 The following is a presentation of TFNN. The Morning Market Kickoff with your host, Tommy O'Brien. Good morning, folks. This is Jacob Schup filling in for Tommy O'Brien. He is in his own vacation right now. I think he's having a great time. Let's take a look. We're kind of flat, a little bit sideways this morning and everything. We were slightly green, but you know, this is an ever-shifting environment. The ES Futures sideways, the Russell sideways, NQ sideways, the Dow Futures sideways. Gold doing about the same. The dollar floating at that 105 mark that has held substantially. And it's quite the juggernaut right now. We'll see how that shakes out today. We've had a weird week and this is Friday on it, so we'll, you know, try to cautiously throughout the day. Disney trading at 8069. This broke its 200-month moving average and which is not a good thing. They're having issues with Comcast currently. Spectrum. They also are, they're a lawsuit against DeSantis, which is the governor of Florida continues to devolve. This is not really the news you really want. DeSantis is relatively popular in Florida, I suppose, from what I can kind of gather. And I think any large company that focuses a lot on like the culture of not only the state, but the country as well, kind of getting into lawsuits with government officials that are so highly publicized, probably not the best way to do things. But they're angling basically like a, they're kind of focusing on free speech now, right? Like what they did was free speech and we'll see what happens with that. It's a mess and they're getting hit pretty hard as well. And there's a lot of things as well on the fundamental side of their business that is kind of struggling a lot. Meta at 300. Apple has kind of continued its nosedive as well. There are some new developments that we'll get into with China and they're expanding their kind of freeze on it as well. China makes up roughly 30% of their kind of consumption, which is massive. Now, of course, the ban did not extend to all of China. Initially, this was just government workers, but now it's going into like state sponsored. Workers can no longer utilize Apple on the job. And then Huawei is stepping in pretty heavily and they will obviously be propped up by the CCP. Tesla at 252, I have a story today that kind of shows one of the things I always harp on about Tesla is they're really a data company. So understanding the general routes that everyone takes are the most traveled routes, kind of driving behavior of people like that and then also getting data on their autonomous driving. When other companies start acquiring this, I'm sure they will purchase data from Tesla in order to enhance the autonomous driving capabilities of their vehicles. DocuSign did okay. They had their earnings yesterday. Let's take a look at that. Oops, wrong ticker. We'll just go in the monthly to see them up like that. Some interesting volume here, very wide price swing. Let's take a look. I'll get you the numbers here right now. Total revenue was $687 million, which is an increase of 11% year over year. Subscription revenue was $669.4 million. We'll round that. That's an increase of 11% again. Professional services and other revenue was 18.3%. And excuse me, that was 18.3 million in an increase of 8% year over year. They did pretty all right. Free cash flow was $183.6 million and that was compared to $105 million from the same period of last year. So that's pretty decent, especially in kind of a cash-strapped situation that we're in, in the market. All right, let's take a look here. We'll talk a little bit when I was saying earlier with the Chinese band in Apple, at least for the government. So that's local governments that's expanded and then the state-owned firms as well. The essential ministries and agencies have restricted the use of foreign brand products in official business since around 2020. Such curbs have since been expanded to employees, local governments, including prefectures and cities and state-owned enterprises since around August this year. The sources told McKay. Concerns over the impact sales in China in the Chinese market have dragged down Apple's market capitalization by $109 billion over two days. Employed and state-owned company Beijing said she received a confidential notice in early September about the move. So yeah, you know, and this is a little bit of a response to there's the back and forth going on with West and really particularly America and China. We banned the use of Huawei phones in our kind of government systems as well. And I've seen a drop too. I did actually know a few people who had Huawei and I don't see them anymore. That is, I don't see a prevalence of Huawei phones here. Like I used to. That's obviously just kind of anecdotal, but still, something to think about. China is one of Apple's most important markets in greater China, which includes Taiwan and Hong Kong. Kind of from about 20% of total sales, that's just in April and June period this year. The assembly of iPhones is also centered in Chinese factories and the company stock price fell 6.4%, two days from September 6th to September 7th. And it's not even just about, you know, selling the base phones either. So many Apple services make up a huge amount of their revenue and this will be cut off as well. Let's take a little bit more too. One of the ways that they have kind of combated this is with the Mate 60. And that uses the Kirin 9000 processor. Supposedly, as the Chinese media says, actually gets speeds faster than 5G. I mean, that's dubious, right? I'm not even really sure that we get speeds that are even 5G equivalent, at least in the States, right? That was the most interesting rollout to me. You need much more of a tighter grouping of relays for 5G towers, for 5G to actually work. And I mean, I've genuinely noticed a slowdown during certain hours. It seems like the kind of infrastructure gets weighed down around 2 p.m. and around work and hours. So about, you know, 430 to about 630. It's nearly impossible to use my phone if I'm not on Wi-Fi. And a lot of other people experience that too. And that is because you need these relays of 5G and building them was halted during quarantine. And we never really progressed. And if you can switch back to 4G, it actually does operate a bit faster, especially in really populous areas. So that's, you know, it was just a bizarre switch over. And obviously, conspiracy is abounded with that as well, which we're entertaining. China's Huawei launches Mate 60 Pro Plus. And again, we're not going to get this here, but it's interesting to look at, you know, one, how the Chinese economy is really going to kind of bolster itself, right? They're in somewhat of a deflationary period currently. Obviously, I don't see a, at least in the immediate period, a massive transition from smartphone users, excuse me, Apple users in China, into Huawei. But obviously, the CCP's enforcement is pretty wide-reaching. If anything gets worse, we might see that and Huawei might explode. Folks, stay tuned. We will be right back. We have some more interesting news for you. Stay tuned. If you're looking for potential trading setups in the stock market, then Rocket Equities and Options Report is a newsletter you should try. Tommy O'Brien delivers options and equity trades when the markets present them, using a combination of fundamentals and technicals. Sign up for Rocket Equities and Options Report today with a 30-day money-back guarantee so you have nothing to risk. For all the details and to start your subscription today, visit the front page of TFNN.com, TFNN Educating Investors. 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TFNN has launched the Tiger's Den. Hosted at Discord, TFNN has been educating traders for more than 20 years with live programming hosted by a variety of professional traders during market hours, the Tiger's Den. Available to all Tigers and Tigresses for just $1 for the year. There's no catch or added costs when you join our community of traders. Sign up today and become a part of this educational community of traders. Just visit the front page of TFNN.com. Welcome back. Just something quick news here. I know we have, you know, when I talk with some of you guys on the phone or via email, I know we have some people who are in, you know, IT or computer science and everything like that. I obviously have an interest in it as well. So I'll just run over this very quickly. This isn't necessarily market related, but I think it underlines what I say a lot, which is, you know, security and being vigilant about this, super important. And I really do see a future where, you know, investing in some of these cybersecurity companies will be extremely profitable. It's a really long-term play, but this is a new bug that came out, a new exploit. CISA is the cybersecurity infrastructure and security agency. They release these kind of vulnerability assessments and names and how to remediate them. It's very interesting. So, you know, if you're in an industry where, you know, IT is very important, obviously that's everything, but if you're more in that kind of realm and that line of work, this is important to know. You haven't read it yet. And also just for like general edification, because it's so important in today's society and we'll come so. Apache RocketMQ is kind of like a cloud-based messaging and streaming system. That was open-sourced by Alibaba a few years back. Essentially what happens, and again too, this also kind of crosses into the realm of these strange, like, you know, this global black market kind of economy that goes on, right? So if you're seeking to, like, let's say shut down a website, okay? There was a famous one recently with Kazakhstan Airlines where they had so much traffic going towards them that it actually shut down everything. And I have some suspicion that this happens with, I know with the United Airlines, they say it was a computer issue and this might be true, right? Infrastructure is really old. This happened with Southwest Airlines as well. You know, I'll take the companies that they're face value and not like try to delve into anything strange or anything like that. But what I will say is like, this is a valid concern of what are called botnets, right? So every computer, if you run vulnerable applications, it's kind of susceptible to these, right? And so in the case of the Kazakhstan Airlines, what had happened is there was a free VPN that was being installed. That was on the Android store, right? And what had happened is, you know, these VPNs end up communicating with different servers. It's the same thing that happens with like all of your appliances that communicate with the internet, right? These can be susceptible to what are called botnets. And it's not really that it has any effect on you as the consumer. But what happens is that malicious actors can utilize this traffic, right? And redirect it to a different server. So in the case of, you know, Apache RocketMQ, that was communicating with this, you know, Apache server that Alibaba had open sourced and they were redirecting the traffic into basically Monero crypto mining. Super interesting. This just causes low latency speeds, but it can be used, at least in the case of like, you know, Kazakhstan AIRs to kind of like shut down the server because there's so much traffic. And this goes from these kind of botnets, if they're done correctly and can kind of evade any kind of detection, can go for a lot of money. And it's super interesting. This is anything like Apache RocketMQ is most likely going to be used just by an end user. So it'll probably be more for, you know, again, high-skill hackers aren't trying to target individual people, right? They're going for, you know, government assets, enterprise assets. Regardless though, you know, you want to stay safe and if there's any kind of vulnerability, you know, you want to patch that on your end. So super interesting. If you're curious about this in any way, you can go to cisa.gov and they have a bunch of vulnerabilities listed and it's kind of cool just to look through. So yeah, there's that for the day. We'll move forward a little bit. I was talking a bit about how data is so important to Tesla and it's important to really every car maker. Data is so valuable, even if in its rawest form if it's just, you know, a simple, you know, kind of basket of random data. It's so much money. It's valuable and the car company is new, different. So car companies here are collecting too much personal data from drivers who have little freedom to opt out and this is from a researchers' rotor report and assessing the data privacy policies of 25 automobile brands. All car makers received a privacy not included warning from Mozilla Foundation, which developed the Firefox browser and advocates for better online privacy and internet safety. This means that the reports, authors have determined that the company's products to have quote, have the most problems when it comes to protecting a user's privacy. Cars are the worst product we have ever reviewed for privacy. The authors wrote calling for privacy nightmare. The computing for cars is strange as well, right? It's like peripheral or like fog computing for a lot of these, but they're absolutely susceptible to be remotely hacked as well and that's not to say that it's going to like, you know, I know there was a bunch of like fear that they would control the speed of the car. It's not that it's just data on the car, right? Like where did it go? How fast did it go this hour? You know, all these kind of things still that's very valuable stuff. The authors reviewed at least seven additional product categories including mental health apps, entertainment, electronic devices, smart home devices, wearables, health and exercise products. Cars in the first category we reviewed where every product earned our privacy not including warning label. And this is from the Mozilla Foundation. This is super interesting I feel like and I'll share this too. They can collect super intimate information about you from your medical information, your genetic information and this is just from any of these kind of applications not vehicles obviously. Modern automobiles increasingly equipped with the latest electronic gadgets can record data automatically connect to a car GPS navigation system and can collect location data and driver habits. Hook up your smartphone and data stored there can be transmitted to car makers. And it's low hanging fruit that offers many opportunities for car makers at low cost. I think we definitely will see going forward. I know the EU is really good at data protection. America not as much and you know, the almighty capital kind of runs that a little bit. I would also say just kind of a general ignorance among legislators about this kind of stuff. But interesting nonetheless. So we have that there. A big talk and actually did see someone in the den talk about it a while ago that I was bringing up that a lot of these retailers were blaming theft for you know, lost in revenue. As it as the situation transforms, a lot of these calls have come and they just refer to shrinkage. It's not just theft and shrinkage could be anything and that shrinkage does include theft but it also could be you know cashier airs. It could be administrative airs. It could be lost inventory and route. So it's interesting to hear this kind of you know vocabulary shift, right? According to CNBC, it's not the main drag on the profits. A quick key point here is CNBC analyze balance sheet is having retailers determine how much money they're losing from shrink and retail theft. Generally the inventory losses are only a small fraction of the retailer's net sales. And remember this was like a big kind of drive that a lot of these retailers had in their investor meetings, right? They're saying that theft in particular not just not really shrinkage but theft in particular was a main driver for some of their losses, right? At least for the quarter they were speaking on. Some retailers are pulling back on their contention that organized retail crime is a primary cause of losses. And folks, we have a break right now. We'll talk a little bit more about this when we get back. The Gold Report. As a precious metal, gold is still king. It continues to hold the most effective safe haven and hedging properties across the global major trading hubs of the London OTC market, the US futures market, and the Shanghai Gold Exchange. The Gold Report. Tom O'Brien publishes his weekly Gold Report every Monday morning for subscribers consisting of coverage of the XAU, HUI, GDX, the Dollar, Bonds, the South African Rand, as well as 25 different mining equities with specific buy-sell recommendations. The Gold Report. 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Every once in a break, we were talking a little bit about how shrink and theft is impacting some of these retailers. Of course, earlier this year, that was a big kind of conversation point, right? But this organized kind of retail crime was heavily impacting a lot of retailers. Famously, Walgreens pulled out of some areas in Los Angeles because of this. Obviously, these kind of products being behind locked store cases has become quite commonplace. However, some new releases suggest it isn't that large of an impact. So look at this here. During the second quarter earnings reports in August and September, nearly two dozen retailers said shrink has continued to weigh in on profits. But the details each company provided and the explanations they gave for losses varied widely. Many of them said that shrink is at an all-time high and said the industry is struggling to control it. It's still difficult to compare the losses to the past years because most companies have never previously disclosed how much shrink costs them. Generally, the inventory losses are only a small fraction of the retailers that sales. They also pale in comparison to other factors squeezing margins such as excessive discounting and promotions according to CNBC analysis of their balance sheets. While shrink is growing for some companies, losses are generally in line with retail industry standard of 1% to 1.5%. That signals that it may not be as dire as certain retailers and trade associations have suggested. When they reported second quarter results, some companies like Target and Dick Sporting Goods offered clues into how much shrink is costing them and squarely blamed theft. Target lost about $219 million to shrink during the three months end in July of 29th while Dick's lost about $27.1 million during the same period. Ulta and Footlocker, which both blamed organized retail crime for losses in May, did not mention theft during their most recent results. They only used the term shrink when discussing how it squeezed margins. This organized retail crime, you know, it is legitimate. Of course, with, you know, social media and everyone having a phone and everything like that, I think some negative things in the culture get magnified quite a bit. I mean, obviously this is terrible, right? Like this is definitely like something that's just a kind of a net negative for society that these kind of things occur and it would be nice if they didn't. But also a lot of these companies, it's easy to take from them as well. There is an interview, I think, that CNN did or CNBC, one of these companies where they actually interviewed a guy who ran an organized retail theft ring. He was in California doing it. He's in jail now. But, you know, they interviewed him and kind of asking him, you know, how do you do it? What are some steps these companies can take to prevent this? So on, because it really does just, it ruins it for everyone, right? And it's just sad to see this kind of stuff in the news. I mean, it's negative for mine, you know, your mindset. And it was pretty insightful to listen to him. I'll see if I can find that. I was watching that a few days ago. I'll see if I can find that video and I'll link it for sure, because I think it's pretty interesting. Lowe's has some of the highest shrink numbers among companies analyzed by CNBC. It has blamed the range of factors for the losses. Sometimes it said that organized retail crime cut into profits, but in other cases, it blamed weather-related damages. Wal-Mart was a little bit more kind of tempered on it. The note of that shrink isn't always related to retail theft when reporting second quarter earnings. It said it remains focused on other causes of inventory losses that are more controllable. And this will probably be like damaged products and routes, lost products, again, in transit and probably administrative errors as well. That can also be a massive cause of losses. So, anyways, I think that's pretty interesting as well because, again, there was such a large discussion in the culture about how much is organized retail theft is affecting some of these profits. Let's take a look. I think this is pretty fascinating too as we kind of get in to see what the state of the average American consumer is. And this is like the delinquencies rise for credit cards and auto loans and it could get worse. I think I spoke about this a little bit yesterday, but I kind of want to keep going more into it because consumption is still staying consistent in some capacity. It definitely has crawled back a little bit and any drive in consumption is probably going to be done by citizens with more money. But still, we still have loan payments that are going to resume. We have these like variable interest rates, at least like homes and everything like that that are going to change. And people might be pretty cash strapped. And I was speaking a few months ago how more Americans are using credit cards in order to pay for groceries, which might not just be good planning for credit scores. So, some of the Washington Posts is that more Americans are falling behind on their credit card loan, see their car loan and credit card payments than any time more than the past decade. A troubling signal of consumer stress is higher prices and rising borrowing costs or squeezing household budgets. The pain is most acute for lower-income earners who have largely used whatever they managed to save during the pandemic with the help of government stimulus checks and breaks on obligations such as rent and student loans. The increase in delinquencies and defaults is symptomatic of the tough decisions that these households are having to make right now, whether to pay their credit card bills, their rent, or buy groceries. Now, as the economy finds its post-pandemic footing, there are no signs the hardship for millions of consumers will get worse before it improves. The average credit card interest rate, already at a record high of 20%, according to BankGrade.com, appears likely to keep climbing. As the Federal Reserve indicated, it could continue raising interest rates to get inflation under control. Student loan payments that were paused for more than three years are poised to resume in October, and the banks and other lenders have been clamping down on credit cards, excuse me, on credit for months as a process that accelerated after the spring banking crisis and shockwaves through the industry. And this is pretty crazy too. And you know, a lot of lower income earners are in a rock and a hard place. You know what I mean? Rent is extraordinarily high, at least in cities. And I see, of course, you're gonna have to get roommates and stuff like that is really the answer. But I mean, it's people even into their early 30s who are struggling with this. And I've seen this discussion that's like, well, just move out of the city, like move to somewhere. And, you know, the city is where all the jobs are. And people are trying to transition back into office work, which, you know, that's the prerogative of the company's leadership. But, you know, like it's difficult, I think, for a lot of people. You know, you leave the city and you have like a 40 minute long commute or something like that. You know, I have a buddy who lives outside of Chicago, excuse me, he lived outside of Chicago because it was cheaper and he worked in the city and the commute was miserable. He spent a lot on gas, you know, insurance payments go up in those situations and stuff like that. So it's, you know, it's a tough situation to be in. And this is the increase in delinquencies too. Obviously the highest in 2008, 2009, consumer loans, pretty steady decrease up into it. And we just see this shoot up. Again, you know, like it's nuts too. And with the high prices, at least like it was going on with cars and everything like that. I mean, it's no wonder that these, I was paying, luckily my payments have gone down and this is really a testament to being like serious about your credit score. And that's so important, especially in a society where loans are, you need those to kind of survive, right, and get stuff. But cars are so expensive. I mean, anyways, people are paying like 500 bucks a month for their car loads. It's nuts, folks stay tuned, we'll be right back. You might think that if you want to be successful at trading in the stock market, you're going to need a crystal ball. After all, it's impossible to predict the future, right? 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This program is brought to you by Vista Gold. Traded on the NYSE American and TSX under the symbol VGZ. Welcome back, folks. All right, so about 12 minutes past the open, we are a little bit green to the upside in the S&P futures. Definitely up on some little bit of volume right now, which is nice to rustle down a little bit. Everything else kind of sideways or up. So we'll see how that plays out throughout the day. Apple gaining a little bit back right now, up about 1.2%. Someone was musing in the den, you know, is phasing out the iPhones and the government offices and employees, you know, a precursor to any kind of like movement on China's end against the U.S. What I'll say to that is Apple is really, Apple products are extraordinarily secure, right? They keep all of their back end under a tight, I mean, remember with the, there was the California shooter, right? And sorry to even bring this up, but the government wanted to get, the feds wanted to get into his iPhone and what that would have done is require kind of a back door, right? There's ways to brute force iPhone passcodes on older models, but of course you need to actually physically have the device on a software level. Apple was unwilling to give them that back door because it would have compromised the whole system. To my knowledge, there's only been, I think two major exploits that ever occurred on Apple products. One of them had to do with a calendar exploit that if you clicked on a message, it would, you know, take advantage of the calendar pop-ups and they could send you messages and kind of like utilize some parts of the phone. And then there was another one called Pegasus, but that was developed by an Israeli cyber group with the government and most likely the U.S. government as well. There's a group in the U.S. government with the NSA, they're called the Equation Group and they, you know, they're responsible for some pretty large, what are called zero days, right? And these are like massive exploits have never been seen before, most famously, Eternal Blue, which compromised a lot of Windows systems. What I'll say with this is you want to look at it when you're trying to get inside the mind of like, you know, really criminals in general, but cyber criminals as well. It's, you know, I think it's like famous kind of, you know, the saying that my granddad had, which is like, you don't have to be the fastest, but you just have to run faster than the other guy. And that's really what this is about, right? I have a family member who's an incident response lead at Cisco and they actually just strictly use Apple products, right? Just because there's not a lot of exploits for them and they're relatively secure. It's far easier, you know, say there was some kind of cyber attack from China or something like that or whatever, some other kind of entity. It would definitely be at some of the more, you know, antiquated kind of infrastructure that we have just because it's far cheaper to do that and easier. And I would say to like on a side note as well, like if we ever hit some weird like deflationary period in America, like say like a massive recession, obviously you can use government spending to get out of that. I think a revamp of the IT infrastructure would be a really good way for the government to get out of that because we do have, we have a weird old patchwork system essentially, right? Like we were, America was the leader in a lot of this kind of stuff. So a lot of our tech is so old. I mean, we saw that even with, you know, United Airlines on an enterprise level, but think about it on a government level as well. So that's some interesting stuff to use about. I wouldn't be too concerned with Apple at all because they're pretty, they are pretty safe. I think more what it's going to be is just, these are like shots on an economic level towards each other. So in the news of, you know, the green transition, poor Texas, so they suffer a solar wind powered route and they're avoiding blackouts using natural gas. Triple digit temperatures aren't unusual during Texas summers, but power shortages coupled with urgent orders to conserve electricity are now routine. While Texans barely averted blackouts Wednesday evening, the state's energy ordeals are flickering a warning to the rest of the country. This is Eric Cot, we were speaking about them yesterday, how they were paying riots to kind of stop mining for a little bit during excessive heat waves. They call a stage two emergency on Wednesday evening, one step from rolling blackouts. High demand, lower wind generation and the declining solar generation during sunset led to lower operating reserves on the grid and eventually contributed to lower frequency. Businesses that use large amounts of power redirected to curb their energy consumption, i.e. scale back operations, utilities urged Texans to unplug electric vehicles, turn off pool filters, et cetera. And we do use a lot of power for some creature comfort things, such as pool filters and stuff like that. If you ever want an insight of what it could be when a power management company really drops a ball and you see wide scale blackouts, you should look at South Africa because they have had, I mean, there's a lot of it due to widespread corruption as well within the industry, but they experience daily blackouts. Just it's a pretty nuts kind of case study. So you can look that up as well to see kind of what the reality of something like that would be if our country doesn't figure out something. And of course we have states are really in control of that kind of stuff, but you can see what the future of that would be if there's not something that's done to change this really. So it says businesses that use large amounts of power are directed to curb their energy consumption. Texans can serve enough power Wednesday to prevent blackouts, but they're asked again Thursday to use less power in the evening when many come home from work and want to crank up the AC. Last month, AirCot issued eight emergency alerts to conserve power. The state's refineries, manufacturing plants and data centers need huge amounts of power. Texas produces 10 times as much solar power as it did five years ago. An estimated 7.7 gigawatts of solar power capacity will be installed this year. About 9% of the states peak demand on Wednesday. Renewables at times can generate 40% of the state's power. That is pretty impressive. Neither solar nor wind provides reliable power around the clock. Solar predictably wanes during late afternoon and the state doesn't have anywhere close to enough large-scale batteries to make up the shortfall. Yeah, I'm curious to see what will happen with them. Again, I'm a big believer on nuclear power. We'll see what happens. Obviously using what you have in the area, you know, a mixed portfolio, you know, dependent on the low-cal, super important. But even with Texas, which you would assume, you know, wind, especially at its coastline and solar as well, you'd think that'd be enough. But of course, they've also had a lot of people moving in there and it's so hot and it never has been this hot. So, interesting. We'll see what happens with that. You know, I believe in the American ingenuity. We'll figure something out on that, but it's important to keep that as a real situation so that we actually can solve it. Let me see here. I'm going to pull this up. This is cool too. This is JP Morgan is exploring blockchain-based deposit tokens for payments and settlements. This isn't necessarily cryptocurrency, but it uses the same kind of concept, right? They're in the early stages of exploring a blockchain-based digital deposit token for speeding up cross-border payments. Guys, this is what we were saying so many months ago, that this is really the benefit of this concept of blockchain and quote-unquote crypto currencies. This isn't really going to be a cryptocurrency and everything like that, but this skirts all these kind of issues regarding cross-border transactions and stuff like that. You can essentially make this little hub. If you're going to have your own blockchain as a company, you can essentially make this hub and all your partners can plug into it and there is better liquidity. You can plan better. I mean, this is really, in my opinion, what I think the biggest benefit behind blockchain is. Folks, stay tuned. We have a short segment after that and then we got you going on to Basel Chapman. Accessing of coverage of the XAU, H UI, G DX, the Dollar, Bonds, the South African RAND, as well as 25 different mining equities with specific buy-sell recommendations. The Gold Report. New subscribers get a 30-day money-back guarantee so you have nothing to risk. Subscribe to Tom O'Brien's Gold Report newsletter now at TFNN.com. You might think that if you want to be successful at trading in the stock market, you're going to need a crystal ball. After all, it's impossible to predict the future, right? Like any endeavor in life, before you decide it's impossible, get some advice from the experts. You might find that it's not so impossible after all. For daily market overviews that give you direction on the key indices, selective stocks, and commodities, subscribe to the opening call newsletter at tfnn.com. 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This is a inevitable, this is an inevitable results of global trade. 37,000 so-called alien species have been transported due to human activities around the world. The cost of invasive species has quadrupled every decade since 1970. And I can give an anecdote on this, right? Like when I was young, we would go to the Florida Springs, right? Swim all the time, they're absolutely beautiful. As time has gone on, I've gotten into like scuba diving, I've gotten into like snorkeling and stuff like that. You know, I love going to the springs for it because it's just beautiful water, constant temperature. The clarity is unbelievable. But as I've gotten older, I have seen the introduction of like, you know, tilapia into these springs. I've seen things called plecos, right? Which are like the little algae eaters in tanks. And most notably is the water hyacinth, which is a massive plant. It grows on the top of the water and it completely chokes out, you know, the floor of the river. And you know, this is just much more like quality of life kind of things. And it's sad to see it like transform like this, right? But it does affect us long-term. You know, think about too, all the kind of Japanese beetles that come and they can like mess up our timber, bunch of different weevils that affect us as well. So you know, this is a major thing. And honestly, it's like, what do you do about this, right? Like it's really difficult to solve anything. I know at least for, I suppose you could do something strange, like what they're trying to do with the mosquitoes, right? Which is genetically alter them. So they only produce male offspring and that kind of kills them out. But like, I mean, can you really do that on such a widespread kind of scale? So anyways, this is just some, you know, it's kind of sad news I would suppose too. But I think it's also important to understand too. So if there's anything that moves forward in order to kind of like halt the spread of some of these species, you know, we support it as well. And it's important to keep, you know, our locality pristine. So folks, thank you so much for joining me. I'll be with you next week as well as Tommy is out. We have Basil Chapman up next and I hope you guys have a great weekend.