Wednesday, July 22nd, 2026

By Tom Dyson, Investment Director

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Friday, July 17th, 2026

Laramie, Wyoming

By Dan Denning

Prediction: Now that Christopher Nolan’s cinematic version of Homer’s Odyssey is in theaters, the ‘tomato meter’ on Rotten Tomatoes will plummet–below 75% by Monday and on its way to 50% by the end of the month. All the initial ratings, which drove the score up to 98% at one point, were critics who’d seen a screening before the public. Critics are generally elitist line-toers. The Crowd will now vote. And it will be merciless.

The good news is we can now look forward to the final installment of the Dune series as re-imagined by Denis Villeneuve. Aside from some odd casting choices here and there (nothing as unabashedly ‘woke’ as the choices made by Nolan), the first two Dune movies have pretty much stuck to the book: a coming of age story in which a charismatic son avenges a murdered father and unleashes a galaxy-wide jihad on the decrepit, corrupt, and elite ruling order with an army of fanatical jihadist warriors who believe their leader fulfills a religious prophecy about the coming Paradise.

Pretty standard stuff. If you’ve read Frank Herbert’s Dune books, you’ll know that Paul Atreides isn’t the hero. He’s the villain. And even though he thinks he can find ‘a golden path’ to restore justice and peace and order in the universe, he’s wrong. History marches to its own rhythm and appoints each man his role. Paul drenches the world in blood.

The books are a warning. It’s not that power tends to corrupt, or that absolute power corrupts absolutely (as Lord Acton famously said). It’s that power is magnetic to the corruptible. Herbert wrote, ‘Power attracts pathological personalities…Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.’

We’ll see how the story ends when Dune, Part Three comes out December 18th, 2026. Until then, let us resume with our story about American power, drunk on debt. We’ll set aside liquidity and valuations this week and look at two other variables that affect our investment returns for the next ten years, policy and strategy.

To the extent that the Trump Administration has an actual strategic policy goal, we learned in 2024 that it might look like Stephen Miran’s new global currency re-set, dubbed the Mar-a-Lago Accord. The argument was simple: the use of the US dollar as a global reserve currency made it over-valued. This chronic/structural over valuation resulted in the US running large trade and government (fiscal) deficits.

From an economic point of view, the large trade deficits helped American consumers in the form of low import prices and massive choice in consumer goods, textiles, and food. But it did not benefit American manufacturing nor the inflation-adjusted hourly wages of American workers. Trump promised to get a new deal. A better one.

Miran’s paper said the US also deserved more equitable ‘burden sharing’ for the cost it has paid to protect the global order with massive military spending. American taxpayers pay for this ‘security umbrella’ (mostly by large annual deficits). It benefits Americans in the sense that the world’s goods continue to flow into the US (or did) at bargain basement prices. But Trump wanted a new deal there, too.

Miran’s solution came in three parts. First, punitive tariffs to force bi-lateral trade deals more favorable to American industry and labor. Second, make US defense and security spending conditional on better currency/trade deals. Third, impose fees on the interest payments due to foreign holders of US government debt if trade and currency deals aren’t re-arranged.

Lots of stick. A tiny bit of carrot. And to thoroughly mix the metaphor, no dice. The chart above from the Congressional Budget Office shows the US government collected $195 billion in tariff revenues in 2025. But when the Supreme Court ruled them broadly illegal earlier this year, the government began issuing rebates (it’s not clear to whom, but it’s definitely not consumers).

The Administration does have other statutory authority it can use to impose tariffs and has already done so. But the stick is limp. Tariffs are not going to generate enough revenue to eliminate the income tax (as was very briefly discussed before being discarded). Nor are they going to lead to a broad de-valuation of the dollar like the 1985 Plaza Accord devalued the Japanese yet. Speaking of the dollar.

Here it is. Remember that this time last year, the US dollar was coming off its worst first-half performance in 50 years. Not since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1973 had the greenback fallen by 10% in six months against its international peers.

Of course that was all part of the Miran plan. Weaken the dollar without damaging foreign demand for US government bonds. But the chart above shows that the Dollar Index [DXY] is almost exactly where it was ten years ago. Not stronger. And certainly not weak to the point where US exports would suddenly surge according to the plan.

The available evidence shows there has been no restructuring of the global trade system by fiddling with the dollar’s financial plumbing. Money moves where it wants and where it’s treated best. In the meantime, DOGE didn’t cut $2 trillion in wasteful spending (although it probably found at least that much…and Congress didn’t seem to cut any of the waste DOGE DID find). And with the war in Iran (which Congress has still not declared) military spending will go up 44% to $1.5 trillion if the President has his way.

This is the New Boss behaving a lot like the Old Bosses. No new deal for American workers. No New Dollar. No year in the sun for Main Street. Just more debt for future Americans to pay off and higher financial asset prices for Wall Street now.

The trade deficit has not gotten smaller either. You can see it absolutely blew out in early 2025 with importers trying to front-run the tariffs and build up inventories. Since then it’s been more of the same. Month after month, America importing more than it exports.

It’s been that way for a long time. But the real decline began with Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress passing the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) in 1995. US political leaders from both parties made a conscious decision to favor Wall Street and the dollar (the capital account) over Main Street, manufacturing, and trade (the current account).

Deep in the details, the result is creation of one of the largest debtor nations the world has ever seen. The Net International Investment Position (NIIP) of a country tells you whether it’s a creditor or a debtor. It’s the difference between what we own versus what we owe. We owe.

The most recent numbers show the NIIP at a negative $21.2 trillion (liabilties of $66.64 trillion versus assets of $43.37 trillion). And if you can believe it, that was a $600 billion improvement over the net debtor position at the end of 2025. But that improvement came entirely from the increase in the value of foreign assets owned by Americans and not a smaller trade deficit.

A net creditor (like Japan) can afford to run a debt-to-GDP ratio over 200%. It can finance its deficits out of available domestic savings (it saves). The ONLY way a net debtor like the United States can afford to do the same—without seeing a huge spike in interest/rates and borrowing costs–is if investors see the global system as safe, basically fair, and stable.

Yet the whole intellectual basis of the Trump Trade Stategy was to make that order LESS stable….It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for them.

So far, it hasn’t. And you could argue that it is un-like Trump to have a complex mechanical plan for restructuring the entire global trading system. He’s a self-styled deal-maker. And he probably thought he could get a better deal using the usual tactics he’s employed over the years—move fast, be chaotic, set unrealistic expecatations, make bombastic announcements, settle for something. Rinse. Wash. Repeat.

Only it hasn’t worked. And that begs the question, IS there a strategy?

Well on that question, the answer is probably ‘yes.’ The idea that tariffs and manufacturing are the source of a nation’s wealth, strength, and security go back all the way to Alexander Hamilton. Writing soon after the Revolution, Hamilton was worried that a nation of farmers and commodity exporters would not be able to stand up to Great European Powers for long. In his report ‘On the Subject of Manufactures,’ published in 1791, he wrote:

Not only the wealth; but the independence and security of a Country, appear to be materially connected with the prosperity of manufactures. Every nation, with a view to those great objects, ought to endeavour to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply. These comprise the means of Subsistence habitation clothing and defence.

The Trump Administration, through the investment programs at the Departments of Energy, War, Commerce, and Interior, has made a conscious effort to re-shore manufacturing in the nuclear supply chain (mining, processing and refining, next gen reactors), rare earths, and critical minerals. We’ve covered some of those stories in these pages.

Whether it results in self-sufficiency and resiliency in industries deemed critical to national security, only time will tell. The soonest any of the investments might bear fruit, according to my research, is 2028. A lot can happen in the interim.

In the meantime, it’s clear that some people in the US government (and in the industries most likely to benefit from government investment) believe the country ought to have an industrial policy. That industrial policy ought to be linked to various trading strategies. And that done correctly, all that should result in more security, a better and more self-sufficient industrial base, and higher wages for the American worker.

Maybe. It’s an idea. And this is a departure from throwing hundreds of billions of dollars toward renewable energy and hoping for a mythical ‘Energy Transition.’ That resulted in wasted money and wasted time, or at the very least, the lining of a lot of pockets from those closest to the money in Washington.

It’s certainly not the free market as we know it, though, is it? The more important question is will investors and BPR readers benefit from the Trump national industrial strategy, such as it is, and for however long it lasts?

Energy Fuels Inc. [UUUU] is a company we wrote about in May of 2024 (Nero Would Weep). Its White Mesa Mill in Utah is/was the only operating uranium mill in the country. It has a licensed capacity of eight million pounds of uranium per year. It’s the leading US producer of U308, the concentrate you need to make fuel for nuclear power plants.

It is/was a uranium play. But it’s also a rare earth play. Processing uranium is toxic partly because the ore is radioactive. You have to make all sorts of provisions for the dust generated. And you have to be in a jurisdiction/geography friendly to such endeavors. Utah is such a place.

Last month, the Department of War signed a $720 condition loan with UUUU to process monzanite ore at the White Mesa Mill. This might make it (might) a successful domestic producer of rare earth elements. That would fit nicely with the ‘Mine-to-Magnet’ strategy the Administration is pursuing. We’ll see.

The stock chart shows the thrills and perils of piggy-backing on US industrial policy. Without a 50% trailing stop, you would have been knocked out of the position twice since May of 2024 before being in the money. Then you MIGHT have tripled your money. Or suffered some massive drawdowns. It would involve a lot of tactical trading, which is not our bag.

It’s all very exciting. But it’s also well beyond our Maximum Safety mandate. Tempting with play money. And worthy of continued study. But nothing to bet the farm (or the factory) on. Especially at these prices/valuations.

We’re making a few revisions to our dashboards to make them more visually appealing. Here’s an example above. It’s ‘the long view’ of the Buffett Indicator. Record times. Record risk. We’ll stay off stocks on the golden path for now.

Until next week,

Dan

PS We’re also looking at updating the look of the Official List. What do you think? These two images are based on Wednesday’s data (not updated for today’s close). Leave a comment below. We’ll publish the full dashboard, the BPR Reckoning Index, and the Doom Index in the upcoming August Monthly Strategy Report.

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Friday, July 10th, 2026

Laramie, Wyoming

By Dan Denning

Happy statehood day Wyoming!

On this day, July 10th, in 1890, Wyoming became the 44th State in the Union. Jubilee Days in Larimie at the moment. Big parade and pancake breakfast tomorrow. But nice work on becoming a state 136 years ago, Wyoming. President Benjamin Harrison admitted it. And as it turns out, there are some things we could learn from 1890 and President Harrison. More on that shortly.

First, the clowns, charlatans, and counterfeiters at the Federal Reserve have released their semi-annual Monetary Policy Report. The paper argues that inflation expectations are ‘anchored’ at 2%. Which is funny because in the same report, the Fed says that Personal Core Expenditure inflation is actually at 4.1% for the last twelve months.

You wonder who the Fed is asking about inflation if it concludes inflation expectations are ‘well anchored’ at 2%. They’re not asking anybody who buys gasoline or groceries. Or pays for insurance, tuition, or prescription drugs. And keep in mind that a policy goal of maintaining 2% inflation is not ‘price stability.’ It’s a slow-drip devaluation in the purchasing power of your savings…by design.

The report went on to ‘blame’ inflation on three things: tariffs, high energy prices, and supply-side shocks from the AI/data-center build out. Meh. The only one of the three for which there is real evidence is high energy prices. And those are almost entirely related to the ongoing war/cease fire/war in Iran.

Notably, the Fed did not blame itself for inflation. But the paper indirectly admitted the Fed’s role in undermining sound money by publishing the chart at the top of this week’s note. The chart shows a sharp spike in US government debt held by the public beginning in 1913, which was the year the Fed began perverting US money in earnest.

Huge US annual deficits and public debt equal to 100% of GDP are not possible without the Fed’s intervention in the market. It creates money to buy bonds from banks. It also directly buys bonds issued by the Treasury. The Fed is the beating heart of the US Welfare/Warfare State. But you won’t read that in the report.

The scariest line on the chart is the rise in net interest expense on the debt since 2020. A trillion dollars a year is one thing. That’s the nominal amount (more or less) of annual interest expense on $40 trillion in debt. That’s about 3.5% of GDP. If Bill is right (and he is) about the Primary Trend being higher interest rates, the US is going to spend a lot more money in the coming years just paying interest on debt. Even a small increase in interest rates will be a big problem.

A BIG increase–the kind caused by a failed Treasury bond auction or the fear of massive money printing–well that will be a death sentence for the dollar, executable immediately. The Fed appears to prefer a slow, managed decline–the kind you will barely notice unless you’re paying attention. Pay attention. And don’t forget to buy the dip in precious metals!

When is a Strategic Petroleum Reserve no longer a reserve? There are about 320 million barrels left in the reserve at the moment. That number is critically low and getting lower. When will it stop? When does it HAVE to stop? First some context.

The Biden draw-down in the SPR—ostensibly to compensate for the ‘oil shock’ at the beginning of the Russia/Ukraine war in 2022 (but also about lowering gas prices before the US mid-terms) was 180 million barrels. The Trump draw-down has been around six million barrels per week and now sits at a total of around 172 million barrels.

By the time the next official data comes out, the Trump draw-down will exceed the Biden draw-down and the Reserve will be at its lowest level since 1983. Again, how low can it go?

The answer is determined by how oil in the SPR is stored and released. It’s stored in underground salt caverns. It’s released by pumping briny water into those caverns. Highly saturated salt water has a much higher density (specific gravity) than oil. Pumping the water into the cavern displaces the crude oil up, forcing it out at the top.

But there’s a catch.

Even briney sea water can alter the structure of the caverns in which the SPR resides. It mixes and erodes or distots the walls of the cavern. Below 300 million barrels, the government says the salt cavern structures become less stable with the added water. At current rates of depletion, that means in about three weeks, the Administration will have to decide whether to go below 300 million barrels…or buy oil on the open market. Or do something. Or do nothing and hope for the best.

Congress hasn’t been helpful (when IS it helpful?) In 2017, it began using the SPR as a piggy bank by selling oil to fund special government projects. It failed to replenish the Reserve when oil prices were low (something Trump suggested in his first term…but wasn’t done because mostly Democrats said it would be a subsidy to ‘big oil.’)

The statutes on the books say the Reserve can never go below 150 million barrels. We’re a long way from that (about 24 weeks according to current draw-down rates). Will we still be engaged in a special military operation in Iran in 24 weeks? Will other transit options that bypass the Persian Gulf entirely be available by that time? What will the oil price be?

Nobody knows. But in the meantime, we’re quite happy with our positions in uranium, oil and gas, and other real assets that throw off a stream of income. New readers can catch up quickly by reading Investment Director Tom Dyson’s July Monthly Strategy Report.

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Wednesday, July 8th, 2026

By Tom Dyson, Investment Director

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Friday, July 03rd, 2026

Laramie, Wyoming

By Dan Denning

Happy 250th America!

🎆 🎇 🧨💣🇺🇲

And here’s to all those who celebrate liberty and the idea of America. Fire up the barbecue. Crack open a beer. Light up a sparkler.

Enjoy!

But don’t think any of the festivities this weekend will keep the coming reckoning at bay. Not gonna happen. In this week’s research note, I’ve compiled more evidence. But not just about valuations. Also about certain indicators that will help us narrow down the ‘when’.

Before I get into them, check out the chart above. It’s an index that measures both the price and the volume of AI use by big businesses. At the ‘enterprise’ level, big businesses have been spending heaps of time and money trying to make AI (subscription-based Large Language Models like ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude) do something.

C’mon AI! Do something! Anything, really.

Replace lawyers and accountants, pad the bottom line, automate and optimize processes…be the transformative general purpose technology Silicon Valley has told us you’ll be.

But what if it isn’t?

There are several good reasons why ‘token maxing’--spending millions on AI compute blindly–might be in a downtrend. First is that the US players are closed-source, subscription-based models. You can’t customize the model. You don’t really own it. And there’s no guarantee the proprietary intellectual property from your business that you entrust to the AI vendor is secure…or won’t be used to copy your business model.

Second, the open-source models from China are cheaper and by most accounts, just as good. Granted, the Chinese open-source models may have also…effectively borrowed all the training data used by US companies. But the US companies ‘scraped’ a lot of the data they used to train their model and didn’t pay for it either. My point is that neither group is in command of the moral high ground here.

The third reason for the decline in AI spend is that customers may have doubts about whether they’re getting–or will continue to get–the best services (at any price). I’m referring to the Trump Administration’s brief suspension of Claude’s Fable model on national security grounds last week. It now appears that new models will require Uncle Sam’s permission to go public…and the implied threat of nationalization (in which case the government owns third party data) is now a factor users must consider.

I also refer you to Palantir’s stock chart above. And I encourage you to think about the term ‘AI Sovereignty’ this weekend. The ‘frontier’ companies in AI like Anthropic and OpenAI have basically built a brain you can rent. But they don’t show you how they trained the brain (is it Woke…is it anti-racist…does it have ‘guardrails’ to prevent you from ‘wrong-think’?) and they don’t let you customize it. You pay to use it…in the way they allow you to use it.

Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp made waves this week when he all but said that LLMs and AI based on the subscription model aren’t going to make it. He implied these companies have no real business model going forward. Why? Corporations and nations want to ‘own’ the whole technology and keep their data private and proprietary. That’s not what the big US firms offer.

Karp is partly talking his own book. Nvidia has an ‘open weight’ model called Nemotron. It runs on Nvidia hardware. And you can run Palantir’s various software offerings on it. But you can tweak and improve the model to suit your needs (that’s partly what ‘open weight’ means)–without surrendering your data back to a model provider.

You get AI Sovereignty, in other words. That’s a world where you can run your own AI or army of agents on your own machines with no constraints. The individual, the corporation, and the government are all sovereign. Not the AI provider. Nemotron is also ‘multi-modal,’ meaning you can input text, images, video, and audio into your training data for the model. That’s a LOT more data for the model to ‘learn’ form.

Bottom line: If big corporate spenders move away from the ‘closed source’ frontier AI models, then it’s a danger to the hyperscalers, to the AI capex boom, and to the entire AI bubble that’s been building in the stock market since November of 2022. That’s what’s at stake. The catalyst for the Big Loss and the mean reverting crash.

Palantir’s stock chart doesn’t give any clues. It’s not an AI play. And you could argue that Palantir has been quietly delivering advanced business intelligence and analytics for the government (especially the Depart of War and intelligence services) for years. Maybe LLMs like ChatGPT are just the watered down versions of this technology that are ‘safe’ to make available to the public (on a subscription basis only…and if that turns out NOT to be a viable business model…than nationalization as an ‘intelligence utility.’)

Lots to consider. In the meantime, Fable is back, baby. It got out of Trump jail mid-week. And I put it right to work improving our BPR valuation dashboard. I’ve broken it up into three parts–Valuations, Triggers, and the Verdict. I’ll show them to you now…and I invite your feedback in making them even more useful. Let’s start at the beginning with valuations.

All honest measures of value — the CAPE, the Buffett Indicator, the price you pay for a dollar of earnings — will tell you the same thing today: U.S. stocks are historically expensive. That’s a fact.

But it answers only one of the two questions a serious investor needs answered. Valuation tells you the size of the eventual reckoning (how far we have deviated from historical levels). It tells you almost nothing about the timing (which I’ll come back to in a moment).

For example, Robert Shiller’s Cyclically Adjusted Price Earnings ratio (CAPE) CAPE is good at predicting ten-year returns but not especially helpful for what will happen in the next ten months. For the new and improved dashboard, we’ve taken out the silver/oil ratio and the equity risk premium. Both are too abstract with too little useful informational content. We may come back to them from time to time when relevant. But not each month.

We’ve replaced those two with three new ones: the household equity allocation, the gold/silver ratio, and the S&P 500/GSCI ratio. These are all additional insights based on financial data. For example, the household equity allocation is based on eighty years of Federal Reserve data. It’s a great forecaster of ten-year returns. At 45.8%, US households have a record amount of their financial assets in stocks. They are ‘all in.’

The gold/silver ratio is more controversial subject to debate about its value. It doesn’t tell you anything about the individual prospects for gold or silver individuall. But in my view, it does tell you roughly where we are in the precious metals bull market. The lower the ratio the later it is (silver rallies to catch up with gold). If this were a baseball game, I’d say we were in the seventh inning.

The last new valuation edition is the S&P 500 to Goldman Sachs Commodity Index ratio. In some ways, this is similar to the Dow/Gold ratio. But it’s broader. You can think of it as the ratio between financial assets and real assets, or ‘paper’ and ‘stuff.’

One last thing: we’ve added a percentile bar. This shows you where the current reading sits for as far back as the data is available. For example, there are 675 readings on the Buffet Indicator (market cap-to-GDP) going back over 56 years. This month’s reading is the highest ever (100th percentile).

The percentile shows you where today’s reading is relative to all past available readings. It doesn’t have anything to do with ‘fair value’ or ‘intrinsic value.’ Stocks could go higher. The bubble could get bigger. The experiment may run longer. Or it could blow up.

When you condense all our percentile indicators into ONE indicator–the BPR Reckoning Index–you get a more precise read of what all of them are telling you. And THAT tells you what you can likely expect from stock market returns for the next ten years. Now for the second part.

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Wednesday, July 1st, 2026

By Tom Dyson, Investment Director

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Tower Bridge, England

By Dan Denning

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Wednesday, June 17

By Tom Dyson, Investment Director

The Four Quadrants model we’re using, created by Charles Gave, has moved definitely into the INFLATIONARY BOOM quadrant.

This is the biggest news this week.

In the Inflationary Boom quadrant, stores of value like real estate, precious metals, commodities perform well. Gold beats stocks. Also, high fixed-cost, cyclical producers do well like shipping, like oil and gas infrastructure, and the new iron ore royalty idea we introduced last week.

The worst investments in the Inflationary Boom quadrant? Long term bonds.

More importantly, we can take down our Crash Alert flag as we’ve now left the Inflationary Bust quadrant, which Gave calls the ‘Equity Hell’ quadrant. All the major bear markets of history have occurred from the Inflationary Bust quadrant.

On the other hand, he says “nothing too dramatic tends to happen” in the Inflationary Boom quadrant.

Here’s the key signal. When the stocks/oil ratio is above its 7-year moving average, the model says ‘Boom.’ As you can see, the ratio is now well above the moving average. This signal doesn’t flip flop very often, notwithstanding the flip flop we’ve just had, so hopefully we’ll stay in the Inflationary Boom quadrant for a few more years now. We’ll see.

It’s important to note that this model doesn’t forecast or predict what comes next. It only tells us where we are now and what assets do best now. For all we know, oil could soar again, the stock market could dive and the ratio goes back below its moving average again. In which case the model would flip again. We’ll see. The chart is the chart!

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Friday, June 12th, 2026

Laramie, Wyoming

By Dan Denning

What a day for a space dream. As epic bubbles go, this one’s been a doozy. And if the SpaceX IPO marks the symbolic (if not the actual) top of the AI/tech boom, well at least it’s made some cafeteria workers and janitors into millionaires. That’s more than Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren have ever done for American workers.

The company began trading today at $135/share. It raised $75 billion at that price, for a market capitalization of $1.77 trillion. After finishing up 19.2% on the day, the market cap is now $2.1 trillion. That makes it the sixth-largest American company by market cap. Add in the other five and you have $21 trillion worth of new tech ‘wealth’.

The miserable communists and envy merchants of the world can’t stand that Elon Musk is the world’s first trillionaire. Sanders wants to use Musk as the poster boy for lifting the cap on taxable income for Social Security. Having never had a real job his entire life or created an ounce of value for anyone, Sanders says if billionaires and trillionaires pay their ‘fair share,’ Social Security can be saved for the next seventy-five years.

The US government spends around $1 trillion every 50 days. You could confiscate all of Musk’s net worth and it would buy you about seven weeks of spending. And in any event, as numerate people understand, net worth tied to the value of stocks is not cash. Why?

It’s not liquid. And if we’re right about this IPO marking a high-water mark for the bubble, Musk won’t be a trillionaire for long. Enjoy it while it lasts! And don’t forget that all the valuation metrics on our dashboard are screaming ‘danger!’

It’s tempting to pop up some corn, add some butter, and kick back to watch the coming calamity. But you can’t help but be a little impressed about the SpaceX hype and what Musk has managed to achieve (in the face of hostile politicians and carping legacy media). That doesn’t make me optimistic that a ‘Big Loss’ isn’t coming. Our mission is to avoid it.

But there WILL be a future after the bust. And on the optimistic and opportunistic side, uranium is going to be a part of it. After all is said and done in the Strait of Hormuz, nuclear will be the big winner of the Iran war. That’s worth keeping an eye on.

The World Nuclear Association updated its ‘reference case’ for uranium demand in its 2025 report. It reckons uranium demand will double to 390 million pounds a year by 2040. That figure is a 55 million pound increase from the ‘reference’ case in the 2023 report. What’s driving demand?

New reactors.

Trouble is, there aren’t enough new mines!

Current annual mine supply is around 155 million pounds. The big three producers, geographically, are Namibia, Canada, and Kazakhstan. With some valuable advice from our friend Rick Rule, Tom Dyson made a simple ‘long’ uranium position the first one in BPR’s Official List (make sure you don’t miss the new position Tom added, with a Canadian angle, in his note on Wednesday).

Then there’s this chart.

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Wednesday, June 10

By Tom Dyson, Investment Director

The stock market has just logged one of the all-time great rallies in history, gaining 19% over nine consecutive winning weeks.

An exciting new technology has sparked a gargantuan capex boom. Suddenly, after years of buying back stock, Google says it wants to issue $80bn in new stock to fund even more AI investment. Meta says it’s thinking of doing the same thing. So is Amazon.

But what’s this? Some businesses are complaining about token costs and telling their staff to limit their use of AI because it isn’t worth the cost. Uber blew through its entire AI budget for the year in just four months. One company — that forget to set a cap on usage — reportedly spent over half a billion dollars on Anthropic’s Claude. Ooops.

Meanwhile, they’re pumping the SpaceX IPO, by far the largest IPO in history.

Suddenly, momentum has stalled. Korea, a momentum leader, has dropped 12% in the last five days. Nvidia, another momentum leader, has dropped 8.6% in the last four days. The Philadelphia semiconductor index, a third momentum leader, has fallen 11% in five days.

And look at this final momentum leader, the outperformance of the Nasdaq100 versus the S&P 400 midcap index. It’s been one-way traffic for 25 years! It’s down 5.4% since May 29… but the peak still barely registers on this chart.

Oh…and interest rates are rising, which is a stiff headwind for growth investing. And the Strait of Hormuz is still closed.

In short, I couldn’t be more bearish. This is a classic stock market bubble in search of a pin.

Greetings from Rome!

They tied his tongue and then burned him at the stake.

This is Giordano Bruno. He believed Earth rotated around the Sun and the Universe was infinite. He was arrested by the Inquisition, and spent seven years on trial being tortured. They gave him many opportunities to recant his theories, even right up to the end when the flames were licking his feet. He still refused. So they gagged him for the last time and let him burn.

This is the exact spot where they executed him, 426 years ago.

Let me show you the simple guide I’m using to imagine what comes next for the stock market…

This chart shows the S&P 500, adjusted for inflation, going back 150 years.

The red lines show the bear markets…the long stretches where the stock market didn’t generate a positive return.

I assume that the S&P 500 will return to the uppermost red line on this chart (at 3,038), probably right where those three question marks are (sometime in the early 2030s).

As the red lines show, it would not be surprising for those buying the S&P 500 at today’s levels to be waiting four or five decades to see a positive return on their investment.

Overly simplistic? Maybe. Unorthodox? For sure. Contrarian? Extremely.

Source: Dave Collum’s Year In Review 2025

Our current asset allocation is like two separate bets against the stock market. Holding cash is a direct bet against the stock market and falling prices. We have 35% of our savings allocated to cash.

Precious metals and cheap energy stocks are also a direct bet against falling stock prices, and a devalued paper currency. History shows that when stock market values mean revert, gold and other hard assets soar.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about placing a third bet against the stock market…either by selling short or by buying long-dated put options.

I’m meeting up with Dan and Bill in London later this month and I’m going to seek their counsel. For now, I feel it’s a bad idea. Why? It’s game theory. If our two existing bets against the stock market pay off — and the Dow/Gold ratio goes to 5 — we’ll end up making a fortune.

The additional impact of buying put options or short selling seems like unnecessary risk for no clear gain.

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Friday, June 05th, 2026

Laramie, Wyoming

By Dan Denning

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Wednesday, June 3

By Tom Dyson, Investment Director

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Tom Dyson, Investment Director

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Friday, May 22nd, 2026

Laramie, Wyoming

By Dan Denning

Well, how now, Dow? The big blue-chip index made a record intra-day AND closing high today. It went into the Memorial Day weekend strong, with a close at 50,579.

But wait!

In gold terms, the Dow is at 11.2. That’s higher than in the last few months. But it’s a long way off from the lows we expect it to make (under five, if past cycles are any indication). Below, we’ll look at broad money supply trends and total dollar-denominated liabilities in the global system…and what they mean for gold.

But first, late last month we said the clock was ticking on two things. First, the 90-day deadline on military operations in Iran. After 90 days, the President has to seek permission from Congress, or Congress has to explicitly authorize the operation. Second, Iran is running out of room to store the oil it pumps. Let’s begin with a chart.

What on earth is really happening in the oil market? The physical market is still pricing scarcity. The financial market is pricing a quick and peaceful resolution to the war in Iran. In fact, even though prices are still up from early February, the financial markets are acting as if the war is already over.

Which one is right?

Industry sources still quote a large premium for oil being offloaded from tankers in Asia. That is, the price at the port is higher than the price in the newspaper. The premium is smaller than it was a month ago. But it’s still there. (Many of the prices and data are behind industry paywalls or only updated intermittently, so the market is a bit opaque.)

Meanwhile, there is growing concern among energy analysts that the draw-down in commercial oil inventories will mean much higher energy prices this summer. There is an important distinction to be made between commercial oil inventories and strategic petroleum reserves held by national governments. The commercial inventories are stocks that are constantly drawn on. What’s the issue?

About a billion barrels of global oil supply have been “lost” due to the Iran war. It comes out to about 14 million barrels per day (bpd) after you subtract overland pipeline supply that’s still flowing from the 20 million barrels per day that used to transit the Strait.

Some releases of strategic petroleum reserves have offset that lost production. Higher prices have destroyed demand for oil in markets that can’t afford it. (There is even an argument to be made that global inventories may actually be rising…but I won’t get into that today.) And with financial markets expecting the current ceasefire to be permanent, the financial price of oil is lower than you might expect for what’s been called the biggest oil shock in history.

Oil analysts concede that the Iran war began with about 8.2 billion barrels of oil reserves around the globe (in commercial or other storage). That’s about 86 days’ worth of oil at current global daily demand of 95 mb/d. And that’s if all we had to live off of was the oil in storage — an unlikely scenario, as plenty of oil and gas are being supplied daily all over the world.

But here’s the big thing: all that oil in storage is not readily available. Some of it is required to keep systems pressurized and/or maintain critical supplies as defined by national security legislation. There is also a minimum level of reserves required to keep pipelines and refineries functioning normally. It is not available to be ‘released’ and make up for production interruptions.

Just where that level is — and how quickly we’d get there if the Strait doesn’t open and the war doesn’t end — is the big question. In the best-case scenario, the ceasefire becomes a formal agreement for ending the war. Oil resumes flowing through the Strait, although it’s not likely to happen as easily as flicking on a light switch.

If this happens, then you’d expect the oil price to come down even further. This has no effect on our long-term position in XOP, the oil and gas producers ETF we’re using to execute the Trade of the Decade. If anything, an oil correction might allow new readers to enter the position when the RSI is at or below 30. (We’ll let you know if that happens.)

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Wednesday, May 20

By Tom Dyson, Investment Director

QUESTION: DHT’s stock price has closed below $18 two days in a row. Did we say we were closing that trade? I haven’t seen an ale…

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Friday, May 15th, 2026

Laramie, Wyoming

By Dan Denning

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Wednesday, May 13

By Tom Dyson, Investment Director

At the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting this month, Buffett said that, of the 60 years he’s been in business, only five of them have been really juicy years for buying stocks.

Another time, he said that waiting for a market panic is like a mortician waiting for a flu epidemic, which would not be a good investing technique.

Yeah, well…

Decades of flawed economics, flawed finance and flawed policy-making have inflated a gigantic bubble in leverage and speculation. They’ve created a monster… and one aspect of this monster is that market crashes come around more frequently than they used to…and each one is more powerful – and potentially destructive – than the last, requiring ever-bigger interventions from the Feds.

Furthermore, conditions today — the valuations, the concentration, the stocks-never-go-down sentiment — would seem to be perfect for a crash…or at least the perfect starting point for a bear market.

Of course, I’m not predicting a market crash. But we CAN make sure you don’t take a “Big Loss” should a crash happen.

We continue to recommend the absolute safest investment portfolio you can muster. Lots of ultra-short government bills, lots of physical precious metal, and some energy stocks to hedge against currency depreciation.

And then…patience to wait for the next panic, crisis or recession, which will surely come along sooner or later.

Greetings from Chiswick…

Dan Denning sent me the chart below of the 30-year bond yield today. It’s on the verge of making new 19-year highs above 5.11%.

Recall our traders’ saying that there’s no such thing as a triple top. If a price bumps into resistance three times, then it’s clearly telling you which way it wants to go. In my experience, a breakout almost always happens after the third attempt to break through resistance.

We saw this a few years ago with the gold price as it tried to break through resistance at $2,000 an ounce, first in 2020, then again in 2022 and finally in 2024, when the gold price took off and never looked back. It’s now at $4,700.

The 30-year yield first broke 5% in 2023. Then again in 2025. And now it has just broken 5% for the third time. (The 30-year bond yields 5.05% at tonight’s close.) Let’s watch.

If the triple-top rule works, the long bond yield is about to head much higher. The Fed can try (and even succeed) in controlling the short end of the curve. But the long end is a different animal. The market sets that yield. And the bond vigilantes are about to ride again.

QUESTION: We’re just beginning our journey of self-managed investing after getting rid of our financial advisor. If you were going to construct a portfolio from scratch today, would you allocate the funds according to the Maximum Safety Mode portfolio or would you ‘tweak’ it based on where things currently stand? (i.e. gold at $4700, oil at $102 etc.). We recognize that you cannot provide investment advice but would appreciate your insights as we commence this journey!

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Chiswick, West London

Wednesday, May 6

By Tom Dyson, Investment Director

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Friday, April 24th, 2026

Laramie, Wyoming

By Dan Denning

Two clocks, one outcome. A global energy depression and a stock market crash in the balance. Tick…tick…tick….

The first is ticking in Washington. The President notified Congress of his military operation in Iran on March 2nd. Under the 1973 War Powers Act, he has sixty days to conduct that operation without Congressional approval. That sixty day deadline is May 2nd.

The President can unilaterally extend his operation by another thirty days by writing to Congress. But, he’s technically only allowed to do so if those thirty days are required to conduct the safe withdrawal of US forces. War over.

Congress could step in and pass a resolution authorizing continued military force with a simple majority in both the House or the Senate. Or–and here’s a radical idea–Congress could do its duty and exercise its authority under Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the United States Constitution and vote, by a simple majority, to declare war.

The Congress has only done that eleven times in American history. The last was in 1942. Since 1942 there have been 15 ‘conflicts’ in which Congress ought to have declared war but did not. Congress will not do its duty.

Technically, the President’s special military operation ought to end next week. Realistically, it could go on for at least another 30 days. And historically, based on the post 9/11 world, it could last years or decades. But in the short term, we have one clock ticking in DC.

The other is in Iran. Like everyone else in the Gulf, Iran is shipping a lot less oil these days. Their wells can keep producing as long as they have room to store that oil. But according to unofficial figures, the Iranians will run out of available storage for their oil sometime in mid May. And then?

And then they will have to ‘shut in’ their producing wells. A ‘shut in’ turns an oil well into a static pressure vessel. The longer the ‘shut in’ the more potential damage to the oil well itself, or the long-term production of the oil reservoir below it. And obviously, you can’t sell or ship oil you aren’t producing anymore. Tick Tick. Tick.

The global oil market has lost close to 700 million barrels of oil since the war began and the Strait was closed. If things ‘normalized’ today, clearing out the tanker traffic and resuming production would take time. It will be a billion barrels of ‘lost’ oil before you know it. And it will take years and billions of dollars/yuan of investment to repair the damage to energy infrastructure already inflicted (mostly by Iran on Gulf states).

This is the largest ‘oil shock’ in history, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). It’s affecting supply and refiners and distillate products all over the world. But the only reason it isn’t an even BIGGER shock yet is that the supply shock has been met by about four million barrels per day of demand destruction.

High oil prices HAVE affected affordability/demand in those markets furthest away from the Gulf or least able to pay or find a substitute supplier. But the supply shock and demand destruction have more or less cancelled each other out at the moment. This gives the appearance of a weirdly stable status quo, where you can have the biggest energy shock ever…but have no real-world consequences.

I would not expect that to last. I’m leaving out the question of whether financial markets have been used to distort the contract/paper prices for oil. This would be a form of ‘narrative’ control to show that the war was going fine and there was no oil crisis. But the ‘real’ price–what users are paying to unload oil–is already much higher than the ‘paper’ price in some markets.

Another weird situation. High prices will destroy demand for people at the end of the supply chain, or without friends in oil-rich places. But that demand destruction may counter falling supply and allow for ‘stable’ oil prices. For a while. Until when?

Well, either things get back to something like normal or they don’t. My guess is that the supply disruption is still wending its way through global supply chains. Higher prices and real shortages will show up in the summer, if not sooner. And it will show up in a politically sensitive food prices (shortages). All of THAT is assumes the worst of the interrupted flows and damaged infrastructure is behind us. And stocks? See below.

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