Saturday, 20 January 2024 — Melbourne, Australia

By Murray Dawes Editor, Fat Tail Daily

[2 min read]

Dear Reader,

There is no quicker way to get egg on your face than to profess to know whether a market will break-out or not above a major level.

The best you can do is trust the trend and have an escape plan if it all turns to custard.

The Santa rally spiked US and Australian stocks to within a whisker of the all-time high and now we are all waiting with bated breath to see whether a serious uptrend can develop.

Australian stocks have been going nowhere fast for over two years and remain stuck in a range. Conditions are looking more bullish than they have in over a year, but it won’t take much to snuff out the rally. 

There was a surprising jump in job losses in the employment figures released during the week in Australia. That may be a sign of things to come and makes you wonder whether falling interest rates due to rising unemployment is a bullish signal for equities.

I have my feet firmly in both camps at the moment because I think the bullish and bearish cases stack up fairly evenly. If markets can bust out above major resistance I will be prepared to go with it, but if the selling returns I won’t need a lot of convincing to go and hide under a log.

Focusing in on sectors that look promising is what is necessary when general market conditions are so up in the air.

I have been banging the drum on uranium for months, and I’m hoping you have benefitted from that call even if you aren’t currently a member of one of my services.

Future facing metals are currently getting hammered and look like they will fall further, but I remain firm in the view that once the dust settles and a new uptrend develops the opportunities in that space could be some of the biggest you may see in the next decade.

In today’s Closing Bell I show you the long-term chart in Lithium and rare earth ETFs to show you why I think the current capitulation phase is pushing prices down into a major buy zone.

Regards,

Murray Dawes,
Editor, Retirement Trader and Fat Tail Microcaps

Murray Dawes is our resident expert trader and portfolio managers. He is a former Sydney Futures Exchange floor trader who went on to design custom trading systems and strategies for ultra-wealthy clients (including one of Australia’s richest families). Today, his mission is to help ordinary Aussie investors make profitable investments, while expertly managing risk.

He uses his proprietary system for his more conversative and longer-term-focused service Retirement Trader…and then applies the same system to the ultra-speculative end of the Australian market in Fat Tail Microcaps (this service is strictly limited and via invitation only).

By Nick Hubble Editor, Fat Tail Daily

[6 min read]

Dear Reader,

The science is settled: people aren’t panicking about climate change anymore. But without its planet saving impetus, how will the most important investment trend of our lives unravel?

I haven’t the foggiest idea. But it’s incredibly entertaining to consider the wonderfully ironic possibilities…

First though, the science. Because we can’t just declare the science is settled without supporting our claim…right? It’s not like we are ‘the science’. Nor is it the truth simply because you hear it from us.

So, are people really turning on the green dream?

A report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) claims that more than a third of teenagers in the UK believe, ‘Climate change and its effects are being purposefully overexaggerated’.

Not only that, but intriguingly specific and sceptical views are becoming dramatically more popular over time. These include, ‘the climate science/movement is unreliable,’ and, ‘clean energy won’t work’.

The same report estimates that the share of YouTube videos which are sceptical about climate change and green energy efforts has almost doubled to 70% since 2018.

Their content is, of course, outrageous claptrap, misinformation and…confirmed by what you’ll find on the news.

The Australian Financial Review reports on a court finding that, ‘Battling Santos, a university scientist lied to Tiwi Islanders.’ Ironically enough, the climate scientist attempted to stop the gas development over a pair of culturally significant water holes that were submerged 7,000 years ago… But just the idea that climate scientists can be questioned is an extraordinary development.

In Canada, the Edmonton Journal asked the Alberta Electric System Operator spokesperson, ‘How did Alberta wind up facing blackouts in the extreme cold?’. The Q and A responses from the grid operator read like a green energy sceptic’s dream. The intro was perfect too:

‘It was a jarring, unprecedented alert that arrived on Albertans’ mobile phones Saturday evening: a warning to conserve power, lest the electricity grid operator resort to rolling blackouts during a historic cold snap.’

Does anyone else see the problem with trying to conserve energy during a cold snap?

The absurdity of relying on your neighbours who face the same renewable energy constraints and conditions was also exposed: ‘We try to import as much as we can. But other regions are also in a similar situation, so there’s less imports available to us.’

Who would’ve thought that other parts of North America face winter at the same time of year?

Of course, in the end, rolling blackouts were avoided. Not by blowing at wind turbines or shining lights on solar panels, but by asking Albertans to cut energy demand. Now, I don’t know about you, but this does not seem like much of a solution for anyone, except perhaps the Alberta Electric System Operator spokesperson.

Isn’t the energy system supposed to provide enough power, rather than asking the economy to demand the amount of electricity the system wants to provide? Isn’t a cold snap precisely the sort of moment you don’t want a choice between rolling blackouts and keeping your house warm?

Not so, according to the Tennessee Valley Authority, which found itself in the same situation. The federal agency is supposed to supply power to 10 million people. But as the TVA sees it, 10 million people are supposed to demand the amount of energy it decides to supply. And so they also recommended customers reduce electricity demand.

They helpfully explained that unusually cold weather had caused a problematic spike in demand. Yes, power demand due to cold was the problem. Not the lack of supply when demand predictably spikes.

It’s no wonder people are turning on green energy and climate alarmism. But their efforts seem a bit misguided…

In Germany, farmers protesting against climate change policies have, ironically enough, blocked Europe’s busiest autobahn…

The Germans are also blaming their crashing house prices on expensive Net Zero regulations. There’s nothing like the end of a housing bubble to make people angry.

Even the climate change activists are getting a bit confused. They’ve vandalised a Tesla store in Germany and an EV in the UK.

Even the virtue signalling corporate sector is turning on the climate change agenda. It’s just too expensive. Car rental company Hertz is dumping tens of thousands of electric vehicles (EVs) because of their costs and a lack of customer demand.

Some politicians have smelled the change in the wind already.

The Australian government rejected a wind farm development proposal because of the environmental damage it would’ve caused. Apparently dredging wetlands to save the planet is not an acceptable trade off. This puts the threat of rising sea levels into perspective nicely…

Climate change is such a non-issue in UK politics that the government hasn’t bothered to replace the chairman of its Climate Change Committee for 18 months! And now the CEO has quit too.

The Germans are so sick of their energy shortages that their Green-coalition government has hatched a cunning plan to transition back to dirty coal. Yes, they’ve already done so for a few years due to energy shortages, but this time it’s part of a secret and deliberate plan.

Perhaps they’ve heard about what’s going on in my birthplace in Germany. Households which converted their heating to electricity will see electricity prices double next month. No wonder the average German now uses less electricity than in 1978.

Even the Dutch have seen the light. They’re risking earthquakes to get at the gas in their Groningen gas field.

Even the scientists are worried about the monster they’ve created. One IPCC contributor put it like this: ‘We climate scientists used to always be arguing with the climate sceptics. Nowadays I feel like we’re just as likely to be arguing with someone who says civilisation is going to collapse in the next 30 years.’

So, now that the consequences of green policies are changing people’s minds, and the climate alarmism is looking decidedly unscientific, what happens next?

Well, the truly impossible amount of mining, refining and manufacturing which would’ve been needed to build the green energy dream was one of the most important investment trends in the world. It implied an extraordinary commodity boom, which of course would’ve been rather good news for the Australian dollar and commodity exporters.

But will it happen if the green energy system just isn’t credible anymore?

Plans for vast amounts of green energy seem to be falling apart at the poorly welded seams. Australia’s emissions are rising, not falling. And we’re not even close to meeting renewable energy targets.

Wind projects around the world are being put on ice or cancelled. The UK government is doing more to investigate and cancel dodgy renewables projects than build the required ones.

Of course there is a solution to all these problems. It’s a new untried and untested technology called nuclear power. It provides safe, reliable, clean, controllable, cheap and geopolitically secure electricity…which would make renewables dangerously obsolete. I mean, if your grid needs to be able to supply power cleanly during a period when renewables are out of action, why not just use that backup grid and dispense with the renewables?

Even the French have figured this out, dropping their renewable energy targets for the nuclear option instead.

But with the green lobby’s money spinner under threat, the campaign against nuclear has been hyped, especially in Australia. Unfortunately, it’s not very scientific either…

Finland’s new nuclear power plant OL3 is the largest in Europe. And it has of course been a disaster, according to energy consulting firm Rystad. Except one blogger has exposed the dodgy maths:

‘Rystad Energy's methodology and assumptions result in total costs that are over fourfold higher than those reported by the OL3 power plant owner. To summarize, they miscalculate the construction costs, capital costs, and operational costs and apply an incorrect method for calculating the normalized costs.’

This is of course not unusual in the nuclear demonisation industry. Australia is pioneering the way on those dodgy cost estimate comparisons, as exposed here and here. (The secret is to just assume stuff is free.)

The most intriguing question is what discredited climate change initiatives will mean for nuclear power. Will abandoning the green dream mean we transition to nuclear power or go back to fossil fuels?

On the one hand, the business case for nuclear includes its emissions free power. So, if that’s no longer a priority, do we still pursue it?

Investment in those fossil fuels is certainly booming, with truly vast amounts of gas set to come online in the next decade.

But it seems to me that nuclear is the only viable compromise for all the different interest groups out there…

It keeps the climate change fanatics happy by cutting emissions.

It keeps the geopolitical enthusiasts happy because it would be easy to develop a nuclear supply chain which isn’t reliant on Russia. (Even the UK is opening up a new uranium enrichment site.)

It would keep industry happy by providing reliable and controllable power at prices that are predictable and stable.

It keeps environmentalists happy by avoiding degradation of vast swathes of land.

It keeps the tech enthusiasts happy because they seem to think nuclear power is groundbreaking (90% of the world’s nuclear reactors were built before I was born).

If only Australians were heavily in favour of it, then the government would be forced to accept it…

Kind Regards,

Nick Hubble,
Editor, Strategic Intelligence Australia

Nick Hubble found us at Fat Tail Investment Research in 2010 after a stint inside Wall Street’s most notorious bank, Goldman Sachs, during the 2008 GFC. That’s where he saw the true nature of the investment banking business. Since then, he’s been the editor of the Daily Reckoning Australia and the UK-based Fortune & Freedom and Gold Stock Fortunes.

He’s delighted to work as Investment Director and Editor for Jim Rickards’ Strategic Intelligence Australia. Here he helps turn Jim’s big-picture views into specific actionable advice and ideas for Australian investors.