“Victory Belongs To The Most Tenacious”

Roland Garros, the World War I aviator, and Roland Garros the tennis tournament.

Travis’s Intro Note For Members

Six days into a 12 day steroid and antibiotic regime (I normally try to avoid anything like this going into my body) to treat a difficult case of poison ivy exposure and the resulting rash, I am feeling the effect of the “devil’s drug”, which my friend I spoke to today on a phone call dis-affectionately called prednisone.

More than anything, prednisone, a cortisol steroid, has impacted my sleep along with other side effects, including hormonal impacts, which impact my mood. Going to be thankful and grateful to be done with this, in due time. And, sometimes feeling the bad, helps reinforce feeling the good, which I am looking forward to on the other side of this journey.

That stoic philosophical approach, particularly appreciating the bad to appreciate the good, embracing the peaks and valleys, can help with trading and investments too, as the wild gyrations of the financial markets, including what we just witnessed in the stock market the past three months, and really the last three or four years, can test the emotions of the best investors and traders.

This volatility brings significant opportunity too, as we have demonstrated in the past.

Digging in further to this point, looking back at the core of our outperformance over the long-term, it has been driven by opportunistic value investing.

This was first evident in the Too Cheap To Ignore stalwarts of the 2015 and 2016 vintage (about ten of these), think this article on Teck Resources Limited TECK 0.00%↑ , or this article on Freeport McMoRan FCX 0.00%↑ , or this article on U.S. Steel X 0.00%↑ as examples. Ironically, Apple AAPL 0.00%↑ was a relatively cheap stock that we highlighted back then too, so in a way that was an opportunistic value play too.

The next real opportunistic value opportunity occurred in the natural gas equities that got cheaper and cheaper in the ensuing years with a bottom occurring in the heart of the pandemic.

These natural gas equities, particularly the Appalachia natural gas equities, got so cheap that I featured Antero Resources AR 0.00%↑ as a generational buy in a series of articles, and highlighted EQT Corp EQT 0.00%↑ in an article where I said the bearish natural gas thesis was dead.

Amazingly, the relative opportunity in this group was still there last year, and now others are jumping on the natural gas equity bandwagon for many of the reasons we have articulated throughout the years.

On this note, fortunately, today our core natural gas equities have become verifiable blue-chips, with almost everybody wanting in, or the momentum certainly going that way.

Also, fortunately, there is a smorgasbord of other downtrodden value equities and commodity equities offering potential opportunity, some of which I discussed more recently here in this article referencing discount to book values.

On the fortunate note as well, I have the French Open at Roland Garros to watch, which is turning out to be a good match between Jannick Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz (Sinner just got the first break in the 4th set, update Alcaraz just broke back, update again, Alcaraz came back from triple break point down in the 4th set, then won a fourth set tiebreaker, this is a good match!!!). These two feel like the next version of Federer and Nadal.

And, tonight, I have the Pacer’s to watch, which the whole city of Indianapolis and the whole state of Indiana is enthralled with right now.

And, always, I have the financial markets to occupy my interest and focus, which are at a compelling potential historical inflection point right now.

Specific to the U.S. stock market, will the new Nifty 50 cohort of stocks in this modern era led by the magnificent seven stocks, which of course are Microsoft MSFT 0.00%↑ , Nvidia NVDA 0.00%↑ , Apple AAPL 0.00%↑ , Alphabet GOOGL 0.00%↑ , Amazon AMZN 0.00%↑ , Meta META 0.00%↑ , and Tesla TSLA 0.00%↑ continue eating the world?

Or will something else happen?

I got a feeling it is going to be something else, which will catch most investors off guard.