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.)

Trump and Powell are no buddies. They’ve been fighting over rate cuts all year—Trump demanding more, Powell holding back. Even after cutting twice, Trump called him “grossly incompetent” and said he’d “love to fire” him. The tension has been building for months.

And Trump now seems ready to install someone who shares his appetite for lower rates and easier money.

Trump has been dropping hints for weeks—saying on November 18, “I think I already know my choice,” and then doubling down last Sunday aboard Air Force One with, “I know who I am going to pick… we’ll be announcing it.”

He was referring to one Kevin Hassett, who—according to a recent Bloomberg report—has emerged as the overwhelming favorite to become the next Fed chair.

Here we sit — investors, analysts, retirees, accountants, even a few masochistic economists — gathered beneath the leafless monetary tree, rehearsing our lines as we wait for Jerome Powell to step onstage and tell us what the future means.

Spoiler: he can’t. But that does not stop us from waiting.

Tomorrow, he is expected to deliver the December rate cut. Polymarket odds sit at 96% for a dainty 25-point cut.

Trump, Navarro and Lutnick pine for 50 points.

And somewhere in the wings smiles Kevin Hassett — at 74% odds this morning, the presumed Powell successor — watching the last few snowflakes fall before his cue arrives.

With U.S. stocks trading at about 24 times forward earnings, plans for capital growth have to go off without a hitch. Given the billions of dollars in commitments by AI companies, financing to the hilt on debt, the most realistic outcome is a hitch.

On a valuation basis, global markets will likely show better returns than U.S. stocks in 2026.

America leads the world in innovation. A U.S. tech stock will naturally fetch a higher price than, say, a German brewery. But value matters, too.

As copper flowed into the United States, LME inventories thinned and backwardation steepened. Higher U.S. pricing, tariff protection, and lower political risk made American warehouses the most attractive destination for metal. Each new shipment strengthened the spread.

The arbitrage, once triggered, became self-reinforcing. Traders were not participating in theory; they were responding to the physical incentives in front of them.

The United States had quietly become the marginal buyer of the world’s most important industrial metal. China, long the gravitational center of global copper demand, found itself on the outside.