Transcription
Everyone's talking about Trump's tariffs, but they're looking at the wrong thing. While the media argues about politics and potential retaliation, a quiet $1 trillion shift is happening right behind the scenes.
And here's what most people don't realize: these tariffs are not just about China or manufacturing jobs. They're setting up one of the biggest investment opportunities of the decade. But the question is, who's about to win big? What stocks, what industries are about to explode, and how do you position yourself before the rest of the market catches on?
Now, real quick, I'm Mark Moss. I've been an investor and entrepreneur through multiple boom and bust markets. I've got two big exits under my belt. I'm a partner at a leading tech-focused VC fund, and I'm an officer and adviser to multiple tech and publicly traded companies. These are the same insights that we use to guide our portfolios, and hopefully, you can as well. So let's go.
All right, so let's just jump right into this. What is going on here? I want to give you just a high-level overview. I'm not going to give you the full news; you can go read the news on your own. What we're here to do is talk about what's behind the scenes, what's between the lines, and how do we profit from this.
Okay, so first off, just to sort of understand, as you already know by now, the title says it all: Trump is bringing tariffs back. Now, when I say "back," that's partly because, yes, they've been around a long time. Yes, the U.S. used to run on tariffs before the IRS, before income taxes. In Trump's first term, he started bringing tariffs back, and the Biden Administration got rid of them. Now he is bringing them back.
Part of the reason why is, one, he's talking about getting rid of income taxes. I did a whole video on this talking about an IRS. I'm going to link to it in the show notes down below if you want to know what's really going on. I think he's pretty serious about it. But what he's really serious about is this American First strategy.
So let's hear directly from President Trump himself. I'd like to go right to the source. Let's go ahead and play this clip.
"But I'll also be placing tariffs on steel, aluminum, and copper, and things that we need for our military. Things we have to bring production back to our country. You know, there was a time when we made one ship a day, and now we can't build a ship. We don't know what the hell we're doing. It's all gone to other locations and other lands. And to further return production to the United States, we're going to environmentally free up our Rare Earth minerals. We have some unbelievable sites. We have some of the best Rare Earth anywhere in the world."
All right, so you heard it right from his mouth. He is bringing tariffs back. Specifically, he's talking about bringing tariffs on base metals—so steel, copper, things like that—because those are the things that we need to rebuild America, rebuild the American economy, and bring jobs back. We need the base metals; we need the steel; we need the copper. We need those things here. We also need it for our defense department.
So Rare Earth elements, things like that—there's a lot to this. All right, so I want to break all this down. But we can see here a sort of list of what he's talking about. He would impose import tariffs on aluminum and copper—super important things to rebuild our economy. Tariffs on computer chips, of course. We're in this AI tech race with China. Pharmaceuticals—we found out how dependent we were through the COVID pandemic. Steel—these are the things that he's really, really focused on.
And again, like I said, there's a lot to this. You're seeing a lot of noise in the news without really... well, I think the noise is sort of blocking you from what's really going on. But let's just address some of the news right now because I'm sure a lot of you are having some questions.
So the first thing you have to realize is that in life, there's no linear choices, right? There's trade-offs. So to get more of one, you give up more of another. So there's trade-offs.
So in this, with tariffs, there are winners and there are losers. There are lots of reasons why we should love tariffs and want them, and there are other reasons why maybe we don't want tariffs.
So some of the things—like who loses in tariffs? Well, manufacturers could lose, right? The cost of their goods could be going up. Maybe people can't import the goods now because the cost went up, and manufacturers don't have as many choices. So manufacturers could be hurt.
Retail consumers—you and I—we could be hurt, right? The prices of our things could go up. That might be something that we'll see. Also, people sending stuff to the U.S.—China foreign metal exporters—they're certainly going to be hurt, which is the whole point.
Now, who benefits? Well, American citizens could benefit. Well, you just said that we would be hurt. Well, it's good and bad, right? So the cost of things could go up, but our economy could do better. My business could do better. We could have more jobs here. So we may pay a little bit more, but we may have a better economy. We may have better-paying jobs.
Infrastructure companies are definitely going to benefit, right? So the companies that are going to be building back this infrastructure, bringing the manufacturing bases back—they're certainly going to benefit. Mining companies—the ones that are bringing these materials to be the industrial companies—they're going to benefit. Steel and copper producers, specifically. He said those are the areas he's going to target the most, so those companies are really going to benefit from this.
So there's winners and losers, and we can also be a loser in one area and a winner in the other. So you have to understand this, okay? And the reason why we want to understand that is because what the smart money does is don't sit back and go, "Oh, woe is me. I guess my price is going to be higher. That sucks."
What we might do, what I do, is go, "Well, that's bad, but there's also a way to profit from this." Maybe I could make more than enough money to offset a little bit of higher prices. As a matter of fact, maybe higher prices are worth having the economy do better, bring jobs back, and things like that.
But what is the smart money doing again? Well, smart money realizes that yes, maybe we will have some higher costs, but we could also have higher returns. We could invest into these areas, have these massive home runs, and then we can just pay a little bit more for some of these American-made goods.
And the big thing is, again, is bringing back the U.S. industrial base. So let's go back to some quotes from Trump here. We can see on Bloomberg, President Trump said right to the source he wants to impose across-the-board tariffs that are much bigger—quotes—"much bigger."
"They'll be so much bigger, they'll be so big." I know it's a horrible impression, but they're much bigger, much bigger than what? What we had in the past. Much bigger than what he did the last time.
Why? To reshape U.S. supply chains. Let me read that again: why? To reshape U.S. supply chains. So instead of getting so much from other places, let's bring it all back here. This is a massive shift. There's good and bad, but as an investor, we can understand this could be a huge opportunity if we can understand where that money is going.
Okay, Trump laid out his clearest message yet on tariffs. So again, go to the source. Forget all the opinion pieces. Go to the source. What did he say? He said that we're going to look at pharmaceuticals, drugs. We're going to look at chips again. So we talked about that—microchips, the semiconductors.
Again, we know that steel, some other industries like copper—the only way to get out of this, the only way to get out of the tariffs—so if you're a country that doesn't want to have tariffs imposed on you for sending your goods over here, the only way to get out of that, the high tariffs, is to build your plant here. Build it here in America.
So if you don't want to pay the tariffs to import stuff to America, then just come to America and build your plant and sell it right here. So he's not telling companies or countries, "Hey, you can't sell your stuff to America." He's just saying, on an even playing field, if you want to do that, just come build it here and sell it to us.
But what does that mean? What's the second-order effect? Well, if some companies decide, "Well, okay, we'll build our cars there. We'll build our microchips. We'll build our stuff there," well then that means a lot of companies come here. That means a lot more jobs. It also means that there's a lot more building, a lot more construction.
In order to get building and construction, we need a lot more supplies, and we can't import the steel and the copper because of the tariffs. So that means those supplies will be coming here from the United States.
And so we can start to chase down this money once we start to understand this. Now, what this is doing is it's starting to bifurcate the market. So we can see here copper rises in the U.S. The price of copper is going up in the U.S. and it's slipping in London. So it's going down in some markets and it's going up in some.
Why? Well, because, of course, the U.S. is going to have this massive demand for it, and the rest of the world maybe won't benefit as much from that. And so we can see that it's starting to bifurcate the market.
Now, on top of that, it's not just Trump that's doing this. Now, Trump is pushing this with the tariffs, of course. But what Co really highlighted for the world, and even more importantly, what the Russia-Ukraine war showed us is that the U.S. can't really make anything.
That's what Trump was saying in that video clip earlier, right? The U.S. can't really make anything. And the war highlighted that Russia is outproducing all of NATO like 10 to 1 on munitions, something like that.
And so we found that there are mission-critical things that we need in the U.S. that we just don't have. And so it's not just a Trump "Make America Great Again" thing; it's also a Department of Defense thing.
So now we have a DOD-driven economy. Critical minerals—this is from Congress—critical minerals are essential for our economy and our national security. This is not about tariffs now; this is about national security.
Demand for these strategic resources continues to increase. The United States must ensure access to a reliable supply. Arizona Congressman said in a statement, "It's not just about tariffs. It's not just about making America great again. It's like for our own national security, we better get these what they call strategic resources. We better get them in place right now."
U.S. GS critical minerals and DOE—Department of Energy—materials list to strengthen the domestic supply chain and include copper, electrical steel, silicon, and silicon carbide on the critical minerals list. These are things like if we don't have these, we can't go to war with China or Russia. If we don't have these, we have nothing.
And so they're now on the critical minerals list. It highlights copper's essential role in empowering America's energy future. So obviously, going into this digital future—AI, crypto, decentralization, which I talk about all the time—we're going to need that legislation.
Specifically, we need them right now. Eligible for the fast 41 permitting process. So one of the things Trump is also promising is to continue to get rid of the regulations. He paused all new regulations in his previous term. For every one new regulation that got passed, he got rid of 2.5, which was more than what he had promised.
And so we need to deregulate this stuff so we can bring this stuff to market. Under the Biden Administration, it actually worked the opposite way. So we're rebuilding the U.S. industrial base. We're going to reshape the economy. We're going to bring on the U.S. critical resources—steel, copper.
That's also like uranium, which we're still getting from like Russia. Rare Earth minerals—minerals that we're getting from China. And so the playbook for this is to understand the second, third, fourth, fifth order. If we're reshaping the economy, we're going to rebuild it.
We're going to bring companies from outside the U.S. to build here. Then we're going to have more jobs. The economy will do better. There's going to be a lot of construction. There's going to be a lot of supplies, specifically around the things that have high tariffs that are critical by the DOE.
So things like steel, things like copper are going to do really well. Now, how do you play that? Well, one, you can buy like an index, right? So, well, I guess they're in the S&P 500. I can buy the S&P 500 index. I could buy an ETF that's maybe like a commodity basket. We could do something like that, or we could buy individual stocks, which of course will have much better returns.
But now you have to be selective on what you're buying. And then it really depends on what your strategy is with this. We can do long-term or we can do trading. In my opinion, of course, it's always best to think long-term. The daily action of why copper or monthly action of why copper might go up and down is hard to know.
But what we do know is over the next 3 years, 4 years, 5 years, 10 years, it's going to be going up. So think long-term in this. A couple of things we want to be paying attention to: risks are what if these tariffs get reversed? I don't think that's going to happen, but it's possible.
So we want to be paying attention to the news, paying attention to these regulations. What about potential retaliation? Some nations are vowing to get retaliation on the U.S. But the joke's on them; the U.S. doesn't really import much stuff.
However, they can get out of control. Maybe there are some unseen things that we don't know. It could crash the economy. If the economy goes down, then maybe some of this gets stalled out. Something to pay attention to. And then just the overall economy as well—that could bring demand for assets down as well.
So we want to be paying attention to those things. But I think this is a much bigger picture than just the $1 trillion. It's not just the $1 trillion from the steel, from the copper, from the commodities that are going to be coming to the U.S.
We're talking about making America great again. We're talking about reindustrializing the base. We're talking about something much bigger. There's going to be a lot of opportunities, so there's plenty of ways for you to go out and find these.
All right, now hopefully you've enjoyed that, and that gives you some game plans on what you need to be going forward. At this point, I want to talk about a sponsor for today's video. This is a sponsor. Their name is Giant Mining Corp. This is their ticker: BFGF.
Now, U.S.-based copper mining is in heavy demand, as we've already talked about—not just from the tariffs, but also because it's a critical mineral as deemed by the government. And so copper mining is in mass demand, especially in the United States.
And of course, there's not a lot of it, which is why it's taking off right now. This company, Giant Mining, is in the world's number one mining jurisdiction for copper, which is in Nevada. So they're right there in the hotbed of where all the copper is, and they're really already starting to benefit from Trump's tariffs, from the talks of his tariffs.
Everybody knows what's happening, and so we're already starting to see this company going up based off of just this talk. And so really, it comes down to having time and strategy. The company story is sort of a story of timing and strategy.
So what am I talking about? Well, we can see that in these types of sectors, like uranium or in this case, like copper, there's a lot of political uncertainty about it. So for example, the Biden Administration was very aggressive on environmental stuff and was not allowing people to mine, was creating all kinds of red tape to get things through and things like that.
So under Biden, the price of this company went from a $100 million market cap before Biden took office down to about a $16 million market cap today. That's about an 84% discount. Why? Because all of the red tape and all the regulations that caused this company to barely be able to get stuff to market.
The price of copper came down as well. However, since Trump announced the tariffs, this company has already doubled in price. So it's going way back up. Now, doubling in price is not very far when it's down 84%.
And when we look at copper overall, we can see again the price is very volatile, as you can see. But again, if you zoom out, this is a 5-year chart. You can see that it's just going up and up and up, and we're about to see it go up at a much faster rate, specifically in the U.S.
As I showed you, the markets are already decoupling from the rest of the world. So now we have the political volatility swinging back to our favor. And as I said, the company is done with the free fall, and they're now trending back up.
Now, it's not just the timing on that; the strategy overall is peaking. So we're at this point where we're at this AI, this technology race. Elon Musk is talking about having more robots by 2030 than humans. China is now trying to outcompete with their deep-seek AI.
And so we have this—the whole world is going into this right now, and we're going to need more copper. You can't build the data centers; you can't build the electricity stations, the EV charger stations without copper.
It's also at the right timing where the U.S., under Trump, is making America great, is going to reindustrialize. Remember, all these tariffs are about reshaping the economy. As he said, if you want to get around tariffs, come build here.
And so as we reindustrialize, we're going to need lots of copper. The thing with Giant is that their infrastructure is already ready. So this is in a mining jurisdiction. They've taken over old mines that were cost-prohibitive in the past, but now they're much more profitable.
So they already have the roads, they already have the power, they already have the processing, they already have the water—all of the things that they need to get going. And they've been drilling to start getting their core samples, and they had just hit a hole which has their highest grade to date. So pretty good.
So they're showing good results, and it's right at the right time as Trump tariffs are coming in, which is why we see their stock going up. And of course, like I said, the right administration. So under Trump, they had grown to a $100 million company. Under Biden, they dropped down to a $16 million company.
If they could even get back to, I would say, maybe that $100 million is probably a little bit of over-market exuberance. But if they get back to $30 million or $40 million from $16 million, it's looking pretty good.
All right, so this is a company that's a sponsor of today's episode. I'm not telling you to go buy it, but it is one that you should probably put on your watch list. Maybe just go save it in your stock browsers so you can look at it regularly.
But check it out: Giant Mining, right here in good old USA, in Nevada, in the mining district. And that's what we got for today's video. Hopefully, this makes sense. Learn how to look for these political storms, see where it's sending the money, and then go position yourself to get some of that money when it shows up.
Hopefully, that makes sense. Leave me a comment. Let me know what you think. As always, give me a thumbs up if you like it. If you don't, give me a thumbs down. That's okay. And that's what I got. All right, to your success, I'm out.