Announcer: Wall Street Unplugged looks beyond the regular headlines heard on mainstream financial media, to bring you unscripted interviews and breaking commentary direct from Wall Street, right to you on main street.

Frank Curzio: How is it going out there? It’s February 3rd. I’m Frank Curzio, host of the Wall Street Unplugged Podcast, where I break down the headlines and… Tell you what’s really moving these markets. So, if you’re watching this on the Curzio Research YouTube page, be sure to subscribe. But you’re going to see me wearing a Tom Brady jersey. And it’s Super Bowl week; I’m going to come up my prediction. This is not an indication of my prediction. I’m wearing this because I lost a bet. I don’t know if I lost it, but I really won the bet, but I was in a fantasy football league. My buddy, Glen, who is a diehard for Tom Brady, would dump his wife for Tom Brady, and Mariam, loves everything Tom Brady and the Patriots.

Frank Curzio: He is still a Brady fan now that he’s with the Bucs. But he was running a fantasy football league. And I didn’t have a lot of time. So I said, “Look, you’re going to have to do most of the work.” And he wound up picking up Tom Brady and said, “If we win this thing with Tom Brady as our quarterback, I’m buying you a jersey and you have to wear it on your podcast.”

Frank Curzio: I said, “Done.” And we won the league. So I won, but I lost a bet. And now, I’m wearing this, as you can see right here, the Buccaneers, so I’m wearing it. It’s a bet; I’m going to honor it. I’ll wear it throughout this podcast. But I’m going to be making my Super Bowl prediction later in the show, like I’ve had for the past 10 years. And I went 0-8 and eight against the spread. I’m going to throw out the Eagles game because that’s the Super Bowl I went to. That’s what this bottle I have next to me is, right? Super Bowl winners. I went to the Super Bowl, Minnesota, unbelievable. But outside of that, I’ve lost every single Super Bowl, and I’ve been following football for 40 years.

Frank Curzio: I break down, analyze it, and as a joke, if you’re new to… Listen to this, I said, “Listen, it’s the most guaranteed bet ever. I’m going to make perfect sense to you and tell you why that team’s going to win. And buy the spread, you take the points.” And I lose every single week… Until last year, when I had the Chiefs. So, I’m going to break this down later on. You don’t want to miss it, really break it down in-depth, including the best prop bets. And I’m hoping it’s going to be a good, good Super Bowl.

Frank Curzio: Now, I want to start this podcast off by really talking about GameStop and the short-selling drama, which is getting pretty sad now. I mean, you’re seeing it fall under $100, GameStop. I mean, it was like $500 at one point for a couple of minutes. But I really like that you started with 300, 350. And it’s sad because a lot of these kids are starting to get wiped out. And all of you know the story by now; it’s every place. They have thousands of people talking about it. And 90% of these people aren’t qualified, in the media. They just… I don’t even know. Again, you get on TV, it doesn’t matter if you know enough. But just listening to them, it’s not going to make you smart. It’s going to get dumber. So many of these people, and I’m not saying that to criticize, but there are great people out there that really want to know what is going on.

Frank Curzio: And now, they’re talking about something that’s really cool. Daniel and I, we’ll break this down later. But the clearing houses and how when the stocks are at the clearing house, and if any of you are in a private placement, you understand this, because your shares are usually at a clearing house. But when that lockup is over or whatever, they hold them at the clearance and it takes two days. And you own the shares so you could rent them out. And even if they can’t even sell any of those shares that are at the clearing house, but they’re breaking that down now, which is becoming a big story. That’s the next chapter in this. But we’ll go through every single thing. But I do want to talk about how it all got started, where a guy named Jaime Rogozinski, he started the blog on Reddit in 2012, called WallStreetBets, and started with a few thousand people.

Frank Curzio: And as you know, it blew up tremendously right over the past month or two. And I think there’s over two and a half million people on it. Also a guy that was of a… Keith Gill joined, I think, later on, and a really big promoter of GameStop had a massive position, told everyone on the blog, constantly posting, “Hey, you know what? These hedge funds are short more than 100% of float. If we squeeze this, guys, this thing’s going to take off.” Never in his wildest dreams did he think he’d go to 300. He probably thought it would go to 60, 70, 80, and it’s 90 today, right? There’s a stock that’s pretty much worth like $3 on paper. Everybody bought in, and look, these guys were heroes a week ago, and they crushed a major hedge fund, Melvin Capital, twelve and a half billion.

Frank Curzio: They had to get bailed out, and it crushed a lot of other short-selling firms. We took on too much risk, and now changed the landscape of the industry with these short sellers and how they market these picks, where Citron’s not providing research anymore. They wanted to get short sellers, and they yet purchase Square. Who said, “We don’t have any short positions as of January, you got hold the short positions, right?” It has changed the landscape. It’s is going to continue to do that. But now that these thoughts are absolutely crashing GameStop, AMC, Nokia, I mean, it can go on. And American Airlines is on that list for a while. I could see Wall Street and the regulators going after these guys. On Wall Street, that’s… I mean, really going after them, since Keith said he lost $13 million last week. Guys, we’re talking about big money here, right?

Frank Curzio: We think of these kids and some of these guys, I mean, they had options, 20, 25 call options, would have stopped going to 5,300, do the math. It gets pretty insane. And that’s 13 million of the more than 20 million that he made on his games lottery, which I believe he still owns. But I can really see the regulators going after them, since a lot of kids are getting smoked now. I could see regulators, where, which is… When I say regulate Wall Street, right? Wall Street, in some sense, I don’t know if you guys know this, it’s very easy to find, just do a search. But the SEC is a government organization. They don’t pay a lot of money. So, when you move up the chain and you get to a certain level, maybe, I don’t know, you can make 125,000, maybe a little bit more, 150 if you really the top person, but they really pay these guys nothing. Right?

Frank Curzio: It’s government jobs that give them great benefits. So, what happens when you move up the chain and you know everybody, then you’re like, I’m out of here, because Goldman Sachs is going to pay you 2, $3 million, and Morgan Stanley is going to pay 3… So, all those top SEC officials, or all who had the major connections because they’ve been in the SEC for a long time to build up, they all work for the major institutions, which is Wall Street, right? But I could see to try to discredit these guys.

Frank Curzio: So, where a revolution like this, or something that disrupts Wall Street, to where multi-billion dollar hedge funds had to get bailed out, you can see this never happens again. I really think that could happen. And I use the word “revolution,” and it’s not lightly. Because the hardest movement is about the little guy, right? Fighting against a 600 pound gorilla, which is Wall Street, right? So, you have David versus Goliath. And I believe it was Jamie who talked about his family experience. I think it was him who wrote the… He took it down for something, I don’t know why it took it down, but he talked about the reasoning behind what he… Why he created this, what he’s doing, where his family lost their jobs and had a bunch of people living in their home. His parents had like no money because of the market crash of 2008.

Frank Curzio: And then what happened? All the banks, institutions, got bailed at. Nobody went to jail. Nobody went to jail, nobody got punished, it wasn’t a big deal. And look how big these companies are now.

Frank Curzio: Look at the major banks. I mean, look at the banking industry. It’s one industry, the banking industry, where you can’t start a company from scratch and become one of the largest in the world. Now, you can’t do like you go the route of Facebook, or just any company, Amazon. Starting small and getting big. You can’t do that in a bank. They don’t allow it because of the rules in place. So these guys get bigger and bigger. The capital requirements that you have to keep on the… But it’s just… It’s impossible… Not impossible, but there’s a reason why it’s been… What is it? The four major banks for a long time. You haven’t seen like seven, eight, nine different banks really breaking into them.

Frank Curzio: You can do it in oil. Look how Pioneer did it. I mean, look at some of these shale fracking companies. They challenged some the majors and stuff, and then market caps got up there. You can’t do that in banking, right? Because those are the rules. Those are rules put in place. But holding GameStop is personal to him. It wasn’t about where it was trading or the money he made, although we were making money. But the point is that Wall Street deserves to get… Excuse my language, fucked, since they always win.

Frank Curzio: And you know what? I could identify with that. So in 2001, I was working at my dad’s firm, FXE Investors. We managed money, published a newsletter called the FXE Newsletter. A lot of fun. And my dad called the ’87 market crash, or the retailer’s newsletter crash, one month before it happened. And he said, “This crash will be worse than the prior three crushers combined.” And he went on TV, and just every single program picked them up. And it’s ’87, guys, that today would have 5,000 people on there from so many different firms. Only a small group of people they listened to. And CBC was just getting going, and Maria Bartiromo. I used to go there as a kid and meet Bill Griffith and Sue Herrera and everything.

Frank Curzio: But after that call, he became a household name, right? At least in the finance industry. He’s on Neil Cavuto; he’s on all kinds of everything Wall Street that week, everything. Louis Rukeyser. By the ’90s, our business was doing well, is growing, and grew into 2000. Well, my dad also called the tech crash. He was about six months too early, which was a big deal because the NASDAQ went up a ton. But he was positioned for it and saw it coming and then called that right. And again, he helped his clients out tremendously. So, our assets grew to over a hundred million dollars, which is substantial back then. We are talking about 2000… We had over 10,000 subscribers who paid… I think we were charging $39 for an annual subscription for the newsletter. So, when I… You look at the numbers, we’re not generating millions. I can’t remember a year we actually generated more than a million dollars in net income, if we ever did.

Frank Curzio: And my dad was perfectly okay with that. I mean, it frustrated us, his kids, when we were working. They were like, “Oh, you’ve got to grow. You’ve got to get bigger.” But that was him. He loved having a small business. You know going upstate four months out of the year in New York, where he worked out of a small office with my mom, while he fed all his animals, pigs, chickens, rabbits. Let’s call it… All the kids now called it Grandpa’s Farm. We still go up there. We still have the house. That’s what he loved. Now, my dad always had a great performance. He average annual gains of 22% for over two decades. And then our performance was picked up by Pension Investments Magazine. They published an article showing that we were ranked number one. And the company’s under us were all institutions.

Frank Curzio: I believe it was Goldman, a couple of others were Morgan Stanley. And we didn’t manage any money for institutions, just individuals. I think Pension Investors sent us a questionnaire. We get questionnaires from so many different places, Dick Davis digest and Holbert Financial Digest. And I think it was one of our employees who filled it out, but with all the performance numbers, which are factual, not knowing this ranking, only included the money managers, where the rules are different when it comes to publishing results. So again, we didn’t capitalize it on it. You get one account from it. It wasn’t managing any institutional money from it, no. But it was interesting because a few weeks later, no coincidence here, the SEC knocked on our door and ordered a cease and desist and they ordered us… This is October 2001 to June 2002.

Frank Curzio: So, there was nine months where we couldn’t send out any marketing material, basically a complete halt in our business. And then they would go into every single number, every client, all the company and personal bank accounts toward a business, and just ripped it apart. And the SEC was looking to fine us and accused us of fraudulent advertising. They want to put fraud on it. The basics of that, our newsletter performance was not exactly the same performance for our managed clients, and that is true. Since so many of our clients… We manage individual accounts, and we were instructed by them to structure their portfolio, where they’ll have a certain allocation in aggressive speculative. Some of them own more closed in bond funds. Some are more aggressive picks. And we have balanced picks and large… So we had a mix of these companies, but the performance was accurate.

Frank Curzio: But it wasn’t that every single client had the exact same performance of news. It depended on their allocation. So, every managed account was different, and that’s what they argued. Now, the SEC presented no expert testimony, no testimony from prospective advisory clients. The division conceded eventually that ethics advertisers, without material misleading to ethics, these existing advisory clients… They worded it and they determined the harm to others was not great, meaning it was completely non-existent right? We’re not lying about anything. Our figures were accurate, but they were based on our newsletter. They determined, after looking at all these bank accounts, that FXE Investments, my dad, did not enrich themselves financially. And again, it provided no witnesses because almost all of our clients were extremely happy with my dad before. He was outperforming the market like crazy every year, year-after-year. You’re not going to be around for 22 years, and it’s more 30 years in total, unless you’re good at your job. And he was great at it.

Frank Curzio: So now, all of a sudden, the SEC ruled that FXE investors cease, to cease from committing any future violations going forward. They ordered that FXE engage an investment advisory consultant, which we’re a small business, and if we wanted to focus on institutions, right? All right, we should have an investment advisory consultant to help us out with that. I never thought about doing that again. It’s a small business. When I opened this business, it’s… You don’t think about… When you open a small business, you don’t think about it providing benefits. You’re not like, “How am I going to provide benefits to people? Their healthcare, credit card processing, accounting.” You just… You’re focusing on what you’re good at, but all that stuff comes into play if you get bigger and bigger.

Frank Curzio: But then, the SEC went out and published in the Wall Street Journal, front page, left-hand side, where they have… They just break down individual stories. They investigated us for fraud, which is where most of our marketing was on to TV. We didn’t know anything about marketing, and my dad’s gone on TV all the time. It got… Back then, it’s about 10 to 15 people, they listen to, I mean, Natalie or Gabelli, Abby Cohen from Goldman, Elaine Garzarelli.

Frank Curzio: But this was nine months. Imagine that you stopped marketing your business for nine months. Completely shut down. I know many of you can identify with this because you were forced to shut down due to COVID, and look what happens to your business. Well, FXE Investors, our business was destroyed. Our subscriber count fell by 70%, assets under management fell under 25 million. We didn’t have to register with the SEC anymore, just the individual states. And my dad had told me about integrity; he should always put the customer first.

Frank Curzio: Well, I was there when a lady walked in off the streets and said, “Hi, I heard about you on TV. You are great. I had a $3 million portfolio.” Again, we had a hundred million; that’s a big portfolio. And my dad looked and said, “You know what? You’re positioned well. So, we really can’t help you.” I mean, who does that? No, I can do better. I can do… No. The lady wanted to give us business, and he knew we couldn’t really help her. And she had a great diversified portfolio, so just stick what you got and don’t pay the fees.

Frank Curzio: But now, he had a stain on his name, all because some… excuse my language… fucking asshole at an institution, who probably worked for the money management firms that were ranked under us in Pension Investments, brought us to the SEC’s attention, which led to the investigation. But it gets even better; stay with me here. So, when all this crap was going on, my dad was a mess. He was stressed out and all that because he thought he did something wrong. We did nothing wrong. Everything was good, but we were losing accounts like crazy. We were paying lawyer fees. He was worried about supporting his family. The business went under, which is kind of funny when you think about it since my dad… If you look at the industry back then, he could have easily made tens of millions of dollars and the paid a fine to the SEC for $3 million, just like Merrill did with Henry Blodgett, who popped stocks from Merrill during the dot com era.

Frank Curzio: Merrill just threw Blodgett under the bus, paid a fine, it generated a hundreds of millions of dollars in fees. I think they paid, whatever, maybe 20 million, whatever the fine was, which is nothing. It was definitely worth it, but that was a promotion not to do wrong, right? Approach you to keep listening. If you only got to get busted and you’re not going to jail… Well, I didn’t go to jail. He got fined a little bit, but he made absolutely fortune, and everything worked out. Merrill worked out. They made a fortune. Henry Blodgett made a fortune, and they paid the SEC fine, which is just… Again, that’s Wall Street, right?

Frank Curzio: But no, he never did that. He didn’t want to build a huge firm. He was content being a small business owner, working on his terms and providing for his family. But that stress, oh man. It led to him smoking two packs a day, wasn’t eating right, gray hairs coming out. I never saw my dad more stressed out than that. And towards the end of the investigation, towards the end, just like a month or two, for… Basically, they didn’t do it, they didn’t find nothing right? They didn’t find anything. They shut our business down. They didn’t find anything. My dad ended up getting diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, and he passed away less than a year later.

Frank Curzio: That’s Wall Street for you. That’s why I started Curzio Research: To level the plain field between Wall Street and main street because it’s a disgrace. And I know. I worked on Wall Street. I saw the shit that takes place. It is an absolute joke. The advantages they have over main street are a joke. But that story, that’s the motivation. That’s motivation to beat these guys, to build a company, to build Curzio Research into a multi-billion dollar company to compete with these guys, to take business away from them. You could fight against them and we get that. But it’s always going to be focusing on helping the little guys. So, when it comes to WallStreetBets, and that blog… I get it, man. I get you guys. I hear what you’re doing and what you’re trying to accomplish.

Frank Curzio: Now, with that said, a lot of these kids are getting crushed now. Which isn’t the worst thing in the world, right? You’re going to learn more from losing an early age than winning, especially about risk management, which ironically, gave birth to this revolution. As Melvin Capital used zero risk management, naked shorting GameStop, getting caught off guard, which caused it to get bailed out by other hedge funds. What was it, two and a half billion dollars needed to be infused. It was over 50% of that position.

Frank Curzio: And now, you have a lot of people capitalizing on it, or you’re representing this group now, right? Because there’s so many people… If you have any of those, like Elon Musk is talking about… Chamath, who’s, again, is all over everywhere now. And David Portnoy… And I have to say, I love all three of these guys. I do. I’m a big fan of all three of them. They become very influential people now during this movement, not the beginning, no. They came in and made their money. And I don’t know if I must play it so much, but Chamath made… Bought call options, made half a million dollars, showed the quote options on Twitter. And then he’s donated it, which he should have.

Frank Curzio: And that was on GameStop. David Portnoy owns AMC and… But loud voices. And influential people were… Many of them when this all happened, Robinhood shut down and said, “We’re not allowing you… When to buy restrictions on…” These guys were just, like, balls to the wall on Twitter, going crazy and saying, posting like crazy. And you know, I remember someone saying these kids hold a stock here. Hold the line, I’m holding the stock and just shouting at the top of route. Robinhood placing restrictions on GameStop and other stocks is illegal. It’s bailing out Wall Street. So, you need to hold the line, or I’ll hold the line. I mean, look, Portnoy, Chamath, Musk, I’ll even throw Mark Cuban in there, has been vocal now and this… I like Mark Cuban, and I know he likes himself and likes attention, which is fine. That’s cool. He deserves it. And he’s very successful.

Frank Curzio: Tremendous respect, again, for all these guys, big fans, but they need to check their egos at the door a little bit. And these guys could afford to lose millions and they won’t blink an eye. They wouldn’t even know they lost this money. But the influence they have over the younger community, where these kids are holding GameStop, which is probably worth $3 a share based on fundamentals. AMC is an insolvent company, a 5 billion in debt, no revenue coming in, no one’s going to the movies. Hardly any revenue coming in, and these guys are in big trouble. Okay, we saw this rocket.

Frank Curzio: But I think we need to be better than this. And when I look at David Portnoy, who has millions of Twitter followers… Millions to two and a half, 3 million, last time I looked at his Instagram followers… And telling these people not to sell the stock trading at 300 that’s worth $3. I mean, you are a guy that could afford to stand on that wall. But 99% of the people who are listening to you can’t. They can’t. You tell them to hold a $300 stock that’s worth $3. Maybe it’s worth $6, if my analysis is off a little bit… Even 10, it’s not 300, and it is going to get to a single digit. It’s just a matter of time.

Frank Curzio: I see so many to people who listen to David; it’s their responsibility to research for buying anything. And I agree with that, that’s true. But let me tell you something. I mean, a lot of you out there listen to the podcast, you subscribed to my service, even own our security token, Curzio Equity Owners, CEO token. The measurement recommended stock that crashes, or I’m talking about a stock that crashes, and when you email me saying “What do I do with it? This is down.” I’ll say, “Look, you should have done your own homework and show responsibility.” I mean, you guys, you can cancel this subscription, stop listening to me immediately, and you should.

Frank Curzio: But you listen to this podcast, listen to me to get new ideas… I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every single year to travel around the world to find unique ideas, different opportunities, expand my network, and bring this stuff to you. There’s a responsibility behind that. I mean, Portnoy doesn’t have a financial newsletter, but he makes a fortune in ad dollars from a lot of those followers, who would like to go to BarStool. They’re going to bet. And now, a ton of people, millions following his trading advice, which by the way, the guy’s been like dead right. I think it was, like, the last three, four months, it’s been buying everything and saying, “This game is so easy.” And now, you realize it’s not easy. It’s not. There’s times where it’s easy and there’s times it’s difficult, but a lot of these kids, they never saw a bear market for three, four, five years, like we saw with the money industry.

Frank Curzio: Look what happened with you guys in Vancouver and how tough it’s been. And it came back; gold shot up. And you’ve seen uranium, seen silver, and everything, But when you go through a bear market, you understand a lot about risk management. The point is, I’ve got a lot of stuff right in the past six months. But I just think having that type of following it comes with responsibility. I know it’s not done on purpose or he’s manipulating anything, but a lot of kids got killed over the past few days by holding GameStop

Frank Curzio: Buying it at 200, 250, our margin. And again, the stocks go back to single digits just a matter of time. You could play it and go to 301 first and go to 401 first. I don’t know what’s going to go. I just know that the stock will be sent in single digits because that’s what it’s worth. And that’s it. $79 is a crazy expensive valuation. I mean, the price tag should be like a dollar, $2 on the stock. But sometimes, when we get caught up in emotions… You were fighting for something that we truly believe in, like this revolution, like these people, WallStreetBets. You are trying to make a statement, trying to disrupt an industry that that makes money, takes advantage of the little guy… You lose sight of the big picture a little bit.

Frank Curzio: If, for me, I want more kids to learn about trading. It’s a great thing. You’re young, you lose your money, got to play your work in power, it’s fine. But you have to go through those emotions and be like, “Holy shit. I just had a million dollars. And now it’s like $50,000.” You go through that and you learn and you build it because, I can tell you, if you do it at 50 or 60, you lose the money, you don’t have a lot of working power. Maybe you do. You want to work ’till you’re 92 to pay your bills? No. But I hope this doesn’t discourage these kids because I’m happy, truly happy, that they’re deciding to take advantage of the system, which the system is low interest rates, the Fed stimulus. Don’t fight it. I mean, these are kids that were holding up signs, protesting that they hate the Fed, and student loan bills. But for over a hundred thousand, now, they’re buying assets to buy equities. That’s what we want. Right?

Frank Curzio: You can make a lot of money investing over the long-term. Why are these kids looking short-term? How much money you can make? If you do it the right way, it’s not that difficult. You want proof? Pull the chart, S&P 500 since its inception, like 1950s, when it became 500 companies. It’s a line that always goes to the left, to the right, straight up, except a few periods. 2008, March of this year, it’s straight up with near record highs, 8% annual returns over 60 years. You know how much that is when you compound it? I’m not going to tell you. Throw a calculator up, and you’ll see millions and millions of dollars.

Frank Curzio: And you would have got paid a nice dividend on top of that, of 1.5 % every year, around that. But there are times to take on risk, there’s times to own cash, and there’s times to own dividend stocks, also times to buy value stocks, time to buy growth stocks, time to allocate money to bonds. And having someone that could guide you just like… I was lucky, man. I was lucky. I had my dad who… I had Jim Cramer. I mean, people have their thoughts about Jim Cramer. I worked right next to him, man. He was tough; he was hard on me. But man, I learned everything about growth investing. And I was fortunate, very fortunate, and lucky. I mean, that means everything. If you want to learn more about the markets, get great ideas from someone who loves this shit.

Frank Curzio: I mean, I work 14 hours a day and continue listening to this podcast. The best thing you could do… And if you want to try us out, go to our Dollar Stock Club letter, which is $4 a month. We make no money off of it. It’s $4 a month, and after marketing, we make no money off of that newsletter. But what it does is, it shows you the type of research. And that takes one pick from our podcasts, from our guests every week, and we write up a one-page report, put a target price on it, nice PDF. There you go, and here’s what we think about it. And it’s not always easy to find that stock, because sometimes I’ll get it. I talk to my guests that I interview offline before the interview and at the interview. And they’ll talk about ideas, I’ll talk about ideas, and I’ll say, “Hey, you know what?” and I’ll present it. But it’s… Yeah, it ends up to be like a dollar a week, which is nothing. But why is it so low?

Frank Curzio: And why am I putting a newsletter out there that doesn’t make any money for us? It’s because it’s a starter newsletter, where I could show you the research, we show you what we do here. And when you see it, our hope is that if we make you money, that you’re going to subscribe to our premium products, which are all doing absolutely fantastic right now. The three newsletters that we have, that I have, they’re on fire: Crypto Intelligence, Curzio Venture Opportunities, which I’ll talk about later. We’re going to open that membership back up. Go to our website and see the link, and we’ll provide a 40% discount. That’s what I mean; we’ll open it back up.

Frank Curzio: But that’s our goal here. I mean, this is why I want to start a free clinic for kids, pick 12 to 15 kids. We’re going to do that. We’ve been busy, just trying to get a little more liquidity from my token, and it’s been busy over here. We’re growing, more downloads. Thanks you so much. And it’s awesome right now. But I want to start that clinic. And the only thing I ask is… Listen, I’m going to be hard on you, and if you’re half-assing, I’m going to kick you out of it.

Frank Curzio: I’m getting a lot of emails, frank@curzioresearch.com. So many kids that want to go into it. The only thing I ask, the only thing I want, is to pay it forward. I’ve been lucky; I’m paying it forward. This is a free podcast. Not every one of you subscribes to my newsletters. But you pay it forward. That’s what you’re supposed to do for every generation. You’re supposed to pay it forward and make the next generation smarter. I want to give you everything that I’ve learned. Hopefully, you’ll be able to pass that down to 10, 15 people that really want to get better and make a difference and change the world. That’s the goal.

Frank Curzio: But anyway, continue to listen to the podcast. We’ll continue to have some great guests on, awesome guests. Speaking of guests, I have a high profile, very high profile, guest on today. It’s a former secretary of energy for the Bush administration. His name is Spencer Abraham, Secretary Spencer Abraham, who is now the chairman of the board at Uranium Energy, a company that’s been on fire lately. It’s run by my buddy, Amir Adnani. So Spencer, one of the smartest people you’ll know in the energy sector, knows everything, helps the U.S. sign energy deals with foreign nations, knows all the technologies. And here’s a guy that just decided to say, “Hey, I can go anyplace I want to go,” which you’ll hear in the interview. Any place, any place you want to go, and he decided to go to UEC, a small uranium company. It’s interesting. So, we’re going to break down the oil industry, what the cancellation of the Keystone pipeline means to the oil industry, as well as less fracking, which the current administration ran on. This isn’t political here, not political.

Frank Curzio: We just want to position ourselves right. But this could be… We could lose our energy independence. Does this mean oil prices are going to go high? We’re going to cover all that stuff, but it’s also going to address the zero carbon emissions by 2050 objective. Can we really achieve that? Very interesting, what he has to say. And finally, he’s going to break down the nuclear energy sector. Pay close attention. There’s not too many people that know more about the sector than this guy. Again, he could have gone anywhere he wanted. He chose UEC. He is the chairman of the board. It’s amazing. So, it’s a great interview, and you know what? Let’s get to it right now. Secretary Abraham, thank you so much for coming on Wall Street Unplugged.

Spencer Abraham: Thank you, Frank. It’s a clearly a busy and interesting time on Wall Street, so you’re no doubt covering a lot of interesting matters this week.

Frank Curzio: Especially this week, and you know what? Let’s start there, because we saw recently the cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline, which goes from Canada to the US. We know that fracking is going to be limited to some capacity. We don’t know how much, based on the current administration. I don’t want to get political here, because I want to show people how to make money off of this. But does this worry you in terms of it took us so long to get energy independent? Could this bring us back a few steps? Are you worried at all about that?

Spencer Abraham: Well, I don’t know whether, how far, how much this impedes us. I mean, it’s frustrating, because… Just at a time when the U.S. had broken free from its dependence on imported oil, for instance, and began to be an exporter, just at the time we became a global player on the natural gas front, we’re now moving in the direction of people saying, “Well, we can’t let that happen. So, what we need to do, is impede the infrastructure development that would allow the U.S. to really take advantage of these gains.” And to me, as is the case with so many things in life, if you cut off one avenue, something else will happen. And most likely, it’ll be less favorable from an environmental standpoint.

Spencer Abraham: I think you may have seen, I think, energy transfer partners are running ads right now that point out that, if you let pipelines happen, you maintain the scenic settings and the pastoral backdrops and so on. If you cut off pipelines, then you’ll have more trucks on the road, carrying fuel, you have more rail carts. So, it’s a trade-off, and that’s what will happen. I don’t think it means that there’ll be no place, no way to transport fuel. It’ll just mean that we’ll find alternatives, and they may not be any more… They may be less advantageous environmentally than the pipelines. But it’s consistent with, I think, the policies most people anticipated the Biden administration would enact on these issues.

Frank Curzio: Yeah, it is true. I mean, it could be expected. It is what they campaigned on. But when it comes to the individual companies, oil and gas, we’ll talk about here, because I know you’ve sat in the board in some of these big companies before. I don’t know if you’re still on the board of some of them, but I’m sure you have an ear to the ground here. I mean, it has to result in them spending their CapEx spending? Just moving in different directions, I mean, it has to impact them, because-

Spencer Abraham: Of course, I mean, there’s headlines every day, almost, about the reduction in CapEx and the consequent impact on earnings for these companies. And that probably means that there’ll be globally a reduction in product. Which means that if not tomorrow, soon enough, you’re going to see the supply inadequate to meet demand. And you’re going to then start seeing the prices go up, which will precipitate people spending more on CapEx. But in the short-term, I think it means probably higher prices for oil. We’re now in the 50s, and it could… It likely will go higher than that, as these CapEx cutbacks take even fuller hold.

Spencer Abraham: But you mentioned energy independence, and the thing that’s disappointing to me, is that even though we’ve acquired through the development of horizontal drilling and fracking and so on, the capacity to meet demand here in our country for oil, and we’ve got abundant natural gas at the same time, we still are very dependent on the of the importation of another key ingredient: uranium, which is the feed stock for our nuclear fleet, that produces 20% of our electricity. I think there’s one thing I would hope the parties could all agree on, is that we don’t want to continue to be as dependent as we are on imported uranium. Today, that percentage is about 99%. Given the defense needs that we have for uranium, as well as the civilian power plant needs, this is area of energy independence that truly needs our attention for a long period of time. Also, we’re going to find ourselves at the mercy of exporters who may turn the tables on us down the road.

Frank Curzio: And I’m glad we’re talking about uranium here, clean energy. It seems like this has bipartisan support. I mean, this is one of the things, one of the few things, that we have bipartisan support on. Even with the latest initiative, I think it went through the U.S. Senate committee on appropriations where we’re looking at $1.5 billion a year, 10-year uranium reserve to purchase newly found uranium in the U.S. I mean, this seems like everything’s a go here. I guess, what’s the initiation for this? How does this get started?

Spencer Abraham: Well, first, it’s $150 million a year, all of this uranium reserve. And now it’s in the hands of the Department of Energy, I think, to really develop the program. I mean, the program would hopefully be as a competitive, transparent process, by which the government would accept bids from U.S. producers to sell to the U.S. government, a certain amount of uranium at a certain price. I think if it’s a fair and open process. It helps to incentivize that industry, which is in great need right now of some momentum.

Spencer Abraham: What we’ve seen happen over the last 10 plus years, is that that state-owned uranium mining companies in places like Russia and Kazakhstan have flooded the international market with underpriced uranium, because they’ve got state subsidies maintaining these operations. And that’s, in turn, put free enterprise mining operations out of business, because they simply can’t operate at the prices that these FSU countries and Russia are willing to produce uranium and sell uranium at. So hopefully, by building a reserve, we can start to increase the sale of domestic product. That, combined with what I think will be a growing global demand for uranium, may start to put the market back in good shape.

Frank Curzio: Yeah, and it’s amazing that this finally passed. I think it’s 1.5 billion for 10 years, and you’re right, 150 million, I think, a year. When I look at the dynamics of this, where we’re one of the large consumers of uranium, yet why… And it’s a tough question, I don’t know if you can answer this. But why did it take every U.S. producer to basically shut down before something like this passes? I mean, there’s no one producing. Now it’s going to change, with this change. But I mean, how come it gets that far?

Spencer Abraham: No, and even the change itself, I mean, $150 million a year, even if it was all spent buying uranium from domestic producers at fair price, at a free market price, wouldn’t be enough to put everybody on easy street. I mean, these companies could at least start to begin operations again. But it’s been ignored, in my opinion, by too many policy makers for too long. And part of the reason that we got into this position was that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S., in an effort to try to address non-proliferation problems in the FSU and in Russia itself, was willing to buy down-blended weapons grade uranium to use in our power plants.

Spencer Abraham: So, we began to look to Russia to supply our uranium for power plants. Then, we saw the state-owned companies and places, that I’ve mentioned earlier, undercut the market price. Why it took so long is frankly frustrating to me, because a year and a half ago, I think it was, the Department of Commerce actually came to the conclusion that these companies were undercutting U.S. development of uranium. And that… Because it wasn’t critical material with national security implications, that we ought to impose some domestic buying quotas. But the White House, the Trump White House, chose not to go down that road.

Spencer Abraham: Had they done so, I think we’d already be in much better shape, because that proposal would have required 25% of the uranium used in our domestic nuclear plants to come from America. So, we let it go. And again, we have the 99% dependency on uranium. We were obsessing over 60% dependent on oil. We thought that was catastrophic and damaging the national interest. So, it is a disappointment that we’re where we are today. There needs to be account… It needs to continue to be a priority for U.S. national security policy.

Frank Curzio: Now, being a former secretary of energy, and as secretary, you could probably get a job almost any place you want within the energy industry, but you are currently chairman of Uranium Energy. So why… What do you see with Uranium Energy that separates it? Again, this is a U.S. producer, and this just passed recently. So yeah, they’re well-positioned, but why UEC compared to almost any place else you can go to?

Spencer Abraham: Well, I had worked on these issues as secretary, trying to develop more domestic uranium and uranium enrichment capacity, because the fuel cycle for the nuclear power fleet was clearly… And this is 20 years ago when I took office, was clearly very dependent on imports. We didn’t even have a domestic enrichment facility in the U.S., that were using modern technology to produce civilian nuclear reactor grade uranium. So, it was something I worked on. Then, when I left government, it was something I kept my eye and interest on. Finally, it turned out, just through the course of my regular business activities, that I got to know UEC and was ultimately offered the chance to be a member of that board. I took it as much because of my interest in this national security challenges as any other fact.

Frank Curzio: So, now you’re chairman, do you tell Amir Adnani what to do, or is it that he tells you what to do? You don’t have to answer that, but I’ve been good friends with Amir for over 10 years. And-

Spencer Abraham: He’s a very able guy.

Frank Curzio: Incredible.

Spencer Abraham: And I’ve come to be very good friends with him, but also come to respect deeply his business skills. Hopefully, I bring a little bit to the table in terms of the regulatory side of the issues that we deal with.

Frank Curzio: I definitely think you do. So, just let’s turn from uranium into clean energy. ExxonMobil just reported, and they said that they are starting a new clean initiative division, and every single company is making it publicly aware, they’re putting out statements. It just almost seems over the top, a little bit. But are we going to go too far to one side, where I think most Americans, and I could be wrong on this, really believe in climate change? So, we want to do everything we can to help the environment.

Frank Curzio: But I mean, you’re looking at solar, you’re looking at wind, you’re look at electric batteries… I mean, is there anything there really that you’re interested in? Because I know that you’re interested in some of these technologies, including, I believe, it was hydrogen fuel cells. But talk about some of the other clean energies? Because that market’s really taken off in terms of stocks. And I just want to get your opinion.

Spencer Abraham: I think… Here’s where you’re at. You’ve got definitely great concerns, in the part of large numbers of Americans, in the environment and in the impact of CO2 emissions and so on. My experience is… That there’s a lot of political support for that, up to a point. That’s the point when people start either losing their jobs or being unable to afford their energy that they have to purchase, whether it’s electricity for their homes or gas for their cars or so on. That’s not just true in the clean energy area; it’s the truth across the board. I mean, Americans have a certain amount of their budget for energy, and if it starts to be inadequate, they’re going to push back. So, I think that the clean energy movement is going to be successful in a number of these areas.

Spencer Abraham: I think you mentioned one: hydrogen, that I worked a lot on as secretary. And I know it’s starting to really have a comeback in terms of being an important component in terms of hydrogen fuel cells, in terms of things like transportation. But there does need to be, I guess I would say, a realistic approach as well. The realistic approach has to take into account the time between where we are today and when it will really be possible for some of these technologies and clean energy sources to replace the existing sources.

Spencer Abraham: I mean, I think they can, in the interim, begin to take a bigger share of the market. But that’s why nuclear is so important, because we need a clean alternative, a way to provide base-load power before these renewables can really pick up a big enough part of the energy responsibility. Nuclear is the one area that doesn’t emit and can take base-load responsibility. But I think a lot of these are going to do well over time, and they’re becoming more economical and therefore, more realistic as energy alternatives.

Frank Curzio: Yeah. Now, and just guys out there, base-load is 24 hours, where wind, solar, I mean, you need the wind to blow, you need the sun to be out, solar. But for nuclear, it’s 24-hour base-load. But I want to ask a question, because you’re from Michigan, and Jennifer Granholm, who is now the current secretary of energy, is also from Michigan. So, is there a Michigan connection there? Do you guys know each other at all?

Spencer Abraham: Yeah, we do, and I think she’ll be a very strong leader for the department. We were in office in Michigan, we overlapped for a couple of years, when I was in the senate and she was the attorney general. And I’ve spoken to her since her nomination. I think she’s definitely ready to give her all to the job. And I wish her well.

Frank Curzio: Yeah, and she was saying that oil, coal, obviously this isn’t going to go away quick, and gas. But she was in favor of alternative energy. She said all the right things during a hearing. I’m going to ask you a tough question. When I see the current administration saying that they want to have zero carbon emissions by 2050, is that something that’s actually achievable? I mean, we’re talking such a long time out. But to me, like you said, it’s a sacrifice. If you don’t have a pipeline, you’re going to have trucks, you’re going to have… It’s going to be alternatives.

Spencer Abraham: Yeah. Well, I mean, again, I don’t know on what basis that goal is set. I mean, when people set goals that far away, they’re really… None of them are going to be around to be held accountable. So, I did some of that when I was in office myself, when we talked about a hydrogen revolution. But it was going to be well past the point when my term was over. So, I think it’s a… As to whether it’s achievable, obviously, it’s going to take significant developments of new technology, I think, for that to happen. We have great hopes for things like batteries and other storage approaches, or systems for energy to work. If they do, that makes it a lot more achievable.

Spencer Abraham: Because right now, when the sun is shining brightly, you’re often producing more energy and electricity than you can use. So, if you can find a way to store it and keep it for long periods of time, then that helps you to address, to meet these kinds of goals. So, we’ll see. Certainly, it’s the direction we’re moving in. And as I said, the break will be, I think, the cost and the dislocation issues. Again, Americans, I think, given their choice, are going to pick the cleaner environment of CO2 reductions, et cetera, until it starts to be a significant impact on them financially or otherwise. So, they’ve got to work this in tandem, making sure that these steps forward are not, in one way or another, going to shift public opinion negatively.

Frank Curzio: No, that definitely makes a lot of sense. And I mean, we covered a lot of areas. I appreciate you coming on. I think the one last question, this one is important: I’m assuming that you’re a football fan, since you’re from Michigan. Who do you got for the Super Bowl on Sunday?

Spencer Abraham: Buccaneers.

Frank Curzio: Oh yeah?

Spencer Abraham: Well, Tom Brady went to the University of Michigan. So, I’ve got some loyalties to, even though I didn’t go to the University of Michigan. But I think that the odds-makers favor the Chiefs, and certainly they’ve been almost unstoppable. But Brady seems to know how to win in the Super Bowl. So, it’ll be great. I hope it’ll be as good a game as the Patriots-Chiefs game, the AFC championship game two years ago, where he and Mahomes would go head-to-head, and it went right down to the wire and into overtime. So, for those of us who’ve been largely shut in our homes here for months, it will make this Sunday a little bit more exciting than the usual one.

Frank Curzio: Yeah, I hope it’s a good game, three points. I just… I thought it’d be more. The fact that it’s three, I think it’s going to be a lot closer than everybody thinks, so hopefully-

Spencer Abraham: Safeties may be a factor too. Because each team has a couple of guys, I think, that are questionable. And depending on who can really play on Sunday, it may have a big impact. Because if both the defensive backs for the Buccaneers are out, those young safeties that… That’s going to definitely help the Chiefs.

Frank Curzio: No, absolutely. We’ve got a football fan talking about the linebackers and everything. I love it. So, I’m looking forward to Sunday. I’m hoping for a good game. I’m a big football fan. And Mr. Secretary, thank you so much for taking the time to come on here. I know how busy you are, and it really means a lot. I just want to say thank you very much.

Spencer Abraham: Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

Frank Curzio: Yeah. I’m such an idiot. Spencer from Michigan, I should have figured out the Brady connection. Again, if you’re watching the podcast, putting in a plug, on YouTube, you’ll notice that I had a black shirt on during the interview. Because now I have the Brady jersey back on. I’m interviewing the secretary of state. You know, these guys can be stuffy or whatever. But let me tell you, he was cool and everything. Really cool. I mean, I asked him a football question, I had no idea if he watches football or not. But I still, I should have put two-and-two together and that he was going to root for Brady since he’s from Michigan. But Spencer was just a really cool guy, down-to-Earth. And usually, we have conversations before and after, and we joke around after, and he loved the interview.

Frank Curzio: And he said, he’s going to mess with Amir, right? Because, I mean it’s his company, and now ,he’s chairman of the board. And I was joking around. Does he answer for Amir, or Amir answers for him, or whatever? And he said, “Yeah, you know what, I’m going to call him right now. I’m going to message him, text him. Because I’m going to say, I thought that guy, Frank, was your friend. He explained the strengths and weaknesses of working with you.”

Frank Curzio: I said, “All right, I’ll go through with it.” So, it’s funny because we taped that earlier. He likes messing with people and is just a great guy, a great interview, and thanks so much. Because of you, we’re getting the secretary of energy. Next week’s going to be another amazing interview, Marc Randolph, co-founder of Netflix. Some really big, high-profile names are coming on because our downloads are doing great. And I just want to say thank you. I’m going to continue to put on some great people in front of you. And to get back to Spencer real quick, that wasn’t about politics. Whether you agree with clean energy initiatives, climate change, fracking, it’s about positioning yourself in the right areas that you see, or you believe, where the most money is going to flow to, due to these new policies.

Frank Curzio: I agree with Spencer. New policies are going to push oil prices higher. Well, it’s just the beginning of this. We’ve seen over the past couple of months, oil was going higher and higher and higher. But just someone who’s very connected and who really believes in the uranium industry and that industry, I’m so happy for so many of you. I know I covered it for a long time. You guys, I have been in it for a long time and see some of these stocks really moving higher. It’s really cool. I love to see you guys making money. But thank you so much, Spencer, for coming on the podcast. And again, I always say, this podcast is about you, right? It’s not about me. So, let me know what you thought of it at frank@curzioresearch.com. That’s frank@curzioresearch.com.

Frank Curzio: Now, let’s get to some of the news this week with Daniel Creech, senior research analyst, Curzio Research. It’s been crazy, right, the news flow. I love earnings season, as crazy as it is. But still, you got the Robinhood thing going on. You had some amazing earnings from some of these big guys that reported. And you got MicroStrategy buying more Bitcoin, which is insane. I think something like two and a half billion dollars that it’s worth. But let’s cover some of these things. Daniel, thanks so much for joining us, man. What’s going on?

Daniel Creech: Hey, thanks. Happy… Well, happy Wednesday, Wall Street Unplugged. We got a lot to rock and roll about this week. This is good stuff.

Frank Curzio: And I came in with the Brady jersey on and he’s like, “Whoa!” He’s like-

Daniel Creech: This is nothing. I had to play golf with him where he wore the damn thing. One round.

Frank Curzio: Yeah. One golf, that’s what he gave to me. I said, “All right I’ll wear it on the podcast.” But I actually wore-

Daniel Creech: What is it? You lost a bet to a friend or… That’s how you got the jersey, right?

Frank Curzio: Yeah that’s how I got the jersey. And it’s funny, I didn’t really lose… Like, I lost that bet, but we did good, man. We won. It was pretty good league. I think we won a payout of like a thousand dollars or something like that. So the winner… But Brady really killed it, man, and it was great. Unfortunately, I got to wear this jersey now. Again, I’ll break this down later on. But Daniel, let’s talk about what’s going on with… There’s a lot of new stuff with Robinhood here. I know that these guys have to take responsibility, and I know you have a different opinion there. So, let’s start there. What’s going on?

Frank Curzio: Because we saw a lot of these big guys get out of their positions now. And these little guys… Yet, you also hear him say, hold the line. Hold what line? It’s pretty crazy out there. It’s not that they had the responsibility. But, they do have the responsibility. But still, people have to do their own research. But, when you have an influential person telling you what to do, now you’re losing money. I don’t know.

Daniel Creech: Yeah. I totally understand what you mean on the influencing part and maybe getting some people in. But, ultimately, if you have the conversation long enough, I think you got to get to the realization that, hey, if you went ahead and made the order and you bought it, you were taking on risk whether you knew that or not. And it’s like, you point to… This is going to be a great… I hate to use the word fascinating, but this is fascinating to me from a lot of different angles. And you’ve talked about it in the past. This is going to be a great thing for younger investors. Because the best thing you can do is lose… I don’t want to say wiped out as in wiped out, not being able to get back up and try again. But to get that gut feeling, to get that emotional feeling of loss, and it sucks. It’s terrible.

Daniel Creech: And you don’t have to buy a stock and lose money to get that same feeling. But I do think that’s going to happen. But that’s normal. You’re going to… Or, some people are going to get pissed off and say screw trading or screw investing altogether. Yeah, probably, there’s percentages of people in there. That’s okay. Are some going to learn from it and maybe go on to be very successful? Absolutely. Those all fit in the same funnel, and I think that’s ultimately really good overall. To your point, yeah, I understand, and I’m not going to say I’m completely up to speed on this because, if you go through any of the Reddit’s or tweets, they’re happening so fast and you’ve got millions if not… You’ve got hundreds of thousands of people, and those on the Reddit WallStreetBets, if not millions.

Daniel Creech: So, I don’t want to act like I’m completely up-to-date. But, to my knowledge, Portnoy was never in GameStop. He was buying AMC and all that kind of stuff.

Daniel Creech: And, if you only know him from the trading, I guess I could lean a little bit more towards… Why you understand the responsibility. But if you know him, do you check his Barstool Sports app at all? Or have you ever seen any of his commentary on gambling?

Daniel Creech: So, he’s like a Donald Trump. He’s out front saying, “Hey, I’m rich. This is what I do. You do your own thing. I can bet a hundred grand here or there. You can’t.” So, I got to respect him for being… He seems to be very consistent on my point.

Daniel Creech: And that’s why I have to stop at the responsible side. But, I give you influential, and if people are losing money, because they’re on him, they’re going to get pissed at him. He’s dealing with blowbacks; he’s getting called a suit. And I’m sure that people think that he made money and got out. But, supposedly, he lost a bunch of money. Now, he’s back in, as of this morning, in certain stocks. So, the saga continues.

Frank Curzio: Yeah. I mean, I think he’s good for the markets. I mean, he’s everywhere now. He has a big following, and he’s got a lot of young people on. But again, there’s just a responsibility. I hate when people go on TV and they’ll say something and they’ll never come back on again. At least he’s going to come up and follow up and say, “Hey, I lost this, I lost money a lot.” Which I respect. But there’s no accountability out there, right? And I think people lose sight of the fact that when you’re on TV, CNBC, Fox News, whatever business news, there’s tons of people watching you and listening to your advice. And they’re going to take their money, their personal money, and invest it according to what you’re saying. That’s one of the things I love about Jim Cramer, where, working with him, it was really difficult.

Frank Curzio: But when he got things wrong on TV, he was throwing shit. He was pissed, and you wanted to stay away from him. But I like that. He understood the responsibility. He understood that, wow, I just lost people money. And I don’t know if he understands that yet, but I know some of these bets aren’t working out for him, and he’s been fantastic the past six months. But I don’t know, I hope he continues doing what he’s doing. I know that he wants everyone following it to make a lot of money. And that’s a good thing. But sometimes, things backfire a little bit and-

Daniel Creech: Absolutely.

Frank Curzio: It’s been holding GameStop right now and getting the shit kicked out of him. It’s pretty crazy. But let’s stick with the same subject, but move on from that, is Robinhood because Robinhood went on TV and said, “We’re okay.”

Frank Curzio: We’re perfectly okay. These are requirements. And then, a couple days later, they raised, what, over 2 billion, $3 billion. And they’re saying, well, we were required to give you one on TV, the week before, last week, and said that, no, everything’s okay. And this wasn’t our fault. We didn’t make a call to Citadel or anything like that. But now, these guys needed to raise money. And now, they postponed their IPO indefinitely because, you know, they’re losing tons of accounts right now. And there’s a lot of investigations being launched on them.

Daniel Creech: Yeah, in lawsuits, investigations, and class action lawsuits. I know those are getting popular. I read somewhere that this is going to be a movie. Did you see that? It was-

Frank Curzio: Yeah.

Daniel Creech: No doubt, it could be and should be, for a couple of different reasons. It’d be a lot like any other Wall Street movie, you know-

Frank Curzio: Portnoy wanted Bradley Cooper to play him.

Daniel Creech: Oh, there you go. Who doesn’t like Bradley Cooper?

Frank Curzio: They all know. Cramer mentioned it. If you need me-

Daniel Creech: Oh, that’s hilarious. Oh yeah, you can do a what’s it called cameos or whatever. Yeah, the Robinhood thing, I think… Let me defend Goldman Sachs here real quick. Because, as you know, they were getting ready to do the IPO, initial public offering, take Robinhood public. And they had nothing but momentum, especially before this GameStop. They were growing users. I think they added over 3 million last year alone. They were changing the game. They were making other huge brokerages follow their lead to zero commission trading and all that kind of stuff.

Daniel Creech: So, they had all this momentum. You bring in Goldman Sachs, and every other Wall Street banker, is going to take them public. And what do you do when you’re starting from the start line to the finish line, Frank, you piss off millions of people. They had locked them out. So, in defense of the big greedy banks, man, I feel sorry for you.

Frank Curzio: It is crazy.

Daniel Creech: Because the IPO is now on the backburner. And you know, Goldman… Somebody bought a Ferrari with a bonus coming up. Now, they’re pissed. And you know-

Frank Curzio: There’s tons of heat. They moved to the cash app on Square, who benefited. There’s another company that just raised $125 million. It’s another free trading platform. I mean, talking about millions of people, just getting off the account because they’re so pissed off. They may come back or whatever-

Daniel Creech: Yeah absolutely.

Frank Curzio: But it’s just the way this went down, where it’s the first time in the history of the markets where you said, we halted stocks because you’re not allowing people to buy them. It’s different with short selling. And sometimes, when you look at banks who are merging, or institutions, you can destroy and have so many… The whole financial system would have collapsed if they continue, after they let Lehman fail. I didn’t want them, but they had to bail them out, or our employment rate priced to 25% today.

Daniel Creech: Yeah. And the craziest thing with Robinhood here is, Vlad, and I might be butchering that, but like you said, he went on TV and said, “Oh no, we weren’t under pressure from anybody.” Then he wrote an op-ed, I believe, in the… It was in USA Today. It’s been published all over. But the crazy thing to me is that, you’re either the worst PR… Bad communicators. And you made a dumb ass decision at the worst time, to make everybody an ass.

Frank Curzio: Why do they make that… That’s like a full day though.

Daniel Creech: I know, exactly. That’s what I’m saying without-

Frank Curzio: When probably, without them saying the reason why, they shut these accounts down and put restrictions on it. They did not say it was the whole entire day. If they would have come in and said it right away, I don’t understand that.

Daniel Creech: Or at least said it beforehand, before they limited stuff. And that’s what I’m saying. It’s either the worst public relations communications screw up in a long time, or there’s a bunch of shady stuff going on behind the scenes. And there are settlements or trades and or whatever behind the inner workings of this Wizard of Oz… It isn’t going well. So, the funny thing is that if you keep asking those questions and go up… Because then, the CEO of Robinhood came out and said, “Hey, no hedge fund.” Because Citadel at .72, who loaned them, or not loaned them, but put money into Melvin capital… Which, did you cover how much Melvin Capital lost?

Daniel Creech: Did you see the figures?

Frank Curzio: I didn’t say figures yet. I think it was-

Daniel Creech: Roughly, it was a 12 and a half billion dollar hedge fund.

Frank Curzio: Was it like five or something?

Daniel Creech: They lost 53%. And that was, I think, over 5 billion in January alone with that short squeeze.

Frank Curzio: Just them? Because I thought it was 53%, the whole fund was down.

Daniel Creech: Just Melvin Capital.

Frank Curzio: Just the GameStop position. But yeah, that’s-

Daniel Creech: So, .72 in Citadel. Citadel fulfills or gets a lot of the orders from the Robinhood trading app. So, he had to come out, Vlad, and say, “Hey, it wasn’t Citadel,” because that was a lot of rumors. And Portnoy was on that and everybody was yelling and pissed off, rightly so. But who to be pissed off at? They said it was the clearing house. The Robinhood CEO, Vlad, came out and said it was the clearing house. Now, most people probably don’t know. And if you want to go down a rabbit hole here, we’re going to get down a rabbit hole, Frank. The depository trust and clearing corporation, DTCC.

Frank Curzio: That’s a story now. I’m glad they’re looking at this.

Daniel Creech: Well, and hopefully they will. I don’t think that they will, because there’s two avenues to go here. One, you can just bury it because it’s just basically a monopoly that controls all the settlements and all the trades. I know Frank’s had experience with this, but if you go back to 2008, remember our old friend Patrick Byrne from Overstock when we recommended that?

Frank Curzio: Yep.

Daniel Creech: So, Patrick Byrnes, CEO, founded Overstock, he’s no longer there. He’s on the other side of the world. He’s kind of just hiding out.

Frank Curzio: I don’t even know where he’s hiding.

Daniel Creech: He’s interesting, but he has a website, and it is the deep cover, deep capture. And back in 2008, 2009, and I remember seeing this, and I was interested in this because he was always arguing that the crash in 2008, 2009… Yes, it was due to leverage and stupidity, but it was also a big settlement issue.

Daniel Creech: And he has a lot of negative things to say about the DTCC and the ownership of that and how it operates. I don’t think anybody’s going to look into that nearly the way they should. I think the heat’s going to come down on either hedge funds and Robinhood, and you’re going to have a lot of regulatory limitations put on individual investors, which I think is a bad deal. But go to deep capture, read a little bit about the DTCC, who owns all the stocks and settlement, who owns all the certificates. It’s a wild Wizard of Oz story, but it’s just ironic that retail brokerage and retail investors brought all this into the limelight. So, we’ll see where we go.

Frank Curzio: So, it’s called T plus two, where it takes two days to clear some of this. So that means, if you’re looking at clearing house, they settle trading accounts, clear trades, maintain margins, delivery, regulated delivery, your reports trade data and stuff like that. But selling these trades, this is why it’s a big deal, because this happened to me. So, if you notice in our promotions, we say Frank Holmes got me into a company called Hive Technologies. And someone dropped out and I got in, and this was before the market really took off for crypto. So, I think it was like late 2017. And I said, sure, I’m in. And then I was $25,000, I think it was… He got me in .25 cents. So yeah, a hundred thousand shares, and you know, crypto went crazy.

Frank Curzio: And these guys mined for Ethereum and Bitcoin. So, the stock went to $6, right? I don’t know, 25 cents to $6, and there’s like a four month lockup period. So, the shares at the clearing house, right? You got to go through this whole thing, like try it there at the clearing house and the lockup period ends. So, this is like six, it goes to five, it goes to four. All these guys are shorting and selling it short and shorting the shit out of it. And I call my broker up, who’s a great broker, and I said, dude, how come I don’t have the shares yet? He’s like, it took two weeks. And I told him, I said, well, by them having the shares, meaning that in order to short, you have to be able to lend the shares out. They have to be someplace. And in the clearing house, within that period, they could be short.

Frank Curzio: And that that’s a big deal, two days, when you’re looking at two day moves that you saw, I think… What was it, two days ago, wasn’t GameStop at 250? And we went for 350, 250, now it’s 90. I mean, two days a big deal. And finally, I was able to get out of that stock. You know what I got out of a $1.80? I’m not complaining. It’s amazing. But I was calling him-

Daniel Creech: I’d be complaining, from six to a $1.80.

Frank Curzio: Oh, I bitched to him. But 354, we’re talking about a lot of money, that I winded up having to get out at a $1.80. But you know, these are issues I… And I talked about this being a revolution, where this is, you saw… What is it that Dan Loeb said, he has no short positions he saw in January.

Frank Curzio: He’s usually short something, right? Whatever. You had Citron Research side without publishing these or publishing reports, it’s going to be shorting, I guess. But they’re going to be publishing, meaning they’re not going to do that whole marketing campaign they do. But it is having big changes, and let’s see what happens. But I will tell you that, as of now, GameStop is in the nineties. And again, I think it could go high before it goes low, but it will go… AMC is down to $8 now. Again, AMC, I think is an insolvent business. Hopefully, they make it. They did get a little bit of funding, which started this move. And then, the short squeeze and everything. But it is pretty crazy, man. It just continues, and it’s not going away anytime soon. But I want to turn the attention-

Daniel Creech: Hold on real quick. Can I add one more thing?

Frank Curzio: Sure.

Daniel Creech: Because I think the real issue here is just what you said, and I wish that the investigation would lead to, is naked short selling, which means you’re selling stuff you don’t have possession of, which is entirely illegal by rule. It’s supposedly not to be able to be done. There’s been tons of cases with companies and short sellers going back and forth with hedge funds, especially 2008, 2009. That’s the real issue and what we should be looking at. What I fear is that, the issue will be turned and blamed on hedge funds and shorting. Because shorting at something isn’t bad. It’s not wrong. It’s not illegal. It’s a market.

Frank Curzio: You’re hedging yourself-

Daniel Creech: You could argue-

Frank Curzio: You could hedge yourself.

Daniel Creech: Yeah, exactly. It’s not that evil shorts are… Do they do shady shit a lot? Yes. And that’s when should get them and punish them.

Frank Curzio: I mean, did they short in two companies that got hurt from the lockdown, right? I mean, GameStop has stores, right? That’s not an online operate, but they have stores. And you have AMC cinema. So, it’s almost like these companies… Fire employees. And that’s a lot to the Reddit crowd, who was saying that, you’re destroying companies that have been forced to close and your piling on and you don’t give a shit. So-

Daniel Creech: And like I said, I am taking a side here on this one because it’s not… The coronavirus and the shutdown didn’t change these business models and drive them out. AMC, I’ll give you that one. The GameStop, I mean, that was going downhill until they turn it around, or it’s just going to slowly bleed out. But the big thing here, I think, should be looked at is the naked short selling and all that kind of stuff. But I fear it’s going to get turned to hedge funds, and then the little guys are going to have more restrictions on trading, I.E: Us, and that’s going to be a bummer. But we’ll see how it unfolds.

Frank Curzio: I definitely see how it unfolds here. All right, I want to talk about a couple other things. Bitcoin gained some steam again at 35,000, and you had MicroStrategy come out. So MicroStrategy is the one that uses the cash balance, and you know, they’re buying Bitcoin, they’d been dead right on it, right? So, they just bought another $10 million worth. They paid the average price of $33,800, which is close to where it is today, showing you that this isn’t, hey, a short-term investment. He truly believes that Bitcoin is going to replace gold as a store of value. That’s his thought, right? He’s not buying it for that it’s a currency. He corrected… I forgot who went after. I don’t know if Steve Forbes or whoever said, “Oh, you know what MicroStrategy is doing?”

Frank Curzio: And he said, no, it’s not going to ever replace a dollar. He said it’s just the alternative for gold. It’s going to take all the money away. That’s why he’s buying it. So then now, on 71,000 and 79 Bitcoins, right, at the current price, that’s roughly two and a half billion dollars, which is 40% of their entire market cap. I mean, this is becoming like a pure play, right? Not a software company, nothing like that. And another thing we could talk about that MicroStrategy… And then I want to talk about something that everyone focuses on cryptocurrency, and they look at Bitcoin, you got to look at the Ethereum, right? Dig a smart contract maker. They’re coming out with Ethereum 2.0 to address a lot of things that doesn’t function as fast as it should and be able to do as many transactions as some of the alternatives.

Frank Curzio: But this thing now broke out 1500. I mean, we have this in our portfolio at, what’s the price? I don’t even know. It’s-

Daniel Creech: Ugh, you’re going to put me on the spot. And I don’t know-

Frank Curzio: You could bring it up, but this was something that was $120 not long ago, and 1,500 broke through its all-time highs, right? And it’s kind of amazing. You’re seeing this… It’s not just Bitcoin, guys. So, you need to understand cryptos, you need to understand… You can buy a lot of these things through Coinbase, a lot of large ones. But some of our positions have really… That Crypto Intelligence newsletter, if I knew the positions would be like that, I would have quit my job and just bought all those and not worried about it. But again, we went down on some of these positions two years ago. But now, all things are up tremendously.

Daniel Creech: Yeah. The moves have been incredible. And you’re starting to see this, build out of the platforms where it makes it a lot easier for the average Joe to buy it in a safe or at least in, quotations around the word safe. Of course there’s risk and everything, but a safety net of buying it and a trusted source. So a lot of people that buy through square or PayPal excuse me, feel a hell of a lot more confident doing that on their cell phone than they would, going to either a Coinbase. Which is a large name or a Binance us, or an overseas or whatever.

Daniel Creech: That is all helping out tremendously. And I’m sure you touched on this a little bit. I know you have in the past, but if a fraction of corporations start even thinking about putting anything into Bitcoin as an asset or a hedge against inflation, man, that thing can go a lot higher. The Ethereum is interesting. We’re in a $139… We made that in, what is that, April of 2019? It’s been a couple of years, going on two years now. But yeah, it’s up over 850% as a 1,300. Now it’s at 1,600. So ,we’re up a lot more than that.

Frank Curzio: And there’s a 10 bagger for us. I mean, we have a Silvergate Capital. I mean, these are a stocks that we have in this portfolio that recommended 12. It went over a hundred yesterday. I mean, some of these moves are just absolutely incredible. And Voyager Digitals is another one we just recommend at 86 cents. It’s over $8, and that was in November. And I’m not just touting. I mean, we’ve-

Daniel Creech: And like you said, they were down. They were down after we recommended Ethereum, and it was down. So-

Frank Curzio: It just shows you, when you’re looking from a risk-reward standpoint, guys, I mean, it makes sense here. It makes sense that if you’re looking for… A lot of people take on a risk and they say, hey, I got to take a lot of risk, and I don’t care if I lose the $5,000 as long as you turn it to $10,000. No, that’s not a good risk, if you’re going to risk all of your money, right? If you’re going to risk all of your money at $5,000 that you put into something, make sure those gains are three X, five X, 10 X. And that’s what crypto offers you if you listen to the right people. But yeah, it’s kind of amazing to see how crazy this is.

Frank Curzio: But getting back to MicroStrategy, they have a conference today, and I tweeted about this, @FrankCurzio. They have a conference today, Daniel, that a ton of people registered. I registered as well. And CEO came out and said, I’ve never seen so many CEOs of other companies sign up for this thing. What does that tell you? It tells you that, you’re looking at, man, I don’t know how much cash is on the balance sheet altogether for S&P 500 companies. What is it? Over 200 billion for Apple.

Daniel Creech: Yeah. I was going to say, look at Apple and those guys.

Frank Curzio: But you know, you’re looking at these guys just putting, one, 2%, 3% if they decide to buy Bitcoin. But the fact that so many people are looking at this and you’re sitting in cash, zero rates, zero everything, he’s going over the whole conference. It’s really cool. He goes over like the legal aspects. He’s going to have like five or six different sessions, and it’s just really cool. I’ll try to bring it up for guys to show it to you, but it just shows the interest, right Daniel? And Bitcoin from corporations, institutions now, right? That’s why it’s a different ball game. It’s not just regular folks or young folks getting in it. You’re seeing people, even some of the biggest hedge funds, talk about it, right?

Daniel Creech: Yeah. And that’s really the cool thing for me from just a maturing standpoint, as a fan of history and capital markets and things like that, just to see it expand. Obviously, there’s no argument that the big difference here in the runup to new highs, versus a few years ago in 2017, is a lot more institution and big money getting in like corporations. And another fun thought is, it’s not a far stretch… Let’s say you’re Apple, Frank, or Microsoft, Google, or anybody with a lot of cash right now in a 0% interest rate world.

Daniel Creech: When it is advantageous for you, as an owner or an allocator of capital in a position of management or CEO of a company, and you have a fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders to do what’s best. When it is advantageous for you, Frank, to take out debt and buy back stock and or pay dividends like what Apple and the big guys are doing… When you live in that kind of an environment and you have hundreds of billions of dollars, explain to me what the risk is, on putting a billion or 2 billion in Bitcoin, as a hedge against silly policies that make it advantageous for you to take out borrowed money, and buy stock, and pay dividends with it.

Frank Curzio: And that’s why you-

Daniel Creech: And I don’t think that’s a big stretch.

Frank Curzio: No, I don’t think it’s a big stretch.

Daniel Creech: And that’s why I don’t want to get too bullish near all-time highs, because it’s so much easier to get bullish and more bullish as things are going in the momentum and in whatever way they’re going. It works for bearishness too, like you always point out. The market will drop 30% and the bearish come out and say, it’s going down another 50 from here. But that’ll be interesting on that management… On his conference call. And I just don’t think it’s a hard stretch. So, I think there’s going to be a ton of volatility between now and then. But as more things open up and more people realize and get more money given to them to gamble with and have fun and do whatever, expect silliness and volatility.

Frank Curzio: I have it up now, MicroStrategy World.Now. The future is now, February 3rd, 4th, today and tomorrow, and you can register for free. Again, I’m not promoting this, but I registered because, again, I want to learn more about this, just like we all want to learn more about this, right? I’m very familiar with Bitcoin, but I’m not familiar with the laws around Bitcoin, which he’s going to cover, Bitcoin for corporations, create shareholder value, improve your product, score your company. He goes over the legal aspects. I mean, this is really, really cool. But the fact that you also… The CEO, Michael Taylor, is going to be on with lot of other great, great people and have round tables. That’s a little bit expensive one, that’s a premium pass.

Frank Curzio: It’s just amazing how quickly this is getting adopted by institutions. It took a little while, but now, it just makes sense. It really does. I could see some of these companies that they’re looking to do it. And not only that, from a corporation… Look at the companies who got into Bitcoin. Look at their stock prices. Look at PayPal. Look at Square. Look at Silverlake Capital. Look at Voyager. Look at Hive. Look at MicroStrategy. Look where the stock went. So-

Daniel Creech: So, you’ve got to give Horowitz credit. We shorted that in the Dollar Stock Club, got out for a small gain in a week or two, and thank goodness we did. I think our price was $577, that we got out for a small gain. It’s $732 today.

Frank Curzio: You know what? I don’t know if I want to give him full credit because on Wednesday, he said that, and that was through Wednesday. Wednesday, it went up tremendously, and Thursday is when we publish our report on it. And we say, well, now it’s really up a lot. Let’s use this pick and we did, and we-

Daniel Creech: Yep, timing is everything, and that’s all right.

Frank Curzio: So thank you, Andrew, for that pick, I don’t-

Daniel Creech: To your point, MicroStrategy has gone from basically $577 to $730 in the last few trading days.

Frank Curzio: Yeah. And the last thing I want to cover here is, as you know, that the earnings between Amazon and Google… I don’t know if you’ve seen these big guys’ reports, but it is absolutely insane. Of the numbers that… They’re blowing these numbers out, blowing, blowing, blowing these numbers out. It’s going to continue. I know you’ve been covering it well, Daniel, right?

Daniel Creech: Well, I just, I don’t have all the details in front of me. I just… I’ve been really bullish on the bigger names simply for the change in policies and what I think is going to come down. We’ve been going back and forth a few times over the past several weeks. I think any weakness that you see on the headlines around breaking them up or monopolies or taxes over in Europe, in other countries when you know people are… Even here in Florida, I always screw it up. What is his name? DeSantis?

Frank Curzio: DeSantis. Yeah.

Daniel Creech: He’s threatening to fine Big Tech censors. If they find to be censoring elected officials, like something like $100,000 a day, and all this kind of stuff. Anyway, these guys just have unbelievable businesses. Everybody uses them. Frank and I… I was talking to you about… I know a ton of people that are upset about Facebook for a number of different reasons. But you know what? They still get on every day, a couple of times a day, and chat or post stuff, or talk to their friends through it. So Google, when you’re $2 trillion companies and multi-track… I mean, I think Google is probably, what? Between one-

Frank Curzio: It’s a trillion still.

Daniel Creech: Is it still one? I think Microsoft’s over two now. I know Apple’s over two.

Frank Curzio: Apple’s over two. Yeah.

Daniel Creech: These guys are still growing revenues by 20% and more in individual in multi-billion dollar divisions. Like Amazon, said their run-rate for Amazon Web Services, AWS, is 50 billion a year now.

Frank Curzio: And that’s the guy, Jeff Bezos, stepped down, the guy was running it is the guy-

Daniel Creech: Or he stepped up.

Frank Curzio: I mean, yeah, basically. Right. He’s executive chair, which means you don’t want hands-off and everyone’s just going to report to you now. And you’re not focused on other things. It’s not a negative because the guy’s taken over as the guy who basically is-

Daniel Creech: Hey, here’s what we’re going to do, okay? I’m the new CEO. Here’s what we’re doing. Jeff. You okay with that? Okay, that’s fine.

Frank Curzio: Yeah, exactly, exactly. That guy’s really good, that’s taken over for him. So, he’s not getting as much touch as he deserves. He’s… That’s the reason why that cloud business is so big. But you know, just to show you guys some numbers here, which is kind of funny… This is from briefing.com. Again, a site I use, if you want… You want to get… It’s a little expensive, but it’s pretty cool, just highlights everything for you right here, just highlighting this. I mean, it crushed its earnings forecast, this is Google, by its largest margin, over five years, $22 a share compared to $1,598, whatever. Revenue growth ramping, 23.5% compared to the expectations of 13% growth. A lot of times, you see earnings really beat… They cost cut. They do different things. It’s the sales.

Frank Curzio: When you… If you’re able to see those sales, now you’re seeing sales increase. So, same thing with Facebook, see the same thing with Apple, you see the same thing with Amazon. All these numbers are absolutely incredible. What does this filter down to, Daniel? It filters down to as much as everybody hates these companies, as crazy they are, they know everything about every one of us because these are the sites that they know what we search for. They know what we buy. They know where we’re going… And with algorithms and AI and all this stuff, with 5G making it a 100 times faster to figure this stuff out, they’re able to predict what we’re going to do, when we’re going to do it, right now. It’s insane. It’s something that I’ve followed for over 10 years now, and this was going on seven, eight, nine years ago.

Frank Curzio: Think about where we are now compared to then. But comp corporations are going to pay a freaking fortune for this if they can increase the money they’re spending that advertising spend, right? Return on advertising. They’re going to do it so they’ll spend more money, but their results and their margins are incredible because you’re not doing a commercial on TV where you really don’t know who the hell is watching. And here’s the guys that, Walmart, whoever, here’s the people in your stores right now, what do you want to send them? You know, you can’t beat that and people will continue to pay a fortune for it. It goes to the point where these companies aren’t going away anytime soon, even if there’s forced regulation on them. I just think the amount of stuff they’re able to track.

Frank Curzio: I would say at least 90% of the people who are on these platforms and use these platforms have absolutely no idea what these companies are doing behind the scenes. I mean, you have no idea? I mean, yes, they had a… There’s Netflix, you know that the social whatever. They have no idea how much of it… Just look at your cookies next to you, pull up a website, go to that little lock in your browser. Next to the site, there’s a little lock. Just right click it. It’s going to say cookies in use, click that. Click sites… These guys track everything, every website is a reason why it comes up and… This is priceless. Everyone’s going to advertise it. Same for us. We could figure out who bought a newsletter for over $500, a group of people through Facebook in the past couple of months who has numerous newsletters.

Frank Curzio: I’d rather be targeting that crowd than just targeting anybody randomly. These things aren’t going away anytime soon. These numbers, man, these analysts… First of all, the analysts got to get up-to-date with this shit. I mean, you can’t be off by 30, 40%, come on. That’s your fricking job, right? You get paid for fricking… You get paid for this shit. Those are the numbers. Think about that, $13, and they want 22. It’s been going on for the last three quarters. I mean, are you kidding me? What if you have a sell rating on it? If you have a sell rating on it, they just bought that. What are you going to do? Oh, we’ll get a good thing, you know? But come on, analysts got to get better than this. They are horrible. They’re useless. If you’re going to see this actually blow out, they’ve got to see it. They got to be tracking this stuff a little bit through every single month and seeing demand. It’s not that difficult, but holy shit, these guys are useless right now in these companies.

Daniel Creech: Yeah. I’ll give them a little bit of defense because I understand, and you’re right. They have a ton of information and they meet with these guys. They do like Amazon. What do they report on operating income? Do you have it in front of you? And it was verse their guidance, their own guidance, of between a like negative half of billion and 4 billion positive. So, I give them a little leeway because these companies have so much… They’re so successful. Their services are so amazing that so many people use them. They have a lot of leeway on how to claim revenue, et cetera. So, I’m with you though. I give them a little credit, but-

Frank Curzio: For the companies have gotten wider in terms of, not margin, but just the spreads of that-

Daniel Creech: That’s a pattern too. I mean, there’s a lot of sandbagging going on-

Frank Curzio: But that happened basically because the COVID. But now you know, by this time, that COVID is actually benefiting you, right? Companies like Peloton, where you could actually predict that a little bit better, but they’re predicting declines or very slow growth. I don’t know, I just don’t get it. But anyway-

Daniel Creech: Nah, I’m with you.

Frank Curzio: I mean, these companies probably still get so much more upside and companies are trading at 30 times earnings and now trading at 22, 23 times forward earnings because their earnings exploded, and some of these things went up a little bit. Google had the biggest run, I think. Apple’s starting to move up. Microsoft fell after that, those amazing results, and now it’s starting to move up again, to new highs. There is a rush getting into these large technology companies again. Thanks for helping me cover that, Daniel, I really appreciate it. All right guys, Daniel, thank you so much for coming in and breaking down all these topics for me. Now, we’re going to get to the fun part. I don’t know if you want to stay here for this Daniel. Do you?

Daniel Creech: I’ll listen. I don’t care about this game, so I’ll see what way you do persuasion.

Frank Curzio: The Super Bowl prediction. And guys, again, it’s something I’ve been doing for, I think it’s over like 10 years again. I take out the Eagles won because I went to the game. Just like I got to… I can’t say that the Eagles aren’t going to at least cover, I think they were down by five points, and they won the game. But outside of that, last year is the first year I got it right. But it was always like this, a long standing joke that… Just listen, I’m going to break it down and give you all the information, who’s going to win. And then, I will lose every single time. So I said, “It’s a great guarantee. Just do exactly…” So, let’s see what happens this year. Hopefully, it’s not going to go to the string while I’m right all the time. Because I want you guys to try and make money off of this.

Frank Curzio: The Bucs and Chiefs spreads three points. Chiefs are favored. A matchup between the GOAT, greatest of all time, which is Tom Brady, and someone that could possibly take that title away from him 10 years from now, which is Mahomes. The kid’s unbelievable. To me, these are two best teams, and Cleveland beat KC when Mahomes got hurt. When I look at these teams, I think these are two teams from their respect the divisions from conferences. So, I’m hoping for a good game. I break down Tampa. Amazing D led by Devin White. If you don’t know him, he’s absolute freak. Don’t ever catch the ball near him because you’ll die. That’s how hard he hits people. He’s amazing. They have great, great corners. Their front four… Ndamukong Suh. I mean a lot of people heard of him. He’d punch for how crazy is.

Frank Curzio: He’s a great player. He’s like the third best lineman on that defense. Right? You have Shaq Barrett and JPP, Jason Pierre Paul, Will Goshen is also good. So, Tampa gets an edge on D over KC. On offense, when I look at the Bucs, their wide receivers, Antonio Brown, who was one of the best receivers ever before he went a little crazy. I mean, he’s like the third best wide receiver. Chris Godwin, Mike Evans. You have speedsters, Scotty Miller. You have your Tyler Johnson. Guys, remember that name. If he can… I know it’s crazy if you’re a football fan, but help this guy get some playing time. If he does, he’s probably going to score a touchdown. But in the Super Bowl… But he’s a future superstar. This kid’s amazing, but he’s just that getting playing time because these veterans are there.

Frank Curzio: The Bucs offensive line is unbelievable. I mean, I think the average weight of these guys are probably 320 pounds. They have been protecting Brady like crazy all year. They’re monsters, especially when they played the Chiefs in week 12, which Chiefs won by three points. Chiefs should have won that game by three TDS. Fournette with their running game. Unbelievable. Right? Fournette just disappeared. He played in Jacksonville. He was that put the last four or five games. This guy’s been lights out, man. He’s been awesome. Catching them all out of the backfield, making plays. That’s huge for Brady who likes to dump his passes off really, really quick to avoid sacks as much as he can. And Fournette can come out of the backfield. Again, he was a big contributor to probably the X-Factor, in the Bucs winning those three playoff games against Washington, New Orleans, the Packers.

Frank Curzio: Brady. An X-Factor right. Obviously, I don’t have to go into there. Was he six and three in Super Bowls? 10 Super Bowls. Unbelievable. But the Bucs have a few weaknesses. A really, really good team. Now, for the Chiefs, their D hasn’t really lived up to expectations until the last couple of games. But really, the last game and best game by far was against the Bills, who I had as the best team in the league a couple of weeks ago. But the top running back went down and they became one-dimensional, passing like crazy. Josh Allen, amazing. But you’re looking at their D for the Chiefs led by Tyrann Mathieu, the best in the business. Free safety Sorensen, defensive lineman Frank Clark, Chris Jones. Unbelievable though; those are the superstars on those teams. I believe they match up great to the Bucs. They really do. They match up great to the Bucs, their defense.

Frank Curzio: So, that’s going to a wash to me. But on offense, Mahomes is the best of the best. He, from anywhere, he throws the ball sideways. You think he’s in trouble, he’s hitting… Tyreek Hill, who runs… He was the fastest man on Earth, in stride every single time. I don’t know how he does that. I would say almost never, not in a history of me watching football in 40 years, I never saw a guy pass for 300 yards and three touchdowns so easily like nothing. And also maybe Dan Marino, and Duper in those days. I mean it was incredible. But just look… How many yards? There was like 300, 350, 400 yards, like nothing. It’s like automatic. I mean, Tyreek Hill, you got to get fast.

Frank Curzio: The Bucs gave up 200 yards to them when they played them at week 12. Yes, these two teams played not long ago, right? 17 weeks and see it play week 12. Kelce, best tight end in the league, also had a good game. You either got speedsters like Hardman and Sammy Watkins coming back, who’s really good.

Frank Curzio: But breaking down the game here, the one thing that scares me guys, and I hate saying this with my Brady shirt on. As you get older, there’s more pressure put on you. I look at the Braves pitchers, right? Remember those Braves where you had Glavin, you had all those guys, man, it’s just… Maddux, Avery won a couple of World Series. And then, all of a sudden, they always choke, going… As you get older, there’s just more precious when you’re young, you’re like Mahomes… You think you’re the greatest ever. No one’s even close to you… You have that confidence. As you get older, more doubts creep into your head and… Brady has been absolutely awesome and amazing, right? Over 40, but he played terrible, really, really terrible, in the second half against the Packers. He almost gave that game away.

Frank Curzio: That worries me a little bit. That does. I mean, he needs to be at his best. No bad decisions. Now, week 12, when they played, the Chiefs won at Tampa, 27-24. It’s a game Terry Kelly had 13 catches for 269 yards and three touchdowns, Kielce at eight catches for 82 yards. But later in that game, they changed their defense around Ball changed his defense around. And they caught up and they did well, right? That’s one of the things that they got destroyed the first three quarters. In that last quarter, they figured it out of how they got to stop these guys. Maybe Tyreek Hill is just too tired from catching 13 times 270 yards, but they didn’t sell their best guys at all, where Belichick is known for taking away a certain part of a team’s offense.

Frank Curzio: They didn’t take away anything. I mean, KC should have won that game by three touchdowns. Also, you look at the last two games. Tampa Bay looked good. I didn’t think the pack was that good all year. They did have a good record. But the Chiefs beat, I thought, the red hot Bills team. They hadn’t one weakness, right? No running game, but one of the best defenses in the league, and Mahomes just killed them, destroyed them. They won easily 38-24, wasn’t even that close. The Bucs are playing at home first team ever to play the Super Bowl at home. That game is determined years in advance, and whoever makes it, makes it. But no home team ever made it. It’s funny because the Bucs are the first team.

Frank Curzio: There’s only 25,000 fans allowed to attend a game. To put that in perspective, there will be 30,000 cutouts in the seats, which is insane. Well, cut out people and people at that game. But another big disadvantage for the Bucs is they have these big cannons that they shoot off every time they score. But the league said, you’re not allowed to use those. You can’t use those for the Super Bowl, because this is a neutral site, a neutral game. So, not going to be able to bang those cannons out every time they score, which kind of sucks. But for me, I’ve seen the Bucs play terrible this year and get smoked. And I also saw that Chiefs play terrible, but when the Chiefs play terrible, they still manage to win games. They won 14 games. They always find a way to gut it out somehow. I’m rooting for Brady. But I think he’s going to have a weak game here. The X factor is Fournette.

Frank Curzio: If he runs for a hundred yards, catch a pass out of the backfield, they’ll keep it close to have a shot to win. I don’t know if that’s going to happen. At the end, Mahomes is just too much. He’s that great. He’s that awesome. And in fact, last year, he played terrible, terrible, for three-quarters. He should have lost that game. That is motivation. But he’s going to come out and he’s going to come out strong. I see Chiefs take a 14 nothing lead right away. That’s what I believe, and they’re either going to continue to play great. And also, Bieniemy, who is the best offensive coordinator in the league, he should be a head coach for 20 of the freaking teams in the past couple of years, got passed over again. And I think this team, this offense, is incredibly motivated to blow the doors off of one of the best defenses, with Bieniemy leading the way, calling the plays. So, the Chiefs win the Super Bowl over the Bucs, 34 to 24.

Frank Curzio: Last thing here, prop bets is an under, over for Brady’s rushing yards. You know what it is? It is a half a yard. It is a half a yard that… Because he never ever runs. However, he does quarterback sneaks all the… Every third and fourth day, he’s the best guy to do quarterback sneaks in the hole freaking league. Every time he does, he gets like two, three yards. You need one third and one, and he’s going to call back… See, you get that it’s a half a yard. I think it’s an easy bet. Total interceptions of the game one and a half, I would take the over. I think Brady’s going to have two by himself. I think Mahomes might have one as well. If you can’t find it, because this is a prop bet that I liked.

Frank Curzio: Sammy Watkins, they said he’s going to play. Sammy Watkins will score a TD in the Super Bowl. This guy is going to be left wide open with all the other weapons, and he’s very difficult to guard one-on-one. He did great last year, Super Bowl. I think he’s going to score a TD and he is coming back for this game, I think. Make sure he’s playing, but that’s another prop bet.

Frank Curzio: So that’s, again, give it to me. That will be, hopefully, I don’t know how you want to bet it since I won last year, but I was hoping to give you this with a full breakdown and then you put everything you count on the books and win. Then this way, you can celebrate, because that’s all I want to do is try to make you guys money. But I did win last year. So, I wouldn’t go too crazy. Let’s see if this is a trend where I’m going to be right for eight or nine years, but I have the Chiefs winning 34, 24 over the Bucs.

Frank Curzio: And really, I hope it’s a good game. And I’m rooting for Brady. I mean, I’m hoping I’m wrong here. And Brady goes great and goes out and you still got to play for a couple more years, but it’ll be amazing if he pulls this off because I think the Chiefs are much better team based on the way they play that last game and their defense. They were unbelievable. So, if they both play their best games, I think the Chiefs easily win this game. But if the Chiefs don’t play that well, it will be close. But we will see. I’m hoping for a good game on Sunday.

Frank Curzio: Right, guys. That’s it for me, be sure to check out my Curzio Research YouTube page, which is broadcasting right now. And can you see my Brady jersey. We pull up sites and research. You get to see me and Daniel, the good looking Daniel Creech, as he chuckles. Here, I’ll show you. He’s a chuckle. Yeah. Very good looking guy. Anyway, it’s nice being young.

Daniel Creech: Yeah. Thank you.

Frank Curzio: Yeah, I’m just saying, I’m just saying that-

Daniel Creech: I’m getting older. I’ve got a birthday coming up.

Frank Curzio: Oh yeah?

Daniel Creech: Yeah.

Frank Curzio: When is it this way you can get everyone to… What is your email?

Daniel Creech: I’ll be 35 soon. Imagine that.

Frank Curzio: You’re going to get all the people from the Left sending you nice presents.

Daniel Creech: Wonderful. Send them to me.

Frank Curzio: You can watch the Curzio Research YouTube page, and be sure to like it, subscribe to it. It’s really getting a lot of traction now because people like to see these videos and stuff and it’s cool. We’re able to bring up sites and you can see us do the research process of what we’re actually doing here. Or, you can listen to iTunes, which is fine. Also, I mentioned earlier, we’ll open up Curzio Venture Opportunities. It’s either going to be tonight or tomorrow. When I say open up, we’re offering it for a 40% discount for anyone that’s coming in, and there’s a reason why. I always… Whenever I sell my products, I only do it when I think it is a great, great time for you to make money. It really… It’s all the products you’ll see when we promote them most of the time, it’s that I think you should buy them. Our performance has been great in Curzio Venture Opportunities, but there’s one particular stock that I’m talking about. I’m incredibly bullish onto gold stock.

Frank Curzio: It’s sitting on a high-grade gold deposit based on its last drilling results. It’s still an under-the-radar, incredible asset that I have pegged being worth over 400, probably more like $600 million. Yet, the bar cap of this company is like 70 million. So, this is something that I think, in terms of the risk-reward, it’s little risk here, ton and ton of reward. They just raised money. They’re fully funded. They put together several high profile guys to run the company, including one of the best engineers, geologists, in the world, who could have went any place, and he went to this small company. This guy helped run the largest gold mine in Nevada for decades. And there’s several catalysts coming up over the next few weeks, next two, three months, including more drilling results, which I think it would be fantastic. Why? Because I visited the site and I saw it right up front on the surface; on the surface was amazing.

Frank Curzio: You know, I showed these rocks to so many subscribers, and it’s absolutely incredible. And again, when I heard about this company, I had to go see it in person. I did that and I really, really like it. I think it’s incredible. They’re also going to come out with something called a pre-feasibility study, which determines the economics of it. When that happens, this asset’s going to be re-rated. I put a stamp of approval on it. And it’s going to put this under-the-radar company… It’s going to be like a flashlight in front of the whole mining industry. The best part: This is a mine that’s operating in one of most friendly areas, and the world in this particular… Their state, I won’t give it away, to the point where this is a mine that can go to production inside of five years; they’re projecting four years.

Frank Curzio: I think it’s going to be five years. The average mine, probably 12-15 years. Hey, to say that’s the case and they come out these drilling results, I think you’re going to see this company be bought. But it’s a good opportunity. It came down a little bit after they raised money, which is normal, fully funded for the next two to three years. It’s just a really, really good play. Again, my job is to show you returns. If you buy the site that goes down, you’re not going to subscribe again, you’re going to hate and whatever. So for me, when it comes to marketing, it’s always we don’t get paid by companies to recommend them or anything. It’s me showing your returns and where the stock is trading. I think it’s a really good opportunity to come into Curzio Venture Opportunities.

Frank Curzio: By the way, I own a lot of the positions in this stock. I eat my own cooking here. This is my largest position in my portfolio right now. I’m not going to sell this out until you sell out, until I instruct you to sell out, it’s going to be after you. So, something I’m excited about. And to learn more about this, just go to our website, curzioresearch.com, you’ll see a banner up there. Again, we don’t discount this product often. I’m doing it because, again, we want to get subscribers in here because I really like this opportunity. If you don’t commit, it is perfectly fine because it is an expensive newsletter, back-end newsletter. I just want to let you know that we are promoting it, and I’m going to promote it probably for the next seven days or so, maybe 10 days tops. If you want to come in, I’d come in on that discount because it is 40% cheaper.

Frank Curzio: Okay, guys, that’s it for me. Great podcast. Great guest today. You end up a lot of different topics. Love you guys. And next week, I have another great guest, Marc Randolph. I’m telling you, the interview is fantastic. It’s awesome. It’s taped already. He wanted me to put it out two weeks, it was a week and a half later because he’s launching his podcast. This is a great, great guy. Great interview. Awesome. Trust me, you’re going to like it. You really are. If you are a small business owner, if any of you out there are an entrepreneur, please listen to this interview. It’s going to be fantastic. This guy is really, really sharp and great. Again, Marc Randolph, co-founder of that small company called Netflix. So guys, that’s it for me. Thanks so much for listening. As always, I’ll see you in seven days. Take care.

Announcer: The information presented on Wall Street Unplugged is the opinion of its hosts and guests. You should not base your investment decisions solely on this broadcast. Remember, it’s your money and your responsibility. Wall Street Unplugged, produced by the Choose Yourself Podcast Network, the leader in podcasts produced to help you choose yourself.