The Collapse That Never Comes

Todd turned his basement into a general store. Fully stocked, like what you’d imagine finding at the end of that winter highway on Ice Road Truckers.

This archived video on YouTube shows his stash in a December 20, 1999 interview with a local news channel.

He wasn’t the only one. People hoarded bizarre quantities of random items leading up to the calendar flip from 1999 to 2000. They heard the nascent information age couldn’t handle the “99” turning to “00.” Computers would evidently think it’s 1900 and stop working… or worse.

Todd goes on to riff about threats far beyond the calendar date issue. People tend to justify belief in a loop where everything supports their view. It always ends up with the deterioration of society or some other broadly-accepted bad situation. That in turn supports them doubling down on the hoarding.

For some unknown reason, we love preparing for crisis. Yet rarely prepare for the right one.

Todd had enough condensed soup, frozen milk, and vacuum-packed meat to feed a subdivision. There’s even canned meat; in case the power stays out. If you’ve never tried canned meat, you might not realize how horrifying it would be to eat it for months.

Maybe you’ve had SPAM, in some kind of throwback sandwich or Hawaiian dish. That’s one thing… but we’re talking about months of sitting around with Todd eating Vienna Sausages out of a can without cutting your finger on the serrated lid.

To The Extreme

There’s nothing wrong with being prepared. When the Boy Scouts of America still existed, they had it as their motto, Be Prepared. It’s sound advice.

Prepared means different things to different people. I like to drive around with a full tank of gas, just makes me feel good. And I keep some cash, not a ton, but as a kid in the ‘80s it seemed like having a little wad on you made you stand up straighter.

These are low-stakes prepper choices. But people like Todd over-prepare and lose their senses.

One crisis after another, from Cold War basements to the computer calendar fritz to the flu panic and our most recent obsession, financial calamity, we over-prepare at our own expense.

Just about everyone seems to think there’s some horrendous, apocalyptic financial event ready to show up any day.

In fact, some advertisers wisely prey on this modern obsession with headlines like “Investment guru says March 18, 2027 at 3:15 PM is rapture moment for markets” followed by, “click here to purchase your profit guide.”

If you can’t see the insanity in that… you might just need to buy that profit guide and support good advertising.

Life Goes On

People like Todd slowly ate through their food supply. There was no rush. The world didn’t end, and the food shelved downstairs is so void of life it never expires.

Sadly, most people wrapped up in this behavior never go back to analyze their thinking. Maybe it’s embarrassing, to look back and wonder why you did something that didn’t work. It’s easier to blame the Profit Guide, if you can find the publisher.

There were thousands of Todds, maybe millions. Computer executive Scott Olmstead told NPR back then he’d secured “bug-out” necessities like:

“A mobile home; a year’s supply of dehydrated food; a propane generator (He also said he was shopping for a handgun.)

If “Whatever it is, if we want to ‘bug out,’ as the programmers say, we can do it. We’ve got a place to go.” He added that he might take his money out of the bank and convert it into gold, silver and cash. NPR

Better to be prepared than not, usually. But life goes on.

Rarely do the Todds or Scotts of the world think about what they’ll do in the mobile home, with all the Vienna Sausages… or what they’ll buy with the cash and gold. Yet gold did prove wise back then, in 1999.

In fact, Google Gemini tells us an ounce of gold bought only ~400 cans of Vienna Sausages in the late 1990s. That same ounce get you around 10-times as many cans today.

The problem’s in the extremes.

A little gold goes a long way. I know. I wrote the book on the subject.

Instead of stuffing gold in a mobile home and waiting for planes to fall from the sky, the move was to simply buy some gold, some stocks, a house or two, and get on with living. People who did that survived just fine. Maybe, thrived.

Resist The Urge to Hoard

Once you see the pattern you might avoid future canned meat hoarding.

People still feel we’re on the edge of disaster, and want to survive even in odd conditions. They’ll even live deep underground in a bunker.

Notice this owner, who has privacy concerns, revealed the bunker is somewhere in Southern California. Which with the state’s current aggressive taxation moves, might prove difficult to utilize.

While you might toss this off as just one wealthy guy doing something odd, try visiting a local Costco Warehouse Club NYSE:COST).

Fun fact, I’ve never once set foot inside a Costco… the whole idea of bulk-buying anything freaks me out.

The stock chart looks decent, by the way… since this is after all, a financial newsletter.

And without getting too distracted with potential profit from collapse eagerness, stay focused on the real issue here, the store has pallets of Apocalypse Dinner Kit featuring 150 freeze-dried and dehydrated meals.

Just in case there’s even one ounce of excitement left in the kitchen area of your home, go ahead and kill it by dropping one of these plastic buckets on the counter next time you walk in the door to greet the family.

There’s something for everyone, Cheesy Macaroni, Creamy Pasta, Pasta Alfredo. Seems like there’s an awful lot of pasta in this bucket. Maybe you’d be better off just buying a few sealed bags of hard pasta and calling it a day.

Get Busy Living

If the financial world does end, you might not want to be around anyway. Someone bigger and tougher than you may come around wielding a metal pipe, and take the Readywise Emergency Food Bucket from you anyway.

It’s wild how people relish these catastrophes. When you see the endless repetition of the behavior, and its intensity, you then notice the true financial cost. The wasted canned meat is one thing, the bigger issue is you completely miss changing reality…which is where opportunity shows up.

Instead, maybe root for the system to keep going, peaks and valleys included. Or just enjoy it while you can… which has worked well for the past ~30 years, or more.

The people who insist gold should be double the price seem shocked to learn it’s already worth ~$28 trillion right now… and doubling it means approaching the value of the entire listed U.S. equity market. Which seems like a lot, for a bedrock asset.

They’ll go on and on about spending, profligacy, and quickly turn into an audible newsfeed reciting a bunch of things they heard on YouTube, which didn’t pan out.

I went on the David Lin Report last week. Shocked that he even asked me, I figured any time now it’ll be my last interview.

The way these shows work is, they have people like me, who get a lot of views due to name recognition. Then they’ll charge companies or super boring mining stock CEOs with no ability to excite people, to come on shortly after. They hope you’ll nod off and wake up to see that guy explaining why his drill hole is exciting. Remember, exciting for him is not the same as exciting for you.

But I go on anyway. I see the other guests who this year headlined Oil To Run Out By July and other sensational claims get 3-4x the views. It’s further evidence to me that people want to be part of a panic.

Further, I think they don’t know what they actually want to do. Like a dog that wants to get out of the cage badly, then once out, hangs around the cage because it’s the obsession of exit that keeps him going, not the actual escape.

Unlike the computer date fears in late 1999, your calendar will stop at some point. It’s not one of those platitude things… it’s more like if you have a finite amount of time, go do something fun occasionally.

Fun doesn’t mean excessive either. Just go see something, learn something, or find a hobby.

Mid-Summer

The Tucker Kids got an all-expense-paid tour of Martha’s Vineyard last week. We’d never been.

Every year we put something on the calendar for late July. For a while, it was Stowe, VT. There’s a great hotel with indoor and outdoor Har-Tru tennis courts. We’d pick blueberries up over “The Notch” which is an odd, windy road “notched” through rock, pretty cool. There’s the Ben & Jerry’s facility, which you can tour, and a decent amount of random stuff going on. But we sort of had enough of it, and wanted to try something coastal.

We’d heard people talk about “The Vineyard” but didn’t know much about where to go, or what to do. It’s an odd place. We might not go back…

The island is fairly large. At ~100 square miles, it’s about the size of six Manhattans. It’s shaped roughly like a triangle.

The left side is pretty rural. You can take the free bus system there, to Aquinnah, which is apparently gorgeous, but a visit felt like too much effort.

We based out of the northern tip, near Oak Bluffs, which seemed logical during planning since it has ferry access, hotels, and a reputable tennis day camp nearby.

Then there’s the eastern part of the triangle, Edgartown.

Think of Oak Bluffs and Edgartown like the clear distinction between labor and management. We slowly figured this out, ending up at restaurants, stores, and activities there as the week went on. The road between the two towns runs over the “Jaws Bridge” as Spielberg filmed the movie there.

Edgartown is home to the Obamas in the summer. They evidently bought the ~30 acre estate a few years ago. They’re not alone…

We had to wait in the outdoor makeshift tented terminal at MVY while a gorgeous blue and white 2021 Gulfstream G500 skidded in to meet a flank of black Chevrolet Suburbans. Tail number registration info for N502P was blocked… but seems like it’s Penny Pritzker, billionaire former Commerce Secretary, sister of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, and all-around political heavyweight.

Go See Something

The roots of elite liberal summer life run deep on the eastern side of Martha’s Vineyard.

There’s the rarely discussed incident where the Honorable Senator T. Kennedy ran his car off a bridge, passenger drowned, he somehow made it to the rural 500-foot ferry crossing, and swam across, went to sleep in a hotel, and the next day reported the incident to authorities…after conferring with his advisors… very odd.

That’s the 500-foot ferry crossing to Chappaquiddick, or “Chappy.” Wicked current running through there, and it’s hard to imagine pickled-nose T. Kennedy swimming across. But we’ll never know the true details. Lots of fun stories to tell the Tucker Kids while traversing this hallowed ground.

It’s not really our kind of place, overall. There’s a big contingent of what feels like people who have jobs by appointment. We’re more the meritocratic types… and wrapped up the stay agreeing we’d try Nantucket next year.

Nantucket, which seems to be by the name Tucker-adjacent, even has an remote beach area called Tuckernuck.

The island is about half the size of Martha’s Vineyard. Dave Portnoy, now rightfully famous for pizza reviews, evidently lives there. If he plays tennis, we might run into him.

Some of you might have tips and opinions on this. Post them in the comments. The TTL comment section is a vibrant social scene these days.

The point isn’t to get the trip exactly right… part of the fun is exploring, learning, and simply goofing off in a new place.

I had trouble finding a tennis game there, partly because I’d drop the kids and have ~3 hours to do something myself, then return. We didn’t rent a car, as counseled by the tennis people. Take the bus, is what they told us, and it worked fine.

Yet by mid-week I was desperate. Dressed in adult racquet-sport attire, I flagged down a guy in the grocery store with a Sea Island Tennis Center hat on. I pressed him for a hit, and got one. Turns out, he’s an aviation lawyer with a polo addiction… including snow polo, which evidently happens mostly in St Moritz, Switzerland. I bought a watch there once, but have limited interest in horseback sports.

Point is, go see new things. You might learn about something that helps make the next move seem obvious.

You also might rattle loose your ability to see things clearly. People crave being stuck in, focused, firmly convinced they have it all figured out. The cost of that certainty can be atrophy.

By contrast, the more new things you experience, the easier it is to spot opportunity.

Success By Appointment

For about a solid year around age 10, my father insisted we dine at Cracker Barrel on Sundays.

You’ve surely been to The Old Country Store, loaded with things you’d expect to see in the home of a real, authentic frontiersman.

From the rocking chairs to the triangular golf tee quiz game placed on the table for entertainment during the 45 seconds it takes to deliver biscuits and cornbread in a basket; the place is iconic.

For context, this forced dining era for me was pre-ubiquity for the chain. A guy named Dan Evins in Tennessee started it in 1969. At some point in the ‘80s they built one on a freeway exit near Roanoke Rapids, NC. We drove a solid hour-plus to get there in a rapidly-depreciating Chrysler New Yorker which around that time someone told me a guy named Lee Iacocca had replaced the shocks with some ineffective, cost-saving alternative and at that particular moment I felt like he should be punched in the face for doing it.

It’s hard to screw up biscuits and cornbread, but Julie Masino did it. She oversaw a strategic plan which centered on removing the familiar frontiersman from the company’s logo, changing the business to attract a modern diner. Essentially, turning it into an IHOP with biscuits and cornbread.

What you might not know is, this pattern of appointment, destruction, severance, plays out again and again across many businesses. It matters more to your wallet than you realize.

Every year, those annoying proxy forms arrive by mail, or email. You’re too busy to read them, and just want a ticker symbol so you can get rich in a hurry before the world collapses… or something like that.

But the proxy is your chance to vote for the board of directors. That board in turn hires management.

The Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc (CBRL) hired one Ms. Julie Masino, who then hired a team of loyalists around her. That’s how it works… the board’s Executive or Nominating Committee hires the C-level, and they in turn hire their teams.

The teams, no surprise, are people who typically heaped praise on the C-level person at some other firm that person either ruined or somehow extracted life force from before moving on via executive headhunter.

The way these C-people do it is they implement big multi-year plans. They argue you can’t fire them now; the plan is only half-way done, don’t quit before the miracle happens.

Plus, their dedication and commitment, and expertise, etc., deserves proper compensation since they passed up other opportunities to dismember companies so they could work on this one.

In the case of Ms. Masino, that equates to around ~$6 million for being fired, benefits, a consulting arrangement, and personal security protection estimated to cost the company millions per year, though yet disclosed. For reference, she’s taxed on that benefit, and the company says it’ll pay the tax for her as well, which is also a taxable benefit. Sort of an endless loop akin to divorcing a litigious monster.

This is no slight against Masino. She’ll almost certainly go on to oversee large teams of loyal sycophants at some other company in no time at all. She’s the portrait of American business success. There’s already heavy media coverage on her female status being the reason for this whole thing… but it’s not. It’s the decisions she made.

Further, the board, elected by shareholders, has a Compensation Committee who sets the pay scheme for C level executives. Each CBRL board director earns ~$250,000 or more per year in cash and stock, about half is cash.

However, modern board directorship is a job for retired professors of African Dance Studies from obscure colleges. Typically, the C-level executive rallies for hard-to-criticize people with minimal business acumen. They want to be sure they’ll rubber-stamp whatever agenda they present. Then they urge consultants to provide expensive compensation reviews, the whole thing sort of turns into an ecosystem of waste. The people rolling biscuits in Roanoke Rapids, NC at the location by the freeway have no idea any of this is going on.

And while Masino is the news of the day, you have no business buying a stock until you understand the mechanics of share ownership… Just gimme the ticker only works in a ripping bull market. And that’s not what we have at this moment.

It’s Never Been So Good

We’re in one of those, “sit down son, we need to have a talk” periods of stock ownership.

Everyone sort of knows this. It could be why people start parroting collapse narratives from doomish YouTube content.

If I hear one more person talk about revaluing gold or Chinese retail traders, etc., I might need to do the Nantucket trip sooner than expected, with no phone or laptop.

There is such a thing as the market being over its skis… financially. This current situation is less that and more a recurring profit opportunity. We now get cycles in weeks that once took years.

What that means is, stocks during capitalism were different from today. For starters, you studied financial metrics, learned the business, worked out valuations, and bought equity to fund business initiatives.

These days, the business funding largely happens during the private years. When the company lists, you want to watch out, like with the recent Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX) which hit a new low yesterday.

However, there is something great about these large firms. They sometimes find their footing, recalibrate leadership, change the narrative, and rip higher. The larger the company, the easier it is to follow along.

Like Alphabet Inc (GOOG) rising ~62% last year and ~35% the year before. We’re talking a massive firm… a no brainer trade. Not that we have to make this trade, but it’s sort of like riding a tame elephant.

Yet GOOG, SPCX, and a slew of other names are way off their recent highs. Way off…

Where the preppers get it wrong, and we don’t mean explicitly Todd or Scott or the other people at Costco lugging a cart full of those tubs to the register… is their thinking. Extreme thinking cuts a hole in your pocket.

The whole idea you need a secret ticker symbol to multiply your savings ASAP while also certain there’s a doomsday scenario ahead… is almost a guarantee you’ll pick the door with the hatchet-wielding thug behind it.

Instead, the way we do it, which sadly still seems lost on a lot of you, is get involved with stocks you like… a business you’d like to own for a year or two, maybe three. There will be lulls… and surges.

Two of our cybersecurity stocks are up 73% and 55% respectively this year. They were up ~80% and ~94% earlier this month.

Here’s the thing… those numbers are serious for a half-year performance. During capitalism, people seemed thrilled with ~8% a year.

Add to that, both of these were nearly trampled in February. So, if you bought the low, the rise is even more dramatic.

The one move most people never consider is, take a little of that off the table, book a trip to a new place, sign up for a tennis camp, work on your one-handed-backhand for five days straight, eat about ~6lbs of lobster to slowly figure out that claw meat ordered as a “side item” at ~$49/lb is actually the best way to enjoy the hefty crustacean.

The Tucker Kids pegged this by mid-week and approach the counter armed with new info. After a salutation, requested, “Four side orders of claw meat, please,” which left the Boston University sophomore manning the window totally baffled, “So, you just want four sides of claw meat salad?” “Yes, thank you!”

A Return to Value

The shift to value might be underway. Let’s not forget September is a historically awful month for equities… and there’s decent odds cheap gets cheaper.

That doesn’t mean mushroom clouds, it means maybe the other section of our portfolio gets a little boost… if so, maybe we trim one side, and top up the other, making sure to keep a little of that claw meat for ourselves in the process.

The Core section of the Trustee Portfolio has three sort of forgotten stocks in it. The nation’s premier auto parts retailer, which I urge you to visit in person and judge for yourself…

We also own the leading cement provider ready to prove its profitability at the first sign of analyst coverage. And tractor/heavy equipment maker who forgot the importance of paying lobbyist these days…

All three suffered in the era of growth at all cost… and if that shifts, now’s the time to think about owning them.