Cow Guy | Stocks | Bonds | Commodities

We catch up with Scott “The Cow Guy”  to make sense of a market day that breaks the usual rules, with crude oil surging while the NASDAQ holds firm. We connect the dots between Fed policy, bond yields, inflation hedging, and what farmers and ranchers can do right now to protect margins. 

• cross-asset read on equities, bonds, and commodities as one system 
• Why oil can spike while stocks look through it 
• VIX behavior and what muted volatility can imply 
• Fed meeting fallout and why rate cuts get pushed out 
• Kevin Warsh's background and how Fed leadership works as a committee 
• Scott Bessent's story and how tariff timing can prevent market stress 
• grains outlook for corn, soybeans, and wheat with energy tailwinds 
• fertilizer and input-cost risk heading into next season 
• hedging mindset for producers using downside protection 
• China concentration risk for US agriculture and the case for diversifying demand 
• cattle fundamentals behind record prices and the ground beef shift 
• energy as an event-driven market and why high prices can cure themselves 
• gold, silver, and copper as portfolio tools and signals 
• classic pit stories and what floor trading taught about execution 

If you’d like a free trial of Trade The News, go to Trade The News and tell them the Ag Bull Boys sent you 

Transcript

Welcome And Sponsor Mention

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Welcome back, everybody. Tom Gristaffi, AgBull Media, Agbol Trading. I'm in my new studio in Nashville, Tennessee. And if you're gonna bust out your first podcast in Nashville, Tennessee, you better bring in a Nashville, Tennessee. Great. We have the one and only the Cow Guy. Now you can watch him daily on RFD TV, on the Cow Guy Clothes. Great show. Used to be a half hour. It's now an hour. He brings in five of the best guests out there. We'll let him tell you about that. But before we get started, I want to thank our sponsors. We do have a sponsor, Trade the News. Thank you, Trade the News, for sponsoring the show. If you don't know what Trade the News is and you'd like a free trial, go over there and go to Trade the News and tell them the Ag Bull Boys sent you. They'll give you on a free trial, Trade the News. But with the crude oil up$8 today, and Mr. President Trump loving to put out true socials, nobody is breaking out the news in real time and a squawk service as fast as Trade the News. Of course, if you haven't joined yet, we'd love to see on the premium side$25 a month,$2.50 annually. You'll get lots of podcasts like this. Of course, you get a morning email, you get text throughout the day, you get research, and you get the uh private podcast like Mr. Mike Sands and other people like Scotty Boy. So with that, uh let's bring him in. He is the star of the show. Scott Galladay, a friend. I used to stand next to his father at the Board of Trade. I've Scott gave me a hell of an opportunity to let me be on RFD and actually host the Cow Guys. So Scotty stage is yours, my friend. We got a lot of stuff to talk about. And guess what? We no one's gonna talk in our ear and tell us we got to go to commercial break. We got all that out in the beginning. How are you doing, my friend?

SPEAKER_01 1:51

Good. I mean, there's it's nice. There was a time there that we didn't have a lot to talk about. So it's great now that we have more than more than we can talk about in a day. So we get to bump some shows to the next day. But yeah, and it's when it rains, it pours. You know, suddenly you're you're starving to death. You you all you want is a little bit of a drink of water, and then the next day you're trying to drink off the you know, fire hose. So it's been uh it's been interesting and it's been fun. So and and we're still having fun. That's the most important thing.

Oil Up And Nasdaq Up Too

SPEAKER_00 2:17

Yeah, I told clients today, I said, we got a market here. Grains are busy, meats are busy, everything we touch and trade here in the commodity world is busy. I want to start from the top. When I look at the markets, I look at stocks, bonds, and then you know, we talk about commodities all day. One of the things you helped the uh cow guy close do is it was such an agricultural-based show. But you start bringing in all that talent like Kenny Polk Carey, and we can go over all the list, but you are so dialed into the New York Wall Street type of stock people. We just had a bunch of earnings come out after the close and uh a lot of moving parts here. But if you would have told me, Scotty Boy, on the bingo card, hey guys, you're gonna go home. Crude crude oil's up eight bucks. Oh, NASDAQ's gonna be up 100. I wouldn't have had it on the bingo card. What gives?

SPEAKER_01 3:06

No, I talked about that today on my show too.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

Okay, yeah, I didn't watch it yet.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

No, we're up seven and a half percent of the time in crude oil, and we had a NASDAQ that was higher on the day, and even I mean, that's just supposed to show you that the world's getting kind of sick and tired. You know, and maybe the world's maybe, well, I think it is getting sick and tired of the oil up, you know, stocks down trade. But I think that I think that the it just tells me a little bit that the equity market's kind of looking through this oil problem, and they know at some point in time it will be fixed, and that's true, it will. So if they're a forward-looking mechanism, which the stock market really is, they're looking through it. But this but the but the crude oil market has to live it every single day, so that's gonna be the one that's volatile. But interesting enough, and I don't know how much I don't know how much it's changed because I've been busy since my show. But another thing you didn't mention that has was just laying there not doing anything, was uh the VIX. So the VIX was dead, NASDAQ was up, and so was oil up about 7.5%. So it was really an interesting kind of uh dichotomy to see. Really, those things are telling me that this is gonna be over, we have to deal with it in the short term. But get your portfolio lined up. So when this thing does kind of come back down to earth when I'm talking about oil, we had Ray Wong on. He's about probably the preeminent mind in the tech space on my show the last segment, too, right before the earnings calls. And he was like, Well, you know, whenever we get through it, we'll get through it. But he thinks that the the year ahead looks fantastic as far as your 401k and stock and equity investing. And I would have to add this to it, Tommy. You know, there's only three things that we can trade in this world. One of them is the cash equities, which is what we trade at the New York Stock Exchange, right? Or Nasdaq and the likes. And the other silo would be anything that's governed by interest rates, and that's bonds, that's currencies, euro dollars, those types of things. And then the last one obviously is commodities. And I like to look at them all. I really spent a lot of time. I started in the commodity sector, obviously, but when I moved to London for 16 years, I did a ton of uh equities and a ton, a ton of bonds and euro dollars. And I got to really know the interest rate products, I got to know the equities world. And so now when I see them all together, you can start to see the money flows between the two, and it actually gives you like a three, a third dimension. You can kind of start to see what's been happening to markets. And I will say this the the the there's been Wall Street money, some hedge fund money has been moving from the hedge funds, or at least Wall Street, and you probably saw the commitment of traders, but they're looking at this, even though we might have a short-term resolution to this oil problem, that there the money moving in some of our commodities. Yes, we generally have a weather issue in wheat, I get that, but there has been money moving there because of inflation. And I think that it's interesting to see that yes, the oil at 107 bucks a barrel, is it gonna get back down 40 bucks to 67 dollars a barrel when it was on that Friday before we went into Iran? Yes, probably, maybe even lower, but it's gonna take some time. And there's all the while it takes time to get down there, inflation's gonna stay big, and that's why I think we're seeing money move over to the commodities, which I think is really interesting. That's it's that's why I like to have that kind of all three silo view of what's been happening out there because the money flows sometimes is a tell.

SPEAKER_00 6:22

Okay, so we're gonna talk about commodities, but let's go to bonds because we had a Fed meeting today. You know this guy. Look at can you see my screen? Can you see old Jay Powell there? Yeah, yeah Jay Powell, they threw a retirement party for him today. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_01 6:37

I don't know, but if they did, they probably didn't invite him. So they might have had a huge retirement for you party for him, but they wouldn't invite him.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

Yeah, and this guy's coming on Mr. Kevin Walsh. I don't know a lot about Kevin Warsh. What do you know about this guy? Handsome, I'll tell you that much.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

But no, he was a Fed governor. He was a Fed governor in 08-09 with the last debacle that we had. Remember when we lost brothers. And so he's absolutely has the ability to do it. And he's also got a net worth of over$200 million. So he's done very well with the financial system himself. He's a fantastic guy. He's got a great sense of common sense. He's gonna do, I think he'll do very well. The president likes him. The president's gonna put pressure on him to cut rates, but he's a strong enough guy in his own that he'll he'll listen to the president, but he won't, he doesn't have to heed his actions all the time, unless, of course, he agrees. And even if he does agree, the Fed is consistent of a committee. It's not just the chairman that makes the decision. So there are other people that'll be involved. So it'll be an exciting time. But basically, after today's announcement, uh today's rate decision, they've taken any rate cuts off the table for the entire year in 2026 when we came into the year thinking we were going to get three. So there'll be some disappointed uh folks out there.

Scott Bessent And Black Wednesday

SPEAKER_00 7:51

Yeah, and that especially if you're trying to buy anything, all these people want to relocate, Scott, for a job that they say, hey, I want to sell my house in Valparazo, Indiana, and I want to buy one in Nashville. Well, maybe you have a mortgage, maybe you don't. But if you do, you're probably locked in at a low rate. And that's a big jump. If you go from 3% to six or seven, that is a significant amount of money over 30 years if you term out that loan. And it's affecting all, you know, it's affecting our farmers. No one loves you more than the American farmer. Uh, they just went and planted a crop into very high input cost. And that operating note, even though the TV, if they watch TV, they said rates are coming down, rates did not actually come down. The 10 years we go home today, Scotty Boy, is at 4.40. So rates have actually gone up this year. And I do want you to educate the viewers of the AgBo podcast on what a badass this guy is. I want you to talk about, because you understand, if this isn't one of the greatest minds I've ever seen in the administration, talk about Scott Bassett and how wonderful this guy is and how many things he's dealing with. And in just a wonderful mind in the White House. I mean, he is in charge of the Treasury.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

He's an amazing person. And let me just give you a let's rewind the clock back to 1992, September the 17th of 1992, to be exact. That was Black Wednesday in London. I was trading one of the biggest short Sterling Options books in the city of London. I was way out over my skis with a huge position. I was clearing Roosevelt Collins. Bob Collins was the later parts of his career, but in 1992, he paid to have somebody hold a phone on the outside of the short Sterling Options bit to give him a play-by-play rundown of exactly what trades I was making because he was con he was he was afraid of me bringing the house down in London. My position was that big. Probably the first time in my life when I was trading that I ever felt like fainting. Um I had a it was just I was it was ridiculous. I was 27 years old. I was out I was out of control. But anyway, uh the the story is is great because we walked into the pits on that Wednesday morning. Interest rates in London at the time were 10%. We had a lot of inflation, they were trying to keep rates high to keep the uh lid on the inflation, but at the same time they were going through a recession, right? So it was like stagflation. The inflation was high, but they were losing jobs, and it was really a bad time. I knew people on my desk at work that were, you know, just leaving their keys underneath the mat and walking away from the homes. They didn't care if they you know were floor foreclosed on, they just couldn't take it anymore. But at the time, this is before we had the European Union, and we had pledged, we mean the Brits had pledged to stay within these bands of the European Union so that the common market could kind of get its footing before it started to become the European common market and then ultimately the Euro. So we had to be within a certain percentage points away from the Deutschmark. That was what they pegged everything to at the time, that was the biggest economy in Europe. And so at the time we walked into the the pits, it was we had a 10% interest rate in Europe. I mean in uh London, and I was trading the interest rate in London, and at about 9.30 that morning, they raised rates to defend their currency against the Deutsche Market from 10% to 12% in one fell swoop. Wow. Now obviously, you know, the futures market tanked, you know, when rates go up, futures go down. I I was I had so much risk on below. It was it was just incredible. But and I almost painted in the back. And we it was it was so it was so tightly packed in the pit, you know, back in the day, Tommy, when you had to have your I couldn't have my arms next to me, I had to have them above my head so that I could write. There was no room next to me. And so I I traded I I traded up a storm. I went absolutely bananas. I was you know, I was pretty, you know, I I was having I was trying to have fun, but I had such a bad position on it was horrible. Anyway, at about noon, that 2% interest rate hike did not work. The currency had come into more selling, and we were still we were trying to keep ourselves within a ban of from the Deutsche Market, and so they raised rates from 12% to 15% on the same day.

SPEAKER_00 12:08

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 12:09

So now we've gone from 10 to 15%. And so there were people behind it that were forcing the Bank of England to make these moves, and one of them was George Soros. George Soros ran in 1992 the Quantum Fund, and he had another guy by the name of Stanley Drunkenmiller, with if you know the business, I took me I taught a lot about Stanley. I think he's fantastic. He's still pretty active, but he's probably one of the most preeminent minds. It's like saying Joe Namath when you talk about the NFL, right? Well, Stanley, Drunkenmiller, and George were together. They ran the Quantum Fund. There was another guy you might know, Jim Rogers, a big commodity guy.

SPEAKER_00 12:41

Of course, yeah. We're going through the Jim Rogers role.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

Yeah. Well, in the in the office in London, they were based in London. They had a junior, they had a clerk in that office that they relied upon a lot. But George Soros was trying to break the Bank of England and he thought he had him on the ropes. Stanley Drunken Miller was like, you know what, we bet too much of our fund against this. I'm I'm a little reticent to continue with this. But the junior, the the young kid in the in the office kept on saying to George, we got him, we got him where we want them, we got him by the short curlies, whatever. I can see the whites in their eyes. Mr. Mr. Soros, if I was you, I would bet the farm on this. The Bank of England's gonna break. And so Soros decided to go against Stanley Drunkenmiller, listen to the 26-year-old clerk they had in the office, and they started to hammer these bonds and start to hammer the currency, sell the currency down so that the Bank of England had to raise rates by 5% in one day from 10 to 15 percent. And finally, the Bank of England said uncle Soros' Quantum Fund won. And before we went home that night, Tommy, they they cut rates from 15 to 10 percent again.

SPEAKER_00 13:57

And was this young guy, this man, right here?

SPEAKER_01 14:00

You got that right.

SPEAKER_00 14:03

It's unbelievable.

SPEAKER_01 14:04

Little did I know, but in that on September 17th, 1992, I was trading against Scott Bessant's orders that he was flying into that pit because they were trading short sterling heavily to help add to their position to try to break the Bank of England. And they did a masterful, masterful job. So that was the first time in the history of hedge funds that one single hedge fund made a billion dollars in a day.

SPEAKER_00 14:27

Wow. And and just personally, if you don't mind saying, how big of an equity swing did you have for your firm or group from down to up or low to be?

SPEAKER_01 14:36

Seven figures by the hour. And then by the end of the day, by the end of the day, I was up about 700, 800 grand. But I would go from 500 grand to up to 500 lower or 700 up to you know one million lower. I mean, it was all over the place.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Crazy, crazy story. And the whole point of that is that the bond market is moving and we are moving bonds. And the reason I brought up Scott's name is I don't think farmers, ranchers, my parents, I you talk a lot about them on your show, but I don't think people realize what a brilliant, brilliant mind when it came to the tariffs, how he said, Well, we're gonna put these tariffs on, but most likely we'll have to unwind them. He's developed the program to help unwind the money. This guy is playing chess when the rest of us are playing checkers, Scott.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

So what I think he did, the most magical thing he's done since he's been in office, I think, was back on April the 2nd of last year, when Trump had his Liberation Day and he now sell those tariffs and the market absolutely collapsed and fell out of bed. I think we went through two or three days of heavy selling. And unless you've been in the markets, you know, you know relative value. If this is trading here, this should be doing that. And if that's not happening, you begin to see stresses in the system where you're like, oh, this is not good. Something's gonna break because you can't have X doing what it's doing against Y, right? A lot of people will look at temporary products like, you know, you need if bond, if bond yields are going up, bonds should be trading lower, and the currency should be getting stronger. If that relationship doesn't work and it starts to fracture and it does break, you run the risk of having the whole market melt down. And there were some stresses. If you know markets, like I well, I know markets, and if you know the markets, and you're I'm talking about currencies, I'm talking about bonds, I'm talking about you know the Fed Fed funds and what's been borrowed at the government level, you can tell when something's about to break. And about three days after we were seeing this massive selling, Scott Besson from from Washington flew down to Mar-a Lago so that he could ride the plane back with Trump. Because Trump was coming up to Washington, he needed to speak to him ASAP. So he flew down to Mar-a Lago, got on the plane down to Mar-a-Lago and spoke to the president on the way back from Mar-Lago up back up to uh Washington, and basically said, Mr. President, there's some stresses in the system. I think it's best if we pause your tariff implementation and get let the market get a hold of itself. And that's when he called off the dogs and a pause, and the market did get a hold of itself and finally found its footing, it was able to accept the tariffs more broadly, and away we went. But if he didn't stop what was happening at that moment in time, we could have been in some serious trouble. So that was Scott Besson threw down there just so he could ride back with the present.

Grains Lifted By Energy And Inflation

SPEAKER_00 17:23

That's unbelievable. Yeah, and the market had incredible whipsaw. Just to think that silver went down to$27 an ounce that night, Scotty. Just a year ago. Silver is$27,$30 an ounce, then we hit$121 this year. You ready to do a lightning round? We'll go grains, meats, energies, metals, and uh we could talk an hour just about those. But let's do what farmers love to talk about grains. They're plant right now. Your family was a farmer. Um, you guys also had dairy cows, too. But you talk a lot about grains on the cow guy clothes. And and and and that's your crowd, right? That's you the rural America is your crowd, and you're trying to bring Wall Street smarts, common sense thinking to uh rural America, and nobody's better at it than you. So let's hit the grains. What do you know? Corn, wheat, beans,$12 beans,$5 corn,$7 wheat. Those aren't bad prices, not to mad, not to mention the government's got the printing press going. Look at this. We got Trump Bucks, second round of SDRP. We got Trump Bucks number two coming out. I think the farmer should be a little less squeaky when it comes to prices, don't you think so?

SPEAKER_01 18:30

Absolutely. And they're benefiting from two things at the same time, which is a great, that's a great gift. And that's number one, that's some some of the products like ethanol and bean oil are being viewed as oil energy products. And we've got$107,$108 crude crude right now, so they're getting a lift from that. And at the same time, that the those those higher energy products are getting people worried about inflation. So they're getting a lift from people coming over and buying equity or buying commodities for an inflation hedge. So you've got two things happening there that are helping to buoy the prices. Now, and then and throw and then throw in Mother Nature. We generally do have a weather issue when it comes to the wheat. And it's done a world of good for, I mean, just think about where prices were after the Graham Report in January. So the you know, this has been a fantastic boom to farmers. Now, if they had all most of their inputs booked, it's gonna be a good year that way if they if they manage themselves well. But then we still have to deal with this fertilizer issue as as we get into the end of this year and then the beginning of next year. We'll see how that goes. I don't want to borrow trouble. It might it might be mitigated or at least come off a lot. But right now, we've seen the benefit of mother nature and wheat, and we've seen the benefit of energy and inflation and corn and beans. So um, that's all proven to be a really a huge story for farmers when uh when things did not look that good at that uh January Prof report.

SPEAKER_00 19:53

Did you see the breaking news Rollins today? She came out and said that she had a way to get fertilizer reduced in this way, that this type of fertilizer 20%, this, that. Her and Lee Zeldon did a press conference. And uh, I don't know how familiar you are with Lee Zeldon. I'm sure you hear his name swung around a lot.

SPEAKER_01 20:10

But oh yeah, I I love Lee Zeldan.

SPEAKER_00 20:13

I don't hear him on the press conference, but yeah, it was during your show. And uh here's a picture of Lee Zeldon. He's he's a pretty smart guy. My friend Jim Weismeyer thinks a lot of this guy and says that you know he knows his head.

SPEAKER_01 20:25

He absolutely destroyed, he he destroyed I think her name was DeLorean yesterday when he was up on the hill. I don't know what he was testifying or what the meeting was about, but she used to be on the appropriations committee, and he absolutely schooled her on uh the Chevron Doctrine and a lot of other things that he has to do on a daily basis, and she had absolutely no idea, and he embarrassed her and she went bananas. You know, when when little kids get frustrated, they they lash out, she lashed out. And yeah, hey, I have a lot, yeah. He kept his cool and he looked fantastic. She looked like an idiot, and uh, I think he does a great job. He's fantastic, and he's they're thinking about bigger and better things for him. He's doing so well.

SPEAKER_00 21:02

All right, let's move along. We like these prices and corn and beans. Uh, we'd hedge these levels. You were a hedge broker. I'm telling people to hedge and protect. If you're afraid to get forward sold, you gotta get forward protected, in my opinion, Scott. Crude oil turns around, soybean oil turns around, wheat sells hot.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

No, no, no. Crude oil is going to turn around at some point in time. Can you tell me?

SPEAKER_00 21:22

You gotta tell me what day.

SPEAKER_01 21:23

So we could buy it. I can't tell you. Well, it's gonna be between now and November. Um, but you're but you have to have some protection on it. If you don't want to sell the board outright, you can make sure you're spending some insurance premiums on some puts because you need to make sure you're exactly right. You have to protect the downside. And you know what? When it's hard to sell, it's probably the right time to sell too. That's what 39 years of experience tells me.

SPEAKER_00 21:45

All right, what about these two cats? Is there going to be a Trump G meeting? Well, I mean the market, sure. Hope so.

SPEAKER_01 21:52

Yeah, I mean, they'll they'll they'll get together. But I, you know, I don't we need to make a five year plan in this country to kind of wean ourselves off of off of China. I mean, China despises us two times last year while we were meeting them and I think once in Geneva and once in Paris with our high level. People. Bessett was one of them. You know, I I Trump says I have a great relationship with G. I think he just says that so that it gets back to G. But we need to treat China like they treat us. They're an enemy. And they don't want to help us really at the end of the day. They want to hurt us. And so I I I know that they've been a huge buyer of our beans. And you know, when I got in the business in 1988, 88, they weren't anywhere near where they are now. They've, you know, they've exploded. But at the same time, we need to find, we we have to find a better way than just relying upon them to be 40% of our you know of our business. That's too much. No business can survive on that. And by the way, they don't like us. And so those two meetings I brought up, one in Geneva, one in Paris, when we were we were face to face with them, and we caught Chinese students that were going to school here in this country getting off the plane twice with biohazards that would were enough to kill all of our corn and all of our corn and wheat. Is that a friend? No. So they're treating us like an enemy, and we continually treat them like a friend, and we gotta stop doing that. So for us to continue to rely upon them is probably gonna be a mistake, and we need to be doing everything we possibly can to diversify our customer base away from China being the only game in town.

Cattle Records And Tight Supply

SPEAKER_00 23:32

Well said. Okay, let's talk meats. Meats hit a record high yesterday. We cash market absolutely on fire. Cash market exploded. And here at NASVIC, uh, you know, we have a lot of cattle traders here. We all went out to dinner last night. It's not often they say we are going to gap higher tomorrow. The board was under the cash market. We thought they were equal. The cash market exploded. There was a guy at the office who had some friends who was, they were calling their people who they sell cattle to so hard trying to sell cattle at 255. By the time the end user picked up the phone, they're like, we'd like to sell our cattle. They're like, Oh yeah, no problem. We'll pay 257. They were tripping over the phone to sell 255s, they sold 257. So when's the last time you've heard something like that happening? Cattle and each day is better than the next, got and I'll tell you, well, I'll let you go on your rant. If you're a hedger and you have Carly Garner on your show, she's wonderful. You know, she helps people. I help people get hedged, and puts are nice, but uh, you know, sometimes you need to be short futures. And when you sell futures and we go 10, 20, 30 dollars past where you sold them, it starts to hurt. So what are you telling people in cattle?

SPEAKER_01 24:44

Well, I mean, but fundamentally, you can talk, you know, every now and again we get a technical move lower. We go, you know, the you know, everybody talks about the elevator up or no, the uh escalator up and the elevator down and all that garbage. Yeah, that does happen in cattle, and it does. We just had one a little while ago. But at the end of the day, I find it hard to talk about cattle, to be honest with you, because if the fundamental picture does not change, and it's not changing significantly. We have Dr. Daryl Peel on Market Day report to Wednesdays and Fridays, and when he's on, I'm on with him the last hour or both those days. And he struggles too, because it's hard to bring something new to the market when all you're still worried about is how many heads of cattle do you have out there? And if that hasn't changed and rectified itself, well, this is the problem that you get yourselves into. And so on a day-to-day basis, it's hard, but it's just gotta be as you know, from from one day to the next, you might have these big up and down days. But over time, if that's if that situation doesn't rectify itself, we're gonna go from the lower left to the upper right. That's just that's just there's no there's no ifs, ands, up, buts, and bottom. And by the way, when they're starting to get dry out west as well, that doesn't, you know, that's how we got in the situation in the first place. So that's another powder keg that uh could be a problem. We'll see. Uh, but we did uh a story today about how how expensive steaks have gotten, and that more people have been turning into ground beef, and the ground beef sales, as a percent of overall cattle sales, have skyrocketed because people still want to get their beef, but they're going, they're they're moving down to the cheaper stuff, which is beef uh hamburger. And that tells you, and that happened the last time around, too, that the situation is still really tight.

SPEAKER_00 26:21

Are you down to hamburgers, Scotty Boy?

SPEAKER_01 26:24

Uh you know, I eat beef a little bit, but I'm not a massive steak guy. Like some people love it. Huh?

SPEAKER_00 26:30

Are you a chicken on the traeger?

SPEAKER_01 26:32

No, chicken, fish. I love fish. I mean, my favorite food is sushi. So I love fish. I mean, I just don't, I mean, I've never I don't know. I I do love a great steak every now and again, don't get me wrong. But every now and again for me is once every you know eight weeks.

Oil Shock And Event-Driven Volatility

SPEAKER_00 26:47

Well that that helps the budget. But I'll tell you what, sushi's not cheap easy either. There's some fine sushi restaurants uh all over. All right, we touch grains, we touch meats. Heck, we even touch fish with sushi. Let's do the energies crude oil as of today. It is April 29th, 350 uh 359. And we got we got a hell of a market here. And I don't know what to say about energies. I'm I'm a little nervous and scared for the world, and I think President Trump likes it that way. So if you think we're getting screwed here in America, you should see the shit show Europe's in, Scotty. And I you can say whatever you want on this show. Stage is yours.

SPEAKER_01 27:27

Well, I think it's he he might be using it as a short-term screw against the rest of the rest of the world. Um if you watch Lee, not Lee's Veldon. If you watch Chris Wright, I think is our Secretary of Energy his name. He's got a Cheshire Cat smile on him. We talk about higher for longer when we're talking about oil because our oil sector is killing it right now. And we've got Mr.

SPEAKER_00 27:48

Chris Wright.

SPEAKER_01 27:49

There you go. Here he is. And then we get a got a lot of people, a lot of ships streaming their way towards the Gulf of America, too. So it's not necessarily a bad thing that we're doing, that part of our economy is doing very well. Obviously, everybody that goes to the pump on a weekly basis is paying more, but I think this is the most important thing to take away from all that is, you know, in 2022, we had a 9.1% CPI, right? So 9.1% inflation. If you listen to Jay Powell today after his speech, he he's got it at 3.2, I think it's 3.1, you know, basically a third of what it was back in June of 2022. And in 20 in June, or in the year of 2022, we had the average per gallon gas ranged from basically from 395 up to 450, but we did have one month that was like 501. All right. And my question to the rest of the world is and to these traders that are a little bit uh worried about 108 or 107 right now in WTI is back in 2022, we had those high energy prices. We had high high, we had three times the you know higher CPI than we have today, inflation. And what did you get for that? What did you get for that higher CPI that you're paying in you know the grocery store every week or or at the pump? Or you got absolutely nothing. It was policy blunders and dumping money into our system that caused those inflationary times. At least this time around, we can say that it's because of an event, it should be short term, it will end, and at the end of it, you will get a safer world when they've taken a state-sponsored terrorist country off of a list of nuclear power owning countries. So at least you're getting something for the price you're paying at the pump right now, and it won't be as long as it was in 2022. Anyone that's complaining on the left about gas prices today has really got a problem to defend what they did in 2022 and 2023 for that matter. So I tell you, we we're getting something for the short-term paying that's gonna be definitely be short-term. And I'm not trying to do a President Trump advertisement. I'm just telling you that, yeah, they're high. I don't like it. I filled up, I just drove up to Chicago on back last weekend. But I know that I'm getting something for that, and it's not gonna last forever.

SPEAKER_00 30:06

Well, I mean, that that is one of the benefits of having your private jet is you have so aviation fuels went up. But that's what you always say to your guest on the show. You're like, well, Chris, now that you're flying private, I've heard you bash people like that so many times. Energies will calm down and they you know what's calmed down tremendously that people don't talk about? Natural gas has come down. Do you see that? It's got a 2-6, 2-7 in front of it. That that went hog wild this winter, but natural gas has calmed down. The farmers are getting it a little bit because they're putting, if they didn't have their fuel bought, which I don't know why they wouldn't have, because we were 56, 57,$60 crude. The the government announced they're gonna fill up the what do you call it, the retardic oil reform? Yeah. We talked about it one time. You let me host. I remember, you know, we myself and you know Jim Urio or someone talked about it. And if the government's willing to fill up their tank, you damn well better be ready, right, Scott?

SPEAKER_01 31:04

I agree. And yeah, and and I mean that's a that's a touch you want because sometimes it you it gets used politically. But I I would say it's you know, this this high short-term crude oil, it's gonna be short-term, folks. We're not gonna have 107 bucks this time next year. And so if that's the case and you trade like that, you have you have to say to yourself, all right, what is the world gonna look like when this happens, you know, when we get through this? And I'm really bullish on what the world's gonna look like once we get through this Iran, uh the Iran issue. So many things look good for this economy, even with oil at 108 bucks a barrel or 107, but it's not gonna be there forever. It might be there longer than you might like, but it's not gonna be there forever. And you have to plan your portfolio, whether it may be short term or long term, around the fact that oil will get back down to 60 something. And Carly Garner is calling it down. And for that matter, so it's Phil Flannett calling it for the you know, 50s, maybe 40s.

SPEAKER_00 31:55

That'd be well, I'll agree with them in the sense that once this is over, right now we are conditioning the whole world to pump, pump, pump, drill, baby, drill. I don't know if you watched Landman or not, but I'm sure you've seen the quote. I mean, I mean, before oil went up, you got him saying, you know, here, sweetie, let me teach you about oil. The 60s low, 80s high. Anything above 80, they get greedy. And he talks about the sweet spot of oil. I think he's talking to the new lawyer in the show, Landman, and probably three-quarters of people watching, listening to watch Landman. But it's just a great clip because Billy Bob Thornton's describing the economics of oil before the oil exploded. Now we're trading 107 today, and you're like, okay, if they solve this tomorrow, OPEC and everyone else, and I don't know, we should talk about like who was part of that club and someone left. And but regardless, they are going to pump so much oil, they are gonna bury this oil market with supply, right, Scott?

SPEAKER_01 32:53

Yeah, I mean, I've heard some people talk about the 30s. So right now, you know, you've got the scaremongers out there talking 150, 200. That's not, I don't think that'll happen. But and if it does, it does, whatever. But it's not gonna be here forever, and this time next year it will be lower. Uh, it's just how however long that takes. And you know you don't want to be, you know, you don't want to be married to a long oil price, that's for sure. And higher prices cure higher prices. We talk about that in commodities all the time. And by the way, this is an event-driven market. This was not because of a short-term supply issue or some cat, you know, catastrophe. But we can see and we know that this is not gonna last forever. Trump won't want to be there forever. And I think that today's price movement really is back basically on the back of the fact that there was a Wall Street Journal article yesterday that says that the president thinks that the country will fold faster if he has an economic warfare rather than kinetic, you know, or bombing everything. And I think he's right. So he's gonna keep the straits closed in order for them to absolutely fold in on themselves and flood themselves with the oil if they don't want to stop pumping. Because when you stop pumping, everything gets gummed up and you can't really get back to 100% ever again. And that's gonna be something that will hurt them faster than trying to bomb them to death because there's 90 million people there. I'm sure we've radicalized some of them. There's a lot of them that don't want to be there, but we're gonna have, you know, they're gonna fight till the last guy wants to die. And that might take a lot longer than you think. But if you constrain the oil and and stop them from eating, that actually could be a faster way.

Gold Silver And Copper Signals

SPEAKER_00 34:21

Excellent. One more subject. And we're going long today. Isn't this it's kind of funny because I could see you're like, okay, we got to wrap, but we don't have to wrap. We can go, yeah. It's nice also because when you're on your show, you do a great job letting your guests talk, but you have so much knowledge that sometimes we laugh. You know, you as a host, you'll ask people a question, you'll tell them what you think, and then you let them talk. You ever see when you do one of your minute monologues, you talk for a minute, and then we all giggle, you know, your producers and stuff are like, do you see what he just did there? But here you could truly talk. We're gonna go over two more subjects metals, and then I want you to tell the viewers and listeners, they love hearing stories about the pits in Chicago and just think of a crazy Chicago pit story. Hit it up with metals, gold, silver, copper from the top.

SPEAKER_01 35:10

Yeah, well, I'm just look, I think they got memefied earlier in the year. They went kind of crazy. There's a reason you want to hold gold. I mean, I'm not a gold bug, I don't have any gold right now, but I understand why people like it. And I just have been a broker for so long, too, Tommy, that I, you know, have people buy gold in 2011 and they they finally had a breakeven party in 2018, you know. Uh sometimes those things take a long time to come back. And that was gold was one of them, but they've now exploded. There's some reasons why, which I understand, but I I think that um when you get too many people getting in that market, I would I I think you'll be able to pick gold up cheaper, and I and I would because I'd like to put some in my portfolio. But I've massively missed a boat. And you can say that about Bitcoin too. Bitcoin, though, 126,000 plus down to 75,000 now. It was a low of 62,000, 63,000. You know, might see some sell-offs in the in the in the metals world that you probably can get maybe something picked up for for like roughly that cheap. So I'm I'm gonna wait and get some. I think everybody should have a little bit, two to three, maybe five percent if you're being crazy of your portfolio. But I think it's gonna be something that everybody's gonna kind of look at as an inflation hedge, and or something that can be used in electronics like silver. So I, you know, I think there'll always be a little bit of a a natural bid to it, but I think it gets cheaper in the short term. And and even after we do settle down with everything in the Middle East, then it'll probably will rip higher because everybody will be happy about it right now with the higher oil prices. You see it come off because metals are so interest rate sensitive. And today they took any interest rates and cuts off the table. That's why it's was a little bit under pressure here when I was doing my show. I don't know where it's at right now, but I yeah, that's what I think. You know, it got so crazy for a while there that it was, you know, when they're doing television shows about people walking in with anything gold to sell at a pawn shop. I kind of start to think we get a little bit toppy. So I'm gonna wait a little bit, but I definitely think you should have someone on board.

SPEAKER_00 37:05

And same thing could be said. Ditto for silver, right? Same thing.

SPEAKER_01 37:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:10

What about Dr. Copper? She tells the health or he tells the health of the overall world.

SPEAKER_01 37:15

It's a six-month, it's a six-month leading indicator. That's all I use it for. I don't, I don't have it on board, I don't trade it, but I look at it as a six-month you know leading indicator. I used to have customers in London that traded it. It's it's a pretty popular thing in London. But it's, you know, it's it's used in a lot of the housing market, and the housing market's not very good right now, or it's used in maybe, maybe it ticks up because of data centers, and we have to see some of those start to get built. But it's just it's just right now, I look at it as like an economic indicator, a six-month look economic indicator, and I use it to do other things. I don't usually use it to do, you know, to trade copper.

Trading Pit Stories And Wrap-Up

SPEAKER_00 37:49

All right, favorite board of trade story. You were a member and had a seat at the board. I stood next to your father, Ron, legendary corn broker. You could talk about anything you want, and I want to hear a crazy, crazy pit story. You started off the show pretty good with uh what happened in England, Bank of England. That's one of my best.

SPEAKER_01 38:09

I use that when I go speak. I don't know. I you know, there's a there's some pretty funny ones.

SPEAKER_00 38:16

You want me to give you let me ask you a question. Because I was just asking PJ the other night. You know PJ, he's always guest on your show. Great guy. Whatever happened, that guy, Billy, who used to sell the teenies? Explain to people about the guy who would sell all those teeny options. Billy, was it Billy Hunt or Billy?

SPEAKER_01 38:32

Yeah, Billy Hunt. Yeah, I don't know. I didn't know personally, but I think that's his name. Well, I mean, he's sold way, way, way out of the money options for the lowest tick value, which was uh six, I think one sixteenth. Um and and he would just let them expire worthless and taking the money. It was like an annuity. And then you know, you have to if you if if you get off on the right foot, you can do that forever. Because what happens is every now and again you're gonna get caught. But if you've built up enough cash before that, you're okay. But if you if you get caught early on in your in your career and you don't have enough cash for it, well then you're out of luck. But he he had been successful enough doing it in a lot of different contracts that he had enough money uh built up that if if it went wrong and he got caught, well then he had enough money to you know to put back in. So he had kind of he always left some side, you know, some aside for lost reserves, and he was able to build a business out of it. So good for him. It's not the way I could sleep at night, but he uh he found a way to turn that into to making some money. I I you know the there's there's always obviously book every book written about the characters on the floor, but I always found the the humor to be real funny. And I got two which are funny. The first one is an American one where I was a broker for I can't remember who I was working with at the time, but they wanted kind of an exotic option package out of the soybean oil options pit. And you know, that pit's only got about 100 to 150 people at the at the peak, maybe two maybe 150 guys, you know. And it was a fairly busy time. And I have a house in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I like, you know, being outside playing golf and stuff. And I had been gone for about two or three weeks, I think it's solid two, maybe three weeks. And I my skin uh I get really dark in the skin in the sun, really dark, like like uncomfortably dark, you know. Like people are like, what? But I had come back and it was a Monday, and I got an order to go to the soybean oil pit to kind of get this this rather difficult quote. The reason why I say that is because it took the guys' time to kind of you know add it up and type it up on you know, they all use their little computers and their their handhelds and their Macs, whatever they're using. And so I came in and I said, What's this, this, this versus this? And they all put their heads down and it was quiet for about you know 20 seconds. But in the midst of that quiet, one guy, this short little guy that didn't really, he was a smart ass, he didn't really want to trade the trade the the order, so uh he didn't trade the months I was asking, so he didn't even try to make a price in it. But he looked up me and because I was tan, he just said he broke the entire silence by saying, Hey Fatty, how was Jupiter? I I had to laugh out loud because it was so good, right? Yeah, yeah, they would have to be a good thing. But years earlier, when Margaret Thatcher was still the the uh the prime minister of England, I was trading short strolling options still at that time, and that's where I got started. And we were waiting for an interest rate decision, and I had a little risk on, of course. I always had risk on, I couldn't stand about it, but I had a little bit more risk than my firm liked me to have, so they were asking me to rein in one of the wings of something I was trading. And I needed to buy these calls, and it was towards the end of the day in London, it was a Friday, towards the end of the day. We closed at 4 o'clock, it closed at 4.02, I think. And it was probably about 3.45 or 350. And I was getting a little nervous because I hadn't really done anything about my problem. And in walks a guy that had been knighted, his name was Sir Daniel Beckett, and he worked for a firm called Cater Allen Futures. And he and he had he talked like Prince Charles or King Charles did. You've probably heard King Charles talk the last couple of days. Absolute upper crusty, silver spoon in your mouth, kind of an accent. He walks into the pit and he asked for this price in the strike that I had to cover. That's exactly what I needed to do to get out of trouble with my, you know, with my compliance officer, with my risk manager, with the whole firm. You know, I needed them. And you know, I had on my little sheets, I had a value of six for these things, six cents, right? And so the pit made a price of five bid at eight. And I thought, if this guy offers sevens, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna take the hickey, lose the money, but make everybody happy and make everybody whole. Right. And so if he offers sevens, I'm gonna take him. If he offers me sixes, I get out for a scratch, which is unheard of, right? Well, anyway, he says he stands there after we all said five minutes and he goes, I would like to sell 500 at six, all right. Well, because we started trading at the Chicago Board of Trade, we have a sold, sold deal, right? So if I say sold, that means I bought them. If he bid for them and I said sold, it means I sold them. We initiate a trade with the word sold, regardless of purchase or sale. They don't do that at the CBOE and they don't do that at the Merck. Well, they don't do that in London either, because I said I can't, I didn't care, I said sold. We got out of doubt. I was first by a mile, nobody else had said anything yet. And he looked at me and he said, You fat American wanker, we say buy them. And so the little kid next to me, about half my size, said bye them. He went, Anthony, I will sell you 506, and I got zero and the kid. Set the bottom all didn't give me any, but he's now one of my best friends, you know, 40 years later. But that's probably one of the funnier ones where um I was by far first. I should have got the trade, but because I didn't use their vernacular, I A, I didn't get the trade, and B, I was publicly humiliated by a guy that had been knighted by the Queen.

SPEAKER_00 44:28

I love it. I love it. Scotty, what's the best way for people to get a hold of you? What's your social media's Facebook, everything else? Love the cow guy.

SPEAKER_01 44:35

Scott the cow guy for Twitter, I guess, or you can message me on uh Scotch Feldy on Facebook or the Cow Guy on Facebook, either one of those that both those accounts are me. Or Scott at RPTV. That's easy too.

SPEAKER_00 44:47

Sounds good. All right. We'll do this again here in a few weeks. And thank you for coming on the show. I could almost see your house from my office here in Nashville. You got to come visit us at Nesvik. We are right above the Ryman Theater. We could just see uh I can I'm staring out my window. I can see Morgan Wallins and I'm staring down to the uh Ryman Theater parking lot. So, folks, if you're out there, you go see Scotty over at RFD. Stop by Nesvik, come see us with that. Scotty, I am I just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. First time you asked me to be on TV, that was an honor. You asked me to host, that was an honor. I was nervous as hell, but like Carly Garner said, hey, we did it. We didn't embarrass ourselves too bad. And uh thank you for the opportunity, my friend.

SPEAKER_01 45:26

A lot of people when I go traveling still, they ask me where you are.

SPEAKER_00 45:29

So you're okay, you made an impression. Love you, brother. See you soon. Bye bye. All right, man. Thanks.