The Most Expensive Election Trade Ever Made (A Cautionary Tale)
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The fed is on practical interest rates next week, despite the fact that the U. S. Had the most WTF jobs report.

There is a decent chance that inflation going to keep rising. Gold is going absolutely bunkers through the roof as investors look for security amid st. Financial and geopolitical chaos.

Eyes bonds are starting to suck. And we have a cautionary tale for anyone who is thinking about trading based on the election. I know yellow buying holders, but you probably have friends, family, coworkers who want to make stock market trades based on your election predictions.

We have a cautionary tale to illustrate why that's a bad idea, regardless of who wins. Welcome to the first friday episode of the afford anything podcast. This is the show that understands you can afford anything, but not everything.

Every choice Carries a trade off, and that applies to your money, to your time, to your focus, to your IT, to your attention IT apply to every limited resource that you have to allocate on your host polar pant. I hold a masters in economic reporting from columbia once a month. On the first friday of the month, we host a monthly economic update, so welcome to the november twenty twenty four first friday economic update.

Happy election month. I know election day is coming up in a few days. Early voting has already started in many states. I cast my early ballot two days ago. I was my first time voting in both the city and state of new york, but the election is not the only big thing that's happening next week.

The federal reserve is also meeting, and they seem poised to cut interest rates yet again, most likely by another twenty five basis points or a quarter of a percentage point. Here is the schedule for next week, election days. Tuesday the fed meets wednesday.

Thursday the fed will likely make their announcement on thursday. The market at this point has Priced in a twenty five basis point cut, not just at the november meeting, but also in the anticipation of their december meeting. The market is already pricing that in as well.

Now I should add, what makes these fed meetings history, ally, interesting is that in twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three, the fed really signaled their rate hikes ahead of time. We had in twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three, much clear of an indication as to what they were going to do before they did IT. What's made the rate cutting cycle in late to twenty twenty four, a little different has been that the fed is playing their cards much closer to the vest.

And as you recall, when the fed made their first big great cut at their last meeting, their september meeting, when they made a fifty basis point cut, there was for the first time since two thousand and five, there was one dissenting vote that is incredibly rare for a fed governor to cast a dissenting vote. IT is Normally a twelve zero decision every time, but the vote at the most recent meeting, the one in september, was eleven to one. So given that history of unusual history of descent, and given the fact that the said has not signaled their intent as clearly this year, as they did back in previous years, in in recent history indicates that they themselves might not be too sure of what their next moves are, that they are watching the economy, the markets, the inflation data, the jobs data very closely and are not inclined to get too far ahead of themselves.

Speaking of watching the data, the jobs report in october was, as I said in the intro, an absolute WTF report, completely out of step with our Normal patterns. So in october, the U. S.

Added twelve thousand new jobs, twelve thousand. The dow Jones estimate for what analysts believed the report would be was one hundred thousand. And the previous month, september, we added two hundred and two, twenty three thousand new jobs.

Actually, that is a downward revised number. So the initial report from the bls stated initially that we had added two hundred and fifty four thousand new jobs in september, and that number was later revised downward to two hundred and twenty three thousand. So we're talking two hundred and twenty three thousand new jobs in september twelve, one thousand in october.

There are two major factories that play. One is, of course, the hurricanes. Oxford economics estimates that hurricanes halen and milton likely reduced employment, buy about seventy thousand jobs across the southeast. Now that's just one estimate. Golden sex estimates that the job production was somewhere between forty thousand to fifty thousand.

But regardless of which of the estimates you take, we have a range of somewhere between forty thousand and seventy thousand fewer new jobs being created as a direct result of the two harricane that hit the southeast last month. The other major factor are strikes. So there's a strike at boeing that has caused job numbers in the manufacturing sector to go down by forty four thousand.

There are also strikes at textron and Hilton hotels. So between both the storms and the strikes, those two factories combined probably LED to around one hundred thousand fewer jobs created in the month of october, resulting in october incredibly poetry number of only twelve thousand new jobs. The good news is both of those factors are likely to have temporary effects.

I would not read too much into such an unusually low jobs report, and IT seems as though the fed is an agreement. If the fed was concerned about unemployment, they would likely take more dressing measures, but analysts and investors have all Priced in a very measured quarter point rate cut, which they'll probably announce next thursday. By the way, I should add that the unexplored rate is holding steady at four point one percent, which is very low unemployment and consistently in line with what we've been experiencing.

Stocks are up pretty consistently across the board broadly. The S M, P, five hundred is up, the large caps, the magnificent seven are doing well. Generally speaking, whenever there are rate cuts, those tend to benefit small cap companies.

As the cost of accessing capital gets cheaper is the smallest companies that often tend to benefit the most. So we see the big companies, the magnificent seven, magnian seven total return index is up one point three percent, but the conditions are in place for small caps to also have a pretty good run. As capital gets cheaper access, global stocks are up, the next stack is up, bitcoin is holding steady, that yield on tenure treasuries is up.

But the big runaway winner, which I want to turn your attention to, is gold. And this is unusual because gold is an asset the investors often flew to in times of uncertainty. And yet here we are with a very strong equity market, both in the U.

S. And globally. We have declining inflation both in the U. S. And globally. We have many high performing assets that investors could be buying. And yet the safe haven asset of gold, the thing the investors by for safety gold is soring Prices for gold are on track to reach their best years since nineteen and seventy nine.

And can I emphasize how long ago one thousand nine hundred and seventy nine was? I know we all love rod start and Michael Jackson, dona summer earth, wind fire, the dub brothers, but that was forty five years ago. That's where the Price of gold is heading, and it's happening at a time when you could just be buying equities instead.

So the question is why? Well, I know it's kind of early in the show for this, but we're going to take a really short break to hear from the sponsors to make this show possible. And when we come back, we're going to dive into what is behind this counter intuitive run up of gold at a time when investors could be making a lot more money in equities.

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Welcome back. Why are investors pouring in the gold? First of all, the modern gold rush was started not by individual investors, not even by institutional investors like pensions.

No, neither of those parties did IT. The modern goldrush was started by central banks back in two thousand and eight. Gold accounted for only six percent of central bank reserves.

Today, gold accounts for eleven percent of those reserves. So it's nearly doubled, and it's done so in a relatively very short order. While the state that I just gave you runs from two thousand eight through today, a large part of that buying has happened in the last two years.

And here's where IT gets particularly interesting. Many central banks are buying physical gold. Now there are a lot of different ways that you can invest in gold. You can buy gold etf. You can buy gold futures.

Good futures are contracts that trade on exchanges are you make a deal to trade gold at a specific Price, and you agree on the terms today, but the settlement day is going to happen in the future. And then in between now and the settlement day, the Price of that contract that you have is going to dry rate and you can try to profit off of that movement. That's the common way that commodities are traded.

Very few people actually want to settle up for any commodity. But what we've seen with gold is that the central banks have been purchasing and storing actual physical gold. They're not buying good futures.

They're not buying gold etf. They're physically accepting delivery of gold. There's a huge storage area in singapore where much of this goal is kept, and there are other banks that are trying to ship them to volts in their own home countries.

And so what these signals is that central banks around the world are worried about geopolitical risk. It's telling that some of the biggest demand for gold has come first out of china and then later india, turkey. Now there are open questions about what's going to happen in many areas across the world.

In particular, one that few people are talking about right now is china. In taiwan. There is the potential for taiwan to really become a flash point in U. S. China relations.

And there are many questions around what could happen to the world order of china were to invade taiwan when the central bank of nation holds gold, that gold is not subject to sanctions, the dollar is the world's reserve currency. While there's been a lot of speculation about always, is the dollar going to get reacted as the world deserve currency? You hear people talk about that a lot.

There is no secondary currency in the wings. Like what would the dollar possibly get replaced with? The u. an. Is not a contender, not right now.

And yes, there have been officials from brazil, russia, india, china and south africa that met at a brick summer. So those countries, collectively, they known as the bricks country's B R I C S. And if you invest in emerging markets, you can actually invest in bricks etf if if you want to.

And so the brick's countries are working on creating a new set of cross border payment rails that would circumvent the U. S. dollar. But it's nowhere near ready.

I mean, it's notable that the bricks countries could have simply chosen one of their home currencies, any one of their home currencies, to serve as the replacement to the dollar. They did not do that. Instead, they decided they were going to attempt to form totally new crossed border payment rails.

And so that highlights the fact that there is nothing waiting in the wings to replace the U. S. Dollars gone to continue to be the world's reserve currency.

And the central banks that are worried about that, the ones who are worried about U. S. Sanctions, are turning to gold.

And this is happening in such a major way that the cost of gold has gone up thirty eight percent over the last year. It's now over twenty seven hundred dollars per roy outs. And I want to underscore how unusual that is.

The U. S. Left the gold standard in one nine hundred and seventy.

Once I remember how I said, this is the highest point that it's been since nineteen thousand nine nine, one thousand nine hundred and seventy nine was eight years after the us. Left the gold standard. What that means is that the us.

Ended the direct convertibility of the U. S. Dollar to gold.

The decision was made by president nixon in an effort to do two things want to carbon inflation. In the second to reduce the U. S.

Is a vulnerability to a run on gold. Once the gold standard ended, gold became a purely speculative asset. Think about IT other commodities.

Es have intrinsic usable value. Broadly speaking, there two types of commodities. There are hard commodities, which are things that are mind or extracted. And there are soft commodities, which are more like agricultural things.

Under the category of hard commodities, you've got crude oil, coal, natural gas, right? And then under soft commodities, you've got soybeans, you've got beef, corn, cotton. All of these are things that have intrinsic usable value.

But gold does not. Gold has scarcity, which is where its value comes from. But IT doesn't have any utility arian value.

You can eat IT. You can live in IT. You can use IT to protect yourself. War in butt says that bets on gold are made by those who fear other assets.

Even though the Price of gold has gone up thirty eight percent over the last year, american institutional investors are not loading up on IT. When I say institutional investors, i'm talking about big investors, big investment groups. Despite the huge run up, they're still not buying in.

Overall, among american U. S. Based institutional investors, only one point five percent of their assets are in gold. So a lot of this demand is coming from china and india.

Those two countries make up one fifth of the world's economic output, but one half of consumer purchases of physical gold. And there are very good reasons that demand is for physical gold. So if gold is stored overseas, if it's not in your home country, then the nation that holding IT could seize IT.

So for example, the british government has refused to repay, create dozens of tons of gold to venezza ela because he does not recognize Nicholas majora as the legitimate leader of venezuela. And so it's holding onto vane's uel an gold. So what we're seeing right now is that a lot of central banks are bracing themselves for the possibility of global political risk.

IT remains to be seen if putin has bigger ambitions for europe, but the national bank of poland has raised its gold holdings by one hundred and sixty seven times. IT has a strategy of keeping twenty percent of its reserves in gold, twenty percent. And the president of the bank of poland, adam good pinsky, has said that what he likes about gold is that its Price tends to be high precisely at times, good as a quote, precisely at times when the central bank might need its ammunition most.

So what we have in gold is an asset that is an inflation hedge. Because, remember, any physical asset is an inflation hedges, real al estate, gold art, tangible goods, or inflation hedgers. Right after a period of high global inflation, we have involved in asset that is an inflation hedge.

Eight is independent of the U. S. Dollar, and therefore reduces the level of influence that the U. S. Can have in the form of sanctions on other nations.

And it's an asset that has low correlation with the performance of equities and bonds, both low correlation with other asset glasses. Historically, IT hasn't been something that makes you a lot of money, but it's the asset that investors pile into when they're looking for safety. A missed potential, looming chaos.

And so this is notable that, that's the direction that many major central banks across the globe have decided to lean into in a big way, switching our attention to eyes bonds. Okay, if you're not driving, raise your hand. If you remember back in twenty twenty two, when I bonds were yielding nine point six percent, those were the days, I mean, we also had like enormously ridiculous inflation.

But we also, to help offset that, had eyes bonds. Now eyes bonds are designed to help investors protect themselves from inflation. And in twenty twenty two, IT was yielding nine point six percent.

The only real downside to them was that the total amount of money that you were allowed to put into eye bonds was catch eyebrows, have a purchase limit of ten thousand dollars per person. And two years ago, that was a huge source of complaint because people wanted to flock into eye bonds. It's a virtually risk free, nine point six percent, but at least IT was two years ago.

These days, bands have dropped dramatically and are now at a four year law of three point one percent. I bonds actually consists of two different rates. They have a variable rate and there's a fixed rate, and the fix rate adjust twice year, first business day of may and first business day of november.

So welcome to the first business day of november. And the new eyes boundary is three point one percent. That's a decline of the four point two percent rate that will set six months ago back in may.

So what does that mean? That means that Frankly, at this point, you can get Better returns from a high yids savings account. And those don't have the same purchase limits that I bons have nor do you have to deal with like the super monkey treasury direct website.

Basically, there's really no point anymore at the current rates of chasing eye ones. And that means, unfortunately, that the ibd era is over. It's good news for the economy. It's good news related to inflation and macroeconomics. It's just bad news for the ten thousand dollars that you have burning a hole in your pocket.

But congrats to those of you who are on the ball back in two thousand twenty two and who claimed eyebrows at the nine point six percent rate next friday night drinks around you. I want to talk just briefly about small caps. I mentioned earlier that, generally speaking, when the fed cuts interest strates, small caps tend to benefit because small companies most need and can grow from cheaper access to capital.

One way to test this hypothesis is by looking at the Russell or two thousand, which is an index of smaller companies. IT is currently trading above its Normal long run valuation multiple, and what that implies is that investors are bullish about small cap companies. Now the fact that the Russell two thousand is trading in an increasingly bullish h way, that should be contextual ized with the fact the nas tech, which is comprised of tech companies, is also doing that in the S M.

P. Five hundred is also doing that. So IT isn't that the rustle is necessarily a break out. It's just that bullishness seems to be happening across the board.

I mentioned earlier the small cohort of companies called the magnificent seven that apple, microsoft, alphabet, amazon, invidia, meta in tesla. Those seven companies together constitute sixty two percent of the gains in the S N P. Five hundred over the past year.

They comprise such a big component of the S M P. Five hundred 的。 There are some people who cloak really kind of have jokingly talk about not about the S M P.

Five hundred, but about the magnificent seven and then the S N P. Four hundred and ninety three. Just so we have some verbiage that distinguishes the other four hundred and ninety three companies in the S M P outside of those seven.

But even still, the profits among the SMP4 ninety three are expected to grow by thirteen percent next year。 Compare the progress that the U. S. Is made to look at germany. Germany is suffer from a recession right now.

The german economy is expected to contract contract by zero point two percent this year, and this is going to be its second consecutive year of decline. IT also contracted two twenty three. So among the g seven countries, the U.

S. Has had the highest level of economic growth since the pandemic. And a major piece of that is the tech and innovation is centered here, something that will be increasingly important as we, the age of A.

I, which is truly a game change drive. I've mentioned this on this podcast before. A bit. A I will be to jane alpha, what the internet was to millennial. Soon jane alpha will be the last generation in the world who will remember what life was like before. A I.

And when they are elderly, they will tell their great grandchildren these stories that will sound antiquated and outdated about pra I life, like when millenia nial talk about recording songs off of the radio wanted concept tapes, or using three in hathi's floppy disks to play their bootleg copies of the oregon trail, right? IT will sound like that. And it's clear, you know, why we can't get complacent.

It's clear that we are winning the A I race, at least as of now. Look at the degree to which L M. Large language models are trained in english.

LLM are trained more in english than in any other language, so there is plenty of reason to be bullish on the future of the U. S. market.

And in the absence of some catastrophic black one event, the U. S. Market is poised to do great things and to perform very well in the foreseeable future.

That said, I do want to talk about summer risks that the U. S. Market may face. One is the risk of inflation. And I I mentioned to this in the open, while inflation over the past many months has trended downward and where currently pretty close to the feds, two percent target if terrify are enacted, Terry fs, have an inflationary effect. I am broaching politics with that statement, with the election just a few days away.

And there are concerns that I have that I I voice in the previous first friday epo de as well with economic proposals put forth by both candidates. As I mentioned in the last first friday episode, any effort to enact Price controls on groceries or on grocery stores, which is a proposal pup forth by vice president Harris, is deeply concerning. I won't go into the arguments in this episode, but if you want to hear a detailed description of that, go to the october first friday episode.

What i'll mentioned in today's episode is a concern related to terrify. A former president trump has proposed terrify univerSally on all imports and on certain goods, such as cars being imported from mexico, where ford and G. M.

And many american auto manufacturer have plans. He has proposed terrify of between two hundred to five hundred percent. Terrify have an inflationary effect.

A terf is functionally attacks on all imported goods, and IT causes the Price of those goods to rise. So if those heros are enacted, there is a high likelihood that inflation will increase. There is also the issue of the deficit.

Currently, the U. S. Deficit is at six percent of G, D. P, which is a number that is abNormally high.

Typically, that is a number that is not seen other than during times of war or recession. IT is abNormally high for a time period of peace and prosperity, which we are living in right now. And both candidates have economic proposals that would increase the deficit, though by differing amounts.

So to differ degrees of severity, both candidates would increase the deficit. And history, ally, we've seen the deficit go up under every administration, red and blue, for the last twenty three years. So the last year that we did not run a deficit was two thousand and one.

Since then, from two thousand and two onward, under every administration, the deficit has been growing. No matter what the outcome is of this upcoming election, IT will continue to do so because both candidates have proposed economic policies that will continue to grow that deficit. Now the average deficit over the past fifty years has been three point seven percent of GDP.

IT is growing to six point one percent of GDP in twenty twenty five. That's according to the congressional budget office. Among the g seven countries, our deficits are the worst.

And so that more so than a monthly economic capital. That's really a an annual economic update. This is a marker of where we as the U.

S. R in this place in time, among the g seven nations, we have both the strongest growth, the strongest economy, the best markets. We have the magnificent seven on our home turf.

We have the stocks you want to buy. And despite that prosperity, we also have the biggest deficits among the g seven nations. We are the extreme in one very positive way and in one very concerning way. The question then becomes, how do we maintain our growth and continue to press our advantages in in an increasingly globally competitive world while simultaneously keeping the federal deficit in check? And how do we protect against geopolitical shocks that may happen given the increasing volatility in europe, in the middle east and potentially between china and taiwan?

How do we protect ourselves from any black swan events that we, as of this moment, cannot clearly for sea, which is another way of asking, how do we think, probabilistic ally about a range of possible outcomes? I think that primary way to do so is by guarding against what the economist referred to is tail risk, low probability but high impact events. By the way, some people have asked me, what media do I consume, particularly with regard to major, mainly riam media.

What do I consume? There are three, one is bloomberg, one is the financial times, and one is the economist. I would urge you, especially as we head into the election, to read the endorsements and the opinions of those three platforms.

Actually, the financial times I I wanted to link to authoring the showers. The financial times one is unfortunately behind a paywall and only available to paying subscribers. The financial times, by the way, is owned by nk, which is the japanese talk exchange.

So you know, when people talk about the nk index, that's japan's stark exchange index. So the f the financial times, the F T is is known, is quite focused on the movements of the markets and on global economic performance. Bloomberg and the economist are, of course, are also quite financial markets focused and economics focused, although bloomberg maintains more of a domestic outlook, while the economist maintains more of the U.

K. Based perspective. That is, by the way, part of the reason why I make sure that my information diet is all three.

Bloomberg represents, in many ways that the U. S. Of viewpoint, while the economist represents the british viewpoint in the F, T, at least through its top breath, has japanese ownership.

Although many of the riders also represented a more british viewpoint, all three platforms have significant concerns about terrify. Not only because those costs would be born by U. S.

Consumers with us who would see the Prices of everything from clothes to cars go up, but in addition to all of that, I would be the beginning of a global trade war, which could Spark retaliatory tariff. S, I spoke about this the last first friday episode as well. And those retaliatory tariff.

S, could, according to the I, M F, lop off a percentage point or more from U. S. Growth next year and could cut global expansion by a quarter of a percentage point is also, I mentioned earlier that the brick countries, brazil, russia, india, china, south africa, want to find some alternative to the use of the U.

S. Dollar as the world reserve currency. So far, they have not been able to do that.

There is no good second place contender, but the onset of a global trade war could speed up the efforts, which are already underway, to undermine the strength of the U. S. dollar.

Now coupled that with the fact that central banks around the world are loading up on gold, which therefore makes them less subject to U. S. Influence, there are less vulnerable to sanctions.

So the dominoes are being set in place for the U. S. To have a weaker global position if terf s were to go into effect.

So the prospect of looming turfs, a global trade war and increased deficits could have some serious economic ramifications, both for you and me and our everyday spending as our cost of living goes up as well as for the U. S. In its position on the world stage.

I should add on the topic of deficits that warn the warton school of business at the university of pennsylvania, which is former president trumps on a mother, warton has estimated that former president trumps spending proposals would increase deficits by five point eight trillion over the next ten years, while the spending proposals of vice president Harris campaign would increase deficits by one point two trillion over the next ten years. I'll add an astra car. That neither of those analysis include the financial ramifications of the proposal to not tax tips, no tax on tips, which is a proposal that both candidates have put forward.

It's it's the one thing they both agree on no tax on tips. The definition of what tips are and the construction around there is so vague that IT is impossible to forecast because neither neither candidate has been specific about how exactly that would be written. So leaving out the no tax on tips proposal, which is a proposal that both candidates are usually putting forth outside of that, the deficits will grow by one point two trillion er vice president Harris and by five point eight trillion under former president trump.

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As promised, I want to close out with a story, a cautionary tale, about why you should not try to the upcoming election regardless of who you want to win.

Now when I say don't trade the election, i'm not talking about going to Polly market or predict IT and placing a hundred bucks on a winner actually right now on friday, november first, as of the moment that I am recording this, the betting market on predicted has identical odds on former president trump t and device president Harris with the yes Price for both of them trading at fifty three cents each. In any event, when I say don't trade the election, i'm not talking about the betting markets. I'm talking about executing trades in your portfolio based on the outcome of the election.

Don't do IT buyin hod stay the course, think long term, all of the standard principles of personal finance apply. And I know that you know that, but I also know that you probably have friend's family, coworkers, cousins who are treating the news. I also know that it's natural human behaviour that when you're surrounded by people who are doing that, you start to question yourself and you start to wonder, what should I? So i'm here to reinforce what the financial independence movement and the classic teachings of traditional personal finance have always emphasized, which is, do not trade the news, think long term, stay the course by and hold.

And here's a cautionary tail as to why let's go back to twenty sixteen. Few people accurately predicted the outcome of the twenty sixteen election. IT IT caught many people by surprise, including nate silver, the statistician who is the founder of five thirty eight.

I want to be clear because many people rather unfairly piled on nate silver for not for seeing the twenty sixteen outcome. To be absolutely clear, net over and five thirty eight reflected that there was a probability that president trump would win the twenty sixteen election that they never said IT wouldn't happen. They said that there was a probability that IT might happen.

They simply assigned lower odds to that probability than they did the alternative, which in the twenty sixteen election would have been the election of senator clinton. Very few people predicted the outcome of the twenty sixteen election, but one person did sam bank man free. That's right.

The guy who today is best known for the collapse of F, T X, which is the digital currency exchange that he created before all of that happened before seven bank man fried got involved or created F, T X before any of that. When he was only twenty four years old, he worked at a company called James street capital. And he devised an extremely intricate system to predict electoral college votes.

And he nailed IT. He absolutely nailed IT. So using this incredibly complex system that nobody, not even five thirty eight, with nate silvers, five thirty eight, nobody else was using this system.

Sam bank man freed, say what you will about him, but he is a genius. He created the system. He figured out electoral college votes in twenty sixteen. He figured that out before c. Nn announced that senator clinton had conceded, I figured IT out before any of the major news networks had IT.

So he and on the half of his employer, gee street capital, they had that information first, and they made market bets based on the fact that they had that information. And when then bank man fried went to sleep at one A M on election night to twenty sixteen, he had made three hundred million dollars in those bets on behalf of his employer, jean street capital. Twenty four years old, IT was the most profitable day in the history of that company.

So this twenty four year old kid goes to bed at at one A M. And when he wakes up in the morning, he finds the, even though he got the prediction right, even though he knew the outcome of the election before anybody else did, his assessment of how the markets would react was wrong. And so the three hundred million dollars that he had earned prior going to bed by the time he woke up had reverted to a three hundred million dollar lost, lost.

So he lost six hundred million. He lost his three hundred million of gain, and then he lost another three hundred million. Underneath that, this twenty four year old kid lost six hundred million dollars in his sleep overnight.

What this illustrates is that even if you out guess everyone else as he did, even if you call IT correctly before anyone else, you still don't know the downstream effects of what that means, right? You can get a prediction, right, but miss the second order and third order consequences of that outcome. Sam bank, man fried, created a system, a prediction model, that knew the outcome of the twenty sixteen election before any of the major media stations knew he possessed essentially insider information.

Yet even with that information, he could not accurately predict what that next order consequence would be. And that goes to show that if you are in the game of making guesses, which is the game of predicting, you can't just get one thing right. You have to get multiple things right.

If you're buying and selling stocks, it's not enough to buy a stock at the right time. You also have to sell IT at the right time. Here's a very, very simple example. I bought pallet on stock in december twenty nineteen.

Of course, I didn't know at the time, but december twenty nineteen was also the first recorded case of copy in the world in wuhan, december red funy nineteen, without knowing, you know, completely on accident, I bought pallet on stock. I got in at the right time. Yes, when I sold IT, I sold IT in march of twenty twenty, right? So I was correct in my, accidentally, coincidentally, correct in my timing of getting in.

But way off in my timing of getting out. Like I told my best friend, I was like, I saw the stock in march twenty and SHE. He was like that just funny.

This underscores when you're in the game of making predictions. You can't just get one thing right. You can't just buy at the right time.

Buying at the right time is meaningless if you sell at the wrong time, as I did with pelton and in sam bank man freeze case, knowing what's about to happen, having an accurate guess on that is meaningless if you don't know how human behavior will behave as a result. And Frankly, human behaviors, one of the hardest things, they've not the hardest thing in the world to accurately predict that story of them. Bank and freed, by the way, comes from a book written by Michael Lewis called going infinite.

It's a book all about the rise and fall of S. P. F, so i'll close with that story, which you can share with anyone in your life who is thinking about executing trades in their portfolio based on how you think election day or election week or election month, however long this is going to take.

I'm recording this on friday in november first. So we have no idea. Obviously, I have no idea what's ahead, but if you or anyone in your life are thinking about buying or selling stocks or bonds, or gold or or any other assets based on what is about to unfold in the month of an november, I share S.

P. S. Story as a cautionary tale. You could be among the best in the world at making those predictions and at gathering and analyzing and assessing data.

And yet you could still miss the mark on the follow up question of, and so what would that mean as IT applies to assets in your portfolio? So don't trade the news. That is the rap up lesson for today.

Thank you so much for tuning in to the november twenty, twenty four first friday episode of the afford anything podcast. I hope that you enjoyed IT. As a reminder, we have a course that is currently open foreign ment.

It's all about how to invest in rental properties. It's called your first property. Our course is available now through november seventh. For more information, go to a four anything dot com slash in roll that's afford anything dot com slash in roll. There's a ton of information there about this rental property investing course in roman, again, is now through november seven.

After that, we close our doors and we work closely with these cohorts in training you, teaching you how to step by step, analyze, find finance, renovate and rent out cash flow producing income properties, afford anything dot com slash, enroll for more information. Thank you so much for tuning in. My name is polar pant.

This is the afford anything podcast. You can find me on an instagram at pola. A P A, U, A, P, N, and i'll meet you in the next episode.