I Don’t Trust These Two Categories of “Financial Experts” (And Why)

Part 2 of 3

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My first post in this series reviewed 14 people whose content and economic analysis have helped me make sense of the macro-economic climate, and what will follow as we go from what was pitched as a health crisis, to the inevitable global economic crisis. If you haven’t read that first post, it’s a good place to start.

Today I want to review two categories of influencers, experts, and analysts whose opinions I don’t value, and why:

1. I don’t much listen to the old guys like Jeremy Grantham, Warren Buffett, and Ray Dalio. They’re scornful of BTC because they refuse to take the time to understand it. They’re too old (ditto Donald Trump), and they’ve gotten so wealthy during the “Golden Age” via other instruments, that they don’t feel there’s going to be a sea change in finance.

I don’t really value these old guys’ opinions as much, because for instance, they buy in on propaganda such as the fact that we’re going to “green energy” to address a problem with carbon dioxide, because we have global warming, oops I mean climate change. And most of them got several quaccines, so they’re bought in on the whole pandemic thing.

(The problem, I believe, why so many people fall for that “climate change” propaganda, is the innate desire we ALL have, to green the energy sources AND stop the madness when it comes to hyperconsumption that has spiraled out of control. We can all see that we have a problem with how we use or abuse the Earth and its resources. However, just because I re-use my Ziploc bags and I garden and I compost and I try to avoid buying stuff with a lot of packaging–does not therefore mean I take a knee to the Climate Change Cult.

When the Al Gore lie of “we’re all going to drown in melted glaciers by 2020” was exposed–many scientists easily rebut the idea that human beings are causing too much carbon dioxide which in turn causes global warming–when all that fell apart, they just shifted the narrative.

So that whatever weather is happening, it can be glibly blamed on “climate change,” thus forcing everyone from consumers to governments, into an agenda. Bizarrely, Germany, who stated they would use only wind and solar going forward, nuclear energy was “too dirty,” are now reverting to the use of COAL, if you can believe.

And they fell for the quaccine propaganda because, well, they’re old. And the TV told them that people over 65 desperately needed 1, 2, no, it’s 3–maybe 4 will do it!--quaccines.

That was a side tangent, just to highlight that some of the 85 to 90-yo investors are pretty irrelevant in discussing today’s economic shifts. They lived through the Golden Era, they were conditioned for 50 or 60 years by the best times economically in the History of Ever, so they’re overcommitted to the idea that because cycles have occurred for their 60 years in investing, it will continue to be so.

I disagree with that profoundly, and would argue that the old rules are still interesting and worth looking at, but always with an eye to the sea changes occurring in the world, which shake the whole foundation–not least of which is blockchain technology, decentralized finance, AI, and machine learning.

(Our own Insiders Mastermind Coach Justin had a career in supply-chain logistics and thinks AI and machine learning are the real main drivers of 100k Amazon layoffs announced last week, as well as many layoffs in the banking, finance, and retail sectors.

Even though yesterday Fed Chairman Jerome Powell declared that we’re in a 50-year low in unemployment. But hey, he believes that CPI actually measures inflation, too, doesn’t he.)

These older guys have made a great contribution to the world of finance, but if I listen to them, I find myself sifting through old dogmas that no longer serve, to find the nuggets of wisdom in their commentary.

2. I don’t listen to young’uns, either, the YouTube crypto influencers: I don’t listen to them, because if I had, 90% of what I spent a few hundred hours listening to, in 2020-2021, I’d have lost a lot of money.

Virtually all of them did long videos soliloquizing on whether BTC would reach $100k, $200k, or $300k by the end of 2021.

I find almost all of them to be Millennials, and while I raised four people of that generation who are productive, successful people, I wouldn’t ask them for financial advice, since that generation just hasn’t gotten clobbered by anything yet.

The youngest adult generation hasn’t started multiple businesses and invested in many sectors–and it’s our failures that teach us most, they’ve not failed at anything, until now.

I have made millions and lost millions. I don’t know a single person who has made millions, who hasn’t also “lost big” as well. When you lose, you start doing more precise research. It hones your critical thinking skills. You make purpose of your pain; you learn from your mistakes.

I’d listen to my Wharton MBA brother, who has made and lost millions three times–and he’s younger than I am!--before I’d listen to the 28-yo crypto nerds.

The younger crowd have a profound lack of understanding of the risk of startups. They get very excited about “use cases.”

Ideas do not make a business great. Execution does, which takes years. Ideas are a dime a dozen.

It’s usually the second or third company to come in, who really disrupts an industry with the idea of the first company, and “goes the distance.” The first one creates the awareness and the market, but the second one often makes the big bucks and sticks around for decades.

(The perfect example of this is Young Living. Gary Young spent decades teaching people about the foreign concept of essential oils. My mom sent me to one of his talks in 1990, and I blew it off and thought it was weird. Then 7 of Young Living’s executives broke off, formed a sexier company more appealing to the younger generations, solving many of Young Living’s big problems.

They hit a homerun, leveraging their insider knowledge of the essential oils space, becoming a $2B company and landing on the cover of Forbes, in about 7 years. A lot of litigation ensued, between the two companies, but that’s a tangent. The point is, the first company to disrupt an industry does the hard work, and the second one capitalizes, and gets rich–so often.)

Failures are the best teachers. They make you rather committed to making better decisions. They teach you not to ignore what you don’t know. I’ve learned, just because I was very successful at one thing, that doesn’t necessarily translate to being great at a completely different industry I do not understand.

Just like people coming out of divorce more often than not quickly rebound into a second marriage that just as quickly fails–many successful business owners rebound into a second business that fails spectacularly. Because the entrepreneur was riding on euphoria from some number of years of winning, in another industry–and failed to take into account how little s/he actually knew about the new industry s/he was tackling.

But nowhere is this more important–besides maybe starting a business–than in the world of investing. The “big guys” know how to press buttons in the media and social media that can spread fear and doubt, to manipulate markets for their own gain, often wrecking the unsophisticated small retail buyer in that industry, like you and me.

So it’s unwise to go out there like a “babe in the woods” to start investing in crypto, with no more information than “my sister’s husband said this was a good crypto investment.”

For instance, I’ve never invested in commodities. And I am keenly interested in them right now. But “I know what I don’t know,” so I’m trying to squeeze 10 years of experience into a couple of months, by curating knowledge from those on YouTube and other platforms, whom I’ve come to trust.

(I don’t think ANYBODY is the fountain of all truth by any means–we are all just trying to figure out what’s going on, since we cannot trust our government or our media to tell us the truth. But the 14 analysts I shared about in Part I, have a depth of knowledge I appreciate. And the two groups I discount in this Part II, aren’t the gurus I listen to.)

I am not investing in commodities, YET. I find myself weeding out advice from most very young investors, and most very old investors. I find myself listening to the senior-level folks who are still working fulltime, are highly experienced, who are researching, investing, and trying to guide the way for others, using their hard-won skills and knowledge.

Basically, I find myself gravitating toward the “experts” in the 45 - 65 yo age range.

That’s just a guideline, based on those I’ve observed who really know what they’re talking about. Of course there are some Millennial geniuses who learn from others rather than always having to learn from the “school of hard knocks.” And there are some old guys like Kiyosaki willing to take a look at new, disruptive changes in finance.

(He’ll admit he knows just enough to be dangerous, about Bitcoin.) (As Michael Saylor says, only after about 1,000 hours of research, do you really start to understand Bitcoin. My own experience validates this.) Kiyosaki, in his mid-70’s  is still actively working fulltime, and interviewing experts on his very ambitious show on YouTube, and he’s somewhat of an exception to these two groups I don’t listen to–although I also find him to be highly repetitive and also a bit braggy for my taste, too.

Sure, I have some FOMO (fear of missing out), when it comes to commodities, as right now it’s beyond clear that we are seeing both a desperate shortage of many commodities (like oil and gas, lithium, copper, uranium, and more) –

– AND at the same time I see commodity funds have taken a hit, price-wise, along with virtually every other market, creating a lot of potentially “good buys.” Those two events being a “perfect storm” I’m keen to capitalize on.

I still feel like I’m not ready to invest, because (a) I need to sift through the various companies and find the ones who have a strong balance sheet and management team; and (b) I am concerned about the Leftist governments of the Western world trying to wreck certain commodities (especially oil/gas).

There’s also the moral issue of first-world nations investing in raping the third world of its cheap labor, even child labor, and its natural resources, while polluting their environments, to bring more wealth to Americans. There are the issues I’m struggling through, as I try to learn enough about commodities to feel confident enough to invest.

The people I follow, I listen to and value their interviews because (a) I see them understanding and not devaluing or ignoring geopolitical issues; (b) I see them understanding macroeconomic issues and histories; (c) I see them delving into blockchain and DeFi to understand how they’re rapidly changing the world (but are also a dot-com-like bubble that the leverage is being wrung out of right now); and (d) I see that they have massive experience spanning decades in investing and finance, and have learned and improved by “taking their lumps” along the way.

The YouTube crypto cult grew feverishly between 2017 and 2021, and I find them to be blissfully unaware of economic bubbles, cultthink, and risk.

If you find my work valuable, and want to support it for $10/mo, it helps keep my team doing great work, and we appreciate you. My final part of this series will be to share in detail, how I’ve repositioned myself pretty radically, the last 2 years, to survive and thrive in “The Great Reset.” And, please assume that some of the links I may share, compensate my small business.