The Easy Part of This Trade Is Over

The thesis still works but new entries needs a different playbook  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

January 16th, 2026   Donald Doge We got a thoughtful note from a current subscriber, and I wanted to share it with everyone because I suspect a lot of you are wrestling with the exact same question. This reader lived through the inflationary 60s/70s (they even held a CD paying ~20% and still lost purchasing power), and their question was essentially: "Your analysis lines up with my lived history. But I'm late to the party. A lot of these stocks (in the Moonshot Minute Portfolio) look topped out. Should I buy the materials names you recommended earlier in 2025, or wait for new opportunities?" It's a fair question. And it's the right moment to address it, especially after the moves we've had. The scorecard first: the thesis has worked Let's start with what the Moonshot Minute Portfolio is actually saying right now. Across the 18 open positions, the equal‑weighted average gain is +52.7% per position since initial coverage. A few details for context: 17 of 18 positions are positive (about a 94% win rate on open names) The median open-position gain is +34% Several of the hard-asset exposures have posted outsized, triple‑digit gains Even if you remove the three biggest winners, the remaining positions still average +29.8%… Even without our three biggest winners, we're still beating the S&P So yes, our materials / energy / hard-assets positioning has delivered impressive gains. But… Here's the key point I want everyone to internalize: A great thesis can still become a bad entry if you chase it. A number of our recommendations have already made very large moves. When you're looking at something that's up 50%… 100%… 200%… the risk/reward profile for fresh capital is not the same as it was near the original coverage price. This doesn't mean the theme is broken. It means the easy part of the move may be behind us, and the next good entry often shows up when: price cools off, volatility shakes out weak hands, and we get a pullback, consolidation, or retest. In other words: the next opportunity tends to arrive when things feel "quiet," not when they feel obvious. Guidance for readers who feel "late" If you're underexposed and you want to get involved without chasing, here's the framework I'd use: Don't confuse urgency with opportunity The market is very good at making you feel like you're going to miss it right before it pulls back. Scale in. Don't swing all at once If you must start exposure, consider a starter position (small), and reserve capital to add on pullbacks. Let price come to you I'd rather miss the first 10–20% of a move than buy the last 10–20% before a drawdown. And if you're more conservative like I am? It is completely reasonable to wait for better entries and let my team and I bring you the next setup with a cleaner risk/reward. A note for free readers: where to focus (even without our Premium recommendations) I want this update to be useful even if you're reading the free version of Moonshot Minute. We reserve the specific tickers, buy zones, and risk-management levels for Premium members because that's the work we do for paid subscribers. But we can say this confidently: Even if you never follow a single one of our Premium recommendations, these are the areas we believe deserve your focus if you're trying to protect and grow purchasing power in the years ahead. Here are the core "arenas" represented by the themes we've been targeting: Precious metals and monetary hedges Think gold, silver, and Bitcoin. But not just as "doomsday trades," but as long-cycle insurance when confidence in paper claims gets tested. That can include: direct exposure (bullion/spot-linked vehicles) producers and miners cash-generative businesses tied to precious metals (often with leverage to price moves) The supply-constrained metals needed for electrification The world is building more data centers, more grids, more transmission, more everything. That requires industrial metals (especially the ones that are hard to bring online quickly). If you're building your own watchlist, look for: low-cost producers strong balance sheets real reserves in stable jurisdictions projects that can actually get financed and built Energy and "energy logistics" Energy is a physical system. Alongside producers, pay attention to the unsexy but essential "pipes and shovels" of energy movement and infrastructure (transport, midstream, shipping/logistics, and related real-economy chokepoints). The uranium/nuclear fuel cycle Whether you love nuclear or hate it, the reality is: many countries are extending reactor lives, building new ones, and re-thinking energy security. That tends to pull capital toward parts of the uranium and nuclear-fuel ecosystem (which can be volatile, but powerful in the right cycle). Select "hard-asset adjacent" exposures Not everything that benefits from hard assets looks like a commodity chart. Some businesses act like toll collectors on real-world throughput (infrastructure, bottlenecks, mission-critical systems), and they can hold up well when the macro regime shifts. If you're a free reader and you do nothing else, do this: Build a watchlist around these themes and commit to buying on pullbacks instead of headlines. The discipline matters as much as the theme. Where we stand today We remain very bullish on the broader hard-asset backdrop. The same forces that made this trade work—scarcity, supply constraints, real assets regaining attention, and the inflation/sovereign-debt overhang—haven't disappeared. But we're also going to stay disciplined about entries, because the market always punishes chasing strength after big runs. Now, for Premium Members: two new recommendations are coming. We're preparing two new recommendations: One in metals, which is a fresh way to express the themes we've been covering, and with a setup we like at current levels. The other is in an asset class we haven't covered yet. It's something outside our usual lane that we believe belongs in the "hard assets / real value" toolkit going into the next phase. We won't front-run the tickers in this email, but we will say this: both ideas are built around the same principle we're emphasizing today: better entries, clearer levels, and disciplined risk/reward. If you've thought about joining Premium but haven't yet decided, I encourage you to consider it now that 2026 has begun. I believe what's in store this year, especially with the themes we've been following, will be big. More soon, Double D P.S. If you've decided to give Moonshot Minute Premium a try, you can do it here. In case you missed it, yesterday's Moonshot Minute is below. We received a lot of feedback on it, so reprinting it here: In January 2003, I watched my father, a man who'd spent thirty years building a modest nest egg, stare at the television as American tanks rolled into Baghdad. "They're saying it'll be quick," he muttered, flipping through his brokerage statement. "In and out. Maybe six months." Twenty-two years and $8 trillion later, we know how that story ended. I thought about him last Saturday morning when news broke that U.S. Special Forces had extracted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from his compound in Caracas. Over 150 military aircraft provided cover. The operation was surgical, efficient, and, according to Washington, necessary. Here's what nobody's talking about: This isn't just another regime change. This is the starting gun for the most inflationary period most of us will ever live through. The $180 Billion Fixer-Upper Energy consultancy Rystad estimates it will cost $180 billion to return Venezuela's oil production to its pre-Chávez peak of 3 million barrels per day by 2040. Just maintaining the current output of 1.1 million barrels requires over $50 billion in upstream and infrastructure investment over the next fifteen years. Venezuela's oil infrastructure is cannibalized. The Financial Times reports facilities in a "catastrophic state" due to decades of underinvestment. Pipelines over fifty years old leak. Electric power systems fail regularly. Tens of thousands of skilled workers fled during the Chávez and Maduro regimes. When we invaded Iraq in 2003, Washington promised oil production would jump from 2-2.5 million to 5-6 million barrels per day within three to four years. Reality? It took over a decade just to reach 5 million, and that was after a troop surge that put 150,000-170,000 American boots on the ground. Venezuela has the mountains of Afghanistan and the jungles of Vietnam. Armed militias. Colombian guerrillas running drugs and gold along 2,200 kilometers of border. A former interior minister wanted by U.S. authorities who controls paramilitary forces across the country. Bob McNally, who served in the George W. Bush administration and now runs Rapidan Energy Group, told Politico there's no clear plan beyond the "principal decision" that American companies will be "at the top of the list" to reenter the country. We just bought a $180 billion fixer-upper in the most dangerous neighborhood in the Western Hemisphere. We don't have a contractor. Why War Always Means Inflation My grandfather used to tell me stories about the 1970s. Waiting in gas lines, watching grocery prices change weekly, feeling like the rules of money had suddenly shifted beneath his feet. He wasn't imagining things. The most protracted periods of inflation over the past century occurred during wartime: World War II and Korea in the 1940s and 1950s. Vietnam and the Middle East conflicts in the 1960s and 1970s. War is inflationary by design. Demand for resources surges. Fiscal and monetary policy loosen to fund defense spending. Supply chains get disrupted. The bills always come due…usually paid by ordinary people through the silent tax of currency devaluation. Here's what makes this moment different: When we invaded Iraq, federal debt-to-GDP was 33%. Net interest expense was 1.3% of GDP. Today? Debt-to-GDP sits at 95%. Net interest expense has ballooned to 3.0% of GDP—and it's climbing. Interest payments surpassed defense spending in 2024 for the first time in American history. President Trump posted on Truth Social that he wants to increase defense spending by 50% in 2027 from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion. Meanwhile, Washington has threatened military action against multiple countries, from Central America to Greenland. There is no mathematical way to achieve these ambitions without vastly more inflationary fiscal and monetary policy. Gold just broke out of a 45-year downtrend against the Consumer Price Index. Silver is starting to outperform gold. Copper hit fresh all-time highs in Shanghai this week. The market is screaming. Most investors refuse to hear it. 🚀 Get Moonshot Alerts Instantly Markets move in minutes. Your inbox can't keep up. Join the Moonshot VIP Text Service and get real-time alerts, portfolio updates, and first-move intelligence directly to your phone. Be first to know. Anywhere. 👉 [Join the Text List →] The Trust Deficit Nobody's Pricing Former U.S. Army judge-advocate general officer David French wrote in The New York Times that Trump's decision to "turn his back on the democratically-elected opposition" while negotiating with the remnants of a corrupt regime "risks perpetuating corruption and oppression at the expense of freedom and democracy." For decades, America maintained that its foreign policy was driven by principles…human rights, free markets, democracy. The reality was always messier, but the optics mattered. It gave foreign investors confidence that their capital was safe in U.S. Treasuries and American stocks. Things are even messier now. Secretary of State Marco Rubio responded to questions about international law with five words: "I don't care what the UN says." The U.S. ambassador to the UN declared: "You cannot continue to have the largest energy reserves in the world under the control of adversaries of the United States." Whether you agree or not, what we're witnessing is the Rule of Power replacing the Rule of Law. European officials are already exploring what some call the "nuclear option": selling their $2.34 trillion in U.S. Treasury holdings. The European Commission is pushing for eurozone residents to repatriate the €6.5 trillion they hold in American stocks. That's double what they held a decade ago. And these events are important because when trust breaks, money runs to hard assets. In the past week, gold bullion rose 3.3%. An institutional silver index we follow surged 8.0%, followed by their copper index gaining 7.0%. The S&P? Up 1.1%. The rotation has already begun. The Playbook for What Comes Next I've spent years studying how wealth gets built and destroyed during periods of monetary chaos. The pattern never changes. Those who recognize the shift early and position accordingly build fortunes. Those who cling to the old playbook watch their purchasing power evaporate. As I've been writing since mid-2025, we're in what many call the "Recognition Stage". The moment when capital begins rotating from financialized paper assets into real things. Precious metals. Industrial commodities. Energy infrastructure. The Moonshot Minute hard assets portfolio is outperforming the S&P 500 by a factor of 4-to-1. But here's what matters more than any single number: The structural forces driving this rotation aren't going away. They're accelerating. Venezuela is just the beginning. Regardless of your political stance, it's clear that Washington's territorial ambitions extend to Greenland, Central America, and beyond. Each new adventure requires more spending, more borrowing, more money creation. Each erosion of international trust pushes more capital toward assets that don't depend on promises from governments. The inflation-adjusted prices of gold, silver, and copper are sending a clear signal. 🚀 Get Moonshot Alerts Instantly Markets move in minutes. Your inbox can't keep up. Join the Moonshot VIP Text Service and get real-time alerts, portfolio updates, and first-move intelligence directly to your phone. Be first to know. Anywhere. 👉 [Join the Text List →] One Thing You Can Do Today I'm not going to pretend I have all the answers. Nobody does. But I've learned one thing from watching my father navigate the aftermath of Iraq, from studying the 1970s inflation, from building my own portfolio through multiple market cycles, and now, since March of 2025, building the Moonshot Minute Premium Portfolio: The time to prepare is before the crisis becomes obvious to everyone. If you own zero hard assets, no gold, no silver, no exposure to commodities, you're betting that the current trajectory is sustainable. You're betting that $180 billion rebuilds happen on schedule. You're betting that trust in institutions holds. You're betting that wars don't cause inflation this time. That's a lot of bets against historical precedent. And when it comes to betting against history repeating, well, let's just say the house always wins. Start small if you need to. A position in physical gold or a gold ETF. Some exposure to silver miners. A copper fund. Something real that doesn't depend on a government's promise to pay. Because when the bills for Venezuela come due, and they will, you don't want to be the one paying them through the slow erosion of everything you've saved. The invasion already happened. The inflation is coming. The only question left is which side of this wealth transfer you'll be on. Which brings me to one final point: The Materials Renaissance Basket Here at Moonshot Minute, we've been building exposure to what we call The Materials Renaissance—a group of strategic material companies quietly rebuilding the industrial backbone of the next decade. This basket spans the metals, mining, and critical‑minerals ecosystem: advanced alloy producers, rare‑earth refiners, and resource developers at the center of the new supply chain. The signs are everywhere. Federal infrastructure outlays are approaching $300 billion per year, the highest level in roughly two decades. Private capital committed to energy projects exceeds the record set during the shale boom. This only accelerates after the United States operation in Venezuela. Global copper production is on pace to hit record levels this year, driven by new mines and expansions across South America and Africa. The next twelve months will define the shape of this new economy. The winners will be those who move faster than the noise. They'll treat volatility as a signal, not a distraction. They'll understand that the most valuable thing to own in a world of infinite intelligence is something the machines still can't replicate: conviction. The future isn't waiting. Neither am I. I've recently invested in a $15,000-a-year institutional research system. The same one hedge funds and energy giants use to track trillion-dollar shifts before they hit the news. It now powers every insight and recommendation inside Moonshot Minute Premium. Premium readers get that intelligence for less than a Starbucks latte a week. That's $25 a month, or $250 a year if you pay annually. Over five years, that's just $1,250 for $75,000 worth of institutional data. The math isn't fair at all… It's tilted entirely for your benefit. It's an asymmetric bet in your favor. Most research like this stays locked behind paywalls built for the elite. We broke that wall. Moonshot Minute Premium exists so individuals, not institutions, can profit from the same information Wall Street hoards. For the first time, you can see what they see when they see it. The next twelve months will not wait. Capital is already moving. The winners of 2026 are being decided right now, and they'll be the ones who had this data first. Joining Moonshot Premium isn't buying research. It's crossing into a different vantage point where you stop reacting to headlines and start predicting them. A year from now, the people who joined today will look back and realize this was the moment they stopped watching history and started shaping and profiting from it. The map is still ours. The coordinates are already drawn. What we build from here determines everything that comes next. Double D P.S. Here's a screenshot of the current Moonshot Minute Portfolio. I've blurred out the tickers since that information is only for Premium Members but you can see how we've done so far: 🔓 Premium Content Begins Here 🔒 In today's Premium Section, you'll find the basket of recommendations we're putting our money in during this explosive stage of the infrastructure buildout. I hope you've been paying attention because many of our picks are currently beating the S&P by up to 4-to-1 this year. Most financial newsletters charge $500, $1,000, even $5,000 per year. Why? Because they know they can. I don't. I built my wealth the old-fashioned way, not by selling subscriptions. That's why I priced this at $25/month, or $250/year. Not because it's low quality, but because I don't need to charge the typical prices other newsletters charge. One good trade, idea, or concept could pay for your next decade of subscriptions. The question isn't 'Why is this so cheap?' The question is, 'Why would I charge more?' 👉 Upgrade to Premium Now P.S. If this newsletter were $1,000 per year, you'd have to think about it. You'd weigh your options. You'd analyze the risk. But it's $25 a month. That's the price of a bad lunch decision. 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