Christmas Things I Think... I Think...
She got us up at 6 am...
Dear Fellow Traveler:
I really look forward to Christmas next year because it falls on a Friday.
Look at how utterly beautiful this schedule is next year…
It’s perfect… a Friday for Christmas… and a Friday for New Year’s Eve.
I know that we’re still doing the archeology of Jesus of Nazareth’s birth… that it might have been in September…
So if the Pope wants to really shake things up… he can tell us all that it happened on the Fourth Friday of December.
I wouldn’t complain… and I’d be donating big to the collection plate…
This whole getting up on Friday because the market is open is the most American thing possible. I’m going to bed in about 30 minutes… This is outrageous…
Radical proposals and jokes aside… Amelia woke up at 3 am on Thursday… and sat there… on the steps… then woke my wife up at 5:30 am… and woke me up at 6 am…
And we were downstairs ripping things open…
My wife got me something incredible… a seed bank for all the crops that should be grown in USDA Zone 7, with planting months, so we can get to work on the Edge of the World farm in January.
Plus this shirt… how great is this?
And what did my daughter like the most?
Thing No. 2 I Think: I Think I Was Right About This Gift
My wife and I gave Amelia a keyboard for Christmas…
It’s a digital one that has a lot of interactive lessons for people who are good at teaching themselves how to do things… I won’t be stunned if she’s putting on a show in about two months…
There were baseball cards… and Disney cards… and a lot of Wicked-themed gifts…
But there was one gift that she talked about more than once…
My time.
As I noted, I gave my daughter a 30-minute hourglass filled with purple sand.
The rule is that if I’m doing anything after 5 pm on a weeknight, she can interrupt me, put the hourglass down, and command 30 minutes of my time. I wrote about this on her birthday, and a few people reached out to say they were taking that idea too…
No problem… it’s yours…
“I’m really excited about that hour glass,” she said, as if it had some magical quality…
The basics go that she never asked - assuming I was busy… and I didn’t give enough… because that’s the life of an entrepreneur and writer. And if an inanimate object with falling sand (and time) is the ruler of everything… then so be it.
Who knows what adventures we’ll go on… and how far past that 30-minute clock it will inevitably take us each evening…
But that’s what I know I’ll look back on and smile about in 15 years… I barely remember half the stuff I write sometimes…
I’ll always remember the times she beat me in the Game of Life…
And she’ll remind me if I don’t…
Think 3 I Think: Long Resource, Free Nations in 2026
I’m starting the process of looking for anything that isn’t nailed down that might still be cheap in this global market. On the resource side, I’m not looking for anything that’s liquid… (natural gas, water, oil).
I’m looking for things that are cheap in both gas and solid forms.
Yes… seventh-grade science stocks…
Find me helium stocks. Find me zinc stocks.
And I’m definitely staying long palladium…
I’ll talk about metals next week when I release my annual outlook.
But I’m also going to throw another layer onto this. I expect that we’re going to see additional outflows to other nations. Where could money flow… logically?
I expect resource-rich nations… but those that are economically free and are safer places to invest capital. That puts a focus on the Scandinavian nations… Australia… Canada… Chile… and Uruguay.
If you want a head start on me, look at the Economic Freedom Index…
Think 4 I Think: In Bruges is a Christmas Movie
The 2025 Deutsche Bank Global Markets Survey ranks Home Alone, Die Hard, and Love Actually as the top Christmas movies on Wall Street…
I’ll be the judge of that…
People keep saying that Die Hard is a Christmas movie…
I understand that debate…
Fine… if we’re playing that game - because it takes place at Christmas… I’ll raise you…
In Bruges, set in Belgium during the Christmas season, is also a Christmas movie… and would easily be the best of the names listed above…
Bruges, Belgium, looks like a snow globe someone shook too hard.
It’s about guilt, punishment, and the faint hope of redemption, but it replaces Christmas carols with Irish profanity.
It’s also a movie about being stuck somewhere you don’t want to be, with people you didn’t choose, while waiting for judgment to arrive.
And if you disagree with me… allow me to apologize in advance…
In Bruges is the best script I’ve ever read in my first sitting…
I laughed harder than when I watched the film, and it’s one of my favorite movies.
Colin Ferrell remains underrated as an actor…
Thing I Think No. 5: Don’t Try to Make Too Much of It…
It’s the end of the year… so there are plenty of forecasts and plenty of noise about the year ahead.
One of the things I find a little tricky is that too many people are hyper-convincing about what is going to happen next… or that the crisis we’ve been undergoing can be aptly explained by looking at history…
The reality is this.
We have nothing to compare our current situation to… There are too many variables…
A Federal Reserve that’s printing money out of thin air and then telling us that they’re not really printing money out of thin air…
The Treasury Department is manipulating our debt issuance to stabilize the fiat banking system.
A bifurcation of global trade partners… a reserve currency on the brink… billions of people on the planet all acting in their self-interest… a Congress with an approval rating lower than colonoscopies….
But worst of all, people who really don’t understand how the system really works after 2008. Everyone is a self-proclaimed expert… and everyone has an opinion… but it’s clear that so many people are still stuck in a 1990s mentality on how money moves…
My argument is to avoid predicting too much.
Just react… that is what you can control in the year ahead. We have a specific momentum signal that has navigated the post-2020 era very well - despite all the unprecedented actions by our financial elite.
It’s designed to help you know if and when liquidity spasms are happening… but it also helps us understand what’s right in front of us at all times. And we’ve been very successful since we started using it in February 2020…
Again, we’ll continue to focus each day on the inflows and outflows as they happen…
I have my bias… but I listen to the mathematics and the real physics of this market…
Not opinion… just capital flows.
That’s the reality… price.
Price is the truth.
Not what some guy in a tie says on television…
Every crisis and liquidity cycle is different. What happened with the Repo market in recent months is radically different than what happened in 2019. What happened during COVID was completely different than what happened in 2008 or 1987.
We move from crisis to crisis constantly… it’s the history of American markets…
But the math never lies.
We take it a day at a time, with an emphasis on the long term…
I’ll be back next week with a different outlook than Wall Street issues…
We’ll talk probabilities… opportunities… and the importance of momentum.
Until then… Merry Christmas…
Stay positive,
Garrett Baldwin
Do you see any tariffs being walked back soon? I was thinking that it could be that Tim Cook bought nike because it has a labour intensive supplier base in Vietnam and Cambodia which could strike deals for lowered tariffs on, at least textiles.....