Friends – happy Monday!
Spring is starting to show its face up here in the mountains of Virginia. The snow has melted, and many of the trees are starting to bud.
It will probably take another 30 days or so, but we have a weeping cherry willow tree on the property that blooms the brightest pink for roughly one week every Spring. I always look forward to it.
To me, Spring represents new life and new beginnings. I’m always humbled by the logic of nature’s cycles.
And if we turn our attention to the world of finance, we can see evidence of new beginnings everywhere we look. If we pay attention to the signs, that is.
The Strait of Hormuz — the narrow waterway that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply — is now effectively closed. As a result, oil is back above $100 a barrel for the first time in four years.
Meanwhile, gold is holding firm above $5,000 an ounce. For context, gold was just over $3,000 per ounce at this time last year.
And the US Treasury, which has been trying to manage a great economic reordering, is now in a tough spot.
If oil prices remain elevated, that will put a drag on economic activity. And since Congress has not done anything to stop all the waste, fraud, and abuse uncovered by the DOGE team, the US government is still running a massive fiscal deficit… which puts upward pressure on interest rates.
At the same time, the stock market has pulled back from its recent highs, and many stocks (like software companies) have fallen dramatically. Now narratives are shifting by the day.
If you’re watching all of this from inside a conventional portfolio — heavy on financial assets, light on real assets, and anchored to the hope that the Fed will eventually cut rates and rescue valuations — this environment might feel troubling.
But for those of us who recognized the trends and positioned ourselves with real assets investing, the current climate feels like confirmation.
So I’d like to step back from the headlines today and talk about what it means to invest wisely in a changing world.
And a key thing to understand is this: volatility is not the same as risk.
This is an important distinction that many investors never fully internalize. Volatility is price movement. Risk is the potential for permanent loss of purchasing power.
These are not the same thing, and confusing them leads to some of the worst investment decisions people make — selling gold when it pulls back $80 in a week, or selling out of Bitcoin because the price falls 40% and suddenly there’s an avalanche of Twitter posts claiming it’s captured and dead.
But if we zoom out and look at the big picture…
Two years ago, gold was under $2,500. The investors who responded to every short-term dip by questioning the thesis have missed one of the greatest structural moves in a generation. The investors who understood why they owned gold — as protection against currency debasement, geopolitical risk, and the steady erosion of paper wealth — held through the volatility and are sitting on substantial gains.
The same logic applies across the real assets investing portfolio. Uranium is volatile. Bitcoin is volatile. Royalty companies are volatile. But the underlying thesis behind each of them — that real assets will outperform financial assets in a world of fiscal excess, structural inflation, and dollar system stress — has only been strengthened by recent events.
To me, that means the structural shifts are no longer theoretical.
A year ago, talking about economic recapitalization, gold remonetization, and the end of the Age of Paper Wealth seemed radical. Mainstream financial advisors considered this crazy talk.
Today, those themes are playing out in real time.
Simply put, the foundation has shifted. And that means our playbook needs to shift with it. Real assets investing is the smart play in today’s world.
To that end, I’d like to invite you once again to our online strategy session on Wednesday. We’re calling it Charting Financial Freedom – The Blueprint for Personal Wealth Today.
At the session, I’m going to walk through our approach to building out a portfolio of hard assets and creating extra streams of income. We’ll walk through it all step-by-step.
And I should mention that none of this is theoretical.
This is the investment strategy that I’ve used to create true financial security and thousands of dollars a month in passive income. And we have hundreds of investors inside our investment strategy group, The Phoenician League, who are following the same playbook with great success.
As always, the strategy session is free to attend. And we’ll provide all attendees with some resources to help you implement the action items that we’ll cover.
If you can join us live, we’ll get started at 3:30 pm on Wednesday (March 18). You can register for the event at: https://phoenician-league.lpages.co/charting-financial-freedom-webinar/
See you there!
-Joe Withrow
P.S. The world is changing fast. That’s not a reason to panic… we’re still in the early stages of several multi-year trends. So there’s still plenty of time to reposition your investments today. We’ll talk about exactly what that looks like at our session on Wednesday.