John Polomny — research hub

Stock & name index

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Overall thesis

• Oil over $100 on a second chokepoint — and a pre-committed exit (9.12.26 weekly). Iraqi militias knocked out Saudi Arabia's east-west bypass pipeline and the Houthis took Mocha, Perim and Zuqar islands — "two major choke points controlled by either Iran or proxies of Iran" — while Trump declines to act before the midterms; he puts a non-zero chance on the kingdom falling. Global refining online is "the lowest in modern history," and with commodities "priced at the margin" a 4–5% loss is enough; Kroger and PepsiCo confirm pass-through. Oil "is where I'm putting a lot of my money now" (McClellan's gold-leads-oil signal runs to Sept 2027), but "when they peak they go back down… don't be afraid to take profits." Bonds: Norges Bank cutting government bonds 70%→50% is the direction of travel toward yield-curve control and forced holders.
• Be at the table; build the permanent book from land and real assets (9.5.26 weekly). The S&P-versus-wages chart since 1964 is the Cantillon effect — "if you're not an asset owner, you are out of business" — and the Permanent Portfolio is the within-the-system alternative to "international man" for anyone below true high net worth. Forestry is cheap because lumber is in a bear market, but the trees keep growing and the land carries TPL/LandBridge-style options. Still bullish oil (upstream + downstream) on record $5.85 diesel; the ag bull has "woken up" (Deere's breakout, corn); Brazil played through the exchange operator B3; Argentina's Vaca Muerta LNG; the Pentagon's 35% of NABEP makes Venezuela "investable"; no tech — hyperscaler debt is the telecom bubble "far and beyond."
• The AIA Permanent Portfolio, launched — and land is the first sleeve (9.3.26 monthly issue). The structural view finally gets a book of its own. The debt question is settled by elimination, not forecast: spending cuts are "not likely" (the growth is Social Security and Medicare; "zero appetite" for reform), default is "zero chance… the end of the US Empire" — so monetization via QE and yield-curve control, with the 1942–51 Fed peg quoted as the precedent (CPI over 17% by 1947, over 20% annualized in 1951). The saver's escape hatch is closed by Russell Napier's repression list — bank liquidity rules, pension minimums, insurance solvency treatment, capital controls: "the government does not necessarily announce: 'You must finance our deficit.' Instead, it changes the regulations… so that owning government bonds becomes practically unavoidable" (von der Leyen calling €10tn of EU deposits "lazy" is offered as the live rehearsal). Doug Casey's five-flags answer is rejected on implementability — "a family office with a billion dollars? Yes. Guy who sold his HVAC business for $2 million? Not likely" — so the vehicle is Harry Browne's Permanent Portfolio (25% each stocks / long Treasuries / bills / gold, one asset per economic regime) with one deliberate deviation: "I want less exposure to bonds… I expect persistent inflation and the government to institute yield-curve control." Mandate is separated from the AIA Portfolio's 3x–10x rule: "not a get-rich portfolio… better suited for those with accumulated wealth who want to preserve it." First sleeve = land, owned liquidly (the Talmud's one-third-in-land rule; Kopernik on timber; "easier to sell shares in a stock than to sell a piece of land"), expressed as WY — an asset play with the P/E deliberately switched off. The same issue carries the one hard sell: Global Atomic, on dilution not geology, with the rule restated — "when a resource company misses a goal or projection, sell first and ask questions later" — while the uranium view itself is unchanged (URNM: "the bull market continues").
• Warsh is not the new Volcker; measure in ounces, buy the discount (8.29.26 weekly). The clearest separation yet between the view that sets allocation and the dated events that set positions. On policy: Warsh's Jackson Hole debut is "all gaslighting and gamesmanship… what do you expect him to say?" — the binding constraint is leverage, so "if long rates get to five and a half or 6%… he's not going to have a choice," and at that level "that could destroy the US economy. You think housing's bad now? Just wait." Near term he reads a September 25bp hike as "the narrow base case but not a certainty", with bills and short duration out to two-year notes attractive and a widening Treasury/Fed schism (Bessent selling bills and buying back orphaned long bonds while Warsh tells investors not to assume QE). The conclusion is unchanged: "the die is cast… all roads lead to money printing. It won't be linear." The measurement half is the new material. US household net worth ran $400,000 → $1.35 million since 2000, "3.4 times in dollars," but 1,430 ounces of gold → 295 — "you're 80% poorer in real terms… it's the boiling frog." Bessent's growth claim is granted in principle and killed on the data (GDP 2.9 / 2.8 / 2.1 / 1.5% for 2023–26 against debt growth 7.2 / 6.9 / 6.1 / 7.5%): "debt is growing two to three times faster than the economy. So the man is lying again." Corroboration stacks up — $650bn added since July 1 ("$12 billion a day"; John Adams: "there are two ways to enslave a country… the other is by debt"), Druckenmiller's WSJ op-ed (interest at 4.5% of GDP by 2033, 144% of all discretionary spending by 2043; "anyone who tells you entitlements won't be cut is lying — not about the outcome, but about who decides it"), Tavi Costa's global money supply over $122 trillion (+$22T in under three years) with gold due to "reattach itself," and China ramping gold purchases precisely when the price dips. The seven-indicator currency-crisis checklist (own-bond buying, debt/GDP >100%, interest >15% of revenue, foreign holders retreating, reserve share declining, oversight gutted, political interference) scores 7 of 7 — but with the reserve-currency exemption and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations caveat, so it is "adopted into our long-term financial planning. It doesn't mean it's a tradable situation on Monday morning." Bitcoin gets its first real hearing and lands mid-scale: "an asset class that can probably be used to protect purchasing power," but "I'm more partial to gold… a 5,000-year history"; the instruction is the category — "you want to own scarcity," land, royalties, "things that if you drop them on your foot they'll make you go owie" — inside a fourth turning he expects to stay violent. Manufactured scarcity gains a European exhibit: Europe pays 8× the US gas price — "not a geological problem. This is a political choice" (an intact Nord Stream line nobody will restart; hydrocarbons it forbids itself) — which the US monetizes through LNG at $3/mcf here versus $20–30 there, hence every new export train from Corpus Christi to Sabine Pass. On uranium, with spot at a seven-month high, he states the method rather than a name: track NAV and buy the Sprott physical trust (SRUUF/SPUT) at −10% to −15% — "buy something that's probably going to go up over time at a discount. That's how real wealth is created"; anyone who insists on the tenbagger should run it "as a private equity investor… a portfolio of 8 to 10 names with the understanding that 80% of them are going to fail." The supply case comes off a NexGen chart (a 335 Mlb/yr primary deficit by 2040 against 530 Mlb of demand, mine supply needing to more than triple) against a ~15-year discovery-to-production clock — "you're already in the window" — so the incentive price stays $200–250/lb; Kazatomprom's troubles are read as "managed to have the price go higher" (excuses about "sulfuric acid and dinosaur bones" while old contracts roll into higher-priced new ones), and Sweden's 8 GW of applications as ~4 Mlb/yr of fresh demand. On food: corn-belt farmers in their "worst crisis in 40 years" on $5.70 diesel (a refining problem, not a crude one), suspended Middle-East nitrogen capacity and an unresolved sulfuric-acid shortage, with the cattle herd at generational lows and 300,000 tons of imported beef undercutting the very price signal that would rebuild it — and DBA up 11 sessions straight as grain finally prices it in ("how do you establish a position? That's the trick"). And Venezuela: Trump's announced agreement gives the US majority control over 65 billion barrels with $100bn aimed at the Orinoco Belt and Lake Maracaibo — the "Donroe doctrine," which he refuses to endorse and will still trade ("do I agree with it? No… but this is what's happening") — disciplined by the week's best line: "resources and reserves don't equal production" (former holding MEG Energy, since acquired by Cenovus, carried 4bn barrels behind just 100,000 b/d at Christina Lake), with export terminals so degraded tankers wait 30 days on demurrage while Schlumberger and Halliburton already move rigs back in. His own money sits in an unnamed, "highly speculative" junior with legacy Venezuelan and Colombian deals, identified only in last month's paid issue. Housekeeping: a third book is coming — "I'm also introducing now a more permanent portfolio… how can we create and maintain wealth and navigate through this ice field?"
• Argentina re-entered via ARGT, uranium "making a move," and the empire trade explicitly ruled un-tradeable (8.27.26 weekly). A thin, mostly video-embedded issue carrying one disclosed action and one rare, fully-argued country thesis. The action: "FDW Capital wrote an article back in April about the commodity supercycle and how Argentina will benefit. I have become more confident in Argentina and have begun re-entering via the ETF (ARGT)" — begun (staged, still building) and re-entering (a name owned and exited before). Three legs. Cycle: "the cycle bottomed around 2020 — the deepest trough since the Great Depression — and has turned sharply upward," with Capital Market Assumptions datasets pointing "toward a peak somewhere north of 12% annual returns by 2028–2030." Structure, which he says holds even if the cycle disappoints: "Brazil and Argentina… now offer something that is genuinely scarce in global commodity markets: political accessibility combined with world-class reserves. A lithium deposit in Argentina, a deepwater oil field in Brazil — these are not subject to the geopolitical risk premium that now shadows Middle Eastern barrels, Russian metals, or Chinese rare earth supply chains… Even in a scenario where commodity prices disappoint, the relative attractiveness… has permanently shifted" — an argument about the discount rate on the assets, not the price of what they produce. The engine: Vaca Muerta, "discovered in 2010… in Neuquén province," the world's second-largest technically recoverable shale gas reserves (308 Tcf per the EIA) and fourth-largest shale oil, where "for over a decade, chronic political instability, capital controls, and punitive export taxes kept this titan dormant" — the constraint political, not geological — and now, "under Milei's reform program, particularly the RIGI large-investment incentive scheme, the formation is producing at record levels and attracting every major oil company on earth. This is no longer a story about potential. It is a story about execution." The template is a repeat with three lags in it: "We have run this playbook in other countries before. As economic reforms take hold, positive economic results lead to better per capita economic outcomes and are eventually reflected in markets. It will not be linear, and there will be volatility, but the trend is in place." On uranium the whole written content is "Uranium Making a Move… AIA is very bullish on uranium!" — no ticker named, though "making a move" implies the equities are finally following the record term price he complained they were ignoring in the 8.3.26 monthly. And on the Doug Casey debt-topples-empires discussion he grants the conclusion ("nothing particularly special about the US… another empire in a long list") and then refuses to trade it: "just because something is certain does not mean it is imminent. No one can put a time frame on these events, making them difficult to act on… 'There is a great deal of ruin in a nation'… Nevertheless, the die is cast, and this should be taken into account in your financial planning. Although we are getting close to the precipice." The rule in practice: the structural view sets the allocation (scarcity, hard assets), while dated, checkable events — a production record, a signed licence — get the positions.
• $40 trillion printed, Bessent doubles the long-end buybacks, and BP walks into Venezuela (8.19.26 weekly). The milestone he has been forecasting all year arrived: total public debt "surpassed $40 trillion for the first time" — "200 years to reach its first $1 trillion… 95 days to add its last," a third of the total added in under five years — and it printed "just hours after" Treasury Secretary Bessent unexpectedly said he would ramp long-end support by "increasing, by at least double, the size of liquidity support buyback operations" in the 10–20y and 20–30y sectors, off-cycle, "just two weeks after the latest Refunding Announcement where it should have made this change." His whole comment on the number is one line — "Hurray..we hit $40 trillion in debt!" — and the operative read is the confirmation from the assets: "Gold and Bitcoin are up. Both of these are sniffing out the upcoming QE operations in my view." He frames the week with George Noble's Metals and Miners summary, reprinted approvingly: "there is only ONE way out of $40 trillion… it runs straight through the printing press… the Fed doesn't hold the cards. Mr. Market holds them," with interest expense now "the second-biggest line item in the entire federal budget," $2.5T deficits "while the economy is still fine" and rates unable to fall "when the demand for capital from government borrowing and the hyperscaler capex boom is the largest we have seen in decades" — the two-sided trap being "you cannot suppress yields without debasing the currency, and you cannot let them find their real level without blowing up the bond market," so "the easy way out is to print, and they always take the easy way out." Noble's energy screen sharpens Polomny's own weight-only call from the 8.13.26 weekly by supplying the cash-flow side: energy is "barely 3.5% of the S&P while heading toward 20% of its free cash flow" — "that gap does not stay open forever" — with the SPR at 43-year lows and the paper barrel market 40–50× the physical; plus gold sentiment "hitting literal ZERO three weeks ago was the signal" with the miners "set up to lead this move," and the AI buildout "shaping up to be housing bust 2.0." On Venezuela the "Donroe Doctrine" gets its second dated confirmation: BP licensed on 14 August for Phase 2 of the offshore Loran gas field (~4 tcf) with the UAE's XRG/ADNOC and Qatar-linked UCC, four days after a US Treasury delegation flew to Caracas — "BP now joins Shell and Chevron," and the gas can move through Trinidad's existing LNG infrastructure rather than a greenfield build. The pattern, stated as a sequence: "U.S. political leverage -> Western capital and technology -> rapidly rising Venezuelan energy production," where "the geopolitical implication is more important than the individual BP project." And the disclosure: "I added a speculative position in the AIA Portfolio that has the potential to re-enter the Venezuelan oil industry by acquiring an existing producing oil field… No exploration risk; just apply capital and know-how and rinse and repeat" — unnamed in the free post. Finally, a rare personal disclosure on income: he endorses Benjamin Demase's options-income "freedom number" recipe (an option strategy run "as a business… without being wed to the 9-to-5 grind") with "I retired from a 9-5 job a couple of years ago. I have adopted a similar strategy in my personal investments (I wish I had started earlier!). It has exceeded my expectations."
• The bust is the entry: copper to $10–12 by decade-end, but back the truck up at $4 (8.13.26, guest on In It to Win It). Asked whether photonics and a data-center backlash kill the copper call, he concedes the bear case and then dates it. The AI buildout "is the biggest bubble" — as a share of GDP it "exceeds what happened in 1999 and 2000… and it also exceeds housing" — because "the amount of capital that they're investing, they cannot get a return on." The tell is the financing ladder, already two rungs down: hyperscalers built "out of cash flow… then some of them started issuing stock. Now, they're issuing debt," into an arms race that never becomes maintenance capex ("every two or three years you're having to reinvest hundreds"). So when it "blows up, which it will, we're going to have a deep recession" and copper goes "down to four or 350, that's kind of median price of production. That'll be a buy, you should back the truck up" — because the Fed prints and hard assets "rally. Just look at history." The dip is temporary because supply is structural: Chile "in terminal decline," Peru in trouble, and an $8bn eastern-DRC mine that only Chinese-partnered developers will fund — "if you're RIO or BHP, do you want to go into these places? Selling that to your board is difficult" — against the arithmetic that "we have to mine as much copper as we've mined in the history of the world in the next 20 years… I don't see the investment." Hence "$10 or $12 a pound" by the end of the decade; photonics doesn't touch it because the copper is in "the transformers and all the wiring for the power." On Hormuz: the bypasses are real (east-west Saudi pipeline, Oman, hundreds of Iraq→Syria trucks) but "maybe you're bypassing half of it," and the forgotten losses persist — "It's LNG. It's 6 or 7% of your aluminum smelting capacity is in the Gulf… nitrogen fertilizer." The gap is being papered by coordinated stock drawdowns (China cutting imports and drawing on stocks "well over a billion barrels") which are "all finite" — and which he suspects were bought: "What are they getting for it? I think they're going to get Taiwan," inside his hemispheric-control-points thesis. The fiscal spine hardens: deficits at WWII share of GDP, "$40 trillion in debt," "the United States will not exist as a political entity intact as it is now in a generation" — and the path is double-digit inflation → yield curve control → capital controls (Russell Napier; Lyn Alden on the post-WWII precedent), enforced on captive buyers by statute ("you have a Fidelity 401K, you'll buy 30%… Congress. They'll mandate it"). Warsh "tried to portray himself as the new Volcker, which I think was a mistake… the people are all clowns," because the arithmetic forbids it: $9T to roll plus $2T new issuance, the bond bull "over a few years ago," and "the US economy can't take 7 8% long bond yields. The thing will break." Position management gets its clearest statement yet — write the thesis in a logbook so a 60% drawdown is a decision not a feeling (buy more if nothing changed), measure each name's annual high-low range (50–60% swings are normal), take half off after a 100% gain, size so you can sleep, and buy the canned peaches when they go to 40 cents. (The premium continuation — oil & gas royalties, oil services, his "number one focus" — is behind the host's paywall and not captured.)
• Yield curve control is the engine, scarcity is the expression (8.8.26 weekly). The clearest statement yet of the whole framework in one chain. Federal debt closes on $40 trillion at 6–7%-of-GDP deficits — "not a problem until it becomes a problem and then it will be the only problem that matters" — and the historical exit from that overhang is the one used after World War II: yield curve control and financial repression. Reading Doug Casey verbatim: the central bank "decides what interest rate the government should pay on its debt and then uses its money printing power to enforce that rate… in other words, yield curve control is price fixing for government debt," and it will arrive under a euphemism ("financial stability policy," "market functioning support"). The line he calls profound — "the Fed has only two tools in its toolkit, currency debasement and gaslighting" — is why he owns hard assets. Transmission is Cantillon: bondholders front-run the cap, sell to the New York Fed, reinvest the created cash, and the flood reaches "the average slob living paycheck to paycheck" — "ergo, the cost of living crisis"; the price level never resets down, so "he who is closest to the money printer wins." Foreign central banks are already swapping Treasuries — the 1970s slur certificates of confiscation, held at par by banks that would be insolvent at market — for gold, and on Jordan Roy-Byrne's history (a 20%+ week in gold stocks after a deep decline; 15%+ weeks "suggest the bottom is likely in") he thinks the low is probably in, with the caution "never say definitely." Copper's scarcity keeps being manufactured: the DRC banning copper/cobalt concentrate exports to force domestic processing, sulfuric acid (needed for >15% of global primary copper) going $400→$1,300/ton on the Gulf war — a windfall for his unnamed smelter holding — and Codelco suspending life extension at its biggest mine on new seismic risk as Chilean output "rolls over and heads south." On oil he reads Aramco's Q2 as the tally: 11 Mbpd removed, 2.6bn barrels lost, and 18 months at 2.1 Mbpd to refill inventories even if Hormuz opened today — so he's bullish oil and refining, backs the Canadian oil sands (CVE, SU) and has just bought Athabasca (ATH), "the cash machine" repaying debt and buying back stock ("cannibalization of shares"); Latin America is "being repriced already" (PBR; Colombia's new government reopens EC/PXT/GPRK; Vaca Muerta and YPF, where Marks and Druckenmiller have large positions). He owns Glencore (GLNCY) personally — "I love that company" — for value-chain capture, Q2 trading profits "tremendous" on flat production, the same quality he sees in Total (TTE). And the standing warning: per Apollo, data-center capex adds 1.7pp of GDP in two years, "close to twice the pace of the housing boom at its fastest" — housing and telecom both busted, "the same arithmetic runs in reverse," and "I see no path to recovering the capital that's being invested." Discipline restated: look out 18–24 months, expect multi-baggers to take ~5 years, keep speculative gold juniors in the personal account so the portfolio isn't "a junior gold mining newsletter," and recycle capital after a 5–10× (a seven-or-eight-bagger oilfield-services name just cashed out).
• Housekeeping, the multibagger taxonomy, and Venezuela re-opening (8.3.26 monthly). The mandate is restated as the filter the whole book must pass: "I am looking for companies that can potentially have 3x-10x moves over three to five years" — and "any company that does multibag needs years for that to happen." Three admissible types: early capital compounders reinvesting above-average returns; blown-up or mismanaged names where "an event occurs — new management taking over, business improving, or, in the case of a commodity producer, the market for the underlying commodity cyclically bottoming and then turning up"; and event-driven specials (spinoffs, bankruptcy re-emergence, legal outcomes, management change). He admits scope creep and clears five names — BBD ("hasn't played out as I thought"), DBA ("not likely to be a candidate for a multibagger" though "I am bullish on agriculture"), LITP ("I may have been early"), TDW ("has stagnated") and, hardest, FTI after a 700%+ five-year run: "nothing is necessarily wrong with the company, but at this point I don't see the potential for big upside… a great example of buying something that was out of favor as it was inflecting. We held it for five years, which shows that for my style to work, one needs patience for positions to mature." The macro underneath is unchanged and blunt — indebted Western democracies with unpayable health/retirement obligations, voters who "seek to live off of each other" (Bastiat), "it does not matter who you vote for; you will get more spending" — so "all roads lead to inflation" ("insidious even if the FED were to meet its fake 2% goal"), and the expression is scarcity: "things that we need to survive but that can't be created out of thin air or by government fiat," including scarcity "created by government interventions… dumb policies, regulations, war." The new money goes to New Stratus Energy (NSE.V) — the "Donroe Doctrine" trade: after Operation Absolute Resolve removed Maduro (3-Jan-2026) the Rodríguez government reversed Chávez-era oil nationalization, and NSE moves first to reacquire fields it already had a deal on, reactivating idle wells with hired service crews ("no exploration risk initially. The oil is there"), recycling cash flow into more reactivations — the Bankers Petroleum / Hurricane Hydrocarbons legacy-field playbook he has twice profited from; "still very speculative," insiders ~40% after a $6.5M placement. Elsewhere: uranium's term price $97/lb against sold-off equities ("another opportunity to buy"; SPUT at a discount as the safe version), Ivanhoe's Kamoa stabilized toward 500kt by 2028 with the war-driven sulphuric-acid by-product cutting copper costs, Amerigo "a cash machine" at a 25% yield on cost, and Seabridge back in the AIA Portfolio update list (a US$100M KSM bridge, "I think a deal happens eventually") after July's sale.
• Reform + resource windfall, and the debt-funded commodity build (7.31.26). On Argentina: "Austrian economists would be proud… at this pace, Argentina is on track to eliminate inflation within one to two years" — the pain was real but "overall the situation for the majority of people has improved," and "the goal now is to move from economic triage to real and lasting economic growth." His stated second factor is Vaca Muerta — "one of my views is that the continued growth of the Vaca Muerta shale basin… is acting as a big tailwind to Argentina's economic recovery and growth" (May 2026 record 887,227 b/d, +19% YoY; gas 5.5 Bcf/d, +11% YoY; shale a record 70.6% of oil / 69.8% of gas; 1–1.5 Mbpd expected by 2030 with YPF and private producers spending; Argentina now South America's fourth-largest producer) — rhyming with the North Sea under Thatcher, "often ignored when discussing the UK's recovery." On AI capex, the item is a "wealth transfer from hyperscalers to semiconductor makers" and "that which can't continue will not": Google "reports its first quarter of negative cash flow. Is this still a company that deserves a premium valuation?" as "the companies are shifting to debt to continue their buildouts" — "when has piling on debt to invest in a commodity-type investment worked out long term?… we have seen this movie before: fiber, shale, housing" — expecting them to "borrow and build until the money runs out." He endorses Trump accounts ("make them owners so they are vested in a good outcome"; "participation is the key"), and reiterates the emerging-market position as a duration call, not a trade: EM/DM relative-performance shifts "usually have a long wave of 8-10 years. Still lots of meat on the bone in my view."
• "My main thesis going forward is scarcity" (7.23.26). A three-item free weekly that names the through-line explicitly. He publishes Matt Smith's June natural-gas letter in full — 18 months of bottom-up work across basins, pipelines, processing, LNG exports and AI power projects concluding the US could draw storage at unprecedented rates as early as 2028 and "by 2030 we are likely to exhaust working natural gas storage… the fuel everyone thinks is abundant is not… this does not portend a modest price increase" — and handles it with explicit generalist humility: "I don't have the expertise to refute this, but it's worth keeping on my radar screen." On oil, with the SPR at a more-than-40-year low (DOE claims a ~70M-barrel cavern operational minimum, "far lower than oil industry estimates"; TradeStation: "the SPR draws can't continue forever"), he sets a single physical falsifier rather than a price target: "staying bullish oil until I see Iraq and Kuwait resume full export capacity — that is my canary in the coal mine" ("Trump says we are good, so take that for what it is worth"). And he flags Incrementum's Active Aurum Signal (Offensive/Neutral/Defensive gold-miner exposure; Defensive ahead of the Q2 drawdown, where gold −11.52% vs GDX −20.78% — "a dislocation, not a verdict," now overbought→oversold and being rebuilt "cautiously and selectively") as "interesting and useful," while publishing an independent critique that the reported record (144.1% vs gold's 88.7% in EUR, vol 22.2% vs GDX 38.2%, Sharpe 1.92) is "not yet an independently verified source of alpha" absent a timestamped signal history, exact execution rules, net returns, rolling periods and more out-of-sample time.
• Manipulated crude, refiner bull & buy-quality-on-the-drop (7.11.26). Won't chase "a bubble probably bigger than the internet bubble." Oil's weak spot price is "blatant manipulation" — SPR draw + Bessent shorting futures + China's import halt, "a gutshot straight" — while product crack spreads sit near record highs (~$65/bbl): the tell that a real shortage is building (world demand ~105 Mbpd, missing 5–10 Mbpd from finite storage; ~100–150M barrels "jailbroke" out of Hormuz and "nobody's going back in"). The Iran/Israel fight is "existential," so flows never reset to pre-war levels and the US 24-hour "toll-free Strait" ultimatum is "kayfabe." The refiners are the bull market (VLO, PSX "look like AI stocks"). Discipline: keep dry powder and "pounce" when quality is re-priced by an exogenous shock that doesn't touch the moat — the SEC perpetual-futures rules for Kalshi/Polymarket dropped the exchange group (CBOE/CME/ICE) to the 200-day, so he bought CBOE. Bullish lithium (+353% demand to 2040) and copper (+28%); central banks keep buying gold into a coming gold-anchored monetary reset as 6%-of-GDP deficits make Treasuries "dumb"; Berkshire's ~$400B cash is the patient-capital tell. Societal long-thesis: reading has collapsed and gambling/prediction markets (DraftKings) rule — "another brick in the wall" of imperial decline; the edge is to read, think, and ask cui bono.
• Uranium ATH & the liquidity lens (7.4.26). A macro-heavy weekly: record price-to-sales are sustained by money printing (Raoul Paul's ~97% liquidity/NASDAQ correlation; the Cantillon effect keeps a floor under valuations), so "own hard assets you can't create by fiat" — oil, gold, uranium. Uranium's June term price hit an all-time-high $95.50/lb (conversion $55.50 LT / enrichment $180 SWU also ATHs) as Orano (McClean Lake), Cameco (CCJ, Cigar Lake) and Lotus (Kayelekera) all shut on a sulfuric-acid shortage traced to the Gulf — the same shortage earning his unnamed African copper smelter ~$1M/day on byproduct acid. New starter ARKG biotech position on a bottoming chart (+73% YoY fund flow); Friedland's copper math ("mine as much copper in 25 yrs as all human history"; U-Mich 1.1Bt by 2050 vs 23Mt/yr); Latin America's left→right rerating (Ecopetrol EC board purge; GPRK/PXT independents; LatAm cheap after ~20yrs of US outperformance = a possible decade rerating); the Hormuz oil "sugar rush" reads as a Minsk-style pause before "round two," not peace; food inflation higher into 2027 (super El Niño + fewest US wheat acres in 149 years); and a new "cannibal" serial-buyback name for the newsletter (Singleton/Teledyne; AZO exemplar).
• AI/IPO mania = not investing. SpaceX (popped 25–30%, "not a real business long term"), and the coming Anthropic/OpenAI supply, are overvalued — passive/index-inclusion rules force them into 401ks and lockups dump insider stock onto retail ("strip-mining"). 51% of S&P market cap is above 10× sales; Grok ~3% share is "an also-ran." His method instead: buy cash-flowing, undervalued businesses with a catalyst (Munger: most fail because they want to get rich quick).
• Datacenters = "the new shale oil." The hyperscaler AI-datacenter buildout is "deeply negative ROIC" — he's seen no model showing a positive-ROIC datacenter, yet they build anyway, working down the funding ladder of desperation: cash flow → debt → equity. The tell: Alphabet (GOOG) "resorted to its first major equity issuance since 2004" and Meta (META) "reportedly considering one as well." Many MAG7 are "no longer the high-margin, asset-light businesses they once were" — building data centers and power plants with no profits to show. Like last decade's shale CEOs drilling negative-ROIC wells, "it goes on until it can't," then "the crash and the reallocation of capital… into our favored sectors."
• Oil — the "Abundance Illusion." Per Jeff Currie: the SPR draw (450M→357M, operational minimums by early autumn; Cushing 33→24.5M; gasoline drawn 15 weeks) has a floor that production doesn't — so a real shortage is "weeks to a couple months" out and price must rise to ration. Surging exports (3.9→6 Mbpd) mask the depletion. Physical (Singapore refinery >$100) already runs above the screen ($80s). Higher oil over the next 3–5 years on clear underinvestment.
• Iran won't fold. A "do-or-die" strategic all-in: inflict enough economic pain that the world says "never again." Memoranda of understanding "won't hold"; neither side can lose face. Time is on Iran's side — keep the draw going and a damaged-economy midterm pressures Washington first (impeachment risk).
• Own the SERVICE layer, not the crude. To be insulated from the oil price he owns overlooked offshore services (Singapore/Norway listings — Tidewater, Odfjell, Gulf Marine Services, Saipem), whose multi-year project backlogs don't pull back unless oil sits at $40–50 for a year. Held producers (PetroTal) cash-flow "tremendously" even at $75. TechnipFMC was the fullest expression of this and is now sold — an eight-bagger over five years, "eight bucks to 80 bucks," disclosed on 2026-AUG-24.
• Gold/miners — capitulation buy. Gold-miner bullish-percent index "reached zero" (unseen since 2016) = capitulation while the businesses stay profitable; added a junior, flags Agnico Eagle (off 40%) as the "just buy that" major. Central banks have resumed buying (China) as value buyers on the dip — caveat: global rate hikes are reversing the easing cycle, tightening liquidity and pressuring gold short-term (watch the trend in real rates). Copper structurally higher (Ivanhoe).
• Data-center scarcity → land/royalty layer. Power/water shortages and local backlash (moratoriums; +50% power in five years) push data centers to unopposed, near-empty land with stranded gas/water — own the toll-collector (TPL, LandBridge), plus an unnamed Arizona land co "like TPL a generation behind."
• Second/third-order effects. Don Coxe's "page-16 story moving to page one": Hormuz removed ~20–30% of world sulfur, doubling the price → his copper miner (IVN) now earns ~$1M/day on byproduct sulfur. Aluminum at 5-year highs (Alcoa, his personal account).
• Income ballast & frontier value (carry-over). The Dividend Portfolio "dripping roast" (FTW ~13% target yield, utilities, EM payers, coal, property) and frontier/special situations (Uzbekistan UZNF, Liquidia, Seabridge, Abacus, uranium via SRUUF) remain the standing book.
• Capital-allocation "cannibals" & an income sleeve (7.2.26). This month's discipline: buy serial share-repurchasers ("cannibals") below book where an aligned, value-driven allocator compounds per-share value — the Teledyne / Henry Singleton archetype (>90% of shares retired 1972–84). The Portfolio addition is Aimia (AIM.T): the Air Canada loyalty cash-out turned permanent-capital vehicle, run by Exec Chairman Rhys Simmerton (Milkwood) with Mithaq (~42.6% insider-controlled) — sold Bozzetto, repurchased $131M of its 9.75% notes, ~C$150M cash and ~$1B tax losses, $2.88 vs $3.66 book; "bet on the jockey," multi-year. Georgia Capital (CGEO) is the live in-book example still "cannibalizing its own shares." He sold Seabridge (SA) — won't follow the Valor spin-out (NWT exploration, production only Q4 2032; "too hard"). And, outside the AIA Portfolio, he's buying bombed-out staples (CPB, GIS, CAG, CLX) to write covered calls and cash-secured puts for tax-deferred income.
• Short-term liquidity squeeze, long-term money-printing (6.27.26). The world's ~55 central banks have flipped from easing to tightening (CFR Global Monetary Policy Tracker) — draining liquidity (Bitcoin is his barometer) and consolidating gold (3,300→5,600 then rolling over), oil and the CRB; falling charts "are not ones I'd want to buy" yet. But fiscal deterioration (1.5–$2T deficits; the dollar down 53% in 30 years / >99.5% vs gold over a century per Kopernik/Dave Iben) means "all roads lead to money printing" — the 1987 Black Monday / Greenspan playbook — so he stays long-term bullish gold, uranium ("a chart you would want to buy") and oil-field/offshore services into a $70–90 oil range. New interest: bombed-out biotech/healthcare (an 11-yr downtrend bottoming, the "silver tsunami") — a small starter ARKG "taste"; SpaceX skepticism reiterated (lockups make retail the "exit liquidity").

The product — Actionable Intelligence Alert (AIA)

From the issue archived here (2026-MAY-31), with the product line as restated on 2026-AUG-29; the shape will fill in as more issues are processed.

How it serves retail investors:

• Named model portfolios, not just narrative. Subscribers get the actual portfolio PDFs plus explicit "I am adding X" calls with the criteria ("dripping roast") stated up front.
• Monthly discipline on every holding. Each issue walks the full book — including the honest "no major news this month" — so a subscriber always knows the standing of every position.
• Plain risk labels. Speculative names are flagged as such in the issue itself (Global Atomic "highly speculative"; the FTW warrants "higher-risk"), and idea sources are credited rather than claimed.
• Free layer. The YouTube channel (interviews like the Uzbekistan CIO discussion, weekly market updates) carries the macro reasoning at no cost; the paid issue adds the portfolios and picks.
• Method taught in the free layer, names kept in the paid one. The 8.29.26 weekly is the clearest example: the buy rule is given in full — track the Sprott trust's NAV and add at a 10–15% discount — along with the venture-style 8-to-10-name basket rule for anyone who insists on juniors, while the new "highly speculative" Venezuela position is disclosed but deliberately left unnamed ("identified in last month's newsletter"). Subscribers get the ticker; everyone gets the process.
• Three books for three horizons. Capital appreciation (AIA Portfolio), income with capital-gain optionality (Dividend Portfolio) and, from 8.29.26, a permanent portfolio for the multi-decade view he explicitly says is un-tradeable — so the structural thesis has a home that doesn't distort the 3x–10x mandate.

Issues & videos

One dated page per processed monthly issue or weekly video — each has its stock table, talking points, and either the saved offline copy (issues) or the clickable transcript (videos). Newest first.

To process — backlog

30 earlier issues (Dec 2023 → May 2026) are saved offline in the standalone AIA archive (outside this hub, under subscription/john-polomny/newsletters/). To process one, copy its folder into this source's archive/<yyyy-mmm-dd>/, rename the saved page to newsletter.html, and run the pundit-analysis skill.

For personal study — not investment advice. Source material © John Polomny / Actionable Intelligence Alert.