Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Scammers Are Pros When people think about internet scams, they envision a solo person pulling it off from a slum in Nigeria. No one realizes how big a business this is and how much money it generates. The big players in this area are highly sophisticated. They have their own IT departments, marketing groups, legal and investment teams, offshore banking arrang...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - The Plot Against Savers In a normal economy the rate you can earn on savings should be higher than the rate of inflation so people are incentivized to invest. Over the last 2 decades for example, the interest rate on savings accounts for the most part has been consistently lower than the rate of inflation. Even without taking taxes into consideration, this me...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Hype vs Reality When a sector goes straight up in price, the dominant headlines are predictions of a new era, suggesting investors throw caution to the wind because conditions are different this time. We recently witnessed this with precious metals, crypto currencies and artificial intelligence. They all had a huge run that was supposed to never end. The prob...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Wars Changing Technology The conflict in Iran has really highlighted how the weapons needed to do the job have changed. Iran is using swarms of $20,000 drones offensively. America is shooting them down with missiles that cost 2 million to 4 million dollars a piece. To learn how to fight on this new type of battlefield, the US has called in experts from Ukrain...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Defence Stocks Defence stocks have the political and economic winds at their back. Countries in Europe and Asia, have ramped up defence spending out of fear that the US could walk away from commitments to protect them. They have little trust, in the intentions of China, Russia, North Korea or Persia. Current wars, like Iran and Ukraine, are draining equipment...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - America Still The Cleanest Dirty Shirt Investors, have been diversifying their portfolios outside of the US for two reasons. They dislike President Trump’s bullying, and they worry that America is declining as an economic power. Yet, even though its numbers are weakening, the US is still the cleanest dirty shirt in the laundry. Five years ago, America’s total...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - The Chinese Real Estate Bubble Chinese love to own real estate. This countries investors have 70% of their assets in property, 20% in bank deposits and insurance policies and only 10% in the stock market. Yet even as the bubble grew, few people in 2016, took Chinese President Xi Jinping seriously, when he warned that houses were for living in, not speculation...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Trump’s Military Mistakes I think hindsight will show, that what caused the Republicans to lose their majorities in the House and/or the Senate this November, were the mistakes Trump made in his unexpected war with Iran. The first, was thinking that he could win the fight with Air Power alone. That has never happened. The second was believing that Iran’s lead...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - The Fog of War 200 years ago, a Prussian military strategist nailed it, when he coined the phrase fog of war. He noted that three-quarters of the factors on which wars are based, are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. This is eerily similar to the current conflict in Iran. The newsfeed continuously comes out with statements that are often cont...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Busts & Booms In the dot-com boom of the late 1990’s, telecoms laid 130 million kilometres of fiber optic cable. In the following bust, 85% of this capacity went unused and bandwidth prices fell by 90%. While this drove telecoms like Global Crossing into bankruptcy, cheap access to fibre optic cable, fuelled the rise of early Internet adopters like Netflix an...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Markets & Tides One of the most important things investors need to understand, is how markets behave, both on the way up and on the way down. Probably the best way to visualize this, is to look at how the tide affects ships in a harbour. When the tide comes in, it raises all the ships, no matter how big or small they are. The same thing happens when the tide...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Wars Neverendum According to Trump, the war with Iran should be wrapped up within a month or so. But this could be naive. A financial commentator from the UK wisecracked that the hardest part of a 4 week war is the first 6 to 7 years. The grim reality is, they usually become a neverendum. America was in Vietnam - 20+ years. Russia in Afghanistan - 10 years. A...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Fertilizer Squeeze People worry that high oil prices caused by the war in Iran will lead to rising inflation and interest rates. Very few pay attention to this conflicts impact on global fertilizer prices. Roughly 1/3 of all internationally traded fertilizer passes through the 40 km wide Strait of Hormuz just off Iran’s south west coast. This narrow bottlenec...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - AI Makes Stuff Up When Artificial intelligence makes stuff up that isn’t true, and presents it with a such a high degree of confidence it seems believable - they call this AI Hallucinations. There are plenty of documented stories where AI has cited legal cases that never happened, quoted non-existent scientific studies, generated fake biographies, or misident...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - The Integrated Oils Energy companies that focus strictly on finding and producing oil, have earnings that are pretty much held hostage by whatever the price of crude is at any given time. Those wanting a more defensive and less volatile way to invest in fossil fuels should look at the integrateds. These companies produce oil, refine it and also sell finished...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Diversify Beyond the US After decades of dominance, the influence of the American dollar has begun to fade. Countries have increasingly looked at paying for imports and exports with other currencies like the Yuan, Euro or Yen. Central banks have steadily reduced their holding of greenbacks and replaced them with gold and other currencies. Investors have diver...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - AI Reality Check For years the tech sector outperformed virtually everything else. Lately not so much. The change has come about, because investors have adopted much more realistic expectations about the future. They want proof that the trillions being spent on artificial intelligence, will produce consistent profits down the road. They also want a better und...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Wars & Deficits Wars are expensive. America’s recent misadventures in Iran are expected to cost at least $100 billion and could go much higher if the battle drags on. These numbers don’t include the extra costs that business and consumers have to pay when the price of oil doubles and inflation rises. Nor, does it factor in the increases to America’s $37 trill...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Alligator Investing I remember a tour we took down a croc infested river in East Africa. Our tour guide pointed out an enormous crocodile sunning itself on the bank, and said that if this predator ambushed a big animal like a wildebeest, it could go for 6 months without having to eat again. In the financial world, we call this type of investor an alligator. T...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - China’s Export Hustle While Canadians worry about protecting the home market, China is reaching out and conquering the world. A good example is electric vehicles. A decade ago they were barely a blip on the radar screen, but by building a quality product at a bargain price, and then globally doing the hard work of knocking on lots of foreign doors, they have...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - China’s Nuclear Growth The 800 Ib gorilla in the nuclear space is China. Of the 74 reactors under construction in 15 countries, China represents over 50% of new builds. China currently has 38 reactors under construction, 43 planned, and 145 proposed. They can achieve their growth targets because of speedy development. It takes only 5-7 years to build a reacto...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - The Super Bowl Indicator The Super Bowl Indicator was developed by a sports journalist at the New York Times. It says that if a team from the National Football Conference wins the big game, stock markets will go up, whereas a win by an American Football Conference (AFC) team, signals a bear market. During the thirty year period between 1967 and 1997 it had a...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Iran’s Big Economic Risk President Trump has repeatedly said, that the military campaign in Iran is almost complete. Unfortunately, the Persian’s don’t seem to agree with that assessment. They mined the 40 km wide Strait of Hormuz, through which passes over 20% of the world’s daily oil supply and effectively brought tanker traffic to a standstill. If it remai...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - AI vs Software Software is a code or set of instructions, that tells a computer what to do and how to do it. For decades software companies have had the wind at their backs. As more and more sophisticated technology got developed, better software was needed for it to communicate with everything else out there. The threat to all this … is AI. Investors worry t...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Gold Backed Reserve Crypto One of the reasons gold has had such an incredible run, is the growing belief among financial types, that cryptocurrency backed by the yellow metal, could eventually replace the US dollar, as the world’s reserve currency. Its creation would be outside government control, allow borderless monetary transactions and importantly, would...