Stocks And Facts March 6, 2025 If you care more about democracy than money, by all means skip ahead. Either way, don’t miss Claire’s investment update at the end. STOCKS CMRX, first suggested here in 2022 at $1.74, is being acquired at $8.55. As posted recently, I sold half at $4.83. Yesterday, at $8.40, I sold the rest. (Whoever bought it is welcome to the extra 15 cents.) VERU has a drug in development that it believes everyone taking the new miracle weight-loss drugs will consider taking as well. Early indications are that with their drug, the weight loss patients experience is 99% fat and only 1% muscle — versus 69%/31%. Most people would much rather lose fat than muscle. This one is highly speculative — with no revenues and big expenses, they could, for one thing, run out of cash. But it comes recommended from the same wonderful reader who suggested CMRX, and who thinks VERU has the potential to be a 10X or 20X winner, so I bought a bunch yesterday at 52 cents a share. Only with money I could truly afford to lose. PRKR keeps sliding, down to 65 cents last night from its recent $1.26 high. But you know what else keeps happening? Time keeps passing. Which means we grow ever closer to the hoped for trials in its numerous lawsuits. In the meantime, there was this press release yesterday. It seems encouraging. Ultimately what’s at stake is whether patents mean anything and small inventors still have a shot in America. I think they do, and that a jury might agree (as one did to the tune of $173 million 12 years ago). Only with . . . OPRT has given up some of its gains as well, but my same thinking applies: Time will pass. If a year from now they really do report earnings in the range of $1.10 to $1.30 a share, as projected, I would expect the company to be awarded a multiple of 12X or more, so a double from here. To me, the reward outweighs the risk . . . though only with . . . And since you’re interested in money, here is Warren Buffett’s annual letter from a couple of weeks ago. The foregoing speculations notwithstanding, he drives home the point that the market as a whole is hardly a bargain here. FACTS The President told us Tuesday night Joe Biden handed him a horrible economy and stratospheric inflation. In point of actual fact, President Biden handed him inflation under 3%, and falling; and an economy that both the Economist and the Wall Street Journal called “the envy of the world.” Trump said he was the best president since George Washington; Biden, the worst. We all know that little he says is true. Even Republican senators privately know that. But the MAGA base eat it up. They know Ukraine started the war against Russia (by being invaded?); that the January 6 cop-beaters were heroes, unjustly imprisoned; that contracting measles builds valuable immunity; that John McCain was no hero; that Trump will absolutely release his tax returns as soon as the audit is completed. Here, with much less snark (I can’t help myself — his breathtaking dishonesty and narcissism scream for snark), is NPR’s Fact Check of the Joint Address. COMBINING STOCK PICKING AND FACT CHECKING Claire Margaret Brown — former Air Force doctor and exceptional trans woman whose Aristides Capital has compounded my IRA at 15.83% since 2008 (growing each $1 into $11.30) — has given me permission to share excerpts from her latest monthly investor letter: . . . [T]he elimination of USAID Global Health funding will, in the very short run, save $18 per American per year and will result in the deaths of tens of millions of people worldwide. I don’t know if it matters to the financial markets or not. I do know it is, without a doubt, the darkest moment for the American government in my adult life. In the long run, it’s also incredibly stupid. In a global economy, disease does not stop at borders. More HIV, more malaria, more measles, more tuberculosis, more chikungunya…they will come for us. Had Trump been President in 2014, the Ebola outbreak in West Africa would have been several regional Ebola epidemics around the globe. It would have easily cost $100 billion or more in knock-on trade effects. Instead of saving millions of lives, President Trump this weekend announced a national “Strategic Reserve” of cryptocurrency, to include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Ripple, and Cardano. I don’t really understand what those last three things even are, but I’m 99.99999% certain that none of them are a strategic asset. I do know that Trump donor and “Crypto Tzar,” David Sacks, happens to own all five. That is probably all you need to know about them, too. Our President had a nifty episode of narcissistic rage in the oval office on Friday, as he and his toady Vice President lectured Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky for daring to ask what would make Vladimir Putin honor a new ceasefire this time, when he has broken three already (the Budapest Memorandum, First Minsk Agreement, and Second Minsk Agreement). This is the sort of thing markets absolutely do care about because for the last eight decades the Western world has been led–politically, militarily, and economically—by the United States, while in the first six weeks of Trump’s second administration, he has unilaterally done more to damage U.S. hegemony than anything else that has happened in the last eighty years. European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas commented “Today, it became clear that the free world needs a new leader. It is up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge.” . . . Today, the U.S. equity market sold off again on a Trump plan for tariffs against Canada and Mexico, which makes no economic sense, unless one were clumsily trying to destroy the entire American auto industry except for Tesla. The policy of this administration is utterly incoherent other than fairly consistent in its awfulness. It’s a mix of Project 2025, white nationalism, Christian theocracy, Curtis Yarvin, aggrieved Silicon Valley sociopathy, Trump’s unpredictable narcissistic ego wounds, and the most brazen corruption ever seen in the United States. There’s no point even writing an outlook for the year or the month because it’s hard to know what cruel idiocy will happen next. My expectations for the second Trump administration were incredibly low, and Trump has delivered well beneath them. Humans are prone to normalcy bias, but nothing about this administration is normal. The decline of our country that I thought might take years to materialize is being delivered in mere weeks. As always, I tend to be very mild in the way my political views bleed into the portfolio, and we tend not to run the portfolio net short, ever, and this year has been no exception. Fortunately we’ve been positioned generally okay so far . . . We have close to 25% of the portfolio long foreign securities, whereas nearly all of our short positions tend to be in the United States, so, effectively, we are close to market neutral in the United States (on a beta-adjusted basis), and our modest net long exposure comes mostly from Europe, Japan, and Canada. . . . [T]he share prices of our longs have held up much better than the prices of our shorts . . . . . . But the last six weeks . . . to see millions of deaths getting queued up globally for no good reason and to see our nation weakened dramatically and its institutions gutted for nothing but some crazy ideology of destruction . . . it’s a good reminder that the world needs me and you. The world needs all of us. We, here at this moment, each of us the only one of us who has ever been or will ever be, the product of 13.7 billion years of the universe striving to see what is possible, we each make so many changes in the lives and the futures of everyone with whom we interact. Our country, the most gifted nation in the history of earth, is in such a stupid, needlessly dark time right now, but hopefully your response to that is to be a light in the lives of those around you. We’re incredibly fortunate to be here. . . . Thank you, as always, for your partnership. Good luck navigating all of this. The money part is not the hard part right now, and hopefully we’ll help to keep it that way. Join Indivisible! Plant seeds of DIS-disinformation!