Transcription
Hey everyone, hopefully you're having a good day. My name is Andy. My channel's Finding Value.
Today we're going to go through Twitter like we normally do. I'll interject my financial opinions as we go through it together. It's generally related to three different topics: wealth building, commodities, and/or financial topics. So, we're going to dive right in, take a look, see what's going on in the markets.
If you want to follow me, it's @financerscore. And if you want to join our community, findingvalue.com, where I dive deeper into all these opportunities that I'm finding in the markets, uh, it's generally related to commodities because that's where I think the value is. That's where we're bottoming at. Uh, and I cover across all those different commodities. Uh, if that's something that you're interested in, I communicate to everyone in the community through midweek updates that I release Tuesday night on what I like, the companies, the setups. I describe all of that in those midweek updates. Uh, and then on the weekend, if you guys have questions, you can come to me, ask questions, you can send to me, uh, send them to me beforehand if you can't make it, and then I answer them during that Q&A. And those Q&A sessions, uh, you know, they're they do they can get long, no doubt.
I would say in 2025, we had a pretty good year, uh, in the community. Uh, the success isn't necessarily measured by my returns. It's measured by the returns of people in the community. And I would say a lot of people were getting returns anywhere from about, I'd say, 45-50% all the way up to 150%, depending on the mixture and how they allocated.
Uh, special is a coupon code if you'd like to join. It works on both the monthly and yearly memberships. The way I would do it, I would do a monthly membership, use "special" as a coupon code. It ends up being $25 for the first month. If you like it, then I would go to the yearly membership, use the "special" coupon code again, and it would cost me $500 for a year. Uh, if you don't like it, then you're $25. You tried it out. No big deal.
All right. Rock bottom. Nickel cycle bottom is in. One of the most asymmetric commodity themes for 2026. Yes. Uh, on the website, we've been following this. We've actually taken uh a few positions. Uh, over here because the equities bottomed before nickel broke out. How is that the case? Because insiders know when things are squeezing up. They know when they're going to push the price higher. So a lot of people, they accumulate the smart money, quote the insiders, they accumulate uh off of patterns, the equities before they may push the physical metal prices higher. So, nickel's bottom is in. Yes, the companies have already bottomed and we are up over uh 100% in one of them. Uh, and then the other larger diversified company that I would consider to be a good nickel mining company that is up. It's not up 100%. But, uh.
So when we look at these markets and we approach the markets and the strategies that I, I deploy and and try to uh, I guess teach. As we look for value, we look for technical setups and we look for those um opportunities where we get an alignment between technicals, sector fundamentals, uh, and the value of the company. When those align, we take positions and then we generally get in these corners and we wait for these breakouts. Uh, we are in a commodity bull market. That is something that I am viewing this market with. It's the paradigm that we are cheap and that we are in a commodity bull market that we're coming up into. So yes, I am more aggressive sometimes. Uh, and patience is required uh for some of the opportunities. And obviously, I state, state that in those midweek updates, the ones that uh may need a little bit more patience versus ones that, you know, I might say, "This is a last chance breakout." Like this is more of a last chance breakout, buying into strength, so to speak.
Multiple large margin hikes to force out metal speculators out of futures market may be more pain ahead. But this isn't 2011 or 1980. Industrial demand is higher than ever for silver and platinum, and deficits are wide. China is taking over the market. Shanghai reopens January 5th. Uh, they have an export ban going on with China in the physical silver markets. I don't know if it expands to anything else outside of silver. Uh, he is right. This isn't 1980 and it's not 2011. I'm seeing accounts on Twitter talk about, "Oh, we're gonna get this gigantic pullback. It's it's done." Um, and then they go on to state, while making fun of some people. Um, I'm not going to name names, this person, but that they have 45 years in the market. I have 45 years in the market. Well, how the heck have you been in the market for 45 years and you don't see this big fat cup and handle in your face? I mean, come on, guys. This is just getting going. We just broke out of interest rates. Um, 2020, September of 2020 is where we broke. This is just getting going.
We have a price discrepancy between physical silver and paper futures markets. That's going to be a problem. That's all I'm going to say. It's going to be a problem. And I think we could see a disconnect between those two where you get a physical price with a gigantic premium on top of whatever paper funny money they want to throw up there. Uh, and and and the banks are hurt. They're hurt. They've got these big short positions that they can't get rid of. Why? Because they have too many. The physical silver doesn't exist. They're screwed to some, to some extent. And this is just getting going.
Now, I'm not stating that we're going to go up immediately. We could. We may not. I don't know. But there's a couple things I want to, I want to point out here. This cup and handle pattern, it's an imprint of the psychology of the herd. And if you can identify the pattern, you can buy early. You can tell what's coming. You don't know the exact timing. You don't know what the news will be. You don't know what the dynamics will be playing out, but you know that it's being accumulated because the pattern exists. And if you understand some things about this stuff here, you understand that we've got interest rates that drive silver and gold higher. Increasing interest rate environment, increasing silver price. Your consolidation is the cup and handle. Then we break with interest rates. And I don't know if you guys see that. Clear as day to me. So for someone to say, well, you know, this is 1980. Do you really think interest rates have peaked? Do you think that is equivalent to this? I don't. Not on the long term. Short term, could we get a false little breakdown before heading higher? It's possible. And maybe we do a detour where we do a retest move like that. That is completely possible. But in the long term, no, we're going higher. And the physical market, there's going to be panic in it.
Another thing I want to make a comment on. I think in the future that some of these materials are going to get so short that it will slow down the progress of whatever we're trying to use those materials in. If we, if we think that we're going to displace all this energy with solar panels, you better figure out a way to make it, you know, silver. You better figure to make, you know, you better figure out how to connect the solar panels with all the copper lines. You better figure out ways to do it without copper or aluminum because we're not going to have the quantities out in the future that I think people think we're going to have. Then there's going to be tertiary effects because of this. What do you mean tertiary effects? Tertiary effects means you've got direct effects. Copper short, anything with copper in it, it won't be able to be built as quickly. So you're going to have slowdowns or industries will not exist, certain industries, because the the copper price gets too expensive. Uh, same with silver. But I think it will slow the progress of just, we can produce as much as we can because we've got infinite amounts of copper and silver. I don't think that's going to be the case. So then the tertiary effects, the the later on effects is people are going to say, well, if I can't get silver, we're going to burn more oil. We're going to burn more diesel. If I can't get natural gas generators for power, I'm going to burn diesel. We'll, we'll burn it in diesel generators. You get where I'm going here? I'm going here where you need to think like this is a chess game. You need to think four, five, six, seven steps ahead.
As you see these things break out of these big patterns like this, which is a paradigm shift in the market for silver pricing, they can, they're they're going to try to hike, they're going to margin hike their, you know, they're going to put margin requirements and hike them uh to much higher levels. And we're going to see these things drop. Every once in a while, you're going to see a big disconnect between the the paper price and the and the fiscal price if they try to do this. And it, and it's because the banks are hurting for cash. They're hurting. If there is a physical problem in in a bunch of these different markets, which I think there will be over the next 5-10 years, it's not like AI is going to sit there and be like, "Oh, we're just not going to build because we're out of silver." They're going to find ways and they're going to say, "Burn coal, burn oil, burn diesel, burn whatever you can." And if solar panels become more expensive, because the components that go into it become more expensive, they're going to burn whatever's cheap. What's cheap? Coal, oil. Catch my drift. Catch my drift.
So, we've got copper is tracking gold's move almost perfectly. 2026 is the year of the copper bull market. It is. Copper is going to do what silver has done. How do I know that? It's baked in the chart pattern. We're in a bull market for commodities. It is really that simple, guys. You go around, you identify uh consolidation patterns in copper. The consolidation pattern isn't a cup and handle. Uh, it is a large uh three hump consolidation into a wedge. Your consolidation is here, and that was between the 2008 peak over here all the way to 2020, which was the bottom of the breakout. This here is your wave 1, wave 2. This is an ABC correction, and then we've broken out of that. This little choppy pad there that he's, that rock bottom is talking about, this little consolidation there. It's the same consolidation that silver experienced, which is this one here. And you could even say it's this entire one here. It's a pattern within a pattern. This is also a gigantic consolidation going this way. You could also say that's almost a cup and handle pattern, too. Uh, and then gold did that too. I don't know if you guys saw that when gold was doing it. The the, it's the same fractal pattern as here. Your cup and handle, which is that, and then this is the handle portion. You can see these all exhibiting the same psychological patterns.
Now, some people will say, what does silver have to do with gold? What does, you know, Nvidia has these types of patterns too? They all exhibit the same patterns because humans are trading them. It's not a pattern of the underlying asset or sector. It's the extension of the psychology of people trading. And if people are trading whatever it is, the patterns start to come out of that psychology of the herd. So what links everything together is either the dollar, the strength and weakness of dollar, or the patterns have imprints of the psychology of the herd across everything.
Houston, we have a problem. Banks tap Fed repo facility for $75 billion in emergency liquidity overnight. Just how big exactly are the losses in their OTC silver derivatives and swaps that the big bullion banks short silver have sustained this month? Yes, we know today is 12/31 and it's year-end, but needing $75 billion in emergency overnight liquidity from the Fed's repo window is not normal. Smoke is now pouring out of the financial system. Do we have a five-alarm silver fire raging? Silver is the most shorted commodity. It is. Silver and platinum are. And then it's palladium, and then gold. Those are the the top four. Silver and platinum. They're shorted to death. Those two have massive shortages. The deficits are pretty big, and then they're going to end up in shortages. The banking system is shorting this crap with a bunch of paper garbage. So, what they're doing is they need to keep the price down so they don't blow up. That's really what it's, what it's, what it's looking like now. They're blowing up because when these contracts, people are demanding physical. Even if they have to settle in dollars where they pay them out, they still need money to pay those out. They're screwed because now people are saying, "Well, give me the physical." And they're like, "We can't get it." Then you're going to get a disconnect because if they try to hike margin rates and play paper games, you get a disconnect between the paper price because it's forced liquidation for people who are using leverage in those markets. So, they have to sell. It drives the price down like we're seeing in silver right now. Uh, we are seeing a pretty big pullback uh on the on the daily candlesticks here. And and both of these days here, this one here and this one here, those are they're hiking margin requirements, which forces people to sell. They're liquidating. But we've got the physical price that's like $10 or $12 higher over in China and the Middle East. You catch my drift here? They're playing paper games in a market where the physical is drying up. I think, I think they're in a very difficult position here. I'm not sure how they're going to resolve this. They're living day by day and they're just printing money and printing contracts and doing all sorts of stuff trying to push the price down to stay alive.
Data centers will be powered by oil. [clears throat] Why? Because we simply don't have enough base load power to run them any other way. The US has 100 gigawatts of projected data center demand coming. The problem is data centers require constant firm power. Renewables can't deliver that. Gas turbines are sold out through 2030. Nuclear plants take 10 years to build. The solutions: delaying coal plant retirements, restarting nuclear units, relying on diesel generators to keep servers alive. To keep the AI narrative alive, the only pillar holding up US stock markets and much of the economy, America has no choice but to go all-in on base load power. And this is happening after a decade of chronic underinvestment while chasing intermittent energy instead. The pick and shovel approach to AI still comes down to good old energy. Large industrial diesel generators to help curb rising electricity costs and support the surge in power demand from artificial intelligence. The move could add the equivalent of roughly 35 traditional nuclear power plants worth of electricity. Is that possible? Are we going to be burning a bunch of diesel or coal? I think it is. I totally think it is. And this is not on people's radars. It is not on on people's radars here. So, we've got that going on. Uh, the system is breaking in real time.
I've been trading futures for two decades. I've seen volatility crashes and squeezes. Uh, but I've never seen. Actually, did I go over this one? Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. No, I haven't. It says, [clears throat] "We've seen volatility crashes and squeezes, but I've never seen the CME raise margins on a major commodity by 30% overnight. For the second time in a single week, they're panicking, guys. They're panicking. Look at the document attached. Effective tomorrow, December 31st, silver maintenance margin hiked from $25,000 to $32,500. Platinum hiked 25%. Palladium hiked 22%. When the exchange hikes margins this aggressively, they aren't managing risk. They are forcing liquidation. They know that hedge funds and retail traders run on leverage. By jacking up the capital requirements by $7,500 bucks per contract overnight, they are forcing the longs to sell their positions just to stay solvent. This is designed to kill upward momentum. It is a manufactured sell-off with physical silver trading at $95.05 in Dubai, the real price versus the suppressed paper price of Comex. The banks are part are facing a margin call that would bankrupt them instantly. The exchange is stepping in to save the house. They are making it impossibly expensive for you to hold long contracts, effectively bailing out the naked shorts. This is the exact same playbook they used against the Hunt brothers in 1980. When the Hunt brothers cornered the market, the Comex implemented silver rule 7, changing the rules mid-game by liquidation only and hiking margins to the moon. It broke the price then. They are trying to break it now. This signals extreme distress at the clearing house level. If the market was healthy, they wouldn't need to suffocate it. If you're trading paper, you're fighting a rigged casino that can change the rules whenever the house starts losing. By the way, I call..."
Okay, we don't need to go over that. So, this is, this is what they're doing. They're changing the rules, so to speak, and they're upping the margin requirements. They're forcing people to liquidate out. They need the price lower. Now, some people will say, Andy, why would you try to fight that? I'm not fighting it. I'm not. I went into physical. I went into physical because I knew that the paper market potentially could break, and I think we are close to that potential breaking point. The signs are there. We've got these guys, you know, they're hiking margin rates drastically in the same week, and then we've got this repo market where they got all this emergency liquidity overnight. I think these two are over, are interconnected. I think they're interconnected. So, let's have fun and watch and see the system take higher and higher prices. I do think they'll continue to go up with time.
Says, "Everyone's talking about silver, but what about copper? Copper's up 43% this year on pace for the best year since 2009. Morgan Stanley expects the most severe copper deficit in 22 years in the year 2026. It's going to be 590,000 tons. In fact, output in the world's largest producing country is at one of its lowest levels in over a decade. At the same time, demand from AI data centers and electric vehicles is expected to outpace supply. Nearly half of the copper mines are over 20 years old, and ore grades have fallen 40% since 1991, pushing costs higher and slowing supply response. Miners have struggled for years to keep up. Data suggests higher copper prices are here to stay. This is your copper supply shocks at the stage for shortages. Do you see the supply deficits coming? Once we get behind this, I don't think we're catching back up, guys. I don't think we've got the copper projects out there. I don't. And then the the gaps get worse and worse out in 2040 and 2050."
I look at this from a different perspective. I mean, I, I understand that copper is going to be a, we're going to get into into deficits here. I understand that the the direct way is, oh, let's just go buy copper. Well, what are they going to do? What is it? What is the impact of these deficits? Well, we're going to have deficits in a couple of different materials. And it seems like it's all impacting the energy transition. And it's not even a transition. I'll just put the energy addition, renewables specifically. If I were to make a guess, I would guess that we're going to continue to burn coal, continue to burn oil in ever greater quantities because this is not a viable option to scale as fast as we want it to. I also think that we need to reduce our energy per mineral intensity. As mineral prices go up vertically, we want to use less of it, but get a lot more energy out of it. That screams nuclear. Nuclear is going to come in a massive way. And I don't see how we, we don't go that way because we have to. Uh, we're going to be forced to. It's not like, oh, we'll throw up solar panels and connect all these solar panels together with copper. I don't think so. I don't think I don't think the renewables are going to be viable. So, we need to put where energy is located. We put the energy generator right where we're going to use it and then reduce the the lines that we have to run between things. So, that's what I think is coming out in the future and uh, that's what we want to prepare for in our portfolios if you're trying to play this. Is I don't think people are thinking strategically enough uh yet, but they will on Twitter here. Um, I'm just throwing out ideas obviously.
China bans the export of silver in 24 hours. China officially bans the export of silver. That means silver won't be leaving the country. Well, you could. It may be leaving the country. They have to do approval. They know what is coming. China's the number two silver producer on Earth. By banning exports, they are effectively removing 110 million ounces from the global pool instantly. 13% of total supply. Why? Because they know the US dollar is failing and precious metals are the hedge. The squeeze to $100 plus silver is already happening. This is an accelerator. Buckle up.
>> [clears throat] >> Yes, it is. Oil services are setting up for a big squeeze in 2026. You can see the move and here we are squeezing up. Short interest is rolling over. Here we go. Uh, we've already positioned and we purchased this bottom over here in a lot of the companies. There's still some really good opportunities in energy service that uh are still available. I'll say that. And I will be taking advantage. You're going to see which ones I'm going to be buying here this next year. The industrial base are firing up on a. Oh, I already talked about that one last time. So, that's where we're going to end it. We're going to end it there. Uh, give me a thumb up for the content, guys. Subscribe to the channel. Subscribe to the website if you like. "Special" is the coupon code. Uh, we do have a Saturday Q&A session coming up at 7 a.m. Mountain time this weekend. I hope to see you there. And that's all I've got. So, catch you next time, guys. See you.