Chief Investment Strategist, The Freeport Society
And he’s off to the races.
In his first hours as president, Trump signed executive orders scrapping most of Joe Biden’s policies, in particular his DEI initiatives and his restrictions on oil and gas production. He put a hiring freeze on the federal government. And he somehow had time to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
President Trump – the epitome of Chaos – has come out swinging.
There will be volatility.
Oh will there be volatility.
But where there’s volatility, there’s opportunity.
And no one knows this better than Freeport Society friend and 40 year market veteran and volatility wrangler Jeff Clark.
Jeff and his readers have enjoyed some of the best profits during some of the most volatile times.
During the 2008 Financial Crisis he pointed his readers to…
- 490% gain in 25 days on Palomar Medical.
- 250% gain in 14 days on Silver Wheaton.
- 233% gain in 13 days on D.R. Horton.
- 211% gain in 3 days on Citigroup.
During the 2020 Pandemic Meltdown, he predicted and provided readers with multiple profitable trades to double their money.
During the 2022 Tech Wreck, he warned about the “sharp and sudden decline” before the crash, helping his followers capitalize.
In fact, Jeff has delivered more than 1,000 winning trade recommendations to date, navigating 11 presidential transitions and all the chaos in between.
Through it all, he’s learned that the first 100 days of any presidency is bursting with opportunity.
So today, he’s taken time out of his schedule to talk with me about why we’ve entered the most profitable 100 days of our lives as President Trump races headlong into his second term.
Click on the video below to hear why Trump’s aggressive policy changes and the heightened chaos they will ignite are exactly what your investment portfolio needs this year.
Tomorrow, Jeff is hosting a special presentation where he will tell those watching what he believes is the #1 trade opportunity for Trump’s presidency.
It’s free to watch, so sign up here for a reminder when it starts at 1 p.m. ET.
But the profit opportunities at hand are only half the story.
The other half is a cautionary tale.
The accelerated Chaos that President Trump will champion could burn investors if they’re not careful.
His polarizing personality could trigger some to react impulsively to headlines or surface-level trends, leading to poorly timed trades.
Even stocks often overreact to news and this will be even more true over the next 1,460 days.
So now’s the time to be the most disciplined and vigilant. It’s also the time to grow your wealth.
Jeff will explain tomorrow at 1 p.m. ET how you can juggle all three of those things. Join him for his special presentation, The Most Profitable 100 Days of Your Life.
To life, liberty, and the pursuit of wealth in this Age of Chaos.
Transcript
Charles Sizemore: Hi, Charles Sizemore, Chief Investment Strategist of The Freeport Society here and today we are talking about what is potentially the most profitable 100 days of your life. Now, I won’t tease you with that. Of course, we’re talking about the first 100 days of the new incoming presidential administration. And to unpack all of this, I have the editor of the Delta Report, Mr. Jeff Clark. Jeff, thanks for being on today.
Jeff Clark: Thanks for having me, Charles. How are you doing?
Charles Sizemore: Doing well, doing well. Now, I do want to go back in time for a minute. You and I met in person for the first time last month actually. We went out to dinner in Baltimore, and you had a way of putting something into perfect clarity for me. I made the comment, I’d had a drink or two, and I was talking big that Jerome Powell was the most incompetent Fed governor chairman we’ve ever had. And you corrected me on that. You said, “Well, hold on now, he only appears incompetent if you think his actual purpose is to keep inflation in check. If his purpose is to keep inflation in check, then obviously, yes, he’s incompetent. But if his purpose is just to keep his masters on Wall Street happy, then he’s a model of cool competence.”
Jeff Clark: That’s right. That’s right. A lot of folks don’t realize it, but Powell and the Fed, they don’t work for us. They work for the banks. And I mean, just look at the banks reporting the earnings this week, and it’s been phenomenal. So he’s done a great job.
Charles Sizemore: Indeed, indeed. Now, before we get any further into this, let’s talk a little bit about you. So you’ve retired at the age of 42, right?
Jeff Clark: Yeah, about there. It was the quickest retirement ever. I got really bored because there’s not a lot of people my age that were retired at the time. So it was either figure out how to play backgammon and golf with some of the older folks around here or find something else to do.
Charles Sizemore: Well, I am glad you did because in your career as a financial writer, your second career, I would say, you’ve made a lot of people a lot of money. I believe I read that you’ve made over 1000 profitable trades for readers.
Jeff Clark: Yeah, it’s something like that. Maybe slightly more than that now as we’ve started the new year.
Charles Sizemore: Well, I’d like to think you’re adding to them by the day, right?
Jeff Clark: Well, that’s the objective, right.
Charles Sizemore: That’s why we’re here, right?
So anyway, let’s get down into it. So we’re talking about the, how would I put this? There’s always a lot of shock and awe with Donald Trump. First and foremost, whether you love the guy, you hate him or you’re indifferent, he’s a showman. He’s gotten where he is in life because he is an entertainer. He’s a showman. For him, it’s all about the image, the presentation, the boom. So I would imagine, I think you would agree that the first 100 days of his administration… The first 100 days of any presidential administration are always big. That’s when they really come out strong with their legislative agenda. They have a lot of momentum. They have goodwill from the election. The just day-to-day grind hasn’t set in yet. So this is when the high energy phase of the presidency is. But all of that said, for any president, with Trump, everything’s just on steroids. It’s just bigger. It’s louder. It’s more in your face. So let’s talk about that. What are some of the things we should expect in these first 100 days?
Jeff Clark: Well, I think what everybody needs to count on, and you mentioned it is the first a hundred days of any presidential term is big. Nowadays, they sign a bunch of executive orders and they really hit the ground running and things go crazy. And you saw this right after the election, you had this huge rally of optimism and folks that thought everything was fantastic, and you got this great, what is it? Greed factor going into the market in anticipation of a wonderful first 100 days for the president. And then you had a little bit of reality setting in, and we got this nice little correction as we started off 2025. And I’ll tell you, if you fell asleep the day before the election and you woke up earlier this past week, the S&P 500 was at 57/80 the day before the election, and it was at 57/80 at one point this past week.
And if you’d just taken a very long nap, you’d have gotten up and thought nothing happened. But we know that’s not true. We know that there was an incredible run-up and then an incredible back-down, and now we’re all over the place here. And that’s the emotion that this president brings to the marketplace. He even said it himself, he likes to say things, he likes to do things. He likes to make statements and tweet and do all this of sort of stuff that evokes emotions. And more so than any other president in my lifetime, this president evokes a lot of emotion. I mean, love them or hate him, you have a reaction to pretty much everything.
Charles Sizemore: No, but it’s not a bug for him. It’s a feature. There are presidents that have been controversial, not necessarily because they wanted to be. He courts controversy. He likes this. This is his personality, this is what he does.
Jeff Clark: And that works its way into the marketplace, and you can see it with these very large moves up and down. In the long run, none of this is supposed to matter. In the long run, what President Trump tweets on one day in January shouldn’t matter all that much, but in the short run, stock prices move on, emotion.
Charles Sizemore: What was it that John Maynard Cain said? “In the long run, we’re all dead.”
Jeff Clark: That’s my thought process. When I’m trading stocks, that’s what I’m looking at. And so in the short term, since stock prices are really a function of emotion more than anything else, I pay attention to the emotion. And so my trading philosophy, it’s a reverse into the mean type of philosophy. What I look for is extreme situations where we’ve either gotten way overbought and we’re ready to snap back a little bit, or we’ve gotten way oversold and we’re ready to snap back a little bit. It’s like the proverbial rubber band. You can only stretch it so far in one direction before it either has to break or it has to snap back. And in my entire career, I’ve never seen it break. So I always play, I look for the snapback. So my function is I look at the next a hundred days is I have a president who evokes very strong emotional reactions. And so we’re going to see a lot of that rubber band stretching on both sides, up and down, and I think we’ll have lots of opportunities to trade off of that. I think it’s going to be an amazing opportunity for folks who are watching for it.
Charles Sizemore: Jeff, why did you have to say I’ve seen it stretch and I’ve never seen it break? You’re tempting fate when you say that. I mean, I’m just superstitious enough to never say never on something like that.
Jeff Clark: Here’s what I mean. Obviously we can go back to 1987 when the stock market crashed and people can say, “Oh, it broke back then.” Not really, it way overstretched and then it stretched again the other way. The market will always exist in some form is what I’m saying. Stocks. It’s unlikely the entire market will go to zero. And if it does, we have much, much larger problems.
Charles Sizemore: At that point, you and I aren’t talking anymore. It’s going to be our cockroach that’s left at that point.
Jeff Clark: We’ll be down in our bomb shelter eating our MREs and not worrying about anything else.
Charles Sizemore: I hear you. I hear you. So let’s go backwards a minute. One of the words or phrases I heard you use was that it’s going to be a whirlwind of chaos and volatility. And that stuck with me because one of our themes in The Freeport Society is that we’re living in this age of chaos where everything is bigger, the swings are bigger, it’s a time of upheaval, it’s a time of radical change. And there’s several things driving that. One of course is just technology. We are living in an age of a rapid change of pace in technology where everything is just happening much faster. AI is both a cause and an effect of that, for example, everything’s just bigger, faster, on some sort of technological accelerant, if you will. And then another part of that, of course, it comes down to monetary policy, government. We live in an age in which there’s a lot of money just sloshing around. When the fed kept interest rates pegged at virtually zero for what, 15 years or close to it, that created this massive pool of capital that just sloshes around and it builds up bubbles, it builds them up, it inflates them, it breaks them. The liquidity just moves from place to place. Fiscal deficits don’t help either. Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about these next a hundred days. What stays the same and what changes?
Jeff Clark: Well, see, it’s interesting because what stays the same? If you look at the market, and again, we talked about taking a nap, 57/80 all the way up to here, 57/80 again. I don’t see a lot of major movement in the broad market indexes, but I do see a lot of… Let me rephrase that. At the end of a hundred days, I don’t think the indexes are going to be that much change from where they are currently. I do however expect during that a hundred days to see an awful lot in there. And you’re going to see sectors that folks think are going to benefit from a Trump administration, like the banking sector, like oil and gas, like crypto, that sort of stuff. You’ll see them get these huge waves of optimism where that rubber band stretches way out. And all I look to do is look for extreme situations where I think that that rubber band might be ready to snap back, or you might see other sectors that are not supposed to be all that favorable.
Looking at tanker stocks, looking at, I don’t know, maybe some of the new wave energy type stocks where they’re already, I mean, if you look at them, they’re already viciously oversold. So I’m just simply looking for an opportunity where that might snap back a little bit. What happens a lot of times is people read into whatever the president is saying and they get very optimistic and they think all these wonderful things are going to happen and they don’t pan out, or it takes longer for those things to happen. I think back to President Trump’s first administration where he signed an executive order that said basically any pipelines that we’re going to build here in the US, we need to use United States Steel. And of course, US Steel was a great performer. As soon as he said that, the stock I think ramped up 30% or something.
But folks who bought in at the tail end of that, a month or two later, the stock was all the way back down, it fell 30%. So at the end of his a hundred-day period there, US Steel was roughly in the same price it was as it started, but in between, it had done one of these things. As a trader, you have an opportunity to jump in on those things. Whenever conditions get… Fear and greed are the two major emotions in the stock market. And anytime you get greed that’s gone way off the charts, you’ll have an opportunity to profit on the downside or anytime fear has gone way off the charts, you’ll have an opportunity to profit as that snaps back. So that’s really all I look for. I look for those situations where things have gotten a little bit too far-stretched, and I just want to play the snapback.
And like I said, with President Trump evoking the types of emotions that he does, I think the greed is going to be off the charts some days and the fear is going to be off the charts some days, and we’ll have just a phenomenal chance to make lots of trades and do really, really well. And when I say lots of trades, I don’t mean we’re going to trade 5, 6, 7 trades a day. Nobody needs to do that, but one or two solid trades a week, at the end of a hundred days, you could have a really good result.
Charles Sizemore: Well, no, you bring up a good point there. So if you’re making five or six trades a day, what’s the quality of the trade? You don’t have an unlimited number of good trading ideas. It’s not like a punch card where you only get 10 or something. I mean, there’s always a trade somewhere. There’s always an opportunity somewhere, but you want to focus your time and your energy on the best opportunities. So a couple a week, you’re going to get better quality than if you’re trying to do five or six a day.
Jeff Clark: Well, yeah, that’s certainly the hope. It’s also, there’s only so much that you can pay close attention to. If you’re juggling five or six trades a day, and sometimes it takes a week or two weeks or three weeks for those trades to play out, I mean, you might have 50 balls in the air at some point. That’s just crazy. I don’t want folks to have to sit at their computer constantly all day long. I don’t mind doing it. It’s my passion and I enjoy it, but I understand other people have lives. And so, one or two good trades a week is manageable. Five trades a day, everybody likes it, the idea of it is really fun, but it can get really chaotic. So I try to focus, when I’m making recommendations to subscribers, I try to focus on my one or two best ideas for the week and leave it at that.
Charles Sizemore: Yeah, no, I think that’s solid. I take a similar approach myself. Going back just a second, one of the points you made really stuck with me, and that is, okay, the market really hasn’t moved since the election, right? It had a nice run. It gave up most of those gains. By the time we finish this, it might be up, who knows? But I think one of the takeaways is there’s times to be a buy and hold investor. There are times when it makes sense to just buy hold, drop the stocks in a drawer and not look at them. And there are other times when that approach is just not going to be as effective. Again, over the long term, sure, you’ll probably make money, but in the long term, you’re dead. The long term might be 30 years, it might be 20 years. Who knows?
In the here and now, where we live, buy and hold may not be the best strategy for you at all times. When you’re in a more chaotic environment, short-term trading can actually be less risky than buy and hold. And by that it comes down to position sizing. So in a short term trade, who knows, you might take a total loss, you might lose 100% of your capital, particularly if it’s an options contract, the [inaudible 00:14:13] is worthless, for example. That can happen. But if you manage your position sizes, for example, if you do things like that, then it can actually be far less risky than a buy and hold position. How do you really lose a lot of money? You buy and hold something that falls and falls and falls and falls and eventually goes to zero. That’s how you take losses you can never recover from. If you’re a shorter term trader, yeah, sure, you can take losses of course, but if you’re disciplined, if you have risk management in place and position sizing and all that, then you can control your risk and it can actually be far less risky than long-term investing. So talk to us about risk. How do you manage risk? What kind of advice can you give?
Jeff Clark: Well, you made a lot of interesting points on that. I think what’s important as we look at 2025 and how that might unfold, if you look back at 2024 and 2024 was very much what I call a momentum market. So you had stocks that were favored at the beginning of 2024 that had strong upside momentum, and they held that momentum the entire year. And then you had other stocks that had very poor momentum, were out of favor at the beginning of 2024, and they lost that momentum and just kept falling to the downside the entire year. Typically, following a period like that, you do get a reversion to the mean. The stocks that we’re outperforming tend to pull in a little bit. The stocks that we’re underperforming tend to do pretty well. And following a momentum fueled market, you tend to get a lot more back and forth action.
As things consolidate, we pull in, we pull out, that sort of stuff. So I think just on the surface with 2025 being what I think is going to be a reversion to the mean market, it’s going to be more chaotic than what we saw in 2024 and I think the buy and hold investors is going to have a difficult time. And again, just going back to the day before the election to where we are right now, stocks have done, they’ve gone all over the place, but they’ve done nothing on the indexes so buy and hold hasn’t really made you any money. I like to use options when I trade, and I know a lot of folks when they first hear the word options, they freak out, “Oh my God, you’re talking about gambling, you’re talking about leverage, you’re talking about all this sort of stuff.”
That’s if you’re doing options, pardon me, the stupid way, which folks do, and I had my stupid period as well, and I think most people who trade options will admit that they’ve succumbed to stupidity at some point. But what I try to do is I use options as what they were originally intended to do, which is to lower your risk. That’s what they were created for, is to reduce the risk in your portfolio. And you can give me any sort of stock trade, say, “Oh, I want to go into the market. I want to buy Nvidia.” I can go to the options market and I can create a same sort of trade that will profit as Nvidia goes up or lose a little bit as Nvidia goes down. But I can reduce my risk substantially more using options than I would have in the stock, and I can increase my upside potential substantially more using options than I would have in the stock.
And that’s really what I try to do. If you were thinking, “Oh, I can go out there and buy a hundred shares of Nvidia,” which is what about 140 bucks a share, you could put $14,000 into the stock. What I want to do is I want to go over to the options market, and I’m going to create something very, very similar by putting a fraction of that amount into the options market. That way you have 90 or 95, 99% of your money sitting safe earning whatever interest it is in the account, and you’re using an option, putting in this much of your capital. And if it goes zero, you probably lost more in your $14,000 investment in Nvidia, in the shares, than you would’ve lost on the option trade. And if it goes up, it’ll make more than you would’ve made on the shares. Where stupidity comes in is folks who look at either buying a hundred shares or buying one or two or maybe three contracts, option contracts, instead, they take the entire $14,000 and they go buy option contracts.
That’s crazy. That’s when you’re talking about gambling, you’re talking about over-leveraging, people do it and eventually blow up their accounts doing that. I don’t want that to happen to folks. So I talk about using options as a way to reduce risk and increase the potential return off of it. And we always talk about if you would buy a hundred shares, then you’re just buying one or two or maybe if you’re aggressive, you can buy three contracts, but there’s no business putting the entire… We have an 11th commandment in the option world, in the trader’s world, and it’s called risk not by whole wad. And so what I try to counsel folks on, and probably the number one thing that I have to tell folks is don’t take that entire amount and put it in there. That’s when you yourself are stretching that greed too far. And just as stocks are subject to the rubber band scenario, human motions are subject to the rubber band scenario. And anytime you get that greedy… The market gods are a fickle bunch, and they will usually put their wrath on you at that particular time.
Charles Sizemore: They don’t like hubris. They will punish hubris.
Jeff Clark: You’ll be humbled, yes.
Charles Sizemore: The people that survive in this business are able to keep their ego in check. And it’s not just keeping your fear and your greed in check, it’s also keeping your ego in check, and that’s knowing. And how do you do that? When traders get into an ego problem, it’s because they’re so convinced they’re right that they oversize their positions. And then because they have so much of their self-worth, not their net worth, their financial net worth, but their view of themselves, their self-esteem built into the trade, they can’t get out of it, because getting out of the trade would be an admission that they were wrong, and they can’t do that. So the way you stick around, the way you retire at age 42 like you did, and the way you continue to make profitable trades in the decades that have passed is you keep that ego in check. And the best way to do that, of course, is just position sizing. Don’t get carried away. Don’t get so enraptured by your own genius that you end up taking more risk than you want to.
Jeff Clark: Yeah, that’s entirely true. And it also helps if your spouse keeps you in check and your kids keep you in check. So I might be really, really smart to everybody I work with, but boy, ask anybody in my household, they can tell you other stories. So yeah, you’re totally right. The second the ego gets involved, you really got to tail it back a little bit. And I know it from personal, and most people who trade at some point, they figured this part out. And for me, it was many, many years ago, and I realized that anytime I had a super, super strong conviction about something where I really felt like I got to put a much larger position on, I always back up and I check and I go, “Wait a minute, this is where I’ve gotten in trouble before and this doesn’t make any sense.”
Whereas the trades that I’ve been the most nervous about, the most cautious about, and I’m like, “Okay, I’m just going to take a little taste,” those have always been the ones that have worked out phenomenally well. I shouldn’t say always, right? We talk about never saying always or never, but most of the time it’s the ones that I’m most cautious about that perform extremely well, and it’s the ones that I’m most confident in that don’t do so well. So it helps to understand your own emotions as well as a trader, because you can check yourself.
Charles Sizemore: Yeah. Very well said. Let’s pivot here for a second. So I mentioned that you’re giving a presentation this week, and it’s all about trade in that first 100 days. We’re going to put a link below here so that anyone watching this can sign up for it, and I highly recommend you do, everyone watching this by the way, this is going to be a very good presentation. It’s going to be very informative, this is something that you absolutely want to watch. But give us a tease here, give us an idea of what are we doing? What are some of these opportunities defined in that first a hundred days?
Jeff Clark: Well, I will talk about some of the strategies that we’re going to be using to incorporate that philosophy, that whole reversion of the mean philosophy. I’ll talk about some of the sectors that I’m looking at. I’ll give my number one trade recommendation, I think. The number one asset that you’ll be able to trade around both sides up and down, and we talk about using options in the right way, the smart way, to reduce your risk and to add a decent pop potential to your portfolio. That’s really what options are designed to do. So the webinar is really structured around the opportunity that’s in front of us, maybe not just for the next a hundred days. President Trump’s going to be there for four years. We might have four years of this. My goodness, if I could make a wish, magic genie comes out of the lamp, I got to make a wish, I love the idea that President Trump’s going to be there for four years, because every time he tweets, every time he talks, there is an opportunity somewhere that presents itself in the marketplace, and this is going to be a phenomenal period. So if it sounds like I’m a little excited, it’s because I am a little bit excited.
Charles Sizemore: No. I mean, volatility is an option trader’s best friend, that’s what makes or breaks the trades. That’s where you get the premium built into the prices, is from volatility.
Jeff Clark: It’s not just that, it’s anybody’s best friend, as long as you are prepared for it. See, that’s the problem, most people, when they look at a volatile market, they think, “Oh, I can’t have anything to do with this.” No, that’s where your opportunities are made. We talk about 2008, you go all the way back to 2008, the great financial crisis anybody can make money in a bull market, but in a chaotic market, that’s where you get rich because those are the opportunities. Think about back in 2008, you had the chance to buy Bank of America two bucks a share. You had the chance to buy Goldman Sachs at like 20 or something like that, some absurd number. There were phenomenal opportunities. And folks who took advantage of that did really, really well. Folks who were scared and stepped away, you were out of the game for a little bit, or you suffered what a lot of folks suffered back in 2008. So I’m not wishing the same sort of environment, the same sort of 2008. But what I am suggesting is that if you are looking at the next a hundred days or the next four years, and you’re a little shaken up about what might occur during that time, embrace it. Don’t be afraid of it. There’s going to be fantastic opportunities.
Charles Sizemore: Embrace the chaos. I love that. No, you live by the Trump, you die by the Trump, right? So some of his policies are going to be very pro-business, very, very good, I don’t know if you can say a policy is good or bad. Others are going to be probably… There’s going to be some after effects. There’s going to be some side effects that Trump probably didn’t want. For example, his tariffs. I personally don’t see the tariff thing going well. If he actually does what he says he’s going to do and jacks tariffs up, we’re going to have some side effects from that that we’re probably not fully prepared for. Perhaps a resurgence of inflation. Who knows? Right? But that’s great if you’re a trader, any sort of chaotic reverberations that happen from that, that’s where the opportunities are. So even if the policy creates some shock waves, great. As a trader, we can take advantage of that.
Jeff Clark: Yes. And the market always has a reaction, always has some sort of emotional reaction to it. You can look at Chinese stocks that just got battered as soon as President Trump was talking about… As soon as he was elected and then he started talking about increasing tariffs, look at the shipping stocks that had a horrible reaction initially as well. And then he talked about taking back the Panama Canal, and you saw those shipping stocks just… I mean, look at charts of them, you look at [inaudible 00:25:53] it’s up 25%, the front line up 25%, 30% a week. So you have these tremendous opportunities when the market has such emotional reactions to it. And again, just to reiterate that point, President Trump is the most provocative president that we’ve had in our lifetimes, and I think it is just going to build on itself, so all of these opportunities. You don’t have to be afraid of the volatility or afraid of the chaos, but you can trade that. And those are where your opportunities come in.
Charles Sizemore: Trade the volatility, trade the chaos, embrace the chaos. To our viewers out there, if there’s any takeaway to take from this, it is embrace the chaos. Don’t run away from it. Manage it smartly. Trade it smartly.
All right. Well, again, Jeff, thanks for being on today. I enjoyed this. You’ve educated me. You’ve educated all of our viewers. To everyone watching, I would very, very much encourage you to watch Jeff’s presentation. I’ll be watching it myself. I’m really looking forward to seeing what Jeff’s number one trade is and how to play that. So Jeff, thanks again. And to everybody watching, thanks for viewing. To life, liberty, and the pursuit of wealth. This is Charles Sizemore, signing off.