Transcript was automatically generated.

00:01 – Frank Curzio (Host)

So Mr Frank Holmes started the JET ETF, which is about airplanes. Apparently, they didn’t get the message because you got here a little bit late with your flight, right, which is tough. So the ETF, the biggest ETF, right, it’s JETS in that industry which you launched. You also launched a gold ETF right, go Gold, which Frank was nice enough to call me. I believe that was in. Actually, we have a picture of that if you want to put that up. I think that was in. When was that? When you launched out of New York Stock Exchange In 2018. 18. 

00:37

And he calls me and he says hey, you know what we’re going to. You know, ring the opening bell or the closing bell Opening bell right. Ring the open or the closing bell Opening bell, right, closing bell. Oh, it was a closing bell. There it is, and I was on and I think there was about I don’t know how many people were there, but we were able to actually go up on the balcony and it was fantastic. 

00:55

So when you see my Twitter profile the ex-profile that’s because of him, and I have to give him this introduction, because Frank’s such a good guy, because we go on a lot of field trips together and we see each other all the time and we really believe in being in the field. We call it being in the room, right, and you know it’s the Boeing facility as well, which I could show. If you haven’t done this, in Everett Washington, if that picture comes up, should I hit it again One more time? Nope, nope, that’s not it. That’s we gotta go back there we go. So that’s from uh, the uh, everett facility right in washington, and if you haven’t gone there, it’s an assembly line for boeing 737 jets. 

01:39

Think of a car assembly line. It was an incredible experience. Oh so, I mean, a plane is bigger than this room and picture seven or eight of them in an assembly line. It’s the biggest manufacturer facility in the world. It’s bigger than singapore, it’s bigger than disney, right, and it was just an incredible. You see all the suppliers, how they they put everything together. But, um, I’m just so glad you can come because we have so much to talk about, because we’re going to go to gold, we’re going to go to the jets, right, the ETF, but I wanted to start with Hive, which is you’re a gold guy and we’re talking about Bitcoin. 

02:10 – Frank Holmes (Guest)

Well, I’m always asked about the journey. So in life, you know, we have the journey. We meet people, by the way. Thank you everyone. I’m sorry I wasn’t here this morning and so I ended up coming up from Miami. We had to get up at 3 am to fly there and did two board meetings Fantastic with Zoom and came up here for this event and you were so accommodating for me, so I really appreciate it. I have known for World of Gold. I wrote a book on gold and created the first gold royalty companies. It was my first as an investment banker was Franco Nevada in 1983. So I’m aging myself. 

02:48

And in that journey I noticed that I had to get in the ETF business but the number of flights that was available to travel globally had all of a sudden contracted and the price of my tickets were going up. And that’s because everyone was in bankruptcy Everyone but Southwest Airlines. So I started looking at the history of them and said you know what? I’m going to go launch this product. And in this little product it captures 9% of the global GDP and it’s called Smart Beta 2.0. It’s a quant approach of picking airlines and airports. So you don’t realize that learning is that airports De Gaulle, bangkok, japan, mexico. There’s many public airports and they run like private equity, so they create this unique stability. And then that journey was then launching Go Gold, and that focused on gold royalties applying. The smart beta which you attended with and during that process was the creation of a Bitcoin ETF, and I realized that $1,000 an hour legal bill I was going nowhere in 2017. 

04:03

So in that process, I learned about Bitcoin mining and if you mine the original coin, it’s called the Genesis coin or Virgin coin. It’s never been in cybersecurity, so you don’t have a KYC or AML problem. So the idea is I put up the first $5 million to launch the first crypto mining company in September of 2017, which you know well. That whole story One of my biggest failures. And so as soon as I put in 5 million, 25 million came behind it. And it was the darling because of all the gold following I had. It was they all of a sudden were reluctant to go into buy Bitcoin, but Hive became their proxy and we started in Iceland, sweden and then back to Canada, and now we’re exploding in growth in Paraguay. And during that whole journey, I also launched the first AI company for gold mining Goldspot. And then Eric Sprott came in in and he bought more than 15% of the company at one time and I had to learn all about AI. 

05:13

So you don’t realize. I learned about Bitcoin because of gold as a decentralized asset one’s tangible, one’s intangible. You just recognize the similarities and then on that journey, you all of a sudden realize that there’s other unique things that are taking place and I didn’t realize at the beginning. It’s the data center business. I am in the data center business and right now we have a arms race for electricity and data centers and we think of China, and China has been building military bases in the Himalayas, a superhighway along the whole border to build up against India, and what’s interesting is that they’ve been rerouting the water from the glaciers down to China and they can easily create a drought as a complaint in Bangladesh and in India. So now India is spending a ton of money to build hydroelectricity dams. So China’s use of this model has exploded. They’ve created these data centers, which are like military camps to fund and push for all the BYD, electrical cars and, most important, for armaments, and they have tripled their navy. So if there’s another war ever that takes place with China, it’s going to be predominantly navy. 

06:39

I live in San Antonio, texas, even though I have this Tex-Can accent, you can tell. I say out and about because I’m Canadian, but I’m a dual citizen and lived in Texas for 35 years. So I say y’all come back, eh, and you start to realize there’s something bigger happening, so I launched my latest. There’s something bigger happening, so I launched my latest has been the war ETF and that is AI and data centers and semiconductors. Because the US is rebuilding all of their military and in that journey I find out that most of Biden’s what he sent to Ukraine was old equipment so it kept the economy going in all 50 states as the industrial military complex were rearming, are with the latest technology in America and and what they’re realizing is that they need to spend more money in data centers. 

07:37

So the first people they will go to is which blew me away the first group of data center but they call tier one data centers are Bitcoin miners. They’re scrappy, they’re really scrappy entrepreneurs Petroleum engineers that went into West Texas and they took that flare gas and surplus not hydro, but surplus solar and wind and they started Bitcoin mining. They took an area, which we did in northern Sweden, which had surplus or wasted electricity and all of a sudden made an economic model out of it and started creating in the community a huge big boom, thank you. So now you realize the biggest spend in America today is called Stargate and it’s in sweet Abilene, texas, and it’s only $500 billion being spent. And who was there first? Bitcoin miners. So what you’re seeing now is that the valuations on data centers are 20 times EBITDA. Shocks you 12, 15 times revenue, which is called Tier 3, right? 

08:54 – Frank Curzio (Host)

Pardon me, which is called Tier 3, right? Tier 3,? 

08:57 – Frank Holmes (Guest)

and then if you go military, they call it Tier 4. Oh, that’s interesting. And in San Antonio is three military bases and it’s now. They started this 25 years ago. Cybersecurity school had 100 students 100. Today it’s 10,000. It’s the number one cybersecurity school. And if you’re from mainland China and you’ve got the best PhD in engineering, you can’t work, you can’t go to school there, because it’s the path into the NSA, because you have this clearance. 

09:28

So you realize that Microsoft is spending $3 billion in San Antonio. There’s a huge spin happening just here, but nothing like Stargate. And you can look on Bloomberg, you can look it up on YouTube and it’s incredible footage to see what is taking place. But we still have a long way to go to really catch up with what’s taking place in China. And I think that at the beginning I thought that one belt, one road was a brilliant idea by Xi Jinping. I thought it was what a way to build the network around the world. But really it was a Trojan horse. It was disappointing because I thought what a brilliant idea. But you realize he’s bought 100 seaports it’s to control and they’ve lent out, I think, $2 trillion to 140 out of 194 countries in the UN. So they’ve taken money and with that money comes clauses that now we’re seeing the outcome is the lowest percentage of the world’s population are Democrats. Democratical Democracy is shrinking. Why? Because he comes in with and he supports authoritarians. He supports the mining industry, they find out. They’re funding NGOs to be anti-mining, anti-this, while China goes ahead and has all the rare earths and this mechanism. So we see that the mining sector and global resources as a whole will continue to run, which we believe, and we’re seeing that overall performance. But we do think that this battle of wits and brains and the tariff and trade war is really what China has been doing. 

11:21

They tried to buy a former naval base in Greenland, built by America in World War II. The Chinese tried to buy it in 2017. It was kept quiet. The US government shut it down through Denmark. So that’s why, when Trump came to power, he said we’re going to take over Greenland. We’re going to take Greenland. Why Greenland? Why? Because the Chinese have built five ships that are icebreakers, because they’re making claim to the Arctic, so it’s faster to get to Europe. But why would they want to buy a former military base, just like they’ve done in Afghanistan? They merely took over this massive military base we built in Afghanistan. 

12:04

And so there is this turmoil that’s taking place and the big spend in modern monetary theory is gone from all this sort of social work programs and it’s now going towards defense, cybersecurity, military walls, and it’s not going to go away. And so I’m a big believer for gold, because MMT, modern monetary theory, which you’ve spoken about so many times, is so evident that today it’s $340 trillion of global debt. It’ll be $350 trillion by Christmas. It’ll be $350 trillion by Christmas. It’s much bigger than America. If you look at our GDP to debt ratios, compared to the global world, we are actually better than half of what the world is, but they continue to spend, and so these dynamics mean gold’s going to be a great asset class and the idea of Bitcoin as a portable, intangible wealth, a transfer. 

13:13

I think that gold, I think these asset classes, are going to go through a secular market, and the best thing that’s happened is that most of this past year two years there’s been redemptions in gold and gold funds. Until the last quarter, gdx lost $3 billion. Until just in August, you saw a turn of fund flows coming in. Gou has been relatively stable. But you look at the macro numbers in 2012,. But we look at the macro numbers in 2012, 8% of America’s ETF world and investors 8% had gold investments. They were in equity and GLDs equivalent and it shrunk down to 1%. It’s now at 2% and so I remain very bullish that trade’s higher, that this idea of having, like Ray Dalio says, 10 to 15% in gold and gold equities and another 15 to 25% in resources. So you’re in a sweet spot as well your podcast and all the things you’re giving to people. Explain to them. We’re in a secular bull market, but the apathy in the marketplace is really positive for us. But you wouldn’t think that people should be long old the way they’re acting. 

14:32 – Frank Curzio (Host)

You’re hitting off on so many different things, because now you have your gold ETF, you have the war ETF and then you have Hive. Right, talk about that because you talk about the dynamics of Hive and Bitcoin mining. But we know, and that’s tier one when you go to tier three, in the data centers, those assets are 15, 20 times more. Do you still want to keep the Bitcoin assets? Do you want to split it? Because how many megawatts do you have altogether, like total capacity? I only have 600. Only, isn’t that a great asset to have if you own power right now, you’re a god, and but I only use hydro electricity and I only take surplus electricity. 

15:11 – Frank Holmes (Guest)

The big growth for us has really been this past year. Going to paraguay anyone here been to paraguay? Oh okay, paraguay just blew me away. It’s like Switzerland in respect that there’s no water, there’s no ocean, and like Uruguay has, or Brazil and Argentina. But Paraguayans love Americans. You know why? Because there was genocide in 1870 by. 

15:50

You can look at this trilateral war with Brazil. Uruguay and Argentina went to wipe them out and take all their fertile farmland and it was President Hayes that solved the problem, gave the Paraguayans their land and on November, the 12th, is Hayes Day. It’s a national holiday. And two, the biggest state in the country is called President Hayes. It’s not Texas, it’s not California, it’s President Hayes. That’s great. And the other real shocker they never had income taxes until 2009. Wow. So now it’s outrageous. They pay a flat 10% tax and they have all this surplus electricity from the biggest dam in the Western hemisphere. Problems are solved. They’re partners with Brazil. They have half of it, produces more than 10 gigawatts of electricity. They were selling it to Argentina with no pay, so Argentina owned them $250 million. 

16:57

It’s a little country, population-wise, big agricultural. They are pro the president of the country. He’s a little country, population wise, big, agricultural. They are pro the president of the country. He’s a rugby player. He’s 47 years old, went to Columbia in New York University, worked for the IMF. He is so articulate and has a vision. They have the strongest growth in Latin America, so I’m so happy to be there because we build these data centers tier one for Bitcoin mining and they get paid every month Great, they don’t have to worry about no pay to slow pay from Argentina or any other country. So we help facilitate and build their infrastructure out and we get surplus electricity. That is now creating economic viability for them. We write a check every month now of about $10 million and that will go to $20 million, I think, over the next few years. The blue sky with what’s going on, and then it’ll usher in high performance computing. 

17:57

How many here are 70 years old? All right, I got a couple here 20%. Well, so am I, and I just want to share with you all is that Hive has been so good for me to keep my brain young because I’ve had to learn so much about data centers which I didn’t know, except for I pay for them. I was a line item at the office. And so you realize that in that journey that you’re continuously learning and being early in the AI and you realize how big and how phenomenal of what’s taking place in the space. So stay young by keep reading. Reading novels is the other big part of all the research shows, and just coming to listen to you and coming to your conferences, I appreciate that. 

18:51

It keeps your brain young because he’s going to challenge you to say I never thought of that Really, really. And now you can go so quickly and use OpenChat or Grok and you can get all this wealth of information. How many are using OpenChat here? So the number one thing for those that don’t, it’s the quality of your prompt. And if you want to argue, don’t argue with your spouse, argue with OpenChat. That’s the rule you can argue. If you want to argue, don’t argue with your spouse, argue with open shot. That’s the rule. You can argue all you want. 

19:26

And, in fact, critical thinking in your brain accelerates from all the research If you don’t use it like Google, you actually write an essay. You write one paragraph to two paragraphs and then it populates something and go I think that’s BS. And then all of a sudden it’ll say thank you, oh, I didn’t think about that fact or this fact. And it starts crafting you and it forces your brain to actually stay young with the research because you’re doing critical thinking, and one of them is called perplexity. You use perplexity, yes. So perplexity took off nothing like open chat and the reason for that was because it gave you five questions. Whatever the answer was, it gave you five more questions. So it was like Alice in Wonderland, like you go down this rabbit hole of questions. But the whole purpose of it was to get you into critical thinking, and the more we do critical thinking, the more neurons we have in that brain of ours. Then we stay young, yes, and we come to your conference, great. 

20:30 – Frank Curzio (Host)

And I got to tell you perplexity if you want to know how powerful they are, buy Snapchat. Snapchat is an unbelievable platform that they have no idea how to monetize. And finally I said I mean, my kids are on it all the time. It’s unbelievable. They just don’t know how to monetize a platform. They just sign with perplexity, kind of like how Reddit signed with Google, right, and now they’re able to take all the chats on there. Notice, if you go to Google and you sign on and you have a chat, what comes up? 

21:05 – Frank Holmes (Guest)

no-transcript down the path of learning about reddit. How many here use reddit one? Not many here. This is a minority. Here I got about three percent of the audience, so open chat gets 30 of their information from reddit. That blew me away and I like it because I learned this has the funniest memes or memes, whoever your phonetics are. You want to pronounce them as canadian or texan, but it’s so witty and you wonder where these kids like. No one’s paying them and they’re going crazy on creating these sarcastic, witty commentary about politics or an industry. It’s really quite brilliant, but I had no idea how much Open Chat uses that for tracking and looking for information? 

22:05 – Frank Curzio (Host)

Yeah, because those are original conversations, so it’s amazing. I guess I want to ask you. A lot of people we hear stories and I covered this earlier when you were here of I have great contacts in the data center industry and throughout, and everyone says that AI is in a bubble and they’re seeing more demand ever. We’ve been very firm the last year and a half saying look, it’s not in a bubble. What are your thoughts as someone that’s in the industry that probably talks to some of these hyperscalers? What stage, what inning, would you say we’re in? Or is it getting top heavy with some stocks? 

22:35 – Frank Holmes (Guest)

What are some of your thoughts? It’s a scramble, you have to think of it. We’re at war, and it’s not the war of missiles and hopefully it doesn’t happen that we can block and check everything in place. But we must go and source energy and we must build these data centers for the digital world. And that’s where we’re going. And it’s to recognize that Last year I went to a conference in Lugano. 

23:09

Anyone been here in Lugano? It is spectacular, it is so beautiful. I’ve never been to Lugano. I’ve been to Zurich many, many times, et cetera. He took the train or he could take it from Milan over Zurich many, many times, et cetera. He took the train or he could take it from Milan over. 

23:25

And it’s for an Italian group of guys that moved from Italy to Lugano because everything’s Italian there, basically, and they are software coders and they start creating a security. No, we can’t call it a security, but it is. It’s a money market fund that does not pay you interest. They keep the interest there. Today, 600 million wallets and not one prospectus is allowed in America or Europe. 

24:01

Everybody in Latin America and Africa and Eastern Europe want to have US dollars. The biggest critics of the US dollar and debt and economy are Americans. When you leave this realm and you go off to like Star Wars to another world and you go to these other countries, they all want US dollars. So in Argentina, in 2002, they confiscated all your US dollar bank accounts, and only this year. Still you can’t. There’s no foreign currency. You go to Mexico, you go to Colombia, you can get foreign currency, you can’t nothing in Argentina. So everyone kept that economy going with $100 bills in the mattress and last time I was there I was told to bring ones, fives and tens and twenties. They’re more valuable. So if you have a $100 bill, the official rate was $300. They give you $900. Now it’s over $1,000, $1,200. And in the street I would not get $300. I would get get 300. I would get 900. But if I had a smaller dollar bill I’d get 920, 930. So that whole economy. 

25:08

And I talked to the US ambassador in Argentina and he said there was $25 billion of US cash that keeps that economy going. So I go to Tether and I find out that these guys have $140 billion. They bought their own vault in Switzerland. They have 50 tons of gold. They are computer science people only 175. They made $13 billion. 

25:37

It’s the most profitable company in the world. What’s it? Based on? Stablecoin, and everyone outside of America wants. It’s the most profitable company in the world. What’s it based on? Stablecoin, and everyone outside of America wants. So President Trump has been meeting with them and the president of the company is 40 years old. He came over about America having its, also stablecoin. That would be around the world so people don’t have to have cash. They could be able to have this interoperability. So you don’t realize. You go to a conference like this today and you learn something new that you just don’t realize. And you can look this up Tether T-E-T-H-E-R. There’s articles in Forbes and in Bloomberg. It’s just phenomenal. It is the most successful company of software people, that’s all. And they are bigger in owning US dollars than Germany. They are basically going to probably become the biggest foreign currency holder of US dollars outside of other governments if it keeps going the way. It’s growing that people want to own US dollars. 

26:44 – Frank Curzio (Host)

I tell you so, a gold guy promoting the US dollar, you must have a lot of friends in that industry. 

26:50 – Frank Holmes (Guest)

And they have a gold tether and it has the 50 tons of gold in it. 

26:55 – Frank Curzio (Host)

They’re buying a lot. They’re buying in royalty companies a ton of gold tether yeah. 

27:01 – Frank Holmes (Guest)

Every week they go buy so much gold. It shocks you. It’s just not mainstream. You look at the futures market and you look at the GLD and things and fund flows the things that you would look at and I would look at but in another world that no one is here. It’s functioning as crypto and that’s what really shocked me and what they spend for these conferences $1,000 for a ticket and they get 20,000 people $1,000. And if you want to be like VIP, 15 grand and they’re getting it and they get it. Yeah, they get it easy. So my wake-up call was in 2017, the creation of Hive. And they’re getting it and they get it. Yeah, they get it easy. So my wake up call was in 2017, the creation of Hive and I said this is big. 

27:48

I went to Consensus in New York City and the keynote speaker is one of the richest women in America. She owns Fidelity. Abigail Johnson, she doesn’t speak at investment conference, she’s speaking at a crypto event and that blew me away. And she’s been Bitcoin mining for 10 years One of the originals, yeah and she wants everything on the blockchain for settlements. And I’m sitting there with my jaw down here and I’m feeling, wow, this is another world and that was another big part. I’m in I’m going to co-found this hive Because I saw her there and I saw IBM was there with a big booth but they had people spending at that time 7,000 people, $500 a ticket 2017. 

28:42

And fast track forward now the Bitcoin magazine people get phenomenal numbers of people spending and you go to the conferences and this is the first time this year in the summer when I saw people my vintage like a nice mature bottle of Burgundy Otherwise it was really young wine that I would show up at these events. The other weird thing is, in New York City went to Consensus. There used to always be the big gold coffers at the Marriott. Do you remember the Marriott? Yeah, the Marriott. So at the Marriott, you have to go up to the eighth floor, the Times Square Marriott and so Rotating, right, rotating. 

29:20

Yeah, and it’d be all the gold miners, marin Katusa and that whole gang, right, and they’re all drinking. They got whiskeys, they got beers and everyone’s drinking. At the crypto event. No one was drinking. The only complaint was how come you don’t have Coke, they only serve Pepsi. That was the complaint. So I turned to this other young coder and said well, like what is going on here, because I’m so used to the gold world and heavy drinking these characters and it’s because they’re micro dosing. What do you mean micro? What’s micro dosing? I don’t know what micro dosing is. Oh no, it’s a little bit of of lst and you just take a little tiny bit and your brain and your brain can stay focused, alert, and if you have any alcohol, it neutralizes it. I said, really, did you try it? 

30:11 – Frank Curzio (Host)

this was just like I would have tried it in two seconds, I would have been like. 

30:15 – Frank Holmes (Guest)

Let me try that. I really felt that I was in the movie star wars. Remember the original scene when you went and saw jubba the hut in the bar scene and you have all these different characters there. I felt like I’m in another world. It’s just a brand new experience and it’s big. So in my research and when I share with you is for your grandchildren, are the ones going to teach you is that these kids were all coders? One’s going to teach you is that these kids were all coders. The NVIDIA chip today that’s doing all the AI came from their GF, their G-Force chip. 

30:49

For gamers, the first crypto type of money was a game in 2001. 2001. So all these kids got used to that. I was really good at gaming 2001. So all these kids got used to that. I was really good at gaming. I could upgrade without cash, asking mom and dad for money. 

31:07

Then these kids learn at the age of 10 and 12 years old to mine Ethereum. So you guys were paying the bill, the electrical bill. They were going to sleep, they took the GPU chips in their gaming console and they were mining Ethereum and they could get maybe two coins a year and with those two coins. They found a way they couldn’t open a bank account or brokerage account they found a way to monetize and get the cash through one of these exchanges. These are kids. There’s millions all over the world that were mining Ethereum. That was another big wake-up call for me to say they’re all capitalists, gamers everywhere in the world. And what happens when that transfer of wealth and the crossover takes place? And I think that that’s what we’re going through this sort of transformation and this crossover. 

31:58 – Frank Curzio (Host)

So we have a couple of minutes left. I’m going to go a little bit longer here. But why is it when someone from the gold industry, like yourself, you, were able to adopt crypto, and yet we see this disconnect with the peter schiff’s, where all you crypto guys are a bunch of idiots, and yet you have these kids that I think like that’s the next generation of they’re buying bitcoin for the same reason people buy gold, right? So I’m trying hard to figure that out. Where that’s the next generation of people that are going to drive gold prices? Why are you crapping on them where you’ve adopted both sides and said, wow, you could own both and you’re one of the few? A lot of people don’t do that, especially who are deep in the gold industry. They just totally against crypto. What made you embrace it? Was it just these kids? 

32:41 – Frank Holmes (Guest)

Were you fascinated by it. I understand that it also took me to luxury goods. So I have the only luxury good mutual fund. I mean it’s done super well, I mean fantastic. You realize, on those data points, that 60% of gold demand is for love and I call it the great love trade, and it’s predominantly out of Southeast Asia. India, china and the Middle East, which are pushing now about 55% of the world’s population, have a cultural affinity to buying 24-carat gold jewelry. So this century, as their GDP per capita has been rising, every time there’s a sell-off in gold there was a buyer, a bid. That didn’t happen in the 80s, it didn’t happen in the 90s, but it’s certainly happened this century. And it’s really easy to look at this correlation to see that 40% is fear. And so you see that the difference to gold is always a preservation of wealth. The Bitcoiners are about making money. It’s not just preservation. So it’s a different type of thought process. And they all have these rockets taken off and crushing it, crushing the market. I own it, a type of high testosterone 22-year-old kid, and so now that 22-year-old is now 32. And that’s the big transition that we’re seeing. 

34:06

So I like art, I have Picasso, I have Warhol. I found that if you collect some of those, even the prints, the Andy Warhol prints, when he did 1,000 mouths, each year for five years, a different color, they came out at $1,000 and they went up to $50,000, $60,000. Marilyn Monroe, queen Elizabeth, they all same thing, same idea. So if you have that, limited scarcity is the word, is the operative word. If there’s a limited number of art pieces and the adoption grows that that’s a good artist, your prices grow exponentially. That’s Bitcoin kept the 21 million coins. Gold is same, but it doesn’t have the scarcity defined like a piece of art or like Bitcoin, 21. 

34:59

But gold, it’s getting more and more difficult to find new gold and so I think that scarcity element is there. The supply from mining is never going to keep up with modern monetary theory, money printing, so gold will always have this reset button and what we’re seeing is the GDP per capita. Middle East, china, malaysia, all these places they’re still big gold buyers. So I remain so bullish on these alternative asset classes, like art, like gold. Silver coins I love silver coins. I say the best Christmas present, best Hanukkah gift you can give your kids, are silver coins because they will keep them, and I bought when silver is under $5, I bought thousands of them and every year I give them out to employees and it’s still been giving them out, because they’re just one of the best gifts and people come back and say I still have them all. I’ve been with you for 15 years and I got my 15 coins, things of that nature so I like these alternative asset classes. 

36:06 – Frank Curzio (Host)

So we have a few minutes left here. You have a blog called Frank Blog and you could see just by. I think I said up here, maybe ask Frank two questions. You could go another hour easily with you If people want to find out more information. One, they could follow your blog. But you have ETFs across so many industries. You’re looking at Hive right, which is amazing, right, right in the middle of the data center trend. You’re looking at your ETF that you just launched, the War ETF, and I haven’t looked at the stocks in it. I’ve had a guess those are the Palantirs, maybe the Kratos and stuff like that. If I know you Because one of the things I admire about Frank is the analytics One is I admire him so much because the energy he brings when I travel with him is just fascinating and he’s like you know, you see, we go Marin Coutou says Marin’s like I’m tired, I’m like come on, I just get running around everything. 

36:54

It’s great to see, you know, it’s inspiring actually, and the biggest thing that I love is that we have that friendship for a long time. But it’s the energy and also the analytics, like I love always picking your mind, because I think that doesn’t come out so much where you have all these ideas, but the analytical part of how much you research and how there’s a formula behind every single thing that you do and it’s a strict formula that’s tested, that’s back-tested, before you launch these things. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

37:22 – Frank Holmes (Guest)

You’re so kind. Well, thank you, Frank. I have this thing called Investor Alert Comes out every Friday and there’s about 100,000 readers in 80 countries. And then there’s Frank Talk, which comes out several times a week, and it’s events that I see or something that’s off the wall, like the intersection of. I like to look at the intersection of events Are they related or are they non-related? Such as, JD Vance is a Catholic. 

37:57

Well, he wasn’t a Catholic. He converted 10 years ago. So my wife and I were having dinner and we were saying why did you go see the Pope? Why is he going to see the Pope just before Easter, and that was actually where we were. So the weekend the Pope dies JD Vance. 

38:11

So we find out he’s Catholic and he goes there. And what’s that intersection of being there? And then rumors were that there was going to be an American Pope. No, it won’t be an American Pope. The Italians want an Italian Pope. And then, all of a sudden, the big election’s taking place with the Cardinals, and. And then, all of a sudden, the big election is taking place with the cardinals and Trump puts out a picture, made with AI, of him being the pope, and there was more clicks on that than the pope died, and he polarized people that loved it and people that hated it. I mean talk about polarization. But now, when we look at social media, the intersection of the influence of social media, all of a sudden, the following week is an American pope who speaks Spanish, learns Spanish fluently in Peru Mili Peru said it’s a Peruvian pope. 

39:07

But there’s these interesting intersections that happen in geopolitics, that also happen in business, and so I like to write about those intersections. And then I like to go to now that I have open chats and grok, et cetera, to go back and apply Bayes’ theorem. And Bayes’ theorem is they all use a statistical tool that says we have a bunch of data and all of a sudden there’s a new event that’s taken place. Is it correlated? Is it meaningful data or is it just nothing? And Bayes’ theorem is something that really says statistically it’s valid. And so it came out and said what Trump did was valid because of social media’s impact around the world today. 

39:52

So now, a couple of weeks ago, we were with the former president of Colombia and he ran the government, did a great job, duque, not today Petro is a communist lunatic. But prior to that, duque, ivan Duque, he said that he ran the government, everything through COVID, everything went well, but he didn’t know how to manage social media. He didn’t. And now we have the mayor of New York City and Kevin O’Leary says that he can’t stand his communism, but he’s going to win because he’s mastered the algos for social media. So I write about things like that that try to provoke thinking differently. 

40:35

So you go to US funds and subscribe to Frank Talk and US Funds Investor Alert. But all our funds are run on what’s called Smart Beta 2.0. It’s a quant approach to picking stocks and portfolio allocation and it recalibrates and rebalances every quarter. That’s the discipline so portfolio managers must follow. And then they have to back test, going back a decade every quarter quarter to make sure the factors that we’ve identified are relevant today, because social media could change that. 

41:11

What’s really become significant that’s more difficult is sentiment based on Reddit, based on how many people put out memes on such a subject. So you look at Google and just by the weekly change of how many people look up the price of gold not that gold is going to go up or down, just look up is our indicator. If it increases, gold’s going up the following week If the number of people just looking starts to shrink, people become bored and all of a sudden gold has a correction. So these quants are using these sentiment tools like that and I will write something like that, but we try to apply that to our ETFs. So it’s called Smart Beta 2.0. But in the mix of all of that, every product I create, another one’s called C, because 80% of all commodities and all finished refrigerators and cars, et cetera, are shipped by the C Cargo shipping is 80%. So that means looking at the human body, the arteries and veins that put the blood up to our brain and heart pump back and forth, that give us this vitality. 

42:24

The same thing happens in the global economy and by following sea and by following shipping I can follow the global economy better. So I’ve got my pulse on global GDP by looking at SEA and you can see that the tariff battle, april the 2nd, they all fall, everything fell and all of a sudden it surges back. Shipping rates went up. Who would have thought that the cost of shipping and then there’s a problem in the Red Sea Shipping has to go around South Africa. Oh, shipping rates went up. So you can follow this economic activity in a different way. That’s positive and the whole threat of all this war that’s going to happen with China. It doesn’t show up in C, so it helps me because I’m a big believer that you have to follow macro trends. Like purchasing manufacturers index is the best leading indicator of commodity demand and it’s six months out and I write about it every month. The data comes out and I give you the weight of the evidence of what that trend is. That’s what I do that’s great. 

43:30 – Frank Curzio (Host)

Love it guys definitely visit and thank you so much. I think I asked you about two weeks ago and you’re like, I’m there thank you for your patience are waiting for me to get. No, that’s great, I’m so glad. So, guys, Frank Holmes, thank you so much. 

43:42- 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.