Friday File: Royalties and Commodities… plus “America’s Greatest Retirement Stock”

Here I am again, still having no idea whether the war with Iran will actually be over tomorrow, or will stretch on for five years… and without much conviction about whether the next day will be a bounceback for semiconductor companies or a collapse of same. I don’t even know whether interest rates will be going up or down over the next year, or where gold prices will go this year.

That’s pretty much always true, if we’re being honest, but it feels more true when we’re rolling through a period of substantial uncertainty — and war, inflation, big technology transition, global decoupling, and rapid changes to government policy certainly make this a period of “substantial uncertainty.”

So I’ve got some portfolio adjustments to talk to you about this week, but mostly what I’m doing is (still) holding on to the relatively small allocation I own to technology growth stocks and riding through that volatility, maintaining my overweight in natural resources stocks (commodities, gold, oil, etc.), and, beyond that, mostly making company-specific decisions on the margins.

Is the “29% Account” also “America’s Greatest Retirement Stock?”

So my musings today are starting in that natural resources sector. Earlier this week I was thinking about how the “29% Account” story continues to percolate and lead a bunch of questions our way — that was Marc Lichtenfeld’s promo, starting in late January or early February, which promoted Texas Pacific Land (TPL) as that “29% Account” investment and, as a secondary pitch, Royal Gold (RGLD) (both of which I also like).

So as we see wild swings in gold and oil prices over the six months since we covered that ad, which came out about a month before the US and Israel started bombing Iran, I’m reminded of how important commodity prices are to so many companies, as we saw TPL shares bounce around with oil prices expectations, and have seen RGLD mostly fall with the falling gold price… even as I continue to think that gold, oil and gas are likely to increase in value in dollar terms, over time, and even as I’ve continued to slowly build my TPL position (including a little buying this week).

And that hit home this morning, again, as I saw a pretty big new promo from Whitney Tilson roll through, an ad for his Commodity Supercycles newsletter over at Stansberry — here’s the lead-in to that …