This transcript was automatically generated.

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.

Daniel Creech: How’s it going out there? It’s Wednesday, October 11th, and you are listening to the Wall Street Unplugged podcast.

I am your guest host, Daniel Creech, Curzio Research analyst here, the one that works for alongside behind, and with the one and only Frank Curzio.

Frank is out today, as he mentioned last week on the podcast.

He is wining and dining wheeling and dealing at an industry conference.

He will be back behind the mic to update you all next week.

Thanks to him in advance for once again trusting me with the entire scope and direction of the business for all of about 30 minutes or less.

Thank you.

Having more fun than I should be able to.

Absolutely a thrill to be behind the mic filling in for Frank.

I wanna go over a few things today.

I recently just got back from a quick trip up to southwest Ohio to see some family.

I’m gonna talk about that and then lots to go over in the news around energy and politics and economics.

Of course, the lenses that we look through to help you make the best decisions for you and yours when it comes to investing and life decisions.

We’re just good.

Overall helpful on whatever you need.

Email us Daniel@Curzioresearch.com.

That’s daniel@Curzioresearch.com.

Alright, I, I was out last week, hate to miss a podcast, but I, I did.

I went up to southwest Ohio, drove up there from northeast Florida, about a 13 hour drive, give or take, depending on how long you push it.

And I wanna give you some observations and ask for some feedback because I think it’s very powerful and it can be very, exciting to have several hours or a trope trip.

A lot of times the, a lot of the fun in a trip and, and trips don’t have to just be for fun or, or joy.

even if you’re going home for not such a good reason to see some family, there’s still some positives there.

You gotta look for that silver lining.

Not to be a guru on self-esteem or anything, but just kind of a common sense.

Hey, you know, stay grounded.

Try to stay in the middle there.

And I wanna ask you, when you have several hours, when you have a trip that you know you’re coming up on, first of all, first couple of questions is, if you are driving by yourself for any length of time, pick your, pick your time.

Let’s just use my example.

So 12, 13 hours.

Do you, do you plan out your trip? Do you already have your stops pre-planned? Do you have, books on tape or podcast or your serious XM or anything like that? What do you listen to? Keep you occupied or, um, from going insane on a nice road trip? Question number two is, if you’re not alone, like I was driving there and back, how many people would you like to have next to you? Or how many people could you think of that you’d ride across the country or on a long road trip and not be able to go insane by having somebody? There’s importance with somebody when you can sit there and be silent just like that.

That sounded, that probably felt like 30 seconds to some of you.

Some of you reached out for your listening device and probably started touching it, wondering what the hell happened to me.

Anyway, daniel@curzioresearch.com, that’s daniel@curzioresearch.com.

From my trip, first off, I wanna say on the way there, I went up, I cut across 26 to 40 and hit 75 in Knoxville.

And I have to say that the drive from I 95 over to 40 to 75 through the mountains and things was absolutely Florida.

Beautiful.

And I don’t remember, I don’t use the word Florida, just meaning Florida, the state.

This is a family show.

Frank can say whatever he wants, he’s the boss.

I keep it clean.

So it’s Florida beautiful.

And you know, the leaves are changing this time of year and I’m the type of guy when I go on a road trip, I don’t plan.

I, I kind of had an idea where I would stop if I was gonna stop and get a hotel depending on traffic and weather.

I ended up driving straight through there and back and just taking in the views.

The leaves are changing.

Uh, it just makes you feel, a sense of calmness and how small you really are in the world.

And I hope that all of you, I’m not just preaching to you here.

I hope that all of you, wherever you’re at, cities, mountains, planes, oceans, fields, whatever your landscape is, whatever your view is, I hope that you take some time to catch a sunrise or sunset depending on what type of person you are, morning or evening.

And just think about kind of the calmness and everything around that instead of the craziness of headlines that we’re bombarded with in our 24 7 news cycle.

I not throwing stones, I’m part of that behind this podcast and there is actually beauty in everything.

So again, I’m blessed here with going to the ocean anytime I want.

Living on Amelia Island, I, went to the ocean immediately when I got back, snapped a picture, sent it to my family because no matter how old you are, damn near 40, doesn’t matter.

They still wanna make sure you are safe.

Hey, Texas, when you get home, hey, can you send us a picture when you get home? Hey, let us know you’re getting home.

Hey, what’d you do today? Hey, you know what I did? I drove for 12 hours.

I just saw you yesterday.

Love you.

Oh, anyway, along the road to keep me sane.

I go through all the sorts.

I’m not a, I’m not a subscriber to XM or anything.

I don’t pay for any services that way.

Uh, I do all the freebie things.

So I listen to some Joe Rogan podcast.

I listen to, a lot of N P R and talk radio.

I listen to an interesting and, and again ’cause you’re, ’cause I’m scanning through there and, don’t know all the stations are programmed.

And when I’m in different areas, I listened to Dr. Kate Marvel and she was interviewed, on N P R and talking about cutting emissions and climate change.

And she was going way past the hey net zero or anything like that.

She was talking about cutting emissions 50% and even more so, and there wasn’t a lot of meat there on how or why.

It was simply, Hey, the data is set settled, c o two is terrible, terrible, we’re polluting, the earth is warming and we gotta reverse that.

And I actually looked her up later on after I was safely not behind the wheel.

And I listened to a Ted talk from her from 2017 about clouds and how it could increase global warming or maybe save us from global warming and catastrophe.

Uh, we’ll we’ll see about that and how it unfolds.

but again, there wasn’t a whole lot of data outside of, hey, the science is settled and that’s what I’ve talked about in the past and I’ve upset a lot of you people and that’s not my intent.

I’m trying to get everybody to think.

But on that, the science is settled type deal.

When you hear that, just ask why and ask if there’s any other arguments.

And I know you can say, oh, this number of people think this, therefore that’s the majority.

That’s the way democracy works, that’s the way science works, yada, yada yada.

That’s fine.

I’m not telling you how to think.

I’m simply saying I would learn and listen and actually be open-minded to whatever and, you know, more than one outcome because energy plays such a magnificent and serious role and that’s why we ought to pay attention to that in my opinion.

Last thing on my road trip, I will report to you happily taxpayers, that your money is hard at work and being put to good use.

Yes, between the trillions getting thrown around for whatever reason, pick your topic.

You want to get a megaphone out and blow about and yell about.

I will tell you when I left and I was on 35 east out Ohio, heading towards the West Virginia to catch the bypass to 77 South, there is a long stretch and there’s construction going on all the way.

When I was going up and back, of course there’s always construction there.

Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure.

Well, I have to give it to the crews, and the policemen there because there’s times where you get in these speed zone traps or these work zone traps and the speed limit’s like 55.

And if you’re not doing 70, you’re getting run over by 18 wheelers.

That’s kind of scary.

And then there’s always that great time when you come around a curve and you’re doing 10 to seven mile an hour over the speed limit and a cop standing there with his little radar gun looking at everybody.

And I guess he’s just making sure you’re not doing 25 over.

I, I don’t know.

But hats off to them.

The construction crews, um, were as good as they could on limiting the, stop and go traffic.

I know you can’t, they can’t do anything about idiot drivers out there.

And there’s a lot of those.

I’ll, I’ll leave that ramp for another day.

But the traffic wasn’t bad considering the amount of construction.

But the tax dollars are at work because there’s a stretch of 35 east in Ohio that has the center line painted.

Both lanes are open, it looks so brand new, the sidelines aren’t even on yet.

And I was driving on it just as it was before sunrise and it was absolutely beautiful and it looked slicker in hell for a while.

I was, had I I was a two and 10 driver thinking, man, this looks like black ice.

I mean it was absolutely beautiful.

So rest, no fear when you see the 30 trillions in debt and going up and we’re giving money away to anybody and everybody rest assured the drive on Even my small little town in southwest Ohio has a brand new stretch of payment just slicker than a baby’s bottom.

Absolutely beautiful.

So the lobbyist and everybody in, our area of southwest Ohio is doing well.

So hats off to them.

Alright, let’s get to some serious topics like markets here.

That’s enough of me.

Let’s go here.

Markets are in rally mode as Frank called just a couple of weeks ago when he was sharing some investor sentiment and some technical analysis on just how in the short term markets were getting oversold markets had pulled back over five, between five and 7% over the last month or so.

And if we check out our email here, this is a good from market ear and it says before you short equities and they have this beautiful chart for those of you not following along on the Curzio YouTube channel here, it has a chart of the S&P 500 index seasonality.

And this goes back when you’re looking at this chart here, this goes back 20 years and you don’t have to understand a lot about this, don’t worry about the numbers.

You simply wanna look at the blue line, which is going from the bottom left to the upper right and it looks like any good stock you’d like to own.

And then you wanna look at that solid red line.

And the solid red line is where we are right now or where we were just a couple days ago, the beginning of October.

This picture is great because it’s a simple picture that shows you, hey, we are here at this red line and from a seasonality standpoint, this is a bullish time for the year.

Call it, great holidays Eve, call it the Santa Claus rally early.

Call it the Thanksgiving joy, whatever you wanna call it.

This is a seasonality time, a seasonal time where markets generally go higher versus lower.

Now that doesn’t mean that that’s gospel and you should go out and put all your eggs in the S&P 500 or what, whatever it simply means know the world and the environment around you.

That’s what we want to try to preach here.

So we know that we put a feather in our cap and we say, all right, let’s take a fresh eye.

Let’s take fresh eyes and look at this.

The market is in a bullish environment right now.

All right, let’s put that on one side of the T chart.

Now, this next chart says, before you buy protection, this is the same type of idea.

This is going back this blue line.

However, um, in the red arrow you are here, this is the volatility index or the vix.

This is supposedly the fear gauge of the market.

All you need to know about this chart is when this blue line starts to trend lower, that’s more positive for stocks, meaning you have fear going down and then market prices would be rising.

This just correlates with the picture I showed you above, which is simply saying, Hey, I get it.

There’s a lot of problems to point to.

There’s high debt, slower consumer, higher inflation, higher interest rates, housing market is slowing down, interest rates are much higher on that.

There’s all these headwinds for your average everyday US consumers and global consumers around the world.

So that’s more of a negative sense.

And you can think, oh well stocks have held up rather well and it’s time for a pullback.

It very well could, I’m, I’m not trying to talk outta both sides of my mouth, just bear with me here and, and let’s continue.

I’m simply saying we want to grab pieces of data and say, Hey, what is our environment right now? Let’s get the context, let’s get the data and then let’s make decisions around that.

The only thing I’m saying is if you are a sky is falling guy, oh my gosh, the market’s down 5%.

Okay, you’re right.

It is, it’s pulled back.

Look at your portfolio, know what you own and why and adjust accordingly.

But just know that this we are entering this typical bullish period.

There’s a few more charts here.

I’m gonna skip.

I wanna get to the very last one because if this doesn’t make you laugh out loud, you must be doing something way too serious today.

This is diet and this is the usage of the three magic fat pills, their language, not mine.

Three magic fat pills have exploded over the last 18 months and you can see that this basically goes from under, we’ll call it a million.

I can’t read this chart that well, but it’s under 2 million to over 12 million.

And what I want to bring to your attention here is about how there was some recent quickly here, there is some recent reports across CNBC and everybody and even some interviews where people taking Ozempic and different weight loss drugs have lost so much weight and they’re having such great results that they’ve actually cut back on their junk food intake at big box retailers like Walmart and Costco and things on CNBC.

I saw somebody, a woman was interviewed about how she was saying, oh yeah, I’ve lost several pounds and I’ve cut back my pantry is, you know, half or more than half full.

Or excuse me, I’ve bought, you know, um, half of what I used to or, or even more than that.

And I just wanna, I wanna pull up a chart here to, have some fun because if you think now I don’t know how much of this 15 plus it was bouncing up around here around $300 per share, much of this past year.

And then it really has sold off down to the two 50 level.

This is just kind of fun because there’s this announcement about, minimum wage getting bumped up to $20 an hour, out in California.

We’ll see how that plays out if you think that that’s going to increase efficiency and business environments for fast food and quick service restaurants, I would disagree.

McDonald’s is just a fun, big name dominant player to put on your radar because the knee-jerk reaction is, Hey, there’s a magic pill that’s helping everybody lose weight.

It’s going to tank Walmart, McDonald’s, things of the past.

What if America, what if America is actually getting healthy? Should we start buying Peloton again? Or we should.

We start looking at Weight Watchers, which is having a good rally in our Dollar Stock Club portfolio, just from a few weeks ago.

What about lifetime fitness or any gym memberships? Now I say all this tongue in cheek to have some fun.

You gotta keep your perspective in markets.

There’s so much knee jerk reactions.

Maybe a few percentage points of this move lower in McDonald’s is related to this and Walmart’s and these, these new stories about how people are gonna change their lives because of Ozempic and these weight losses.

And I’m all for that.

Hey, if we want to get healthier as a nation and I myself need to better, don’t think I’m in a glass house and Arnold Schwartzenegger over here, but if we are going to see this massive trend of actually getting healthier and working out and all that, then we’ll find stocks to do that.

I just wouldn’t go with the knee-jerk reaction right now.

I would look at McDonald’s other quick service restaurants just as a fun play on how to do, um, how to take advantage of sillinesS&Politics all over.

Alright, getting now that, that’s a little fun rant there on, on weight loss and things.

Now turning to energy in politics, unfortunately there’s no, there’s no better example in my opinion than how the stock market proves that the market and market indices, so let’s just see here, um, are not always a great snapshot or a picture of Main Street and or the world.

So for instance, last week the sky was falling, markets are pulling back on Thursday and Friday we got this bid.

We had a higher, um, jobs number on Friday.

Markets opened lower, but yet rallied back.

Now Frank had talked about a lot of that being sentiment and just oversold conditions from a technical bounce.

The S&P hit its 200 day moving average.

You can look at all these technical indicators and you should pay attention to them.

But then we had some horrific news over the weekend with the terrible attacks on Israel.

They have now declared war.

So we have another war, and I’m not saying this lightly, these are, these are crazy times and yet the market opens up on Monday, sells off, and then rallies higher.

And now if we just look at, I’m gonna pull up here Finviz share my screen with you because this is a good free website.

If you just go to Finviz’s homepage, look at the banner across the top right under the search bar, you can see the heading for groups.

Click on that and then that just breaks down everything into this wonderful bar chart.

You can go one day, one perf one week performance.

Now, what I have on my screen here is you can see communication services in the last week is up over 4%, followed by technology energy is only up 1.

6%, one month performance, excuse me.

And then you can scroll down three month performance.

Now the one month performance is interesting because you can see all the red there and that was that markets pulling back, Hey, we’re, we’re, you know, the technicals, the oversold and everything like that.

Now fast forward, we have this terrible, um, attack on Israel, just, you know, some of the, some of the new sites and, and slaughtering and beheading this, it, it, it’s absolutely horrific.

So thoughts and prayers to to those in Israel and and family selected, um, impacted all over.

I know some people here that were over, um, are over there or we’re over there trapped.

I don’t know their exact location.

So, um, thoughtS&Prayers on that whole situation and markets go up.

Now, it’s not a crazy question to ask, okay, hey, there’s already this Russia, there’s terrible conflict in war between Russia and Ukraine.

Now there’s another terrible conflict, um, in Israel with Israel and now counter attack with Hamas.

And then there’s these rockets fired from Syria and there’s just all this unknown and markets yet rally.

And it’s not a crazy question to ask why? Well, because manufacturing, unfortunately war is good for economies in certain situations.

You are burning through fuel and ammunition.

Look at Lockheed Martin in the defense sector.

Uh, they were selling off extremely hard.

Again, going back to Finviz here.

This is a chart of Lockheed Martin, as you can see it was selling off extremely hard here, hit down all the way to the 400 level, dipped a little bit below, but then gabbed higher about $30, um, just on the war news with Israel and Hamas.

And this is what’s so interesting about markets because if you just look at markets and markets are rallying, you wouldn’t even know the horrific things that are going on behind it.

And I say all this just because you can’t get one sided on, don’t get too bearish or too bullish no matter what markets are gonna be forward-looking and it’s not always the need jerky reaction that you need to stick through.

That’s key.

Key point number one, turning to energy.

And what I wanna share with you here is energy and I, I’ve been very bullish on this and I’m gonna share my screen here right now.

This is just a, um, a look at the pre-market, market’s open in just a few minutes.

I started recording just about nine o’clock eastern time and oil spiked a few percentage points on Monday, and then it sold off a little bit Tuesday.

And it’s down about 1% before market opens right now.

And there has got to be some geopolitical, risk here, of course priced into the market.

So if I look at oil right now, and I don’t have a crystal ball, but oil’s basically $85 a barrel down from the nineties up from the eight nineties a couple weeks ago, up from the eighties, just last week, let’s say there’s $5 in premium in the barrel of oil, because of this Middle East and the, and the wars and the potential, escalation.

Now this is all coupled and the reason that I’ve continued to pound the table on oil and gas and energy in general is because unfortunately we’re just at this terrible crossroads.

There’s this all this intersection of bad decisions and bad policies that are making the direction or the least path of resistance much higher for oil prices.

And whether you agree with me or not, let’s just follow oil and see what happens.

And the only reason I’m talking about this and the attitude I am is to try to help you have exposure to this.

I’ve talked about how I don’t think that we’re gonna get off fossil fuels as quickly as we can in the past.

I’m not gonna reiterate that right now.

I’m not gonna reiterate the policies, that are in place right now other than the fact that let’s look at the here and now.

We have a huge situation with wars and outbreaks of war and the escalation there.

There’s a heck of a lot more risks that wars escalate versus deescalate in the short term.

That’s just my opinion when it comes to oil.

We have drawn down the strategic petroleum reserves, and I’m not throwing stones there.

You can argue, Hey, was that a good, it doesn’t matter.

It’s done.

It, it was done.

It, it has happened.

There are limits to how fast we can refill that and of course the price of that and the money and all that.

But let’s just say, okay, so we have prices.

Excuse me, we have the SPR levels at extreme lows, okay? We’re still increasing production, believe it or not.

Here in the US we’re about to surpass our record, in the next several months, depending on how quickly they they add rigs or not.

There’s a, um, just this week there’s an article out of oil price.com about how actual US exports hit an all time high.

Uh, we’re still importing oil.

we’re not independent from that nature yet we still import, more than export, whatever.

But my point is is that you have the SPR low, you have geopolitical tensions between us and Saudi Arabia.

You still have Saudi Arabia cutting production.

There was this peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel kind of being brokered.

Now that obviously has to be on the hold with what’s going on right now.

And there’s been no knee jerk reaction from Saudi Arabia to increase production, to stabilize prices and rumors and the actuals, and the, the outlay and the playing out of this war.

There’s no word from anybody else to increase production to help.

There are geopolitical concerns with Saudi Arabia and backing the Palestinians or saying they’re still standing with them.

There’s been some quotes flying around there.

You have to take everything with a grain of salt.

My point is, is that everything points to sustain higher prices.

And I still don’t expect, and listen, I I don’t want this to escalate at all.

I’m extremely bullish on energy.

I still don’t expect oil to jump past a hundred dollars and stay there for any amount of time.

What I’m simply saying is that we need to pay attention to it right now because just like the producer price index today showed, it came in a little hotter than expected.

and I’m sharing my screen again here.

I want to show you on why you need to pay attention to this leading into tomorrow because I’m pulling up again following on YouTube here you can see this is the energy column and it goes from September, 2022 to the most recent September, 2023, which was today’s readings.

And if you go down this chart, you can just see energy is basically not doing anything.

It was plus one in September, 2022, December.

And as you follow down here, it really didn’t do anything until August.

And that’s when oil started to rally.

And oil energy, excuse me, was up over 10% in August.

It’s up 3% right now.

My point here is that tomorrow’s Consumer Price Index is going to come out and I want you to pay attention to the energy sector.

So, click on the, let’s see the bls.

gov.

Go to the CPI release and just scroll down to the chart and look at energy.

My whole point here is that since we’ve had that rally a few months ago from the sixties all the way to the nineties, and now we’re in the mid eighties, if oil doesn’t drop significantly right away, the next several readings going forward.

’cause remember we’re looking back at these indicators.

So next month when we get this month’s and in Octo in November when we get October’s, when we are going, and then December, when we get November, if oil doesn’t drop severely below the $80 handle quickly, we’re going to see sustained higher inflation in the data, which is gonna force the hand of the Fed.

And I know the Fed’s out, Nick Turmo, and I’m sorry to butcher his name, he’s out in the Wall Street Journal again, the mouthpiece of the Fed basically saying that they are going to hint and look at pausing rates again at its next meeting later this month.

I think that’s absolutely asinine.

I’m not gonna go off on that again.

I simply want you to pay attention to energy prices and the inflation data.

Now, if 1, 1, 1 thing here on politics and how it affects, one last thing here quickly on how politics and these economic events and, and all these things, policies and, and things go together is because if we weren’t already divided enough in America between Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, what have you, again, not telling what side you should pick, I think you can agree we’re all divided.

Now it fills over into did you look at, did you see the CNBC? Anybody discussing hedge fund Bill Ackman asking through the old Twitter now x about publishing, um, the Harvard, the Harvard list of people that blame Israel for the attacks.

And what I want to, what I wanna point out here, so Bill Ackman calls for Harvard to name the stu students that are blaming Israel for the attacks so that none of these CEOs hire them.

And it’s not just Bill Ackman.

There’s been CEOs from other companies saying, Hey, yeah, let’s, and, and I’m not telling you how to think or whatever.

I’m simply saying, you couldn’t be more divided right now.

And you have to pay attention.

You have to understand what you own and why you own, why you own it.

Because unfortunately everything is getting political and that is going to continue down that path.

I think that’s gonna get much worse before it gets better.

I don’t have the answer right now.

I’m thinking through that.

I’m just being honest with you.

But when you see this kind of stuff we’re getting into an election year, we have, R F K Jr. announcing his run that he’s gonna run as an independent that might throw craziness into the third party.

the Trump supporters were excited about that early on because they thought that he was just gonna run as another Democrat and be Antibi Biden and take away from President Biden’s votes.

Now as a third party, they’re realizing well, maybe he can take votes away from Trump and that’s no good.

So now they’ve gotta attack him.

My point is, is that unfortunately people, the division in America is going to significantly increase from here.

You’re seeing it with um, everything from Harvard and Bill Ackman and all this kind of stuff.

You’re seeing support.

Take everything with a grain of salt.

Take a few deep breaths, understand what you own and why you own it and have exposure to the energy sector because not just because of wars but because of policies, the combination.

What we wanna try to do is look at the world right now and find opportunities for you and yours so that we can separate ourselves and we can try to get the best investment returns and help everybody around us.

So that’s our goal here.

Alright, Daniel Creech at daniel@Curzioresearch.com.

Daniel@Curzioresearch.com.

Send me your info, your feedback, good or bad.

Love me, hate me.

Just do not ignore me.

Lemme know what you do on road trips, how you look forward to ’em.

If there’s anybody you could drive across the country with and send me your feedback on Energy, energy policies, policies, what do you think, these terrible wars will lead to higher or lower prices? Send me your feedback program.

You know, I will be here tomorrow on Wall Street Unplugged Premium.

While I will go more in depth on the energy and policies, I’m gonna talk about Bitcoin and the huge tailwinds behind it and tokenization in more detail as well as revealing our new Dollar Stock Club pick of the week.

Thank you for tuning in everybody.

You have a great rest of your day.

We’ll see tomorrow.

Announcer: Wall Street Unplugged is produced by Curzio Research, one of the most respected financial media companies in the industry. The information presented on Wall Street Unplugged is the opinion of its host and guests. You should not base your investment decisions solely on this broadcast. Remember, it’s your money, and your responsibility.