In this week's Stansberry Investor Hour, Dan and Corey welcome Andy Swan to the show. Andy is the co-founder of LikeFolio, a financial-technology company focused on providing its clients with actionable research based on consumer-driven data. He has a free report focused on a new wave of health care and AI that can inform investors of how to best prepare before it arrives. You can download the report here.

Andy kicks things off by sharing how LikeFolio evolved from being designed to create "like" portfolios for social media users based on the companies they and their friends are interested in to being geared toward investors and traders. He says that the data from social media and other publicly available sources is very powerful because it can show where consumer sentiment is for a product and can help estimate sales for a product before an earnings report is released. Andy then provides some of his background in trading, along with his rules for investing...

[After a loss, you say,] "I should probably have some rules around this stuff. I should probably think of this a little differently." I've been trading for a very long time. I still trade almost every single day. I like using leverage. I like using options, everything. You have to tie it with discipline if you're going to do it well, and if you don't use discipline, I can almost guarantee you're going to do it extraordinarily poorly. So that's what drives my trading right now: risk control first and then get greedy after you've set those guardrails.

Next, Andy states that investors need to have some guardrails in place to protect their capital when investing. However, he believes that there's no "one size fits all" method and that investors need to ensure that the rules they establish match their approach. Andy switches the topic to the ease and accessibility of trading with apps like Robinhood. But he warns users to beware leveraged exchange-traded funds – while they sound appealing because of the potential to triple gains, "poisonous" stocks in a fund could send you tumbling. He then gives his thoughts on how AI is changing the world and what he thinks is the next step in its development...

Everybody already knows that AI is changing the world. I'm not sure that people truly understand how much and how fast that's happening and how much that's accelerating... I'm tired of the Nvidia type of play and the chip plays. I'm thinking more about the next steps. And so, we continue to love AI-infrastructure build-out because we think the world's always going to need more power. I don't know that there's ever been successive decades where you didn't need more power than you needed before... I feel like we're at the... second inning of the railroads being laid, and there's still a whole lot of money to be made.

Finally, Andy discusses how one company is currently hated due to its financials, but according to his data, consumers are gravitating toward it. He compares it with other stocks that lost money early on but turned into behemoths in today's market due to new customers consistently using their products. This company could follow in their steps based on his data. And Andy provides his thoughts on the type of mentality to have as an investor...

The amount of wealth that can be created is infinite, and there is no limit to how much these companies can make you if you're an investor. There's no limit to how much money you can create and make as an entrepreneur or as a business owner. So I always try to just challenge people to just think far bigger than the normal confines of life... And that applies in investing, applies in entrepreneurship, [and] applies in your personal life as well.

Click on the image below to watch the video interview with Andy right now. For the audio version, click "Listen" above.

(Additional past episodes are located here.)

This Week's Guest

Andy Swan is the co-founder of LikeFolio. Using data derived from social media, his company is able to follow consumer trends to see shifts before Wall Street does. LikeFolio has been named Fast Company's most innovative in finance, and its unique research is consistently featured on CNBC, Yahoo Finance, and Barron's. Prior to LikeFolio, Andy founded two other companies. He graduated from Bellarmine University with a bachelor's degree in business.

Dan Ferris:                 Hello, and welcome to the Stansberry Investor Hour. I'm Dan Ferris. I'm the editor of Extreme Value and The Ferris Report, both published by Stansberry Research.

Corey McLaughlin:    And I'm Corey McLaughlin, editor of the Stansberry Daily Digest. Today we talk with Andy Swan from LikeFolio.

Dan Ferris:                 Andy's a very smart guy. He's been trading for decades. He knows a lot. He approaches the market in a really unique, fun way. So, let's talk to him. Let's talk to Andy Swan. Let's do it right now.

                                    Andy, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.

Andy Swan:                 Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, so you're a brand-new guest. We've never had you on the show before. And maybe we'll let you just sort of tell our listeners a little bit about yourself. Give us the 30-second background on how you got where you are today.

Andy Swan:                 Yeah, I've been trading for probably since college, so 26, 27 years on my own. I've also created a few companies around trading and especially trying to help active and individual investors. And so, the company that we have now is called LikeFolio. We focus on identifying big consumer shifts and consumer spending behavior, consumer trends, that sort of thing by ingesting a lot of content from the Web, a lot of user-generated content from social media, etc., to try to figure out where the customer dollars are going before Wall Street takes notice. That's kind of our big play and we've gotten pretty good at it. We've been doing that for a little over a decade and sending out those notices to subscribers and to hedge fund clients and things like that. So, that's my schtick. And you can kind of think of it as "buy what you know" on steroids.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. You started – you reminded me a little bit of the Market Wizards guy, Chris Camillo. You ever heard him?

Andy Swan:                 Yes.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, he focuses on social media for a lot of his research and he automates how he looks at it and stuff. But do you use social media at all as a research tool?

Andy Swan:                 Yeah, we do. We've had extraordinary contracts with Twitter, now X, where we ingest a ton – almost the entire firehose at once. We use AI to search Reddit, Google Search trends, Twitter posts, anywhere we can find natural language of people in real life talking about brands or products that they love or what they're buying or where they're eating or where they're not eating anymore, that kind of thing. We are trying to ingest it and analyze it and find signal for the stock market.

Dan Ferris:                 That is cool. That's really cool because you would think – I assume that the idea is they talk about what they're doing right now, and if they've only recently started to talk about it or they're talking about it within the last few months, maybe it hasn't hit the financials yet. Maybe it's not in the market yet.

Andy Swan:                 That was actually – the way that we discovered this, our original design for LikeFolio was connect your social media accounts, let's look at what you and your friends are talking about, let's build a portfolio of the companies that you and your friends like, a "like folio." But what we found really quickly and almost by accident was that the data we were ingesting was much more powerful and useful to us as traders and investors than the output of the LikeFolio. And so, the kind of aha moment for us was the company Deckers Outdoor, they own Uggs boots, and we were going through our data and we thought something was wrong with our data collection process because when we looked year over year for the fourth quarter – this was several years ago. I think it's 2017 maybe, or maybe 2015 – we looked year over year at the Q4 numbers for Uggs boots and there was a massive drop-off in the current year for mentions of buying Uggs boots. And we thought, "Our data ingestion must be broken. Something's not right here." Double checked, triple checked. We're like, "No, just people aren't buying Uggs boots this quarter, this holiday quarter. This is a big deal." We put out a little note on our LikeFolio blog. We got traction on Yahoo Finance. And four days later, Deckers Outdoor reported earnings that were completely terrible. The stock tanked 30-something percent. And we said, "OK, I think we're a data company now."

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, I remember it. Wow. So, you presaged that. That was a big one. And caught a lot of people – obviously, a 38% drop in one day is like – that's catching a lot of people by surprise. But you were able to anticipate it, which is huge.

Andy Swan:                 Yeah. And it was accidental.

Dan Ferris:                 Amazing.

Andy Swan:                 We kind of tripped into a gold mine there. But we recognized what we had and really pivoted the company into that kind of social data analysis company that we've grown to become.

Dan Ferris:                 That is so cool.

Corey McLaughlin:    What platforms are you – what platforms do you kind of look at now? Is it all Twitter? Is it others? We've got all kinds of social media stuff happening that we didn't –

Andy Swan:                 Yeah, we've got – it's a crazy amount of stuff. It's – X is very good because people talk pretty naturally, and the data is pretty concise. Reddit is phenomenal. We are ingesting app store download data. We're ingesting website visit data. Sometimes you can get that down to the sub domain or to the product level so that you can see if people are searching for a specific product or hitting specific products by page more often. Google search trends. And we're even starting to get into some of the AI stuff because a lot of people have shifted their behavior from searching Google to just chatting with ChatGPT or Claude or one of these about the problem that they're having and it's giving product recommendations. So, we want to be on top of that, too. So, it's like a constantly moving target but we try to stay ahead of it as well as we can.

Corey McLaughlin:    Oh, yeah. That's interesting. The AI piece is – that's brand new, right? I wasn't thinking of that, how to scour even ChatGPT or Claude. I don't know. I can't even begin to think about that. But...

Andy Swan:                 Yeah, we don't get that data output as in how many times it's recommended a certain product, but what we do is we use [application programming interfaces ("APIs")] to query it as if we're users and pretend and then see what products it recommends. So, we might go in there and say, "Hey, I'm a man that's getting into running. What shoes should I look at?" And lo and behold they're recommending On Running, and so we know that that's probably happening at a little bit of scale at this point.

Dan Ferris:                 Very cool. Yeah. I like this. I like this idea a lot. Is this data available to anybody? How do you get it?

Andy Swan:                 We pay a lot of money and we build a lot of scraping tools and AI agents to go out and get it for us. Yeah. But it's all – it's almost all publicly available data. None of it is identifiable down to the individual level. We don't know what Dan has searched for or what sites Dan has gone to or products Dan has bought, but we know that 35% more people are visiting Lemonade for insurance than they were a quarter ago.

Dan Ferris:                 Is that a real stat or you're just – is that hypothetical?

Andy Swan:                 That's probably underselling –

Dan Ferris:                 Lemonade?

Andy Swan:                 – it on Lemonade, but that's one we love. Yeah, I just threw that out there. That's definitely underselling it. I think they're starting to get some real traction.

Dan Ferris:                 OK. So, that's really –

Corey McLaughlin:    I could tell you where Dan's shopping. He's buying some gold, some silver, maybe some firearms.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. Well, that, yeah – I'm buying gold and guns and groceries always but – yeah.

Andy Swan:                 That's paying off. Yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. But you're a real trader, though. I was banging around at AndySwan.com and you've got like real time-honored, six critical rules to eliminate emotion from your investment process. That's exactly the kind of stuff that we – we talked with Market Wizards and they say the same – that's like, "Well, I have these rules to keep emotions out of the process." Exact same thing.

Andy Swan:                 Yeah. I started out as a trader in college, and this was in 1999 and 2000, so you can imagine how easy that was. I mean, you just buy and everything goes up and you make money and next thing you know our $2,000 account was $30,000-something and it was all just a fever dream. And then you lose it all. And you start to say, "I should probably have some rules around this stuff. I should probably think of this a little differently." And so, yeah, I've been trading for a very long time. I still trade almost every single day. I like using leverage. I like using options. Everything. But it comes with – you have to tie it with discipline if you're going to do it well. And if you don't use discipline, I can almost guarantee you're going to do it extraordinarily poorly. So, that's kind of what drives my trading right now, is just risk control first and then get greedy after you've set those guardrails.

Dan Ferris:                 Discipline around what? What do you mean by discipline specifically?

Andy Swan:                 Yeah, I think it's mostly discipline for managing existing trades. I'm not that disciplined about how – what my entry criteria are or anything like that. I'm more of a tape trader. I like to get – I have a feel for the market, contrarian stuff like that. So, entry doesn't bother me that much. I think you could give really great traders either side of a trade at any price and they could probably do better than most amateur traders because of position management and adding to a position that's going your way. Not adding to positions that are going against you, having the guardrails in place to say, "OK, if it gets to this point, I think I'm right. I'm going to add to it. If it gets to this point, I'd better get out because the one thing that I can't do that I've done before, every trader I think's done before, is let this blow up my account." And that's the No. 1 thing. And that's the No. 1 thing that people need to know to avoid, is just do not let a trade or a thesis blow up your account.

Dan Ferris:                 It's not sexy but it sure is important, isn't it? It's just, "Hey, don't lose all your money." People want to hear you say, "I know a way you can make 5 times your money really fast or 10 times or whatever." They don't want to hear you say, "Hey, I've got the secret of how you can be a successful trader. Have lots of discipline and don't blow up your account." Ooh. Wow.

Andy Swan:                 That's not something I'm going to – most people are going to click on. But it's the truth.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, that's not – yeah, that's not clickbait. And that's a hint, too, right? If it were clickbait, it's like, well, probably not – something that is clickworthy is probably what you don't want to do.

Andy Swan:                 Yeah, I totally agree. If you're seeing it over and over on TikTok, you probably should go the other way.

Dan Ferris:                 OK, so – but your rule No. 1, it's interesting to me that you said, "Well, I'm not so disciplined about the entry," which I love, by the way. And I've often thought exactly what you said. You could give a trader a flip of the coin, put him on either side, and he'll come out over time. The point is not that he'll make a million dollars this minute – it's that over time he'll get steady returns, right?

Andy Swan:                 Yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 And so – but your No. 1 rule here was have a data-backed thesis. I don't know if you're – if these are still your rules, but they're out there. So, maybe you're not so disciplined but you've got some kind of a data-backed idea for an entry.

Andy Swan:                 You want to have a reason that you're getting into the trade. And so, when I talked about not having specific discipline around entry, I meant on entry price. I want to know why I'm buying a stock or why – and sometimes why I'm shorting a stock. And it has to be data-driven. I lean on our data in terms of I know that more people are visiting – again, I'll use Lemonade as an example – more people are visiting Lemonade's site. I know that more institutions are looking at Lemonade in terms of partnering for insurance. And so, I have that thesis and I can say, "All right, as long as that's true, then I have at least a decent reason for being long this stock. And if that reason changes, I'm going to have to get out." If the data moves against me, I'm going to have to get out, but I've got a decent reason for this. And as long as my thesis is true, I'm comfortable in the trade as long as it doesn't move against me too much.

                                    So, I want to have something that is probably true, data-backed before I get in, and that has to remain probably true and data-backed throughout the duration of the trade. And so, that's kind of my No. 1 rule, is you've got to have a reason for getting into this. I see a lot of traders, they'll [say,] "This is moving. That's moving. I'm going to do that. Silver is going to keep going from $120 to $150. I'm going to do that. I read this tweet. Somebody said this is going to happen, so I'm going to do that." That isn't data-backed. That isn't a real thesis for getting into something. That's just greed. And that's probably going to tear you up.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. But again, those are crazy reasons to get into a trade, but I feel like you – if you did that, you could still manage your way through it. It's crazy. Where people go wrong with that – this is worth talking about, isn't it? Because you and I both know that the risk management is the thing, right? The position sizing and the risk management, that's the thing. We always get here with all traders. This is like the – one of the great lessons of the Stansberry Investor Hour podcast. We come to this moment where we say it's not about entry and making a million dollars a minute. It's about discipline over time and risk management.

Andy Swan:                 Yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 So, when you say, for example – let's see. What am I thinking here? I'm thinking that, for example, when you say determine in advance when you – how you will prove your thesis wrong, are you talking about the market proving you wrong? Or are you talking about the fundamentals proving you wrong?

Andy Swan:                 Really both. And I think the – when I talk about the fundamentals – so, there's two ways for my thesis to be proven wrong. Let's say for example I think Richtech Robotics, ticker symbol RR, a stock that we love, I think that they're starting to get inroads with enterprise-level accounts for their AI robots that are going to replace the hotel cleaning ladies and the Starbucks baristas. And so, that's my reason for getting into the stock.

Dan Ferris:                 Wow.

Andy Swan:                 First of all, I need to see over time – and now I'm in the stock. I need to continue to see data showing that in terms of LikeFolio data that more and more people are visiting this website, more and more people are talking about these robots, more and more – we're seeing the signs of real adoption. No. 2, I need to see that that adoption is translating into financials for the company. That takes a lot longer time – three, six, nine months – but that can happen, too. And so, I need to see that start to materialize. Either one of those fails, then my trade has failed.

                                    The other way that my trade can fail is by simply saying, "All right, when I got into this, I thought support was at $2.90. And that's a whatever percentage drawdown from here, a risk I'm willing to take for my position size. If it breaks under $2.90, then that reason for being in the stock is out." So, there's three different ways I could be tripped out of a trade and only one way I could continue to hold it, and that's all the things that I think are true remain true.

Dan Ferris:                 I see. Wait a minute. The three ways are technically and –

Andy Swan:                 Yeah. Price.

Dan Ferris:                 Price.

Andy Swan:                 A support level fails. It hits a maximum loss level of mine.

Dan Ferris:                 Right.

Andy Swan:                 The second is our internal proprietary data says that what we thought was happening with the consumer is no longer happening. The website visits are dropping. People aren't talking about this product anymore.

                                    And then the third is whatever is happening is not translating to Wall Street reporting results the way that we thought and –

Dan Ferris:                 Got it.

Andy Swan:                 Yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 Very interesting. That's a substantial bar, actually, isn't it? Because you can get 2 out of 3 – I would imagine you could get 2 out of 3 of those on the regular.

Andy Swan:                 Yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 Right? But all three of them, to keep going and to really get you into it a big winner, that's a high bar.

Andy Swan:                 It is a high bar and that's the – it's one of the reasons why – the other thing I'm sure you guys talk about, I'm happy to talk about is on the other side of the coin, you talk about risk, but on the profit side I think the biggest shift for me as a trader and as an investor was to refuse to take profits too early and to let some of my best trades, some of my investments just continue to compound. And there's not – it doesn't happen often but I've gotten to the point on a few positions now, like Tesla, where an intraday move can be larger than my original basis point, my original basis cost, and that is an unbelievable position to be in. And you can only get there by refusing to take profits and sticking with something for as long as it continues to work and allowing some volatility to drive you crazy throughout the process. So, I think that risk control is really important and I think that profit, not restricting your profits, is also extremely important. If you want to really win big, I think that's very important.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, man.

Corey McLaughlin:    That's interesting because – yeah, and we talk about that a lot, too – well, we've talked about it recently and Dan wrote about it, profit – taking profits in respect to silver and all kinds of other things that we've seen move higher lately. You talk to some people and they'll say, "Once a stock doubles I'm trimming so-and-so percentage," 50% or something. It sounds like you're not in that ballpark? You've – or do you have some form of that?

Andy Swan:                 Well, I'm not but it doesn't mean it's wrong. I think that everybody has to have their own approach. The other thing I tell people when they come to me and they start talking about trading, if I'm sitting at a bar with someone and they're talking about trading and their rules and so on, and I'll say, "Look, your rules have to match your personality. You have to be able to do this. You have to be able to execute this. If it's a – if it's completely antithetical to the way that you think about the world and your psychology works, then you're not going to have the discipline to stick with this." And so, it has to be within your personality zone. So, what's right for me doesn't mean it's right for everybody else. I can handle 50% swings in Tesla from 2017 till now. There's a lot of people, tons of people that cannot do that. And that's fine. So, you have to know where those risk parameters should be. And so, I'm not saying any hard and fast rule for anybody, but you need to have rules.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah, that's the important thing, to have something, not just firing off trades from tweets or deciding to panic-sell and FOMO buy and all that stuff. Yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. Right. So, that's another one of your – just looking through your rules, you sort of know where you're going to exit. Know the whole – it's like you know the whole trade before you enter at all. You have a plan. Plan your work, work your plan. I think that's what we're really – that's what the three of us are counseling our listener on here. We're saying you don't just get a good idea and then go buy it with everything you've got. There's a whole systematic way to think about doing this.

Andy Swan:                 And just – sorry to jump in, but if you look at what's happening in especially the crypto markets right now, and I think it also spilled over into the metal stuff a little bit, and it's – we've got a bunch of people with a decent amount of money entering markets with 20X, 40X leverage. And they're FOMO-ing up and down and it's creating these liquidation cascades in both directions that make the markets just look like complete amateur hour. Like, how in the world could you ever invest in this stuff when it can move 25%, 30% in a day? And it's all just these cascading liquidations that are coming out of Asia, the U.S., etc. It's a really dangerous time. So, I think everybody's – you really have to expand your volatility window in terms of what you expect moving into a trade until we get some of the – a lot of these degenerate leverage traders out of the market. They need to blow up their accounts so we can kind of get back to normality here a little bit.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, somebody tweeted about people buying precious metals because they're less volatile for – they were making fun of the idea that they're less volatile than bitcoin or whatever. I'm like, "Well, maybe not always." I mean, 38% one day is –

Corey McLaughlin:    They're working their way through the risk scale.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. And I think personally, I have to say I think that what has hit gold and silver, I think it's coming for base metals. I think it's coming for copper for sure. I think we're going to –

Andy Swan:                 It seems like copper's gotten pretty crowded, just based on what I'm reading. Yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 Yep. If it knocks off 20% in a single day, it wouldn't surprise me at all, is what I'm saying.

Andy Swan:                 Totally agree.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah.

Andy Swan:                 Totally agree.  

Dan Ferris:                 So, I think that the – just the excitement can go anywhere because anybody on Robinhood can buy anything. You can buy – through some kind of ETF mechanism usually you can buy futures and anything. And then people – and you're right, people don't understand it. They're using massive leverage and they're just – they're virtually gambling. It's a – it is a strange time. It's a very strange time to be in the stock market. I wonder if we would be saying this in the '80s or the '90s. Would we be saying, "Oh, this is a strange time"? Maybe if it were –

Andy Swan:                 I think people were saying it in 1999 and 2000 and I just wasn't trying to hear it.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, that's right. They were. They were saying in October 1987, too, I'm sure. All right. So, maybe it's just – maybe it's always pretty strange, but we just don't realize it.

Corey McLaughlin:    New ways. New ways of doing the same thing. Yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 That's right. Yeah financial innovation, right? It's just like we've –  the number of – the sheer number of products has exploded, hasn't it? It's just – it's so weird. What do you make, Andy, of a 3X leverage on a single stock as an ETF? Like, I – here's what I have trouble with. There are people sitting around thinking this stuff up who don't say, "We really shouldn't sell this."

Andy Swan:                 Right. Right. And there are exchanges sitting around thinking "We probably shouldn't approve this."

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah.

Andy Swan:                 I don't even blame the product creator because I think everybody's out trying to make a living and they're not lying about what they're doing. But I think at some level, if you're going to put something on your exchange or on your platform for people to buy, it should at least not be poison. And these 3X levered ETFs, you look at these – you look at the charts over time and they just all – the gravity's right to zero for all of them. They claim to be intraday products, but the way that they're actually marketed to people is "This is a way to triple your exposure to this great stock Tesla or this great stock, etc." And it's just – it's bad.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, that's right. Today. You won't triple it if you hold it through to tomorrow. Right?

Andy Swan:                 Right.

Dan Ferris:                 It's like, "Oops, we forgot to tell you something." Anyway, I just – that kind of popped into my head because we got to talking about whatever. But – and just I was also thinking in the back of my mind, yeah, it's weird silver trading like a meme stock or a crypto or something. It's just – I never saw that coming.

Andy Swan:                 No. It was – that was – and it may not be over, so I hate to use past tense because sometimes –

Dan Ferris:                 Right.

Andy Swan:                 If you remember GameStop, when it went from whatever it was, $13 to $550 or something like that, there were several times in that process where I probably started using the past tense of the run that it had. And the first time was probably about $22 or $25. And it still had another 20X to go. And so, sometimes you can think that these things are over, and they're really just catching their breath and getting a new wave of people interested and liquidating the old. And so, yeah, that – but what we did see a couple of weeks ago in late January, early February was unbelievable. Silver and gold moving trillions of dollars – I think it was trillions of dollars of market cap in a single day. It just – mind-blowing.

Dan Ferris:                 Wow. That is mind-blowing. I didn't know it was that much. And I would amplify the point and use GameStop as the example. If you look at the market cap and where it is and where the chart is today, it's still way elevated versus before the – maybe a year before the meme stock [went] higher. So it was a buck or something. It was nothing. And it's still – and it – and after the initial spike there were a few more. It wasn't – it was not over. It doesn't even look like it's over now. Just because it's still – it's classic Soros reflexivity, right? The market action has changed the fundamentals of the company and they raised equity and did whatever they did. I mean, bizarre. Absolutely bizarre.

Andy Swan:                 And I'm glad it worked because I also just – you just have to give credit to the guys that were literally sitting there on Reddit and identified this opportunity and basically overtook the company and forced the executives of the company to be successful. And [they said,] "Wow, we can raise money? Well, OK, we should raise money. Wow, we've got a billion dollars in the bank now? We're not going bankrupt anymore? This is fantastic."

Dan Ferris:                 That's right. It just happened. Yeah.

Andy Swan:                 It's amazing. It was an amazing thing that happened. And they're probably – and just like you were saying, Dan, I think that they are still elevated versus those levels. The company has changed, but what's still in the back of people's minds that saw that or more likely missed it is that next time there's any hint of any short-squeeze type of rally in the markets, GameStop stock will still be top of mind for that and will still be one of the ones that people lean into because of the run that it had before. So, you've kind of just got to keep that on a watch list, I think.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, speaking of those 3X levered charts, have you seen AMC lately? That was not top of mind anymore.

Andy Swan:                 No, no. That one's – that's a – yeah. It can go the other way, too.

Dan Ferris:                 It can go the other way. That's right. There you go. All right. So, do you got any – we've been good at teaching our listener how to fish. You got any fish that you want to throw their way? Anything you really like right now. Any trades, any stocks that you'd like to share?

Andy Swan:                 Yeah, I'm thinking of the world – and it's everybody's talking about it. Everybody already knows that AI is changing the world. I'm not sure that people truly understand how much and how fast that's happening and how much that's accelerating. And so, everything that we – that we've been thinking about lately has been AI-related, but not necessarily – I'm kind of tired of the Nvidia type of play and the chip plays. I'm thinking more about next steps. And so, we continue to love AI infrastructure buildout because we think the world's always going to need more power. I don't know that there's ever been successive decades where you didn't need more power than you needed before.

                                    So, we got into Oklo – or is it "Ock-low"? Oklo?

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. Yeah.

Andy Swan:                 Really nice entry there and starting to really like it again on some pullbacks here. In terms of agentic AI, I already mentioned Lemonade, the from-the-ground-up AI insurer, ticker symbol LMND. They got a partnership now with Tesla that I think is going to really change both of their worlds in a really positive way. And then we're also just getting really, really hot into the space trend. I think what Elon Musk is doing in starting to put these data centers into space, and you're starting to see – and I use "space" very loosely because it's orbit, but it's – but you're shooting things up into the sky that can be computing for you. And that's an interesting use case of putting things into orbit that did not exist before. And so, we love that a company called Planet Labs, ticker symbol PL. It's basically the Bloomberg terminal of Earth data. It's up 75%, I think, since our report in October. So, those are some names we like here. It's all kind of AI-related, tangentially AI. And I just – I feel like we're at the second inning of the railroads being laid and there's still a whole lot of money to be made.

Dan Ferris:                 All right. There was a – my wife and I saw a movie, I don't know if we watched the whole thing. It wasn't that great. A movie, I think, if my memory serves me, called Heart of Stone with Gal Gadot about the – I think it was called – the heart was the data center in orbit over the earth.

Andy Swan:                 Really?

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, that was at the center of the whole plot.

Andy Swan:                 Wow.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. So, I don't know. You might want to –

Corey McLaughlin:    Elon's making it a reality.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. And here you are talking about it. I'm like, "Wow. How come I didn't know this was real?"

Andy Swan:                 Yeah, you start to wonder how much of our entire reality is built on the back of fiction writers from 20 or 50 years ago.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. That's right.

Corey McLaughlin:    It is interesting. With those – I don't know, with one of those stocks in particular, how do you make the jump from consumer patterns or behavior, what you're seeing in data to, I don't know, say, an Oklo or a PL or a Lemonade? What do you kind of look for –?

Andy Swan:                 Yeah, because there's not really consumer activity around those companies. So, that's a great question. So, that's where started to really lean on – the Google search data is good. The website traffic data, if you're looking at the right sections of the site, if you're looking at traffic to the proper section of the site, it can be very telling, because that's where a lot of due diligence of partnerships, of build-outs, etc., starts from. So, one of the reasons we caught Oklo fairly early wasn't just the thesis of the world's going to need more power and they have a great product. We actually discovered it because we saw so much more interest in the key sections of their website that talked about how to contact them and how to deploy these at your site. And so, that's the way that we look at it. You've got to be careful. You can't just move on the first – it has to be a sustained type of thing, but that's the way we think about those things. Because you're right, consumers are not talking about installing an Oklo instance in their backyard.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah, but that's – no, but that's really smart what you're talking about. It's the same idea, just applying it to – not everybody can figure out how many times people are – or how often people are contacting Oklo. So, that's valuable, for sure.

Dan Ferris:                 Do you have a current example that's more of a straight consumer-type play?

Andy Swan:                 Yeah, I really love – we really love Hims & Hers Health. I know it's been beaten down really badly. Ticker symbol HIMS. That – the loyalty that people are showing to that tells me that it's kind of like Chewy was in 2018, 2019, where if they get a tipping-point moment, then every one of those customers that they bring in is going to probably remain a customer for a very long time and it will be extremely profitable. So, that means they can pay more to bring customers in the door. And you have to be able to weather volatility in the stock, as we're seeing recently, but that's one we definitely like. We definitely like On Cloud Running – ONON. That's one we've been on for quite a while. Again, it's the combination of more and more people discovering the brand and expressing extremely high happiness with their purchase, which tells us that they're going to be repeat customers that the company can count on going forward. So, those are two that the consumer data for us is just absolutely popping.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. And what do the current financials look like for those? Are they losing money and just nothing that you would fundamentally be attracted to?

Andy Swan:                 I don't have the data in front of me on the fundamental outlooks. What I'll say is I think Hims & Hers is probably losing money. I think that they're –

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, it was the last time I looked at it, like months ago. Yeah.

Andy Swan:                 Yeah, I think On Cloud is probably profitable if I had to guess, but I don't have the data in front of me. I don't want to speak out of turn. But from our data perspective, consumers are flocking to them.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. And what I'm thinking is you guys had your epiphany moment when you said, "Hey, man, we're using this tool all wrong. We're going to pick stocks with it." The – what I've seen with small mining stocks and all kinds of things is there's this moment when it goes from – a moment could be months – when it goes from everybody says it's going to lose money and it's not going to work to cash flow positive, gap profitable, and it's a rocket ship. It's an absolute rocket ship for – if that process takes two or three years, you're multi-bagger returns in those two, three years.

Andy Swan:                 Yeah. And that's what –

Dan Ferris:                 And your system sounds like a good way to find that stuff.

Andy Swan:                 Yeah, it is. That's what happened with Tesla. There was forever. I can remember when I was first buying Tesla, you couldn't go on any investing site and not hear about how they were about to go bankrupt.

Dan Ferris:                 Amazon, too. Yeah.

Andy Swan:                 Amazon.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah.

Andy Swan:                 Netflix was that way for a while. All these – all the really big ones, they started out losing money, and they started out losing money hand over fist, but they continued to bring in new customers that were telling their friends about the product and were creating viral feedback loops of positivity for the product and for the company. And so, I think that's – if you can find those, it's like every venture capitalist's dream. And – but it's what every venture capitalist hears in every pitch they hear, is "We're going to lose money for this long and then it's going to go like this and we're going to see the hockey stick." Well, some companies do pull it off, and if you can buy into those and get into those you can be part of a 10X, 100X venture-capital ("VC") type of return.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. And yet, I feel like the venture-capital guys, though, they're way earlier, right? You're – you are looking at public companies and they're doing startups and stuff. So, they don't get the benefit. If they could find a way to do what you do, we'd all be venture capitalists.

Andy Swan:                 Right.

Dan Ferris:                 Who's going to buy this thing? Well, 300 million people just said they'd love to have something like that, but they don't because nobody offers it. Boom. That's my next VC bet, right? But as it is, it remains – that business remains, like, 100 bets and good luck.

Andy Swan:                 Yeah. That's a tough one.

Corey McLaughlin:    Good idea, Dan. Maybe we should do that. We should do that. I'm curious, are you able to pull any macro observations out of what you do? For example, we talk about this – everybody's waiting for spending to fall off here, or it has been for a long time and it just hasn't, at least overall. And then you have a lot of discussion over the "K-shaped economy" and different levels of income levels and whatnot still spending, others not as much as they used to. Are you able to glean anything on that front? And what do you think about the state, if you do, of the overall economy right now?

Andy Swan:                 Yeah, I think that we can and we do – it's not as robust as our individual company consumer data is and it's not as leading. I think it's not as uniquely valuable. There's not as much edge there because what we see is generally what a lot of other people are seeing in terms of macro stuff. But I will say when we look at the companies on an individual basis and we say – OK, if we had to say one thing that is true about the entire set of 500 consumer-facing companies that we truly cover, I would say that for the past six to eight months the one thing that's probably true about all of them is that if they sell their goods or products to people that have a lot of money, they're doing very well. And if they sell their goods or products to people that don't have much money, they're probably not doing well. And so, that reaffirms the K-shaped economy. I think that generally speaking, the whole market's underestimating how powerful the top portion of the K-shaped economy is, how much money that demographic has to spend and is willing to spend and is almost forced to spend because there's no real return in saving. So, that's extremely powerful. So, that – we see that – when we start looking at the companies as a whole, it starts to tell a story. And that story of the K-shaped economy kind of keeps slapping us in the face.

Dan Ferris:                 In much the same way that you described the way people don't appreciate how much AI is changing things. So, these are two instances of – and I'm sort of underscoring this for our listeners, two instances of how you think. This is how you're looking. What's underappreciated? What's happening? We know it's happening, but maybe we don't appreciate it so much. So – and having that view means I know which – or I have a better idea which trend is more important. And obviously you're backing it up with lots of data but that's – that basic thought is valuable when you get it right. It's really good.

Andy Swan:                 Yeah. Yeah. And again, I'd have to be – I'd have to see data to show me that I'm wrong at this point because it's been right for six to eight months. So, I'm going to continue to ride that. I'm not going to try to predict when the K-shaped economy flattens out or when the top half of the K-shaped – or top 10% that's driving the top half of the "K" is going to peter out. It's just not yet. I know that right now. So, that's what I'm going to continue to play.

Dan Ferris:                 Cool. All right. I'm going to ask you my final question now, which is the same for every guest, no matter what the topic, even if it's a nonfinancial topic, same identical question. And the question is simply – it's for our listeners' benefit – if you could give them one thought, one takeaway today that you'd like them to take away from this, what would that be?

Andy Swan:                 It's the same answer I have for my son and his friends who are starting to become entrepreneurs. It's the same mentality I have for investing. I think the No. 1 thing to keep in mind is that the amount of wealth that can be created is infinite and that there is no limit to how much these companies can make you. There's – if you're an investor. There's no limit to how much money you can create and make as a entrepreneur or as a business owner. So, I always try to just challenge people to just think far bigger than the normal confines of life. And I don't want to get preachy, but I think it's important to understand that there are no limits to wealth creation. And that applies to investing. It implies in entrepreneurship. It implies just in your personal life as well. So, that's my primary message to people is let's think bigger. Let's think about multi-baggers if we're talking about investing. And let's talk about – and let's think about the ways that we can make the world a better place through both our investing and what we create.

Dan Ferris:                 Awesome. I would say preach, brother. Go ahead. Preach away.

Corey McLaughlin:    Fire it up.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah.

Andy Swan:                 Yeah, and I do want to – I have to get my plug in here, if you don't mind.

Dan Ferris:                 Absolutely.

Andy Swan:                 We did just release a phenomenal report on what we consider a big next wave AI-driven health tech boom. We call it the WHOOP effect. It's a free download for anybody that wants to get it. Just go to stocktradesmith.com and you'll be able to download that for free. It's got two stocks inside of it for free and we just want to get people involved in thinking about these next waves and how AI can take every industry to a whole new level.

Dan Ferris:                 Stocktradesmith.com.

Andy Swan:                 Yeah, yeah, hit that up.

Dan Ferris:                 All right. Great. Andy, thanks for being here. I had a lot of fun talking. I'm glad we just freeformed it and talked about whatever. It was a lot of fun.

Andy Swan:                 I agree. I love to talk to you guys any time, especially about trading and get a little bit more – a little bit less of me talking and a little bit more learning from you guys as well. So, hopefully you'll have me back sometime to do that.

Dan Ferris:                 Well, I love to hear myself talk, so I will definitely be taking you up on that.

Andy Swan:                 I love it.

Dan Ferris:                 All right.

Corey McLaughlin:    All right. Talk to you again.

Dan Ferris:                 Thanks a lot, man. We'll talk to you again soon. Yep.

Andy Swan:                 Thank you.

Dan Ferris:                 I like that guy. We're going to have him back on soon. I like him. He's smart.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah, a lot of lessons there for sure, just that everybody, I think could use, Trading – I mean, even long-term investing, just having parameters of what you're trying to do. But it's interesting what their – what he does, finding data and then unique pieces, unique observations and then using that as a way to find companies and get the companies, whether they're worth buying or trading or not. So, yeah, that was fun. I really was interested in his – that last comment there about the K-shaped economy and just – that's what we're seeing, right? And so, to hear him say it the way he did – well, that's what I'm seeing, and to hear him say it the way he did, it's about companies that sell to people who have money are doing fine. Everybody else, not so much. It's very simple in that way. And I think it's true. So, yeah, that was fun.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, and I like the framework of thinking K-shaped economy is a trend. It's a real trend. It's in place. People don't appreciate it enough. AI is huge, huger than you think. People don't appreciate it enough. That's valuable because that – it serves as a razor to all the things that might not be as solid of a trend as you would think, as you would like them to be, right? It's intellectually, actually valuable and it helps you focus your mind on where the money in the market is going to be in the next several months. Simply put, it's a good way of looking at things.

                                    And I've got to tell you, I'm jealous. I use AI for all the fundamental kind of stuff that I look at in companies and I just pile documents into a folder and point AI at them and query it in all kinds of different ways and ask it to do all kinds of things that I do as an equity analyst. But I mentioned Chris Camillo, and now we've talked to Andy, their ability to point their software at these – all this information on places like Reddit and X, Twitter, and find out what people are doing now that might not be in the market, man, I have serious envy of that skill. I want to learn how to do that because it sounds huge. It sounds like you could – there's a lot of predictive value in that data, a lot of huge trades just sitting there waiting for somebody like Andy or Chris to find them. So, I'm glad I know Andy. I'm going to become his best friend and have him teach me how to do that.

Corey McLaughlin:    Feeding you tickers.  

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. All right. Well, that was a lot of fun. That was a fun interview and a fun episode of the Stansberry Investor Hour. I hope you enjoyed it as much as we really, truly did.

Announcer:                 Opinions expressed on this program are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Stansberry Research, its parent company, or affiliates.

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