The Flying Frisby - money, markets and more

A few weeks ago, an Irish friend of mine was contacted by the Irish Postal service. A package had arrived for her from abroad, but there were a couple of euros and change of duties to be paid. This had happened to her before - she buys a lot of stuff on the internet, clothes especially - and she duly got out her debit card and paid up.A week or so later, she was sitting in a meeting, when she started getting updates from Revolut notifying her that money was being sent from her account to Binance, the crypto exchange. She doesn’t have an account with Binance.She contacted Revolut and then found money had also been sent to the crypto exchanges Kraken and Coinbase, and then, of all places, to Deliveroo. The perpetrator was ordering dinner.She thought she had frozen her account, but it seems Revolut had already done this ten minutes earlier - their fraud detection system had been triggered and the customer alerted. The Revolut rep advised her that the transfers had not been completed yet, that they would be halted and that in a few days the money would be returned. My friend calmed down.The following day, however, she saw that the transfers had gone through. She got in touch with Revolut again. Only this time the rep told her that yesterday’s rep had given her the wrong advice. Those payments could not have been halted and the money would not be returned.After several days’ back and forth, Revolut then confirmed that the money was gone and that they would not be refunding it to her. If she had any complaints she should take it up with the police. In total, she had around 7,000 euros stolen from her account. Someone had stolen her debit card details, most likely that person supposedly from the Irish postal service, and that is how the fraud was perpetrated.She reported it to the Gardai (the Irish police), spending several fruitless hours on several different occasions at the station, where notes were taken on bits of paper (not digitally) and she was given titbits of advice such as, “ah, well, you don’t know what’s going on with them foreign banks.” There was one detective, apparently, who was helpful, but, apart from that, fruitless. They then told her to speak to the financial ombudsman, which she did, to be told that it was too close to Christmas and she should try again in the new year. She would eventually be given the run around by the ombudsman as well.She asked another of her banks what they did in this situation, and they suggested she try and find a solicitor. But this, it seems, was hard too. Most specialise in defending organisations against fraud, but few act for individuals, she says, and certainly not in her price bracket.She then started getting repeated calls from another company - a Florida number, but based in Israel - asking her for €1,000 upfront to recover the money, which they say there is a “good chance” of doing.Eventually, she got in touch with me to see if I could help. The whole story seemed extraordinary. I read the conversations she had had with the Revolut representative telling her not to worry. I couldn’t believe Revolut then saying she had no protection, when she was clearly the victim of a debit card fraud. Surely, even with Revolut’s non-banking status, it has to abide with EU customer protection laws, doesn’t it?I’ve had money stolen from my account, when I lost my debit card. Whoever found it went on a shopping spree round the supermarkets of South London. I had to fight to get the money back, and go through endless phone calls and form filling - and even then HSBC “forgot” to re-instate the stolen funds - but I did eventually get the money. I’ve never had such problems with credit cards, which is why I prefer them to debit cards. But even with HSBC’s delaying tactics, I never got a flat refusal in the way that my friend was given by Revolut.The ability to hold numerous different currencies in Revolut, the ease with which you can send and receive money internationally and indeed send to crypto exchanges, where many traditional banks will block transfers, make it a tempting option. But the convenience it offers seems to come at a cost and that cost is the safety of your money.I got in touch with Revolut here in the UK saying I was writing a story about this and I wanted to hear Revolut’s side. Revolut replied straight away. I spoke to their representative, who was extremely helpful (he doesn’t want his name mentioned here).He recognised that I was working to a deadline, looked straight into the case and then came back to me a couple of days later with a resolution. “The experience of [unnamed] fell well below our high customer support standards and we’re sorry for the distress this caused her,” he said. “We have reimbursed her stolen funds in full as a gesture of goodwill.”I’m not sure my friend’s experience would have been the same had she not had a friend who is a financial journalist, but I have to commend Revolut and this employee in particular for the way he acted as soon as I came banging on the door. He also had this to say: “Criminals use increasingly sophisticated techniques to steal your details and your money. If you receive an SMS message from any person or business, be on guard, particularly if the message asks for your details or includes a link or number. Do not share authorisation codes or passwords with anyone, ever, even if they claim to be from Revolut.”And, there, I suppose is the moral of this tale. Debit and credit card fraud is rampant, and its perpetrators are a lot more wised up than most ordinary consumers - than you or me, in other words. I’m not a writer who specialises in this kind of consumer finance, but I would also add that my experience is that you seem to get more protection from credit cards than debit cards, so use them. Use 2 factor authentication wherever possible. Have your payment notifications switched on, so that every time there is a transaction you get notified. That way less will slip by you. Cyber crime is everywhere.Revolut also added: “If you think your card details may have been compromised, freeze your Revolut cards immediately in the app by tapping “freeze” on each of your cards and report the fraud to Revolut immediately by contacting a customer support agent via the in-app chat.” That’s exactly what my Irish friend did though!My eldest daughter is about to go on a backpacking trip. She has a Revolut account - she likes Revolut - and she’ll be taking a Revolut debit card with her. But she will keep her core funds in another account, for which she won’t have a debit card with her, thereby leaving it less vulnerable. She’ll only transfer money to Revolut when she needs it. It may seem long-winded, but it adds a layer of protection. Thank you for reading this. Be sure to check out my recent piece on the Great Decline, if you have’t already. It as caught a real nerve. And be sure to check out Dr John’s latest: My Top 5 Investment Trusts to Own for the Next 20 Years. You do not want to miss that.If you’re buying gold, my current recommended bullion dealer in the UK is The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. You can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deal with them.If you’re buying bitcoin, be sure to read my special report.And make your Number One resolution for 2023 to listen to Kisses on a Postcard.This article first appeared at Moneyweek. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

Something is very wrong with my country. Something big and something bad. We can all feel it, though we might not agree on what is actually wrong. The great institutions of state are falling apart. Mighty institutions that I grew up trusting for their integrity, respected around the world, seem to be crumbling amidst incompetence, incoherence, corruption and more.The government, essentially unelected, is unpopular and ineffectual. Not that a properly elected government would make much difference. Sir Humphrey and the Blob still seem to run everything. The system seems set up to look after the system, rather than its people. The opportunities for change and reform that were first, Brexit, then Boris Johnson’s sweeping 2019 election win, have been squandered. The government is unable to carry out even its most basic function, which is to defend the borders. The Bank of England has for many years been destroying the value of money. Inflation, which apparently was unforeseeable, is now at 9%. And that’s just official inflation – we all know actual inflation is higher. The Bank’s monetary policies, together with planning laws, have given us an intergenerational wealth divide which means anyone born after about 1985 can’t afford anywhere to live. They delay starting families as a result, and they have smaller families, with the long-term consequence that the local population is eroded away. This then gives rise to the argument that, as locals aren’t reproducing, we “need” immigration. I can’t remember trust in the police, who seem more concerned with online wrong-think than violent crime, ever having been so low. I wrote that sentence before the David Carrick scandal. The courts are overwhelmed and the court system is both expensive and antiquated. The legal system is manipulated and exploited, only affordable to the very rich or very poor. The penal system is inadequate. Google “NHS and news”, if you want to see what state healthcare is in. Radical progressive ideology has enveloped education. Even the armed forces have been afflicted by it. Universities are overpriced and increasingly irrelevant to the modern work environment. The BBC, the national broadcaster, is loathed for its bias, and its output is, for the most part, crap. Luxury green ideology has left us with sky-high energy prices. Royal Mail only occasionally delivers - I’m still getting Christmas cards now. The trains are useless and expensive. Who knows how well the civil service is doing? It’s opaque. The electoral process has become meaningless. You get the same blob whoever you vote for. Representative democracy is neither representative nor democratic.I could go on. You get the point. Everywhere that is not functioning involves (or has involved in its recent history) the heavy hand of the state. You could look at, say, shops, tech, restaurants or media – areas where the state is less involved – and user dissatisfaction levels are not comparable. Airports actually ran better when the border force went on strike. It’s as though the state is inherently incompetent. Why there aren’t more libertarians, I’ll never understand. Meanwhile, all of these institutions are costing a fortune. Spending on most is at all-time highs. By the time you factor in inflation (which is a stealth tax - even the Chancellor recently admitted as much), taxation levels are comfortably in excess of 50%. That is to say: more than half of everything you earn is taken from you by the state to pay for stuff that doesn’t work. That’s before we get to the tax on the future which is debt and deficit spending.And then there’s the waste. Here is just one example:Imagine how much better off we’d all be, if citizens, rather than the government, could choose where to allocate the money they earn. You spend your money better than they do.Culture wars and mass migrationIt’s not just crumbling institutions and state overreach. They call it the Culture Wars, but we are in the midst of a religious war, an ideological struggle. What Elon Musk calls “the woke mind virus” – an aggressive, radically progressive ideology born out of an obsession with identity politics – has taken over, especially within institutions and education, and is wreaking havoc. From male rapists being put into women’s prisons to expensive green initiatives that actually damage the environment to a pandemic of cancel culture. Again, I could go on. I don’t need to spell it out here. You know what I’m talking about. Small government and libertarianism solves this too, by the way. The virus would not be able to survive and spread without the oxygen of public money.Meanwhile, the demography of the country has changed, and as a result, so has its identity (though few have yet realised that). Last year, 1.1 million people migrated to this country –  that’s just the ones who were granted visas. There are plenty more that weren’t. In effect, roughly one in every 65 people you meet in this country only came here last year.  The London of the 1970s that I grew up in has vanished. The archetypical Londoner used to be the Cockney – the white working-class man or woman born within the sound of Bow Bells. Today the Cockney, once such an instantly recognisable English type and one that has had an incredible influence on Britain, barely exists. They’ve all gone. Almost every other UK city is on a similar journey to indigenous British white minority.As the song goes, “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”. Whatever we had has gone and we will never get it back. It’s not just the UK. It’s the whole of Western Europe, and probably much of North America too. My German friend jokes that Buenos Aires will be the last European city. On which note, it was incredible to watch the World Cup Final between Argentina and France. By the time the game ended and the substitutions had been made, it was, essentially, a match between Africans from Europe and Europeans from South America. I am not “anti-migration”, by the way. If anything, I am pro it. In my National Anthem of Libertaria I argue for free movement. The mass movement of people is an inevitable tide in the affairs of men. People have always moved, and always will. But I also view conserving our culture, identity and communities as paramount, and the state is failing to do that.  If such things were not state responsibility, but locals’, and people were empowered by lower taxes and the greater responsibility that comes with a smaller state, the outcome would be different. Mass migration is inevitable. People think it’s going to decrease. It’s not. It’s going to increase. There are more people in the world than ever before and – whether it’s those displaced by war, by lack of water, by poverty, hunger or (probably the primary factor) lack of opportunity – more and more of them are on the move. Because of modern communications, more of them are aware of better lives to be had elsewhere. Because of modern travel, more of them are able to travel further and faster than ever before. As a result, we are in a migration of people of historically unprecedented proportions. It’s only going to increase.Terrified of being labelled racist, Western governments have no coherent philosophy, let alone an actionable strategy, to deal with it all. Especially as both the public and the media have lost sight of the difference between what is legal immigration, what is illegal and what is asylum. Moreover, it has become impossible for all the shouting “racist” to have a grown up conversation about how much immigration we actually want - 100,000 a year? 500,000? Net zero? How pertinent is the Douglas Murray title: The Strange Death of Europe.The world is changing fast. For good or for bad, the Britain we once knew has left Middle Earth. I don’t think anyone voted for it. I don’t see many leaders trying to stop it. Locals who have paid taxes all their life and now receive inadequate services, or see that tax money being spent on these new Britons, while they go overlooked, not unreasonably feel betrayed, angry, frightened and more. Accountable local government with local borders might be better able to act on the wishes of its people, and defend against this sudden influx that is disrupting so many communities – if so desired. But that is not possible with Britain’s remote, centralised, unaccountable state. Given its record elsewhere, when the state is in charge of borders, why should it be any surprise they don’t function properly?A genuinely free market-driven economy might be happy with open borders and quickly able to adapt – more people to sell products to, a greater choice of people to employ – what’s not to like? But the state systems – schools, hospitals, transport infrastructure – cannot cope. As Milton Friedman observed, you cannot have open borders and an expansive and benevolent welfare state. You can have one or the other, but not both. Yet currently, both is what we have (or are attempting to have). That’s why everything is falling apart. In effect, we are paying for ourselves to be colonised.Maybe it’s multi-culturalism and expansive state welfare that are incompatible: the latter may only properly function in more mono-cultural societies, such as Japan. (Similar arguments can be made about crime levels. They tend to be lower in mostly mono-cultural cities, especially in Asia, to those in the the more multi-cultural west).Whether it’s Hull, Skegness, Mansfield or any other provincial town, when boatloads of young men from different cultures, with no instinctive loyalty to the UK or its ways (and sometimes a contempt for it), are dumped in a community and the community is given no say in the matter, and locals have no power to resist, any anger felt is pretty understandable. There are incidents when the young men are put up in four or five-star hotels, while there are locals, homeless, in tents outside. It is not what people want, nor what they voted for. As I say, representative democracy is neither representative, nor democratic. The model is broken.Brave New World, digital nomad-ery, robot takeover — or something worse?Finally, there are incredible developments in technology: the new worlds being designed for us by nameless, and, in many cases, slightly autistic coders in far away places, the extraordinary expansion of surveillance and the erosion of privacy. Those who have monitored ChatGPT will know that before long as much as half of the content on the internet will be generated by bots. But they are not neutral - they are politically biased. What are the implications of that and the extraordinary influence these nameless coders will have to shape the global narrative?Never mind whose fault this all is, or the rights and wrongs of it all. We all have our ideas. Plenty of them.  What I want to know is: where is this all going? I’ve been thinking about it a lot.Many draw parallels with the Fall of Rome and the invading barbarians at the gates. Others say we are headed into totalitarianism akin to George Orwell’s 1984. Many of my Eastern European friends think we are making the same mistakes they once made and headed into some kind of 21st century Marxism. My Venezuelan friends think the same. Some see a new rise of fascism akin to the 1930s.Some look to Isaac Asimov and the rise of intelligent machines (see my piece on ChatGPT, if you want to know just how advanced machine learning is now). My genius bitcoin billionaire mate, who has long since disappeared somewhere remote in New Zealand, thinks we are going into a world where everybody is housed in Butlins/CentreParks/Club Med (depending on your socio-economic status)-type holiday resorts, with virtual reality headsets on all day, while robots do all the work. That vision tallies somewhat with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.Another compelling scenario comes in James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg’s, in which they describe a two-tiered society. On one tier, thanks to advances in technology and communication, there will be a class of largely untaxed digital nomads, travelling from place to place, operating independently of nation states and government structures. Meanwhile, there will be a much larger class of people trapped in their nations, working in the physical economy (rather than the stateless digital one), heavily taxed and indebted. Hard-money advocates argue that some kind of hyperinflation and the destruction of fiat money is inevitable, or that, with the emergence of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the US dollar is soon to lose its reserve currency status, with major implications for the international balance of power. In that case Western Europe is probably going the way of once-wealthy Argentina. “Great Reset” theory, in the wake of Covid and the vaccine furore - that powerful, yet secret actors and organisations, especially the WEF, are planning all of this - looks rather more credible than it once did.There is also a persuasive argument that the expansion of NATO, Vladimir Putin’s ambitions and the conflict in Ukraine is going to take us eventually to nuclear war. There is a lot to worry about. These really are incredible times.So back to the underlying question: where is this all going? The South Africanisation of everythingI was in the pub with my friend, the director Alex McCarron, the other night, when this subject came up. He had a simple but compelling answer: South Africa. The South Africanisation of Everything.There are many parallels: crumbling institutions, widespread corruption, mass migration; failing rule of law, rising crime rates – especially violent crime; inadequate policing and reliance on private security; identity politics, siloed, ghetto-ised communities within a so-called multi-cultural country; race-based crime, justified because of history; many cultures, each with their grievances, thrust together and by no means living harmoniously. It’s a credible scenario and one I can envisage. One small example: private security vehicles are ubiquitous in Johannesburg. You never used to see them in the UK. My friend sent me this image, spotted this in Notting Hill the other evening. I think such sights are going to get more and more become commonplace. It’s another symptom of a failing state.My view is that we are going to see all of those above scenarios. Nevertheless … things are better than we realiseIn all of this negativity, in many ways, things are much better than we may think and the world is in a better state than it has ever been. We are living longer than ever. There are fewer people living below the poverty line than ever. The number of people dying from natural disasters is lower than it has ever been. Information technology means we have greater access to information than ever. 6.8 billion people now have a smart phone - think of all the possibilities that open up as a result. More than 80% of the global population now has access to electricity. With modern transport we are able to go further than ever, quicker than ever. The world is, as a result, more accessible than ever. We might not enjoy her status, but most of us live with luxuries Marie Antoinette could never have dreamed of. Life is so much easier for us than it was for our ancestors and we should be grateful to them for the benefits we enjoy, as a result of what they went through. Wonderful things are possible. There is much to be positive and excited about. There has never been a better time to be alive.But something is missing. Something is wrong. We can all feel it.Our belief systems are awry. I am sure it’s to do with the absence of religion. Naive worship of incompetent state institutions has replaced it.Am I right about this? Please post your thoughts in the comments below. And how do you navigate it all, as an investor, and protect/grow your wealth? Gold and bitcoin are the obvious “anti-state” choices.Please share this article on Twitter, Facebook etc (if you liked it).Meanwhile, if you want to listen to Alex and I discuss the South Africanisation of everything – that podcast is here.Interested in protecting your wealth in these extraordinary times? Then be sure to own some gold bullion. My current recommended bullion dealer is The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. You can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deals with them.My guide to buying bitcoin is here.Make your Number One resolution for 2023 to listen to Kisses on a Postcard.The Flying Frisby is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

There has been a discernible change in the narrative over the past few weeks regarding Covid-19 vaccines. From the Andrew Bridgen affair and questions in the House of Commons regarding the unusually high seasonal death rates to the publicity that came with “Novacc” Djokovic winning the Australian Open, to the sudden collapse of Thailand’s Princess Bajrakitiyabha, daughter of the King, and the resulting (likely fabricated) story that Thailand is nullifying its Pfizer contracts, the powers-that-be - and I’m still not sure who they actually are - seem to have lost control of the narrative.The take-up of boosters was low and there is now widespread doubt amongst those who had the vaccine that they did the right thing, while there is both pride and vindication amongst those who didn’t.In a world awash with both censorship and misinformation (which is worse? - there is another thing I’m not sure about), it is difficult to know who or what to believe.We do, however, have price. There is a truth to price. Price, like the truth, can change every day, many times per day, but the price of something, or should I say the price of a publicly traded asset, reflects all the available information about that asset at any given moment. In that respect, there is a truth to price.The price of Brent Crude Oil, currently $84, reflects all the available information there is about current and future oil supply, current and future demand, current and future government policy, net zero, global risk appetite and more. All the information, opinion, and research, the truths, the half-truths and the lies, the ideals and the realities - everything is distilled into those two digits: 84 dollars.And so today, with all this in mind, I thought it would be informative to ask - how are the vaccine stocks doing? How’re they are doing might tell us about the vaccine narrative itself.Covid-19 vaccine stocks The main vaccine stocks are as follows: * Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) - although not a “pure” play (its share price is determined by the success or failure of many of its products and patents), it did bring the world’s most famous and controversial vaccine to market. * Biotechnology company BioNTech (NASDAQ: BNTX), which teamed with Pfizer to produce its vaccine, can be seen as much more of a “vaccine bellwether” stock. Its messenger RNA (mRNA) technology was critical to the Pfizer vaccine.* Moderna (NASDAQ: MRNA). The ticker’s on brand! Moderna was quick in the wake of Pfizer and BioNTech to win a US EUA for its vaccine. Unlike Pfizer and BioNTech, it doesn’t have to split profits. It’s also a ‘pure play”, so a good bellwether.* Johnson & Johnson's (NYSE: JNJ) sold its vaccine at cost during the pandemic and it is so diversified with numerous other products that we can probably discount it as a vaccine bellwether. Still, we can include it on the list as it is a key player.* Likewise AstraZeneca (LON: AZN) -was an early winner in the vaccine race, but then it got embroiled in disputes with the European Union. Like Johnson and Johnson, it is also heavily diversified with other products and it also initially delivered the vaccines at cost. So, again, it is not a “pure play.”* There is the lesser-known Novavax (NASDAQ: NVAX), whose product is not as widespread as the others.* Ocugen (NASDAQ: OCGN), also not very well known, is partnered with Indian drugco, Bharat Biotech, and has a vaccine authorised in India. * Finally, Vaxart (NASDAQ: VXRT), is developing an oral vaccination tablet. At this stage of writing this article, I haven’t yet looked at a single chart of a “vaxco”, so I don’t know what I’m about to discover. I’m going to post 4-year charts - ie going back a year before Covid - along with a 200-day moving average (200DMA) in green to help identify primary trends.Let’s start with Pfizer (NYSE: PFE)You can see the run it had since 2020. But, shorter term, since early December, it’s been falling like a boulder off a cliff. It’s not seen any of the rally that accompanied the broader stock market since Christmas. It’s below its 200DMA and trending down. On the other hand, it’s still at $43, above its October low, and well above its pre-Covid price in the low- to mid-$30s, so all is not lost. I do not like the look of that chart at all. I’m pretty sure its handle will no longer be a four but a three before long.Next is BioNTech (NASDAQ: BNTX). This is a classic pop-and-drop and could just as easily be the chart of some crypto currency or junior miner.At $140, it’s 70% down from its $460 high, and it too is in a downtrend. There is support at $120 and it’s still three or four times higher than it was before Covid. I wish I’d known about BioNTech in 2020!Moderna (NASDAQ: MRNA) is next and like BioNTech, the other “pure vax play,” this is another pop-and-drop. Cynics would say pump and dump.Gosh, this was a $25 stock in 2020. It went to $500. How fortunes can change.Now it’s at $175, 65% of its highs, but above its 200DMA. The shorter-term trend is down, however.Gosh, these vaxco stocks are volatile. As volatile as crypto. (I don’t see the FCA warning against them, or indeed banning them though).Johnson & Johnson's (NYSE: JNJ) is next. Like Pfizer, it’s not a pure play, but I do not like the look of this chart at all. Double tops and stuff.It’s come down hard in 2023. What does the market know that I don’t?It’s below its 200DMA and trending lower. You want to see that October 2022 low, just around $158, holding, or failing that $152.To be fair to Johnson and Johnson, and not wanting to get too sensationalist, it has previous when it comes to spiky, up-and-down action. See early 2022 for more details.And so to AstraZeneca (LON: AZN) and this too could be displaying the worrying, early 2023 chart sickness of the vaccine major. Not as bad as the other two though.I’m going to give this one the benefit of the doubt and say it's a standard pullback to the 200DMA, which is rising, amidst an ongoing secular bull market.Pre-Covid it was around 7,000p, so it’s about 45% up on the back of the pandemic.If they’ve banned cryptocurrencies, why the FCA hasn’t banned speculating in the likes of Novavax (NASDAQ: NVAX), I cannot understand. Where’s the consistency? Surely that is what we want from our regulators. In any case, this is one brutal chart, and it’s back where it was before Covid.This was a $3 stock at the beginning of 2020. It went to $330. Somebody made a lot of money. Nancy Pelosi is my guess. Or maybe that Fauci bloke. (For the avoidance of legal doubt, I’m joking).Now it’s a $10 stock. I make that a 97% drop. Somebody lost a lot of money.By the way, here’s a chart of Novavax since its IPO in 1995. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it. Talk about hype cycles. Fortunes have been made and lost in this company over and over. Remind me to buy it in about a year’s time at $5. It’ll be $150 or $300 a couple of years after that. (Then remind me to sell it).Next, we have Ocugen (NASDAQ: OCGN). Cripes, it’s another one. From a buck to 18 bucks back to a buck. I need to get more into biotech. It’s extraordinary.And last up, Vaxart (NASDAQ: VXRT) is developing an oral vaccination tablet. I almost don’t need to post this one. You know what’s coming.From below a dollar to $25 back to a dollar - and trending lower.So what can we learn from all this?One: vaccines are dead in the water.Two: there might be something nasty lurking in the pipeline for Pfizer, and perhaps Johnson and Johnson. My guess is something legal.If you’re buying gold, my current recommended bullion dealer in the UK is The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. You can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deals with them.If you’re buying bitcoin, be sure to read my special report.And make your Number One resolution for 2023 to listen to Kisses on a Postcard.This article first appeared at Moneyweek. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

There are just three ways, I once heard someone say, to create real wealth:* You make stuff* You mine stuff* You grow stuffEverything else is just redistribution - pushing what is already there around. We can argue about whether offering a service is “making stuff”. I would say, generally, it is. I’ve always loved that as a maxim by which to view things. Pretty much all wealth creation comes under one of those three categories. You are bringing something new into the world that did not previously exist. It’s why I have issues with forex. The foreign exchange markets are the largest and most liquid financial markets in the world. They are more than 25 times larger in daily turnover than all of the world's stock markets combined. Forex has made many people supremely rich. But is forex trading actually creating new wealth or is it another illusory consequence of fiat, and just pushing existing wealth around? It’s a question for another time because it’s item two on that list - mining - that I want to talk about today, that loathed and despised industry, responsible for so much pollution, waste, injury, fraud and death. Why mining is so importantWe need mines. We cannot do without them. They are essential to human progress. Mines provide the raw materials that are the foundations for modern living. We would not have the world we have around us today were it not for mining: the primary means by which natural resources - metals, minerals and fossil fuels - are extracted from the earth. Human beings have been mining since before the Bronze Age and we won’t ever stop. These natural resources can be used to make wonderful things: buildings, bridges, planes, trains and cars, electronics, and, of course, energy. Mining, and all the risks you have to take to do it, is to bring new and real wealth into the world that did not previously exist. In the West we sit at our desks all day, in our clean, sanitised environments, and we forget that, for example, for the internet to exist, we need untold amounts of metal , be it steel, copper, silver or some rare earth metal neither you nor I know the name of. With our cosseted western existence, we have in many ways lost touch with the world around us: the land, the environment, the animals and plants we eat. We have forgotten just how the things around us came to be. There was a time when you would build up a relationship with an animal before you ate it. I’m looking around me at my office and every single item - from my desk to my computer to my books to the house I’m in - would not exist without mining.If Net Zero is to be realised (spoiler alert: it won’t be), and we are going to transition from fossil fuel to electricity, we are going to need to mine unprecedented amounts of copper and lithium (which in itself is going to entail extraordinary amounts of fossil fuel consumption). But mining has a huge environmental impact. Though it’s hard to find a human activity that doesn’t have an environmental impact, mining is exceptional. Together with certain types of fishing, it’s probably the most environmentally damaging of all industries. That’s why there are so many rules and regulations in place. They’re there to attempt to minimise damage. Mining will never have zero impact. There is a trade-off between the impact of the mine, the wealth it creates and the benefits it brings. But it is because of the potential mining has to cause harm, to the environment, to local communities, to workers, that so many of us feel ambivalent about it, if not downright opposed. The fellowship of miningThere are common characteristics to miners, visible throughout history and in all the myth and legend that surrounds them: brave, strong, hard working, fiercely proud, stoic, with incredible camaraderie amongst them - probably because of the incredible risks and effort involved in doing their job.From Snow White to Middle Earth, you see it in the depiction of dwarves, the miners of mythology. Visit any of the old mining pubs in Cornwall, Wales or the North East, where the mines are no more, but look at the pictures on the wall, let your senses go and you can feel it there too. The old boys who used to work in the now closed mines still talk about the camaraderie.Mining is hard. It always was and it always will be, even with modern machines. Never mind the financial and political risk, it’s dangerous. It’s a difficult business. You have to go to some of the most unsavoury parts of the planet. Yet for decades we have been attacking mining. We attack this key industry, which instead we should support.Protestors become heroes when they stand against this terrible industry. Lawmakers do not stand up to protestors, they bow to them.The cost of regulation in the UK is so high, the mining industry barely here exists now. We have lots of coal, we have tin, we have copper, we even have tungsten and lithium, but producing mines are few and far between. We were once a nation once internationally famous for its mines and its miners. It’s why so many metals exchanges are here. It’s why so many international mining companies are based here.We are using more metal than ever here in the UK, yet we are barely producing any of it. We are getting that metal from Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas. Just because that mining is out of sight, it isn’t any less damaging to the environment. Heaven forbid the war in Ukraine, or tensions between China and the West, or Islam and Christianity, could grew into some kind of global conflict. If it does, we have big strategic problems - because we barely produce any metal."The Battle of Production is the Battle of Life and Death,” said Winston Churchill to the House of Commons in September, 1940. “It is being fought out every day in every mine, factory, and farm in the country. It is the Battle of the Coal Mines. It is the Battle of the Steel Mills. It is the Battle of the Harvest Field. It is the Battle of the Factories and Workshops. It is the Battle of the Shipping Lanes. It is the Battle of the Aircraft Factories. It is the Battle of the Munitions Works. And on the outcome of this Battle depends the life and death of the nation."So it was with great concern that I read this article from Chris Hinde about mining graduates.The state of mining in the UKCornwall’s Camborne School of Mines, founded in 1888, once used to be the most important mining college in the world. Through the 20th century, its graduates operated many of the world’s most significant mines - in Southern and Western Africa, Malaysia, Australia, South America, Mexico, the United States and Canada. It is now merged with Exeter University.Do you know how many British people over the past two years have enrolled in mining engineering or mineral processing undergraduate courses there or indeed anywhere in the UK? Take a guess.The answer is not one. Not a single person. As recently as 1990, there were over 300 mining graduates every year from five UK mining schools. Now there are none.The UK’s Engineering Council has 1,237 registered mining and mineral processing engineers. 80% of them are over the age of 50. Half of that 80% are over the age of 66 - retired or about to be, in other words.We used to export mining talent all over the world, but just to operate the few mines we have left here in the UK, never mind build new ones, the UK Mining Education Forum calculates the country needs over 60 new mining engineering and minerals processing graduates every year. We have none.Everybody wants to work in finance or tech. With years of greenwashing, we have forgotten the essential contribution which mining makes to society. We have lost touch. The green narrative has done so much structural damage to our history, our identity and our industry.Who is going to run Cornwall’s tin and tungsten mines, or extract its lithium? Who will operate Cumbria’s new coal mines (should they ever get planning approval)? If we don’t act fast, we will lose the self-knowledge of our own landscapes to be able to utilise their many and varied natural resources. This is not just a UK problem, by the way, it is the case across Western Europe.One lesson of the soaring cost of energy is that the mineral resource industries need investment and support, not attacking. Why would you invest in future production, if you know the government is just going to impose windfall taxes? The War in Ukraine, and especially the bind in which Germany finds itself, has demonstrated the strategic stupidity of being dependent on dodgy regimes for essential resources, when there is abundant domestic natural supply. The ridiculous irony is that to import resources from unscrupulous corners of the earth is considerably less green than producing them ourselves.A rather big country somewhere to the far east of us gets the concept of making stuff, mining stuff and growing stuff in a way that we no longer seem to. What are the implications?Please tell your friends about this article.And please consider becoming a subscriber to The Flying Frisby.If you’re buying gold, my current recommended bullion dealer in the UK is The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. You can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deals with them.If you’re buying bitcoin, be sure to read my special report.And make your Number One resolution for 2023 to listen to Kisses on a Postcard. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

Gold had an epic bull market in the noughties - I still remember the key numbers like it was yesterday.There was the low in 1999 at $250/oz, marked for all eternity by Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, as he sold off two-thirds of British gold at the bottom of the market, when there were no compelling need to sell.That low was re-tested in 2001 and we got a classic double bottom, followed by eight years of bull market, which ended, after a big wobble in 2006, in 2008 at $1,030/oz. Then the Global Financial Crisis came along. Gold plummeted along with everything else. An unstoppable rebound lasting three more years followed. First, the gold price broke out to new highs, and on it marched until it eventually peaked in 2011, with the Greek debt crisis, at $1,920/oz.Then came the bear market. Five brutal years of pain. It went all the way back to $1,040/oz.The period between 2018 and 2020 saw gold rally again, heading north of $2,000/oz, albeit briefly.But here we are in early 2023. And guess what? As I write, gold sits at $1,920/oz - the same price as it was back in 2011. Markets remember prices.What’s next for the gold price? Will it pull back from here? Maybe. Probably.It has rallied $300/oz in barely two months. It’s overbought. Neither silver nor the miners are leading. That’s usually not a good sign. Charlie Morris says gold is trading above fair value. Charlie Morris is usually right.You can get cute and try and trade it, but no one knows what is going to happen. It’s a precious metal and it’s a market. If they can throw you, they will.  But then again, gold usually does well when trust in financial markets is low. I’d say that’s the case now. Do you risk your position in the hope that you can get back in lower? What if it goes up instead?Or you can take the longer-term view. Like the famed trader, Old Partridge, in Edwin Lefevre’s Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, who never wanted to lose his position in a bull market, a view since echoed by a memed typo, you can just hodl on.We must each make our own choices, learn from them and live with them.What happens to the gold price if everyone starts buying? Here’s a nice little thought experiment. I’ve heard it before - but I’d forgotten it, and it was brought to my attention again by Winston Miles of Canadian investment house Eight Capital.There was a presentation by strategist Grant Williams in 2016 called “What If?” when he asked what would happen if pension funds, which currently had a 0.15% weighting to gold, increased that allocation. Miles decided to run that scenario in today’s marketplace.“According to the OECD’s most recent data, global pension assets are $56 trillion. I could easily see pension funds getting up to 1% of their portfolio in precious metals on average. But let’s be a bit more conservative and go with two-thirds of 1%, or 66bps… which is $373,903,924,800.“That amount of money …  could buy every single company that makes up the Philadelphia Gold and Silver Index… which would set them back a cool $297 billion.  Then they could buy every share of GLD, even taking delivery of all that gold if they wanted, as it’s all sitting in a vault somewhere.  That would cost another $56 billion. Then with the scraps left over, they could buy every share of the GDX… GDXJ… SIL… AND the SILJ.” (Those are the gold and silver mining ETFs).In short, there’s a lot of money out there. On a relative basis, there isn’t a lot of trade-able gold, and there aren’t that many gold mining companies. A small shift in the narrative could send the gold and silver markets a long way higher. “It’s an environment,” says Miles, “where almost no major pensions have a portfolio manager focused on metals and mining. The infrastructure is totally gone. It’s hard to add supply, the mines are old, it takes ten+ years to build new ones, these are really long lead time projects.”You can conduct the same thought experiments with oil, gas and coal. Very little allocation (largely because of ESG), and very little investment leading to tight supply and long lead times.You can conduct the same experiments with bitcoin. What happens to the bitcoin price, if bitcoin were to become a core, mainstream portfolio holding?They all go a lot higher.You can’t say the same about tech, the S&P 500, or government bonds. They are already owned.The narratives for gold, fossil fuels or bitcoin may not change, but if they do, look out above.On this note, here is the S&P500 relative to gold since 2000. When the chart is rising, gold is rising relative to the stock market and vice versa. At $1,920/oz gold is a lot cheaper today, relative to the stock market, than it was when it was $1,920/oz back in 2011. It’s a third of the price. To get back to those equivalent levels, assuming no change in the price of the S&P500, gold would have to triple. I like the sound of $5,700/oz gold!$5,700 gold - that’s a stat worth sharing.Gold and gold minersHere are the gold miners relative to gold. With the plethora of new ways that opened up to get exposure to gold in the 2000s - ETFs, online bullion dealers, CFDs, spread bets and all the rest of it - investors stopped bothering with miners, and who can blame them?Too much incompetence, too many frauds, too much political and environmental risk - and all the rest of it.Miners have been falling since 2003. But they stopped falling in 2015. Since then they’ve gone sideways. They are, as the technicians say, “building cause”.I reckon the low is in. It came in 2015. And we re-tested it last year.What do you think? Post your comments below.If you are interested in gold miners, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. I cover gold mining extensively.If you’re buying gold, my current recommended bullion dealer in the UK is The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. You can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deals with them.If you’re buying bitcoin, be sure to read my special report.And make your Number One resolution for 2023 to listen to Kisses on a Postcard.This article first appeared at Moneyweek. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

It’s that time of year once again when I get out my crystal ball and tell you exactly what is going to happen in this the Year of our Lord 2023 (here’s how I performed last year).   You can normally rely on your intrepid author to have strong, even if wrong opinions on markets, but I must confess to not feeling as strongly about things as I usually do. My biggest concern is how Chat GPT - the new chatbot that can generate intelligent text about, it seems, almost anything - is going to change the world. In fact, my greater concern relates to the extraordinary influence its designers are going to wield on the global narrative.So it is a humble Dominic Frisby you find today, one lacking in clear vision, nervously looking up at the egg that is no doubt going to be on my face in a year’s time. Nevertheless here are 14 things I think we will see in the year ahead.* Commodities have a good year. Oil is currently in a downtrend, so it may have a bit more to fall. Metals took their hit in mid-2022 and appear to have made their lows. For the last couple of months, they have been rising, but both fossil fuels and metals have suffered from many years of underinvestment, which has hurt supply. China opening up should see increased demand. I see a good market for metals and energy in the first half of 2023 at least. Possibly the second half as well. Let’s set some targets. Brent, currently at $80/barrel, revisits three figures.* And Copper revisits with $4.80/lb.* Yield becomes a thing again. With choppy, uncertain markets, but sticky inflation, investing for yield rather than capital growth becomes a much bigger theme in 2023 than it has been for a decade or more.* This is a classic recessionary bear market. This bear market proves to be more of the recessionary variety, rather than an all-out collapse. It’s a tricky, grinding market, but the S&P 500 gets back towards its old highs at 4,800. Briefly.* Emerging Markets outperform. That’s something we haven’t seen in a while, but their time has come again.* Biotech becomes a thing again too. Remember how back in the day biotech was all the rage? Somehow it was overlooked in the last tech bull market. Not anymore.* European banks have a good time of it too. Thanks to Swen Lorentz for pointing out to me just how uninterested people are in them. Normally a good sign.* Bitcoin also has a good year. It’s hard to think of a time when sentiment in bitcoin has been as low as it’s been these past few months and yet it’s still $17,000. It has a market cap north of $300bn. The mining hashrate hit all-time highs this autumn, meaning the network is more robust than it has ever been. The tech is stronger than ever.Usage is growing in East Asia, Africa, especially in Nigeria, and anywhere there is a currency crisis (which is a lot of places - Turkey, Lebanon, Argentina, and Venezuela). It solves the many issues facing the member nations of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation - China, India, Russia et al - which are desperately seeking a non-dollar alternative money to trade with that doesn’t rely on trusted third parties. (I doubt they’ll go for bitcoin by the way, even though it does everything they want it to).Bitcoin’s Lighting Network solves the problems facing Elon Musk who is looking to incorporate a payments system into Twitter.There are so many reasons to be bullish about bitcoin, yet sentiment could not be worse. It will not always be this way. My prediction for 2023: bitcoin will have a good year.Tell your friends about this amazing article.* Silver fails to deliver yet again. I’m getting so complacent with my predictions about silver that I’m bound to be proved wrong. If you can count on anything in this cruel world, it’s that silver will let you down. Silver can’t get above $30.* The US dollar - up and down. It’s perhaps the world’s most important price and it has periods of strength and of weakness, but it ends the year higher than where it started.  As I write, it’s at 102.* CBDCs - they’re coming. Currently, there are two countries in the world with functioning CBDCs - the Bahamas and Jamaica. Several other Caribbean nations are at the pilot stage, including St Lucia, St Kitts, Dominica and Grenada. As demonstrated by the reaction to Covid-19, risk-averse governments tend not to trail blaze, but to follow the lead of their neighbours. In this regard, it is likely that a couple or more Caribbean nations could have functioning CBDCs before the end of 2023. Such a roll-out is easier in nations with small populations.But my forecast is that in 2023, probably in the latter part of the year, a nation with a population greater than 15 million rolls out its first CBDC, likely one of Canada, China, India, France, Saudi Arabia, Ghana or Nigeria.* Ukraine. I know Dominic Frisby is the first person you turn to when you want insights into the Ukraine conflict, so here they are: The Ukraine War will not end before October. There will not be a nuclear war and Vladimir Putin will still be Russia’s president by year's end.* Gold. Everyone always wants to know what I think about gold, however. "Well, this is a bull market, you know!" While it’s currently overbought, so don’t rule out a pull back, I think it goes up. Miners have a good time of it too. Gold retests its old highs around $2,080. But then it finds a way of being frustrating. It always does. It’s gold. * Your Bruce-y Bonus sports prediction. Manchester City wins the League. Southampton, Wolves and Bournemouth go down.So there we are folks. Everything you need to know about 2023 in one handy list.Have a great year folks - and stick to those resolutions. Make your Number One resolution for 2023 to listen to Kisses on a Postcard.Interested in protecting your wealth in these extraordinary times? Then be sure to own some gold bullion. My current recommended bullion dealer is The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. You can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deals with them.Please subscribe to The Flying Frisby. You’ll enjoy it.Finally, folks, the good folk over at Visual Capitalist put together the graphic below. I thought you might find it useful.This article first appeared at Moneyweek. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

Later this week I’ll be posting my predictions for 2023, but first we revisit my predictions for 2022 to see how I got on.This is more an exercise in entertainment than anything else because, in case you needed reminding, risk management changes - and so do forecasts - as events unfold. As Mr Keynes once said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?” So when you leap back a year, and there’s stuff that’s wildly out, and I have egg on my face, because, for example, a certain man ordered the invasion of a certain country and that threw things off rather, by all means chortle at my expense - but don’t think I didn’t revise my opinions.Right that’s the excuses over and done with. A reminder of the rules: I get 2 points for a direct hit, 1 point for close but not a bullseye, 0 for a miss and minus one for a howler. There were 14 predictions (you can read them in full here) and the first was a humdinger of a howler. My view was that, because of the scalability of tech, the Nasdaq would continue its relentless march higher and we would see 19,000. The opposite happened. Tech gave back all its post Covid gains. Minus one.Prediction Two was that oil (Brent), which began the year at $77, would revisit $100. We hit that target in March, and some. Two points.Prediction Three was that the US dollar would start weak, with support at 95, and later go higher. Longer term “the dollar looks like it can go a lot higher”. Support did prove to be 95, and it went a lot higher. Two points. Prediction Four was that gold, which began the year at $1,825, would go north of $2,000. It went to $2,080, then it went down. Two points.Prediction Five was for the S&P500 to go to 5,000. Wrong. Bear market. Minus one.Prediction Six was for the crypto market cap to go above $3trn. The year started quite well, but no. Minus one.Prediction Seven was that two other nations would follow El Salvador’s lead and adopt bitcoin as legal tender. Just the one did - Central African Republic back in April. Zero points.Prediction Eight was that copper goes above $5/lb. It did. For one day in March. Technically, it’s a two pointer but I’m only going to give myself one because it had such a horrible bear market later in the year.Prediction Nine was for house prices to continue their inexorable march higher. Amazingly, house prices have marched higher. “Average UK house prices increased by 12.6% over the year to October 2022,” says the ONS. That will come down as the data for the last part of the year comes in. I’ll give myself a point, but not two. The backdrop for house prices is looking shakier than it’s looked in a long time.Prediction Ten was that the pound would get to €1.24. It didn’t. €1.21 was the high, and it ended the year lower than when it started. Zero points.Prediction Eleven was that silver would disappoint, as always, and can’t get above $30. You can always depend on silver. It disappointed. As always. $27, or just nigh, was the high. Two points.And so to Prediction Twelve which was that, to everyone’s surprise, Boris would still be Prime Minister. Ha! We’ve had two since then. Prime Ministers are like buses. Uh-uh.Prediction Thirteen, your Bruce-y bonus sports prediction, was that Manchester City would win the league and that Watford, Norwich and Burnley all go down. A bulls-eye, sir. This year’s table will be much harder to get right.And, finally, my Prediction Fourteen, “based on my own instincts, not data or science” was that “Peak Covid has now passed and something akin to free movement can slowly return”. It looks obvious now. It was not then. I lost Christmas last year to Covid. And so to the score. Maximum possible would be 28. Minimum minus 8. Both so extremely unlikely as to be impossible. I’ve got a middle-of-the-road, deeply mediocre 11. Could do better, as my school teachers so often noted.Happy new year, everyone, hope you have a great 2023 and that prosperity makes a welcome return to our portfolios.And make your Number One resolution for 2023 to listen to Kisses on a Postcard.Interested in protecting your wealth in these extraordinary times? Then be sure to own some gold bullion. My current recommended bullion dealer is The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. You can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deals with them.Subscribe to this most learned of publications.This article first appeared at Moneyweek. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

This is a podcast recorded with director Alex McCarron, following a comment he made to me in the pub the other day, when I asked “Where is this all going?”. “South Africa,” came the reply. Indeed. We are witnessing the South Africanisation of everything.Here’s a link to the the YouTube video, Science Must Fall, Alex mentioned in the discussion.And here is the follow-up article:Have you got you Kisses on a Postcard CDs yet?If you are interested in buying gold bullion, my current recommended bullion dealer in the UK is The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. You can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deals with them. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

I’ve been playing with a new technology this week, which, I think, is as potentially transformative as Google’s search engine, Facebook’s network or Apple’s iPhone. It’s that significant. Elon Musk says it’s “scary good”; Google management is so worried about it they have issued a “code red”; and it has achieved in just five days what took Netflix three and a half years. And it’s going to put me out of a job. This is Open AI’s latest offering ChatGPT - short for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer. Open AI, if you are not familiar with it, is a research institute that develops artificial intelligence.  The company has developed language models that can generate human-like text and neural networks that can create images from text descriptions. Its founders include many of the world's most famous tech entrepreneurs, not least Elon Musk, and it is funded by private donations and research contracts. Its lofty “ultimate goal is to benefit humanity through the responsible development of AI”. I first heard about ChatGPT from my son when he came back from university last weekend.  Apparently, loads of students are getting it to write their essays for them. Academics, reports the Guardian, say it generates exam responses that “would result in full marks if submitted by an undergraduate”.  Programmers meanwhile, the Guardian continues, “have used the tool to solve coding challenges in obscure programming languages in a matter of seconds – before writing limericks explaining the functionality.” I was discussing it on Twitter and User @Peng33G got it to write a perfectly passable song in the style of Dominic Frisby.  I urge you to go and have a play.To give you an idea of how quickly this thing has found users, cast your eyes over the following, which shows the amount of time to reach one million users. Netflix → 3.5 years Airbnb → 2 years Facebook → 10 months Zoom → 9 months Spotify → 5 months Instagram → 2.5 months iPhone → 74 days ChatGPT → 5 days Share this really interesting article on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.To verify the above take would probably take me an hour of research. ChatGP did it in a matter of seconds.  “The information you provided appears to be accurate”, it said. “Here is a brief summary of the growth of each of the companies or products you mentioned:* Netflix: It took Netflix approximately 3.5 years to reach one million subscribers. The company was founded in 1997 and reached one million subscribers in 2001.* Airbnb: It took Airbnb approximately 2 years to reach one million users. The company was founded in 2008 and reached one million users in 2010.* Facebook: It took Facebook approximately 10 months to reach one million users. The company was founded in 2004 and reached one million users in 2005.* Zoom: It took Zoom approximately 9 months to reach one million daily meeting participants. The company was founded in 2011 and reached one million daily meeting participants in 2012.* Spotify: It took Spotify approximately 5 months to reach one million users. The company was founded in 2006 and reached one million users in 2007.* Instagram: It took Instagram approximately 2.5 months to reach one million users. The company was founded in 2010 and reached one million users in 2010.* iPhone: It took the iPhone approximately 74 days to reach one million units sold. The iPhone was released in 2007 and reached one million units sold in 2007.ChatGPT has multiple uses in the real world  My buddy, business consultant and tech entrepreneur, Danny Richman, mentors, as he puts it, “a young lad with poor literacy skills who is starting a landscaping business. He struggles to communicate with clients in a professional manner.” In less than 15 minutes, with no coding required, he created a ChatGPT-powered Gmail account to which the landscaper sends a message. It responds with the text to send to the client. Danny continues: “I also helped him use GPT3 to prepare an estimate, create a contract and respond to client enquiries. He just secured his first contract worth £220,000.  This would not have been possible without this tech”. So what will ChatGPT be used for?  In the words of ChatGPT itself, slightly edited by me, “A wide range of natural language processing tasks, including language translation, text summarization, text generation, and language modelling” . So that might be chatbots and virtual assistants; “text generation tasks”, as it puts it - writing news articles or social media posts. It could also be used to summarise texts - anything from legal documents to the tax code to the bible, by generating a shorter summary of a longer piece of text. Its capabilities are likely to improve as it is further developed and refined. It is learning all the time. So what does all this mean for investors? And how do you invest in ChatGPT? How to invest in ChatGPT the technology shaping the world  Earlier in the week, I looked at how the world’s largest companies by market cap change from decade to decade. Seven of the top ten in 2011 were natural resources companies. A decade later, in 2021 not one was. Nine were tech companies: Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Tesla, Berkshire Hathaway, TSMC, Tencent Holdings, Nvidia. Which of them will be there in 2031? Many of these, you might have thought a year ago, have near-impervious monopolies. But tech changes quickly, as this latest development demonstrates. Already Alphabet’s position looks precarious. Microsoft, though, was there in 2011 and in 2021. And guess what? It owns a large chunk of Open AI. It has made a number of investments in OpenAI, including a $1 billion investment announced in 2019. It is not known if Microsoft has a controlling stake in OpenAI or if it holds a minority stake in the company. So the way to get some exposure to this new tech is to own Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), though it’s not exactly a pure play. Its stake in Open AI is minimal in the context of everything else it does. Moreover, will Microsoft still be one of the world’s ten largest companies in 2031? That would make three decades in a row. I also gather ChatGPT is costing a lot of money to run. $3m per day is the figure doing the rounds on the internet. The bot itself would not confirm: “GPT is a large language model that requires significant computational resources to run, as it is trained on a very large dataset and has a very large number of parameters. As a result, it is likely that running GPT would incur significant costs, depending on the specific circumstances”. But that’s the way with big tech. Get the users first, then worry about the profits. ChatGPT is doing that in spades. If the product is free, you, the user, are the product - and all that. By the way, I got ChatGPT to write some of this article for me (though I ended up subbing it quite a bit - stylistically, I still feel I’m a better writer - but only just). Can you tell which paragraphs?Have you got you Kisses on a Postcard CDs yet?If you are interested in buying gold bullion, my current recommended bullion dealer in the UK is The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. You can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deals with them.The Flying Frisby is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.This article first appeared at Moneyweek. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

I stumbled across a Gavekal Research Daily Comment over the weekend with a really interesting table that I thought we could discuss today.Gavekal Research, if you don’t know it, is a financial research firm that provides analysis and insights on global economies, markets and industries. It was founded in 1999 by Charles Gave, Anatole Kaletsky, and Louis-Vincent Gave, and is headquartered in Hong Kong. It is, the internet tells me, known for its holistic approach to analysis. Holistic is one of those corporate buzzwords that I never really know what it meant. Again the internet is our friend: in the context of financial analysis, holistic analysis refers to considering a wide range of factors, such as economic, political, and behavioural, in order to gain a full understanding of market developments. It is a way of looking at the big picture rather than just focusing on specific details or individual factors.Why didn’t they just say “big picture”? Such is the equivocal financial world in which we live.In any case, Louis-Vincent’s Gave’s report is a compelling one. He describes how, roughly every decade or so, financial markets fall in love with a new narrative. This is something we have observed many times in the column. The 1970s were all about precious metals and energy. The 1980s went to Japan. The 1990s saw tech stocks take over and the 2000s were all about natural resources and extraordinary growth in China. The 2010s were all about tech.So what about the 2020s. What are they all about?What does the next decade have in store for investors? Gave suggests that there are three narratives each with a core idea: “The opening of new markets to capitalism (Ricardian growth), technological breakthroughs (Schumpeterian growth), or the fear that in the coming years there will not be enough for everyone (the Malthusian constraint).”Each time the narrative is persuasive and rooted in some truth, which is why it takes hold, but by the end of the cycle, valuations reach such extremes that they no longer make sense, a bear market sets in and a new narrative takes over. Asset allocation is everything, I have often argued - and it has been repeatedly proven that being int he right sector is more important than individual stock selection. All you have to do is shift from narrative to narrative. A lot easier said than done of course.But here is Gave’s humdinger of a table.Share this amazing article.You can see how clearly the narrative has shifted with each decade. By the end of the 1970s six of the world’s largest ten companies were oil companies. By the end of the next decade, just one of them was.By the end of the 1980s, eight of the world’s largest ten companies were Japanese. By the end of the following decade, just two of them were.At the turn of the century, seven of the world’s largest ten companies were tech related. By the end of the following decade, just two were.At the end of the noughties, seven of the world’s largest companies were natural resource companies. By the end of the following decade, not one was.2022 seems to have marked the turning point. The Covid rallies in tech were the final spike in an amazing bull market. These are all huge companies that make the foundation on which portfolios are built. But how many of 2021’s top ten will be there in ten years' time? Not more than two or three I wouldn’t have thought.You have to hand it to Microsoft. It’s been there three decades running. Perhaps that’s because, in a way, as much as it is a tech stock it is also a patent holding company. Apple has also made that list twice. So mighty are these companies and so entrenched in their monopolies, it is very hard to envisage them not being so mighty in ten years' time.  But this is the world of tech. New inventions can come along that quickly make old monopolies redundant.In that regard, I’ve just been playing with a new Open AI chat bot that my son, who is at University in Bristol, put me on to and it’s extraordinary. It can write essays. It wrote a biog that I am now going to use on my site - and it’s a better biog than I’ve ever had. What the impact of it might be on, say, Google, who knows? The investment landscape has changed for goodGave says waiting for the Fed to cut rates and being long the likes of Nvidia or Alphabet makes “about as much sense as sitting in Tokyo in 1992 waiting for the Bank of Japan to cut rates in order to buy Industrial Bank of Japan.”In short, we are in a transitioning phase. What does the next decade have in store for us? Elsewhere Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital also argues that we are in a “Sea Change” - only the third we have seen in his career. That the model of success for the previous cycle is not going to work this time around. He suggests that the high leverage, asset owning, low-interest rate, low yield, low inflation models of the last cycle are behind us. The general landscape is much less optimistic. He suggests that stimulative rates are not coming anytime soon and that the base rate will remain in the 2-4% range. We are now in a full-return world, not a low-return world, and investors can get good returns from credit yield instruments -  high-yielding bonds and so on.What worked before will not work now. What works now might be something that hasn’t worked for a long time.Commodities could be winners Gave meanwhile suggests emerging markets and commodities. Even with a China slowdown/lockdown, the Fed tightening and a surging US dollar, the S&P Goldman Sachs Commodities Index (S&P GCSI) has still returned 27%.This will be an even better story when these forces reverse - when China opens up, the Fed stops tightening and the US dollar rolls over. The GSCI has returned 27% mostly on the back of energy. Metals have been a rather different story. But with those three reversals in place - weak dollar, no more tightening and China open - the stage is set for metals.What do you think the next decade’s narrative is going to be? It’s there percolating somewhere. Malthusian, Ricardian or Schumpterian?Check out special report on helium, if you haven’t already, and Dr John’s latest on bonds. Both for paying subscribers, there is lots of valuable info to be had.Please consider subscribing.If you are interested in buying gold bullion, my current recommended bullion dealer in the UK is The Pure Gold Company, whether you are taking delivery or storing online. Premiums are low, quality of service is high. You can deal with a human being. I have an affiliation deals with them.Have you got you Kisses on a Postcard CDs yet?This article first appeared at Moneyweek. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe