Latest / Financial Survival Network / Contrarian Investing Mastery: Navigating Economic Downturns with Elliot Kallen of Prosperity Financial Group #5936
Transcript
- 0:00Everything that we do in this world revolves around energy, and primarily oil and
- 0:04oil and gas. It even gas has gone up a little bit, even
- 0:06though natural guests has always been super low. And if you take that again
- 0:10in there right now is a great time to buy and hold, but not
- 0:14for a quick turnover. But I do think that you're going to see some
- 0:17nice returns coming in for technology next week when you all start reporting, you'll
- 0:22see a quick fix in there at the end of the month or the beginning
- 0:25of November. You are listening to Carrie Lutz's Financial Survival Network where you get
- 0:30valuable information you just can't find anywhere else to thrive in today's trying times.
- 0:36You need the Financial Survival Network now more than ever. Go to Financial Survivalnetwork
- 0:43dot com and get your free newsletter and gift. Financial Survival Network now more
- 0:50than ever, and welcome. You are listening to watching the Financial Survival Network.
- 0:58I'm your host, Carrie Lutz. We're just about at the end of
- 1:02October. No crash yet, but there's still how many more trading days are
- 1:07there? There's two more trading days after today, so you never know.
- 1:11October twenty ninth, nineteen twenty nine was a date to live in infamy.
- 1:17Hey, it always beeds to be a contrarian. Sometimes not in the short
- 1:22run, but in the long run. Always. We've got the king of
- 1:26contrarian investing with us now. His name is Elliott Callen. Maybe not the
- 1:32king of it, but certainly a master of contrarian investing. Between both of
- 1:38his entities, he's managing close to a billion dollars. Elliott, great to
- 1:42have you on the show. Pre call, we were talking, we came
- 1:45from the same area in Essex County, New Jersey, so we got a
- 1:49lot in common here close in age of Hey, is the market going to
- 1:55crash at this point? Or is this the tide to be rushing in?
- 1:59You know where wise men fear to go fools. You know where wise men
- 2:04fear to go, fear to travel, fools rush in? Right? Well,
- 2:07Kerry, thanks for having me on. I appreciate that. So as
- 2:09we're talking about New Jersey, now that I missed the New York cheesecake,
- 2:13so you're making me hungry as we're talking here, I'm most ad deli.
- 2:16You know, we have it here in Florida, just not quite as good,
- 2:21and now in California has none of it, so I get it in
- 2:23California. Here's where I think we are asked me for my market to be
- 2:29a prognosticator here and I do a little bit. We do a lot of
- 2:31research. I just came back from a three and a half day confidence in
- 2:34Philadelphia with the Schwab organization, which we do our custodia work with. I
- 2:39think we're I think we're at a little positive interest rates. Here's here's the
- 2:44good news for investors right now is the markets have been beaten up. If
- 2:47you nobody expected this year that AI companies, you know, the Microsoft's of
- 2:52the world would zoom the first year for the year. But everybody thought that
- 2:55that the low tech, high dividend paying companies would that was the place to
- 3:00be. So what did all of us experts do. We sold out of
- 3:05tech early on this year, We bought into everything that based dividends. What
- 3:07did the market actually do. Dividend paying stocks junked out, they were terrible,
- 3:13and AI went crazy with a twenty three to twenty seven percent gay Wow,
- 3:17totally different. What's happened in the last ninety days is basically all the
- 3:22AI stocks for the most part, not specifically, but for the most part,
- 3:24gave all the money back and they did s ANDP. Now with down
- 3:29below where it started the year, and it was up into double digits for
- 3:31a while, and then what's starting to come back the broader market a little
- 3:35bit with dividend pay So all the experts have been wrong, All those guys
- 3:39with economics degrees have been really wrong on what we're doing. But with eighty
- 3:45dollars a barrel oil, right it is possible for the Federal Reserve to drop
- 3:51interest rates. It's impossible because plastics, metals, everything that we do in
- 3:54this world revolves around energy, and primarily oil and oil and gas. Gas
- 4:00has gone up a little bit, even though natural gas has always been super
- 4:02low. And if you dig that again in there, right now is a
- 4:05great time to buy and hold, but not for a quick turnover. But
- 4:10I do think that you're going to see some nice returns coming in for technology
- 4:14next week when we all start reporting, you'll see a quick fix in there
- 4:17at the end of the month or the beginning of November, and that shul
- 4:20hold us through the end of the year. So I'm a buyer today,
- 4:23but I'm a cautious buyer with a very diversified, spread out portfolio, not
- 4:28just trying to pick sectors and winners, but try to spread the news out.
- 4:31All right, So did you see since you're a contrarian and you were
- 4:38presumably you weren't buying dividend stocks when everyone else was rushing in there, did
- 4:43you see any of this coming? It's hard. I saw the technology coming,
- 4:47but everybody did, but nobody believed it was going to last for six
- 4:49months. Everybody thought, well, we have a one week, a two
- 4:53week, a one month gain. What I did is I cautiously bought in
- 4:57so well, the SMP basically is beneath the water today and the SMB and
- 5:00the NASAGIK is for them almost beneath water. We're up eight percent, so
- 5:04we really out pasted by eight hundred basis points over the most of our indexes.
- 5:11So sometimes you win by not losing. In other times you lose by
- 5:15not winning, right, that's correct. Then you also can't bet on mergers
- 5:19and acquisitions. That's a sector that is due for a big rally, but
- 5:24not today, probably next year. That's the place you want to be.
- 5:28Take advantage of miss printing, and there's a way to do that. And
- 5:31we could talk separately, how do you take advantage of mergers in the mergers
- 5:35and acquisition market, which is a good thing. I know, you like
- 5:39we talked about this. You like mining stocks, you know, I like
- 5:44them, but I am invested in them to some extent. Yes, and
- 5:48gold is generally does well. I think you know you not have more world
- 5:54volatility, don't forget, and more world multity is generally good for mining stocks
- 5:59on the leg. They haven't performed as well, but they're good on the
- 6:01leg. So you're actually probably saying something for the next six months. Well,
- 6:06the world is more volatile. If it doesn't get more volatile than it
- 6:09is, mine should be a very good place to be. Okay, So
- 6:14you don't think the world's coming to an end? What about the ceaseless wars
- 6:18the Middle East? Ukraine, Russia? And the market just shrugs it off
- 6:24here, Elliott, Right, So the biggest problem we have is if the
- 6:27war spreads. So Ukraine and Russia have been doing this for over a year
- 6:30and it did not really affect the markets. As a matter of fact,
- 6:33what it's going to do, it's going to dramatically help out the US defense
- 6:38industry because we've got to catch up on all new armaments. That's a great
- 6:41place to play right now, and they're high dividend bank stocks those but that's
- 6:45a great place to play. The other place to play is to lessen your
- 6:48portfolio of Taiwan. If China decides to become ward wrestling, because we have
- 6:54two carrier battalions, carrier fleets over in the Middle East, we're a little
- 6:58more vulnerable that it would be a smart play for China, But they don't
- 7:01want to create war either. I don't think, but I don't trust anything
- 7:05coming out of China. But again, the defense industry one US industry that
- 7:10will be the biggest winner from all this volatility, and they've already been big
- 7:15winners before write anything. Yeah. I mean you look at Raith the on
- 7:19McDonald douglas. GEI had that one of the biggest quarters in her history,
- 7:24and they have stunk for ten straight years. They've been doing great. You're
- 7:28just going to see more and more of defense related contractors have record profits probably
- 7:33for the next twenty four to thirty six months. Okay, So let's just
- 7:38go shoot back to interest rates for men in Italy. So the two years
- 7:43bumping up and the FED can't allow the two year to get ahead of the
- 7:47Fed funds rate. Right, the yield curve no longer inverted as it was
- 7:55for the past fourteen months. I think, do you think we're in a
- 8:00recession right now or are we heading for one? No, I don't think
- 8:03we're in a recession. I've heard now for the last two years. Fourth
- 8:07quarter of twenty two, there's gonna be a recession. It didn't happen.
- 8:11Fourth quarter of twenty three. There's gonna be a recession. Now you have
- 8:13some experts talking about the fourth quarter of twenty four. Sooner or later,
- 8:16they're gonna get it right. You just keep saying that you're gonna have a
- 8:20flat tire sometime on the road. If you keep saying, I'm gonna get
- 8:22a flat tire. But I think you're going to slow down today. There,
- 8:24I'm sorry. Sure, we're gonna have to slow down today, a
- 8:28traditional slowdown. I think we're kind of at a little bit of a malaize.
- 8:31You know, you don't like they're here, but you don't do anything
- 8:33about it. That's kind of the malaser ll in. So we're gonna look
- 8:37at one one and a half maybe two percent growth for the next two years.
- 8:41We do have an election coming, We're not gonna have four and five
- 8:45percent. That's not in our willing today. It's just not. We have
- 8:50to have some changes at the leadership level to rebuild the US energy again,
- 8:54and then you'll see oil come down. But as well as we are depending
- 8:58ourselves on four oil, you're going to see high oil race, which is
- 9:01going to be a slow down in the interesting e raise oil. Okay,
- 9:07back in the seventies when we had the dual of Middle East oil embargos that
- 9:11really put the herd on the US economy led to recessions both times. Arguably
- 9:18the first one never really ended and the second one started. I think it
- 9:20was seventy two and seventy five when we had those embargos. Memory serves may
- 9:28correct. I might be off a little bit on the seite. Right.
- 9:30It was once under the Dixon campaign because gave permission to the Shaw to form
- 9:35OPIC and they immediately did an a bargo and then once starting to fod campaign
- 9:41following on when he rescued the US ship in North Korea. Right, Okay,
- 9:46so, but what happened since then? Yes, oil consumption has continued
- 9:52to go up. However, natural gas has become much more essential, much
- 9:58more are important, and in many ways has eclipsed oil. Other than in
- 10:03the transportation sector, that gas way more important. The discount of that gas
- 10:11per BTU to the price of oil, you know, it's pretty substantial,
- 10:18and it's stayed very high over the years, so that gas is low.
- 10:28What does that mean, Yes, people might drive less, but cars are
- 10:31more efficient. I'm just not sure that the oil impact from eighty one hundred
- 10:37dollars a barrel oil is as great as it once was. So the world
- 10:41used or the UF uses, well, that's called developed world. The developed
- 10:46world uses forty million barrels of oil a day a day, so staggering.
- 10:50Now now we add electric cars, we add gas, which are absolutely correct.
- 10:56We're borrowing more clean gas that we've ever brought to the United States,
- 10:58particularly less cold. China's bring more of it on both on oil ends,
- 11:03but we're not any of the bring more of it. Africa's boarding more of
- 11:07it. The prediction is that in twenty five years from now, with all
- 11:11the electrical changes that are going to be happening in your car and maybe hydrogeneral,
- 11:13so who knows, we're still going to be using thirty six to forty
- 11:18million barrels a day. Yeah, and that's it's not going to change,
- 11:22Okay, But the percentage of energy, you know, not gas, is
- 11:28definitely higher in Europe. You know, with the Ukraine Russia war last year,
- 11:33it was a near disaster. Was only you know, NonStop LNG ships
- 11:39leaving the US that really saved their bacon last winter. So in many ways
- 11:46that gas more important than oil. I'm not downplaying the importance of it.
- 11:50I'm just saying it's not exactly the same situation as it was back in the
- 11:56oil embargo days. Forget the energy that's been cowered, and you make a
- 12:01really good point there, Kerry. The energy that's being that's powering the US
- 12:05economy is really much your right, is much more natural gas. You one
- 12:09hundred percent right on that. You know, in calum in California, you
- 12:13couldn't build an oil refinery if you wanted to. You could not build an
- 12:16oil power plant if you wanted to. It's going to be natural gas as
- 12:20some solar and a lot of the country is going out way. Coal is
- 12:24basically dead, a dead product in the US. Not dead for export only,
- 12:28it's only for export. It's like Heineken. The beer that we get
- 12:33here in the United States from Heineken, they call it export, and it's
- 12:35nowhere near as good as the beer that they keep in Holland. Well,
- 12:41I think that you can make a good point on natural gas. I think
- 12:43from an investment standpoint, natural gas is a lousy investment and has been for
- 12:48a very very long time there now or now. Yeah, So I am
- 12:52not an investor in natural gas, but I have played the oil markets over
- 12:56the last few years. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm not down
- 13:00playing the importance of oil by any stretch. I'm just saying it's not what
- 13:03it used to be. Plus, vehicles get much better mileage. But I
- 13:07totally agree. Consumption has continued to go up, although it peaked at the
- 13:13gasoline consumption peaked at the Great financial collapse, and it's never gone over that
- 13:20least the last time I looked at the chart. Yeah, Now, we
- 13:22do have carrier. To be fair, we do have a really big set
- 13:24of head winds in front of us that could spell session, and that's real
- 13:28estate also commercial, especially right it's going to start with commercial and then we'll
- 13:33see where the contagion continues from there. But you know, in the office
- 13:37space across the US, there's about a forty percent vacancy rate in California.
- 13:41Our building, I'm about forty percent empty the building. It's a large building.
- 13:46The older of these buildings now had eight buildings like ours. He's downs
- 13:50fol six of them off add less than he borne for. Yeah, that's
- 13:54happening side down. Everything is upside down there, right. New York is
- 13:58going to be like that. Florida might not be as much because you're really
- 14:01much more a strip wall state rather than big office park state, but most
- 14:05of the country still works on office parks. There's going to be a gigantic,
- 14:09you know, come to Jesus situation in the second or third quarter of
- 14:13twenty twenty four when a third of these buildings have to be refinanced and they're
- 14:16not worth that much anymore. And that could spill over into the personal housing
- 14:22market. And it wouldn't be so bad to have a housing correction happen where
- 14:28houses go down in the US, because that would open up the opportunity for
- 14:31more buyers, which is not there today. So that bad news could spell
- 14:37good news for demand, even though it breaks havoc on supply. Yeah,
- 14:43Yeah, there's a like you said, a lot of the potential economic headwinds.
- 14:50But going back to what you said initially, you know the economists,
- 14:54remember that old saying economists they have successfully called five at the last two recessions.
- 15:03Well, I you know that's that there are a lot of jokes about
- 15:05economists. You put twenty in a room asking what tom it is, and
- 15:07you only get the approximate time. I's no, what you don't actual time
- 15:11I listen to I get about one hundred and fifty economic reports daily. It's
- 15:16impossible to go through all of them. And I talk with them, I
- 15:18meet with them, and I do everything all the time. And my afternoon
- 15:22can be the exact opposite of my morning depending on point of view. So
- 15:24some of this isn't going to yeah, no, hey, I couldn't agree
- 15:28with you more. But and the one thing that most economists never look at
- 15:33as the actual flow of funds that is coming from the rest of the world
- 15:41because of the uncertainty. You know, when you're parking money in a bank
- 15:45overnight, you're not gonna park it in Deutsche Bank for the weekend, right,
- 15:48You're gonna park it at JP Morgan or Wells or one of them,
- 15:52even though our banking sector is certainly ailing, or you're gonna be parking it
- 15:56in treasuries, You're not going to be parking parking it in in Chinese government
- 16:03debt or Chinese real estate debt, right for sure, and ended fine something
- 16:07percent in you were short term treasuries. That's a really attractive number. All
- 16:11right. So when we have this conversation, the come next October, where
- 16:17you think we're going to be at, Elliott, I think where you're going
- 16:19to be higher and better off today because we'll be a month out of the
- 16:25election next October, and right there's an election. Well, I consider myself
- 16:30trans I am trans political. I've moved beyond it. I don't even think
- 16:34about politics anymore because everything always comes down to economics. Elliot, you have
- 16:41the podcast, you're a website. How do we find you? Right?
- 16:45So, best place to reach me to the website is Prosperity Financial Group dot
- 16:51com or Elliott E. L. L IoT at Prosperity Financial Group dot com.
- 16:57And there's a website. There's a phone number on a website. I
- 17:00take phone calls. It's a lot of fun. Love to talk to anybody
- 17:03at any time, all right. Hey, appreciate you coming on. I've
- 17:07got a question for Elliot. Shoot me an email. Kl at Carrie Lutts
- 17:11dot com. Show notes to this interview on Financial Survival Network dot com dot
- 17:18com. You will find Elliot's site. Just click through to it and hey,
- 17:22questions, comments, whatever, criticism. We don't really accept criticism lightly,
- 17:29but we always accept it. It's kl at Carrie LUTs dot com.
- 17:33Elliot got at absolute pleasure. We'll have you on again soon. Thanks so
- 17:36much for stopping by. Thank you so much, Carry thanks for listening to
- 17:40Carrie Lutz's Financial Survival Network, your solution to today's trying times. For the
- 17:45latest, go to Financial Survivalnetwork dot com. Financial Survival Network now more than ever