From the Vault: Big Picture Profits in 2025

Donald Trump’s second presidential term has already delivered a whirlwind of transformation & volatility to global markets — and he’s still just warming up.

Based on this week’s market action, investors are clearly struggling to adjust their expectations.

But I laid out our specific gameplan all the way back in the very first episode of Moneyball Economics, in December of last year.

Most of you weren’t yet members, so today I’m going to share my predictions with you once again. Hopefully it will spark some ideas on how you can profit as markets surge in 2025.

Let’s roll the video tape:

Video Transcript (Recorded December 19, 2024):

Welcome to Moneyball Economics. I’m Andrew Zatlin.

Today I’d like to share with you my view about the stock market next year. I think the market’s going to rage again, I think we’re talking double digit growth, but I don’t think it’s going to be a repeat of this year. Instead, I think it’s going to be incredibly volatile and with that volatile environment come new opportunities for investing.

Let me start by walking you through why I think next year we’re going to see a lot of growth. I have three reasons actually, and reason number one is probably the most important, the economy. See, I see the economy taking off next year. If the economy grows, the stock market’s going to grow.

Why do I think the economy’s going to grow? Well, basically a lot of the most recent economic data is saying consumer sentiment has turned positive, business sentiment has turned positive.

There’s a lot of pent up demand that’s suddenly going to be released this Friday. We got payrolls coming out. They could be strong. I think they’re going to be strong. They could be a little bit still messed around with by the hurricane, but overall, going forward, we’ve got a lot of business activity that’s about to take off because it’s been sitting on the sidelines waiting for this presidential election cycle to end and it has ended. Now, from a timing perspective, it’s not going to happen this year, right?

It’s already December. Companies are winding down for the holidays, but you come back in January and it’s going to be off to the races time, and I think everybody understands that so strong economy is about to happen just because it’s been pent up. Now it’s introduced to second reason, the Trump factor, no matter what, Donald wants a strong economy and he’s got a lot of cards he can play to make that happen.

He wants the consumer spending, he wants businesses investing, so he’s going to do whatever he can to create a climate that is conducive to both. Now, we’ll talk about this in a minute, but there is a problem with it. It’s called the Powell problem, and we’ll talk about that in a minute, but by and large, we’ve got Donald Trump coming into play and let’s face it. Reason number three, it comes down to strength, begets strength.

Look around. We’re the only thriving economy out there, and quite frankly, if we have an economy growing and a stock market growing, all this capital is going to flow into our stock market further raising prices, so that’s why I think we’re going to see a strong economy leading into a strong stock market. But the volatility factor, well, the volatility factor comes in a couple of ways. First and foremost being the Trump factor.

He is Mr. Volatility, right? He’s unpredictable and he’s very reactive. He could throw things out there one day and reverse ’em the next. He could say, I love Bitcoin. Come back a day later. I hate Bitcoin. He could throw tariffs up, take ’em away. He’s unpredictable, and as a result, that’s going to introduce a lot of volatility into the market.

In addition to that, we’ve got, just generally speaking, world affairs have suddenly become very volatile, and when I say suddenly, I mean “suddenly.” Don’t you find it interesting that post-election, a lot of things have suddenly started to happen, and I don’t mean the pardon of Hunter Biden, we saw that one coming. That’s not sudden. I mean, things like the Russian ruble overnight went from 10 rubles to the dollar to 113. The Russian economy suddenly is collapsing because their currency is suddenly collapsing. Was it planned?

I kind of have a conspiracy view in my mind. I think with the election passed, the Biden administration has a lot of plans that they want to enact, and they’re just rushing to get them in place before Trump takes over. For example, look at the Lebanon Israel ceasefire.

Did you notice how that’s a 60 day ceasefire? Do you know why? 60 days? Because in 60 days it’s Donald Trump’s problem, he’s the president. When that ceasefire ends, look at Syria, suddenly you’ve got all these renegades taking over huge areas of Syria. We didn’t know about all these armored cars and stuff building up in Turkey, getting ready to invade. Yeah, there’s a lot of things going on the world order, all the things that we assumed were fundamentally consistent and constant. It’s been upended. We’ve got Russia fighting war with Ukraine, and that’s going to be winding down.

This year. We’ve got suddenly Iran and Russia losing control of Syria, and remember, this is critical to their imperial ambitions. For Russia, it’s their only warm water port. You kick them out of Syria, they’re done as a naval power in the Mediterranean. They can’t harass Europe anymore. Same thing for Iran. If they don’t have this land bridge in the form of Syria, they can’t funnel weapons to Hezbollah, for example.

They can’t harass the neighborhood as much. A lot of things suddenly happening, and this is what I mean by volatility. World events as we expected them are being upended, and as a result, these things aren’t going to stop. They tend to linger. So the next six months, the next year under Trump, no matter what world events are going to overtake him up to a certain degree. Not to mention he’s going to be introducing it with his new administrative deputies and his cabinet and so forth.

Okay, volatility growth. Well, there are a couple ways to play it. One is just to play the volatility. Buy gold when the damn thing falls. Sell it when it goes up. Just look for the risk assets. Bitcoin’s probably a new risk asset. Sell it when it goes up. Buy it when it goes down because whenever we see volatility, the money’s going to head for the hills. Another way might be an option straddle play. I think we’re going to see a lot of days where the market moves up 1% or more down 1% or more, and you could come up with a nice option play that says, I’m going to make money as long as it breaches that 1% up or down.

Another thing, just get ready to buy your favorite stocks when they collapse, because quite frankly, there will be a lot of buying opportunities. In any case, let’s gear up. End of the year is coming. I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I hope you have wonderful holidays coming up. Let’s make next year a really satisfying one for all concerned.

We’re in it to win! Zatlin out.