Dana Blankenhorn

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What To Buy Today

If you have money to invest, here’s an obvious truth.

We’re at or near the bottom of a bear market.

Everything is down. Some stuff has been crushed. Some of my stuff has been crushed.

But don’t despair, friend Investor. Bear markets end. Even with the worst of them, the average stock has gotten back to even in just a few years.

If you have taxable income you want to hide, and a taxable investment account, then feel free to dump your garbage. Anything that won’t come good in 3-4 years – take the loss. Dump the SPACs, dump the crypto, dump the stuff that’s losing money faster than it’s growing, or that lacks the cash to wait 2 years for another injection of money.

Now, because I write for Investorplace I’m going to tell you what to buy.

Propaganda for Good

Russia thought it was attacking a Russian province.

Turned out it was attacking Europe.

Europe is a state of mind. It’s egalitarian, but it’s fractious. It’s united, but not entirely. It’s western civilization in microcosm – messy, slow to anger, but mighty when provoked.

The invasion revealed that Putin’s Russia wasn’t even a nation-state. It was a medieval Empire, gilded by 20^th century ideologies, wealth, and technologies.

What makes this Empire so dangerous is that it has used all it had to attack America. Until recently it was successful. Putin ran our government, through Trump. Had we not beaten Trump he would be sitting in Kiev right now.

The Putin threat to this nation is still alive. It can still win. That’s because Trump was never Putin’s most dangerous puppet.

Rupert Murdoch is.

Without Fox News, Trump would have gone nowhere. Without Fox News, racism could not still be rising. Putin is a King. He won’t be satisfied until he rules everything. Murdoch is an oligarch. Rich man wants to be King.

Find me three issues on which Murdoch and Putin fundamentally disagree. I’ll wait.

I’ve written this before. It is time for Americans to become Ukranian in the defense of our heritage and rights. I’m not talking about grabbing guns and heading for Kentucky. I am talking instead of using what Ukrainians have taught us, in their hour of need, about propaganda.

The video above teaches this lesson. The song is about mothers, how they grow gray but still treat us like children, protecting us. What we see are women soldiers rushing into the war zone to take children to safety.

Then note the twist. These aren’t their own children they’re saving, or not just their own. When the children are safe, the women go back to the war. They seek their faith. They go on. They are soldiers. Everyone is a soldier.

What America is going through is a struggle. It’s a struggle that can be won. But it will take every weapon at our disposal, including propaganda. We have 5 ½ months and, if we win this time, anything is possible. If we fail, nothing may be possible for a long, long, long time.

Cash is Still King

You don’t have a loss until you sell.

I am reminded of that during the current tech wreck.

I have a retirement account, which for a while was worth over $1 million. It’s worth just two-thirds of that now.

But that’s OK. Because the account includes about $140,000 in cash. I can buy some stocks. I don’t have to sell any. I can wait out the bear market.

The stocks I own are all in real companies, most of them profitable. I have some dogs that may not come back, like Cloudflare and Upstart. But Amazon will rise again. So will Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia. Bitcoin won’t come back (I hope), nor the rest of the cryptotrash. There’s still almost $1.22 trillion locked in that garbage. There are losses still to come.

American Bear, Global Crash

I’m not a millionaire right now.

My retirement account is down 25%. I was heavily into tech stocks like Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Google. They’re all down. My more speculative investments, companies like Fubo and Cloudflare, are worth less every day.

But I’m lucky. If you’re an American, you’re lucky too. Because what’s really happening is a global market crash.

The best investment for an investor in China, in Europe or in the global south today is the American dollar. Government bonds at 3% look good because the value of the dollar itself is rising.