A Nation of Day Traders

With all eyes on today’s CPI read, which tells us inflation is slowly ticking up again, it’s a good idea to wonder why we care about a 0.1% move in any direction.

How did this monthly data point become so important?

One big reason is that we’ve become a nation of impulsive, quick traders, not investors. High-frequency trading algorithms don’t help.

But it wasn’t always this way. Investors used to hold their average stock holding for years, just a generation ago:

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So, what turned America into a nation of traders? Cheaper transaction costs are a big reason. Fees earned from Robinhood accounts make up a major revenue stream for Citadel, Wall Street’s largest hedge fund.

Lower tax rates on capital gains, especially under Trump’s tax regime, have pushed investors towards faster-growth companies, which naturally lead them to take quick profits.

At Grey Swan, we’ve built a robust Model Portfolio designed to benefit from stocks that can rise for years at a time… and pay dividends along the way. We include long-term holdings such as gold and silver — hard assets that have stood the test of time — along with the new kid on the block, bitcoin.

Our research often reveals shorter-term trades related to trends like AI, soaring uranium demand, and the surprising opportunity in American natural gas right now.

We don’t need to trade every data point. However, following long and medium-term trends has proven to be profitable over time. And a lot less stressful.

~ Addison

P.S. Tomorrow, we’ll look at a Grey Swan event in the making: the rise of drone warfare and its meaning and the remaking of the American defense industry. John Robb, former advisor to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff on netwar, will join us for Grey Swan Live! to share the latest on how drones are actively being deployed in Ukraine and will figure in the Golden Dome. We’ll also discuss investment opportunities these innovations will spawn in the private sector.

Andrew’s also planning to attend the Rule Investment Symposium in Boca Raton on July 7-11, 2025.

The Symposium is a five-day affair featuring in-depth research from dozens of small-cap resource companies, including gold and silver mining companies – but also copper, uranium, and other critical commodities we’ve explored in-depth in our research over the past year. Click here to attend and meet your future cutting-edge resource investments face-to-face.

As always, your reader feedback is welcome: feedback@greyswanfraternity.com (We read all emails. Thanks in advance for your contribution.)

With all eyes on today’s CPI read, which tells us inflation is slowly ticking up again, it’s a good idea to wonder why we care about a 0.1% move in any direction.

How did this monthly data point become so important?

One big reason is that we’ve become a nation of impulsive, quick traders, not investors. High-frequency trading algorithms don’t help.

But it wasn’t always this way. Investors used to hold their average stock holding for years, just a generation ago:

Turn Your Images On

Lower tax rates on capital gains, especially under Trump’s tax regime, have pushed investors towards faster-growth companies, which naturally lead them to take quick profits.

Our research often reveals shorter-term trades related to trends like AI, soaring uranium demand, and the surprising opportunity in American natural gas right now.

We don’t need to trade every data point. However, following long and medium-term trends has proven to be profitable over time. And a lot less stressful.

~ Addison

Andrew’s also planning to attend the Rule Investment Symposium in Boca Raton on July 7-11, 2025.

As always, your reader feedback is welcome: feedback@greyswanfraternity.com (We read all emails. Thanks in advance for your contribution.)

Since the US confiscation of Russian assets in 2022, pretty much every pull back to 50-day moving average (red line) has been bought, and they continue to be bought. The average is now flattening out, as you would expect with this summer consolidation, rather as it did late last year. Some sideways consolidation is good. Ideally, you want to see the short-, medium- and long-term moving averages all flatten and converge. There often follows a big move higher.

We know many consumers continue to live paycheck to paycheck. After spiking higher, the drawdown in savings—cash that can be used in an emergency—is back to pre-pandemic levels.

While the overall debt picture is ugly, in some ways it isn’t – and that it may take some more time for a debt crisis to reach a kitchen countertop near you.

As we knock off for the week approaching mid-summer, it strikes us how hard it is to distinguish signal from noise. Markets defying gravity gives us pause.

Don’t buy in at elevated prices.

Keep your asset allocation in full view.

Buy cheap.

Sell dear.

It’s a funny old world, isn’t it?

AI is buying engineers like they’re first-round picks. The military is investing in rare earths like it’s the 1950s space race. Tariffs are flying, cocoa’s getting scarce, and your cereal may soon come with a luxury markup.

None of it, likely, concerns your portfolio.

This new wave of tokenized shares is exciting. It has the potential to break down walls and democratize access to pre-IPO giants.

But at the moment, it’s also risky, opaque, and largely unregulated.

So while we applaud the innovation, we urge caution — especially if you’re being offered something that seems too good to be true.