Welcome back everyone. Today on the Joseph Carlson Show, the Fair and Greed Index, which measures investors sentiment, is at a 4A4 out of 100. The extreme fair category starts at a 25 and we're at a four. If we take a look at the S&P 500 over the past five days, this is what it looks like. Basically everything is red now.
It's not just the color red, which is unique because we've had red days before, but it's the numbers associated here -17% with Apple -10% with Meta minus 8%, with Amazon, ServiceNow, Intuit, Salesforce, Adobe, Uber, all down past 9%. These are massive declines in some of the most important US tech companies in the world, and they continue to go down. They were going down until there was this big reversal because there was news that Trump was considering a 90 day pause.
Just this glimmer of hope that President Trump was considering a pause caused the stock market to go from -4% to plus 1% in a matter of 20 minutes. But this hope was quickly crushed as the administration said this was fake news. Stocks are now continuing their steep decline with incredible volatility whipsawing back from red to the green. We have commentary now that buying now is not buying the bottom. This is a suckers rally.
It's now gotten to the point that even some of the most ardent vocal supporters of Trump like Stanley Drucken, Bill Ackman, have come out to speak publicly against the tariffs, saying they are a massive mistake, that they are not balanced, that they're not reciprocal. They are well in excess of what other countries are charging us. Other business leaders like Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan warns that the tariffs will raise prices and slow growth.
And while this is going on, we have Peter Navarro, who is the senior trade counselor and advisor to Trump on the tariffs, one of the biggest advocates of this policy, coming on to CNBC in a long form interview to defend his policy. And while all this is unfolding, we have individual investors wanting to know what to do with their money. Is it time to step back from the US markets or is it time to buy? We're going to be going over all of this in this episode.
Now let's go ahead and start off by taking a step back and seeing how we got into this mess. The reason that the markets are falling so much in a 2 day period, down 10 to 15% for most companies, the reason that US born investors and foreign investors are both pulling their money out of U.S. markets is a lost of trust in confidence in the US. It's because many investors now don't trust that the US is the
place to put their money. And that lack of confidence is because of how this policy is being rolled out. For example, we can break down what we were promised. President Trump ran on promising tariffs. Most investors agreed that tariffs aren't inherently a bad thing. In fact, we were promised that the US is not always treated fair. In many cases, Many other countries charge US tariffs, and they have trade barriers in which the US does not.
We don't have tariffs against them and we don't have large trade barriers. This creates a trade imbalance. So President Trump's goal was to enact different measures to create reciprocal or fair responses to those countries, to incentivize them to come to the bargaining table and to strike deals. We were promised that the US would be eager to strike deals with other countries so long as they lower their tariffs and trade barriers.
This was the basic pitch that most people had an understanding of. the US would have moderate tariffs, reciprocal or fair responses, and would be eager to strike deals. But what we received in the rollout of this policy was something entirely different. President Trump held up a board with two different columns of numbers. One of them was the tariffs charged to the US. The other was the quote UN quote discounted reciprocal tariff that in most cases was half of the number off to the left.
The only problem with this board and the formula to calculate the tariffs charge to the US is these numbers were not only wildly inaccurate, they were fabricated. It's a completely made-up number. President Trump described the tariff as reciprocal or equal to half the rate of the tariff of the non trade barriers imposed by other countries. However, they are nothing of the
sort. The tariff that the United States is placing on other countries is equal to the US trade deficit divided by US imports from a given country. Or if we don't have a trade deficit, it's just 10%. If we were to use the correct math to calculate the actual tariff that other countries are charging us, they look entirely different. For example, the tariff that we're going to be applying to China's 34%, it would reduce it to 10% if we were using correct reciprocal tariffs.
The tariff we're applying to Thailand is 36%. It would be 10% if we were using the correct formula. Based on the actual math, most of the tariffs would be in a range of 10 to 13%. And originally when this was announced that there would be reciprocal tariffs, the market was expecting 10 to 13% tariffs. The market actually went up 1% based on this news, and then it immediately dropped as soon as President Trump started showing this different math.
Investing is a confidence game. In order to invest your money into a company, you have to have confidence in the nation you're investing it in. That they will have predictable, sensible, and reliable policies when the math doesn't add up, When these tariffs are based on numbers that don't make sense, it doesn't build trust with investors. So capital all across the world, including within the US, has
fled the US equity markets. The fear in the market today is not based on an irrational fear of the future. It's based on the lack of trust and predictability with the White House's policy that these policies of enacting extreme punitive tariffs on every country across the world will make the United States a place to avoid doing business with a hermit turtling into their shell, not wanting to do any type of commerce or business with the rest of the world.
And even the most historically ardent supporters of President Trump, business leaders, people that voted for him and publicly supported him, are now coming to the realization that this policy will damage America, will create trade barriers and formations of other countries to circumvent doing business with America. Bill Ackman is one of the latest business leaders to join the pact of them that are growing in opposition of these tariffs.
Bill Ackman called for a 90 day pause in the tariffs to negotiate with other countries, warning that the alternative was a, quote, self induced economic nuclear winter. He says we're in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business and as the market to invest capital. Despite pushback from a growing number of Republicans and Trump supporters and business leaders, he still continues to hold strong with this tariff plan.
At least of now he's pushing back saying, I don't know what's going to happen to the markets. I can't tell you I don't want anything to go down, but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something. Trump still views this as short term suffering for long term gain. But now there is a growing chorus from big names on Wall Street and politics, including those who back the tariffs in theory, that the current plan is misguided and will cause
irreparable damage. Even Elon Musk has been critical, calling for free trade agreements between the US and Europe while criticizing Navarro, slamming his ego and brains. We have people like Elon Musk, Ted Cruz, news, Bill Ackman, various supporters from political leaders to business leaders who have supported Trump up until now pushing on the brakes saying that this tariff plan is not rolled out well and will damage the United States.
But the Trump administration so far hasn't changed course. Led by the White House senior trade counselor Peter Navarro, they continue to defend their tariff plan. The first thing that he does in this interview is defend the methodology of calculating other countries tariffs and our reciprocal tariffs. I mean, first of all, the methodology was perfectly sound. It was done by the Council of Economic Advisers based on long term studies that are in the
academic literature. And the people taking potshots at us are the same people that always take potshots. American Enterprise Institute, Peter. Of course, of course, the Joe come on, the American Enterprise Institute has been against. Conservatives. Larry Lindsey. Let's not get buried down in those weeds. Now you asked me a serious
question. He mentions that the people taking potshots at the methodology of calculating these tariffs have always taken potshots at the president, and that is an inaccurate portrayal of what's going on. Many of the critics of this tariff plan are people that are new critics of the president, people that have previously supported almost everything the president has done up until now. Blackman is a great example. He has overwhelmingly supported
a President Trump up until now. This isn't taking potshots. This is real criticism of a deeply flawed methodology. Whoever came up with this methodology and the calculations for these reciprocal tariffs should be fired. They came up with a calculation of other countries tariffs that doesn't make mathematical sense and therefore our reciprocal tariff for applying is erroneous.
And when you apply nonsense mathematical formulas to global trade policy, it creates a lot of insecurity in the markets. The reason that the market is so concerned about what's going on is because of how unclear this policy is. But the way that Peter Navarro's framing this is as though the critics are just the same old critics of the president the entire time, the globalists that don't like President Trump. And that couldn't be further from the truth.
One of the critics of this plan is Elon Musk, who helped Trump get elected. Elon Musk is not someone that takes potshots at the president. Now he goes on continuing to defend this formula, emphasizing that it's not not the tariff other countries are charging, not just their straightforward tariff that really matters. It's the non tariff trade barriers. And he gives an example.
But let's understand what the problem is when you have a country like Vietnam. Let's take Vietnam when they come to us and say we'll go to 0 tariffs. That means nothing to us because it's the non tariff cheating that matters. Let's do Vietnam, Joe. They sell us $15.00 for every $1.00 we sell them about $5.00 of that 15 is China trans shipping to Vietnam to evade their tariffs. What is what is Vietnam?
What is Vietnam? Do they dump into our markets killing our shrimpers, our people who make metal brackets, kitchen cabinets, agricultural products, they engage in the intellectual property theft. They have the biggest number of cases aside from China at the Department of Commerce on the dumping. So the point is, the point is anybody who wants to come to talk to us, talk to us about lowering your non tariff barriers. Vietnam has a 10% vet, Europe has a 19% vet.
We can't compete against that. We have tried help us on Trade Organization to get Andrew. Let me just make this point. We have tried at the World Trade Organization since the 1970s to get VAT tax relief and they've told us no every single time. We've won case after case at the World Trade Organization on things like our agricultural products, pork, beef and other
and. Corn he brings up a valid point that these non trade barriers are an effort of other countries to make it very difficult to do business in their country without a specific tariff. And that's the problem with this policy overall. There's so much grey area. There's so many different things specific to every country. That's why many people are suggesting a 90 day delay to the tariffs, but it doesn't seem like that's going to happen
right now. Peter Navarro saying that these countries going to 0% tariff is just simply not enough. So what is it that these countries have to do? He tries to lay it out. Here. So what is enough? OK, you take any given country, they're like fingerprints. They all cheat us in a different way. So here are the things they cheat us on. Some of them engage in currency manipulation. Some of them have a hefty VAT tax. All of them dump into our
markets. All of them engage in heavy export subsidies and government subsidies. All of them put up these phony technical and phytosanitary barriers to our AG products and our autos and everything in between. Many of them steal our intellectual property. A lot of them runs sweatshop labor, including forced child labor. They have pollution havens. So when you say to me, aunt, what do we want from them? We want fairness. We don't want them to kill American workers by inundatis
with this non tariff cheating. And it would be really refreshing to have the media talk more about that this zero tariff thing. It's a it's, it's a misdirection. No, it's a misdirection. It's the non tariff where. All these problems are real and the challenges are real, but the question is whether or not this can be accomplished in a short timeline.
These tariffs again go into effect very soon and it seems like these problems are so big, so vast, so wide and somewhat subjective that this level of unclarity of what these countries specifically need to do and what timeline they have to do it is causing people to lose confidence overall. The market can get behind real reciprocal tariffs that are in line with the tariffs. Other countries are charging us a smart methodical rollout of policy.
But the market's lack of confidence is a reflection of this haphazard and confusing policy rollout. Unclarity and unpredictability continue to over shadow any effort of this tariff policy. It's creating doubt and business leaders, investors in the capital markets. And this has been the problem since the announcement of these tariffs. Investors don't know what to expect. Business leaders don't know what
to expect. They don't even know the intended goal of these tariffs, the long term plan right now, capital allocators, CEOs, investors, business leaders, they're all working blind. And perhaps nobody has pointed this out better than Derek Thompson. What bothers me most, honestly, is not that I don't know which side is which. It's that I don't think the folks who are in charge know what they're doing or why. If you look at the justifications for this policy,
they're all over the place. You've got Peter Navarro saying the tariffs are going to raise $600 billion a year. That suggests they're going to remain in place. You've got the tech folks who are associated with the Trump White House saying that actually this is just an opening negotiation tactic to force other countries to bring down their tariffs, and then we'll bring down ours. Well, wait, pause. You cannot raise taxes with a
tariff is designed to go away. So already you have parts 1 and 2 not making any sense. Then you have this third strategy, that sort of Stephen Marens idea that what we need to do is de dollarization. Well, you just showed about 30 seconds ago that the dollar is actually appreciating right now because the entire global economy is puking. I don't think the folks in charge know what they're doing
or why. And the reason that scares me on top of all of the obvious is that there's this theory that Donald Trump is this mastermind of uncertainty. And there's there's some reason to this, that if you have someone who is so great about uncertainty, they can get other countries to do what we want them to do. But the problem is that uncertainty is a double edged sword. Domestic businesses need
certainty to know how to invest. Domestic manufacturers need certainty to understand how to expand. If there's uncertainty in terms of our trade and tax and spending policy, how is a manufacturing company supposed to figure out how it's supposed to finance a doubling of their factory base? They cannot do it. What we need now is absolute, clear certainty.
It might be good in some very specific unique deals to have a level of uncertainty, to be unpredictable, but in terms of a global economy and preparations of large CapEx investments, businesses preparing for tax policy, certainty is a good thing. Certainty and predictability is a very positive thing. It allows businesses and investors to plan for the future with confidence. And right now they're losing that confidence. Now, not everyone is negative on the tariffs.
There are still ardent Trump supporters that view this is a positive development, Kyle Bass being one of them. He went on to CNBC to share his view that he thinks this strategy will ultimately work. I think the tariffs are thoughtful. I think they will work. I think you've already seen Vietnam ask for a 90 day reprieve to negotiate. You're going to see a lot of first cash, plane tickets, delegations from all around the world coming to meet with the president to try to hammer this.
Out he's on the side where he believes this is a negotiating tactic that will lead to more fair and balanced deals between the US and other countries. This back and forth debate continues between the few people that are supporting the rollout and implementation of this policy and the growing chorus of people that are now coming again. And here again, we have Derek Thompson listening to that past interviewee Kyle Bass and responding to it.
Be totally honest, Kelly, I've been listening the last 10 minutes of this show. I cannot believe what I'm listening to. I, I heard your last guest say if the economy shrinks, that's good. If the stock market goes down, that's good. If the housing market crashes, that's good. If there's a trade war, that's good. When did the capital class get taken over by degrowther protectionists seeking 19th century autarky?
OK, But Derek, let me just jump in for a second, because if there's one refrain we've heard from millennials over the past several years, it's that the dream is gone. They can't afford a house. Groceries are too expensive. It's. Only the first chapter of. Abundance. Apparently the 1st chapter of
your book. So aren't you a little surprised to hear the globalists, the pro stock market types who are supposed to be at fault for all of this, now reading out of your book and saying we're bringing prices back down? They're, no, they're, they're crashing the economy. That's very, very different than making housing affordable. If you want affordable housing, you need a job. If you crash the economy, you're going to have unemployment.
And whenever unemployment hits an economy, as we just saw in 2008 and we saw before in the 1990s, who loses their jobs first? It's last one in, first one out. It's young people. So if your job or if your plan is to crash the economy in the short term for the purpose of helping young people afford a house, you have got it totally backward. Young people need jobs, they need money, and then they need a plan to make housing affordable,
right? Donald Trump could have come into office and said what I want to do is to make the construction of housing affordable, and that means the inputs to housing. Instead, he slaps a 25% tariff on Canada, which we import our lumber from, and a 25% tariff on Mexico that we get drywall gypsum from, thus immediately raising two of the most important inputs for housing by
25%. This is the strategy to make housing less affordable at the same time that you make it harder for young people to keep a job because the stock market's puking. This is not the way to go about abundance. This is scarcity meeting scarcity. This is Trump saying we we don't have enough housing, So, you know, we need fewer immigrants or we don't have enough manufacturing in the US, so we need less trade. Abundance is a positive, some
way of looking at the economy. It says we can grow if we invest in housing. We can have a strategy that seeks to make more of what we need in the US without trying to cut ourselves off from the entire global economy. I completely reject the idea that what Trump is pursuing is
anything like abundance. Derek is correct that the path the US seems to be pursuing is 1 of scarcity, one of cutting ourselves off with the rest of the world, wanting to live in our own little shell and do everything within the United States. Not wanting to do any type of trade with any other country because in each case what they're doing is unfair. This is not a policy of abundance and confidence and growth and growing the pie, making America a place of business and to invest.
It's the opposite. And the reason that stocks are trading down so much is because investors are assessing the situation, looking at the potential future cash flow impacts, and realizing that they're going to go down. These companies will earn less money as a result of these policies, and there's broader implications of risk and uncertainty that can happen if these policies continue in the
long term. For example, many of the best companies in the United States have an enormous amount of their revenue outside of the United States. Microsoft has around 50% of their total revenue outside of the US. Other great U.S. companies like Amazon, Netflix, Google, Meta, you name it, have an enormous amount of their revenue in their business from without the United States. They're overseas. They do business in Europe, they do business in Asia, for
example. Example, if we look specifically at Netflix and the revenue broken down by region, you can see that over 50% of the revenue from Netflix is outside of the United States and Canada. This orange bar hair on the bottom represents the United States, grouped in with Canada. Then we have this lighter orange bar, which is Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We have Latin America here, and we have Asia Pacific. All of these countries are enjoying US products. They're buying US services.
And even though there's no direct importing and exporting, these companies will become reciprocal targets to this trade policy. We've already seen many other leaders from different countries threaten to retaliate with strong restrictions on U.S. companies and even blocking them from their markets, and there's a high chance of future escalation. So right now, we have a situation of increasingly greater risk every hour that
these policies remain in place. And unless there's a quick off ramp offering relief for a greater path of clarity or time to negotiate, stocks will continue to fall and be discounted further and further. And during time periods like this, I continue to buy. I'm buying companies at a faster pace than I have in years. In fact, I continue to transfer new money out of savings to aggressively buy this dip.
This morning, I bought $3000 of Equifax stock, and I have another order of $7000 going into Equifax. That is $10,000 of that stock just today. And simultaneously, while I'm buying Equifax, I'm increasing my stake in Google, buying another $3000 of this stock in the story fund. I don't have any buys going through today, but I'll continue to buy these companies throughout the week. In fact, in just the past five days, I've bought over $20,000 of Amazon.
That is the most aggressive pace I've bought that company since the lows of 2022. Overall, I'm digging deep to try to buy this dip as aggressively as I can, even though I know the dangers and uncertainties in this market and I'll explain why. Let's go ahead and go through some of the facts about buying the dip.
This whole idea that as investors, as good investors, we're going to strike when opportunity arises, when stocks are super cheap, when other investors are fearful we're going to jump in. Well, that's great in theory, but that whole idea of buying the dip is much easier said than done for a couple of reasons. First of all, buying small dips is easy. Buying huge dips is hard.
This is something that I've observed as an investor for a long period of time is that investors are always eager to buy small dips. The market drops 3% or 4%. That's all fun and games you buy in, you get a little dip on a company that's easy to do because there's no real risk there. There's no real uncertainty. You're just buying when price is fluctuating due to natural volatility of trading. The real challenge comes into play when you're buying huge dips.
Buying huge dips is a lot more mentally challenging, mentally tasking. It requires a lot more resolve when stocks go down 10% or 15% to want to buy. And part of the reason it's harder to buy huge dips that keep dipping is because buying the dip always runs the risk of stocks dropping further after you buy. And that's psychologically difficult to deal with. What if you buy today and stocks are down another 5% tomorrow because of the same tariff news? Would you have been wrong to buy
today? Well, that remains to be seen. But either way, the psychology of this makes it difficult. It's difficult, in fact near impossible, to time the bottom. It is impossible to reliably time the bottom. Nobody has ever proven over any length of time that they can reliably time the bottom in the market. It is unknowable. Investors will claim that this is the bottom or that is the bottom.
Those are guesses. Investors focus their attention on trying to time the bottom rather than investing in quality companies when they're intrinsically undervalued, when the opportunity today, right now in front of them offers them an assortment of great quality companies at reduced prices. But instead, they look at the risks, the risk of the stock market going further in the red after they buy. How disappointing would that be? The risk of them not being able
to accurately time the bottom. Now, another thing that scares people out of the market during times like this is people say, you know, the, the great financial crisis was one thing. The.com bubble is another. We also had COVID, but this time it's different. This time we don't have the Fed stepping in to help. We don't have stimulus. We have a a leader that has this policy and he's not listening to anyone. This time it's different.
And while that's true, it is different this time and there's unique risks this time that didn't exist the last time or the time before. It's also true that literally every time it's different. Every dip is different. Stocks don't fall unless it's different. If we face the same challenge that we faced 1000 times, investors will know the outcome and stocks will not become discounted. The inherent nature of unpredictability, unknowable futures, is what causes equity
price declines. That's what causes stocks to get discounted. This is called the risk premium, the price that you have to pay to get the alpha in the market. You're not going to get a premium in the market. You're not going to get alpha over other investors by avoiding investing during any times of uncertainty. This is also the case where big dips almost always coincide with times of great uncertainty. This relationship of big dips being tied to great uncertainty almost always happen.
There's never really time periods where investors willingly sell out of companies that have very predictable, forecastable futures. It always happens during a time where investor confidence is challenged, where investor emotion takes over. And in many cases, it gets to a boiling point where investors discount stocks to too great of an extent, where the dip is mismatched with the level of
uncertainty. Just like the market can become overconfident, believing that the future is completely predictable, there is no risks and you can pay almost anything for stocks like we had in 2021. You can also get to the other end of the spectrum where stocks are so heavily discounted, where the uncertainty is so heavily factored in that stocks are
trading for too cheap. One of the things that frequently happens with big dips in the market, especially challenging times of uncertainty, is it can cause investors to give up on their investing strategy. Investors have a strategy, they're sticking to it. Once that strategy comes under real pressure with equity prices going down, they start to divert and change their strategy. For example, a common one is they'll give up on individual
stocks and move to ETFs. This is something that I see almost every time we go through any challenging environment. Investors have been previously investing in individual stocks, picking out what they believe are the best investments. As soon as those individual stocks start to go down, they throw in the towel and go to ETFs.
While that's not bad per SE to invest in ETFs, in many cases investors move from high beta individual stocks to low beta ETFs, therefore lowering their exposure to the market and to volatility during the time period where they should be increasing it. So in many cases, this swap is a
negative move for investors. If they were bullish on companies just two months ago, they should re evaluate the case on an individual basis and see if there's any reason to be less bullish on that individual company compared to other options available. When buying the dip, you're never going to have a situation where you'll have total clarity
of what will happen. Investing in general requires a little faith that things will work out better in the future like they usually do. This is why good investors are naturally somewhat optimistic about the future. You can hear Warren Buffett over and over again saying notwithstanding the many challenges that the US has faced over decades of time, his entire life, he remains bullish on the US. He says we have this special ingredients, we can figure it out.
We challenge people that make wrong decisions. We pressure people into change. If leadership doesn't work out, leadership changes. The tariff issue is a policy decision without congressional approval, and it can be changed just as rapidly as it's implemented. There's of course the option that it faces the long term reputation damage with trading partners and long term economic damage, but there's also the option that it's quickly walked back into a more reasonable range.
As investors, we don't know what the outcome is and that is the unclarity in the market today. But if things move in a positive direction at all, if there is any semblance of hope or future clarity in this market, these same equities that are being discounted today will bounce quickly. The dip will suddenly turn into a massive bounce where investors
clamor back into equities. Right now, investors are faced with this tough decision of whether or not they should continue to buy these companies during a time where they don't have total clarity. But in general, over my investing history, I've noticed that the time to buy is probably when it feels the most difficult to buy. The time to buy is when discounting has taken place, when investors are in extreme fare and panic pricing in the
most bleak of futures. The time to buy is when equity prices are low and other investors are afraid. Now I want to reverse time and go back to a time period where we had a very significant dip. This was during one of the worst times in the world's history. We lived through a literal pandemic. We actually did. If you actually look back, it was crazy what went on requirements that we wear masks everywhere we go.
People clamoring to Costco taking as much toilet paper and water as they can to the point where they say you have to have a limit of one per household and people guarding them. This was a crazy time period where shipping and logistic networks were completely dysfunctional. Every business shut down. And at the very bottom of this, I'll highlight it in red, that was the exact bottom of the
market. The very bottom day of the COVID sell off, which was one of the lowest points of the whole past decade to buy equities. Stocks were selling at extremely low prices, discounted for the most extreme disastrous scenarios possible. The day was March 23rd of 2020. Let's take a look at an old CNBC interview that happened on that exact day, March 23rd of 2020. This is the exact bottom of the
Covic dip. This is Mohammed El Aaron, a chief economic adviser, someone that seems wholly qualified. But listen to the tone, to the theme of what was being shared that day. Again, the exact bottom of the dip. People are suffering. There is real pain in the street. This is an economic sudden stop that takes away your livelihood, that makes you feel insecure, that takes away goods from shelves. I mean, this is a real, real hit and people are looking to Washington to to do something.
But understand this is also a really tough policy design. The best you can do right now is protect and contain the damage. You can't erase it overnight. That's a health issue, not an economic and Financial Policy issue. You've got to do that, but designing it strictly. And I think we're going to see much bigger emphasis on people than companies compared to 2008. And that distinction is going to have implications for different segments of the markets.
The theme is that things are bad, really, really bad. People are suffering, the future's bleak. We don't know how the White House is going to address anything, and it sounds like they're going to favor people over companies. He goes on to address investors specifically and directly. Here's what he has to say to them. But this I'm still for most investors out there, I'm still telling, you know, be cautious because that we are in completely uncharted what is
here. Be cautious, we're in uncharted territory. I want to show you with my brokerage what I did during this same time period. In fact, what I did that exact same day, March 23rd of 2020, the exact bottom of the market. During that day, I not only made one, but I made two deposits into My Portfolio, 1 of $500 and another of $2000. This is to buy companies, to buy ones like Apple, to buy ones like Microsoft, these companies
that were incredibly discounted. Now, I didn't know when the bottom was, and you can see that evident in my trading history. I didn't just buy on the exact bottom, but I bought a little bit too early and a little too late. If I had known that the bottom was March 23rd, you would see all my deposits happen on that exact day. That's when I would have bought everything. But of course, we don't operate with that knowledge in advance. What I was doing during this time period was investing
aggressively. I was digging into my savings. I was buying companies at extreme discounts. Now I want to be clear on something. I'm not suggesting that today is exactly like March of 2020. There are so many differences and I don't know if it will work out the exact same way either. I don't know the timeline of the recovery. I don't know what deals are going to be negotiated. I don't have any type of foresight and exactly how things will turn out more than anyone
else. But what I do know is consistent throughout time, buying extremely high quality companies that are deeply embedded with incredibly wide moats and profitable business models with great balance sheets during times of despair and uncertainty typically works out really well for investors. I know that these companies are going to be around for the next 10 or 20 years, irregardless of what type of restrictive or punitive policies governments
enforce. These companies are used to going through restrictive policies. Half the time these companies are under lawsuit by the government, under threat, under taxation. They're under punitive measures all the time. These companies outlast and outstand administrations and government officials, and they only go on dramatic sales during time of dramatic uncertainty. Most of these companies have traded down 10 or 15% in just the past three days alone.
So I'm going to be buying this dip aggressively, knowing that I don't know the future. I don't know how things are going to turn out. I don't know when this dip will turn into a bounce, but I'll be buying anyway. That's going to be it for this episode. Hope you enjoyed. See you in the next one, yeah?