December 30, 2023 | Thanks For a Great First Year

Hi everybody,

On January 3, this newsletter will be one year old. Amazing how fast the time went by!

Thanks for a great experience. Being part of this growing community and hearing your thoughts about the crazy world we’ve inherited has been both fun and educational.

Going forward, there are several things I’d like to mention:

To founding members: Your generosity is appreciated! As promised, I’ve converted you to “lifetime” subscriptions. But because that’s a manual process, it’s possible that one or two of you slipped through the cracks. So if Substack tries to charge you for the coming year, send that message to me ([email protected]) and I’ll fix it.

To free subscribers: Articles on general topics like monetary policy, broad investment themes, and culture will stay free, and your comments — especially about what else you’d like to see covered here — are always appreciated.

But the nature and usefulness of an “actionable ideas” newsletter like this one changes over time because the archive of past articles — most of which go behind the paywall after a few weeks — becomes more valuable as posts accumulate. Eventually, the previously published stuff becomes the most useful part of the newsletter.

Our archives now contain multiple posts on the following series:

• Gold/silver royalty stocks
• Junior mining stocks and explorers
• Uranium and copper miners
• Becoming Invisible
• People We Should Know
• Things We Should Understand
• How to Short Stocks and Markets
• Strategic Relocation
• Health Hacking
• Your First Gun
• Recession Watch
• Skill Stacking

I’ll add to these series in the coming year. But the new posts may not make complete sense without the background provided by the introductory articles. So — especially for relatively recent free subscribers — it might be worth considering a $5 monthly subscription (cancellable anytime) to check out the archives and get up to speed.

To paid subscribers: Substack has a useful feature that maintains the original price for existing subscribers as the cost to new subscribers rises. At some point, I’ll probably bump up the rates for new subscribers, but current subscribers will never see an increase.

A shifting focus

Since our portfolio of stocks and options now contains 44 positions, I’ll be adding fewer new ideas and instead will focus on updating the existing companies and strategies as they evolve. The ongoing question of whether a position is a “sell” or “hold” is a lot trickier than whether it’s a “buy” in the first place. Next year’s goal will be to deepen our understanding of these companies and strategies until we’re experts on them.

Name change?

Many Substack writers launch under their own name (i.e., “Bob’s Sustack”) and, once established, change the title to something descriptive. I’m toying with that idea. Specifically, this newsletter’s tagline is “Survive and thrive in the coming crisis,” and I’m wondering if “Survive and Thrive” would be a better long-term name than “John Rubino’s Substack”. What do you think?

Anyhow, thanks again. 2024 looks like a year for the record books, for better and worse, which is another way of saying it will present even more risks and opportunities than 2023. I look forward to covering them with you.

John

John Rubino December 30th, 2023

Posted In: John Rubino Substack

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