Show Notes
Dispersion is increasing and the corrections are starting to arrive, and after 3 years where owning the index was enough, this market has started paying the people who actually know what they own.
I've been through enough cycles to know this is where stock picking starts to matter again:
Our longs are up 28% this year and our shorts are down 40%, which puts 68 points of spread between the 2 books. It's all documented and time stamped on my feed, so go check the work yourself.
We were early on gold and the miners, early on energy, and one of the first to call the AI buildout the biggest misallocation of capital in history. None of it was a narrative and all of it was valuation and fundamentals.
That's the Fidelity way, and it's the same one Peter Lynch taught me. 45 years and five crashes since then, and everything I'm seeing says we're just getting started.
So before Q4 starts:
For the next 10 days you can still get The Noble Update Premium at $450 for the year or $45 a month. That's what this year's 68% long-short return cost the people who were already inside.
Founding Membership is $950 and includes 6 conferences a year on top of everything else. The next one is the technicians conference on October 27 and 28, where 20 of the best chartists on the street each bring 3 ideas, which puts 60 actionable money-making ideas in your hands over 2 days.
The conferences alone are worth more than the membership.
Any fool can make money in a rising market. What you're paying for is the 45 years that tell you what to own when the tide goes out.
On October 1 the annual goes to $599, the monthly goes to $99, and Founding Membership goes to $1,200. Waiting 10 days costs you $149 on the annual and $250 on Founding.
It's a market of stocks, and Q4 is where that really starts to count.
Join our journey today:
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit georgenoble.substack.com/subscribe
More from The Noble Update Podcast
All it takes to break the AI picks and shovels trade is order growth slowing from 30% to 15%. That's STILL double-digit growth, but the stocks can get crushed anyway.
Last week CoreWeave's bonds traded at yields around 15%, and the cost of insuring its debt implied roughly a 60% chance of default within 5 years. Oracle's default insurance hit a record high at the same time. That's what it looks like when narratives and dreams run into a lack of cash flow and a mountain of debt.
This is the final episode of our series with Tom Gober. Last episode ended with Tom challenging the offshore reinsurers to show us the $1.5 trillion, and in Episode 4, he shows you which companies are behind it. Just 40 companies account for 85% of it, and the biggest sends $235.7 billion to a single offshore affiliate while holding only $4 billion of surplus, which Tom describes as moving money from one pocket to another, like "trust me, bro, I got this."
Last episode, we left off with Tom Gober about to reveal a secret document he found in a company president’s personal files, and Episode 3 opens with what it said. A CFO in a criminal case was recorded calling these offshore deals “a little bit like morphine,” and Tom explains why: once you start, the hole gets bigger and you need a bigger dose. Here’s what we’re going over in Episode 3 “The Secret Side Letter”: * Tom tells you what was in the side letter hidden behind a reinsurance contract that looked perfect to an examiner, from a case that sent the man in control to prison for 18 and a half years, and you’ll hear what happened when the FBI knocked on his door in Del Mar. * Tom puts the cushion of the entire US life and annuity industry at about $650 billion, and he says more than that sits in secret captives alone, while more than $1 trillion has gone offshore, out of sight. * Tom shows what happened at a big insurance group after KKR took it over from Goldman Sachs, including a carrier with about $3.7 billion in affiliated investments sitting on roughly $200 million of surplus, where a 6% haircut would wipe out its entire surplus. * Big institutions hold more than $500 billion of short-term notes issued through these insurers, and at one of those companies, a legal opinion puts those investors on equal footing with policyholders like you, which Tom says means they’ll see trouble coming first and get to the exit before you do. Tom also names the two insurers he loves, so stay for that. In my world, if you sell a stock through one broker and buy it right back through another, that’s painting the tape, and you’re not allowed to do it because it kills true price discovery. When the same owner sits on both sides of an insurance company’s investments, it looks eerily similar to me. Tom ends this one with a simple message for the offshore reinsurers and secret captives: if the $1.5 trillion is really there, show us.
Our long/short spread widened to 67.4% today, with our longs up 25.9% on average and our shorts down 41.6%.