The Most Important Stock on Planet Earth

Lessons from history's no-brainers... The most important stock on planet Earth... Hoping for the next meme stock... Fleecing the 'apes'... Folks will be in for a surprise... 'It's all happening...' Actress Kate Hudson uttered the line in the 2000 film Almost Famous. She played the part of a groupie who calls herself Penny Lane – […] [Stansberry Research Logo] Delivering World-Class Financial Research Since 1999 [Stansberry Digest] Lessons from history's no-brainers... The most important stock on planet Earth... Hoping for the next meme stock... Fleecing the 'apes'... Folks will be in for a surprise... --------------------------------------------------------------- 'It's all happening...' Actress Kate Hudson uttered the line in the 2000 film Almost Famous. She played the part of a groupie who calls herself Penny Lane – after the Beatles' song of the same name – as she travels with a rock band in the early 1970s. The line suggests that Penny feels something meaningful is taking place in the world – culturally and politically – and that traveling with a rock band makes her a part of it all. It captures the feeling some folks had in the '70s that a cultural revolution had taken place in the previous decade, and it was still gaining momentum. I'm not saying I agree with any of this... The point is that, in those three words, Penny Lane sums up the swirl of rock music, purportedly revolutionary politics, and sentiment against the Vietnam War into vague and constant references to a "cultural awakening" – which were already becoming stale by then. In finance, nothing makes you feel that "it's all happening" like stratospheric stock market valuations, the swirling upward spiral of new-era optimism, and companies going public that perfectly capture the ignorance-fueled zeitgeist. We even have the staleness of yet another group of "shoeshine boys" touting "the most important stock on planet Earth." Oh man... Penny Lane's grandson just told me about this one really groovy stock right now... At the peak of every mega bubble, there's a stock. Just one. One shining, can't-miss, no-brainer company reporting the most incredible financial results as its share price travels endlessly, unstoppably upward. In the 1920s, that stock was Radio Corporation of America ("RCA"). It sold General Electric and Westinghouse radios and parts, mostly to amateur home-radio enthusiasts. The first U.S. radio station started broadcasting in Pittsburgh on November 2, 1920. By 1929, there were nearly 700 radio stations across the country. Sales of radio equipment rose from $60 million in 1922 to $843 million in 1929. Like "gold" in the 1970s, "dot com" in the 1990s, and "blockchain" in the 2010s, any company that had "radio" in its name in the 1920s soared... like Kolster Radio, which sold radios like RCA. It soared from $10 per share to $95 per share from 1927 to 1929, then crashed below $1 per share and filed for bankruptcy in 1930. RCA's performance was even more dramatic. Its split-adjusted share price rose from about $1.165 in 1921 to $114.75 in September 1929 (the bubble's peak) before crashing back to $2.63 by May 1932. RCA was a terrible investment, but not because it was a terrible company. It was an important developer of broadcast-television technology, including the advent of color television, and it created both the NBC and ABC radio and television networks. The company really was at the center of a huge new trend... just not enough to justify its prices during the radio bubble. After the 1929 crash, it didn't exceed its previous all-time high until the 1960s. In 1999 to 2000, the one no-brainer stock – as I've pointed out before – was Cisco Systems (CSCO)... Cisco makes routers and switches, or "Internet plumbing." So folks believed that no matter which dot-com companies succeeded or failed, the Internet's exponential growth would continue for long enough to justify paying as much as 62 times sales and 395 times earnings for Cisco in March 2000. Cisco's sales grew from $5.4 million in 1988 to $22.3 billion in 2001 – a 4,000-fold increase. Cisco has continued to grow, with sales reaching $57 billion last year. It has been a profitable, cash-gushing business since the 1990s. But its stock price has yet to exceed its March 2000 high. Today, of course, that one stock is Nvidia... Before the AI-focused semiconductor maker reported earnings on Wednesday, Goldman Sachs traders dubbed it "the most important stock on planet Earth." Like RCA and Cisco, Nvidia has a real and excellent business. The company invented graphics processing units ("GPUs") in 1999, sparking a revolution in gaming and other graphics-intensive software. Through various innovations from 2006 to 2018, the company pioneered a new line of hardware designed to power artificial-intelligence software. AI became the next new thing in the stock market in 2023, and Nvidia's stock rose 240%... outperforming the Nasdaq Composite Index's blistering 44% rally by more than 200 percentage points. The stock hit an all-time high closing price of $739 per share on February 14. Nvidia reported fourth-quarter and full-year results for 2023 on Wednesday, with quarterly revenues 265% over last year's fourth quarter and annual revenues up 126% – all of it fueled by demand for its AI chips. The stock hit a new all-time high yesterday... and again today. It trades for roughly 32 times sales and 66 times earnings and has a market cap just shy of $2 trillion. Nvidia is approaching meme-stock-like price action, up more than 60% since the start of the year... as at least one investor has noticed... Last week, I called clueless PhD finance professors 'shoeshine boys' for touting 100% equity portfolios during a mega bubble... This week, some actual boys (and girls) are taking up the mantle and touting Nvidia. The Wall Street Journal reported on a recent business conference for high-school students. During breaks between the conference's competitive events, the room was alive with chatter about Nvidia. They all love AI and, therefore, they love Nvidia – just like everybody else on Earth right now (except you and me, of course). And just like everybody loved radio and RCA in 1929 and the Internet and Cisco in 2000. The Journal quoted a 17-year-old investor with more than 25% of his portfolio in Nvidia (via his parents' account) who seemed really excited by the possibility of Nvidia reaching "meme-stock levels of growth." I guess he missed the part where the meme stocks all crashed. He looked at the boom fueled by social media site Reddit... then pretended it had a happy ending. Kudos to him for having money to invest at 17. I never had any until I was in my 30s. But he's a teenager loaded up on "the most important stock on planet Earth" at mega-bubble valuations because AI is cool. There's no way it's not a huge mistake. I don't want to pick only on kids, though. The Journal also quoted two more Nvidia bulls: a 61-year-old engineer and a 39-year-old financial analyst. The latter first bought Nvidia in 2021 – the last time the entire world wanted to own it. Speaking of meme stocks and Reddit, they're 'all happening,' too... Reddit filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday for an initial public offering ("IPO"). It plans to trade under the symbol RDDT on the New York Stock Exchange. Reddit is a social media website consisting of more than 100,000 active message board-like communities called subreddits, with 267.5 million weekly active users. Right in line with the "it's all happening" groove, Reddit calls itself a "global, digital city." Completely tone-deaf to the way social media isolates and alienates many users, and just two years after Instagram admitted it was "toxic for teen girls," Reddit says: Our mission is to bring community, belonging, and empowerment to everyone in the world. Of course, Reddit's IPO filing mentions "artificial intelligence," "AI," "large language models," and "LLM" a total of 83 times. There's no use doing an IPO if you can't say that you're also an AI-related company. It's the first big social media IPO since Pinterest went public in 2019. Pinterest debuted at $19, ran up to $89 in 2021, crashed to $17 in 2022, and trades around $35 today. It has generated losses ever since 2016, except for fiscal year 2021, when it benefited from folks stuck at home during pandemic lockdowns. Reddit was founded in 2005 and has only lost money. It lost $90.8 million in 2023 on $804 million in revenues. It sells advertising and is experimenting with ways to monetize the data it gathers from its users, including using it to train AI software... perhaps to figure out ways to target them more effectively with ads? As we mentioned, the entire "meme stock" phenomenon of 2021 started and caught fire on a subreddit called WallStreetBets, created by past [Stansberry Investor Hour podcast guest Jaime Rogozinski](. That's where financial analyst/investor Keith Gill first began touting shares of video-game retailer GameStop (GME). He argued that because they were heavily shorted, the share price would soar as the result of a massive short squeeze. The WallStreetBets community got more and more excited about the possibility of so many "David" investors sticking it to big-money "Goliaths" who thought they were making easy money shorting an ailing business. Gill had inadvertently fomented a rebellion in the stock market... And it worked. Avid "Redditors" poured money into the stock, attracting other investors and squeezing out those shorts. The flurry of Reddit-fueled trading pushed GameStop from a low of $0.70 per share in 2020 to a high of $86.88 per share on January 27, 2021 – a rapid 124-fold rise. Goliath lost big... Hedge fund Melvin Capital's GameStop short cost it nearly $7 billion in January 2021. The fund never recovered and had to liquidate in May 2022. Hedge fund Citron Research didn't disclose dollar losses, but said it took a 100% loss on its GameStop short. And David won big... Gill reportedly invested $53,000 that turned into nearly $50 million as of late January 2021. (We haven't heard whether he cashed in any of those gains before shares crashed again.) The GameStop short squeeze became the subject of the 2023 film Dumb Money, starring actor Paul Dano as Gill. Of course, most Redditors and other know-nothings lost money on GameStop, whose stock now trades about 85% below its all-time meme-stock-era high. It was always a lousy, dying business loaded with debt... which is why it was so heavily shorted in the first place. GameStop's fellow meme stock, cinema chain AMC Entertainment (AMC), followed a similar trajectory. It soared from $12.46 on January 6, 2021 to a high of more than $386 – a 31-fold increase – on June 2 that year. AMC's new shareholders admitted they knew nothing about the business and called themselves 'apes'... The apes went on Reddit, Twitter, and other social media sites to declare they were "not leaving," meaning they'd never sell the stock. As I've pointed out before, they bought one of the biggest pieces of garbage ever to trade publicly and held onto it like it was Berkshire Hathaway. AMC management exploited the apes for all they were worth. It created and sold billions of dollars of worthless shares at exorbitant meme-stock prices. AMC had fewer than 6 million shares outstanding in the third quarter of 2020, 51 million in the second quarter of 2021, and more than 197 million today (all pre-August 2023 numbers have been split-adjusted). AMC currently trades about 99% below its meme-stock high. Becoming a meme stock is a great way to fleece shareholders... But if you can't make that happen, an initial public offering on a major stock exchange in the middle of a huge, AI-fueled tech rally is not a bad Plan B. That's what Reddit is about to do. And Reddit wants to fleece its users like AMC did, by selling them a bunch of its stock... In a highly unusual move, the company has decided that it'll give 75,000 of its most active users a chance to buy a total of 1.3 million shares at the IPO price – a privilege usually reserved only for institutional investors. This is not Reddit's first rodeo. Reddit filed confidentially for an IPO in December 2021 – about a month after the Nasdaq peaked. The market kept falling and took the company's hopes for a debut with it. Now that the market has soared back into mega-bubble territory, Reddit is planning to strike while the iron is hot. We'll see. Nvidia's leap to a new all-time high suggests the market has room to run. The day it reports more hypergrowth and the market doesn't care, you'll know it's all over and we can all load up on popcorn and watch Nvidia get cut in half or worse. So to sum it all up... The most important stock on the planet is soaring to new all-time highs. High-school students are in love with it and have convinced their parents to trust them with real money. The company that helped give birth to the most insane speculative financial-market episode since tulipomania took over Holland in 1637 is going public – and planning to offer its users a chance to take a gamble on its fortunes. Like I said, it's all happening... What happens next is bound to surprise a lot of folks. --------------------------------------------------------------- Recommended Links: [A Stunning 90% Win Rate]( Marc Chaikin's Power Gauge issued buy signals on 90% of the top 50 stocks of 2023 and at least nine out of 10 top stocks of every single year going back to 2016. Now, he's revealing a little-known market event he has never shared before – one he can predict with 90% accuracy. Find out more when you join him at his latest market broadcast on February 29 (and get his two recommendations for free). [Get the details here](. --------------------------------------------------------------- [Gold Is Headed Above $3,000 per Ounce (Here's How to Play It)]( With so many strange events happening across the economy (the longest bear market for bonds since the Civil War... unprecedented bank closures... and soaring prices), it's no wonder the richest investors are loading up on gold. But what you might not realize is there's a much better way to profit from rising gold prices – WITHOUT ever touching an ETF, mining stock, or even bullion. [Find the full details here](. --------------------------------------------------------------- New 52-week highs (as of 2/22/24): ABB (ABBNY), Abbott Laboratories (ABT), Applied Materials (AMAT), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Amazon (AMZN), ASML (ASML), Broadcom (AVGO), American Express (AXP), Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B), Brown & Brown (BRO), CBOE Global Markets (CBOE), Canadian National Railway (CNI), Costco Wholesale (COST), Salesforce (CRM), Crispr Therapeutics (CRSP), Cintas (CTAS), Dell Technologies (DELL), iShares MSCI Emerging Markets ex China Fund (EMXC), Franklin FTSE Japan Fund (FLJP), Fortive (FTV), Home Depot (HD), Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), ICON (ICLR), IQVIA (IQV), Iron Mountain (IRM), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), KraneShares MSCI Emerging Markets ex China Index Fund (KEMX), Linde (LIN), Motorola Solutions (MSI), Neuberger Berman Next Generation Connectivity Fund (NBXG), Novo Nordisk (NVO), Procter & Gamble (PG), Parker-Hannifin (PH), ProShares Ultra QQQ (QLD), Ferrari (RACE), Regeneron Pharmaceuticals (REGN), Sprouts Farmers Market (SFM), Sherwin-Williams (SHW), VanEck Semiconductor Fund (SMH), Spotify Technology (SPOT), SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 Value Fund (SPYV), ProShares Ultra S&P 500 (SSO), Stellantis (STLA), Stryker (SYK), TFI International (TFII), Travelers (TRV), Trane Technologies (TT), ProShares Ultra Semiconductors (USD), ProShares Ultra Financials (UYG), Visa (V), Viper Energy (VNOM), Vanguard S&P 500 Fund (VOO), Waste Management (WM), W.R. Berkley (WRB), and Health Care Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLV). In today's mailbag, a response to a letter [in yesterday's mail](... Do you have a comment or question? As always, e-mail us at feedback@stansberryresearch.com. "Sorry to nitpick, but Fortran (invented 1957) and Basic (1963) were both ancient not 'in their infancy' 35 years ago when subscriber Clay H. studied programming at the Colorado School of Mines." – Subscriber P.K. Good investing, Dan Ferris Eagle Point, Oregon February 23, 2024 --------------------------------------------------------------- Stansberry Research Top 10 Open Recommendations Top 10 highest-returning open positions across all Stansberry Research portfolios Stock Buy Date Return Publication Analyst MSFT Microsoft 11/11/10 1,355.8% Retirement Millionaire Doc MSFT Microsoft 02/10/12 1,307.3% Stansberry's Investment Advisory Porter wstETH Wrapped Staked Ethereum 02/21/20 1,173.5% Stansberry Innovations Report Wade ADP Automatic Data Processing 10/09/08 916.9% Extreme Value Ferris WRB W.R. Berkley 03/16/12 782.2% Stansberry's Investment Advisory Porter BRK.B Berkshire Hathaway 04/01/09 636.1% Retirement Millionaire Doc HSY Hershey 12/07/07 475.1% Stansberry's Investment Advisory Porter BTC/USD Bitcoin 01/16/20 455.9% Stansberry Innovations Report Wade AFG American Financial 10/12/12 441.5% Stansberry's Investment Advisory Porter TT Trane Technologies 04/12/18 352.7% Retirement Millionaire Doc Please note: Securities appearing in the Top 10 are not necessarily recommended buys at current prices. The list reflects the best-performing positions currently in the model portfolio of any Stansberry Research publication. The buy date reflects when the editor recommended the investment in the listed publication, and the return shows its performance since that date. To learn if a security is still a recommended buy today, you must be a subscriber to that publication and refer to the most recent portfolio. --------------------------------------------------------------- Top 10 Totals 4 Stansberry's Investment Advisory Porter 3 Retirement Millionaire Doc 2 Stansberry Innovations Report Wade 1 Extreme Value Ferris --------------------------------------------------------------- Top 5 Crypto Capital Open Recommendations Top 5 highest-returning open positions in the Crypto Capital model portfolio Stock Buy Date Return Publication Analyst wstETH Wrapped Staked Ethereum 12/07/18 2,291.8% Crypto Capital Wade BTC/USD Bitcoin 11/27/18 1,269.3% Crypto Capital Wade ONE/USD Harmony 12/16/19 1,147.8% Crypto Capital Wade POLYX/USD Polymesh 05/19/20 1,054.5% Crypto Capital Wade MATIC/USD Polygon 02/25/21 893.3% Crypto Capital Wade Please note: Securities appearing in the Top 5 are not necessarily recommended buys at current prices. The list reflects the best-performing positions currently in the Crypto Capital model portfolio. The buy date reflects when the recommendation was made, and the return shows its performance since that date. To learn if it's still a recommended buy today, you must be a subscriber and refer to the most recent portfolio. --------------------------------------------------------------- Stansberry Research Hall of Fame Top 10 all-time, highest-returning closed positions across all Stansberry portfolios Investment Symbol Duration Gain Publication Analyst Nvidia^* NVDA 5.96 years 1,466% Venture Tech. Lashmet Microsoft^ MSFT 12.74 years 1,185% Retirement Millionaire Doc Band Protocol crypto 0.32 years 1,169% Crypto Capital Wade Terra crypto 0.41 years 1,164% Crypto Capital Wade Inovio Pharma.^ INO 1.01 years 1,139% Venture Tech. Lashmet Seabridge Gold^ SA 4.20 years 995% Sjug Conf. Sjuggerud Frontier crypto 0.08 years 978% Crypto Capital Wade Binance Coin crypto 1.78 years 963% Crypto Capital Wade Nvidia^* NVDA 4.12 years 777% Venture Tech. Lashmet Intellia Therapeutics NTLA 1.95 years 775% Amer. Moonshots Root ^ These gains occurred with a partial position in the respective stocks. * The two partial positions in Nvidia were part of a single recommendation. Editor Dave Lashmet closed the first leg of the position in November 2016 for a gain of about 108%. Then, he closed the second leg in July 2020 for a 777% return. And finally, in May 2022, he booked a 1,466% return on the final leg. Subscribers who followed his advice on Nvidia could've recorded a total weighted average gain of more than 600%. You have received this e-mail as part of your subscription to Stansberry Digest. If you no longer want to receive e-mails from Stansberry Digest [click here](. Published by Stansberry Research. You’re receiving this e-mail at {EMAIL}. 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