Welcome back to happiness isn't brain surgery with Doc Snipes practical tools to improve your mood and quality of life We're going to finish our third and final segment on building resilience in This section we're going to explore the concept of hardiness as it relates to resilience Learn how to bolster your reserves that we kept talking about in the last section develop a crisis plan and Look at how to become your own MacGyver using learned resourcefulness So hardiness is a concept that was proposed back in the late 1970s and in which It was proven that people who have three characteristics commitment control and challenge tend to bounce back or are more resilient from physical health problems like Open heart surgery then other people and they went on in the 80s to do more study to found find out that the same is true for mental health issues. So depression and anxiety and Situations that cause you emotional upset people tend to bounce back from those better if they've got commitment control and challenge But what are those commitment to what? Commitment means big commitment to a various areas of life Resulting in a sense of purpose that can carry you through turbulent times. So There are a lot of aspects of your life your family life your work life your health and fitness life your hobbies your pets All all different things that are probably very important to you So when something bad happens if you can focus on those things that are important to you You can recognize What you also have going for you. There is this setback here this unpleasant thing, but there are all these other Things that you're committed to keeping going keeping moving forward too. So, okay In order to keep moving towards those things, how can I deal with this current situation? So your commitment to achieving your goals your Commitment to becoming the person you want to be can help you look at something bad that happens and figure out Alright, how do I integrate this into the plan? It's kind of like if you're going on a road trip Somewhere and about halfway to where you're going you get a flat tire Well, that's an unpleasant event. It kind of stops you in your tracks for a second But then you're committed to getting to your destination. So you call triple-a or put on the spare tire or do something like that Control is the next characteristic Understanding what is and is not within your control Something happens, you know, let's say with the flat tire metaphor for a moment. That's unpleasant You may get angry at first. It's like kind of put a damper on the plans and it's going to put us behind But you are in control of your thoughts reactions behavior and environment So ideally before you left you made sure that you had a spare tire that would kind of be the environment thing But you're also in control of your thoughts reactions and behavior so you can either focus on how horrible it is how hot it is outside how Unfortunate how late you're going to be and all the negative stuff or you can focus on the fact that well We were able to safely pull over to the side. We're going to be a little bit late, but you know Nothing catastrophic happened here. So you can choose how you look at the situation You can choose what you continue to tell yourself if you continue to tell yourself Angry stressful things you're going to continue to surge cortisol and adrenaline and just drain yourself dry and Challenge viewing the situation as a challenge instead of a threat Accepting that change is a normal part of life. So looking at the situation and going, you know, what this wasn't what I anticipated I Didn't anticipate having to get a new tire right now didn't anticipate having to spend the money But you know what I'm going to drop back in punt because there's nothing I can do about it. So Let's figure out how to make this work There are other situations that we can look at this For example if If you're in a job and you really don't like your job But you're committed to those other aspects of your life keeping a roof over your head and your family and all that kind of stuff So you're like, okay I'm committed to achieving these other goals for right now This job is what's putting food on the table and helping me achieve those goals It's also got a lot of unpleasant stuff associated with it. All right, so there's the commitment Control is looking at what is and is not within your control. Can you change whatever's unpleasant about the job? Maybe maybe not Can you change your reaction to it at least for the short term? Now that you can do you could say, all right, maybe your boss is an unreasonable witch You can breathe and think to yourself. All right, you know, every time she speaks to me I'm going to tell myself something positive And and that's going to help me get through it or I'm gonna remember that this is only a short-term situation And in that situation you do have control over whether you stay at that job So you may choose to change jobs completely which is changing the environment So there are things within your control can they happen as quickly as you want like tomorrow? No You know It may take a little while before you can find another job that enables you to leave the one you don't like But it gives you hope and it is a challenge to help you work toward You know your future goals And then again viewing the situation is a challenge All right, this isn't a threat. It's not going to kill me to continue to work here it's Something that I've got to figure out how to deal with and that's the change that's the normal part of life Normally you would probably prefer To do things one way But in this particular job with this particular boss, you've got to do it some way that seems completely basakwards But that's okay. You can say all right Change is a normal part of life. I need to breathe, you know, I'm not going to get my way on this one And then, you know, when I find a new job, then I can move on so I can endure this for the short term So you've got commitment control and challenge. This helps you handle unpleasant events when they come your way But as we've talked about in the last two segments, you need to be healthy ahead of time. You need to be strong You need to be resilient.  So is relaxation. Why? Why do I have these here? How can those bolster your reserves? Well, your body is either relaxing or it's in or In a fight or flight sort of mode.  It is relaxing. It is charging up. There's nothing draining the battery When you're working And or when you're talking on your phone and you're playing on your phone and doing whatever else And draining the battery Then it's not recharging and even if you have it plugged in is not going to recharge as quickly So you need to take some time out to allow yourself To recharge But what about recreation? How does that fit in that takes the energy to go out and have fun? Yes, it does But again, it's kind of this mixture you have your stress chemicals Your fight or flight chemicals and you have your relaxation chemicals If you're not pushing out those stress chemicals, then how about increasing those relaxation chemicals to help you feel happy Imagine that so you're having this balance And ideally you want to have More amount of a greater amount of time each day that has happy chemicals and calm chemicals flowing through your body Then the stress chemicals And engage in purposeful action to avoid wasting energy You know, there's a lot of stuff that we do that you look back and you're like, you know what? That wasn't necessary This past week couple of weeks i've been sick And normally I do laundry every single weekend and it's just one of those things that I do And last weekend I didn't do laundry because I was just I couldn't do it And you know this weekend i'm getting ready to Do laundry But nobody died there was no major consequence because I skipped a week Of doing laundry in order to take care of myself and rest and recharge So looking at that purposeful action, you've got to balance what you're doing with what's important to you And what your body needs at the moment because some days you're just not going to be able to give a hundred percent Have a crisis plan It's a whole lot better to have a plan ahead of time than to try to figure out something when you're in crisis So know ahead of time write it down. So it's right there When something bad happens How can you get a grip? How can you get control of things for me? I'm an extrovert. I tend to talk it out Other people will go on a run go on a walk if they're more introverted because they need to clear their head Whatever works for you, but since I need to talk it out It usually helps if I have somebody to talk it out with So I have a list of people that you know my common contacts that you know, I can call and just kind of vent if I'm having a bad day That's step one in my plan for emotional regulation Ask yourself does staying miserable serve a purpose You know if you're feeling unhappy Just ask yourself what can I do to not feel miserable or to improve the next moment Another thing you can do if this unpleasant feeling is still hanging on a little bit Redirect your anger or fear impulses metaphorically.   Yeah, this wasn't first. Was it this was second when something happens Your first the first time you realize there's a problem is when you start feeling angry or scared or Devastated. All right So you need to get that feeling under control for half a second So then you can say, all right What is really going on here? This is when you're getting into your wise mind and you can say This is the situation. What are my options? And you can start creating a plan for figuring out how you're going to integrate this how you're going to deal with it and integrate it into Your life because it is what it is. You can't make it go away now Look at what must be done Who can you call on for social support? And what boundaries do you need to set when you are feeling? You know completely overwhelmed or anxious or whatever So these are all things that you need to think of kind of ahead of time What is it that you need When you're in crisis and what is it that you can do to deal with that initial flood of emotions? When efforts to change something are successful then your expectations are often generalized to other situations So if you ever watched the show magai ever back from the 80s MacGyver could take, you know a match book a twist tie from a pack of bread and a bottle of alcohol And figure out how to escape a prison. I don't know how he did it But he was always able to put stuff together and somehow get out of sticky situations Well, normally you wouldn't think of a match book and a twist tie and a bottle of alcohol as really all that significant Well, those were resources that he had. Remember we keep talking about building up resources. So emotionally and and Cognitively you want to have as many resources as you can and in your environment You want to have as many resources as you can. So when stuff Happens You can draw on those resources and go okay. I have all this at my disposal How can I best use it to help me get through this situation? When you're doing that Focusing on previous successes will help you feel more confident and competent. Remember those two C's Look at others who are similar who have succeeded, you know, if they've dealt with other things This is why support groups are so wonderful um For people who have experienced some sort of a loss or who are experiencing chronic pain Because they're able to see other people and learn from other people's strengths and coping skills And elicit positive self-talk and supportive statements from yourself But also from others Get a get a cheering section get a crowd go on that can go you got this, you know, it stinks right now What can I do to help you? And manage your physical arousal Using radical acceptance and distress tolerance skills because if you continue to get emotionally Blinded if you will whenever you have that adrenaline rush, you're not thinking as clearly as possible You're probably going to make mistakes. So if you can control that emotional arousal and just Moment by moment when you feel a feeling except what it is and say how can I improve the next moment? If you feel another unpleasant feeling say all right It's back. It is what it is. How can I improve the next moment?  I'm thinking about it again And okay, you know instead of getting upset and beating myself up for thinking about it again. I go, okay Yeah, that happened can't change it. What can I do to improve the next moment? So when life sucks, what can you do? support others Reach out and try to help others feel better. You can get outside of yourself So you're not focusing as much on what's devastating you at the moment, especially if it's something unchangeable like a loss Take stress breaks You can't focus on solving a problem 24 hours seven days a week You know focus for an hour or two on whatever it is. This is why counseling you do it for an hour once a week Or an hour a couple of times a week, but you're not doing it 17 hours a day even when I worked in residential treatment We had four hours of therapy a day and that was it the rest of it was Dedicated to relaxation recreation and rejuvenation So it's important to take stress breaks and get some fun in there get some relaxation remember your comebacks Because you're going to get knocked down sometimes, but remember the fact that you have bounced back before Identify your strengths and resources. So when life sucks, you go, okay What is it that I have to get done right now? And how can I pull on my strengths and resources to get this done? most efficiently and effectively Take care of yourself physically Even when life sucks, you know, we talked about building resources But when something bad happens, it's easy to either sleep too much or not sleep enough or stop start drinking alcohol Or do things that are unhelpful to allowing our body to make the Hormones and chemicals it needs to help us feel happier and deal with the stressors as they're coming Practice radical acceptance recognizing that each moment is the opportunity for a new beginning What happened happened and now we're past it now what? View adversity as an opportunity for growth I love this when people say it to me right after something adverse has happened, but it's true So when something bad happens go, okay What can I learn from this and What's my next step? practice optimism recognizing what you do have or an attitude of gratitude if you will And focus on small positive changes, you know, if something happens life sucks and You're not dealing with it really well, okay? Well, if you start dealing with it a little bit better give yourself A pat on the back, you know, if you went from crying Six or seven times a day to only crying three or four times a day That's positive forward movement if you went from not being able to get out of bed at all To being able to be up for two or three hours That's real positive forward movement So don't expect to go from being bedridden to running a marathon in a month Focus on the small incremental positive changes That are helping you move forward to get through whatever this tragedy was that made life suck Focus on those things you can control by changing the situation causing the distress if it's possible Sometimes it's not possible You know, if there's a death you can't change that If you are working in a place at a job that's really unpleasant you may not be able to change that There are certain situations that you just can't change when after the last election people were just devastated for months You know, you can't change the election it happened. So you can't Get that get the current president out of office right now Now in the future could you well, yeah So if you want to focus on trying to put a better candidate up against him in the next election that you can do But focusing on changing the election that already happened you couldn't So sometimes you can't change the situation. So if you can't then you step back Control the meaning of the situation the severity the importance and how much you're personally responsible You know in the big scheme of things how much Is this really going to negatively impact your life And what can you do to buffer against that? Once you go through that you're probably going to realize that there are some still some things that are sucky about it And it may have some negative impact on your life And the only thing you can do at at that point once you have tried to change the situation or Controlled the meaning so it wasn't all your fault or it wasn't totally devastating. You're looking at the positives You're looking at what you can control The next thing you can do is control the stress response by practicing relaxation Exercise and I have here verbal or written expression either talk it out or journal about it to try to help get it out so you're not mulling it over constantly and Continuing to tell yourself negative stuff sometimes if you just get it out on paper Then you don't have to think about it Commitment control and challenge are all aspects of responding to a stressor which increase resilience So focus on all those things that you're committed to when something happens along the way Look at it and go. Okay. How can I? Address this situation and keep moving forward towards what's important to me Focus on those things that you can control And let go of the ones that you can't otherwise you're just you know trying to move a house 10 feet by pushing it with your shoulder It ain't gonna do any good and you're just gonna wear yourself out And look at things as a challenge as an opportunity to learn new skills or to figure out something new about yourself Remember that even the best vehicles can't run without energy So to be as resilient as possible you must take care of yourself and have energy in your proverbial reserves When bad things happen accept that they are without fighting or telling yourself what should or should not happen And just stop and say okay What now how can I improve the next moment? When answering the what now or how can I improve the next moment question? Remember your goals and values and choose actions and reactions that move you closer to those things And people which are most important to you instead of Saying okay, what now well, I need to escape. I need to have a drink Well, does having a drink get you closer to those things and people that are important to you? Probably not So this comes to the purposeful action. So commitment control and challenge Ask yourself When something bad happens What's the next step to get me closer to my goals? And choose those actions that do get you closer to your goals If you like this podcast, you can subscribe on your favorite podcast app Join our facebook group at docsnipes.com slash facebook or join our community and access additional resources at docsnipes.com


presentation of TFNN. The Tom O'Brien Show is produced every business day. Tom takes your phone calls toll-free at 1-877-927-6648. Internationally at<PHONE_NUMBER>. Let's go to Alan Homassasa. Hey Al, what's going on? Isn't it wonderful? This gentleman here with the gold report might be for the market fell apart, ended up with P-A-A-S. We have a 98% gain in the year. And I mean, we want 99% proof like Irish whiskey, but we had a good gain there. You always told us to do what we feel comfortable with. And if I lose a little bit of money on the table, I will, but I know that I just pocketed $8,000 or $9,000 for two weeks. That's a beautiful thing, man. Now, Tom O'Brien. Welcome, folks. This is Jacob Schupe, filling in for Tom O'Brien. Happy New Year, everyone. It's nice seeing you this early in the year. I hope it was good for everyone. It was nice here at TFNN. Let's take a look at what we have going on today. We have the ES-Mini down about 0.65%. We have the Russell down about 2.32%, after quite a big run-up. The week's proceeding, Christmas holiday and New Year's. NQ's down about 0.89%. The Dow futures down about 0.59%. So we have gold taken down here about 1.29%. Let me see here. The dollar actually on the way up, we were looking at a down target of 99%. The DXY, that was going to bring some very nice buying kind of energy into the markets. Well, we're seeing the dollar kind of move back up. Of course, the 10-year note, the yields went up a little bit today as well. We have still dynamics to talk about them a little bit. Their trading at 1.1935 went all the way up about 1.20%, even a little bit higher, if I remember. Let's take a look. About 1.28, and that was December 14th. So I really think that we're gonna see a big year for steel. Obviously, we had everything going on, with nip and steel, buying US steel. This used to be a lot of demand going on. Of course, we have the, what do they call it, the Inflation Reduction Act that was passed by the Biden administration. That's going to, not really sure how that results in less inflation because it's higher government spending, but I, anyways, the point is, is that a lot of steel is going to be being purchased going forward. I think the same for copper as well. We see if we have the copper contract. The futures here are trading about $3.87. Take a look at southern copper as well. This has done quite well over the last month at least. Really even earlier this year, we had a high of $88.40, just trading down a little bit at about $83.80 right now on less volume than we got on the movement up. I'm personally looking at copper. I think it's, I think we're going to see some good stuff moving forward with it. Disney were trading at $91.70. Apple will talk a bit about them. Trading at about $184.43. Had quite a move down from $199.62 in recent times. Tesla, of course, down 3.58%. What's going on with that? Well, Tesla did actually pretty well last quarter. However, I think there is some sentiment that EV sales won't be as good this year. In fact, I think that's a general sentiment for cars going into 2024. It was a really good year for new car purchases last year. So we might see some kind of declining demand. Tesla's been able to really navigate what's going on in China. They've offered cheaper cars and this kind of resulted in more people purchasing them, which is really good. We have a lot of EV competition, namely in China, you have BYD. That did surpass Tesla in battery electric vehicles. And we might see that going forward. Rivian is doing very well on topping their production forecasts. Excuse me, they're just production in general and the forecasts are looking good as well. Again, for me that is not, the major thing with Tesla is not necessarily selling these cars. That's huge as it is currently. But it's gonna be the software that they use in order to kind of achieve self-driving capabilities, which I think is really the big appealing thing behind Tesla. Take a look at Apple. They had basically declining sales, some issues in China where they're not selling as much of their phones there. Chinese government officials need to buy Chinese made phones. I think you had something like 100 billion wiped off. It was actually pretty intense. 100 billion market cap wiped off. That's more than four in GM's combined. That's the lower valuation by about 107 billion. So again, this is just kind of on lackluster, just performance essentially, right? I think less people are buying Apple abroad. Apple still dominates. One of the things I wanted to talk about too with Apple and it kind of ties into what I like talking about with IT security and stuff like that. Kaspersky, which is a major cybersecurity analyst kind of firm, they were able to find actually a new vulnerability in Apple devices. This was released about four days ago. It's called TriangleDB is the name, at least the colloquial name they've given for the CVE. Essentially what's happening is inside the ARM CPU of the Apple phones and really all Apple devices, there was like a hidden registry that existed. And this was like unknown to anyone obviously outside of Apple and probably unknown to people outside of the dev team. Essentially if you knew the hash for this, you could basically get kernel level, kernels like the most basic level of the operating system. You were able to just basically pull and add to memory. And what this was doing is essentially allowing people, hackers to access all capabilities of the iPhone. So recording, whether that's voice or video, able to send text, able to essentially just do anything on that phone, which was allowing essentially other forms of attacks to happen. Of course, you had Pegasus earlier this year that was developed by NSO Group. Anyways, long story short, there are some actually extremely fundamental issues with the ARM CPU. So this is a vulnerability that is basically built into a lot of these chips. And obviously you can go probably into like tinfoil hat area regarding this kind of stuff. But I think the biggest issue that this presents is you have a lot of major cybersecurity firms, especially like Cisco who use Apple products because they're viewed as being extremely safe. Of course, when you had the San Bernardino tragedy a few years back, the Feds were trying to get into the phone with some kind of back door and Apple said they didn't have one. This is kind of something that looks like it would be a back door. You need to know what you're putting into this hidden registry, but once you do know what it is, you can just get full access at people's phones. This vulnerability was really instrumental. And again, what I was talking about with Pegasus and on a broader scale, what's called zero-click vulnerabilities where the end user doesn't need to do anything. They just are sent some kind of payload and the whole chain of events occur and the phone is then compromised. I would assume in some sense, they'd be able to do something to kind of patch it, but the problem is, is that it exists on the hardware itself, right? This isn't like a software thing where you just patch it. I would suppose maybe they could create something that would, in the software like a new iOS update that would kind of block access to that hidden registry, but regardless, it's a very glaring vulnerability. And this only came out very recently and is kind of being suggested as the cause of a lot of breaches that Apple is having on their phones. Folks, stay tuned, we'll be right back. 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Don't miss out on this opportunity to revolutionize your trading game. Head over to TFNN.com right now to join the thousands of traders who have already experienced the power of Tom O'Brien's award-winning newsletter, Market Insights firsthand. TFNN, educating investors. TFNN has just launched their new trading room, the Tiger's Den. Hosted at Discord, TFNN has been educating traders for more than 20 years, with live programming hosted by a variety of professional traders during market hours. And now they are expanding their reach with the Tiger's Den, available to all Tigers and Tigresses for just $1 for the year. There's no cash or added costs when you join our community of traders. In the Tiger's Den, you can look over the shoulders of Tom O'Brien and the other TFNN hosts while they analyze charts during their live Tiger TV programs and join an interactive trading community with hundreds of members exchanging ideas. Interact with other Tigers and Tigresses as they share trading ideas, news analysis, and discuss the market action all trading day, even at night and on the weekends. The Tiger's Den at Discord is accessible on mobile or tablets as well. So it's always at your reach. To sign up today and become a part of this educational community of traders, just visit the front page of TFNN.com. Call now. Toll free at 1-877-927-6648. Internationally at<PHONE_NUMBER>. Welcome back, folks. Just a quick little break for us there. Give me a second to pull something up. I was reading on the break more with Copper. And I think it's again, like this might be a slow year for EV production, but Copper is going to be used in all of this manufacturing in a way greater amount than it had in the past. That's something for me to research. A little bit later, let's take a look here and I wanted to pull up what happened with Bitcoins. There's a lot of talk going on with new Bitcoin ETFs about to be released. However, you just had about $400 million worth of Bitcoin liquidated, just like today. It was insane. So what's going on with that, right? There's some conversation that the ETF passage, that BlackRock wants to do and so on, may not be accepted, right? Now this is like where you get to this weird kind of, people can be like neurotic online about certain tidbits of information and news. And so this kind of spread in the crypto circles recently and this is what a lot of analysts are attributing, essentially to this massive leaving as exodus out of Bitcoin. But we'll look at it a little more on here. So the likelihood of ETFs passage became less and less likely and the market saw a stalemate, weakness in crypto mining stocks and the sell-off in several crypto related US assets also reinforced market skepticism. I think that there's still so much money being added into it and we've seen a lot of things that the SEC is trying to require are some of these major funds. I think it had to end like December 29th but a lot of these requirements that the SEC was putting out have been being met. We can take a look here of this from an article from CoinDesk, let's take a look. So the Bitcoin ETF looks very likely given these bureaucratic SEC steps and again CoinDesk is, I would say if you're more curious in the day-to-day kind of news on crypto instead of like the big things and kind of more theoretical things that we cover here at TFNN. CoinDesk is pretty decent to look at. Of course anything large, we're gonna talk about here regardless. So there's a recent development support that the Securities and Exchange Commission has been meeting with potential issuers of these ETFs even during the busy holiday season to straighten up final details, structure the creation and redemption procedure and guide issuers to incorporate the latest changes into the revised S1 filings. BlackRock just filed its fourth amendment to his application with the SEC on December 23rd and is expecting to see the Bitcoin ETF with 10 million in, excuse me, today, which is a pretty good sign at least. Obviously I have some meme going here with that. Fox Business reported the final amendments to all spot Bitcoin ETF applications must be done by December 29th. The applications that are fully furnished and filed by, this would have been last Friday will be considered in the first wave. The following indicates the SEC timetable of 13 prospective issuers. You can see this here. I can link this as well in the den afterwards if you're curious. SEC has requested that issuers have their authorized participant agreement describing who will play the key role of creating and redeeming ETF shares available in the coming days. So this all looks decent, right? And these larger companies are basically kind of keeping up with what the SEC is requiring. I think there's a potential here again for a lot of cash inflow into some of these ETFs. I think Bitcoin is still kind of this very strange concept to a lot of people but what they see is that it has such wild price swings and usually kind of selection bias will make people focus on the positive price swings. I guess again today there is just some conversation that they weren't gonna go through and there's not really any vast validity to those comments but the market in crypto responds very quickly to some of this news and it just depends on who's pushing certain kind of information. And so we're seeing a lot of that I would say probably not the entire 400 million because it's quite a bit on a scare. However, that's what a lot of analysts are kind of attributing that to, which is pretty insane. Take a look in some other just basic news. Take a look at Amazon.  However, there is some positive look regarding their ad revenue. So this year it's anticipated an Amazon video ad push is gonna generate about five billion in revenue, which is pretty solid. Ads on Amazon's streaming service will start appearing in North America on January 29th and internationally on February 5th to receive ad free content. You gotta pay basically an extra $3 a month. Amazon will sell about three billion in video ads this year and generate an additional 1.8 billion from prime subscribers who pay the extra fee to avoid commercials. Estimate assumes 70% of prime subscribers will opt out to watch ads rather than pay the fee. I'll say too, I think this, that's not actually a bad analysis. We're seeing a lot of people actually draw out of their subscriptions to stuff like Netflix, like Disney Plus, all these kind of things. And it's just they're raising rates too much on the monthly. And that's where you're starting to see some of these kind of like more interesting dynamics of bundling certain videos and adding small ads every now and then to kind of offset the cost. And we'll talk about that a little bit more. Amazon's advertising business, mostly search and display ads on its web store generated about 12.1 billion in the quarter ended September 30th, excuse me, 30th, about 8.5% of total revenue. The Seattle based company sees prime video as an ideal spot to boost ad sales and profit from the billions it has spent on content including movies, NFL games, and so on. So keeping a look at that, I think that's obviously massive for them. And I do kind of agree, I don't know obviously if 70% is the number, but I think a lot of people will kind of just take this. I know I'm not going to spend an extra $3 a month on that at all in one second I'm trying to find. This was the article here that I was talking about with canceling their streaming services. And again, we were seeing that issue earlier, especially with Disney, right? Like earlier last year, excuse me, earlier at the end of last year. This is more anecdotal with this one individual but the point is that you're seeing an increase essentially in customer cancellation. Okay, about one quarter of you are subscribers to major streaming services, a group that includes Apple TV Plus, Discovery Plus, Disney Plus, Hulu, Max, Netflix, et cetera have canceled at least three of them over the past two years. According to November data from subscription analytics, provider antenna, two years ago, the numbers should have 15% assigned that streaming users are becoming increasingly fickle. I'll say too that I don't, this was the initial, draw out a lot of these streaming services with that it was that they were ad-free, okay? They were ad-free and you could select what you wanted to watch at any time, right? You didn't have to wait for the time slot to come on or anything like that. However, you're starting to see some new platforms coming around where it demonstrates that a lot of viewers are okay with essentially watching advertisements, right? As long as the content is essentially unique enough, right? Give me one second here. The number one thing that I really think of that comes to mind is the platform, Tubi, okay? Tubi just has a lot of really strange films from like the 80s. I mean, even going back to like the early 1900s but they also have some newer ones as well that just don't get all of the big cultural hype. You know, these aren't, again, big famous movies. You have to watch advertisements that are kind of long but this streaming service is gaining a lot of, basically users every day. And so I think there is a level of tolerance for a lot of these users. It more is probably gonna be about being able to select what you want. Folks, stay tuned, we'll be right back. 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Go to tfnn.com and hit Watch Tiger TV. That's tfnn.com and hit Watch Tiger TV. Welcome back, folks. We're gonna talk a little bit about basically mortgage demand, a little bit about what might be happening with grades by the end of the year. We're gonna take a look here first at Toll Brothers. We're gonna get $99. We saw on news that rates were coming down right about December 18th. Just such a high movement. I mean, even really in the beginning of October, excuse me, beginning of November, to get 70 all the way up to a high of 105.91. We're seeing this pull back a little bit. Might have been seen a little bit as overbought. Of course, the market loves pricing in any kind of change no matter how far out in the future that it may be. Let's take a look here. The mortgage demand was actually down 9.4% for the final week of 2023, despite recent drops in interest rates. The mortgage demand ended 2023 on a sour note despite a sharp drop in mortgage interest rates during December. Total application volume was down 9.4% for the week ending in December 29th, compared with two weeks earlier. The MBA was closed last week and the results included adjustments for the holidays. The average rates on the 30-year fixed ended the year at 6.76% lower than when it was two weeks ago, but higher than it was just a week ago. That, however, is still well below the 8% high seen in mid-October. Markets continued to digest the impact of slowing inflation and potential rate cuts from the Federal Reserve, helping mortgage rates stay at levels close to the lowest since May of 2023. The recent decline in rates has given the housing market some cause for optimism going into 2024, but purchase applications have not yet picked up in response. Applications to refinance a home loan ended the year 15% higher than the same period a year ago, and that makes sense as well. The applications for a mortgage to purchase the home ended the year 12% lower. Home buyers are still contending with very little supply and very high rising home prices, and I think this is really what it is. Obviously, you had a lot of people buying, which is, you know, before prices really took off, which is why you had this higher refinancing kind of percentage at the end of the year. Again, prices are still somewhat high. You know, Tom's way more qualified than me to speak on that, but at least like in, you know, general consumer goods, you're still seeing stickiness of prices, even with slowing inflation and obviously lowered rates with that. But let's talk a little bit about what the Fed is, at least speaking on regarding rates. They're saying the Fed officials in December saw rate cuts likely, but the path is highly uncertain. Ooh. The reserve officials in December concluded that interest rate cuts are likely in 2024, though they appear to provide little in the way of when that might occur. And that was according to the minutes that were released today. At the meeting, the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee agreed to hold its benchmark rate steady in a range between 5.25% and 5.5%. Members indicated that they expect three-quarter percentage point cuts by the end of 2024. However, the meeting summary noted a high level of uncertainty over how or if that will happen, which is not. The solid news everyone was buying on. Tell me the news lied to me. In discussing the policy outlook, participants viewed the policy rate as likely at or near its peak for this tightening cycle. Though they noted that the actual policy path will depend on how the economy evolves, official noted the progress has been made in the battle to bring down inflation. They said supply chain factors that contributed substantially to a surge that peaked in mid-2022 to, excuse me, in mid-2022 have eased. And we see this also as well. You're having these kind of short-term issues with shipping as well. I mean, most notably, I think in the Red Sea, just recently Maersk is back kind of pushing stuff through there. What happens when the world basically enters into all these kind of strange and distant conflicts is you really do get a big labor on the supply chain. This obviously increases costs. I mean, I think with what happened with closing some shipments through the Red Sea, there was a good drone attack on some Liberian ship. Anyways, the point was is to move through here, a lot of these freighters were charging up to 12% more, right? And that obviously has a big impact down the supply chain. That's not great when you're kind of trying to deal with a global inflation issue that's occurring. The dot plot of individual members' expectations released following the meeting showed that members expect cuts over the coming three years to bring the overnight borrower rate back down near the long-run range of 2%. So over 3%, I mean, that's kind of like a slower, I think pace than a lot of people might have been thinking. But we'll see what happens. In three years is a lot of time for things to go wrong and a lot of times for supply chains to get bundled up again, but we're hoping that doesn't kind of go that way, right? Let's take a look here. Talk about SIGNA a little bit, just in some more news. The SIGNA group, wow, what a big move here. And then you're trading about 305.62 from a low of about 254. They're in exclusive talks to sell its Medicare Advantage business to Health Care Services Corporation in a deal that could value the unit between 3 billion and 4 billion. Health insurer HCSC from Cross Blue Shield said it does not comment on rumor and speculation. Of course, shares of SIGNA fell about 2% on the news and the company did not immediately respond to a request. The deal is expected to be announced in the coming days. A sale could mark the change in SIGNA strategy for Medicare Advantage segment through which it manages government health insurance for people over 65 and older. And that's a lot to kind of get rid of and I'd be curious of kind of what their logic is behind doing that because it's such a cash cow, right? Reuters has reported in November that the company was exploring a sale of the business SIGNA, which got into medical advantage business with about a $3.8 billion acquisition, excuse me, acquisition in 2011 would be backing away at a time where the US government is tightening its purse strings and it cut the reimbursement rate for health insurance in early 2023. A vast majority of the revenue comes from the commercial business and pharmacy benefits division. So, you know, this kind of segment I think is only about like 5% of its total revenue. So not a major big deal, but regardless, it's interesting to see them moving through that because I would assume that's pretty straightforward to make money, especially when you're dealing with such like a government program like this. Anyways, talk a little bit more about, I think I was just on a kick this weekend. I was on New Year's, I was hanging out with some people and some of them are in like IT and security. But we spoke about this a little bit and it was from 23 and me. There was actually a major breach in this and I like, you know, I'm not really like a big conspiracy guy or anything like this, but I just didn't like the idea of like giving my data to people like this. Well, my sister did it anyways, so I guess my mitochondrial DNA is on the web, but there was a major breach, right? 23 and me tells victims it's their fault that the data was breached, okay? I'll take you through this a little bit and it's absolutely insane and just more examples of what I try to tell everyone here is like these companies don't, if they can get away with losing all this data, right, they're going to. And now of course it's not good for them and it's bad on the face and stuff like that 100%. And there are consequences, but just to kind of show how like much they actually didn't really do anything and how glaringly bad in a real way. And again, we'll talk about this, we're about to go to break, so I don't want to get too much into it. But essentially what happened is they're blaming customers for not changing their passwords. And there's plenty of ways that a large company that's dealing in genetic data to kind of force people to do that in a different way or at least lock down accounts haven't changed. Folks say too, we'll be right back. We'll talk a little bit about this when we return. 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Try any of our great newsletters risk-free with our 30-day money-back guarantee. Just visit the Newsletters tab on the front page of TFNN.com. TFNN, educating investors. TFNN has launched the Tiger's Den. Hosted at Discord, TFNN has been educating traders for more than 20 years with live programming hosted by a variety of professional traders during market hours, the Tiger's Den, available to all tigers and tigeresses for just $1 for the year. There's no catch or added costs when you join our community of traders. Sign up today and become a part of this educational community of traders. Just visit the front page of TFNN.com. This program is brought to you by VistaGold, traded on the NYSE American and TSX under the symbol VGZ. I'm O'Brien. Welcome back everyone, this is Jacob. Shoot with TFNN.com. Again, the more I'm just reading this article on the break, the more I'm like just laughing at it. And really it's just, it's not just so rude I think. So essentially what happened is people broke in, right? 14,000 user accounts were accessed essentially, right? Now what you're supposed to do is, you know, properly kind of sequester different bits of data, right? You can't lump it all together in one big hold because when the walls get breached, well then all your stuff is essentially gone. They were brute forcing accounts with passwords that were known, okay? So essentially there's something called credential stuffing. If you use password one, two, three on all of your devices, right? Let's say you have accounts A, B and C, different websites. You know, I figure out, you use password one, two, three. I'm gonna try B and C to see if that's the same password. That's called credential stuffing, okay? And it's actually a thing a lot of people do and it's honestly not the wisest, right? Anyways, there's enough people to where it doesn't seem like it's an immediate threat to a lot of people, but that's also not a security policy. Anyways, people were brute forced about 14,000 accounts. Now, the issue that resulted from this is that on 23andMe, this is what it's saying here, you have a feature called, I guess, DNA relatives, okay?  Based on these kind of studies. That right there is essentially having kind of front-facing data. So with those 14,000 initial victims, you know, they were able to get the information of 6.9 million customers who were not directly hacked at all. Now, of course, it wouldn't have been the full profile, I would assume, since there must be some things that are private on 23andMe, but that's such like an insane kind of issue, right? And I would reckon there should have been something where you reach out to the person that you're supposedly related with and, you know, they hit accept and that information is transferred that way. But just to have it bare-facing like that, it's pretty insane. So anyways, lawsuits came out being like, hey, you know, what the heck, man? And they said it's basically your guys' fault because you didn't change your passwords and you use the same password or everything. And again, this is the length that some of these companies will go to kind of push any kind of responsibility off them. And it's not really on, okay, it is on the user to be like intelligent with their security and stuff like that, but you can't blame them if nobody's ever taught them these kind of things, right? And there's been no concerted effort by 23andMe to teach people these kind of things either. So it'd be interesting to see how that develops out. Again, I really do think going forward, we're gonna see maybe some more insurance companies that kind of handle this issue or we're just gonna keep seeing more major breaches. Take a look a little bit moving on to gold. Again, we have the gold contract trading down a little bit. Give me one second to pull up the ticker. I wanna talk a bit about Barrick Gold because they have, they're potentially, oh yeah, of course, it's gold. I look at the gold report like every Monday and you would think that I would remember the ticker for that. Anyways, there's some conversation that Barrick Gold might be purchasing essentially quantum holders, okay? Quantum holders was doing copper production, their flagship mine completely imploded and it really messed up quantum holders entirely. They had a massive share collapse, but would say, yeah, it's not a good amount. Save out like even 30% or something like that or more than that. Oh no, even way more than that. Anyways, Barrick Chief Executive Officer approached some of the first quantum's largest investors late last year, according to people familiar with the situation, who asked not to be identified, as they're talking private. Gold giant Barrick has been seeking to expand in copper and I think we're gonna see this a lot with other gold mining companies as well and a deal with first quantum would transform the company and the world's biggest producer. Okay, the smaller Canadian miner has been left vulnerable after Panama ordered the closure of its biggest, most profitable asset, creating a potential opportunity for their purchase essentially. And again, look at these gold companies. If you're one, I'll say, if you're not subscribed yet, you gotta get the gold report. Tom O'Brien released every Monday morning, okay? It is pretty in-depth. There is a bunch of equities, not only in the current portfolio, but better being looked at now. There's analysis on all of them. It's really solid. If you're in a trading metals like this, there's some copper in it as well. But look for these gold companies that are gonna be getting into copper and I'm probably gonna be harping on the copper thing for the year to come. And next time I'm on, I'll definitely have a little better of a presentation as long as it's not like tomorrow or something. But anyways, I'm looking at Barrick Gold for that reason. We're down a little bit, but that always happens when there's conversation of a company buying out another company as well. Move a little bit into biotech. Dan in the Den, if you're listening, check this out. Maybe you can look at it and see if you like it. This is from a company called Roche, okay? Roche Farmer Research and Early Development. One of the big issues that is going to hit us in the 21st century is going to be these issues of superbugs, which are gonna be bugs that are resistant to antibiotics. That's a massive issue. We really overuse a lot of antibiotics. We give them to people. They don't finish, they don't finish their courses. So these kind of pathogens grow stronger in the body. Also, when it's excreted, that goes into the environment as well. And this can make bacteria that would usually not be a big deal for us, make it into a big deal, since there'll be no treatment for it, right? So in a lot of conversations, what the Eastern Bloc has done, we split off in the 1950s or a little bit earlier with discovering things like penicillin, where they were using something called bacteriophages, which was essentially an edited virus that attacks a certain bacteria. The Eastern Bloc has been using that since that branch off to quite a lot of success actually. So there's been some discussion that that's what the West was going to kind of pivot to. And it would be nice, we don't have a lot of bugs obviously that are resistant to kind of viruses. However, there has been some editing going on in some of these new antibiotics, which is pretty interesting. We can talk through this a little bit. You take a look at Roche as well, if you would like to. The ticker for Roche, take a look at ROG. Anyways, going forward here, potential drug offers rare promise in the fight against antibiotic resistant superbugs after it successfully targeted a bacterium that causes life-threatening infections in hospital patients. These superbugs have emerged as a leading health threat as antibiotics and other treatments become ineffective through excessive or careless use. While the drug being developed by Swiss pharmaceutical group Roche has been tested on only one type of bacteria, the way it works suggests that it can be effective against other microbes and encourage much needed research investment in the field. Essentially, this is a quote. We discovered a new way of killing bacteria. You could imagine tweaking the chemistry to address other targets. It's conducting its phase one clinical trials in humans on the candidate drug, which targets bacterium known as Crab. The pathogen which causes conditions such as sepsis and pneumonia thrives in hospitals due to ease of transmission among patients weakened by other illnesses. It weakens the membrane, essentially. It creates a peptide and that peptide weakens the membrane. And this is brilliant. I mean, really, if this works, that drug will be purchased, I mean, without a doubt. Because this is a major fear that a lot of people are running into. Folks, stay tuned. We'll be right back. Are you ready to take your trading to the next level? Introducing Tom O'Brien's award-winning newsletter, Market Insights. Your key to successful active trading. Tom O'Brien, renowned for his expertise in the financial markets, has designed Market Insights to be your daily guide to profitable trades. Tom publishes his daily Market Insights newsletter every market day before the market open, along with updates when warranted. 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When you subscribe, you'll get a weekly report from veteran day trader Larry Pezzavento on stocks you need to pay attention to, and you can trust Larry's analysis. After all, he's got 45 years' experience as a day trader. Larry will also provide daily charts, videos, and data on the key markets that he's tracking. Expect notifications from Larry on market movement you need to act on at any time. First-time subscribers also get a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you're not satisfied, let us know and you'll get a full refund within 30 days of signing up. Subscribe to the Fibonacci 24-7 newsletter today, TFNN.com, educating investors. The reality is that navigating financial markets can be risky. Markets can be chaotic and difficult to understand. Having the latest market advice can help you turn this chaos into a key for creating winning trades. At TFNN, we understand that it can be hard to find reliable market news. That's why each of our market experts offers their very own market newsletter. A must-have tool for every trader out there striving to find an edge in today's markets. TFNN newsletters cover every aspect of the markets so you can analyze the market before you trade. Try any of our great newsletters risk-free with our 30-day money-back guarantee. Just visit the Newsletters tab on the front page of TFNN.com. TFNN, educating investors. Don't forget, you can listen to TFNN live on your mobile device 24 hours per day. Go to TFNN.com and hit Watch Tiger TV. That's TFNN.com. Then hit Watch Tiger TV. Welcome back, folks.  Take a look basically at ASML on the break here. Give me one second. Regardless, ASML is down a little bit. What's happening is the semiconductor kind of war is continuing to go on. They're being blocked from shipping some of their chip-making tool to China, as the headline says. ASML, which makes machines that are critical to manufacturing most advanced semiconductors, was barred by the Dutch government from exporting some of its tools to China. And a statement released on Monday, ASML, said a license for the shipment of its NXT-22050i and NXT 2100i lithography systems has been recently partially revoked. Excuse me, recently been partially revoked. Is it gonna cut it down a little bit? They make the ultraviolet lithography machines, which are really important in producing these wafers. Again, I think we're gonna see more of this. ASML still is in an okay spot. However, if you're gonna get more American entries to the market in lithography, which I think you're gonna see IMB do, this could be, excuse me, IBM, this could be an issue for ASML in the long term. And then we look like more so as well and in a video, right? And some people have been concerned with some of this blocking. What they had been doing is essentially skirting some of these regulations against trading things into China. That got the Kibosh put on it about a month ago. And so what they're doing is they're essentially sending weaker versions, at least at the gaming processor over to China, which I think will help kind of pad some of the loss. So the product page on Nvidia's website for Chinese consumers shows that the new Nvidia RTX 490D has 11% fewer processing cores than versions sold outside of China. RTX and Nvidia's line of advanced gaming GPUs. The company's CUDA architecture is essentially a GPU equivalent for CPU cores, which are processing units. So again, this won't hit them as badly as it could have, but I think going forward, there's a question to be asked, what if such large portions of the global market is cut off if there's some kind of political issue? Folks, thank you so much for joining me. I'm not sure if I'll be with you tomorrow, but we'll see. It's been a wonderful, happy new year and have a great rest of your day.


Hey, what's up everybody? Ricky Caruth here. Welcome back. So the question today is, is Zillow unethical? Is their business model just disingenuous? That's what I want to get into today and I want to hear your thoughts. And yes, I'm talking about their premier agent business model, where literally you can pay, you can pay Zillow a nice hefty amount of money to put your name on other agents listings. That's right. They're going to take your name and just plaster it right on top of someone else's listing. And of course today is Cyber Monday. So there's going to be incredible deals. You can actually have lifetime savings with RedX. RedX is the absolute most incredible thing that ever happened to real estate agents. It is literally how I built my entire business. Use RedX to find property owners, to call them, make friends forever, followed by a weekly email on the same day of the week for the rest of their life. There's absolutely, and I'm asking you right now to tell me if there's a better strategy. Instead of buying leads for hundreds of dollars for a random person's contact information in your market, you can literally pick the exact property owners you want as clients, get their contact information for as little as two cents and just call them up, make friends with them, not even trying to sell them anything.  You want to canvas the market, letting as many people know who you are, what you do and that you're here to help and then build a massive personal brand on the back of a weekly email. If you want to go extremely big in your business, this is how you do it. And for today only, you're going to get massive lifetime savings. I'm going to put a link in the description, guys, go there and take advantage of this huge opportunity. And with that said, let's get into the video. So of course you guys know, I got on real estate back in 2002 and I've tried absolutely everything, everything under the sun to try to build my business, a lot of trial and error, a lot of different things that I tested. And I've been really good at figuring out what works really well and going all in with those things while still continue to test other things to see what else I can find that might work well to add to what is already working well. Okay. This is the kind of mindset you have to have. If you're going to be one of those top 1% of 1%ers out there. So of course when Zillow came on the scene, I wanted to try it. I was probably one of the very first agents to try Zillow leads. So I jumped right on board. I think I got about a six month contract and went pretty big with it because I wanted to see what this thing really did. So I went in, I created an account, talked to one of their, their customer representatives. I got all set up and boom, I started to get leads. I realized after that six month period that this was not efficient. This was not one of those things I was going to test out and I was going to find a winner. So I immediately canceled that account and got right back to what was really working, which was circle prospecting. Circle prospecting is using red X to call property owners. If you want my circle prospecting script, I'm going to put a link in the description for that as well. Since it is Cyber Monday, of course. So since I did that and I tested Zillow out and I realized, no, that's not the route I want to go. I've watched the entire industry evolve because when I jumped on board, this was back in 2011 or 12, something like that. Somewhere around in there, I believe is maybe even earlier than that. Heck, it could have been actually, no, I think it was more like 2008 or nine when I tried this. I can't really remember the exact year, but it was when Zillow first came out and since then I've watched everything come together and I've sat back and I've watched these huge teams. Okay, these huge teams, agents will go out and hire so many agents and then buy Zillow leads for an overly expensive price and then feed those horrible non-efficient leads to their buyer's agents or other agents on their team to get out there and work those leads and then split the commission with them. Now I'm a single agent, so I'm a little biased on this subject of single agent versus team, but when I look at the current climate of how teams actually operate, most teams, not talking about all teams, okay, there's always exceptions. But generally speaking, what you have as a team leader, they bring the buyer agent in, they feed you all these leads and you think, great, I'm getting leads. But what you don't realize is that they're giving you the worst possible leads for the highest possible price and the conversions are so low on these leads, you get out there and what the team leader's hoping is that you get out there, work, work, work, work, work to try to convert these horrible leads and if one goes through, I'll split the money with you. I believe that this is a mirage for most agents that go into those situations thinking this is great, this is not great. You're getting the worst leads, you're getting some experience and there are some positives to this and you're probably going to learn a lot, one thing being that you don't want to be on a team, but at the end of the day, you're not really getting the experience of going out there and creating your own leads and building your own business because on top of everything else, any leads that you get, the team leader is probably going to keep those leads if you were to lead the team. So you're not really building a database, you're not really building a business, you're not learning how to create leads or build your business and when you leave, you can't take it with you. All while paying 50% of your commission for all of this. So I think this is great for some agents who need to get in really quickly and get some experience really fast, but if your team leader that brings you on is really being fair to you, they should tell you the truth and that is hey, this is good to start, this isn't what you need to do long term, let's get you some experience and then let you step up into being your own agent, into being a single agent, into building your own business and to building your own database.  If you're thinking about joining a team or if you need help with anything to do with this subject or any advice, just hit me up on Instagram, I'm still answering all my DMs and I'll be happy to help you. Now to the question of is Zilla being unethical? Are they disingenuous? Okay, I want to reference Andy Florence. Andy Florence is the CEO of CoStar Group, okay? They just acquired Homesnap for $250 million that's set to close by the end of the year and it said that they're gonna be in direct competition with Zilla. In a recent interview with Brad Inman, Andy Florence told him this, the product premiere agent does not resonate with me in any way, shape, or form. The business model strikes me as wrong, so if I go back to the offline world and I'm a residential realtor and I'm excited that I've been selected to list a particular property and I put my sign in the front yard and I'm glad that that sign is there because it's gonna help me sell this home for this family but also I'm very happy that signs out there because other people in the neighborhood will see that I'm active in the neighborhood. In the offline world, competing realtors hammering their signs in the front yard of my client that I have listed right next to mine or obstructing my sign, that's not appropriate behavior so basically what he's saying is that if you list a property and you put a sign in the yard, how would you feel if another agent came through and put their sign right next to it like one inch away covering up your sign? He goes on to say, when you do the same thing in the online world and you sell the ability to put your name on other people's listings, that's not a positive consumer experience. I don't think it's the right thing to do and I also think it's a bad consumer experience because consumers get confused as to who actually has the listing. It actually takes money out of the pocket of the people who actually have the listing and it just feels disingenuous. I 100% agree with that. It happens to me all the time. People are so confused, the public is so confused on who the listing agent really is. Now from day one, just about everything Zillow did did not feel right with me because in the beginning when I was actually buying lease from Zillow, I was looking at it by the end of the six months, I was looking at that situation, I was thinking, wait a minute, they're taking our listings and they're advertising our listings and then getting leads and then selling us back our own leads. He goes on to say that he actually came up with the idea of what Zillow was doing a long time ago, way before Zillow even did it. And he said he thought about it for a day or so and he said, you know what, that's not even right. That's not even, he couldn't figure out a way to make it even feel right. Again, this is Andy Florence, the CEO of CoStar Group that just acquired Homesnap and I'm really excited to see where that goes. And if you haven't watched the video that I released last week about CoStar buying Homesnap, I'll put that in the description as well. Let me know what you think about this subject, Zillow being an unethical company. Is their business model even right? Is it ethical? Is it disingenuous? What is it? I would love to hear your thoughts. And if you're trying to work on your phone script, I posted yesterday an incredible video that not a lot of people watch. So I wanna ask you to watch it right here, but that is where I did a live role play with an agent and gave them advice afterwards. It's very, I think it's gold, so you tell me. With that guys, I'll see you on the next video. Let me know if there's anything in the world I could do for you, if you have any questions. Whatsoever, let's go. I think you need a life for the ideas I'm in the splash zone with the brainwaves I shoot for stars up in Miami street I lay in the sandline in the balesades I'm Ali Baldwin with the angry face


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