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The Only “Free Money” Strategy I Know
Porter's Journal Issue #49, Volume #2
Porter Stansberry
April 30, 2025
Tough Times In The Market Create Outstanding Trading Opportunities
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Using the options market to establish a major portfolio position… Hershey is one of the world’s most valuable brands… Owning government bonds is not safer than owning stocks… Puts are insurance contracts… Most people who learn about this easy way to make money will screw it up… Global shipping has collapsed… |
Table of Contents
Today I’m going to do something I very rarely do: detail one of my own trades from my personal account.
I don’t do this regularly because my personal finances – like yours – are often driven by idiosyncratic factors and because I frequently invest in private businesses that are closed to the public.
My sincere concern is that, if not executed carefully, the things like I describe below can lead to major losses.
I’m sharing this with you today because I suspect we have entered a very different world than the one we saw over the last decade in our financial markets. Since the Global Financial Crisis in 2008-09, central banks have used unprecedented monetary power to dampen volatility and control risk. As you know, every “crisis” was met with more money printing and government bond issuance. Interest rates were manipulated to zero… and then to below zero! Many of the world’s most important financial markets became woefully overvalued. And the reckonings have only just begun.
It will take a decade, or longer, for things like the multi-family housing market to sort out the incredible losses that investors now face. Investors in sovereign bonds have even larger problems.
These enormous embedded financial losses are creating a much riskier world, where I’m certain equity valuations will become compressed. In just the last two months, we’ve seen more volatility – with the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) registering above 30 for weeks at a time – than I’ve seen in my entire career, outside of the Global Financial Crisis.