burst, Gold to $5k | Clem Chambers
It’s the beginning of the last leg of the run-up. It’s the bit that tells you you’re going into a bubble, where you’re going into a major reprice. In gold all day long, because gold’s going to go to 5,000.
Well, stock market’s taking a bit of a slide on Friday, as the S&P 500 is down about half a percent, and the Nasdaq is down almost one percent. Inflation fears are back front and center, and we’ll talk about what’s next for markets, where investors should go, the recent rise in rally in gold, and what’s next for Bitcoin. Clem Chambers joins us once more.
He is the founder of A New FN. Welcome back, Clem. Yeah, great to be back.
We’re both traveling right now. Different backgrounds for both of us. Well, I guess you have a virtual background, so we can’t really tell.
I have mine, because, you know, I spend most of my time in Monaco, and you don’t want to see my unmade hotel bed, and you really don’t. Trust me on that one. Wow, wow.
Maybe we do, but for now, let’s take a look at this article here. Consumer inflation fears spike in February as tariff worries hit sentiment. Consumers grew dramatically more worried about near-term inflation as President Donald Trump pushed aggressive tariffs against major U.S. trading partners.
The Michigan’s Consumer Survey for February showed that respondents expect the inflation rate a year from now to be 4.3%, a whole percentage point jump from January to the highest level since November 2023. Are you in line with expectations here? In other words, do you agree with 4.3%, or is that just completely bonkers? Well, my model is very simple. Governments create inflation because they want it, and they get rid of it when they don’t want it, and they have deflation when they want it, and they get rid of deflation when they don’t want it.
And, you know, they probably want an elevated rate of inflation right now because they’re still trying to, you know, balance GDP growth and all those good things. And inflation is a fabulous tool for government to do things like renege on their debt and rebalance and punish passive people and reward active people, et cetera, et cetera. It’s a popular tool, always has been.
You look around the world, ask yourself why they have inflation. It’s because they want it, because they need it. It’s an alternate form of taxation.
But, you know, if you’re worried about tariffs creating inflation, so you get a tariff rise, bang, up it goes. Well, that injects an amount of inflation that goes through the system because a constant rate of inflation requires a constant rate of increase of money supply. Yeah, because if you print 10% more money, you’ll get 10% inflation over a period, and it’ll go back to zero again.
You have to keep making more money than there is demand for money to make inflation. So it’s not a, you know, you just don’t pull one lever, print the dollar bill, and you get X amount of inflation forever. You just get blip, right? So if you have a blip because Donald Trump puts 100% import duties on everything, you go bang, loads of inflation, it goes away again.
So the key thing with inflation is not to have it chronic. Acute inflation is a pain, but it flushes out of the system. It’s chronic inflation that is being built by a constant increase in money supply, or you can say, you know, constant increase in tariffs.
You know, one quarter is 10%, next quarter, now it’s 20%, next quarter, now it’s 50%, next quarter, now it’s 70%. That will cause chronic inflation, but one hit would create one blip in inflation, and then it would go away again. The more important factor of tariffs is that it wrecks the overall level of international trade.
It brings it, it’s beggar your neighbor, and everybody does worse. That’s the theory of international trade, is that you get a shift of comparative advantages between countries. In the same way markets, it’s about shifting risk from, I’m a gold miner, I’ve got risk.
The risk is I don’t want gold, I want to, I want baked beans to feed my workers. So, you know, somebody gives you baked beans for gold, that’s trade. I need baked beans, you need gold, everybody’s better off.
It’s a win-win situation, that’s what trade’s about. And international trade is meant to be a win-win situation, and if you free trade, that win-win situation is optimal. So, well, the idea is if you’re dealing with a country abroad that’s got hugely low wage rates and is aggressive in geopolitics and is, you know, hacking all your companies and stealing all your IP and very keen to, you know, be bigger than you, you slap tariffs on them to slow them down.
And that’s a geopolitical thing, not an economic thing. It’s actually economic warfare. Well, as we all know, war always ends in tears, and it’s not good for anybody, really.
It’d be better if everyone could just be friends and get on with being operative. And so the tariff thing is potentially damaging for the world economy, and that’s terrible news. And that’s a bigger threat, way, way bigger threat than whatever inflationary project.
War ends in tears for the loser, not the victor. Who’s going to come out top of all this, you think? Everybody loses in war. I mean, Britain won two world wars, and they got wolves full of names of people that died young and would have been, had wonderfully productive lives and done great things for everybody.
So war is bad for everybody. War is a terrible thing. And people forget because they haven’t been around.
Most people have not seen what the real impact of that is because they weren’t born then, and even their parents weren’t born then, and even their parents’ parents weren’t born then. So they forget just how incredibly awful that is because they live in a bubble of peace. But, you know, that’s, people should not forget the absolute devastation, even of old-fashioned wars, which wouldn’t be, didn’t run anywhere near the level that the sort of modern war would be.
Okay. Clem, what happens to markets if inflation does rise above 4% again in a year from now? Well, not a lot. I mean, you know, there’s creeping inflation, which is, you know, 2% to 3%.
And, you know, that’s considered to be, well, 2% is considered to be beneficial. Anything under that is considered to be bad. And 3%, well, you know, that’s unpleasant.
5%, oh, you don’t really want it. It’s only when it gets to 7% to 8% to 9% or 10% that you’re going to have an economic problem long-term with the disruption that that causes. So, you know, if it blipped up to 4.5% and blipped back down again, it’s just, you know, it’s just a bit of a pain.
And, you know, you try to make up for your loss. Well, what are you losing? You’re actually losing 3% of your cash balance value as opposed to 2% of it. And, you know, if you’re getting, the treasurers are paying something similar, really, you shouldn’t really be going down too far.
It’s really when your returns from investments are significantly less than the inflation rate that you’re in trouble. And, you know, if it’s grinding away and you’re getting 0% in the bank and you’re losing 2% to inflation or 1% like the good old days, well, you know, it’s chronic and you don’t really care even though it’s eating away at you. But if you’re getting 4% in the bank and you’re actually getting 10% inflation, you’re losing 6% of your cash balances in real time.
And of course, once inflation starts to muck up your economy, all those marvellous multiples that you see in the stock market, your PEs of 30, they start falling back to 14. So it starts to erode your capital base as well. And then it starts to muck up your economy.
So you lose real growth and then you’re in a, you know, potentially death spiral or you end up like a South American country, really, you know, always on the brink of another economic problem. So the stability of low inflation is the key because on the stability, you can build up valuations, you can build businesses, you can plan businesses and everything’s hunky dory. But really, you’re not really in trouble, proper trouble until you’re sort of six, seven, 8%.
And so, you know, it’s not good, it’s not nice, but you can certainly live with 4.5% as long as you get back down. We don’t need to be worried about hedging against high inflation right now with inflation hedges. 4.5% is not high inflation.
It’s only high inflation if you think 2% is the right number. And, you know, high inflation is 10%. And, you know, old people like me who lived in the 70s, I’d tell you about high inflation.
And that is high inflation. When you go, you know, 13%, 14% for a decade, that’s high inflation. And there’s been many periods in not too distant future when that’s been the case, at the end of the Second World War, at the end of the First World War, in the 70s, in the 60s.
I mean, if you bought a, let’s say you bought Picasso in 1948. By 1972, it’d gone up 200 times. And that was inflation.
Now, it came out of an environment of deep deflation. Nobody had any money in 1948, apart from the Americans who had it all. So if you wanted to buy a Picasso in Paris, it’s simply nobody had any money.
And you had inflation. So you had the worst of all possible worlds. But, you know, 4.5%, in comparison with people that were knocking around in 76, they’d say that would have been celebrations.
So it’s chronic. It’s not optimal. It’s, you know, you wish it wasn’t there.
And probably the real number is actually higher because inflation in certain groups of people is different. So you can get a situation where there’s high inflation for people on low incomes and low inflation for our high incomes. Then suddenly you get really big inflation for our high incomes.
I mean, back in the 2000s, you know, Ferraris had dropped in real money costs a great deal from the 1960s. But you’ll notice they’re no longer cheap. They’re no longer affordable for anybody.
They’ve actually, cars at the top end have exploded. You know, there’s cars, you couldn’t buy cars for the equivalent of $2 million in 1999. They just didn’t make them.
So, you know, hotel rooms 10 years ago were $300 a night. They’re now $1,200 a night. So rich man’s inflation has been absolutely run away.
So there are different types of inflation. And, you know, effectively, if you’ve got low, if you’ve got higher inflation for the common man than the numbers are showing, that’s actually a real problem. So if you take, for example, the Bank of England’s number, in my calculations, they’re 50% lower than reality.
So if you go back to 1982, when I was a young man starting out in business, and you take it to now, they say X amount of it, 300% inflation. It’s actually 500. So these numbers that they throw out are also not necessarily very representative.
But as a block number, 4.5% is not a disaster. Well, okay. So consumers think 4%.
Markets think 2.57%. This is a five-year break in inflation, right? They think 2.57 in five years. So anyway, it’s not a significant increase from where it was just a couple of months ago. The 10-year yield is something I want to bring your attention to.
I have to chart up the whole time. It’s been just trending down. And certainly the bond market is not pricing in higher inflation.
What’s happening with the 10-year? Let’s talk about the bond market first. Are you expecting a rally in the long end of the curve this year? Well, okay. A lot has changed from the past.
And a lot of people are living in the past where there’s bond vigilantism and all that good stuff. But 2008 broke all that. The rate that is paid on US government bonds is basically under the full control of the Fed.
And if they allow it to go up, it’s because they have other things in mind and they have other things planned. I mean, it’s like the inflation expectations. I say, oh, inflation expectations have gone up or have gone down.
Well, actually, inflation expectations is controlled by the bond curve. And the bond curve these days is completely controlled by the Fed. So inflation expectations are completely controlled by the Fed.
But of course, inflation expectations are meant to be what people in the street are expecting and businessmen are expecting. It has nothing to do with the Fed’s control of the yield curve. So that whole concept in the old model is completely gone.
It’s absolutely gone. And the QEQT dynamic that you can actually see with your own eyes because the Fed published what they’re doing every week on Wednesday. You can actually see what they’re doing.
And they’ve been slowly but surely tightening. They slowed down for the election so they didn’t take any blame. And then they’re continuing to suck money out of the economy.
And they’ve changed the excess money in the system. And they’ve drained that out. And now they’ve got it to sort of like a level where they obviously feel comfortable that there’s enough money to go around and maybe just enough too much so that if there’s a shock, it can absorb it.
So you can actually see them driving the bus. And say 20 years ago, they didn’t drive the bus. They stepped in when it was too late and there was a disaster.
And they sort of were busy bailing out a sinking ship. Now they try to make sure the ship doesn’t get into those sort of almost desperate straits. They’re trying to – it’s highly curated markets.
So you’re not dealing with free marketing. You’re not dealing with the things that operate at a market level. They’re operating at a regular territorial government level.
And that’s a very different mechanic. And I’ll tell you, there would be no multi-trillion dollar companies if this wasn’t a reality. Well, the gold market is certainly pricing in something.
Let’s talk about what that something is. Take a look at my screen here. Sure, sure it is.
Breaking out new all-time highs, 2863 is today’s number. All right. What’s happening with gold? Where can we see $3,000? That’s two different questions, but I’ll ask you at the same time.
That’s a ballistic curve you’re looking at there. Yeah, it’s up 11% since the beginning of the year, by the way, which is a lot for gold in a short time period. But the key thing to see there is the shape.
It’s an accelerating ballistic curve. It’s a rocket taking off. Obviously, if it’s an Elon Musk rocket, it goes straight up.
But you see what I mean. It’s accelerating up. All bubbles accelerate up like that.
That’s such a bullish mark. The bad news is that it represents a sentiment that’s really not very nice. Gold is for war.
And there’s an acceleration going on there. And what is that acceleration? You see, what happens, for most of your viewers, they’ll be going, what the hell is he talking about? But if you take a Black-Scholes formula, which is really the core valuation metric, and that’s what the option markets work on. And if you want to believe that those equations are not very powerful, go try to beat that system, and you’ll lose your shirt pretty damn quick.
And that’s an equation that says these are all the factors that go into a price. Now, there’s always a lot more factors hanging off that equation, because markets change. Factors that are not important today are important tomorrow.
I mean, the whole credit crunch was caused by counterparty risk. And there’s nothing in the Black-Scholes about counterparty risk. You can write it in.
You can write counterparty risk in and do another valuation. But that was a hidden variable, what I call a hidden variable. But when you can see all these variables, but there’s a whole load of hidden variables you can’t see, the market will push all the risk into the hidden variables that you can’t see.
And if you want to make money, you better go looking for them, finding them, working out what they mean, working out how that changes the price, and seeing whether the price today is different from your new model. So the hidden variables is what happens. And they get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, boom, bubble, bust, because they take control in the same way as all those crazy derivatives that you hadn’t even heard of in 2008 almost blew up the world.
They were the hidden variables. Now, when gold does that, that means there’s a hidden variable. And what you have to understand is what is it? I’ve got my theories.
I might be wrong. What did the famous film producer say? I’m not always right, but I’m never wrong. Well, tell us your theory then for the hidden variable.
Well, there’s a hidden variable there. Something is going on. And when you look at what the Fed’s doing, it will, by its very definition of what it’s doing, be creating these hidden variables that may or may not be growing and growing and getting out of control, just like these derivatives did in 2008.
Do we know what this hidden variable is? Or by definition, we don’t, because it’s hidden? Well, I mean, I think this is actually, it’s demonstrating an increase in volatility, global volatility. And when uncertainty increases, you’ve got to hedge it, haven’t you? You’ve got to back something that gives you protection from increasing volatility. Now, the thing about volatility, it’s not a bad thing.
In fact, it’s a great way to make money. Volatility is what every trader wants. Yeah.
But there’s some things when you’ve got volatility that you want to buy because it gives you protection. And gold is protection. And gold is protection from this volatility.
And I would say that, I mean, if you look at the current American government, it’s either great news or it’s catastrophe. And, you know, it’s a fairly large amount of people that will say it’s catastrophe. And there’s a fairly large amount of people that say it’s the best thing that’s happened in 20 years in America.
That is increased volatility. Now, how are you going to hedge that? How are you going to put some money aside to make sure that you’ve got your rear end covered from if it turns out to be catastrophic? Well, there’s really only one place to go, and that’s gold, isn’t it? So I think what you’re seeing is an increase of volatility, or you could say danger. You wouldn’t go to gold.
It’s the only place you would go. You wouldn’t go to treasuries, for example. Well, but not if the danger is America.
I mean, OK. It’s the international hedge, isn’t it? It’s the global hedge that has no currency, that has no politics. So it is totally apolitical, agovermental.
It holds no opinion whether you’re an angel or a devil. So that historically has been its purpose. And my catchphrase, gold is for war, it encapsulates that.
But war is a metaphor for increasing danger. And does anybody think there is an increasing danger? So it’s going to go up. But the point is it’s a ballistic curve.
So as far as the market is saying, it’s an accelerating situation of increasing tension, an accelerating increase in volatility. So it’s that acceleration. That is the base of a ballistic curve that you’ll find in every single boom, bubble, bust for the last 800 years.
You know, jiggle, jaggle, jiggle. That’s one thing. That’s linear.
But that since 2025, it’s now formed the base of what could become a ballistic price increase. And personally, I wish I could. I’m not looking at it.
I don’t want to see that. I want a nice price. I don’t want to be the richest man at the gates, at the pearly gates.
Gold just looks like it’s following the S&P 500 on the periphery. Take a look at this. I’ve related with the S&P 500 in the purple.
The S&P 500 is going sideways and gold is going ballistic. That’s what I see. But there’s an increase in the S&P since its trough in the first week of January.
But that, you know, you’re looking at August last year. I mean, you know, wasn’t Biden even going to be running then? I mean, you’ve got since Trump’s got elected, suddenly gold’s going ballistic. And you’ve got S&P going sideways, which I think is fortunate because, I mean, you know, if people get too frightened, it’s going to go south, isn’t it? Well, OK.
There’s a balance of optimism there that’s keeping the equity markets up. And long may it continue. What is your view on the stock markets? We didn’t have a chance to talk about the Nvidia crash of 16% on the day that Deepsea came out with its news.
That was a Monday ago. Let’s take a look at it. Let me first of all talk about Nvidia.
OK, it’s not to say Nvidia isn’t through the roof. I personally hold AMD as a metaphor for AI because it is cheap. And it might be a mistake because if you’re going to hedge your Nvidia position, you’re going to hedge it with AMD.
The market is going to be short AMD and long Nvidia, aren’t they, if they’re, you know, into hedging. So that may be not necessarily the smartest move on earth. But anyway, the point is, is that the AI boom, the stuff that it drives, is not about a model being played.
I, oh, I’ve got all this data. And no, please tell me the future of egg prices or whatever you’re asking the AI to do. It’s the training data.
That’s where the machines, you need the machines. That’s where you need the cost. And it doesn’t matter whether the Chinese have stolen your data and are running it on a player.
That’s so much cheaper. The training is not going to go away. The training is still going to be infinite demand for the hardware that trains the data.
And that’s what all these Nvidia chips have been used for. The training, not the actual using of the of the data, because it builds the the vast network of inferences that cost you a hundred million dollars worth of electricity. And then it says, here you are.
It’s two terabyte. You can fit it on a smart stick, the result. But to get the result, you have to spend a hundred million dollars in electricity and thousands of these blooming Nvidia chips to get the data set that the AI player plays.
So it doesn’t matter. Deep, Deep Seeker, whatever it’s called. It doesn’t matter what they’ve done.
It doesn’t lower the demand for the training hardware that Nvidia makes. It doesn’t lower the demand for cooling, for all those machines, you know, boiling the oceans doesn’t change that at all. The only thing that would change that are people that come up with a better way of doing it.
And then you still need more of it. There’s no limit to how much intelligence you want. There’s no limit to that.
There’s no limit to demand. There’s no second place. It’s not like crypto.
There’s no limit to how many of those machines that you’re going to want because there’s no. So, Clem, this is the this is a NASDAQ more sideways than the S&P since the beginning of the year. In fact, it’s been trending down.
If you if you if you just take a movie. But very, very frankly, it is a NASDAQ primed for a 2000 style correction. Bubble pop.
But put five years on there. All right. It’s a straight line, isn’t it? And there’s maybe a little bit of a toppy thing, but you’ve seen that before.
It’s a straight linear line up. There’s no. If you look at gold, there’s that power curve.
There’s that acceleration. Yeah, there’s no acceleration there. It’s absolutely linear.
And my idea is that some time in the next two or three years, later than soon, because I always kind of see these things a little bit too early or way too early. There will be an acceleration and there will be a bubble. And then that will tell you it will be doing what gold’s doing, which is it will form this suddenly zoom.
And that will tell you that’s the end of the run. We’re not in that mode yet. When anything goes like this in an exponential zoom shape like like what gold’s doing right now.
Is that a buy signal for you? Do you chase that last leg of this run up? No, it’s the beginning of the last leg of the run up. It’s a way to go above where you’re going to a major reprice. Yeah, because what happens is it’s all about equilibrium.
OK, so you’ve got a price and as much as the buyers and sellers and buyers and sellers. And, you know, it’s doing that. It’s pure noise.
Yeah, it’s got equilibrium. Now, if the if the market is the buyers are a bit uncertain, the sellers are a bit uncertain. It will do that.
It will be big volatility. But the more certain they are of the price, the tighter it will go into a range. Yeah.
And then somebody will come on and say, hey, they’ve invited and invented anti-gravity machines and price bang. Yeah. And it’ll go up vertically and then it’ll find another equilibrium point.
And the level of certainty is defined by the width. So you can see it’s a fairly large amount of uncertainty at the end of that chart. And not surprising, seeing that there’s a new administration and the stars are doing a 400 years transit across the sky.
So for those people, I’m just kind of teasing on that. But, you know, there’s there’s good reason for there to be uncertainty. And you can see that in the width of the range.
That noise and that noise is determined by how uncertain the market is on. We’re going to play this game. So S&P 500, Nasdaq or gold right now, which would you rather buy into right now? Oh, I mean, gold all day long because gold is going to go to 5000.
I mean, that’s what I see. And I hate that. I mean, maybe it might take a couple of years to do it.
But it’s it’s it’s it’s going. It’s it’s it’s motoring. Yeah, it’s begun.
Whatever it is that gold’s doing and whatever it’s doing, why it’s doing it. It’s not doing it by accident. It’s it’s it’s going.
It’s on its way. And and as gold is for I’m not really very happy about that. And, you know, I really you trade what you see, not what the market doesn’t care what I think.
I have to pay attention to it and I have to watch the way you’re doing that. What’s going on there? Oh, dear. You know, if that breaks out, it’s going to run.
Oh, it breaks. It runs. I mean, I said that in earlier shows a few months ago.
If it breaks out, I run. Read what I wrote on Forbes about that and on Seeking Alpha. And it’s running.
Right. I said the same thing about Bitcoin when it did that. Oh, if it goes through there, it’s going to run and it ran.
Yeah, it’s gone. It’s running. Now, why it’s running.
I don’t sit in CGHQ or the NSA. I don’t know what’s going on in China. I’m not in Taiwan, unlike some people.
And, you know, all I see is what the people that see that or worry about that are saying. Yeah. So I’m just it’s just telling me what’s happening.
And the shape of it is a you know, look at that. I mean, come on. If you don’t look at that, you don’t look at that and get scared and say, all right, this is enough.
Let’s pull back. Let’s sell. Let’s short this.
I’ve seen that shape over and over again in the last 30 years. Yeah, I’ve seen it time and time again. And the reason I can see it is that when I was a child of about 11, I used to watch my father, who’s a successful commodity traders, trade those shapes.
Because that’s what commodities did in the 70s. They went ballistic. And that’s a ballistic.
And, you know, there was a reason for that. Back then, there was the old shock and all the things that happened there. And the Vietnam War and all the fact they were printing money like like no tomorrow.
And they were trying to flush out the World War Two economic debts in that period. You know, this whole reason for why they did that. But I was sat there watching these things unwrap.
And, you know, I did all right in the dotcom because they did it then. And I’ve done all right on several on Bitcoin. I put the Bitcoin in 2017 and went, oh, it’s doing one of them.
And he did one of them. Oh, he’s doing it again in 20, whatever it was, 2020. He did it again.
Oh, look, he’s doing it again in 2024. It’s the same reason, yeah, for halfening. There it is again.
Oh, it’s going to 5,000. What about Bitcoin here? Bitcoin is, we’re not seeing the same parabolic run up right now. In fact, it’s been kind of just flatlining and trading.
I would say that if you if you if you put it back to how you had it. With with my I’m giving you all my secrets here. You’ve got you’ve you’ve had a you’ve had a ballistic event.
So put five years on it. It’s better to see it five years. You know, if you look at it, you know, it’s had a parabolic event.
And what people are hoping for is the next leg of that. So from 60 to 100 to 100 to 150. OK, it’s just a question of whether you see that as as a thing.
- I’m not completely out of crypto, but I’ve been lightening up because it feels it feels like it’s had its run. Yeah. If you look at the 2021, it’s again, it’s the same curve, right? Now, there was a second attempt at a run up later on.
But if you go back to 2017, so if you put all on there, I don’t know how far your chart goes back, but let’s go to all. I don’t think it’s going to show the entire Bitcoin price history here. So there you go.
So you can see it back in 2017, that same old, same old. I would want it on a rock scale, but you’ve told me you don’t like that. So I’ll not.
That’s rubbish. That is that that turns ballistic curves into straight lines, which is, you know, if you want to think that everything’s a ballistic curve, then please go ahead. But, you know, ballistic curves are rare, but when they happen, they happen.
And you want to be near the bottom of it and you want to be out near the top. You don’t have to get out right at the top. So you’re looking at those ballistic curves.
They’re they’re they’re four times multiple double double double as 20 to 40. All right. Went to 60, 60 to 40 to 100.
They’re all relatively scary at scale. Right. So you but you can see that and you can zoom in on these and see the shapes and you can see that they kind of repeat.
And yeah, I mean, oh, I don’t know. Seeing as I was in a 20, I don’t really care about the next last 20. I didn’t done.
And yeah, it’s toppy. It’s toppy. OK, it’s toppy.
I don’t want to be sat there watching the pixel when I’ve made my money. You know, I can I can go home now, buy wine and forget about it for four years. And, you know, there’s people that are sat there going, oh, oh, it’s two thousand one hundred and five.
Oh, God, it’s ninety nine. You know, you get into the bottom. And when you when it gets up at the top and it’s flashing around, you get out.
I was told that when I was a child and it’s still true. So that’s so if you look at this curve from 2023, you know, you’re you’re starting to see either the beginning of that twenty and twenty, twenty two to twenty three in gold. Or if you want to be picky, 24 event.
And it’s just a question of where the top is. It could be three and a half thousand on gold. Could be five.
I hope it’s not five. I mean, that will that will all be sat there, biting our nails, worrying about other things if it’s going up there. So gold is for war, but it’s on its way.
I mean, that’s that’s all you that’s all you need to know. Which way is it going? You don’t have to know anything else. Which way is it going? Is it going up, down or sideways? It’s not going from right to left, OK? All you know is which way it’s going and that’s going up.
Well, I’m like a correct Clem. So what’s what’s your top asset for 2025? The rest of 2025, is it gold or is it something else? Well, actually, and this is totally contrarian. I’m absolutely loving the UK.
It’s been such a terrible market for so long. And the local chancellors has given a declared open season for taking over FTSE 100 companies and carrying them off. And so it’s going, you know, for me, for the sort of stuff that I hold, which are, you know, value and large companies with huge profits and great value, great international businesses.
They’re all getting strip mined. So they’re all getting, we bought you out for a 40 percent, you know, uplift. Very much.
So, you know, I’m just sat there. I don’t have to worry about it. It’s cheap.
It’s going up. It’s going to go up two or three years. It will, you know, be very good to me.
And like gold, I’m just stacking it. I mean, I had a moment of of of uncertainty last week where I thought I should lever up on this. I should just go out and, you know, grab a couple of bars and stick it in gold and and and ride it.
But I don’t like leverage and I don’t like stocks because they I mean, if you look at gold stocks, they don’t bloom in track gold. I don’t like that. That doesn’t that’s.
I don’t like that at all. I want you know, I want something that I can rely on, that I can sleep at night. I can come back in a year and go, oh, yeah, I did OK with that.
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you very much.
And, you know, you should always be able to sleep at night with your investments. You should always try to make sure your counterparties aren’t going to say, oh, you made a lot of money. Sorry, but bye.
No, no, you didn’t really make that. No, no, no. Technicalities.
So, you know, you need you need good suppliers. You need a sensible environment. You need, you know, the right balance of position for your your psychology.
And you need to sit back and just count your money. And for that, for me, is the UK and gold. Yeah.
I mean, I probably will stretch my myself a little bit on that. But there’s always another bus coming, David. There’s always a bus, another bus coming.
And if you miss this bus, you get the next one. You know, three years time, crypto will go nuts again, probably. Let’s talk about the next bus another time.
But that was a great update. Thanks, Clem. Appreciate it.
And I know you’re traveling, but give us a little synopsis of the presentation you’re about to make at your next conference. You’re talking about startups. Hey, this is a different conversation than what we’re used to having.
What’s your tip for a successful startup? Oh, well, I mean, you know, 200 percent commitment. You know, in startups, you’ve just got to absolutely live it. If you’re not sleeping under your desk in the office, you’re probably not going to succeed.
And, you know, when I was a child, I started a computer game company, you know, in my teens. I would wake up in the morning sometime with my head halfway in a raffia paper wastebasket. The basket is the softest thing to sleep on.
And, you know, in a startup environment, it’s all about commitment. And what kind of commitment and how you’re going to commit and, you know, avoiding the pitfalls and going all in. Because, you know, it’s so much easier world now, because if you can actually raise venture money, you do actually have more than your bootstraps to pull yourself up with.
But you kind of need to have the ability to do it with the bootstraps, because, you know, in the end, a successful business is more about the people than it is about anything else. And the thing I’m doing, there’s a big show called The Leap 2025 in Riyadh next week. And they kind of flew me over to rant on about what a lunatic you have to be to make a startup successful.
And when you look at the people who’ve done it, they are, generally speaking, borderline lunatics like myself. And, you know, there is a way of doing it. I mean, I did 101 ways to pick stock market winners, which is in the same kind of area of lots of simple rules to that you should refer to when you’re in doubt in these things.
And that gives me 20 seconds to talk about each one of them in this presentation. And it can be done. But, you know, it’s a very, very, very, very hard place.
And it’s been romanticized quite a lot. And, you know, you’ve was it it’s eating glass and looking into the void, as Musk said. And, yeah, I wouldn’t say it’s too far off with that.
I spent a lot of my life in that zone. And from my teenage years up to now, I’ve started a spin out with a big university in the UK in environmental chemistry only this year. And I’m back in the fray of that.
And, you know, it’s great if you if you love cortisol as I do. Cortisol is my is my juice. Then it’s for you.
But if you don’t like cortisol, it’s not. All right. Where can we follow your work? Well, you can see me on Forbes.
I’ve been a senior columnist there so long when they pulled my contract. It was in Latin. I write for Seeking Alpha.
I, you know, give you a few ideas, obviously. And a new event is is a new financial website I’m building. And if you want to get on the guest list for the cool and groovy stuff there, you can just drop by and drop your email and we keep the postage.
We’ve got a lot of a lot of stuff. I mean, we’re the big, big, big, big, big thing. It’s big.
And everybody’s kind of knowing it is AI. Yeah. And we do all sorts of crazy stuff with financial information.
And it’s it’s it’s actually actually fun. And it’s going to it’s going to be we won’t be the only people doing it, but it’s going to change the face of investing. Good stuff, Clem.
Thanks very much. We’ll put the link down below. And thank you for watching.
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