Tony Greer of TG Macro breaks down the real forces moving the markets — and why most people are looking in the wrong direction.
From gold’s fragile breakout to retail’s quiet dominance, Tony exposes the stories that mainstream finance won’t touch. He shares why the investment bank model is dead, how store-of-value trades like oil, gold, and Bitcoin are quietly gaining ground, and why AI tools and prediction markets may offer sharper signals than the Fed or Wall Street.
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Transcript
Monetary Metals:
Welcome back to the Gold Exchange podcast. My name is Ben Nadelstein of Monetary Metals. I’m joined by my new friend, Tony Greer. Tony is the editor of the Morning Navigator newsletter. Tony, welcome to the show.
Tony Greer:
Ben, thanks for having me, man. It’s great getting to know you. How are you doing?
Monetary Metals:
Tony, I have been loving all things Tony Greer. I’ve been watching your interviews like crazy. The first thing I’ve noticed is that you’re in Italy, honestly, almost more often than you’re in the United States. You might have to change your citizenship. So let’s start with a fun one. I’ve seen that you’ve been in Italy. What are Americans missing when it comes to Italy?
Tony Greer:
The pace. The pace, man. There’s one thing, there’s the pace in Europe as it is naturally, and then there’s the pace in Europe when you’re attached to the US markets. And that’s the thing that I absolutely love about spending time over there. And why I’m literally looking into spending extended periods of time over there is because I love to be able to wake up in the morning and know that the market ain’t ringing the bell until 3: 30 in the afternoon. So you have the whole day to be your own person. You start warming up towards the markets as they get there. In the afternoon, you’re winding up and really ready for an afternoon market opening. You’ve got a couple of hours to pay attention, and then you’ve got your dinner time, and then back to the markets for bedtime. And it’s literally, it’s just a great time zone for me to be working and living. And the pace that they live over there is a notch slower than we have over here, and that jives with what I’m doing right now. So that’s why I’m really happy over there when I go over there right now, Ben.
Monetary Metals:
Tony, do you think there’s any chance that the traders who live in these different time zones do have a slight edge? You wake up in New York, the first thing you’re doing is like, Oh, I got to check the markets, but your eyes are still grogging, your brain’s barely working. Do you think that maybe if you’re living in these different time zones, you actually might have an edge trading?
Tony Greer:
And I don’t know. That’s a great question. It definitely deserves attention and study. And I don’t know if the answer is such that the time zone is beneficial or just when you’re over there, you notice that the time difference puts you in a certain mindset for some reason. You know what I mean? Where the market is not opening until the afternoon, you’re in a much more relaxed mindset. And maybe just because there was low volatility while I was away. But I was reading headlines on Twitter while I was popping around Italy and then checking the markets and expecting to see S&P down 200. And when you start to get the tape reading sense, when you’re not seeing that against the headlines, you’re like, okay, there’s buying going on, and this thing is holding right now. Those observations were really, really helpful from over there at the pace that I was looking at them at. When I’m in the New York time zone, I’m buried in the minutiae, like you said, just because the markets open from 9: 00 to 5: 00, and that’s when everybody’s focused, and that’s the work day. And I day trade a lot as well, and I also manage a couple of funds.
So I’m really too invested in every tick. And when you get overseas, all of that loosens up. And I think you see the world a little bit more clearer.
Monetary Metals:
And other question for you, have you seen this rise of 24/7 trading, or at least the idea that that could be interesting in a Bitcoin? Oh, Bitcoin trades 24/7. Gold markets only trade 9-5, right? Do you think that matters in the future, going forward, traders having to be on 24/7? Or do you think that this 9-5 window is going to stay?
Tony Greer:
I hate 24/7 trading of anything, quite honestly. The benefit of working on an exchange, if you are ever down on an exchange where I got to spend a lot of time with a badge on, both on the New York Stock Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, there’s a method to the madness. And the fact that the market is open for a certain window of time, it gets people at least organized into that time bucket. Everybody knows that if they want to transact, they’ve got to pick a time within that time bucket that they like and make sure that they’re transacting. So it focuses all the interest, gets everybody into the waiting room, where we’re looking to see where liquidity is and what price action and price discovery is. And then the ultimate is the ability to turn to a guy next to you and trade a gazillion dollars worth of a contract on eye contact. I don’t got to know the guy’s credit card information. I don’t got to know where the guy lives. All I got to know is that I can see his badge, and he’s got a bid, and I have an offer, and we just traded them.
So there’s something really beautiful about that transparency and focus within a certain amount of time. And I guess just the other story that I could tell alongside that is Bitcoin in like, 2017, when it was going vertical, I got really tired of getting texts while I was on the bagel line on Saturday morning saying, You see this thing? Do you see this thing? And I’m like, Look, man, all this tells me is that you are going to be as pissed off that it’s open on Saturday one day as you are excited that it’s open on Saturday today. So be careful what you wish for. It’s nice that you’re cheering while it’s going in your direction. Talk to me when you wake up Saturday morning and the thing’s imploding and you’re losing money. And that’s no way to go through life. So I’m an old-school guy, and I like to trade between the bells. I love opens and closes. I mean, that’s where the most value is always, provided the most opportunity. So if you I take that out of my game, you handicap me a little bit.
Monetary Metals:
And, Tony, one more market question or market future question. Prediction markets have come to the fore recently. These are places where you can bet on specific events. So instead of saying, Oh, Brexit’s going to happen. You can just bet, yes or no is Brexit going to happen the same way you can get bet on the Pacers, for example. So how has that changed trading, where people now say, I don’t really need a derivative. I don’t need a whatever. Look at the Yen. I can just go straight to, Will the JGB intervene? Online. Has that mattered? Has that helped in trading at all?
Tony Greer:
Well, you know what? It’s like the addition of grok, the addition of AI and things like that. There are tools that are out there that can help make you a lot smarter as a trader. I think that that’s definitely one of them. The Polymarket odds were a great tool into the election. And there was one thing, man, that I really, really picked up on as a price action junkie, and that we were tied in the polls, no, followed it back in September of last year between Kamala and Donald Trump. And you were like, Man, I can’t figure out how this is, how not one is running away with an advantage, at least, no matter who you like, right? No matter who it should be, how are we dead even here? And then in October, with about one month left into the election, Trump started to pull away. Bitcoin took off like a bat out of hell. Broker dealers and financials woke up. Interest rates started. Bonds started rallying, and it was like, Whoa, there’s a tell. As soon as the market decided that Trump was the front runner, the whole complexion of the tape changed very, very conspicuously.
So that’s a thing that you’re able to pick up on if you’re plugged into those, like you said, those big betting markets that matter. And man, outcomes like who’s going to be President, that freaking matters. And now the market’s got a new tool with which to gage the odds of that. So That’s a really, really great observation for a young guy and the next generation of market wizard, that these are things that are important. Didn’t Elon Musk just float a… I guess he floated. It was more of a poll, like should we start a new political party? I think that things like that are becoming more and more relevant. I think more and more people feel included when they can cast their vote and see what the odds are and what the outcomes are. So, yeah, I think that stuff is really important. And I don’t generally use those as betting vehicles myself. I like to use them as speedometers for my trading. Either step on the gas or step on the break, given what these Polymarket odds are telling me right now or something like that. So, yeah, they’re very useful. And there are times that you go looking for them, and there are times that they just hit you in the airwaves.
And those are generally very helpful pieces of information to pick up.
Monetary Metals:
Yeah. And one part of this is the democratization, right? We hear that a lot. Oh, we’re democratizing finance. We’re giving kids more access to, whether it’s Polymarket or Robin hood. So has that dumbed down the retail investors? Has that made retail investors even worse than potentially people thought they already were, where it’s like, Oh, now you have access to 24/7 trading, and you can bet on Polymarket, and Elon Musk said this. Or do you think that this is a new class of retail investors that we should be thinking about?
Tony Greer:
So I I can open a can of worms here, Ben, that you may not have time for. But I will tell you this, you are on a really good track here sniffing out the dynamics that are going on in the markets between research and what people are paying attention to and what’s making them better. You’re being very observant because there’s something that’s going on with the democratization of market information that is paving the way for guys like me to make a living without needing to report to investment bank anymore. All I need is old internet connection, and I can reach all of my clients that care about what I have to say. And the cool part is it’s freeing up voices like mine who have been kept under the wraps of working for a big hierarchy, where there are certainly a lot more rules and a lot more constraints, and that breeds a little bit more constrained thinking. When you get out of that ecosphere, and you get out and you learn to think on your own and implement the analytics that you think are necessary, not the ones that your firm is putting in front of you, and devise strategies of your own where what’s going on in your mind meets what’s going on in the markets, then you’ve got a really powerful tool on your hands.
And so that for me, being able to hear different democratized voices with the rise of the independent analyst, such as myself, and being able to listen to guys that I never would have had access to, because they were probably tupped into a cubicle at an investment bank with a list of clients of the investment bank that they were going to talk to all day. Not guys on the internet. So that access, the access on Twitter that you have to some of the greatest minds in finance. I can go sit here and talk to Harris Kuppermann, Le Shrub, I can call Paulo Macro, Raoul Pal, Grant Williams. They’re all at the end of my fingertips when I have questions about the markets. And those are unbelievably valuable valuable conversations that you just have in a DM with somebody that you’re like, Man, think about this. When I worked at Goldman Sachs in the ’90s, this was impossible. This was not possible for me to be sitting here at my trading post in my home office, be curious about it, and just tweet up one of the smarter analysts in the world about it and see what they have to say.
So that stuff has been an amazing, amazing… That’s been really helpful for my own trading book and managing risk and managing a couple of different portfolios. So yeah, man, This stuff is so important, the way the landscape is changing, and I think it’s going to continue to. It seems to me like… I mean, the investment bank model died in the early 2000s when it all went electronic, and they just didn’t know it. They’re doing a lot less business than they used to do with a lot less people, and the divisions are smaller, and things are all shrinking up on trading desks. But they still need to have those businesses open. But all of that information and market flow now takes place outside the bank, which is really, really an amazing development. If you are a trader like me that came from the era that if you didn’t have a seat at a bank, you weren’t even getting a look at what was going on in these markets. You weren’t getting a look at a Bloomberg. You didn’t know what was going on in the world except what you could glean out of the journal and out of Barron’s.
And that’s a one dimensional, still not moving picture of the world. So when you’re plugged into all this, all of a sudden, you’ve got the same resources at your fingertips as a guy that manages five yards of investment-grade debt, you know what I mean, or something like that. So there’s a lot to be said about the democratization of information on the street and as the market structure has morphed into now. Very valuable for guys like me.
Monetary Metals:
Yeah, and I also think it is valuable for people who are around my age because before, finance was this like, Oh, I can’t believe you want to be an investment banker. And now, whether you like Bitcoin or hate Bitcoin, people are talking about the Federal Reserve and interest rates and repo swaps. Like 25-year-old guys are talking about repos. It’s like, What? And in a way, people are interested in markets in a way that they’ve never been, and for good reasons. It’s not, Oh, I want to make a bunch of money. It’s that, I really think this is going to change the world. And kids who are 25 saying, This is going to change the world and going into finance, I don’t know if that’s happened in a long, long time.
Tony Greer:
Oh, this is fascinating right now, Ben. I’ve got guys. I went to Cornell and played lacrosse there, and I’ve guys on the Cornell Lacrosse team that I know just as an alumnus or they’re the son of one of my teammates or something like that. I’ve got these guys hitting me up in my… Directly coming at me in text and saying, Why is the dollar so weak? And you’re like, What the fuck? Shouldn’t you be on a turf or on a beach or something like that? What are you worried about this for? And so what’s cool for me is that I answer everyone because I want to be the voice for the next generation. I want to be the next generation’s Dennis Gartman. And if you know Dennis Gartman is, he was the only guy that had a newsletter back in the ’90s. And when that thing came off the fax machine, it came off hot. It got copied 50 times, and it got dropped on every desk of every person that was managing an iota of risk. Because that was like the beginning of the internet. It was like, oh, look, we got this one guy that’s got all these opinions and accountable analysis
And, look, this is a lot more fun to read than Goldman Sachs research. So that was the beginning the birth of the newsletter, but it was because somebody was speaking to you about what was going on in their head. And so that’s what I try to do now and offer my semi-valuable or at least informed with 35 years of experience opinion on what’s going on in the world today. And so that’s valuable to me as well. And it’s a great, great development for my business as it grows, and I can branch into the younger generation and have them asking me what’s going on.
Monetary Metals:
Yeah. And also, I think maybe there’s a chance that this makes markets a bit more efficient, Because if you have a world where all of these big institutional players all think the exact same way, they’re maybe even legally constrained to all buy the same things and same allocations and the same amounts. And you get fired if you say, Oh, let’s go from a basis point of gold miners to two basis points, and it doesn’t work out. And now you have guys who are like, All I think about is gold miners all day long. And they’re like, Oh, yeah, I’ll buy these up like crazy right now. So in a way, maybe because there’s these different bubbles, these different groups, it’s actually made markets more competitive, more efficient, and people are battling against each other in a way with big institutions you might not have seen.
Tony Greer:
That is an understatement. We flipped the script. We flipped the script on what it used to be like on Wall Street. You used to look for pockets where retail was puking and fade retail. And what we do, think about what we just went through with Liberation Thursday. Every single professional European hedge and mutual fund manager barfed their cookies right into the hands of American retail who was sitting around saying, I don’t know, I like this president. You’re going to put the stock market on 20% sale for me? I’m in. They soaked up every ounce of stock for sale over the course of a month. They absorbed a 1,000-point S&P tip and took it right back up a thousand points because retail was buying this dip. And here we are, 300 points higher than that, and they ain’t going to sell any of this stock that they just bought in the last year. I’m telling you that right now. It is going into their safe deposit box, and it is going to get handed over to their grandkids before they die. It is not coming back into the markets.
Monetary Metals:
Yeah, and Tony, I think for people who are around my age, there’s this meme going around called Nothing Ever Happens, which is basically that, Oh, Iran is going to strike Israel. It’s going to be World War III, and then nothing happens, right? Or, Oh, Ukraine and Russia, there’s going to be this big… No, nothing ever happens. Or, Trump is going No, nothing ever happens. And so the idea here is that since nothing ever happens, markets just continue to go up into the right. And whether that’s true or not true, there is this sentiment now where retail traders go, You know what? Nothing ever happens. The people who told me, Oh, inflation is good for you, those guys were dumb. Those guys were liars. I knew that something was wrong, and it turns out it was listening to those guys. And so now when those guys say, Oh, trust me, Trump is going to destroy the dollar, and there goes the stock market, they go, I don’t know if I’m buying that. And so they say, Whatever, I’ll buy this dip. I’ve got time, right? And so it seems like retail has really changed in terms of its demographic and also what that demographic is thinking in terms of, Hey, nothing ever really happens.
Tony Greer:
Yeah. And as a guy that’s been sitting in front of screens for 35 years, I’d argue that that is a misrepresentation. Nothing ever happens. Okay, well, let’s see. During the Russia-Ukraine, beginnings of that, oil spiked to $130 and back. Even during the last kinetic action where we bombed the snot of Iran’s nuclear facilities, at least there was a $15 move in back in crude oil. There’s $30 a price action that a guy like me is salivating to capture. I mean, he knew what was going on. We got to buy it, buy it, buy it until the Coast is clear and then sell it, sell it, sell it. I mean, that was pretty elementary, and it worked out like you thought it would have. We had a 2000-point range in the S&P in April. I wouldn’t say that that’s nothing happening. I know options traders that were about to jump off a bridge. So, yeah, there’s a few things going on, and I’m okay with that, though. If the next generation wants to call that nothing happening, that’s fine, because I have a lobster bib out when there’s nothing happening like that. Because when you make a living, when you make a living writing about markets, you can only write about what’s exciting.
And so you have to pick the thing that stood out every day and say, okay, there wasn’t that much going on, but this is exciting. This guy said this, and that’s exciting, and it’s moving this market. So I always feel, as somebody who makes their living right about markets, I’m in the case that there’s so much going on, I don’t know what to write about. So very much the opposite of nothing ever happens. I guess it depends on where you’re sitting.
Monetary Metals:
Yeah. And I think also the mindset is that things will generally tend to go up into the ride, or if you want to call it the Francis Fukuyama, like, Hey, everyone’s going to be going to come a democracy, and there’s going to be markets. And it seems like when global conflict rears its head, there’s this blip or something happens, but then we go on to the next thing. And I don’t know if that’s the trumpification of the news, where every day it’s got to be something different. But yeah, it does feel like that we just continue to move past Russia-Ukraine. We continue to move past Iran. Now it’s the big, beautiful Bill. Well, next week, it’s Elon Musk. So every week, it just feels like something. And do you think that people are getting dulls to the information, or dulled to the noise in that way?
Tony Greer:
Yeah. Well, behind all of that, there’s actually one thing that I think that people don’t give enough credit for still happening. In response to the COVID lockdowns, we doubled our balance sheet in 2019. Doubled the balance sheet. That is injecting a tsunami of liquidity into the world that, in my opinion, is still panning out every day on our screens. Because when things back off in price, there’s always that inflationary force that says, Yeah, but we got to be long assets. We can’t be long this currency because this currency is burning to the ground. We can’t be long this credit market because this credit market is no longer performing. What we got to be long is we got to be long the alternatives. We got to be long the store of value trades now. We got to be long gold. We got to be long Bitcoin. Why? And we got to be long stocks. Because in an environment where there is… No matter what the headline inflation says, until I go to the grocery my eggs are 99 cents a dozen again, I’m going to tell you that that’s where the monetary inflation doesn’t go away.
It doesn’t go out of your bill. We may get headlines, CPI from 9% to 2%, your health care, your living costs are exploding every day. Why? Because we doubled the balance sheet in 2019, and that’s going to take decades to filter out into the system before we find peak inflation and then prices of hard assets start coming down. I think we’re in a step in the right direction. Well, I thought we were a step in the right direction with this administration. Then we just passed the big, beautiful bill, which looks like it’s going to tack another 5 trillion onto our debt. And business as usual filled with pork and crapola. It’s hard to tell the difference anymore between Biden and Trump in some ways. I guess there’s still a lot of that, here’s the new boss, same as the old boss, filtering through into the financial market. So we’ll see what happens. As I speak, Bitcoin comes roaring back here to 110,000 bid per coin. And those are the effects that I look at every day and say, yeah, we double the balance sheet, that this is going to happen. Gold, 3,500. Yeah, we double the balance sheet.
We buried our currency all in one day. Those are the things that I never let out of my mind. And they encourage me to buy dips when there are fire It’s like, okay, there’s still an inflationary environment. People are going to need to own assets like this because if you don’t, your currency is burning. So that’s the way that I filter that into my longer term fund management strategies, if that’s fair.
Monetary Metals:
Yeah, and it feels like people are starting to really understand that. They’re going, listen, I saw inflation. I don’t care if you say it didn’t happen or that it was good for me or that, Oh, trust me, it wasn’t inflation that you should care about. I don’t even need to know anything about macro or finance. If you’re telling me that the eggs getting more expensive is somehow good for me, whether it’s 2 % or 14 %, you are out of your mind. And so people are looking for a store of value, if you want to call it that, gold or Bitcoin or even stocks. People just want to own something where if the price goes up, they’re actually happy rather than the price of eggs going up and they go, I can’t believe I’m not going to be able to pay my bill this week.
Tony Greer:
Yeah. Well, we’ve got a couple of make it stop securities now, right? Where it’s like, if you latched on to gold, if you latched on to Bitcoin, every time you see a Western central bank blowing their currency to bits by either lowering rates, providing more liquidity, it’s all just a fiat currency race to the bottom. We’ve now got in your head what I used to say, Oh, God, make it stop. They’re running our currency into, please make them stop. We don’t have to make them make them stop anymore. We can make moves in the market. We can be long gold, we can be long silver, we can buy platinum, we can buy Bitcoin. There’s store of value trades all over the tape up now, and they’re competing in performance on the year with some of the other sectors of the stock market. You know what I mean? Gold stocks this year are up 50 %, but Bitcoin is up 25 %, or gold is up 25 %, and Bitcoin is up 20 % this year. So there are other vehicles that you can be in that will perform as you would expect them to, given what’s gone on in the fiat currency markets.
So, yeah, all really important developments that you’re talking about here, Ben. Standing ovation.
Monetary Metals:
Thank you. Now, I do want to talk about silver just because you mentioned it. So obviously, a monetary metals, we look at gold and silver, the monetary metals. But it feels like gold and silver have been moving maybe slightly odds compared to what maybe a trader would think, Hey, gold and silver should move together. Same with the miners. There’s been some slight odd price movements between gold prices and gold mining prices. So how do you factor that in when you’re looking at gold versus silver versus miners? Is there some correlation that you’re looking for? What’s some way that you trade those three assets, or do you look at them all fundamentally different?
Tony Greer:
So the way I look at that is as follows. I am in the gold trade. Two, I have what I call my store of value trades that I’m in on my viewed matrix, and I’ve navigated my clients into our gold, gold miners in Bitcoin, right? While silver is performing similarly to gold, it’s up 26% on the year, gold is up 27%, so silver is doing great. I had, whether correctly or not, labeled silver as a base metal. And I want exposure to precious metals for my f made the fiat currency weakness trade. I have this idea that since in the dawn of electronic-powered everything, solar-powered, etc, that use massive amounts of silver, Silver has transformed itself into a base metal, in my opinion. Now, that may or may not be a correct assumption, but that was the vibe that I was getting. I also get the vibe that, God forbid, there is a dollar retracement rally north. I think silver is in massive danger. I mean, gold and silver should be in danger if there’s a retracement rally, because we’ve just gotten to the point where it’s been dollar down, dollar down, gold up, gold up, dollar down, dollar down, gold up, gold up.
Well, for the last two months, the dollar has gone straight down and made two new lows. Gold hasn’t made a new high since April 22nd, when it traded 3,500 the day before the Barron’s put it on the cover. So when that Barron’s cover comes out, you have to take a picture of that and slap it on the chart and say, I wonder if the price trade is any higher than this. Two months later, we haven’t even seen it. We haven’t even I’ve seen the 3,500 prints since April 22nd. And all the gold bulls in the gold market are saying, Man, gold looks great. And I’m saying, The dollar is 3% lower. Gold is doing nothing. Gold is sideways looking to consolidate here. And I’ve actually sold a large portion of my longer term holding in gold, which I’m really wrestling with. Because I made the sale based on that premise, two months of non-performance while the dollar has dove. June 30th, that’s the day for to lighten up on my gold position. And I’ve done that, and gold hasn’t gone down at all or anything. So I’m like, I wonder if that was the right idea.
But we’re going to see what happens. If gold goes barreling through the price that it was on the cover of Barons at 3,500, I’ll number one, be in shock. Number two, I’ll be less long for the move, but at least I’ll be in it. Number three, I’ve got gold miners on because I’m insanely bullish stocks. And if I’m bullish stocks and bullish gold, then I can be in the miners trade, even though I don’t I love it, especially when it tells me, We don’t care what you love. We’re at the top of the leaderboard up 55 % this year. So who gives a shit what you think? That’s the sector that’s winning the race. That’s the sector that I’ve got to be in because my style is to let the market speak to me. And I like to try to be in positions that are indicative of what the tape is doing. I like to be going with the tape. I’m a very big participator in the direction that things are going on, and that’s how I’ve been able to make money over the last 30 years.
Monetary Metals:
And I do want to ask you about that. So there’s obviously people who are more fundamental traders. They may be a value trader. They say, well, look, the cash flow of this company and the PE ratios. And then there’s people who are like, I don’t know, I’m a sentiment trader. I’m a momentum trader. I feel like this is going in the right way. Have you felt that there’s been a shift between those different types of investors? Because I think back in the day, if you were like a Warren Buffet, that was considered the cool thing. And now it’s maybe more like, I don’t know, I’m reading Twitter, and this seems to be going the right way. So have we killed off what has been left of the value investors? And we’ve all gone momentum. And does that matter?
Tony Greer:
No, I actually feel that the number of players with these attitudes is the the aim and the delivery of the information is a little bit different. Because I can find you a couple of permabears on Twitter that are guys that have been like Northman Trader and a couple of other guys that have blocked me about 2,000 S&P points ago just for questioning why they’re so fucking bearish all the time. And those guys never change their view. So they’re still that trader where somebody… And this is the way that I used to trade when I was in my early ’20s and coming up working at investment banks with big jobs and things like that. I used to read the journal from cover to cover in the morning, participated in the markets all day, and I used to think about what I thought the world should look like. And then I put my positions on and wait for the world to agree. If I was bearish to dollar, I’d be short dollars. If I was bearish gold, I’d be short gold. If I was whatever, bullish stocks, I’d be long stocks. And I’d be like, okay, the world is going to come to me.
And then I got tired of losing so much money all the time and said, why don’t I stop trying to figure out in my head what’s going on and watch and take notes and say, this is going on. Maybe I should be in this. If that idea is that trends go on longer than you can stay liquid, then I just got to latch onto a trend and follow it, and I can manage that risk, and everything will be okay. Since I’ve done that, and one of the things that was born out of doing that was creating my own spreadsheet when I left working for investment banks that I manage on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis, where I’ve got my list of securities and indices that I follow. And at the end of every single week, month, quarter, and year, I sit here in front of the computer and I stare at what just happened. And I say, does this look likely to continue? And maybe I should buy some of this. Does this look likely to continue? Maybe I should be in some of this. And so since that became my knitting, my success as a trader is exponentially higher, exponentially.
So that’s been a huge transformation for me. But like I said, I think that there are still people that wake up in the morning and they take their view of the world, they put their position on and they say, Okay, it’s going to come to me eventually. So I don’t know if that much has changed unless the younger generation is really, really interested in being tactical sentiment traders where they’re into getting into and out of positions and not marrying things. But we’ll see. We’ll see.
Monetary Metals:
Yeah. And I was thinking about that because obviously, I interview lots of people in different spaces, whether it’s gold or just macro And one of the things I heard last year, beginning of last year, was we have the dollar and gold, and then we also have these high interest rates. The S&P is going to totally crash. We’re going to be perma bears because high interest rates. Oh, my gosh. We were living on Zerp and free money. And trust me, the stock market is-Tech bubble again, right? Yeah, tech bubble. It’s all AI, it’s all a joke. It’s all going to zero. And not only did the S&P hit 25%, but gold hit 27% in the same year, right? You would think if you told someone in the beginning of the year, this is the outlook, and here’s what’s going to happen in performance. They’d be like, Yeah, I’d like to get whatever drugs you’re on because that’s not going to happen. And yet that did happen. So what do you look at when you look at something like sentiment or indicators? Is there something that you’re like, Okay, I’m going to look at this and factor that into my models?
Or do you really try to look more day to day and say, Hey, listen, I’m going to be agnostic. I’m going to look at the tape and say, Here’s what’s actually happening.
Tony Greer:
So that’s what it is, Ben. I guess the easiest way to How to enunciate that is to explain how I am completely obsessed with sector performance on the year. I consider it my number one job to have made my clients money by getting them into the sectors that are going to perform the best on the year. Sometimes that is the triple Q, sometimes that is Bitcoin, sometimes that is gold miners. None of those have anything in common at all. If you have this view that the world isn’t changing, you’re probably going to get stuck in some ruts thinking things are going to continue when the world is very dynamic and constantly changing. We haven’t had too many years where the same sector has led consecutively. Last year, it was semiconductors up 58% behind NVIDIA. This year, it’s gold miners up 50% behind gold. Next year, what’s it going to be? It ain’t going to be either of those two. It might be a uranium miner that quintuples, and that market goes gaga because we’re quadrubling uranium output here in the US. You know what I mean? So I really feel like it’s important to let the tape tell you what’s going on.
And I guess the way that I’ve backed into learning that is by creating that spreadsheet where I manage weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly performance. Because once something Streaks are streaks, streaks are streaks, and trends are trends, and they go on for a long time. And anything that’s going to trend for months is going to show up in my weekly studies first. And I’m going to have to raise an eyebrow and say, Whoa, this sucker has been up four weeks in a row. No matter what, I got to pay attention to that. Then it’s going to show up on my monthly screens and say, whoa, this has been three straight months. And that’s how things land on my radar screen. And that’s how I’m able to get into trends that go from my my weekly radar to my monthly radar, to my quarterly radar, to at the end of the year. Look at that. Turns out that it made it to my weekly, monthly, and quarterly radar. And here we are at the end of the year, and what’s in the lead? If you can figure out how to carefully, and I don’t just blindly buy those sectors that are winning like an idiot, but you start watching them.
Because their markets, given positioning and sentiment, they ebb and flow within the trend. So now you just have to be patient and wait for your opportunity within the trend to get your clients in where there’s better risk reward than when you came up with the idea, and that’s trading.
Monetary Metals:
As we come towards the end of our interview here I want to do some rapid fire with you because you’ve got some great takes all around. So let’s start with a fun one. I don’t know if you know this. So in the gold space every year, we have a Gold Salesman of the Year award. I’m obviously close to winning it, but so far, the leader is Elon Musk. This guy goes on Twitter every day saying, This is the worst bill I’ve ever seen. We’re going to have hyperinflation, or whatever he’s on this week. And this guy basically is maybe unofficially working for some gold company. It’s not Monterey Metals, but he’s working for some. So do you think that Elon wins the year, the rest of the year, as the world’s best gold salesman, or is someone like a Basant or a Trump going to step in and really be the best gold salesman of this year?
Tony Greer:
No, I don’t think anybody could do a better job than Elon Musk. He’s talking about primaring anybody that voted for this bill that’s adding to the deficit. I mean, he’s coming out and taking a freaking ax to all those guys and really supported the gold market brilliantly. Maybe that’s one of the reasons that it hasn’t been able to advance other than the Barron’s cover. But yeah, man, I don’t know who could do a better job than the most popular guy in the world with the biggest platform, literally shitting on fiat currency and our runaway deficit. So what’s cool, if you think about it, is that he is is now a walking advertisement for gold, but he’s shining a lot of light on the problem. And if he gets his way, it might be bearish gold, right? If we somehow come to some level of a modicum more fiscal responsibility, maybe the dollar spikes and gold gets shitcanned for $1,000. You never know. So, yeah, man, I don’t think anybody’s going to do better than Elon Musk this year. But what’s interesting, once again, is that he pumped the price up, made it to the cover of Barons, and now it’s stopped.
So just like any other market, it all depends on where you’re sitting and what the positioning is.
Monetary Metals:
Yeah, that does lead nicely to my next question about DOGE, this Department of Government Efficiency. They had Elon lead it. Obviously, there’s a little kerfuffle there between Trump and Elon. It seems like Elon is doing his own thing again. Do you think this idea of, Hey, we should really try to rein in the deficits and get the debt down? Is that basically just debt? Have we completely forgotten about, Oh, yeah, debt does matter? Or have people just realized, I don’t know, the 30 trillion or 40 trillion or 20 trillion, who cares how much debt we’re in. I’m going to go buy my eggs. And if eggs are down, things are great.
Tony Greer:
Yeah, that’s another great observation, by the way, Ben. Wow. I think that it incrementally wakes people up to the problem. And I think… Why do I want to say this? I don’t know that it necessarily changes people’s behavior right away, but I think it wakes people up to what’s going on. And I don’t know that we’re going to go and go forward and all of a sudden bring to a breaching halt government overspending. It just seems to be the way government works. Doge has been a mega disappointment to me. I would have thought that they would have had a lot more serious effort cutting a lot more out, a lot more fat out. They turned over some fraud. They shined some light in some corners that hadn’t been shined before. It was interesting. I’m sure that Doge led to this huge health care fraud arrest that there were. The Department of Justice announced the other day, arrested 300 people in connection with a $14 billion health care fraud. Pretty cool that we caught them and stopped that nonsense. It is our kids’ future that we’re messing around with here. So I guess it’s the thing where it slowly helps to stop the pendulum from runaway spending.
And maybe at some point somebody will come along and have an adult conversation about it because it’s not going to be President Trump. If you’re looking for President Trump to stop spending, you got the wrong guy. It’s just not the way he operates. You know what I mean? And he could talk a big game about how he’s going to fix this and fix that. It’s all going to cost a fortune no matter what. So it’s hard to see what’s going to actually stop it. Like you said. Like, actually, like cap of deficit, 35 trillion, no more. Whatever it is, whatever our runaway dead is. I’d love to see it happen. But like I said, that might be bearish gold and bullish the dollar. So we have to be careful what we wish for.
Monetary Metals:
Yeah. Hey, listen, I would I’d happily have a better economy and worse gold prices, as I’m sure all gold owners would.
Tony Greer:
Agreed, 100%. I’d rather be paying 99 cents for my eggs again and have gold be a 1,500-dollar item. I really, really would.
Monetary Metals:
Absolutely. Okay, next one for you. I want to talk about oil prices. To me, there’s this obvious contradiction, which is that if you want people to make more oil, the price has to be high, right? No one wants to go digging for oil if the prices are low. On the other hand, consumers are pissed when oil prices and gasoline prices are high. So how is a President Trump or a current administration going to thread this needle? Because if you’re a trader, on the one hand, you have the administration saying, Oh, we’re going to drill, maybe drill, and we’re going to have oil, and we’re going to be independent, which means high prices. But on the other hand, we’re going to bring inflation down. And, okay, well, that’s going to be gas prices. So where do you see this oil question?
Tony Greer:
So I’m looking at it as oil loves these prices, right? I’m looking at it as oil is in the perfect sweet spot in between the customer and the producer right now, maybe even at the perfect price for everybody in the oil market, for producers and services companies to profit massively, and for the consumer not to feel like he’s got an extra tax on him. Two dollar gasoline was nice. We don’t have seven dollar gas like there is in Europe, or seven or eight dollars a gallon like there is in California. In New York, we’ve got a medium price of three something. It feels pretty cheap to me still. I’m not complaining about three dollars a gallon gasoline. I really not. We’d be insane to do that, where if you move to California, you’re paying double. If you go to Europe, you’re paying much more. So the energy prices here in the US are cheap where they should be, though, I think. There are plenty of refined products in the harbor. There are no shortage story whatsoever. Refineries are running at pretty good capacity because the economy isn’t rolling over. Really, no matter what, we haven’t rolled over into a recession, no matter how many recession bros have called for one.
And so I feel like the supply demand story in oil is pretty good. That being said, I haven’t had a major oil trade on my pad since the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Selling my length on the way down through 120 or whatever it was, as my last trade was the last thing that I did in terms of having any risk on an oil market, meaningful risk. I traded the I traded the pop from 70 to 80 on the Iran bombing a little bit, but I wasn’t really super focused on the market, so it wasn’t a major trade for me at all. So that’s why I feel like unless the market is going getting pushed in one direction by some… It’s usually been either the contango trade, where we’re floating oil barrels out in the harbor to take advantage of the steep contango, or the backwardation trade, where we’re just being long front month and rolling and living on the carry. When those conditions are present, then there’s an oil trade to be had. When they’re not, there’s not. You know what I mean? That’s the world that we’re living right now with $65, $75 oil Two and a half, three and a half dollar gasoline, plenty of refined products in the Harbor, refineries operating at good capacity because the economy is okay, not crumbling by any stretch.
That’s a sweet spot for the energy market. It makes everybody happy. So that’s where I am now. Very little risk on in that arena, but happy that it’s providing tailwinds for some of the other sectors, like industrials and airlines and things like that.
Monetary Metals:
Now, I want to ask you about this taco trade, T-A-C-O, which is Trump always chickens out. What do you think about this taco trade? Has that actually panned out for traders? Is it true? Is it not true?
Tony Greer:
You just violated my noise cancelation policy. I didn’t know what taco meant. I didn’t know what the taco trade was at all because it As soon as I saw it, I identified it as nonsense, and I was like, I’m not looking into that. So now I know that Trump always chickens out. Now I guess I’m a little more enlightened, but I’m going to keep ignoring it, and I don’t really have an opinion on that. Trump always chickens out. I mean, he’s done a pretty good job resolving some conflicts that are going on around the world since he came into office. It definitely feels like the world has more of our respect. I mean, did you see him show up in Saudi Arabia and they throw a party for kings for the guy? That was a pretty stark contrast between that and the fist bump at the curb with Joe Biden. So you can’t tell me that we’re dealing with the same character in the White House. And I’m not going to call the guy a chicken in any way, shape, or form. He doesn’t back down to anybody or anything. Whether it’s right, wrong, or indifferent.
It’s probably too much to a fault. But I don’t want to get ahead and start talking politically. It is what it is. And presidents come and go, man. The markets are always there for us.
Monetary Metals:
Okay, last one in the lightning round, which is What’s something you wish you could go back in time until your younger self?
Tony Greer:
Oh, man.
Monetary Metals:
And it can’t be buy a Bitcoin.
Tony Greer:
No, you got to be long stocks. Quite honestly, if I gave a presentation. My son just graduated from high school, and I gave a presentation to his teammates, the seniors, about getting acquainted with markets, right? The nickname of their high school is the Flyers. They’re the Shamanad Flyers. I created a presentation called Flyer Asset Class. What that is, is teaching the next generation how to get acquainted with markets. What I’m telling them is what I would have told my younger self, and luckily, some of them are listening to me. I’ve told them that you have to develop a savings to investing reflex like you play wall-ball in the cross. Every time money comes into the bank account, a portion of has got to go into the savings account and then directly into the stock market. Because if I would have invested $1,000 in the S&P the year that I went to college or graduated from college even, that’s It’s like 50 grand today. You know what I mean? That is a real material difference in how you look at the world and approach investing. When you’re young, you can put money in the stock market and not look at it because you literally don’t have to look at it until you become a full-fledged adult with a family and a house and all the regular obligations.
Tony Greer:
So I guess if I had anything to tell my younger self, it would have been to start investing earlier and take it a lot more seriously than I did until a later stage in my life. And then it became something that I could essentially make a living on between trading and writing a newsletter. So because of the freedom that it provides, that’s why risk is so important at a young age. And that’s the that I would filter to a younger TG.
Monetary Metals:
Tony, it’s been great. What is a question I should be asking all future guests of the Gold Exchange podcast?
Tony Greer:
You know what a cool question is? Gun to your head, where do you put your money for five years? All right, Tony- I don’t know if I necessarily like the gun to the head scenario, but you can say- All right, I’ll turn it around on you, Tony.
Monetary Metals:
Your wife says, Hey, we got to put all our money in five years because we’re going on a vacation to Italy, and I don’t want to see any phones. Where are you putting your money for the next five years while you’re with your wife in Italy?
Tony Greer:
Stocks. Stocks. I’m comfortable with them. First of all, for a couple of reasons, I like the timing of what’s going on with Trump’s second administration, the way he’s handling it differently, the way he handed us a thousand-point dip with this trade war. And then at the bottom of it said, You should probably get out there and buy stocks, because he knew that his next trick was going to be to get rates lower. And in my opinion, if he does succeed in getting interest rates to one, two %, whether he’s got to fire the Fed chairman, whether he’s got to put % in as the Fed chair, if he gets that done, combined with some of the other things that he’s doing, like routing out a lot of the inefficiencies in our energy markets and things like that, I think the US is going to stay the number one center for equity investment for another decade or so. Everybody thought that at the beginning of Trump, it was going to be, Oh, it’s been US overperformance over the rest of the world for so long. Now that Trump is President, you want to sell. That’s the end of that because he’s the America first guy.
Tony Greer:
Bullshit. It’s the beginning of the vertical cycle leg, where we leave a de-industrialized Europe souvenir trinket stand in the dust, and the whole world comes around to investing in US and the brick currencies, a modified version of investing in the West. So that’s why I’m really bullish the stock market. I think that gold and Bitcoin, there may be better places and things like that, but I would sleep a lot better if I had my money in the stock market, I think.
Monetary Metals:
Tony, it’s been a great conversation. If people a lot more, Tony Greer, where can they find you?
Tony Greer:
Yeah, man. There’s samples of my newsletter at tgmacro.com. Any of your listeners can feel free to send me an email at tony@tgmacro.com. And either myself or my general manager will get back to you immediately. And man, I got to tell you, Ben, you give a great interview, and you are really indicative of a younger mind looking at the markets with a brilliant amount of curiosity. And your nose is leading you in all the right directions. So keep up the good work. And anytime you want to have me back, I’d love to come back and talk to you about markets.
Monetary Metals:
Tony, very much appreciate it. And thank you for the compliments. We’ll be seeing you soon.
Tony Greer:
I hope so, buddy. Thanks very much for having me.
Monetary Metals:
Thank you.
