Even for seasoned Crypto investors who are used to the rollercoaster, the last six months of Bitcoin has been like Kings Dominion on steroids! That combined with the volatility of Gold and Silver made today’s episode a “State Of The Union” address on these Alternative investments. Also, in memoriam to what was The Washington Post, you’ll learn how Steve and Dave were almost the “Woodward and Bernstein” of the Northern Virginia high school journalism scene. Wow, you’re getting quite the diverse Pod on episode 126 of Plan For Life Now!
Steve:
Welcome to Plan for Life Now, episode 126, 126. Welcome to early February. Dave, I was sitting here and I was trying to predict what you were going to title the name of this episode.
Dave:
Wow. I haven’t even come close to thinking about that. I don’t do that until we’re done.
Steve:
Yeah, no, I know. You got to kind of feel it out, see how things go. But I don’t know. I was thinking it was going to have something with Bitcoin in the title, maybe some gold in the title there, something like that.
Dave:
I was actually thinking of stuff along those lines. So yeah. Actually, we never talk about that. I don’t think I ever … The blurbs that I write, we call them the podcast blurbs.
Steve:
They’re
Dave:
Really
Steve:
Good.
Dave:
I never take writing. We don’t say who writes those. I would assume people would assume that I write them if they listen to all these podcasts because that’s just
Steve:
… I think that was a great decision that I made, I don’t know, maybe a year or so ago where I said, “You know what, Dave? You write these. My writeups were adequate, but not particularly interesting or colorful.” And I think yours have elevated it to the next level.
Dave:
Right. Well, actually you said that I don’t like writing these because it takes me a long time and it’s not adding anything. And I was like, I don’t know what I’ll add, but I promise you I’m not going to take forever writing them because at the end of the day- I mean, the end of the day, it’s only a blur. The podcast. But I do have fun actually writing them sometimes.
Steve:
Yeah. And I’ve seen you’re a big fan of the asterisks with an explanation for things there.
Dave:
I am. I enjoy using those for some reason. I saw those. I forgot. Some people just write and they do those little things and I always thought that’s a good … Actually, when I’m thinking about writing it, that will come to my mind and then I will do that often.
Steve:
Right. All right. Well, I made actually a lot of notes to talk about here today.
Dave:
Oh, by the way, this is a total tangent.
For those of you who are also natives of DC, this is a complete bummer that The Washington Post is basically getting rid of everybody because I’ve always, from this area like you are, read the Washington Post, especially the Washington Post sports section growing up forever, lived all these moments, both not just sports, but everything like all of us with the Washington Post. And now the whole thing is being shuttered. And part of me totally understands where all this is going, but I’m not talking about, this isn’t a statement about … It’s more a statement about the times we live in and what a bummer it is that the Washington Post is, I guess it’s sort of going away.
Steve:
It’s very disappointing. And I was actually on, I was one of the sports editors for my high school newspaper, and I took great pride in the fact that the sponsor for the high school newspaper, Mrs. Portwood, Mrs. Portwood compared some of my writing. She said, “This is very similar to Tony Kornheiser’s writing.” And I actually didn’t know who Tony Kornheiser was when she said that. But then after that, I went, I’d read some of his stuff, and since then I’ve come to know who he is very well. And so I was very proud of that, that Mrs. Portwood thought I was at all similar to Tony Kornheiser.
Dave:
That is weird. Do you realize that you and I, we’ve never talked about this. We have something in common. We were both sort of into journalism. I was going to my newspaper, high school newspaper career was derailed because sort of like that. I was totally into the news and the post. And then I was started for journalism class and you wrote for the paper and they wanted me, I did a review of a movie. So I went, it was a Muhammad Ali. I don’t even know the name of it. This was in the 70s. It was Muhammad Ali played himself in a movie.
Steve:
So this is not the Will Smith Muhammad Ali.
Dave:
No, no, you’ll have to Google it. Long before that. Movie, Muhammad Ali. I don’t even know what the title was. So I went to the movie, I did it, I wrote up a review, and then I was called in. This has ended my career. I was called into by the teacher and whoever was the head. You plagiarized this. Whoa. I think you plagiarized this. From where? I don’t know. There was no review for it. I said, I didn’t plagiarize this. I wrote this. What are you talking about? So I was accused of plagiarism. And I’m really glad I didn’t get into this. So if I was an adult more, I was shrugged off the plagiarism thing and said, wow, I must be a great writer if they think I plagiarized this
Steve:
Thing. Yeah, I would take it as a compliment. And
Dave:
As a kid, I was just freaked out. I’m like, screw it. I’m not doing this anymore because they’re going to say I plagiarize everything I write. So it must have been a really good review. I think they published it.
Steve:
Okay. Well, if we’re going on tangents, your story reminded me of a story that I experienced when I was writing. And it was an article that I wrote about the varsity wrestling team. The varsity wrestling team, the backdrop of it was that I knew a couple guys were on the wrestling team and I think it was something like eight out of the 16 guys on the varsity wrestling team quit right at the beginning of the season. And so I wrote this article about how they were being pressured to lose weight as wrestlers are often pressured to do. I will say I didn’t do a ton of research. I asked about two friends that I knew that had quit and they said, “Oh yeah, they told me I could have one bagel and one power bar each day and that was all I could eat.” So I wrote this article and they titled it, Wrestlers Drop Weight, Drop Team, and I started getting threats from the rest of the team.
And they apparently wanted to come to my house, beat me up, do all kinds of stuff. So it was a very scary thing. And luckily nobody ever beat me up. I had a friend who was still on the team and he convinced them not to, but that was my drama with my high school newspaper.
Dave:
Wow. That is interesting. We both had this incredible drama.
Steve:
Yeah.
Dave:
Okay. Now if you move on to the podcast.
Steve:
So what I wrote down here and I wanted to talk about is how fast the world moves nowadays. And I don’t mean this in terms of, “Hey, I can’t believe it’s February already. Where does the time go when you’re just making small talk with people? ” I was just thinking back to what’s gone on in the past couple of weeks and the backdrop of what’s gone on in the past couple of weeks, things that I wrote down, and I’m sure this doesn’t encompass everything, we want to talk about gold and silver and Bitcoin, what kind of wild rides those have been on.
I wanted to at least touch on how technology stocks have been really pulling back. And in particular, when you look at the kind of technology stocks that are getting crushed, they’re all of these software stocks. And when you dig into it further, you go, “Well, why are the software stocks getting crushed?” Well, everybody thinks that AI, you don’t need software anymore, that the AI, it’ll do everything. A great example is the company Salesforce. They run contact relationship management software for all of the big companies out there. And they’re in the Dow Jones industrial average, so this is a huge company. I think their stock is down something like 60% because everybody thinks that AI will just … It’ll do all that. “I don’t need to pay for software. AI will take care of it.
Speaker 1:
”
Steve:
So that’s a big thing the last two or three weeks. And not to mention we’ve got a new Fed chairman, not yet, but at least has been announced by President Trump, his pick for the Fed chair, which I think in May will take over. So all of this stuff going on, and like I said, I want to dive into the gold and silver and Bitcoin stuff, but I heard somebody on another podcast, a financial podcast, they declared halfway through this decade, they declared this as the most interesting financial decade for the stock market in history. And I think that this is very similar to a really good football game or a really good World Series or pick your sporting event where someone declares this is the greatest game ever played. And I don’t think in the moment you can declare that. I think you need a little bit of time and let history breathe a little bit before you can go back and say, “Yeah, that was … ”
Dave:
So this is going to be 2020 to 2030 is going to be what they’re saying is going to be the most interesting financial day. In their argument. So we’re at halftime basically.
Steve:
Yeah. But I mean, on their side of the argument, it was, look, you started off this decade with COVID. I mean, how can you argue that’s not one of the biggest market disruptors in a long time? You had negative oil prices in there. You remember that for a month where the price of oil went negative? You had 9% inflation, you had the Fed raising rates aggressively, Russia invading Ukraine, the 2022 bear market, all the supply chain disruption, then you throw in tariffs and all this mixed in with AI going on.
Dave:
Okay. This sounds like Ali Frazier to me because back to Ali, my journalism, because basically my Ali Frazier might be this decade versus 2000 to 2010.
Steve:
That’s what I was going to say is 2010, you had tech bubble meltdown and the financial crisis. Ooh, that’s tough there.
Dave:
A competitor.
Steve:
It’s in the running there. So anyway, all of this backdrop was me just thinking about, gosh, how quickly everything moves. I mean, it was six years ago, right around now that we were starting to get these reports of COVID and what’s going on in China? Maybe it’ll be an issue for us. I don’t know. It feels like a hundred years ago, but it also feels like yesterday. So with all of that backdrop, let’s talk about precious metals, gold, silver, and Bitcoin.
Dave:
I have to tell you that I have been obsessed lately. For someone who doesn’t have a dime in Bitcoin or crypto, I’ve been really interested in what’s going on with it and thinking a lot about it. I guess I’ll do a little bit on the crypto part and then we’ll just go from there. So basically, I was just like, this morning at, I guess about nine o’clock or something, I decided to write some notes for this podcast because I knew we would talk about Bitcoin. And from when I wrote the notes, as of now, I’m not looking at the screen, so I don’t know exactly where Bitcoin is, but it dropped significantly. I was writing at Bitcoin at 70,489 this morning at nine. And I think last time I looked, right before the podcast, it was at 67,000 or something like that.
Steve:
Right around there right now.
Dave:
So it’s really declined. I mean, it’s high, was 126,000 in October, October 2025. So since it’s high, I’m guessing it’s been now down, if I were to go to the exact minute, over 45%.
Steve:
I think you’re right on.
Dave:
And in the last month, this is interesting, just in the last month from our last podcast, which was January 7th, since our last podcast, Bitcoin is down probably about 26%.
Steve:
Yeah.
Dave:
That is a wild ride. And it’s like a couple thoughts came to mind. I’m not going into the crypto game personally. At the end of the day, the reason I’m not into it, not just for myself, but for clients, is that I guess in my gut instinct about investing is something that you can’t even buy. You can’t buy bread or milk with crypto, and its entire existence seems like speculation. The whole thing seems like, as far as an investor, the wild, wild west, it’s a wild, wild west style of investment, just rubs me the wrong way. I guess that’s why. It’s great. It’s similar to I’m not betting my retirement on the Super Bowl, even though I like Seattle giving four and a half. Hey, I don’t even know if I would bet $100 on that, let alone $10,000. I don’t know.
Steve:
No, and I don’t want to go back through the history of Bitcoin and why it’s still around and all of that, because I think a lot of the talking points for Bitcoin in the beginning, this democratization of finance and removing the middlemen and giving this inflation hedge against the debasement of the dollar, all of those talking points have kind of gone away. People don’t talk about it at anymore. They don’t even use it as a medium of exchange really. So it is just kind of this store of value that everyone just kind of agreed has some value. And I’ve talked about this before, that I felt like for me, a big moment with Bitcoin was in 2022 when the largest Bitcoin exchange, FTX, was exposed to be a terribly run fraud and Bitcoin didn’t crash to zero. It went down to maybe 15 or 16,000, but it didn’t go to zero.
So that to me said, okay, there’s going to be a certain pocket of people that will say there’s some value there. So yeah, I would tend to agree with you. I think it probably will be higher 10 years from now than where it is right now, but it’s also a reminder of just what tremendous volatility you’ve got to put up with. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I know the number of 70% declines that Bitcoin has gone through.
It’s a lot. It’s a very common thing for the asset to go down 70%.
Dave:
Right. It is a rollercoaster. It is the rollercoaster of investments. And if you’re into rollercoasters, cool. But it is also, from a short-term perspective, certainly you certainly better be thinking, “I’m not buying high. I’ll buy low.”
Steve:
In addition to the volatility, you’ve got other concerns with Bitcoin. You’ve got to worry about total loss of principle because this is, even if you think there’s promise, this is still an unproven asset. The regulatory uncertainty, I think we’ve gotten more clarity on that in the past couple of years and Trump has definitely been a more crypto-friendly president than in the past, but that’s still up in the air. And there’s a variety of different ways to hold crypto as well. And I don’t want to get into all the cold storage versus this and that, but I’m sure Dave, you’ve seen the story of the guy who threw out his hard drive, I think this guy was in the UK, he threw out his hard drive that had a bunch of Bitcoin on it, and if he was able to find that, it would be worth something like $600 million.
And he’s been searching landfills for years now, obviously an organized effort, but that sort of highlights the custody risk there. And of course, there are different ways you can get exposure through ETFs and things like that, but I think it’s important to understand those risks as well.
Dave:
And if I’m going to buy it all, low. But that’s why I always look at it as weird. For me, it just drives me crazy because I’m not personally a short term investor. If I was, or even a long term, I would say yes.
Steve:
Okay. Well, let’s go from the digital gold, that’s what some people have termed Bitcoin. I
Dave:
Like
Steve:
That. To actual gold. Gold. And silver as well. So what’s going on in the precious metals? And I don’t have the data on copper, but I’ve heard that copper was going crazy too, but let’s just stick to gold and silver. Gold in 2025 was up 50%, five zero. How about silver? Up 150, 150% in 2025, and it was cruising along. They were doing incredibly well, continuing up until last week. And then last Friday, gold was down 9% in one day, and I think it was down 13% over two days. How about silver? At one point, silver was down 35% on one day, just last Friday.
Dave:
Wow.
Steve:
And if we go back and say, “Well, what triggered the rise and what triggered the decline?” And I’ve talked about this before. I think it’s always interesting how the media always loves to put a narrative to any sort of price action. So after the fact, you say, “Oh, well, gold was up 50%, silver was up 150%.” I put this into ChatGPT and said, “Why was it up?” And they said, “Well, central bank buying, especially China, Poland, and India, tariff uncertainty, dedolarization trends, and for silver, strong industrial demand.” So those things all led to the tremendous rise there. And then I asked it, “Well, why did it all decline last Friday?” And I said, “Well, the main catalyst was President Trump nominating Kevin Warsch for Fed Chair, which eased concerns about Fed independence, sent the dollar soaring, but ChatGPT also adds in here, but it was also a massively crowded trade with heavy leverage and a lot of people just were taking profits and selling.”
So that’s all fun and interesting and it’s entertaining to watch from the sidelines here, but it comes back to the question that we get asked and maybe less so after last Friday, but up until then is, do you include any of these assets, silver, gold, Bitcoin, whatever it is, do you include those as part of a core allocation for your clients? And the answer is no, not that we’re totally opposed to them. I tell people, I’ve got a certain amount of money in Bitcoin. We’ve got some clients that want to have gold and silver exposure, and we’ll do that, but we don’t include it as a core part of the portfolio because of everything we just talked about. The volatility is up there. And when you
Dave:
Look- I’ll tell you on my … Okay, so my gold thing, even though I don’t argue with people who want a small percentage of precious metals as part of their portfolio, but part of my personal thing with that is it’s like something that goes up with fear, fear of the dollar being devalued, fear of a war somewhere, fear in general, and then went down because the fear was eased with … I’m sorry, what was the guy’s name, the new Fed?
Steve:
Kevin Warsch.
Dave:
Kevin Warsch, now the fear has been eased and now it’s going down. And I think because of a couple things, philosophically, I’m an optimistic person. I’m not a fearmonger or someone who gets into fear as a motivator of stuff. It just rubs me the wrong way. The other thing from a long-term perspective for clients and myself, I kind of like … Well, take the S&P 500, even though we have so many different investments. Well, let’s just take that. I like betting on capitalism in the long run for a steadier 10 to 15-year increase, like you were talking earlier, you know what? The software fear, Salesforce, which is a big company and a big winner. Hey, because of this software thing, AI might take over. There might not be a sales force because of that. And guess what? There’s precedent of something huge, lots of things huge, disappearing like Kodak.
But at the end of the day, it’s the S&P 500. Salesforce might become the S&P 10,000 and nothing, but at the end of the day, someone else is replacing them, so we’re still betting on companies. I like gold because it’s a hard asset. I’m just making an argument of some people. A hard asset is also a bunch of companies that are real things that are basically, hopefully in general, capitalism growing over a long period of time. Everybody’s allowed to have their opinion in investing. It is a subjective business. No,
I would argue- But that’s sort of my deeper inner feelings about it.
Steve:
Right. No, I would argue hard against somebody who said, oh, I would favor gold over investing in stocks because of all the things you just said. I mean, when you’re investing in stocks, you’re investing in companies, people, capital that is striving to get better, striving to improve, striving to make profits. I would always bet on that versus gold, which you’re just hoping that somebody is willing to pay more for it. I mean, that’s what it comes down to. And there could be macroeconomic factors that make you think that will happen, but that to me is for the long term. And the other reason why we don’t typically include gold is because it can go and has gone long periods of time of doing nothing. Gold did well in the ’70s, right? We’re coming off the gold standard, very high inflation, but then it lost money in the ’80s and in the ’90s.
So you put money in the beginning of 1980 and you lost a considerable amount of money by the year 2000. Okay, did well in the 2000s, didn’t even keep up with inflation in the 2010s, lagged behind. So you just go through these long periods of time where it can underperform. So that doesn’t mean it’s terrible, but it needs to be an appropriate part of the portfolio. All right. I have one last thing that I wanted to touch on, which actually does dovetail nicely with everything we talked about today, but this is something, Dave, that I haven’t shared with you that I have been putting together. It’s really not anything that big, but we’re doing seminars next month. And I had this idea a little while ago and just as something, usually we get there quite a ways before the seminar starts, at least half an hour, 45 minutes, and people trickle in and they’re just sitting there doing nothing.
So I had this thought that it’d be cool to, up on the screen, the PowerPoint slides up there, just have different quotes about investing kind of cycling through.
I like it. Yeah. We’re going to have some classic Warren Buffet stuff up there. We’re going to have some Charlie Munger, some Peter Lynch, some Benjamin Graham even. Yeah, we’ll have some good ones up there. So I was putting together some of these quotes and I love all of them, but there’s one that I thought that I knew, but it turns out I didn’t really know, or at least I didn’t exactly know it. And it’s this quote, “Nobody knows anything.” And I’ve seen this before in the context of that. Do you know where it originally came from?
Dave:
I have no clue.
Steve:
Okay. I certainly didn’t know this. The screenwriter, William Goldman, okay? He was a screenwriter. I think he wrote, what did he write? The Princess Bride. He wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, I think. I’m going out of my depth here. But anyway, he wrote this book and it was called Nobody Knows Anything, Adventures in the Screenwriting Trade. And it was basically talking about all these big Hollywood hits. Like for instance, I didn’t know this, that in Hollywood, every studio passed on Raiders of the Lost Arc and everybody thought, “No, it’s a terrible idea. An archeologist, nah, it sounds terrible.” Of course, went on to be a huge hit. So he used this quote in that context talking about Hollywood, but then I guess it got kind of co-opted by Wall Street and various people. And I think it totally ties in with what we were talking about here.
I don’t think there was anybody, no matter how smart they were, that in October was saying, “You know what? Bitcoin 126,000, that’s kind of ridiculous. I think it’s going to go down 45% in the next couple of months.” Or at least if there was somebody who said that-
Dave:
In a while, last year, I don’t remember tons of people all over silver like, “You know what? I think silver’s going to go up 150%. I’m going to put my reputation out on the line on that. ” You did see a lot of that.
Steve:
I will say there was a guy, I’m not going to name him, because he does this fear casting stuff where he’s been saying for years that silver was going to go up tremendously, and that’s Great. I’m sure he’s out there thumping his chest now because it’s so right. The problem is he’s been saying it for 15 years.
Dave:
Right. That doesn’t count.
Steve:
Do you really get to crow when you’re finally right when you’ve been saying it for 15 years?
Dave:
And one of our clients is all over the gold and silver thing too. Give her credit too.
Steve:
Right. Yep. All right. So nobody knows anything. I think that’s a good mantra for … And
Dave:
Investing, if you do think you know something because you hit it once, that could be a non-blessing, not in disguise.
Steve:
Oh, I mean, there’s tons of … Coming out of the financial crisis, there’s tons of stories of people who nailed the housing market meltdown and the effects of that. And therefore they thought they’d be able to predict the next thing and they couldn’t. So they spend the next 20 years trying to predict the next housing crisis. All right. Thanks for joining us. Hope you all enjoyed that. And who knows what Bitcoin will be at next time we talk. Hopefully we don’t even have to talk about it. It’ll
Dave:
Be
Steve:
An afterthought. Take care. Everybody stay warm and hopefully no more snow and ice.